some ideas, some music, some gardening
Sci-News.com reporting on a University of Washington study:
… Yellow fever mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti) fly toward specific colors, including red, orange, black and cyan, but they ignore other colors, such as green, purple, blue and white.
I’ll consider this when purchasing shelter gear. I’m planning to use a white heavy duty tarp for rain protection because darker colors only exacerbates desert heats. This helps seal the deal.
Dramatic photo of Tuesday, the dog.
Sosa at the valley of Alcove Spring Trail.
Cady Hill in Vermont.
We have left land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you realize that it is infinite and there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom—and there is no longer any “land.”
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Book 3, 124)
In late-2020, I spoke with a mother and daughter from Wisconsin. The daughter, Shelly, is in her early early-twenties and about to leave with an undergraduate degree in hospital administration with an emphasis on ecologically-focused management. Shelly is eager to enter the workforce, but anxious about what good she can do in her line of work. With her minor in this ecological mindset, she worried that her idealisms of environmental-consciousness won’t translate into her work. Shelly couldn’t be “like everyone else”. She remained at an impasse, feeling as though the rails she started upon will only lead her to a path of mediocrity without ideals.
Her mother previously worried that Shelly was carrying all of this environmental responsibility on her shoulders, causing undue stress on the undergraduate since she switched majors from engineering into this hospital administration career path. Angela reassured Shelly that she’ll find a good job that will make a good impact on the earth. But! Shelly should not stress out about changing the whole world, because no single person is able to do that.
“Sometimes you just need to make sure that your family and friends are healthy and safe, which is most important of all,” the mother said. Shelly didn’t respond.
I added to this. “I agree with your mother, family and friends do need to be taken care of. But if you do see environmental injustices in the world—even if you can’t directly change it all right now, you can still contribute to the larger conversation. So the least you can do is write and talk about it, and use whatever expertise you have to forward the conversation on what is wrong right now and what can be changed for the better. I’d say that to really know that your family and friends are safe, you can work closely together to guarantee a healthy future for everyone in the family and local community. You have to write and talk first, or else there’s nothing for family, friends, and others to stand on.”
I didn’t expect much of a response. Shelly is testing the waters of life right now, and providing her the keys to a small but potent kingdom of local action can be overwhelming for someone that never grew up to believe in action. I believe that Shelly—like many of us—hope that there’s some organization that already exists that’s trying to do exactly what we want, thus making us redundant, able to wash our hands of a responsibility to organize action ourselves. It’s not out of laziness, but it is out of a shying away from any kind of boldness that needs to exist to enact change. Shelly muttered a bit and went to bed. Angela stayed at the kitchen table and we spoke for a bit longer.
“You know,” Angela said, “I guess when we get older we tend to lose those idealisms. That’s why I just say “stick to friends and family”, because it’s something we know we can do. After a while, we see the people who are most active fail or just mellow out. So we mellow out as well. But maybe that’s not what Shelly wants right now.”
—
Angela’s observation gave me another: We are living in a decades-long age without parents. Yes, everyone has biological parents. But these biological parents share little to nothing with their children on how to experience life beyond navigating institutions set long before they were ever born. Hospital bills, taxes, real estate, stocks. These are the abstracted realities that our parents can provide light guidance on before we then pass those skills on to the next generation. But on experiencing a good life? They hope that college, a well-paid job, long, global vacations and a fruitful retirement will be the Frankenstein-ian recipe for a spiritually well-lived life.
I ask you: Do you envy your parents in any way? Maybe as a child: I remember my dad’s old girlfriend worked in a post office and at first it felt like an adventure: mail coming from all over the world, right here in Mount Vernon. Even all the office supplies felt like toys. Paper clips could become anything you desired. There was a rubber band ball that I could bounce and take apart. Paper was a canvas to draw anything I wanted. There was a time in childhood when work, no matter how mundane, appeared like play. Smiling, playful people all having fun enacting these roles as mailmen, clerks, sorters.
