“My nature journal is scratch paper for my conversations with nature,” Melinda Nakagawa told me, as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world. Not a leather-bound keepsake, not a portfolio of botanical prints—scratch paper. It’s the page you do the math on before you write the answer, the place where the crossed-out lines and the wrong turns are allowed to remain. In Nakagawa’s telling, that is the point. Conversation is rarely linear, and the nonhuman world—birds, roses,