Once, while studying groundwater contamination at an air base in Florida, I was taken to several old, abandoned landfills to determine which of them should be drilled for testing. One presented a real problem: In the twenty years since it had been closed, the landfill had been planted with pine trees — part of the […]
Category Archives: reclamation
“Okay,” the young student volunteer said, taking a break from collecting native grass seeds, “we’re going to use these to replant all that disturbed ground,” she pointed over to the old nuclear weapons manufacturing plant site, “then global warming will come along and turn it all into a desert. What’s the logic in that?” Several […]
“And every Saturday we work in the yard Pick up the dog doo Hope that it’s hard (woof woof)” ~ Joe Walsh, Ordinary Average Guy A small pond forms where the creek backs up behind a small weir, and the adjacent park is a favorite with the geese. As I walk through with my young […]
“So whether it’s redeveloping dying malls or re-inhabiting dead big-box stores or reconstructing wetlands out of parking lots, I think the fact is the growing number of empty and under-performing, especially retail, sites throughout suburbia gives us actually a tremendous opportunity to take our least-sustainable landscapes right now and convert them into more sustainable places.” […]
One learns that it takes more than a collection of trees to make a forest, as we know it in this country. Unless they house that spirit of wildness and purity like a temple, they fail to satisfy. John Burroughs, Fresh Fields The sand around the greasewood bush on the dune was bare except for […]
The cycle of life was spinning with such speed that even a short-lived beastie such as me could see birth, rise, death, decay and rebirth happening in each and every moment. Life doesn’t get any better than that, I don’t think. Life, death, rebirth – that’s the mystery, isn’t it? That magnificent moment of connection, […]
I am struck again by the apparently incompatible concept of man and nature. When we intrude into nature, do we decrease its nature-ness? “But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.” Aldo Leopold, A […]
When we pried up the rotting board, there was a small gooey orange blob in the wet duff beneath. The cold rain had soaked everything, and I gently scooped up the unmoving creature. Only visitors to the Portland area, none of us knew the local fauna. It might be a small salamander; someone suggested a […]
The Naturalist’s Axiom: You can’t do just one thing. Law of Successful Tinkering: Save all the parts. Corollary: Save the instructions. Roderick Nash The brown head was just visible above the ripples in the water. We watched it cross the tank (what we called a farm pond) and disappear into the weeds at the […]
“Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.” A.A. Milne “But these are weeds,” Melanie exclaimed, “We pull these up in our yard.” “Yes, but this isn’t your yard.” Paul noted kindly, looking out over the prairie. We were collecting native plant seeds on the former Rocky Flats Nuclear Plant site to […]
