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.
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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 introduced readers to many more. A “richness of martens,” a “murder of crows,” and “an unkindness of ravens” show feelings both positive and negative projected onto animals while a “tower of giraffes” and an “ostentation of peacocks” play with appearance. And then there are the nouns suggesting behavior, by far the largest group: a “skulk of foxes,” a “leap of leopards,” a “murmuration of starlings.”
Recently, during some way-too-busy weeks of an overwhelming workload and too many unknowns looming, I slipped away one sunny morning to the Boulder reservoir, hoping to see eagles. Bald eagles begin nesting here in February, and although the reservoir this year was still capped with a solid lid of ice, I hoped perhaps the eagles would perch nearby even if they would not likely find a decent breakfast between its shores.
I parked near the reservoir and began hiking. read more…
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 is near sunset during our visit:
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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 more than we’re giving back to the Earth.
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One of the last things I did before leaving Prescott, Arizona, was climb over rocks in Granite Dells near sunset.
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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:
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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.
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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 of Monsanto’s research methodology. Specifically, this study looks at sex-differentiated effects and non-linear dose response curves whereas Monsanto did not. Monsanto has issued a response to the study, to which one of the lead authors, Gilles-Eric Séralini in turn responded, “Our study contradicts Monsanto conclusions because Monsanto systematically neglects significant health effects in mammals that are different in males and females eating GMOs, or not proportional to the dose.” Originally, published in mid-December, the study has recently garnered coverage in Huffington Post, Grist and Twilight Earth, among other outlets.
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. read more…
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:
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