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 […]
Green Fire
The Lonely Vigil of the Invasive Species
Plastic Owl, Waiting for Its own Kind
Cuckoo Grass
A cuckoo is a bird that lays its eggs in other birds’ nests and lets them go about the hard work of raising them. It’s like that up on the hill. As […]
Worms at Work
For an invasive species, earthworms are pretty cool. “Earthworms make soil,” people say. Hmmm. “Humans make art,” people say. “People,” people say, “are going somewhere.” Ah, are those tire tracks in the […]
Good News for the Butterflies
On Friday, I felt like the earth was one butterfly and one flower away from death, and showed you an image of a single butterfly larva on a single yellow bell… on […]
There is No Such Thing as Wilderness (Unless We Make it So)
In a land that was heavily populated and culturally farmed for 6000 years, only in the last 160 years, the time of European, American and Canadian colonization, has there been wild life. […]
Secret Weapon in the War Against the Weeds
Meet your darkest enemy. This plant is the end of any grassland it gets a hold in. Pretty soon, huge areas of grass are useless for anything, even to walk through. The […]
The Red Shift
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 Importance of Colour
Oh, the ironies. A girl spends thousands of generations evolving the capacity to change colour to match the shades of individual grassland flowers, and then? Well, they die, and weeds take their […]
Prickly Pear Cactus
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 […]
