Look how this wet cloud falling off of the high country …

… just won’t go down into the depths, but rides on top of the middle atmosphere instead.

Coldstream, BC

Dramatic shadow from the sun, too!

The third atmosphere is beneath the ground, where the roots of the trees and grasses breathe. In a landscape like this, it’s more useful to talk about depth and pressure than about altitude. Water flowing down through water channels, or even through the soil, brings the climate of the hills down into the deeps through the subsoil atmosphere far more effectively than it does in the air. Intriguingly, in both the grasslands of the Okanagan and the Cariboo, there are three grassland zones, corresponding to zones of air pressure. Here’s my grandfather in the upper grassland of the Similkameen Valley in 1963.

Bruno Leipe and Pootzie, Above Cawston Creek

Photo: Hugo Redivo

Typically, upper grasslands finger out like fjords among savannahs of Douglas Fir trees. Here’s the middle grassland in Farwell Canyon, above the Chilcotin River, in the Cariboo-Chilcotin Grasslands, the last virtually pristine grassland on temperate earth…

No weeds!

And here’s a view from the lip of British Columbia’s largest sand dune, the Farwell Canyon Dune, formed by depressurized and repressurized Pacific Ocean air blowing up the hoodoos of the remnants of the silt bed of Glacial Lake Fraser.

Notice the sagebrush in the deeps down below. That’s the lower grassland. The trees down there are fed with runoff from the hoodoos. I bet you want to see the dune. Here you go…

Dan Dalgaard on the Farwell Dune

With a view over the Junction Bighorn Sheep Range. The California Bighorn Sheep of California were reintroduced from stock from this dune and the grasslands above it. 

Now, isn’t that intriguing? Three atmospheres and three slightly-staggered climactic zones, with the highest atmosphere’s water being brought underground to the deepest, driest grassland through the lowest, underground atmosphere. What’s more, the lowest atmosphere, the underground one, crosses all three zones of both atmosphere and ecosystems. That’s what water can do in this amazing climate. And if you stay out late meditating on how to clarify your post from earlier in the day, what might you get as your reward? Ah, this little reminder that the sun powers this process…

Rainbow at Dusk

19th Century Water Technology

Similkameen River, Shanker’s Bend, Washington

Before moving on to other exciting new crops, I’d like to step aside for a moment and talk about water, desertification, new water technologies based upon plant physiology, and new forms of and locations for agriculture. This a social and ethical discussion, that touches on art, social sculpture, food, and earth. It cropped up so many times in the discussion of the previous crops, that I felt it would be best to remember that the crops are part of the discussion of water, not the other way around.

Western Swallowtail on Wild Mock Orange

It is possible to farm and have a living earth, too. It’s not a choice. In fact, if anyone asks you to choose, they do not understand water, or earth.

In my explorations here over the last 18 months, I have discovered to my surprise and wonder that farming actually farms water, not earth. Even the soil, which physically supports crops, is really a community of microbes, providing complex underground atmospheres and nutrient transfers as complex as photosynthesis. The air that passes over a tree and the clouds above it, are also present around its roots, in a mirrored form. Storms pass through the earth as much as they do through the sky, and clouds drift there, lazily, and it rains there, and the soil breathes. The soil is a living thing.

Fire-burnt Choke Cherry Tree

Breathing in through its roots and out through its leaves. Breathing in through its leaves and out through its roots.

It is life that we farm, not the dead earth that blooms upon. Anyone who farms that, is farming petrochemicals, and producing petrochemical food. That’s not sustainable. That is 19th century technology. It’s on par with 19th Century medicine — a good beginning but the patient has a good chance of dying.

Abandoned Garden Shed

Improvements aren’t always improvements. More money was invested in this garden shed than was ever invested in the yard surrounding it. Now that a generation has passed, the new owners have no interest in the yard at all. The presence of this garden shed adds to the value of this land, although it has no accompanying garden. Ironically, the absence of a garden improves the value of the land as well. Something went wrong here. 

Once we’ve explored the stories of water, we can talk about herbs and other crops, where they might be grown, and how they might change the social stories of our urban environments. Farming is a form of sculpture. So, here we go!

1. Water

Water is more than a molecule of two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms. It’s the basis of life.

Life, Lost on the Sidewalk

1 minute into an afternoon storm that caught me unawares.

Since water is life, to humans, such as you or I, who are social animals, water is a form of social space. To put that into perspective, here’s a less social animal, with whom I share these grassland hills …

Bullsnake Cooling Itself off on a Vineyard Driveway

The snake is unaware of the social claim laid on the driveway by men and their tractors, and the peril that he is in, because he’s not social. To him, the driveway is the earth, and his self. It’s up to humans to regulate their social space. In this case, I drove the bullsnake into the grass before the tractor came.

2. Where water comes from.

Here, just inland from the North Pacific Ocean, water comes from the open water between Japan and Vancouver Island. It fills the air, breaks in a wave on the arc of volcanoes along the Pacific shore, spills over them, and breaks again on the mountains on the true North American shore, five hundred kilometres to the East. That water comes in the form of rain and snow. The snow is able to store water, and release it slowly through the environment, in a descent from the high country, down to the lowland lakes and rivers. Living water systems on the hills do the same work.

Snow Blooming in a Grassland Gully

Water exists in time.

3. Heat and Drought.

This is how dryness starts…

Rain Forest and Dreamtime Island, Broughton Archipelago

The earth revolves from west to east. The wet winds that blow off of the Pacific are this motion. They collide with the mountains on the North Pacific shore, and instead of stopping are pushed on by the balance of energies between earth and the sun. As the winds are pushed upwards, up the slopes of the mountains, they lose pressure and drop water, are pushed up farther, lose more pressure, and drop more water, and so on, until they crest the peaks, depressurized and stripped of water. They do not stop there, though. The spinning earth pushes them on, down the other side, where they repressurize. Stripped of water, they are warm now, and warmer the farther they sink into the valleys of the plateau, and the warmer and dryer they get, the more water they pull out of the air, out of living things, and out of the soil. The winds might even be wet, but they still draw water out of the earth. At the floor of the valleys, the air can draw 11 times more water out of the soil than falls as precipitation. The dry land to the east and the rainforest to the west are one: mirror images of each other than combine to form a living whole. It is not that the air of the Okanagan is particularly dry, but that it absorbs any water that is not quickly whisked away underground or into chains of life. Freestanding water, or water that can easily become so, will vanish into the rainforest deficit. The effect is a little like this:

The Big Bar Eskers

Cariboo Plateau

It’s not actually dry and hot here. It’s just that the air is turned inside out.

4. Water and Reverse Atmospheres

It’s doing anything it does up top, but it’s also being passed along through chains of life. Let me show you a couple diagrams as illustrations. First, a standard model of water flow in the Okanagan:

Blue Water System for the Okanagan, Government of Canada Source

This system is good at describing water as an element, and tracing its free flow. It is dependent on keeping surface water clean, capturing it, using it, returning it to the ground for the filtration, and letting the sun draw it out of the open lakes and return it to the hills in the form of rain. When put in place, it looks like this:

Osoyoos Lake

However, take another look:

 Annotated Osoyoos Lake

The Orange rectangle is Hurley Peak, Washington. The mountain directs the Similkameen River towards its union with the Okanogan River a few miles south of this lake. The mountains that feed the Canadian Okanagan, including Osoyoos Lake, lie to the North, but are at the same altitude as Hurley Peak, and carry snow into the early summer. Slowly it is released downward, through the chain of life that covers the valley, until it reaches the lakes, from which it flows down to the Columbia River at Brewster, Washington. To see how much this pattern differs from the official government pattern, and how much more life (and less elemental water) is in it, consider the yellow rectangle.

Kobau Mountain Above Osoyoos

At high altitudes, the air is less pressurized than it is in town on the lakeshore. Accordingly, it can support trees, with their high water requirements. As the pressure increases deeper in the valley, trees die out and grassland plants thrive, which are able to balance the pressure of the atmosphere at these new water-deficit depths. In the natural system, the water flowing down from above would generate cloud, that would rain and invigorate these systems, fill the gullies running through them with life, and carry this energy down to the wetlands on the lake shore and the lake itself. Animals living in the environment would be sustained over time, by the differing seasons caused by altitude and its mirror, the particular stages and forms of plant life responding to time and depth. That is prime agricultural space. All it requires is appropriate plants, rather than the European plants currently planted in the valley bottom, in the 19th century colonial model. The water is there, but only for plants that can withhold it from the air, and especially if the system is complete and water is allowed to flow down through the hills rather than over them.

5. Desertification

There are many ways to make a desert. One is with words. Another is with mythology. In the Okanagan, the colonial mythology is rooted in the Manifest Destiny of the United States of America and a near-Biblical drive for Eden. In the 19th Century model, water was removed from the Syilx natural system described above and pumped over the so-called desert, to make it bloom. You see farms like that there in the valley bottom. The only thing is, they missed this:

Ravine at the Foot of Anarchist Mountain

Water that flows underground, through life systems, shaded and protected from the sun, brings high country productivity and crops right into the high-pressure, low-water zone — much like the industrial water systems that supply the gardens of Eden have done, releasing it to the surface, where it is most vulnerable. Over half of the water (over half of the life) in the valley vanishes into the air due to this exposure. Yes, it looks green down there, but not only is all that expensive technology not necessary, but it represents only half of the life that would be present if it were not there. There’s more, too: it also prejudices thought, into thinking that the valley is a desert. It isn’t. It has one desert, yes, the only desert in Canada, yup, and it is contained in the red rectangle you see below:

The Pocket Desert of N’kmip

1/2 an acre of desert. That’s it. The green rectangle behind it is Black Sage and N’kmip vineyard areas, the Cabernet and Merlot and Pinot Noir plots of the Okanagan, evaporating water into the air in order to mine the heat created by the valley depths.

6. The Ethics of Water

Essentially, whose water is it? Let me take a stab at that: it belongs to the planet. In their native environments, humans actually have low water requirements. We don’t need a lot. Every tree needs hundreds of times as much. It also produces far more, or can, with human guidance. In other words, water is life. Our job as living creatures on the planet is to transform that water into life. The trees do, as do all plants. It means, if we care for them, we create life, too. Well, almost. First, the tree, hard at using its high water requirements to produce an abundance of life …

Honeybee among the Male Staghorn Sumac Flowers

… and then, thousands of times more water poured onto neighbouring soil …

Unharvested Vineyard (Due to Bad Crop Practices)

… to produce ice wine, or, in this case, a small amount of bird food. The rest of the grapes were pruned off, to concentrate elite flavours in the wine, for ice wine production. That’s where ethics comes in, and one place in which the social relationship of humans in the community of living things translates into the social relationships of humans among teach other. To take water out of the living system, to concentrate it in order to grow foreign crops for the benefit of one man rather than thousands of individuals in hundreds of species, can, perhaps, be a legitimate choice. One does get hungry. However, using what is the common resource of all mean and women and children in the valley to produce ice wine or low yielding high value wines for export only, which very few people here could ever afford to purchase or consume, for the profit of a few is not only unethical but unsustainable. The water is a common good. There isn’t enough of it to afford to transform it into industrial or economic products, or even agricultural products that waste it.  Water rates should be set at the use of the water for the common good. The cost of lost life due to water being squandered in deep valley environments is one of the costs of water, should be added to the cost of water use, and used to support alternative forms of agricultural production. The land can produce a vast amount of food and wealth for all, or for a very few. A choice like that should be very clear.

