No Tomorrow

Now also at urbanwildland.org

The dark subtext of the neoliberal economy, based as it is on a model of perpetual growth situated on a planet of finite resources, is that it is entirely unsustainable. This is not news. Yet in California, many continue to live as though there is no tomorrow perhaps because, as Joan Didion writes, “the future always looks good in the golden land because no one remembers the past”. This is a fine fragment of the glib, always a hallmark of the Didion canon, but writing in the seventies, she was well aware of legions of young people drawing heavily from the past in creating the Hippy lifestyle, and is shown in photographs from that era wearing the flowing long dresses that were emblematic of their culture. Today, although many of us continue to live avowedly in the present, the past has been resurrected by another cohort of loosely aggregated young people and they use their historical awareness to shine a light on the planet’s potential tomorrows.

To glance into the rear-view mirror (encompassing just this hemisphere) is to reveal past civilizations with fundamental flaws in their economic systems whose societies remained in complete denial of the day when those flaws might be exposed: where the future always looks good, until it doesn’t. We know something about these tomorrows that finally arrive, because archaeologists study them: our long-ago yesterdays, when civilizations were massively disrupted by sudden economic, societal and environmental collapse - so to begin, a jeremiad.

David E. Stuart, an archaeologist in the Southwest, and author of Anasazi America, 2014, suggests that we are now all Chacoans. By this he means that contemporary America resonates with the narrative arc of the Pueblo people who developed a successful society in Chaco Canyon, in what is now New Mexico, but which foundered, almost nine hundred years ago, on excessive attenuation of trade, income inequality and climate change.

The Chacoans devised a diversified economy which combined agriculture and hunting and gathering, which enabled them to prosper in the first millennium despite living in a desert region with less than reliable summer rainfall. Around 1000 C.E., the climatic conditions became more favorable and the Puebloans were emboldened to expand their agricultural base. Stuart writes, “Charcoan society could have used this reprieve to improve the lot of individual farmers and create incremental efficiencies, but it did not. Instead it chose growth and power”.

In their new territories they built ever larger great houses of up to four stories tall and sometimes containing more than six hundred rooms, connected to their home canyon by more than four hundred miles of roadway. Their trade network stretched from southern Canada to the Gulf of Mexico; and while the size, complexity and power of the society grew, so too did the disparity of wealth reflected in rates of infant mortality and average adult height, which varied by almost two inches between rich and poor.

Around 1090 C.E., a devastating five year drought led to widespread famine and the abandonment of many outlying farms. The Chacoan elite responded by creating vast new infra-structure projects which temporarily absorbed the un-employed farm laborers but did nothing to solve the underlying problem of agricultural productivity. A second major drought forty years later led to the unraveling of Chacoan society as more and more farmers fled their lands and joined an exodus to the uplands of the east. Stuart notes that within a generation, amidst sporadic warfare and plundering, Chacoan society had ceased to exist.

As Jared Diamond shows in Collapse, 2015, a similar process was at play in the downfall of the Mayan civilization sometime between the eighth and ninth centuries. Again, a prolonged drought, this time exacerbated by the deforestation necessary to the expansion of their agricultural lands, led to the abandonment of population centers in the central lowlands of Yucatan, leaving their cities and ceremonial sites to be swallowed up by the second growth of tropical and sub-tropical broadleaf forests.

The story of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is almost too well known to bear repeating: suffice it to say that a combination of environmental depredations, notably a deforestation that may or may not have been connected to the transport of their giant ceremonial sculptures or moai, recurring rat plagues and the long term use of the palm forests as fuel, combined with the natural limits of their small island severely stressed the population long before the arrival of the first Europeans in 1722. Indeed, by the late seventeenth century, it is reliably reported that vestiges of a population that once approached fifteen thousand, had been tragically reduced to living in caves, eating rats and sharpening their obsidian pointed spears to ward off fractious neighbors. Whilst not quite the perfect ‘Green’ parable of a society willfully chopping down the last tree to serve the elite’s desire to out compete each other by the erection of ceremonial statuary - and suffering the consequences of soil loss and starvation - the decline of the Rapanui was clearly intimately entwined with the climate and ecology of their tiny bio-sphere.

