Great Bear Rainforest

 

The climate-related conservation and resilience policies of many wealthy countries are beginning to emerge. As part of their 2016 Royal Tour, their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge officially endorsed Canada's Great Bear Rainforest under the Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy initiative. This initiative is the environmental protection of natural resources across the globe that are made up of countries that are part of the British Commonwealth.

This park encompasses the world’s largest intact coastal temperate rainforest. This unique rainforest has old-growth trees over 800 years old. The Kitlope valley is an important habitat for marbled murrelets, bald eagles, moose, grizzly, black bear, wolf and waterfowl. The Kitlope valley lies within the traditional territory of the Haisla First Nation, based out of Kitamaat Village. It was established in Canada on February 20, 1996, as part of a commitment to reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, operated via the Kitlope Heritage Conservancy.

Back in 1791-1795, the Vancouver Expedition explored Canada's western coast under the auspices of the British Royal Navy. In 1793, the explorer Mr. Whidbey discovered the Gardner inlet, and in a verbal description of the shoreline, described it as "a barren waste" that was "nearly destitute of wood and verdure", with only the solid granite mountains in view. Which means that the young trees were not there. Possibly in the intervening 200 years, the temperatures warmed enough that the trees grew rapidly from seed further inland and established a toehold on the steep granite slopes. This item was taken from "British Columbia Coast Names 1592-1906", a very interesting book loaded with excerpts from old manuscripts. (This could be the source of fossil-fuel pushback on climate change using the proliferation of pine forests to show that northern latitudes will benefit from global warming?)

 

I spent a week in the park last month, with a trip into Kitlope aboard a sailing ship. It's a stunning ecology with incredible snowcapped granite mountains covered in forests. There's nothing else like it, the wildlife is abundant in the clear, cold waters and the myriad waterfalls. It reminded me of the Norwegian fijords; there are a few scattered aging structures near the water's edge, without many habitable areas since there's no longer access to these areas except by boat. An account and photos of this experience by Valeria Vergara was published in June of this year. She points out that "in 2020, Raincoast, working closely with First Nations partners, secured the 5300 km2 Kitlope commercial hunting tenure in the Haisla and Xenaksiala homeland. This is part of a bold move initiated in 2005 to end commercial trophy hunting of bears, wolves and other coastal carnivores for entertainment and profit, and to help respect the stewardship of First Nation communities that view trophy hunting as profoundly inconsistent with their teachings and values."

Earlier, in 2015, "as old-growth forest remains an indeterminate definition in forestry regulation, forest companies have arguably continued to log old-growth according to arbitrary discretion. Deforestation, road construction and other operations have changed the local ecological landscape, altering wildlife habitat and affecting the livelihood of local communities. As a result, First Nations, united with environmentalists and NGOs, have been aggressively advocating for forest sustainability while calling governments to determine clearer objectives and improve logging practices." The map above shows how the various areas of the forest are laid out with restrictions on commercial activity as a result of environmental regulations, along with an extensive discussion of the adopted management strategy.

 It's critical for Canada to protect the biodiversity and pristine wilderness that still exists and to push back against several hundred years of exploitation of resources in this forest. By the late 1990's, ancient trees from this forest were being logged to make household items. The eventual agreement between  the First Nations, the forest industry, the government of British Columbia, and partner environmental groups announced a groundbreaking agreement to permanently protect 85% of the forests of the Great Bear from industrial logging in 2016.

This includes the existing Kitasoo Hydropower Project that services the Kitasoo-Xai’xais First Nation community of Klemtu in the heart of the Great Bear Rainforest.  Upgrades to existing infrastructure, including active storage at Baron Lake, will allow for greater power output from the facility. This project is a heavily greenwashed upgrade that will transition the plant off of diesel fuel. Further detail from coastal First Nations involves a $4.6 million contribution from BC’s Renewable Energy for Remote Communities program is funding the upgrade that will reduce carbon emissions by an estimated 11,160 tonnes over the facility’s operating life. "The Kitasoo hydroelectric facility – 100 per cent owned by the Nation – has supplied clean power to Klemtu for 40 years, helping it transition from a dependency on dirty diesel fuel. The planned upgrade is the latest step in the Kitasoo/Xai’xais efforts over the past four decades to build energy sovereignty and support community growth." A detailed examination of how this pact resulted from the “War in the Woods” includes a period that saw some of the largest environmental protests in Canada’s history: "What began in the early 1990s as a large-scale mobilization to protect the Clayoquot Sound region of Vancouver morphed into a movement to save all of the Central and North Coast forests of British Columbia, dubbed the “Great Bear Rainforest” in 1997 by environmentalists."

In the article, "The Great Bear loophole: why old growth is still logged in B.C.’s iconic protected rainforest", Jody Holmes, a biologist and project director with the Rainforest Solutions Project, spent years negotiating with the provincial government, forest companies, First Nations and others to help put in place new conservation areas and a different type of logging in the region. She says it is no accident that the iconic tree of the coastal temperate rainforest continues to be targeted.The 2016 agreement, Holmes now laments, “opened up an enormous loophole” that allowed the logging companies “to harvest every last stick of big, older trees,” while simultaneously claiming that they were meeting their conservation targets. “We’ve been pushing back on that for four years with the industry to absolutely no avail. In fact, they are fighting us tooth and claw on this one,” Holmes said. Other aspects of the Great Bear Rainforest agreement have opened up additional loopholes.The biggest of those are allowances that grant companies permission to build roads through nominally protected old-growth forests.