The Saskatoons are Almost Ripe at the 500 Metre Line!

Water no longer flows from the heights to the depths, creating wetlands and trails of life moving up and down the slopes with the seasons … but it would be a lot cheaper to replicate and repair that system than it would be to build huge new water infrastructure systems at crippling rates of taxation, while continuing to support agricultural practices at the expense of the many and the profit of the few.

Bees in the Staghorn Sumac

And Iceland? Yes! You know I love Iceland…

Bee Landing on the Sun

(On my front lawn… ok, no lawn, only Iceland.) 

And, the glory of it all…

Pure Gold!

Planting these flowers was the first act I made in this project. This is my nuclear reactor, completing the fusion processes of the sun.

You should have seen the bee dancing!

]]> http://okanaganokanogan.com/2013/06/16/beautiful-poppies-and-dancing-bees/feed/ 2 rhenisch heavyload landing2 gold2 http://okanaganokanogan.com/2013/06/14/15-more-new-vegetables-for-the-okanagan/ http://okanaganokanogan.com/2013/06/14/15-more-new-vegetables-for-the-okanagan/#comments Fri, 14 Jun 2013 22:53:29 +0000 Harold Rhenisch http://okanaganokanogan.com/?p=10270 Continue reading →]]> Earlier this week I spoke about fifteen new vegetables for building a sustainable economy in the Okanagan-Okanogan (click). Some were Syilx crops, others were other North American crops, and others were observations from my garden. Look what I have for you today!

16. Wireweed

This Stuff Only Grows in Driveways and Tractor Damaged Soil

And once established, it is almost impossible to get rid of, ever ever ever ever.

It is a traditional ingredient in Vietnamese hot pot cooking, and is a powerful medicinal. What’s more, it turns driveways green, can root in sidewalk and road cracks, slows water run-off and collects silts that are in the water and the wind. These trapped deposits quickly build up among its stems and form soil. If you don’t want to eat the stuff, that is enough. The new soil can be used in place, or soil and stems can be mechanically scraped off and immediately used as new soil. It also actively suppresses other weeds. This is a fantastic foundation plant for building soil in asphalt and concrete urban environments, which will then support gardens — just not wheat. Wheat will not grow in wire-weed. Think of it as a net that catches a garden out of the wind and the rain. Oh, and it has those vegetable and hot pot uses, too.

17. Purslane
Purslane is a nutritious vegetable used extensively in Middle Eastern cooking, so native to the region that it sprouts up in the cracks of sidewalks  and is harvested from there …

Purslane Source

This drought resistance succulent is high in Omega 3 Fatty Acids. It grows throughout the Okanagan.

Here’s some purslane growing in the front yard of the house of worship of a religion that began in Palestine…

Purslane, Okanagan Landing Road

And here is one of its sisters, after the church landscape specialist directed his attention to it …

Food for the Poor, Poisoned

Going, going, gone.

The gravel of this style of landscaping is perfect for purslane: protection for seed, conservation of water, lots of heat and sun, and no competition, as few other plants can survive in such drought conditions. It’s not just gravel…

New Farmland: The Sidewalk Crack

Perfect for purslane, spinach, millet, coriander, lettuce, wireweed, and a host of other crops.

One thing about this farmland is that it is right in front of your house. Another is that it makes use of large amounts of water that are collected by the sidewalk infrastructure. Another is that it gathers sand and dust and turns it into soil. It makes new earth.

The Ultimate in Zero Tillage

Cultivation: 0. Soil loss: 0. Water usage: 0. Transportation costs: 0. Every couple years, the soil could be mechanically harvested and redistributed on areas in need of it.

There are tens if thousands of row kilometres of this agriculture in the Okanagan. If automobile pollutants are an issue, then let’s grow crops here that will mine them, to keep them out of our water, and then harvest the soil that they make. Oh, and the argument that plants will destroy the concrete infrastructure? Really? I think snow removal equipment does a better job of that…

18. Bitterroot

Ain’t She Pretty! A Syilx Crop.

Please do not pick bitterroot. It is highly endangered and under great threat. It is, however, one of the staples of Plateau culture, including the local Syilx and neighbouring Tsilhq’otin and Secwepemc cultures. It was maintained for 4,000 years through spring burning. It grows on rocky outcrops and provides some of the first nutrition in the spring. Selling this stuff in Aboriginal markets and at Aboriginal festivals would bring profit, and be a gesture of tremendous respect. This is one of the spirit plants of the West. It could be brought back to abundance. Water requirement? None. Land? Well, nothing that would grow anything else.

18. Watercress

Here’s some wild Okanagan water cress I found at the end of last week. It goes to prove that dry, grassland habitats are really aquatic habitats, rich in ponds and secret water sources, interspersed with large areas of grass and shrubs. This cress was growing in a persistent boggy area in an alfalfa field in the middle of old orchard land.

Alfalfa Field Not Worth Baling

With a secret pond, worth a second look.

Here’s the second look:

Sometimes a Tractor Tire Can Create a World

A 50 pound bale of hay sells for $5. Since wild Water Cress sells for $15 a pound, which would be $750 a bale if that were how it were packed, fifty pounds of watercress would produce the same gross income as 150 bales of hay, or a hayfield of just over three quarters of an acre. However, yield per acre of watercress (in Hawaii) is 22,857 pounds per acre. Supposing we could manage a quarter of that, that would still be 4571 pounds, for a gross income of $77,565 or the same as 86 acres of alfalfa. Costs are 9% of gross.

That’s worth a third look, isn’t it? Here we go:

Water Cress in January

It doesn’t seem to mind cool temperatures. Of course, it’s growing in water, which is in short supply, but what if it were grown in irrigation water, that flowed through it before being pumped onto, say, golf greens or apple trees or greenhouses? The water would then be free. What if the water that naturally flows through Lake Country on its way to Kelowna grew a little water cress on the way? For one, we’d have some work here. For another, we’d be using water the way it naturally flows here. For another, we’d have soups and salads that would put us on the world culinary map.

Beats milfoil, eh. And it sure beats this:

Alfalfa Grown to Maintain Preferred Farm Tax Status…

isn’t always worth picking up and feeding to a cow.

19. Avalanche Lily, 20. Tiger Lily, 21. Blue Camas, 22. Chocolate Lily, 23. Wapato, 24. Rice Root!

That’s 6 crops. There are many more. They were all traditional foodstuffs of the Syilx, all dug for their tubers. All grow in natural environments and are all very beautiful. There is no reason they could not be grown again, to bridge cultures, heal environments, and provide the continent’s First Peoples with traditional feast foods, for what would no doubt be a good profit, and one that would put no stress on contemporary technologies or supply streams. Many thrive in upland environments. Plus, did I say they were beautiful? Here are our beauties:

Rice Root Source A Syilx Crop

Camas, the great spiritual one. Source. A Syilx Crop

Chocolate Lily Source. A Syilx Crop

Tiger Lily Source A Syilx Crop

Avalanche Lily Source A Syilx Crop

Wapato (Indian Potato) Source A Syilx Crop

This is a wetland plant. If we could divert water through beds of Wapato before dumping it into reservoirs and piping systems, we would get an extra crop, with no extra water. Great for that roadside ditch, too!

Wapato Flowers Source

Wapato Tubers  Source

25. Wild Rice

Wild Rice in Saskatchewan Source An Indigenous Crop

This high priced grain grows throughout the Boreal Forest. Those environments exist in the Okanagan as well, both in the wetlands of Lake Country, and in the wetlands of the high country on the top of the Plateau above the valley trough. That’s land that is currently drained of water to feed the sprinklers in the hot valley below. If it were used up top first, even if crops such as were planted in reservoirs, and some of the agricultural pressure were taken off the valleys, we would have an extra crop and more water than now. It’s not water that’s in short supply here. It’s just that our agricultural systems don’t work with the water that’s here, but against, and evaporate it into the wind and the sun.

26. Cat Tail

Cat Tail Flowers, A Syilx Crop

(Male on top, Female Below)

They can be eaten like corn. Also edible are the corms, and the new shoots (like the ones above). The rhizomes of the plant produce 32 tons of cat tail flour per acre. The pollen can be cooked into pancakes. What’s more, it grows everywhere there is a little water. Here’s some, trying to regrow a wetland turned into a soccer field…

… and here’s some trying to establish a wetland high on the dry hills, where the natural water flow was broken by the establishment of an agricultural canal (long disused) and then a walking trail. And if you don’t want to eat it, why not make a basket?

And if you don’t want to make a basket, what about collecting its fluff.

Red Winged Blackbird in the Remains of Last Year’s Crop

It’s one of the most absorbant water resistant products out there, and cleans up oil spills lickety split. Growing it conserves water, and considering that some 10,000 (who knows) blackbirds lost out when the Red Wing resort was put into their infilled wetlands in Penticton, we owe the birds big time on this one.

27. Amaranth

Red Amaranth, Granite Creek Winery, Tappen

Red Amaranth, Sunnybrae Winery, Sunnybrae. An indigenous crop.

Amaranth grows wherever redroot pigweed grows (pigweed is a form of amaranth), on natural water, and produces one of the highest grain yields of any grain. It grows anywhere. What’s more, it’s not like wheat. You don’t need a field. In fact, it’s so decorative, that it can replace many landscape plantings, with zero water. Think of it: golf courses could put cat tails in their water traps, and harvest them for an income; they could line the fairways with amaranth, and sell them, too. And the jungles, a must for losing golfers and their stray balls, those could be choke cherries, and they could sell those too. If golf course land is going to be called agricultural land … let’s just do it.

28. Borage

Borage: Queen of the Honey Crops

See the bumblebee leading the way?

This is a traditional European vegetable, dispersed by the romans. It is used in many Spanish, French, Italian and German recipes, including the famous Green Sauce or spring sauce of Frankfurt. It ceased to be a staple of European cookery only because of supply disruptions due to war and economic difficulties. It’s a plant that needs little to no water, produces a vast amount of bloom and nectar, and is impossible to be rid of once planted. This stuff is tough. But the new shoots are a delicacy. Its seeds are a productive oilseed. If you want a crop with multiple uses, that produces prolifically, this is your baby. Imagine: a non-GMO oilseed. I could go for that.

