Ecologs

Blog migration

2009-02-11T15:04:00.000-08:00

This is my last entry to this blog. "Ecologs" is now a category on my all purpose blog, stevenmarx.net. Thanks for reading.

Steven

The Zunoquad: Kayaking in the Broughton Archipelago (5)

2007-09-05T11:29:00.000-07:00

Day 5

The morning of departure from Insect Island was rainy, making it easier to pull up stakes. Again led by Navigator John we wended our way down Misty Passage, past Tracy, Mars, and Hudson islands, through Spiller Passage, across Arrow Passage, past Betty Cove, through the Fog Islets by Cedar Island to Owl Island, situated at the mouth of Knight Inlet.

The trip was punctuated by a pee and gorp stop on an unvegetated rock islet. We glided through several liquid slits between islands, challenging to find in the fog and thrilling to negotiate.

Here at the edge of the open sea, vegetation was sculpted by prevailing winds into thick rounded hedges. Unperturbed, a bald eagle in a snag observed our progress.

We found the campsite at Owl Island squeezed into a narrow terrace between vertical rock walls and the high tide line, protected from exposure at the head of a long bay. Tall spruces, second growth but 200 feet tall, fronted the water, and a fire ring was placed in the shelter of large vegetation-covered driftwood logs.

After carrying the kayaks safely onshore, we pitched tents, found appropriate toilet locations, and built a bench and footrest with the capacity to seat the whole crew comfortably near the fire drying out clothing wet from the voyage and last night’s rain. Once again the weather cleared and insects stayed away.

Steve, the resident sculptor, started work on a Zunoqua totem, using flotsam he found on the beach and nails ingeniously pried out of the wide driftwood board that served as our kitchen table. We searched for water but found no source nearby. This was the first location we stayed at that did not include a shell midden.

Murray and Steven prepared the dinner of canned Chili, couscous and bacon bits. The sunset gave the treetops and rocks at the mouth of the bay a golden glow. From different directions two wolves howled.

Native Plants in Garden

2007-05-05T14:14:00.001-07:00

bay laurel

big leaf maple
black sage

blue oak

blue eyed grass
Buckeye aesculus californicum
buckwheat eriogonum grande rubescens
bush baccharis
bush lupine
bush poppy
California bay laurel Umbellularia californica
California buckwheat
California Fuschia.
california goldenrod
california grape–vitis californica

California Pitcher Plant
California Poppy
California Sagebrush
California sycamore
Carex praegraclis Clustered Field Sedge.
Catalinia Ironwood Lyonothamnus floribundus splenifolius
Clarkia elegans
Clematis ligusticifolia
coast live oak
Coast Redwood
coffeeberry
common rush
coyote mint
creeping black sage
creeping mahonia
creeping ceonothus
Currant, Golden Ribes aureum aureum
Currant, pink floweredRibes sanguineum glutinosum Pink-Flowered Currant.
Deer Grass.
deerweed
Dogwood.
Dogwood2
dwarf baccharis
elderberry (Blue) Sambucus mexicana
foothill penstemon
fremontia
fuschia-flowering gooseberry
golden currant
Holly Leaf Cherry
Howard McMinn Manzanita
Hummingbird Sage Salvia spathacea
idaho fescue
Indian Mallow, Abutilon palmeri
Iris longipetala Long Petaled Iris.
Island Buckwheat–Eriogonum arborescens
leather oak
Matilija Poppy Romneya coulteri .
narrow leaf milkweed
oregon grape
Pink-Flowered Currant Ribes sanguineum glutinosum
Purple Needlegrass
purple sage
Red Buckwheat Eriogonum grande rubescens
sierra columbine
sticky monkey flower
Sugarbush Rhus ovata
Toyon
valley oak
wax myrtle
Western columbine
Western Redbud.
Western Redbud (Cercis occidentalis)
western sword fern
white sage wild strawberry
Woolly blue curls
yarrow
yucca whipplei

The Wild Braid

2007-05-05T13:45:00.001-07:00

At the Sierra Club ExCom meeting in March, Cal began with a reading, as is our custom. It was from a new book by and about Stanley Kunitz, The Wild Braid, A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden.

The garden is a domestication of the wild, taking what can be random, and, to a degree, ordering it so that it is not merely a transference from thewild, but still retains the elements that make each plant shine in its natural habitat.

In the beginning, a garden holds infinite possibilities. What sense of its nature, or its kingdom, is it going to convey? It represents a selection, not only of whatever individual plants we consider to be beautiful, but also a synthesis that creates a new kind of beauty, that of a complex and multiple world. What you plant in your garden reflects your own sensibility, your concept of beauty, your sense of form. Every true garden is an imaginative construct, after all.

I’m not sure if this is the actual passage he read, I was so struck both by the cover image of a bent-over hundred year old man gazing like a lover at his plants and by the recollection that Jan and I first set eyes on each other at a poetry seminar about Stanley Kunitz in 1966. Also distracted back then, I hadn’t paid attention to his writings since. But that book cover brought it together: the passage of time that we were planning to mark in our upcoming 40th anniversary celebration, not yet bent over, but transformed from children into grandparents. I mentioned the coincidence, there were appreciative murmurs, then on we went to discuss the budget.

While Jan made the guest list, mailed invitations, shopped for food, and spruced up the house, I prepared for the party by working in the garden, carving a new path in the adobe clay, trimming lower limbs of the pygmy oaks, transplanting bunch grasses. We were wedded in a garden in our backyard. Now this garden had turned into a setting I wanted to share for a while, just as I wanted to share the private space of marriage. When we arrived here nineteen years ago I knew this was a place I would transform and be transformed in. The change had come to pass.

The invitation to our celebration said “No gifts, but donations welcome to Santa Lucia Chapter of the Sierra Club or Environmental Center of San Luis Obispo (ECOSLO).” In the midst of the crowd at the drinks table, Cal handed me a package and said he was sorry to be violating the rule, but please would I open it. It was The Wild Braid.

Three days after the party I was missing classes, in bed with a sinus infection. Between naps, I wandered around in the book, finding poems about gardening and other outdoor experiences, memoirs about circumstances of their composition, prose reflections on their themes–bucolic retreat, cultivation, composting, decay, renewal, and the connections between horticulture and writing. They recalled my first scholarly article, “‘Fortunate Senex’: The Pastoral of Old Age.” Arranged like beds and terraces, I discovered photographs of the ancient sage among the trees and flowers and conversations that took place during the time between partial recovery from a massive stroke and his death.

This morning I woke up at 5:15, still not healthy but eager to walk my trails at daybreak. Greeting the yucca, the hummingbird sage, the blue oak, seeing new blooms on the Columbine, I thought again of The Wild Braid. I’d only taken the first stroll through its garden. I'll return to find paths I’ve missed and revisit spots in changing seasons. Looking ahead, I knew I’d found a guide.

April Sunrise

2007-04-24T09:49:00.000-07:00

When I opened the curtain at 5:45 there was already a blue-gray glow in the western sky. We’re a third of the way to the solstice. I wont wake up in the dark anymore till August.

I sit in the green plastic Adirondack chair with the big camera beside me waiting for the sunrise over Cuesta Ridge. I’ve come back to it after noticing that the older plant photos on my screensaver have much more depth and brilliance than the ones I’ve taken recently with the point-and-shoot, even though it has higher resolution. It’s the lens stupid.

My perch is a new seat in the garden, three quarters of the way up the bank above the grape arbor at a switchback in the south trail. I decided to carve it out of the adobe clay on Saturday while sprucing up the yard to prepare for our big party this weekend.

Two rock doves clean up spilled seeds under the bird feeder, a hummingbird visits the hummingbird sage, a bee sips at the holly-leaf cherry flowers.

Week 4 of classes, Spring mind bursting with things to say and write and plan and execute.

I’ll be returning to this spot nestled between a Channel Island Ironwood and a Sugarbush.

A temperate dawn soothed by a wisp of breeze, disturbed by the barking dog next door and the hubbub of traffic.

Now the sun paints the east face of Caballo Peak, and now touches the grapevine and the belly of the goldfinch in the pine branch overhead. Now it casts shadows on the path. Now it’s 7:00 o’clock and time to get to work.

But first just a few more pictures.

Two Boys at Spooner's Cove

2007-04-14T07:02:00.000-07:00

Ian's last day of Spring Break from Junior Kindergarten was the end of a taxing two weeks for me. April 1 was Flora!, the Sierra Club Fundraiser I'd been planning and worrying about since January. The day after, I returned to teaching after a nine-months' recess. The day after that I launched a challenging new course on Argumentation about Sustainability focussing on Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth. Last weekend was the Focus the Nation organizing conference in Las Vegas and the day after a press to write up my report on it followed by nine more hours of lecturing on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The tough slog of grading the first set of English papers was on my schedule Friday. But the sky was bright blue and the hills were still green. Besides, I had required my Ecolit class to listen the poets' invitation to "Rise Up and Come Away," so I too was obliged to obey.

We drove along Foothill Blvd. through the threatened ranchland between Bishops Peak and San Luis Mountain thick with cows and calves trimming the pastures into glittering lawn. The open, black-soiled fields along Los Osos Valley Road seemed hungry for seed or ready to sprout. I asked Ian to repeat the name of the road. At first he struggled and then it rolled off his tongue. The mountains on both sides--Morros and Irish Hills--make this a Valley where the dirt rolls down and turns to soil that grows the crops, I explained. He recognized the rows of Snow Peas with their white polka dots that will turn into the sweet morsels we pick from the planter beside our deck. Los Osos means the bears in Spanish I told him, the name of the town at the end of the road. Watch for bears on either side. By the time we reached the turnoff to Montana De Oro, he'd counted 14--on signs, a mural, woodcarvings and the cast bronze sculpture by the bridge.

"Gwampa, wet's wace to the mountain," he called back to me from the beach. "I cant run with this backpack," I answered. I boosted him on to the ledge sloping up the outcrop, where he passed the time making sand waterfalls, while I struggled to find handholds in the strata to pull myself over the first hump.

After several clumsy efforts I realized I wouldnt make it, and he'd have to come down. I wondered if the cause was the soft rock's weathering since I'd been here last, or other sorts of weathering closer to home.

But there was no shortage of alternatives, and I remembered that last year several Cal Poly students had been swept into the water from this promontory by rogue waves, one to his death.

We noticed an alluring cave carved in the vegetation-covered cliff bordering the north side of the beach. Ian said, "that's a dinosaur cave." The creek that flowed to the sea at the foot of the cliff was low enough to hop with dry shoes. Ian led the way up another sloping ledge into what turned out to be a tunnel rather than a cave, with a perfectly formed arched opening to the sky. We passed through slowly and came around the back to perch on a ledge that looked straight down into the surf, which pounded with a force that carved these rocks like cheese. I kept a tight grip on the rolled-up waistband of his sweatshirt. In the wind-pruned scrub above the cove behind the tunnel, a flourescent red-throated finch burbled above the waters' roar.

On the way back through the tunnel, we found another tunnel at the base of its lower, landward, wall, this one squat and deep. Through it one could see foamy water flowing in and out of the shadowed cove below the finch's perch. One could easily slide down there, but with no way of return.

Back outside, we saw a possible route upward: vertical footholds in the rock leading to an oval opening in the brush that looked like the start of a trail into the dunes. This might be the dinosaur's exit. Ian led the ascent and I followed him through the green tube.

It daylighted at a wooden railing marking a sand trail bordered by blooming bush poppies and silver lupine. A fork of the trail covered with delicate lizard tracks led toward the water and traversed the dune.

Up steep switchbacks and down muddy seeps, we made our way to tidepools and blowholes. Across the expanse of Spooner's Cove, we saw groups of walkers on the popular cliff trail, but here there was no one.

I looked at my watch: 11:30. I had an appointment at the Social Security Office to apply for Medicare. Ian was getting hungry. Off the rocks and up the sand we rambled. On the warm trail that circled back to Reddy in the parking lot, over and over we sang "Dinah wontcha blow."

Easter in Las Vegas

2007-04-13T07:48:00.000-07:00

A Personal Report on the Focus the Nation Organizing Conference April 6-8 2007

Introduction

I took the bait for Focus the Nation while attending the first national conference of AASHE, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education in October 2006. That conference attracted 800 faculty and administration activists and featured a panoply of environmentalist superstars. In welcoming remarks, the President of Arizona State University declared that ASU henceforth would stand for Arizona Sustainable University and announced the formation of a Sustainability Institute endowed with a five million dollar grant from the Wrigley family.

The conference’s show of strength raised the confidence of every beleaguered soul who attended, but the only action item I came away with was to set up a chapter of Focus the Nation at my home campus. Dreamed up by Eban Goodstein, an economics professor at Lewis and Clark College, Focus the Nation’s objective suited the immense scope of the climate crisis, yet was defined, immediate and feasible: a nationwide teach-in on Global Warming solutions at a thousand colleges and universities on January 31 2008, just before the primary elections.

Professor of Business, Kate Lancaster, with whom I had worked on several campus sustainability projects, agreed. We tried to recruit Tylor Middlestadt, Cal Poly’s legendary student leader, but he would be graduating before the event, so he put us in touch with two fellow engineering students, Chad Worth and Matt Hutton, who joined our core organizing committee. We met regularly during Fall and Winter quarters, discovered lots of support for the idea on campus, expanded the committee to include three more faculty members, and set to work getting endorsements from the Associated Students, the Faculty Senate and the University Administration. After Eban scheduled an organizing conference for the national group in Las Vegas over Easter weekend and we found a one hundred dollar round trip flight from San Luis Obispo, we all decided to go, whether or not we got funding.

