Horticultural Forays Into a Changing Urban World
I don t usually repost what I ve put on my FB page, but the world just keeps getting crazier politically, so much so that our new reality is being lost in the chaos. Now is not the time to give up. As bleak as things may seem to be becoming it will be far worse if we [ ]
As a science nerd I found this a fascinating read. Enlightening. I’ve read a lot of science over the last few years and most of these books focus on what the author knows best, on their particular field, their expertise. There are those scientists, more all of the time and science writers today, who are [ ]
Roxanne Khamsi, in “Beyond Inheritance”, takes the reader on a guided tour of our rapidly evolving understanding of the mutation of our cells and what it means. Mutation is an essential fact of life, one central to natural selection and the ongoing health of every living individual, and, perhaps our demise. Mutation, however, is [ ]
We all know its been a drier and warmer than average Spring. In town people are often exclaiming about how wonderful its been, but in the Canyon the combination of dryness and unseasonable warmth are showing, if you know how and where to look. Dry Canyon has already taken on that ‘sere’ look, the soil [ ]
When I was still working for the city of Portland Parks, one of my jobs, for a number of years, was to do design reviews and construction inspection on big capital Parks projects being built from scratch downtown including South Waterfront, Caruthers, Jamison Square, Director s Square,Tanner Springs and The Fields. I’d attend meetings with our [ ]
Ecologists will regularly claim that fire plays an essential role in the life and dynamics of the Juniper woodland, our sagebrush steppe and the grasslands of our arid and semi-arid plant communities, that without it, the landscape will deteriorate. Okay, but what does that mean? How can fire actually lead to a landscape s improved vitality [ ]
Talk of environmental crises is everywhere, climate change, mass species extinctions, losses of critical habitat, the privatization of once public resources and landscapes (and their subsequent ‘pillaging’ by corporate entities), critically dropping aquifers, what a chaotic climate may mean for world agriculture and our food supply, a world beset by an increasing rate of diseases [ ]
Had I not read Ben Goldfarb’s 2018 book, “Eager”, I probably wouldn’t have picked this one up. Why would I want to read an entire book on ‘roadkill ? But I trusted him. And so I read it. I found his writing here crisp and engaging, like his other work, but I was still hesitant and [ ]
Being a horticulturist, a student of ecology, evolution and all of the usual life science topics, my reading list is long with books I find and others recommended to me by friends. This most recent is one of the latter, “Is a River Alive?”, by British writer Robert MacFarlane. I hadn’t read any of his [ ]
Three years ago I read Jonathan Slaght’s book, “Owl’s of the Eastern Ice’, a book that takes the reader into the inhospitable wilds of Russia’s Primorye Krai, the province immediately north of the Korean Peninsula, its multiple mountain ranges pushing up against the Sea of Japan. With a latitude the same as Oregon and Washington, [ ]