Flowers for All!

29. Peanuts

Only in the American South? Pffuh. 

We used to grow these things all the time.

Peanuts have never been grown commercially in the Okanagan, but that was before the population and culture could support local, specialty foods. Now it can. Now it’s time for the peanut! No more of these dried, salted weird things in cello pacs at the gas station, with their oils all rancid and, well, just go here and read more: click!

30. Queen Anne’s Lace

 Wild Carrot Flower

The leaves, roots,and seeds of wild carrots are edible. What’s more, they are an excellent companion plant for tomatoes, and help to keep them pest free. What’s even greater, domestic carrots are a subspecies of wild carrots, or Queen Anne’s Lace, and can be used in the same way if left an extra year in the ground. The seeds of wild carrots make a delicious spice, an orange-flavoured replacement for caraway. We’ll be talking about herbs in a few days, so I don’t want to get too ahead of things, but think of this: not only can you eat your pesticide, but it’s beautiful. For a host of gorgeous pictures and truly wonderful talk and recipes for wild carrots, here’s the place to go: click. Really? You didn’t  click that? You should. It’s gorgeous. Here, try again: click.

 Next, a discussion of alternate growing strategies to maximize water. The herbs will come soon after that. Thanks for being here. Have a good weekend. Until then, think mint!

Holes, Occupied

“Hole” is an English word, but it is not a thing. The language is older than “things”. At the root of English, a hole is the trace left by one of the powers of the universe. In the case of the image below, it is the process of hole-ing.

Bumble Bee Hole, Life-Sized

Similarly, rain is not a thing. It is the trace left by one of the processes of the universe. In the case of the image below, it is the process of raining. But don’t mistake it. This raining is not the falling of rain. It is the materialization of an eternal force. It is its presence. This makes water form out of air.

Rain in the Grasslands, Skaha Lake

That is the root of the language. All of the elaborations laid on top of that Old Norse foundation don’t erase that. They merely move through it and recombine it, but when the words are used, that’s what they mean. It goes without saying that a story or a poem is also a force of the universe. You did not make it. In the image below, a novel is making itself known in the wind and the rain, as water beads on the needle brushes of a young ponderosa pine at dusk.

Think of yourself, writer, as the flash that was present for a moment in the story before it blew on in the wind and the water. It is time, I think, to leave the books behind. Novels were a new thing once, a kind of story that could live totally within social space. They forgot, however, that this is also social and ethical space:

The Mathematics of the Physics of the Big Bang Dancing on a Saskatoon Bush

The mistake was that human identity is separate from the world. It is, in part, but not always. Humans have homes because they do need to go home. The mistake was based on a faith in the magic of words, and the loss of the knowledge of what those words were doing, or what they were for. The words, however, have not died. They are still doing their magic in the world, moving with energy as it manifests itself, moves matter, and then dissipates again in the wind and the light.

Arrow-Leafed Balsam Root in Bloom

The bloom does not come from the flower. The flower and the bloom, a force of the universe, intersect for a moment. Then the bloom passes on. It’s like a wind.

There are hundreds of verb-noun pairs in the language that come from this Old Norse source. If you’re going to write a poem in this age, you should know the paths you have. You are aboriginal. You are indigenous. You carry deep knowledge and deep magic. Whoever you are. If you speak English, you have this. If you turn from it, well, you are turning from it. You are turning from the power of the earth and a language that can touch it effortlessly. If your intent is to write about the earth, or to live in it, it’s simply leading you into a maze. Yes, a maze is an art form, that also focusses the energies of the universe. It will not, however, lead you to this other manifestation of the same energy …

Green Sweat Bee

It follows lines of energy in the air.  This too is what the Big Bang looks like today, as it begins to still.

… until you walk out of it again. It is the same with modern English, and your novels, and your poems. They are not your home. Don’t try to live there. All that can live there are characters. What can’t live there is life. If you try to live there, you will find you have no words for the earth. At first you will look like this …

Yellow-Bellied Marmot

Reclaiming a subdivision of the land.

… but slowly you will see the Big Bang in a smoke bush …

… and human stories in the earth …

This is Not a Human Story. It is Not a Novel. It is Not Science. It is Not Competition.

No one was hurt in this encounter, that saw the stink bug pushed off to the side of the flower amount later when the wild bee touched it. Only a habit of language tells you that it is so.

If you find yourself writing about the earth and the forces of the universe as if there was competition there, or as if it were a novel, with characters, remember, somewhere, deep inside yourself that you are talking about yourself. If it was your intent to talk about the earth, you will have to deal with your language. It got you there. It can get you back. You can chose to live. The language allows you that. You are one among many, existing in time and space.

You can make a line through that, but it goes through it. And then what? You’ve left the story? Fine enough. But what about your readers? What about your children? Will you give them this, if they want to look outside your book (And what is a book, but a representation of the language and your use of it to see the world?)

Young Yellow-Bellied Marmot in the Wasteland

… or will you give them this?

  Mock Orange

You can’t give them both. I suggest you adjust the form of your novels and poems to make a suitable home for your readers and descendants in time. The language connects your body to the earth and the earth to your body. If you leave it, you will end up here, sooner than you like:

This didn’t happen out of the blue. This is what the English language looks like. Notice the green, Old Norse words there at the right, making air. Notice the graffiti from a young person who wanted out, but had no words for it other than a statement of presence and identity. It’s a start. Human bodies aren’t easily written out. Shouldn’t we be writing them back in?

1. Mariposa Lily

A Syilx Crop

In the American West, mariposa lilies are most often white. Up here, though, they are a beautiful shade of mauve. As you can see in the image below, they are no longer plentiful. It has been 100 years, after all, without burning and with pressure from heavy grazing by cattle.

Mariposa Lilies in the Wild, Bella Vista

This is a hillside of dust that appears almost as dry as the moon. The richness of growth upon it demonstrates that this is not actually true. Think of these plants as being a controlled evaporation of water. Rather than the elemental evaporation (from water to vapour to cloud to rain to water to sewage plant to water and back to you) favoured by Western science, it is evaporated through long chains of life. Western agriculture tries to grow crops within the elemental environment, because that is what its tools can perceive. With a new toolkit, it can begin to grow crops within the long carbon strings of a living environment.

Nonetheless, mariposa lilies are already grown and sold as floral bulbs, including in the Methow, in one of the sister Plateau valleys to the Okanogan. Creating the numbers for edible production is easily within grasp. Not only can the bulbs be roasted and eaten, but the new shoots can be harvested before they open. Please do not attempt this with wild mariposa lilies, as the numbers are too low to support harvest of any kind.

Mariposa Lily Stalk

Mariposa lilies can be grown commercially on high-exposure slopes, without irrigation. They can support a rich bee population and a honey and pollen industry. They can be cropped among other, lower-growing crops, as they easily stand above them. As with many Indigenous crops, they could support an Indigenous vegetable industry, marketed to Indigenous restaurants, feasts and gatherings, as well as an expanded floral bulb industry. The high cost of labour is easily offset by their high value as cultural products, the low production costs created by the use of otherwise unused land, and the lack of need for expensive subsidies of industrialized water and its high capital costs. Because of their aesthetic value, mariposa lilies also support alternate production models, including ones in which production is given to people themselves rather than to professional farmers, or ones in which decorative private or civic plantings are harvested post-bloom, or harvested for seed, which can be sold for a fair price of, say, 5 or 10 cents a seed. I promise you: there is a subculture of gleaners in all cities and towns. It is a culture of generous, gentle and respectful people who collect bottles from roadsides, garbage cans and green recycling boxes. There is one man in Vernon who collects canning jars from a glass recycling depot and trades them to elderly ladies (and Harold) for jam. If there were a market for mariposa lily seeds at the same rate as bottles, the seeds would be collected, right on time, every time. Currently, this culture of people (the poor, the unemployed, the elderly poor, people with alternate mental processing, the homeless, ex-cons, children and others) is marginalized and forced into transience and ghost status by a society in which transactions built on capital and wage models are increasingly dominant. It would be exciting to welcome them as the valuable cultural leaders that they are and bring them back to the community table. Besides, these lilies are a zillion times more beautiful than tulips.

2. Arrow-leaved Balsam Root

A Syilx Crop

These gorgeous, mis-named sunflowers are not only beautiful but intensely productive. They can be harvested for their new shoots, for their seed, for honey and pollen, and for their taproots, which can be as long and thick as a man’s arm. They can be used as foodstuffs or medicinals, especially as a natural mentholated cough and sore throat treatment. They thrive in even more grassland environments than do mariposa lilies. They are less-easily domesticated than mariposa lilies, but there are still millions of acres of land suitable for their development. Their marketting potential is much the same as that for mariposa lilies. Water requirements: natural water only. To put that into perspective, the water in the City of Vernon (Population 38,000) alone costs approximately $5,500,000 a year, of which 85% goes for agricultural use. Increasing agricultural development by enriching the environment instead of drawing on those water resources is, accordingly, worth millions. To put it another way, if even a fraction of the capital costs (far in excess of the $5,500,000 operating costs) of the entire agricultural water system were invested in living water agriculture instead, it would instantly be incredibly viable. Society has chosen to communally subsidize food production and employment by giving its farmers subsidized water. It is not the only way.

3. Dandelion

Blue-Bottomed Bee on a Spring Dandelion, in a Civic Parking Lot. A Syilx Crop.

Dandelions are more nutritious than any commercially grown vegetable. They are also incredibly prolific, grow in almost any environment, heal wounded soil leaking water to the dry sky, are beautiful, provide joy for children, support birds and wild bees, and do it all in balance with whatever water is provided for them, including no industrial water at all. They can be harvested for spring greens and dug up as roots and forced in winter for a crop of mid-winter greens. They can be harvested for bird seed and for honey. Their petals can be collected for Dandelion Wine and Dandelion Syrup (an Icelandic delicacy). They have strong medicinal properties, and their roots, well, look …

Dandelion Root Coffee, Before Grinding

… can be roasted and ground into a rich coffee substitute. The stuff even grows on the gravel at the sides of roads …

Currently, dandelions are commercially sold in health food stores, as greens, and occasionally as a coffee substitute. Even the coffee substitute industry alone, supplemented with local herbs and spices, could be worth millions. Today, most dandelions are tortured with 2-4D, to allow for green lawns. That is only a cultural choice. And a poisonous one. And cruel.