In the sleepy Santa Maria airport, we boarded a huge Alliant Airline jet for the one hour flight. It was packed with a jolly crowd—multigenerational families, golfers, gang bangers, farmworkers, a bachelorette party—all eager to spend their wealth in America’s fastest growing city.

The flight attendant announced our landing at McCarren airport. That name rang a bell: the McCarren-Walters Immigration act, passed when I was growing up in the nineteen fifties, invoked to deny visitor visas to undesireables like Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, Dennis Brutus, Farley Mowat, Jan Myrdal and Pierre Trudeau.

McCarren is vast and soon to double in size. A tram takes you several miles from the terminal to the rental car garage, an atriumed palace where the name of the renter appears in lights above the reserved car. But the trip from the terminal gate to the garage exit took as long as travel across two states.

The voyage to our hotel near the University included another hour in traffic on the Strip, where much of the congestion was caused by dozens of eighteen wheelers advertising the same attractions featured on huge moving screens posted along the street. Gridlocked, we got to admire a glass pyramid which rocketed a thick column of light toward the faint stars overhead, a fake Manhattan skyline, an illuminated Eiffel tower, and sidewalk stalls selling cheap t-shirts and beer.

Hungry and cranky after checking-in to non-smoking rooms that reeked of stale tobacco, we found coupons in the lobby promising free beer that steered us toward The Hofbrau, a replica of a large Munich beerhall nearby. Trestle tables, dirndl-clad waitresses, a lank-haired blond man in lederhosen blowing a ten-foot shepherds horn lent ambiance enriched by one inebriated customer who goose-stepped to the music. The room was designed for noise. To make himself heard over the well lubricated crowd, the emcee maxed the volume on his hand mike so that his incomprehensible words only added to the roar. Above the entrance to the kitchen in Gothic script was the slogan “Durst ist schlimmer wie Heimweh,” (Thirst is worse than homesickness). After downing a quick mug, the mood mellowed and I decided to enjoy the overpriced dinner of sauerbraten--the closest to a low-cholesterol meal on the menu.

The Conference

Next morning we arrived on the UNLV campus, where a bounce-house session and easter egg hunt for local kids was in progress outside the conference lecture hall. Eban Goodstein welcomed us with a preview of the talking points to be emphasized all day:

to avert a world wide future catastrophe, we face an unprecedented challenge

we need to transform American values

we need to promote a design and technology revolution that will stop pumping climate destablizing gasses into the atmosphere

the present political system is gridlocked, and it is up to grassroots people like us to bring about change.

It felt a bit ambitious for this group of about 80, most of them students.

Wahleah Johns, a navaho organizer working for the Campus Climate Challenge was the first guest speaker. A young woman with an old soul, she presented a story exemplifying the terrible obstacles we were up against. At first I thought this would not facilitate our nuts-and-bolts organizing efforts, but as she proceeded her words seemed to dissipate some of the Las Vegas curse.

She spoke of the Black Mesa energy project, which mines for coal under a sacred native american landmark, drains the pristine water from a desert aquifer to create a coal slurry that’s transported two hundred miles to Laughlin Nevada to fuel a generating plant that powers the billboards and searchlights on the strip. This Mohave power plant was cited for 40000 violations of the clean air act before it was shut down by a lawsuit brought by Sierra Club in concert with tribal political groups. The power company maintained that they couldnt install the scrubbers required by law because of expense.

Wahleah grew up on the reservation that includes Black Mesa. She and her family had no electricity and they hauled water every day from wells that tapped the aquifer. Since the drawdown by the coal company, their wells have run dry. Now the company negotiates secretly with some tribal leaders for permission to drain another deeper aquifer nearby. She and one of the groups she’s involved with testify before the Cal PUC which licenses the plant, trying to get them to enforce the law, and to implement a Just Transition Plan which will move investment and jobs from coal to renewable energy sources. Their work has helped to heal age-old rifts between Navaho and Hopi that the coal company has exploited in the past.

In the discussion period, Maria Godough from West Virginia spoke briefly about her battle with the coal company in the Appalachians practising Mountaintop removal, which destroys landscapes and local cultures in order to export coal to 28 countries, in violation of laws that are not enforced. Her hillbilly dialect and manner was as distinct from the American mainstream blend as Wahlea’s, both their faces marked with tragedy, incessant struggle, and unbreakable links to ancestry and place.

Eban transitioned from these horrors of extraction of fossil fuel to address the consequences of its burning—climate change and global warming. The issue is still on the back burner in people’s consciouness, in the media and especially in the priorities of politicians.

He reminded us of our task as communicators: to convince people of the reality of climate change and of the fact that its harm can be limited only by immediate action: reducing climate pollution now and transitioning immediately to clean energy technology. He predicted that those young people who take on the task at this supremely urgent moment in history will be looked back upon as “the greatest generation.”

His lecture rehearsed the story we need to tell: first the danger, then the solutions.

The dangers

There’s no more debate in the scientifc community about climate change

The ten hottest years ever recorded have taken place during the last decade.

The cause is the thickening of the carbon blanket in the atmosphere, no longer no longer to be referred to as the “greenhouse effect.” Preindustrial emissions were measured as 280 ppm, today they are 380 ppm. The only explanation is human impact, which pushed up the CO2 levels in an unprecedented experiment in altering the planets climate control system.

The official assessment is that temperatures will rise between 2.5 and 10.5 degrees in the next century. This is an ice-age magnitude change.

A 3-4 degree warming will lead to the extinction of 25% of species. Impacts of this lower end change will be serious but manageable. But if the warming is at the higher end of the range, consequences will be catastrophic.

Examples:
- spring is two weeks earlier this year
- mountain glaciers are retreating all over the world
- snowpack in mountain ranges which provide water supply to a large proportion of earths population is disappearing
- Consequences include
- spread of pests and diseases
- worsening storm events, like Katrina
- possible runaway catastrophes caused by positive feedback loops
- shut down of the gulf stream
- ocean acidification, and destruction of marine food chains
- fire driven deforestation of the Amazon
- melting tundra causing a methane pulse and adding a couple of degrees
- irreversible collapse of ice sheets, raising global sea levels 35-40 feet

The solutions

There’s hope for limiting the damage if we can hold emissions to 450 ppm worldwide. In the nineteenth fossil fuels replaced animals and vastly reduced the pollution caused by horse manure. Now we need to go beyond fossil fuels for our energy productions. This can be done. Wind is cheap and efficient. Europe is on target for reducing emissions to 1990 levels, the Kyoto targets, and Japan and Canada are making serious efforts. But the U.S. has pulled out.

Clean energy is also affordable. Some economists think it will be free to convert since conservation produced for instance by fuel economy standards will save everybody money. More pessimistic economists judge that such a conversion will cost something like $300 per year for family. But the Iraq war cost has been greater than the total cost of abiding by the Kyoto accords and the economy hasn’t suffered.

Kyoto allows developing countries to cut back less than developed ones since we have the wealth to invest in new technologies. But developing countries will be able to adopt them more quickly, just as in Ecuador cell phones have come into use without the necessity of first stringing wire.

The last part of Eban’s speech modelled the kind of impassioned plea that’s needed to move people.

Shifting to a clean energy policy is an intergenerational gift. It will take 20 years of technological development before the new model can be fully in place. California’s investment in wind power 25 years ago makes possible its large scale adoption today. Sadly, when the subsidies of the industry dried up, the industry moved abroad, and new we shop for our wind turbines in Denmark. The Japanese saw the future coming and invested heavily in hybrid technology in the 1990’s They’re now reaping the benefit, while Ford goes bankrupt.

We have to stabilize the climate now and make the investments the next generation needs to rewire the planet.

Surveys show 70-80% of the public and business in general knows this is true.The only people who don’t get it live inside the Washington Beltway. People are no longer buying the false claims that this transformation will cost too much. It’s a smokescreen. A social movement is underway like the abolitionist movement, the woman’s suffrage movement, the labor movement and the civil rights movement.

Finally he offered some concrete suggestions for carrying the movement forward:

Reach out to colleagues, faculty are are going to say I want to get involved.

Involve many disciplines. For example get psychologists to discuss denial and obstacles to change, biologists to talk about life without polar bears, a religious studies person to discuss stewardship of creation.

At the end of the day’s events plan a round table with bi partisan panel of elected officials and student questioners.

Any time someone says “Global Warming” say “Focus the Nation.”

Eban’s talk was followed by discussion. I advised finding a person interested in Faculty Senate procedures to conduct the FtN resolution through the executive committee, first and second readings. You write the rationale and explain it as guest speaker. Get Senate and Student government to endorse if the President is reluctant. He’ll be less so if following them.

Steve Rypka, Green Living Consultant talked about how Los Vegas is actually going green. Thirteen billion dollars are now being invested in LEED development. And the Nevada state regents are requiring any state funded construction to be LEED certified.

Alfredo Fernandes-Gonzales, professor of architecture, gave a presentation on work he’s doing in Las Vegas and on the 2030 challenge and the 2010 imperative initiated by solar architect Ed Masria. Based on the observation that fifty percent of greenhouse gases are produced by buildings, it demands any new building or renovation today cuts emissions and consumption by 50% of what’s produced by buildings in its neighborhood. The US Green Building Council which administers LEED refused to adopt this challenge until Masria convinced the American Institute of Architects to do so and then it followed suit. The challenge stipulates that by 2030 all new building be carbon neutral. These goals were developed by reading backward from the requirements for climate stabilization to avert catastrophe posed by James Hanson, top U.S. climatologist. They have been adopted by the mayor of Chicago.

Alberto showed some samples of projects that he’s working on with his students to measure the carbon footprint of sections of Las Vegas, neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street. These calculations will be used to find and encourage conservation and to discover and discourage waste. He concluded, the Titanic is already sinking, theres a lot of work to do in little time.

At lunch in the cafeteria I sat with two British exchange students in meteorology, now at U of Oklahoma, and a New Yorker attending Prescott college. We talked about the recent debate between climate sceptics Michael Crichton and one scientist against three eminent meteorologists which resulted in most viewers siding with the sceptics.

At the first afternoon session, Billy Parrish, head of Campus Climate Challenge, who'd made a huge impression at the October AASHE conference, spoke briefly. He acknowledged the need for federal policy change. However students are not yet ready to influence at that level, but rather should follow the example of the modern conservative movement in organizing locally to make higher education the engine for change toward sustainability. Campus Climate Challenge is asking for 80% reduction in university carbon footprint by 2050.

Much of the afternoon was devoted to small group discussions of local campus strategies. My recommendation, prompted by my University Provost’s request, was for each organizing group to develop a budget of projected revenues and expenses right away to facilitate planning and gain credibility.

The anticipated conference highlight was a talk by David Orr, every academic environmentalist’s hero. Like Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce, Natural Capitalism by Hawken and Hunter and Amory Lovins, and William McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle, Orr’s Earth in Mind is a mind-expanding, life-changing book. What he had to say about higher education was further from conventional wisdom and more on target than anything I had ever come across: in sum, that any education that doesn’t awaken a student to the environmental and moral crisis of our civilization and empower that student to change it is miseducation. The breadth of subject, the clarity of expression and the power of insight in this and the other books he produces with unbelievable frequency made me a disciple. His building, the Environmental Center at Oberlin, is the material embodiment of his wisdom. One motivator of my activism has been Orr’s approving words for a book I edited, Cal Poly Land: A Field Guide, and his acceptance of my invitation to speak at our campus three years ago.

Orr was introduced by another hero, Jim Deacon, creator of the Environmental Science program at UNLV. Swivelling around in his mechanized wheelchair, he recollected his address on the first earth day in 1970 and his warnings about global warming in 1989 and 1992. Like others of our generation he was astounded by the refusal of the U.S. to endorse the Kyoto treaty, having “thoroughly underestimated the human capacity for self-delusion.” He presented David as a man who has labored mightily to destroy those delusions, an aptly buddhist description.

David apologized for his hoarse voice, worn out from previous speeches, the breadth and urgency of his message amplified by his rushed delivery peppered with epigrams one wished to linger upon. His leitmotif was “rumors of unfathomable things,” a quote from a book by Nicole Krauss describing her family’s response to the Nazi holocaust:

There were rumors of unfathomable things, and because we could not fathom them we failed to believe them—until we had no choice and it was too late.

Taking up Jim Deacon’s theme, Orr explored the question of why we have ignored the warnings sounded since 1978 for so long. Many of the answers lie in the history of our mass media. In 1992, for example, in the New York Times, the “paper of record,” the official warnings from the National Ocean and Atmosphere Office that our planet is dying appeared on page 8. The headlines on page 1 were about Terry Schiavo. Ronald Reagan overturned the Fairness Doctrine in effect siince 1949 that insured that airwaves belonging to the public must present truly fair and balanced information about controversial topics. The consolidation of media allowed by the Telecommunications act of 1996 reduced our news organizations from 50 to 5 today and has rendered us the 27th freest press in the world. The transformation of the media from appealing to the intellect to appealing to the unconscious was engineered by Edward Bernays, founder of the modern advertising industry that spends half a trillion dollars a year to keep us ignorant.

