Stillness

As penance for flying to Europe and thus bloating what had hitherto been a fairly trim carbon footprint, I chose to read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden on the flight. I consumed it from cover to cover, including the introduction by Walter Harding and his 65 pages of notes. It was the Variorum edition, which claims to be the only one “based directly on the author’s own copy of the first edition” (Boston, 1854). This was a volume I had acquired a few weeks previously from the ‘Free Books’ cart at Santa Monica library. Its pages are deeply yellowed and crumbling at the edges; the once glossy cover is begrimed from fretting against other discarded volumes. The acidic wood pulp pages have that characteristic smell of old paperbacks - somewhere between urine and vinegar. Its purchase price at its publication in 1963 was sixty cents: one can thus hypothesize that it has declined in monetary value at precisely 1.2 cents a year for fifty years before flat-lining at zero in the spring of 2013. Thoreau’s wisdom contained therein, however, remains priceless.

Closeted in the pressurized fuselage of either a 777 (shortly to be replaced by the 787 Dreamliner) (east) or a brand new 747-8 (the last gasp of Boeing’s Jumbo) (west) I enjoyed every word but I felt chastened by Thoreau’s trenchant critique of the profligate life styles he observed in Concord – what would he make of the debt peonage I and my fellow passengers had undertaken for the privilege of crossing continents at an altitude of 30,000 feet?

His was an age newly introduced to high-speed travel and Thoreau considered himself to be living amongst the ‘sons of Tell’. “Men are advertised that at a certain hour and minute these bolts (steam trains) will be shot toward particular points of the compass…The air is full of invisible bolts.” In Upper Ojai we have a similar impression: our bolts being the airliners plying the skies above the Topatopas (Red Smudge).

Thoreau lived between two worlds: the vanishing agrarian economy of small-holdings which Jefferson understood to be the basis for an American democratic civilization and the emerging plutocracy powered by an industrial revolution that had come late to America but here would reach its apotheosis. Thoreau advocates, by his example, a third way: lives lived in isolation and self-sufficiency nourished by the delights of the wilderness – a lifestyle made possible, however, only by his living in the shadow of both flourishing agricultural and industrial economies, in the urban wildland.

During his era, it was the steam train that was the most visible (or, by its lonesome whistle, aural) evidence of the stitching together of industry and agriculture into what, even in the 1850’s was a nascent global economy. When a freight train rattles past Thoreau he notes the “Manila hemp and cocoa-nut husks…reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe”. His ‘Economy’ is dependent upon living in the hinterlands of this mid-century mash-up of land wealth and capital. Both his frugality and his adjacency to the mid nineteenth century Maine economy (he lived only a mile away from the town of Concord) assured him of a lifestyle where there was little need to work and plentiful opportunities to bask in reveries inspired by his wild environment.

Thoreau bought his nails, screws, lathe and lime in Concord and while he cut his own framing lumber from the local woods, the boards for the house siding and the recycled windows came from town – as either products or cast-offs of an industrialized rural economy. Any truly individual or family based, self-sufficient material culture must look to models (often deep in the past) that do not depend on industrial technologies such as those necessary for the manufacture of metal and glass – materials that became the pre-eminent trade goods during the European conquest of the stone-age peoples of the Americas.

Glass and iron are thus emblematic of the transition from pre-history to the pre-modern era: but although the Iron Age, from an archeological perspective, arose in the Middle East around four thousand years ago, it was not until the Romans that it became the sine qua non of Empire. The Conquistadors are lineal descendants of the Roman legionnaires not least because of their iron studded boots.

Some of those boots (Roman’s not Conquistador’s) strode across the flatlands of Norfolk in their customary linear fashion early in the first century. Opposition to these iron-clad marchers and everything they represented came from Celtic outlanders – Britons of the Iceni tribe, led by Queen Boudica (Victory). In terms of ousting the Romans she failed to live up to her name but her spirit was later co-opted by Queen Victoria as an avatar of the British Empire – which explains the grand nineteenth statue of the warrior queen on the north side of Westminster Bridge, remembered from my childhood.

The main artery across East Anglia was carved out by the Romans from the ancient path known as the Ickneild way. Now known as Peddars Way, it serves as one of Britain’s long-distance walking paths: few who walk it now pay much heed to those long ago Iceni enslaved by the Romans to build the road it follows. Lorrie and I stayed with my cousin Robert whose house is on this historic route. While in Norfolk, we also visited Hugh Lupton who has created a story and song cycle inspired by the layering of history along Peddars Way (A Norfolk Songline, Walking the Peddars Way, Hugh Lupton and Liz McGowan).

Earlier on our trip, we made a brief foray along Offa’s Dyke Path, another of Britain’s long distance walking routes, which was developed to follow a defensive ditch dug by order of the King of Mercia to protect his lands from the depredations of the Celts to the west (now Wales). After a couple of days of desultory searching (by car) we failed to find much evidence of this massive earthwork now reduced by time and circumstance.

Both routes are latter-day reconstructions that do not necessarily reflect the full historical realities of either the Welsh borderlands or of Norfolk’s ancient pathways. They are devices to satisfy the demand of growing numbers of walkers - offshoots of Britain’s Heritage Industry which attempts to add value to the natural world through the overlaying of sometimes spurious historical associations along particular routes.