4. Red Root Pigweed

An Indigenous Crop

This is one of the staple foods of the corn-bean-squash cultures of the Eastern United States. It grows around here wherever the land is disturbed by voles or human cultivation, transforming water loss to the dry sky into spring greens, a deep taproot that brings valuable minerals to the surface, where they can be used by other plants, and, most valuable of all, a rich crop of seeds, which are favoured by chickadees. They do it all with no industrial water. Growing these prolific, productive plants commercially would provide nutrient-rich spring spinach-like greens, a bird-food industry, and an alternate grain, with an attractive black shine and an exciting earthy taste, to add value and interest to baking, soups and cereals. Currently, these plants are brutally murdered …

Industrial Water, So Highly-Subsidized that a Farmer can Afford to Evaporate it Into the Sky at our Expense

He even watered one section of this field, so that the pigweed would growth vigorously, so it would respond better to Monsanto’s poisons and die more quickly. Water as a poison! Good grief.

… with expensive, industrial poisons, in order to grow corn (also part of the corn-bean-squash culture) for summer feasts at the beach. That is what has happened to Indigenous North American Culture. This form of agriculture has led to dead soil. Intriguingly, the form of capitalized agriculture that has replaced Indigenous agriculture (using its own crops) is mining today’s soil in the same way that original American settlement mined the fields and carefully-sculpted environments of Indigenous America. We can help heal the soil and agricultural practices by harvesting the weeds, rather than poisoning them. When they are no longer weeds, they can be tilled under after harvest to replenish the soil, without worries that their millions of seeds will cause a new “infection” of wild growth. We need to return profit to the earth, not to Monsanto. As for the water, I suggest we charge what it’s worth. We can no longer afford to mine either water or soil.

5. Lambs Quarters

An Indigenous Crop

Lambs quarters provide the first spring greens. They are far more nutritious and flavourful than spinach. Because of their deeper structure and taste, they can be used not only for steamed greens, as with spinach, but for pestos and green sauces. They fill the same role as does redroot pigweed, but with far smaller seeds. They make up for it by being far more prolific.

6. Arugula Blossoms

Time for Harvest!

Arugula is growing increasingly popular as a salad green, and for good reason: it’s spicy, slightly bitter taste is highly nutritious and balances the sweetness of lettuce well, when used in a mix. It marries spinach well with pears, red onions, goat cheese and candied walnuts, too, and is strong enough to hold up to balsamic vinegar and olive oil dressings. It doesn’t need to have just one harvest, though. Once the greens have been picked and the heat comes and makes it too bitter for use, and once it bolts and goes to seed, it becomes beautiful again. The flower stalks are nutty and intriguing when friend very quickly in a little oil at high heat, the flowers themselves can be harvested as a salad green (well, white) long after the leaves are too strong, and the seed pods as a spicy radish substitute long after the heat has brought the radish worms out and the radishes are, well, eeeyew. Four harvests from one plant, instead of one, in keeping with the hotter days of a progressing springtime. That sure beats tilling and sowing and tilling and sowing again, it reduces water wastage, because mature roots are already in place when the heat comes, and it goes a long way towards creating new culinary opportunities. In fact, the seed pods are so sharp and intriguing that they should turn out to be most intriguing pickled capers.

7. Bitter Lettuce

When Your Lettuce is Old and Bitter, What Then, Dear Heart?

Do not despair!

You have actually made stir-fry greens, the base for a green sauce (the taste of spring  from the Main River in Germany, a sauce for garnishing beef and potatoes, or, may I humbly suggest, pork glazed with mustard, asparagus spears, rice and some Lang Vineyards Reserve Riesling?), and a splendid variation on Endive soup. Here’s what you do:

June Lettuce Soup

Ingredients

2 large heads over-mature romaine lettuce

900 ml chicken or vegetable stock

1/2 cup cream

2 egg yolks

salt, white pepper, summer savoury, and nutmeg to taste

parsley or coriander blossoms for garnish

Coriander Blossoms: More Delicate than Parsley

Prettier, too.

Preparation:

• Heat the soup stock

• Wash and finely shred the lettuce with a long, sharp knife

• Stir the lettuce in and simmer until soft

• While heating, add a little savoury and test for taste, adding more if necessary. A little goes a long way here.

• Remove 4 tbsp lettuce and set aside.

• Purée the rest of the lettuce and the stock until relatively smooth. If using a blender, do multiple batches. Trust me. It’s hot. Ow.

• Return to a pot on medium low heat. 

• Blend the cream with the egg yolks.

• Add the cream/egg yolk mixture to the soup and heat but do not boil.

• Season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg to taste.

• Spoon into bowls, garnish with parsley or coriander blossoms, and serve.

• Also makes a magnificent green sauce for the mustard pork, rice and asparagus, with the riesling or a grüner veltliner. This is not a dish for any wine less bold. No summer sippers! Take those on the deck and enjoy them there while the doves hoot and holler from the top of the spruce tree and the house finch feeds her babies on the fence. Oh, wait, those are my neighbours. Well, no doubt you have an equivalent.

Again, two crops from one planting, using the natural progression of the plant for a natural progression through the culinary palette, and relying on the deep roots of the lettuce to harvest water. Hint: plant the lettuce the fall before, but we’ll get to that in a few days.

8. Nettles

The things grow where it’s cool and the sting like mosquitoes with road rage. Just wear a long shirt and gloves. Nettles are a standard of european country cooking, and make soups much like the June lettuce soup above. There’s no point in reinventing the wheel here. As far as nettles go, I’m the novice, but over on Girl Gone Wild and Weedy, Danika is making soup and tea and shampoo and herbal tinctures and, oh my, just have a look. Click here. Mmmm. Hint: That’s her nettle chicken soup recipe.

Girl Gone Wild and Weedy’s Chicken Nettle Soup

If you type in nettles in the search box on the upper right of Danika’s page, you will find all her other wonderful nettle posts. Click here.

9. Jerusalem Artichoke

An Indigenous Crop

A naming confusion among early explorers gave arrow-leafed balsam root is name, after these beautiful ladies. The arrow-leafed par to the name was a later attempt at clarification. Truth is, jerusalem artichokes are daisies and balsam roots are sunflowers!

These plants are native to Eastern North America. They provide stands of beautiful flowers beloved of bees and the sun and angels. Whoa. Angels? Why, yes, something like that:

Green Fly on the Jerusalem Artichokes

They are farmed for their tubers. Warning: if you till them to get rid of them, you just break the tubers up and get more. This is a kind of permaculture, that’s what it is. Here are the tubers:

Jerusalem Artichokes, aka Sunchokes Source

 That link will give you a little naming history, complete with a picture of Champlain looking like a bored Shakespearean actor. Really. Worth a look.

The tubers are 10% protein, contain no fats, and are extremely low on starch. Instead, they store energy in the form of inulin, a carbohydrate that breaks down to fructose, rather than sucrose, and is of great benefit both to diabetic diets and to the ethanol industry.

German Topinambur Schnapps Made from Sunchokes

It has a nutty-sweet smell and an intense earthy taste. Exciting to cook with, or what!

Now, you can use ethanol to power cars (probably a bad use of precious land, don’t you think) or to make alcohol to extend the range of the local food industry, or you can just make fructose and kiss the sugarcane fields of Jamaica and the sugar beet fields of Alberta good-bye. I mean, if a plant can harvest the sun in marginal environments out of the valley floor, on hillsides and in road margins, why on earth would we ship sugars great distances, and why on earth would we use the precious, sun-drenched land of Jamaica or the wheat lands of Alberta (well, in between the oil industry sculptures) to produce sugar? Let’s start thinking as a planet. Raw sunchokes have a crunchy texture like water chestnuts and a taste reminiscent of artichokes.  When steamed or baked, they have a nuttier flavour than potatoes. The inulin, however, is not easily digestible by humans, and should be gradually added to a diet. However, when stored, inulin-rich sun chokes become intensely sweet, which leads to some great caramelization in cooking. This is an incredibly productive, versatile plant with both industrial, food, and medicinal uses. What’s more, it produces an incredible amount of valuable organic matter, which is useful for silage, and its tubers can be fed beneficially to livestock. This is one new crop that is easily adaptable to existing technologies and to production in large, industrial quantities.

10. Biscuit Root

Biscuit Root Happy on Turtle Mountain, A Syilx Crop

In other areas, the darned things are yellow or green, but here they are dark and glorious.

Biscuit root tubers can be skinned and steamed, or dried and pounded into flour, to be used in flat, unleavened breads. The Syilx staple, Bannock, is an adaptation of biscuit root baking to the introduction of wheat flour to Indigenous diets, with all the complications of diabetes that follow. Biscuit root has a mild flavour reminiscent of parsnips or parsley or old biscuits (hence the name), is quite mild, and has all the marketting potential of other indigenous foods, such as arrow-leafed balsam root and mariposa lily. It also provides relief from coughs and upper respiratory infections. This is a beautiful plant with enough dietary benefits to be worthy of research and development.

11. Wild Sprouting Seeds

Arrow-Leafed Balsam Root Seeds, A Syilx Crop

Many of the flavours of the wild hills come in tubers and plants so small as to present some problems for commercial scale production. However, when populations are increased to bountiful levels, seeds from many species, including dessert parsley, clover, alfalfa, pigweeds, balsam roots, lilies, wild garlic, nodding onions, and so forth, can be easily collected and sold as gourmet sprouting seeds. The potential of a new cuisine built upon wild flavours is within reach, without having to rely on harvesting industrial qualities of perhaps low-yielding crops in difficult terrain. It’s the value that matters. Roadways and walking trails already criss-cross the land. They can easily become harvesting platforms.

12. Brittle Prickly Pear Cactus

After the Fire, A Syilx Crop

This is first season growth after a devastatingly hot fire last summer.

I’ve always wondered how one harvests these cactusses, when the quality of the segments is so varied. Now I know: fire!

Another Friend for the Honey Industry!

Here is a plant that stores water, stores sunlight in complex acids, which it breaks down in the dark, blooms exquisitely, and can be harvested year round, even out of the snow. Once cooked, the inner flesh can be popped out of the prickly shells, or these can be singed off in fire before hand. They can also be cooked over flames, like marshmallows, with the cooking, preparation and de-spining being done at once. They can be cooked in a pit, steamed, boiled, roasted or barbecued, eaten as is or mixed with Saskatoon ber­ries and fat, or boiled into soup, or baked in fruit cakes. They have a taste and consistency similar to green gage plums. And we’re not growing them … because? There’s incredible potential here. Few other plants grow so well on nearly bare rock, and there’s lots of that around. However, I advise wearing gloves. And heavy pants. They tend to kick up from your heels and work their way up your legs step by step until they reach more, um, tender bits. And the spines sting. Gloves and jeans, that’s the trick.