For all our advanced technologies, it is highly unlikely that we are immune to similar environmental melt-downs: hostage to an economic system that must grow or die and living at a time of inevitable and potentially cataclysmic climate change, the possibilities for major societal disruption are clear. An increasing gap between rich and poor and the geographic segregation between the prosperous and the striving only heightens this potential for collapse. When many of our most promising youth are sold into the debt peonage of a frequently valueless college education lured by hopes and dreams seeded by the propaganda arm (comprising the government, the media and grade-school education) of a pervasive neoliberal ideology, the outlook looks bleak indeed. But out of this dire societal amalgam there has arisen a cadre of unlikely potential saviors: the hipsters.

Those who write of environmental catastrophism (and it’s a rich tradition) and its shadow of economic collapse are limning a dystopian future in order that it might be avoided. Others, in the charming small town that lies eight miles distant from my perch in the urban wildland, and throughout the planet in places inflected with a hipster sensibility, practice, or at least consume, arts, crafts and produce that are informed by a sophisticated awareness of a potentially blighted tomorrow.

They practice under the rubric of rustic modernism: ceramicists, woodworkers and weavers who deliberately eschew the glossy surfaces of high technology and employ primal techniques to shape earthy materials while others play with the detritus of civilization to create art. A friend salvages grain bags from a local craft-brewery which, artfully unraveled, make wall-hangings; and salvages drift wood from Rincon, a notable surf beach a little way up the coast, which she lashes together with sisal to create coyly utilitarian armatures. Still others hand-make soap or candles or practice permaculture. Medieval techniques of brewing, wine and cider making are revived in dank warehouses where once bright futures were imagined in distributing imported plastic consumer goods, electronic gizmos or nutritional supplements.

In these and other similar ways, this community plays out a limited version of the New Age - or the subversion of neoliberalism. Within these creative, craft and agricultural realms there are attempts to find alternatives to a system fated to end in the apocalypse of environmental collapse; but while these artists, craftspeople, cottage-industrialists and market-farmers (and many of their customers) practice alternate economic and social behaviors they do so within a prevailing and constantly enticing economic system that threatens every act that is independent of its sway - and like an on-rushing ocean often obliterates their efforts like footprints on the shore.

But their power of example remains immense: that they have assumed a position in the fashion vanguard of this country is hugely significant. On the one hand they are fully entwined in the meretricious machinations of a malevolent economic system while on the other they play creatively with the tropes of its destruction. Our future may well lie with these legions of the fashion-forward. Out of the rich soil of societal decay, this movement, of whom many are the spawn of society’s most prosperous, has arisen to offer ideas for our salvation.

Darkness at Noon

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

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 – essentially 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

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

@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 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 famously 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 (sculptures, moldings and other architectural elements from Ancient Greece 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

Also at www.Urbanwildland.org

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.

The Recent Unpleasantness

Now also at Urbanwildland.org

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 have 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.

We Can Move

Now also at urbanwildland.org

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 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 rain 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.

Atonement

Now also at urbanwildland.org

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

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

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, 2016, 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 shadowed 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

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

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 (of a limited spectrum) 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 of Santarosae, which fragmented into five discrete landmasses after the ice melt deluge of 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, as 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 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 for 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 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, its 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 recently turned a vivid purple and there is the maroon-purple pond of Turkish Rugging (Chorizanthe staticoides) I stumble across each June; Tarweed maintains its bright yellow flowers despite the withering heat while the delicate flowers of spring are now mostly gone.

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. 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 both our souls and their setting amidst what Abrams calls the ’sensuous terrain’ – is mostly alien to our sense of ourselves; but the 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 their 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.

Of Alchemy and Earwigs

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

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).

