Author Archives: Harold Rhenisch

About Harold Rhenisch

www.haroldrhenisch.com

Watercourse to Nowhere

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The top of this new watercourse is two metres higher than the stream it is meant to drain.

And, yeah, the trees in the dumpster aren’t too happy about it all, either, but they’re sure going places.

But look at those colours! Environmental destruction is an organic art form, too.

Especially when it is done to conserve natural systems! Look at the sign below. That was a poem in a previous age of the world!

Now this is. (Note the metaphor whizzing by and making a wake.)Death can become a habit, when you’re a top predator.

It’s like learning to read the bouquet of a fine wine with your nose!

 

Hidden Water in a Year of Drought

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In a year of stress, everyone, from those ants to the right to the leaf miner that left its trail in this cottonwood leaf, is mining the last pools of spring water for life. Deciduous tree behaviour doesn’t just benefit trees. It stores large amounts of water, builds protected environments, and maintains them with deep, underground water through the heat. Without this so-called inefficiency, the land would burn to a crisp, even the fire-adapted grasses, native and feral together, below.

Where the Woods Meet the Water

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Yesterday, I mentioned that Naomi Klein’s critique of this past season of storms and fires missed a Cascadian perspective. Here’s one, from Shuswap Lake.

Let me decode that. When one is of a place, instead of moving into place from a position of external power, one cannot speak of the trees, the rock, the fire, the air or the water without speaking of oneself. The image of the ponderosa pine tree “reflected” in Shuswap Lake is a good approximation of what that is like. So is this Kokanee, from Redfish Creek on Kootenay Lake:

Kokanee are what are called “land-locked” salmon. I doubt they see it that way. There are powerful political and economic forces that make the story of Big Oil critical to weather patterns this summer. There are equally powerful local forces, often expressions of external forces, that make the land susceptible to these global forces, which are called weather but are really economic, social and political, which have great power to amplify or deaden the effects of such global patterns as Big Oil. When we as the people of Cascadia develop intellectual traditions that begin with this migrating loon on a lake drenched in smoke and the light from a red sun, rather than from the smoke and the red sun, we will have the ability to resist Big Oil:

Until then, we will be helping Big Oil along, no matter how much we protest. In other words, protest against Big Oil is vital. Beneath its veneer, however, deeper structural work of bringing the earth into the human social group will need to happen if we are to heal or be in any way whole. We can do this. But it has to be whole, and it has to begin here:

Distance is a dangerous  illusion.

Global Warming is Half the Story

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Naomi Klein has written a strong, compassionate article about this summer’s fires and hurricanes, and has illustrated it with stunning and heartbreaking photographs.

https://theintercept.com/2017/09/09/in-a-summer-of-wildfires-and-hurricanes-my-son-asks-why-is-everything-going-wrong/

Her title suggests that her purpose may have been to answer the question as to why in a summer of wildfires and hurricanes “everything is going wrong.” She talks about global environmental catastrophe and big oil. If she were a Cascadian, she would speak about how land use policy, governmental and business policy towards Indigenous people and earth, American personal mythology, as well as forest policy, and water management policy errors have catastrophically intercepted the effects of Big Oil to create extreme situations. Every fire, and every hurricane, needs breakable conditions to create breakage. Ms. Klein also speaks about the necessity of protest and resistance, which are, without argument, important political tools, yet she doesn’t speak about Henry David Thoreau, who insisted, before and during the American Civil War of 1861-1865 that the issue at hand was slavery and the mechanism at play was industrial land use. To speak so transformatively is the real resistance. Thoreau’s resistance walked hand in hand with the creation of Cascadia out of the struggles of slavery and freedom in industrialized mid-19th century USA and its corollary forces in Britain, and their intersection with Indigenous struggles to maintain the earth within human social relationships. You can’t talk about the place without talking about this intersection. Anything else is to talk about the United States, or Canada. That’s like trying to speak about Mozambique by talking about Slovakia. If Ms. Klein were from the grasslands of Cascadia, she would use the words summer with great care. It’s not a word that fits very well here. I was quite shocked to hear her talk in such an elite way about the fires that are still burning in my country, in an apocalyptic fashion, too. The task of speaking better, and indigenously, gets harder all the time for all the smoke.


Shuswap Lake

The rising sun should just not be this darned red.

String Theory and Black Holes in the Summer of Smoke

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There is a way of increasing the effects of gravity. Here is a picture of the string theory of contemporary physics, out of the laboratory and in the real world.

Call it the black hole effect, if you like. Physicists weren’t the first to work out its possibilities.

But the weavers were. Anyone who enters their gravity wells find themselves moving slowly. Gravity for them is quadrupled, if not more.

Every event horizon has its mistress.

 

And its beauty.

In a year without birds, the managers of the universe, driven away by our drought and our fires, these systems proliferate.

The Earth returns. The web below is an image of her gravity, made into a living thing.

That’s the kind of place it is. Simple as that.