There is a great deal to be said for Thoreau‘s approach which suggests that paying close attention to your immediate surroundings results in the creation of a sympathy between you as observer and the plants, animals and landforms observed. Out of this, Thoreau developed an almost Franciscan way with chipmunks, squirrels and the birds that surrounded his house. A walk in his woods, a circumnavigation of his pond or a stroll into Concord was all the travel he needed.

The coarsening of our sensory receptors has resulted in our seeking out more and more exotic travel experiences. One of the great gifts of living in the urban wildland for these past four years (twice as long as Thoreau spent at Walden) has been a greater appreciation of the subtleties of the everlasting yet ever-changing chaparral. Having fallen off the travel-abstinence wagon, I look forward to lengthy periods of stillness in emulation of Thoreau who was on a kind of long distance path that could be fully experienced within the confines of his hut, his pond and his woods. While planetary, global and personal time races on, our last refuge is spatial stasis - the ability to stay in one place and open ourselves to the unfolding of the infinite.

Ruination

The thing about architecture is that it is mostly immobile. There are a few moving parts (like doors and windows) but buildings are designed to just sit there and their change over time is usually discouraged through a program of maintenance. That’s not to say that when this attempt to halt entropy – the slow collapse of buildings into their constituent parts – fails over time, the results are not charming. But by the time the rain starts to get in and there are structural failures, the building in question is effectively on its way to being subsumed by the surrounding landscape – absorbed by the vegetal world in ways that begin to deny its status as architecture. Ruins, it could be argued, are part of the natural world. Architecture is only architecture when it stands apart from both nature and the natural processes of decay.

Given that they are currently incapable of self-regeneration, buildings are characterized by a finite life span: they are created, maintained and then, if that maintenance is not rigorously upheld, they decay and die. Their death, in urban environments, is effected through a dismembering and recycling or, in rural situations perhaps, through a change of state in which they become a kind of artificial reef upon which all kinds of creatures find a home and in which plants, fungus and mold colonize.

Mostly, these days, we see buildings that a few years ago seemed quite serviceable and well-maintained suddenly (it seems) change in status and become redundant – boarded up, surrounded by chain link fencing and awaiting demolition as soon as the permits come through. Still, in rural situations like Ojai, a building’s redundancy sometime plays out more elegantly - peeling paint and broken windows slowly giving way to signs of structural collapse and ultimately a reabsorption of the building’s organic and inorganic materials into the earth’s mantle. This latter attenuated denouement, given the economics of real estate, is now regrettably rare. Sometimes, just when you think that process is underway, a rescue operation is mounted and the patient is miraculously revived, re-roofed, stabilized and returned to active service. I have been involved in such rescue attempts both for clients and on my own behalf.

There is, of course, no greener building than the one that is already built. Whatever intrinsic inefficiencies may exist within it, the mere fact of extending the period of amortization of the embedded energy in an existing structure guarantees its viridic bona fides. In the last thirty odd years I have had the good fortune to live in two ancient buildings in Los Angeles. Given that city’s short life, ancient can be credibly applied to anything built before, say, 1920. The murdered out mule barn in Echo Park dated back to the first decade of the twentieth century (Black Magic) while, when it came time to decamp to the west-side, the single-wall beach cottage in Santa Monica Canyon, built just before the First World War, served our family for almost two decades.

Professionally, my architectural career has touched on landmark modernist buildings such as the H.H. Harris Birtcher residence in Mount Washington (famously photographed by Man Ray, 1942), as well as several Spanish colonial revival, Greek revival, Craftsman and Italianate buildings from the boom years of the mid-nineteen twenties. In all these cases, the life of the building was extended well into the twentieth-first century with every prospect of the building’s useful life-span stretching to over a hundred years. Now, in a new house in Ojai, we are about to be confronted with our first five-year maintenance cycle.

Given the building’s location in the chaparral its life span is conditional on both such periodic maintenance and its ability to withstand the natural hazards that exist at the wildland urban interface. We have just witnessed 30,000 acres of coastal scrub going up in smoke between the 101 and the PCH south of Point Mugu where, for about eight miles, the land has been blackened clear to the edge of the ocean (The Camarillo Springs Fire, 2013). Our house has been designed to withstand such fast moving moderate intensity fires and we are reassured by our ability to close off all the buildings openings with the wide steel fire-doors which are an integral part of the design.

Situated on a bluff created between a sloped front lawn and a steeply raked bowl at the back, the house exists in a canyon and is vulnerable to the hazards of such landforms which channel fire, water, mud, rain and wind. After the second dry winter in a row, memories of rain and flood have receded – it has been eight years since the vast flooding of the Sisar and Santa Paula creeks on our side of the great divide (aka the Summit) where water sheds to the Santa Clara River and thence, across the Oxnard plain to the ocean (Wild and Free). Local creeks and rivers are now mostly dry and Bear creek, which threads through our property on its western edge, has fallen quiet, although a thin silver thread still winds along under overhanging cottonwoods, sycamores and willows. The seasonal stream to the east of the house, which poses a more adjacent threat, has been bone dry for twenty four months.

The plan for maintaining our sanctuary in the chaparral thus involves surviving natural calamities and preserving the steel and stucco envelope of the wood-free structure against the predations of time, wind, weather and opportunistic plant and animal life.

