Belonging to the Land: Some Historical Perspective

“We immigrants who call ourselves ‘natives’ after one paltry generation on the land, can scarcely fathom what it means to the Indian to walk on a land in which a hundred generations of ancestors have been buried”.
Eugene Hunn, anthropologist writing on the traditions of the mid-Columbia River peoples
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“Drift people”, the indigenous peoples of southwestern Washington [...]

The Green Revolution–Whoops! The Women of Bangladesh Offer an Alternative

The more we try to manage a problem with a technological magic bullet, the less effective we may be in meeting our goals. Take, for instance, the case of high producing variety (HVP) rice in Southeast Asia. The HVP rice provides more calories, but its introduction several decades ago wound up amplifying both vitamin A [...]

Gilgamesh and other pioneers in paradise

11,000 years ago the country where modern Iran is today was a “paradise”, according to the archeologists currently investigating the world’s oldest Stonehenge-type religious site there.  This site is thousands of years older than the famed one in the British Isles.  In the most recent issue of the Smithsonian, archeologists speculate that the landscape filled [...]

Diplomacy with the Nations of Life

The perception of other natural life as nations with distinct ways of life, values, perceptions, rights, and territories of their own would allow us to see the natural world in a more holistic way. This is not a new idea. This perception inspired indigenous Northwesterners to treat the first salmon taken from a run with [...]

Homeowner’s Association for Planet Earth?

Here is a funny story contributed by one of students:
A few years ago, our old neighbor put up a tasteful, unobtrusive, umbrella-type clothesline in his back yard. He erected it right next to the backyard fence that divided our property from his. The clothesline was invisible to the street. Not thinking we would mind, he [...]

“Gourmand’s Paradise”: The Once and Future Willamette Valley?

European explorers and fur traders nicknamed the Willamette Valley, the “gourmand’s paradise”. When they ran low on food, they traveled to this fertile and abundant valley to stock up again. Here migrating birds darkened the sky and as one Willamette Valley pioneer rather gracelessly put it, deer were so “easy to kill” a man [...]

Erasing Nature

At a recent public hearing in Eugene, Oregon, a developer defended his proposal to build over a hundred houses on a steep slope with a history of landslides even though he knew little about this aspect of the site. He asserted he did not need to know. He would just alter the land to fit [...]