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This is bitter root, also known by locals as “rock rose.” It’s probably one of the prettiest flowers in the South Okanagan, a drought-tolerant succulent that produces an incredible flower from what often appears to be barren, dry land. The roots were used by local First Nations as a food source, and were traded with other bands, often for dried salmon.

This is a poem my nana wrote, comparing bitter root flowers to dancers, performing a “minuet” on an old hardwood floor.

Minuet

As primly gay
As sweet old-fashioned ladies
In ruffled skirts — hooped dancing skirts
Of pink and frilly white –
The rock roses grow
Over the long brown flats.

As daintily
And prettily they stand
As if they paused a moment
In the minuet,
On an old hardwood floor
Of long ago,

Wrap’t in the music
Held with a note of the violin.

Only the wind,
Whistling clear through the pines
And soft and low in the sage
Is their music now.

Here’s a link to an op-ed appearing in The Tyee that I recently helped write. Key message: British Columbia needs to conserve 50% of it land base if it’s going to effectively fight climate change while protecting the creatures and plants that make our province so unique.

The blossoms are out way too early this year, and I don’t know if anyone is ready for spring this soon, but since they’re here, with petals already hitting the ground, here’s another poem from my nana as part of my “Woodfires” series of posts.

Finding solace in nature is a pretty classic theme in human literature, but it’s neat to hear my nana exhorting us to “chill out.” I wonder what some of her daytime cares were at the time of this writing, and of course what a beautiful motif, using blossoms and their quiet landing on the grass at night as a soft reminder of the beautiful progression of time and the often trivial nature of our daytime cares. Enjoy.

As Lightly as Fall the Blossoms

The almond tree has loosed its bloom
Where slow winds pass,
With a sweet cascade of petals
On the grass.

The misting night has dropped its cloak
Of dark again,
With a glimmer of white starlight
Through the rain.

So may the cares of the daytime
Drift from your sight,
As lightly as fall the blossoms
And the night.

Just read a very cool article by David Backes where he proposes using biosocial theory as a framework for studying environmental communication.

Biosocial theory is just a formalized version of the widespread recognition that there are reciprocal relationships between society and the environment. Bonnicksen summarizes this formalized theory as follows:

The coadaptation of social systems with their physical environments is predicated on the reciprocal operation of two processes: the first of these consists of innovations and successive adjustments in the structure, behavior, and resource use practices of organizations in response to changes in the material, energy, and information they receive from other organizations and their physical environments; the second consists of successive adjustments in the structure and function of ecological systems in response to the material, energy, and information that is transferred to them through the resource use practices employed by organizations. (Bonnicksen & Lee, 1982, p. 52)

Backes further and more simply reduces Bonnicksen’s summary as follows, “Individuals and groups in society intentionally or unintentionally affect their physical environments, which respond to these actions in some manner, and this response when perceived by individuals and organizations, encourages them to continue or change their actions.”(Backes, p.150)

Backes sees biosocial theory as a useful framework for researchers wishing to explore the relationships between mass communication (part of the social system) and ecosystems through the linkages of human perceptions and behaviour. It also has a useful open-ended predictive function: “Biosocial theory predicts that effects may be expected not only in the direction of mass communication-human perceptions/ behavior-ecosystem, but also in the reverse direction.” (P.150).

To test the use of biosocial theory for mass communication research, Backes uses a case study reviewing environmental communication over 50 years as it pertains to a wilderness area (the Quetico-Superior) straddling the border of Ontario and Northern Minnesota. Based on his review, Backes derives five empirical generalizations that he provides evidence for, with important implications for environmental communicators:

G1: Mass media construct images of place and disseminate them to audiences.

G2: The more dependent a person is on the mass media for information about a place, the more important the mass media will be in shaping the person’s images of that place.

G3: The images people have of a place will affect that place’s biophysical environment.

G4: The level of social conflict over use and management of a place varies according to the extent that the dominant media images of the place contradict each other.

Among other interesting findings, Backes found considerable social conflict over the issue of controlled burns. In an effort to “balance” the ecosystem (following protections that banned logging) conservationists advocated controlled burns, while the general public, heavily influenced by the U.S. Forest Service’s own highly successful “Smokey the Bear” fire prevention campaigns, felt that forest fires were a negative phenomenon to be avoided, let alone intentionally produced.

Backes also found a correlation between mass media depictions of the area as a fishing paradise, a subsequent rise in fishing tourism, and a subsequent crash in fish populations. Backes also found conflict between mass media depictions of the area as the aforementioned fishing paradise and later as a spiritual wilderness area (as communicated by groups like the Sierra Club). Ultimately the mass media depictions of the area as a quiet, spiritual place to be protected grew dominant, with the area eventually protected from logging and motorized water recreation, with fishing lodges purchased and torn down.

While mass media couldn’t be the sole determinant of the areas’ transformation, it has undoubtedly been one of the most powerful, especially considering that society’s knowledge and beliefs about acceptable practices in the area (given its remote location), and subsequent utilizations, were mostly derived from media depictions.

