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Ecosystem Services Come to Town: Greening Cities by Working with Nature
Gary Grant
Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, West Sussex and Ames, Iowa, 2012

This book would be a good introduction to the ecological problems of cities and to the proposed solutions of restoring ecological services.

It begins by summarizing the history of cities and how they came to be what they are today. It moves on to looking at various ways of improving the forest, watershed, and natural functions of cities. It would be a good introduction to these subjects, as it brings together many different threads and thoughts that I’ve encountered elsewhere. In fact, the nice wide margins and complete citation on the title page of every chapter make it practically designed to be made into PDFs by a professor for individual reading assignments.

Given the publisher and cost, I was expecting something more technical than it was, so having said all the above, I found it a little disappointing.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

Cedar: Tree of Life to the Northwest Coast Indians
Hilary Stewart
University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1995

The Western Red Cedar (Thuja Plicata) was so useful to Coastal Salish people that they said it was the reincarnation of a man who was helpful to everyone. When someone needed, he gave; when someone hungered, he fed. His reward was to be made the Western Red Cedar, which was used for clothing, shelter, transportation, storage, and ceremony.

The bark was used for clothing; the wood for storage, planks for longhouses, and canoes for transportation; the withes were used for rope; the roots for baskets. A coastal Salish person would use some aspect of the cedar literally from cradle to grave.

Stewart’s book looks at each part of the tree and its uses in depth. The words are accompanied by detailed line drawings of tools that worked the wood and the uses it was put to. You might not be able to go and build a cedar plank house, but you could probably describe the process well enough for a novel. And you certainly have a greater idea of how important the tree was, and how many people making a canoe or a house required. Or how the baskets were woven.

I found the amount of detail intimidating, in fact, which isn’t Stewart’s fault at all. This would probably be a better book for reading the specific section that interested you, or as a reference in a paper. The material is presented at a writing level that would make it appropriate for high school or undergraduate research.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

Wild Plants of Greater Seattle 2ND Edition
by Arthur Lee Jacobson
Second Edition, 2008

If Pojar is a forest steward’s main reference for botanizing, then Jacobson (as it’s called) is the other reference. Whereas Pojar is focused strictly on native plants (with a few endemic weeds, like Himalayan blackberry), Jacobson attempts to catalog, as completely as possible, any and all plants that might be commonly found growing wild in Seattle, whether native or introduced.

What is a native plant, after all? What is a “weed”? Jacobson spends some time discussing this. A weed can be any plant in a place you don’t want it to be. Or, a weed can be a plant that colonizes disturbed areas, or has an aggressive growth pattern, or attempts to establish a monoculture. These characteristics have little to do with whether a plant was in this region (the Puget Trough) before 1850 (European colonization), the common definition of “native” plant. Strictly speaking the Port Orford cedar in North Beach Park is a nonnative, even though it comes from the coastal temperate rain forest. When does a plant become a “native”? Some introduced plants play well with others, so to speak. They provide food and habitat, and don’t attempt to establish a monoculture. Still, there are weeds and introduced plants at ever level of the forest canopy. Some are higher priority (ivy) than others (European ash).

“Wild Plants of Greater Seattle” is organized following the standard classification for general plant books — from coniferous trees down to ferns and horsetails. Each plant is explained in detail on the left-side page, with an accompanying line illustration on the right-side page. Identification notes are given, descriptions of the flowers and the months it’s likely to bloom. Edibility or medicinal uses of the plant are mentioned if important, although the ethnobotanical notes are not quite as complete as in Pojar.

Plants are indexed by common names only; when a plant has several common names, they’re all listed. The latin names are given after the common names. One section of the book that particularly appeals to me is “Where the Wild Plants Are: 21 habitats and their typical plants.” The habitats listed include “cracks, nooks, crannies in streets, sidewalks, and by buildings;” “heavy industry warehouse districts, freight yards;” “railroad track margins;” and the more-expected “Woods — coniferous; usually dominated by native groundcovers.” When I first read that, I thought it would be a great project to explore the city, and photograph native plants in very unexpected places. (I still do, but if it sparks your interest, feel free to go ahead.) Pineapple weed in a sidewalk crack is the very idea of nature intruding where we don’t expect it.

