The Waste Land

A collective sigh of relief riffled through the corridors of power around the world. The Great Disrupter had been brought to heel, whether by his own insecurities, the deep-state, Mad-Dog Mattis, or Jared Kushner, no one knew. In one act of petulant gun-boat diplomacy the world was restored to its customary axis and America to its past.

The U.S. had returned to fighting the last war. The one great moral force in the world was appalled at the release of low-grade, bath-tub variety Sarin gas and caused five dozen largely ineffective Tomahawk missiles to be lobbed at a remote air-field (back in service days later) and the Russian Bear’s nose to be tweaked. A masterstroke of nineteenth century diplomacy (by other means)!

Meanwhile, its Empire continued to be roiled in real and consequential ways by the blow-back of over one hundred and fifty years of the burning of fossil fuels, the sixth extinction, acidifying oceans and great clouds of turbid toxicity settling over Asia. And its profoundly reactionary leader, to no great surprise, had prepared his response: the nineteenth century be damned, his environmental policy would be guided by attitudes forged in the seventeenth: North America, nay the Planet, the gift of the Great Provider to her chosen people – exists to be raped and pillaged at its God-given pleasure.

The Acourtia lies prostrate across the single track trail; wild cucumber entwines itself amongst the flanking shrubs and crisscrosses the path at around neck height. Progress involves triage: something has to give.  It’s spring in the chaparral. Blue dicks (native hyacinth) are rampant. Virgin’s bower (native clematis) is running riot, poppies and popcorn flower are popping up all over; and solanum and lupin bloom in blue profusion. Bush sunflowers are radiant.

It rained this year. The drought doomsters are perplexed at this entirely predictable turn of events. A cursory review of the rain fall records is all it takes to be assured that Southern California’s drought was fully within historical norms. Don’t be conflatin’ (with global warming that is).

Even in the chaparral, historical perspective is useful. Both the wisdom of reflection and the judgement of time are denied by the primacy of the moment where we become transfixed by the jet stream of trivia generated by the 24-hour media news-cycle - or blinkered by a few years of minimal rainfall. The slightly above average rainfall of 2016-2017 has everyone rejoicing – and me mourning the end of a five year holiday from weeds in the broken edges of the urban wildland. Natives are bred to drought, weeds from temperate Europe much less so.

 In Washington, decision making happens in a place where its obsessions with a golden past deeply color its obsessions of the moment. There is a precedent. The Whig interpretation of history is a precursor to what some now call presentism: the predilection for focusing on what’s happening NOW. If all of history is tending towards its culmination in the present, then it is indeed the present that demands attention - the past serving as mere prelude. But the triumphalism of British mainstream historians in the age of Victoria who tended, as their great de-bunker Herbert Butterfield, wrote 1931, “to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present” was surely the result of their satisfaction with the contemporaneous state of the world with Britain as its Imperial Master. They were blind to the impending decline of British hegemony - blind to threats of greater historical gravitas than those so ably batted away by the Foreign Secretaries of the day who relied on the rattle of the saber and the explosive shell, just as the Lord High Executioner and his Ministers rely on the brute force of the Tomahawk missile and drone delivered ordnance while seemingly unaware of more existential threats to their world.

In among the invasive grasses, those heralds of spring, peonies and goosefoot, still nestle. Deerweed, artemesia and sage show up as sage-scrub slowly re-establishes itself in the soils disturbed by residential development and before that of ranching and mixed farming. Soapweed sprouts in clusters, casually seeded by Chumash Indians who used its poison root to stun steelhead trout in Bear Creek. Native bunch grasses survive, but are crowded by introduced annual grasses. This morning, mist lay heavy in the valley, but rising above it, in the lee of the Santa Paula Ridge, the sun almost over the mountains, I spotted my first owl’s head clover of the season. Moments later, I saw fiddle neck still tightly curled but about to bloom.

In rhapsodizing over the emergence of vernal flora I am a consumer of the natural world situated, ideologically, somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century. Pursuing transcendence through transference, moving the ego aside and accessing what Jung calls the ‘voice of God’ (or at least, wallowing in an aesthetic reverie sufficient to submerge my quotidian concerns) I am following in the footsteps of Wordsworth, Emerson and Thoreau. Mine is a Romantic vision where I find profound aesthetic and spiritual value in the chaparral wilderness that surrounds me on the wildland edge of Ojai, California.

This reactionary excursion, from a position of little influence is, I hope, reasonably harmless. It is a step away from the present where we live in an age of ecology, our consciousness of the natural world informed by notions of complex and inter-related systems and shadowed by an understanding that civilization has impinged on these systems in profoundly irrevocable ways.

Our President meanwhile, from a position of some considerable influence, has retreated to a way of valuing the natural world prevalent at the very beginning of the European conquest of North America: when wilderness was worthless (unless to serve as terrain for the testing of one’s Christian faith); when wilderness was without intrinsic value until transformed by colonists and when its indigenous peoples had no rights to ownership precisely because of their failure to cultivate the land. By common law exegesis (or spiritual alchemy) land became property by virtue of its exploitation by Europeans.

As Jedediah Purdy outlines in his recent book, After Nature – A Politics for the Anthropocene, 2015, America was colonized by men and women resolute in their belief in this providential vision whereby the land existed only to serve human needs, its bounty a God-given gift to those who dared to make the land productive. In his pledge to Make America Great Again!, the President has embraced this vision which serves as divine justification for the mercenary exploitation of the environment. Within this pre-modern world view its protection would be tantamount to an attempt to turn the environment to Waste, a word, as Purdy notes, which in the providential vocabulary suggested wilderness - a place devoid of value.

Amy Davidson writes in a recent New Yorker, that in attempting to restrict the work of the EPA in controlling greenhouse gases, our President is guilty of “reckless endangerment”. The truth is this country is founded on exactly that ethos – ask any Native American even mildly cognizant of his people’s history.

It’s almost as if all of History is trending towards the seventeenth century. Despite his Twitterish presentism, the Baleful One has returned to the world of knee breeches, doublets and ruffs to find justification for an intensified extraction of the world’s resources. Yet there is a neo-liberal twist, a shard of the twenty first century inserted into his providential vision, for the environment will be fully monetized and the market will manage its inexorable decline.

Perhaps, as the earth trembles under the impact of its missiles, the earth’s air stultified by its toxic emissions, its rivers poisoned again by industrial waste and its over-fished seas swollen by its heedless carbon emissions, our land will, in the twenty-first century meaning of the words, be truly laid to waste……while its people (and their Representatives) remain comatose, (to continue our nature story) like so many stunned steelhead trout.

Darkness at Noon

They followed their food. They came from Northeast Asia: men, women and children wrapped in fur and hides lashed with sinew, walking between glaciers, across ice floes, over moraines and through wide river valleys where the megafauna of the fast receding Ice Age still roamed. Or they paddled through the kelp forests of the western ocean, staying close to shore and surrounded by their prey - dolphin, seals, otters and perhaps even schools of saber-toothed salmon coming of age.

They settled across every bio-region of the land: enduring and sometimes thriving, in peace or at war with each other, but always living lightly on the land. They multiplied but did not overpopulate.

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, perhaps fifteen millennia after these first peoples had arrived, the Europeans showed up with, as Jared Diamond puts it, guns, germs and steel. After eons of co-habiting with animals, which Europeans had domesticated to more easily harvest their flesh, take their milk, tan their hides and render their bones, the new arrivals came carrying zoonoses, pathogens swapped between the species; and their very arrival was dependent on the great technical and knowledge revolutions that they had achieved after the stagnation of post-Roman Europe. The native populations were helpless before these biological and technological assaults.

The Unites States is thus a country born of Imperialism. North America beckoned as a land that might be consumed, its peoples killed (deliberately or by biological hazard), the survivors enslaved and its resources ravaged. Europeans, having so thoroughly partitioned their own lands to the advantage of the few (the aristocracy and other landed classes) and to the detriment of the many (the peasants), saw an opportunity to begin again – to escape a time-worn feudalism and more equitably exploit the riches of North America.

This time, carried on the ideological wings of late eighteenth century liberalism, land would be available to all and its government arranged for the benefit of its many owners. What could be fairer than that? But Jeffersonian Democracy carried within it the demon-seed of agrarian capitalism, developed in the Old World and now, in the New, primed to burst into an un-fettered expansion. Teamed with mercantilism, which was energized by the triangular trade anchored in Old World centers of production and which pivoted to North America for raw agricultural materials and to Africa for the slave-labor to farm them, capitalism became the dominant ideology of the United States.

The competition inherent in capitalism plays out as a deep rift between winners and losers – the rich and the poor – as predatory accumulation leads to an organization of society that marshals labor against capital, whites against minorities, urban areas against rural, elite education versus popular and politics against social life - as power, all the while, accrues to the wealthy. The ability of the rich to shape the rules of the game has promoted these characteristics as they manifested first in mercantilism and agrarian capitalism, then nineteenth and early twentieth century industrial capitalism and now neoliberalism.

The great heat-sink of late-stage capitalisms is the so-called middle class –  a creation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and an essential partner to mechanized production. Once those dark satanic mills really got humming it was necessary to find consumers.  Thorsten Veblen understood that conspicuous consumption was essentially a display behavior practiced by this new interstitial class (encouraged by the dark arts of marketing), which slotted between blue-collar workers and capital. Together they established a compelling new tripartite division of labor, consumption and capital.

Marx’s notion that bourgeois ideology (whose charms extend across the ‘lower’ classes) blinded citizens to the exploitation to which they were subjected, was prophetic:  it foreshadowed the entirely passive acceptance of an inherently oligarchic government by the majoritarian middle classes. Our government has enshrined the ideology of capitalism and its concomitant, the rule of the few over the many, from its conception - it is no aberration that George Washington was reputed to be the richest man in America. Our democracy, a shell game played every two years, remains in the duplicitous hands of the country’s wealthiest citizens.

Our current Sun King, radiant beneath his gilded halo, is but a petty pretender: but his election speaks to the American fealty paid to wealth as he acts, in his buffoonish way, as the supreme symbol of the neoliberal oligarchy. While he makes gestures towards curbing this latest iteration of capitalism, spouting nationalist, protectionist, high-tariff rhetoric, current evidence suggests that the stock market remains hugely confident that he understands, like Coolidge (and every president since Grant), that the business of America is business - and that that business is now irrevocably global.

Imperialism ‘adds value’ to the production process by sourcing materials or labor (and often both) at a competitive advantage in territories beyond the market base of its end products. This exogenous capitalist enterprise has been complicit, since at least the seventeenth century, in the metastasis of capitalism throughout the globe. Time was when this activity involved the actual conquest of foreign lands. Now capitalism - enshrined as neoliberalism in this age of globalized production and international trade – is supercharged by the wage disparities between the global North and South.  This hemispheric division largely reflects the divide between the old Imperialist nations and their former colonies and serves as the playground for the neoliberal game of global labor arbitrage.

While industrial production is increasingly based in the global South, this does little to enrich those lands, instead, it has reinforced the accumulation of wealth in the North and led to the immiseration of the urbanizing labor force in the South. At the same time, as John Smith points out in Imperialism & the Globalization of Production, University of Sheffield, 2010, profit making is more and more centered on ‘Financialization’ whereby the profits of production are diverted into financial speculation and private equity mergers and acquisitions. Meanwhile, the hard currency earned by the producing countries (most notably China) is loaned back to the United States so that it can continue to purchase the consumer products which find their way, via laden container ships, to the shelves of Best Buy, Walmart, Bed Bath and Beyond and the like. Smith suggests that we are witnessing “a perverse ‘Marshall Plan’ in which some of the poorest countries in the world finance the overconsumption of the richest”.  The EU, NAFTA and the TPP were all structured, in part, to increase access to centers of cheap ‘offshore’ labor by Western Europe, the U.S. and Japan.

The race to the bottom in terms of global competitiveness inevitably impacts the remaining centers of production in the global North where wages are pushed lower to ensure their continuing viability. It has not gone unnoticed that the industrial heartlands of this country contributed mightily to the Republican victory in the recent presidential election. Voters were gambling that the new president would more effectively control the primary manifestations of global labor arbitrage  – migration and outsourcing - by reaching back to the ultranationalist and right wing ideologies of the 1930’s. Fat chance, but we should nevertheless prepare ourselves for neoliberalism with a fascist face.

It is tempting to assume that darkness has only recently befallen this country: congruent, perhaps, with what we might call our own, low-wattage, Orange Revolution. But the chthonic - the shadow of the underworld - has been endemic since the European Imperial powers colonized what is now the United States. The unrelenting psychic gloom is only occasionally pierced by sunny periods - moments that have often been attributed to the rule of Presidents and Congress but as Howard Zinn shows in his A Peoples History of the United States, 1980, can be more reasonably attributed to the push-back of the governed.

At the height of its twenty-first century financial and military power, the United States remains deeply shadowed by its prevailing ideology which, by its very nature, entirely discounts individual and societal well-being. At this moment of presidential effulgence – its brazen light illuminating tawdry evidence of extreme wealth - we the people are experiencing an existential darkness at noon.

Brutal Landscapes

@BrutalHouse is the Twitter feed of Peter Chadwick, an on-going celebration of an architectural style first codified by Reyner Banham in his essay, The New Brutalism in 1955. One of several new coffee table books that celebrates work built in this brutish style of poured concrete – massive, forbidding and until recently totally disdained - is Chadwick’s This Brutal World, 2016.  

As a memento of our recent trip to Death Valley, a friend sent me a copy of Reyner Banham’s Scenes in America Deserta, 1980. This is a lesser (and late) work in the Banham canon, his seminal book being Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, 1960, a history of the modern movement in architecture that for several decades was a standard text in graduate schools. Of particular local interest is another of his books, his eulogy to Los Angeles, The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 1971.

What lies in the mind of a man who as a newly minted Art History graduate celebrates the uber-functionalism of exposed structural systems in post-war British architecture, epitomized in the work of the Smithsons, Alison and Peter, reveres the late work of Corbusier (Marseille’s Unité d'habitation, 1952, and his Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haut de Ronchamp, 1954) and a quarter of a century later falls prostrate before the landscape wonders of American deserts? It helps to know that he tours the American south west, heavily bearded, dark-glassed and Stetsoned in a rented Mustang, was photographed riding a folding bike (in its unfolded version) over a salt flat, and made TV programs for the BBC in the late 1970’s which attempted to explain the inexplicable urban vagaries of Los Angeles to British audiences.

He is thus exposed as an aesthete with a particular penchant for form and place and an overt awareness of his image in a small byway of celebrity culture. By coincidence (really), I have just read the English writer Geoff Dyer’s essay collection White Sands, 2016, which contains several pieces on his new home of Los Angeles. Both Dyer and Banham quote their compatriot D.H. Lawrence who famously toured New Mexico in the early 1920’s in search of nodality – that special quality that accretes to certain places and gives them a mythic resonance. Dyer first discovers this quality, in retrospect, when he remembers a hillock of compacted dirt in the corner of a park where he played as a child that was the locus for games and was called ‘the hump’. Banham becomes an early fan of the architectural style of Brutalism, which celebrates the massive, primal, imagistic force of poured concrete - and endured as a significant movement from circa 1955-1975. Lawrence is struck speechless by the raw emotive impact of the Taos pueblo (he recovered, of course, to write about it). Late in his career Banham becomes a self-described desert freak pondering the aesthetic qualities of vast landscapes of rock, sand and creosote bushes.

Brutalism is founded on the notion of an imagistic power inherent in the sculpting of forms that overwhelm their environment and can operate from the scale of Dyer’s hump to the Taos Pueblo and beyond to Kallman, McKinnell and Knowle’s Boston City Hall. Brutalist buildings don’t try to ‘fit-in’ they proclaim their differentness. Much of contemporary civilization relies on a built infrastructure that is inherently brutalist (viz. L.A.’s endless grid spreading from the ocean to the San Gabriel Mountains).

Landscapes can only be ‘brutal’, in this definition, by their formal association with this differentness, this dialectic of the anomalous human intervention (the brutalist building or system of infrastructure) within a homogeneous context: thus the mountains that ring many of our western deserts are ‘brutal’ by their association with the placid desert floor.

Banham long ago championed Los Angeles as something more interesting than a sink hole for the depression era diaspora from America’s dust bowl, the home of a meretricious film industry and the progenitor of the urban freeway as substitute for public transport. Perhaps he was reacting to its inherently brutalist topology of grid, freeway and floodwater management system (the much maligned, but appropriately concreted and channelized L.A. River).

Several waves of music, art, architecture and fashion have subsequently developed the reputation of L.A. (in all its colorful, edenic vacuousness), as a city making a credible cultural contribution to global civilization and as a place in which the well-educated, culturally literate, such as Geoff Dyer, might reasonably live and work.

