21 April 03
Bioregional Bookshopping
Today I picked two new books at the campus bookstore. The first, by UCD landscape architecture professor Rob Thayer, is entitled LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice. He is part of a school here of bioregional thinkers and practitioners centered around the Putah and Cache Creek watersheds. Rob Thayer’s new book draws happily for me upon all sorts of local examples for his material.
The second book is Tim Manolis’ new field guide to the Dragonflies and Damselflies of California. It is beautifully illustrated by the author with over 40 plates done mostly in colored pencil. (It’s always striking how illustrations are much more effective in a field guide than photographs). Pica and I know very little about insects, but we had an introduction to dragonflies on a Yolo Audubon Society walk up at the North Davis Ponds a couple of years ago.
20 April 03
The Glade on the Way to Work
Probably my favorite bit on my bicycle ride into work is passing this little glade just south of the UC Davis Arboretum. There are several handsome walnut trees in it, and often it is used for pasture for animals belonging mostly to the Vet Med folks. A few weeks ago there were cattle, but right now there are about a half-dozen horses in the pasture as well as this donkey. Animals bring a civilizing influence to a campus—some of the horses will come over and say hello, and the donkey always regards me with calm bemusement.
As the joke goes, what UCD stands for is “Under Construction Daily”, and according to the current long-range development plan for the campus this parcel is slated to become part of a research park, hosting one or two three-story buildings and many, many parking places. It’s all very rational, the planning process is, with dividers in their thick binders sectioning off the chapters on scenic, habitat, and cultural values, but somehow I think the world would be better off if planners were compelled to become accomplished landscape painters before they ever touched a computer. Sigh. At least the long-range plan and forthcoming environmental impact report are still open for public review and comment.
19 April 03
The watercolor outing
Numenius and I went out on a sketching outing to the Arboretum this afternoon. On the left is my attempt at a lupine with a California poppy behind it.
On the right is Numenius’ fremontia branch: the tree is gloriously abloom just now.
19 April 03
Spring in the Central Valley
I just saw my first ash-throated flycatcher of the year. It was outside the kitchen window in the English walnut, flycatching. I don’t know what it’s finding to eat this early in the morning with a chilly north breeze, though last night there were thousands of flying insects in the pathway… in California we are bracing for the onslaught of West Nile Virus, predicted to hit in August. Nobody knows what it’s going to do to the endemic bird populations here—particularly the yellow-billed magpie.
Inspired by Richard Bell’s spectacular Wild West Yorkshire nature diary, I’m going to try my hand at some sketching today. The California poppies have been given a new lease on life with all the rain we’ve had recently. I love to see them in juxtaposition with the lupines-orange and blue, perfect complements-but the lupines are now almost all gone, so to see them together I have to go exploring. There are still some at the UC Davis Arboretum.
I wish I were better at drawing birds, but the way to get better is to go out and do it. Another good excuse not to clean the house…
18 April 03
Low-Power FM Radio Coming to Davis
The Federal Communications Commission has at long last issued a construction permit for a low-power community radio station in Davis that will be run by Davis Community Television. They have 18 months to get the 100-watt station on the air, which will be on the frequency 101.5 MHz.
Low-power FM radio has been a battleground for media activists such as the Media Access Project and the Prometheus Radio Project who are trying to maintain local community access to the airwaves. When the FCC put forth a proposal to establish a Low-Power FM Radio service, it was strongly attacked by a coalition of the National Association of Broadcasters and National Public Radio (the latter earning my enmity in the process) and the bill in Congress nearly gutted.
But the proposal did get through Congress, albeit in watered-down form, and LPFM radio stations have slowly been getting licensed. There have been some clear successes, such as Radio Bird Street in Oroville. We are fortunate in Davis in being able to receive three independent radio stations already (KPFA in Berkeley, KDVS the local college station, and KVMR in Nevada City), but it will be great to have our own local community radio station.
17 April 03
An Elegy for Walnuts
The Solano County roads department is preparing to take out a row of California black walnuts (Juglans hindsii) along Old Davis Road to make room for bike lanes. It’s a little-traveled road, and I’m not sure that the benefits to the cyclists who use the road (mostly hard-core, with less need of bike lanes) warrant the loss of such a landscape feature.
This row of walnuts was well-established in 1937, when the aerial photograph (courtesy of the UC Davis library map collection) at left was taken. Formal roadside avenues of trees are scattered around the lower Putah Creek landscape, one of the most noteworthy being the row of walnuts on Russell Avenue west of Davis.
