Girl Power Through the Ages

Now also at urbanwildland.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He writes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't Know Much About Geography

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Old Ways Vs. New Spirit

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

I have just finished reading Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s magisterial work, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, 2007. It is dense, closely argued and revelatory. The thick trade paperback now bristles with yellow post-it notes marking passages I thought particularly significant, or more often, just felt that I fully understood. If it is not quite a Theory of Everything, it did offer a thrillingly explanatory ride through fifty years of my lived experience in the working world. It now prompts these thoughts:

Capitalism is a system in which money acts as the medium of transaction between subject (individuals and groups) and object (goods and services) within a theoretically unencumbered or free market. Within that system, it is also characterized (as Boltanski and Chiapello would have it) by “an imperative to unlimited capital accumulation by formally peaceful means”. In other words, it represents (now in the guise of neo-liberalism) an advance in civilization from societies driven by warfare, plunder, and territorial acquisition towards those that formally value peace where individuals have the ability to grow rich through the socially approved accumulation of wealth. Blood lust has been transmuted into entrepreneurial spirit: ‘Capitalism’ thus represents the hive mind of the bloodlessly acquisitive.

Within this system of producers and consumers there exists a world of work. There has been, at least since the industrial revolution and its mass migrations from the countryside to the city, a clear distinction between the personhood of an employee and their contributions as a worker. Previously, workers were involved in close personal bonds with their master or mistress arising out of ancient feudal fealties - evidenced by a total subordination as well as ties of loyalty and mutual aid.

The rise of Capitalism afforded the opportunity for the working man and woman to establish an independent sense of self despite the often onerous demands of factory or trade work. This working class condition, established in the eighteenth century, was characterized by a simple contractual arrangement, based on work performed, between employer and employee, endured until late in the twentieth century.

It was then that increased possibilities for the values of creativity, freedom and authenticity became available within Boltanski and Chiapello’s construct of ‘New Spirit of Capitalism’ which developed in the era of social upheaval in the 1960's and 70's, immediately after the interregnum of what the French call Les Trente glorieuses (those three decades after the end of WWII when the standard of living greatly increased for most people across Western Europe and the USA). The new spirit was shaped by a virulent critique partly in reaction to the oppressive regimentation and control imposed by large scale, bureaucratized industrial conglomerates that dominated American and Western European commerce. For a moment, it seemed as if an entire generation had decided to vacate the world of work and reinvent Life on Earth. They (we!) were eventually reined in by a revised spirit of capitalism that co-opted many of the freedoms demanded by the Hippes, Yippies, Feminists and Civil Rights workers who characterized that era.

This emancipation was achieved, over the last forty odd years, at the cost of job security, lower real wages and a crumbling social safety net. As the authors note, wage earners are now simultaneously more autonomous and more constrained as they seek a foothold in the working world absent the protections afforded by secure long term employment, vacations and benefits. Their work lives are episodic or project based, and depend for continuity on the personal and professional connections that are nurtured during brief tenures of employment (or transitory relationships). The establishment of networks is necessary to the securing one's next gig (or relationship) and both depend on social and spatial fluidity: immobility presages exclusion from the ranks of the successful. The power of place has been re-placed by the power of real and virtual rhizomorphic links and reticular adjacencies (a linguistic thicket in the spirit of B&C) spread across the world’s array of urban nodes bound within an electronic web.

The illusory freedom, individual empowerment and authenticity offered within this new Capitalist workplace are mirrored in its attendant consumerism. The mass production of identical goods has been replaced by their customization and niche marketing. American taste has been fragmented: 'Middle America' has been shattered into a hundred taste cultures by which individual consumers are offered goods that are differentiated and 'authentic' to their particular taste culture - despite the fact that these disparate goods remain within the commodity sphere and must ultimately yield to the “cycles of infatuation and disappointment” inherent in a fashion, marketing and advertising driven consumer society.

The distinction between persons and their labor power, and between disinterested relations and relations marked by self-interest traditionally establishes the division, in Capitalism, of what may be commodified and what may not. Now, in Boltanski and Chiapello’s formulation of ‘The New spirit of Capitalism’ (under the influence of which people continue to be persuaded to participate in endless orgies of production and consumption), this distinction is under challenge: individuals are mired deeper and deeper in the processes of making, marketing, personal branding (which is directly related to employability) and networking, all of which combine to submerge the authenticity of their personhood.

It is into this world that we must now consider the introduction of the ecological critique: for the hive mind of Capitalism is mutable. In a recent interview, Eve Chiapello commented, “The market economy has adopted some of the ideas of critical movements, but only those that did not call into question profit-seeking and the pursuit of its objectives”. She notes, however, that the ecological critique does precisely that and thus has the potential to fundamentally alter the central tenet of our neo-liberal political system; but as long as growth of GDP is seen as essential to societal well-being there is unlikely to be any willing accommodation of the ecological agenda (except at the greenwash margins). Chiapello suggests that ultimately, biospheric well-being almost certainly depends on the development of localized, solidarity based sustainable economies dedicated to meeting basic needs and which entirely eschew the superfluous (Hippie communes redux). Any large scale adoption of such local, down-sized centers of production serving newly temperate consumers will most likely cause the transportation, information, education, healthcare, energy and control networks of modern society to atrophy and current levels of population to decline.

Capitalism has capitulated to demands for the greater freedom, authenticity and personal empowerment of its worker bees but it has done so by demanding increased flexibility and offering less security, benefits, generally lower wages and has undermined the sanctity of its workers personhood by commodifying their personal relationships. It now exists, within the embracing raison d’etre of its new spirit, under attack from a critique that privileges biospheric health above the emancipatory values its promoters have been shilling for almost half a century and which are now thoroughly embedded in the neo-liberal project.

Should the ecological critique succeed against all odds, are we then faced with a new dark age from which will inevitably spring the warfare, plunder and territorial acquisition that history has banished?

Let’s dispense immediately with idea that economic growth is somehow a natural, historically validated phenomenon. Eduardo Porter writes in The New York Times,

“It’s hard to imagine now, but humanity made do with little or no economic growth for thousands of years. In Byzantium and Egypt, income per capita at the end of the first millennium was lower than at the dawn of the Christian era. Much of Europe experienced no growth at all in the 500 years that preceded the Industrial Revolution. In India, real incomes per person shrank continuously from the early 17th through the late 19th century.”

He goes on to make the contrary argument that “Zero growth gave us Genghis Khan and the Middle Ages, conquest and subjugation”. One is aghast by the inclusion of half a millennium of high culture, great learning and spiritual achievement in a list clearly intended to conjure a civilizational abyss. The last two hundred years of the West’s economic growth have been afforded by our plundering of the earth’s carbon riches which, by aggravating climate change, will potentially ravage our coast lines and foster disease and famine on a scale besides which a little old-school pillaging by Ghenghis and his cohorts seems positively benign.

Gary Snyder characterizes the “wisdom and skill of those who studied the universe firsthand, by direct knowledge and experience, for millennia, both inside and outside of themselves” as the ‘Old Ways’. Traditional cultures were of a place, in which the inhabiting of a coherent bioregion forged a profound kinship within a world that provided for their people’s survival. The sanctity of human life was contingent: it existed only as a reflection of human reverence for the web of life.

Capitalism requires a rethinking such that the natural world is revered as the one and only medium of transaction between humanity and its survival. If that world is not to be devalued or destroyed, a radical critique of our economic system (predicated, as it is, on eternal growth and the ravaging of the biosphere) must be established. The hive mind is listening.

