Opposite poles

I went to two very inspiring talks this week, that are both conflicting and complementary. The first was by Thomas Woltz, one of the principals of this firm. Super hotshot, wildly successful rigorous Environmental Design, and I capitalize both because the firm does the most gorgeous science-based design work I've ever seen. The catch is that he does this by milking a set of unbelievably rich client-friends and corporations, and convincing them to let him experiment on their land. The 22000 acre network of Virginian gentlemen farmer properties he has turned into warm-season prairies, for instance, or the network of defunct granite quarries he is talking the stone mining company into donating to the government to use as reservoirs, or, stunningly, the chunk of New Zealand he's gotten his buddy to start a 50 year restoration project on, from a 2 species sheep/grass ecosystem back to something like the original temperate rainforest.

Now, the model of enacting change where you get excited at people until they give you money to experiment definitely has a place, maybe a huge place. The land area you are working with is going to be enormous compared with what you can do on many public or smaller scale projects, for instance. But I find the power dynamics in this model very problematic. Design is sort of inherently a top-down process, and I am absolutely not a top down sort of person. Emphatically not. I don't like being controlled and my know-it-all tendencies notwithstanding, I don't have desire, not to say the social skills, to be a controller.

The talk I heard tonight was by Teddy Cruz, a UCSD professor who works on community-engaged design. His methods are theoretically complex yet highly practical. Of greatest interest to me were his redefinition of urban density as human interactions per acre, rather than units per acre. A high rise with no community gathering space is by nature low density compared to an area that has less people but more tiny businesses and card games and secret playgrounds. This is certainly socially true, and probably environmentally true too. A community where everyone has their patch of beans and you buy your tamales from the lady down the street instead of leaving the area by car to get your dinner is much more sustainable. I asked him if he had any thoughts on the legitimizing of illicit land uses (like the illegal tamal operation and gardening in vacant lots) and the implications that has for social control, and he actually had a set of cohesive answers! He stressed the importance of working with local organizations as intermediaries between citizen and government as a way of empowering disenfranchised people while insulating them from scrutiny, among other things. He also talked about designing flexible spaces--affordable housing with specific groups in mind, interspersed with public space with flexible 'programming,' to make space for spontaneous uses.
He spoke directly to the top-down vs bottom-up problem that I have been struggling with, which I have been trying to talk to all of my professors about without being able to get them to even understand my question.

So my next challenge, now that I have a discourse for how to talk about bottom-up design, is how to apply it to creating environmental change.

Agency, activism and place

So one of the main premises of my interest in landscape architecture is that the built environment effects the way people move, interact with each other, travel, and is generally central to quality of life. I certainly believe this to be true. But none of the academic discussions of 'place-making,' as we so arrogantly like to call it, has included a coherent discussion of how the people that inhabit a place can effect it, change its use spontaneously, shape its growth or degradation. I'm interested in this for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, a few thoughts on illicit use of public spaces. A great deal of thought goes into how to 'program' the uses of public areas. Parks and squares are obviously designed to be gathering places, for a lot of complicated reasons which include relief from the pressures of urban life through exposure to 'nature', recreation, health and social activities, profitable ventures such as music festivals, licit political gatherings. They are also loci for illicit use, for instance living in if you are homeless (oh noes!), and for protests. Spaces that are, by and large, designed to facilitate good social order are subverted. For a little while, we can make good on the fiction that the 'public' in public spaces is literal. I would be fascinated to study the ways that occupied spaces do or do not facilitate protest movements, and even more excited to incorporate some of these principles in design...

I am even more interested in what I consider to be a more durable form of action. How can we facilitate culture-wide behavior change? "I suspect that it's more important for me to get dressed and go downtown while the protest is going on than to stay home and make a giant pumpkin curry. But it would be a lot easier to be sure about this if I hadn't spent a decade so far using food as my preferred mechanism for social change," said a friend of mine on Facebook. This pretty much sums my feelings on OccupyWallstreet up. Small daily behavior changes, in aggregate, can make radical social and environmental changes in the long run. Here's one I have been thinking about, that doesn't seem like such a stretch: what if Americans could be persuaded to grow prairie instead of turf in their front yards, and lavish the kind of attention they now give grass on growing beans? Same behaviors, same level of effort, slightly different values. How many acres of prairie could we restore, that way? How many tons of vegetables? A book I'm reading for class, World on the Edge by Lester Brown, says that in Kinshasa, the capital of Congo, they grow 80,000 tons of veggies a year within city limits, enough to provide 65% of the city's produce. Surely we could could do that too.

If we are going to thrive as a species, and I use the term 'thrive' here to mean 'avoid billions of people dying of thirst and hunger,' every person needs to support the particular ecologies which support them.

So how do we design for that? Design is such a top down process. How do we build a world where growing veggies, living with twelve other people, caring for your big and little bluestem, or your cedar trees, is more fun, more appealing, more normal than living in a suburban house with a lawn and a car per person?

