Macska Moksha Press -

My projects

March 5, 2023 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

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Macska Moksha Press
This site, which is my blog & bookstore.
Wildflowers of Joshua Tree Country—photography & nature literacy
A field guide of plants in the Mojave Desert and nearby locales, featuring animal associations, Native American ethnobotany & translations of scientific names. Non-commercial & educational. Centered on my own photography.
Radio Free Sunroot—podcasting (on hiatus but episodes still available)
“Voices for Nature & Peace”—”ecology, empire, justice, and consciousness” ~70 episodes, from April 2020 and May 2021. Featured guests like Margaret Kimberley, Dr. Susan Block, Bruce Levine, Ajamu Baraka, Margaret Killjoy, and a three-part series on the one-and-only Finisia Medrano.
YouTube: Radio Free Sunroot channel—featuring three “shows”
“Voices for Nature & Peace” podcast & “Kollibri’s Weekly Column” (both on hiatus), plus:
“Farmer K’s Diary”—videos of 2020 gardening efforts. Most likely show to be revived.

Supporting my work:

Medium—blogging
If you’re a member of Medium, follow my work there because I get $ based on member-reading time. Same content as here.
Patreon—members-only content
Six levels of support to choose from. Currently people are getting excerpts from a book-in-progress about so-called “invasive” plants that I’m working on with Nikki Hill.
Substack: “Speaking for the Trees (No Matter Where They’re From)”—both members only & free content
Content focused on plants and ecology. No posts about politics (except how it relates to the environment). Both free and members-only content (excerpts from Nikki Hill& my book-in-progress about “invasive” plants).

Guest post: Botany as Archaeology

March 13, 2023 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

GUEST POST: This is Nikki Hill’s GoFundMe campaign for her “Lithium Lands Fellowship,” a month-long botanical survey she will be undertaking with young ecologists in places where lithium mining is proposed. The fellowship is being co-sponsored by Groundwork, the non-profit I will be working with this year in Paonia, Colorado. I encourage everyone who can to donate to this campaign.

For an in-depth description of a survey like this she did at Thacker Pass last year, see her article at The Esperanza Project: “Botany as archaeology, to save a sacred site from a lithium mine.”

Nikki Hill and Groundwork are seeking funding for a Lithium Lands Fellowship happening this April, 2023. This month-long immersion camp in far southeast Oregon is an endeavor in observation, documentation and storytelling centered on the ecological relationships and cultural heritage which are threatened by the proposed McDermitt Lithium Project.

The northern edge of the McDermitt Caldera has recently garnered attention for containing the largest lithium deposits in the US. The caldera lies within the vast sagebrush sea, which is one of the largest continuous landscape types in North America, but also one of the most at-risk, with only 5% receiving protection at the federal level. This sea connects all the peaks of the intermountain west in a mosaic of habitats and diverse floral communities.

Meaningful recognition of generational tribal caretaking, critical habitat zones and the ecological integrity sustained by their safekeeping are purposefully omitted from the promotion of these large mining projects. The goal of the Lithium Lands Fellowship is to provide baseline data and collaborative inspiration in support of further research and exploration of the living story of this place, as part of a larger effort to protect it.

Why I Quit Social Media

March 8, 2023 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Thumbs down on Facebook, Image by sue seecof

Image by sue seecof, Creative Commons license, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

This morning I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts. It wasn’t a spur of the moment decision. I’d been thinking about it for a months, and I scheduled the date a few weeks out so I could use the medium for a few more things—helping a friend find garden help, announcing a new website, inviting people to subscribe to my other projects.

I got on Facebook in 2015 because I was going to start self-publishing books and people said if you’re going to do that you have to be on social media. You know, so you can get a following and hopefully go viral. Seven books and as many years later, I can say that this never worked as hoped. A following didn’t materialize, nothing went viral, and book sales were never impressive. Thousands of hours that I’ll never get back went into “content creation”—all the secondary and tertiary stuff that people are expected to do to “build a brand”: photos, memes, videos, a podcast, etc., etc. All to call attention to the real thing, the writing. These days, Tik Tok has upped the bar and you have to be a video personality too. <eye roll> Not interested.

Invasion Biology & Invasion Ideology: A theory and a dogma, at odds & overlapping

March 6, 2023 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

St. Johnswort (Hypericum perforatum), Mendocino county pasture, 2019. Photo by author.

St. Johnswort (Hypericum perforatum), as observed in a Mendocino County pasture, 2019. Photo by author.

(The following is a draft of the Introduction for the book-in-progress that Nikki Hill & I are working on, tentatively entitled, “Stop Blaming the Messengers: A critical look at ‘invasive plant’ theory and dogma.”)

