10 January 26
Memorial In Central Park
We went to the memorial held in the afternoon in Central Park here in Davis for Renee Good who was murdered earlier this week by ICE in Minneapolis. There was a good turnout of several hundred people, some of them wandering over from the tail end of the Farmers Market, and the memorial was marred only by a disruption by our town’s Moms for Liberty loon (Lady, I’d like to hear what the pastor is saying, thank you, I thought).
On YouTube later I watched a bit of a conversation between historians Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman about this moment. A fragment from this:
(HCR) “And you know, I quite frankly never wanted to live through historic times. I just got to lay that out there.” (JF) “And I wanted to sit in archives and read dead people’s mail. Like that was our job.”
9 January 26
Escoda Ultimo
An Escoda travel brush arrived today. It’s the synthetic fiber Ultimo #12, a large round brush that can hold a crazy amount of water but also holds a very sharp point.
I am not averse to using waterbrushes like the Pentel Aquash, but I’m looking for a little more control. This brush seems to be able to handle all kinds of things I might throw at it. More anon.
8 January 26
Perils of Public Natural History
I have begun my historical research explorations with some research into a topic in California historical ecology: how did California grasslands come to be dominated by non-native annual grasses? The story I learned as a student was that prior to European settlement California grasslands were mainly dominated by perennial bunchgrasses, but the introduction of grazing livestock led to their replacement by the non-native grasses. This is what Davis botanist Glen Holstein called the “Bunchgrass Dominance Paradigm” in a paper in the journal Madroño in the year 2001. The first sentence of the sign in the photo (“Purple needlegrass (Stipa pulchra) once covered the Central Valley floor and surrounding foothills”) from the UC Davis Arboretum sums up this paradigm pretty well.
The sign clearly dates from no earlier than 2004, and the trouble is is that the paradigm was already falling out of favor in historical ecology by that date, due to the research of Holstein and others. (A more minor point is that Stipa pulchra had been renamed Nassella pulchra with the publication of The Jepson Manual (a comprehensive flora of California) in 1993.) I have used the phrase “public natural history” in the title to this post in an analogy to the field of public history, the professional discipline of interpretation of history for the general public, for example in writing the text for museum displays. Public history is a challenging discipline — how does one know which stories to tell to what publics? From this example from our Arboretum, it seems like there are similar challenges in presenting natural history — the science is always changing.
7 January 26
Drawing Trees
I have, among other things, set as an intention this year to get better at drawing trees. My plan is to draw a tree a day. I feel like I’ve chosen a bad medium — pen is less versatile than pencil, for trees — but I’m going to keep going.
This tree was drawn a couple of days ago in the early morning fog. Here, the pen wasn’t a hindrance. I’ll be posting more as I go.
And I’m writing about drawing because the events in the world are almost too much to bear.
6 January 26
A Neo-Royalist Future?
As we struggle to make sense of Trump’s maneuvers in Venezuela and elsewhere, a couple of international relations scholars have a new term to describe this possible shift in the world system order. This term is “neo-royalism”, and is described in a paper written by Stacie E. Goddard and Abraham Newman which was published a couple months ago in the journal International Organization. This paper has seen a lot of interest in the past several days including many mentions on Bluesky and a MetaFilter post about it.
International relations scholars view the liberal international order as a system that is in decline, but they have tended to think that this shift may be a fallback to what preceded it, that is the Westphalian great power system, where systems of global governance are weak and states are sovereign and acting to pursue their own best interests. What Goddard and Newman are suggesting is that we might be have to look back before the Westphalian system for an analogue (the Treaty of Westphalia was 1648). As they put it:
A plausible emerging order, which we label neo-royalism, would be a major break from both [the liberal international order and the Westphalian system]. It centers on ruling cliques, networks of political, capital, and military elites devoted to individual sovereigns, seeking to generate durable material and status hierarchies based on the extraction of financial and cultural tributes.
They give as examples of royalist cliques the Khanate “great houses”, monarchical families such as the Tudors or Hapsburgs, or conglomerations such as the Medicis in Florence. Today’s analogues would be Trump and his circle of course but also Putin, Modi, Orbán, Modi, bin Salman, and others.