Strange echoes of this protocol reverberated in my mind as I visited the 13th century Tintern Abbey in south east Wales recently. While the church stood steadfast for about 250 years amidst periodic Welsh uprisings, Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 began its fairly rapid transition towards celebrity ruin – a style in which it is currently maintained. The processes of decay are now largely halted and the remains preserved for the edification and titillation of tourists. The abbey has been stripped of the clamorous vines which, entwined amidst the sacred lithic pile, so entranced the early Romantics and later Victorian visitors, and it now rises out of a closely mown green sward, its structure left to silhouette nakedly against the dense hard wood forest of the escarpment that rises a little way behind it or, depending on the angle of the viewer’s neck, the sky above.

Tintern Abbey now endures as a petrified relic. Wordsworth celebrated the surrounding landscape in his Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey without actually mentioning the church ruin. Absent too, is any reference of the pall of smoke that habitually hung about the Wye, from about 1700 on, when intense industrialization came to the valley which, in turn, rang with the sounds of foundries and mills drawing power from his ‘sylvan Wye’ and its tributaries. Similarly neglected, in his evocation of the ’ the deep and gloomy wood', was the ring of the woodman’s axe, for the local industries, which were at the very forefront of the Industrial revolution, were massive consumers of timber. Blinded by his romanticism, the poet blundered over the landscape unaware of the terrifying forces of environmental degradation all around him. Ginsberg, in his remembrance Wales Visitation, briefly cuts to the chase (amidst much chemically induced obtuseness) when he takes note of ‘clouds passing through skeleton arches of Tintern Abbey’.

The valley is now quiet, save for the rumble of traffic along its narrow roads, and the occasional jolly whoop from Oxford students down for the day. The broader landscape is largely restored while the ruin itself, the economic locus of the town, is celebrated for its apparently artful deconstruction rendered by ancient politics, and the elements.

There is an example of more recent ruination in central Europe, where the historical and natural forces at work are similarly capable of being, to some extent, untangled. In Vienna, the economic boom fueled by a potent monarchial combination in the nineteenth century is evidenced by endless streets of baroque apartment buildings restored in dazzling, as new, condition. Radiating out in avenues from the center of the city towards the Ringstrasse their construction was originally enabled by the total destruction of the old medieval quarter, save for the great cathedral which still manages to dominate the skyline - despite the best efforts of generations of Hapsburgs who vied with one another in the creation of elaborately confected palaces. The dual monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which existed between 1867 and 1918, established itself as one of the great European powers – behind just Russia in size and second only to the USA, Germany and the U.K in machine-building, industrial might. Its wealth created two great cities: Vienna and Budapest.

In the Hungarian capital, the explosion of speculative four and five story tenements rendered in florid Renaissance styles built during the last quarter of the nineteenth century is still evident on many of the major boulevards in the City center, but their condition varies widely from the recently renovated to those that remain as the crumbling hulks that they became during the forty years of Soviet misrule (1949 – 1989). When the elaborately molded plaster work that originally mimicked the carved stone, cornices, corbels and statuary of their sixteenth and seventeenth century French and Italian models falls away their hasty brick construction is exhibited in lesions across their facades - sores wrought by weather and neglect.

Begrimed in over a century of industrial and domestic coal-fire soot, crumbling at their exaggerated rusticated bases, many with boarded up widows and heavily lichened mansard roofs, these are text-book examples of ruination. As such they have a romantic appeal that suggests a gravitas entirely missing in the restored models which once again reveal their original, fin de siècle, venal, facile, fashion-backward facades.

In Ojai, we stand on-guard against such romantic ruination and are sedulously planning our five year maintenance protocol, naively determined to keep our building forever young……

Cave Woman

Earlier this winter I spent a weekend at Zzyzx. (There’s a strange, almost illicit pleasure in typing that improbable sequence of letters). The name is the invention of Curtis Howe Springer who squatted in an area of the Californian desert then known as Soda Springs, about seven miles south of Baker on the old Mojave road. In 1944 he filed 12,000 acres worth of mining claims under a moniker he felt confident would reside at the very foot of an alphabetic list of place names. Some would suggest that his choice was supremely apposite: many view this corner of California as the end of the world.

But it is redeemed, for others, by the natural spring which renders it an oasis - a gathering place for the people of the region. Close by is a prehistoric quarry site where Indians fashioned projectile points used to hunt the game that gathered at the spring. Curtis attempted to leverage the allure of the oasis by bottling the water and building a health spa with an apparently natural hot-spring but which, in fact, featured water heated by a large oil burning boiler discreetly located at some distance from the bathing facilities.

The enterprise was a modest success and he built a substantial establishment of guest rooms, a dining hall and meeting facilities on these public lands. His presumption was finally curtailed in 1974, when he was arrested by the United States Marshals for misuse of the land as well as alleged violations of food and drug laws. The property was reclaimed by the government and the village compound bequeathed to a consortium of Cal State Universities who use the buildings as their ‘Desert Studies Center’. It was here that I stayed, for three days at the end of January, to attend the seventeenth Mojave Rock Art Workshop (MORAW).

The participants, mostly male and grizzled, were educators, academics, park administrators and amateur rock art aficionados who were gathered together to give and listen to informal presentations of research, newly discovered rock art sites and the tribulations of site-stewardship. I attended with Doug Brotherton and was accepted as a participant on the basis of my association with Doug, the recent publication of Rock Art at Little Lake (2012) to which I had made small contributions (Little Lake) and, perhaps, because of this blog’s sometime focus on the Chumash.

