Bi-weekly Topic for Dec. 1, 2003
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20060117010714/www.magpienest.org/scgi-bin/wiki.pl?ProtectingPlace
Dec. 1, 2003
By Beth W. at http://longleaf.typepad.com/switched_at_birth/ Switched At Birth
My husband and I own one hundred acres of pine woods in Florida’s panhandle. It’s primarily an old growth longleaf pine forest, with some scrub oak, yaupon, wild blueberry, and a series of springs that make up into a meandering stream.
The unusual aspect of this is how close we are to the City of Pensacola. Our land is prime development acreage. Realtors call. We don’t call back. Instead, we call Meeks Farms and order more longleaf pine to plant. About 13,000 went in the ground last spring; another 8,500 will be planted in 2004.
Simply put, we made a decision: keep the land intact. Forego the monetary enticements which might allow us to do what? Buy condos in Santa Fe, Reno and Hilton Head? Nope. We are planting slow growing, commercially non-viable longleaf pine trees and other native plants, nurturing the pitcher plant prairie, and digging out a fish pond.
We have grandchildren whose idea of wilderness is a mall without a floor plan guide. Who throw up their hands in frustration with visions of terminal boredom when the batteries quit on their game boys.
Grandchildren who take a walk on our soft dirt roads tentatively, the great outdoors being a little too open to be comfortable in their experience and say to one another, “Look! A pine cone. In nature.”
When we die, this land will go into a family trust, protected for generations. During the rest of my life, my plan is to enhance it with plantings of more native plants, and to work with the grandkids so at least one among them develops a fire in the belly for this unique and beautiful place in the world, and seeks to preserve it when one of their cousins becomes a sharp lawyer and tries to bust the trust!
Place/Holders
By P.
I think that places are like children in one way: you protect them all you can, but you can't preserve them, outside of your memory. They will grow and change regardless.
And when you do try to save them you have to make choices. Which ones do you keep? Which must you let go, to build upon or rebuild -- for if you fight to save everything, you end up trampling the needs and rights of others and most likely are wasting your effort.
It helps a lot to be clear on what you're saving, and why, and for whom. It might be that only raw, bulk wilderness will do, as in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, or maybe it's enough to save a symbol, like the facade of the old Union Station in Columbus, Ohio.
For some people, the problem of saving places isn't really about the place, but about civilization and its discontents -- the clumsy work of tasteless designers, the burden of enduring thoughtless people, the whole lazy, wasteful lifestyle of suburban Americans, of whom I am, regrettably, one. Stopping such a tide is like trying to sweep out the sea. but the Dutch know you can wall off some sections of new land if you have dirt enough, and the energy.
I have lost a good many of the favorite places of my childhood. A creek gorge I loved to explore is fenced off, probably for liability reasons; the ancient factories I roamed are long gone, as fire hazards; a hill I often climbed is inaccessible and overgrown now, because of a highway. I miss them, but as an adult I wouldn't be welcome to roam places where a child could and, anyway, modern children seem to have other interests. I would have torn the factories down myself. You move on, to enjoy and learn in new places.
But mainly, I want to tell you here about one of the new places, the Shaker Lakes near my home. Surrounded by some of Shaker- and Cleveland Heights' best old houses, the lakes were part of a radical stretch in urban design a hundred and some years ago, and they remain for me to enjoy because of a knock-down, drag-out political fight in the 1960s.
Now, I can stand on what used to be the beach at Horseshoe Lake, fenced off from the polluted water, looking at the earth-and-stone dam and trying to imagine what it must have been like when the North Union Shaker colony built it in 1852, to power a woolen mill. It's hard to visualize, really. The beach sand is probably recent. The fence is new, and the wetlands plants at its foot must be still newer.
But the faceted stone bulwark and stone steps behind me may date to the original park days, perhaps to the late 19th century. The underbrush nearby, including cherry and apple trees and blueberry bushes, was clearly planted for the park. There may have been chestnuts and elms once, but now it's the oak trees' time to die, and the city has put out some fresh saplings, species unknown.
Most likely, a wood-burning community would cut most of the trees, and the mansions I now see beyond the lake would be standing on former plowland or pasture. The young trees I see filling the Doan Brook ravine screen a vista that probably once reached to the end of the lower, and older, Shaker Lake, where there was a grist mill.
The Shakers had a sense of beauty. They might have left some wood along the lakes -- certainly at the point, which would have been a lovely picnic spot near the beach where I like to stand. The point later became a wading pool shaped like an arrowhead, but now it's half-full of sand and surrounded by brush.
The Shaker colony lasted 36 years past the building of the second dam, and broke up in 1888. I imagine that the edges of the lakes had grown up in weeds and brush by the time the Shakers' 1,300 acres were sold to a group of investors, including John D. Rockefeller. It was Rockefeller who gave the lakes to the Cleveland parks commissioners six years later, and they became part of a park that followed Doan Brook clear to Lake Erie. It was the state of the art then, a park that followed the creek through its wild, romantic glen all the way down to the lake, with a pleasant road above the glen for riding back on. At the time, Cleveland Heights was attracting the cream of society in a booming industrial city, and, starting in 1905, the Van Sweringen brothers famously developed Shaker Heights along the lakes and to the south.