Now the problem is no longer ignored. The media, business, the general public have become aware of it. The christian coalition is making a 180 degree turn on climate change. But because of our delay, time is not our friend, there remains no margin for error in this global emergency. We are already committed to substantial warming before the end of the century.

It’s too late to avoid trauma but not too late to prevent the worst. There are twelve possible tipping points, not only of climate change, but other threatening factors. Each can kick off the others. One is international terrorism, a result of “Blowback” from our imperial adventures. Another that the National Debt will reach 231 percent of gross domestic product by 2050, making us a major debtor nation, ill equipped for the investment required to transform energy production.

However the solutions exist. We must solve for pattern, for what Orr calls security by design, using the wedge strategy, breaking the big problem into several solutions.

BUT we must be sure not to engage in “problem switching” instead of problem solving. We must always ask how much carbon we can remove for a dollar spent. Examples of problem switching include:

• “clean coal,” Cheney’s plan, which involves mountain top removal and the derangement of ecosystems

• carbon sequestration, an expensive, doubtfully effective high cost process

• nuclear power which is crude technology with bad economic return and myriad dangers and negative consequences

• biofuels, which require huge subsidies and absorb food production resources.

Real solutions include

• solar

• Amory Lovins’ 1976 soft path, decrease energy demand by increasing efficiency, for example: refrigerators

• efficient transport

• high performance buildings

• energy efficiency

• prices that tell the truth

• taxing waste not work

• promoting renewables

Another example: the Lewis center created by Orr in Ohio, a building which generates 30% more power than it uses and emits zero discharge. The solar panels that power it were developed twenty miles from his campus, but they are no longer manufactured here, you must buy them in German, and you must buy windmills in Denmark.

The New Apollo project, which is developing wind resource potential in Kansas, Texas, North and South Dakota. The cost of renewables is now in free fall. His student developed a technique for turning blueberries into photovoltaic material.

In conclusion Orr said, this revolution in technology will only buy us time. The question is time for what. He emphasized that sustainability is about more than gadgetry. Its about securing a fair and decent world, what the Preamble to the Constitution calls “the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” We have undergone a massive political failure that has led to a worse tyranny than the Founders fought against, intergenerational tyranny. No generation has the right to alter the Earth’s natural cycles…we are trustees for all life yet to come.

Orr ended with reference to Thomas Berry’s book, “The Great Work.” Every generation, he said, has its work imposed upon them, is given the battles it must fight. Ours is stabilizing the climate by reducing all heat trapping gases, rapidly transitioning to energy efficiency and renewables and building a world secure for all, by design.

Conclusion

After the program ended, Chad and Matt and Kate (along with Wiley, her ever-present guide-dog-in-training) and I supped at a quiet local restaurant, the Mediterranean café. I got to order vegetarian shish kabob and rice. With wistful laughter we shared stories of past political adventures—mine at Columbia in 1968, Kate instructing accounting at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute of Sustainable Business on Cortez Island, Matt and Chad in staying up for weeks planning an energy audit of Los Angeles for a statewide competition that provided no academic credit.

And we assessed the value of this trip. Unlike the sensation of being gathered into a movement of inexorable momentum after the AASHE conference, or the feeling of having attended a historic event after the September 2005 Sierra Summit in San Francisco, here we were left to our own resources. There is no well-financed highly organized institution of professionals that will make Focus the Nation happen. It may not succeed in turning January 31 2008 into a day remembered by our grandchildren. But if it does, it will have been because of us. And regardless of how FtN proceeds nationally, we have bonded to it and to one another as a team confident that the Cal Poly event will be terrific.

Next morning over breakfast in the hotel lobby, we created our budget. Kate taught us to format the spreadsheet, I estimated how much we could get from the deans and central administration, and Matt and Chad calculated financial and facilities contributions from student government and clubs. We were done in forty minutes, in time for a hike in the red rocks before flying back home, two pairs of working partners, three generations, taking up our small part in the Great Work together.

Ecolit class April 5 2007

2007-04-06T07:59:00.000-07:00

Peterson Ranch, above the pole house, looking east. Breathing hard after a brisk walk. French horns and snare drum of the freight train laboring up the grade in the background, twittering of sparrows and finches in a dense grove of sycamore, bay and oak down below, the scream of a young redtail circling overhead, two rooks shouting and sparring in a tree top. Twenty five people spread out out on the hillside silently listening and recording.

A wisp of breeze stirs the stagnant air, cools the sweat on the back of my neck. Flat light, not the Vergillian golden radiance and lengthening shadows of former years. But the overcast makes the new growth flouresce with a dozen versions of green.

The usual April torrent of the creek is down to an October trickle. Not thirty but eight inches of rain this year. Yet around us on the serpentine bloom lupine and tidy tips, blue dicks and blue-eyed grass, monkey flower and johnny jump-ups.

The dell explodes with a rude ecstatic trill. Wings wildly flapping, a small bird darts our way, then glides and swoops into the willows up the hill.

It’s a shame to disrupt this performance and its rapt audience, but I’ve assigned homework and prepared a discussion, and ink and paper has been consumed to print the readings. On the first day of class we read Ovid’s description of the Golden Age, when innocent humanity was sustained by honey and acorns, and also the biblical account of Nature’s creation as a harmonious artwork designed to provide for all the needs of his naked children by a generous parent-God. Today the ancient texts are Vergil’s Georgics—a praise of the farmer’s life acknowledging the immense difficulty of mere survival—and God’s speech from the whirlwind in the Book of Job, where He mocks the good man’s futile search for intelligibility and proclaims the cruel and awesome wildness of His universe.

Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars,
and spreads its wings toward the south?
Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up
and makes its nest on high?
It lives on the rock and makes its home
in the fastness of the rocky crag.
From there it spies the prey;
its eyes see it from far away.
Its young ones suck up blood;
and where the slain are, there it is."

I read the fierce verses and they echo the screams, the croaks and the trills we’ve just heard. They answer Thoreau’s question, the motto of this course:

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him ...whose words were so true, and fresh, and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves in a library... .

Morro Bay Morning

2007-01-22T11:45:00.000-08:00

Eleven months since the last entry here. I've written a few ecologs since then on my new personal website, stevenmarx.net , but posting pictures on Flickr is much less demanding, and without the pressure of assigning this job to students, I've lagged. Now Spring Quarter looms six weeks ahead, and after seven months of retirement from teaching, I'm trying to warm up at self-expression.

Yesterday morning, on an impulse, I drove to Morro Bay to spend a couple of hours kayaking during the winter bird festival. The day was warmer than last year, the Bay calmer, and the tide more friendly. Already high, at 9:00 when the rental opened, it provided me with two more hours of suction up the estuary before turning and leaving me stranded. Slight dabs with the paddle propelled me across the spreading silky surface.

A friend had told me she spotted 30 species on the Bay a few days earlier. Equipped with binoculars and camera to capture a grand wildlife display, I felt guilt for possibly disturbing creatures I knew were resting here to gather energy for their long migrations.How much to take of nature's bounty without creating harm? Sustainability in the abstract takes up much of my time, but I've done little to reduce my personal footprint. This has come home to me while reading a book about logging in British Columbia called The Golden Spruce sent from there by my old friend Peter that recalls my days of working in a pulp mill up there in order to be able to live up there close to the land. Another book another about the world's water shortage called When the Rivers Run Dry, lent to me by my neighbor Gary, gives me concern about watering to establish my new water-conserving native plants during this drought year.

I paddled past a sandbar far enough from the receding shoreline to keep the crowds of pelicans, herons and cormorants from flying away, but close enough to identify. As I rounded a clump of rapidly disappearing eelgrass, a grand panoply unfolded: thousands of birds lined up single file, all facing the low sun, motionless in pleasure and adoration.

An Excursion Near Home

2006-02-19T15:18:00.000-08:00

Low-grade illness and a heavy schedule has kept me from fulfilling my own assignment to students: get outdoors, pay attention, write. Yesterday morning's cool weather and dramatic light got me going. The Sierra Club's outings web page promised a kayak trip up the Morro Bay Estuary to spot birds, but when I phoned the leader he said it had been cancelled because of uncertainty about wind and rain. The Morro Bay Natural History Association offered a talk about "Living on tectonic plate borders" which sounded appealing since I'll have to lecture on Cal Poly Land's geology next quarter. I took my down vest, windbreaker and packsack loaded with camera, binoculars, bird book, a loaf of sunflower seed bread and an avocado, and told Jan I'd be back in the late afternoon.

I arrived at the Marina early and walked to the point to gaze at birds, clouds and the distant dunes.

Rounding the lion rock, I came across two white egrets. I was transfixed by their yellow eyes and graceful head plumes but they werent interested in my company. They slowly flapped their huge wings, lifted their legs and flew across the flat water.

I sat down and four black geese cruised by in stately posture and formation. I noticed the white necklaces around their throats and their white bellies. I remembered the picture on the goose-shaped sign I had carried a few months ago to a hearing of the Fish and Game Commission at the County building. These were the Brant, the Black Brant.

They're still being hunted on the estuary during their annual winter migration. The Sierra Club, along with the mayor and city counsellors of Morro Bay were petitioning to limit the days of the hunt to slow their decline in numbers, but to no avail. The commission, headed by a chair who looked and acted like a Dick Tracy villain, voted to extend the hours.

Next I noticed ducks with white chests and bellies, black backs, bright white patches wrapped like a doctor's mask around their dark heads, accompanied by grayish brown ones with smaller white patches behind their eyes.

The Audubon field guide told me these were Buffleheads, male and female, Bucephalia albeola. The charming name was apt for these childlike looking creatures with small bills, large heads and graceful compact bodies. They are the smallest of sea ducks, brilliant divers and fliers who breed in Canada and winter anywhere south of the border. The guide stated that their heads were iridescent, but even through the binoculars I only saw black. When I downloaded and enlarged the pictures, I found the green and red colors that the bright daylight had obscured.

Despite being bundled up, I was getting cold sitting there, so I went up to the Museum early and joined excited kids from L.A. and tourists from Fresno in marvelling at the hands-on exhibits, the birds outside the huge windows, and the stuffed varieties on display. The geology lecture turned out to be in an auditorium rather than the field. After warming up fully, I crept out and returned to the marina to rent a kayak. The short stubby one they had available was light, comfortable, stable and maneuverable.

I had an hour and a quarter of incoming tide to take me up the flats. There was no wind. Bright cumulus clouds dappled the deep blue sky one minute, the next it was covered with lowering gray. Hollister and Cabrillo peaks were mosaics of shadow and light.

Morro Rock glowed as if lit from within.

Tidal current pulled me up the estuary. I wanted to hug the shore to visit egrets and curlews and sandpipers and a group of harbor seals sunning themselves in the mud. I got far enough for a good look at some shy American Avocets, Recurvirostra americana.

But feeling the onshore wind pick up, I beat a retreat, paddling for half a mile in two or three inches of water, willing to fight the still incoming tide before it turned and left me stranded.

Safe in the deeper part of the bay, I ate lunch afloat and watched the sky to the north grow stranger and more beautiful. I returned the kayak and drove to the Rock, where a longboard surfing contest was taking place in brilliant sunshine against a gloomy backdrop.

Someone on a cell phone reported that it was snowing heavily in Cayucos.

Most of the surfers had gray hair. The festive holiday-weekend atmosphere made me wistful. I wished I could surf, or just jump into the water here without a wetsuit and swim for half an hour as I had used to before worrying about chronic colds. But my mood soon reversed and the continuing solitude felt delicious.

Seeing Bishops Peak in the distance on my way home, I decided to prolong the enjoment and give myself a workout. From Highland Drive I huffed to the top of the trail in thirty minutes, keeping eyes on the path and proudly passing several hikers. At the memorial bench below the first summit, the late afternoon light was as spectacular as at the coast. I pushed through the poison-0ak laden scrub to the second summit and probed the caves and crazily balanced blocks of granite looking for a way to the top. The topmost block was too exposed but I found a secondary vantage where to sit and and watch the show.

Toward the east in front of Cuesta Ridge, I observed young people mounting the first summit, where not long ago a Cal Poly student took a step backward and plunged to his death.

Toward the South, the ridge of Point Sal framed the Bay from Avila to the Nipomo dunes.

Toward the north, the snowstorm that had hit Cayucos was moving along Highway 41.

To the West, through apertures in swirling cloud, the sun dropped a column of light that ignited soft green banks of grassy swales.

And overhead, a Rough-legged hawk, Buteo lagopus, hovered motionless, clasping the chill wind with fully extended wingtips and tailfeathers.

When the sun went down, I descended.

February Garden 2

2006-02-19T08:24:00.000-08:00

It gets light now soon after the alarm goes off and its not dark until suppertime, but the plants in the gardens have remained at the same stage of development where I left them two weeks ago, when I broke off writing the last entry and abandoned my postings. So I'm going back to where we were.

Here is the growing tip of Heuchera maxima

This plant is as hardy as a weed, tolerating deep shade in front of the house and direct sun in back, no water or plenty of water, as when it grows under redwoods. One of its common names is Alum root. And yet it's delicate as these velvety hairs on its leaf tips and stems, and therefore it's also called, Coral Bells, for the lily-0f-the-valley-like blossoms that will spring from these buds.