A Small Moment

A photo above of a traditional station of the cross in a public underpassing in Zagreb, Croatia last year. I love to see people in small moments of grace, and their meditation upon meaning. It happens in the big European cathedrals while the sermons float past the crowds of tourists in many languages, focusing on the local faithful who look inward while the world moves past their walls. It happens on winding streets looking over the piazzas of Rome and the waterways of Venice.

It happens in Nepal while the Buddhists mingle with people on the streets, touching each with a moment of retrospection. It happens in India in the streets and temples jammed with humanity among the Hindu traditions of erotic sculpture and Gods of Death and Life. And in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand with the connection of common culture and the touch of children with strangers and friends. The small celebrations of the Chinese in their festivals in the public square. The ablutions of the Muslims in their daily call. In Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, the sacred is blessed every day with the scattering of petals and the immersion in meditation. The African dusk is a time to gaze into the long shadows of the bush, and celebrate the native traditions with people from all over the world. Mexico is a celebration of The Dead in the zocalo, and in life with people in private spaces and the cathedrals in every square.

In our USA, these moments are more rare and formalized, not part of the everyday ebb and flow of life in all its gifts and trials. Somehow the quiet inner spaces and human connections have been drained from the common sphere of life in our cities, and the sprit retreats in the face of the commercialized public space. It somehow seems impolite to express that centered moment except in formal structures, the warp and weave of human life and its meaning is not strongly expressed in our isolated communities.

I would hope that our emerging global community can help bring these connections back into our everyday experience, unburdened by theologies, cliques and partisanship. I am heartened to see the flash music that erupts in civic and commercial spaces to break open the closed off pursuit of things. I love the public holiday events that are celebrated in parks and open city plazas, where people feel free to express their connection to life, music, ideas and play.

Setting an Equilibrium

The Nash Equilibrium, named for the Nobel Prize winning economist John Forbes Nash, is an important concept  for developing a framework of international cooperation on action to counteract climate change. Nash's equations demonstrate that if one party takes an action unilaterally for its own benefit then the overall benefit to all parties will decline. This is an important principle that needs to guide global cooperation in reducing carbon emissions and controlling the human impact on the environment. There should no longer be any tolerance for countries that flout global guidelines and proceed with their own energy and resource consumption methods that produce unsustainable carbon emissions.

The vision that nature needs rights as well as the entire spectrum of human habitation is crucial to this balance and its success, otherwise a flawed agreement will doom efforts to reduce the impact of human activity on our planet. The world needs an agreement that includes the natural processes and resources of the earth, and all humans need to internalize its key principles if the planet, and we, are to survive. Unlimited human growth is not a viable model for life on this planet.


An example of the unilateral approach to growth and energy production at all costs is in China, with the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. A description of the project in 2008 only begins to scratch the surface of the ecological impact of this dam. Increasing energy demands are driving higher carbon emissions as China relies more on coal and shale gas, as well as tar sand supplies of energy. This is partially due to the lack of projected rainfall by 40% that has reduced the anticipated power production of the Three Gorges Dam. This is how climate change impacts all of the projected costs and benefits of these major infrastructure projects. Chinese scientists predicted many of the effects of this dam, yet their voices were silenced in what the government claimed was the national interest. In multibillion-dollar projects, the national interest is often taken hostage by political prestige, bureaucratic power struggles, and the generous kickbacks of a bribery-prone industry. These vested interests need to be balanced and held accountable by a fully transparent and participatory decision-making process.


So the international framework that must be agreed to in the climate change discussions - which are ongoing - must be put into position recognizing the benefit that it will have for all human societies and the global ecosystems. The issue is becoming urgent.

Sacred Places

When journeying to places on this earth that establish a powerful sense of meaning and connection to the land, sky and water, one can always observe the intelligence of the structures built there as a response to the place. What we've lost in our modern urban cities and suburbs is a sense of how a place is rooted in its location, how it engages the sun and looks at the sky. Some of these places are sacred sites; some of them have been developed by earlier civilizations as a response to the land and water and also keyed to the constellations and solar and lunar solstices. They are the great mandalas, temples and pyramids that follow celestial patterns and embrace them with cultural meaning and intellectual patterns of response embodied in its form, whether it's the Golden Section of Greece or the mandalas of the far east. The ruins and temples of Peru, Bolivia, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Mexico, and so on are all grounded in an ancient world view that engages the earth with a mystic understanding of its patterns and flows, guided by older yet highly sophisticated observations of the solar and lunar cycles. These structures evolved over hundreds of years, expressing a timeframe that is beyond our comprehension; embedded in generational efforts to construct these massive places is the given culture and expression of mind that is alien to us now.

In Cambodia, Buddhist temples were built between the 9th and the 13th centuries by a succession of 12 Khmer kings. Angkor spreads over 120 square miles in South-East Asia and includes many major architectural sites. In 802, when construction began on Angkor Wat, financed by wealth from rice and trade, Jayavarman II took the throne, initiating an unparalleled period of artistic and architectural achievement, exemplified in the ruins of Angkor, center of the ancient empire. Here Angkor Wat, the world's largest temple, an extraordinarily complex structure filled with iconographic detail and religious symbolism, is sited. It was ultimately abandoned in the 15th century because of internecine rivalries and left to the ravages of time. It does, however, retain its orientation to the stellar axes and markers of the solstices; it's a means of orienting a holy form that serves the continual acknowledgement of deities and the stories of history, most markedly the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The culture of South India has made its mark here; it's remarkable how the parts of the day are honored with the gods watching over all, prayers wafting to the sky.

