Coyote Crossing

Chris, I love that you push my vocabulary beyond its limits. I looked up redd, though, and the Mac widget dictionary had only a verb meaning “tidy up.” (My jumbo unabridged dictionaries had meaning 2, the salmon/trout spawning sense.) I learned what milt was a couple years ago (and like that it lends itself to japery about ordering a tuna milt at a diner).

Such gall to reengineer rivers that have been running for eons, and siphon off the water—humans never seem to improve matters below the river’s surface.

I wish I had similar powers of description, vocabulary and eloquence to describe what the Rockefellers did to West Virginia… a place of magic that I visited often in my childhood, now completely transformed. 

They used to call it “Almost Heaven,” which was later inserted into a John Denver song and put on license plates.  It really was. 

Now, I can only say: what Chris said.

Dona eis requiem
Beautiful piece…
but why does this final phrase make me want to whack myself in the head with a Bible?

Daisy, are you familiar with this John Prine tune?

hmmm, bad link…but a couple of extra clicks’ll get you there. It’s called “Paradise”

We’re done for, in the end.
Completely destroying anything wild and beautiful - I’m at a loss for words.

So much loss.

Oh well - what’s the news of Britney today?? :D :D

/sarcasm

The other night I saw a pre-release screening of a documentary film called “The 11th Hour.” Produced and narrated by Leo DiCaprio, if that floats your boat (don’t know what’s up w/ Britney). Lots of very striking imagery spliced together with interview footage of all the right people. Very well done. It followed the now-numbingly-familiar blueprint for environmental work, i.e. an hour of fact-based, unflinching doom & gloom followed by a half-hour of optimistic hope for the future if we all get together and try real hard now (the 11th hour). I am a sucker for that format, but this time, I have to say, the optimistic hope part (again, extremely well done, with sincerely stirring rhetoric from some very smart and articulate people) was not quite enough to lift me above the misanthropic pessimism induced by the first hour (which covered the gamut from endocrine disruptors and global climate change to habitat destruction).
Our little Spaceship is way fucked up, it’s the fault of us, our parents, and our grandparents, and it will never—can never—be anywhere close to the same even as when I made my appearance less than a half-century ago. This is profoundly sad.
I guess I’ll keep trying to do my little part with careful purchases, leaving the Jeep at home when I can, giving my paltry contributions to the organizations of good people, and continuing to educate younger folks. But this movie was free, it starred Leo, and from a campus of 8500 resident undergrads, most living closer than a city block to the theater, only about 40 could be bothered to show up. My stomach still hurts. What a fucked-up world I have bequeathed to my still-innocent daughter.

Victoria speaks more than ever, doesn’t he?

Versa est in luctum cithara mea et organum meum in vocem flentium.

My harp is turned to mourning and my organ into the voice of those that weep.

Don’t know if you saw Dave Neiwert’s piece on the Puget Sound/PNW orcas and the salmon.

I hadn’t seen that, Tmorph. Thanks.

And from the comments on that Orcinus post, I see my old pal Felice has a blog now. That’s good news. He’s been working on Klamath River environmental politics for a very long time: when I was doing Terrain and then Faultline, if I wanted to know the right, ethical, consistent position on a North Coast issue, I asked Felice.

Guess I’ll have to send him some readers.

Sven beat me to it on the Prine song.  Mr Peabody and Mr Rockefeller are no doubt well acquainted and to add insult to injury Sen. Jay Rockefeller occupies the seat of senatorial stupidity, fecklessly waving Bush’s civil liberties outrages into law.

=9= Send him some redders, while you’re at it.