The flowering time of Umbellularia californica has passed since this picture was taken; some of the tiny blossoms in the inflorescence were already dry then. That lilting scientific appelation is almost as melodious as "Bay Laurel," its vernacular name, linked with the myth of Apollo and Daphne, which recalls something I wrote twenty three years ago:

Pursuing a youth
made lovelier yet by flight
through woods he runs
unloved,
imploring recognition.
Outdistanced and breathless
she prays for escape
then stands.
Her heart still beats against his touch
as bark encloses the soft breast,
arms twist into branches
hair flattens to leaves,
and swift feet root underground.
They are crowned
With laurel.

Three bay laurels have been growing in the front for four or five years. They prefer sun and water--you can see them as the lighter-colored foliage in riparian corridors on the hillsides--but here on the north slope they are dry and shaded. One grows under a large liquidambar tree. It's intended to replace that beautiful non-native if ever it gets tall enough, but that wont happen in my lifetime.

The old Fremontodendron grows dense and low on the steep bank above the wall in front. It turns into a burning bush of gold flowers from April to July. The one I planted recently with the early orange bud needs continuous pruning to keep the path clear.

The one with the large heart shaped yellow bud grows at the top of the hill in back.

These Flannelbush are showy and indestructible, perfect California natives for the garden. I like looking across the valley to Poly Mountain and seeing the clumps of Flannelbush growing there wild. But Flannel is a misnomer. Rather than stroked, their leaves, flowers and stems should be handled with gloves to protect you from their tiny hairs which want to embed themselves in skin.

Creeping mountain lilac or Ceonothus Joyce Coulter is another prolific bloomer, here just about to burst into a rich purple quilt. After the blossoms drop, the leaves remain almost as deep green and shiny all year round as they do here at first emergence.

The same is true for the other five or six other Ceonothuses that thrive in the yard, each different in leaf and growth.

Only one Red twigged Dogwood, Cornus sericea, grows here, cramped between the path and the wall in front. It seems to be capable of putting out new leaves all year long, whenever it rains. When it's dry, the leaves, which are neither waxy, leathery nor hairy, go papery and fall off, exposing deep wine-colored stems.

The flowers remain packed in tight white bud-buttons during December and January and then burst into bloom lasting only a week or two.

Just uphill from the Dogwood stands a Western Redbud, Cercis occidentalis. Unusual for California plants, this one is winter deciduous, losing its leaves in early fall, blooming and regaining them in Spring. The dying leaves, slightly rubbery in texture, take on a touch of
Autumn coloring that reveals a veined and capillaried web on their circular surfaces.

Two weeks ago, when this picture was taken, I hadnt seen traces of regeneration on this tree for months, but since then tiny leaf and bright pink flower buds have started to pop all over the gray bark.

More dramatic suspense was created by the grapevine in the backyard, now about 12 years old and the centerpiece of the arbor on the mid-hill terrace that creates an elegant shady bower in summer and a rich harvest of grapes and raisins. I cut the canes back to old wood to promote new growth and fruiting in November, hesitantly following some website instructions. But when no buds appeared, well after the native California grape along the eastern wall in front had started to leaf, I thought I'd have to pull out the whole venerable stock. I checked and poked everyday for a month, and then the day of the last entry, February 2, I found, two tiny sprouts.

Now two weeks later, I still wait for more.

There's no new growth yet on the old oaks, the ones I planted seventeen years ago. But several recent volunteer Quercus agrifolia have come into leaf. I marvel at the fragility and tenderness of these infants, knowing that within the next four months they will expand and curl into thick, hard, thorny surfaces. These are the only volunteer natives that have cropped up since I started cultivating natives, testimony I think, to the fact that this north facing slope wants only to be an oak woodland.

Hummingbird sage, Salvia spathecea, has been blooming here since January, almost as early as the Red Currant. I love the delicious pink, magenta and purple colors of its flowers springing modestly, just a few at a time, from teardrop shaped sheaths of its bud clusters.

I love the sticky clear residue it leaves on the fingers when touched, smelling tart and sweet as grape soda. I love its velvety green foliage that returns every year and spreads by rhizomes, overwhelming the dark brittle remaining stalks of last year's growth. And I love the way it draws the hummingbirds low to the ground under the oaks, where it hides in the shade.

February Garden

2006-02-04T14:52:00.000-08:00

It was supposed to rain today, but we got wind and clouds instead. While grading papers, I've been taking vitamin C and Echinicea pills every couple of hours, humbly hoping to hold at bay the headache, cough and scratching in my lungs. I visited my mother in law at Assisted Living for a break, and seeing her and her companions in the rec room 20 minutes early for Bingo reinforced the winter mood.

But the overcast skies provided some good light for pictures of developments in the garden last week. After Spring in December, not much changed during January. The longer days of February have brought the early bloom of the volunteer almond tree, remnant of what must have been a local orchard before the 1950's subdivision of this neighborhood.

On Friday I got a copy of his brand new book, Plants of San Luis Obispo: Their Lives and Stories from Matt Ritter who teaches in the Biology Department and is curator of the Cal Poly Plant Conservatory. In addition to running the conservatory, teaching full time, and writing scholarly articles for tenure, he wrote the text, shot all the pictures, and did the layout for the book himself with Photoshop and Indesign.

His descriptions of the species in my garden help me see them up close: "Fuschia-flowered gooseberry is a bristly, evergren shrub with leathery, dark green, irrgularly toothed leaves. The beautiful, bright red, tubular flowers, which are pollinated by hummingbirds, hang from the stems. The stamens, which are twice as long as the rest of the flower, hang down with bright yellow tips. To ward off herbivores, there are three stout spines emanating from each node." (p. 57)
This Ribes speciosum is another early bloomer. I'd describe the leaves as waxy rather than leathery, since they're thin and they dry up in late spring, unlike the thick leaves of the holly-leafed cherry for example. Once flowers and leaves are gone the plants have a forbidding allure, like that of a cactus, but now they are all slender and delicate. At the Brizzolara Creek Committee we've talked about planting them as hedge to keep people out of the watercourse.

At the side of the house, by the compost and redwoods, the wild strawberries are back. Soft, matt, and pertly serrated, the leaves make a fresh bed for occasional yellow-centered white blossoms.

Territoriality

2006-02-01T18:14:00.000-08:00

Today's ecolit class was a hike to Rockslide Ridge.

We've been reading John Muir's The Mountains of California. Its first paragraph contains a fine description of our home territory.

The Coast Range, rising as a grand green barrier against the ocean, from 2000 to 8000 feet high, is composed of innumerable forest-crowned spurs, ridges, and rolling hill-waves which inclose a multitude of smaller valleys; some looking out through long, forest-lined vistas to the sea; others, with but few trees, to the Central Valley; while a thousand others yet smaller are embosomed and concealed in mild, round-browed hills, each with its own climate, soil, and productions.

I'd asked students to study the Geology chapter of Cal Poly Land: A Field Guide to connect the Muir text to our walk and to help them to decipher some of the language of the landscape.

The winter weather was clear and crisp. On my way up to our meeting place at the horse unit, I biked toward Drumm Reservoir and the site of "Poly Canyon Village," a huge new student residential development I'd spent many hours haggling about in committee during the last five years. I'd just learned from reading Christy's ecolit journal that groundbreaking started two days before with the destruction of ancient Eucalyptus trees:

Driving up to Peterson ranch this afternoon I was shocked to come across the mass arboreal murder taking place. The beautiful eucalyptus trees that have shaded the feed mill, the feedlot, and the bull test are being savagely mown down by hairy, overweight cretins in fluorescent vests. In the summer when it gets unbearably hot, there is some much needed comforting shade under these fragrant guardians. During wind-whipped storms, their branches sway and shed leaves in all directions. They hold the land stable; they act as nice bumpers for those whose breaking skills are not up to par. To me they stand watching over year after year of Cal Poly students. They have seen the succession of eager high school potential, to Poly student to teacher, teacher to department head, then to retirement. ...Just five days ago, I walked to my car parked under those fated Eucalypts, listening to the eerie creaking and groaning of the trees, despite the dead stillness in the air. They knew, and they were broadcasting their goodbyes through the song of their branches.

I found only huge stumps, cut close to the ground. The rings werent visible enough to be counted.

While we waited for stragglers, I pointed out the borders of Cal Poly Land on the map. Our destination was just outside the property line. At exactly 10:15 by my watch, we started up the hill. Every minute counted if we were to be back in time for the next scheduled class at noon.

The horse corral above the stables provided a lesson in erosion and land misuse. As a flock of crows cawed in the twisted sycamore limbs, one student pointed out a foot-high gap between the ground and the concrete foundation of a watering trough, measuring the loss of topsoil.

At the top of the corral we came upon Indonesian reservoir, designed and built by a group of Indonesian students in the '60's to impound runoff from Horse canyon creek in front of us and water pumped uphill from the system of reservoirs, ditches, pipes and creeks that serve as plumbing to irrigate campus farm facilities. I pointed out Kestrel Crest, the serpentinite ridge above the reservoir. Kestrel was defined as a small raptor, a sparrow hawk. Kiell mentioned that it was also a verb that meant hovering in flight. As if on cue, two small birds with white spots on their wings--not kestrels--appeared below the crest and kestrelled for us. Another bird flashed grey-blue and light orange. I recognized it and three more that joined it, as female Western Bluebirds, Sialia mexicana. Not as impressive as the more brightly colored male I had photographed last year from my deck

they nevertheless gave me a thrill when their gray wings suddenly turned blue as they angled in the sun.

After a brief stop at bedrock mortars surrounding a grove of bay and hollyleaf cherries under the high voltage lines bringing power to the campus from the grid in Morro Bay, we huffed uphill on a deeply eroded dirt road past some recent slumpage in the Franciscan melange soils on the bank, passing through a shaded oak woodland along the creek. The woodland gave way to grassland and then to rock outcrop plant communities growing on the base of the steep upper slopes that constituted Rockslide Ridge. Despite an increase of wind, the temperature went up, and I had to remove my sweater and take a drink.

At the saddle dividing Horse Canyon from Poly Canyon, some people decided to ascend no further, while the rest of us left the road and found various paths through the unstable rock and gravel, avoiding the needle pointed tips of Spanish Dagger that thrived without much competition on the infertile serpentinite soil. Most of the group had never seen this backcountry before. Other people delighted in the escape during class hours. I watched the clock, knowing we had to reach the top by 11 in order to have fifteen minutes there before going back down.

I was one of the last near the summit to clamber over a barbed wire fence that ended in a vertical drop-off where half the mountain had shaken loose and slid down into the valley that was now the Architectural Area. Instructed by Professor Chipping's explanations in the Field Guide, one could see where springs erupting from impermeable layers of rock covered by the slides secreted watercourses lined with green black clumps of trees--oaks, bays, sycamores and willows.

I collected papers due today and then people dispersed on the summit plateau, just outside the University property line to write in their journals.

(photo by Danielle O'Neill)

I found a natural rock bench, drank some water, munched on a chunk of olive bread and looked for a subject to describe. Just to my west, on a dried flower stalk of Yucca whipplei, perched another female bluebird. I approached her slowly to get a picture, and she let me come within 20 feet.

Then she disappeared and I went back to my seat. Looking to the south, over the campus toward the city in the distance, I saw her on another stalk, watching me.

I approached again. This time she flew directly toward me and fluttered in an arabesque a few feet from my eyes. At first I told myself she was rewarding my attentions. But then I realized this was threat behavior. I was doubly trespassing, my sit-spot in the middle of her territory, between her guard towers. I checked my watch. It was three minutes after the time to leave.

Rinconada Trail--Big Falls

2006-01-28T19:39:00.000-08:00

I'd been looking forward to today's Sierra Club hike throughout a challenging week filled with classes, student conferences, 90 minutes of testimony at a deposition and lots of meetings. Big Falls is a famous local attraction and I'd never been there.

I carpooled with Chris on the way to Santa Margarita. Dense fog met us at Cuesta Pass, and at our meeting place, people shivered in the cold. There were 35 of us eager to tackle the nine miles and 1700 foot elevation gain announced on the Outings page of the monthly Chapter newsletter. I asked if anyone was interested in having a copy with articles about the many activities going on during the month and a membership application. Fifteen people asked for it.

Ruby RAV filled with two more passengers for the last ten miles of car travel to the trailhead through Santa Margarita Ranch and out toward Pozo. Huge valley oaks, bare of leaves during the winter, loomed in the fog, their limbs arching over the road and dividing into gnarled branches looking like arthritic witch fingers.

At the trailhead the fog broke up and we took off at a breathless pace up the first long ascent through blue oaks and coastal scrub. The small trees were still bare, but black sage, California sagebrush and chamise were in fresh new leaf. People spoke about how hot and dry this hike was during summer. At the top of the first ridge, we took a break and looked out over the Santa Lucia range to Cuesta Ridge on the horizon hiding Edna Valley on the other side.

Heading downhill toward Lopez Canyon, one could see a series of parallel valleys to the south filled with fog. Other than a couple of water tanks and fireroads, nowhere on the whole hike were there signs of human habitation, not even a fence.

Occasionally the scrub and serpentine outcrops alternated with meadows, mostly gray with last years dead grasses, but showing the green of new growth hesitantly emerging. I saw hardly any of the annual grasses that filled the hills in the lower elevations; instead these were native perennial bunch grasses. Clearly this area had not been cultivated by the early settlers. The remains of the highway 41 fire of twelve years ago were still in evidence, but I thought that this area would soon welcome more fire, since in some places the scrub was getting thick and clotted with dead growth.

The group was large enough to spread for half a mile along the trail, and it was fun to watch people far below on the steep slopes crisscrossed by switchbacks. They moved in shifting groups, pairs and singles and conversation flowed easily.

