Category Archives: the land

According to the U.S. Drought Monitor as of Wednesday, March 27th:

After the devastating Day Fire of last fall, which burned for three weeks in the backcountry around the Sespe (river), consuming about 40 square miles of chaparral in fire, much has changed, but few have been given permission to see the burned areas. Good friends Lauren and Alisdair Coyne and a few others from KeepContinue reading “Sunday Morning on the Planet: A Different Kind of Silence”

When it comes to precipitation numbers; yes, size matters, but not every night. The numbers for Southern California and Upper Ojai, Ventura County this year are unimpressive: 7 inches or less so far this year, when an average year will total just under 25 inches. As my meterologist friend Brad Muller wisely pointed out, notContinue reading “Size Matters, but Not Every Night”

From NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, the Precipitation Anomaly tab: 

For a while the "good news Friday" concept got away from me, but this week the VCReporter gives us two great examples of folks caring for nature around here, and finding ways to bring back species drifting towards extinction. On the cover is a  lovely and personal story from Chuck Graham, with his photographs, aboutContinue reading “The Fox and the Butterfly Return: Good News Friday”

This morning at seven I walked out to get the paper. The gentle rain of the night before had stopped; the mist hung white in the trees, for a moment the world stood still. I thought of a wonderful poem by Pattiann Rogers…

In General

This is about no rain in particular,
just any rain, rain sounding on the roof,
any roof, slate or wood, tin or clay
or thatch, any rain among any trees,
rain in soft, soundless accumulation,
gathering rather than falling on the fir
of juniper and cedar, on a lace-community
of cobwebs, rain clicking off the rigid
leaves of oaks or magnolias, any kind
of rain, cold and smelling of ice or rising
again as steam off hot pavements
or stilling dust on country roads in August.
This is about rain as rain possessing
only the attributes of any rain in general.

(con’t)

Hey, it’s not just me. Freezing in my woodstove-heated office. Trying to keep my turtle Lazarus from hibernating. It’s coyotes slinking into Los Angeles, exactly as we saw last year on the big screen, in the rather unsettling movie Collateral. In truth, coyotes almost never attack, perhaps because they remember what happened to the lastContinue reading “Signs of the Apocalypse. Or, Dang It’s Cold. And Dry.”

This particularly beautiful example of global warming comes from a Finnish photographer named Nayrde von Gobbels. Although you might not think a swan in ice could represent global warming, in fact it’s a good example. Swans–which live on the ice at the edges, where it breaks up–leave the Helsinki area in late December or January,Continue reading “why this image”

And last year moves on. I’m reluctant to see it go, but in this natural world we have been given, even the departures have their compensations…

We had so much rain in 2005–nearly fifty inches–that the seasonal stream by our place kept running, a little, all year long. Now it’s late fall, almost winter, and the pools have turned a lovely Zen green, from  the tiny seeds the alders drop in profusion. A good rain, and all this will be sweptContinue reading “Sunday Morning on the Planet: a Waterhole in Fall”