Built in the later part of the 12th century by Jayavarman VII (the last king), Ta Prohm has been overtaken by jungle and is only now being slowly restored to its initial form. It has a smaller presence than the other temples, and is not as elaborate. The roots of the invading trees have crawled into the structure to the point that their removal would result in the collapse of the structure, so not all of this temple will be resurrected. It will remain firmly embedded in the Cambodian jungle as a reminder of an old civilization that failed to conquer the natural world for long and then passed into history. As have all the old civilizations. As will ours.

Update 3/24/16: The origins of Angkor Wat

Microsoftworld

In a more mountainous land with an erratic overlord, it was a journey not easily undertaken. Having previously traversed the flatlands and foothills of Windows 95 and 98, and then beginning an ascent with the XP beast, it was clearly time to scale further heights and discard old trappings. The new beast of burden, a temperamental and stubborn creature, massive of code, is a lighting fast dual core creature mounted with Windows 7.

It took some particular struggles with new saddles and gear, but after conferring with an ancient wizard, the proper incantations took hold and the new beast began to form. With prayers to the ancient gods of DOS, leaving behind the fading incarnation of Norton, and expert hardware and tech sherpa support, the quest continues for the holy grail of a networked information platform that responds to the slightest gestures of visual command. Similar to a Tron world, the Master Control Program is operative and doesn't permit trespassers in its territory, and actively seeks out control over other processes and users. Its insistence on channeling specific online files into locked in folder structures resulted in difficulties in taming the beast.

This quest needs a platform capable of carrying large loads while scaling new heights, hence the necessity of strapping down the saddle and reining in this creature so that it can be trained to follow the proper leads over the winding ascent ahead. The landscape here grows as it's traversed and and begins to climb into the clouds, making navigation difficult for the traveler with a purpose. Armed with sketchy maps from other fellow adventurers, we're beginning to find our way through the ever-growing thickets and mountains of data in search of a means of arriving at the summit of engagement of a building team in charge of its information and processes.

We've found that the only way to climb the summit is to rope the beasts together and share our provisions, sending scouts ahead to scope out the way before us. Typical of historical exploration into new lands, it's a risk that has to be undertaken by the stakeholders in search of the final objective, which is a new way of using information to create built environments that will meet the challenges of our future. As the flame of extractive energies dims, we're wayfinding our path to new strategies that will move us into a place of regeneration of life, not the endless consumption of it.

Our smarter beasts should be able to get us there.

Miniaturization

I began this blog with a statement from my experiences and education out on the Arizona mesa and Grand Canyon, related to my graduate studies at San Luis Obispo. The concepts we studied as a university class and as workshoppers at Arcosanti were about how people are influenced by their experiences in form and community. The intellectual structure of Paolo Soleri's work evolved from a design generation based upon the work of the philosopher/priest Teilhard de Chardin, which expresses the idea that human culture can create spiritual evolution to an "Omega Point" if given the right form of habitation that is directed towards a high level of human interaction and socialization. This was dubbed the Noosphere as it is laid out in the thesis for this kind of form generation.

The form of these habitats are designed and driven by passive energy principles, and the source of food is locally-grown with water and waste recycling as absolute prerequisites. It's a web-of-life prototype, where all things are interconnected, just as in nature. Miniaturization and integrative life cycle/energy strategies are the direction of the future, following the trajectory of Moore's law, and are part of Soleri's philosophy of using form and streamlining to reduce the impact of humanity on the landscape. That means more and more powerful, effective tools that consume less and less space and relieve the tedium of repetitive labor and work. This reduces the time demand for the drudgery of tasks, and allows this energy to be harnessed in the support of creative and expressive work that connects culture and human interaction. Which is the story of human cultural evolution as societies made the work of survival more and more efficient over thousands of years, and traded ideas and information, cross-fertilizing the creativity that energizes the arts, humanities, science, law and government.

Not only does the form of the arcologies become self-sustaining, but the reduced footprint provides the open spaces for natural regeneration of ecosystems. This theme of building community with efficiencies of scale and conservation of energy and resources is one that has been a strong thread in the architectural community since I first began working and studying architecture, design and urban planning. It was expressed in school as "Long Life, Low Energy, Loose Fit", which is an approach that generates forms that accommodate human needs in a way that does not demand extremes of technology and energy to adapt to its local site, and also provides the flexibility that allows it to shelter many different patterns of living. This responds to what we now call "social media" as the glue that holds a society together and moves it to higher levels of interaction and cooperation. Kind of a "tribal high-rise" as it were.

The future of the global environment, the synergy (greater than the sum of its parts) of the natural world and human societies, lies in the balance of these things.

Is Density the Answer?

Edward Glaeser, author of books on planning and economics, addresses key issues about how the post-war suburban lifestyle is a creature of government subsidy through the highway program (actually a military policy) and tax benefits that encourage high consumption of land square footage, energy and water resources. This created a huge population movement in the US out of the dense industrial cities into low density sprawl that consumed vast amounts of then-cheap energy. This form of suburban development, sprawl, is now the cause of escalating consumption, which is becoming unaffordable as well as a danger to the environment.