I was on the lookout for great stories – and the tale of Zzyzx was going to be hard to top. Each morning at dawn I ventured forth in 24 degree F. weather to run along the dry salt beds and try to fathom this strange, anomalous place in the vast desert-scape of the Mojave. By mid-morning, I was immersed in the minutiae of rock art recordation and the presumed archeological import of the data.

Late Saturday afternoon I listened to the archeologist Steve Schwartz tell his tale of  Lone Woman Cave, San Nicolas Island: Sifting fact from Fiction. Here was a story with a true dramatic arc that glittered with historic and pre-historic insights; a tale capable of competing with the origination myth of Zzyzx and possessing an allure sufficient to eclipse, as the day’s peak experience, the beauty of the dawn’s impossibly low sun grazing the salt lake and sending the long shadow of my frozen body bouncing into infinity.

In 1814, the Russian Fur Company dispatched Aleut otter hunters to San Nicolas Island, the furthest west and most remote of the Southern Channel Islands, to secure some of the many thousands of pelts required to satisfy the booming Chinese market. While a desultory trade had existed for years between the native hunters on the Channel Islands and itinerant European trappers this represented a new and threatening expansion of the fur trade and there was a violent confrontation between the Aleuts and the locals resulting in the death of many of the already marginalized Islanders. (When Viscaino landed on San Nicholas on December 6, 1602, he had reported it densely populated).

Reduced to an unsustainable population, the remnant Nicoleños were removed from the island some twenty years later. One woman remained, however, to search for her missing child, or, as told by Scott O’Dell in his fictionalized version of the story, The Island of the Blue Dolphins, having dived overboard from the evacuation ship after sighting her young brother left behind on the beach. In 1853, George Nidever arrived on the Island with a hunting party and caught sight of the woman, who had survived alone for eighteen years (the brother is killed by wild dogs early on in Scott O’Dell’s narrative), and she was gathered up and taken to his estate in Santa Barbara. On the mainland, she shared few words with the local Ventureños but with the use of sign-language indicated that her lost child was never found. Shortly after being baptized as Juana Maria by the Padres of Santa Barbara Mission, she succumbed to dysentery. This story became a staple of popular magazines in the late 1800’s and was revived by Scott O’Dell in 1960 with his hugely popular children’s novel.

Artifacts related to Juana Maria’s lonely sojourn on the island were recently recovered from a sheer cliff on the leeward side of San Nicolas by the noted archeologist Jon Erlandson. It had long been established that the Lone Woman lived, for the most part, in a cave, and objects she had used in her daily life were recovered from her island home in the 1880’s but were subsequently destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. The cave’s location was lost for the entirety of the twentieth century and  Erlandson’s find was the first, twenty-first century indication that the cave's wherabouts might be recovered. Scott Bryan from U.C. Berkeley subsequently discovered an 1879 coastal survey that pin-pointed its location.

Steve Schwartz - seconded to Naval Air Systems Command which administers the Island and from which it fires test rockets – had attempted to locate the cave for over twenty years. Now, using Scott Bryan’s information he had the confidence to organize a major dig. Eighteen days and 40,000 buckets of material later, with the help of a team of volunteers, the cave was revealed in a sandstone outcrop that had held its secret for well over a century, in twenty feet of accumulated sand.

Steve reached the occupation floor of the cave and followed it 75 feet back into the cliff. At that point the Navy stepped in and halted his excavation. A cave of this magnitude almost certainly possesses artifacts from the beginning of human habitation on the Channel Islands. As Jon Erlandson has demonstrated at the much smaller Daisy Cave on San Miguel, evidence can be traced  back 15,000 years to what he calls kelp culture: the artifactual and nutritional basis of pioneer Asian Pacific voyagers - perhaps the first North Americans. (An Island on the Land and Ancient Isle).

While we can deplore the decision by the Navy to prohibit further archeological research in the cave, we can also be profoundly grateful that the island still exists. In 1945, San Nicolas was one of eight short-listed sites for the Trinity Atomic test, the dubious honor of which eventually fell to the White Sands testing range in New Mexico. The island thus missed its appointment with the apocalypse: but its place in history may yet arrive when proven to be the confirmatory site of the unique culture which came to the Channel Islands with the first peoples of North America.

On the brink of potentially major discoveries, thwarted by labyrinthine Naval bureaucracy, Steve Schwartz has chosen to retire.

Knowledge Scrublands

A little over two thousand years ago an event occurred that precipitated the marking of time in a uniform manner over much of the planet. This synchronization, which occurred in hindsight some 525 years after the event, was not widely adopted until the end of the ninth century when it received the imprimatur of the Venerable Bede. For more than a thousand years thenceforth, years were dated in the form of Anno Domini (the year of our Lord) or simply A.D.. Years prior to His birth were designated as Before Christ or B.C.. In our politically correct era this has been amended to Common Era and Before Common Era, and since this dating system is virtually universal it can be said that humanity exists, temporally, in a Time Commons. We all share in this fundamental database which clicks over, to much celebration, at each completion of the earth's orbit around the sun.

'The Time' is not proprietary knowledge. It is freely available and awareness of it does not confer special privileges. Neither is there a societal requirement to credit the source of this calendric information. This is the nature of commons. It was not always so. In primitive cultures awareness of the astronomical time was a source of power. The 'Antap, the intellectual elite who presided over the fragmented tribelets between Malibu and Paso Robles, controlled these wilfully independent peoples by virtue of accessing astronomical information and mandating the ritual calendar by which the awesome powers of the cosmos might be propitiated (Real Suspense).