But then you grow up a bit more and you find that this isn’t pay: This is survival. These people are doing all of this to eat. And they may have been smiling at a child, but they’re not smiling anymore when they’re alone in a post office, and they can’t find someone’s requested parcel. Even the smallest pressures of mundanity feel like the world is ending—because in the scope of this job, it is beginning and ending of the world. Serving the Mount Vernon U.S. Post Service enables you to eat, sleep under a roof, and buy entertainment.
When you find out that your parents haven’t been playing this whole time, and merely surviving a system that they can barely comprehend, you lose that pride you had. No wonder why adolescents are so moody: They are falling out of love with the reality they’ve been given.
Right now, during this pandemic, I see predominantly white-collar parents trapped in their home, interacting with digital faces on Zoom and taking crackling phone calls on speaker phone. How could I ever envy this life? What examples should I follow from these parents? That the desk, the couch, the bedroom is the place to be for most of my life, except when I spend money for global and domestic vacations? That life is mostly boredom with fits of pain and happiness?
We are living in an age without ideological parents. We are raised by biological parents, obligated to feed, clothe, and house us. But very, very few of these biological parents feel as if their child can do better in experiencing life than them. So these parents are okay when their children accept the same routines, because it at least worked for this generation. Lacking any idealisms of what things should be, and without living the life to make it so, these parents provide children the basest minimum of spiritual fulfillment. I thank my parents for the okay childhood that I had, but boy would I never wish it upon my worst enemy; for I want my enemies to be spiritual equals, even if ideological foes.
I see on forums and news articles that people in China call their president “Daddy Xi”. In the United States some ultra-conservatives also call Donald Trump “Daddy”. In the Philippines there is a sense of patriarchal comfort with Duterte, even as he rounds up “lawbreakers” for executions.
In an increasingly global society, our biological parents feel more and more neutered. They appear as shambling, grumbling, complaining zombies all on a slow stampede toward lives mediated by institutions and systems that existed before them. Once a child questions these institutions and systems, they get riled up, for the child is questioning that which appears to keep the world intact. So the children attempt to find new, ideological parents like Trump and Duterte and Xi Jinping.
These generations of children without parents so desperately want a father and a mother that will lead by example. And lead by examples that are not held up by increasingly de-humanizing institutions and systems. Unfortunately, it appears only grifters and authoritarians have discovered this vulnerability in global society. These new “daddies” seem to act for themselves, their iron-grip starts to look attractive, because the children know the alternative: grumbling, shambling.
There needs to be third way, or a thousand ways, one that doesn’t concede to the authoritarianism of the few or to the meaningless toil of de-humanizing institutions and systems. Once we can encourage ourselves and our children to take charge again, and not just repeat tautologies and falsities like “life isn’t fair!”, “you have to because I said so!”, “no single person can change the world”, we may just make ourselves more than biological fathers and mothers again.
I think that a given culture is a product of the prevailing spirit of the time—the zeitgeist. However, when I consider culture in this context, I’m not thinking about the product cultures of the 1980s versus the 2010s. I think that the greater culture we are enacting right now is over 10,000 years old; it is a culture that felt spited by a land that did not provide when needed, so humans had to take survival into their hands by manipulating the earth to ensure food security. Thus, we have a food culture that exists in spite of the forces of Nature: We employ new chemicals and genetic innovations so that even the most desolate land can bear crops. The fruits of our labors come in the form of being able to buy bananas at any Wal-Mart in America; almost no fruit or vegetable is ever out of season because the supply chain doesn’t even consider physical geography anymore. The whole world is now a potential grounds for massive industrial agriculture because the limitations of natural ecosystems were worth overriding. In other words, the spirit of our culture does not have to go out of its way to give up clean air, land and water for its desire to expand.
Zeitgeist is not composed of the individual actions by singular people or groups: it reveals itself by the aggregate effects of all these actions, and is up to the interpretation of those who discover its current form. This means that while great movements have risen up against the exploitation and pollution of air, land, and water, their effect on the aggregate result—an increasingly polluted earth—is evidently negligible. This is because these environmental movements have never integrated themselves into the spiritual level of the culture.