When the New World emerged from its continental isolation a little more than 500 years ago, California came to exist in the European imagination only as a fabled Island of Amazons ruled by Queen Califia (Las Sergas de Esplandian, Garci Roderiguez de Montalvo, 1602). The world discovered California in 1848 when non-trivial quantities of gold were found at Sutter’s Mill which made San Francisco, the closest port to the gold fields, its pre-eminent city where greed personified flooded the town from all corners of the earth.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Los Angeles was nothing more than a murderous cow-town serving rapacious Anglo-Americans, relict populations of Californio Rancheros and their vaqueros - together with small groups of ghettoized indigenes, African Americans and Chinese. It was only with the establishment of the transcontinental railroad, the discovery of oil, the attraction of the health benefits of the desert-like environment and the founding of the movie industry that L.A. entered the twentieth century with a population swelled to truly urban proportions. Shortly thereafter, with the remnants of its decimated native peoples having long since been culturally assimilated, alienated or removed from the place they called Yang-na, The Valley of Smoke, the real estate boom began, and it has resonated across the flatlands, along the coast and up and down the canyons of the surrounding hills more or less continuously ever since.

The defense industry, Pacific Rim finance, and now Silicon Beach contribute to the economy. The entertainment industry continues to add to the city’s wealth and allure. Tourism thrives under mostly sunny skies. These are the foundations of a New World civilization, the Los Angeles that Banham came to interpret, and Geoff in Venice, (his joke, not mine) Dyer might practice his elliptical irony whilst in search of place in the Land of the Lotus Eaters.

Dyer finds his resonant ‘humps’ in Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, on L.A.’s west side where he visits Theodore Adorno’s house on South Kenter Avenue – where, and thereabouts, 1930’s European academic and high-culture émigrés wound up in an unlikely mid-century conflation of eternal sunshine and gloomy intellectualism – and at Muscle Beach in Venice where arcane rites of physical hygiene are practiced.

Neither he nor Banham attempts to confront the little that is left, in terms of artifacts, architectural evidence, language or other mythically resonant representations, of the Native American cultural efflorescence that once flourished in the territory now ceded to this global city, which together with San Francisco, is the West Coast light of the neo-liberal world.

I had always assumed that the bulk of what does remain was in the collection of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Pasadena, now administered by the Autry Museum of the American West; was in the boxes of John Peabody Harrington’s linguistic, ethnographic and native flora collections deposited in the Bureau of American Ethnology and now housed in the Smithsonian; in A.L. Kroeber’s collection at Berkeley’s Museum of Anthropology; or in other institutions across the State. It turns out, however, that this corner of southern California suffered the depredations of its own Lord Elgin.

Berlin’s Ethnological Museum houses a vital collection of over 1,000 Californian Indian artifacts collected between 1837 and 1914. Schwed and Garfinkel’s paper in The Journal of Californian and Great Basin Anthropology, Vol. 36, #2, 2016, tells the story of how this came to be. The King of Prussia tasked Ferdinand Deppe, a talented painter and naturalist working in the Royal Court to travel to California and collect Indian artifacts for his Royal Museum. Deppe was so successful he was later employed by other wealthy German aristocrats to acquire objects for Berlin’s Zoological Museum. In concert with a European shipping magnate, Deppe established trading relationships that Charles Wilcomb went on to use in the final shipment of some 500 Californian artifacts to Berlin on the eve of World War One. Unlike the Elgin Marbles (ancient Greek sculptures, moldings and other architectural elements purloined in Athens while Elgin served as British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire), which are subject to on-going efforts by Greece for their return from The British Museum, no such movement is afoot to return these spectacular baskets, feather blankets and ritual objects to their rightful owners.

The paper includes black and white photos of some of these extraordinary works of utilitarian and ceremonial art and one is reminded of the profound contextualism practiced by native cultures: taking from their world precisely the resources necessary to coexist with it equitably and with honor. Their brutality was confined to each other and their enemies, but never, it seems, to their natural environment which they tended with reverent care.

 In Los Angeles, the Tongva, linguistically a Shoshone tribe, established their settlements on the mutable banks of the river and journeyed to the mountains in the hot summers: the real brutalism of the L.A. basin resides in the holocaust wreaked upon them by successive waves of Old World immigrants. Whatever we interpret in this conurbation today as ‘Brutalist’, is but a glinting, heat irradiated reflection of the killing fields that came to overlay the land, and from which only the white man walked away unscathed.

Landscapes of Shame

This winter, the war-journalist Robert Fisk and his wife, together with Justin Huggler and his partner Anu, visited Wannsee Villa in the Berlin suburbs where, he writes, “Hitler’s war criminals planned the industrial side of the Jewish Holocaust in 1942……...We prowled the rooms of this delightful lakeside SS guest house with its magnificent windows, parquet floor, statues and gardens where Adolf Eichmann, Reinhard Heydrich, Roland Freislerand other monsters met to plan the destruction of the 11 million Jews who in 1933 lived in lands which might fall to Germany”, Counterpunch, Jaunuary 10, 2017.

A few nights ago, in the dining room of the Furnace Creek Inn at Death Valley, I was gathered with friends to celebrate my birthday. We ate beneath portraits of Fred Harvey, the pioneering hospitality entrepreneur and the American borax magnate, Francis "Borax" Smith, together with copies of some of billionaire Phil Anschutz’s western art collection which features work by artists such as George Catlin, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran , Frederic Remington and Charles Schreyvogel. 

Anschutz, whose wealth was created in oil and railroads (but is now heavily invested in real estate, hospitality and entertainment), owns Xanterra, the National Parks concessionaire which runs the Inn. While we consumed elegant dishes of steak, salmon, scallops and duck, we were surrounded by artifacts of a triumphal colonizing civilization. Below us, at an unkempt corner of the roadside parking lot was an exposed ledge containing several bedrock mortars which had been used over many hundreds of years to grind Mesquite beans by the local Timbisha Shoshone Indians, who were exiled from the Park in 1933, five years after the founding of the Inn, by order of Herbert Hoover.

The Wannsee Villa now serves as a Memorial, Conference and Educational Center. Fisk reports that Justin Huggler proclaimed, after his visit, “Your capacity to take in the horrors just runs out……You have to come back, again and again.”

We ate in the dining room both nights of our stay and slept soundly in well-appointed guest rooms. On the second evening before dining, we enjoyed cocktails at the bar. On our last morning we swam in the warm spring fed pool. During our days in the Park we visited  well known geological marvels such as Zabriskie Point, Badwater (lowest place in the United States), and Artists Drive where oxidized minerals in the hills glow with a rich variety of colors.

We partook of National Park mythology: of virgin wilderness where only tourists roam and out of which an invincible race, Homo Americanus, has arisen. At Death Valley this narrative is embellished rather than discomfited by the near-disaster of those pioneer families traveling in some twenty covered wagons on their way west, who sought to cross this desert floor walled by the Amaragosa range and the Panamints. Reduced to burning their wagons to cure the meat of their erstwhile teams of oxen, they escaped on-foot with only one fatality and the valediction, “Goodbye Death Valley”. The expedition is now celebrated by the Death Valley ‘49ers at Furnace Creek with annual cook-outs, a poker-championship, old-time country music and competitions of wagon-train and horse-back riding. Portraits of the organization’s past presidents looked down on us from the hotel’s winding corridors - their confident sun-dappled faces entirely untroubled by the dispossession of the land’s native peoples.

Blame Ken Burns, the Leni Riefenstahl of the National Park Service. As he suggests, we were reconnecting to our soil and to our souls in ‘America’s Best Idea’ - its National Parks. Writing of Yosemite, Simon Schama in Landscape and Memory, 1995, notes that in the 1860’s it represented “a place of such primordial beauty that it proclaimed the gift of the Creator to his Chosen People”.  After Obama established three new National Monuments late in 2016 he gushed,

“Our country is home to some of the most beautiful God-given landscapes in the world. We’re blessed with natural treasures – from the Grand Tetons to the Grand Canyon; from lush forests and vast deserts to lakes and rivers teeming with wildlife.”

The American myth of exceptionalism is intimately entwined in the grandeur of the landscapes its pioneers found in the process of colonizing the continent, many of which are now National Parks, but in order for these landscapes to fully support a Christian, Eurocentric foundation mythology it was, and remains, necessary to exclude their indigenous peoples.

What I am suggesting here is, perhaps, an obscene syllogism: yet there is something eerily reminiscent in the worship of the aesthetic treasures of America’s grand landscapes with National Socialist notions of the blood and soil (the medium from which sprang the emblematic Teutonic forest) out of which was forged the German volk and the heinous exclusionary principals Hitler enshrined in Mein Kampf and later enacted as the holocaust. John Muir, the founding father of America’s National Parks, and who provided the philosophical underpinnings to this country’s unique vision of an uninhabited ‘wilderness’, was clear that “dirty”, “deadly” and “lazy” Indians did not belong in God’s own country.

As Mark David Spence shows in Dispossessing the Wilderness – Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, Oxford University Press, 1999, in the first half of the nineteenth century there was a very different sense of American wilderness - one in which the presence of native peoples contributed to the gestalt of the wild.  Although this conception evolved directly from a Europeanized Romanticism, it nevertheless provided a place for the ‘Red Man’ in an emerging civilization. Henry Thoreau, perhaps the nineteenth century’s most influential wilderness philosopher, somewhat grudging conceded that,

“Why should we not . . . have our national preserves . . . in which bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race . . . still exist, and not be civilized off the face of the earth?”

But in suggesting that “in Wildness is the preservation of the World” he was referencing a human connection to the earth which he fully understood was best epitomized by native peoples.

After the Civil War and the founding of the transcontinental railroad, there emerged what Spence calls “separate islands of the mind” where the preservation of the country’s scenic wonders in parks and the confinement of Indians to reservations developed in ways that denied their obvious correlation. The new discipline of ecology that emerged out of George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature, 1864, suggested that humans disturbed natural balances and that the preservation of wilderness must therefore consist of places “untrodden by man”.

So it was that our National Parks were created to bind the country together after the ruptures of the Civil War; to take aesthetic advantage of the imperial expansion of the United States into areas of unequaled scenic magnificence; to provide new customers to the country’s burgeoning rail network and support the conservation of natural resources as a salve to the growing sense of impending environmental catastrophe. That this was achieved at the cost of promoting the removal and sometimes annihilation of the native peoples occupying those lands is to the lasting shame of all white Americans.

The resilience of this country’s indigenous peoples has belied what Herman Melville called “the metaphysics of Indian-hating” (see the action at Standing Rock). There is now a small community of Timbisha Shoshone living in an area between Furnace Creek Inn and the National Park Service Information Center, but they are tenants of the U.S. government rather than the inviolate beneficiaries and stewards they once were, of a land they call Tüpippüh.

The Park Service remains paternalistic, seeking to have tribal members continue past practices of mesquite harvesting and thus improve the aesthetics of the oasis’ tangled brush. Younger members of the tribe are understandably more committed to their social and economic development through the running of a shaved-ice stand and seeking positions at the Inn, which is about to undergo a $50M renovation and be transformed into a luxe year-round desert spa resort, from which the glories of a mostly uninhabited landscape can be more comfortably viewed. 

Being Local

"As we move into a connection economy, where the tool that matters most is the one that we can carry with us, the idea of geography fades very quickly. How do we juxtapose that post-geography with the post- industrial to create actual value?"

Thus spake Seth Godin, in conversation with Jedediah Jenkins in the 2016 issue of Wilderness Magazine. Godin is proclaimed in the article's title as The True Master of Intentional Living. In reality, he is an accomplished marketing huckster - selling books, courses and seminars on “relativity, productivity and ideation”. He has found his niche within the world of the gig-economy where participants surf the planet seeking the next wave in an endless summer of rootless short term employment opportunities, buoyed only by the relational networks built on past performances and where one's self-belief is supported by a variety of psychological, spiritual and physical routines conflated into 'life-styles'. He is, in short, the product of end-of-days capitalism and the reductio ad absurdum of Rationalism. He, and others of his ilk, pursue their trade in the slop of spent waves, where broken dreams meet disillusionment and deracination: where the tool that matters most, your brain, is almost entirely disconnected from the body's physical setting - where uprootedness is endemic.

This condition of anomie can be traced back to the 60's and 70's when a grassroots youth-driven movement (pioneered by the Hippies) that demanded greater personal authenticity, creativity and empowerment within a hierarchical and sexist corporate employment sphere was taken by those ossified corporations as an opportunity to increase employment flexibility (as a sop to those demands) and simultaneously to reduce job security and benefits. Thus ended what the French call Les Trente Glorieuses, the thirty post war years when income disparities diminished, a functioning social safety net existed in most western economies and, in America, the dreams of a burgeoning middle class were largely realized.

This process confirmed, particularly amongst young wage earners, the rootlessness already well established in America, by privileging those willing to relocate to secure employment. Home town allegiances were increasingly usurped by placelessness and the beginnings of Godin's post-geography world. Employers and entrepreneurs responded to the attacks on corporate capitalism for its bureaucracy, inflexibility and uniformity by presenting new justifications based on self-actualization, freedom and authentic community for young people to buy-in to the capitalist system in the post-industrial world. Thus Godin both expresses and propogates the values that Luc Boltanski & Eve Chiapello describe in their book, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 2005, by which the prevailing system of oppressive consumption and production successfully coopts new generations of willing victims.

Values of craft, artisanal production, third world travel and organic agriculture are now being added to the inducements by which twenty-first century hipsters are drawn into the capitalist maw. Wilderness Magazine is complicit in this process; and now, Collective Quarterly has published their Topa Topa issue, focused on the triangle between Santa Barbara to the west, Ojai to the east, and Ventura to the south, in an almost perfect celebration of local centers of this new, artisanal spirit of capitalism. Marketed across the United States (the copy I saw was purchased in Brooklyn), it promotes localism as practiced (in the first seven issues) in Marfa, Texas; the Absaroka Mountains, in the Montana Wyoming borderlands; Topa Topa, Ventura County, California; Mad River Valley, Vermont; Pisgah National Forest, North Carolina; Penobscot, Maine; and the Mojave Desert, California. It represents a movable feast of intense regional hipster-lifestyle irruptions often consumed, I would guess, by the haute bourgeoisie of urban, coastal enclaves as place porn.

Committed to placelessness by the demands of a global economy, where one place provides the same divertissements and services as another, there is, nevertheless, an intense interest in the mystique of rootedness, but very little commitment to the slow aggregation of geographic connection that results from staying put. As Godin will tell you, the establishment of networks is necessary for the securing one's next gig and demands both social and spatial fluidity: the establishment of deep, enduring local roots will likely lead to exclusion from the ranks of peripatetic, successful network builders. It is thus that the power of place has been usurped by the power of real and virtual linkages spread across the world’s array of urban nodes bound within an electronic web. Weekend voyeurism or, at a remove, printed or electronic simulacra of particularly charismatic places, is the necessary antidote to a world where material reward lies in movement not stasis, in temporary residence not deep connection.

Building those profound connections is a necessarily slow process and is rewarded with nothing much more than the intellectual and perhaps spiritual frisson that comes from an understanding of the relationship between time and place. The uncovering of the natural, cultural and geologic layers that constitute the genius loci, or spirit of a place, may take years: but it is an endeavor to which I am currently committed here in Upper Ojai, the furthest, easternmost point of the Topa Topa triangle celebrated in Collective Quarterly.  It involves the re-engagement of “the tool that matters most” with the physical substance of the world so that identity is no longer confined to personhood but extends outward to the material and spiritual expressions of the natural world.

Over time, we can fully inhabit our immediate world and that world may insinuate itself into our being. Our network begins to consist not of professional referrals and potential creative collaborators but of local rocks, trees, animals and earth-forms which provide conduits not to future material enrichment but to potential etheric energies – to a primitive spiritual power not pecuniary profit.

So it is that I resent time spent away from my exo-environment. It represents time spent away from who I am becoming; from time in which my authentic identity is incrementally extending beyond my physical body. Urie Bronfenbrenner, the Russian American developmental psychologist (1917-2005), founded a social ecological model which takes account of a child's development within the context of the systems of relationship that form his or her environment. My continuing development, it seems to me, is dependent on the uncovering of the layers of the natural world that immediately surround me. It is a reversion to my experience as a child growing up in a small English village where walking, playing and going to the village school was intensely bound to the hedgerows, fields, ponds, woods and common-lands that insinuated themselves into our young lives.

We all interact with our environment at a variety of scales – and gain information from it from the global to the granular, yet we remain time bound, operating within a finite life cycle: a close engagement with the natural world presents opportunities to live outside of time, to understand the larger, universal cycles and to gain information at a cosmic scale. Ironically, this can only be achieved, it seems, by focusing at the smallest level on that which immediately envelops us. Additionally, this focus can most usefully occur over long spans of time where it results in the wisdom that accrues to locals – those who choose to live their lives with a deep and constant attachment to a place. It is a choice that is increasingly becoming a luxury.

It is unlikely that the benefits of such a commitment will accrue to those who consume artisanal, craft, organic agriculture and permaculture products and the journals that promote them without dedicating themselves, at some level, in some place, to being local. 

The neo-liberal project which seeks to expand markets through globalization – essentially by ‘flattening’ difference through the homogenization of culture and consumption militates against the permanent inhabitation of particular places. It promotes global cities that enshrine its values and is complicit in the withering away of small towns and rural communities - the exigencies of the market having decided that their erstwhile economic functions can be better performed in low wage, emerging economies which themselves have abandoned local, sustainable markets for the globalized export trade.

