I love the West coast on election nights. If I'm going to watch our republic dissolve, I don't want to stay up 3 hours later to do it.

#PST4Life #uspol

The end of an era. On September 24, I used a blade of fresh grass to temporarily mend my glasses after one of the screws fell out in a hay field. I just hoped it would last the day.

Today, 39 days later, it finally started to slip, and I put a metal screw back into the hole. Thank you, blade of grass. You served me incredibly well. Amazing stuff, grass.

#eyegrasses #AllGoodThings

This is infuriating. A rare plant was removed from the US Endangered Species list despite 90% of its population occurring on one Washington golf course. The result was fairly predictable. The golf course mows it down, and we have a completely avoidable extinction risk of not only an important pollinator plant, but an Indigenous first food too.

#PNW #EndangeredSpecies #plants

Rare plant plowed under at Camas golf course leaves researchers worried

Some experts are worried that the removal of a rare plant on a Camas golf course is a sign of species losing federal protections too soon.

opb (www.opb.org)

Halloween seems like the perfect time to test out carless neighborhoods, streets and whole towns. It's our most pedestrian American holiday, and by far the deadliest day of the year for child pedestrian deaths. Close it all down.

If you don't have to drive tonight, don't. If you do, drive so slowly that other drivers get annoyed.

If you tell the story of the burnt ballot boxes in Portland and Vancouver this week (an important story that warrants attention), also tell how good fire-suppressant design saved all but three ballots in the Portland box, and the efforts of the election workers who contacted those three voters and arranged for replacement ballots.

Things are scary and bad, and often literally on fire. But there are good people and good systems too. Making us forget that is always a win for the worst ones.

If you cancelled your subscription to the LA Times, but still want excellent coverage of issues around California and the West, I highly recommend putting that subscription money into High Country News.

https://www.hcn.org/

(I do not work for, and have never freelanced for, HCN. Just a fan.)

The removal of the Klamath River dams will have effects for decades, but one of the most important has already started to show. Less than a month after the dams came down, there are salmon in a Klamath stream where they haven't been seen in 100 years.

Never let anyone tell you there's nothing we can do, that things are too far gone to try. There's still so much we can save, and some we can even bring back.

#Oregon #salmon #rivers

Salmon return to Klamath Basin in Oregon after more than a century

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife spotted the fish on a tributary above the former J.C. Boyle Dam site, just north of the California border. Several more soon followed it.

opb (www.opb.org)

#eyegrasses Day 4 update

(To be read in the voice of German filmmaker Werner Hertzog)

At first, I found the blade of grass to be a simple solution to a problem. A satisfying answer to a question asked by circumstance. Then it became, I admit, something of an amusement. That was a fool's error. Now it is not me who laughs at the grass, but the grass which laughs cruelly at me. It sees me, and by extension all of humanity, stripped of our modern contrivances, naked before it, and it mocks us.

Day 3 and hanging tough. This is who I am and what I talk about now. Grasses and glasses. And also vultures. Always vultures.
#eyegrasses

What's that? You're still doubting the power of grass?

This is 24 hours later. I have a glasses kit. I just wanted to see how long it would last with regular daily use. Absolutely badass stuff, grass.

Grass is pretty amazing.

I was out at the farm, doing the regular fall chores and prepping beds for garlic, when my glasses lens fell out. The screw is, of course, gone. But I need my glasses to drive. Enter a natural material that's abundant, strong, flexible and able to hold a knot.

It got me home. Thanks, grass.
#grass #nature #AnyLandingYouWalkAwayFrom