If you go back in time by visiting urban villages in places like Nepal, you find compact small urban centers with the shop at the ground floor and the living spaces several precarious stories above the shop. These are surrounded by miles and miles of fields and small farm structures, essentially an agricultural society with an adaptation within a hundred years or so of the "town center" where people live together now because they can't afford land or homes. The harvested grain and corn is threshed right in the streets and courtyards, and a few sheep and chickens hang around the edges. This kind of subsistence economy doesn't provide a model for compact design or mixed-use planning as we currently understand it; our western cultures are based on entirely different financial and government models. The same can be said for China, where the old farms and villages are being displaced by huge infrastructure projects, and people migrate to the new cities for the higher pay and better living conditions. The point is, it's not a form solution that can be imposed, but rather a confluence of economic vectors and government structures that are efficient in distributing capital.

If the goal of habitation and transportation design is to reduce consumption of diminishing resources, and to reduce costs in the face of increasing scarcity, the problem to be addressed is one of economics, which is Mr. Glaeser's point. And economics would dictate that subsidies should be directed towards effective conservation rather than physical expansion which becomes more and more expensive to prop up and maintain. In other words, miniaturization and streamlining would have the effect of containing costs, up to a point. At some inflection point, places like New York City and Hong Kong become more and more expensive as density goes up because of lack of space in the face of the demand of people wanting to be where the action is - i.e., jobs.

So the problem is to strike a balance between urban, suburban and rural wildlands such that efficient structures can operate in patterns that are more effective than the kind of cities and suburbs we've created so far. This kind of "green pattern language" can be varied, ranging from clusters of homes within urban edges to dense concentrations of net-zero urban redevelopment.

Hence, stopping sprawl doesn't mean a throwback to old urban forms that arose out of very different agrarian economies and invading every parcel of land with it. It means smart planning that takes into account the land, the resources and the best practices of existing urban cities to create delightful environments. It means rebuilding urban centers like they're sailing ships, balancing the forces and capturing the wind in the sails and the sun on the decks. And leaving the open suburbs and wildlands to flow with restored natural processes.

The Traveler

The experience of the authentic and the real is a crucially important aspect of adventuring in other countries, tasting their character, history and ways of seeing. Different places and people can teach one so much about the character and quality of everyday lives and of the culture, and ultimately, the way a country impacts the world in its exercise of policy and its shepherding of resources. In the Old World, these influences come from a timeline of history reaching back thousands of years, unlike our young country of the USA, dominated right now by commercialization and mass marketing. The fundamental synthesis here is that the environment (built and natural) is key to character of place and way of life, and establishes the framework for how a society succeeds or fails in its ability to sustain its existence.

In Croatia and Slovenia, the recovery from their wars of independence is underway with new governments and repaired structures, with a struggle to revive the production of agricultural resources and a marshaling of their ecological heritage. These values come through loud and clear as one travels up the Dalmatian coast, and it's delightful to talk with people about their lives, hopes and dreams.

An excellent series of articles is being published in Stratfor by George Friedman on the Geopolitical Journey, which delves into the exploration of the Eastern European countries around the Black Sea and their bedrock cultures and historical geopolitics. As he says, "Geopolitics teaches us to think in terms of constraints and limits. According to geopolitics, political leaders are trapped by impersonal forces and have few options in the long run." This means that political vision is shaped by culture and the land and its resources. Which hopefully leads us to the conservation of resources to the benefit of each society and its descendants, which is what sustainability is ultimately about. These countries are currently experiencing the consequences of war which drains life and vitality out of these regions, and takes generations to rebuild. Perhaps that makes their way of life so much more dear in the face of limited resources and counterproductive global fiscal structures.

Jared Diamond constructs the same thesis about the availability of resources across the equatorial land mass in his book, "Guns, Germs and Steel", and the impact that has on human history, which is the written record of human migration and conflict. The land and its configuration, resources and character have a direct impact on political structures through the availability of food, water, minerals and energy due to the unique way in each environment that its population has to solve the habitability challenges and food supply needs.

So it's important to experience and understand what these places and their resources are about. It helps us solve the complex problems that seem to be simply ideological or profit-driven, and get to the heart of the resource and land management issues that drive how humans live on their land and experience it, use it, and conserve it for future generations.

Walk Through a Land of Water

WATER HYMN - Plitvice Lakes from Greenwave on Vimeo.

This is Plitvice Lakes National Park in Croatia, a stunning series of lakes and falls that are cascading down the verdant hills at the center of the country, near the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina. The lakes are situated on the Plitvice plateau, between two mountains The sixteen lakes are separated into an upper and lower cluster formed by runoff from the mountains. The lakes collectively cover an area of just under a square mile, with the water exiting from the lowest lake to form the Korana River.

The Plitvice Lakes lie in a basin of karstic rock, mainly dolomite and limestone, which has given rise to their most distinctive feature. The lakes are separated by natural dams of travertine, which is deposited by the action of moss, algae and bacteria. The encrusted plants and bacteria accumulate on top of each other, forming travertine barriers which grow slowly each year. The lakes are renowned for their distinctive colors, ranging from azure to green, grey or blue. The colors change constantly depending on the quantity of minerals or organisms in the water and the angle of sunlight. The lakes are divided into the 12 Upper Lakes (Gornja jezera) and the four Lower Lakes (Donja jezera). The Plitvice Lakes national park is heavily forested, mainly with beech, spruce, and fir trees, and features a mixture of Alpine and Mediterranean vegetation. It has a notably wide variety of plant communities, due to its range of microclimates, differing soils and varying levels of altitude.