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Salmon in the Trees: Life in Alaska’s Tongass Rain Forest [With CD (Audio)]
Photography by Amy Gulick
Illustrations by Ray Troll
Braided River, 2010

The Pacific Northwest temperate rain forest extended from Mendocino County up to Anchorage, Alaska. It was larger than all the other temperate rain forests combined. You don’t think of Scotland, northern Japan, Chile, or Norway as having rain forests, but they all once did.

The southeast Alaska Panhandle, the northern coast of British Columbia, and all the archipelagos off their shores, are the largest surviving intact temperate rain forests in the world. This book deals with the Tongass rain forest in Alaska.

Even when being set aside as a national forest, the trees were made available to logging companies at dirt-sale prices; one article says a tree would be sold as raw lumber for the cost of a cheeseburger. Economics have weakened the pulp industry, and, in the way of extractive industries, the companies have fired the workers, closed the mills, and moved on.

What is left though is still intact enough to survive and is the largest national parks and national forests in the country.

This book shows us what remains in essays and photographs that made me want to go there. The Tongass rain forest is one of the wildest places on Earth. The essays range from rapturous homilies to the beauty of the landscape, to reports on research being conducted in conservation and ecology.

All in all, it sounds like a magical place. Burgeoning with life, all connected and living together. The essays show in great detail, with many different starting points, why this area is worth preserving. And not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because sustainable practices of fishing and forestry will provide longer-term employment than clear-cutting. Douglas Chadwick points out that a giant spruce, sold as raw lumber for the price of a cheeseburger, is worth tens of thousands of dollars when milled carefully to produce sounding boards for music instruments.

There are sidebar interviews with people who make their living in the Tongass — giving flying and boating tours, fishing tours and hikes, doing research. The photos are beautiful, adding to the information in the essays. I think the illustrations could have been reproduced a little larger — they look like “design elements” rather than an integrated part of the whole.

Salmon in the Trees was produced by the Mountaineers to bring knowledge and appreciation of the Tongass to people who might not have heard of it otherwise. I think it succeeds.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness
By Lyanda Lynn Haupt
Little, Brown and Company
New York, 2009

I read Crow Planet in December, 2010, during my first quarter break at Antioch. It resonated deeply with me, articulating ideas I had only half-thought out: about the city, nature, the interconnections between them, and our connectedness to them. It opened a doorway to other authors and influenced the direction of my studies.

Rereading it now, two years later and at the end of my BA, a circle has been completed. I’ve taken in some ideas of this book so deeply they feel natural, as if I’ve always had them. I remember individual turns of phrases, eloquent aphorisms. But I’ve also forgotten important lessons it offers about observing nature in the city, which in many cases is the study of the very obvious – crows, moss, weeds.

Crows’ intelligence and omnivorous diet has allowed them to prosper from human disruption of the environment. Their problem solving ability has been well documented, and so has their ability to recognize individual humans. It’s also likely that you’ve seen them play in high winds, swooping and diving. They’ve been observed sitting with a dying crow in a crow hospice and mourning the dead. They eat French fries as avidly as they eat roadkill. It’s pretty likely that crows will adapt to whatever humans do to the planet.

Which brings us to one of the main points of Crow Planet: their wildness and proximity can allow us to draw a connection between our cities and nature, a connection that for whatever reason we ignore. As Haupt points out, global warming means there is no place on the world unaffected by humanity. Conversely, there is no place where nature does not intrude; there is no crack in the asphalt that doesn’t have a weed growing through it.