By spiritual, I mean the essential will of individuals and people. This can mean religion, but that’s not my focus. I do notice that the more popular religions, Christianity and Islam, have little to nothing about conceiving earth as anything but a resource to be exploited; in fact, the Christian bible’s god encourages one to “take dominion over the earth”. You can use religion to detect what has become dogmatic in our 10,000 year-old culture. To abstract the spiritual into the will of individuals and people is to
To believe that the land and water is anything but a resource is an exceptional perspective, and not the rule. Thus, the defaults of human action will enact the current cultural belief that Nature is a resource.
In another sense, I don’t think that the Agricultural Revolution has even ended yet.
The combination of features, like petroglyphs, geoglyphs and trail networks, and the landscape’s significance to the origin stories of several Native American tribes have led to multiple attempts to have the area, also known as the Great Bend of the Gila, declared a national monument. (“From the Gila River to Bears Ears, a renewed push to protect public lands in the Southwest”, The Arizona Republic)
This begs the question: Why not reintegrate these lands into the Native American reservations whose histories live on these rocks and boulders? Why rely on a bipolar political administration who can create and nullify national monuments as it pleases?
The expansion of federal protection over lands runs parallel to the disempowerment of local communities as they cede the ability to protect themselves and the land they live in and off of to distant, short-sighted land management agencies managed by politicians in Washington D.C. Bears Ears and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are a testament to the failure of ceding these powers to the federal government, where once protected lands are a political battleground between profit and “protection.”
It was a pillar of American democracy that federal powers were subordinated by state and local ordinances. As the 20th century passed, we have flipped the hierarchy on its head: Local communities are subjugated by state and federal agencies, sometimes at the cost of their health, well-being, and lives. Yet we feel an air of accomplishment when the federal government tries to “protect” public lands—a land that should have been managed, enjoyed, and protected by its local people in the first place.
On the conservative side, public lands are supposed to go the way of the Tragedy of the Commons: uninhibited, also known as exploited and exhausted. On the liberal side, public lands are supposed to be managed by the highest echelons of government so that it cannot be touched by corporations or the local communities who live off it. On both sides, the local community suffers as our two primary ideological factions seek to transfer public lands to those with the largest wallets or the most political power. The question one should ask: What does the community want from their land?
The phrase “public land” is a misnomer because it’ll only be public as long as it’s convenient for corporate and governmental interests, who are willing and directed to lock away and exploit public land when it feeds budgets and fulfills “conservation objectives”. The amount of hoops the public has to jump through to have a say over what goes on within public lands is astounding—the bureaucrats of the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are not elected positions and have no responsibility to the public; they are guided by Congressional legislation, not people.
And we are trying to push for more and more public lands to be managed by such unattached, publicly-uncommitted agencies like the Forest Service and BLM? What kind of cognitive dissonance must one adopt to complain about the failures of federal public lands and then push to make it even more federally-controlled?
Local communities should be brainstorming how they can take back and manage the public lands they live in and off of so they aren’t part of an ideological pissing match between conservatives and liberals, who will designate national monuments and take it right back as easily as the wind blows. Right now, tree huggers and Q theorists from the likes of Michigan and Arkansas have an unearned say in the management of Arizona’s Native American histories and the grounds they are written upon, and it makes no sense. In the case of this, the Fort Yuma Quechan Tribe should have a say, and no one else; we must give up our futile hope that the federal government can truly represent small minorities, and direct our hopes toward a future where local governance reigns supreme and communities can regain a direct say over what goes on in their physical surroundings.
P.S. I’ll be direct here: The federal and state governments are one of many actors seeking the dissolution of community. By representing no one in particular, these government bodies write legislation the erases the specificity of community cultures, and replaces it with a generic “national culture” that feels weightless compared to the tangibility of local cultures.
P.P.S. I’ll be direct again: I argue that public lands are simply lands under constant political pressure from two ideological groups. I seek to innovate on privatizing land: I want to “communitize” it. That is, I want to return public lands back to the people who live within and off of it, and let these communities decide for themselves what they should do with corporations, conservation, recreation, etc. Of course, this is a double-edged sword as some communities will decide to prioritize profit over well-being; if this is the case, can you blame the community when it has lived in a country that has always encouraged profit over personal and communal health?
Thus, if we witness the self-immolation of desperate communities and their land, we will immediately know that it is the national and global culture that needs to be fixed so that future communities will not see it fit to sacrifice themselves for corporate interests.