Today, our sources of knowledge, once carefully guarded by both intellectual elites and those with a more demotic understanding of natural magic, are being democratized on the internet. We are moving towards a Knowledge Commons. Google tried to digitize all the books in the world, but were defeated by copyright laws and lawsuits. Nevertheless, the shell of the Google attempt remains as a ghost ship sailing the world wide web. I have often jumped aboard these creaking hulks, shot through with lacunae, and ransacked them for plunder in patching together my tattered blog pieces.

Now comes the Digital Public Library of America which promises to aggregate digital collections from public and private libraries across the land. One of its founders, Robert Darnton writes in the New York Review of Books, "the DPLA harkens back to the eighteenth century - what could be more utopian than a project to make the cultural heritage of humanity available to all humans?" All humans, that is, with a working command of English and access to the Web. Meanwhile, Europeana coordinates and links collections in twenty seven European countries to which DPLA will, in turn, link. Within a decade, perhaps, there will be web access to most of the world's storehouses of knowledge from a single portal - a digital Alexandria.

Already the ease of access to information on the web has created an explosion of fact based writing on and off-line. Creative non-fiction is arguably the fastest growing literary genre in America and is enabled, to a great extent, by the ease of access to facts on-line. Facticicity has become the glue of much writing (not least here) where arcane information gleaned from the web can laminate elaborate musings that would otherwise congeal into a puddle of solipsism.

Whilst your Urban Wildland scribe endeavors to give credit where credit's due and affects a veneer of academic rectitude, others are less punctilious. Jane Goodall has recently been exposed as a common-place plagiarist: her new book relies on un-credited gleanings from such prosaic sources as Wikipedia and the website of Choice Organic Teas. She quotes interviews with scientists with whom she has never met. The book, Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants, 2013, has been pulled from the shelves and will be replaced with a revised second printing.

Somewhere along the line, this erstwhile primatologist became a brand. Now her name on a book guarantees hard-cover sales in the mid seven figures. In this she resembles Jared Diamond, who has parlayed an academic career studying birds in Papua New Guinea into a series of popular cross-disciplinary books that have a devoted middle-brow following (WEIRD). Now, it is my dearest wish to become a brand, either in my own name or that of my blog, but as Jane's recent fall from grace illustrates, there are dangers.

Seeds of Hope credits a co-author - Gail Hudson - and it is reasonable to assume that it was she who was largely responsible for both the plagiarized and un-plagiarized portions of the text. Jane has relied upon Gail for her previous two books and, as a brand, the sometime primatologist has less and less time for writing: Brand's outline - they ensure conformity to the brand - but write? hell no! Be assured, at this prepupal stage in the development my brand identity, every stolen word, lifted passage and un-credited apercu on this blog is uniquely the work of yours truly.

I first became conscious of the word common as a descriptor of those open lands that were neither populated nor farmed in the parts of 'Darkest Surrey' where I grew up. Our local common was called Heaven's Gate - named perhaps, for its elevational prominence, for it rose slightly above the riverine flatlands that bordered the River Wey, a southern tributary of the Thames, that shaped the string of villages and towns that were studded between these empty, vaguely louche lands that we called commons. Here were smoked our first cigarettes, and if sufficiently precocious, undertook our first romantic trysts.

I now realize that the Common's characteristic scrubland vegetation of bracken, gorse and heather indicated their unsuitability for agriculture. These sandy wastelands were spared from the grasping local gentry who would otherwise have acquired them, had they been worth fencing, through the Enclosure Acts of the early nineteenth century. Happily these lands remained wild and free through the year's of my 'growing-up'; today, Heaven's Gate is riven by the A-3, a major vehicular artery between London and Portsmouth.

In her first book about the vegetal, as opposed to the animal world, Jane Goodall relies on the words of un-credited experts, largely culled from the web by her indefatigable Gail-Friday; but a simple walk through the wilds (or commons) can establish connections with Nature's freely accessible data bases. Sentient beings, as the Transcendentalists understood, can acquire truths in tramping the land that require no crediting - but demand a very un-academic willingness to embrace the non-empirical, to open oneself to the swirling power of the etheric landscape. This should be common knowledge.

Meanwhile, we await the arrival of the DPLA, an unfenced knowledge commons which promises to nourish us toilers in the vineyard of creative non-fiction. However, we should all be mighty afeared of the Gentry - the media barons and their political lackeys in Washington - who, if they see value in these digital collections will endeavor to pay-wall them in (as is currently the case with many academic papers). Perhaps, like gypsies tramps and thieves, we can then retreat to obscure corners of the web where will survive pockets of freely available arcana in the virtual knowledge-scrublands. Or, take a walk in the real woods. Here in the urban wildland I plan to continue doing both.

Night and Day

As the planet turns on its axis and captive humanity experiences a turning towards or away from our distant sun, night engulfs day and day rolls back the night. These diurnal ecotones of dawn and dusk allow for particular moments of reflection uninflected by either the full presence or absence of light - opportunities perhaps, to investigate grey areas of an otherwise manichean life. At other times they simply provide rich aesthetic experiences or space in which to prepare for the flicking of the solar switch. Often, at these moments of luminary flux, great beauty is pierced by pedestrian reality.