Staying put and cherishing ones immediate neighborhood is a political act and may be economically disadvantageous: the experience of being local, however, fully transcends the denial of geography  - a price now demanded of capitalism. 

House and Garden

Urbanwildland is a neologism derived from the term Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) in general use by fire fighting agencies at least since the 1980’s and used to codify the expansion of urban development into traditionally wilderness areas which has increasingly brought humans into contact with wildfires. The International Wildland-Urban Interface Code (IWUIC, 2011) notes that between 1985 and 1994, wildfires destroyed more than 9,000 homes in the United States and goes on to explain that  these homes were usually located in areas “where structures and other human development meet or intermingle with undeveloped wildland or vegetative fuels”.

 It did not require a huge stretch of the imagination to coin the word urbanwildland which rather than being focused on the wildfire issue, describes more generally the frontier beyond exurbia - the edge condition that exists where human development encroaches on erstwhile wilderness areas. It also describes the place where I have chosen to live and make a garden (at least as far as that practice concerns the relationship of the human being to his or her natural surroundings).

The area surrounding human habitation and under the influence of its presence, can never be fully wild since we, as a species, have long lost our place in the wilderness and have constructed, over the last ten thousand years or so, an alternate realm known as civilization. Thus the buffer zone that we inevitably create around our shelters is not wilderness because it has our mark on it, the mark, however unintended, of civilization. As such, this zone has the characteristics of a garden because it not only mediates our remaining connections to the natural world but also physically links us to the infrastructure and appurtenances of civilization, if only via a driveway or a path.

I would suggest that the word is also shadowed by some of the notions that inspired the very first gardens created five thousand years ago in Persia, which were created to symbolize the four Zoroastrian elements of sky, earth, water and plants. This is true at least to the extent that the interstice between the two contrasting realms of urbanwildland can serve as a meditative or even transcendent space in which can be explored our relationship to the unknown, or spiritual powers of the universe; a space in which these ancient garden elements can be transformed into a powerful symbolic language that has the potential for revelation.

Hence, in urbanwildland, within both the meaning of the word, in describing a place or an ecological condition, and in this blog, there is license to reference both the wild and the civilized (or urban), as well as, and perhaps most importantly, the point at which (somewhere between the middle ‘n’ and the ‘w’) they come together and, as I have argued, create a garden and, potentially, a place of spiritual repose. In other words, the two sticks, labelled ‘Wild’ and ‘Urban’ when rubbed together have the ability to make fire - the characteristic to which the Wildland-Urban Interface terminology is directed. They can also make, by that same process of friction, and with a similar level of inevitability, a garden - and that is precisely the propensity that I celebrate in my writing.

So, after all these years, I find that I have been writing a Gardening Blog. Just recently I have had Russell Page and his autobiography, The Education of a Gardener, 1962, at my side. While I burble on more or less in real time as my experience of the urbanwildland unfolds, he had the wisdom to write a single career capping book. Doris Lessing wrote of him in her blurb, “Did you know that we have living among us a master gardener as great as any of those of the past?”

In his youth, Page was a follower of Gurdjieff; later he studied Sufism and his work was profoundly influenced by the principles of Islamic design. Just a few pages into his book a reader becomes aware of his uncanny spatial sensitivities: he suggests that every object “sends out vibrations beyond its physical body” and that there is “interplay between objects”. He believes that the artful arrangements of elements can produce a kind of magic, and can thus elevate a garden to being a work of art. Despite his mystical leanings, the bulk of his book lays out the very straightforward principles that inform his design work, which quickly spread from his pre-war work in England to Europe, immediately after the war, and eventually, to major commissions in America.

His book has led me to question the ways in which the few rough acres that surround our house, which consist of a mix of slowly regenerating chaparral, coastal sage scrub and oak meadowland, can be considered a garden, and in what ways the land is marked by ‘civilization’ or, at the very least, human intentionality. There is an easy answer supplied by the title of M. Kat Anderson’s book, Tending the Wild, 2013, which deals with all the ways that California’s indigenous people impacted the landscape in their quest to find food and shelter, and while I have indeed been occupied in tending the native landscape (for primarily aesthetic reasons) there have also been, in the intrusive act of placing a house on the landscape, a rearrangement of objects (and their emanations) that fits fully within the Pageian definition of a garden.

He writes, “most houses need anchoring to their setting” and benefit from being sited on a level area of ground. He disparages structures that are perched precariously on a hillside (and certainly not a hilltop) or appear to grow out of vertiginous terrain. He is a designer of great simplicity and common sense. When initially confronted with our newly purchased acreage of mostly sloping, rocky and heavily vegetated land, our first act was to select a site for the house around which the existing plantings, rocks and major trees might plausibly become the bones of its garden.

Half way up the dominant north-south slope, which is cradled between a steep eastern rise of chaparral and a minor, rock-strewn spine scattered with walnuts, mountain mahogany and holly-leafed cherry, we settled on a location just below a stand of oaks that rises out of a rocky bank. Although beguiled by the substantial shade of the oaks which make the mound and its trees corporeal - a giant in the landscape - we were not unaware of the view upon which this arboreal colossus gazed: but our primary attention was rooted to the spot. Page warns of the tyranny of the view in which “one’s interest is torn between the garden pattern with its shapes and colors in the foreground and the excitement of the distant view”.  The mounding trees possessed a primal rootedness that spoke to a notion of what our future house could become.

In the nineteenth century a path, Page notes, was customarily built around the perimeter of the house and in his judgement this leaves it “high and dry and destroys any possible relationship between house and garden”. But elsewhere he extols gravel or stone terraces leading from the house out into the garden and the borrowed landscapes beyond.  In our situation, ever mindful of living in both the urbanwildland and the Wildland-Urban Interface, there was a requirement to remove vegetative fuels house from the immediate vicinity of the house. Thus it sits on an entirely graveled bench – the flat area between cutting and filling the slope. This level area is contained by the new, steeper slopes produced by cutting to the north and filling to the south (which were hydro-seeded with a mix of native grasses and forbs), to the west by the aforementioned spine and to the east by the oak mound. We did follow one of Page’s rules by introducing an element of pattern to the gravel: immediately bordering the house we used ¾” crushed rock and separated by an embedded ipe 2 x 6, finer crushed rock for the field. Paige might have used a mix of split and saw-cut local sandstone which he notes “fits well in a very informal garden”.  Our garden is formally ordered only to the extent necessary for circulation and fire protection while retaining most of the informality of the surrounding chaparral. While local sandstone is plentiful, its cutting is now prodigiously expensive. 

Page fully understands the elemental, Zorastrian power that water plays in garden design. He writes, ‘water seems to course on the planet’s surface as blood through the body”. Even a contrivance such as a swimming pool can be effective in referencing this fundamental source of energy and life. Formally, a simple rectangle of still water can make a powerful garden boundary. We chose to place our pool three steps above the surrounding terrace, parallel to the house and backed into the up-hill slope. The horizon lies far above it, dancing along the Topatopa bluffs, but the reflective pool water brings the sky down to the ground and integrates it into the other garden elements of water, earth and plants.

There is, after seven years, a seeming inevitability to this composition of gravel, water, oaks, sage-scrub meadows and borrowed views of true chaparral wilderness. As Page writes of one of his creations in Piedmont, “it is, in one sense, a synthesis and a symbol of the nature and essence of the place, its earth and air and water and what I must call the humanities – the house, its period and its builders”.

 What we have created in Upper Ojai, between house and wilderness - mostly by virtue of restraint - is, above all, a garden.

Girl Power Through the Ages

At the beginning of 2016, I taught an on-line graduate course in Ecological Ethics for the Viridis Institute, an educational start-up focused on Ecopsychology and Environmental Humanities, founded by Lori Pye who also teaches at both the University of California at Santa Barbara and the Pacifica Institute in Santa Barbara. Although I fancy myself a meta-historian, fascinated by the structural mechanisms that impact humanity’s story over time and place, I entirely neglected, in my course, to consider how the ways in which humanity grubs a living from the natural environment impacts our values, so concerned was I with the way our values impact our use and abuse of the environment.  I have now been schooled by Ian Morris, a classics professor at Stanford, having read his book, Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels, Princeton University Press, 2015.

He proposes, quite simply, that our values mutate in sympathy with the ways in which we derive energy (sustenance) from the planet.  Our core spiritual values, for instance, have evolved from the pantheism of foraging to the worship of the god-kings of farming to the widespread contemporary denial of spirituality demanded of late-stage capitalism, where the rational, neo-liberal pursuit of maximum profit, the relentless expansion of consumerism and the extractive technologies that support it, represent a quantum leap in the size of civilization’s energy footprint which, at the present, can only be maintained by the burning of fossil fuels.  It is a breathtakingly broad-brush approach to the story of human development.

Morris concedes that humanity has consistently exhibited a number of basic values over time such as fairness, justice, love, hate, respect, loyalty and a sense of the sacred; but he suggests that the manifestation of these values varies according to the dominant form of energy capture which he reduces to the three modalities of his title. Community governance, which tends to reflect shared values, begins, in Morris’s telling, with the egalitarianism of the forager (encapsulated in the notion of moral autonomy by which we are all headmen – each of us headman over him or herself), moves on to the authoritarianism under which farmers thrive (the genesis of which is traditionally traced to royal control over the flood waters of the Nile) and comes, in the modern age, to democracy, broadly defined as a refutation of political hierarchy with power notionally residing with the people.

For the more than ninety thousand years that anatomically modern humans pursued a strategy of foraging to secure sufficient energy in the form of food and water, and material for shelter, ceremony, tools, transport and warfare, there was an essential equality between men and women. Neither sex achieved a lasting primacy over the other perhaps because their means of livelihood was consistently assured by gathering, in which women more than fully participated, and which was only occasionally enriched by the male preserve of hunting. In contrast, the ten thousand years devoted to non-mechanized agriculture that followed was characterized by a marked sexual hierarchy at least partly because farming privileged upper body strength.

The increase in the food supply afforded by the practice of farming, particularly as it intensified with the adoption of plowing and irrigation, also meant that women spent more time pregnant and caring for young children, further distancing them from the processes of energy capture and creating a sexual divide that was expressed spatially as men in the fields and women in the house. This inside outside dichotomy was confirmed as women became increasingly confined to the sheltered realm of the home and garden while men, literally and figuratively, were out in the world.

A divergent relationship to nature, expressed in woman’s conciliatory practice of small scale horticulture and the gathering of handfuls of wild plants around the home (an extension of their erstwhile foraging) for culinary, medicinal and spiritual purposes, as opposed to the subjugation of nature practiced by farmers, ultimately led to the conflation of women with nature - and patriarchy sought to dominate both. The increasing use of fossil fuels over the last two hundred and fifty years to power machines and, more recently, electronic equipment, has led to a progressive weakening of this entrenched gender hierarchy. The parallel development of democratic institutions in the high energy using parts of the world (producing countries tend to experience, by contrast, huge disparities in wealth and fall victim to tyranny) has further eroded, but not eliminated, sexist hegemony.

Morris makes the argument that Industria (his term for society powered by fossil fuels) does best within a democratic political environment where its technocratic foundations are supported by a liberal ideology which encompasses notions such as competition, efficiency and individual empowerment - and worst in illiberal climes such as Soviet Russia, Maoist China and Kimist North Korea.

He writes,

“…although the state shows no sign of withering away, fossil-fuel attitudes toward steep political hierarchies and upstarts have more in common with foragers’ views than with farmers’. Political scientists have long suggested that even democracies necessarily spawn powerful elites that constitute themselves as permanent political castes, but democrats have consistently preferred visions of government by everyman to the idea of a natural ruling class.”

There is, it seems, a connection between abundant energy and liberal governance: our contemporary appetite for energy is supported by a parallel addiction to democracy - a form of government perhaps temperamentally ill-suited to the curbing of society’s cravings for oil. Additionally, in a world where science has assumed the role of the sacred, we continue to be in awe of scientifically developed technologies, many of which facilitate the extraction and distribution of fossil fuels, as well as those devices which are its most profligate users, such as jets, high powered cars and giant farming, earth-moving and ore extraction equipment. In this country, we paper over the ironies (and climate threats) of our preferred mode of energy capture by espousing values such as freedom, independence, and loyalty to a state whose military consumes oil at the rate of more than a hundred million barrels a year.

But always, there are outliers. In an essay by Margaret Attwood, When the Lights Go Out: Human Values after the Collapse of Civilization, written as a formal response to Morris’ thesis (she was a contributor to his Tanner Lectures at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values) she upbraids him for entirely ignoring the nomadic, pastoralist mode of energy capture in his analysis.  In particular, she notes the value-laden cultural consequences of the development of large-scale warfare by the pastoralist warriors of the Steppe, in their twelfth and thirteenth century campaigns of imperial conquest, led by Ghengis Khan.

 Until recently, Mongolia, was ground zero for pastoralism - a survival strategy fueled by grass - but beginning in the twentieth century, Mongolia’s economy began to be transformed by the development of extractive industries. The country has extensive deposits of copper, gold, molybdenum, fluorspar, uranium, tin, tungsten and coal, most of which it now exports to China; but its surviving pastoralists remain largely self-sufficient and only occasionally dependent on local markets.

For many centuries, Muslim Kazakhs have been grazing their livestock in the foothills of the Altai Mountains, in Western Mongolia. Today, they continue to herd sheep, horses, camels, goats, cattle and yak, from which they extract much of their energy requirements (including cooking fuel from their animals’ dung).  The use of eagles to hunt foxes and marmots survives as a ceremonial tradition amongst these people, and now Sony Pictures has released The Eagle Huntress, 2016, directed by Otto Bell, that documents the training of a thirteen year-old girl as the first woman to participate in this ancient sporting tradition.

I was utterly beguiled by the drone, hand held, and eagle-mounted digital cinematography of Otto’s glossy fairy tale which features the charming Aishoplan, daughter of a champion in the sport both ready to pass on his skills and brook the almost comic chorus of sexist disapproval expressed by community elders. Sia’s breathy  paean to Girrrl Powah, ‘Angel by the Wings’, with its seemingly endless refrain of ‘you can do anything’ plays over the end credits and is a reminder that the documentary, set amidst the snowy crags of Mongolia and featuring the stunning aerial acrobatics of Aishoplan’s pet eagle is, at heart, a showy live-action cartoon of female empowerment.  

Yet it is women like Aisholpan, infused with a warrior spirit born of a profound empathy with the workings of the natural world, who will, I believe, lead us towards the next frontier of energy capture.

The Recent Unpleasantness

This fall the mythography of our country suffered a significant loss. A place went missing. A pastoral room has vanished. Lake Wobegon is no more. After forty years of more or less continuous weekly radio reports Garrison Keillor has hung up his microphone and the landscape and community he made has fallen silent. He created a place that represented the way we were, or at least imagine the way we might have been, in some rural outpost in Central Minnesota where the seasons were often the protagonist and where the human population was deeply embedded in some version of the natural world - their personal foibles or crises mere arabesques on the immutable presence that is the Prairie.

Across the continent, another voice fell silent that also represented a mythic place - a pastoral village green where simple games of stick and ball are played. Vin Scully retired from calling Dodger games. Never mind that the L.A. stadium represents the hyper-commercial aggrandizement of that simple game, nor that the development of the stadium in the early 1960's destroyed an established community in Chavez Ravine with little regard for its resident's welfare: this was the demise of another (white male) voice that enshrined a pastoral, conservative, and not entirely coincidentally, a Christian world view - but which ultimately celebrated the mythic power of a place to which it provided an aural anchor in times of profound transience.

I owe both men a debt of gratitude: they voiced an important part of the sonic background to the three and a half decades of my acculturation to this remarkable feat of the imagination: the United States of America. 

Now, a great transgressive act has occurred within this heady construct. Swept away in the yearlong Opéra bouffe culminating in the second Tuesday of November, were two dynasties containing three Presidents, a Secretary of State, a Governor and a CIA director along with their Washington courtiers, and retinues from Florida, Texas, Kennebunkport and Chappaqua via Little Rock, Arkansas: all having faithfully served mammon and Empire while outwardly maintaining the appearance of divisive partisanship. Both families successfully fulfilled their role in what amounts to electoral authoritarianism (the technique much favored by third-world countries whereby multi-party elections are held, but in circumstances so prescribed that they become instruments of authoritarianism rather than democracy) . The genius of the American system, as has often been noted, is that it consists of two major parties both dedicated to the needs of the deep state and both determined to effectively silence alternative, so-called third, parties. These two familial bastions of this exclusionary system have now been vanquished.

In this we can rejoice. Yet they exit the stage still trailing the clouds of havoc they wreaked upon the world. We wait to see how dark is the instrument of their comeuppance. One thing is certain: the old religion is dead, the new is upon us. 

