Writing is my joy and struggle to give expression to experience, to relate the sublime in terms hopefully not too small and human, and to share my misadventures with those sane enough to stay at home. And of course, as Ellen Meloy put it, writers write because they can't shut up.

Below are some excerpts from feature articles I've written over the years. Contact me to request the full proofs. I also report on sustainable development, the environment, and climate for IISD.

Cycling the Silk Road, WEND, 2009
As young wannabe explorers who wish maps contained more blank spaces, the three of us have come to China to deliberately lose ourselves along the intangible Silk Road. For four months, we intend to live as nomads and roam 5,000 kilometers of China’s cracked and broken misnomers-for-highways, retracing Marco Polo's travels through the autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Tibet. But while Polo relied on camels and caravans to get around, we have opted instead for the sovereign freedom of two wheels propelled by two legs.

At the age of 17 in the year 1271, our muse Marco fled the familiarity of Italy for distant Asia, where he charmed Kublai Khan into appointing him a diplomat. He spent the next 24 years leading exploratory missions to far-flung destinations along the Silk Road, which stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to China and across the Middle East, northern India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Xinjiang and parts of Tibet.

To honor Polo's improvisional approach, our preparations for this trip have been ad hoc at best. Preparation, after all, is the antithesis of adventure. And we want to experience at least a hint of how Marco felt confronting the unknown Silk Road, with its meanders and dead ends, its high passes and harsh deserts, its ancient villages and booming cities.

So we disorient ourselves in China’s faraway places and peoples. We gulp down thin air for dinner and swallow sand for dessert. And we burn muscle to the bone with our pulses pounding to the rhythm of altitude, adrenaline and life itself along the storied Silk Road.

Aliens and the Andes, Outpost, 2009
Solid as a rock, the saying goes. But rock as a reference point for stability is a geological fallacy. Rocks crack like ice floes and wrinkle like worn faces. Tectonic forces heave rock to heaven, building mountaintops out of ocean bottoms. Elemental forces dissolve stone into sand, sifting beaches from those same mountain summits. And in the Andes, where volcanoes fume over the land like temper tantrums rendered topographic, rock explodes.

I have spent years absorbing such facts in the classroom, but the heavy truth of geologic transience only sinks in on the slope of Aguas Calientes, a near 6000-metre volcano in northern Chile. [...] Crouched in the crater of Aguas Calientes is an implausibly crimson lake, its waters as red as a wound. Silence holds sway over winds suddenly shuttered by stone. On the far side of the crater, a white cloud creeps above Láscar. Whether dust or smoke or sulfurous vapor, we can't tell. But we don't intend to stick around long enough to find out. The world has split open, the world is steaming at the seams. Solid as a rock.

"Whatever science you planned to do in two hours, do it in two minutes!" commands Nathalie, our expedition leader. "Then we're getting the hell off this mountain."

Terrified, we skid down the scree slope, graceless as an avalanche, and inhale a rotten egg atmosphere of sulphur. The sun ignites the Altiplano, and the earth blazes infernal beneath an indifferent indigo sky. Far below us the desert is scattered with gleaming lakes, as lapidary and inscrutable as the stars. In this raw light and mood, the world has never looked so awesome, so fiercely alien. Lurching down this unstable slope, I find myself flung farther than ever before, farther than the Andes, more remote than Mars, hurtled into orbit around the infinitely dense, infinitely absurd fact that is our existence.

Before I know it, though, I am knocked out of orbit back onto the Earth. A volcano that took two days to climb takes barely three hours to descend, and we breathe easier, in many ways, on the relatively safe surface of the Altiplano. [....] Whatever high altitude lakes and volcanoes in the Andes might reveal about life on ancient Mars, they taught me an awful lot about life on Earth. Just before we scrambled off the summit of Aguas Calientes, I glanced into the volcanic crater lake. My reflection was warped in the corrugated, ruby waters, but it revealed a truth so simple and so staggering that I am reeling still: the only aliens in the Andes are the lot of us.

Cycling the Silk Road, Outpost, 2007
“Where you go?” the man ventures in elementary-school English. I point down the road toward the depths of the desert, which elicits gasps and clucks of astonishment from them both. “Where you from?” the woman asks next, wide-eyed and worried. “Canada,” I respond in Chinese. My answer provokes knowing “Ahhhhs,” from the couple—either because this fact alone explains why we’d be foolish enough to bike across a desert or because they are shocked that I appear to speak their tongue. When they discover my language skills end there, they proceed to act out in a grim pantomime the various ways we will perish if we pursue our intended course. There is death by dehydration, death by starvation, death by bandits, death by transport truck, death by sandstorm and death by a number of other gruesome means that we can't quite decipher from their miming—but in short, death by desert.

Fortunately, the Taklamakan is not as bleak as their forebodings. In the calm of the early morning, the desert is a beautiful and benevolent place. As the sun rises, the stars slowly surrender to daylight, and emerging shadows sculpt dunes into weird and fantastical forms. At this hour, there is no hint of the blasting heat to come, no premonition of the desert’s imminent transformation into a stinging maelstrom of wind and sand. Just sublime, vast, oceanic space.

Trekking Norway's Tundra, Outpost, 2007
Nothing beats the shrill whine of mosquitoes as a soundtrack for adventure. At the northern edge of Norway, high above the Arctic Circle, is the untrammelled expanse of Finnmarksvidda. This little-known mountain plateau consists of undulating tundra pocked with lakes and stands of taiga forest. Long ago it was plowed and furrowed by glaciers since melted, and today it yields a rich harvest of bloodsuckers. In winter, the plateau is a stomping and chomping ground for thousands of reindeer, which the once-nomadic Sámi people still raise and herd. In the summer, bogs and bugs are rampant. Reindeer have the good sense to flee to the blustery coast.

