Gaia

Hard rains just swept across NW Oregon and vicinity. The creeks climbed their banks. I watch Rock Creek, and its tributaries that flow through Bethany Lake, ten miles west of Portland Oregon.  Upstream of Bethany Lake, a half mile wide grassy meadow has transformed into a nicely braided  creek with...

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  • November 20, 2020

The Tualatin Valley of Northwest Oregon forms a shallow bowl,  about 50 miles in diameter, with 1000-2000 foot tall eroded volcanoes walling in the lowlands, separating the region from the Coast and the Columbia River.  I used to work near Banks, Oregon, and the vast acreages of of flooded croplands...

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  • January 19, 2020

He wakes up at dawn and peeks out the window, looking for the heron feeding at the fishpond in the first light. No heron yet today.  He starts the espresso machine, but cannot make coffee fast enough to clear out almost seven decades of fog from his head. He sighs...

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  • November 22, 2019

In August, many tadpoles in my hand-dug backyard ponds change into small chorus frogs.  For several years now, the frogs have returned to my backyard in March, bred in the ponds, and produced eggs that produced tadpoles that morphed into frogs from Bastille Day (July 14)  into August. The Frog Mitigation...

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  • August 18, 2019

I can’t wait to hear how Huckabee Sanders is going to spin this. The “stable genius” who wants to spend billions of tax dollars building a “Space Force” to defeat Space ISIS just tweeted this: x For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about...

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  • June 8, 2019

I recently set up a 5 gallon aquarium and germinated lotuses in it from storied seeds.  I purchased two Japanese “trapdoor” snails to eat the aquarium’s algae.  They just had a half-dozen live young, so I am sort of a grandfather of snails. This covey of snails swiftly ate all of...

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  • March 6, 2019

Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?  Trump and his minions.  Here are reproductions of posts and narratives from the website of the National Butterfly Center, covering their demonstration and march yesterday.  An earlier march.  The National Butterfly Center Facebook page has video of yesterday’s march and demonstration. www.facebook.com/… The bulldozers...

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  • February 17, 2019

This week of dire weather forecasts for the Pacific Northwest saw a year’s worth of snow fall on Seattle in a few remarkable days. Yet the lower elevations of Washington County, west of Portland, Oregon remained chilly, but stubbornly snow-free.  Gaia took notice, and dumped hours of hard rain on NW...

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  • February 14, 2019

Rock Creek tumbles down the side of extinct volcanoes, through farmers’ fields, under highways, and along my suburbs west of Portland Oregon.  It bisects a golf course, drains lakes,  dodges through a maze of linear parks hidden behind industrial complexes, absorbs stormwater runoff from highways, factories and fields, and finally flows...

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  • December 13, 2018

Illinois is facing an extraction crisis. Expanded coal mining and the looming threat of fracking will create an unprecedented two-pronged threat to southern and central Illinois. Grassroots groups on the front lines of the extraction crisis raised the alarm in a letter to the Illinois General Assembly. The letter calls...

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  • March 27, 2014
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