Celebrate the season!
It’s a colour palette for rejoicing.
Art without four seasons. Life without four seasons. Life with dozens, often two at the same time, passing through each other like clouds!
What a beautiful dance.
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 ago. It probably looked like this in 1858, and likely even through 1859 and 1860.
Then came cattlemen, and cattle, which ate it down to dust and an invasive weed, cheatgrass, by 1871. Sagebrush (look at the image below), as native to this place as bunchgrass, took advantage of the vacated ecosystem and spread like fire. Cheatgrass (green below) filled in the remaining space, grew green all fall and winter, flashed quickly in the spring, and was dead by May: sharp, prickly and inedible. Rain that fell on the land evaporated away in a few hours. A rich landscape became a desert. Cattle did that or, rather, the fences men kept them penned with did that. Look closely.
The clearance of 6,000 years of Syilx care of these grasslands through the insult of putting cattle on them remains, today, in 2016, ironically, there’s almost nothing for cattle to eat here. What a shame. It would be like clearing the cities of Europe away to create ruins of stone and sand in which one could plant olives. That this situation is close to what Europe is dealing with today with intense pressures from Africa and the Middle East is not lost on me. It would be foolish to think that here, in the west of the West, we are immune from the same pressures. We aren’t. They look like the European grape plants below, in the shadow of a November cloud, which are here to increase land values in the same way the fences of ranchers in the 1860s were there to increase land values, to turn, in other words, indigenous land into a product that could flow through the accounting books of a centralized government, instead of through the living process of the land:
There are ironies. An ethical system of accounting would return the land to the Syilx, with an apology and an acknowledgement that a transformation of a humanly-cultivated land into a managed “natural space” was a failure. That’s not the way of things, though. The social succession here is to view the land not as the space of a cold war battle running since 1858, nor as a social ruin, but as “nature”. That’s a wondrous word that includes this cheat-grass-lined (and dangerous; it’s slippery as all get out in the rain) deer trail …
… and this poplar tree, planted as an agricultural air-sprayed chemical buffer for a walking trail built on a filled-in irrigation canal commissioned by Earl Grey, of Earl Grey Tea fame, and blasted by the approach of winter it’s unsuited for.
In short, “nature” appears to be a term containing things that are not ‘natural’ to this place, or ‘native’ to this place, and not particularly well-suited to it either: creatures inhabiting more the ruins of failed human social interactions with land than the land itself. Perhaps the following image can clear this curiosity up a bit:
What you’re looking at is the same landscape as this …
…, but after ten years without cattle. Look again:
The sagebrush is still a bit out of hand, the cheatgrass is still stealing water from everyone and creating a desert, but the bunchgrass is coming back, although in balance with this new, water-poor “cheated” environment. This “Nature” isn’t a “natural state”, isn’t the way things were before settlement …
…but the mechanism by which the earth achieves balance, with the forces at play upon it. That’s the same as saying that the first hillside I showed you above, this one…
… is the balance achieved when cattle are placed on this landscape. It is, in other words, the signature of cattle. You can see a young one signing her artwork below.
Interestingly enough, in this version of nature, there is scarcely room for cattle or food for them, which is a way of saying that the balance is forcing them off. Note how the cow below is pushed off its diet of weeds by the traditional sagebrush removal process of this place, fire, and finds its natural environment: a gravel pile.
That doesn’t mean that either gravel or green grass and sagebrush are the natural state of the Okanagan Valley today. It does mean that the idea of grazing cattle on this land is unsustainable. It doesn’t fit at all. The earth wants something else. Look at it bringing November water for it—water that sagebrush catches poorly, cattle destroy and cheatgrass burns away too quickly.
The colonial use of this land was for cattle grazing, yes. Because that idea bankrupted itself, and the return of the land to the bunchgrass and people who know what to do with it is not considered, for complex and ultimately unethical reasons, doesn’t mean that the post-colonial use of it should be one particular romantic use of “nature” —a space for “recreation,” like the golf course spilling over the top of the hill below. That use doesn’t inhabit natural space but a ruined social space, which it attempts to renew by renewing not the productivity of the land, which was here in 1858, but the aesthetic enjoyment of private space in “nature”.