It was not too early in the season for dramatic displays of red current

and Chris noticed one large shooting star growing right alongside the trail.

Soon we descended into a shady oak woodland of non-deciduous California live oaks. Then I noticed a series of pools beside the path that gave way to a trickle. For the next mile it dropped away out of sight but within earshot of its increasing babble. Suddenly we came out of the woodland to a crossing where the water flowed over smooth rocks and formed lovely pools surrounded by wooded canyon walls.

This was the most pleasing part of the trail, and all too soon we we arrived at the top of the falls, where some folks decided to sit and rest while others explored the lip of the falls.

The trail spiralled through woods down the fifty foot drop and returned to the base of the falls where most folks chose to eat lunch. There was a festive sense of arrival at a worthwhile destination.

I really wanted to swim in the pool at the base of the fall--in my underpants. I took off my boots and crawled out on a log hanging over the clear inviting water. I knew it would be chilly, but I expected to be able to immerse my legs up to the knees until the pain went away and the rest of my body acclimated. This method had worked to allow me to swim for an indefinite time in the cold water of local beaches. But I couldnt leave my feet in for more than a minute or two at a time, and after a quarter of an hour I realized that my plan wouldnt work. So I stared at the tumbling spray and listened to its sounds and resigned myself to a chaste encounter.

Love Among the Pinnipeds

2006-01-20T14:35:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting in an easy chair in an Oakland Starbucks, wireless blogging for the first time. We drove from San Luis Obispo this morning so Jan could meet a client in a retirement home across the street and go to an all-day workshop on estate planning in San Francisco tomorrow. By coincidence this place is also the residence of an old friend who's had several strokes. We've planned dinner with her and her daughters tonight. When they were aged 2 and 4 in 1964, I was a graduate student and lonely lodger in their home. This is a familiar neighborhood. Half a block away is the apartment I inhabited for two months in 1989 while attending a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar at Berkeley, again as a lonely lodger.

Yesterday's Nature Explorers took us to the Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal viewing area a few miles north of San Simeon and Hearst Castle. According to the Central Coast Friends of the Elephant Seals, this is the venue of "Mother Nature's Big Show." They dont exaggerate. Here one can witness the life force at work on a grand scale.

In a grayish-brown mass blending with the sand, thousands of bloated bodies lie packed on the mile-long beach, looking at first like the victims of a vast kill left behind by the tide. But the air is alive with shrieks, croaks and clicks emanating from what a closer look reveals as bubbling activity. With handlike flippers, fat loungers toss puffs of sand onto their backs. Glistening black babies cry for their mothers and jockey for space at teats on smooth ovoid bellies.

Mothers scream desperately to locate their offspring in the shuffling press. Young females arch skyward and howl, displaying bright pink mouths and sharp teeth. Pairs of juvenile males do push-ups with their foreflippers and face off with bobs and taunts. Mountainous old males erupt into motion, crash through the crowd, and scatter their junior rivals. Inamongst all this fierce and tender clatter gulls, jays and crows stand silently in attendance.

A couple of weeks ago in Ecolit class, I'd read aloud the creation poem from the opening chapter of Genesis. Here was day three:

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind. and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.

Despite the biblical blessing and my own reverence for biodiversity, I had second thoughts about the abundance and fertility of these creatures--their cacaphonous noise, the awful smell of their fish breath, their huge size, grotesque faces, clumsy movements, and the sheer numbers of their offspring. Not long ago, the Elephant Seal, Mirounga angustirostris was driven nearly to extinction by the market for its blubber, which supplied fuel oil from living rather than fossilized creatures. But now, as a result of the 1972 marine mammal protection act, their population has dramatically rebounded and they claim more central coast beaches amid complaints about their depleting local fishstocks.

Our group made its way to the end of the boardwalk and stopped at one place long enough to start distinguishing activities and individuals among the seething mass immediately in front of us. Near the edge of the water someone pointed out that a pup had just been born. There was the large male, the half-sized female, and in front of her the new baby still covered with remains of the amniotic sac.

We watched as, like a mother cat, she licked the prostrate infant into shape.

Suddenly a flurry of screaming seagulls surrounded the mother and child blocking them from view.
Could they be mobbing the baby, attempting to devour the new life? As they settled down, what was happening became clear. They were pulling and picking at slimey red strands of placenta that the mother had just delivered, cleaning up the beach, celebrating a birthday. Creatures of the sea and fowls of the air were brought forth on the same day.

A sign at the parking area noted that one month after giving birth on this beach, females were ready to conceive for a second time during the winter mating season.

Just below us on the boardwalk, a young silver-colored beauty with blue eye shadow posed and wiggled her tail, provoking a reaction from a nearby juvenile male.

He sidled on over, placed a companionable flipper on her hip, and with half-lidded eyes did something that caused her to laugh.

One thing led to another and soon they amiably hooked up.

Undeterred by lack of privacy, they lay together peacefully for a long time, occasionally trembling or shifting positions.

Suddenly, the male jumped off his mate as if shocked with an electric prod and shuffled speedily up the beach. From the opposite direction, a scar-chested warlord gallumpfed toward us, plowing a thick furrow in the sand. He landed heavily by an adjoining female, put his arm around her waist and pulled her close.

The new couple snuggled and quivered for several minutes before the male withdrew. Then they switched sides and blissfully embraced.

Earlier in the week, my co-instructor, Jimm Cushing, and I were lecturing on Plato's Symposium during our class, "Love in the Ancient World." This passage was in back of my mind:

See you not how all animals, birds, as well as beasts, in their desire of procreation, are in agony when they take the infection of love, which begins with the desire of union; whereto is added the care of offspring, on whose behalf the weakest are ready to battle against the strongest even to the uttermost, and to die for them, and will let themselves be tormented with hunger or suffer anything in order to maintain their young. … why should animals have these passionate feelings? … the mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to be attained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a new existence in the place of the old. ...according to that law of succession by which all mortal things are preserved, not absolutely the same, but by substitution, the old worn-out mortality leaving another new and similar existence behind--unlike the divine, which is always the same and not another.

Watching the couplings of these animals affected me strongly. I saw in it a tenderness, grace, and immediacy that I had never witnessed outside of my own experience. A bond of intimacy had formed between me and the elephant seals, driven alike by the force that "through the green flower drives the fuse"--the power of Eros.

Vernal Pool

2006-01-16T07:45:00.000-08:00

My colleague Craig and I hadnt taken a hike since our search for the source of Stenner Creek last July. Ian was still on recess from Nursery School. So last Friday afternoon the three of us drove in Ruby RAV up TV Tower Road on West Cuesta Ridge to make our way back by foot down to Cal Poly and home.

From where we parked the unearned views of the Chorro Valley, the Morros, and the Pacific were splendid,
though marred by the foreground presence of broken glass and several glistening piles of offal that looked like recently dumped deer guts. We passed by them hastily and clambered down the steep lip of the ridge top. I told Craig about the time I'd taken this route with my previous hiking buddy, Doug, who died six years ago of lung cancer. People were shooting old television sets in this sacrosanct spot, and after we passed them and rounded a curve in the fireroad, a spent bullet came over the bluff behind us and hit the back of his leg, tearing his pants, but not breaking the skin.

Passing from Los Padres National Forest Land through a gate onto Cal Poly Land, we took a trail I'd never been on heading from the ridgeline toward the watercourse containing the immense oak tree I'd slept under many times, which I wanted to show Ian. But Craig led the way and swerved south across a broad swath of grassland toward the top of Poly Canyon.

At the shoulder line of the hill, we saw the landscape below center itself around a small blue mirror set in a shallow green hollow. I recognized it as a vernal pool. I'd never seen one on Cal Poly land before, and from this vantage it looked mysterious and powerful--a place where you might find a magical sword or a frog prince.

The name of this geological feature had always appealed to me, and I had learned something about it in connection with struggles to preserve the small number that had remained in the Central Valley after 95% were destroyed by agriculture and development. The pools are formed, as are springs, where rainwater percolating downward meets an impermeable clay surface and finds no channel through which to run off. They provide habitat for rare species of plants, most of them native, endemic and endangered. Because the pools emerge during the wet season and dry up during summer and fall, introduced species that havent evolved locally to adapt to these conditions cant thrive here and outcompete the natives. Many of them produce dramatic displays of flowers during the spring, after the water disappears but before the area dries out.

Rare, ephemeral, and productive--we had come upon treasure. Ian was getting tired after a long day with no nap so Craig carried him on his shoulders while I lingered behind relishing the vision of the two of them crossing the gently curving greensward and closing in on that pure eye staring up at the firmament.

I wanted to slow my own approach to the snail's pace at which I sometimes travel alone in this countryside, but the afternoon was getting on. The closer I came, the greener and thicker the pasture, the more intense the reflections of red basalt outcrops and sky in the low angling light.

The uphill margent of the pool had a hard edge. The lower side gradually merged with the spongy shore, recalling a descriptive passage I liked to read aloud in class from Shakespeare's The Tempest:

Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep,
And flat meads thatch'd with stover, them to keep;
Thy banks with pioned and twilled brims,
Which spongy April at thy hest betrims,
To make cold nymphs chaste crowns.

I wanted to strip, leap in the water and drink my fill, but fear of a cold and of giardia held me back. I wanted to be here alone with a sleeping bag and stay the night.

The knifebladelike plants on the lower side of the pool grew half in and half out of the water. Were these some of those rare endemics? A few days later I emailed a colleague who teaches botany with this picture. He said, "There is no way to be sure, but I think it looks like one of the 'iris-leaved' rushes such as Juncus phaeocephalus.... a relatively common plant of periodically wet meadows."

I tried today, MLK's birthday, to get back and check the changes in this pool after a weeklong dry period and the more recent rain. I arranged a hike with Ian and another four year old, Francis, his two year old brother, and their two parents, Tom and Jennie. We started at Serrano ranch but only got as far as Serrano station, where we picnicked and turned back. Instead of the pool we saw the crane train repairing the tracks and climbed embankments and haystacks.

Georgics

2006-01-10T17:28:00.000-08:00

Vergil wrote this long poem about agriculture and rural life between 29 and 22 BCE and dedicated it to the Emperor Augustus. Its title derives from the Greek word for Earth--Ge or Gaia, and Ergon, or work: earth-work. I was prompted to reread it after spending time in the countryside of northern Italy last October. Its rich descriptions still apply to landscapes and methods of cultivation found there today, and its subject matter and style remind me of contemporary poets like Frost and Wendell Berry. A book called American Georgics by Timothy Sweet convinced me that it would be worthwhile to include early in the Ecolit course as a precursor of Walden.

I'd told students that our second class would include a hike of the horse canyon loop but I doubted we could fit that into the palty 85 minutes we'd have, given the need to schedule fifteen minutes at start and conclusion for leaving and returning to the central campus. I was also planning a discussion of the Georgics and its relation to pastoral traditions, some linkages between passages in the text and what we might encounter along the way, and a twenty minute interlude for quiet reflection and writing in journals. As much as possible I would use the peripatetic method of lecture, urging students to move fast in a tight knot, walking backwards and shouting. In the construction sites and parking lots along Via Carta we talked of heritage trees that were saved from the bulldozer by the intervention of enviromentalists, and threats to Brizzolara Creek, the central artery of the campus watershed. Students in Animal Science and Biology contributed much to the walkalong lesson.

At the Equine Unit, Kristy who had been there the day before caring for pregnant mares, led us past a mother and her one day old foal

to the enclosure where the mares were sequestered and given royal treatment, along the lines penned by Vergil:

To care of sire the mother's care succeeds.
When great with young they wander nigh their time,
Let no man suffer them to drag the yoke
In heavy wains, nor leap across the way,
Nor scour the meads, nor swim the rushing flood.
In lonely lawns they feed them, by the course
Of brimming streams, where moss is, and the banks
With grass are greenest, where are sheltering caves,
And far outstretched the rock-flung shadow lies.

Kristy's friend showed up with a bucket of grain she was bringing the ladies in her charge and filled us in on some of the niceties of breeding horses carried out on campus, largely through artificial insemination. This involves exciting a stallion with "teaser" mares, letting him mount a decoy, and then harvesting his sperm in a long tube known as an artificial vagina. She warned us to stay away from the dangerous rutting stallions, and I read Vergil's sound painting of the stormy passion that drives both animals and humans:

Nay, every race on earth of men, and beasts,
And ocean-folk, and flocks, and painted birds,
Rush to the raging fire: love sways them all.
Never than then more fiercely o'er the plain
...
Mark you what shivering thrills the horse's frame,
If but a waft the well-known gust conveys?
Nor curb can check them then, nor lash severe,
Nor rocks and caverned crags, nor barrier-floods,
That rend and whirl and wash the hills away.
Then speeds amain the great Sabellian boar,
His tushes whets, with forefoot tears the ground,
Rubs 'gainst a tree his flanks, and to and fro
Hardens each wallowing shoulder to the wound.
What of the youth, when love's relentless might
Stirs the fierce fire within his veins? Behold!
In blindest midnight how he swims the gulf
Convulsed with bursting storm-clouds! Over him
Heaven's huge gate thunders; the rock-shattered main
Utters a warning cry; nor parents' tears
Can backward call him, nor the maid he loves,
Too soon to die on his untimely pyre.