This is a very important time to reacquaint ourselves with the connection between us and the world. Haupt explains that there are two Greek words for time: chronos, which means the regular succession of time (as in “chronology). There is also kairos, “‘the appointed time,’ an opportune moment, even a time of crisis, that creates an opportunity for, and in fact demands, a human response. … We live in such a time now, when our collective actions over the next several years will decide whether earthly life will continue its descent into ecological ruin and death or flourish in beauty and diversity.” (7)

Crows provide the opportunity to see the wildness and wild life that abounds in the city – that the city, in fact, is a zoöpolis, a meeting of zoo and polis, and is far from tame. This wild life might be thinner than in old growth forests, but it is inescapable. And it’s not only that nature and the built environment are entwined, but that the borders are permeable – from mud tracked into the house or a fly that came in through a window, to a hurricane flooding a city. “We are incapable of isolation. Every time we sip wine, feed the cat, order pizza, watch Survivor, every time we do anything, anything at all, we are brushing, however surreptitiously, however beneath our awareness –however, even, against our will – a wilder, natural world. Such awareness is simultaneously daunting and beautiful. It means that everything we do matters, and matters wondrously. More than we thought, more than we can even know.” (122-123)

It’s impossible to be isolated from nature, even in the densest urban environment: On a recent tour of the NuCor steel plant (West Seattle) I saw a scraggly bodleia bush, dusty blooms hanging heavily (I thought it was beautiful). It’s also impossible to be isolated from people, even in the most remote environment. Who made the 3 ounce tent you sleep in? Who made the freeze dried food you eat? Who made the water purifiers?

Haupt says this connectedness can be a mystical experience, and I agree with her. It can truly take you out of your skin and into something bigger, something wholly other, uncaring but containing everything. Being aware of this connectedness, and how much damage we’ve done to it, can bring one to a sense of deep despair. But this isn’t just a time of doom and gloom, this is also a time of kairos.

This opportune moment can lead to great despair – I’ve felt it. It carries an awful weight, as the doom’n’gloom scenarios become increasingly relentless. But Haupt chooses to dwell in possibility, to make room for it, to see her contributions as valuable. And that’s the path Crow Planet has inspired me to walk as well, however well or poorly I might.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion
by Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor

In his essay in The Heart and Mind of a Photographer, A.D. Coleman focuses exclusively on An American Exodus. He says that its layout and design presage many of the design elements we see today on the web, and that documentary photographers working today could do well to find a facsimile of the first edition and examine it in depth.

Well, the Seattle Public Library has a copy on their reference shelves. During Lange’s lifetime, there was only the one edition. There have been a couple facsimile reprints of the first edition, sometimes with new accompanying essays. After Lange died, Paul Schuster Taylor produced a second edition, but it was revised and reorganized. It’s in the first edition (or facsimile reproductions) that we see their statement in its most clear and direct form.

It was not the first work to combine photos and text about the Depression and Dust Bowl. There had been Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with text by James Agee and photos by Walker Evans; and You Have Seen Their Faces, with text by Erskine Caldwell and photos by Margaret Bourke-White. But this was the first to feature actual direct quotes from the subjects photographed, and deep socioeconomic analysis from Paul Taylor.

I felt this was the distilled essence of Lange’s photography. That, although not the best reproductions of her work (given 1930s printing technology vs. today’s), this was the purest form of her work I’d seen. The book itself does indeed presage design techniques now common, and I agree with A.D. Coleman that it’s worth studying. Unfortunately, I got so wrapped up in it I forgot to take notes.

The endpapers are a stream of quotes from people they interviewed, printed in all caps, without attribution. They flow across the endpapers in a way that reminds me of Jenny Holzer or Barbara Kruger. Each chapter focuses on a different region, working westward. The chapters start out with photos and brief captions, followed by an analysis from Paul Taylor. Another element distinguishing “An American Exodus” is their use of newspaper facsimiles and reprints. A newspaper ad extolling the depth and fertility of the soil of the Oklahoma panhandle, saying the farmer could be living a life of ease in just a few short years, is followed by a photograph of the dustbowl captioned simply “Thirteen years later.”

