It’s too easy to do it wrong. View of Spallumcheen Farm from Swan Lake A 10,000-year-old lakebed gets thrown up into the wind while boaters get ready to be pulled around […]
The Problem With Petrochemical Agriculture
Cascadia: Earthquakes Lifted into the Sky
Look at the earthquake lifted into the sky. Plus a couple hunks of mid-oceanic volcanic islands, a lump of an underwater sea monster out of kwakwaka’wakw ancestral time, and a heron hunkering […]
Persian Music for the Coldest Night
Last night, the frost stayed away on this spring-two-weeks-too soon. The apricots are waiting for bees that are too cold to fly. Thanks, everyone, for your prayers. Tonight, though, is April 1, and […]
Living on a Sphere
If the earth were flat, she would be half as much fun. The grassy slope would always have the same orientation to the sun, for one thing. With a tilted earth, sometimes […]
The Future of Life
Life is the ability of self-replicating organisms being able to react to the environment. Life is also a quality of an environment. When an environment is said to have life, it means it is energized, […]
E = MC2 and Slavery
E = mc2 is Einstein’s attempt to express the spirit of the universe in numbers. The principle he is getting at looks sort of like this: Snow on Bunchgrass I say “sort of” because […]
Okanagan Rhododendrons and Climate Change
In the Okanagan Valley, rhododendrons, so glorious in the rain forests on the Pacific Coast, and so frost tender, grow at elevations between 3,000 and 5,000 feet, in moose swamps of black spruce, alder, […]
Snow on the Apple Factory
When the Okanagan Valley was a grassland, it was cold in the winter. The grass stretched up to the high country forests. In the valley floor, orchards were planted, then cities, and […]
How Water Ignorance Has Changed the World
It is possible to change the world. You can start out with a landscape in which the strategies of plants to capture water, air pressure, gravity and evaporation join to stop water […]
The Lungs of the Earth
Bunchgrass defines the grasslands of the intermontane west. It is not, however, the main story here. It is only the canopy forest. The real grassland is here. It is far older. It lies […]
Okanagan Okanogan 