In the gloaming, color leaches out of the landscape turning oaks an inky black and shades of grey are all that's left to describe the land. Above, there is a monotone firmament, except to the west where, at the end of an almost infinite layering of dissolving ink washes - sfumato - there are the pinks and apricots of an early evening sky lightly bruised with clouds. Walking down Koenigstein, entranced by this blurred edge between light and dark, two flickering lights semaphored the arrival of the night - natural gas flares in the Arco Oil field half way up the the Sulphur Mountain escarpment across from the Summit.

My mind has been on the development of the local oil-fields recently. First, Marianne Ratcliff alerted her neighbors that Mirada Oil, a small operator with a number of wells between Koenigstein and Thomas Aquinas, has applied to ammend their County Conditional Use Permit. They are requesting that the document be modified to allow a further five wells (from 6 to 11) on their Harth lease which is located in the hills north of Arco's Silver Thread facility above the Painted Pony petting zoo on the 150. Then, Alasdair Coyne, in his invaluable newsletter for the Keep The Sespe Wild and Free Committee (which he co-founded and now spearheads), wrote a piece titled Fracking in The Sespe in the Winter 2012-2013 issue.

Maryanne and I attended the County Hearing on March 21 which focused on the Planning Director's Staff Report which had set Mirada's application on a glide path towards approval by Kim Prillheart, the County's Planning Director. Key to facilitating approval of this expansion of drilling activity was the staff decision not to require either a new Mitigated Negative Declaration or an Environmental Impact Report - a decision predicated on the notion that this was a minor modification to the original CUP granted in 1985, that there will be no significant additional impacts to the environment, and that no new information of substantial importance on the project's environmental effect has been uncovered since 1985.

The gallery of some 15 local residents expressed their disdain for these Pollyanna assumptions. History, is perhaps, on their side. Our immediate neighbor on Koenigstein, John Whitman, successfully challenged the granting of a CUP to Phoenix Corporation who planned to drill a single exploratory well within a quarter mile of his home (the old dude ranch Rancho del Oso) back in 1975. Four years later he won on appeal to Ventura's Supreme Court.

I called John the day before the hearing and offered to drive him to the County offices. He did not return my call but the next day his son Andrew, a lawyer, was there to represent the family's interests. His call to his father had also been unreturned, but he referenced John's erstwhile activism and expressed alarm that the County was again ignoring cumulative environmental impacts - the very issue that prompted the Appeals Court to overturn the C.U.P. granted to Phoenix by Ventura County.

I suspect that nowadays no public hearing which has as its focus the activities of the oil and gas industry avoids the hysteria surrounding the practice of hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Mirada's proposed extraction program does not include fracking, but we nevertheless listened to an Ojai resident who drove twenty miles to the meeting to deliver an emotional tirade based on the film Gasland, an alarmist and largely discredited account of the horrors of fracking documented by Josh Fox. Alasdair, in his analysis of the activity in the Sespe, makes the sensible point that this potentially hazardous technology requires firm State regulation. Several bills are making their way through the California legislature promising just such control.

California's Monterey Shale formation was the elephant in the Hearing Room, but the palavering pachyderm was eventually called out by Marianne. While having nothing to do with the case at hand, this geological formation looms large over the energy future of both California and the United States; it is estimated that it contains some 400 billion barrels of oil - although less than five percent of it is accessible through today's drilling technologies. Even so, this 15 billion bbl. represents ten years of Saudi Arabia's output and could radically impact both our dependence on foreign oil and the local economy.

Because hydraulic fracturing is effective in extracting oil and gas from shale it will be the preferred technology as this resource comes on-line. Marianne expressed a generalized unease that Ventura's part in this bonanza would generate deleterious environmental impacts. Alasdair points out that part of the Monterey shale sits under the Los Padres National Park which will require stringent review by the National Forest Service, but that other areas under private ownership, outside of the park or as in-holdings, will potentially allow for faster development.

These great reservoirs of oil that lie beneath the land represent the solar energy beamed down to the Earth between 300 and  360 million years ago in strict accord with the diurnal patterns that continue to govern the circadian rhythms of all animals, plants, fungi and bacteria. That energy now enables us to turn night into day, traverse great and small distances at extraordinary speeds; heat our built environments independently of the exterior weather, grow vast amounts of food and cook it at will. The word transformational barely begins to cover it. As I point out in Moai, it has enabled the Modern World.

In the Hearing Room, under the faint buzz of fluorescent lights fueled by a long ago sun, we argued about the form and propriety of sucking more oil out of the bowels of the earth. Our mostly pasty faces were by turns amused, annoyed and fiercely attentive to the process of our County administration and the extemporizations of its punctilious representatives and our querulous neighbors.

Perhaps I alone harbored memories of that morning's dawn in the chaparral - somewhere above the Ojai Oil Field, the marine layer still settled densely over Ojai, the sun half an hour away from splashing the dark Nordhoff ridge off in the distance, with thoughts only of choosing my next step over the still, grey land.

Worlds Apart

There are creamy yellow blossoms of mountain mahogany, blossoms of California bay, the passion-flower-like virgin’s bower (the cream-white native clematis) and the rest of the cream meme – star florets of wild cucumber, flat-top elderberry blossoms, pendulous poison oak flowers and the miniature grape-like flower clusters of its close relative, squaw bush - cream on grey skeletal twigs. The tiny fuzz balls on the mule fat (baccharis salicifolia) are the color of a tea-stained linen napkin while the local morning glory is whiter, but replete with red wine streaks on the exterior of its trumpet.

