Southlands

Articles

A national park.. city? On Chattanooga's new title

1 week ago | southlands.substack.com | Boyce Upholt

Programming note 1: Somehow, the newsletter this morning only went out to paid subscribers (despite the fact that—see below—I just turned off paid subscriptions). Trying again; apologies to those of you seeing this twice!Programming note 2: Last week, quietly, I paused all billing for paid subscribers to this newsletter.
A national park.. city? On Chattanooga's new title

1 week ago | southlands.substack.com | Boyce Upholt

Programming note: Last week, quietly, I paused all billing for paid subscribers to this newsletter. (Thanks to all of you for the support, BTW!) Because this mailing list is now transitioning to its new form: This is now “The Southlander,” the bi-weekly free newsletter that accompanies our paid print issues.And the first of those print issues is now available for pre-order! I’m calling this a soft launch; I’ll make a more formal announcement soon.
"The fabulous ordinary [is] still out there"

3 weeks ago | southlands.substack.com | Boyce Upholt

I spent the past few weeks assigning writers for the inaugural issue of Southlands—and it’s a really phenomenal line-up. I’m excited to share it soon. The process put hunting and fishing on my mind. I knew I had to get both into the issue, in part because hunting and fishing are some of the more prominent ways that Southerners get out in nature.
The good fight

1 month ago | southlands.substack.com | Boyce Upholt

Our biweekly publication schedule is woefully slow compared to today's news cycle. I tried writing this before my vacation last week but knew anything I wrote would be outdated by Tuesday morning. So: I’ll keep this brief. As a Southlands reader, you probably know already about the devastating job cuts at the National Park Service. Here in the South, our relatively scarce bits of public land are all the more precious for that scarcity.
The end of Outside

2 months ago | southlands.substack.com | Boyce Upholt

For a couple of years in my mid-20s—an era when I dreamed of being a writer but did not know how—I woke up every morning and read two longform magazine stories. It’s part of how I learned this work. Often enough, the stories came from the pages of Outside—and so, naturally, one of my ambitions became to publish my own adventure yarn in that august magazine. I came close, thanks to this online-only essay about the Bass Pro Shop inside the glass pyramid in downtown Memphis.
The Lowdown #1

2 months ago | southlands.substack.com | Boyce Upholt

When the new year begins, one of the top items on my to-do list is begin formal planning for the first print issue of Southlands—and that’s got me eager to revamp this newsletter as the digital arm of that print publication.
Can outdoor rec save the world?

2 months ago | southlands.substack.com | Boyce Upholt

I have a feature out today in the Bitter Southerner about, among other things, whether going out to have fun in beautiful places is an inherently good thing. It’s an idea that’s been on my mind lately because next year I’ll launch a print magazine focused on outdoor culture—with the hope that telling more stories about nature in the South will inspire more people to protect our beautiful places.
Jimmy Carter, Southlander

2 months ago | southlands.substack.com | Boyce Upholt

Greetings, Southlanders—I hope your past few weeks of deep winter pause have been restful, despite all the gloom and violence. Among the sadness, of course, was the loss of President Jimmy Carter. Plenty of paeans have rightly anointed Carter as “the greatest environmental president,” to borrow the headline of this Jeff Goodell essay. And much of his environmental legacy has to do with his prescient understanding of our society’s precarious relationship with fossil fuels.
Pin Drop: Crowley's Ridge

2 months ago | southlands.substack.com | Boyce Upholt

As a foggy twilight descends on Birdeye, Arkansas, the last rays of sunlight are swallowed by the hulking mass that is Crowley’s Ridge—a sliver of uplands that cuts through 200 miles of Missouri and Arkansas. As Arkansas elementary school students are taught, Crowley’s Ridge is the smallest of the state’s six natural provinces—a formation is so unusual that its only geological counterpart exists in Siberia.
Field guide: Fraser fir

2 months ago | southlands.substack.com | Boyce Upholt

Happy holidays, y’all! For this, my last post of 2024, I figured I’d go timely and look at a species that’s been called the “Cadillac of Christmas trees.” That’s thanks to its soft needles—which, winningly, stay intact longer than some of its rival species—and its perfectly Christmas-y scent. Want more proof? Sixteen times, the official White House Christmas tree has been a Fraser fir, more than any other species.