This morning’s e-mail arrived with the Word of the Day (www.wordsmith.org): Desultory, an adjective. 1. Marked by absence of a plan; disconnected; jumping from one thing to another. 2. Digressing from the main subject; random.

There are desultory times when cruising the Web—looking for marshes or restored rivers to write about, collective nouns for fish or mammals, a timely study—that I must pull myself away from tales of shipwreck expeditions in the Mediterranean, remote hikes in New Zealand or the butterfly collection at Chicago’s Field Museum.

Lab Technician Tricia Boland of the Fundy Geological Museum, prepares the hip section of a Prosauropod dinosaur excavated near Parrsboro, NS for research and display. Photo: Katherine Goodwin

Information and imagination are intoxicating. The Web can be viewed as one vast catalog to the natural world, in just one click. It is much easier to read about the International Appalachian Trail (www.internationalat.org/SIAIAT) than it is to walk it, and much easier to view plans on how to build a wildlife pond or certify as a Master Wildlife Habitat Naturalist (www.windstar.org) than it is to do it.

Of course the Web is not a substitute for the real thing. As essayist James Gorman has written, “Digital data, however enhanced, is a narrow stream that feeds the mind. When you actually go to natural surroundings…you acquire another sort of information that cannot be digitized, the thoroughly analog experience of being a whole person, body, senses and mind undivided. And the light and the air are so much better.”

Isn’t it pretty to think so, to coin Hemingway. When I started writing about the marine environment, I thought it would cut down on my time online. If anything, it has increased it. For every day I spend outside, I probably spend four days searching for topics applicable to the Gulf of Maine: old growth forests along the Fundy coast, invertebrates that live in the salt marshes of Cape Cod, the impact of sprawl on a Maine fishing village and so forth.

To track down current studies on marine conservation issues, I recently tried searching the words “marine science studies 2003.” This is when the randomness of the Web becomes like a coastal hike. You start down one trail, find an interesting rock formation, watch a boil of red-tailed hawks spiraling in flight, and before you know it you are lost inside the pages of Warren’s Plankton Net, which gives a “comprehensive compendium” of nearly every plankton researcher on the planet. Or you might end up at the Nature Conservancy’s page, which can lead you directly to Conserveonline (www.conserveonline .org), a one-stop public library with documents, data, maps and images on the science of conservation.

Just as the Web can leave you feeling sensory deprived, it can also make vast regions like the Gulf of Maine seem like one big neighborhood. I started looking for stewardship projects the other day and returned to one of my favorite pages, the Orion Society’s Grassroots Network (www.oriononline.org). The page lists 475 groups in the United States and Canada by state or province. There I was introduced to the Ferry Beach Ecology School (www.fbes.org) in Saco, Maine that offers school children outdoor workshops and courses in ecology. At the Audubon Society of New Hampshire page (www.nhaudubon.org) I watched a streaming live video of a peregrine falcon nest on Elm Street in Manchester. The Center for Ecological Pollution (www.ecowaters.org) in Concord, Massachusetts promoted several ecological toilet options. And at Restore: the North Woods (www.restore.org), conservationists are calling for a 3.2 million-acre Maine Woods National Park.

There are the old reliables. For an overview of river restoration news, I lock oars at American Rivers (www.amrivers.org) and I also receive its e-mailed newsletter, River Currents. The site’s River Restoration Center comes with a library, a restoration science link, projects and toolkits.

Then there are those awe-inspiring images. One day—don’t ask me how—I happened across Earth from Space (http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov /sseop/EFS/). The page contains 400,000 images from the NASA Space Shuttle Earth Observations Photography database. A clickable map will place you high above cities around the world (Boston, Halifax and Portsmouth included), show you geographic and ocean landscapes and hurricane and weather maps. I sent this site plus a real-time radar image of Cleveland, Ohio from the National Weather Service (www.nws.noaa.gov) to my nephew who lives there. I also sent along the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow address (www.epa.gov/airnow) so he could track the air quality in his region. It may be a bit much for a seven-year-old, but you never know.

Anyone, from a Ph.D. candidate to a second grader, can access information treasures from the collections of natural history museums near and far. At the Fundy Geological Museum in Nova Scotia, watch researchers uncover the 200 million year old skeleton of a prosauropod dinosaurttp (http://museum.gov.ns.ca /fgm/lab/lab.html). Or explore ocean life and ecosystems from the Smithsonian’s Ocean Planet (http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov /ocean_ planet.html) and the American Museum of Natural History’s Millstein Hall of Ocean Life (http://www.amnh.org).

Eventually, though, data fatigue sets in, and it is time to load the senses with a real trek into the woods, river or open sea. Indeed, the air and light are so much better. And if you live in a rural area like I do, where high speed Internet lines are at least a year away, you won’t have to deal with net congestion either.