They see neo-royalists maintaining their power through rent-seeking rather than a rules-based order. As they say:
The goal of rent extraction is not simply self-enrichment; it amasses wealth from both the domestic and international peripheries so as to perpetuate and extend clique political dominance.
Or as Newman just expressed it on Bluesky: “Why target Venezuela/Greenland? Because they offer rents that can be extracted and distributed to the insider clique. The broligarchs have a long term interest in these places.”
I’m afraid to say it but I think Goddard and Newman are onto something here. This has a lot of parallels to discussions around neofeudalism but perhaps neo-royalism as a concept has more descriptive power. Maybe it’s time for medieval and early modern political historians to educate us all about the world before states.
5 January 26
Birding While Indian
I just finished Thomas C. Gannon’s book of essays, Birding While Indian: A Mixed-Blood Memoir. A riveting, erudite and surprisingly intersectional exploration of what it means to bird, what it means to grow up part-Lakota in ground zero of the white genocide of Native Americans (South Dakota), what it means to be an outsider in what is a very white (and progressively more expensive) hobby, birding. Gannon is an English professor in Nebraska and Foucault, Baudrillard and Derrida rub shoulders with field sparrows, black-bellied whistling ducks and dicksissels.
Many people are familiar with the Central Park Birdwatching Incident during which Christian Cooper, a black birder in Central Park during spring migration, was aggressively targeted by a white woman who called the police on him for asking her to leash her dog. He caught the incident on video and it went viral. This incident took place on May 25, 2020, on the same day as George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis, and together these incidents shone a bright light on the extent of white racism in the United States, the fact of which has never been in doubt by neither Cooper nor Gannon.
It is uncomfortable to have this light shine on your face. Yet shone it must be, in this era of ICE raids of people being targeted simply for looking the way they do (remember “Asian During COVID”?).
4 January 26
Sketching Between The Rain Showers
There have been a lot of showers these past several days which has made for interesting sketching outings. Yesterday I walked over to the city hall and completed my ink sketch of some tall trees and a portion of the building before heading back home. On the way back I stopped to photograph a mushroom and then noticed a bit of drizzle on the camera. I put it back in its case and then came the downpour. I scurried the block-and-a-half back home. Our weather station recorded a maximum rate of 4.27 inches of rain an hour during the downpour.
The sketch at left is from today and shows a view looking northwards across a playing field towards the Davis Senior Center. No dramatic downpour, but it did drizzle a bit on the page.
3 January 26
Revisiting Old Art Supplies
I do have a habit of accumulating art supplies, which at this point should probably be enumerated in my will. I broke out the Prismacolors this afternoon to do a slow, inexpert drawing of a persimmon we were left as a gift.
I’m much more of a sketcher than a drawer, but you can get so absorbed in the slow, painstaking process of layering different, contrasting colors onto Bristol board that it’s quite a meditation.
I might do more of this. I should also work on my sad watercolor skills. But this year I have another intention too: I want to get better at drawing trees.
2 January 26
Davis Bird Count
It’s raining again this evening, but fortunately there was a break in the weather pattern earlier and we woke up to partly cloudy skies for our local bird count. This was the Woodland-Davis Christmas Bird Count. This is a relatively new Christmas Bird Count which started in 2022. In prior years we would do the Putah Creek Christmas Bird Count which is centered west of Winters, but lacking a car we prefer doing a count closer to home.
We were assigned to bird the Wildhorse Golf Course which is on the northeast edge of Davis. Despite having lived in Davis 27 years we’ve never birded around that area before, since golf courses aren’t our thing. But it was surprisingly birdy there. In part this is because the course is bordered by a naturally vegetated open space buffer at the edge of the agricultural lands to the north. We walked the perimeter of the golf course, a two-and-a-half mile route, and saw forty species in total. Our most abundant bird species was the red-winged blackbird. Our favorite sighting was an overflight of 17 tundra swans.
Once home (we got home in time to feed the cats their expected meal at 11 AM) I tallied up our counts and entered them into eBird to share with the count compilers. I thereupon noticed that I made exactly one entry in eBird in 2025 — maybe I can improve on that this year?
1 January 26
Scoping out the Local Golf Course for a Christmas Bird Count
Tomorrow we’ll be participating in our local Xmas count, and we’ve been assigned the Wildhorse Golf Course (and residential streets).