I can readily imagine long dresses swishing across the lawn under graceful young trees, and the days when they planted white oaks as a thin green line of monuments to World War I soldiers along the north and east sides of the lakes. There were canoists and swimmers then, but who knows whether they drank the water. I wonder if the relatively older money of Cleveland and Cleveland Heights disdained the newcomers on the Shaker Heights side.
The Depression would have changed things. It broke the Van Sweringens. Cleveland began its long slide after World War II, but the park was green and leafy in 1960, when the picture at top was taken.
That could have been the last green and leafy picture, because the county engineer, Albert Porter, soon proposed running two freeways up the Doan Brook ravine, then north and east to make connections within the highways circling the city. The Heights, still well educated and reasonably well off, revolted. When the dust settled, federal law banned routinely routing Interstates through parks and Porter, famous for calling the lakes "two-bit duck ponds," was himself history. To this day, Horseshoe Lake is as far as you can get from an interstate highway and still be within the metro area. That adds half an hour to any trip, but most of us who live there think it's very cool. Cleveland itself now fights expanding freeways, but with limited success.
The struggles had only begun. Race and class became the issues as the lakes ceased to be the preserve of an elite -- you can find a better account of all the years of change in several books, most recently "Cleveland Heights: The Making of an Urban Suburb". In my time, the uproar of the hour was a project to dredge the lake and refurbish the dam, which killed the fish, discouraged the ducks and left a band of empty grass over there. People were, well, mad.
In the snow, I can forget about the politics, for the park is only peaceful. The quiet hiss of flakes on leaves and branches mutes the deep rumble that has been the city's voice for the past century; the white washes out the dam and the underbrush on the scruffy north shore, and sticky snow softens the lines of the utilitarian metal-pole pavilion and concrete-block restrooms, both idle for the winter. This is not the place the Shakers flooded, nor is it where Rockefeller strolled, nor yet is it even the place that Al Porter didn't understand. It isn't mine, either, but I can share it.
I like to think that unlike my old haunts, the lakes will remain to stir my daughter's memories two decades from now. Maybe she'll remember playing "Rapunzel" and "Billy Goats Gruff" on the playground climber. Maybe she'll remember tossing stones in the water and avoiding goose poop on the dock. Maybe she'll remember adventures she won't tell me about. I can't know, and I can't know what she'll find here then. I just hope she returns.
Source: http://my.core.com/%7Epzicari/text/Saving.htm
protecting place
By John
Which place are you protecting?
There are so many places,
and they are all right here,
in the same place.
***
write this from my house, from my second floor desk, at the front of the 1893 Italianate I have lived in for the past five years. Protecting my place has a different meaning tonight, as my car sits in its garage, at the back of the house, with a bullet hole through the garage door and through the front bumper and through the radiator and possibly beyond.
The neighborhood is an old one, immediately east of Columbus’ downtown. Before the interstates tore through in an immense destruction of place (houses upon houses demolished; streets, connections, sidewalks severed; deep trenches filled with speed, noise, and exhaust ripped through the gaping void), it was part of the “Silk Stocking” district, home to the grand houses of the city’s elite. Now, it is home to a very heavy concentration of dedicated Section 8 (low income, government-subsidized) housing, and pockmarked by properties small and large that can, by deed restriction, never be utilized for anything else. The participants in last night’s shooting both emerged from an apartment in the Section 8 complex across the alley from my backyard.
Conservationists wish to protect the historic architecture, and the feel of a neighborhood with small commercial stores right up against the sidewalk where walking can accomplish more than just “exercise.”
One of the principal streets, Bryden Road, is governed by a Historic District code; homeowners must request permission for nearly every alteration -- even to repaint in the exact same color.
Most of the rest of the area is ungoverned by any restrictions, and beautiful, unique structures are often lost to expediency and ugly, unremarkable replacements. Or vacant, neglected lots of weeds and overgrowth.
Not everyone is a conservationist. Other people, such as an African-American artist residing for many years on Bryden Road, don’t accept the historic district code, believing that it is used not to protect, but to destroy their place, their neighborhood, and make it anew in someone else’s vision.
White flight had left this a predominantly African-American neighborhood by the 1960s. Columbus has a German Village, an Italian Village and a Victorian Village, but there is no African Village; mandates focused on 1900 seem to debase, if not ignore, the history of the area under its later, African-American residents.
Some want to protect the diversity of the area, and worry that the continued renovation of historic homes will drive up property values and displace the poorer residents, college students, and artists. These people are renovating themselves, but were drawn to the area by the many divergent experiences it encompasses and wonder if it is possible to retain that breadth even as it seems that the barriers to entry, in the form of income and wealth, may rise and rise.
To anyone hit by crime and reminded of fear, as I was last night, that continued renovation seems less certain than before. (I attend Blockwatch meetings -- I know that there are problems and dangers and guns and vicious dogs nearby. They have never come so close.)
There is very little left to protect in terms of businesses. The Main Street Business Association has determined that in order to attract them back to its boarded up storefronts (there are not very many that aren’t boarded up), the area must have more residents with incomes above the poverty level; this assessment appears to be in line with U.S. Housing and Urban Development guidelines which discourage high concentrations of low income housing.
Should someone worry that so many factors conspire to keep so much Section 8 housing in this neighborhood that its viability to businesses is compromised? Should someone worry that these high concentrations might preclude a safe, economically viable community?