The serpentine boardwalk is an amazing experience, no handrails, and winds endlessly through the falls and lakes. There is just no other place like this one, and the area is largely unspoiled as well as full of wildlife in the forested area. Croatia is recovering from its war of Independence from Yugoslavia in 1995, as are other former Baltic states, and are preparing to enter the European Union. One governing principle of this country and others are a commitment to sustainable existence and preservation of the natural ecosystem. Further south in Dalmatia, the country is struggling to re-establish olive, lavender and wine production in the rocky soils of the islands. The intent is to establish eco-tourism as well as promote the well-known resort areas of Dalmatia and its historic remains of the Roman Empire, the Venetian occupation of Dalmatia, and the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

The government is taking these steps forward with great care, and exhibits a commitment to its own culture and history. In this sense, it's not a "third world" country, its approach is a conservative one that does not want to embrace an urban lifestyle as a source of investment and development, or create massive engineering projects for its infrastructure. It has an extremely rigorous historic preservation ethic in its existing towns and cities, and is seeking to repair and reinforce its heritage.

Makes me want to start over in the US when I see the dysfunctional urban and industrial landscapes around our country; the endless roof farms. And we've never even been bombed like most of Europe. We just trash the land and then keep moving on...it's all "immediate profit" and very little planning for effective sustainable use of the land by the community, which pays off in the long run.

I'm beginning to sound like a European Socialist!

A Cosmology?

The video clip above from Shift of the Ages, "Tata and Titicaca", features the guide Rose Marie, who led our small group in 2004 on an excursion through the lake, to the Island of the Sun, and to Tiahuanaco which was possibly constructed in 15,000 BC. I wrote earlier about the monumental ruins and excavations, and it turns out that Tiahuanaco is an old port city miles from the lake, and there are more ruins below the surface of the lake itself.

Some of the old ruins and temples are on the Island of the Sun, and Rose Marie took us to many sacred places and taught us the blessings, the use of the flowers and the scattering of pure alcohol into the ground - a version of holy water. Remember that the ancient practitioners had to distill the alcohol using simpler and more primitive methods, so it was comparatively difficult to obtain and relatively expensive.

The Bolivians have ancient Andean legends about the lake, about how it was the birthplace of civilization. Viracocha, the creator deity, lightened a dark world by having the sun, moon, and stars rise from the lake to occupy their places in the sky. Life in the Incan empire was measured by a thousand year cosmic cycle called an Inti, which means 'Sun'. There is also talk of the legend and carved formation known as "Gate of the Gods".

Myriad archaeological, astronomical and NASA satellite earth studies have unearthed some highly unusual theories about how these legends and remnants of ancient history may be linked together in a cosmological fashion to larger structures in the solar system and its consequential impact on planetary systems. It's an expanson of the view of the earth as not in isolation as a planetary system, but as an integral part of a much larger system that is playing out in an unusual fashion at this particular point in time. Hence, the "Shift of the Ages".

The Trees on the Hill

The Panch Rathas at Mamallapuram in the state of Tamil Nadu are monolithic cut-rock shrines from the 7th century. These incredible stones were carved on site to resemble wooden temples and structures that later became influential in South Indian style temple design. The name is from the sanskrit epic Mahabharata, naming the five Pandava brothers and their queen Draupadi.

This epic, supposedly recorded by Ganesha - a deity resembling an elephant, known as a "Remover of Obstacles" - is a rich tapestry of stories and legend that informs Hindu culture. It is also one of the great philosophical tracts of all time, with part of its material comprising the Bhagavad Gita, its verses encompassing Hindu theology. The great value of Hindu philosophy is that life is manifest as a web of energies that interact on material and spiritual levels. This is distinctly different from the western view of things as isolated entities that have only material properties.

This world view is one that has enabled the spiritual leader Sadhguru, acting through his Isha Foundation, to counteract the desertification of Tamil Nadu by claiming land decimated by illegal forest logging and then planting trees. Millions of trees. By the inhabitants of Tamil Nadu that barely touch the land in the way they live. They regenerated their land by returning trees to the hill.

Tree planting and urban forestry are becoming the way to bring nature back, in the face of climate change. It is a regenerative strategy that requires people to make individual efforts to plant trees and conserve water that have a huge aggregate effect on the local climate. So it takes people working with the planet. Many organizations across the globe are putting this strategy into place as the simplest and most effective way for local action to restore bioclimatic cycles and structures. Tree planting and watershed restoration efforts are going on all over the world as alternatives to resource depletion, human habitat expansion and the ecological damage wrought by large dams. It's a strategy that mimics the action of natural processes and networks by linking actions as a "hub" system. The very small seed that becomes exponential growth; once again the metaphor of the mustard seed, exponential growth of all life processes, the mathematics of fractals and the geometries of the spiral.

So this view that life is a web, and that it is possible to repair it exponentially with efforts from all people, is an idea whose time has come. It's not the brute force of machines and the concrete and the industry and the oil and the coal that deplete resources and ultimately come to a dead end. It's a transformative view that can inform the way humans inhabit the earth and enhance its resources.

Anger Rises

One thing I can say for this BP oil spill is that it is finally creating the very urgent, critical national conversation about what our oil addiction really means to us and the world we live in. It's not just the anger, wrathfully portrayed in Stephen Colbert's skit, but the utter destruction and terrible risks to people, their livelihood and the environment that oil drilling and coal mining create. The difference here is that it's not off happening in some jungle in Ecuador, it's right here in our own front yard with the whole world as witness. Kind of an I-told-you-so moment for the environmental groups.