On a Sunday Afternoon

Now also on www.urbanwildland.org

Very early this morning, Rita whooshes down Koenigstein in her red Tesla. Perhaps she is driving to the west side of Los Angeles to meet with a client. She is a personal trainer.

Three years ago, she and her husband bought the old Hansen property (Death Comes to Koenigstein) at the top of the hill. A Los Angeles architect designed a modern re-model of the 1960’s stucco ranch house and after a protracted construction period approaching two years, Rita moved in earlier in the summer. The major views and windows are all to the west and despite a roof laden with photo-voltaic panels I imagine the house falls short of being net zero in energy consumption: of an afternoon, the searing westerly sun is likely to defeat the best efforts of even a continuously running refrigerated air cooling system, and then, when it cools down and the a/c finally shuts down, there’s the six or seven hours to charge the car’s battery at a 240 V outlet. As Kermit sings, “it’s not easy being green”.

Nevertheless, several of us on Koenigstein are attempting to present a virid face to the world. It is all, to some extent, a sham. The three overtly ‘green’ structures feature enough newly embedded energy to discount whatever savings to the grid are effected by their solar strategies. In the bigger picture, our contribution to saving the world is precisely nil. We remain part of a society that is dedicated to endless economic growth – of which so-called ‘green’ industry is a contributing factor.

It is the fatal model of expansionary capitalism (if that is not a tautology), consuming the world’s resources and producing biosphericaly threatening levels of greenhouse gases that requires immediate mitigation – not our relationship to the power grid. There is, of course, a connection between these two phenomena, but an amelioration of the latter is unlikely to make much of a dent in the former. Indeed, it has been argued that the replacement of dirty, fossil energy with clean solar, hydro or nuclear power is entirely beside the point: what we need is a society that uses radically less energy, of whatever provenance, since its consumption is largely devoted, at present, to the rape of the world.

The Pope, in his recent ‘green encyclical’ has called for a "truly communitarian economy", where "human beings in harmony with nature, structure the entire system of production and distribution in such a way that the abilities and needs of each individual find suitable expression in social life". In other words, he is calling, at least in this speech, for the revolutionary overthrow of the results of at least half a millennium of Western colonialism in which the Papacy has been entirely complicit, as well as the financial structures that grew out of this exploitative model and that now support the plutocrats, oligarchs and kleptocrats who conspire to rule the world irrespective of the political arrangements that pertain in individual states.

But he goes further. He has nominated as the foot soldiers in his Revolutionary Army, "social poets" who remake "social reality" along their own unique paths, person by person, generation by generation. It is a fantastically bold vision that entirely transcends ideology and attempts to return the world to a prelapsarian Eden where individuals can create their own destinies certain of "access to education, health care, new technologies, artistic and cultural manifestations, communications and recreation". Nothing here then, that cannot be achieved in the kind of primal harmony evinced by tribal societies intimately connected to their local ecosystems and surviving within them by hunting and gathering - in a return, in other words, to traditions from which Homo sapiens has only very recently departed. The Pope may believe that his Edenic vision can be achieved without abandoning the technological infrastructure of the modern world, but that infrastructure is entirely dependent on the exploitative model he deplores. The Pope, as Unintended Revolutionary is, perhaps, not quite ready to follow the full implications of his utopian, populist rhetoric.

Neither are we, emerald hued ones, on Koenigstein Road. Our position, as beacons of energy responsibility, does not quite elevate us to the position of social poets. We are acting in the belief that the same kind of thinking that got us into this mess can be utilized in extricating ourselves from it - that ever more sophisticated, nature alienating technologies can save us from the previous generation of sophisticated, nature alienating technologies; that embedded energy is somehow free provided we use it to demonstrate our conservation bona fides; that conspicuous, individual consumption can be justified if it models a slightly better than average understanding of how to build responsibly in the urbanwildland.

Not a social poet then, but at my best, perhaps, a lyrical observer of the rural scene: a watcher of the weather, a cataloger of the light, of the twilight and of the dark and, betwixt all this, a writer of jeremiads, a doomsayer, an unrepentant nostalgist and occasionally, a bringer of hope - my bleak outlook flecked with gold seams of optimism, like July's drenching rain in an unending season of drought.

As the veil of rain lifted a world of yellow green was revealed, punctuated with late blue-grey evening shadows; the two galvanized corrugated steel water tanks at the base of the hill pulsated with a silvery, aqueous light - their conical lids reflecting, in a colloidal amalgam, the concentrated light of the tropical skybowl's penumbra. The infinitely subtle colors that surround our house reach through the windows (despite the impediment of their solar bronze coating) and inflect the pure white of the walls. Our house, as I was reminded when dining at a friend’s place at the tippy-top of Foothill, sits in the landscape, partakes of it and is colored by it. Our friend's, sits on the landscape, in sublime difference.

The unexpected July rain had me thinking: are we, in Hawaii yet? Or better yet, Japan.....where Rikyu grey might so perfectly describe the eventide chromatic impact of tropical depression Dolores on the parched chaparral of Upper Ojai? No: just another Global Warming impacted Ojai summer long since returned to normalcy: dry, bleached and hot - 106 degrees Fahrenheit this Sunday, 16th. August, an Ojai record high for the day. Now, at the end of the month, it is still warm, soft and the day capable, if one takes a moment to bask in it, of inducing a delirious drowsiness. Meanwhile, we thrill in anticipation of a major El Niño promised us by N.O.A.A., which, in conjunction with the hemispheric air pressure variable, the Southern Oscillation, (ENSO) is a reliable indicator of heavy winter and spring rain in California…….

Not then, a social poet enrolled in God’s Army (as proclaimed by Pope Francis), nor a Green Crusader, but simply the creator of a place (by virtue of building a structure and tending the land), and the creator of an ecotone, between town and country (manifested both physically and through the posts of Urbanwildland): a place where I can observe the confluence, at least within my own psyche, of drought and rain, of the wild and the urban and of hope and hopelessness. Alternatively,

We'll keep on spending sunny days this way
We're gonna talk and laugh our time away
I feel it coming closer day by day
Life would be ecstasy, you and me endlessly

Edward Brigarti and Felix Cavaliere (of The Rascals)

The Village of the Damned

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org

Awakening on a remote mountain shelf in the Carpathians in 1934, Patrick Leigh Fermor writes, in Between the Woods and the Water, 1986,

“There was no dew; but mist wreathed the clefts and ravines. Faraway spurs rose up, stage-wings only defined by the hair-thin line of their summits against the next vaporous upheaval, each a paler blue as it receded, while the valleys that twisted downhill were dusky with timber."

Sounds like early mornings in Upper Ojai. Missing only are shepherds playing small bone flutes, their wives following in their wake spinning wool between distaff and spindle whom Fermor describes populating these wild reaches of Transylvania; but on cold mornings here in the Upper Valley there is the thrum of wind machines stirring the gelid air and dispelling the icy fingers of Jack Frost as he grabs for the tender citrus; at other times, the creak of pump jacks and the fluttering orange flag that is the nearby gas flare animate the scene. The settings are similar: the ancient human rituals of sheep herding replaced by automatons or, on Wednesdays, when Harrison sends giant trucks that grab our garbage cans and upends them over their gaping maws, before peremptorily setting them down again and departing in search of fresh canned prey - their human operators almost entirely invisible - by a mechanical ballet, staged against the stunning backdrop of chaparral, mountain and sky.

