Category Archives: the land

Medicinal Herbs of CA

This month the Ojai Quarterly published my “Off the Shelf” feature on Lanny Kaufer’s spectacular and informative new field guide to medicinal herbs in California: Here’s the opening: And below the fold [page 2, below] the full story in a more readable font for the web. Much respect to Lanny, who not only has beenContinue reading “Medicinal Herbs of CA”

County planning mulls wastewater in Santa Paula

Seven years [after the explosion], on Nov 8, a new management group, led by Tom Koziol, CEO of Fontana-based Ri-Nu Services LLC, brought a proposal to expand and reopen the industrial wastewater facility to about 75 people at a community meeting in Santa Paula, hosted by the county of Ventura Planning Division.

Podcast interview re: PCT completion: Talk of the Town — Ojai Quarterly

Bret Bradigan, the publisher of Ojai Quarterly and other magazines, talked to yours truly for a Talk of the Town podcast on my completion of the Pacific Crest Trail. I thought this was an illuminating and even entertaining conversation (although I must stop laughing like a crazy person). About an hour long. [use link forContinue reading “Podcast interview re: PCT completion: Talk of the Town — Ojai Quarterly”

Walking around Mt Tam

One of the most beautiful and least known poetical flowerings of that outpouring of youth and art we call the 60’s was, arguably, a journey on foot around Mt Tamalpais, in Marin County north of San Francisco. This honoring of “the quiescent one,” this circumambulation, a walk completely around the mountain, following with our feetContinue reading “Walking around Mt Tam”

High Sierra PCT under snow in 2019

This winter turned out to be a very good year for precipitation in the state of California, as experts working with the California Department of Water Resources kind of predicted last fall. This means that right now, in July of 2019, the John Muir Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail through the High Sierra fromContinue reading “High Sierra PCT under snow in 2019”

Flee or stay and defend? Rethinking evacuation from wildfire

News from around the Ojai Valley Thomas Fire dilemma: Stay or go? Residents, fire officials rethink evacuations Published: Friday, 22 March 2019 08:48 Photo provided by CAPS Media Firefighters try to save a house during the Thomas Fire.   Kit Stolz, special to the Ojai Valley News On the night of Dec. 4, 2017, fueledContinue reading “Flee or stay and defend? Rethinking evacuation from wildfire”

“a very strange argument” for global warming

From David Wallace-Wells’ just published The Uninhabitable Earth: “Over the last few years, as the planet’s own environmental rhythms have seemed to grow more fatalistic, skeptics have found themselves arguing not that climate change isn’t happening, since extreme weather has made that undeniable, but that its causes are unclear — suggesting that the changes weContinue reading ““a very strange argument” for global warming”

Precipitous insect decline: collapse of nature?

This week a Dutch cartoonist with beauty dramatized a horrifying new study warning of “the collapse of nature.” Yes, that statement seems extreme, but the art contextualizes it as form of suicide. Or even worse, as a form of ecocide-suicide. First our species exterminates the insects, and then their decline unravels nature. The study, freely available fromContinue reading “Precipitous insect decline: collapse of nature?”