The World Value Survey (conducted by a consortium of social scientists from around the world) locates national values along two axes: vertically (y) from Traditional values to Secular-rational values and horizontally (x) from Survival values to Self-expression values. Sweden resides in splendid isolation at the top right hand corner of the chart and a cluster of Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Jordan and Morocco at the bottom left. The USA lurks in the bottom third of the ‘y’ axis, favoring traditional values, but is to the far right of the ‘x’ axis, favoring the values of self-expression. Despite the keening of liberals, we have just experienced a beautiful expression of this metadata. We have, indeed, demonstrated the vitality of our democracy, for the demos, or the villages, have spoken and their standard bearer is about to be installed in the White House. While many fear that we are about to suffer under an ochlocracy, or mob rule, (one of the three systems of government that classical Greek thinkers derided as evil, along with oligarchy and tyranny) the recent unpleasantness demonstrated that the system is, after all, not irretrievably rigged.

Despite the dastardly deeds of the Democratic National Committee in defeating what it perceived as an inappropriate choice as their candidate and an equally nefarious campaign waged to ensure the selection by the opposition of a candidate it believed was so flawed as to be unelectable, our democracy prevailed - and our imaginations are now newly challenged to remake our Union.

I accept that as a white male pontificating on such matters from on high, or at least reasonably high in the Topatopa foothills of Ojai, in Southern California, I inhabit a position of great privilege. I am unlikely to be amongst the first cohort to be shadowed by the darkness many perceive to have befallen our nation. What I can authentically do is to continue what I have been doing for the last seven years, but with a renewed energy; that is, to write of a particular place, the Urbanwildland, in the spirit of those writers (from Jefferson and Thoreau, to Edward Abbey, Ursula le Guin and Leslie Marmon Silko and beyond) who have, in the life of this nation, clearly seen that our relationship to the land is crucial to the way in which we arrange our society.

No creative writing practice is likely to exert direct influence on scientific or technological developments, even less on public policy and little or none on the political process. Yet if, as Lawrence Buell suggests in The Environmental Imagination, Harvard, 1995, “there is an emerging culture of environmental concern” some part of that culture is likely open to the persuasive power of  literary production. Many of us who labor (however sporadically) in this vineyard seek an end to the ideologies of neoliberalism and more broadly of the rhetoric and mythos of ‘progress’ and seek to foster an embrace of green thinking which might value cooperation rather than competition, the community rather than the individual and diversity rather than conformity. Our political crisis (if such it is) is ultimately transcended by our environmental crisis: reimagining the natural world and our relationship to it is a necessary first step in the resolution of the secular affairs of state.

Early November, early morning, preternaturally warm; the sun barely over the Santa Paula ridge, my shadow long, flaring towards the ocean; skin riffled by the Santa Ana winds - fire winds. The pasture I am moving across is flushed with green after the first rains of the season; part of my attention is caught by the mounding turkey mullein along the track, but the particularities of place are swamped by that long promised transcendence which arises from an engagement with the natural world –for this moment, the minutiae of our social arrangements fall away, lost in the eternity of the empyrean.

Pastoral Rooms

Lawrence Buell (The Environmental Imagination, 1995), writes that Thoreau practices the embedment of pretty pastoral rooms within a radical critique of urbanism and chastises him for turning away from social confrontation "for the sake of immersion in a simplified Green world". The environmental movement is predicated on a similar tendency to valorize the wild and to pillory the urban for whatever faults it sees in our world now or in an imagined future. Here at Urban Wildland, I attempt a fluid analysis of our predicament which privileges neither urban nor wild and indeed, neither past nor present: our shared future is the river in which these temporal and physical tributaries come together. Our individual consciousness is influenced by similar complexities of time and material circumstance, and in the black and white textual rooms to which I fully admit to retreating, there continue to be useful revelations pertinent to an understanding of the process. Hence this week’s Book Report.

Joan Grant was an extraordinary English writer who wrote the global best seller Winged Pharaoh, a historical romance, in 1937. She first visited the United States in 1914 aboard the Lusitania (yes, the very same ship that was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland in 1916 and became the proximate cause for America's entry into WWI) and returned in 1964 with her third husband Denys Kelsey (known to her as 'K', like Krishnamurti, in what is unlikely to have been an entirely unconscious conflation) on the Queen Elizabeth to visit the center for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach where she and Denys would lecture on Reincarnation. Now, her granddaughter Nicki Bennett (a recently widowed, treasured friend in Ojai), is returning to England on the Queen Mary II to take up residence in Edinburgh.

There is, between these several voyages, a fascinating tale which I will leave Nicki to weave. But before she left, I took a shrink wrapped copy of A Lot to Remember, 1962, Grant's travel memoir re-issued in 1980, beautifully cloth bound in a pale sage green, no dust jacket, but instead a purple imprint of the author's mesmeric eyes and bewitching eyebrows on the front cover, from a carton of same before placing the box in a storeroom of the Ojai house which Nicki has now left.

The book concerns the author's time in the Dordogne, and focuses on the architectural and scenic splendors of the towns and villages along the river Lot and on life amidst the Lotoise, particularly those involved in what we would now call the hospitality industry. It is, to be frank, a slight volume both in heft and literary pretension, but it is enlivened by Joan's psychic relations with what she calls 'spooks' which inhabit an alternate plane of reality to which she is acutely attuned. The region's history is drenched in bloody dynastic and religious rivalries and grotesqueries lurk in ruined manorial piles, chateaux, abbeys and fortifications scattered amidst the now placid countryside. Eternally damned torturers, murderers and fallen priests are sent on the way of reincarnation by Joan's sensitive analysis of their plight and her powers of love and forgiveness - expressed in Christic epigrams, presumably delivered in her fractured French.

At other times, she fully inhabits her role as a prototypical upper-middle class bohemian Englishwoman dispensing gobs of noblesse oblige over the French countryside. Accompanied by her second husband and later by her third, gallivanting, gormandizing and practicing what she calls her Far Sight, she is at once entertaining and annoyingly precious. The couples’ choice of steed is carefully selected for their progress along farm tracks, minor ‘D’ roads, rustic Rue Principales and Routes Nationales, the system of ‘N’ roads which largely follow ancient Roman routes; for it is an Armstrong Siddeley, perhaps a Sapphire, which has as its hood ornament a sphinx, adopted as the company's logo in 1912 after a journalist described an early model as ‘as silent and inscrutable as the sphinx'. One of Joan's alter egos (or more accurately, previous incarnations) is Sekeeta, the daughter of a Pharoah and heroine of her first book. Joan enjoyed many lives in Egypt, recollecting them in another three Far Memory books, Eyes of Horus (1942), Lord of the Horizon (1943) and So Moses was Born (1952). Looking across the long-hooded car, the sphinx imperiously leading the way, the French countryside is deconstructed beneath her penetrating gaze.

Jonathon Bate's exhaustive biography, John Clare (2003), is my current sleepy-time, lights-out soporific. ‘The peasant poet’, was one of a cohort of British Romantic poets in the early nineteenth century, which included, most famously, Keats, Byron, Cowper and Tennyson. Clare was briefly famous in the 1820’s, but his work began to gain a new level of popularity in the 1980’s and continues to be discovered by readers charmed by his poetic descriptions of the English countryside and galvanized by his outrage at the injustices of the Enclosure movement which restricted the rights of landless peasants in a process by which highly profitable monocultures replaced small scale arable crops and common-land grazing. Much of the land of which he writes is simultaneously under the threat of creeping Industrialization. Reading him is to experience our world foretold, of nature scarred and compromised and society riven by ever increasing economic injustice.

Ironically, the impoverished Clare, who made almost nothing from his infrequent publications, was supported by members of the aristocracy and for a while became a literary mascot to several of the noble houses which surrounded his humble cottage on the edge of the fens in what is now Cambridgeshire. Briefly feted in London, he risked being integrated into high society but his manic behavior saw him, instead, institutionalized first in a private hospital in Essex and then in a public Lunatic asylum in Northampton where he wrote perhaps his most famous poem, ‘ I Am’, which ends with a fine, transcendentalist howl,

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.

He longed to retreat, in other words, from padded cell to pastoral room. Turned solipsistic in his dotage, he abandons his social gaze and is transformed into an admitted “self-consumer of my woes”. Perhaps, a nineteenth century incarnation of Joan could have helped him, for Joan practiced psychotherapy with #2 Charles Beatty and #3 Denys Kelsey in Britain the U.S. and France. Employing a kind of regression therapy, she believed that diagnosing unresolved issues from past lives could assist in the treatment of the patient’s neuroses in their present incarnation. Clare’s hold on his identity was always tenuous – he identified with Byron to the point of re-writing that aristocrat’s poems and on occasion believed that he was Shakespeare. He explained, with admirable candor, “I‘m John Clare now. I was Byron and Shakespeare formerly”.

One of the appeals of Clare’s work is that it is the expression of a true rustic. He knew of what he wrote in a way that Wordsworth, for instance, did not. Clare was a participant in nature, Wordsworth an observer. The nature they both wrote about was part of a pastoral tradition: a land tamed over the ages for the benefit of its human inhabitants. Enclosure represented an extension of pastoralism not its beginnings. Thoreau’s ‘simplified green world’ was, in the case of Walden, an island of second growth forest in a largely deforested countryside.  Joan traveled through a similarly compromised environment, but it was exactly the human imprint to which she was attracted, for in that lay the psychic reverberations which were her true subject. Her pastoral rooms existed as traps for superannuated spooks.

My pastoral rooms, to quote Thoreau, “are made out of Chaos and Old Night”. They are not pastoral at all – they are wild, “not mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, not waste-land” - but primal chaparral. This week has been warm and the winds strong. The other evening I arrived home to find that a dead Deerweed plant (Lotus scoparius) had blown up against the front door. It was largely spherical - perhaps three feet in diameter - and it glowed a fiery orange in the sun’s last rays. It appeared as a burning bush, heralding the presence of the wild within the precinct of our home.

My green world is aflame: it is a threat, not a comfort - and there is, I realize, no turning away from the Urban Wildland.

Boom and Thump

The catalyst for the development of the human species is climate change. Nowhere is this more obvious than amongst the first peoples of California; their arrival by land and sea was predicated on a long retreat from the deep freeze of the north, from northeastern Asia to a potentially warmer continent that spanned the northern and southern hemispheres of the globe. They followed the mega-fauna across the tundra, or chased pinnipeds amidst the kelp on their long coastal voyage, but within a few thousand years they were forced to adapt to the dramatically warming climate of the Holocene when populations of mammoths and elephant seals were both in rapid decline and oaks were replacing the pine forests that had flourished in the Pleistocene.

Up into La Broche Canyon it was possible, this morning, to get above the ocean of fog that had rolled into the valleys overnight.  To the west, only the dark, oak-clad ridge of Sulphur Mountain was visible, while to the south the telecommunications, satellite tracking and radar paraphernalia bristled above the fog on Point Mugu Ridge and the jagged peaks of the Boney Mountain State Wilderness appeared as islands in the milk sea. Eastward, into the rising sun, the chaparral clad flanks of Santa Paula Mountain and its foothills were obdurate in the brilliance of the morning.

 I was following a trail that was established, perhaps, as an exploratory oil road; was an old trading route between the Chumash villages of ‘Awha’y and Mupu, or was a part of an ancient spirit path that eventually led to a mountain peak. In its current incarnation, it is a little used track (by me, evidence of a lone horse, faint markings of a quad-bike, and recent mountain lion spoor) that ends, inconclusively, just to the west of Santa Paula Canyon. This palimpsest, this overlaying of intentions over time reflected in markings on the land, is but a tiny and almost lost fragment of the human-environmental history of the area that spans 15,000 years - each morning of which fully sentient beings have awoken to subtle or not so subtle changes in the weather.

It must be said, that this morning and every other time I take this particular trail, my HOKA ONE ONE PRO2 Lite’s leave very little in the way of evidence beyond my confirming the pre-existent path through my footfalls limiting new plant life along the single track. Mine is a very faint imprint on the already mostly blank record of human impact in this particular part of the canyon.

The wider (but still local) record of ancient, pre-contact inhabitation is similarly sparse. Through every development of the Indian presence - characterized by the 1984 Chartkoff model as Paleo-Indian (15,000 – 11,000 years ago) with an economy based on mega-fauna; Archaic  (11,000 – 4,000) marked by a diffuse economy and the colonization of new ecological niches; and Pacific (4,000 – contact) evidenced by an increasing range of foods - their intimate, immediate and essentially co-dependent relationship with their environment produced little in the way of permanent monuments or even non-degradable artifacts. Archaeologists consequently obsess on enduring items such as chipped stone tools, grinding implements (metates and manos) and pounding tools (mortars and pestles), shell fish-hooks and shell money. Local Indians were basket weavers not potters, their houses fully biodegradable woven rush structures, not adobe brick and their diets were only evidenced in middens by the remains of shellfish, fish and animal bone - not the great quantities of seeds, roots and berries that made up much of their sustenance.

The archaeological record of the ancient coast line has been entirely expunged by post glacial rising sea levels and what is left in the always less inhabited interior seriously devalued by bioturbation (the action of burrowing animals). We are thus confronted with nothing much more than minimally informed conjecture.

The record of climate change is a little more substantial. Every hundred thousand years or so, the planet retreats into the ice. The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) was 21,000 to 18,000 years ago. Sea level was almost 400 feet below current levels, and great sheets of ice covered much of the Sierra and Klamath ranges. At lower elevations vast lakes covered inland areas to the south and east while the present coast line at Ventura was as much as twenty miles further west. The northern Channel Islands were one connected whole. Temperatures were 12-14 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than today and thickly coated mega-fauna, such as sabre-toothed cats, wolves, bears, mastodons, mammoths, deer, elk, big-horned sheep and the ground sloth thrived. They continued to flourish for several thousand years as the Pleistocene gave way to the Holocene inter-glacial and their world slowly warmed.

Around 15,000 years ago, amidst the melting ice, the Paleo-Indian occupation of southern California began. Wielding hafted projectile points that were chipped along their edges to make serrated (or fluted) cutting surfaces, they hunted megafauna for their meat, fat, fur, teeth, tusks, antlers, horns and sinew. The general trend of a warming climate was briefly interrupted by the so-called Younger Dryas which signaled a return to a near glacial climate between 12,900 and 11, 400 years ago and this interregnum may have extended the viability of the large herd and pack animals of the Plesistocene which favored the open tundra.

When the warming trend resumed, however, the megafauna’s vulnerability to a changing ecosystem was quickly established as afforestation began to limit their rangelands. The replacement of patchy conifer forests with dense stands of oaks, the disappearance of pluvial lakes and overhunting by native populations all contributed to the local extinction (paralleled throughout North America) of some 35 genera of the continent’s large animals by 10,000 years ago.

Many local people, it seems, adapted to their new environment by hunting rabbits and deer and developing a millingstone culture where manos and metates rang with the sound of grinding seeds. Others moved into coastal areas where Paleo-Indians, who had arrived via the ’Kelp Road’ (the coastal route from north eastern Asia) some 13,000 years ago (Erlandson), had long established fishing and gathering shellfish as a part of their subsistence – skills now central to their own survival and adopted by this influx of climate refugees.  Thus Paleo-environmental change inevitably forced accommodations to an altered resource base and, as Glasgow, Gamble, Perry and Russell point out in California Prehistory, Ed. Terry Jones and Katherine Klar, 2007, these adaptations greatly impacted the cultural evolution of local tribes. Such subsistence models represented a break with the past and allowed for ever larger coastal and near-coastal populations. We can imagine then, that the Ojai valley hosted Indian communities from at least 6,000 years ago subsisting on hunting and trapping and the local superabundance of edible seeds and berries which provided a surplus for the acquisition of fish, shellfish, and pinniped steaks traded from the coast and the Channel Islands.

By about 4,500 years ago, there is evidence of mortars and pestles in the archaeological record, indicating the human utilization of a greater variety of crushable plant foods. A higher frequency of projectile points is also discernable in this era, indicating an increased emphasis on hunting, and this is also suggestive of a gender-based bifurcation of food acquisition. By about 2,000 years ago there is evidence of a switch to pulpy foods such as acorns, islay (the red berries of holly-leafed cherry) and the edible portions of the chaparral yucca, all of which were processed in mortars by the action of a percussive pestle.

After contact, some eighteen hundred years later, William Bryant Logan writes in Oak, the Frame of Civilization, 2005, that “early European travelers came to recognize how close they were to a village by the boom and thump of women driving pestles into mortars to grind acorns into meal”. That sound had hung in the Ojai valley for at least two millennia. For the Chumash (the name archaeologists have given to the dominant group of regional tribes at contact), acorn meal was an essential part of their diet and central to their culture. Its importance was demonstrated in their careful tending of the oak forests that thrived amidst the creeks that threaded through the bottom lands between the Santa Ynez and Sulphur Mountains – the site of present day Ojai and Meiners Oaks.

