Stebbins Cold Canyon: Training

Last night I attended an introductory training session to lead trips at Stebbins Cold Canyon, a UC Reserve just west of Winters. I am interested in how Jeff Falyn is organizing how he encourages people of this region to connect with place, with this place in particular, and nothing is considered too off-the-wall. (See here and here for accounts of our trips to this reserve.)

We were asked to consider what the focus of our walks might be. A sixth grader is interested in maps and has discovered trails and tunnels nobody else knew, wants to share them; a retired Iranian professor of engineering wanted to lead walks focusing on poetry and nature in the great Persian tradition. I immediately put down birds and sketching, but this is a place that invites multiple prisms, and I got to thinking it might be fun to have some calligraphic doodling with reed pens I’m going to try and make from one of our noxious riparian invasives, Arundo donax, giant reed, which grows in a mild-mannered way in the Mediterranean basin but which is good for nothing here.

Except making pens and, I’ve decided, a bunch of fences to protect my new garden against the wind (Jennifer, thanks for showing me how to do this).

There’s a stand of Arundo just down below our bridge. I might see if I can’t get a stack this weekend…

Above 9000 Feet

I’m back now from Colorado, land of the aspens and steep, beautiful mountains.

Off Season

I am now at a conference in Keystone, Colorado, up at 9300 feet elevation, surrounded by mountains that are 11,000, 12,000, and even up to 14,000 feet high. Keystone is a resort town, and we are betwixt and between the summer mountain vacation period and ski season. This means that the town is quiet, very quiet. Foraging for dinner is a challenge—the cafe I went to for dinner the day I arrived is closed Tuesday through Thursday.

The area got some snow about two weeks ago, and there’s still some remaining on the higher peaks. The aspen is in full fall color—an intense warm yellow. The cadmium yellow hue in my paint box is getting plenty of use.

Mapping All Them California Plants

A couple of years ago, two colleagues of mine at work started to pull together two data sources on the California flora into a combined database that they call CalJep. For many months now, I have been working to make the CalJep database into an online mapping application and am happy to say that it is now live on the web. This application allows you to look at a distribution map of any of almost 7900 plant species in California. Do have a poke if you’re interested—feedback on the interface is always helpful.

Landscapes Of Moral Rot

Two institutions of higher learning and several lifetimes ago, a progressive colleague of mine recommended the book The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, by Andrew Bard Schmookler, saying that it was brilliant. I read it and concurred, gleaning from it the idea that the vast majority of evils result from layers upon layers of acts of power across successive civilizations, not from anything innate in our nature. Moving on to the present, I just discovered that Mr. Schmookler has a website and blog. The site is his response to the amorality and fascistic impulses of the present administration.

But his premise is that this moral crisis is the result of the failings of both liberals and conservatives. In the introduction to the site, he writes:

Many Americans feel a sense of alarm about the moral condition of American society today.

Many in the liberal half of America worry that the political right has been taken over by amoral forces that only pretend to be righteous while they indulge their lust for power and wealth. Many in the conservative half of America fear that America’s moral integrity has been eroded by an “anything goes” culture abetted by the moral permissiveness of contemporary liberalism.

Both these worries are well-founded.

His critique of liberalism is of particular interest:

First, unable to recognize the truth in the old idea that the battle between good and evil is a central part of the human drama, liberalism has been unable to recognize the nature of the forces it’s up against. It is this inability to see these forces for what they are that has rendered liberalism impotent to make an effective stand against them.

And, second, unwilling to take seriously the distinction between right desire and wrong desire, liberalism has been complicit in the emergence of a trash culture that undermines standards and ideals and that cultivates what is base and degrading. This moral decadence, in turn, has created among many Americans a kind of moral anxiety that has historically provided fascistic forces an opening to exploit in their quest for power.

In one post on his blog, he asks his readers for “vignettes of ‘moral rot’ in America”. He cites as an example the routine nastiness in the media, even in in his favorite television show that is at times prophetic and brilliant.

Violence and nastiness in the media are clear examples of moral rot, but what I am curious about is finding instances of cultural degradation in our landscapes. Does the way we create landscape have a moral component to it? And concomitantly, doesn’t inhabiting a degraded landscape lead to moral decline in other aspects of culture?

I believe this is the case. Trying to define a “landscape of moral rot” I come up with the following—a landscape where the forces of greed or lack of respect for personal or collective space predominates.

What are examples? At the small-scale level of individual action, graffiti is clearly one. At the opposite end of the scale would be the the result from the act of drilling for oil in ANWAR. (One perspective on the Republican fixation on ANWAR is that once the taboo on tearing into that last pristine landscape is broken, all other acts of environmental destruction would be simple.)