Rest assured that my failure to post much here recently is a lack of garden work recently.
Things I have been doing recently:
Planting second round of spinach, cilantro, mustard greens, shallots onions and leeks.
Repotting houseplants and porch plants (coffee plants and spirea).
Harvesting some of my food, most notably including my corn. I know it's early but some of the ears were getting bit of fungus at the base. They are beautiful! Pictures soon, I promise.
I went to the Oregon Nursery Association trade show, and ended up buying two amazing books, Don't Throw it, Grow it! a book on starting plants from your grocery leftovers, and Food Plants of the World: An Illustrated Guide. The latter is probably more useful, and I have definitely looked a bunch of stuff up in it already. Don't throw it is really much more exciting though. I have lychee, mango and avocado seeds planted, and pomegranite seeds saved. Next up, meyer lemon, kafir lime (because these are true-breeding varieties, not hybrids)and almond! Also next up, more windowside shelf space.

HAWK

HAWK
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

If it weren't for the chickens, I would unreservedly say I am doing something right/awesome in having a visit from this youngster, which I am pretty sure is a juvenile coopers hawk. As you can see, though, he was pretty excited by the ladies, who were pacing and bawking in hilariously useless terror (that wire under him is the coop). The chickens, which aren't full grown yet, are about twice his size. The internet says that it was once thought that coopers went after poultry a lot, and were hunted for it, but that they in fact almost never go for chickens. As far as I'm concerned he can go for all the pigeons and starlings he wants.

I didn't get a good picture of its back, but it has these great fawn-like spots.

Chances are good that I saw this kid getting conceived in a park near my house, back in April. (The best you can say about cooper's hawk sex is "grumpy ambivalence")

In other wildlife news, we seem to have a special needs possum living under our back porch. It is tiny, fearless and clumsy, and keeps getting itself cornered by our totally harmless cat, in plain sight. It is super cute. I hope it grows more so it can't fit under there anymore, but it has stayed the same size for at least a month. I'm sure I will find eviscerated by one of the more hunter-like neighborhood cats one of these days.

On balance, I am happy that our yard is a good wildlife hangout, even if it means extra vigilance.

wonder bean in flight

aerialbean
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

This is my tuscan wonder bean. It has climbed up its six foot tall corn and I may or may not have helped it make the leap to the adjacent shrub. It is also trying to make its way up the peach tree on the patch's other side.

More soon on the early phases of my summer harvest! In the mean time, check out the flickr set.

Summer is doing its thing

sunpattern
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

I don't have time at the moment to upload all my new garden and harvest pictures right now. Suffice it to say that that sunflower (the pattern is my doing) and a couple of others have been cleaned and the seeds are drying. Three heads came to about a quart of seeds, and I have approximately a zillion more to collect. We may try to make sunflower butter with them. We have this scheme, in the fall, to make a meal only of food grown in the garden, and if we make sunflower butter we can skim the oil and use it to make sopes or tamales. The first tomatoes are coming in. My volunteer sungolds are in fact sungolds, though slightly darker than they were. I think they may be ripening faster also. The extremely persistent but not totally delicious cherry tomatoes that are on generation 3 are both more delicious and starting to get that seamed look that heirloom tomatoes have! I will have to look up tomato genetics to get a clue about what is going on there.

I am really beginning to find the summer drought difficult. I kind of hate watering. I killed my wood fern by not watering. My sunflowers in the front bed that I haven't watered since my water barrels dried up are finally starting to parch, though they were okay through the heat wave. I will have to turn the hose on that side of the house on again. My potato boxes are also getting neglected over there. Oh well. Chris doesn't like potatoes anyway.

I finally figured out how to take close-up pictures with my crappy digital camera, so there will be many pictures soon.

first corn

first corn
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

This is the tiny baby corn from the precocious but ultimately stunted red corn plant which is now about a tenth the size of the others (which are probably 9 fee tall!). I probably picked it too soon (I'd meant to let them all dry on the stalk) so we'll see how well it dries. I tried a kernel. It tastes like, well, cornmeal, since it isn't sweet corn. I was expecting this to be more red, since the leafy parts of the plant have a lot of red pigment in them. There were red kernels in the mix i planted. I'll have to do more research to see if I can find anything on heirloom corn genetics.

It looks like I'm only going to get one cob per plant. I may experiment with clipping the tassel off the top of some of the plants to see if they'll put out more fruit. There is a complicated hormone related reason why that may work which I am too heat-addled to dredge up at the moment.

This is kind of a weird time in the garden. Summer squash is at eat-one-a-day levels, the basil is growing like mad, and I am kind of terrified of all the tomatoes that will be ripe soon. The spring greens are all pretty much toast, (aside from chard and kale, which are pretty much always in season). I would like to plant some more greens, maybe have another go with the cumin, and I have onion starts to plant, but I'm not sure I could keep any young plants alive right now. All I can really do is water.