The East End of Ojai is still watered by a number of tributary streams that flow out of Senior and Horn Canyons and feed into San Antonio Creek whose confluence with the Ventura River, just to the east of Casitas Springs, is marked by a tangle of cottonwoods and sycamores.  It was along these streams, in the shade of oaks, that the Chumash congregated in tribelets, essentially extended family groupings, and lived their lives in the valley of the moon. That they pounded acorns into flour is quite certain. Yet evidence of this activity is less than emphatic. Occasionally, there is an ancient oak limb bent unnaturally low to the ground forcibly manipulated to provide an opportunity for woman and children to easily pick the tree’s acorns. This we know was an aspect of Chumash arboriculture, but such trees are rare and slowly disappearing.

Bed rock mortars are sometimes associated with rock art sites in the Sespe Wilderness, but the agricultural clearing in the East End, beginning early in the last century, has obliterated all such evidence, but just recently a friend in the area unearthed a pestle – a smooth cylinder of stone rounded at each end – one of which was distinguished by a pronounced wear edge. This pestle had seen much service, had produced much acorn meal and had resounded, we can presume, with much ‘boom and thump’. As I held it, the realization slowly crept upon me, that for a moment, I had a physical connection to the primal subsistence of a lost people.  They had inhabited their immediate environment in ways that fully reflected the productivity of the land and the limiting factors of the climate; they understood the ever evolving dance between the two and made that understanding the basis for an enduring culture.

We have broken this tradition: destroying, in the process, all knowledge of living mindfully on the fruits of the earth.  We, in this ignorance, prepare (or not) for the mild vicissitudes of a cyclical drought and the looming horizon of ice-melt and a rising ocean carelessly initiated by one hundred and fifty years of anthropogenic global warming.

The pestle is a totem: an emblem of dietary fortitude in the face of environmental limitations. This particular stone implement has now been re-hidden beneath the roots of an olive tree – ironically, an example of the exogenous biota introduced by conquering Europeans. Holding it, I was offered a glimpse into a world where stone, wood, bone, animal skin, sinew, earth, and cellulose defined the material limits of the universe and where the natural world was composed of a web of intensely intimate relationships with food of which the local Indians were fully a part: it was a glimpse which loomed with both hope and despair. 

We Can Move

Weeds are overspread on the cattle pasture at the top of the hill: tar-weed, vinegar-weed and milk-weed (although not so much of this last one); all are natives and all highly unpalatable - likewise turkey mullein - to the cows that are occasionally put here to graze. There was a brief flush of non-native grasses earlier in the year, and then mustard and Erodium, but the cattle were out often enough to reduce the field to a dusty, over-grazed paddock by spring. Yet somehow this pretty (and in the case of vinegar weed, pungently aromatic) trio of weeds survived the bovine onslaught and made it through much of the summer. Now, still blooming tar weed dominates the gentle north facing rise and turkey mullein studs the ground either side of the north-south track the cattle and I take as we make our way across the field. Along the way too, stunted vinegar weed still sports its delicate blue flowers.

Recently, approaching from the south (along the track that parallels the deep ravine that becomes the western boundary of the field) with the rise forming the near horizon, a flock of Dark-eyed juncos rose up like a small cloud from the un-seen meadow: the avian mass quickly dissipated then came together again in a similar sort of vaporous formation. They had been feeding, I realized, as I chased them north in the early morning light, on the tarweed. A few days later, the entire spectacle was reprised but this time, they flew off to the west - just far enough to alight on a chaparral bush too distant to identify but close enough that I could make out the coal-black feathered eye sockets of these little brown-grey birds.

Here, on the meadow, east of the great chasmic gorge, there is a clear view west out to the Santa Ynez range as it stands up before Ventura’s coast and forms a scenic flat over which the sun and moon disappear. This morning, the almost full moon appeared as a mottled apricot for the few minutes that it hung above the jagged edge of the mountains. To the east, and at more or less the same time, the sun – the two celestial bodies in cosmic lockstep – was beginning to rise over the Santa Paula ridge. It is at such moments that this spot feels like a rostrum from which one might, with some trepidation, direct the morning’s music: coaxing the full majesty of the sun from its terrestrial lair, urging it up into the empyrean from where it can let loose its cosmic rays, destroy the ambiguities of the night, banish the moon, and unsubtly establish the incontrovertible truths of the day.

There is, in this process, a clarity that is usually less than evident in our lives, although we too are in lockstep with biological processes that will ensure our eventual decay and death. A long night, we can be assured, will follow our brief day. Exactly how much light floods into that day is, it seems, a function of the circumstances of our birth and subsequent happenstance: first we are locational victims of geo-politics and then often hierarchical casualties of our natal socio-economic milieu. We are products of our particular environment quite as much as those native ‘weeds’ are of their horticultural setting; but we can move.

From the very beginning, humankind has done exactly that - we have left one place and sought advantage in another - and the history of California, in particular, is inextricably entwined with a long succession of arrivals from less favored homelands.

Locally, during the depths of the last ice age, from 21,000 to 18,000 years ago, sea level was 400 feet lower than at present and the beach about twenty five miles further west. The northern Channel Islands were one, known as Santarosae, and it only remained an island by virtue of the fact that it rose out of a deep channel beyond the continental shelf.

 As Terry Jones and Katherine Klar point out in California Prehistory, Colonization, Culture, and Complexity, (2012), the extent of glacial ice during this period would almost certainly have precluded the initial settlement of the land from northeastern Asia. The melting of the glaciers in the warming that followed (known as the Holocene Interglacial, which continues as our current geological epoch) opened up the New World for migration from Asia, and despite subsequent dramatic oscillations in climate, made California, with its dense conifer forests, rich marine life and relict megafauna, a favorable destination for the prehistoric Asian diaspora. We can now, with a fair degree of certainty, date its first arrivals back to 15,000 BP.

The west coast of North America remained an outlier to history until the seventeenth century when the voyages of Cabrillo (1542), and Drake (1579), brought it into the realm of European politics. By virtue of Cabrillo’s explorations, Spain claimed California and considered its native peoples as subjects of the Crown, but they did not take possession of the territory until 1769, when goaded by an awareness of Russian fur trader’s interest in the area, Junipero Serra and Gaspar De Portola took hold of the country by establishing missions and presidios – military garrisons in support of the Franciscan project of Christianizing the native population while installing them as un-paid laborers, or serfs, within what they planned to be initially self-sufficient, then surplus producing communities.

The Spanish were the first of California’s modern conquerors; then Mexico, in 1821, took control as a more or less unintended consequence of their overthrow of Spanish rule (exactly three centuries after Cortes’ conquest of the Aztecs); finally, Alta California was invaded by Anglo-Americans in the middle of the nineteenth century.  It was a moment of triumph for the mostly poor-white frontiersmen, many of whom were Bear Flag veterans, who rallied behind West Point educated Fremont and his successor Stockton, but their occupation predictably resulted in the devastation of the Californio, campesino and Native American populations.

A measure of the disruptive impact of the arrival of Americans can be judged by the fact that for a decade or so around the conquest, Los Angeles was the most violent place on the continent and quite possibly on the planet. John Mack Faragher, in Eternity Street, Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles, 2016, suggests that the murder rate was “comparable to that of Mexican border towns in the first decade of the twenty-first century, at the height of the violence between warring drug cartels”. He goes on to quote William Butts, editor of the Southern Californian, who in 1854, bemoaned the fact that the cultural contribution of the Americans to local culture was the introduction of “ever more formidable weapons of death and destruction”. This homicidal frenzy extended throughout the nascent state - San Francisco, still caught up in the Gold Rush, and far more populous than Los Angeles, almost equaled its murder rate.

After the onset of the Civil War, the formation of the California Brigade, to fight on the Union side, absorbed much of this psychopathic energy and when the four year paroxysm of industrial scale violence had run its course, California began a more peaceful integration into an expanding United States.  In 1865, the Central Pacific Railroad hired many thousands of Chinese immigrants as the labor force for the last sections of the transcontinental line. They joined the thousands of their countrymen already in California from the Gold Rush era; despite anti-Chinese xenophobia, many stayed and more arrived until mounting pressure from poor white Americans and recent Irish immigrants (who, ironically, arrived on the newly completed railroad) led the Federal government to ban Chinese immigration in 1882.

In the decades that followed, agricultural migrant farm workers arrived in California from Japan, the Indian sub-continent, the Philippines, and increasingly, as time went on, Mexico. The great Dust Bowl diaspora saw as many as half a million poor white farmers flee the plains States in the 1930’s and settle in California. Black Americans began to arrive in significant numbers during World War II to work in the war industries.

Exclusionary immigration rules were finally overturned in 1965 when LBJ signed a number of bills that again opened up the U.S. to migration from Asian countries  (several of which the American Empire were concurrently attempting to annihilate) and set generous quotas for nationalities around the world.  Two years later, I was a part of the global Hippie migration that for a moment, found its locus in San Francisco’s Summer of Love.

Jonathon Gold reflects on the impact of the last sixty years of immigration into southern California through the medium of his weekly restaurant reviews, published first for the L.A. Weekly and now in The Los Angeles Times. His life and work are documented in the film, City of Gold, 2015, written and directed by Laura Gabbert. Gold celebrates the evolution of ethnic food sold from carts, trucks, and hole-in-the-wall restaurants to white-table-cloth establishments as a way of demonstrating the power of gateway capitalism - through which immigrants can establish their ethnic identities in new places by selling their distinctive cuisines to the local community and the wider population. Their service workers, many of whom have shared a similar journey to their employers, remain mired in the low wage world that such entrepreneurial ventures demand and thus find less reward in having moved.

In both Los Angeles and San Francisco, and throughout the towns and cities of California, a complex mix of cultures contributes to what in the botanical world would be called a climax community – where an intricate mix of environmental adaptations contributes to system stability. The preservation of difference, in values, customs and lifestyles is fundamental to the spirit of southern California and is greatly threatened by the neo-liberal globalism that seeks the homogenization of values congruent to its goal of asymmetrical capital accumulation. The tragedy of Gold’s food cart entrepreneurs is that their gateway capitalism tends to feed into this neo-liberalism which seeks to erode the unique qualities of community (the very foundation of disparate cuisines) in its relentless mission to blend and commodify the cultural experiences of the planet.

The cow pasture is encrusted with a dried mulch of Erodium botrys through which the native weeds still manage to emerge. From this ferruginous mat the corkscrew seeds of the invasive annual herb await the first rains of Fall to swell and drill blindly into the newly softened soil. Next Spring will see the renewal of the species’ inexorable progress in entirely colonizing the field.

Between the Mountains and the Sea

It is not in the books, by which I mean Milt McCauley’s painstaking catalog called Flowers of the Santa Monica Mountains  and Wildflowers of Orange County and the Santa Ana Mountains,  by Robert L. Allen and Fred M. Roberts; yet it flourishes in the canyons of the southern California cismontane, in the lands between the mountains and the sea;  locally,  it grows in the upper reaches of Bear Canyon, along the La Broche Canyon trail and alongside the now dry, spill-over washes of Sisar Creek that run down towards State Highway 150; it has even grown in our neighbor’s yard in a patch of south sloping oak meadowland;  but it is a flower, now in pink-purple bloom, for which I know no name. It is, in Hawaiian pidgin, da kine  (I’m reading William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days, A Surfing Life, 2015), a whatchamacallit or as a botanist might gamble, probably a part of the Asteraceae  family (just because this is the largest flower family on the planet).

Its foliage is spikey like an artichoke plant and colored a silvery spearmint green. From a base of incised leaves it sends out sprays of stems to which the one inch diameter flowers are closely attached on short stems bracted along their length. Each of the leaves from which the flowers subtend is a single miniature version of the mess of mostly withered foliage closer to the ground. In spring and winter this foliage alone is remarkable, its silvery color unusual amidst the chaparral drab of sandstone, and the mix of golden and chocolaty soils strewn with dead leaves and twigs beneath the leathery, deep rooted chamise, ceonothus, mountain mahogany, scrub oak and red berry; it favors rocky escarpments and dry stream beds but somehow I had never previously seen it in bloom. At this moment in late summer, its pinkish, purplish ray (or ligulate) flowers dotted along its gracefully arching wands are truly startling.

Get close to the ground at this time of year (when removing tumbleweed perhaps) and another startling vision appears: tiny red and black diamond patterned beetles scuttling around in the dry soil. They too, despite a little desultory web research, remain for the moment, nameless. Barely a quarter of an inch long they demand close-up inspection, and such hands and knees investigations reveal black diamonds on red, crisp, deck-of-cards-like graphics genetically painted onto the hardened–for-battle, heraldic wings of the little creatures.

At another scale, but with the same intense graphic quality, our big rock (ours, because we claim it as a profoundly dense moon anchored in frozen orbit, forever mocking the precarious enfoldment of space that is our house) sitting a hundred feet west of the front door, is this evening a black silhouette against a livid blood-orange sky.  The composition is completed by a piercing point of light in the pale grey just above the color wash at the horizon: Venus appears, as the sky darkens, laggardly following the sun into the southern hemisphere, somewhere over the raggedy mountains.

These Santa Ynez Mountains are a famously transverse range on a continent characterized by great north-south cordillera – the axial north-south mountain ranges such as the Rockies, the Andes, the Sierras, the Cascades, and the local coastal ranges such as the Santa Monica and San Bernadino Mountains: running parallel to the Pacific shoreline, these ranges shelter vast, biotically productive plains, watered from their slopes.  The Ojai Valley, idiosyncratically, is formed between the tail end of the transverse Santa Ynez range and the parallel Sulphur Mountain ridge.

The lower valley is not squarely between the mountains and the sea, as in archetypal cistmontane, but is instead the terminus of a gently sloping flood plain spread beside the Ventura River and its major local tributary, the San Antonio Creek; it is a valley that points towards the ocean. The upper valley is similarly situated although dramatically bifurcated at the Summit where the focus of its rain shed is split between the Ventura and the Santa Clara rivers. On Koenigstein, our oceanic connection is through Santa Paula which stands at the head of the vast Oxnard Plain, and is a city shaped geomorphically by the transverse South Mountain, the Santa Paula Ridge (last gasp of the Santa Ynez Mountains) and the terminus of Sulphur Mountain.  

Surface run-off has but this one route to the ocean from our property – down the hill to Sisar Creek thence to Santa Paula Creek where the co-mingled molecules make their way to the Santa Clara Estuary just north of Point Mugu and into the Pacific. We can replicate this route – more or less – by car and be at Point Mugu Beach in about an hour. Alternatively, we can head west on the 150 and follow (again, more or less) Lion Creek, to San Antonio Creek to the Ventura River and thence to its estuary hard by the County Fairgrounds, where, just a little to the north is Emma Wood State Beach bordered by the South Pacific Coast Railroad and the old Pacific Coast Highway (now usurped by the 101); to the south is C street, Ventura’s in-town surf beach where the eleven year old William Finnegan learnt to surf.

A third beach-bound option is to continue west on the 150, and cross over the Ventura River at Baldwin Road rather than parallel it along the 33, and wind through the hills past Lake Casitas and on towards the 101 just shy of Carpinteria where Rincon’s famous point break awaits a few hundred yards to the south. Santa Barbara is another dozen miles to the north and here, at East Beach, just last weekend, I experienced one of those epiphanies that abound in the natural world and which constituted the third in this late summer group of talismanic black-on-red vignettes.

Standing on the sand, late in the afternoon, bemused by the assortment of shorebirds busy on the beach (curlews, sand pipers, plovers and gulls) I was transfixed by a group of perhaps half a dozen ungainly Black Skimmers (Rynchops Niger) lurking on the periphery. Every so often one of their number would wheel into the sky and swoop over the waves bordering the beach and dredge, with the lower half of its beak, through the water - hoping, presumably, to catch small fish. Back on the beach after each brief foray, the bird lost its aerial grace and assumed its earthbound awkwardness. Most remarkable about this strange group was their oversized and mismatched bills, the lower mandibles being noticeably longer than the upper maxillas and the color of their beaks: brilliant red, tipped with black as though they had been dipped in squid ink, or perhaps in the oil that bubbles up in seeps along this coast.

From January 1970 to early in the 2000’s I too lived ‘A Surfing Life’, rarely living far from the beach and almost always aware of the local surf conditions – a pale reflection of William Finnegan’s whole-hearted commitment and performed athletically at far below his level of skill, which was at an almost professional standard. Having started surfing a few days after my twenty second birthday on Manly Beach in Sydney, I suffered through many years of humiliations before achieving a bare proficiency; then, in my fifties, I lost just enough ability for it to become untenable for me to continue this life into the new century. As Finnegan points out, no one who begins surfing much after their fourteenth birthday is ever going to be any good.  He continues to surf well into his sixties but must maintain his fitness level by daily swimming a mile in a basement pool in Manhattan, where he now lives.

Much of the allure of surfing is in the close connection to the ocean it affords its participants. Standing on East Beach in Santa Barbara, I felt disconnected from the rhythm of the sea: I had become a bird-watching by-stander. My Chaparral Life, which began with regular early morning runs in Will Rogers State Historical Park on the north western edge of Los Angeles, at just about the time that I abandoned surfing, usurped the primacy of the ocean as the focus of my existence. This life continues in Ojai, where I remain consumed with trying to achieve a plausible connection to the unknowable complexities and visual richness of an alien environment; it is a life spent in pursuit of tapping in to the strange energies that eddy through the chaparral.