An active religious organization, BREAD, comprised by Christian, Muslim and Jewish congregations, wants to protect the availability of low income housing. BREAD is concerned by housing codes, including historic districts, which drive the cost of homes ever higher. Some Columbus suburbs mandate such large lot sizes and expensive siding materials that the working poor are excluded from residence by the cost of building within these cities. In historic districts, materials required for period accuracy (multi-paned windows, prohibition of chainlink fences) can add considerably to the cost of maintenance.
BREAD has also aggressively lobbied the city of Columbus to tear down vacant houses to prevent their use in drug crimes, leading to conflict with conservationists.
(Above) Police tape across the alley next to my house marks the area as a "rough" part of town.
love this neighborhood. I love the diversity. I love the very different people I can meet just by walking down the street -- a man from the homeless shelter around the corner to a university president to a local artist. I love the people who want to make it better. It has color and texture (right now (though not usually) it strikes me as a “rough” neighborhood; perhaps see the “Photographing Place” topic for this fortnight) and history, and has been shaped by so many amazing and individual people I can never know.
Each house on each street was one in birth, and has grown more individual through its age and the habitation of the people who have lived inside its walls.
The physical imminence of Columbus’ history is worth protecting. Affordable housing is worth protecting. Interesting and individual architecture is worth protecting. A living neighborhood is worth protecting.
But tonight my thoughts of this individual place are shaped by:
Who wants a house with a bullet hole in the garage door?
Who wants to live in a house, fearful that the next bullet may tear through something living, something less easily dismissed than a garage door?
I am getting married next July. We will live in this house together. The room we have tentatively planned for her study is 10 feet above the bullet hole.
This neighborhood, this place, is worth protecting -- it is worth finding and working out compromises between the many different people who find it their home and their place and want to protect that sense.
But I will need a home that will protect us. Once that sense of security is breached, it can be very difficult to get back.
-- John.
Source: http://www.polyphony.org/jfsl/xyt2901.html
Enduring Places, Unaltered Spaces
By Fragments from Floyd
I don't know how the experts draw the distinction of meaning between space and place. But in my thinking, there would be only spaces if I did not exist, and you, and the countless billions who live and have lived and will live in these spaces. There would be no place if there were no names attached or values imposed on and lived within spaces. Places are spaces that have souls-- the linking principle between Spirit and matter. We give spaces ensoulment by belonging to them. As we find meaning, gather experience and lay up memory, we make raw spaces into places where life happens through time.
On this small plot of Earth-- our rough sheltered valley in the Blue Ridge of Virginia-- I am the steward, the temporary "owner". For a time, uncertain and finite, this place will be the tableau of my life. Decades from now, I'd like to imagine that my love for and intimacy with this place will live on-- not in the abstract but in the very particulars of the view out my window, in the same footsteps I tread in my day's walk. I have left a record of these days in what I have written to my children, and ultimately, to their children from and about this place-- a field guide of sorts to its natural history and to mine. If they in future years should care to know what our lives have been like here, they will need to know this place-- to sit where I have sat, see what I have seen. And so the importance of protecting place is a matter very close to home.
I have lived in the southern mountains all my life and loved them in a generic sort of way, but only known this homeplace for a short while. Many of my neighbors in rural Virginia have had family roots for generations in these green mountains, and so have ascribed immeasurable meaning to particular stretches of creek and to rock walls, to sheltered forests and gnarled trees and high ridges-- and of course to old home places and barns that have heard the communion of human lives through an unbroken hymn of years.
But when the tax bills become greater than the modest income of those who go on trying to make a living from their farms, there are always others with no value in place and its associations with human histories, but only in the space--ready to come in with a different set of 'best use' ideas that risk turning places with souls into commodities sold to the highest bidder.
When our land is sold, the next owner would be under no obligation to feel for it what we have felt. Ownership of land confers the legal right to make decisions that have no regard for the associations and memories and values of those who came before. The next owner of this place could terrace the ridges on either side of Nameless Creek and dot the hillsides with Swiss A-frames painted in bright pastels. A trailer court would fit nicely in our pasture. Summer tourists in Airstreams could park side by side in the cool shade under the Rhododendrons at the back of our land in that most quiet place that has been our "Fortress of Solitude."
While all of us must seek ways to protect places on the larger scale from countless forms of misuse, one person alone may be able to do little on that scale, for instance, to protect the southern Appalachians from the ravages of woodchip mills or strip mining. Perhaps one person could do more to prevent their county from being overtaken by shopping malls and fast food franchises. But my wife and I can act locally in the near term and with predictable effect to protect one parcel -- our place-- for all generations to come. We are putting our land under conservation easement. And so are several of our nearest neighbors. It will be protected from a future use that does not suit its nature or its history.
A hundred years from now, should anyone chose to, they can read what I have written about these hills along the banks of Goose Creek; they can look at my pictures of the creek, the barn, the ridges above us as they are today. And they will be able to go to those same places, hear the same sounds, smell the spicebush and pennyroyal in these woods and find, perhaps, the very same peace and serenity that I found there in my walk this afternoon.
In this world where places of the heart too quickly disappear under the machinery of efficiency and speed, I will be able to grow old here in this place, pass it on, and know it will still proclaim what I have known, immutable through the decades. What few dollars we might leave to our children will quickly pass. This place protected is our true legacy.
The Ecotone topic for December 01 is "Protecting Place".
Comments
I was reading this with much interest but have stopped to quibble about this: "Perhaps one person could do more to prevent their county from being overtaken by shopping malls ..." Not the content; it's grammar again.
