Articles
Primarily a collection of articles published in a regional community paper; The Applegater. Circulation 9,200.
Grow with Respect
Spring 2016
So you’ve moved to the Applegate, with the plan to “grow” this year. You’re from Florida, New York, or Texas, and rented a house with some old pastureland or with a place for a greenhouse. Maybe you’re just on a hillside and plan on clearing out that manzinita and bulldozing some terraces. The green-rush is on...
The Problem with Bullfrogs
Fall 2015
In the mid 1800’s, as streams of migrants poured into Southern Oregon and Northern California, driven by their hunger for gold, they brought with them another unrelenting appetite–for food. As the first waves of fortune seekers arrived into areas with no agriculture and limited supplies, they turned en masse to the landscape to fill their bellies...
High Extinction risk for Applegate Coho
Spring 2015
This past November, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) released their Final Recovery Plan for our region’s coho salmon. These Southern Oregon & Northern California Coastal Coho, often referenced as the “SONCC Coho”....
Applegate Forests, a Product of Human Tinkering
Fall 2014
This summer I’ve been working with The Nature Conservancy, poking around for how the forests in the Applegate existed pre-white settlement when we started fighting wildfire. I grew up here, and heard about how the exclusion of wildfire had changed our forests. This summer it has been striking to see the hard “on-the-ground” proof of that transformation...
Poisoned Marijuana Grows Silencing our Forests
Fall 2013
Whether you support it or not, marijuana cultivation has become increasingly rooted in our local community and economy. These grows bring boutique fertilizer stores, cheap weed and a Fall migration of slightly disheveled “trimmigrants” to our area, but many also bring deadly harm to this valley’s wildlife through their use of common rat poisons...
Thinking for ourselves: Taking back Wildlife Conservation
Winter 2013
Conservationist Aldo Leopold once wrote, “All the regulations in the world will not save our game unless the farmer sees fit to leave his land in a habitable condition for game.” He was writing in 1930, but today this statement still stands. Replace the words game with wildlife, and farmer with landowner, and this could have been written about the Applegate...
Beaver in the Applegate
Spring 2013
In 1826 - 27, a Canadian fur trapper named Peter Skene Ogden became the first white explorer to document the valleys of southwestern Oregon when Ogden was appointed by Hudson’s Bay Company to lead a series of mass beaver- trapping expeditions, called the Snake River Expeditions. The goal was to leave no live beaver behind...
Of Sloths and Men
Summer 2011
Dawn is a brisk moment on the island of Escudo de Veraguas. So near the equator, the sun breaks from the Caribbean with vigor. The whole event hardly lasts a half hour, the time it takes to get a pot of water boiling and steep coffee grounds. We took turns making coffee in the morning, so that the others might only need to crawl from their mosquito net and hammock when it was ready. We drank it black, with lots of sugar...