Truth and Beauty

We returned this morning to Cold Canyon for a journal entry workshop. The person leading it, Ed Dawkins, wanted us to focus on Truth and Beauty. My immediate reaction on seeing the workshop advertised was Keats: a romantic’s view of the universe, but there are worse ones… but Dawkins’ counterpart was Whitehead, talking about half-truths and how truth is impossible without beauty.

The first part we were to focus on the beauty within ourselves, and how that shapes our truths. The second section was dwelling in the moment. I was hearing wrentits and hutton’s vireos and, toward the top of the trail, black-headed grosbeaks but we were encouraged to eschew specificity for general input. It was hard, but it was useful.

My mind kept turning to Abu Ghraib. It was inevitable. What role has beauty there? Or truth, for that matter? How will the people who survive that experience—captors or captive—ever experience either truth or beauty again? When Truth, a half-truth informed by ill-informed religious belief, starts to run the world, we are all in for a nasty shock. And worse, if we are at the butt end of a rifle or cigarette. Evil will reign.

Yet there is something here, something that calls. The gray pine—digger pine, foothill pine, ghost pine, pine of more names than we can utter, most of them unuttered by any human—sits in that canyon and is. Is beauty. Is truth. Our job is to attend to it. Otherwise it’s all smoke and mirrors, or dogs in torture chambers.

Conservation Commons

I heard a seminar today by Tom Moritz, who is a librarian who has been at the American Museum of Natural History and prior to that the California Academy of Science and has just taken up a position at the Getty Research Institute. Tom is a great proponent of the Conservation Commons, the purpose of which “is to ensure open access and fair use of data, information, knowledge, and expertise on the conservation of biodiversity for the benefit of the global conservation community and beyond.” The idea of the Conservation Commons has grown out of the Creative Commons movement, the idea of the latter being to give creators a spectrum of possibilities to license their work between full copyright and the public domain, “a some rights reserved” notion of copyright. There have been many endorsers of the Conservation Commons to date, but the idea of open access to data is still a difficult one for a lot of folks to work with.

Slow Road Home

A copy of Fred First’s book arrived today. A Blue Ridge Book of Days. This book has been a long time coming and it’s a thrill to see it finally bound and delivered—a book we’ve been watching happen through Fragments From Floyd.

When you write a blog, daily, you do write in fragments. Yet how well this transition—from screen to page—seems to have gone, especially since there are almost no photographs, a surprise for me. Fred’s writing is always at his best, I think, when he allows humor to punctuate his deep and often quite moving observations about place, his place, his nook in Floyd County where the county seat has only one traffic light (we’ve seen it).

And then there’s this:

“This was a pasture where cattle grazed. Before that, virgin hemlock and oak and white pines tall as ships’ masts grew in dark forests seldom visited. I wish I could have seen it then. I wish I could see it fifty years from now when it will have begun to seem like healthy forest once again. But I only have today—a fixed point in the succession from past to future; and I’ll try to do a better job of living in the land and in the time I have here.”

John Elder couldn’t put it better…

Losing The Heart Of Berkeley

We heard the bad news from Ron. Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley is closing as of July 10. This store has been in its present location for as long as I have been alive and has always been the flagship bookstore in Berkeley and the East Bay.

The press release blames a 15-year decline in sales in the Telegraph Avenue location, together with a loss of sales from the Internet. The store has two other locations—one on the highly yuppified 4th Street in Berkeley, and another that just opened in the past year or so on Stockton in San Francisco. I have always found the 4th Street Cody’s to have a fairly paltry selection, and have never been to the San Francisco store.

Probably this decision has been in the works for some time. In my last several visits to the Telegraph store I’ve noticed that the selection of books has been getting poorer. And the recent opening of the San Francisco store worried me.

I grew up near Berkeley, and I have a routine I often follow when I return for a visit. I’ll start off at the Berkeley BART station, walk through campus visiting a few shops along the way, and then head south several blocks for a good browse in Cody’s. It’s very sad that this is no longer to be.

Yolo Loam

Pica rented the rototiller and had it overnight. It’s nice soil, Yolo loam I remembered from perusing the soil survey for Solano County. Or to be more specific, assuming the map is accurate, Yolo loam with a clay substratum at a depth of 40-60 inches.

My colleagues over in soil science across the road from my office have put together a very nice web mapping application describing the soils of California, Arizona, and Nevada. So if you’re curious about the soil type where you’re trying to garden, zoom on in and have a look.

