23 October 06
Stink
October’s the month where we get infested with beetles that fly, crash into the light, and then emit a stench which is like concentrated smelly feet squared.
They’re small beetles, small and long. They look like a shortened earwig without the pincers, innocuous really.
They live in leaf litter and make all efforts to get indoors, where they then hide under anything there is to hide under. If they’re disturbed, they freeze, then scuttle in all directions. Like miniature cockroaches that smell.
Efforts to come up with an ID have so far met with failure. It’s in the Carabidae, is all we know for now. We may scan one for all you carabid experts out there…
22 October 06
Puncturevine
Yesterday I finally fixed the flat in the rear tire of my road bike. Feeling down the inner surface of the tire, I noticed two tiny embedded thorns, each capable of producing a leak in the tire. I gently worked these out of the tire and installed the new tube.
On page one of today’s Davis Enterprise, the paper ran a story on the bane of cyclists that gave me the flat, puncturevine. According to one bike mechanic, most of the flats in the Davis area are now due to this plant. The lentil-sized seeds of this weed have hard stout spines for dispersal, whether via fur or tires. The common names for the weed are somewhat ominous—caltrop, tackweed, goathead, Texas sandbur—and its scientific name is the alliterative Tribulus terrestris. But I never seem to see the actual plant, instead just finding the seeds in unfortunate places.
21 October 06
A Very Warm Saturday
This morning I joined twelve or so people in our first guide training at Cold Canyon. It was hot by eleven, the kind of hot that makes you sweat in a T-shirt walking slowly up a slight incline. We saw blooming California fuchsias and the Anna’s hummingbirds that guarded them ferociously; I learned to tell the difference between poison oak and skunk bush (really really important); we divvied up our mini-presentations (I’m doing mine next week). It was a good day to be out in the sunshine.
This evening was a chili cookoff with bluegrass by Chicken Tractor (a friend and neighbor plays mandolin in this band). It was punctuated by checkins of the first World Series game. (Cards were winning 7-1 when we left.)
A normal, sort of, Saturday.
But when (I’m a when not if person) the flu pandemic hits, we won’t be doing any of this. No doing out, no mingling, no shopping, not any of it.
Maybe a lot more gardening?
14 October 06
Turkeys 1, Coyote 0
This morning as I was digging outside (I’m considering digging for a morning activity even when there’s no good reason to do it, so much time to ponder plus you get to say hello to so many earthworms) I heard a soft cluck, cluck. The turkey flock was moving south across the alfalfa field that got mowed three days ago, pecking and scratching as they went.
Out of frisbee range; I went back to my digging.
Alarm clucks raised my head again: a coyote was approaching the flock. But with no alfalfa he had no chance at a surprise attack. Two turkeys flew, laboring, into the top of the osage orange, to be scolded by crows; the coyote couldn’t decide which way to look, and eventually slunk off, presumably to wait for a better chance.
We’re off to Numenius’ 25th High School Reunion (his idea, don’t faint folks). The Tigers just won the American League pennant, and we’ll catch the Mets-Cardinals game in the car.
12 October 06
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…
6 October 06
Above 9000 Feet
I’m back now from Colorado, land of the aspens and steep, beautiful mountains.
4 October 06
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.
1 October 06
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.
26 September 06
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!
22 September 06
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).