maintenance

these are people that the government is forcing to do land maintenance, usually for vegetation suppression around roads and airports.
They're being forced to actualize a cultural belief about how land is supposed to function.



These are vegetables planted in the parking lot of a Chinese food drive through in Fort Bragg CA. It looks like it was recently converted from a mass of junipers, a prickly tough shrub. The owners removed the junipers, created small berms and planted bok choi, squash, cucumber, and beans. A single juniper was left in the beds and when we walked by a man was carefully pruning away the dead branches to reveal the trunk.

He was actualizing a cultural belief about how land should function.

data boom

The above two images show an aerial view of the Ashby fleamarket that happens every Saturday and Sunday in the parking lot of the Ashy Bart Station. The top photo is from the USGS Seamless database and is 0.33' for Alameda County, the bottom is from Google Maps. The GM aerial seems to be taken at an earlier date, based on how the shrubs along the north edge of the parking lot have grown in the USGS aerial. (or were they pruned?) Despite this the similarity in the layout & temporary structures of the flea market itself make it seem like images could have been recorded on the same day, perhaps just a few hours apart. Why do I only have access to aerial images that were taken on the weekend?
these and other questions, weekly and biweekly.

knowing snails

Back in 2005 I was working on an undergraduate thesis at Portland State University, studying terrestrial mollusk species diversity in a Portland Oregon urban forest.



It was a fairly straightforward piece of research that wanted to answer the question: what species of slugs and snails live in this patch of woods?

26 sample sites, 844 square feet per site, 21944 square feet total. 1004 total terrestrial mollusks found, 16 species, 1 range extension for Cryptomastix germana germana, 1 possible threatened snail, Megomphix hemphilli.



I crawled around in the rainy woods looking under leaf litter & sword ferns for a few small slugs or snails that I would temporarily corral, identify, photograph, then release.



I brought a few home with me, boxed them up, and sent them to the BLM offices outside Roseburg, where Nancy Duncan preserved them and stored them in their Oregon Mollusk collection.



I also took samples of the leaf litter, baked all 26 liters in the oven in our small apartment, then sorted through the detritus with a hand loupe looking for microsnails about the size of a pinhead.



the thesis is here, the associated field guide is here

The thesis process was great and the results typically "scientific" but they both lacked, in retrospect, any kind of discussion of the subtle character of the snails & the environment. There is no subjective information, information without numbers, or purely intuitive data in this kind of product. (Journal of Irreproducible Results which has some real oddities)
Snails are full of character, and spending time in their habitat gave me a lot more information than I could package up and put in the report. The literature seems to suggest that snails have favorite foods, preferred & avoided trails, repeat acquaintances, memories, can live for 20(+?) years, and make their way back to their nest even when picked up and moved (no slime trail to follow, how do they know which way to go?) Through my observations and sensing I began to understand how each snail was different, some were gregarious, recalcitrant, feisty, or gentle. Some were strong for their size, some were very curious. Slugs and snails seem to have individual personalities informed by their genetic code and their life experiences. They make choices.

The science that attempts to get at this holistic view is behavioral ecology. This research tends to focus on explaining the evolutionary origins of behaviors rather than finding patterns or meaning in how/why a plant or animal responds to its environment. What is the organism's nature? This is an extremely difficult question for science to answer and would require mountains of data just to establish action, nevermind motive (Do you know why you do what you do? Do you know the snail does what it does?).

Maybe the better method is to use intuition to establish a relationship with a given life form. Perhaps we could all be assigned a creature, like a zodiac, that we are responsible for observing closely. I think we would find that every organism has the potential to invoke empathy in a human. The ability to feel what it's like to be that plant, animal, or (archae)bacteria. While we call this "projection" and dismiss it as a human artifact we simultaneously labor under the belief that other means of knowledge production are objective and can create a reality divorced from individual experience, with repeatable results, and no fingerprints. A myth, that we believe in to guide our actions.