We get by, somehow, without a roster of Arcadian extras to flesh out the bucolic scene. Shakespeare called these all too human bumpkins 'mechanicals'. We have attempted to dispense with flesh and blood in this postindustrial world and the bumpkins exited stage left some time ago; our service workers are made invisible in the interest of creating the flawless, non-human, technological surface that threatens to shrink wrap our existence. Now we see little of our world being made (but suspect that much of it may be happening in the Middle Kingdom) the better to function as creatures of unalloyed desire – units of economic consumption.

In the village of my dreams there are cottages, workshops, crossroads, a church, a farm, stables, a dairy and dark, inscrutable barns. There's a blacksmith at his forge, a farrier, a butcher, a baker at his ovens and a candlestick maker. There’s a thatcher, a brick maker, a carpenter and a tinsmith.

There are shops - a butcher, a green grocer, a grocery store, a bakery, an ironmonger, a toy store, a book store, a stationers, a newsagent (because these reveries are often sourced by memories of England) and a bank. There’s a laundress, a tailor, a tanner and a gunsmith; even a furniture maker, a seamstress, a tailor and a cook. There is a winemaker and a brewer, a schoolteacher and an undertaker; a farmer, a jeweler and a silversmith; a woodcutter and a miller, a stone carver, a cooper and a wheelwright. There are agricultural laborers and ditch diggers - and Gypsies. At the crossroads there is an inn.

There is doctor and a lawyer, even an Indian chief (outside of the tobacconist); a fortune teller and a story teller, a bank teller and a musician, a soldier and an artist, a sign painter, a poet, a dancer and a druggist; a witch and a wizard, a cobbler and a preacher.

At a distance is a benign despot, The Good King.

Just your average chimerical village - where human activities are clearly attached to material benefits, life processes are attended to by living beings, and our nourishment conveyed to us by its farmers and its cooks, its processors and packagers; where the business of survival (of community, of life) is transparent. Where, in the daily round, the moving parts, the actors and the hangers-on, the movers and shakers and the mechanicals, are all on full view. A life where there is clarity of exposition. An existence where we understand the plot: where we know what's going on for chrissakes. We should be so lucky.

It is in our dreams, in our fairy tales, our myths and our imaginations that we seek exegesis: simple explanations for complex operations - or in economic theory. The fairy-tale village may be a construction of our childhood imaginations, built at a time when we remain mostly unaware that a taxman is lurking to enforce the social contract that each and every one of this happy throng (except, perhaps, for the itinerant Gypsies) has made with The Good King. Only later do we realize exactly of what those fairy tales had been grimly hinting – of the menace hiding in the bushes, of a wolf waiting to garnish our hard-won wages.

The Carpathian moment in Paddy Fermor’s sepia-tinted youth existed during the erratic rule of the Rumanian King Carol whose government swung between royal absolutism and an indigenous fascism. A brief alliance with Nazi Germany then led into the long night of Soviet domination, which reached its apogee in the nightmare of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu’s dictatorship which lasted almost a quarter of a century, from 1965 to1989. Through it all, victors plundered the vanquished whether by taxes or privation. Fermor saw an Arcadian idyll which, if it existed at all, was perilously brief and owed much to his own romantic vision when seen at first hand then further mellowed by the years through which his journey was recalled - something like the illusory village that lodged in my own callow imagination and that I now, many decades later, happily visit.

But we need to go back further than an idealized village, that figment from some golden age (reifications of which Fermor wanders through in Eastern Europe), to find The Happiest Place on Earth, in a Magic Kingdom (and that kingdom, of course, was not a kingdom at all), far, far back into time, before a long ago global warming presaged the end of the ice age and of the mega fauna that ranged the open tundra. So far back, that neither is it a village; so far back that this ‘it’, this nirvana, preceded the development of agriculture and of what Kojin Karatani calls “The Sedentary Revolution” (The Structure of World History, 2014).

Karatani makes the point that economic activity began with the pooling of resources within bands of nomadic hunter gatherers who also practiced reciprocal gift giving with outside groups. There was no incentive for nomadic peoples to store food – instead, they moved to an area where fresh supplies could be obtained. Acquisition ran counter to the nomads’ need for mobility and as long as there was room to roam and mega-fauna to hunt there was no reason to settle – where conflict was more likely with outside groups and, within the band, social malcontents could stir resentments; neither was there any desire to reside alongside their dead: far better to bury the departed and move on.

Between ten and fifteen thousand years ago, as the ice was melting, the steppes and prairies began to be forested and the great herds of mastodon, giant bison and other megafauna began to diminish. At the same time, increasing seasonal fluctuations in weather made foraging a less successful year-round activity. Global warming thus generated conditions prejudicial to nomadic hunting and gathering and fishing began to be of increasing importance to humankind’s survival. River bank settlements became proto-villages. Smoked fish created the first opportunity for the stockpiling of food - initiating the long history of resource inequality. Food supplies were soon augmented by the herding of domesticated livestock and the cultivation of crops. Notions of ownership developed that established the rich and the poor, those who had and those who had not.

As the climate warmed and the rivers ran more freely, construction of permanent settlements dependent on agriculture initiated a complex syndrome we know as Civilization - what Jared Diamond characterizes as “the worst mistake in the history of the human race” and with it, the degradation of the planet.

Human labor began to be commodified - something bought, sold or stolen. The weak toiled for the strong; leisure for the few replaced leisure for everyone. For the many, it was in Civilization, rather than in Hobbesian Nature, that life became nasty, brutish and short.

Long, long ago, the happiest place had been no-place - where there was little thought of tomorrow and little memory of yesterday. A filmic succession of places, a songline, a journeying embedded within the pulses of the planet as it pursued its irregular orbit around the sun, informed all of human life.

Only the sick and dying were sedentary, confined to one place: the village of the damned.

Zombie Apocalypse

 Anyone notice that Urban Wildland was on hiatus for a while?...Thought not.

Notwithstanding your lack of attention, I will explain. For the last ten weeks I have been co-teaching an on-line course with my pal Will Reed at the Viridis Graduate Institute – a feisty start-up focused on eco-psychology helmed by Lori Pye, a lecturer in Environmental Studies at UCSB and part of the core faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute.

As the sun moves ever south and its rays are spread lower and wider we have emerged, here in Upper Ojai, from the thrall of summer, but on this Thanksgiving day it is expected to reach into the high 80’s before we sit down to our mid-afternoon feasts. Someone, no doubt, will mutter something about global warming as we gorge on the seasonal turkey and pie.

Will and I were guilty of a great deal of muttering over the duration of our course, Re-designing Ecosystems: Cities and Communities, and it is conceivable that one or other of us may have mentioned the fact that our climate has warmed about one degree centigrade since 1860 and that this can reasonably be attributed to the 500 billion tons of Co2 Civilization has dumped into the atmosphere since we got serious about burning fossil fuels. Will, or I, may even have noted that this may increase to one trillion tons by mid-century and that by the end of the century the planet will likely have experienced a further average rise in temperature of 2 or 3 degrees centigrade.

Let me tell you, we tried hard to be neither sanctimonious nor alarmist (the one, hand-maiden to the other) – but if you think about the prospects for ‘sustainability’ (which was the un-spoken subtext of our course) with any amount of seriousness for even ten weeks, you will begin to think some very dark thoughts.