It is, of course, not so very different from the life I began, so many years ago, on Manly Beach.

Dog Star Rising

Oceans of marine layer fog lap at the mountain shore lines of the lower valley and the Oxnard Plain. The cities of Santa Paula and Ojai have disappeared beneath roiling water vapor. Up above the fog line in La Broche Canyon the morning sun has just risen above Santa Paula Ridge illuminating the east facing sandstone escarpment along which I run. To my left, the twisted limbs of Manzanita, tenaciously anchoring themselves in rock fissures, flush red; along the track and at moraine's edge, gnaphalia, dried yucca and the clouds of Acourtia seed atop tobacco brown stalks are sepulchral: a patchwork of the chaparral's ghostly summer shroud.

There is, or at least I imagine there is, a profound stoicism in the chaparral plant community: in the many thousand years old succession of plants, soils and weathering rock, the rains have always come and the plants have endured. Now the wildlands hereabouts are littered with the woody remnants of shrubs and perennials, of dead sage, artemisia, laurel sumac, and chamise : their armatures dried grey in the sun and waiting, quiet as the grave, for wildfire to return their nutrients to the soil. Fallen oak limbs and split trunks dot the dry land, elephant bones in the chaparral ossuary.

We live in a canyon through which we can reasonably expect fire in our lifetime. Hence the elaborate precautions in the two built structures on our wildland spread made to increase their chances of survival in a bush fire. We expect the fires to return (evidenced in our yard by fire-blackened oak trunks), and we expect, too, the balm of heavy rains. Like most southern Californians, we maintain a level of pragmatic preparedness in the face of natural disasters.

While providing an anthropomorphized example of stoicism, the plant community also serves as example of Aristotelian telos. The philosopher maintained that every living thing, whether plant, animal or human, acted according to its nature and for all these beings that inevitably included living in community with their fellows. Cycles of birth and death, dormancy during drought and revival after rains and fire-scorched earth and subsequent regeneration from within ash enriched soils, are intrinsic to the chaparral plant community and it is these processes which formed the environmental setting for the human groups that lived within it.

For fifteen thousand years, the Chumash and their forbears, such as the people of the Oak Grove Horizon and before them the first Paleo Indians settlers who voyaged down the coastal kelp-road or trudged across the Beringian land bridge valued community as their guarantee of survival in these lands of uncertain rains and randomized fire events. Seeds stored in woven baskets were insurance against a lack of game or a dearth of fresh plants. Equitably shared resources promoted the welfare of all. Like most indigenous peoples, the Chumash sourced all their food, clothing shelter and tools directly from their local environment, and the weather played an integral part in either sustaining or pauperizing their communities. To voluntarily attempt to live outside of the community or to be banished from it was to court death. Survival was a cooperative endeavor. Individuality was of little value, for to consistently express it was life threatening.

Tribal and peasant cultures have always relied on high levels of cooperation, community and shared values (albeit ones sometimes forged in the brutal furnaces of oppression).  Elite groups, in turn, shared values based partly on the exploitation of the under-classes.  In either case, anomie, Durkheim’s term for societal alienation, was mostly unknown in pre-modern times. The overbearing extremism of the European aristocracy eventually shook loose the elaborate social structures that had arisen out of Feudalism (which exhibited some levels of shared welfare and responsibilities within its hierarchies) and prompted the political revolutions of the late eighteenth century (including ours) as well as the more generalized European liberalizations of 1848.

It was at this historical moment that increased levels of population, food production and industrial infrastructures (all based on new energy inputs derived from fossil fuels) provided a social and financial environment in which individualism began to have value. Voltaire, Locke, Hobbes and John Stuart Mill, amongst others, provided the philosophical underpinnings of this new liberalism. Yet Locke’s notion that humankind should live in a “a State of perfect Freedom to order their Actions…as they think fit…without asking leave, or depending on the Will of any other Man” runs entirely counter to the lived experience of our species for the roughly two hundred thousand years of its existence prior to this pronouncement.

Liberalism’s intimate connection to new forms of energy production, dependent on exploitation of the planet's crust, should come as no surprise. These new values better served those who were beginning to benefit from the shift in the sources of energy wealth. As Ian Morris points out in his recent book, Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve, 2014, tribal cultures (such as the Chumash), who made a living foraging or hunting and gathering adopted social structures that were substantially egalitarian: they included strong norms of sharing and exhibited very limited inequalities. The brief interregnum of farming societies (in the long scheme of things), enabled the rise of Aristocracy, because their hierarchies were based on the ownership of land which tends to aggregate into the hands of the few (who then justified their ascendance by linking it with Divine Will). This complex system of values, norms, expectations and cultural patterns that supported the Divine Right of Kings was then systematically undermined by liberal philosophies that privileged the individual and emphasized humankind’s supposed freedoms.

Fossil fuel societies have proved to be highly tolerant of wealth inequalities. Their implicitly technocratic foundations correlate highly with liberal ideologies which foster values such as competition, quantifiability, majoritarian rule and efficiency. As Morris points out, liberal, individualist values have come to define Western ideology (what he elsewhere calls “a pack of lies from which someone benefits”).

Rousseau offered a warning at the birth of modern liberal society, in the late eighteenth century, when he observed that competition would create a society riven with “Jealousy, suspicion, fear, coldness, reserve and fraud”. A hundred years later, Thoreau, a great reader of Jean-Jacques, observed that it was a wise thing to “cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage…” while noting that “the civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage”, eschewing, by inference, wealth, vanity and culture for the profound pleasures of a primal relationship with the natural world. Now, neoliberalism is a kind of metastasized, cancerous liberalism that feeds on the sugars secreted by the polluting organ of capitalism. Wealth inequality is symptomatic of this condition and leaves (to continue flogging the oncological metaphor) a vast societal tumor that is the disaffected middle classes.

Sometimes, there’s really nothing to be done but to take a walk in the chaparral. Even here, your experience may vary. A couple of weeks ago an oil storage tank set deep in sage scrub, exploded about half a mile from our house. A plume of black smoke rose into the still air. Prompt response by the local fire brigades prevented the fire spreading beyond the immediate confines of the pad. The last significant wildfire that began in the area, less than a hundred yards from the entry to what is now our property, occurred  in December 1999, raged for five days, involved over 1500 fire fighters, scorched nearly 5,000 acres and threatened multiple structures and two private schools. It was caused by fire crackers stuffed in a mail box. The explosive impact of the oil storage tank was far greater but was thankfully vitiated by the almost total lack of wind. It is ironic that the chaparral landscapes that produce so little that is of material value to modern society conceal, in places, vast reserves of fossil fuel.

At other times, the ‘tonic of wildness’ is more reliable. One recent early morning, looking over the steep, rocky bank of a seasonal stream (dry now for three years) I watched the single panoptic eye of a rabbit crouched in a crevice a few yards away. Shyest of creatures, I have only seen rabbits freeze when a bobcat is stalking them. This animal remained comfortably immobile as my attention was drawn to a fluttering brown bird spiraling up slope from the dry stream bottom. It circled towards me (I remained as still as the rabbit) and alighted on my arm. Feeling a little like my notion of Saint Francis, I looked down on it and took note of its whitish cream breast, orangey brown (rufous) plumage and darker, herringbone patterned tail. Over breakfast, I learnt from Sibley’s Field Guide that my visitor was a Canyon wren (Catherpes mexicanus).

For a moment, that morning, we had shared in our chaparral community.

Atonement

It is late July and a welcome stasis has descended on the landscape surrounding our house. The bunch grasses move in the merest breath of wind, animating the meadows with waves of bleached straw. Stiff, broom-like stands of Deerweed, mostly a dark reddish orange, punctuate the land, while the dried blossoms of California everlasting appear (to the fancifully inclined) as foam caps on the moving ocean of grasses: through August and September little will change. The weeding work of winter, spring and early summer is rewarded in these months of landscape hibernation.

It is in this pale scene, occasionally interrupted by patches of bare, ochre to reddish soil that young cream and sepia rattlesnakes sidle along, hunting western fence and western whiptail lizards; in other years (but entirely absent at the moment, reflecting the dearth of their prey - tail thumping wood rats) Red Tail hawks shadow the ground from on high, tails flashing their earthen color. More subtly, the homely Towhee reveals, on close observation, a cinnamon colored belly, echoing the tones of the dirt and leaf litter in which it digs for seeds, insects and grubs.

And so, with a few changes in the details but none in sentiment, we can, perhaps, celebrate with Browning that,

“The hill-side’s dew-pearl’d

The Lark’s on the wing;

The snail’s on the thorn;

God’s in his heaven –

All’s right with the world!”

 But this summer, as the grasses bleach out, I am particularly aware that there is a darkness abroad; that the chaparral is missing its California Grizzlies and the trail making, tending and fire managing of Native Americans; that all’s not right in the world; and that this country continues to pay the price for the trauma it has wreaked on the land.

As much as we pretend that we are a Nation founded in religious freedom at Plymouth Rock, in liberty won from our erstwhile colonial overlords and in justice enshrined in the words of our Constitution and its amendments, the reality remains that this is a country forged in the hell-fire of violence. We are a people who created a home based not so much on political, philosophical and religious ideals as on the brutal displacement of an indigenous population and the venal consumption of their land’s natural resources. The continuing denial of our genesis calls into question everything we think we know about ourselves.

The frontier that rolled west in the nineteenth century was the final resolution of a genocidal pogrom that had begun long before the signing of the Declaration of Independence  (which proposed a minor rearrangement in the circumstances of European hegemony over the Native peoples of much of North America). In the great sweep of history it is the bloody fact of our killing of the original, in-place, intact, highly diverse, fully sustainable, intellectually adept, and spiritually attuned peoples of this country that is a central theme of the American nightmare.

Welcome to our world.

This is not a world customarily evoked in popular culture, in political rhetoric, in our churches or in our classrooms and yet it is a world reflected every day in the rage, in the violence and in the hate that surrounds us. 

Some would call it karma.

Gun control, believing that Black Lives Matter, increased policing, borders walls, extreme vetting of potential migrants, fewer prisons, more prisons, an end to poverty, more jobs, better housing, improved trade policies, peace in the Middle East; none of these things is going to change the multi-generation transmission of America’s original sin. The Nation’s violent conquest is daily played out on our streets, in our government, our homes, our schools, in public places and in foreign lands as a recurring psycho-drama: it explains our metastasizing military; the militarization of our police force, our obscene nuclear arsenal, the 9mm. Glock in your neighbor’s glove-box and the Heckler & Koch HK416 assault rifle at the back of her closet. It explains the true American Exceptionalism - why this is one of the most violent places on the planet. It may even explain why a man soaked in the blood of foreign wars is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

It is commonplace to ascribe to survivors of an historic genocide a traumatic inheritance, passed along through generations, that results in violence, substance abuse, chronic health issues such as diabetes, and mental health disturbances. While these impacts are routinely observed in American Indian communities, it is less acknowledged that these traumas impact the perpetrators of such genocides and are transmitted along similarly multi-generational lines.

The business of America is business and, in an unbroken line, (with the exception, perhaps, of FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson) our Presidents have consistently privileged the powerful over the common people. Campaign promises may swing from the progressive to the conservative but once in power our leaders are gripped by the disastrous lure of Empire. It is in the conflation of Empire and Capitalism, of Territory and Treasure, that many of this country’s greatest sins have been committed. Both enterprises are built on the backs of the common man and woman and on the despoliation of the places they call home.

The history of the parts of North America which now form the United States is braided with the narrative threads of greed, conquest and subjugation. It is these stories and the trauma created in their unfolding, that are far greater determinants of our national character and disposition than American democracy - originating as a modest conflation of enlightenment philosophy, the governmental structure of the Roman Republic, and a belief in the political and social primacy of the white, land owning male.

The pernicious triangular trade in slaves, raw materials (cotton, tobacco, sugar cane, indigo and rice) and manufactures that linked the continents of Africa, America and Europe for centuries, was the foundation for this country’s wealth long before the great infrastructure projects, mineral extraction and heavy industries of the nineteenth century added to the wealth of the very few. The railways were built on land taken from Native Americans, the mines of Appalachia on lands earlier purloined from its rightful inhabitants, and polluting industries established in the richest biological confluences of land and water. These projects inevitably relied on the exploitation of racially diverse, mostly impoverished, native born, migrant European, Asian, Mexican, and Central American labor.

Having subjugated its native peoples over a period of almost four centuries, and in some areas having committed a thorough-going genocide, in the late nineteenth century this country turned its attention beyond its continental borders (and their few remaining indigenous peoples) and purchased Alaska from the Russians in 1867. In 1893, an American led coup resulted in the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands. A few years later, the Spanish American War of 1898 expanded the Nation’s Imperium to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. In 1903, the Panama Canal Zone was annexed to the United States. These were the glory days of Empire.

American military adventurism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has continued to project the country's vast resources of troops and military technology in pursuit of American cultural, economic and political hegemony. The toll in foreign death and destruction and the wasting of American lives and treasure is beyond counting. The so-called ‘Good War’ (WWII) was, in reality, an internecine battle with the U.K. to establish global financial dominance (achieved at Bretton Woods in 1944); the D-Day bid to salvage a portion of  Europe not saved by the Russian army from Nazi Germany; an attempt to establish the dominance of the U.S.A. across the Pacific and most importantly, inspired by a desire to limit the power of the Soviet Union.

Domestically, the blowback from this American Adventurism, underpinned by dreams of Empire and a Capitalist endgame whereby all the world’s resources are concentrated in the hands of the few, are psychic, psychological, and sociological. We see the resultant pathologies played out in our neighborhoods, on Twitter and Facebook. Externally, blowback is reflected in the increasing levels of terrorist violence directed against the U.S.A. and its neoliberal allies.

This summer, I have dedicated my chaparral experiences to a process of lamentation and regret. Come Thanksgiving, I may be ready for a re-naming ceremony whereby it becomes our Yom Kippur, our Day of Atonement. 

Lost Peoples of the Lake

I am walking out the door of Room 18, at the Dow Villa Motel in Lone Pine (gateway to Mount Whitney) at around 5:30 am early in July. If there is music to be cued it is Richard Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathrustra: horns, reeds, strings and timpani in full flood as dawn’s first light hits the craggy peaks of the Sierras to the west. The crashing chords and the heart beat percussion (Strauss’ accompaniment to Nietzsche’s enquiry into God, humankind and the natural world) are the exact aural equivalent of the silent sensory palpitations that are occurring somewhere deep within the striatal sub regions of my brain as I focus (blearily) on the magnificence of this primordial scene. 

We are not in Upper Ojai anymore, where the pretty wash of first light on the Santa Ynez Mountains impacts me like the breathy trilling of a flute.  In the synesthesia induced by this Sierran scene I am hearing the dawn’s light wash over the celestial ramparts as a full symphonic assault, where the reticulated mountain ridges are bleached pale within a triumphal sound scape: the crashing sonic waves resound in my head - signaling the start of another remarkable day on the planet.

We are in Lone Pine to meet up with neighbor Margot and her partner Michael to visit the dust remediation project on Owen’s Lake that Margot and her consulting firm have been working on for the past fifteen years.

It is only in the past one hundred and fifty years that the Owens Valley has existed as a contested landscape. Up until the middle of the nineteenth century a relatively consistent human population had, for many millennia, remained enfolded in its geological, biological and hydrological setting  

The level and hence the extent of Owens Lake varied over pre-historic time, but it has slowly shrunk from its post ice-age maximums of 10,000 years ago (which saw it stretch to thirty miles long and up to 250 feet deep) in a process that, through the last millennium, greatly increased its salinity. Through it all, however, it provided a rich and varied lacustrine environment for human, faunal and floral life; but as all of Southern California knows, despite its continuing decline, the Lake's death, when it came, was not natural. 

Early in the last century it became a toxic waste land, inimical to all life, spreading poisonous clouds of dust along the wind corridor that lies between the eastern Sierras and the White-Inyo mountains.

The destruction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century pastoral life in the Owens Valley that centered on the lake is often lamented: local farmers are portrayed as victims of urban rapacity. As anyone who has seen the film Chinatown (1974, dir. Roman Polanski) knows, in the great conurbation to the south, water engineers, (most famously Mulholland) inspired by civic boosterism, professional hubris and their implicit partnership with the profiteering of land barons who purchased dry land in the Los Angeles basin in the sure knowledge that it was about to be watered by the California aqueduct, syphoned the lake's last water some two hundred miles to the Los Angeles basin where the artesian wells that sufficed when the city's population was no more than 300,000 had long since run dry. What is entirely lost in this story are the circumstances by which these dispossessed Anglo Americans came to be farmers in the Owens Valley in the first place.

They, and their immediate predecessors, it should be noted, had engineered agricultural diversions in the valley in the late 1800's hastening the shrinkage of the lake to which Mulholland administered the coup de grace in 1913. Eleven years later, the valley floor become a playa, the fate to which other pluvial lakes in the region had long since been consigned. 

What then we're the circumstances of the establishment of these American farms in the graben, or geologic ditch (specifically a linear fault bock basin) that runs between the mountain ranges and where the sediment atop the underlying granite is as much as two miles thick?