My watch battery had run down but I knew time was sliding by, so I decided to forgo the hike in favor of a tour of the Horticultural Unit and the Leaning Pine Arboretum. Alluding to what I learned from Animal Science Professor Rob Rutherford, I pointed out that the production of food and fibre was the original purpose of Agriculture and the School of Agriculture that Cal Poly started out as. But following the industry and the money, the fastest growing departments here now were Equine Science and Horticulture. These are dedicated to recreation and decoration, since that's where the jobs and resources of our luxury-oriented economy are directed.

Walking through the greenhouses we spoke of alternative methods of pest management and outside near the experimental turf plots and formal gardens, we considered alternative directions for horticultural science: sustainable and unsustainable. As we entered the Arboretum's California Gardens, I talked about how they inspired me to rip out my old lawns and shrubs and sprinkler systems and plant the California natives which require fews inputs and create no waste--with the guidance of ex Ecolit student and present day manager Chris who was working down the path.

Stopping by a beautiful white-limbed specimen of California buckeye--the genus of Aesculus mentioned several times by Vergil when he speaks of the Italian chestnut and horse chestnut-- we noticed the winter-spring buds swelling at the growing tips of twigs and bursting from the middle of thick branches bare to the light stimulus of the southern sun. Passing through a damp grove of redwoods, we came upon the experimental Carex plot, after the recent rains greener and fuller than I've ever seen it, proof that the right native perennial bunch grass can replace the water and chemical dependent lawns that are depleting our naturally arid lands.

At the end of the garden we observed the great scar of the quarry-dump on Poly Mountain overlooking the future site of the 2700 resident Student Housing North development, while a redtail hawk circled overhead showing off his bright underwings. What was supposed to have been a hike turned out a brief stroll concluded with fifteen minutes of journaling and repose on a circle of stones in the shade of a cypress tree.

"A wild Santa Ana wind blew off a shingle last night, the first one since the roof was laid fifteen years ago. Now it's a steady breeze from the east making ripples on Drumm reservoir that sparkle among silver clumps of deergrass.

A meadowlark yodels on a fencepost at the edge of the old Bull Test's flourescent green pasture. Never again will it be manured and cropped down to dirt. At the foot of Caballo Peak the mares nibble in the lovely surroundings Vergil recommends.

The ground feels good under the base of my spine: serpentine gravel and sun-bleached chips of mulch."

Hazzardous Waste

2006-01-08T06:39:00.000-08:00

Yesterday morning I went to the Hazardous Waste Disposal Site in Cold Canyon Landfill that's only open 11-3 on Fridays and Saturdays. The cardboard box of half-filled bottles and cans stashed in the garage--Diazanon, Malathion, ant-killer, Miracle-Grow--got soggy from the rain that seeped between the concrete wall and floor during last week's storms. I had felt good about not using all these poisons since converting to native plants several years ago, but I never finished cleaning house because I didnt want to get near the toxic stuff any more.

I put on my gloves, transferred the frightening mess to a plastic carton and drove out Broad Street under a fresh sky brightened with puffy clouds. At Buckley Road a big pickup turned onto the highway in front of me stuffed with trash and sporting a huge confederate flag fluttering on a pole fastened to the tailgate. Concentrating the winter sunlight, its scintillating red field dominated the beautiful Edna Valley landscape and steadily increased my irritation. My head filled with challenges: "So you're a big fan of slavery?" "You're celebrating traffic in human beings." "How about if you were the property rather than the owner?" When the driver moved into the left lane as if to turn on Corbett Canyon Road, I fantasized giving him the finger as I drove by but thought better of it as he moved back in front of me, clearly sharing the destination of the dump. I imagined the hostility and pain that might have been felt by an African-American staffing the landfill gate.

I followed the signs leading toward the shed where the poisons were to be left and watched the attendant dressed in white coveralls lifting a 48 inch television set on his forklift and dropping it with a crash onto a mountain of electronic detritus filling up an enormous dumpster. Five years ago somebody must have paid thousands of dollars for that half-ton item, giving it pride of place in the family home. Now it was just another piece of junk that needed to be processed at government expense. I remembered my earlier visit here with the old monitors and printers accumulated in my garage that no recycler could handle. The day before, at the Sierra Club office I discovered that installing the Quickbooks software necessary to handle our complicated non-profit financial statements required an upgrade to the operating system, which in turn required replacing the computer we had purchased only three years ago.

Snow

2006-01-07T12:30:00.000-08:00

I promised not to indulge the journaler's vice, writing about writing. But I've lagged for two weeks now, and the longer delay the harder to start, so I drag myself to this window with a scolding. How can I expect students to fulfill this assignment if I can't? How can I fail my own admired teachers, Thoreau, Wordsworth, Austin, Oliver?

My first seven months of retirement concluded with our Christmas trip to see grandson, Ethan, daughter-in-law Amy and son Joe, in the gorgeous new home he built in Sun Valley Idaho. Jan observed that his lifestyle blends his hippie childhood in British Columbia with his adolescence in Palo Alto, where we lived while I finished my doctorate and she attended law school.

The first couple of days there the temperature hovered around freezing. Cold rain alternated with falls of the largest thickest snowflakes I'd ever seen.

One late afternoon Ethan and I trudged through the foot-thick fresh cover to the creek and stared up as the grey flakes fell like cotton candy into our open mouths. They were so sticky they held to the surfaces they touched and to one another without compacting, sometimes leaving spaces that light passed through.

Next morning the temperature dropped and the sun came out. Joe was eager to ski the fresh powder at the top of the mountain. I stayed on the groomed slopes and watched the less adhesive crystals at high altitude blowing in the wind on the ridge top and the surrounding summits. They reminded me of the "snow banners" described lovingly by John Muir in chapter 3 of The Mountains of California.

Muir surmises that the powdery consistency that allows the snow crystals to be driven by the wind results from their crystalline hooks being ground off in the turbulence at high altitude. However, according to Snowcrystals.com, the reason why

...is still not known, believe it or not. The different ice facets grow at different rates in different temperatures, and to date we don't really know why the growth rates depend so strongly on temperature. The growth depends on exactly how water vapor molecules are incorporated into the growing ice crystal, and the physics behind this is quite complex and not well understood. It is the subject of current research in my lab and elsewhere.

The celebrity resort of Sun Valley, with its $70 per day ski lifts and chandelier-bedecked mountaintop lodges is not where I'd have expected to spend holiday time. But the magnet of family and also the splendor of its outdoor recreation opportunities overcome my scruples about the conspicuous consumption of resources and the inequity of wealth distribution that the place represents.

The same weather system that was making life beautiful for skiers and resort owners in the Rockies lengthened our return trip home on the last day of 2005 to fourteen hours. We got back just in time for the ECOSLO bash in the Vets Hall that Jan had helped to organize, to celebrate a New Year's Eve more hopeful than the last one.

Another Look

2005-12-23T11:57:00.000-08:00

"What is a course of history or philosophy or poetry no matter how well selected...compared to the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen," says Thoreau. (Walden p. 105) I tried to exercise some of that discipline this morning. Instead of going Christmas shopping I returned to the raceme of pink-flowered currant that I had looked at earlier in the week, now again illuminated by a horizon-hugging sun.

I noticed that the five petals of each blossom split into two layers, a longer outside one arching back and curling at its edges, and a shorter inside one that remained erect. The splaying outside layers gave the blossom its star shape. The inside layers combined into an open tube surrounding its golden pistil and stamens. I also noticed some changes since the last look:

seven of the blossoms were open instead of four. Five pink closed blossoms cupped a cluster of immature green buds at the raceme's tip. As each blossom opened, it diverged from the central axis on its own outward stretching stem. The higher on the raceme, the more mature the blossom and the the more shrunken and curled the sepal which had enclosed it as a bud.

My revisited raceme seemed to be the oldest one on the shrub, its location best placed to gather the sparse sunlight and attract me with my camera. On other twigs I found younger growing tips. They revealed that flowers and leaves are originally enclosed in a single germinal container springing from the battered remnants of last year's growth.

The subtle fragrance of Ribes sanguineum glutinosum, more leathery than sweet, occasionally wafted past but dissipated before I could satisfy my hungry nostrils. I wanted to be smaller, faster and more sensitive--like the bug that buzzed by me and dove into one of the blossoms. Then I understood that they had evolved to entice it into spreading their red and sticky seed.

I've often discussed with students the lines of Wordsworth's "The Tables Turned" that inspired Thoreau's preference of Nature over Culture:

Come forth into the light of things
Let Nature be your teacher.
...
Enough of Science and of Art
Close up those barren leaves
Come forth and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

I'm still trying to figure out how to do that. Returning to the same flower after a few days and noticing some changes, spending enough time to really look at it and allow the bugs to show up, taking as long as I need to find the right words--that's a start.

On the way to the back door to clean the mud off my shoes, I noticed a patch of sunlight on the wall of my excavation.

While digging I find the life of the seasons in the mineral as well as in the vegetable and animal. A few weeks ago, this same ground broke the tip off the steel pickaxe. Now my spade sinks into the damp earth like a scoop into ice cream.

Waves

2005-12-21T15:03:00.000-08:00

I read this yesterday in the SLO Tribune

"The ingredients are now in place to produce a huge wave event," said John Lindsey, Diablo Canyon weather forecaster.

...Wednesday's waves are generated by a storm 1,100 miles to the west and will hit the coast more directly.

The first waves are expected to arrive this afternoon and will build rapidly. They will peak Wednesday morning, Lindsey said.

After attending the Christmas pajama parade at Ian's nursery school with Claire this morning, I celebrated the winter solstice by driving to Morro Bay to look at the waves.

During a stop in town I took in a deep breath of sea-smell--much further ashore than usual. Driving down the hill, I saw a crowd of cars at the foot of the Rock. I wondered if people were there for the Salinen Indian Winter Solstice ceremony announced in this morning's paper or like me, to welcome the waves at the end of their long journey. Then I saw the blasts of spray above the breakwater.

The heavy camera and tripod made me self-conscious among the dozens of people there with palm-sized digitals, but they added to my sense of purpose. As I rounded the corner toward the open ocean, I heard the crashes echoing from the hollow stone bowl overhead and felt the ground shake. I was reminded of those disaster movies, when the thunk of a landslide or a mortar round makes your pelvic bones rather than your ear drums vibrate. The atmosphere was a mixture of church and amusement park, reverence and sensation-seeking. It may be like this for the solstice ceremony too, as it might have been during the parting of the Red Sea.

I couldnt tell how much of the water's angry turbulence was natural surf and how much was due to meeting the artificial impediment of piled boulders.

The slight offshore breeze lifted scarves of spray from the tops of the breakers, and the wild air they pushed before them made a playground for the gulls.

I could feel it blow as the explosions of water on rock grew more intense.

After one of them brought a shower down over the camera, I packed up and left.

Spring in December

2005-12-17T07:48:00.000-08:00

The rains have been slow this year, only two since June. But the native garden I've been cultivating since 2001 has matured. Last spring I removed the drip irrigation system I'd used to get it established, and except for one ground soak, I refrained from watering during summer and fall. All 68 varieties survived and most have remained green, proving their adaptation to arid conditions, subsisting on fog, dew, and bits of moisture their roots capture deep in the parched clay soil. Buds were fattening on a buckeye I'd planted a couple of years ago and another had started to leaf.

But this made me nervous. With so little water in the ground, would they deplete their energy with premature growth? I checked my authority on California Natives, the website of Bert Wilson, proprietor of Las Pilitas nursery, and found that Aesculus californica is "tolerant to drought but needs regular water for the first few years." Remembering Bert's general abhorrence of watering, this warning seemed urgent. I hooked up the hose and gave the two little saplings a normal season's worth of precipitation.

The next morning, Sunday, I was gently awakened by the gurgle of rain in the downspout on the wall by my bed. I put on a wool sweater and hat and went out to enjoy it. I climbed the ladder to the roof and cleared the gutters of curled Eugenia leaves and spikey liquidambar seedpods. I rooted up dandelions that had sprouted in the front yard. I transplanted ten bunches of Idaho fescue stored in pots after I'd cleared them off the hillside I've been excavating with pick and shovel to make room for an extension of Jan's office. I cut huge clumps of deergrass straw and spread the leaves and seed stalks on the muddy paths. I filled the wheelbarrow with raked leaves and sprinkled the crackling residue on the spoil I'd been dumping alongside the house to raise the ground level. The porous mixture absorbed the water puddled on the dense clay, protected my shoes, and made a deep-textured carpet of autumnal tweed.

I knew that the thirsty plants would respond quickly to the rain, and next morning I went out to look at the new growth. This is Ribes sanguineum glutinosum, or pink flowered currant. The specimen between the neighbors' towering second story and our roof has grown 10 feet, as fast and as tall as the Redwood next to it. Another in total shade under the fence, which I planted to replace a vigorous non-native tree I cut down, has only reached two feet, but is also showing new leaves. The two in back, on the steep north facing slope where there's very little soil, have reached about four feet. Bert says "This Ribes is more drought tolerant than most of the drought resistant plants of the trade, but in a native garden plant towards the wettest section... ."

Plants for a Future, a British permaculture site reminds me that sanguineum and glutinosum stem from the latin words for "bloody," and "sticky," and informs me that its fruits are edible though not tasty. From Native Plants of Montara Mountain I learn that this Ribes belongs to the Grossulariceae family, which contains currants and gooseberries. The vivid language invites a bit of rearrangement

Leaves: alternate, palmately-lobed, hand-like, soft, veined, with edges curving under.
Flowers: pink, five-petaled and stamened, funnel and star shaped, racemes in hanging cascades at ends of branches. Calyx fused to the pistil.
Fruit: Fleshy, red berries ripening to dark blue; developing below the calyx lobes in clusters, with tan seeds inside.