13. Desert Parsley

Desert Parsley in Flower

This is one of the plants for which the Syilx, the Tsilhq’otin, the Secwepemc and the other Plateau peoples burnt the grasslands annually. It provides early spring greens. By the time the other and plants come up …

End of the Season (April)

…it’s done. Then it’s time to harvest the large and bountiful seeds. It should be possible to increase the numbers of this now rare plant and harvest it once more, to supply indigenous food markets and seasonal feasts. What’s more, however, is that if this parsley survives on the grassland by blooming early in the year, cleverness with planting and timing should allow for the production of other parsleys on the grasslands, without irrigation. This is a plant that shows the way, not only to the value of maintaining juvenile conditions through burning, farming through ten years of succession crops, then restarting the process, but also for working with the seasonal nature of plants to grow in the wet season, rather than the dry one. Research into cross-breeding with European biannual parsleys would likely bring great benefits. A parsley that weathers the drought by producing its crop quickly, while water is available, and responds to the coming drought by adapting its speed of maturation, is a parsley well worth working with and improving. I’m not talking genetic modification. That’s just trouble. It leads to thinking of the earth rather than as a living process. We cannot afford to poison our connection to the long chains of life in this way.

14. Grape Leaves

Dolmathes, anyone?

Have you ever wondered why grape leaves come in cans, shipped from Greece? Me too. Vineyards are always cutting off grape leaves and throwing them away. A little harvesting and a secondary crop is produced. What’s more …

… they come in a variety of shapes and sizes, with varying mineral contents, and, depending on where in the plant they grow, how old they are, and what time of day and in how much sun they are growing, different levels of acidity, astringency and taste. That’s a lot to work with, for a product that is basically free. Surely, if we can spend the money to prune grapes, we can spend the money to harvest those leaves. Oh, the poisons? Yeah. Well, there are organic vineyards. I suspect the sale of grape leaves, and their development into more than just wraps for dolmathes, would pay for the extra costs of organic production.

15. Edamame Beans

Soy Bean in Its Natural State

The classic japanese appetizer grows gloriously in the Okanagan. If you’ve ever had edamame beans, just think of one thing: when they are picked fresh out of the garden or the field, at just the right ripeness, they taste 100 times as sweet and good. No, that’s wrong. 1000 times. It’s like the difference between old frozen peas and spring fresh peas, just picked at their optimal hour. And we don’t grow these things? And we can? Are we nuts? They can be left on later, for soybeans, and all the proteins and tofus and soy milks and every thing that comes from that. What’s more, like all beans, they collect their nitrogen from the air, not from petrochemical fertilizers, and they leave it in the soil for other plants. So, I repeat: and we don’t grow these things? And we can? Are we nuts? In Vernon, especially, where we have a long tradition of japanese-canadian farmers.

So, those are some possibilities to augment the fruit production and smart water use that I spoke of earlier in the week. Tomorrow, more vegetables. After that, some serious talk about planting schedules to maximize water.

11. Oregon Grape

This was Oregon Once. A Syilx Crop.

Oregon grape is not a grape. It is the sourest darned thing you’re ever likely going to come across. There’s a certain point in the development of a grape in which the berries are 100% citric acid. These things are still close to that when fully mature. Two thoughts on that: 1. the other few percent are amazing, concentrated fruit flavours and sugars and 2. citric acid is a valuable crop product in itself. We don’t need to grow lemons here, to flavour food and make refreshing summer drinks. We just need oregon grapes. Souring agents are the foundations of entire cooking traditions. A new souring agent can lead to a new cuisine. This work is beginning. Here’s what Tara is up to at Three Bells Ranch in Oroville, Washington, at the heart of this valley that crosses the border on its way south and crosses it again on its way north:

Tara’s Sweet and Sour Cabbage in Oregon Grape Sauce

Now we’re talking! You can read Tara’s recipe on this page here: Source.

Oregon grapes also make excellent preserves, especially jellies. Their roots are a potent medicinal  and their leaves are a fine, decorative floral product, especially for the Christmas season, with both red and green colour.

Sun Dried Oregon Grapes

They go through the same complex fermentations as grapes left on the vine. I think wine and vinegar makers could do wonders with that.

Oregon grapes are drought tolerant and prefer the edges of woody areas, the drip lines of trees, or slopes below cliffs, where they can collect water filtering out of talus slopes, especially ones covered with a bit of silt.

Oregon Grapes in Full Bloom

They are cold hardy, provide premium forage for honeybees and wild bees, are productive, attractive, evergreen, and come in two varieties: tall and short. Currently, they are used as landscape plants. This is one agricultural niche they can fill admirably. They can bring farming back into the city, or back into the hills, where they can farm water that to eyes trained in European agriculture looks like drought.

12. Wild Rose

A Syilx Crop

The hips of wild roses are rich in Vitamin C, and taste like incredibly over-ripe apples. Traditionally, they are dried to make a fruity, floral, tart-sweet herbal tea. They are admirable for that and have the potential to be yet another souring agent. They provide excellent and popular forage for bees. As there are a number of varieties, and many different altitudes and climactic zones as the valley climbs up into the mountains, the season can be extend for many weeks. The Hills Guest Ranch & Spa in 108 Mile, up north in the Cariboo, have been harvesting them wild for years (in large volumes) and distilling them down to essential oils, with are used as a high-end, high-priced medicinal tincture. It puts a lot of pressure on the birds, however, which use these berries for late winter forage. Better to add to the environment rather than taking them away. Better to plant them out. They grow on waste fields, in roadside ditches, at the bottoms of slopes, on the sides of arroyos and gullies — anywhere where a small amount of underground water can find them. They provide cover for birds and valuable protection for herbs needing a thorny fence between them and deer.

13. Rose Petals

Wild Wasp Harvesting Pollen

You see how that’s done? Straddle the opening stamens, and turn around in a circle to brush all the pollen off onto your leg brushes, then over to the next blossom, to spin around in a circle again. Whee!

All those bees, wasps, beetles, ants, and pollen-collecting flies can’t be wrong: this is one sweet pollen and nectar plant. Blossoms, however, can also be collected, for floral decoration, for rose petal water (for Middle-Eastern baking and cooking and for perfumes and soaps) as well as for tea. Tea? Oh my, yes.

Wild Rose Petal Tea

It tastes like honey in its pure form, before it has been digested by a bee: spicy, sweet, and aromatic, with flavours both gentler and richer than rosewater.

14. European Currants

Red Currant

Black Currant

These cool climate, northern European plants do well in the Okanagan if given ample water. They do even better in the cooler areas around the edges of the valley and up into the hills — areas originally ignored, because the idea was to grow peaches, which need a lot of heat. Currants don’t. Red currants make exquisite jams and jellies and are a staple of Danish cooking. They provide fruit flavours for pickled cabbage, bright notes for cream desserts, and the base of light marinades and meat sauces. Black currants are smoky in flavour, make exquisite jams and form the base of rich, full meat marinades and sauces. They have the potential to replace balsamic vinegars. In Britain, they are reduced to a syrup, which is then reconstituted in beverages of many kinds, including cassis sodas. They form the bases for cassis liqueurs. One of the most popular uses for them in Scandinavia is as a juice mixed with apple juice, in the proportions of 10% black currant juice and 90% apple juice. When the Okanagan Juice company Sun Rype tried this about 20 years back, they hit upon the insane idea of substituting artificial black currant juice and lots of sugar for the real thing, and then still had enough ego left over to announce that North Americans did not like the taste of black currants. Yeah, sure. The plants require little pruning and are regularly grown for mechanical harvesting throughout Denmark. They are also a great source of nectar for bees.

15. Wild Currants

Native Syilx Currant

American Black Wild Currant

These native Okanagan currants (red) and native North American currants (black) deal with drought and heat and produce in conditions that would send a European currant shrivelling and back on the boat to Sonderborg to drown its sorrows in Akavit. Other than that, they have flavours that are more intense (more floral, spicy and sharp for the red, Okanagan currants, and smokier for the black ones). They are easy to reproduce. The black currants are currently sold as landscape plants. Early adopters of these plants could make a good living just selling plants to the nursery trade. Where the European currants can harvest the cooler upland climates, these can harvest hotter hillsides. The smoky flavours of the black currants should make steakhouse chefs sit up and take notice.

16. Juniper Berries

Also Known as Wild Gin

Look, if we’re going to landscape with these suckers, with either these imported varieties or the native varieties that carpet exposed hillside slopes, we might as well harvest the berries and make gin. Fortunately, one Vernon company, Okanagan Spirits, is doing just that, with a fine martini gin. The path is open to explore a wide variety of local juniper species and to create a more extensive, more varied gin industry, and perhaps even a gin strong enough to stand up to a tonic.

As Gentle as a Spring Rain

The combination of juniper flavours with flavours from other wild berries and plants also needs to be explored, to create other gins with distinct local profiles. Dried juniper berries are excellent for wild meat flavours, including wild boar and bison. Most of them have a sharp, petroleum taste, but some are sweet as can be. This is one of those crops used extensively as a decorative ground cover, that has the potential, after further development and exploration, to bring farming into urban gardening. Furthermore, given the wide variety of colours and growth patterns in this species, the potential for a floral industry is extremely strong. Junipers are extremely drought and cold hardy, withstand untold abuse, adapt to a wide variety of soils, are long-lived, require no pesticides or pruning, and are simple to reproduce. Oh, and they smell soooo good.

17. Sumac

A Syilx and Indigenous American Crop

The Syilx harvested the indigenous Smooth Sumac, which is a smaller version of this giant from the east, Staghorn Sumac (which was also an indigenous crop).

Tanner’s Sumac is an ancient Aramaic, Arabic, Indian, Egyptian and Mediterranean spice, still essential for cooking in the Middle East. It has left India with tandoori cooking, where it has recently been replaced by manchoor, Egypt with Duqqa, and the Fertile Crescent and Greece with an entire culinary tradition — one of the oldest, if not the oldest, of them all. It is made from the dried berries of a European cousin of the North American sumacs. The drupe fruits of our sumacs are too stony for this procedure, and bear a slight risk of allergic reactions among people allergic to cashews (their loving sisters, along with the mangos), but they have long been used by Indigenous North American peoples to create a cooling summer drink, that far surpasses lemonade or iced tea, and which can reproduced into a syrup that can take the place of Mediterranean sumac. The wood of the tree can be reduced to a high temperature, smokeless wax, for candles, and lights up in a black light, which ought to have some interesting applications. Every part of the tree is highly medicinal, with that cashew-allergy caveat, and the leaves are essential to the leather tanning industry. In fact, in the American east, whole groves of sumac are grown for their use as tanning agents. This is a plant that withstands incredible drought, grows anywhere, is highly decorative, and currently lines the short term parking lot of the Kelowna International Airport — for example. Some mature trees in Kelowna are 20 feet tall and dwarf the houses they once stood before. This is a plant with a great future. What we need is a tiny bit of research from a university willing to do so, and we are off. What’s more, this is the real autumn colour of New England. Plant enough of these things, and local tourism operators should be able to appreciably increase the value of fall wine tours, and even provide fall colour tours, for the many partners of wine enthusiasts who just don’t like to play the taste-the-papaya-on-your-tongue-in-the-wineshop game.