The argument could be made that this is the natural space the land finds when it is inhabited by humans, as demonstrated by these homes in the cheatgrass and the November fog…
…but that argument is just silly: not all human activity is balanced in this way, and not all human activity is based around private enjoyment. After all, who enjoys this land’s water privately and doesn’t share? That’s right, our old friend:
Cheatgrass
Our mirror.
Cheatgrass burns off a whole season’s water at once … in early March.
By May, this will be a desert, and this fire will be red. This sagebrush-cheatgrass culture takes the place of a complex world of 100s of species. It is the result of exploitive grazing in the 1870s. When will we adjust our agricultural regimes to this new timing? Spring is actually in October now. Right now, it’s been like that for about 138 years. Would 139 be long enough? 140?
Red June Cheatgrass, Colville Federated Tribes Reservation
In forest fire season, even the grassland hills are suffering in the smoke.
Note how the golf course road zig-zagging back and forth here manages to take all the water away. Note as well that there are few species growing here: mostly cheatgrass (which is responsible for summer drought), sagebrush, a few mariposa lilies, the odd death camas, a few remaining desert parsleys, the odd thistle and a fair number of blue-bunched wheat grasses. Most of the flowers that bloomed here a century ago, and most of the medicine of the Syilx, are gone. What is a poor bee to do! Aha! Off to Harold’s place!
As I showed you yesterday, a few square feet of xeriscaping using wild flowers does a few powerful things. You don’t have to irrigate more than two or three times in a season. You don’t have to move the thing. You can have fun scything in the fall (scything is very fun). And birds, toads and insects thrive here. I posted a pair of goldfinches feasting on my catnip yesterday, and then I realized, whoa, just think (and I did): if the normal density of flowers on the grassland hill is about one plant per square metre, my density of about 200 plants per square metre (I collect the seeds each fall and sow them back in, so there’s no expense) means that in my 25 square metres of wildflower garden I am providing the insect and bird habitat of about 5000 square metres of land up on the hill. That’s pretty close to one acre. Here’s the thing. In my little subdivision there are, oh, I dunno, about 100 houses. If we all took care of an acre like that, 100 acres of grassland could be saved. There are another 100 houses in the subdivision a mile back down the road, and 50 more in the other direction. Just above that one, there are 1000 building lots gouged into the grassland and doing magnificent service in destroying it. I’m thinking today, it doesn’t have to be a story of destruction. If each of these houses had one small wildflower garden, together we’d be helping to maintain some 1250 acres of grassland. If we went further and planted some appropriate plants along our roadsides and walking trails, we could easily double that. It might be that the grasslands are so compromised that they will not return, but that does not mean that we cannot live in them in new ways. It would take almost no water, and, I mean, really, when the alternative is this?
… or this?
Walking Around the Old Neighbourhood
More life for less water, and the use of our dwellings to help the grasslands and to bring them close. There’s no downside. This is the kind of things a progressive city council could fix almost instantly. We would become rich.
It started as a trail to the promised land. Here at the Whitman Mission in Walla Walla, in Oregon Territory (now in the State of Washington), it has led to a hill of cheatgrass, an invasive weed, and a monument to the dead, who got caught between worlds. This was the arrival point for thousands of new immigrants to the territory along the Oregon Trail in its early years.
We live in the ruins.
Cheatgrass shows us the way to the future: harvest snow.
Cheatgrass at the Edge of Winter
There is no need to wait for the rains or to finance high pressure water systems worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s all a matter of planting the right crops and developing the technology to harvest them. On the very edge of the snow is a microclimate that balances abundant water with the rising spring heat. It last for only a few days.
Our future depends upon understanding its processes and developing technologies that harvest them. In the meantime, it is a place of deep beauty.