A dao that may be spoken is not the enduring Dao. A name that may be named is not an enduring name. No names – this is the beginning of heaven and earth. Having names – this is the mother of the things of the world. (Dao De Jing)
Here is the inevitable trap about concepts like “sense of place”: When you feel it, you’re not thinking about it. “Sense of place” is like that moment of pure focus when you have left yourself for another activity, yet when you snap back to it, you didn’t even know it happened. “Sense of place” is not an “ideal” like Nirvana or the Dao, but it is a mindset that prevails when you conceive of the earth a bit differently than how it is presented now.
The phrase “sense of place” became more common in the mid-20th century in the multidisciplinary intersection of architecture and phenomenology. Architectural writer J.B. Jackson had complained about sense of place as a “much-used expression, chiefly by architects but taken over by urban planners and interior decorators and the promoters of condominiums, so that it now means very little.” Indeed, writings on sense of place have meandered between forest management, tourism, festival organization, child psychology, and so on. But “sense of place” has stuck around with architecture for almost a century, likely because of its origins within an 18th century poem by Alexander Pope:
Consult the genius of the place in all That tells the waters to rise and fall Or helps the ambitious hills the heavens to scale Or scoops in circling theatres the vale… (1731, lines 57-60)
The “genius of the place”, in Latin genius loci, became a repeated phrase for centuries to come. For Alexander Pope, genius loci pointed to a divine guardian that took stewardship of a location; with god-like gifts, they could personally shape the natural landscape to their own desire. From this perspective, we could infer the aesthetic desires of a divine power by studying the natural landscape. On a more tangible level, we should be able to see the spirit of a township or its ruler by the changes made to the landscape and the methods in which buildings were constructed. Norwegian architectural phenomenologist Christian Norberg-Schulz, connected genius loci to the modern demand for a “sense of place” when entering a town or building. To Norberg-Schulz, achieving a sense of place meant to design a town and structure with full regard to the natural and cultural environments; in other worse, buildings should be fully informed of their context during the design process. You can see this in any city where architects are allowed some creative room, but still seek to constrain themselves by the styles and culture of the locality; even postmodern architects must validate their bold choices by reasoning that their building is attempting to convey the city’s “essence” despite sticking out like a sore thumb.
The underlying assumption about this architectural perspective on “sense of place” is that people do not want to be alienated by their physical environment, and would prefer that a new building still follows the same design language as others in close vicinity. It’s an aesthetically conservative point of view as well, seeking the traditional or the slightest deviations from tradition.
Why? I propose that there is a comfort in recognizable symbolism: People, seeking a common language with others, can find it in traditionally-constructed buildings; undermining that brings the more conservative to a literal loss of words.
The problem is that the architectural envisioning of “sense of place” depends on auteurs who are willing to put in the extra effort to design new buildings with regard to their cultural and natural landscapes. As housing and building developers consolidate and become more “efficient” in their design templates—in other words, reducing the number of variations in designs to maximize economies of scale in material use and logistics—towns and cities all over the United States are starting to look the exact same. At times I forgot whether I was walking through 4th Street in Austin or K Street in Washington D.C.; the mass housing developments in Stoughton, Wisconsin didn’t seem any different from those outside Bellevue, Washington. Even more visibly, Wal-Mart and Target and Best Buy effortlessly turn any plot of land into the same cookie cutter shopping center.
From a descriptive point of view, the why of all this is obvious: the United States has evolved to become a nation of chains and mega-developments, because that’s where the money is; if the money was anywhere else, we’d be there. From a prescriptive point of view, the why is more impassioned: The natural processes of centralized government and commerce, if unquestioned, will continue to erode any sense of locality or rootedness in the physical environment.
Think of the aesthetic conservatism proposed by the architectural “sense of place”—resistance to deviations in design will only hold for a generation or two of people. A once-contentious issue building design will look like cultural wallpaper to a child, who grows up with this building as a point of fact rather than a point of argument. The goal of aesthetic conservatism then should not be a battle over designs, but over the spirit behind the design: Right now, we see a cultural spirit to turn every corner of the United States into a templated condo. Understand the spirit’s origins by pinpointing what it fulfills in people, and try finding ways to fulfill people by encouraging an alternative spirit.