I got a better sense of the interplay of elements in the catastrophe from Taylor’s words than I had from other reading I’ve done about the dust bowl (admittedly, not very much). It wasn’t just the drought, it wasn’t just the mechanization of farming from mule to tractor. Also involved were farmers taking payments from the government for crop reduction, part of which should have gone to their tenants and sharecroppers. Instead, most farmers used the money to buy tractors and kick the sharecroppers and tenants off the land.

Tractored out, Childress County Texas, June 1938
Photo by Dorothea Lange

All the farmers moved gradually west, until they wound up in the central valley of California. Here they were met by large farms that were already industrial, already mechanized except for the planting and harvesting. When labor was needed, it was needed by the thousands — Lange and Taylor reproduce an ad saying “1000s of cotton pickers needed.” The farms there had already been using Philipino, Japanese, and Mexican migrant labor for decades. Now they were flooded by displaced white people as well.

Paul Schuster Taylor made a graphic representation of the migrant labor flow: An outline map of the US, the tributaries of the flow start further to the north and east than I had expected them to. But they build across the south, as the streams unite through Texas and Oklahoma, until they become a vast sideways river dumping into California. The sudden influx of labor drove down the already near-starvation wages.

And what happened to the migrants after the harvest? They had to choose between food and gas money. The car was necessary to follow the work, but there was never enough money for food and car maintenance both. If the crop failed, or if they arrived too late for a place, they were stuck.

The final chapter of the book makes suggestions for reform, calls for action. But you know, I couldn’t read it. I was already pretty wrung out by the sustained reading of the previous chapters, and I thought that reading the suggestions made in 1939, ignored completely or only half-executed, would have been too much.

NOTE: Since I’m working without Coleman’s essay at hand for reference, I may have either misquoted or unintentionally plagiarized. My apologies.

Here’s another article on An American Exodus, from the University of Virginia’s American Studies program. And here is a contemporary review of the book, by Paul Strand.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

Mr. Bristol’s Barn (with excerpts from Mr. Blinn’s Diary)
John Szarkowski
Harry N. Abrams, New York

You might not know it, but John Szarkowski has influenced how you look at photographs. During the decades he was curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he brought to the foreground such photographers as Lee Friendlander, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston, and many others.

After he retired, he returned to his own photography. His own work is nearly the opposite of the photographers above, about as far removed from the snapshot aesthetic, decisive moment, urban, 35mm street photography as it’s possible to get.

Mr. Bristol’s Barn was his first post-retirement publication. It features 33 duotone photographs of an old timber barn on the Connecticut farm he retired to. The barn was built about the time of the Civil War, and followed a construction style old even then. As Szarkowski says in his introduction:

The frame of a timber barn … was made from the trunks of trees, fashioned to a degree of reulartity with ax and adze and two-handled drawknife, and fastened together by mortise and tenon and wooden pegs. There were no standardized parts, and every joint was a special case. The buildings were expensive in terms of the material they used, the time they took to build, and the cost of the skilled mecahnics who tailored them, but this was not understood until something cheaper was available.

Living with the barn for years, Szarkowski had plenty of time to study it, get to see it in many different types of light, all different seasons. These large format, long exposure, low contrast, wide tonal range photographs reveal every detail of the ancient wood. But the details aren’t laid bare, as if on an examination table. They’re brought forward to us, for study, with a fondness and affection. It’s almost as if Szarkowski were standing next to us, and we could talk about the people who built the barn, who farmed the poor land (good for forests, too rocky and rolling for more than subsistence farming). The excerpts from Mr. Blin’s diary add a voice as well. Mr. Blin and Mr. Bristol were neighbors, and may have been acquainted. The diary talks of the hard, never ending work, the distant Civil War, and going to church.

I come back to how different these photographs are than the work he promoted as curator at MOMA. I like these photographs, but find the work of the photographers in my first paragraph more challenging. I want to engage in their dialogue, whether I take pictures like them or not, whether their influence is directly visible in my photography or not.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.