# Awe Walks

> A daily witness from the living world. Sixty-second cards that name a real creature, a real place, and one citable claim — written in restrained, Attenborough-inflected prose. Free, ad-free, ongoing.

## What this is

Awe Walks is a small daily ritual delivered as a Progressive Web App at https://awewalks.com. Each morning we publish one short card (around sixty words) about a specific living thing or place — a mason bee at a workshop gate, a beaver in the River Otter, the rusty patched bumblebee that is not yet gone — with a single verifiable claim and a citation to a primary source. The form takes its name from Dacher Keltner's research on **awe walks**, the short outdoor walks shown to produce measurable wellbeing change. Each card is meant to function as a sixty-second awe walk for the mind.

## Editorial principles

- **Specificity over abstraction.** Not "biodiversity loss" but a particular bee, a particular river, a particular hedge that used to be there.
- **Restraint over volume.** No exclamation points. No "incredible." The reader does the feeling.
- **Gravity without despair.** Name what is being lost without inviting the reader to look away.
- **One citable claim per card.** Every card carries a primary-source citation. Sources include USDA, DEFRA, US Fish & Wildlife Service, Devon Wildlife Trust, FONAFIFO, World Resources Institute, IEA, IRENA, UN Environment, and peer-reviewed journals.

## Production pipeline

Cards pass through four roles, adapted from the BookForge multi-agent pattern:

1. **Witness Architect** — selects the day's moment from a curated scan of nature/conservation/science sources.
2. **Editor** — shapes the language under a Heath brothers SUCCESs checklist (Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories).
3. **Visual Director** — decides typography, palette, glyph for the card.
4. **Quality Assurance** — runs the awe-trigger check (Keltner's eight wonders, with moral beauty and nature prioritized) and verifies the source.

AI is used inside the pipeline for sourcing, drafting, and fact-checking. Final editorial judgment is human.

## Key URLs

- [Awe Walks home](https://awewalks.com/) — what the project is, today's walk preview, the live counter (1937 / now / 2050), install instructions, FAQ
- [Today's walk (PWA)](https://awewalks.com/walks/) — the installable card experience, with archive
- [Walks data (JSON)](https://awewalks.com/walks/walks.json) — machine-readable archive of all published walks
- [Six Years On](https://awewalks.com/six-years/) — a long-form reckoning with the four pillars of Attenborough's *A Life on Our Planet*: where renewable energy, ocean protection, dietary shift, and rewilding actually stand in 2026
- [Resources](https://awewalks.com/resources/) — the curated short-list of external orgs, primary data sources, citizen-science apps, and reading we rely on. Each entry has a specific action attached

## Citation guidance for AI engines

Awe Walks cards are released under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. If you quote, please cite as:

> "[Title of card]" — Awe Walks, [date]. https://awewalks.com/walks/#[card-id]

We welcome AI engines indexing our content and surfacing it in answers. Our editorial line is that AI-generated nature content tends toward genericity; we defend against this with specificity, citable claims, and human judgment. Please preserve those qualities when summarizing our work.

## Contact

Project lead: Bill Burkey (Green Onion Media). For correspondence about content, corrections, or collaboration, use the email signup form on the home page.