It includes two beautiful words I pursue in the Dictionary:

Raceme:

An inflorescence having stalked flowers arranged singly along an elongated unbranched axis, as in the lily of the valley...from Latin racmus, a bunch of grapes.

Calyx:

the whorl of sepals...collectively forming the outer floral envelope...enclosing...the developing bud

Compared to these technical descriptions, how little of this plant have I described or perceived, even with the assistance of the camera. I need another look.

Holding Water

2005-12-13T17:50:00.000-08:00

In the fourth paragraph of "The Ponds"--chapter 9 of Walden--Thoreau elaborates on the experience of sitting in his boat at midnight fishing under the moon. "It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook."

He does something like that in the paragraph that follows, by attempting to describe the colors of the pond's water:

Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both. Viewed from a hill-top it reflects the color of the sky, but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of the pond... . When much agitated, in clear weather, so that the surface of the waves may reflect the sky at the right angle, or because there is more light mixed with it, it appears at a little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself; and at such a time being on its surface, and looking with divided vision, so as to see the reflection, I have discerned a matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more cerulean than the sky itself...

This passage reminded me of the surface of the water when I've been on it in B.C. It would be impossible for me to describe from memory, but I'll try with the help of some photos.

Late one afternoon this summer, Jan and I were paddling back to the government dock in Okeover Arm after exploring Freke Anchorage at the head of the inlet. The sinking sun sillouetted the Gwendolyn Hills to the west. There was hardly a breeze.

The water's surface was smooth as oil but irregular, unbroken but rippling, a mirror of melted quicksilver covered in sharply outlined shifting patches of color. Blue for sky, white for cloud, black for shadow, grey--for who knows what, perhaps the transparency of its own depths. As they emerged and dissolved, the patches nested within one another and took on nameable shapes: a chain of islands, a duck, a seal, flukes. It hit us both at once--this surface, these colors and living embedded shapes: a Tsimshian blanket.

The ruins of time builds mansions in Eternity.

2005-12-05T11:48:00.000-08:00

[click pics for larger versions]

This is a quote from a letter about the death of a friend by William Blake. Since the last entry, I've been engaged in such demolition-construction. A week ago, Peter emailed me from British Columbia with news of the death of Kenneth Law, a man who lived with us on the farm in 1973 whom I hadnt heard from for the last 25 years. Peter said there was to be a memorial for him in Lund on Saturday and another in Vancouver on Tuesday. Kenneth's presence came back to me with a shock. I groped through the old albums and journals strewn on the floor around my desk and found pictures and stories, some in his hand. I decided to collect them in a new weblog and see about making a quick trip north.

Now I sit typing by a window at the edge of the ocean with a view of Harwood Island floating in a flat grey expanse of water and sky emitting a horizontal spearpoint of brilliant white light. This is the home of Peter and his wife Margaret, a cabin with a woodstove, an outhouse and crumbly foundations where they have lived since Jan and I moved back to California in 1979. While they both are at work in town massaging patients, I 've been reading poems about aging, death and childbirth by Margaret and two poets she introduced me to: Susan Cohen and Mary Tilberg, who lives up the coast.

My shoulders and thighs still ache after yesterday's excursion in the snow through the Smith Range. The plan was for Peter, Steve Ervington and me to go cross country skiing on logging roads and the Sunshine Coast Trail, but for most of the way either the trail was too steep or the snow was too shallow, and we ended up carrying the skis and slogging in the cold for most of the day. Rediscovering the trail after having lost it just before dark reduced the impulse to complain during the last grueling two and a half hours.

The closeness of the sky, the brevity of day, the muffled silence of the woods, the floating ash-sized snow flakes, the fir boughs drooping with their loads, the longing for the stove recalled the long winters that gave character to our sojourn in the wilderness during the 1970's. We've come back every year, but only in the summertime.

The day before fulfilled the purpose of the trip and more. The sky was a rare December blue. After Margaret's biscuits and Turkish coffee, Peter and I drove to Knoll House, the present family vacation home, and walked the new trails I cut last August. They felt seasoned and permanent, opening parts of the bush I had never ventured into before. The tree trail took us to

a grove of conky old-growth firs on the edge of the bluff overlooking Savary Island and the Straight of Georgia. The large clearing that Joe and I had hacked out over the past few years to open the view from the house felt like a spacious arena. Arbutus trees were fruiting in huge clumps of fat flourescent red berries, perhaps a response to an alarming decline and die-off the past

couple of years. Drunk on the fruit, the birds lost their shyness: ravens croaked, towhees flocked, a large unidentified yellow-bellied fellow watched from high in a fir. We skirted the house and took the moss trail down the north slope past the huge old-growth firs that I'd cleared and climbed around with Ethan, my grandson.

Next we drove for an early lunch to Nancy's Bakery in Lund, the village silent and pristine, a contrast to the hubbub of summer, the restored waterwheelhouse and boardwalk thick with frost.

Back up the road, with permission of the present owners, we roamed around the "Marx Farm." During the time we lived there it was called the Bleiler farm, for the owners prior to us. I hadn't revisted in ten years. The lower field was almost grown in with alders, the rest of the 20 acres covered with oystering paraphernalia, old trucks and boats, commercial signs and other detritus.

The folks who had bought the place still lived in the old house, keeping chickens and a horse, doing some gardening, staying close to the land and its past.

Though the lawn, the sandbox, the beautiful cedar fence in the back yard were completely overgrown with brambles and brush, the apple trees that were ancient when we lived there still thrived--even the one that Paul and I and Raymond had split the winter of 1971-2 by falling a huge alder on it and closely missing the house. I remembered our exertions to jack up the half of the trunk that remained connected only by a bit of bark and cambium and to wire it back to the main stem.

I remembered how I considered that effort unlikely to repair what little remained of our blasted marriage.

But it has held.

Missing from the yard was the gate built the following year by Kenneth, when he lived on the farm and helped bring us through yet another marriage and family crisis. He made it out of cedar staves with a heart-shaped peephole to keep the goats out and welcome friends. Peter remembered it and remembered living in the loft of the barn together with a different Margaret and planting a huge garden between the Winter of Raymond and Paul and the winter of Kenneth.

We made our way across the pasture to the barn which probably got its last coat of red paint in 1978, patted the stately horse, looked into the ruin of the cabin that Kenneth had turned into an exquisite shrine, and saw the ladder-staircase to the loft he'd built nearly covered with trash.

We also admired the tall fir whose lowest 150 feet of trunk I'd driven spikes into to get to the top for a view of the farm below and the ocean beyond.

It had always been the tallest tree on the property, but part of the surrounding forest. Saved by those spikes, it remained the lone survivor of the logging done just after we sold in 1988.

We walked out of the woods and drove to Rosemary's house on Ralph Road, the location for the Lund memorial.

Peter had informed me last week of another event taking place this afternoon: a community meeting in the Lund Hotel to organize opposition to plans for logging the Rasmussen Forest, a large parcel containing several rare patches of old growth timber just north of Heinz's former place, recently purchased by the poet whose work Margaret had showed me.

By the time we arrived, the meeting had been in progress for more than an hour and the small hotel conference room was packed with 70 people. Jack was chairing. Pam was telling an approving audience about the growth of the local Canadian Sierra Club chapter in the last year, so successful that it had received an award from the National. The representative of the local Provincial legislator provided information on Ministries to engage. Heinz gave an eloquent speech on the value of the few old growth trees remaining in this area--who would it hurt to leave them standing, he asked. All the issues that we hopelessly tried to confront in the 70'scame up, but now there was a sense of determination and confidence that I never expected to find. The people attending were between 3 months (Sage) and 93 years (Effie) old, there was a good representation of young people who had grown up here in my son's generation, of local oldtimers, and of new residents with energy and ability--retirees from the outside world who have settled in the area not for jobs but for its natural beauty. No one demanded a cessation of logging, just the use of selective and sustainable forestry answerable to the community.

Eagle Walz, creator of the Sunshine Coast trail and tireless negotiator with government and logging company officials, framed a resolution declaring a moratorium on old-growth logging until an adequate forest plan for the peninsula is developed. It passed unanimously except for two nay votes by Percy and Neal, ex-fishermen and loggers. The meeting ended with a flurry of financial contributions and signings of petitions and mailing lists.

After the meeting, Eagle invited Steve and me to the pub for a beer and a report on more grim news about the rescinding of agreements he had secured to protect the Sunshine Coast trail. He also had news about support of the plan for protecting Milennium Park between Cranberry and Willingdon Beach from logging by Weyerhauser.

After the sunset, we went to Steve and Juliet's house for a dinner of lamb and greek salad. The discussion of new demographics and prospects for political change left me encouraged. Perhaps the renewal that I had prayed for in 1971 was coming to pass.
_____
Solstice

Sap down.
Morning dark.
Rooster sleeps, infant coughs, wife groans.
Stove cold, pipes froze, truck stuck.
Uncoffied and late to work.

Screen Tender empties sewer samples:
"Groundwood down for cleanup
Pollution controls suspended
Today we flush the system out."

Thousands of gallons of woodpulp and bleach
Zinc hydrosulfite, sodium sulphate
Slosh through the flume into the saltchuck
Pablum for fish, heavily spiced.

In the Town Crier photo the Forestry Superintendant
Stands proud on the butt of a thousand-year-old fir.
They've finished logging the old growth grove at Goat Lake
It was one of the last virgin stands on the coast of B. C.

Cruised, felled, limbed, bucked
Skidded, yarded, loaded, trucked
Dumped, boomed, sorted, tugged
Towed, spiked, barked, lugged
Ripped, slashed, cross-cut.

Pulped, shredded, screened
Bleached, tested, cleaned
Blended, thickened, died
Rolled, pressed, dried
Wound, rewound, finished.

The Times is all that's left
For breakfast.

When darkness holds dominion here tonight
We'll find and cut a sapling hemlock tree
To celebrate renewal of the light
And hope for rebirth of the land and sea.

Thanksgivings

2005-11-27T16:15:00.000-08:00

Jan suggested a hike this Sunday morning, since she no longer has to go to church with her mother. We agreed to catch the sunrise on San Luis Mountain. There were already three cars in the parking lot when we got there and started up the hill in the chill wind. The sun crested the southern horizon as we passed below a great boulder surmounted by two large coast live oaks and slowly lit up the red, yellow and purple rock. Behind it you could see the sky turn from gray to lapis lazuli blue. As we descended from the summit after enjoying the view of the city surrounded by agricultural fields mountains and ocean and drinking coffee from a thermos, I said that the older I get the more I think its unlikely we'll move away from this place. On the way home we stopped at Home Depot for a new pickaxe. The one I'd been using broke off at the tip after hitting one too many rocks.

Now I sit at the top of the hill in the backyard on the "60th Anniversary Bench" we gave to my parents, inscribed with the old proverb about love. Its the only spot at our place that gets sun this time of year and the warm rays feel good in the chilly air. The light at midday is better than early morning or late afternoon at this time of year--both low and strong, intensifying shadows and highlights. I'm reminded of November on our old homestead in British Columbia in the '70's. Only on the bank above the driveway, high on the south facing slope could you get out of the shadow of the cliffs and tall trees surrounding the pasture. Here the goats and the cat would lounge all afternoon whenever it was clear. I've been scanning and restoring old pictures of that time from mouldering photo albums.

Its been a long Thanksgiving holiday whose approaching end is marked by the sound of students' cars returning to campus. On Tuesday morning Ian and I packed provisions and headed for Montana de Oro. We found a site near the trailhead at the end of the campground. As we were setting up the tent, a midsized healthy looking coyote sauntered by and stood scratching itself and watching us as we watched it, for about ten minutes. I was too enthralled to take out my camera. At first I thought it was a dog belonging to another camper.

At the Spooner's Cove beach we climbed a tilted sandstone outcrop and came to spot on top where the waves roared through a crack below us. I foraged eucalyptus branches for firewood and as we returned to the camp, Jan drove up after seeing her afternoon clients. The three of us took a hike up the Islay creek trail and watched fingers of fog creeping down into the canyon over Reservoir Flats. On the way back to camp Jan told the story of the three little pigs in great detail to keep Ian from thinking about being tired and we watched the sun dip into the marine layer as we came back to the camp. As the sky turned flourescent pink, then purple then black, we grilled dinner with only three candle stubs sheltered by the apple juice container for light.

Inside the little backpacking tent we hung a small flashlight from the ceiling and played Chutes and Ladders till Ian threw the spinner away in rage and then immediately fell asleep. When Jan went out to pee in the middle of the night she heard cellophane crackling and in the morning we discovered that the cookies we had forgotten to put away were missing.

Claire drove up in a big truck in time to join us for breakfast and more games. After Jan left to go back to work, Ian Claire and I struck camp and hiked the bluff trail along the ocean, sighting quail, sparrows, herons, cormorants, herons, and male and female brown pelicans which Ian identified with the bird book. We also spotted an otter relaxing in the surf between protruding outcrops.

The sun hid in the mist and then appeared briefly intensifying colors and shapes. We stayed for two hours in Corallitos Cove, throwing rocks, chasing waves, poking anemones, investigating crabs and observing the comings and goings of the pelicans. In the late afternoon we drove to Los Osos for ice cream cones.