"... one person ... their"? How can one person be a "they" or a "their"? But I see this use everywhere - even repeatedly by Pat Holt, who wrote the Ten Mistakes article you posted a while back!
Does anyone know whether "their" is now widely considered acceptable for use as a singular pronoun? Some argue that it's the answer for avoiding use of clunky "his or her" gender-inclusive language now that "his" is unacceptable. I discussed this a couple of years ago with Bill Walsh, chief copy editor at the Washington Post. He said: "their" is still plural, and the singular/plural mix is still NOT acceptable. But what's "correct" does change over time ...
Fred, you might enjoy a look at Walsh's Web site, http://www.theslot.com/ - he exposes embarrassing mistakes made by journalists.
Zinsser deals with this in _On Writing Well_. The problem of gender is with us now. He suggests either putting it into the second person, you, or rephrasing the sentence. In this case, I can see that you want to repeat the "one person" for emphasis and contrast, but instead of the possessive pronoun, you could simply say "the county" or "the home county." Another thing I do is just alternate. One person, her county, one person his something else. Another possibility is to turn it into "we," as in Perhaps we could do more to protect our home county. In this case, though, you're trying for the problem of the lone activist in the face of the Forces of Ugliness and Destruction. So far, though, I agree that "one person" can't protect "their" county, unless you've elsewhere referred to a group of people. The folks in the county look with dismay at the changes, but one person can't protect their county (where the they refers to the others aforementioned.)
I'm an editor. The use of "their" as a non-gender specific third person singular pronoun is not yet correct, but is a very common workaround for a bug in the English language. I tend to expunge it from formal writing when I edit, in favor of recasting the sentence or using the third person singular feminine if gender is indeterminate.
The thing is, the use of "their" in this sense fills a much-needed role in the language, and unless a better workaround is created, singular "their" will almost certainly become accepted in formal writing over the next century. I use it in informal writing without hesitation.
In fact, the only reason I expunge it from formal writing is due to the word's potential to distract those who read a piece primarily for correct grammar rather than meaning. Eventually, the point will come where I will decide such people aren't worth worrying about.
Um, nice entry.
"Places are spaces that have souls"
I love this phrase. It's as good a definition as any and better than most.
Keep on painting those word pictures Fred. Photographs are wonderful for allowing others to see what a place looked like in the past but a picture cannot tell another what the experience was like living there.
Quite by accident I landed on your site "fragments~from Floyd" while searching for historic farmhouse paint colors but I stayed awhile and completely enjoyed myself. I've lived in Texas for the last dozen years so it was so awesome to see the snow scenes similar to the ones that I loved so well in the adjacent state of West Virginia. My fifth-greatgrandfather Soloman Washington possibly died there in 1878
neighborhood story
By prairie point
You could easily think that there is nothing worth preserving about this neighborhood. It has no historic value. There are similar ones all around the city. It is just a unremarkable collection of small 60-year-old cottages originally built for working-class families that happens to be surrounded on three sides by big estates that cost twenty times as much or more. Still, a few years ago for a brief period a handful of people thought it was worth trying to keep it as it was.
For years the neighborhood changed slowly. When a house changed hands new owners would modernize the kitchen or add on a master bedroom suite or a family room. When we moved here ten years ago some of the houses were still in the hands of original owners. Most people knew their neighbors. They borrowed each others tools and looked out for each others kids. There was a small-town or country feel to the place even though it was in the city.
Then something gradually started to be different. New houses started to go up on the few remaining vacant lots and when they were filled up old houses started to get torn down to make way for new ones. These houses were much bigger. They filled their lots to such an extent there was scarcely room for a tree. Instead of a porch swing and rose bushes in front they presented a row of garage doors and a paved driveway.
At first we thought nobody would buy these houses and the developers would soon give up and go away. But that did not happen. A few people recognized that these changes would destroy the small-town feel of the place and decided to try to do something about it. They took over the moribund neighborhood association and tried to rally the neighborhood to their side. They began to publish a newsletter to advocate their point of view and to hold meetings. Legally there was nothing to be done since the neighborhood was developed piecemeal and had no restrictions other than regular city codes. But they believed that if everyone in the neighborhood shared their values and stuck together they could prevent the changes from taking over. They passed around petitions and presented them to builders.
From the beginning you could see that it was not going to work. There were a lot of people at the meetings but afterward they would shake their heads and say “Yes, it’s a shame, but everyone should have the right to do as they want with their own property.” Besides they might soon be able to sell out at a handsome profit and move on anyway.
Someone at least was threatened. There arose an alternative neighborhood newsletter, published anonymously, which satirized the association leaders and went so far as to name “tacky yard of the month” awards.
In the end of course they failed. All of the leaders have sold out and moved away. In a final act of bitterness they formally dissolved the neighborhood association and mailed the charter back to the state. One woman even sold her property to a developer. The house going up there now looks as if it may turn out to be one of the ugliest.
Posted by Bill Hopkins on December 2, 2003 10:58 AM
Comments
Sounds like my neighborhood...started out as a place for vacation cottages, then it became really upscale, then it transitioned into individual retirement homes, and THEN the developers found it and cookie cutter houses are popping up everywhere, cheap, tacky, and change hands every year!! Bummer!
