“A filthy drinking glass, used toothbrush, and crumpled tube of toothpaste lay on top of a simple cement capstone, their ordinariness heartrendingly poignant. I lit candles I had tucked into my pack earlier that morning, said a prayer, and remained by the graveside for several minutes longer, swatting mosquitos, racking my brain, trying to […]

  A celebration of traditional culture. Each book features a different aspect of biocultural diversity: Waterdog & the Love Charm, a delightfully mischievous tale told by Dry Creek Pomo Elizabeth “Belle” Lozinto Cordova Dollar (and edited by her great-niece Sherri Smith-Ferri) illustrates the close ties between nature and culture – and the perils of interspecies […]

…this month by my extended family in Tado, eastern Indonesia, to help achieve my annual goal of carbon-neutral living while conserving biocultural diversity. Why 300 trees? What types of trees? And why Tado?   Three hundred trees represent the number of actively growing woody plants I need to plant to offset the tonnage of carbon […]

This Winter, like all the winters going back for decades, our US Forest Service and our National Parks Service are coordinating the slaughter of American Bison on public lands. Plains Tribes have been asking to receive the “excess” Yellowstone and Grand Canyon National Park bison for many years, and they are rarely – if ever […]

One of the most abundant, nutritious, and freely available foods in California falls on the ground every autumn, and while the squirrels, woodpeckers, and several hundred other species take notice, very few humans still do.   Acorns were the original all-purpose mush, providing protein, carbohydrates, fats, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, and niacin. Stripped of their outer shell and […]