Vector of Force

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

There is, close by The Beverly Hills Hotel, six acres that will forever be Los Angeles County; and there is, in this island of County jurisdiction, just north of Sunset Boulevard, the world's largest King Palm forest outside of Australia and there is too, set in this lush pleasure garden, a tennis court with a faded pink aggregate surface backed, at the east end, by a wall flamboyantly draped in pink bougainvillea originally sourced almost a century ago from South Africa: and it was here, in phalanxes of white chairs, that we were seated to celebrate the life of Bridget Hedison.

This is the Virginia Robinson Estate, deeded to L.A. County in the 1970's by the widow of the department store magnate. Bridget is my erstwhile landscape partner who died on February 22, after being diagnosed with stage four cancer some three years ago. Carleen Cappalletti, a former client of ours, and friend to Bridget, organized the event with all the precision that she brings to her professional work producing entertainment, corporate, political, and fashion events around the world for a division of AEG. But here the tone was muted - a quiet remembrance of a remarkable soul, in the grounds of this garden paradise.

Bridget wove her career in and out of ‘Hollywood’ – that chimeric society that insinuates itself throughout Los Angeles, but finds its apotheosis in Beverly Hills - both in film production and later in garden design. Deeply influenced by her Italian heritage, an English insouciance (where she was educated) and profoundly impacted by the Islamic sites she had visited in Spain, her work as a garden designer exhibited an understanding of the transcendence afforded by the rigorous pursuit of an abstract order. Her work aspired to achieve the impact that Vincent J. Cornell captures, writing in Voices of Islam, 2006,

“at the sight of glittering waves or of leafage trembling in the breeze, the soul detaches itself from its internal objects, from the ‘idols’ of passion and plunges, vibrant within itself, into a pure state of being.”

So we got along just fine. In our Laguna project, where she and I worked most explicitly in an Islamic idiom, those glittering waves were not incised within a field of tilework, but were simply spread before the garden in the bay below. Bridget provided the trembling leafage in generous swathes of citrus, olives and Ligustrum lucidum (a tree privet); I provided a stepped and terraced way down the precipitous site and the destination of a walled pool which Bridget surrounded with olive hedges and punctuated with giant palms craned in from above. Bridget plotted to install fountains and rills, but in the end the sparkling cerulean waters of a lap pool and a spa, both plastered in white with an aggregate of tiny pearl pebbles and shell fragments, had to do the work of transporting the viewer into a pure state of being (or not).

She worked then, in the tradition of Southern California as a tabula rasa upon which could be installed fantasies of an earthly paradise. By the time I came to work with her I had already come to the conclusion that the riches of Los Angeles landscape, afforded by extravagant sprinkler layouts, hid a more authentic layer of paradisial planting that was revealed only at the edges of the great conurbation - in the native chaparral. But here in Beverly Hills, Virginia Robinson spent six decades directing her ample garden staff to create a lush, notionally Italian style Mediterranean garden on a knoll graced with ocean breezes, and views of the Pacific and Catalina Island beyond - banishing, in this process, all traces of the indigenous chaparral.

Great human energy, water and financial resources continue to be expended in maintaining this alien, although reasonably climate adapted, plant community plucked from the global, Mediterranean biome (of which, of course, California’s chaparral is a part). More capriciously, Robinson let her close friendship with Coco Chanel dictate the signature color of the garden as Chanel Pink – echoed in camellia plantings, a garden of pink David Austin Roses, the bougainvillea, and the faded pink of the tennis court surface.

The idea of the garden as a paradise was first developed in Persia and was subsequently adopted in Islamic cultures and, in a mutual exchange of ideas, became incorporated into the Renaissance gardens of Italy. As Barbara Bend notes in Islamic Art, 1992, “every vision of Paradise which Islam offers is that of a garden with running waters, and every garden in the Islamic world tends to be seen as a metaphor for Paradise”. Persian gardens and their Islamic successors inspired subsequent gardens around the Mediterranean - their aesthetic principles eventually dominating their generative symbolic underpinnings. So it is that in the Virginia Robinson Estate, in southern California, there is a water rill of upturned clay roof tiles that runs down the middle of the brick steps that descend from the top of the knoll, through four terraces, each with a fountain or water trough (with crudely carved lion’s head spouts) to the foot of the site in a classic Islamic gesture originally adopted from the desert paradise gardens of Persia……..via Italy! Bridget would have loved it.