There are the blues of lupine, the nightshades, fiesta flowers, blue eyed grass and blue dicks and now sage; white popcorn flower, white California everlasting and the black to carmine of the California peony blossoms.

Most of the white ceanothus flowers were lost to the winds of late February and early March but there is still the blue. Owl’s head clover, tending deep pink, has pushed up in drifts amidst grasses, invasive erodium and clover; pink prickly phlox is set in sandstone cliffs and at the damp base, coral Indian paintbrush. The bush poppies and bush sunflowers provide splashes of yellow (along with the tiny punctuation of fiddlenecks) amidst the chaparral’s mostly blue, white, cream and pink flowers.

This efflorescence is a tiny slice of the local botanical diversity. As Lightfoot and Parrish point out in their California Natural History Guide, California Indians and their Environment, 2009,

"California is home to more endemic species of plants...than any other equivalent sized area in North America. 3,423 species are considered to be native and another 1,416 are classified as endemic, i.e. they are found only in habitats within the state. Nearly 25% of all known plant species in the United States are found in California. These include the world's tallest trees, the coast redwood (sequoia sempiverens), the world's largest trees, the giant sequoia (sequoiadendron giganteum); the worlds oldest trees, the western bristlecone pine (pinus longeava); and some of the smallest and unique plants known to mankind."

By contrast, as my friend Will Reed reminded me the other morning, Britain possesses only 32 (or maybe 35) native trees and 32 native shrubs, of which only one, an obscure hornbeam, is endemic. Yes, there are some 1,500 grasses and forbs native to the Old Dart, but Britain was wiped clean of flora during the massive glaciations which began around 100,000 years ago and has half the biotic diversity of its cross-channel neighbor France (quelle dommage!).

After the end of the last Ice Age, plants slowly re-colonized Britain in their general drift towards the northwest as the climate improved and the range of species was extended. However, about 8,000 years ago, with continued ice-melt, the rift between Britain and France was submerged in a cataclysmic megaflood fed by the rising waters of a vast freshwater lake formed over many thousands of years in what is now the southern north sea. This devastating surge of water pounded and gouged the land, creating a giant channel between the two land masses. This newly formed English Channel then halted terrestrial migration of plants from the rest of Europe, forever limiting Britain's native biotic diversity. (Sanjeev Gupta et al. in Nature 448, 2007)

It is interesting to note the comparative ages of human inhabitation in California and Britain. As I have detailed in Ancient Isle, the first humans arrived in California, perhaps via the Kelp Road (and if so, perhaps on the Northern Channel Islands) about 15,000 years ago during the last groans of the mega fauna.

Some 700,000 years before, early humans were mixing it up with hippos, rhinos and elephants along the banks of a vast meandering river that drained central and eastern England and flowed sluggishly into the North sea. This, of course, was millennia before Britain separated from Europe and the warm interglacial period afforded opportunities for settlement in the continent's northern reaches - what today is Suffolk and Norfolk. (Simon Parfitt et al. in Nature 438, 2005)

It is tempting to view the protracted isolation from the uber-predator as the reason for California's biotic fecundity. But, as I mention in WEIRD, human populations can sometimes foster biotic diversity and certainly the absence of pre-historic agriculture went some way towards preserving California's variety of plant-life - many of whose species native peoples incorporated into their food, medicine, craft and buildings. There are more profound, climatic and geological reasons why this 'Floristic Province' is now designated by Conservation International as a Global Biodiversity Hotspot.

Over the last 2 1/2 million years, California largely avoided the ravages of the Ice Ages. Instead, the coastal areas were characterized by grassy plains with rich sediments deposited by rivers meandering their way to the ocean. Seismic activity has bounced some of these old beaches inland and old sea floors now form our mountain tops. Old wave-cut ocean terraces step down towards the present-day coastline. Streams have cut through the up-lifted land mass and created deep valleys. As the climate warmed and sea levels rose these valleys were flooded to form estuaries rich in the deposition of soft sediments, which have eroded and spread their riches down stream as sea levels have dropped again (viz. the Oxnard Plain). Over time, these processes have shaped California’s unique habitats and produced a rich mosaic of life. Now, the cold ocean currents to the west and high mountains to the east have formed, in Carey McWilliams' phrase, an island on the land, where California's dizzying diversity is nurtured in its short wet winters and long dry summers.

The other evening on the pool terrace, drinking a Page tangerine cocktail (equal parts juice, Campari, and soda), with Jim Churchill, the drink's originator, he looked across at the east hill and asked, what is that pink bush mid-slope? It was at that hour when the world is suffused with an apricot blush (resonating with the color of our drinks) when the low sun, filtered through the planet's dust, casts its glow across the spalled cliff face of the Topatopas. I had no answer, but assured him that I would investigate the following morning.

Walking through the east meadow past the oaks and walnuts, I pushed through the chamise up the slope until I had a clear view of Jim's pink bush. In the morning light it was a more prosaic beige and it was apparent that the color belonged to a frost damaged bough of laurel sumac. In this floristic paradise, it is easy to imagine flowers where none exist.