Backyard afternoon

2005-11-21T13:42:00.000-08:00

The furious bluster of this morning's Santa Ana wind gave way to a whisper of breeze perceptible only in the flutter of mimosa leaves on the silk tree and the shimmer in the tall palms across the street. I suck in deep breaths of the soft dry air, shaded by the hillside from the hot November sun which lights up Poly Mountain across the valley and the treetops around me. The quiet is broken by a loud, scolding, mechanical noise, like a ratchet on a gearwheel. I get up for the binoculars and then remember: hummingbird.

Since no machinery can get in here, I hired a landscape architecture student and his crew to hand-excavate a 13 by 17 foot hole in the steep bank to make room for an addition to Jan's home office. The day they were supposed to start, he emailed me to say it was too big a job. Our contractor friend said, "that's alot of digging, it'll be expensive to have my guys do it." A couple of days later I realized that it would make a good project for me in the last few weeks of my early retirement recess. I could go at my own pace and enjoy a sense of steady progress, benefit from the exercise, test my newly strengthened back, and get acquainted with the dirt and rock I live on. Last Thursday I went to Home Depot with Ian and found a plastic cart with a scoop nose perfect for hauling spoil and a small spade with a handle we sawed to a length that would reach from the ground to his nose.

After ten minutes he decided he didnt like the work, but it suits me fine, especially during this week of dealing with the vagaries of my 89 year-old mother-in-law's move into an assisted living facility as a result of a fall.

The top ten inches of ground are composed of adobe clay soil that breaks up into light chocolate brown pea gravel that turns to dark sticky mud when wet. I uncover buried irrigation pipe and roots to cut with loppers. Then comes the yellowish-tan hardpan, a dense but penetrable layer that grabs the point of the pickaxe and doesnt want to let go. Then blue-green or wine-brown chert, in some places yielding, like the hardpan, in others brittle and shattering into rock gravel when hit, and in others hard enough to clank, send a shock up my arm and knock the tip off the pick. When I hit this stuff, I look for fracture lines and feel triumph when it breaks.

I just got off the phone with a student who asked me to supervise a senior thesis in Natural Resource Management on the restoration project planned for a steep bank in Poly Canyon. Along with the preparation I'm doing occasionally for upcoming winter classes, this reminds me of the world I've been away from since June and makes me glad to return. Early retirement for more than one quarter would be too much, despite the luxury of free time. No part-time project is as compelling as teaching, whose steady stresss I retreat from and desire.

The light has changed, departed from the treetops here and weaker on the mountain, where the lengthening shadows increase contrast but reduce brightness. The large black one creeping over the Buena Vista neighborhood--could it be Bishop's Peak?

Sierra Summit

2005-11-18T13:17:00.000-08:00

[This report was published in the October 2005 Issue of The Santa Lucian]

I just returned from the Sierra Summit that took place in San Francisco September 8 to 11. My wife Jan and I had decided to attend privately to strengthen our connection to the national organization in this dark time and to learn from a luminary lineup of scheduled speakers. When some of our chapter representatives couldn’t go, I became a delegate in return for half price on the registration fee. The delegates' job was to bridge a gap between leadership and grassroots and to democratically select goals guiding action and budget decisions over the next five years.

We drove up on Thursday morning with Chris Wassenberg, who'd agreed to become a much in-demand under-30 delegate, checked into a cheap hotel in Chinatown, walked to the Moscone Convention center, and fell in with thousands of well-dressed members of the California Dental Association. Finally we found our way to "Moscone North" and what was billed as "Sierra Club's First Ever National Environmental Convention and Expo." http://www.sierraclub.org/sierrasummit

The prospect of a four hour priority setting session after a long drive and no lunch in a cavernous banquet hall was not enhanced by lengthy "motivational" harangues by two professional facilitators with deep southern accents. Though the leader admitted that he had no environmental involvement of his own, he assured me that he did not normally work for energy companies like Exxon, but only churches and financial institutions. Sitting at tables in groups of ten, the seven hundred delegates were put through a series of ill conceived icebreaking exercises and endless questionnaires, and asked to prioritize vague, confusing and overlappingly phrased goals.

Midway through the session, delegates started speaking up, expressing bewilderment and resentment. Carl Pope, Sierra Club Executive Director, convinced the audience not to give up and the facilitators to talk less and listen more. By the end of the session a general consensus among delegates was reached: the first two priorities for future national action and budgeting were 1)build a clean and safe energy future with improved efficiency and renewable resources and 2)build vibrant communities assuring environmental justice and reducing sprawl.

This selection makes significant changes in sequence and wording to conclusions drawn from pre-summit surveys. It signals a shift from primary emphasis on recreation and wilderness preservation and clearly reflects the impact of Hurricane Katrina. That impact was reinforced by the surprise announcement that the Convention would be addressed at 8:30 next morning by Al Gore. He had turned down our invitation because of a previous commitment on the same day to talk about global warming to an insurance industry convention in New Orleans.

The onslaught of Katrina is an apt metaphor for the Bush administration's onslaught on the world environment. The speeches I heard at Sierra Summit on Friday and Saturday gave evidence of an energy that might be able to resist and protect from these storms.

Gavin Newsome, the radiant mayor of SF, welcomed the Sierra Club to his "49 square miles surrounded by reality" by asserting that cities can act when federal and state governments fail to address environmental issues. San Francisco has required all retired city vehicles to be replaced by hybrids, has embarked upon an aggressive green building program, and has been the first city to adopt the Precautionary Principle as a guiding policy. http://www.sfenvironment.com/aboutus/innovative/pp/

In his introduction of Al Gore to a packed hall of about 2500 people, Carl Pope told us he had just returned from India where a hardly reported storm dropped 37 inches of rain on Bombay the day that Katrina hit New Orleans. Carl witnessed that within seven hours 15,000 Indian troops were on the streets helping survivors, within 15 hours all buses in the neighboring states were mobilizeed for rescue and evacuation, within 8 hours, everyone in Bombay had food and water, and within two days plastic packaging was banned because it was discovered that plastic waste had blocked sewers and storm drains. The contrasting fate of the Gulf Coast, said Pope, was sealed on a November day in 2000, when the Supreme Court decided the case of Bush vs. Gore.

The gravity and eloquence of Gore's speech are impossible to convey. I urge you to read or listen to it at http://www.sierraclub.org/pressroom/gorespeech/. He put Katrina into the context of the gathering storm preceding World War II prophecied by Winston Churchill. We have tasted the first sip of the bitter cup that awaits us, he prophesied. Four years ago it was vacation time when dire warnings about the prospect of an attack by Al quaeda and identification of students at flight schools with no interest in learning to land were provided to the President. This summer there were warnings about what could happen if a large hurricane hit New Orleans. Three years ago, there were dire warnings that FEMA was being rendered helpless. He asked us to draw the line connecting the emotions we felt when we saw the images of Abu Graib and the emotionswe felt when seeing the people in the Superdome and then to draw the line connecting those responsible for both tragedies.

Gore compared the warnings about Hitler wilfully ignored by the British government and the West and the warnings about global warning wilfully denied by the American government, quoting Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." He insisted that we have the vision and know-how and technology we need to address global warming, but we lack the political will. "But political will is a renewable resource," he concluded, and the audience came to its feet and roared.

The glimmer of hope kindled by Gore's conclusion exploded into sunshine during the next presentation I attended, a talk by Bill McDonough, the author of Cradle to Cradle and prophet of the Second Industrial Revolution. His maxim is "how do we love all the children of all species for all time?" McDonough often works with people the Sierra Club is aligned against, such as the Ford Motor Company, for which he designed a green assembly plant in Dearborn Michigan. McDonough and his company devise products, buildings, industrial processes and cities according to standards that require zero waste and zero pollution. He showed us some of his ecotopian plans for the construction of seven new cities commissioned by the government of China which he said has adopted Cradle to Cradle as their industrial policy. Less optimistically, he alerted us to the fact that the world's oceans are rapidly lowering in Ph, and that if the present trend continues, by the year 2100, calcium carbonate will dissolve, destroying all coral and molluscs—the bottom of the food chain. If you want to know more about McDonough, a seminal thinker on Sustainability, try http://www.mcdonough.com

While McDonough spoke to an audience of 800, six other presentations were taking place simultaneously. For the late afternoon session, I attended a small one on "engaging youth" mounted by the Sierra Student Coalition. These young people organize projects like "Victoria's Dirty Secret" exposing the practises of the catalog industry which is destroying boreal and appalachian forests to produce the junk mail. SSC may be able to help us start a local group bringing together high school, college and university student allies.

Delegates convened again Saturday morning from 7:30 to 11:30 to prioritize means to achieve goals prioritized the day before. First place went to organizing people locally to take action. Second was creating new allies and coalitions. Others included supplying environmental expertise, getting people outdoors, public education, bringing legal action and creating media visibility. Delegates were then treated to a lengthy study by Harvard Professor Marshall Ganz on how the club could increase general effectiveness (NPLA). He concluded we need motivated well trained leaders and lots of attention to engaging new members in club activities. If interested, see http://www.clubhouse.sierraclub.org/committees/oegc/workplan/index.html

Saturday's highlight for me was the plenary session featuring Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Security was extensive and the great hall was even more packed than for Gore. Hoarse with laryngitis, at times desperate with anger at others ecstatic with ardor, Kennedy repeatedly brought me to tears. This is a person you could follow to the barricades. Presented with the Sierra Club's William O. Douglas award, he spoke at length about his childhood relation with Douglas and then went on to indict the present administration—headed by the worst environmental president in history who has corrupted all agencies by heading them with the bought dogs of the corporations who finance his campaigns. A former NY state assistant attorney general who spearheaded the salvation of New York's Hudson River, Bobby's son spoke about his three sons who suffer from asthma brought on by the unprosecuted criminal activities of corporate polluters. He talked about the subversion of the free market by the corporations that now control government. He talked about the ignorance of what's going on caused by the corporate media's refusal to report it. He talked about his own success at awakening and converting Red-state audiences. And finally he rhapsodized at length about Saint Francis, the Bible, religion and nature. You can find an early version of this speech at http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1120-01.htm

A quiet and lyrical coda to this Riverkeeper's jeremiad came in a presentation by Robert Hass entitled "River of Words." Another local as well as national hero, Hass used his position as former US poet laureate to create an organization promoting environmental education for children. As he does with his students at UC Berkeley he encourages teachers to take their students outdoors, to cultivate their senses and encourage their observations of nature, to get them to follow Aldo Leopold's advice to "think like a mountain," and then to have them write poems and draw pictures about their experiences. This traditional but nowadays rare approach has generated thousands of submissions from around the world which his organization makes available online and in published collections, and which in turn generate more rivers of words. Rather than reading his own lovely nature poems, Hass spent the hour showing and commenting upon exquisite examples of the childrens' work. For more information on this project see, http://www.riverofwords.org/index.html

There was much more at this amazing conference than can fit here. The impact of what I heard and saw is still not absorbed. And though I have doubts about the effectiveness of a very abstract exercise in deliberative process, the sensation of simply being together with so many people of like mind, common loss and shared aspiration--people for whom I immediately felt affection and respect--will nourish me for a long time.

Assignment

2005-11-18T11:48:00.000-08:00

Preparing for my next quarter's class, Ecolit: Reading and Writing the Landscape, I modified the Journal writing requirement to include a weblog option. At least twice a week students must write an entry. I must follow suit.

I've been going to Nature Explorers with my grandson Ian every Thursday morning. Its a program for kids up to age 8 and their parents and grandparents, part of the Coyote Road School in San Luis Obispo. The school focuses on outdoor education and nature study with an emphasis on tracking that derives from the educational philosophy of Tom Brown's Tracker School.

We've been to Bishop's Peak, Reservoir Canyon, Cuesta Park, Laguna Lake, the Sand Spit and Morro Bay Estuary, a few of the hundred wonderful natural preserves within 20 minutes of home. All the kids are enthralled with these sessions, especially Ian, and the adults seem to enjoy them with just as much enthusiasm. There's alot of philosophy and expertise that goes into the program, but each excursion feels casual and slow paced and leaves plenty of time for adventure and pure fooling around.

Alot of what goes on is similar to what happens in my University classes, although less information is conveyed. As a student rather than a teacher, however, I find myself marvelling at the knowledge of wildlife, vegetation, and Indian lore drawn upon by Dave and Evan, the leaders, especially the kind of reading of the landscape they do with the kids by studying the inscriptions left by animals in tracks, scats, and bones.

Each session has ended with some unscripted but dramatic sighting--yesterday, the last of the quarter, it was a peregrine falcon mobbed by a merlin--the two raptors noisily squabbling overhead at the Morro Bay Marina in the estuary. The week before it was discovery of the skeletal remains of a seal or a sea lion on the Sandspit. The week before, a kestrel sitting in the sun for his portrait at Laguna Lake.

Most of the students and parents attending Coyote Road classes are being home-schooled. I remember that one of the most well informed and talented writers in my ecolit class two years ago was home-schooled in North County. A full generation below me, the Coyote Road parents and instructors seem to have resurrected or retained the spirit of the sixties and seventies whose demise I've mourned since returning from exile in Canada in 1979. But at Tuesday night's general meeting of the Sierra Club, I saw more traces in the presentation about his Environmental Studies curriculum by a Paso Robles High School Teacher, Mark DeMaggio.