The explanation many indigenous indians in California gave for how they knew which plants were good to eat, weave baskets with, heal wounds, calm babies, make rope, was much the same; the plants told them what they were good for. A dialogue. Trial and error over long periods seems a likely way to have this conversation, but keeping the records would be no mean feat. Most California tribes had names for each plant, but also a more refined name that depended on where the plant grew. Perhaps our capacity for empathy is great enough that, if trained and valued, we can intuit our relationship to other organisms.

We're currently driving many species extinct without understanding what they can do. Human action has outpaced the system we have of establishing cultural limitations for those actions; science. Eliminating variables before we know what they are, erasing unknown knowledge, foot shooting. catch up quick! it's an emergency.

maintenance

a beautiful, healthy, and abundant landscape requires a lot of it at small spatial scales
replacing humans with machines may also mechanize the ecology
but for maximum resiliency use maximum diversity
we just have to start tending every square inch

photo from peter sucheki: 1/2 mastermind behind redstart
taken in blake garden

Back to the Land

After a long summer away from the Doghouse I've been putting energy into the garden, testing out some ideas and research I've been doing about taking care of the soil. What I've done thus far:
1. Fork up the beds whose summer crops had died back.
2. Mix in some composted horse manure bought at a premium from Berkeley Horticulture (the guilt)
3. Seed a variety of cover crops into areas that I'm not quite ready to plant. Fava beans, Austrian Winter Vetch, and some Red & White Clover. I sprung for the innoculant.
4. Seed a bed with a few varieties of radish and some turnip.
5. Seed a six pack of broccoli & cabbage for transplant once the soil is ready.
6. Transplant in giant chard, italian parsley, sage, and peas.
6. Snag a few bales of straw from David's house via PARK(ing) Day: "Hollywood Hoe-Down"
7. Harvest the forest of Arundo donax that regularly springs up along the fence and prop it to dry for eventual chipping via Anida's chipper (Assuming it's still up for use.)
8. THE CHLORAMINE ISSUE. Treating garden water with aquatic life protector & a few teaspoons of quality liquid fertilizer with no industrially processed nutrients.
9. Trap out 5 rats, all five clean kills, buried in corner by comfrey.
10. New garden gate: 1 redwood post, wire.
10. General weeding, raking, trimming, pruning, hacking, spading, picking, chopping.

Things learned:
1. Rats are suckers for peanut butter with a small piece of bread and a raisin stuck in it.\
2. Leave No Trace ethic is incorrect, it should be "Choose What Trace To Leave".
3. Deferred maintenance is often more difficult, time-consuming and tedious than daily maintenance.
4. Using weeds in the garden is tricky, my field mint was getting out of control but seemed to be keeping the ants out of the NW bed.
5. The distinction between and ecological decision and an aesthetic decision is constantly evolving.
6. The three primary elements are Camper, Campsite, and Campground
7. Started the 1859A Log, a journal of activities related to the house & garden that stays with this place the next tenants.

After a few months away from this project I decided that I should never be too busy to have a garden. Everytime I work around the house I have a sense of immense satisfaction and feel good physically and mentally. I also receive the added benefit of good food and increasingly healthy soil. I always have the time to garden but I often choose to spend it doing other things and pay farmers to do my gardening for me somewhere else. I think I have to put the same amount of calories into land as I take out or other energy sources have to be tapped to make up for the deficit, like fossil fuels. With all that extra energy we go the moon, make hollywood blockbusters, and build helicopters.

POLL

Insufficient turnout at the poll prohibits statistical conclusion analysis.

Photo Copyright. Shared Territory. 2009. HODGES & CO. all rights revealed

Utility Sleeper

The Utility Sleeper utilizes a ubiquitous urban infrastructure skin to camouflage a small homespace so that a human can sleep without getting hassled by the cops. Solar panels embedded in the skin provide power to a small fan that draws cool air from beneath the Sleeper and into the homespace to ensure adequate ventilation. click to enlarge or go here for mouseover version.