Braiding Sweetgrass

missing forest, left over from the first cut more than a century ago. It was too big to cut through and a long way around, so Fr ...

that used to be. “My work grew out of a deeply experienced sense of loss,” he wrote, “the loss of what should be here.” When the ...

little chance against fast and thorny. When he drove away from the farm intended for “till death do us part,” the woman waving g ...

The early successional plant species arrive immediately and get to work on damage control. These plants—known as opportunistic, ...

reducing biodiversity, and simplifying ecosystems at the demand of societies always bent on having more. In five hundred years w ...

After the garden and the fruit trees, his next goal was building a house that would honor the self-sufficiency and simplicity th ...

at Oregon State University offered Franz technical assistance, prescribing herbicides to quell the brush and replanting with gen ...

offered by the forest itself. His goal was to match his vision for an ancient forest with the possibilities that the land provid ...

canopy. But most never do. Forest ecologists estimate that the window of opportunity for cedars to get started occurs perhaps on ...

Management Unit 361. At Shotpouch, more evocative place names are penned on the hand-drawn trail map of the property: Glass Cany ...

Transplanting what has already been planted to a more favorable spot. I call it ‘anticipatory redistributive naturalization.’ Da ...

been engaged less in a personal forestry of restoration than in a forestry of personal restoration. In restoring the land, I res ...

exterminated. The land holds their memory and the possibility of regeneration. They are not only a matter of ethnicity or histor ...

women in green shawls, beaded with raindrops catching the light, graceful dancers in feathery fringe that sways with their steps ...

Witness to the Rain This Oregon rain, at the start of winter, falls steadily in sheets of gray, unimpeded, making a gentle hiss. ...

silently dissipating among the tiny shingled leaves. Most other places I know, water is a discrete entity. It is hemmed in by we ...

they hang, swelling and pregnant with gravity, far longer than the drops on me, or on twigs or bark. They dangle and rotate, ref ...

where the warm-blooded among us take refuge. There must be niches here and there where the rain does not reach. I try to think l ...

of treefalls, I feel safe in the moment. The pace of my resting and the pace of its falling run on different clocks. Time as obj ...

a moss thread, lit from within like a fiber-optic element. As I watch, the wandering thread touches upon a leaf just millimeters ...