Ever since Apollo astronauts sent back a picture of the blue earth hanging in space, it has been easy to imagine the earth as a drop of water in the emptiness: tiny, […]
Many Worlds
Creatures of Light
Some people try to define life. It’s a little bit like locking yourself in a library stacked with millions of volumes of texts. The fluorescent lights hum. The electrically-disturbed atmosphere makes your […]
Horses and Almond Trees and True Love
What about the horses, eh? Pretty intriguing creatures to share a planet with. You saw them yesterday, recolonizing the mistake of an orchard at Kiona, after the seduction of cheap water evaporated […]
The Biggest Waterfall of All
So, just imagine. You’re beetling along happily across the wheat fields of the Washington desert after a freak spring snow, getting passed by giant fertilizer trucks every time you stop to take […]
Social Energy
Trees are great energy machines, transforming the nuclear fusion reactions of the sun into matrices of carbon and water. How cool is that? Here’s what that energy looks like when it leaks […]
Wild Humans, Tame Horses, Brother Deer
In some ways of thinking, it’s not just humans who are persons. In ways that have worked well during the greater part of the life of our species on this planet, this […]
Pussy Willows and Land for All
Welcome to the road ditch: a prime spring habitat. First, to an Okanagan Indian Band ditch… Pussy Willow Preparing to Bloom Imagine the sound of cars roaring past behind your back, and […]
The Joke is On Us
It’s that time of year! An Old Tradition Hangs On Despite the infill of subdivisions, old habits of spring burning aren’t dead yet. The bigger the flames the better, it seems. Sun […]
Respect
Time is a strange thing. The farther in distance we look into the night sky, the father back in time we are seeing. If we look far enough, we see the beginning […]
Being the Mountain
There’s a thing that happens with sheep in the mountains of Wales and Iceland: they become acclimatized to the mountain, and pass that acclimatization on to following generations. Once they have been […]
Okanagan Okanogan 