There is a group of plants that produce food, require little or no irrigation, little care, and are open to be shared by human and animal grazers. They are called weeds. They should be called the future. I’m going to be celebrating them all week long. For openers, here is lambs’ quarters. This is one of the classic Canadian weeds. Here it is at the beginning of September:
Lambsquarters in the Brown, Grassland Hills, September 1, Without Irrigation
Each of these plants can have about a million seeds. Um, that’s lambs’ quarters with the pale clusters of seeds, not the prickly Russian Thistle in the background. That one is a true invader. They’re getting along, though, right? Right?
A weed, yes, if you let it get out of hand in your tomato patch, because you’ll never, ever get rid of it short of chemical warfare, but, you see, the thing about weeds is that many of them are the food plants of indigenous North American people. This is one. Given that water is getting more and more precious, don’t you think it’s about time to give up on colonial forms of engineering and just embrace the continent and what it can grow for us? This stuff is closely related to Quinoa, was one of the major food staples of Indigenous North America, and is still grown as a grain and a leafy vegetable in Mexico. What’s more, in a landscape such as this one, seeds planted in the fall will sprout pretty much the day the snow goes in March, and will produce a leafy crop in two weeks. The young plants are better by far than spinach, both taste-wise and nutritionally, and can be grown pretty much anywhere, without infrastructure or water systems, because by the time the heat comes they are done with being a leafy crop and have moved on to being a grain. Speaking of grains, here’s another one:
Red Root Pigweed, Bella Vista
This stuff is even pushing through the herbicided wasteland of this dead field.
You got it. Another indigenous American crop, both for medicine and for steamed leaves. It is still used in India today as a staple of cuisine. And, yessss…. like lambs’ quarters, it has a million seeds per plant. And where it grows, other members of its family, the Amaranths, will grow as well, producing highly-nutritious, protein-rich grains. The related amaranth, Kiwicha, was one of the staple foods of the Incas, and provided up to 80% of their caloric consumption before the conquest. And, yesssss, like lambs’ quarters, the stuff will grow anywhere and couldn’t really care a whit about irrigation, as it sends down honking deep roots and takes care of business well. What’s more, here in the cheatgrass infected grasslands, it can mine water as early as cheatgrass, and then punch through the cheatgrass barrier and outlast the fire-prone interloper by going deeper and higher, and that’s what you gotta do. And farm culture sprays herbicides to kill this stuff. Pitiful. Global warming is going to raise the mean temperature of the Pacific Northwest by between 0.5 and 7 degrees Celsius by 2050. Let’s be ready. If we poison the gifts from the past, we have no-one to blame but ourselves.
Tomorrow: Sprout culture for drought management.
Palettes of colour can provide lenses with which to enter into the landscape. That was the story last week. To put on those glasses, click here. The earth may be an art installation, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have certain genres of its own that go beyond human interest in light, colour, and beauty. Today, an attempt to describe the red shift that is taking place in the western North American Grasslands, in less human terms. So, here’s one of the signature flowering plants of this formerly rich wildflower world, the pungent, lift-your-heart-to-the-sky yarrow …
Still Hanging in There After All These Years
Yarrow and Rabbitbrush hanging on among the new immigrant weeds.
I can’t give you the complex sagebrush and ashen scent of this flower, that lingers for decades in the back of your mind and describes all this land between the mountains, where the clouds float overhead and the screams of red-tailed hawks carry for miles above the bunchgrass, but I can get a bit closer …
Yarrow in Its Glory
Once one of over fifty varieties of flowers from which the bees of the grasslands collected honey, in many areas yarrow is now their only nectar source, for weeks at a time. Note the spiky cheatgrass trying to steal her water in the lower right hand corner of the image.
This is, however, a story of great hope, because after decades of cheatgrass, the yarrow is still here: one of the species that can survive its water-hoarding. Yarrow is, however, also a cultivated plant that with a bit of coaxing can be brought to flower in raging colour. Here is a plant that a landscaper forgot to load onto his truck while developing the golf course subdivision up the hill a few years back …
Red Yarrow Going Rogue
A prince among weeds.
