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. […]
How to Make a City Indigenous, Even if You’re Lazy, Eh
Let’s go downtown as if we lived here. Let’s look at Canada through the lens of the story it tells in the Syilx illahie (illahie is Pacific Slope trade jargon for “story” […]
Indigenous Culture, Settler Culture and Canada: Agriculture’s Highways and Byways
Harold Innis argued long ago … Societies that depend solely on time-biased media are oral and tribal. Although leadership tends to be hierarchical, time-bound societies may also operate by consensus. Since, in […]
Okanagan Okanogan 