The excellent dialogue this has engendered about how we live and how we build sustainable habitations are taking place among the conservation orgs and the planning and design professions. What kinds of cities should we build? How do we manage traffic and people and the connections from place to place so that we cut way back on our energy demands? The form of the city, and its interconnectedness, is key to solving this problem. And interestingly, it looks like the old township grids that were laid out over 100 years ago at walkable scale, before the automobile forced a dystopian network of highways. These small-scaled blocks and alleys allow even dense city centers to be delightfully habitable. Venice, Italy is always a talked-about example because everyone walks when they're not using the water taxis down the river.

Research with traditional density diagrams shows how the scale of connections is critical for making a place walkable and accessible.

Right now many of our suburban edges and cities sprawling out into the inland empire are nothing but tract homes packed along highways, with no local stores or places to interact, they simply connect to malls with arterials. As this article shows, the scale is far too large for people to walk or even commute with bicycles; they're effectively trapped on huge, isolated expanses of asphalt that absorb and re-radiate heat. This is an utter failure of planning and a lack of understanding of what creates habitable places. There's ways to deal with this that are an intervention of scale and design on these degraded landscapes: break down the scale, unpave the asphalt, integrate the small projects that serve local populations. I remember walking in Venice, to go back to that example, it's a rabbit warren with incredibly interesting architecture and plazas and, of course, the bridges. Up and down, around corners and zigging along the canal pathways. Paris has much the same feel in places, all the small shops and short blocks with trees and landscaping all over the city. Some of our older suburbs here in Los Angeles have the small township style layouts, and they're delightful neighborhoods once you get out of the sea of flat, featureless asphalt. The smaller scale and interesting, sustainable landscapes are the way out of this energy nightmare.

The impact of oil and coal is not only environmental, of course. There's a long-term destructive impact on the economy because of the way that the resulting costs and risks are allocated into financial instruments that poison the markets with toxic assets decades into the future. And this one is Exxon-Valdez on steroids.

What is India?

The above photo of the Taj Mahal in Agra, by a friend of mine, reminds me of a lesson I learned while traveling in India last year. A corporation called Tata owns everything, from cars to tea plantations to resorts. I've never seen anything like this kind of corporate ownership inside of one country. The Taj Mahal is a major tourist destination, so of course it's part of Tata. Prices in India are sky-high for anything involved with Tata. India is really not cheap any more, that's so last century!

In any case, here's the list of companies owned by Tata, along with its subsidiaries. The sustainability banner, typical of ecoresorts in India, is here. Greenwash? To a large extent, yes.

India is a very different place. Right now there's much political tumultuousness in Delhi over the Maoist positions on socialistic government, it includes disputes between Tibet and China, as well as the northern India provinces. The Dalai Lama is in northern India, challenging the Chinese domination of Tibet. Add to this the Maoist strikes that affect the adjacent country of Nepal and its city of Kathmandu, and you have a true recipe for volatility. It remains to be seen how the Indian government will resolve all of this.

Add to that a different philosophy of business and a completely alternative view of life's issues. Our Western approaches to these tensions are not really relevant in the face of a complex and multivalent culture and government. The confrontation between China and India over the problem of Tibet will play out in an unpredictable fashion, and hopefully our government will stay out of it, except via its UN participation.

Of the Earth

My foray into one of the more important sacred places in Europe took place after some exploration of the powerful spaces of the Grand Canyon and the ruins left behind by its indigenous peoples. A vast monumental effort, clearly tied to the visions of the skies and stars, is standing on the plain of Salisbury in England. A short history of the development of Stonehenge as we know it is here.

It is an established fact that Stonehenge was an astronomical observatory for both solar and lunar observations. One of its functions was the determination of the summer solstice date using the summer solstice sunrise. At the 21st of June the rising sun in the North East shines its light in between the Heel Stone onto the Alter Stone at the center of the Trilithons or horseshoe of Stonehenge. A more comprehensive study of its astronomical alignment and structure is here.

What struck me about this place was the strong presence of a mindfulness of 5000 years ago; the structure and scale of something that has left no imprint in history, yet has a resonance that strikes me as did the ruins of Tihuanaco in Bolivia, the Aztec pyramids of Teotihuacan in Mexico, and the ruins of Mesa Verde in Colorado . Human presence and intent, lost in the abandonment of a historic place because of famine or drought. Yet the patterns remain, giving up their secrets reluctantly, if at all.

Ancient folk worked with what they had in their technology and resources, but had no lack of comprehension about their ecology, their environment or its resources. While they lived more or less in concert with natural forces, there were times of extremes of weather - mostly drought - that forced them to relocate to other lands. This would tend to indicate that there is a set of boundaries within which human consumption and sustainable existence can coexist. Going past that involves the costs of technology - energy needs and its attendant pollution and carbon dump - that are now threatening the global balance of climate and biology.

I'm just hoping that we can readjust our priorities while we can.

Change the System

A World People's Summit on Climate Change took place last week in Bolivia, as a reaction to the failings of the Copenhagen Climate summit last December. Bolivia's privatized water wars 10 years ago set the stage for Bolivian protests against the accords set in this summit by the leading global powers. One of the key initiatives of the climate conference in Bolivia is to come out with a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. Democracy Now speaks with South African environmental lawyer Cormac Cullinan, the co-president of the Rights of Mother Earth Working Group at the summit.

