Deeper Listening | Apr 2026

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Neil Zusman. Deeper Listening | Apr 2026 — slowed observational study

Neil Zusman. Out Walking | Apr 2026 — realtime source

Walking Ithaca

In recent months, I’ve been spending more time walking through Ithaca.

Most days, I leave from North Plain Street, cross Buffalo Street, pass the Children’s Garden, and follow the inlet trail toward Treman Marina and Cayuga Lake before circling back home. On alternate days, I follow the creeks through town — Cascadilla Gorge, Fall Creek, wooded paths near Beebe Lake, and the trails that weave between water, stone, bridges, birds, traffic, and neighborhoods.

These walks have gradually become part of the structure of this project.

Earthstage began as a librarian’s effort to gather and preserve public information related to hydraulic fracturing: reports, films, interviews, scientific papers, activism, industry claims, government documents, and historical context across many formats. The original goal was straightforward — help people encounter primary source material directly and make complicated information more navigable.

Over time, however, the project has also become something else.

Restoration is slow work.

Repairing broken links.
Recovering memory.
Preserving context.
Reconnecting citations.
Rebuilding archives.
Walking through forests.
Listening across disagreement.
Making room for uncertainty without abandoning evidence.

Increasingly, I have come to understand Earthstage not simply as a record of environmental conflict, but as an ongoing attempt to explore how people remain attentive inside technologically saturated environments.

This includes difficult questions about energy, extraction, infrastructure, scale, ecological cost, and public responsibility. Writers such as Bill McKibben have spent decades exploring these tensions — not as a rejection of technology itself, but as an argument for thinking more carefully about consequence, scale, and long-term stewardship.

What scale?
What cost?
Whose land?
Whose water?
Whose future?

At the same time, recent neuroscience and environmental health research has begun examining how natural environments affect stress, cognition, attention, and emotional regulation.

A 2024 study by Sonja Sudimac and Simone Kühn investigating one-hour forest walks observed measurable changes associated with hippocampal stress regulation and reductions in rumination. Another 2024 study by Andrew S. McDonnell and David L. Strayer found that walks in natural environments altered resting brain activity in ways associated with reduced cognitive fatigue and emotional stress.

Of course, scientific literature alone cannot fully explain the experience of walking beside moving water at dusk, hearing wind across the inlet, or watching changing light move across Cayuga Lake. (link will open in Google Earth)

But the growing body of research does suggest something important:
environments matter profoundly — neurologically, emotionally, socially, culturally, and ecologically.

Walking has gradually become part of the methodology of this archive.

Not escape.
Not retreat.
A form of listening.

Earthstage is no longer only an archive of extraction and environmental risk. I hope it can also become a place for reflection, restoration, curiosity, and deeper listening.

See also: Sudimac, Sonja, and Simone Kühn. “Can a nature walk change your brain? Investigating hippocampal brain plasticity after one hour in a forest.” Environmental research 262 (2024): 119813.

See also: McDonnell AS, Strayer DL. The influence of a walk in nature on human resting brain activity: a randomized controlled trial. Sci Rep. 2024 Nov 8;14(1):27253. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-78508-x. PMID: 39516236; PMCID: PMC11549482.

See also: Steve Curwood. ‘This is the Costco of energy, man!’: author Bill McKibben on the promise of renewables. 23 Dec 2025. The Guardian. The activist and author of Here Comes the Sun discusses rapid advances in solar and wind power and how the US ceded leadership in the sector to its main rival.

See also: Paul Hond. How to Write (Persuasively) about the Climate Crisis. Winter 2025-2026. Columbia Magazine.

See also: Rebecca Solnit. As we prepare for 2026, remember we have the power to make our future. 30 Dec 2025. The Guardian. We enter 2026 with radical uncertainty about the fate of the US – but also with the clarity that people have the power to determine what it will be

See also: Oliver Milman. Trump officials halt offshore wind-farm projects over ‘national security risks’. 22 Dec 2025. The Guardian.