Very slowly, and with great drama and beauty, the atmosphere breaks bedrock to bits. Why are we not farming the air? It is doing this everywhere, with a bit of help from […]
Farming the Atmosphere
Do You Digest Your Food Outside Your Body?
Birds do. Here’s a clutch of haws that have used frost and sun to break their acids down into sugars. This is the time of year that birds will come for them […]
Hope for the Earth: Settler Lessons from the Voles
The bunches grass bunches up. With the help of snow, it mounds. We could call it mound grass. We could call it a village. Note the vole highway in the lower centre […]
We Are the Sun
The sun came up last Wednesday. Isn’t that great! Looking west, away from it, was great fun. But not so much fun as looking east. Look at it projecting itself on ice […]
Changing the Climate One Porcupine at a Time
This is the closing of a series on mitigating climate change through local action. The Earth is very responsive. We can trust that. This estuary on Vernon Creek, for example, with its […]
Healing Climate Change in the Grasslands of the Okanagan
In the last couple of posts, I talked about the industrial, environmental and social costs of growing fruit in the Okanagan Valley. You can have a peek in this post: The True Costs […]
Race and Orcharding in British Columbia and Washington
This is the second of three posts about the costs of farming. This one is about the tangle between land and race. The next is about broader environmental and social factors. If […]
The True Costs of Farming in the Okanagan
Farming is expensive in Canada. One way of looking at it is shown by the apple plantation below. Let’s look: Posts: harvested on the plateau, trucked, milled, impregnated with toxic copper compounds, […]
How the Earth Flies
The air lowers its pressure with altitude, and fog appears. It lowers its pressure above draws of water, as well (the ones that are usually considered draws in the land), creating streams […]
How Fences Change the Climate
Last week in Kelowna, I talked to a group gathered at the library about the price of fences, such as this ‘deer fence’ around an orchard in Vernon. Deer need to go […]
