First, you take the shrub steppe of the lower Snake River. Then you add petroleum-based fertilizer (white tank) and water (six deep well pumps). This combination makes bread. It’ll be seeded again in […]
This is How You Make Bread and French Fries
Be Like the Mouse Beneath the Hawk
This is Pahto, mistakenly called Mount Adams. She is one of the wives of the sun. Look at her rising like the sun over the White Swan plain. We’re a long way […]
Don’t Mess With the Earth, I Say
Some people look at the flax, that used to keep people clothed in the cold, and think, “My, that makes life worth living.” And other people just whack it down. […]
Let’s Expand the Notion of “What is Life”
That is alive, I think that’s easy to agree on. We call it a sedum, drawn up out of soil by the sun. This, too. Like the sedum, this one is self-replicating, hence the […]
Why Do Some Fire Hydrants Play Cowboys and Mexicans?
Russian thistle was one of the first weeds from the Russian steppes to destroy the grasslands of the North American West. It became one of the dominant characters in Country & Western music, […]
Land Claims in the Okanagan
To say that a land and its people are one, as the first people of my land, the Syilx, say, is to say that the following image is an image of the […]
Save the Earth, Save Yourself (Seeing in the Dark, Part 3)
I promised to write about the environmental and scientific consequences of reading the land as darkness, in an embodied science, rather than as light (the kind of science we have today). I meant […]
Cuckoo Grass
A cuckoo is a bird that lays its eggs in other birds’ nests and lets them go about the hard work of raising them. It’s like that up on the hill. As […]
The Oriole in the Coal Mine
Trees are boundaries. They are creatures of the air, but are anchored to the soil. Most birds are like that, too. Many put their nests up in the sky, supported by trees. They even […]
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 […]
Okanagan Okanogan 