Coyote Crossing

Are you a grassroots green blogger? Would you be interested in being part of a biodiversity blog network?

WordPress offers a free way to set up a network of blogs on a single server, all of them interconnected. Check out freethoughtblogs.com as an example.  The advantage of such a network to the individual blogger is the built-in community of fellow bloggers who can generate traffic and discussion for you, as you do for them.

I’m imagining:

• a group of blogs by people who are interested in biodiversity and local landscapes, environmental justice, grassroots activism, nature photography, and other arenas of environmentalism increasingly ignored by the Big “Green=Climate” Groups
• a community of bloggers that selects among possible new additions to the network, aiming for good basic science, conviviality, creative style and diversity
• a network of activists, essayists, poets, artists and photographers, wonks and dabblers, gray-bearded elders and enthusiastic young folks
 
• building the network to include bloggers outside the US and UK

I’m also imagining that I would cover the server costs up front (though members pitching in a few bucks would certainly be welcomed), with the intention of using (screened) ads to generate revenue to cover costs and (hopefully) kick back some cash to our bloggers, perhaps even to pay someone to handle emerging technical issues so that we don’t have to worry about it.

Bloggers who are interested, if they’re a good fit, would get a blog for free with some ability to customize it—but member blogs would all resemble one another in basic design so as to reinforce the visual sense of community. (In the absence of a better designer stepping up, I’d be overseeing overall design, so there will at least be basic standards in place that help your work look good.) You’d get a blog that had incoming sidebar links from every other blog in the network. You’d get a back-end to your blog running on WordPress, which is pretty easy to navigate. You’d be part of a new community of bloggers who will help promote your work as you help promote theirs. And all of this would help us advance the causes of the urban, rural and wild landscapes we love and the plants and animals that live in them.

I mentioned this idea on Facebook a couple months back and got a few responses, but it’s kind of fallen through the cracks, and I still want to explore the possibility. Setting this up would be a volunteer effort on my part (at least at first), and so in the first stages potential network members who have an interest in helping set up things like community Terms of Service would be very welcome. (Or, for that matter, people with more expertise in Wordpress than I have.)

If we get a handful of people interested in being charter members of such a network at launch we could presumably have something up and running in the first months of 2013. If you think you might be interested, comment here or get in touch with me via email.

0 comments on "Would you be interested in being part of a biodiversity/grassroots green blog network?"

1. Two nights ago I walked out barefoot, pulled the cover off the little grill. It was dark. My steak—$2.15 at the local store—was a shadow over red coals. I cooked by smell. Sear one side over the hot mesquite, wait, grab with the tongs and turn. Wait some more. When it smelled right I flipped it onto the hard rock maple cutting board. It bled onto the wood.

2. I am the age my father’s father is in my earliest memories of him. I see him in the mirror. My hair less white, my soul more dissipated, but it’s him nonetheless.

3. It’s a hundred days’ walk from Joshua Tree to Gorham. I could be there by the twentieth of January.

4. The turn of the season is sharper here than anywhere I’ve lived in a quarter century. October has settled in. The rabbits fatten. Sleek clouds turn bright pink before the workday’s close.

5. My grandfather’s last words to me were an apology. Christmas dinner cold across the street, leftovers packed and sent in different directions with my aunts and uncles, and I walked over to his house to say hello. He lay on the couch. “Chris, I’m sorry. I wanted to eat dinner with you.”

6. In his yard there was an old well head, cemented over with the pump still working. At six I could just reach the handle. Fifteen strokes, or twenty, and rust-colored water spilled out the spout. A scent of leaf mold and secrets. My grandfather worked in his garage shop. His sons stood nearby handing him tools.

7. My cutting board is well-used, a skein of sharp knives’ slices in its sturdy grain. It is 3/4 inch maple cut in the shape of a pig, a jigsaw project cliche, a hole in the tail for hanging on a kitchen peg. Each year I think to myself I should plane it down, take an eighth-inch off each side, the marks of cast iron rust and olive oil. Each year I put it off.

8. Tonight I walked out barefoot and in shirtsleeves and shuddered against the wind. It is 52 degrees. I have grown soft. The Milky Way shone diffused through a high haze. Cassiopeia pointed at Polaris. Between them, the head of the king, Gamma Cephei, grew brighter as my eyes adjusted. In a thousand years it will be our pole star. The Earth’s axis wobbles inexorably toward it.

9. My grandfather was proud of me. His clever grandson learned to read years too early, ridiculous polysyllabic words in a toddler’s mouth. He bought me high school textbooks before I started school. No one thought “multiple myeloma” was too difficult a name for me to understand.

10. 2,600 miles from Gorham to Joshua Tree in half a century. The light that reached my eyes tonight left Gamma Cephei the year he died. I do not remember the sound of his voice, except when he laughed.

11. When he was the age I am now, my grandfather placed a slab of 3/4 inch maple on his jigsaw, carved out notches for ears and mouth, drilled a quarter-inch hole for an eye and a half-inch hole in the curled tail. It was an idle kindness, a present for his young daughter-in-law who lived a few miles south. It is 500 times that distance from him now. I cannot use it without hearing his laugh.

6 comments on "Cutting board"

My KCET editor Zach and I had a very nice, very cordial meeting in Riverside on Monday with two very friendly people with the PR wing of BrightSource. BrightSource asked for the meeting to address and correct what the they thought were certain deficiencies in my writing about them. Very few of those perceived deficiencies were found in my writing at KCET. Most of them were here.

Most of the meeting was taken up with the BrightSource senior VP in attendance explaining BrightSource’s position on a number of things. He’s a persuasive man, and fascinatingly wonkish. It was a valuable meeting for me if only for that.

