Greening the Desert

This is one amazing piece of film.  I first watched this over a year ago and have felt inspired ever since.  Australian Permaculture expert, Jeff Lawton, travelled to the middle east and tackled the challenging problem of desertification.  Using Permaculture practices, Lawton incorporated a simple irrigation system to a desert area and planted native draught tolerant plants to the area.  The result of his work in this arid desert is amazingly a strip of edible forest and eventually the growth of mushrooms.  As Lawton said "You can solve all the worlds problems in a garden. "  I think he's right. 

Nature Calls- Phantom Island

Phantom Island is by Bartel.  A local Vancouver artist and my friend Emily's boyfriend.  She told me stories of how he collected the sounds for these tracks from their trips to Galiano Island.  Sounds were used from them dropping rocks into a well, or layers of waves.  I think if you listen to it you can see how nature is used to create and inspire this song. 

Forest Artist and Nature Photographer Melanie Bonajo

My friend Sarah picked up a book in Portland of Melanie Bonajo's nature photography.  Check out Sarah's  blog for more of Bonajo's work.

Nature Calls - Curse Your Branches

I saw a living room show with David Bazan a couple of years ago in my friend Lars's living room. It was an amazingly intimate and awe inspiring show.  Bazan is from a small town not to far from me- Everett, Washington. Curse Your Branches from the album of the same name was released in 2009.  It was a controversial song that uses nature as a metaphor depicting his view of Christianity.  Especially controversial because Bazan was previously touted as a Christian artist.     

Nature Calls- Blue Ridge Mountains

The Fleet Foxes are an Indie Folk band from Seattle, Washington.  There music has a very grass-roots feeling to it.  Blue Ridge Mountain was written by Robin Pecknold and he explains in this interview with the Daily Mail in 2009 why this song has a natural incarnation.    "The music was already sounding very rural so it didn't make sense to start adding lyrics about receiving emails and watching TV."

Nature Calls- Ocean of Noise

Arcade Fire is definitely one of my favourite bands of all time.  I love the Montreal music scene and seem to dig everything that develops from that side of the country.  Ocean of Noise is from the album Neon Bible and was released in 2007. 


The ocean is so beautiful from a distance but expansive and exposed when experiencing it from the surface.  This is an interview from Win Butler from New Musical Express in 2007 describing how the ocean inspired this song: "My parents live near the ocean and we've gone there quite a bit over the history of our band. It's really isolated there by the ocean. I remember one time we went out on the 4th of July. It was dusk and we had a little motorboat, so we went out and the fog was starting to roll. We stopped and all of a sudden we were surrounded by fog. We had no idea where we were. And there was a fog horn. It's like you're never less in control of your own life than when you're in the ocean underneath a big wave and there is fog all around you. You can just see that you're a passenger in a weird sense. Things are out of your control. It was just that kind of feeling that I wanted to express."

Nature Calls- Big Yellow Taxi

Okay, I'm starting a new segment called Nature Calls that is based on songs that have been inspired by nature.  Since nature is the source of everything... it encompasses all emotions and the beginning of so many great ideas. The beauty and forgiveness of nature has written some beautiful ballads. The fury and the magnitude of nature has caused many a sorrowful song too.  However, more recent music seems to be motivated by the act of humans on nature.  Hence, the first selection. 


Big Yellow Taxi was released in 1970 and was written and performed by Joni Mitchell. I listened to a lot of this Canadian treasure when I was in high school.  Maybe that's what spawned my passion to become an Eco Warrior.  This is an excerpt from an interview with Mitchell in a 1996 with the Los Angeles Times speaking about Big Yellow Taxi : "I wrote 'Big Yellow Taxi' on my first trip to Hawai'i. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart... this blight on paradise. That's when I sat down and wrote the song."

Patterns in Nature

Medicine Wheel

I'm currently reading The Medicine Wheel Garden by E. Barrie Kavasch

Here's a snippet... 


"A medicine wheel is a central circle, spiral or cairn of stones from which lines of other stones radiate, often as "spokes" to an outer circle of stones. Since ancient times, American Indians have created many such arrangements of stones and held them sacred. Planted with healing herbs, the sacred space of a medicine wheel can also become a special kind of garden: a private ecosystem and a small sanctuary for the birds, butterflies, ad animals whose natural wild spaces are at risk. Or the medicine wheel can take a larger form as a unique community area or even an outdoor classroom.

Medicine Wheel Architecture

Whatever its size, start at one side of your site and pace to other in a straight line, counting your footsteps. Turn around and follow your footsteps back, stopping when your count reaches the midpoint. If you have taken fifty steps, for example, stop at twenty-five. That is the center of your medicine wheel. Mark this spot by sinking a short temporary pole in the ground.

The Stone center, outer circle, and directional cross of a medicine wheel garden give with sacred space its basic form. Some of the herbs you will plant will be colourful and grow quite tall, but they should always be arranged so that the stone architecture remains clearly seen.

Tie one end of a long, strong cord around the pole. Holding the cord, pace from the center to the edge of your site (twenty-five steps in our example). Stretch the cord taut and tie a knot in it to establish your distance from the center. Now hold the cord at your knot, keeping it stretched taut, and begin walking in a circle around the center pole. As you walk, place a fist-sized stone or anchor a stake ever few feet in your path. "

Food Forests

Check out these 3 videos.  A 30 year old food forest from Australia, a 300 year old forest in Vietnam and a 2,000 year old food forest in Morocco. Why not take some design tips from Mother Nature?   

Let's be honest.  The Western approach to agriculture is egocentric and superfluous. This gardening system requires plants to be almost completely dependant on human and mechanical activity.  It's extremely labour intensive with a dependency on chemical fertilizers and irrigation. Basically it's drug pushing.  And, the plants are annuals so this process needs to be repeated from beginning to end EVERY year. 

30 year food forest

In many of the other countries around the world, food crops become naturalized and develop into there own ecosystem, requiring very little human aid to keep this structure functioning.  Medicinal plants grow throughout this system and ultimately these "food forest" floors become something similar to a first aid kit.  These plots of valuable land are passed on from generation to generation.  Each generation is taught how to handle the plants on the property and learn their purpose.  Chickens and livestock also become part of this matrix and run freely fertilizing the soil. 

300 year old food forest

2,000 year old food forest

A Rose So Sweet

The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour which doth in it live

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying:

And this same flower that smiles today

To-morrow will be dying

by Robert Herrick

My good friend Sarah was kind enough to make me this beautiful cream coloured shopping tote with a rose print. I sat outside on my patio yesterday admiring the shock of pink of the climbing rose bush that just recently budded out.  I can see why roses have been the inspiration for music, poetry and art work for centuries.