Stories.

Most of what we know about the natural world we learned from a story someone told us. The neighbor who saw the fox cross the yard. The grandparent who knew which berries were safe. The teacher who took the class outside in third grade and pointed at a tree.

These notes are stories. Things that happened in our patches, or in the patches of people who wrote in to tell us. They are not arguments and they are not how-to guides. They are accounts.

We think the case for paying attention is mostly made by stories like these — not by data, not by lists, not by anything you can put in a chart. By the moment a person looked up and saw something they hadn't seen before, and tried to tell someone else what it was like.