It’s fun to go out and read the weather by looking down, too. It gives a longer term view. For instance, the really poor shape of the early season cheat grass below […]
Holding on to Our Water for Dear Life
Climate, Wild Harvest and Human Life as Environments
More important as a food crop than the pretty yellow bell lily … …is desert parsley. She’s cream-coloured… … with short flower stalks, or tall ones… … or purple, when still half-closed… […]
Invasive Weeds Are Beautiful
I think weeds get a bad rap. I’ve never seen native plants pull this off. Beautiful, really. Enough to inspire for an entire year. Even invasive weeds, like knapweed. Maybe it’s not […]
When Trees are Weeds: Truth and Reconciliation from the Ground Up
Yesterday I started a meditation on classicism, and how the cultures within Canada have some choices, given German experience with the power, failure and abuse of classical models as a means of […]
Beautiful Starlings
Isn’t it a bitter irony that these beautiful birds, starlings, an invasive species here, are called pests and are electrocuted for it by the hundreds of thousands … … by that other […]
A New National Park Reserve for the Okanagan Similkameen?
Here’s my grandfather Bruno Leipe, c. 1963, looking down from above Cawston Creek over the middle Similkameen Valley. This area is part of a proposed National Park Reserve, in partnership with the […]
Slow Glaciers, Cows, Deer, Lichen and Poetry Making a New Hydrology Together
A mysterious rock near the top of the hill. Here’s the hill in the smoke last fall. Looks dry, huh. We’re going up to the top of the bare patch at the […]
How Ecology Got Messed Up
This blog is about walking. Sometimes it’s about walking through myself, which is an environment and peering at stuff. A snake den, I suspect. I’m pretty sure (if I correctly remember the […]
Reading Balsam Root, Writing Earth, Reading Mind
Here’s a word. Don’t let abstraction fool you. Just be with her for a moment. As you can see, she’s a living creature. Don’t let her dead stalks fool you. Because they’re […]
Magpie’s Thoughts on Land Claims
Middle Class Country: an American pop culture project. Dude Ranch Country: an older American pop culture project. Spiritual Country: a Chinese-European folk cultural project. Artistic Country: an American cultural export installation. […]
Okanagan Okanogan 