Benjamin Madley, in his startling new book, An American Genocide, writes of the extermination of California’s indigenous population between 1846 and 1873: he notes that “Owen’s Valley’s Paiute-Shoshones to the north and Western Shoshones to the south, had very little contact with non-Indians prior to 1861”. He paints an idyllic picture where these native peoples hunted deer, big horn sheep and antelope on the lakeshore and into the mountain hinterlands while trapping rabbits over the russet colored Alabama hills that lie at the foot of the Sierras, or foraged for pine nuts in the cooler alpine altitudes of the Inyo Mountains in the summer. All that changed after 1860 when white ranchers invaded the area and unleashed hundreds of cattle to fatten in the valley for sale to miners who had discovered gold north of Mono Lake and nearby Aurora , Nevada.

The inevitable friction that developed between the indigenous peoples of the area and the newly arrived immigrants quickly devolved into what Madley calls “the well-established California patterns of genocide” whereby mounted vigilantes, supported by the Second California Cavalry, armed with howitzers and muskets, slaughtered hundreds of Valley Indians, destroyed their food stocks and burnt their villages. This first ‘Owen’s Valley War’ culminated in 1863 with the forced removal of upwards of a thousand Indians who were marched over the Sierras to a reservation in Fort Tejon. The survivors of this grim journey were left without adequate food or clothing at the reservation and most attempted to escape despite the threat of being shot for doing so.

Those that managed to return to their homes found a land transformed by cattle ranchers and with their traditional food resources and game animals in short supply. Forced to rely on taking the settlers’ cattle, a second war was precipitated between 1864 and 1865 in which the indigenous peoples of the Valley were hunted to extinction.

This genocide is the patrimony of the ranchers and farmers whose lands were subsequently made worthless by the diversion of the Lake’s remaining water to Los Angeles. They and their descendants have been obliged, for almost a century, to breathe the poisoned, dust laden air that blows off the desiccated Lake bottom: conditions for which the L.A. Department of Water and Power has now been held responsible in suits filed by the EPA and subsequently by the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District. It may not be too fanciful to imagine that this Californian inheritance of a playa that generates toxic winds containing arsenic, boron and other carcinogens, is the dark consequence of some long ago Paiute shamanic curse that might be idiomatically translated as Eat my Dust.

Since the beginning of this century, the efforts of Margot and other Environmental, Engineering and Landscape consultants have been largely successful in remediating the conditions at the Lake, and have made life tolerable for Valley residents. Now, Lake bottom tourism is being encouraged through the building of trails and a central monument designed by Nuvis Landscape Architects.

Our visit was punctuated by the sighting of a lone coyote padding along the salt crust: the traditional Native American trickster is perhaps conjuring further redemption for the Lake. There is no commemoration of the killing fields of Inyo County:  surely they bring even greater shame upon this country than, for instance, the nearby WWII era Japanese internment camp of Manzanar and are of at least equal educational potential.  The new monument might be more relevant if it referenced the lost peoples of the Lake rather than simulating, in earth and granite cobbles, the waves that animated the vast body of water that once filled the graben. In the Owen’s Valley, there is yet a greater, unacknowledged debt to be paid.

Time Clock

Our voyage across pellucid seas, chased by a pod of elegantly arching dolphins, held no hint of the approaching scene. Nor did the Black Rock, at the far eastern end of the island (topped with white gull guano, or Anacapa snow) as we approached our landing, truly portend the world we were about to experience where browns, sepia, black, grey and white would dominate in the form of mature white gulls, their mottled grey fledglings, their straw nests, antic coreopsis stumps, bleached grass, guano splattered stone and deeply weathered russet colored, rock strewn beaches. Unprepared: but once immersed in this alien world the pleasures of its complex visual composition somehow transcended the prevailing stink of seagull shit and the carnage underfoot of dead fledglings murdered by gulls they had mistakenly taken to be their parents in moments of panicked disorientation - of which careless tourists are a prime cause.

Anacapa rises like a dragon spine out of the ocean, the southern twitch of its tail disappearing in a playful loop (known prosaically, to non-dragonistas as 'the arch'). Spawn of the great Ice Age island Santarosae, which fragmented into five discrete landmasses after the ice melt deluge ten thousand years ago, now it is itself composed of three primary islets, home to the largest western gull colony on the planet. Despite diurnal disturbances by dazed tourists (courtesy of Island Packers) the colony is, at this moment, in the final stages of its annual regeneration: anxious gulls (yellow scimitar beaks stuck between beady eyes in ovoid heads atop short necks all wrapped in a white feather hijab) strut menacingly, watchful of their fledgling broods. 

It is the 100th Anniversary of the National Parks - at least to the extent of their being sanctified by Congress. By the time the National Park Service took charge in 1917, after the passage of a bill the previous year, there were already seventeen National Parks, the earliest being Yellowstone, established in 1872, while in California, Yosemite and Sequoia date to 1890. In commemoration, the New York Times ran an essay collection recently called My National Park in their Sunday travel section. Cheryl Strayed (Wild, 2012) wrote about buffalo ("their faces primordial; their dark eyes, indecipherable") at the Badlands Park in South Dakota. Other literary luminaries lauded imposingly scenic parks in Maine (Arcadia), Arizona (Grand Canyon), Wyoming (Grand Teton), and Montana (Glacier) - all notable for the dramatically rugged morphological juxtapositions so admired in the mid-nineteenth century and so complicit in the development of a Romantic national mythology based on the religious resonance of wilderness.

My National Park is the Channel Islands: I get to write about an island where there are no mammals save the pinnipeds and where the sea gulls (their faces blank with stupidity; their beady eyes viciously vacant) have no predators - an island where even varmints disdain to live; an island that will slowly disappear, perhaps, as sea levels rise - the dragon drowning incrementally in anthropogenic ice melt. My National Park is a mini-Galapagos where evolution has proceeded independently from the mainland and has thus created a variety of unique animal and plant species; but on Anacapa it is not the variety of life forms that amazes but the stunning profusion of one dominant species and the almost total disregard of the adult gulls for the crocodile of visitors that wander through their breeding grounds. Despite a small collection of partially abandoned Spanish colonial revival buildings on the island, built in the early 1930’s to house a crew of some fifteen or twenty people who maintained the lighthouse perched on the highest point of the easternmost island (whose jobs disappeared into the miasma of automation in the 1960’s), it remains remote, apparently barren and with no permanent human population, rising out of its enormously rich marine environment, it is a land that time forgot.

A few days earlier, at home in Upper Ojai, there was a presaging event of beige, blonde, cream and white that splashed across my retina. The local rattlesnakes, Crotus oreganus, use their cryptic coloring and skin pattern to disappear into their surroundings where they lay in wait to ambush prey. Lurking beneath the wooden rubbing strip of our steel fire doors, a twelve or fifteen inch youngster blended almost seamlessly with the surrounding gravel and only its slight movement gave me warning as I stepped from the house. Once safely outside, I took a closer look at the pale creature: sepia markings bordered in whitish cream bands undulated on its fresh young skin as it slithered over the gravel. It was, in its uncanny melding with its environment and its minimal earth-toned coloring, a pre-echo of the monochromatic gull families (save for the mature gulls’ red-spotted orange beaks) merging with the island meadows, strewn with dun-colored cactoidal stumps of giant coreopsis and dried grasses.

On Anacapa, and elsewhere on the Central Coast and its inland valleys, we are experiencing the annual color-shift from predominant green to predominant…….well, no one word describes the sun-bleached meadows and greying coastal sage scrub. As ever, the chaparral remains, at the edge of every pale summer vista, an indomitable presence - eternally green. There remain too, inky ponds of oak shadow spotting blonde hills. That this change in tone and temperature occurs every year does not dull its annual surprise; and if these changes are closely observed, there are revelatory washes of color at the margins: the moment a month ago when the leaves of black sage turned yellowy orange, the etiolated stalks of giant white sage that recently turned a vivid purple;  there is the maroon-purple pond of Turkish Rugging (Chorizanthe staticoides) I stumble across each June;  the orange and rust of deerweed and buckwheat; and while the delicate flowers of spring are now mostly gone, Tarweed maintains its bright yellow flowers.

This cycle of the seasons continues to resonate even within a society which runs on linear time; but we are mostly taught to sacrifice the precious moments of the present to future plans or package immediate experiences into memories that themselves are mortgaged to forward planning. Thus the magic of evanescent neurological simulation is transmuted into the dross of ‘experience’. The eternal present, a cyclical mode of time that forever presages the returning – of the seasons and of our souls and their setting amidst what Abrams calls  Earth's ’sensuous terrain’ – is mostly alien to our sense of ourselves;  but this overpowering circularity of the changing seasons somehow dents even our well-armored notions of linearity.

The idea that Anacapa exists outside of our quotidian sense of time’s arrow is enormously powerful: that it is indeed forgotten within the prevailing trope of temporal awareness; that it is an island forever in the thrall of circularity, from the gull’s roughly constructed nests of straw to the bird's metronomic return in the spring to breed another generation to drive time’s wheel. Our presence on the island (it was a family outing of Lorrie and me, our two grown sons and Ellen our daughter-in-law) represented, perhaps, a moment out of time: but it was inevitably bound by the chronological strictures of the Island Packer’s timetable.

Our eternal present lasted precisely from 2:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. on the first Saturday of July in the year of our Lord, two thousand and sixteen. 

anatomy theater

The smoke from the Sherpa Fire daubs the morning sky in playful streaks of apricot and the smell of burnt brush hangs in the air.

There is, in this election year, as two corrupt, compromised and, it must be said, old candidates, the one a vicious neo-Nazi the other an equally vicious neo-liberal - separated in their lack of probity only by their sex - vie for the presidency of the United States: a sense of End Times; a sense of the imperium collapsing in on itself. 

The fire is a natural thing although perhaps maliciously caused, the quadrennial obeisance to Democracy a gruesome tic that now consumes the body politic.

The nation is in deep shadow: late in the day, long past its high noon of power, influence and prestige in the world; signs of environmental collapse are all consuming, and writers everywhere compulsively reflect these twin strands of apocalyptic zeitgeist. Your Urbanwildland scribe follows dutifully along. What if the Federal election was about the recovery of this country’s lost connection with the natural world - about the loss of its animistic soul?

It is at this moment that Annie Proulx’s epic novel Barkskins, 2016, has appeared: the New York Times‘s suggests that “This is a jeremiad about the loss of North America’s “monstrous pine finery,” in the author’s resonant phrase, and thus its weird, old pagan soul”. She chooses, as the epigraph to her multi-generational, 736 page book, a passage from the medieval historian Lynn White Jr.’s seminal eco-theological article, The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis, 1967.

“In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.”

In the last two pieces I have referenced David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, 1996. He makes the point that since the adoption of an alphabet we, as a species, have become distanced from our environment - now veiled by the abstractions of our written language. Where once the natural world was the co-creator of our reality, and we (in our long ago oral traditions) were fully involved in the unfolding of its sensory information, we now see it encoded in the matrices of text: imprisoned in a human construct of abstract symbols. We have lost, he suggests, the ability to hone our consciousness against the whet stone of the biosphere - we are trapped in an iterative loop of purely human intelligence.

Lynn White takes a narrower view, essentially blaming the teachings of Christianity rather than the development of an alphabet for our abusive behavior towards our world. The two are connected.  Abram’s notes that the aleph beth (the first semitic alphabet) was an integral part of the Hebrew religion, where the primacy of text was acknowledged in their appellation as ‘People of the Book’. Christianity, an offshoot of this earlier monotheism, gained institutional support only when it was enshrined in the gospels – where it was made clear that divine grace was dispensed not in this world but in an abstract heavenly realm accessible only in death. A full engagement of life on this planet was made secondary to some future off-world paradise with instructions for its access encoded in the Good Book.

This evening a full moon rises over the east ridge and to the west, three brownish-purple bars streak the sky, watery vapors of dust, debris and smoke from the fire splayed across the flesh of an evening sky like striated bruises.

Annie Proulx writes,

 “I am sure that wild natural woodlands are the only true forests. The entire atmosphere — the surrounding air, the intertwined roots, the humble ferns and lichens, insects and diseases, the soil and water, weather. All these parts seem to play together in a kind of wild grand orchestra. A forest living for itself rather than the benefit of humankind.”

The wild, fire-burnt sky that floats over the westerly sea is resonant with the grandly sonorous tones of an oboe.

This country’s overt linkage of Christianity with Republican politics and neoliberal economics was established in the 1950’s under Eisenhower, when our national motto, ‘In God We Trust’ and a new line in the Pledge of Allegiance, “one nation under God” were coined (Kevin Cruse, One Nation Under God, 2015). Now Democrats too, are subject to the same conflation of their politics and Christianity. Who will stand, in this country, for the pagan animism that might lead it out of its environmental morass?

For my Father’s Day treat, I was taken to Redcat, the performance space founded by CalArts beneath Disney Hall where we saw the world premiere of an LA Opera production, anatomy theater. Composed by David Lang with a libretto by Lang and Mark Dion, it is set in the early 18th century, and features the hanging of a murderess and her subsequent public dissection, ostensibly conducted for the scientific purpose of discovering where evil might reside, manifested as some deformity in her vital organs. “Where does evil lie” is a recurring refrain and it occurred to me that this enquiry might be directed towards our country’s existential electoral plight.

As we confront our contemporary choice between two white, pasty-faced, cosmetically enhanced cadavers, who will be publically dissected by the press and the citizenry over a long summer and fall before November’s voting, we may all soon harbor such metaphoric imaginings. Splayed on a dissecting table tilted towards the audience, a naked Peabody Southwell, playing dead but occasionally singing, represents the body politic: her bleeding Christian heart, and her viscera (redolent with the stench of politics?) and finally her Lady Liberty parts are extracted from her pale body, Filipino psycho-surgeon style, in a fruitless search for Evil, or more prosaically an answer to ‘where did she/we go wrong?’

David Abram would suggest that human awareness has folded in on itself, and transfixed by technology, we have short circuited the sensory connections that we once made with the earth and have thus denied ourselves the opportunity to be fully human in a world we recognize as much more than human. Annie Proulx echoes Lynn White Jr. in believing that we must come once more to revere not a universal, distant deity but the local gods of place and the spirits and sprites that inhabit the living planet and its earthen mantle. These are meta-prescriptions: cosmic shifts in consciousness from our current position, where the only demand we make of our leaders is that our society is managed to better support our acquisitiveness and that the resulting consumption is more closely aligned to the few or the many depending on our philosophy. But they are also shifts that can be initiated in tiny incremental acts of observation and reverence.

Last night, the full moon’s reflection in the swimming pool (left uncovered to let it cool it down) attracted swarms of white moths (Caenurgina erechtea).  Many flew too close to the pool’s lunar illusion: in the early morning its dark water was patterned with drowned moths, their pale wings still stretched in flight.

Of Alchemy and Earwigs

I walk out of the house at first light and the enveloping ridge to the east wraps me in its lithic embrace, enfolds me in its darkling biomass and whispers to me of its ineffable secrets. For a moment, my consciousness is permeable, unguarded and malleable. For a moment, in that early morning, my anthropocentrism is capable of being dented by dawn’s hammer.  I am fleetingly aware of a greater consciousness, the etheric charge that flows through the earth and into its every being - modern-day humans mostly excepted.

It is the search for such moments of enfoldment into a greater consciousness, of reconnection with the primordial generative spirit that has brought me, like so many others, to Ojai.  Many are not even aware of the deeply mystical vortex that has pulled them into the Valley of the Moon, but once ensconced, begin to experience a slowly emerging but inexorable expansion of consciousness.  It is here that we begin to feel a reconnection with the cosmos, a limbic reawakening that echoes with memories of the dream time, when we emerged out of nothingness as flickering points of awareness.

It begins, quite simply, with the place. As David Abram notes in The Spell of the Sensuous, 1996, certain mountains, canyons, streams, boulder–strewn slopes and groves of trees have “a particular…. expressive potency and dynamism with which they present themselves to the senses”. The landscape becomes complicit in our construction of meaning - as an animate partner in our sensory world.  Abram suggests that it is both the City (where nature is mostly marginalized by the man-made) and the written word (composed of an entirely abstract alphabet divorced from its originating glyphs that related to the natural world) that has distanced us from our co-creators of reality - other beings, plants, earth forms and hydrological expressions on this planet and the solar system beyond. Words and buildings have overwritten a more fundamental text to which we now have diminishing access. Ojai represents a particularly vibrant portal into this lost world of embodied meaning. It represents a showing forth of the earth.

Within this generalized notion there are exquisite examples.  Another morning late in May, as I was picking my way down the steep slope that runs down to Sisar Creek from the mesa which spans eastward (more or less) back to Koenigstein, I saw a yellow Mariposa lily. Pink, lilac and purple spotted varieties abound on the dry hills, but a yellow one is unusual in these parts.  On the scramble down, my senses alerted, I noted other springtime flowers nestled into the chaparral undergrowth and at the base of lichened rocks (now arrested in their long-ago journey towards the bottom lands). There was yellow pincushion, deerweed, monkey flower and tarweed, each vibrating spectrally somewhere between yellow and orange to create a golden heralding of summer.