18. Soap Berry

A Syilx Crop

These berries whip. Like egg whites. Whipped, with a little sugar, they form what is locally known as “Indian Ice Cream”. Here is a crop that grows in the cool hills and open upland forests. It laughs off cold and drought. An industry built around it can not only supply
Aboriginal communities with a traditional product, but has the potential to supply the chemical and cosmetic industries with an organic foaming agent. In that direction, the potential is almost limitless. They also make an attractive landscape plant, especially for xeriscape situations. And, yes, the bees love them.

19. Black Hawthorn

Black Hawthorn (Falkland Clone). A Syilx Crop.

Black Hawthorn (Vernon Clone). A Syilx Crop.

What beauties, eh! Here is another fruit crop that take fruit farming out of the valley floor into the side valleys, and onto grassy slopes, lake shores, road margins, hedgerows and boundaries of all kinds. They harvest water moving by gravity down gentle alluvial slopes, are favoured nesting sites for magpies, provide early spring forage for bees, and fruits and bark of high medicinal value (anti-cancer drugs). There are indications that the fruit has fresh fruit or processing value as well — again, just a small amount of research is necessary and we will have a crop resistant to deer, needed no pruning, easy to train and hedge, free of pesticides, with incredibly low water needs or none at all, and able to grow in a huge number of currently wasted or under-utilized environments. What’s more, she’s pretty as all heck. This is another one with potential.

20. Velvet Leaved Blueberry

A Syilx Crop

These North American native berries are traditionally grown on Vancouver Island, in Oregon, on the Olympic Peninsula, in the Fraser Valley, in Maine and in Montana. Montana? Yes. That’s inspiring. The Okanagan Valley bottom does not have the moisture or the acidic soil to grow these berries unless a cheap, easy, organic acidifier can be found and the water issues can be cured with shade, perhaps from mulberries. The high country, though, where the water for the valley floor farms is sourced, that is perfect. The local blueberry is a low-bush variety, with low yields of small, intensely flavoured fruits, hovering just above the 3000 foot level. It should be possible to find enough land to grow enough of these high up there, in that blueberry zone in the pine shade, to keep an appreciable amount of water in the upland system to return some balance to the natural water flow down through the hills. At $3 a pint for decent berries, and $2 a pint for the ones 2 days short of rot, sold here to empty cold storages in the Fraser Valley, it’s worth a go. Besides, the darned things make excellent bison sausages, fantastic preserves, wondrous baking, and a deep wine that puts the low end $15 Okanagan reds into the spittoon. I’m all for wine that regular people can afford. This is one worth exploring. Look up to the hills. There, where the clouds run.

The Lip of the Plateau Above Vernon

Right now, we ski and snowmobile and snowshoe and cut down trees up there. We could do a lot more.

That’s twenty fruits, and twenty new ways of not only creating new economies and new cultures, with room for our young to grow and invent and prosper and dream, but also to enrich the environment at the same time. Inspiring, eh. There are many further opportunities within fruit crops currently grown here. I’ll be getting back to that. Next, however, I’ll look at vegetables. Until then, you noticed my new mascot, the guy with the tongue, right?

Click on This Young Buck for a Closer View of the Okanagan Tasting Experience

Peaches, Such as This Now-Dying Tree, Were Originally Planted as Part of the Healing Process and Economic Recovery that Followed the American Civil War

They were plants of peace. This particular tree was planted by a Japanese-Canadian farmer as part of the healing process following the internment camps of World War II. We need new plants for a new peace.

When I started this blog, I promised practical applications. There have been many. To start recapping them, here are some fruit crops that we could grow for new industries, water conservation, increased species diversity, removal of agricultural and population pressure from the hot, dry, pressurized valley bottom, reduction in chemical farming, less food waste, and a culture with hope and opportunity for young people.

The Hills are Covered with Food, Still

In European tradition, this is called “beauty”, suitable for “art”. In that tradition, agriculture is “industrial” instead. This division of art, nature and industry relegates native agriculture to a concept called “wilderness” and indigenous knowledge to a concept called “anthropology”, and of historical interest..

Based on a long-overdue integration of traditional and imported land use practices, a new agriculture will match new social and political landscapes.

A Rich Profusion of Berries and Small Fruits Grows Without Water on the Peshastin Pinnacles (Wenatchee River, Washington)

A high-input American pear orchard, requiring expensive water and chemicals, spreads on the flat land below. This is  one of the few remaining natural gardens in the Plateau.

It’s time to produce crops that add to the environment, rather than take from it. Every one of the crops below will lead to increased environmental and social health.

1. Choke Cherry 

A Syilx Crop

Chokecherries are suitable for preserves, high quality kirsch, honey production and a cherry cider industry. The fruits have all the tannins necessary for a completely new product, of the highest quality. The trees are completely adapted to the climate, use very little water, are drought tolerant, support many indigenous species, are easy to propagate and grow, are extremely productive, bear annually, are adaptable to mechanical harvesting, require minimal pruning and no pesticides, and reclaim overgrazed lands. They grow naturally in a wide variety of habitats, and are completely adaptable to low-cost areas unsuited for European crops and farming methods, including hillside gullies, “dry” hillsides with rock outcrops, slope and road margins, and areas with cooler climates, in side valleys far from the valley floor, leading to improved demographic dispersion, away from the depressurized landscapes of the valley bottoms.

2. Perry

Pear Cider (Perry) in the Raw

Current pear cider in the Okanagan uses Bartletts (Williams Bon Chrétien) pears, a sweet, aromatic dessert variety, excellent for fresh eating, bitter with canned or dried, and capable of making only bland cider like soda pop. Perry is made from bitter, astringent, sour-sweet, half-wild pears in the Cotswolds of England and is one of the world’s ancient drinks. Some of the best pear land in the world is in the Okanagan. Perry trees can produce perry, either sparkling or still, honey, vinegars, complex acids and sugars for juice additives to otherwise bland juices (such as commercial apple juices made from excess dessert apples.) They aid in the beautification of landscapes, require little or no pruning, thrive in marginal climates, and are available in hundreds of potential varieties, with the potential for crop improvement and specialization through breeding programs. As with choke cherries, there is little need for pesticides, as there are no appearance considerations, the fruit requires no thinning required, and can be mechanically harvested. They will thrive in the main valley and in side valleys with cool or short season climates, thrive in pasture plantings, where they provide shade for livestock, are able to source their own water from underground sources, thrive as hedgerows and along fence lines, and provide habitat for birds and deer (which can graze the lowest-hanging branches without harm to the trees).

3. Scrumpy

Ashton Brown Jersey

This is a perfectly balanced English cider apple which grows well in the Okanagan, despite our heat.

Reine de Pomme (Queen of the Apples)

There are a few Reines out there. The one I’ve seen in the Similkameen produced tiny crabapples in clusters like golden cherries. A wonderful source of citric acid, lemon flavours, and honey notes for scrumpies and other traditional ciders. The tree is not a heavy producer, but the fruit is so concentrated that only a few drops of juice per bottle will work its magic.

Scrumpy is a traditional English cider made from the roughest, wildest tasting apples scrounged, gleaned and grippled from hedgewrows. It and other traditional ciders are currently produced on Vancouver Island. They could easily be grown here, where more land is available, and could put the soda pop ciders currently on the market into their rightful soda pop niche. The trees thrive in the same conditions as perry pears. In addition to cider, they can produce vinegars, complex acids and sugars for juice additives, and honey.

4. Elderberries

A Syilx Crop (These are in Fintry)

Elderberries thrive in all regions of the valley, from Brewster, Washington, north to the Shuswap. There are two native varieties: scrubby bushes like the one above, and 25 foot tall trees capable of providing a second tier and sourcing deeper water. The berries can be used for preserves, juice, wine and vinegars. The bushes require little water, thrive on sandy or rocky ground slightly above stream beds, as well as in arroyos and below water-collecting cliffs and scree slopes. They are productive and precocious, cold and drought hardy, require little pruning, can be trained for mechanical harvesting, need no fertilization or chemical inputs, and provide bird and insect habitat. They thrive in the same areas as perry pears and scrumpy apples, as well as dryer areas on their margins. A related product with the same horticultural profile is:

5. Elderberry Flowers

Most are white. Mine just happen to be pink.

This plant is 6 years old and has over 400 flower clusters.

Elderberry blossoms can be dried in salt, and then stored for long or short periods to produce elderberry blossom juice and wine, through a process that removes the salt. They can be used to produce medicinals, as well as their crowning glory, sold fresh for elderberry blossom fritters (a high quality breakfast and dessert delicacy).

6. Quince

Sister of the Apple and the Pear

And once considered their queen. Most people know it now from the flowering varieties in their gardens.

Quince makes a delicate eau de vie, and a variety of preserves. In addition, the trees can be used as dwarfing rootstocks for pears. They have exquisite flowers. They thrive wherever pears and apples will grow.

7. Raspberries

Tulameen Raspberries

Tulameen raspberries were bred in the Okanagan (Summerland) for an Okanagan climate. They are named after a placer-platinum-bearing tributary of the Similkameen River. It is the preferred variety of raspberry growers throughout Europe. It is not grown here in any quantities. The berries can be used for honey production, fresh fruit, juice and sweet vinegar, sour vinegars, wine, glazes, cider, preserves, and the vines can be used to produce nursery stock for home plantings or export. These are vigorous, cold hardy, late bearing, heat resistant plants producing large, firm fruit suitable for machine harvesting and pruning. They grow in all climates, from dry to wet and lowland to upland.

8. Siberian C Peaches

The Mother of All Peaches

Gobi Desert, China. 

Siberian C peaches produce the richest of all peach juices. The seeds are valuable as seed for nursery rootstocks or orchard planting. These are cold-hardy trees that have an extremely low tree cost because they are true to variety from seed. They are productive, require no thinning, are suitable for mechanical harvesting, and require little pruning. They are early-ripening with low to no pesticide requirements. They have enough genetic variability to allow for further selection and development. If grown in place from seed, they grow a strong water-sourcing taproot. They are suitable for many valley production and production in more northerly parts of the valley and in some side valleys.

9. Saskatoon

A Syilx Crop

Saskatoons can grow in almost all areas of the valley, from mountains to lowlands, deep soil to rocky slopes, but produce their best fruit in areas with ample spring water. They are extremely cold hardy, and can be used for pies (they taste like marzipan when cooked this way), preserves, wine, juices, pemmican, meat and sausage production. Wild and domesticated varieties are available.