Posted by: Mary Lou at December 2, 2003 12:14 PMMuch the same story that I saw unfold over the years in all the neighborhoods I lived in since we moved to suburbia in California.
Luckily, where we live right now it would be hard to build bigger houses given the forbidding slope of the hill and the friable nature of the rock that covers it. We don't have the prettiest backyards here, but at least we still have a bit of breathing space between houses.
Posted by: maria at December 3, 2003 03:15 PM
Source: http://www.prairiepoint.net/journal/archives/000228.html
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
By CassandraPages
ECOTONE post for December 1, 2003: “Preserving Place”
For many years I’ve puzzled over the fact that some of us seem to bond with certain places, almost as if a certain landscape, certain paths, certain moments we experience within a place become imprinted upon us forever. Like parents and children, some of us bond fast, and some not at all, and some of us bond to a particular place while others are more egalitarian, spreading their affection and care evenly over all of nature.
I care deeply about the entire natural world, especially the wilderness. But there is one place on earth that seems to have a special hold on me: the land of central New York State and the area around the lake where I grew up, and my parents still live. Driving into the region, there’s a point when I feel instinctively that I'm "home". It’s something about the geology, the particular glacial understructure of the land, combined with its agricultural history, that give rise to the openness of the fields and woods and pastures that roll over the low hills, and cause streams and rivers to flow in the valleys. The lake itself is a small glacial lake of irregular shoreline. My grandfather, his business partner, and my father bought the lake and the surrounding land in the late 1950s and divided it into lots for development. Gradually houses and cabins were built on the lots, but the developers had the foresight to establish a Lake Association whose responsibility was preserving, as much as possible, the quality of the water and the character of the lake. Motorboats have never been allowed, and there are rules for what can and can’t be built, and where, and what can happen on the shoreline or in the water itself. Over the years the lot owners, a mixed-income community of people who now mostly live there full-time, have been pretty consistent in preserving the quality of life and at least sections of natural habitat, despite the construction of homes.
I remember when there were almost no houses on the lake. I was very young, and we’d go up on weekends with a picnic and sit on the shore, fishing, or make a bonfire for warmth in the evening. My grandparents built a cabin, and next to it my father and mother built, with their own hands, the house where they live today. I carried rocks, spread tar on the concrete foundation walls, climbed on the roof, found fossils and just-hatched snapping turtles in the excavated earth. While the adults worked, I explored every inch of the land near the lake and across the road in the woods. I knew where the deepest blue hepaticas bloomed in early spring, and the respectful distance to keep between myself and the weasel’s home so that he would come out, in his brown coat in summer and white in winter, to stare back curiously at this large fellow animal.
I’ve never owned a piece of land, except for the in-town lot where our house stands. In recent years, though, I’ve come to think more and more about the lake house and the woods I hope I’ll someday inherit. During a recent visit back there, I asked my father to show me the map of the undeveloped lots across the road, and then we walked along the boundaries. There were two lots, inaccessible, that had been held by other people for a long time, and during the past few months my father was able to buy them. Now the property is contiguous. It’s not large, but it is the longest stretch of undeveloped property near the lake, and it backs up on cultivated fields that are unlikely to ever be subdivided. My father told me that if I ever needed money in an emergency, there were now several excellent building lots. I’m grateful for that. But my real desire is to care for and preserve this land forever.
As I’ve thought about writing this piece, Thoreau’s phrase “In wildness is the preservation of the world” kept coming back to me. This little spot on earth is barely wild, and it may only be special to me and a few other humans, but I know that I am meant to take care of it, and to take my turn in caring for the lake itself. “In wildness” is its preservation, but also mine. I know that a part of me – perhaps a far larger part than I even realize – would die if the woods turned to grass and human dwellings, or a new generation of lot owners voted to allow motorboats and chemical weed control.
The reason for this is that wildness does not only exist in nature, but in us. We are wild too, living in bodies made of stone and earth, star and water. Our souls remember the connections, even as our minds forget; we dream of water, and branches, and sky.
7:25 PM
Source: http://cassandrapages.blogspot.com/2003_11_09_cassandrapages_archive.html
Squatting Lightly On the Earth
By Laughing Knees
Oak tree standing beside the Maine coast, U.S.A., 1987.
This is the twelfth installment of the bi-weekly topics at Ecotone: Writing About Place. This week’s topic is Protecting Place. Please have a look at other contributions to the topic, or join in the discussion yourself.
With Russia’s official declaration earlier today that it would not ratify the Kyoto Treaty, because the treaty would limit its economic growth, a confirmation of the blindness and madness of the human world seems to have taken root and the shoots of the consequences will hereby officially make its first, introductory cough. The leaders (and, by association, the populace) are not taking the health of the planet seriously. You really have to question the sanity of people who fail to make the connection between the air they breathe and their own survival. This is the only place we have and yet we go on drunk, oblivious to all warnings. Nothing short of a super-hurricaned, multiple tornadoed, giant tsunamied, mass flooded, collapsing mountains, global food deprived catastrophe will seem to carry the clout needed to ring the bell in people’s heads that we are not going to survive this assault on our world.
