The Impossible

While in Peru (Machu Picchu of course) and Bolivia back in 2004, I did make it up onto the altiplano to Tiahuanaco, an ancient city that has been undergoing formal excavation and study for almost 100 years. The ruins of the Kalasasaya (see the map on this page) have been partially restored, and the adjacent Acapana pyramid was just beginning excavation when I was there. In observing the dig, I was struck at how deliberate the excavation work was, the trenching followed precisely in the plan of the uncovered stones, rather than being a single large hole or random diggings.

I consulted our Aymara guide, Rose Marie, about this, and she showed me the cruciform-shaped tablet that was being used like a compass to direct the excavation. This tablet image has been passed on down through the oral and graphic traditions of the Tiahuanacota people who had no written language. But clearly they had a geometric and graphic record of their methodologies in constructing the city, and rules about how things were to be oriented and scaled. So this tablet provided all the instructions needed to accurately excavate the pyramid, which the local Aymara laborers were doing under the direction of the Bolivian government. It is now a World Heritage site.

There are questions as to its exact age and purpose, but it's clearly a ceremonial site with statues and the Gate of the Sun covered in geoglyphs. It appears to have been oriented according to skycharts regressed back 15,000 years through a study of archeoastronomy, and its "sound holes" that magnify voice and its framed statuary in concise orientation are all indicators of a highly evolved understanding of geometric structure and celestial positioning.

The more conventional description of its age and its cultural context dates the construction to around A.D. 200, but that could be the time when the Aymara moved into the existing site and its ruins, primarily due to its agricultural resources, capable of supporting a large population.

Lake Titicaca, 12 miles away, has many ancient beliefs attached to it, particularly at the Island of the Sun. In the ancient Andean myths, the world is recreated after a massive natural holocaust by the god Viracocha who emerged from the lake.

Art of the River Walk

The LA River has been undergoing some small transformations under the watchful eyes of the Santa Monica Mountains conservancy, which instituted a nature restoration/art walk/community space project along the river. This has involved many organizations and art projects, including one carried out by North East Trees which uses bioswales to return rainwater to the aquifer instead of running it into the storm channel. This is the Oros Green Street project, also known in this chain of projects as Steelhead Park.

Folks have been blogging about these projects for awhile, including Eric Garcetti and the LA MetBlog. The arts are integrated into the fabric of the river restoration in order to encourage increased social use of the river walk. As the river is revitalized and becomes more "green", it will become a natural playground and open green space for families in the city. These projects are significant, because as Eric states on his blog, "Oros marks the first complete Prop O project, and also marks the success of the city in meeting its federal water quality standards. We are the only city in the nation in compliance with our Total Maximum Daily Load compliance timeline, thanks to the installation of hundreds of catch basins throughout the city and projects like Oros."

Things inspired by the river's presence are a book, pictures up on a photostream, an onsite theater production, and what most people do, a bike ride.

Cudahy River Park, also by North East Trees, opened in April of this year at the intersection of Clara Street and River Road next to the Los Angeles River in the City of Cudahy. These linkages are small and disparate right now, but will ultimately link people and places all throughout the stretches of the LA River.

The Possible

Philadelphia's urban sustainability competition, "Brown to Green" challenges students across North America to create a new vision for South Philadelphia's Grays Ferry Crescent. With the industrial DuPont Marshall Laboratory complex closing down and the Schuylkill River Development Corporation extending its riverfront park trail along the edge of the site, this area offers strong potential, but also great challenges. The competition gives students the opportunity to push the envelope on cutting-edge ideas for transforming brownfields of an industrial past into sustainable environs for a green future.

"Entrants are encouraged to focus more broadly on the role of industrial sites in a modern city such as Philadelphia" is in the program section of this design criteria.

It's the new standard to bring the old abandoned industrial land uses - particularly oil extraction and refining - into a restored capacity to function within the natural ecosystem and contribute to civic open space. Cities have been implementing ideas like this for years, particularly Seattle and San Francisco. Los Angeles has begun its regeneration along the LA River. This competition provides a view of the information required to develop intelligent design solutions to this kind of a problem, although I have to say that it barely scratches the surface compared to the engineering and geotechnical work studies required to pull this off.

More and more agencies are putting these urban spaces out there for public problem-solving, and it's creating a great public buy-in as well as a refreshing way to capture new energies and ideas. As long as these requested ideas are credited where they're due, it's a great way to help build a vision that the big design and engineering firms can use as a starting point.

Can You Imagine?

As I've pointed out in earlier posts here and here, the US is heavily into funding armed conflict with our tax dollars that should be more wisely spent on our programs here at home that support the middle-class safety net as well as provide infrastructure repair and upgrade so that the US can meet the necessary global CO2 goals that are approaching very quickly. I've also mentioned the policy shift that's being carried out by our Secretary of State to shift funding from the military to climate change, now considered a security threat to the USA.

The USA is currently the top arms supplier to conflicts around the globe. This has everything to do with propping up corporations for now, like Boeing/Lockheed Martin, until they can shift to more peacetime production. Our tax dollars are not just going to banks and auto production, they're also being used to support global armed conflict, which drives national public policy. This is a major portion of US industry. The list of aerospace and defense companies is here. This whole thing doesn't strike me as an example of a capitalist free market, it's like a Monopoly game with the winner holding the money bag; no transparency or balance is possible with this kind of an old-boy network.