The two of us are plant lovers. We love all plants, wild and domestic, ancient and ephemeral, native and introduced. We have dedicated years of our lives to propagating and protecting botanical life as farmers, wildtenders and advocates.

We are deeply saddened by civilization’s war against the earth: the pillaging of the forests for logging, the mountains for mining, the valleys for agriculture, the steppes for ranching, the rivers for irrigation and power, the oceans for over-fishing, and now the deserts for “green energy” infrastructure.

We have witnessed brutal clear-cuts, cow-trampled wild food gardens, and hellish open-pit mines. We have also slept under old growth Fir and Cedar, sown the seeds of Yampah and Biscuitroot, and hiked back country among Mesquite and Prickly Pear. The joys of fragrant foliage, vibrant flowers, juicy berries and starchy roots, ripe seeds, exuberant seedlings, and furrowed bark are unparalleled by anything from a factory.

Reckless Disregard for the Consequences of War

January 26, 2023 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Collage showing hourglass & nuclear explosion

Collage by the author from elements by Gianluca Miscione (“Sand clock Enschede”) & the National Nuclear Security Administration (“The BADGER explosion on April 18, 1953, as part of Operation Upshot-Knothole, at the Nevada Test Site”), Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license retained from Miscione work.

“Opposing the horrible madness of war is not anti-European, its not anti-Ukrainian, its not pro-Russian. It’s common sense… I oppose all war. I want it stopped. I make no apology for that. And I’m not going to be scapegoated and labelled for it either.”
~Clare Daly, member of European Parliament (video)

We are living in a very dangerous moment. Tensions between the US and Russia are high. Lines of communication between the two countries are more frayed than during the Cold War. Militant rhetoric is steadily ratcheting up on both sides. In such a strained atmosphere, the risk of setting off a deadly nuclear exchange is all too real, even just by accident in a heat-of-the-moment misunderstanding.

If the situation goes nuclear, it won’t matter who started it. It will only matter that it wasn’t stopped before it got there.

We really need all hands on deck to pull humanity back from the brink. Arguably, nothing is more important right now. All other concerns—the environment, social justice, economic inequality—will be moot. Certainly, our insipid partisan bickering will be irrelevant if we’re bleeding out of every orifice, our hair is falling out, our skin is sloughing off, and we’re dying agonizing deaths from severe burns and radiation sickness, while rotting corpses pile up around us.

The stakes could hardly be higher.

Climate, Covid & Wishful Thinking

January 4, 2023 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

[Art by author from public domain elements]

The challenges presented by climate chaos and the Covid-19 pandemic have both elicited cultural responses that superficially appear to be opposed to one another, but that end up working hand-in-hand to bolster a status quo that’s intrinsically harmful to everyone. Both succeed by appealing to wishful thinking.

In the case of anthropogenic climate chaos, the two clusters are centered around denialism and what we could call technophilia or perhaps techno-hopium. Climate chaos results from industrial-scaled agricultural civilization, so seriously addressing it would any would entail significantly changing that system, and—if we’re going to be honest—ultimately phasing it out. Avoiding such change is the shared motivation of both parties, so Team Denial shrilly insists that climate chaos is not real, or if real is “natural” rather than “man-made,” so there’s nothing we have to change about how we live. Team Technophile smugly assures us that it is real, but that “green energy” (so-called “renewables” like solar, wind & hydro) will solve the problem, so… there’s nothing we have to change about how we live.

In both cases, it’s wishful thinking: the former insist there’s no problem to solve, and the latter that science alone can do it.

Two sides, same coin.

My Top 10 favorite songs of 2022

January 1, 2023 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

A year ago, in January 2022, I ran across an article listing the top 25 songs of 2021 according to Billboard magazine. Now, I’d stopped actively following the national music scene and the Billboard Hot 100 back in the ’90s when I was living in Boston because the local music scene was so rich that I happily sunk into it and stopped paying attention to what was happening outside the little clubs and labels there. I heard some of the best music of my life during this time, including songs I was convinced would’ve been big smash hits from coast to coast if they could’ve gotten the exposure. Then, I was living in Pacific Northwest, where I was involved in activism and then farming, neither of which left time for pop radio. I’ll admit I also felt like I should dismiss popular music, or should try to hold myself above it or something, because “corporate,” “shallow,” blah blah blah.

But in January 2022, I checked out that article, and listened to the songs on the popular video sharing website. To my surprise, I liked some of it. So next I went through the top 100 for the year, and found a few more things that appealed to me. Then I started digging, to see what I’d missed since the turn of the millennium. I ended up putting together several playlists of 2000s music, and from April onwards they were my mainstays when driving, doing farmwork, etc. Over the year, I made more playlists comprised of just 2022 music, as new releases came out. For six solid months, I basically ignored my music collection in favor of exploring current/recent bands & songs. It was really enjoyable actually.

