Add a third person to the list of those actually managing to make me reluctantly listen to podcasts – next to my Beloved and my son, I now owe some gratitude to Gordon Caron, a dear friend who yesterday sent a link to an NPR program, HUMANKIND.

The program features Mike Houck from the Urban Greenspaces Institute at Portland State University, who launched the Urban Naturalist program at the Audubon Society many years ago, and helped form the Metro Parks and Nature program.  He also serves on the City of Portland’s Planning and Sustainability Commission; The Intertwine Alliance board of directors; and The Nature of Cities board.

Houck’s central focus, other than acknowledging and preparing for climate change, concerns the integration of natural spaces into built environments, cities and the like. He feels strongly that we should not just preserve the pristine wild, a priority of so many other environmental organizations, but ensure immediate encounters with nature on a daily basis. Providing easy access, in other words, to nature where people live, whether it is San Francisco, LA, Chicago or Portland, every day, not just on vacation. “How can a child care for the survival of the condor, if s/he has never known a wren,” is something he cites in the conversation with Humankind’s broadcaster, Freudberg.

He urges that we need to protect urban green spaces and (re)build them, including metropolitan wildlife preserves. It will make people engage in nature, come to love and thus protect it, reap health benefits and even financial advantages, since property close to natural areas are increasing in value. Indirectly that protects rural and more pristine areas as well, because people will reside in livable cities and not expand beyond the urban growth boundary, parceling up the country side (and using the car to drive to work….)

One of the urban nature preserves he is keen on is Oaks Bottom, my regular Tuesday haunt as readers of this blog (particularly those who I cherish as my coffeecup coven) are well aware of. (iPhone photographs are from yesterday! Original introduction here.) The 160 acre wetland was filled with rubble from building the freeway and once used as a landfill.

Black cottonwood and ash forest only partially obstruct the view to the downtown skyline. Yesterday I saw a bald eagle (there is a pair nesting close by)

a barred owl (!)

and once again the little kingfisher from last week, although too far away to get in view with the phone in one hand, an impatient leashed pointer on the other…

In the podcast you hear Houck’s voice get all excited when he reports, live, all the kinds of critters he is seeing. Map that marveling onto my face, and you got me pinned Tuesday mornings. The podcast is worth a listen.

So is today’s music: Schumann’s Wald Szenen (Forest Scenes.) I chose not the perennial version by Richter, but a faster one by Kadouch. If you ignore his theatrics, it’s really a lovely interpretation. Just close your eyes.