Just, like, you know, find a cliff and get rooted. This is an old railway cut, but a road cut will do fine. For this approach, it’s good to be below a […]
Need Water? Make Some. Need Land? Make Some of That, Too.
8. Calling Things By Their Right Names
Blind Creek, “the place of yellow flowers”, might indicate “rabbit brush…” …the bright, feathered sage that catches the sun in October and draws in jewelled bee flies, with their dense, brightly-coloured fur […]
Gravity and Anti-Gravity Hard at It
Here’s some gravity at work. Some snow melt strikes a rock face and tears soil down with it. This is gravity working in open, unconstricted space. Note as well the salts on […]
When is a Rose Not a Rose?
Why, when it is a rose window. Count the petals. And again: In the second window, the bricked-in one, the one just above, the petals form a cross, but in the top […]
The Right Angle for Rocks: Building Resilience
Note how the two stones below differ. The one in the foreground is rich with lichen, and producing nutrients for life at its base. The one above it, in the upper left […]
The Evolution of a Dead Planet and What to Do Next
Start with a grassland, maintained in a state of ecological diversity by human care for 5,000 years… …and under human use for 12,000 years. A productive grassland. Then add cattle. Hungry cattle. […]
Earth Weather, Sky Weather and Climate Change
The pictures are everywhere: the terrible washouts of rail lines and highways in the Fraser Canyon, that severed Canada’s third largest city for a week. As you can see in this photo […]
Starvation in the Okanagan
Ah, so green, right? So full of life! Not so great in the grasslands, really. The green is a sign of nitrogen uptake, and this is the season of lichens… They draw […]
Okanagan Architectural Bloopers, Part 4: Plastic, Imitation and Gravity
Basalt rock breaks into angular shapes, of differing dimensions, according to how it cooled, This is pretty standard for the North Okanagan: These rocks roll naturally down slope and collect in hollows […]
Fail and Fail Again: Okanagan Architectural Blooper, Part 3
This is not good! In January, I knocked on the door of this house and suggested they had a problem. Here’s the problem from around this time last year, before it got […]
Okanagan Okanogan 