It’s a common cliche to claim that music now isn’t as good as it used to be, and I had that question in the back of my mind as I surveyed. I definitely have a bit to say about it (spoiler warning, “no”) but that’s for another essay on another day.

In the meantime, just for fun, here’s my top 10 favorite songs that came out in 2022. I put together a playlist of the videos here.

The Tragic but Teachable Moment of China’s Relaxed COVID Policy

December 20, 2022 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Collage by the author from public domain elements

China recently relaxed its COVID policy and the virus is now running rampant. Though exact numbers are not available, we are hearing about overburdened hospitals, emptied pharmacy shelves, and corpses backing up at crematoria. There are also reports about the government expanding hospitals and ICUs and closing down schools, so though “Zero COVID” is no longer in effect, the country has not devolved to the “let it rip” approach of the US and other Western nations.

This turn of events is, first and foremost, an unalloyed tragedy. We should all be hoping that suffering will be minimized as soon as possible. The people of China are other human beings in the world, fully deserving of our compassion. Ultimately, borders are fiction and culture is superficial and we’re all just one family. That’s what I personally believe anyway. I don’t pray, but if I did, China would be at the top of my list.

This tragedy is also a major teachable moment and will remain so for some time to come as events unfold over the next few months. I stress that everyone will stand to learn something, regardless of where they are in the COVID debate. Given that what China did was so different for so long, they were a “control” of sorts compared to the US and the West. Or vice versa, rather, as the control in a study is the group that doesn’t receive treatment. Regardless, for people who are truly interested to learn more about the global phenomena of SARS-CoV-2—no matter what they believe now—what happens next will be instructive. We must then press for policy to change in sensible ways based on what is revealed.

Maskless Dystopia

September 12, 2022 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Munch’s “The Scream” with COVID [collage by the author from non-copyrighted elements]

When I was growing up in the ’70s, a common vision of the dystopian future was a bleak, industrialized landscape where everyone has to wear gas-masks because of pollution. The image goes back further still; speaking on the campaign trail in 1968, RFK warned a classroom of children that unless the US did something, air quality in NYC would be so bad in a decade that people would have to wear masks to breathe.

Now here we are, half a century later, sinking daily further into a dystopia, but one of the emblems of our moment is a lack of masks.

I’m referring to COVID, of course, an infectious disease known to be airborne since January 7, 2020, and to the low number of people who wear masks in public although COVID’s spread can be greatly curtailed by doing so.

This is not an an anti-anti-masker screed. I blame institutions, not individuals, for the behavior of the populace. Despite their at times blustering claims to the contrary, most US Americans are obedient and do what they’re told. Most unquestioningly believe the media which, from conservative to liberal, from Fox to CNN to NPR, is telling them they don’t need masks anymore.

So most people don’t wear them, and two and half years into this pandemic, as we are afflicted with new variants and surges, and as more people die or become disabled—and as other diseases like Monkeypox enter the market—we are exposed, defenses down. This is our maskless dystopia: a nation that has apparently given up on the idea of public health, and is barely even making a pretense about fighting an ongoing pandemic. I find it depressing, to say the least.

Botany as Archaeology, to Stop a Lithium Mine

August 11, 2022 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

GUEST POST, by NIKKI HILL

Photo 1: Thacker Pass, all photos by Nikki Hill

“Sagebrush sea” is an endearing term that describes the vast high desert steppe lands of western North America. Rolling hills enveloped in silver green shimmer and sparkle like waves in the mid-day sun. This sea that spans the wide valleys and crests over plateaus connects the peaks and ridges from the shores of the Cascades and Sierra Nevada to the Greater Rocky Mountains. It is vast, indeed like an ocean. Nowhere does it ripple more like a sea than in the Great Basin, which coverrs most of Nevada and half of Utah, held by the Wasatch range to the east and the Sierra Nevada to the West, spilling out into the Mojave to the south and well into eastern Oregon in the north.

Many of the desert plants do indeed resemble ocean creatures: coral-like cactus and urchin-like succulents. Although it is commonly thought of as desolate and emptiness, the high desert steppe is incredibly abundant and alive. 350 species of wildlife and insects depend just on sagebrush herself.

The sagebrush sea is one of the largest continuous landscape types in North America, but only 5% of the area receives protection at the federal level, making it the least protected landscape in the USA.

This sea has been speaking to me for some time now. Calling me back, holding my attention, inviting me to see the patterns within it. In 2009, I was first introduced to the various First Food plants of the high desert, the traditional staple-food plants, and the reciprocal relationships that have fostered them for thousands of years. I have dedicated the majority of my time to following these plants since 2013, spending time camping and interacting with them, learning how to tend them, gathering and planting their seeds and picking up their stories as I wander. I have become endeared to them, bonded to their continuance in heart and hand.

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