WEIRD

Last night, I attended an Ojai Music Festival event at a house on Mulholland Drive. Expansive glazing allowed for panoramic views of Los Angeles to the south and of the valley to the north. The dense grids of lights in both directions seemed to represent a sort of neural tracery – the synaptic pathways of our fluorescing civilization. The house itself occupied its ridge top location surrounded by dense pools of darkness, the perquisite, in Los Angeles, of the very wealthy.

This morning, walking along freshly cleared paths in the chaparral that surrounds our house in the foothills of the Topatopas, suggests another societal analogy: the birds, insects, and scurrying mammals, the sounds and the scents, the light and shade, the arabesques of leaf and twig and the shimmy of grass or forbs underfoot create a sensory, integrative web in which one becomes blunderingly complicit.

The adoption of agriculture is often considered to be the dividing line between ‘primitive’ and ‘advanced’ civilizations. The latter, it is presumed, only developed where environmental conditions allowed for the farming of domesticated plants and animals; the disposition of the resultant food surplus was then organized through social stratification and a hierarchical command structure. One further result, as evidenced last night, is a myriad of twinkling lights in the hinterlands below the redoubts of the rich and famous.

Philip Slater, in The Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture, 2008, calls the arrangements necessary to generate ‘advanced’ civilizations a ‘Control Culture’ which he identifies with “authoritarianism, militarism, misogyny, proliferating walls, mental constriction and rigid dualism”.

For California’s Indians, agriculture represents the road not taken. In eschewing farming they had no need for ‘Control Cultures’ - their political units were often no larger than one extended family, or what Lévi-Strauss calls 'House Societies'. Slater identifies such arrangements as ‘Integrative culture’, characterized by an order that derives from spontaneous interactions, and that function, like the Natural world, through a system of self correction and cybernetic feedback. Some faint simulacrum of this can be experienced in a walk through the Elfin Forest.

The current muse through whom we connect to traditional cultures and gain some sense of how modern culture figures in the civilizational continuum is Jared Diamond. I don’t know him, but there is only one degree of separation. He’s a colleague of Jo Anne van Tilburg with whom I have worked, off and on, for the last five years at UCLA’s Rock Art Archive. Several years before that I read his classic Guns, Germs and Steel which attempts to answer a Papua New Guinean tribesman’s simple question: How come you, indicating Jared as a representative of the West, have all the stuff?

Diamond’s answer is announced in the title of his book. Critical to the West’s ability to develop beyond the Mesopotamian agricultural watershed and truly modernize (for want of a better term) was the invention of gunpowder, the relative lack of virulent diseases in the cool temperate North and the ready availability of iron ore from which to forge its tools. Thus the West (but more accurately the North of Asia, Europe and the Americas) developed the ability to create the kind of wealth that is expressed in ‘stuff’ (and twinkling lights) – infrastructure, machines and electronics of every scale and purpose as well as endless supplies of food.

 In four books, The Third Chimpanzee, 1991 (how we evolved as a species capable of dominating and ultimately threatening our environment); Guns, Germs and Steel, 1997 (why the West has the most toys); Collapse, 2005 (why do some civilizations fail?) and now, The World Until Yesterday, 2012 (what we can learn from ‘traditional’ societies), Jared Diamond has engaged a broad public in questions of how societies are. He has also introduced us to a wonderful acronym: WEIRD - Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic - the characteristics, he suggests, instrumental in our domination of the planet.

 As a committed conservationist, Diamond realizes that this is not altogether a good thing, and his work is full of reminders of the values (and warnings) that inhere in traditional societies. Looking back from a twenty first century perspective one can celebrate the fact that in all their myriad manifestations over the millennia, none of these cultures came close to destroying the planet: this may yet prove to be the unique distinction of those societies Diamond lumps under the WEIRD rubric.

How Californian Indians threaded the needle, navigating between the needs of an assured food supply and ensuring sufficient flexibility to survive vast swings in climate and dramatically rising sea levels and the smaller scale, chronic disturbances of drought, flood, earthquakes, and fire is the subject of M. Kat Anderson’s, Tending the Wild, 2005.

She writes, “California Indians did not distinguish between managed land and wild land as we do today”. Tribal languages lack words for both ‘wilderness’ and ‘civilization’. Overgrown, dense wilderness was not conducive to hunting, the nurturing edible plants village sites or to creating the web of spirit, summit and trading paths that threaded through the land. In managing the wild the indigenous peoples of California contrived to create a system of linked prairies, open woodlands and coppices that resembled what we might conceive of today as parkland.

Vestiges of this vast enterprise, nurtured over fifteen millennia, survive. More often, the food-lands that have not been engulfed in industrial, suburban and transportation infrastructure, have reverted, in our highly fire averse culture, to impenetrably tangled forests and shrub-lands. The mosaic of meadowlands, managed woods, tended marshlands and open rivers and streams which, in cooperation with the sprit world, the aboriginal population both harvested and replenished, has mostly vanished.

Of the colonization of the state she writes, “When the first Europeans visited California….they did not…find a pristine, virtually uninhabited wilderness but rather a carefully tended garden that was the result of thousands of years of selective harvesting, tilling, burning, pruning, sowing, weeding, and transplanting.”

Our rigid dualisms - wild or tamed, barbarous or civilized, natural or man-made, have hindered our comprehension of this great experiment in integrative culture where, in a complex matrix of connectivity, humankind fully cooperated and co-existed with the natural world. This Edenic past is not an altogether hidden layer of California’s landscape. We could do worse, amidst the tumult of secular materialism, to unveil its history and enact its lessons.