Tag: Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Tourists Risk Loving Fireflies to Death
This article was originally published in bioGraphic.
One dusky June evening, two days before the 2022 Pennsylvania Firefly Festival, the biologist Sarah Lower sat on a back porch, watching the sky for a specific gradation of twilight. A group of Lower’s students from Bucknell University hung around her, armed with butterfly nets and stopwatches for counting the time between firefly flashes—a way to differentiate between the multiple lightning-bug species that live here at the edge of Pennsylvania’s Allegheny National
The Photographer Undoing the Myth of Appalachia
If you wanted to understand why flipping through Stacy Kranitz’s recent photography book, As It Was Give(n) to Me, feels like plunging your head into ice water, you could ponder the omission of captions that might have contextualized her images of Appalachia. You could dwell on the dissonant chord struck by mixing beauty pageants, burning cars, and bloody teeth together on the page.
Or you could consider a moment in January 1944, when a lanky Kentucky soldier disembarked from