In the middle of spinning tales of doom - our Decameron – I flew to San Antonio. From the very back seat of a Bombardier CR1900, flying at an altitude of 30,000 feet, the badlands of West Texas appeared white-threaded with tracks and the sinuous black line of some tributary to the Rio Grande – or perhaps the great border river itself - lay like a loose strand of some mad-woman’s knitting on the land. Parallel tracks of an interstate headed for a group of buildings where deep pools of shade cast by irrigated trees foxed the unrelenting beige of desert. Most striking were the festoon of white lines that laced together rectangular patches of intaglio, white against brown. Branching chaotically, the mess appeared as though snow-white Christmas lights had been strewn across the land, perhaps by that same woman whose single strand of discarded wool it was we had flown over minutes before. Here, I knew, nodding donkeys lapped from deep beneath the desert crust where, in the Permian Basin, stew metamorphosed plants and animals from the Cretaceous – Texas Oil!

I was staying at the Grand Hyatt, eighteen stories of standard convention hotel with glassy condos above, in San Antonio’s down town -right across from a tired urban mall anchored by Macy’s and just a block and a half from the Alamo - on my way far beyond the traditional oil fields of the Permian Basin in West Texas, to the new frontier of the Eagle Ford Shale, deep in the south of the state. Cotulla, the county seat of La Salle County had once, it seemed, been a charming, if faded, Western cattle town. There are the remnants of its old main street with store-fronts right out of The Last Picture Show, but the action is now on Interstate 35, the great NAFTA highway that slices through the heart of the country from Duluth Minnesota to Laredo on the Mexican border. It also serves as the conduit between San Antonio and the oil fields of the Eagle Ford shale. Close to Cotulla, on I-35, are sixteen hotels with another seven under construction. Walmart and H-E-B, the giant Texas supermarket chain, are on their way.

Away from the highway, the mesquite brush that covers the South Texas plains (fire suppression has allowed the thorny trees to predominate the once more open savannah) is widely punctuated with two or three acre plots where hydraulically fractured wells pump oil from the narrow stratum of the Eagle Ford shale formation that lies between 7,000 and 14,000 feet below. Petrohawk Energy developed the first frac’ed well in 2008 and now over two hundred operators are involved in this ‘play’ with 268 drilling rigs active as of the week before Thanksgiving.

We began our on-line course with a recounting of the transition from the Paleolithic mega-fauna hunters of the last ice age to the hunter-gatherers of the Neolithic and onwards to what Jared Diamond calls the worst mistake in human-history – the development of agriculture. He suggests that,

“the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism that curse our existence”.

David Korten (The Great Turning, From Empire to Earth Community, 2006) takes up this theme by characterizing the last 6,000 years as a male-dominated, exploitative social pathology he calls Empire - in contrast to early hunting-gatherer settlements that were marked by the worship of female deities, egalitarianism and a profound lack of separation between human consciousness and the universal energies of the natural world, which he calls Earth Communities.

Will and I were both determined that before there was any consideration of “Re-designing….Cities and Communities” our students gain a thorough understanding of the impact of human activities on the world’s eco-systems over the last 10,000 years. Our primary ally in this endeavor was my old stand-by, Clive Ponting’s A New Green History of the World, 2007 (No Soft Landing). Ponting is blunt in his assessment, suggesting that since the end of the last ice age humanity has undertaken “the rape of the world”.

As we were developing the course outline, I read The Derrick Jensen Reader, 2012, and was tempted to make it one of the assigned texts, but ultimately decided against it. Jensen picks up where Edward Abbey (The Monkey Wrench Gang, 1975) left off and promotes active opposition to what he calls the death culture of industrial capitalism whereby the living planet is turned into dead ‘products’. On reflection, it was the right decision, but it now seems to me that a discussion of Jensen’s work, specifically Endgame, volumes I and II, 2006, would make an appropriate coda to our course.

Jensen suggests that Civilization is inherently un-sustainable and it is immoral to stand idly by as the world burns. He suggests that we act as enablers of the serial abuse of the planet unless we actively oppose Civilization, which, in its various iterations for at least six millennia, is founded on that abusive relationship.

The rape of South Texas is being undertaken deep below the earth where nine inch oil casing pipe runs horizontally for up to a mile and a half in each direction from the well head in multiples of six lines, 300 feet apart. Each of these lines has been perforated by frac’ing guns prior to the injection of thousands of gallons of water and sand that simultaneously open up and prop veins in the tightly packed shale which then, for as long as three decades, bleed oil into the pipe. It is an operation of bewildering complexity, technological sophistication and ruthless efficiency. It represents a stellar achievement of a Civilization, that for the last two hundred and fifty years, has been super-charged by the energy extracted from fossil fuels.

Beneath the mesquite brush, where white-tailed deer, javelinas and quail are still hunted (and stray bullets occasionally whine across the oil-well pads) this ‘play’ represents the last throes, perhaps, of a global oil industry in which North America has increased its production in the exact amount of the declines in other oil-producing countries.

Miraculously, this country’s Co2 emissions have been reduced by 4% (back to levels not seen since 1993) due to the rate of new natural gas-fired power plants coming on-line and conversion of old coal burning plants – all due to the downwards pressure on natural gas prices exerted by increased production from fractured wells.

Last time I checked, a gallon of gas was below three bucks – due to Saudi Arabia’s turning up the spigots in an attempt to drive marginal producers out of business. Ain’t working in South Texas, where the shale ‘play’ is viable down to $50 a barrel.

Like Zombies, amidst good news and bad, we continue to lurch towards the Apocalypse.

The Children's Crusade

The planet is in the final stages of a mass migration of humanity that was initiated in the mid-seventeenth century. After eons of civilizations based on highly circumscribed agricultural settlements where, for the most part, generations lived and died in geographical stasis, Europeans discovered the New World and then the Antipodes - lands that could be turned to more intensive farming methods and produce substantial new wealth (at the incidental cost of eradicating their native peoples).

Within a hundred years, however, the industrial revolution began to establish the city, for those without substantial land-holdings, as a more reliable source of income. From that point on, millions of people began to be swept up in a global diaspora where the goal was to exchange rural poverty for urban poverty. Now, in the twenty-first century, we are experiencing the final stages in this almost total urbanization of the Earth. People have been, and continue to be, both pushed out of the countryside by the establishment of large scale mechanized farming - that leaves little room for peasant agriculture - and pulled into the city by the lure of a higher standard of living.

In Arrival City, 2010, Doug Saunders documents the role that favelas (self-built shanty towns), squatter enclaves and urban-slums play in succoring the newly arrived, predominantly peasant, populations. In his historical review, he notes that “between 1800 and the First World War, about 50 million Europeans left the continent permanently for a new home…twenty percent of Europeans moved to the Americas, Australia or South Africa”. Half of these migrants ended up in the United States and settled in major cities like New York, Chicago or Toronto. This country, with the Statue of Liberty as its symbol of welcome became, to millions of Northern, then Southern and Eastern Europeans, Arrival Nation. Here, from often squalid urban beginnings, migrants could begin their transformation into the galley-slaves of consumerism – the Great American Middle Class.

Charles Hirschman argues that as the country became successively less anglo-centric (or WASP), it was the children of Eastern and Southern European immigrants, predominantly Catholic or Jewish, who helped pave the way for the New Deal of the 1930s, the Great Society of the 1960s, and the 1965 Immigration Act – political circumstances that would eventually lead to a wave of immigration from Asia and Latin America. Now, as the country heads toward a non-white majority by 2043, it is these new migrants that are poised to change, again, the domestic political balance.