This gathering of 15,000 people at a global conference that speaks to issues ignored by the world leadership looks to a powerful new vision of climate change policy from Bolivia that evolved from social movements through a participatory process, and the end result was a transformative and radical view of earth: that it belongs to all of her people.

This isn't just some value shift as has been portrayed in the major digitally produced movie production by James Cameron, Avatar, that has an Earth Day action tie-in. It's a deep, resonant call to action by the third world countries that have been excluded from a dialogue about climate change that has severely impacted their ecologies.

Update: The BASIC group (Environmental ministers of Brazil, South Africa, India and China) are not optimistic about an agreement being reached this December in Cancun, Mexico. This group will expand to include other countries in the global south.

Coexisting with the Wild Things

Botswana is home to the cheetah, herds of gemsbok, prides of lions, giraffes and all manner of wildlife on its expansive plains. This wildlife is now under conservation as part of an evolving approach to resource management.

It's also part of a new emerging Africa, which is slowly evolving reform in governance, to counteract the corruption in government and society which keeps it from moving forward. New entrepreneurial alliances emerging from this country and others on this continent are bringing many people out of poverty at the same time that resources are being directed towards constructive business and infrastructure improvements. These things ease the poverty which degrades the environment of the African bush and the cities and townships which are a legacy of colonial imperialism. A reflective article by Bono expresses some of the cultural and innovative fusion that is taking place.

Africa has a unique position in history as the birthplace of the human race, as well as being a continent with tremendous ecological biodiversity. But this is being threatened by the poaching and decimation of remaining wildlife. What this makes startlingly clear, per an article in The Atlantic, is that destruction of wildlife disrupts the entire cycle of life on this continent, which still heavily relies on natural processes, local farming and tribal migration to balance the ecosystem. Drought is forcing the nomadic tribes to abandon the range and camp out near the roads, as subsistence in this environment is no longer possible, and the stress is seen in the declining wildlife as well.

Addressing the consequences of climate change, as well as preserving and restoring the African bush heritage, are critical components of the emerging Africa and its new self-identity that moves beyond the tribal divisions and becomes self-reliant.

A Lesson in Spain

Spain is a former seagoing empire (1400 - 1800) which employed a far flung global network of its Galleons (warships) engaged in extensive exploration and trade in the New World and in Asia, establishing a colony of Chinese in Manila. It had extensive tradings and was in a global balance with China during its empire period. That story is here.

The period of empire faded in the 1800's after the English had built a seafaring empire that colonized North America, India, Africa and Australia. Then from 1959-73, the Spanish Miracle happened under the dictatorship of Franco. Spain's dictatorship fell in 1975, and the monarch King Juan Carlos started its transition to democracy; it became part of the European Union in 1985. It has since grown its economy and reestablished its ancient links with China.

Yet in the midst of this prosperity, the 2008 financial collapse of its industry provided a familiar tale of over-reliance on construction and property investment as a growth mechanism. The economic analysis of this collapse is from the Elcano Royal Institute (Real Instituto Elcano), a private entity independent of both the public administration and the companies which provide most of its funding. It was established, under the honorary presidency of HRH the Prince of Asturias, on 27 December 2001 for the purpose of generating ideas on the international scenario and on Spain’s strategic options in international relations that are of practical use to politicians, the business world, academics the media and public opinion at large. The report, The Way Forward for the Spanish Economy: More Internationalisation (WP), states in part:

"Spain has reached a crossroads in its economic development and cannot proceed further along the same path. The short-sightedness of an economic model excessively based on construction has been brutally exposed by the collapse of the property sector. The choice now is between an economy that continues to be based on arms (labour intensive, unskilled) or brains (more knowledge-based and internationalised). In the medium term, the former will create more employment, but as Spain’s recession has shown more clearly than that of any other EU country this is not a lasting solution. No other European country, and probably no other developed nation in the world, has created and then destroyed so many jobs so quickly."

So here is a former global empire, with ties to China and Latin America, which fragmented in the early 19th century, and in the last 50 years has managed to restructure itself and participate in the modern European economic structure, celebrating its growing influence with the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. Barcelona is home to famous architectural works by Gaudi as well as the Modernisme architects of the early 1900's, an incredibly colorful culture. Park Güell is probably one of the most enchanting public spaces I've ever visited around the world.
And Spain has famously lifted its profile with the Guggenheim Bilbao, by Gehry, to the point where an old industrial port city is taking on a new life as an arts and tourist destination; rightfully so, as I thought after an extensive tour of the structure and the city. I love the interactive page here, it brings back memories! The creative spirit also endures with La Salve Bridge and its new design by Daniel Buren.

This collapse has been a devastating lesson for an entire country to experience: that constant development growth is inherently unsustainable.

One that California needs to learn.

Sharing the World

A three-week trip to Paris in 1997 gave me a chance to do some photographic documentation of architecture spanning from the early gothic cathedrals, through the turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau works by Hector Guimard, to the international style by Corbusier, to the very modern works under construction at that time, including the just-finished La Defense Grande Arch. I stayed in a small maid's attic garret (toilette down the hall) in the 6th Arrondissement, just a stroll from the L'Eglise de Saint-Germain des Pres, the area known as the "Left Bank". Of course I hung out at Cafe de Flore!