10. Mulberry

Hardy to Zone 4

In eastern Asia, mulberries are used for silkworm production.  It would be exciting to see such an industry here, but failing that mulberries produce delicious fruits on spreading, beautiful trees with light and cooling shade. They can do well in warm areas of the valley, especially where winter lake effects keep the cold air of the high country at bay.

Winter Crow in the Great Blue Heron Hatchery, Vernon

Fog creates a warm protective area out of water evaporating from the winter lake. Don’t look for a lot of winter sun here. It’s not good for the mulberries!

So, that’s ten new fruits. I’m going to keep at laying this out over the next few days. Just remember: the wine industry came from observations such as this.

Butterfly on Sagebrush Trunk, Bella Vista

Photography is a technology that represents the same world view. That brings us, though, to the other definition of science, the popular culture one, in which science is, quite simply, the natural world AND technology. It’s not a method. It’s just everything that is “real”. It can look this:

Waste Concrete With Cheatgrass  Chaser

The concrete is left over from pouring a sidewalk in a failed real estate development. In accordance with local cultural practice that values machinery over the earth, it is poured out onto living soil, to harden there, so that it doesn’t present a clean-up problem within the cement truck itself. Cheatgrass, however, has managed to colonize it, nonetheless. (Those stringy little red stalks in the centre of the image.)

In popular science, you see, there is only science. In that culture, this is not an image of an intellectual process of ordering the universe into a kind of map, like the periodic table of the elements, but, simply, an image of the way things are. An intellectual scientist would analyze the length of time it took for the cheatgrass to establish, the amount of soil and water required, what other species followed it, and so forth, to come up with an understanding of the chemistry of concrete, or of the processes of soil formation, or the ability of cheatgrass to handle drought, or something like that. Such scientists are very smart people, and can think of all kinds of really intriguing interrogations, which they call experiments. These experiments all require technical manipulations, out of which principles are logically derived, which, they trust will be recombined later into a picture of the world which can be used for technical and intellectual development. To a popular scientist, however, this is just an understandable pour of concrete onto a dead earth, to save a piece of valuable machinery. Such scientists have inherited not the intellectual tradition of pure science, but the machinery of the experiments. To them, the earth is machinery.

In Popular Science, This is a  Flower, a Beetle, and Some Story of Missing Petals

In both Popular and Pure Science, this is beauty (which is not a part of science) and nature (which is wildness; that which is not yet part of science, but which science can move into, should it wish to.)

In the world before science, this moment did not have those parts. It was one complete thing. It wasn’t even in a photograph, which turns it into art of a particularly technical kind. It was just a moment of spirit. Before Science came along, alchemists tried to break that moment down into a language of symbols. If they could just isolate them, the language, they believed, that God spoke when he spoke the world, they could speak it as well and fix the dying Earth. That it was dying seemed obvious to them. Adam and Eve had been driven out of Eden, the world was full of disease and misery, that had once been a paradise, and there was war and pain everywhere you looked. It took a new breed of alchemists, such as Isaac Newton (and he was a deeply spiritual man and an alchemist) to turn this language from one of symbols to one of logical argument. What had previously been seen as the language of God, a very symbolic business involving the spirits of the earth and the air, and this kind of thing …

 … became God’s Laws of Nature. It wasn’t a language. It was a mathematics. That was quite a breakthrough, but it did have a presupposition: it was possible to stand outside of the manipulations and put them back together again. Humans, though, are infinitely creative and malleable. They adapt. Back in the day when science was getting established, the dichotomy of scientific views between the-world-as-secret-language-or-laws and the-world-as-dead-ordinary was seen as a struggle between the people (practical) and the aristocracy (poetic and intellectual [hint, not a good thing]) or even the church (in the understanding of practical, individualistic men, dictatorial and dismissive of individuality). Why, the church might have said that something like this, for instance …

… was an angel from God and should be protected from steel mills. That kind of thing drove practical, intellectual men nuts. They couldn’t analyze that. They couldn’t make an experiment to prove it. They could argue a thousand different things in its place, none of which could be proved, either. They gave it to the artists and washed their hands of the affair. As a result, stuff like this …

Yes, it was alchemists who gave us our maps of the world.

… is now “art” and “new age” “spirituality”, and stuff like this, which is its spiritual and alchemical heir, like it or not …

Electrical Post Art Installation and Spiritual Communication Device, Vernon

… is called science and technology. Odd, eh. Today, popular culture uses the techniques of scientific method, without the intellectual, aristocratic and spiritual contexts in which they were developed and on which they relied. A couple observations on that: 1. Humans are a darned clever bunch and incredibly adaptive; 2. Nothing changes. The pre-scientific world, the world before an intellectual enlightenment, the world of practical men focussed on everyday practical affairs, is still here in spirit. It’s just that in terms of popular culture it has moved from a home within spiritual matters, to creating a method of science that replaced those spiritual matters with a practical analogy, to a home within the machinery of scientific method, but without its intellectual or spiritual context. In popular culture, this is called historical development, and it is, but it’s also a method that has lost important parts of itself, and so is always playing with half a deck. By dismantling the world as a place of completeness, it has created powerful tools, but has guaranteed that the completeness is not reachable. It always recedes somewhere into the future. This is a consequence of the method. You could say it is a tragic flaw: the thing that makes the method great, is the thing that prevents it from succeeding. There is, however, a way, and that is exciting. For instance, this …

A Moment in Harold’s Flower Garden

Two years ago, this spot was dry dust. Now look at it. Not a lacewing, not the colour green, not russian sage in bloom, not the stalks of cheatgrass before I weeded them out, not a fairy, not an angel of God, not a mathematics, not a story of evolution of a species, not a photograph, not beauty, not art: all of them, together, at once, and not just that, but a moment, apprehended humanly, in a way that even this photograph reduces.

The poet Goethe pointed out 200 years ago that it was possible to have other forms of Enlightenment than Newton’s, that it was possible to create a science that included all of the world that came before science, that it was possible to do it in individual ways, that many such ways were possible, and that anyone could do it. The results of his scientific efforts were not provable using Newtonian physics, and so were scoffed at. Nonetheless, they led to the colour wheel used by artists and large pieces  of the science of colour, the modern European art tradition and the German chemical industry, as well as to Waldorf schools. It’s not that one needs to adhere to Goethe’s developments to find value in what practical men scoffed at. One needs only draw a simple conclusion: the way is open for a reunion of art, spirit, and science; the technicians do not own the world; what science describes becomes the world and the methods it uses replace the world that was there before with themselves. Goethe warned that a science based upon technical experimentation would lead to a dead world without humans. Sadly, it appears to be becoming the case. The exciting thing is that it is reversible. Rather than, for example, a theory of evolution based upon the evolution of European individually-minded scientists, as was Darwin’s, a theory can be built based upon the evolution of complete moments and of social groups. Yes, it was shattered once.

Battle of the Somme

A practically understood science is put to to its ultimately logical end: chemistry and mechanical logic are dedicated to removing humans from the earth. It was all fought on the rhetoric of Christian faith and artistic purity, in the sense that before these battles, art was considered to be a force that ennobled mankind and helped mankind evolve spiritually. When it led to this, civilization ended. We’re still picking up the pieces.

Well, let’s pick them up. The flaws in the method are plain to see. More of the method won’t ensure human safety or the survival of the planet. The method needs to change. In the late 20th century, the sciences of ecology and earth science made great leaps in this direction. In the early 21st century, the intellectual dominance of the social scientific method called deconstruction, which attempts to break down the normalization pattern which allows for intellectual understanding to become technical normalcy and leads to such things as the Battle of the Somme, has begun to be normalized itself. Its method has become reality. Meanwhile,

grasslands such as this, with all their ability to create food, energy and to move and store water in an atmosphere that attempts to remove it, continues to be deconstructed and to erode. Deconstruction, like science as a whole, is a powerful tool, but it is not the world. This grassland is where we should bring our children and young adults. It’s not deconstruction that is needed, or the reconstruction of conservative artistic disciplines, that hold that if the values of the past (art, literature, Tennyson, sestinas and so forth) can be maintained as classical models, culture will remain stable, or even the construction of worlds that leads to this …

This is called “landscaping”. Notice the water drug pipelines .. and how little they help. Bella Vista

What is needed is co-construction. In the Syilx world that preceded the disaster of that landscaping above, this was called respect. One doesn’t have to subscribe to any notion of noble savages and the sanctity of Syilx and other indigenous land relationships to recognize the power of the reciprocal notion of respect. It’s what Goethe was talking about. It’s possible to bring the world along with you. It’s possible to see this all at once …

Bella Vista, Okanagan Landing and the Commonage

This is a view, nature, history, ethics, tragedy, greed, devotion, work, agriculture, sport, society, individualism, ruin and none of them. It is all of them together. 

… and to have that as a tool as well. In the aristocratic world that science helped dismantle, the most successful states were organized as poems; that’s why poetry was studied. That this was degraded into the Battle of the Somme (etc.) and other abuses, is a function of normalcy, not poetry, and not aristocratic thinking. The intellectual development of alternatives has been beneficial, but now that they have become normal and the material they left out is lacking in their world views, social and ethical opportunities are becoming narrower and narrower, at the same time that the physical world is becoming more and more compromised. That’s not an accident. We have to step up to the plate and come up with new concepts. Over the last 22 months I have set out on a journey to try to understand some of these things and to come up with practical proposals. If you’ve been following this conversation, even sporadically, you may have noticed some of these things cropping up:

1. new crops, that work within the context of the land,

Alfalfa Blossom Tea

2. new agricultural methods, that improve the health of the earth and society,

3. new visions of how water moves in the landscape, which can lead to increased social wealth, increased productivity of the land, new urban design, and decreased taxation,

4. new technologies for water and energy capture, based upon natural observations …

5. new integrations of soil communities and soil atmospheres with agricultural development,

6. new educational strategies,

7. new artistic strategies, connected to integration of social development and urban renewal,

8. a renewal of beauty as an important scientific and artistic tool,

9. an integration of science and art and literature, which uses the strength of all to a common goal,

10. integration of indigenous and settler cultures, with the social and land-based wealth that comes from that,

and many more. One could build an entire university around these ideas. Just as Goethe built the first botanical department at a university, and an important model that contributed greatly to the universities of today, around a garden …

Botanical Garden, Jena

… so is it possible today to provide new structures which enable new understandings, new solutions, and new opportunity for the young to truly create. I undertook this journey in order to write a book. It took me across the Pacific Northwest, deep into history, to Germany and Switzerland, to Iceland, and back home, here, in the grasslands between the mountains. I started as a poet, working in the tradition of literature. I stand now as that, of course, but in a literature that has been returned to a world that is whole. As for the university, well, in an ideal world I would be teaching this stuff there. The good fortune and good sense of devoting 22 years of my life to raising my children, and doing so on the edge of the last surviving grassland on temperate earth, a humanly created space that exists in the same form now as 4000 years ago, saved me from the fate of teaching only the literary tradition. What a walkabout this has been. What worlds poetry has taken me to. What science it has inspired. What a new form of literature, moving with images and words at the same time. Now it’s time, though, to pull the book together out of these nearly 500 posts. I’ve done much of that work, actually, but much remains to be done. I have six weeks in which to be done. I’m going to keep on at this blog, of course, but if you the posts meandering through the book now, don’t be surprised. I can only do so much at one time, but I do do it with delight.