Meanwhile, increased border security, including the infamous wall (where technologies are shared with Israel) has had the unintended consequence of preventing Mexican and Central Americans from returning to their home countries - and thus encouraging them to become permanent settlers in the U.S. The fence is more effective at keeping ‘illegals’ in the country than keeping them out - by raising the difficulty level of entry and denying migrants the easy opportunity of return. For a country founded on immigration, the United States has signally failed to uphold that tradition of welcome and refuge towards their southern neighbors.

Now, a Children’s Crusade is massing on the border established by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848. Like its original, eight hundred years ago, this new crusade is founded on a combination of hope, delusion and tragedy.

Early in 1212, a twelve year old French shepherd boy named Stephen, inspired by a heavenly visitation, began a crusade to win back the Holy Land from infidel Muslims. By the end of June, according to contemporary reports, this child-preacher had gathered 30,000 children at Vendôme, in central France, where they all began their march towards the Mediterranean port city of Marseille. Although many died along the way, the crusade eventually arrived and here, Stephen had prophesied, the seas would part and they could continue their journey on foot; but there was to be no divine work of geo-engineering and the children accepted the offer of two merchants, Hugh the Iron and William the Pig, to transport them across the Mediterranean on their fleet of ships.

Nothing more was heard of them until 1230, when a priest returning from the Middle East told their sorry tale of ship-wreck, enslavement, martyrdom for refusing to accept Islam and, for a lucky few, employment with the governor of Alexandria. (A History of the Crusades, Steven Runciman, 1951).

Ian Gordon reports in the July/August edition of Mother Jones, that 70,000 children, many no older than Stephen the boy-preacher, will arrive unaccompanied at the border this year. Prey to drug-traffickers, sexual predation and physical assault, these children are part of a surge in child-migration fostered by tales of sympathetic treatment by immigration officials, burgeoning drug-violence in their home districts, the underlying surge of the rural poor in search of material advancement in first-world cities, and most prosaically, hunger: Gordon notes that “the cost of tortillas has doubled as corn prices have skyrocketed due to increased American ethanol production and the conversion of farmland to sugarcane and oil palm for biofuel”.

They arrive from Mexico and Central America's Northern Triangle—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, hoping to send remittances back home or join a parent no longer able to visit them. While Mexican nationals, whatever their age are turned back immediately (to try again) children from non-contiguous countries can benefit from long judicial reviews of their status and settlement with a relative or an American family while their case is processed. Many successfully disappear into immigrant communities, or eventually receive legal status, and may achieve a level of education, food security and economic prospects that ultimately validates their long and often dangerous migration.

This, indeed, is in the tradition of our Arrival Nation. Although younger perhaps than most, they share in the struggle of arrival which characterizes the history of migration. Their hardships become a part of their arrival mythologies: their struggles transmuted into a determination that their success, and eventually that of their children, can assuage the trauma of their up-rootedness – their deracination.

As a part of the epic transformation of the planet from a rural to an urban way of life this new children’s crusade is also part of a trend which will see, by 2050, according to United Nations projections, a halt in the world’s population growth. Clive Ponting, in his A New History of the World, 2007, writes that it took two billion years for the world’s human population to reach one billion in about 1825, and is projected to increase to nine billion before the trend’s reversal in another thirty five years. The children massed at the border will be instrumental in effecting this epochal shift - unless they are returned home to poor rural communities where birth-rates remain high.

Stephen, shepherd and boy-preacher, stood ready to take his followers, children all, into the heart of an unfathomably alien culture and there convert the infidel to a Europeanized Christianity and return the Holy Lands to their iconic centrality within the Roman Church. The rag-tag assemblage of children massed at our borders is engaged in a very different crusade. They await not the parting of the waters but the melting of the hearts of this Arrival Nation – an atavistic return to the true spirit of this country, tragically first evinced by its native populations who welcomed the white man.

Each successful child migrant, however they establish their new lives, can thus, perhaps, count as a small part of our repayment of the heavy psychic debt we owe to these lands.

Blood Moon

Is Ojai cool again? It’s been an awfully long time, perhaps not since Beatrice Wood was a girl. The dead hand of the Ojai Valley Inn and the sepulcher that is the arcade have made this town a very dull place indeed.

Alex Proud, writing in the Telegraph notes, “I have seen the future – and the future is Paris and Geneva. The future is a clean, dull city populated by clean, dull rich people and clean, dull old people”.

Make that Paris, Geneva and Ojai. Except that something wonderful is happening in the Valley of the Moon. Hipsters have arrived.

Now some of you may be thinking that this is not an unalloyed beneficence. Many may have experienced being pushed off of the sidewalks of Venice and Silverlake in Los Angeles and herded aside along the streets and avenues of Brooklyn by twenty-something, facially hirsute and tattooed young men and alluring, inked young women lurching from noisy bars to shade-grown organic, cold-press coffee houses to artisanal bakeries and restaurants with market-driven menus. When they take to the road (where their elders may sometimes be randomly strewn, dazed and confused by this generational putsch) they are on fixies, Jack Spade messenger bags flapping in the breeze.

Here in Ojai, lacking the overwhelming numbers they are able to muster in the hipster capitals of the world, they represent a piquant seasoning to the still predominantly old, dull and clean - or at least clean shaven, and sometimes wealthy population. They do not threaten, they enrich. They will forever be exotics not endemics. But their influence is keenly felt………..and it’s a good thing.

Now, fortunately for the future health of the planet, hipsters have little interest in driving cars but they are curiously attracted to the derelict and defunct infrastructure of an erstwhile, car-centric world. Thus Summer Camp, a general goods store specializing in the ephemera of a simpler, pre-digital civilization, sits atop the toxic waste of a long-ago service station. The House of Fixies’ showroom (signage confusingly proclaims it to be The Mob Shop) is in the service bays of a gas-station that used to actually fix cars as well as sell gas (how quaint is that?). The building is thus re-purposed to cater to the urge for self-propulsion for which the aforementioned purveyors of hipster comestibles provide the necessary fuel.

One of the enduring mysteries of the modern world is that the increase in cars has resulted in the radical reduction of the number of gas-stations. Used to be, in the 40’s and 50’s, one could barely drive half a mile through Ojai without being beckoned by a forecourt enlivened by colorful gasoline pumps and their boiler-suited jockeys (or so the number of such abandoned and now re-purposed structures leads me to believe).

Pedaling east and leaving the many chambered, non-hipster, retail crypts of the arcade behind, our exotic, ex-urban twenty-somethings are accosted by the unbearably charming Spanish colonial revival forecourt that serves as an annex to Knead which now sells, in lieu of petroleum, serious hipster fuel – delectable, artisanal baked goods. Next up, our single-speeder finds, on the left, a Pet Spa specializing in the grooming of very small dogs, housed, inevitably, in a very tiny ex-gas station and, across the street, CJ’s repairs the farm-trucks of yesteryear in the service bays of a larger, but long-dry gas station - nostalgic, artisanal kinds of vehicles that still gladden the hipster heart.