There's a fabulous way to see the urban texture and context of many of the world's most famous landmarks in Paris in panoramic very high definition. Paris 26 Gigapixels is the name of the biggest assembled panoramic image in the world. It's a fascinating online technical project, and the blog is here. There's a discussion and the diagrams of how the RAW images were stitched together, based upon a critical clear-day shooting from a tower on top of of Saint Sulpice.

It all started at the 360 Degree video blog. Thomas Hayden is what Grand Canyon river-runners call a "river rat". He was introduced to 360° video in a little ski cabin in Girdwood, Alaska, and brings lessons learned from five years experience specializing in 360° video production and marketing. Starting as a river guide/expedition leader on the Colorado Plateau for the legendary Holiday Expeditions, he has taken thousands of clients down the magnificent rivers of Utah, Colorado, West Virginia, Mexico, and Alaska.

Folk Architecture

This kind of "built place" has many layers of history and diverse roots. Scattered throughout Alaska are remnants of the hand-hewn Russian Orthodox churches that were built over 100 years ago by Russian Missionaries, following the traditions of their old country. The picture above is St. Nicholas church, which is also part of the Athabascan Indian Cemetery that's filled with their small, colorful "spirit houses". This is how colonial settlement fuses with local culture, as has gone on around the world throughout history with religious missionary expansion.

The roots of these old log churches are found in North Russia, which have been captured in a study by professional photographer Richard Davies, who discovered a postcard series of unique fairy-tale style wooden churches and decided to undertake this project. The result is Wooden Churches, a series of beautiful photographs of these forgotten landmarks.

The wooden church architecture of Russia is unique. Built during the 18th and 19th Centuries, these iconic structures have weathered a storm of changes ever since, ranging from harsh winters to the churches' abandonment during the years of Soviet Communism. Many of the structures today remain in a state of tragic disrepair, damaged by vandals, neglect and the constant barrage of the weather.

Davies' photo collection perfectly captures the beauty and neglect of these amazing structures. The barren Russian landscapes, the sense of decay and the intricate architecture will make viewers feel like they've stumbled upon the remains of a fantasy civilization. The photos are a bid for preserving these amazing landmarks before they crumble to dust.

Also check out this great blog, Jilli's subarctic journal, Up in Alaska.

A Different Culture Matters

A March 1996 AIA junket took us from San Diego down into Tijuana to discuss the dynamics and population trends in that area. We visited the Colonia Esperanza project as the guest of Christine Kosko, director, the Americas Foundation. Never having seen this kind of lliving situation, which was essentially squatters living on the land with no infrastructure, it was difficult to understand how the cities and governments in Mexio could allow this form of habitation, which severely degrades the environment as it becomes crowded with migrant families. It becomes important to understand the culture of governance and control in Mexico, which exists under a Napoleonic form of law that is enforced primarily by the land-owning weathy families who basically run the country. The government does not have the resources to oversee much of the land outside of the cities, hence the unallayed destruction of the outlying environment with sprawling camps.

A description of how these colonias typically evolve is here in a discussion of their encroachment in the Oaxaca Valley:

"Colonias tend to follow a basic developmental pattern. Once about ten families have settled in a given spot household heads gather to demand the basic services of water and electricity. In the meantime they live in wretched conditions: without electricity, on dirt streets with no sanitation or sewers, walking long distances to find potable water. The irregular status of the settlement means they have no direct access to public transport or services such as vaccination campaigns and other health programs. During a second phase, which may take years to emerge, residents begin to pressure for other services: schools, sewage, transportation, paved streets. Higgins labels these "mature colonias" (Higgins 1974) and notes they usually are associated with a process of housing improvements such as concrete roofs, brick walls, and more sturdy construction. Even so these improvements basically reflect do-it-yourself construction without regard to formal plans or regulations.

"Another component in colonia development is the land speculator. These individuals gain access to ejido or communal lands committees, and through corruption or pressure, arrange to have lands to which they have no legal right transferred to them for resale to families looking for homesites on the urban periphery. During a field survey in November, 1995, it was possible to identify plots, usually 200 square meters, for sale at 3000, 5000, or 8000 pesos under conditions where no legal titles to the land were available to the seller. Such plots, often with dubious or fabricated titles, are common elements in colonia formation. After the official declaration of Monte Alban boundaries in 1994 the occupation of land speculator became popular in the neighboring communities. Not only private manipulators but municipal presidents, vice-presidents, and treasurers as well as ejidal and communal lands committee members entered the speculation game.

"As for the families who create the colonias, it is obvious that one commonality is that they are poor migrants arriving from elsewhere. Nevertheless they are not all peasants from rural indigenous communities who have come to the city in search of work, as was the case in 1878 (Yescas Peralta 1958: 779). Today the majority are families from towns across the state (Rees, et al 1991) who have lived as renters for some time in the city of Oaxaca. Having accumulated some capital (Butterworth 1973: 220) and finding the cost of housing in the city center prohibitive, they opt to move to a nearby suburban area where they can purchase a low-cost lot and have the possibility of a home through owner-built construction. Land on the slopes of Monte Alban fits this need, for as ejidal or communal lands no longer in use those holding the use rights prefer to subdivide and sell parcels cheaply to low-income people who will not demand formal title."

So the form of governance, as well as culture, has a major impact on how sustainable land use happens, and how the preservation of the existing natural environment must be undertaken. In this country, it will necessarily involve radical land use reform as well as providing affordable living spaces in the urban areas for people who don't own property.