“Going on the Side of Life”: Managing Humans to Foster Nature’s Resilience f

Here is the outline of the paper I gave at the recent environmental philosophy conference that a number of you have asked for. Sorry it took me so long to get it up: I was hoping to flesh it out, but since that will take me awhile, I can at least post this:
Given the [...]

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 [...]

The Superpower of Foresight

By Camila Thorndike
Lately I have been pondering the significance and utility of reports and plans, as I write one myself as the summer intern with the Oregon Water Trust, a non-profit that uses free-market solutions to increase instream flow. In the small watershed that I am concerned with alone, there are countless assessments and analysis [...]

The Mice in the Sink– and Us

In “Mice in the Sink”, an essay exploring empathy in non-human animals, Jessica Pierce leads off with a provocative incident witnessed by CeAnn Lambert, head of the Indiana Coyote Rescue Center. Lambert found two baby mice, exhausted and terrified, trapped in the sink in her garage. She set a bowl of water in [...]

Burning down the House

As Chehalis elders reminded a visiting anthropologist in 1926, human power strong enough to heal is also power strong enough to kill. It would not have surprised them that the third leading cause of death in the US today, after cancer and heart disease, is undergoing a medical procedure.
Today we are great at developing new [...]

Update on “Re-storying the Northwestern landscape” (and an excuse to share more stories)

Places on this land–and the ancestral spirits of all the species that reside there– connect us in ways our rational minds cannot always account for. On the same day I composed a post about my experience riding with Henry Cultee on the Humptulips River three decades ago, the Seattle Times published a note [...]

Re-Storying the Northwestern Landscape

“So I’m rooted to this ground. That’s why I’m supposed to outlive everybody”.
Henry Cultee, Chehalis
“I don’t believe in magic. I believe in the sun and the stars, the water, the tides, the floods, the owls, the hawks flying, the river running, the wind talking. They’re measurements. They tell us how healthy things are. How healthy [...]

“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 [...]

The One that Got Away and Other Stories of Sustainability

The next time a fisherman tells you he let that big one get away you might congratulate him on his sustainability practice. The bigger the fish that got away the better, as indicated by the research publicized by OSU professor Mark Hixon, multi-award winning marine biologist. It seems that fishing folklore that enshrines [...]

Our Plant and Animal Elders

It is not only fallacious but imprudent to insist that humans are at the top of a natural hierarchy. In fact we are among the youngest and most fragile of species—and our place in the natural world is comparatively shaky. As a Siletz student of mine recently noted, plant and animal species that have [...]

Takelma-Siletz Elder Agnes Baker Pilgrim: Honoring the Water

Before she blesses the Willamette River, pouring into it a vial of similarly blessed water from around the world, Takelma-Siletz spiritual elder Agnes Baker Pilgrim thanks the natural elements, including the cloud people, for their cooperation. The latter answered her prayer to hold off so that it would be a nice day for people to [...]

Concerned about the Economy but not Global Warming?

Yesterday a buyer for a local market told me the prices of bulk food items have gone up– way up. Some of them have doubled. “It’s scary!” he exclaimed.
High food prices are driven in part by rising gas prices, since we transport much of our food over substantial distances. But they are also [...]

The NIMBY Lie

The NIMBY (Not in my backyard) attitude makes us downright stupid about social and environmental decisions. Even as we try to divide up the world into good parts where we live and bad parts where we don’t, earthly cycles and global dynamics are busy mixing it all up. We ingest bits of the [...]

Tree Huggers in the City

One day I looked out my window to see a woman with her arms around the old maple tree in front of my house. When I stepped out my door, she explained she has just had breast cancer surgery and, “It feels like healing here.”
Research has shown that those who look out on [...]

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 [...]