The knowledge to care for our home is there. We know what to do, if we would only wake up. People like Bush focus on utterly petty concerns like the conquering of Iraq, but completely ignore the evidence of one of the most climactically disastrous years in history. Mass flooding in the States. Unending rain in Japan. Record-breaking heat waves throughout Europe (more than 10,000 people died in France alone). Uncontrolled wild fires in Australia. A new, unprecedented and fearsome drought in northeastern Africa. Huge super typhoons and cyclones in Asia. Unexplained mass dying off of mackerel and sardines due to new oceanic fluctuations. The entire, enormous island of Madagascar on the verge of an environmental collapse. The first melting of the permafrost in Siberia since before the last Ice Age. The breakup of the Antarctic Ross Ice Shelf…
What are people waiting for? Why do we deny that a problem exists? It’s like we have gotten caught up in a drunken party and are ignoring a great blaze burning right in our home, ready to bring the whole house down.
I was working for an architecture firm in Boston back in 1989 and one day was sent to measure and evaluate a site for a new holiday resort. I drove alone to the area, passing through wooded hills and New England style farmland. The hill where the resort was proposed stood overlooking a small lake and the surrounding countryside, with barely a break in the trees. I sat and ate lunch, sitting on a log and gazing at the clouds rolling by overhead. Birds twittered and sang in the tranquility, quiet enough to hear bees buzzing and grasshoppers zithering in the grass. As I sat there, the feeling that this place was perfect just the way it was crept up on me. More and more the prospect of walking around the site with a measuring tape and taking notes about the attributes and problems of the site in terms of architectural needs seemed like a foolish and unnecessary exercise. I did the work as expected, but as I drove back to Boston I resolved then and there that I would not be one of those contributing to the further degradation of the world’s already beleaguered natural places.
It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with architecture. Done the right way, architecture can help create extraordinary and integral human artifacts upon the land that exist almost as an extension of the land itself. Most traditional farming communities around the world have developed vernacular designs that work closely with the habitat they exist in, often enhancing the human presence within the landscape. One of the most ecologically balanced, human-altered landscapes in the world is Tuscany, in Italy, where a medium was reached, by which the natural world and the human world could co-exist without destroying one another. Traditional Japanese settlements worked much the same way, often with a buffer zone, a “commons” (zoki-bayashi or sato-yama), where wild animals dwelled and human interference was minimal. Such communities often continued for centuries with little or no deleterious effect on the land. Tokyo itself, when it was still named Edo, was once the largest city in the world, with over a million residents, hardly producing any waste, its water clean, its coastal fish the pride of the country, and nearly everything was reused.
These examples show that humans can create settlements and use local resources wisely, without destroying the delicate balance.
Ecologically efficient rural communities continued mainly because the amounts of resources they consumed and needed for upkeep were small compared to the ability of the landscape to provide, and also because they had time to become familiar with unique local issues of climate, terrain, feeding capacity, and so forth. With time many of these communities came up with unique solutions to problems that only experience could help recognize. The northern New England landscape was once plowed under to plant crops, but the poor soil and rocky conditions eventually caused many homesteaders to give up and move back to the cities, later to be replaced by livestock oriented farming.
Once human settlements began to grow, however, and the demand outstripped the resources, all the problems associated with modern development took over. The problems are so huge today that just attempting to figure out where to start to tackle the issues can leave one reeling.
Architecture itself has fallen into the trap of glamour and riches, often leading the drive into bigger and bigger projects, with less and and less thought given to the consequences. And yet there are architects who have thought deeply about how we might address the issues of huge populations, destruction of natural habitat, overrunning of space, and over-consumption of resources. During the 60’s Christopher Alexander and a group of back-to-the-land thinkers at U.C. Berkeley developed the idea of “The Pattern Language”, a kind of encyclopedia or almanac of typological precedents used throughout human history for dealing with local conditions or architectural needs. The book of the same name, “The Pattern Language” lists and diagrams hundreds of patterns and ideas that a modern day architect or settlement builder can browse and use within a design context. The genius of this idea is that it takes into account local differences and allows an individual to tailor a project according to individual needs. It is almost the opposite of the standard modular cookie-cutter designs that dominate most large scale development.
Another project that has been developing steadily since the sixties is the Arcosanti project, an ecological town in the middle of the Arizona desert. The brainchild of Italian architect Paolo Soleri, the town is being built by volunteers who develop solutions to onsite problems as they move along. Almost 40 years in the making, the project aims to house an entire town of 5,000 people, while using a minimum of resources and attempting to become an extension of the landscape itself. The idea of using a ecological town stems out of the premise that, if contained in a limited space, the population will cause minimum damage to the surrounding land, while providing all the needs for its inhabitants. Whether or not this idea will succeed remains to be seen.
Malcolm Wells, an architect living in Massachusetts, and with whom I was in contact for a number of years while I was still an architect, is one of the most influential architects promoting “green architecture” (See his book “Gentle Architecture”). He believed that it was important to build human settlements and buildings that put the environment first, so much so that he advocated building designs that actually incorporated the landscape as part of their construction. He proposed cities with forested roofs and subterranean streets to get cars out of the way. He is most famous for his underground houses which, when approached, look like gardens dripping with flowers, grass, and trees.
View of walkway to the dining room of the Hotel Fufu, designed by the Japanese architecture firm, Team Zoo. The area to the left, covered in grass and trees, actually covers an entire underground hall, complete with skylights and clerestories, vents and rafters. Above the Enzan Valley, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan, 2002.