Closer to home, don’t we see an expression of moral rot in our current housing slump, one that I predict will be long-lasting and deep? It’s sheer greed upon the landscape. People buy huge houses they can’t afford which leads to developers building vast tracts of huge, ugly, and shoddily-constructed things until the system collapses of its economic contradictions.

The antidote to such landscapes is cultivating a sense of aesthetics in our built environment. Of course this means doing something that is completely academically uncool and counter-postmodern—making moral judgments about aesthetics in cultural production, claiming a role for high culture, asserting the primacy of social order, and so on.

Some landscapes just are ugly—let’s cultivate!

Greening the Parking Spot

(I’m blogging this in the dark—we’ve had no power since 9 AM, due to the wind storm.) Yesterday, a number of environmental design activists in San Francisco, and perhaps elsewhere, declared it to be PARK Day. Rather than occupying a 2 hour metered parking spot with a car, they set up a temporary park, often complete with a lawn and a tree! They did this at a dozen or more sites throughout the city.

(From WorldChanging).

Bound For Rio Vista

We had a big, blustery north wind today. Headed into town after lunch today, we noticed that our cardboard solar cooker, last seen on the plastic chair by our front door, was now about 100 yards into the alfalfa field to the south. I ran after it and jammed it into the shelter of the back seat of the car.

A Fortnight-long Sketchcrawl

Going to Europe—including a wedding—with no camera raised a few eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic. But sketching our way around Madrid, Segovia, from trains, from benches in three countries allowed both of us to connect with our surroundings in a different way than a digital camera would have.

For a start, anything’s fair game, subjects that would not have been “worth” photographing. My new shoes. The top of the head of the balding man in the seat in front of me on the plane. The half-drunk glass of sangria on a table, an old wooden door, Jennifer and Harald’s boots. Sure, we did sketch the grandiose—I did two sketches of the aqueduct in Segovia, for instance—but there is much pleasure to be had in tracing lines that outline the simple, the mundane.

Blogging for us grew out of our log book, a journal with pen and a few sketches about our dwelling-place. Sketching for me at least has in turn been influenced by blogging, in that I chose where to go in, say, London, in part by what sketching opportunities might be had.

(I should probably fess up at this point that I did shell out an enormous sum to go up the London Eye precisely for this reason, only to succumb to vertigo and possibly regret, but then I made up for it in far more prosaic settings along the South Bank, such as the kid who was bungee-trampolining with a grin on his face almost the size of the pods revolving slowly above and to his right.)

We had different trajectories, Numenius and I. We mostly sketched independently. And, at night, we’d look at each other’s books and get peeks into each other’s days and glimpse alternate universes and our courtship from years ago, a slowly unfolding narrative conducted at a slight remove of time and a considerable remove of space…

Try it, I urged a Canadian tourist whose brother-in-law had invited me over to their table across from the Museum of Garden History, having caught a glimpse of the fish-lampost I’d just rendered quickly in pen and ink. Your life will be changed.

She did, right away. She drew a sketch of me. It was rudimentary and she was embarrassed but I urged her on, because this is important.

I really do believe that.

[Postscript: Doc Rock’s comment reminds me that I should add a link to Danny Gregory’s site and urge readers who’d like to find out more about this kind of thing to see his books, Everyday Matters and Creative License. I certainly did end up telling quite a few people about Danny’s books while I was away.]

City Mouse-Country Mouse-City Mouse

I think our plan to recuperate from the rigors of a Madrid wedding by heading to our friends’ 150 year old farmhouse in rural Småland, Sweden, turned out to be wise. At least I’ve had a chance to recover from this cold probably picked up at Gatwick last week (where every variant of the common cold in the known universe passes through) and have had lots of therapeutic sketching sessions in garden, yard, and forest. Today we went on a little outing to Eksjö, famous because a large section of town still survives as all-timber wooden construction. Tomorrow we’ll be ensconsed deep in central London—are we ready for the change of pace?

There, and Here

There was Madrid. Growing fast, unrecognizable, a chaos of consumerism and people coming back from their month at the beach. There was the sun, the fans whipped out the minute any woman over fifty broke a light sweat. There was the metro, now pristine and on time. There was the queue—a queue! in Spain!—at the bus stop.

There was the wedding, chaotic again and multilingual, fans handed out to both men and women and which my goddaughter and I used to scoop up rosepetals. There were the foreigners in Madrid, the ones I grew up around, some still there though creaking now.

There was the new anti-smoking ordinance.

Here is the green. The red barns. The opulence of conifer forests broken by fields with huge granite boulders that would turn a plough into splinters. The wind and the draughts and the need to take your shoes off before going indoors, no matter what.

Here, finally, is some decent tea.

We are filling sketchbooks…