Search Results for: sustainable

Portland Sustainable Landscapes: Toward Health and Diversity – Creating an Organizational Structure for Implementation

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    Introduction An Office of Sustainable Landscapes that oversees all landscapes within the City and provides active leadership to both private and commercial property owners through the following: Public Landscapes (active urban contrived) Horticultural Management Public Landscapes (urban plant communities) Corridor Management: Transportation and Riverine Division of State Lands Tri-Met P-BoT O-DoT Multnomah County […]

What Really is a Sustainable Landscape & Why it Matters

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(I’ve made earlier postings on this topic, but this piece actually predates those.  I wrote this in 2013 while still working as a horticulturist for the City of Portland Parks and Recreation as a member of a Bureau committee that was working to define ‘sustainable landscapes’ so that we could begin to make our policies […]

Losing Our Urban Landscapes: Sustainable Goals and Our Crisis in Leadership

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The following is intended as a template for action or a beginning point for a discussion that is long overdue. Landscapes are more complex than most people realize.  They can go seriously awry in a very short time.  Undisturbed native plant communities are relatively stable and are able to respond on their own, as they […]

Adaptive Management and the Dynamic Maintenance of Sustainable Landscapes

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  We, all of us, are part of the landscape.  Just as individual plants belong to a local native plant community, and its place, so do we. That we live in highly disturbed and contrived landscapes does not change the fact that we live in relationship with it, that we are a functioning part of […]

On Plant Drought Tolerance and Gardening in the Arid Oregon High Desert

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Drought tolerance is an interesting topic. I’ve written on it before, but now have some additional thoughts to add, in part because we have recently moved to much more arid Central Oregon. A drought tolerant plant in Portland is a very different thing than one here where annual precipitation can vary from around 13″, very […]

Addressing the Disparity: If Food, Shelter, Health and Education are Necessities for Humans…

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On Fulfilling our Debt to Each Other and Supporting a Healthy Society and Economy Economics, we are often told is a very complex science. It can be, but at its most basic level it is simple. An economy is the mechanism by which societies create and distribute the products and services demanded/needed by its members. […]

Swamplands: Tundra Beavers, Quaking Bogs and the Improbable World of Peat, a Review

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The idea of individuality and control, key elements of the American psyche, are a self-deception. We can take an individual action, guided by an intention, and see its effect in the world around us, but after that, the first ‘tier’ of effects, there are secondary, tertiary and others beyond them, as what we have effected […]

Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things–A Review…and a Deeper Look Into the ‘Fire’ of Life..

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This is a book about ‘life’, that which animates particular organic structures, organisms, absent from other ‘structures’ which remain fixed, but for the physical and chemical forces which wear them down. From our human perspective, this sets ourselves, and all other living things, apart from the inert, nonliving, matter that comprises our world and the […]

Physics, Evolution, Natural Selection and the Generative Power of the of Far Out of Equilibrium Dissipative Structures (Organisms), part 2

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On Pattern, Chemistry and Life Pattern builds upon pattern.  Whatever you start with effects and limits everything that follows whether we are talking about masonry bricks and stone or Eukaryotic cells and organic molecules.  A different starting point or ‘decision’ at any point in the process, effects every ‘decision’, or even possibility, there after, effects […]

Why Bad Things Happen to Good Plants?: On Root Problems, Root Washing, Nursery Practices and Customers

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“To be, or not to be? That is the question—Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And, by opposing, end them?”  Hamlet. Is the question we face as gardeners as simple as, To ‘root wash’ or not to […]