Shortly before I returned to Japan I had a conversation with Malcom Wells on the telephone. He had just finished apologizing for not being able to take me on as an apprentice, when I asked him what advice he could give me for getting started as an architect, especially in green design. He first replied that I should make sure to get a thorough background in all the essential fields of architecture, such as construction, drafting, structure, materials, typology, history, project management, drawing, and design. Then he said one last thing which has remained with me to this day, and which defines how I want to approach all the work that defines my commitment to the natural world:
He said (at least to this effect), “Forget the new sites and new developments. Forget trying to break new ground on pristine land. Instead, find the ugliest, most polluted, most badly damaged strip of earth you can and dedicate yourself to bringing it back to life. Find the beauty in it and revive it. Coax wild animals back to inhabit it. And when you’re done, be able to say that you helped the place to grow more healthy and beautiful than it was before it was destroyed.”
This is what the preservation of the world ought to be, I believe. We need to learn to be healers. If nothing else, we can start small, right here where we stand.
Posted by butuki at 03:49 AM in Nature and Place | Permalink | Comments (9)
Comments
This is a truly inspiring piece, written from the heart yet informed and informing. I love the way it ends on such a positive, constructive note. It is a real struggle to work out ways of going forward in world which is run by uncaring, destructive forces. I have a need to find encouragement and guidance from others more and more these days. So thanks for yours and Malcolm’s.
Posted by Coup de Vent at December 4, 2003 06:49 AMI’m moved. You’ve packed so much into this post it’s hard to know where to begin in responding. Two things that spoke to me in particular, coming from my own background and interest in such ideas, are your question of how people can ignore huge global alterations and your thoughts on finding a home in the environment instead of outside it.
A point I have been arguing for some time now is that many of the problems we face in terms of environmental degradation rest, ultimately, on a human conceit that they somehow take place in a world separate from that of human beings. I see the answer to this (well, a limited answer, anyway — the problem is centuries in the making!) is first, challenging the mental and cultural patterns that allow people to think this way easily and without much care, and second, doing things like you advocate here, namely getting people to understandin a gut-level, lived-daily way, the connections between the place they are and the larger world beyond them.
So hard to do, and so necessary. I take small — but real — hope in the fact that more people seem to be speaking of these things these days, even if their voices are not always easy to hear above the drone of the indifferent.
Posted by Rana at December 4, 2003 07:57 AMThis is a beautifully written and most compelling piece. Malcolm Wells’ statement puts it exactly right. One of the saddest aspects of so much contemporary development is that it almost never re-uses prior structures or locations; thus we get sprawl and blight — much like the growth of a perennial that sends out shoots to the sides but dies in the center. My husband and I once considered buyin a beautiful piece fo land and buildin gon it, like so many of the people here do. But we opted to stay in our house in the village and try to improve it, and I’m glad. I dont’ want to contribute to that overtaking of nature either, any more than I already do by being a consumer.
By the way, I loved “A Pattern Language” and have it on my shelf.
Posted by beth at December 4, 2003 02:51 PMIn college, I picked up a book titled The Prodigious Builders, about the structures people made when they didn’t bother with plumb lines or squares. I got it mainly for the pictures, because the shapes were so interesting. There was some sections on cave dwellings, and on grass houses, and that sort of thing. Mostly focused on organic building, where people started with whatever was to hand and worked with that until they had a shelter (or whatever it was they wanted).
Posted by pericat at December 4, 2003 05:52 PMA few weeks ago I wrote about my visit to Bamberger Ranch in the Texas Hill Country, whose owner David Bamberger claims he started out with the “absolute worse piece of land he could find.” Actually I noticed a bit of a flair for dramatic effect so maybe it was not really the “absolute” worst.
Whether he knows of Malcolm Wells or not, and he probably does, he has followed his advice to the letter. Streams that were once dry have started to flow once again. He has opened his property to educational tours to show what can be done.
Posted by bill at December 4, 2003 11:12 PMA great piece, Miguel.
This is a bit tangential, but about sticking with dwellings — yesterday I drove through a housing development that I loathed when it was first built twenty-five years ago. The place was transformed. The houses weren’t all the same now: people had altered them & painted them odd colors, trees and shrubs had grown up, sheds had sprouted, fences had mutated and differentiated — all the horrible symmetry and dead, pretentious, abstract design had been overgrown with twenty-five years of human life, and the suburb, tho it may not have been inspiring, looked like quite a decent place to live. There was something very comforting about that.
Posted by Dale at December 4, 2003 11:32 PMCoup de Vent- In spite of all the awful things going on in the world today, one of the things I do believe about human beings is their incredible ability to imagine. If we would all trust in our imaginations more and think of ways to overcome the problems (not necessarily technologically), we could really create a wonderful world. Who would have imagined something like blogging twenty years ago?
Rana- Europeans often speak of the great shift in human consciousness as the realization that the Earth was not the center of the universe (the Chinese and Indians and Arabs already knew this). I think the next great shift in human consciousness is the final acceptance of the truth that we are animals. We know this intellectually, but have yet to really take it to heart. Until we do we will never really understand ourselves and our limitations.
Beth- Ask any architect what buildings they enjoy the most and almost always the answer is an old structure with history and character. There is something compelling and alive about old houses and old places. Perhaps it is a recognition on our part of our own participation in the circle of life.
Pericat- Underground buildings are definitely not anything new. In China people have been living underground for thousands of years. In Cappadocia, Turkey, people have been living in limestone caves and underground for hundreds of years, in some of the most interesting and unusual dwellings ever devised by humans.