On the occasions that Lorrie and I visited Bridget and David at their aerie on Trudy lane, high in their City’s eponymous hills, it always gave me pleasure to see her copy of Mirrors of Paradise, The Gardens of Fernando Caruncho, 2000, laying in the living room, somewhere close to hand. I had recommended it to her (the book was introduced to me years ago by Sarah Munster) because I believed it spoke profoundly of what Bridget achieved with apparent ease (that English insouciance born of an ethos that preaches: ‘don’t let them see you sweat’). Her design solutions arrived, she said, via her muse - some ethereal garden sprite perhaps, that would whisper, at the very last moment before a critical client meeting, a list of appropriate trees for the site. In reality, I knew that many hours of subliminal thought and a few sleepless nights went into finding just the right solution.

She intuited much of what Caruncho learnt through his study of philosophy. She understood the dualities of the visible and invisible, the sacred and profane, the light and the dark, without reference to the ancient Greeks. Many moons ago, she studied astronomy at UCLA, and this choice of discipline reflected, I think, her practical approach to the mysteries of the cosmos. She did not employ metaphysics in her work, nor even metaphor - just plain speech and she mostly let her landscapes do the talking.

Caruncho works with massed plantings usually organized in some sort of grid or linear arrangement. Flowers are almost entirely incidental to his designs. He works in greens and browns and ochres; his groundscapes of stone, gravel or decomposed granite resonate with intense shadow from heavy penumbral foliage or reflect the fierce light of Spain; water becomes an earthbound sky. Ditto Bridget, southern California substituting seamlessly for the Iberian Peninsula.

Bridget’s commitment to her muse’s vision was breathtaking. Rick Passov was a fellow student alongside of Bridget back in the day: he tells the story of her upbraiding a professor for failing to adequately explain Vectors of Force in her UCLA Physics class. The professor had no need. Bridget had ample self-knowledge – and she, intrinsically, was a Vector of Force. With great strength of will and an unerring sense of purpose she pursued her design objectives with a powerful directional focus.

Don't know much about History

Now aslo at www.ubanwildland.org

Brits often disparage American History as being short - almost to the point where the association of the one with the other is imputed as oxymoronic: what they are suggesting is that the duration of the Republic, of these United States, is comparatively short-lived when weighed against the venerable statist traditions of the English kingdom. What they ignore, is that in terms of nationhood, this country is older than most, and predates that great efflorescence of nation states that occurred throughout, but often towards the tail end, of the nineteenth century (think Italy and Germany). More crucially, the very idea of assessing the venerability (or any other characteristic) of histories through the matrix of political associations (in which Nation States hold a privileged position) is decidedly reactionary.

This epiphany emerged out of my reading Clive Ponting's A Green History of the World, 1992, at more or less the same time that I ingested the great Marxist historian E. J. Hobsbawm's Nations and Nationalism, 1990, about twenty years ago. It was in this latter work that it became apparent to me that fictions of nationhood were the convenient tool of elite groups wishing to conduct feats of social engineering conducive to their aggregation of power. Quoting Ernest Gellner, Hobsbawm writes, "Nations as a natural God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent political destiny are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures: that is a reality" - a reality, incidentally, almost totally reflected in the initial establishment and subsequent development of the United States.

We all move on. Now there is an understanding that what matters to us, at this cosmic moment, is history on a geologic time scale. The whole world, it seems, is obsessed with the human impact on the ecologies that envelop us. Us: a.k.a. Humans. This Anthropocene is an age when we (We) are creating sedimentary strata of toxic waste, collapsing aquifers, reshaping and perforating the lithosphere, drastically reducing levels of biological diversity and fundamentally changing the composition of the earth's atmosphere.

Set against this elemental reality, the disfunctions or otherwise of political arrangements validated by nationalist mythologies which, in this country, are based on moldering documents crafted by a few wealthy British diasporans more than two hundred years ago, or in this and other continents, less transparently, on histories of pillage and conquest, are of trivial import.