Apart from its abandoned gas-stations there are few buildings in Ojai that might stir the hipster-soul. Adam Tolmach’s Ojai Vineyard now occupies one such, the old Fire House on Montgomery, a landmark WPA brick building which served the Ojai Fire Department from 1936 -1979, and it is here that his fine hand-made wines may be tasted. Predictably, the much lambasted (in this blog, at least) arcade, post-office tower and Libbey Park pergola, once the defining architectural icons of Ojai, appeal largely to the old and dull. The Libbey Bowl, set in the park, resounded to the sounds of an echt hipster band, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, for one brief moment -a magical night a couple of years ago - but customarily serves up, outside of its signature New Music festival, superannuated performers from the old and dull’s youth.

In the back of another brick building of only slightly later vintage than the Fire House Ben and Marissa, creators of Hip, a restaurant serving vegan food, have successfully bridged the gap between hippie and hipster and cater to locals as well as the Silverlake diaspora. The main room of this building (where once its owner Mary Goldberg ran her restaurant, Treasure Beach) is occupied by dba, a small design-driven architecture firm and P.Space where P.Lyn Middleton sells her stunning hand-made ceramics.

Now comes Warner Ebbink (owner of the Rocker-Hipster Coffee Shop 101 in L.A.), a serial restaurateur with an eye on the bourgeoning Ojai market, as the new owner of Mary’s building. His precise plans are shrouded in a too tight and too short hipster jacket of secrecy.

Topa Topa Brewery is optimistically proclaiming that its future space, the disheveled, barely roofed old plumbing workshop that has stood forlorn and empty for many a year on the Avenue, just west of Ojai Creates, will be open early in 2015. Some discerning residents consider this to be perhaps the finest of all the mid-century quotidian commercial structures in town but sadly its conversion to a code-compliant building will almost certainly eviscerate its charm. After a few craft beers (the young’s new wine), perhaps no one will care. Inspired to lurch west towards ersatz colonial arches, the buzzed throng might do well to visit The Hub - the single business that escapes the general opprobrium I have conferred on the arcade - a blue-collar bar that is ripe for a retro, PBR (Pabst Blue Ribbon) kind of revival.

Lodging for this youthful diaspora is now thoughtfully provided by The Rancho Inn, a motel from the 50’s recently infused with the early twenty-first century zeitgeist by two young, hip hoteliers. Regrettably, the new owners of The Capri, The Hummingbird Inn and The Deer Lodge have decided that there’s still gold in the old and dull hills. New publishers for Edible Ojai and Ventura have just replaced the perennially hip Jane Handel and they too, based on their first few issues, appear headed for those same hills. The two journals of Ojai real estate boosterism, the Quarterly and the Visitors Guide remain blithely unaware of the new kids in town, and continue to pitch their publications to guests at the Ojai Valley, rather than the Rancho Inn.

When Mike Kelley, the internationally acclaimed Los Angeles artist, visited town none of this mattered. His analysis of the place as evinced in a series of a dozen or more 8 ½ x 11 pencil drawings, currently on display as part of the massive show devoted to his work at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Gallery, depict three elements emblematic of this series of valleys - oil, oranges and the geomorphic shape of the enveloping mountains. All of which once seemed like the eternal verities of the area. Now, not so much: the presence of the oil industry in Ojai is an embarrassment to many while citrus is threatened by changing long-term weather patterns and a persistent drought – only the mountains remain un-moved by time, fashion or economic expediency.

The town too, is in flux. Kelley identified an arc that stretches from Thomas Aquinas College to the Libbey arcade at the center of town while citrus groves are shown quartering the East End. Hipsters who land here now favor the wilder reaches of Upper Ojai or the dramatic gorges of Matilija Canyon. The East End is dead to them, perceived as ground zero for the old and dull. For those youngsters with a more urban bent, Motown (Meiner’s Oaks) is an attractive, funky option with a growing array of hipster oriented services such as The Farmer and The Cook (Restaurant and organic produce); Book Ends (housed in a re-purposed Church) and The Coffee Connection.

The 150 artery, as Kelley discerned, is the life blood of Ojai but the arrangement of vital organs along its length is subtly changing: now the young are creating a new corpus corporis channeling energy to their favored haunts while the provinces of the old and dull slowly wither. It’s a brutal process, but one that is necessary for the continued relevance of our Lunar Valleys. This week's blood moon is a sanguinary harbinger.

Another......Beautiful Day

I have found, over the years, that the effort I have exerted in understanding a particular place from an historical, geographical, botanical, biological and meteorological perspective, is richly rewarded in terms of what I am going to call resonance – the feedback loop between a sentient being and its physical setting.

The scope of analysis can differ, but it does seem that the attention we pay to our surroundings enhances the possibility of symbiosis – where what we learn on a theoretical plane is enriched by the actual experience of a place. Perhaps it’s like knowing the plot of a Shakespearean play before attending the performance: an understanding of the narrative structure allows for an openness to the play’s more subtle emanations.

It is the weather, in southern California, that is one of the subtlest aspects of our environment. I often think of a remark attributed to Alice de Janzé in which she had once flung open the shutters of her window in her house in Kenya and declaimed: "Oh, God. Not another fucking beautiful day." De Janzé was a notorious Chicago meat-packing heiress and a key member of ‘The ‘Happy Valley’ set, a community of wealthy expatriates in East Africa in the 1920’s and 30’s, who clearly missed the meteorological vagaries of the Great Lakes region. I still miss the thunderous cycles of sub-tropical weather washing over coastal Sydney, Australia - that great build up of heat and humidity regularly broken by cyclonic storms - which I experienced for a decade before arriving in California.

Once in Los Angeles my regular plaint was, “and when exactly is the rainy season?” Although I arrived at the end of a wet calendar year, 1980, it wasn’t until January 1983 that I had me some serious southern California rain. It started raining late in the season, on my wedding day, the 23rd of the month, and It didn’t let up until late April, for a total of 32”. At that point, my meteorological acculturation was complete - with a visceral understanding of Albert Hammond and Mike Hazelwood's 1972 lyrics,

Seems it never rains in southern California
Seems I've often heard that kind of talk before
It never rains in California
But girl don't they warn ya
It pours, man it pours

Between 1986 and 1991, Southern California experienced a drought (I still remember the moratorium on water served at restaurant meals). Then the El Nino returned in 1991-1992 and began a series of wet winters culminating in the ‘super’ El Nino of 1997 – 1998, during which I was commuting a few times a week from Santa Monica to Ojai. In that memorable season the rains did not let up until the middle of May and totaled 41”. 2005 also brought heavy late winter rains (36”) to Ojai and briefly marooned our newly acquired land: the 150 was closed at the Grade and at Santa Paula canyon where it crosses Sisar  creek. The only reasonably wet year we have experienced since we moved in to the house in May 2009 was that first winter of 2009-10, when rainfall totaled almost 30”.

While it does sometimes seem as though ‘it never rains in southern California’ where one glorious sunny day succeeds the next, we remember the exceptions, the wet years….the dry, not so much. So it is that we find ourselves, in 2014, deep into a drought that has crept up on us like a (water) thief in the night. We have not, collectively, been paying enough attention and by now the emanations are no longer subtle: oaks are dying; year-round creeks are going dry and wells are failing.

Kit Stolz, a local journalist and the curator of a fine blog, A Change in the Wind, recently arranged a symposium, “Facing Drought Together, A Call to Community Response and Action” to focus the attention of Valley residents on the fact that we might just be half way through a 20-30 year drought. William Patzert, Ph.D., of JPL/NASA, introduced the audience to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) a measure of average ocean temperatures in the Pacific that, historically, switches from a warm-phase PDO (leading to cold and wet weather in the western states) to a cool-phase PDO, which causes warmer, drought conditions, every twenty to thirty years.