For all the red shift the colour of this plant makes in the landscape, look what else it does …
Wild Bee Collecting Necar
I watched a variety of bee species on this yarrow community for fifteen minutes. Not once did any choose the native white yarrow to the right.
Here’s a closer view …
Just One of the Species Making Use of the Red Shift
Perhaps keeping the grasslands alive as a landscape is as simple as introducing the right weeds. If a bit of colour up on the hill brings the landscape back into balance by replacing lost, brightly-coloured flower species, which insects can easily find in that sea of brown and grey, with brightly-coloured variants of plants that have shown that they are a match for the worst of weeds, then I’m all for painting the hills red.
I think it is interesting that the civilization that has determined the expansion rate of the universe through a physical property called the redshift, has been the civilization that has expanded over the earth and transformed it from a physical space to a visual one. The red shift shows up on earth, too. Here’s what it looks like close to home.
Natural Intermontane Grassland Farwell Canyon
Except for the temporary introduction of a fence (no longer used), this land has not changed in 4000 years.
This is just one of the grasslands in northwestern north america that claimed the old lake bottoms of giant lakes that formed at the end of the last period of glaciation, about 10,000 years ago. When the ice dams that formed the lakes broke, the water rapidly cut down through the lake bottoms, to produce terraced benchlands. The grass that thrives here, and the sagebrush that grows at the lower, hotter, and drier altitudes, are yellow and grey, like this…
Benchland Above the Chilcotin River
Note the pale straw colour of the blue-bunched wheat grass. These are the signature colours of the American West.
The photograph below, however, shows what they look like today in the Okanagan, a few miles south, where weeds have largely overtaken the natural grasses:
Bella Vista Grassland Today
Notice the addition of stray alfalfa (green), russian thistle (brown), and, especially, cheat grass in full seed (red).
Now, this might not be the full red shift, which is an effect of the speed at which objects move towards or away from a viewer, but it might be this similar red shift. A red shift due to optics or radiation transfer … yes, that’s what painters and plants work with. When this land was colonized, in the period during which modern astronomical physics was also invented, it was the task of painters to observe the world and to create palettes of colours that could give name to it, so that its colours would be available to others, later. This form of painting lost the aesthetic battle to abstraction. Perhaps, though, it still retains value. Here’s another view …
The Red Shift
Our painters and designers are going to have to come up with a new palette of colours.
This is not just a story about colour, though. It’s also a story of change, movement, and expansion. As I said, I think it’s fascinating that it shows up not just in theories of the structure of deep space and the universe itself, but in the smallest details of local life. My gut says that these phenomena are connected, and that one can be understood in terms of the other. My gut also tells me that this …
Bluebird Box (click)
Such boxes are set out along trails to provide habitat for bluebirds, as a part of the process of ensuring the continued health of grasslands.
… is a sign that the landscape has been completely transformed. These boxes are over five years old. They have never been used. There are no bluebirds. There is just not enough grassland left for them. The world that was tan and blue, is now grey and red. It appears to be moving away from us at the speed of light. It is brand new. It has never been described. What stands before us is the great age of exploration.
And today we stop breathing. Once upon a time, there was a prickly pear cactus. It lived high up on a warm rock outcropping in a cold place, and was as happy as can be. In the spring, well, some springs, when conditions were just right, it bloomed. Here it is, blooming …
Brittle Prickly Pear Cactus Okanagan Landing
The flowers lasted for a few days, and then fell off, but while they lasted they were like finding the sun had settled like little birds at your feet. You just had to be careful not to step too close, because then you’d have prickly pear cactus climbing up your leg, and those things leave little sting holes that last for days.
Peering into the Flower
A good time to blush.
Some of the prickly pear’s flowers were yellow, some pink. And usually that would be that, but while people go about their business in the valley bottom and the grasslands are ignored, cheat grass has been moving into this dry environment and rooting in the small amounts of dust that collect underneath the cactus. In this situation, cheat grass acts as a sponge, trapping water right there where the rock should carry it away, and…
Slime Mold and a Cactus Duking it Out
Folks, this is not good.
