Yesterday I talked about how humans (and dogs) navigate the world through one- and two-dimensional patterns and the intersections between them. These are less qualities of the world than qualities of the […]
Humans Go 3-D
Dogs and Humans: the Showdown
Here’s something cool about dogs. Footprints in the Snow Dogs follow edges. When you’re a dog, you don’t even think about it. You go for boundaries, and you stay there. Since the […]
Environmental Accounting & Poverty
In my last post, I spoke about the Old Norse concept of a tun, a farm yard constructed at the intersection of social and physical earths. I argued that tuns created the […]
Ponderosa Pine: The Tree at the Heart of a People
There is a tree that determines the home range of a people. This is the North Plateau Ponderosa Pine, known in Latin as pinus ponderosa Douglas ex C. Lawson. Wherever this tree […]
Who’s the Best Mouser of Them All (in the fog)?
Is it the coyote? Or is it the magpies? You gotta admit. They have a lot of eyes and beaks to devote to the task. But maybe it’s the great […]
There Is No “Post-” in Post-Colonialism
I walked up the hill across the valley today, to get into the fog. No, this isn’t today. This is the spring of 2012. But that’s part of the hill in the […]
Lost Knowledge: Apples and Culture
I weep. At the beginning of the 1980s, I grafted the first Fuji apples in this country, as part of an attempt to free us from the trade rules of the Canadian […]
Think Big
Aren’t cat tails cool! They fold over themselves, layer upon layer. When you see this, you could invent a tradition of basket- and mat-making, and could build houses out of rushes and […]
The Beauty of Winter
The immense wealth of colonial Brazil made Lisbon into the first modern city. The money for all the lavish spending was laundered through British banks, who used it to build an empire. […]
The Manhattan Project Today
This is the Columbia River as understood by the people who brought us the Atomic Bomb. Control Panel, B Reactor, Hanford Engineering Works, Washington This is the Columbia River as understood by […]
Okanagan Okanogan 