Many of Ojai’s residential and agricultural landscapes are predicated on a permanent warm-phase PDO. California’s agriculture was founded on such wet-year optimism: the cattle industry in the mid-nineteenth century was established during a warm-phase PDO and subsequently foundered disastrously when the PDO switched states later in the century - the industry then suffered a terminal decline from drought and drought-induced cattle disease. Ojai’s citrus industry may one day suffer the same fate as the Ranchos.

So, in denial of our own experience of the flood and drought cycles of southern California, it takes a NASA scientist to awaken us to the meteorological realities of our Valleys. A few days later, The Guardian published a synopsis of a new study sponsored by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center that suggests that industrial civilization is likely headed for irreversible collapse…………If it’s not one thing it’s another.

Every age harbors doomsayers, but it is undeniable that every previous civilization of the current post-glacial era, a 10,000 year epoch of civilizational efflorescence (a direct result of a warming climate) has collapsed in circumstances that are now alarmingly familiar. The study highlights the probability that global industrial civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

The sophistication of our late-capitalist western culture is no guarantee of its longevity. The study notes,

"The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent."

When I taught World History in High School, I used a college level textbook that, from my perspective, was blessedly free of pictures, bar graphs and side-bars. It demanded of the students a sustained textual engagement of which almost all were developmentally incapable. Oh well. But as we marched through the rise and fall of civilizations in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Indian sub-continent, we were alternatively entranced or bored stiff by the repetitive story lines. Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy were the recurring characters in these tales of unheeding hubris and mindless careening towards inevitable collapse. This was the mid to late nineties – when the writing on our own civilizational wall was not quite so evident.

It appears now to be all of a piece. Western Civilization is about to be added to the chapters of failed societies where the harvesting of resources outstrips the ecological carrying capacity of the planet and, concurrently, societies are stratified into rich Elites and impoverished Masses. As the lead author of the study, Safa Motesharri  makes clear, our civilization is doomed by either this collapse of the natural world and the resources it provides or a societal collapse engendered by the over-consumption of the Elites and the inequality-induced famine of the Masses or, most likely, a perfect storm of both.

What is striking about the report is that mathematical models suggest collapse is imminent, perhaps within the next fifteen years - which leaves me with the thought: Never mind the drought – Feel the impending civilizational collapse. Pay attention. Time and Place have assumed a profound, dystopian resonance.

Pale Creatures

Sleeping alone on a 90 foot fishing boat, moored just off the Costa Rican Pacific coast, Dr. Lori Pye was woken by a dull thud. Getting out of her bunk to investigate, she stumbled on deck and bashed her head against a davit supporting the little motor boat which kept her connected to the mainland. Knocked unconscious, she lay where she had fallen, quite still, until dawn when she became aware that next to her on the cold steel plate was another pale creature: a dead shark, wantonly fished from the ocean, its fins sawed off, and then dumped on deck.

Lori worked with the environmental-action group, Sea Shepherd, when this Godfather-like threat was delivered, presumably by a local poacher enraged by Lori’s work dedicated to the eradication of shark fishing – an activity pursued solely for the profit in preparing the luxury delicacy of shark-fin soup, largely controlled by the Taiwanese. Sea Shepherd subsequently endured an un-happy relationship with the Costa Rican authorities after their intrepid leader, Paul Watson, prematurely attempted the arrest of a long-line shark fishing vessel, the Vadero I, off of Guatemala before taking up Costa Rica’s invitation to help patrol the waters around the Cocos Islands World Heritage site. Watson was arrested when he docked in Puntarenas and charged with endangering the lives of the Vadero I crew. Watson and crew managed to flee the next morning but he has been under indictment ever since and last year was briefly extradited back to Costa Rica to face these decade-old charges.

Lori’s story unfolded in the Administrative offices of the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy in a Wild about Ojai talk titled, The Human Ecosystem (January 11, 2014).

Twinned, for a few hours, with a mammal whose consciousness had been brutally ended in asphyxiation while hers had been merely suspended, Lori awoke to an epiphany: that we share our home, the earth, with all other living things in a complex ecosystem that relies, because of human kind’s great ability to do damage to that home and the life-forms within it, on ours species’ collective psychological health - on our understanding of the balance, stewardship and comity required to maintain a healthful relationship with our environment. The well-being of the individual’s psyche can thus be the key to ensuring the outer, physical, health of the planet. After briefly becoming Sea Shepherd’s Director of Operations Lori retreated to the calmer waters of academia to pursue her passion for Ecopsychology, the discipline that addresses these concerns.

 Lori challenged her audience to consider how we might create, as she puts it, “a new narrative for the relationships between nature and human nature”. There are serious structural obstacles in the way of developing such a revised narrative. The foremost barrier to lives lived on the planet in a sustainable relationship - and there are many - is a collective psychological pathology, the transcendent ideology of Capitalism.

This system is entirely dependent on turning natural resources into saleable goods and at this point, as Jerry Mander argues in The Capitalism Papers, Counterpoint Press, 2012, we are engaged in a kind of global, system wide Ponzi-scheme. The collapse of our macro-environmental systems such as the oceans, the atmosphere, rivers and the climate, at least as we know them, seems inevitable faced with the resource pillage necessary to feed the beast, for Capitalism demands not a steady resource diet but one that grows with the expansion of goods and services (the measure of GDP) necessary to ensure ‘the health’ of our economy.

As I pointed out in No Soft Landing, the development of Capitalism as a dominant economic force in the West is coincident with the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels. As such it has thrived over the past three centuries when these resources were plentiful and cheap. Given the finite nature of the world’s mineral resources it is self evident that a system for which growth is imperative will, sooner or later bump up against these limits. Put another way, Capitalism demands the conversion of the living into the dead. Animals, plants, minerals, sunlight and fossilized solar energy are appropriated by the economy at a scale that threatens the very viability of the ecosystem.

The Capitalist bastions are manned by the super-rich. With the possible exception of the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age in late nineteenth century America, we have not seen such concentrations of power and wealth as exist today since the European monarchies of the eighteenth century - the excesses of which unleashed a democracy project that continues to unfold. That project, most notably in the United States, has now been captured by the Capitalist oligarchy, through political contributions and lobbying, and subverted to wealth accumulation and the cooption of the public commons to its own ends. Our government now routinely arranges for Corporations and their leaders to escape taxation, receive Government hand-outs and profit obscenely from health care, defense, communications and public works while belt-tightening in the areas of entitlements, education, social services and basic infrastructure is focused exclusively on the 99%.

We are thus faced with a system that is entrenched both economically and politically and supremely adept at the co-option of potentially threatening ideologies such as living in a sustainable relationship with the Earth. In the West, the development of newspapers in the latter half of the nineteenth century enabled the rich to quickly regain control of the recently enfranchised (male) masses. The ability to shape the debate around issues of war and peace remains with the media - still mostly owned by the oligarchy, and still supported, by and large, by purveyors of consumption, advertisers of goods and services blindly driven to an expansion of their markets - and is key to the demagogic control of the public-mind.

Eco-warriors such as Paul Watson operate entirely at the margins or worse, provide fodder for the media industry that perpetuates heedless consumption. Watson’s Whale Wars is into its sixth season on Animal Planet Cable TV which, as VP of ad sales Sharon O’Sullivan gushes to Adweek, November 18, 2013,

“… had all the pet endemics and all the major female packaged-good companies…now we have a really strong proposition against male categories—alcohol, home improvement and the more male-focused end of the movies category.”

