Our little herd of nine does had two fawns last year. The coyotes got one last week. This doe is now being very protective. It’s hard, though. Forage is reduced by overgrazing, the […]
Tragedy in the Spring Snow
Making Humans
On the shores of Kalamalka Lake there is an ancient village. It’s so old it has been forgotten. The people who live there now don’t know that the land that called them, […]
Reviewing David Pitt-Brooke’s Walk Through the Grasslands
I spent the early winter reading a beautiful and, unfortunately, incomplete book: Crossing Home Ground, by David Pitt-Brooke. It records an epic walk through the grasslands of Southern British Columbia: my own […]
The Pacific Northwest is Not the Southwest
Here’s a place. Squeezed in between the United States and Greenland. Canada. Best to stand right-way up. Lately, I’ve heard the strangest thing. I’ve heard that my part of the country… … […]
Against the Descending Night, A Prayer in the Rushes
I am not angry. I am sad. My elders taught me that these were cat tails. They taught me that poetry was a fairy tale. They taught me that these were swamp […]
The Lessons of Red Osier Dogwood
I went looking for light. In a grey world, it was all in the red osier dogwoods, stəktəkcxʷlɬp, the purifier, the beloved of moose. I spent some time with it as it turned […]
Sustaining the Okanagan 21: The City of the Okanagan
In keeping with my conviction that we would do better to build things than tear them down, I would like to propose a new form of civilization in the Okanagan Valley. By […]
Art and Ethics on the Okanagan’s Ancient Water
The sun rises. It draws the night fog off of Okanagan Lake. It’s early and 18 Below Zero. The gulls sleep on. The gulls that seem to have erupted from the lake. […]
How the British Columbia Government Looks After the Land and the Water
It doesn’t. If I look from my house towards the western shore of Okanagan Lake, I see this. The land has been burnt, slashed by logging roads, scarred by development and turned into an […]
Do the Rich Have All the Fun?
You tell me. That’s their houses up above, and some beautiful ice drifting in. Below, is Okanagan Lake the next day after the wind did its thing all night long. I have […]
Okanagan Okanogan 