Birdathon

Today Numenius and I did a birdathon by bicycle to raise funds for Yolo Audubon Society. We went in different directions: he headed south to do the breeding bird atlas survey I birded along Putah Creek with a friend and colleague on the Audubon Board, headed into west Davis, down to the Arboretum, east to the Yolo Bypass, south to the Yolo Grasslands and Tremont Street Cemetery, and finally home.

We tallied 80 species between us by bicycle, great considering the day started out gray and a bit cold and ended up hot and windy and the flooding is still extensive. Not quite the total someone like Richard might have put together on a day like this, but respectable.

If you’d like to make a contribution of any size—a total amount or an amount per bird—you can mail it to

Yolo Audubon Society (Birdathon)
P.O. Box 886
Davis, CA 95617

Seeds Of Resistance

I just heard Vandana Shiva give a wonderful talk about sustainable agriculture and globalization in a presentation organized by the California Student Sustainability Coalition. She is a sustainability activist and ecofeminist who has been working on agricultural issues in India for over 25 years, her original field being physics. She described two waves of industrialization in India, the first being the Green Revolution, which left much violence in its wake due to people’s loss of empowerment, particularly in the Punjab, and the second being globalization, exemplified by a recent US-India bilateral agreement rather frighteningly entitled the “Knowledge Initiative On Agriculture”.

Not surprisingly, such knowledge refers mainly to intellectual property (a term, she notes, only came into use after WTO; before then patents, trademarks, copyrights, etc. were quite separate concepts) and the most egregious misappropriation here being the patenting of seeds. It is simply morally wrong and ontologically suspect for thousands of years worth of human creativity that has gone into crop selection to be sequestered away in a corporate patent, leading to the absurdity of it being a crime for farmers to save their own seeds.

But such an absurdity has within it an obvious path of resistance. She is the founder of a movement called Navdanya which aims to promote biological and cultural diversity through nonviolent agriculture. One major project of this movement has been saving seeds, and they have established 34 seed banks in 13 different states across the country. Next year, in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Revolt of 1857, they will be burning Bt cotton seeds and distributing seeds from their own banks! (She told an enlightening anecdote from the time of the British: it’s curious how all the English names for the pulses of India have to have an animal in them—why, there’s chick peas, pigeon peas, horse gram…The English just couldn’t get their brain around the idea of diverse vegetarian protein crops.)

At the end she quoted Wendell Berry—eating is a political act. My favorite question response concerned how do you keep up hope? By engaging, she said. Be less concerned with brutal dominating power structures, but more with the creative power within each of us.

Good Year for Beavers

We went for a walk this evening. The wind had died down and the sun was setting over the coast range—such a pleasantness after all the rain we’ve been getting.

The creek is still well over its banks, making the eucalyptus trees wonder whether they’re mangroves. The water is turbid and fast, and there were a few lads fishing as we walked across the bridge.

Just before the railway undercrossing, we spotted a beaver swimming around an “island” of willows—normally well up on the bank. There’s so much for them to eat this year. I hope they do well. It’s a splendid thing to see almost in your yard…

Flu Symposium Day

Thanks to the efforts of Pica and many others, the avian flu symposium that the Yolo Audubon Society organized for today was a great success. Over two hundred people packed the Davis Senior Center for five hours worth of presentations and discussions. We can all use education in risk evaluation: even without a human pandemic, people will be reevaluating their interactions with birds, both domestic and wild. It seems quite likely that the high pathogenicity strain of avian flu H5N1 (not as yet mutated into a form capable of causing a pandemic) will arrive in North America shortly, perhaps this summer. Once this virus establishes itself in local bird populations, people will be reacting in sensible (washing hands more thoroughly) and not-so-sensible (in Italy, tens of thousands of poultry farmers are now out of work because people scared of avian flu have stopped eating chicken.)

The last speaker, who spoke about planning in the private sector, provided a link to an excellent mailing list that gives day-by-day reports on avian flu and other infectious diseases. This is ProMED-mail, sponsored by the International Society for Infectious Diseases. There’s a pretty high volume of messages on this list, but it’s fascinating stuff.

Prairie Dog Companion

My workshop has been at the Denver Federal Center, which is a 670-acre site in Lakewood, very spread out, with lots of open space between the buildings (one of which is 19 acres in size!). Walking back to the hotel yesterday, I saw my first prairie dogs! I’m not sure which species they were, of the three in Colorado, but I’m now quite a fan of the genus. On the way back today, I sketched several, along with an extremely cooperative rabbit: I’ll post a sketch or two when I return.