Mander, like Naomi Klein (No Soft Landing), believes in a kind of Eco-socialism where corporations would be reconstituted “to harvest private interests to serve the public interest, rather than seek profit”. Perhaps he should try selling that idea on Animal Planet, right between the ads for Gillette’s Venus Embrace Women's Razor and Bud Light.

The history of systemic and radical societal change over the last few hundred years is not pretty, beginning in the late eighteenth century with the French Revolution and moving to the nineteenth to include that first foray into modern industrial warfare, the American Civil War; the twentieth century then offers up the grisly examples of Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot, to name only the most egregious actors in the effort to create new social, economic and political paradigms.

The restructuring necessary to accommodate a fundamentally altered relationship between humanity and nature will dwarf all previous efforts at systemic change. Interior psychological remodeling seems like a very attractive alternative but the ‘new narrative’ must necessarily wait on the unraveling of Capitalism. The resolution, for now, may be to initiate a slow, peaceful, pulling of threads.

Roaming Charges

The landscape in Southern California has not existed independent of human intention for more than 15,000 years. Over the last two and a half centuries, evidence of that intention has increased exponentially as population levels have increased. Residential, commercial, sports, education, entertainment, industrial, military and agricultural development – and the transportation infrastructure that link these elements – now dominate much of the land. Prior to the Spanish, Mexican and Anglo-American colonization, Indians shaped the landscape to their ends primarily through the use of fire – rendering the land more amenable to their hunting practices and seed gathering (Another Day) - but the scale of this impact was limited by their relatively small population and Neolithic technology.

My interest is in the edge between land that has been obviously intentioned, so to speak, and the acreage that is still contested – wildland upon which a variety of interests, oil, logging, recreation, ranching and mining (for instance) have designs and which are variously privileged by its owners - usually the Federal or State Government. There are thus two tiers of intention, one that impacts the institutionally or privately owned environment and the other that impacts government land, or ‘wilderness’.

Here at the interface, there are sometimes strange adjacencies: instances of public and private land conjoined in awkward entanglement. Take Black Mountain, known to the Chumash as Kahus, or Bear Mountain, which presents an iconic cone shape to us here at the east end of the upper valley and appears to have a definitive summit. Anyone who has paid attention driving east along the 150 past Soule public golf course knows that the mountain is actually a ridge line that runs parallel to the road before terminating at the top of the grade – the switch back that climbs a thousand feet to the Upper Valley.

Access to the mountain is through Dennison Park, a County car park, picnic, barbeque and camping facility. The park backs up to Black Mountain Ranch, a vast property owned by Richard Gilleland who made a fortune with the Health care supply conglomerates Tyco and Amsco. His ranch, part of the original Fernando Tico Mexican land grant of 1837, was formerly owned by the Dennison family. It is now immaculately ranched and fiercely protected. In order to walk along the ridge-top fire road, which cuts through dense chaparral, it is necessary to hop a six foot oil-pipe fence elaborately bound with rusting barbed wire. The ridge offers stunning north views of the lower valley over the golf course, Lake Casitas is to the west, and to the east, distant vistas to Koenigstein Road are visible with the Santa Paula mountains looming beyond; to the south, the view is of the ranch, where oak meadowland is threaded with pastures grazed by occasional groups of lustrous cattle. The diminutive publicly owned park, at just over 39 acres, offers an enticing gateway to the mountain-top wilderness at the edge of the 6,000 acre ranch but this promise, for most fence-abiding citizens, is cut short by the aggressive barriers to its privately held neighbor.

In hopping fences to access ancient pathways (Kahus was a Chumash sacred mountain) I assume my common law Freedom to Roam - rights which, in many European countries have now been formally legislated. In America, less so. As an individual one is restricted to National, State, County and City parks and some Bureau of Land Management (BLM) territory. In this country, rights of property trump the individual’s freedom to roam, but oil companies, loggers and mining operations play by more liberal rules and often claim prescriptive rights over private land. The Mirada oil company, for instance, is currently suing the Rainwaters, owners of the old County Honor Farm at the top of Koenigstein, for an easement across their land to access wells that, in a recent CUP hearing, they claimed they were abandoning (see CFROG).

In the land of the free we have allowed ourselves to be penned in. Because of the vast system of National parks, a concept pioneered by the U.S.A. and initiated by Teddy Roosevelt, few are complaining – but my purview is strictly local; I am not interested in driving to the Sierras to trudge through wilderness when there is so much right on my doorstep. Indeed, the tangle of wilderness, transportation corridors, residential, industrial, and commercial development, agricultural and ranching acreages and everywhere oil drilling, amidst the rivers, valleys, plains, beaches and mountains of Ventura County is of far more appeal to me than pristine landscapes that, until the last century, have rarely known the footsteps of humankind. There is a reason that much of the Sierras, for instance, were spurned by Native Americans – they are lands where it is wiser to let the tree-sprits and glacier lake sprites well alone.

The etheric skein that lays over these parts is harder to comprehend but when spirits are discerned their mood is likely to have been tempered by long association with the human psyche and its intention. More often, earth’s primeval, animating energy has simply been extirpated by a gross trampling of the land. This was certainly my impression when walking along the crumbling asphalt road that snakes along Black Mountain ridge – recent tire tracks suggested frequent passage of heavy trucks - belonging to either the fire department or the Ranch – or both. Any notion of tracing ancient Chumash or Oak Grove horizon inhabitation was quickly dispelled. Nevertheless, were I to regularly tramp this path I imagine some sense of its past might ultimately make itself felt.

Meanwhile, I am poring over the National Geographic map to the Los Padres National Forest East and seeing blocks of land along the Santa Clara River administered by the Nature Conservancy and marked ‘No Public Access’, some of which extend more than two and a half miles along the river. What barriers, I wonder, have they erected to my freedom to roam? We (freedom-loving-roamers) are assailed on two fronts: by perniciously paranoid private interests and well-intentioned conservationists. Both bring their values (or intentions) to the landscape in ways that are exclusionary. Simon Schama in writing of the Charta de Foresta, the Magna Carta of the woods, established in 1217, suggests that “ it was not a simple matter of greenwood liberty defying sylvan despotism, each wanted to exploit the woods in their own way”.

I certainly have an agenda in the wildland: to mine it for its historic, pre-historic and botanic vibrations – for my personal pleasure, enlightenment and psychic titillation. As well, I have a generalized interest in preserving and observing a particular aesthetic gestalt (comprised of elements referred to above) that privileges decay, industrial process, random adjacencies, edge conditions and native flora and fauna and disadvantages the new, suburban lushness, exotic flora and commonplace juxtapositions. These preferences can be easily accommodated if I can roam where I want – but most often I am corralled within the mundane. The pristine wildernesses carefully curated within our National Parks are one such common place and therefore hold little appeal.

We exist in a fast-changing world where the divide between rich and poor is becoming more entrenched. The rich maintain their wealth by the expansion and elaboration of a financial-technology complex that operates almost independently of ecological concerns while the poor resort to extracting food and water from the land in ways that allow for little consideration of its sustainability. In the diminishing space between the two, scientists, academics, conservationists and artists are left to consider their powerlessness in attempts to preserve the planet. I am one of the powerless, my goal is but to observe and sometimes record: while I have the strength to hop fences I am determined to maintain my freedom to roam.

Ruination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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