It is fire clearance time on the property: raking, weed-whacking and plain old hand weeding the chaparral margins which run along the driveway as it careens down to the road. Mustard, tocalote, clover, erodium, mallow, rye, broame and oats cleared amidst the favored deerweed, sage brush, tarweed and native bunch grasses. Crows gather as I uncover rotting vegetation beneath which earwigs lurk. Fearless, one oily feathered, carmine gulleted, beady eyed specimen lurks close to me hopping awkwardly over newly raked terrain, occasionally beating its wings half-heartedly to clear rocks and debris. Taking a break, I walk downhill towards some east facing boulders one of which offers a particularly comfortable angle against which to recline. I neglect to mention my intentions to the crow. Slouched against the rock, straw hat pulled low over my eyes I settle in for a few minutes repose. Coming out of the east, flying low over the newly cleared landscape comes my crow heading directly for me. At the last moment, as I throw up my arms to protect my head, it veers south and lands on a rock a few feet away and takes a shit: inter-species communication at its most elemental - an avian showing forth. Appropriately, I have no words.

Attempts to broaden ones community of sensorial correspondents (an effort to enlarge the class of species with which a dialogue can be established and in which intimate knowledge can be mutually embodied) have a long history - mostly disparagingly codified as magic, mysticism or alchemy. It is into this realm that Jessica Cornwell, daughter of our neighbors across the hill, ventures in her celebrated first novel, The Serpent Papers, 2015, and in this realm a place is never, as Abram writes, “ just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there. It is an active participant in those occurrences”.  He goes on to suggest that, “the place may even be felt to be the source, the primary power that expresses itself through the various events that unfold there.” For Jessica, that place is Barcelona.

Cartheginians established an outpost on the coast of Catalunya half a millennium before Christ, and the city has had many subsequent colonizers in Pheonicians, Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, Moors, Franks, and finally neighboring Iberians whose leaders outlawed the local language in the interests of establishing the hegemony of Madrid, and of Castilian, over an homogenized Spanish nation whose cultural, economic and political influence is still resisted by many Catalonians. As Cornwell writes, the city has been “Scraped and scraped again. Written and rewritten”.  Inserted into this protean city, she spins her many layered tale of esoteric knowledge, codes, secret books, murder, mutilation and the present-day survival of the horrors of the Inquisition and its concomitant witch hunting.

Yet at its heart the book deals with the historical search for the relationship between meaning, the written word or glyph (represented here as an ouroboros, a nightingale and a golden moon), the processes of nature and those whose lives are dedicated to the uncovering of shadowy supernatural powers that exist in the liminal space between science and spirituality.  In true alchemical tradition there is a sense that time is folding in on itself and the novel successfully creates a palimpsest of history, place and human agency.  The nexus that exists between Barcelona and Mallorca and their related esoteric traditions is set against the seemingly more benign folkloric pageantry of Catalunya.

Here in Ojai we have our own esoteric traditions upheld by the Krishnamurti Library, the Krotona Institute, Meditation Mount and the Ojai Foundation all of whose followers, knowingly or not, are dabbling in ancient occult practices. Here, our modern history is underlain by fifteen thousand years of Native American inhabitation whose arcane attempts to harness the power of the universe were practiced locally, most sophisticatedly, by the Chumash ‘Antap (Real Suspense). The secrets of those adepts are now lost, although many in southern California still cling to remnant liturgical aspects of syncretic native American animistic practices,  heavily influenced by the showy paraphernalia of the Plains Indians, that emerged along with the Ghost dance towards the end of the nineteenth century. Of the Chumash, lacking a written language (and undoubtedly more thoroughly embedded in what we would now call the bio-diversity of their environment absent the distancing abstractions of the written word) there remains little but faded rock paintings, vestigial spirit paths now claimed as hiking trails, burial poles, and the testimony of the last of their tribe gathered by the early twentieth century ethnographer, J.P. Harrington (Trunk Show).

More commonly, the remaining mystical rituals (founded in south Asian and European traditions) practiced in the valley run the gamut from highly athleticized forms of yoga to a variety of monotheistic liturgies. In between, pantheistic rites are enshrined in the institutions of occult knowledge mentioned above and more generally by anyone who ever sat and watched the pink moment as the setting sun washes the spalled face of the Topatopas in its warm light.

I cling to my own protestant roots and seek direct communion with the chaparral, the crow and even the repellent earwig (Forficula auricularia) absent liturgy, rites or holy books (excepting, perhaps, Milt McAuley’s magisterial Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains, 1996).

No Planting Plan Required

In the early morning mists, a pale frieze of bunch grasses sweeps along the drive animated, in this still air, only by the swoop of the chip-seal roadway as it parallels the fall line of the seasonal stream at the foot of the east ridge. Beyond, in the weed patches left by a century of intermittent ranching and more recently by the land's development as a rural home site, the alien mustard, tocalote (Centaurae militensis), rye, oats and the interloper broame grasses, together with native deerweed, not yet flowering tar weed and tangles of wild cucumber vines, convolvulus, occasionally a stand of toyon, coyote bush, currant, holly leaf cherry, mountain mahogany and laurel sumac form an arrangement (held together in the grey miasma) redolent of the work of the great Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf.

Amongst Oudolf's startling innovations are his practice of ecologically attuned planting schemes, his championing of perennials, his awareness of a plant's natural life-cycle (and his joy in every phase) such that he believes that "a plant is only worth growing if it also looks good when it's dead" and his celebration of mist as an active collaborator in his garden designs. This latter innovative trait extends to a delight in the frost riming of skeletal plants and their seed heads. These aesthetic predilections are amply demonstrated in his assiduous photographing of his work.

His notion of natural planting - the creation of an apparent structural chaos in his invertebrate planting schemes - is an example of high artifice (or even, perhaps, high art). But for those fortunate enough to live in the southern California biome his aesthetic goals can quite simply be subsumed within the real, existing, chaparral plant community. Early summer mists reliably arrive in May and June and soften the margins of and between the natives and create stunning, Oudolfian early morning views of the chaparral and its sage-scrub margins. Along any given track there will be, just now, the perennials Lotus scoparius (Deerweed), buckwheat, any or all of the three sages (white, black and purple), ghostly gnaphalias – all in bloom –the shrubby artemesia, yerba santa and sometimes the red blooming heart leafed Penstemon together with annuals such as clarkia, yellow pincushion (Chaenactis glabriuscula), and phacelia. No planting plan required.

 As I look into our back yard to the rise beyond the pool, there is a garden that puts the showy naturalism of Dutch New Wave planting to shame: it is composed mostly of drifts of deerweed and bunch grasses, dotted with sculptural chaparral shrubs and straggly clumps of coyote brush; all that is required is weeding – primarily the invasive tocolote and mustards. To the right, as I look towards the spalled face of the Topatopas, a native walnut that has succumbed to the drought provides a rich tangle of bird perches and stands in graphic silhouette against the sky as an explicit homage to Piet, the patron saint of dead biomass.

I first discovered Oudolf around the year 2000 when a panoramic video of his own garden at Hummelo was featured on his site (sadly, it is no longer available) and I was absolutely stunned by the randomly arranged clipped yews set amidst a meadow of perennials and grasses. I seem to remember that there was a swirling mist featured as well. By that time he was well established as a plantsman in Northern Europe and enjoyed a growing reputation as a garden designer, but was almost completely unknown in this country. For a while I felt that this explosive, transformative talent was my secret. His commission to plant James Corner’s Highline in New York City changed all that.

The Dutch live in an entirely constructed, managed and un-natural landscape – and it has been that way for a very long time. The last stand of natural forest was felled in the 1860’s. The land has also long been riddled with dykes, drains and sluices in an ongoing attempt to hold back the rising waters of the North Sea. In this environment, the lure of un-reconstructed naturalism is intense and Oudolf’s horticultural stylings (he selectively breeds many of his perennials as well as designing their garden settings) are the outward manifestation of a longing for a reconnection with the natural world.

David Abram, in his The Spell of the Sensuous, 1996, notes that we are embedded in the matrix of earthly life: that is, we are embedded in the biosphere “experienced and lived from within by the intelligent body” and of which we are entirely a part. Our perceptions are transitive: we see objects in the natural world and they see us. What does it mean then, to exist in an entirely humanly constructed version of the natural world? It means, (it seems to me), that we become solipsistic, consumed with ourselves - the world not a rich stream of data constantly challenging our primacy, but a pale reflection of our own anthropocentrism. It means, ultimately, that we become incapable of caring for other beings -other life-forms - because we are surrounded not by self-willed nature but a domesticated landscape that speaks not of the cosmos, but of our own small, self-serving place in it. The pleasures of the garden are then muted by this echoic mechanism; us looking at a ‘natural’ world edited, composed, bred and finally neutered by us.

Many Americans live in suburban homes surrounded by such botanical ghettos, where well trained plants are sequestered for their sensory delight. Oudolf has taken a step away from this tradition. He demands, in his planting schemes, that we accept the chaos of the natural world and that we take delight in a botanical life cycle where dead flower heads , stalks, and seed heads have intrinsic grace and beauty.  He demands too, that we embrace weather as an aesthetic accomplice in our obtaining sensory pleasure from his plantings. Yet there remains an irony in the fact that his gardens remain no more than a simulacrum of wilderness, of wildness, of the chaotic profligacy of the natural world.

He has, in a life lived in the well-ordered, mostly agricultural landscapes of Holland, demanded that we look again at the richness and diversity of plant communities in Europe and in North America (he has a particular passion for the Prairie biome of Ohio) that have, for millennia, developed wayward complexities that are self-sustaining, site specific and possessed of a gravitas entirely lacking in even the finest gardens. Plants in the wild are playing for their very survival, their persistence forever contingent on the quality of soil, the weather and their interaction with the surrounding plant, insect and animal life. Oudolf has gone some way in replicating this intense game of life in his perennial gardens and has, by his acceptance of death and decay within his aesthetic realm, captured some of the spirit of the wild.

Those of us who live at the wildland urban interface can entirely forgo the elaborate conceit of the artificially constructed, sprinklered garden. Yet most choose not to. An Ojai friend explained recently that he had been busy planting a small garden of California natives, expecting, perhaps, to receive my approbation.  I did not have the heart to tell him that growing natives is about not planting.  It is an entirely extractive process. The soil is brimming with native seeds. Remove the invasives and the locals will inevitably show up.

Practiced assiduously, this will result in a patch of wilderness rich in complexity and capable of an expressive power that extends far beyond the human sphere. Living at the edge of the chaparral wildlands I can experience, as Abrams puts it,

 “a vast interpenetrating webwork of perceptions and sensations borne by countless other bodies – supported, that is, not just by ourselves, but by icy streams tumbling down granitic slopes, by owl wings and lichens, and by the unseen, imperturbable wind.”

Don't Know Much About Geography

Particle agglomeration refers to the aggregation of elements floating in a colloidal solution. Roderick Frazier Nash, in an epilogue titled Island Civilization to the fifth edition of his Wilderness and the American Mind, 2014, proposes that the planet might usefully undergo such a process wherein the dispersed, but increasingly predominant, detritus of civilization, together with its human creators, be neatly encapsulated into circles of, say, one hundred miles in diameter, and thus isolated from their generative medium - a self-willed or wild Planet. 

Such a segregation of humanity and all of its works within its erstwhile edenic environment is necessary, in Nash's judgement, for the survival of a diverse and flourishing world, for we are the cancer cells threatening its consumption. He proposes one-thousand years as a reasonable time scale for this separation of the wild and the not-wild (reminiscent of the social theorist Claude Levi-Strauss' notions of binary structure such as the raw and the cooked) and identifies a number of historical phenomena which have, over time, already demonstrated this process of particle agglomeration. Of local relevance is the Mission system put in place by Franciscan friars as isolated feudal encampments linked by inter-mission Caminos Reales - a system which I have previously characterized as plague blisters of an intensely venal and theocratically totalitarian European civilization suppurating on lands populated by indigenous cultures highly mindful of their envelopment by a self-willed nature.

Hold on: might there be, in these circles of contained civilization some approximate correlation with bio-regions? Nash's concept is, shall we say, highly conceptual: might there not be some relaxation of the platonic purity inherent in the polka-dotting of a wild planet with these fever spots of civilization? Could these 'Islands' conform, not to Euclidean geometry, but to bio-regions where natural resources, industry, agriculture, dense populations and transportation corridors already exist? Have we already, in short, jump-started Nash's millennial Reich?

His idea, of course, is intensely reactionary. It suggests a reversion to insularity, to a doing away with global inter-connectedness and a complete upturning of the contemporary balance between civilization and nature. Wildlife corridors that attempt to patch together the remaining areas of wilderness would be replaced with vestigial civilizational corridors that connect the mosaic of self sufficient, isolated Islands of civilization between which, in Nash's plan, there is no mechanically assisted transportation. 

Parag Khanna writes in Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization, 2016, "America is reorganizing itself around regional clusters that ignore state and even national boundaries". He goes on to suggest that Western Europe and Asia are already "orienting themselves around robust urban clusters of advanced industry". He invokes Nash's island concept by branding these as 'urban archipelagos' - left unsaid is that these loose aggregations of dense metropolitan mass might float in a sea of wilderness where rural towns and smaller regional centers not explicitly linked to an urban archipelago would atrophy and eventually revert to wildland as, indeed, is beginning to happen now in depopulating areas of Europe.

As I suggested in Don't know much about History, the fiction that is the United States merely awaits a more coherent narrative. Nash and Khanna, amongst others, are opening up the space of future ideas into which a new paradigm for our relationship with the natural world might be realized. Implicit in their shared notion is that there will be a profound political shift in which nation states devolve into cogent, independently organized bio-industrial regions like city states of old. Nash argues for the almost complete isolation of these 'Islands' one to the other. Khanna imagines their being highly connected at a global scale (in other words, an extension of the status quo). I believe a middle ground is plausible (not territory in which I am usually comfortable) where limited civilizational corridors might connect these intensely developed, densely populated and hyper-productive  agri-industrial regions utilizing globally regulated air traffic. 

Energy production (coal, oil and natural gas) and its transportation has largely shaped the modern age, but we can now foresee that rising sea levels will eliminate the coastal infrastructures that support the global transshipment of these fossil fuels. In their place, bio-fuels, wind, sun and hydro can all be harvested locally within urban archipelagos derived from existing conurbations, bio-regions and transit corridors. There might be then, a future where wildlands can predominate on continental land masses and where the oceans become entirely self-willed - free from maritime traffic (each archipelago being largely self sufficient in material goods, energy and sustenance), un-fished (except by micro-populations of indigenous peoples), subject only to their lunar cycle while absorbing freshets of ice-melt and re-establishing their great littoral domains of salt marsh, wetlands and estuarial ecotones in the abandoned zones of old coastal development. We can thus use the imminent arrival of climate disruption as a spur toward the final achievement of an already clearly emerging clean energy future.

Similarly, we can, as individuals, begin (or continue) to rigorously privilege the produce of our local food sheds, purchase locally fabricated consumer products,  spurn meaningless touristic air travel, and practice other small acts of global disconnection. As Daniel Drezner notes in his review of Connectography (NYT, 05-01-2016), "global flows (trade) as a percentage of output have fallen from 53% in 2007 to 39% in 2014 because of the cost of managing complex, lengthy supply chains". In other words, more stuff is staying where it is produced - either close to or within the bio-region of its origin. The future, if it is going to be a green one, is about global disconnection. As Khanna acknowledges, "devolution-aggregation is how the world comes together by falling apart". 

Calls for preserving our remaining wildlands are meaningless unless they are accompanied by an encompassing vision of how this might be achieved. Calls for a transition to clean energy are relevant not because such a move will prevent climate disruption (that horse has already left the stable) but because the transshipment of fossil fuels (which have been at the heart of global connectedness at least since the era of coaling stations fueled the British navy in its mission to protect the fragile links of Empire) remains the heart-blood of global flows - and because clean fuels are locally available across the planet and thus facilitate disconnectedness. 

Calls for increased engagement with the natural world in the hope of inculcating a concern for its preservation are similarly distorted: they encourage its further exploitation as a recreational resource, increase the building of access routes into wilderness areas and inflame a fascination for it which may result in residential development at the Wildland Urban Interface (guilty as charged!).

Alert readers may note that the call for wildland engagement and the embrace of clean fuel as a supposed antidote to climate disruption represent the twin planks of the venerable Sierra Club's current platform. I attended their Trail Blazers annual dinner in San Francisco as the guest of a board member (and former chair) on Thursday. As they seek continued relevance in the increasingly crowded space of non-profit environmental organizations (Nature Conservancy, Friends of the Earth et al) they might well embrace instead, a call for urban densification and wilderness sanctification - the twin practice prongs of a theory of particle agglomeration that could facilitate the realization of Nash's 'Island Civilization' and the very necessary devolution of the ultimately ungovernable (because of inherent bio-regional conflicts) United States of America.