We are very pleased to host Marnie and Ken Crowell’s newest natural history guide series, a digital introduction to the plants and animals found here on the island. Thanks to ecologist Ken Crowell and natural history writer Marnie Reed Crowell for creating this suite of PDFs, a local compendium of PDFs based on their years of nature walks. Read them online, download them to your computer, or download to your mobile device to take with you on the trail. We also thank Roger Hooke and Robert Knowlton for contributions in their respective fields: geology and marine biology.

In Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything, she writes about the problem of what our obsession with electronics and ‘screen time’ is doing to disengage us from our natural environment, and how this impacts our reaction to any natural crisis, like climate change. But it is also applicable to the other environmental issues of our time. Of climate change she states; “… this is a crisis that is, by its nature, slow moving an intensely place based. In its early stages, and in between the wrenching disasters, climate is about an early blooming of a particular flower, an unusually thin layer of ice on a lake, the late [or early] arrival of a migratory bird – noticing these small changes requires that kind of communion that comes from knowing a place deeply, not just the scenery but also as sustenance, and when local knowledge is passed on with a sense of sacred trust from one generation the next.” Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything p. 159

We hope the Crowell’s virtual guides will help people in this community commune with and learn about the natural wonders of our special place. Remember, if you don’t know something you can’t love it, and if you don’t love something you won’t take care of it. Please enjoy these guides.