Bill- I fell in love with earth shelters the first time I saw them. Besides being very practical and efficient, there is also something inspiring and magical about a home where the garden is part of the structure. Another building philosophy is Baubiologie or Building Biology, an idea first developed in Germany by architect Helmut Ziehe. The philosophy works on the idea of buildings being seen as living organisms, and in its extreme form, being built from actual living things like trees and bamboo and such.
Dale- No matter how much we try to impose our limited systems upon the world, nature will always, in the end, have its way. Humans themselves are intimately natural in their very nature; and with time that will show. Even were we to destroy the entire human veneer, the planet itself would regrow. It is our own survival and our relationship to the natural world that worries me. If we don’t step lightly we will destroy ourselves. Ultimately the “husbandry of nature” is a selfish act… we are only hurting ourselves right now, I think.
Posted by butuki at December 5, 2003 12:43 AMUnderground buildings are definitely not anything new.
I didn’t mean to suggest they were, or that this book was focusing on modern buildings; the first third (I’ve actually re-located it) is mostly pre-history, and is the part I remembered, since it was why I bought the book in the first place. :)
The author is Bernard Rudofsky, if that helps.
Posted by pericat at December 6, 2003 03:13 AMPericat… sorry if I sounded as if I were trying to correct you or second-guess you. I actually read Rudofsky’s book while in college (I also own “Architecture Without Architects”. Rudofsky was one of the people who got me interested in vernacular architecture, and in architecture without some special, cliquish status). I was trying to fit you into a general discussion with the others who made comments and to use your comment as a springboard reflecting my comments about a “new” type of architecture. Your comment contrasted well with what I was saying and I wanted to put my own post in perspective. Sorry for not wording it better (•j•)v
Posted by butuki at December 6, 2003 09:43 AM
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Changing Landscape
By London and the North
It's a changing world out there. From hard crunch underfoot to soft sink-and-glide. Mirror-like, frozen and wind raised surfaces of our canal. Canopy and candelabra'd skylines.
Today I summoned up energy to write to the director who asks for but doesn't really want feedback. I'm struggling with being ethically consistent. The fact is I'm ethically knackered.
I think one of the reasons, a key reason, that I couldn't get it together to write about Protecting Place at Ecotone is that I feel like I'm aware of protection issues a lot of the time and often take one kind of action or another about those kind of things. Not terribly effective action. Not all that well thought out. But I often feel the need to do something.
This weekend, a neighbour made a bonfire on the common land opposite my house. We live in a conservation area. It's a shared space and has heathers, ferns, gorse and many wild flowers (not at this time of year) growing on it. We avoided eye contact when I walked past and pretended not to see each other. I walked around the moor preoccupied knowing my speaking outness is tired. Which issues should one take up in life? Is there an answer to this anywhere? Surely someone has the answer. I am increasingly attracted to cliches these days. So any ideas welcome.
When I came back down from the moor, having rehearsed fourteen hundred variations between Excuse me, I-hope-you-don't mind-me-mentioning-it to For-G-d's-Sake-what-the.... Anyway, I went over and chose some words from the politer end of the spectrum and was told that 1) there had always been a fire on that spot (Ah that's okay then) and 2) they would have had to PAY if they'd taken it all to the tip (Ah yes I see). I pushed it a bit but the dog was barking madly so I flung her ball across the hill to keep her quiet. Unfortunately it landed in the worst bramble patch up there so I had to abandon the conversation and climb up to retrieve the bloody thing while she looked on saying how bad the brambles were. In my viillage such sympathy is usually reserved for what is perceived as 'offcumden' ignorance.
Posted by Coup de Vent at 10:26 PM | Comments (5) Comments: Changing LandscapeNot to be flippant, but perhaps your dog choosing that very moment to distract you was his way of being a friend? He made you look at precisely the right portion of the scene to remind you of what you feel is important... brambles no less! Wise dog!
Posted by butuki at December 9, 2003 04:48 AMTotally profound and very funny!
Posted by Coup de Vent at December 9, 2003 08:15 AM"...Which issues should one take up in life? Is there an answer to this anywhere? "
CdV, this is a question that has me by the neck and won't let go. The problem is that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. That would be too easy.
It should be stated as: "Which issues should *I* take up...." and that leaves 'one' staring in the mirror at 'one's' stubbornly silent and reproachful reflection.
The subject is preoccupying me too and I am about to try blogifying it.
Natalie, I look forward to reading your posts on The Way Forward with a certain keenness. I fear that I may be an impetuous and relatively haphazard taker upper of issues. Responding to things often allows any rage I feel to subside. Doing nothing drives me mad. And unfortunately doing something has quite unpredictable results.
Posted by Coup de Vent at December 10, 2003 07:43 PMI just got finished spiking an indignant e-mail I was on the edge of firing off -- before I realized I would make a fool of myself. The older I get the more I realize I have to stick the the problems in my back yard and let those younger, with more energy, take up saving the world. Saving the commons from idiots strikes me as about my speed; your neighbor was cheerfully ignorant of the dioxins and other toxic chemicals she was putting into the air you were both breathing ... if I lived in the country, it would be in the hope of AVOIDING lung cancer, actually. A bit of frost from the chastisee is to be expected; it's a sign you got her attention.
Posted by P. at December 11, 2003 06:27 AM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20040103120519/http://www.airenet.co.uk/alife/2003_12.html