Many industry publications track this activity and stump via their government connections and lobbyists for further Federal funding for their companies; examples here and here. The DOD has an extensive website on their structure and armed forces organization, very helpful.

What if we spent these dollars not to fund war and conflict, but to heal the eco damage we've done and produce sustainable businesses and global community so that there are equitable returns for countries around the globe? What if we were in balance with natural processes? Could there be better return on investment here? Can you imagine?

But the room will have to be half-full of women...

Micro-mindset

(the picture above is a link in real time to the UCLA TowerCam at Mt. Wilson, and it's aimed at the fire for now)

Well, here we go. Everyone's responsible for shutting off their faucets and sprinklers. Meantime, development expansion and paper water sales continue apace. The California Department of Water Resources is attempting to stem the abuses with a water management plan, but progress is glacial, to use a bad pun. Just like the legislature. A struggle goes on now in the state over the nature of water reform, and shifting it to a conservation-based structure rather than a plumbing problem focused on highest revenue.

Consume and buy. A directive issued by Bush immediately in the aftermath of the 9/11 destruction. A small problem appears, however. The jobs are gone, the big profits have dried up, and there's no financial reserves. California has already blown through a big chunk of its firefighting budget at the beginning of the fire season, another indicator of how overdevelpment and corporate supply chain to consumers (what happened to "people"?) has decimated the processes that provided a temperate climate, fresh air and adequate water to people in this region. This is mirrored in the global picture, as our human-inflicted climate change reduces the resources provided in nature, as well as its diversity.

Backlash to this arson-initiated destruction of the Station Fire has begun; I would expect that it will encompass the larger issues in the Southern California region very quickly. Hopefully it will result in a reaffirmation of the central importance of the natural environment in people's lives, and return the focus from profit to stewardship.

Chill out the Planet

Wait a minute. Or a day, or a year, or a millennium. What are we doing here? Nature has worked for free for millions of years until the Industrial Revolution began to carbonize the environment, and the beginning of the century in 1900 ushered in the chemical pollution and waste that became pervasive in the subsequent World Wars and the conflicts after that. What drives all this destruction? Growth for profit.

Growth of civilization is not a force of nature, it's a characteristic of unrestrained population expansion due to the human intervention in natural cycles. Not to say that's completely out of line, but we've overrun the ecosystem with our lack of comprehension on how we should "fit" into our niche. Basically it violates the UN-adopted concept of sustainability.

This runaway growth of one species has mushroomed into a massive impact that must pull back significantly, with a restoration of natural processes in an intelligent fashion. Yet we now have a form of denial in the concept of re-engineering the earth, when we can't even keep our own systems going without massive costs or energy transfers. These untested and massive-scaled interventions address only one dimension of any given problem, when we really need to understand that we've unbalanced the system, which has to return to its "resting" state. These interventions are like any other "bubble" that we've produced financially, for example - they collapse. Some ways of returning to the balance are better than others, but they've all got to start with scaling back our use of the planet for single-purpose efforts. The BBC article on the feasibility of geoengineering the earth states this in its preface.

Sustainable development has possibilities, but hacking the earth is pure dystopian panic, and as Prison Planet points out, the US Government is already doing this on a dangerous and untested scale.

So chill out, everybody. A steady, focused multi-systems reversal of ecological damage is key to this problem that has been over 300 years in the making by human civilization. A forward push in new technologies in Net Zero design of reconstructed cities is another viable strategy, as is urban reforestation and ecological repair. All of which we would not be paying for now if we had forestalled the growth of human populations and its consumption much earlier. So we need to figure out how to get commerce and the corporations to pay back for all this. The clawback, as it were...

Station Fire Update from Home

Everyone now knows about the Station Fire just above Pasadena and its massive plume that hangs over Los Angeles, threatening the communications center of the region and its significant Mt. Wilson observatory, its historic Hale museum and Chara array. A view of it has turned up on the earth observation aggregation service, EOSnap, clearly showing the extent of the carnage from space. What you don't see is the horrific damage in the Angeles National Forest, local structures that have burned and the hazardous air quality that the region is experiencing as a result.

The EOSnap, an international web portal, describes its mission: " We have been working in the field of earth observation for over 13 years. Even after all this time, I am continually surprised by how beautiful and varied our planet is. Every day, we generate photorealistic images from satellite data. I am lucky that this work puts me in the privileged position of observing the planet in great detail. EOSnap is meant to be a small window on our planet that allows all people to appreciate the Earth’s beauty and also, hopefully, a way of increasing public awareness on environmental issues so that such beauty can be preserved for future generations." Luca Mellano (Founder and CEO of Chelys) May 13th, 2008

This site generates worldwide photo documentation and mosaic photo assemblies of geographic earth scans, and is easily viewable. This creates a critical awareness of the scope of global environmental conditions, an awareness necessary to create a regenerative public policy in all nations for the survival of the ecosphere and, of course, human life.