Toward the end one of the BrightSource folks asked me if I’d closed this place. I told her the truth: that writing for pay has had to take precedence. Both of them seemed very pleased. The senior VP said something like “hey, we’ll have to put an note in our company newsletter: ‘Chris Clarke has closed down his blog.”

So I’m ramping this back up again, because that’s just the motivation I needed. Thanks, BrightSource!

9 comments on "Best writing prompt ever"

It’s been quieter here than I think it ever has been, with the possible exception of the summer of 2008 after I closed this blog and before I opened this blog. Oh, and November 2006 was pretty much dead around here, as I recall. But still, I posted one photo all last month here, and that’s close to a record of taciturnitude.

There’s been a reason for the quiet, and now there’s another one.

The reason is that I’ve been writing anywhere from 2 to 5 posts a day for KCET during the week, and that’s taken a lot of my writing energy.
The now there’s another reason is that I’ve just joined PZ as co-blogger at Pharyngula.

The third reason, now that I come to think of it, is that there’s been all kinds of stuff to look at in my yard, like:

There is also the fact that I have determined to plow through the revisions to the existing Joshua tree book chapters I’ve written and finish the book. I got a huge amount of writing done in the year and a half I was in LA, and got much guidance from my wonderful writer’s group there, and subsequent events have made it clear to me that I got off down the wrong path a bit, so there are a few dozen hours in the next two or three months I’ll need to spend fixing things and getting the book ready to ship.

So I can’t honestly say there’s going to be a whole lot going on here any time soon, but that doesn’t mean you don’t get to read new stuff of mine almost every day if you want to. Check out the above links for KCET and Pharyngula, and don’t forget you can find me on Twitter and Facebook and sort of at Google Plus, though it’s spammy as fuck over there lately.

I’m not saying this place is closing down. It might be. Or I might find a hundred things I suddenly need to share here that don’t fit at KCET or Pharyngula. But for now the paid gigs take precedence. Come on over to either place and say hello.

4 comments on "Update on Coyote Crossing"

In the Jeffrey Pines south of Mono Lake. Zeke was about two years old in this photo.

Need to go back there.

6 comments on "Deadman Creek, Mono County, California, 1994"

Got the last couple of things from the Palm Springs apartment Sunday morning: the bed platform, the step stool, a handful of cleaning supplies. Spackled the few holes we made hanging artwork and bolting bookcases, vacuumed up the dust from making a couple of the holes bigger so I could spackle them properly, Tetrissed everything into the car. Walking out for the last time I looked back and tried to summon up some gratitude for the place, the way I usually do when I move out of a house. It didn’t quite work. So I left.

There’s a high, thin cover of cloud blowing in from the southeast, from the Sea of Cortez and the Gulf. We’re going to get some rain in the next couple of days. Some parts of the desert will likely get a whole lot. I have my fingers crossed for flash floods cutting through a couple of solar projects under construction.

Our new neighbor moved away—was it something we said?—and as she fed the local cottontails and quail, I decided I’d better take up a bit of the slack until they got used to it. I picked up a bird seed bell at the supermarket. It’s not cracked corn and sunflower seeds, which would be better for the quail. But it’s something. The quail never got to it: the bell was discovered within seconds by the local scrub jay, and then fifteen minutes later the jay had been elbowed aside by the Boss rabbit.

It was an interesting glimpse into rabbit interactions. I’ve only ever had one rabbit at a time before, and though I did watch him boss around a dog and a cat, and a few humans, I never saw him with one of his own species. Subordinate bun was hungry and curious, and crept up toward the seed bell. When he’d get too close Boss Rabbit would charge, and each time Sub Bun would avoid the boss by leaping directly into the air. Three, four times in a minute and a half this happened. Then Boss wandered off and fell over in the shade of the peach tree, and Sub Bun carefully went over, tried a nibble of seed bell, then a mouthful, then eight mouthfulls, digging in with his bottom incisors to pry off great chunks.

He worked at this for five minutes or so, then Boss Rabbit came back. He took Sub Bun by surprise, but there wasn’t a fight at first. S.B. made a submissive display without moving away: He stretched his head out low to the ground, and Boss Rabbit came over and nuzzled him for a moment, then they both ate. For five more minutes. The Boss Rabbit changed his mind and chased Sub Bun away again.

At length the boss wandered off to find someone else to dominate, and a covey of about 15 very noisy quail—including one quite small youngster—wandered into the yard, eating everything but the seed I’d bought for them. Sub Bun took out a bit of his frustration by chasing the quail, barreling into groups of six or seven birds and busting them up. I don’t have the patience to watch the Olympics, but why should I when I have world class quail bowling going on right here?

Though tomorrow’s bout may well be rained out.

1 comment on "Rabbit fight"

We just moved the last of our stuff into the house in Joshua Tree.

We live here now.

This is something I first wanted a dozen years ago. It never occurred to me, after it didn’t happen a dozen years ago, that it could ever happen at all.

We had two dozen quail in our yard this evening as we unloaded the 14-foot U-Haul. A bat amiably checked us out as we unloaded the few things that fit into Annette’s Mini Cooper. There be rabbits here, and roadrunners, and this evening as we chatted with our next-door neighbor a Steller’s jay decided to holler at us. Yesterday I was scolded by a ladderback woodpecker for having the temerity to take out the recycling. That was a couple hours after Annette spooked a rosy boa from our driveway.

In the last month we have moved, and lost a Jeep, and I have started a new venture at KCET, and it has been crazy. But we have made it through most of July anyway.

I am sore and I am going to take myself and stand under some hot water for a bit. But y’all have deserved an update for some time. There will be more to come.

5 comments on "It’s official"