02023-03-19 | Environment
Standing up here on this slope as the sun hung low in a murky sky, I tried to imagine what a woodland composed of these oaks must’ve looked like 12,000 years ago & how the climate & surrounding desert must’ve changed since then. Moments like that are one of the most addicting things to anyone interested in botany – Gaining an understanding and a knowledge of the land you live on & how all the different organisms & environmental factors in it interact is part of what seems to make a fulfilling human life. It gives us a contextual setting in which to put ourselves & our own conscience & sentience, so that this often fucked up, insane world begins to make sense.
LIVING RELICTS OF THE DISTANT PAST — Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t
from one my favorite blogs and easily the one with the best title: Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t
02023-03-19 | Environment
Europe’s ubiquitous recycling system for household batteries means virtually none get thrown away. Why doesn’t the US have something similar?
Why Europeans Recycle Their Batteries and Americans Don’t
I remember taking a box of batteries to a recycling facility in Santa Fe and learning that batteries were no longer recycled. I was told that batteries had been classified as trash and we should simply throw them away. The caveat is that, I believe, this only referred to non-lithium batteries, but how many people actually check which batteries contain lithium? Battery recycling too difficult? Just call them trash and put them in the landfill.
Why are we becoming more short sighted, not less? Is the perceived tempo of modern life?
02023-03-16 | Book, Environment, Photography
Great macro photography gallery of slime moulds by Barry Webb. Many gorgeous images. Via Iain Claridge
Formerly classified as Fungi, Slime Moulds are no longer considered part of that group. (Wikipedia)
Here is a quote from Ways of Being, by James Bridle.
In 2018 the same slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, showed that it was able to solve the traveling salesman problem in linear time, meaning that as the problem increased in size, it kept making the most efficient decisions at every juncture. Using the same method as the Tokyo rail experiment, researchers at Lanzhou University in China placed scraps of food in the place of cities and used beams of light to keep it from repeating connections. They showed that the mould took only twice as long to solve a map of eight cities as it did to solve a map of four cities – despite there being almost a thousand times more possible routes. In short, the slime mould easily completed a task that the most powerful computers in the world – and humans – absolutely suck at.
02023-03-13 | Environment, Philosophy
Every moment is a new beginning
– T. S. Elliot
Life is one continuous mistake
– Dogen
Everything is equally evolved
– Lynn Margoulis
Life is soupy, mixed up and tumultuous. Muddying the waters is precisely the point, because it’s from such nutritious streams that life grows.
– James Bridle, Ways of Being
Every moment is a new beginning. That’s the saving grace… we can make changes, sometimes, usually, hopefully. The second quote sounds more depressing than it is. For me Life is one continuous mistake means that we might as well be prepared to keep getting up, because we will continue to fall down. I like to remember all of the lucky accidents in art, in music, accidents that became the defining element of a work. The stupid mistake I just made may lead to a helpful insight later. We move forward, we fall, we get up, we get used to the fact that it’s all a continuous mistake.
A couple of days ago, while walking through Santa Fe, a sentence bloomed in my head: We are all broken.
This sentence appeared out of nowhere, like birdshit hitting me square on the bald head. The deaths of loved ones, accidents, medical emergencies, diseases, depression, sadness. We may pretend on Instagram that our lives are perfect, but no life is. It’s not perfection that makes a life beautiful, it’s the Kintsugi… putting the pieces back together as best we can. As Ram Dass said, We’re all just walking each other home. Hopefully we can be mended like this bowl, and wear our brokenness in beauty.*
That brings me to the quote by Lynn Margoulis, Everything is equally evolved. Everything on this planet evolved together. Humans aren’t separate. In fact we carry several pounds of non-human critters in our gut and share DNA with many plants and animals. We didn’t rise out of nature, and we are not separate or above nature, we rose in nature. We rose in the soup, together with everything else.
*These words would make a great t-shirt: We Are Kintsugi…
or This Planet is Kintsugi… or Kintsugi is Life
02023-03-09 | Environment, Santa Fe
Crews are taking down dozens of elm trees on Alameda, on the river side. My first thought was, they should have started with us Europeans. We are a non- native invasive species. Walking past the tree carnage this afternoon I argued with a crew member, who shouted that I didn’t know what I am talking about.
He should read this article from the Santa Fe New Mexican, headlined Rethinking the dreaded Siberian elm:
But for all the hate, Santa Fe and many communities in New Mexico would have little shade without the dreaded Siberian elm. And now, as climate change increasingly makes the state hotter and drier, some researchers and arborists are rethinking the value of this hardy tree.
and
“It is a new world we live in, and elms are succeeding,” said Nate McDowell, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who led a Southwestern tree study that found that climate change could leave the high-desert mountains of New Mexico nearly bald, with the majority of piñon and juniper trees dying off by 2100 as a result of drought, heat and bark beetles.
“Do you really want to cut down something that is doing OK when other things are dying?” said McDowell, who is now with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory studying the effects of climate change on tropical forests.
To me this action of cutting down fifty or more elm trees, some of which were standing on the slope down to the river, with their roots keeping the dirt from eroding, is a terribly misguided project. There are thousands upon thousands of elm trees in Santa Fe. Take these by the river down and new ones will be seeded this spring. There are also huge lawns in front of big mansions on Palace Ave that are an invasive species of grass that requires lots and lots of water to survive. The irony is that mansions on Palace Ave are probably donating money to Friends of the Santa Fe River for this project.
02023-02-26 | Art, Environment
Check out this blogpost about courtyards in general and an unknown rock artist specifically.