My pals Sarah, Geir and I, however, lack such keen animal acumen. We don our backpacks and mosquito head nets and trudge up onto the plateau, following a soft suggestion of trail over hummocks bouncy with moss. The sun swoops overhead, tireless and unblinking. Mosquitoes swarm all around, tireless and crazed for our blood.

In ordinary, sub-Arctic circumstances, Sarah possesses that brand of bleeding heart that goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid harming other living creatures, insects included. While packing our gear at the mosquito-free hostel before our hike, she explained her philosophy to me. "You see Kate, it's like bugs are these oblivious, innocent beings and we are these capricious gods who either strike out or spare their lives on a whim. It's our choice. You know?" I said that I did, then snuck another bottle of DEET into my pack. Noble principles sometimes need the reinforcement of heavy artillery.

During summertime in the high Arctic, even compassionate convictions follow the reindeer in fleeing the omnipresent buzz and sting of Finnmarksvidda bugs. Within minutes of hiking, Sarah devolves into a slap-happy savage and I murder mosquitoes with unrepentant glee. Of the three of us, Geir proves the most gracious of gods. When he isn't outpacing the bugs with his sweeping Viking strides, he is impervious to them freckling and feasting on his entire body. "They are really not so bad," he tells us, a true Scandinavian stoic.

Alien and Extreme, Endeavors, 2005

By most measures and standards, Antarctica is an alien planet. For months at a time, the sun never sets on an elemental landscape of snow, stone, and sky. The rest of the year, Antarctica slumbers through an interminable night. Human explorers first left footprints on the continent just over a century ago, and even today no nation owns the place. Instead, the Antarctic Treaty preserves the entire continent as a zone for the peaceful conduct of science. Antarctica is famously the coldest, highest, driest, windiest, emptiest, and most inaccessible place on Earth. And despite - or more truthfully because of - its forbidding reputation, there is no place on this planet I find more alluring.

When our helicopter lands in the Antarctic Dry Valleys and the blades whir to a stop, I am crushed by the quiet. Not a bird chirping, tree rustling, airplane roaring, person hollering—just a stillness beyond frozen. In that sublime silence, I can feel the pulse of the planet.

Life in the frozen wasteland of the Dry Valleys is fierce, robust, and tenacious. I’ve spent months exploring the tropics, where living things burst forth in all imaginable colors and proportions. But while the biodiversity of temperate regions is dazzling, I’ve always been more taken with desert places, where living isn’t so easy. To me, a single rare lump of algae floating in the subfreezing, briny waters of a pond in Antarctica is many times more poignant, dignified, and wondrous than an entire rainforest.

The Idiom of Ice, Outpost, 2007
Frazil, pancake, slush, grease, shuga, nilas: this is the idiom of sea ice, an onomatopoeic vernacular that floats and fractures with the vitality and violence of the ice itself. From crystallization and evolution to decay and dissolution, sea ice is a physical phenomenon in flux, and the science of sea ice possesses a vast language for characterizing it. The Inuit may have hundreds of words for snow, but modern scientists have a truly staggering number of terms for describing frozen water.

For two weeks at the International Sea Ice Summer School, on the island of Spitsbergen in the archipelago of Svalbard in Norway, my days are devoted to learning this vocabulary. Through lectures by sea ice experts, we scrutinize sea ice from every perspective: from the past to the present and future, from small-scale crystal structures to global distribution patterns. We learn that sea ice, solid as it seems, is technically a two-component mushy layer of ice crystals and brine inclusions. We are tutored in the thermodynamics of freezing and the mechanics of sea ice ridging. We study the role of melting sea ice as an amplifier of climate change, and learn about the hardy life forms, great and small, that call sea ice home.

The only aspect of sea ice that we fail to scrutinize is the substance itself.

Even at 78 degrees north, the latitude that also slices across northern Greenland, Svalbard is too temperate for summer sea ice, thanks to the influence of the tepid tailend of the Gulf Stream. Though the name Svalbard is an ancient Viking word that translates as “cold edge,” or “cold coast,” it is actually one of the balmier places in the High Arctic due to the relative warmth of its coastal waters. While the abstraction of Arctic summer sea ice soon becomes familiar intellectual territory for us, sea ice itself remains an elusive, imagined thing.

Light-headed in Ladakh, Outpost, 2007
Poised high above an impossibly blue river, Phuktal Gompa’s ramshackle walls jut out of rock like the exposed white bones of the mountain itself, marrow removed and replaced with monks. I wind my way through the chiaroscuro monastery following corridors of stone that slippered feet have scuffed smooth over centuries.

Unfamiliar as I am with the rhythms of monastic life, I confuse the mundane for the mythic. Gongs ring profound and timeless rites to my ears, when in reality they probably signal something far less remarkable, if equally eternal, like tea time. Monks talking animatedly are to my ears passionately debating the meaning of life. More realistically, they are arguing over dishcleaning duty.

For the unordained itinerant, though, all is awash in mystery. And whether we’re wearing red robes or filthy trekking pants, we are all pilgrims in Ladakh. In the scope and ringing silence of this land, each contour is a sung line of poetry, each cloud a chanted prayer. The terrain itself tilts you toward contemplation of infinity and all its implications. We trudge away from Phuktal Gompa carrying loads that seem lighter through a world a little more suffused with wonder.

"I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion." - Thoreau