The First Mock Oranges of the Season Are Now In Bloom

Now, that’s news! And what is in the news? Ah, this …

This is an image of what “Canada” looks like right now. It comes complete with a Put-the-Plastic-Picnic-Cooler-in-the-Sport-Utility-Vehicle Game. It is what that mock orange or this …

… looks like through the filter of the social and constitutional structures of the national state called Canada. I think we can do better than that. I think we must.

]]> http://okanaganokanogan.com/2013/06/07/science-art-spirit-and-ethics-as-one-the-project-moves-forward-now/feed/ 4 rhenisch mothonwood concrete goldenbeetle Alchemy-Workshop jewel2 350px-Durer_astronomer P1010661 lace2 british-machine-gun-unit P1040633 P1040747 P1040565 P1040134 P1010210 jena mock3 news beetleclamber http://okanaganokanogan.com/2013/06/06/evolution-and-the-colour-blue/ http://okanaganokanogan.com/2013/06/06/evolution-and-the-colour-blue/#comments Thu, 06 Jun 2013 23:37:56 +0000 Harold Rhenisch http://okanaganokanogan.com/?p=9812 Continue reading →]]> Take a look. The colour blue is the one first seen out of darkness. Look at it …

The Rise Vineyard, Bella Vista

Our fences can’t hold it, nor can they hold the Western Kingbird that uses it, because to him fences are excellent perches for hunting insects, which he does out in that blue. Look again …

The Rise Wind Funnelling System and Subdivision, Bella Vista

Okanagan Lake below, looking across to Fintry. Yes, it’s June in the grasslands. Rain.

Still a little more blue. I’m zeroing in on something for you. So far we’ve had sky, a bird living in the sky, the inability of a fence to contain the sky, a bird using the fence for its own purposes, a subdivision spreading noxious weeds by providing wind channels moving across entire communities on the grass, 10,000 year old glacial water, the beginning of the rainy season in the so-called desert (Canadians have to try hard for that, but they’ve got the money to make it so), and now some beauty …

Lazuli Bunting on a Saskatoon, Bella Vista

This bush is growing out of solid rock. A couple more weeks and the crop will be ready, by the looks of it.

And not just beauty, but productive life coming out of solid rock. Folks, the planet is solid rock. Keep that in mind when you look at the next image.

Brown Birch with Dead Leaves

This planet of solid rock is so rich with life that it has even filled the living spaces between the upper and lower surface of the leaves, in the form of tiny larvae, which have munched their way to happiness and health.

The point with all this blue is that there is a wind blowing off of the sun …

Morning Shadows in the Dwarf Asters

The sun is blasting through them at 299 792 458 metres per second. Eventually it will use itself up.

That’s the way of the Universe. It starts with a lot of energy and it uses it all up until it has no energy anymore and is at complete rest. This is a fundamental property of the universe. It’s everywhere, except here:

Salsify Facing the Sun

When the sun moves, the salsify moves with it. When the light diminishes with the failing day, the salsify closes, to open again in the morning sun. This French immigrant is doing well here. After all, there’s lots of sun.

And that’s the point. The sky is blue because it is full of oxygen. On a planet the size of the earth, oxygen floats away into space and is gone, as part of entropy, but here it doesn’t, because the salsify, and the leaf miners, and the birches and the asters create more. They reverse entropy. There is, however, a way to return this system to entropy. It looks like this:

House Blocking the Main Energy Path of West Bella Vista

Nice house. Great view. Big price.This is called improving the land. The house is called an improvement. That’s a legal term.

In grasslands, water channels such as the one above hold much of the life of the local earth, and act as vertical highways for animals and plants, insects, reptiles and birds moving up and down on the hills, gathering and creating and storing and reproducing energy before it escapes into space. The house breaks that. The deer and other animals go around. They muck up the grass on the hills with their back and forth wandering. They reduce its capacity to reverse entropy. And the strangest thing is this: the house didn’t have to be there. It could have been fifty metres to the side, or whatever distance the grassland community needed. The gully is a road, for life. It moves water through life, under the power of gravity, and reverses entropy. Here’s what the closest human road looks like …

Human Road

It moves water through the power of gravity and calls it waste, increases entropy, and is lined with pipes which deliver water (such as to the yellow fire hydrant) using powerful electric pumps, further increasing entropy.

Well, that’s what human cleverness, the cleverness of a top predator is like. It looks at communities and sees how it can rearrange them into temporary grids, or hunting strategies, which allow it to move across them, just as this road and the predatory weeds that follow it do. The only thing is: the effects of a hunter that hunts the living community by turning it into individual elements, individual species, and individual animals and plants are permanent. They aren’t individual. They are communities. This beetle clambering in the sky …

… can be separated from its rose, but if it doesn’t have some yarrow, another member of this community, it’s likely not going to make it. Similarly, this beetle, which is very close to being a bee (like, verrrrrryyyy close) …… is not separate from the rose. These creatures became a community here, and formed in each others’ image. It’s a powerful predatory idea, to cut across that community and make a new arrangement of individual species evolving individually in a highly-competitive environment, and to call that evolution, but it’s really a form of poverty. There are individuals, but without the community, there is only entropy. There are many plants upon the grasslands. They compete for resources, certainly, yet they also support each other. It’s not the species that are the life here, but the community of species. An individual plant makes oxygen for a few weeks, then sinks into the dry soil. Another plant takes over, adds a bit more oxygen, then sinks away as well. Plants extend their range, by location up and down the slopes and by variation within their species, like this balsam root, blooming a month late…

… when all her sisters on the whole mountain look like this …

… with their seedheads eaten off by deer.  Those are both resiliences in time — time gained by altitude and time gained by a range of growth. Why, you could prevent extinction by this resilience, not just of the balsam roots, but of all that feed upon them. Like the plant-based processes which reverse the death of the universe, these capacities in grassland plants reverse entropy — but not individually. And these plants …

… these nondescript wild flowers, that don’t really even properly bloom, put on no real show, colonize absolutely bare gravel roads, are also helping to reduce entropy — in the case of the gravel roads, entropy created by people. And these brown-eyed susans …

… are not, as evolution likes to point out, just attracting bees, although they certainly do that, and as we know now on Okanagan Okanogan, bee-like beetles as well, they are also attracting humans. Their beauty, and the beauty of this rare pink variation of Snow Buckwheat …

… have the capacity to lead humans to the grass in wonder, so they will see this…

Autumn’s Grass Seedlings Starting Now

On the lower elevation grasslands in the Okanagan, cheatgrass, an imported weed, has replaced the blue-green algae of the soil’s crust with mats of old, matted growth off-gassing carbon dioxide and limiting plant opportunities, thereby wildly increasing entropy and helping humans kill the planet. However, even in the community of weeds that is replacing the community of the ancient earth, certain entropy-negating processes are still active. The multiple seasons of cheatgrass growth above are one example. Here, on a patch of ground opened in the cheatgrass by voles, where the new weed community is practicing resilience in time, is another.
 That is evolution in action. The next image, created by the removal of a concept called “water” from the community of life of which it was a part, is just entropy. This is settler thinking. It is not the thinking of people who intend for their great grandchildren’s great grandchildren to live here, which is good, because this isn’t the way. (Mind you, someone might ask those kids what they want.)

Throwing Water Away

“Agricultural” use receives entropic water at a highly subsidized rate, presumably because it can produce food for people and money for social economies. Here, one panel of corn is being irrigated, but because the sprinklers are all joined together, another panel of dead earth is being watered at the same time. It has the capacity to create a few weeds, which are trying to heal its soil profile, but as you can see humans have killed them. If that weren’t all enough predatory entropy, 45% of that water is just evaporating into the air. It’s illegal for people to do that in their own yards, on their own corn patches, because it’s just too stupidly wasteful, but “farmers”, or, rather, industrial soil miners, have full permission to waste this water in huge volumes with impunity. As for gravity, road-building without attention to natural gravitational water systems, that move through communities of life, produce soil erosion, and entropy….

It didn’t have to be like this. Outwardly, they look the same as the mess made by another top predator, a rare, endangered badger who has just moved into the community. Here you can see the results of his predation on the vole community…

Voles create soil and rich plant environments, leading to continual fertilization and renewal. When their populations get to too high a number, though, and they start to reduce plant capabilities, endangering the community, the badger comes and starts things anew … but just a little bit at a time, as part of the context. As long as we keep the badgers. Similarly, when wasps get a bit too bold, ants come and take care of the problem …

New Wasp Nest Built in the Wrong Spot and being Preyed on by Weaver Ants

Life is replaced with life and the community remains in harmony.

It’s wrong, though, to think of humans as being top predators in a predatory system of evolution. Some humans may be like that. Others are attracted to this …

California Quail in the Sagebrush

… not to hunt it, but as an affirmation that the hunters haven’t won yet. Humans, in other words, not only have the capacity to cut across systems of balance to return them to entropy, but they have the capacity as well to increase the capacity of living systems to reverse entropy. Beauty can lead humans there as easily as anything, or maybe more easily. And remember, if anyone says, “It’s just business,” or “I have to make a living, so I’m going to clear all this sagebrush away,” they’re predators. As part of the living community, that is reversing entropy on this planet, we need to protect each other from them. Flowers are a start…

Today was Beetle Love-making Day

This is an activity that takes place on flowers. Every flower on the upper hill! The lovers are covered in golden pollen.

See, here’s the trick. The human capacity to cognitively cut across community, is also the capacity to cognitively form oneself to what one sees. It is a process of art and poetry. Science, the particular science that has evolved without either of these, sees only individuals and species and misses the fact that we, humans, are this earth. No lecturing will make anyone see that, but beauty has a chance. We’re wired for it. It’s how we fit into the greater community. And beauty, as the Greeks knew, is balance. And beauty, as Moses knew, is choosing life.

Life always chooses that. I think it would be safe to say that if you don’t, you’re not alive.

Note: what are needed are practical processes. They’re coming soon.