When I was six years old, I went from farm to farm with my father, and watched as he and the other men in town sliced open peach blossoms to see how […]
Peach Harvest Begins
Reading Trees
Every piece of the bark of a ponderosa pine fits together… and comes apart. It is a kind of hieroglyphic language — a special one, in which each word is unique and […]
The Power of Opening
We are clematis. The rushing waters where the Pacific Ocean lifts to the sky and splashes down on rock sometimes look dry, scoured by the sky more than by water… … and […]
Beyond Settlement: Energy, Cascadia and the Portland Protests
Let’s look at energy by getting going. There is a way forward. You did not make it. No human made it, yet humans have followed it for, perhaps, 10,000 years. Deer made […]
Space, Place, Land and the Deceptions of Language
Things are what they are. If you see in that image a boulder covered in two varieties of lichen, you are seeing words and the resonance they make when they draw on […]
Is Democracy Done?
Look at what Wikipedia says about democracy: In Ancient Greece, a deme or demos (Greek: δῆμος) was a suburb or a subdivision of Athens and other city-states. … The establishment of demes as […]
How Much Soil Do We Need, Who Gets to Decide, How, and Why?
Today a little tour through democracy in action. Note the two anti-insect bands. Given that a gram of soil continues 1 billion microorganisms, beating out seawater’s 1 million, how much topsoil does […]
Future Memory
I’ve got it! Creativity is the act of settling land. Instead of knowing where you are and planting crops where gravity, sun, rain and snow say to plant them, like the mustard […]
Fixer Upper in the Okanagan
With a little love, it could be a home again. The idea is that species like Western Bluebirds … … will maintain their presence in a grassland if bird houses are erected […]
The Fire Deficit and the Depth of Global Warming
For 10,000 years, the people of the grasslands have been living in a fire landscape. For 100 years, they have been living in a fire debt. This landscape: Selah Creek, Yakama Nation […]
