Here’s a healthy stand of bunchgrass, which I showed you a couple days ago. As I mentioned, the Okanagan Valley of the North Eastern Pacific Rim probably looked like this 200 years […]
The Private Landscapes of the Okanagan Valley
The Okanagan’s Missing Water
Here it is. Blue Bunch Wheatgrass This 10-year-old re-seeded slope shows the likely historical condition of the valley under Syilx stewardship. This grass is very much alive. The valley hasn’t looked like […]
The People of the Grass
Just look at this Great Basin Giant Wild Rye in the late November sun. It’s growing up the hill from my house, in land set aside for new houses. Actually, it was […]
The (Post) Colonial Landscape
These plants have gone wild from a garden above them. Not one is native here. They are native to Eastern North America. To survive in its illusion of seasons, White culture requires […]
Autumn and the Wind
Thoreau called images like the ones below “autumnal”. He described the ripeness of such leaves at great length. He called them fruits. Keats did much the same. He called them mellow fruitfulness, on the […]
Sustaining the Okanagan 19: Humans, Class and Environment
This is one of a series of posts about how to maintain a local landscape in the face of technological pressure. In this case, both the primary observation (all land and landscape […]
As the Pool of Agribusiness Giants Shrinks, Will Innovation Follow?
Here is an example of the kind of technological intervention in earth-human relationships which one contemporary urban- and intellectually-based elite sees as the solution for a shrinking food supply and an increasing […]
Appetite, the Commons and Private Land
Henry David Thoreau argued that industrial agriculture and slavery were expressions of the same impulse, which led towards the replacement of common experience and trade with private […]
Bear Going Nowhere
Two years ago, a mama bear taught her cub how to find grubs at Big Bar Lake, by knocking the cap off this old tree carcass. This year, as a two-year-old kicked […]
The Earth Makes Perfect Sense
If you crush up black bedrock and strew it around, you get predatory spiders, and nothing else. This is a fire landscape. They clean up. Anyone who knew this land would know […]
Okanagan Okanogan 