A biosocial approach to evaluating Canada’s own domestic and international social conflicts with respect to environmental land-use decisions in the tar sands might be useful to those advocating for a slower, cleaner approach to their development. It also explains why mass media depictions of the tar sands, are so important, and why environmentalists need to shift from images that demonize, towards images and symbols that chart a new future for the area.

Black Sage

Greasewood trees are always old
And gnarled and twisted, where
They crouch along the hilltop
With ragged limbs in air.

Greasewood leaves are dusty green
And dull and tiny, still
Greasewoods carry cheer enough
To brighten all the hill.

Greasewood bloom is neat and gay,
Life elf-lamps burning high;
Like little yellow candle-wicks
Alight against the sky.

Greasewood trees are always old
And gnarled and twisted, so
They crouch along the hilltop
With ragged limbs bent low.

Growing up in the Okanagan, my nana was fascinated by Okanagan First Nations culture, drawing and copying pictographs from the rocks and cliff faces in the Vaseaux Lake area, and adapting Okanagan Indian legends into plays that were performed at the Inkameep Indian School in association with Anthony Walsh (a teacher at the Inkameep Day School in the 1930′s). One play, “Why the Ant’s Waist is Small,” was produced in 1939/40 at Hart House in Toronto and in Banff, Alberta.

While not an unproblematic cultural association, Anthony Walsh is still credited by the Okanagan First Peoples as being a rare teacher who encouraged Okanagan visual art practices within the confines of the educational system at the time: “It is through Anthony Walsh that the young Aboriginal children were able to continue learning and further developing Okanagan art practices and non-Aboriginal education.”

http://www.okanaganfirstpeoples.ca/visual_arts.cfm

While my nana was helping to tell stories that weren’t naturally her own, the cultural hybrid they represented at the time, and the new audiences they reached were, I think, a valuable creation that created new understandings and forms of respect between peoples, and were a unique art form in their own right.

I’ll reprint “Why the Ant’s Waist is Small,” in a future post.

Indian Paintbrush

On trails where once the Indian roamed
His crimson paintbrush grow -
Gay symbol of forgotten things
That no white man may know.

Spirit of all his singing fires
Long since grown cold and grey,
Once more in them the beauty lives
We thought had passed away.

A house is such
A little thing to hold
So much of happiness
And dearer things than gold.

Build it with spaciousness,
With windows deep and wide,
Let them encompass
A great countryside;

Let them look out upon
Tall trees and straight,
Contentment and serenity
Will enter as you wait;

Let them be open when
The first bird calls,
You will not be bothered
By hemming things like walls;

It will be big enough
And fine enough to hold
A whole world of happiness
And dearer things than gold.

If you watched the Super Bowl and were somehow able to view the American commercials, you would have seen this one for the new Audi TDI diesel. My friend Arianne, who originally sent me the link, has an interesting assessment of the commercial on her blog here. What did you think about it?

Photographs from the 1862 book Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine by Guillaume Duchenne. Through electric stimulation, Duchenne determined which muscles were responsible for different facial expressions. Charles Darwin would later republish some of these photographs in his own work on the subject, which compared facial expressions in humans to those in animals. (From Wikipedia).

“Smile!” That’s what a woman said to me yesterday while I was walking back to my car after a morning meeting. I smiled. “That’s better,” she said.

I was really struck by this woman’s gesture. By a lot of conventional standards you’d think she had less to smile about than I did. We were in a “rougher” part of town and at least from a socio-economic perspective, this woman appeared to be what some would call, “down and out.” Clearly she wasn’t, and if anything, with pressing thoughts and artificial stresses, I was the one who was down and out.

The whole exchange, especially her generosity of spirit got me thinking again about the ecology of ideas, and even of emotion. It’s the same thought I had when I watched video of a Haitian woman being pulled from rubble six days after the earthquake and the first thing she did was sing a joyous song about overcoming adversity. It makes you question your own ecology of ideas and emotion…the way of interpreting the world that was no doubt planted by upbringing and circumstance, but that is also tended and nurtured by you. If you can become aware of your own thought processes, it’s possible to plant new stories and mental frames, a personal terministic screen to borrow roughly from Burke. A terministic screen is, “…a set of symbols that becomes a kind of screen or grid of intelligibility through which the world makes sense to us.” (Wikipedia). If your terministic screen means that you smile less often, or end up living a story that’s different than the one you want to live, why not blow it up? Remake it, reshape it, tune it up. To a large extent you’re gardener of your little piece of consciousness, your chunk of reality.

Anyhow, more on mental gardening in the not too distant future. I just ordered three books from Barnes and Noble (gift card): Steps to an Ecology of Mind, A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. We’ll see what new ideas they conjure up for remaking one’s terministic screen. In the meantime, here’s one of a fascinating series of videos I’ve been enjoying on YouTube…these folks, the Kombai, have a much different terministic screen than ours and it’s refreshing to watch:

Last October, Linnet and I took a trip to Yellow Springs, Ohio, to visit her family. One beautiful sunny afternoon, we rode out through the soybeans and corn to the farm where she grew up. This is my attempt at remembering a “scene” from that day. One of these days I’ll learn to draw hands!