This just popped up in Google Alerts. My review of the original catalog.

I can’t remember where I picked these exquisite little baskets up. The 3 sizes are 1⅝″, 1¼″, and 1⅛″. They may be either Miwok or Pomo (both central California tribes). They’re sitting on top of our little Bose radio in the kitchen and we look at them all the time. Originally they had tiny hummingbird feathers attached to each of the beads, but they were destroyed by some kind of insects.

• From @lloyd.kahn’s Instagram

Isolated and challenged by a harsh climate and battered by the financial crisis of 2008, Iceland has successfully moved away from fossil fuels and shifted to 100% electricity production from renewable sources. The island nation has developed high-tech greenhouses to grow organic vegetables and embraced sustainable fish farming, ecotourism, breakthrough processes for carbon capture and disposal, and efforts to restore the forests that were lost in earlier centuries.

www.theguardian.com/…

From Maui Surfer

In a Miwok myth, Coyote creates all animals, then calls them to a council to discuss the creation of human beings. Each animal wants people to be imbued with its own best qualities, causing an argument. Coyote mocks them all, vowing that human beings should have his own wit and cunning. Each animal makes a human model in its own likeness; but overnight Coyote destroys the other models, so that only his own model comes to life.

–Katharine Berry Judson, Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest

Talking to Louie on the phone just now about the smoky air of the last week, he said, “That isn’t just wood smoke: It’s plastics, building materials, exploded gasoline, burned-up houses and cars…”

Shit, I hadn’t thought of that this last week. I wasn’t out running, but did take a few walks.

I shouda stayed inside a lot more.

We went on to talk about causes of these fires. He said that a lot of the problem is the type of logging that does not deal with the “understory” — all the saplings and plants that spring up afterwards. If they keep growing unchecked, they produce ever more fuel for fire. It makes sense to burn the understory (at its right phase of growth) on a windless day in wet or moist weather.

When foresters are involved in a cut, they will set a limit on the height of the understory, so loggers have to cut slash up into smaller pieces; this is managing the forest. However a lot of logging is interested in profit, not land management, and they leave behind conditions ripe for fire.

He then segued into how the Pomo of the Pt. Arena / Manchester area managed the land. In addition to hunting, fishing, and  harvesting, they used fire to clear selected areas of land, making it easier to move around, making hunting easier, producing green young growth.

I told him about this great book, Tending the Wild, by M. Kat Andersen; about “…indigenous land management practices …in… California when first encountered by Europeans and detailed explication of the care of, harvesting of, and use of California’s native plants.”

You can get it at Larner Seeds: www.shltr.net/tend

The cycle of life…