On this page the following entries were made in the “Lively Earth” category.
Archive for “Lively Earth”
Radicalized by a creek
A story in today’s San Francisco Chronicle pasted a huge smile on my face. It’s about the Butters Canyon Conservancy in Oakland, California, which recently passed a significant milestone—sealing the deal on the last for-sale property along a green stretch of urban creek.
Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle
The story juices me because Butters Canyon was my home for some years, and I founded this land trust in 2001. I never set out to work in land conservation. It’s just that I got radicalized by a little urban creek flowing far below my kitchen window.
My partner and I bought the hillside house during… Read more »
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A peace of eagles
Some decades ago the American poet and producer James Lipton revived interest in an old word tradition—giving fanciful names to groups of animals. An Exaltation of Larks explored how English hunters and word lovers in the fifteenth century pursued with imagination the collective names for the beasts they pursued in the woods with bow and arrow. Most of their terms died out as markers of class—intended to be used to show off superior breeding—while a few slipped into common usage; today we still speak of a “pride of lions” and “gaggle of geese” as well as a “school of fish.” Lipton… Read more »
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Beside the White River
I caught my first-ever glimpse of Arkansas this week—a quick trip to attend a wedding in Calico Rock, in the Arkansas Ozarks at the far north of the state. Beautiful country! We stayed in a cabin peeking between trees, perched on the Calico Rock itself, the variegated bluff that caught early settlers’ attention because, as an old history book in the cabin said, the Europeans had never seen anything like this along the Rhine:
from bbonline.com
The bluff sits next to the beautiful White River, named “white” because it was so clear you could see right down to the riverbed. Here it… Read more »
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Reciprocity
I’ve been thinking about reciprocity lately—how it holds relationships together. How partnerships end if one or the other takes more than gives. How wars start over lack of reciprocity—disrespect, seizing land, taking resources. How contracts aren’t successful and trades don’t work unless each party gives as good as it gets.
In other words, taking and giving in equal measure is the only sustainable practice in human relationships, whether interpersonal or international.
But then I’ve been thinking about how reciprocity is key in our relationship with the Earth too. At bottom, our ecological crisis boils down to one simple fact: humans are taking… Read more »
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Granite Dells
One of the last things I did before leaving Prescott, Arizona, was climb over rocks in Granite Dells near sunset.
Fantastic mounds of rock look like toes or fingers or mushrooms or just about anything else you can imagine.
The neighborhood sits right next to a Rails-to-Trails throughway where you can hike for miles. We scampered up and up to catch the last rays of the sun. On the way we played with our shadows to make living rock art. That’s Joan on the left, me on the right, and Marna offstage taking the photo:
The trees cast their own shadows as the rays… Read more »
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Snow in Prescott
I’m in Prescott, Arizona, making my quarterly pilgrimage to teach in the graduate programs of Prescott College. This weekend we’ve had more precipitation than I’ve ever seen here in eight years of visits. It started with snow on Thursday morning—wet and slushy but gorgeous:
An hour later the snow turned to rain, and it rained—and rained and rained—the whole day. Heavy, driving rain. Rain that soaked you the instant you stepped out in it. Rain that collected as three inches of slush on the ground. I didn’t stay outside long enough to get photos of the raging creeks. Too bad. They… Read more »
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Do GMOs reduce pesticide use?
That was one big promise of genetic engineering: fewer chemicals dumped into our soils. But has it worked out? A new report by the nonprofit Organic Center of Boulder says not by a long shot.
The most striking finding is that GE [genetically engineered] crops have been
responsible for an increase of 383 million pounds of herbicide use in the U.S. over the first 13 years of commercial use of GE crops.
In the earliest years of GMOs, pesticide use did go down. (Pesticides means all chemicals used to control insects, weeds, and fungi.)
But then something happened. Plants wised up—specifically, the plants farmers didn’t… Read more »
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GMO corn causes organ damage in mammals
From the Pesticide Action Network (PAN North America):
A ground-breaking study in the International Journal of Biological Studies links three common varieties of Monsanto’s genetically modified (GM) corn to liver and kidney toxicity and clearly illustrates the need for independent research on GMOs’ health effects. As noted by Scientific American and a host of other observers, agricultural biotechnology firms consistently suppress or render impossible independent scientific studies by hiding behind patent law. This study — conducted by French university scientists — is a meta-analysis of studies conducted by Monsanto and another biotech firm, which comes to a different conclusion and calls into question the adequacy…
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Do animals tell stories?
Other animals, that is. 
Of course we humans are compulsive storytellers. We tell stories to entertain ourselves, to explain the world, to heal each other. Sometimes we call the storytelling ritual “therapy.”
But because storytelling requires language, and because until recently Western humans thought we were the only animals who had language, we also thought that we were the only storytellers.
Now the picture is getting more complex.
Recent scientific studies with animals from monkeys to parrots indicate language use that satisfies all but die-hard linguists. Koko the gorilla is perhaps the most famous for using sign language, and Alex the grey parrot, on… Read more »
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Scenes from a writing weekend
Over the weekend I had the good fortune to attend a women’s writing and meditation retreat. I can’t think of anything I would rather have been doing in the first days of the new year than listening to poetry, writing, practicing yoga, watching the breath, walking in the woods.
Here is the way our retreat room greeted us on Friday afternoon:
The retreat was held a couple hours south of Boulder, at the Benet Pines Monastery, a community of Benedictine women. On Saturday morning I went for a walk as the sun was beginning to lighten the tips of the trees. Birds… Read more »
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