I believe that the current spirit against locality, region and natural environment is fueled by a loss of one’s “sense of place” and the seeking of this feeling within cultural constructions rather than that of the familial and natural. The problem with rooting one’s identity in cultural constructions is that one’s identity thus becomes as malleable as the symbolism of the culture. One may identify with New York City, but only with the magnificent buildings of Manhattan than the contours of the Hudson River. Another New York resident might think of NYC as “Brooklyn first, and then the others”. Thus the New Yorkers, while able to call themselves as such, will have no shared language with the other; as time passes, Brooklyn and Manhattan get replaced with new buildings and apartments and these New Yorkers, if gone too long, lose the language of their own locality. In other words, the construction one’s identity from cultural symbolisms is like trying to keep hold of a particle of water in a river: Before you know it, you’ve already lost that molecule to the un-ending churn of progress.
Rekindling a sense of place will not be as simple as taking a few hikes each day or joining the Earth Liberation Front. This sense depends on restructuring one’s perspective on land and water as not a commodity but the extension of the individual and their community; more accurately, the individual and community are an extension of land and water. If this is to ever be believed, then one must also think critically about the assumptions made by a modern, technological, global society, and how these assumptions produce a habitual distinction between humans and all other life on the planet. Finally, to understand the root cause of why so many of us don’t have a sense of place anymore, we must understand the spiritual nature of why we try to distinguish ourselves from everything else.
From Margit Wennmachers on Andreessen Horowitz, explaining the direction of their new tech-splaining media venture:
Our lens is rational optimism about technology and the future. We believe that it’s better to be alive after the industrial revolution than in an agrarian society. I say this with conviction as I grew up on a pig farm! Living through a pandemic has not been fun at all, but try doing it without technology.
When someone attempts to coin their perspective on the world with words like “objective” or “rational”, you will see anything but. Just read the next few sentences after the mention of rational optimism:
We believe it's better to be alive after the industrial revolution than in an agrarian society.
Paired with the first sentence, there are two observed implications here:
I came to Margit's announcement after running across a single sentence quote about “rational optimism”, but she filled the next few sentences with cognitively dissonant gold. I find techno-optimism to be a tragic phenomenon because its thinkers spend an enormous amount of useful energy thinking of ways to use technology to put out the fires of past technology, believing that what they're seeing is “progress” rather than the at-times literal wheel-spinning (electric vehicles anyone?). Techno-optimists are a people without a past, unmoored to the realities of what previous generations of similar perspectives have wrought against the health of the earth and the human spirit. They appear as patients of perpetual forgetfulness, clinging to a supposedly historical promise that “it'll get better”. And how? Well, technology feels like it's making our lives better, so I guess that'll be our buoy. And we see it with assertions like Margit's:
Living through a pandemic has not been fun at all, but try doing it without technology.
I can only be direct: A pandemic is impossible without technology. I know, our unmoored fortune tellers of the future cannot see the distant past, but before the internet, planes, ships, agriculture—technology as Margit might call it—the best human beings would have been able to do is an epidemic, and a highly localized one. If you want to argue the prowess of Western medicine compared to primitive treatments, you will find your argument hollow when indigenous people described the effectiveness of their own remedies. Sure, consider them wrong in the back of your head, but know that your “rationalism” only applies to your own constructed world of techno-optimism.
Soon the spirit of the indigenous people will die out, and you can erase the thousands of anthropological, archaeological, sociological texts depicting their enjoyment of a pre-agrarian, pre-industrial revolution society, but know that we human beings spent 3 million years doing fine without technology, and were not beset with the existential crises that we have run into repeatedly since we began and continue the agricultural revolution. We didn't have to tell ourselves with conviction that, after having grown up on a pig farm, we're past being an agrarian society.
You “rational optimists” of technology can only be so without the reality of humanity's history. The future can and will be made of optimism by applying a bit of skepticism on “technological progress” and a lot of our substantive learnings about the natural role of human beings on this planet. Spoiler alert: Technology won't be the future's defining character.