In Britain, the nationalist religion of patriotism is nurtured by a Royal family founded just 99 years ago by George V as the House of Windsor: an act of xenophobic re-branding (from the Germanic Saxe Coburg and Gotha) at the end of World War One. (There was, in Ojai, a faint echo of this, in the same year of 1917, as it was transmuted from its erstwhile Teutonic place name of Nordhoff).

Part of being a nation is, as Hobsbawm points out, getting its history wrong: but neither this country nor Great Britain have national histories, however delusional, of any great consequence except as they contribute to the great Modernist project that has seen the planet globalize under the flag of Capitalist convenience, Neo-Liberalism. It is, operating under this credo, that they are assured of a significant place in new histories that operate on a millennial and geologic time scale and have as their protagonist, not petty princes or nattering nabobs of nationalism (to paraphrase the late and unlamented Spiro Agnew) but the Lonely Planet itself.

I have mentioned Clive Ponting's seminal 1992 text: it opened up a space which has been populated by a plethora of 'green' or environmental histories of the world. Enter Joachim Radkau with Nature and Power, A Global History of the Environment, 2008, in which he notes that "environmentalism is the only ideological alternative to the absolute hegemony of the quest for private profit and consumption".

Remarkably, in this nation based exactly, explicitly and proudly on the pursuit of private profit and consumption there has been a parallel history of appreciation and concern for the natural world. It has been advantaged in this by the scale and variety of its natural setting and its convenient extirpation of native populations who fully inhabited its vast range of ecological niches. Absent indigenous peoples, killed in great numbers by introduced disease, by the U.S. Cavalry who supported the western migration of Anglo-Americans, by frontiersmen and women on their own account, or forcibly removed to marginal lands where their traditional means of sustainability were no longer viable, the nation’s great and glorious landscapes were fetishized in the nineteenth century as objects supporting a range of broadly romantic ideologies centered on our relationship to the divine. At the beginning of the twentieth century, many of these areas were institutionalized as National Parks and in this process the last vestiges of their indigenous populations were banished. The Eurocentric traditions of Emerson, Thoreau and Muir were validated in this creation of vast reserves set aside for the aesthetic, moral and spiritual delight of newly wrought and quickly populating ‘Americans’, enabled in their peregrinations by the mass production of the automobile by Henry Ford and others.

In the 1960’s and 70’s an Environmentalism emerged in the U.S. that truly challenged the cash and consumption nexus and, arguably, initiated an epochal shift toward a revision in the ways the natural world might function as a sustainable setting for its top predator: humankind.

Not much these days goes uncolored by the recent death of my friend Will Reed with whom I hiked the Sierras last summer, along with Victoria Salmon (Wild America). He was a man without a nation, having left his native New Zealand in his early twenties and subsequently been refused permanent status in both the U.K and the U.S., despite his living in one or the other place for over forty years. I regret that he will not read this piece which touches on the spurious nature of the nation state and might give him a reason for celebrating his statelessness. Now he has truly transcended such petty considerations!

He and I were, in different ways and in different places, children of the various revolutions that occurred a little after mid-century which established in us an anti-authoritarian ethos and a profound love of the natural world. We both arrived in Ojai about eight years ago and quickly established a kinship. We subsequently co-taught at Lori Pye’s feisty on-line start-up, the Viridis Graduate Institute, where we wrestled with many of the issues with which this blog concerns itself. We both lived in a world where the concerns of environmental histories were very real. He, perhaps, was more comfortable in the timelessness of the eternal present that holds sway in the lives of indigenous peoples and his mind, I believe, actually resonated on a frequency that enabled insights into the natural world that were profoundly pre-verbal, while I am forever pursuing intellectual fashion in such histories, true to my more academic, very western understanding of wilderness as cultural artifact and ideological talisman.

The last book we talked about together was Roderick Frazer Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind, 1967, just a few days before he died. Will’s was not an American mind; he disliked this country precisely because it was mired in materialism - but he loved its wildlands and understood their history on a millennial and geologic scale, his mind in harmony with the cosmic energies that pulsed through his lanky frame.