Category Archives: Portland and Cascadia
Future Baroque
The following piece was published last summer in La Tempestad; given that La Tempestad circulates primarily in Mexico and is published in Spanish, we — Rob Holmes and I, who co-authored the piece — thought that it would be worth re-publishing it on our respective sites for English-language audiences. The article builds on a pair of […]
Foundational Forests IV: All Forests are Experimental
Above is a sample of British Columbia’s Forest service’s Biogeoclimatic Ecosystem Classification (BEC) maps, which delineate Canada’s forest types and their geo-spatial patterns. The incredibly detailed classifications are based on field surveys of assemblies of vegetation, assemblies which are expected to shift in tandem with accelerated climate change. As they do, these maps will shift in […]
Buoy Wave Park
[Section and model rendering of the pv150 PowerBuoy, by Ocean Power Technologies] The U.S.’s first federally approved commercial wave energy infrastructure is readying for deployment off the coast of Oregon. In an ocean array 2 miles from shore, each energy producing buoy will measure 150 feet tall by 40 feet wide, and weigh 200 tons: As interesting […]
Landscape Ruralism: management design of 248,000,000 acres
["Flames and smoke from a backfire dwarf a firefighter along U.S. 95 in southeastern Oregon just north of McDermitt, Nev. Fire crews set backfires like this in an effort to block the spread of the fast-moving Long Draw fire that scorched 871 square miles earlier this month." The agency behind the fire - weather, weeds, […]
Columbia Migrations: Dredge Oregon
[a hand-crafted steel cutterhead of the Dredge Oregon. The specular silver sheen on the backside (click on image for detail) is a nickel plating added to extend the life of the cutter as it rips and churns through the shifting sediments of the Columbia River.] Back in February of this year I had the opportunity […]
N48 05.738 W123 33.287 Elwha Overlook
Near Olympic National Park, just off of highway 112, the National Park Service has set up a public viewing station facing what was formerly the Elwha Dam. The platform is equipped with a high magnification spotting scope which one can use to peer into the various accelerated anthro-geologic events happening there. The series of images […]
Pearls from Phosphorous
[Map of Aquatic Dead Zones and human population density (altered), courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory] The irony of peak phosphorous is that while there is a perceived shortage, there is an excess amount of phosphorous found throughout the human-influenced environment, exactly where we don’t want it and which we mostly don’t know what to do […]
River was: 34,131,100 points
The U.S. Geological Survey recently posted a LIDAR fly-through of what the Lower Elwha River looked like as of September 2011. The composite of 97 on-the-ground LIDAR scans were made less than a week before the start of dismantling the Elwha and Glines Canyon Dams upstream. The 34,131,100 georeferenced points of light will serve as […]
Pokegama’s Macro Accelerator
[a log stripped of its bark and lubricated with animal fat collides with the Klamath River after descending through the Pokegama Chute at speeds of up to 90 miles per hour. Is that dust or smoke we see in its wake? Image circa 1900, by Maud Baldwin] The western United States’ historic logging boom was […]
‘Drawing Water’
[Maps from David Hicks Drawing Water Series. Winter, 2011 (top) and Midwest, 2011 (bottom)] David Wicks MA thesis project, Drawing Water, links USGS national water consumption data with rainfall data compiled by NOAA/NWS in a series of maps. The data are parsed with Python scripts and the prints (above) were generated using software written on […]