Juglans hindsii has an interesting history: it is widely naturalized in Northern California, but only two stands of the tree, in Napa and Contra Costa counties, are considered native to their sites. The plantings of the black walnuts provide good wildlife habitat: in this row of trees we’ve seen roosting Swainson’s hawks, and nesting yellow-billed magpies and western kingbirds.
16 April 03
Rain on the Picnic
Last Saturday’s Picnic Day got seriously rained on. Picnic Day is UC Davis’ annual open house (first held 1909) and is the largest student-run event in the country. I watched the parade and then took cover inside.
The following is a photo of Jim Thorne in the disguise of an SUV as part of the Environmental Science and Policy Club float.
And what Picnic Day would be complete without the Doxie Derby, the dachshund races held in UCD’s Rec Hall? Here is a tense moment in the finals of the competition in the Standard division.
16 April 03
Interruptions
Feathers of Hope is back online after all sorts of hardware woes on the server. It’s been moved to a new server at the ISP which will hopefully have better luck. Such interruptions definitely break the writing rhythm.
Back at home, the Davis Enterprise had a feature article on blogging yesterday, but once again they fail to put it online. If the local rag has a full-page article, I guess it means blogging really has gone mainstream.
12 April 03
Poets Against the War in Davis
The Davis Enterprise, our local paper, ran a story yesterday on the Davis Poets for Peace. The article is not unfortunately online, but it gives an extensive spot to my efforts to gather local poets and activists to protest the U.S. war on Iraq.
This grew out of the movement spearheaded by poet Sam Hamill, founder of Copper Canyon Press and a veteran activist from the 1960s, in response to Laura Bush’s cancellation of a symposium on American Poetry scheduled for February 15—on the grounds, according to her publicist, that she didn’t want poetry politicized (!). Since Langston Hughes was one of the three featured poets, along with Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, this is even more ironic. And here’s a Republican who reads.
Sam Hamill asked some of his friends to submit poetry against the war. The word spread. Within days there were 3,000 poems on Poets Against the War; within weeks, the number had grown to 13,000.
Poetry readings against the war were hastily organized and hundreds were held across North America on or around February 12. In Davis, thirty of us huddled outside the City Council Chambers under the covered walkway (it was raining hard) and read poems by ourselves or by others. Another two poetry readings were held at the 24-hour peace vigil that began on Thursday evening after the war started. Participants ranged from well-known local poets such as Maria Melendez to first-time poetry writers. Many of their poems can be found through the Poets Against the War site.
All this has been possible because of the online activist community exemplified by MoveOn.org, whose focused issues and reliance on word-of-keyboard dissemination have altered the way many Americans participate in the political process. The community has grown fast, and has turned global. Simply in terms of activism for poets, there are Poets for Peace, UK Poets Against the War (great headline: “Oxford Poets Blast US Air Base with Rhyming Couplets”), Poesa Salvaje, Potes Contre La Guerre (“parce que le mot ne peut pas stopper la guerre, mais peut l’empcher de se drper du bien” [“because the word cannot stop war, but it can prevent it from cloaking itself in good”]).
Poetry provides an outlet for some people who want to protest the war but are not willing to chain themselves to buildings in San Francisco. Voices of peace, humanity, anguish, fear, and general questioning are a fresh antidote to the bombastic howling, lies, and deceit emanating from Washington. Where, we all ask, are the weapons of mass destruction? And why, even if hundreds if not thousands of Iraqis take to the streets and wave to the American and British soldiers, did that make it legal for our government to invade?
Here’s a poem I wrote after being asked to calligraph the names of Iraqis who had been killed by bombing or by sanctions since 1991 to hang on the Davis peace tree, which stood for two weeks in the G Street Plaza following the outbreak of the war.
11 April 03
McCarthyism at the Hall of Fame
The president of the Baseball Hall of Fame cancelled a 15th anniversary celebration of the movie Bull Durham on account of the anti-war sentiments of would-be participants Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins. There is substantial discussion of this over at Kos and at Peace Tree Farm (here and here). Doug Pappas in his Business of Baseball Blog notes how condemnation of the HOF’s move is coming from all over including noted baseball writers Roger Kahn and Jules Tygiel.
Sigh. Fortunately baseball can survive bad institutional leadership
such as we have now. I liked the comment at Kos that baseball is a
non-violent, process-oriented sport in a goal-oriented, violent society.