Girl Gone Wild

One of the primary goals of my writing is to advocate for people to spend more time outside, for their good and the good of the environment. As a result, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to hundreds of people from all over the world about barriers and challenges they face in doing just that. What is becoming clear to me from these discussions is the existence of a deep divide between people’s…

It’s been years since I’ve heard my own, or any other neighborhood for that matter, alive with the sounds of children. It’s not a subject much discussed, perhaps in large part due to the lack of adults outside to notice. The streets of the small city I live in are barren. On any given day I step outside to find a world more similar to the beginning of an apocalyptic movie than any of us might…

Alsea, an unincorporated community of less than 200 people in the Siuslaw Forest of Benton County, Oregon is home to one of the most important private libraries of environmental information with respect to chemicals, herbicides and pesticides in particular, in the United States. What started in the 1970’s as a community lawsuit against the National Forest Service for spraying residents with…

Year of the Artichoke

This year spring has arrived with a whimper, heralded by icy rains and hard-frost mornings, dense fogs and high winds. Crocuses sat for weeks with lonely daffodils, waiting for an early rush of greenery and blooms that never appeared and snow clung to low hills with alarming tenacity. Now, the daffodils are stooped from frosty mornings and the cherry blossoms float like snow through the air,…

Overheard- Playing with Fire

Building a fire in the 21st Century is a political act. Camp fires, that is. For most of human history camp and cooking fires were symbols of home, safety, and security. Today, modernity has replaced hearths with screens and kitchen fires with microwaves to such an extent that the skill of fire building itself is becoming a lost art form. In A Woman’s Guide to the Wild I argue that fire building…

The last thing one might think of when considering the cultural origins of the ubiquitous hippie-camp song Kumbaya, is early 20th Century Oregon. Even if you did, it would be easy to wrongly assume that the song had its origins in regional Native American culture and was appropriated at some time for the drum circles and festivals of the New Age generation. Not so. In fact, the copyright for…

And We Watch It All Burn Away

There is no possible way at the moment to be a resident of Oregon and not take note that the entirety of the state, it seems, is burning. The skies have grayed, filling valleys with dense smoke, replacing our beloved rain with delicate flakes of ash. And the fires are close. Our safest havens and most treasured places, those that have been protected for so long as to constitute little more than a…