A Change in the Wind

The fall of a mighty oak: The Guardian notices

Nothing against new style longform journalism, but let's give credit where credit is due to a tradional but awesome story from The Guardian on the greatest tree in Wales, and how it fell (but could possibly have been saved).

No one knew quite how old it was because it had lost its heartwood, but Michael Lear, a tree expert with the National Trust, visited Pontfadog in 1996 and wrote to Josie Williams: "Using Forestry Commission techniques, the youngest it can be is 1,181 years, the oldest 1,628 years. "I cannot find a record of an oak tree of any of the 500 species internationally which has a greater girth anywhere in the world."

Yet, for all its local renown, the Pontfadog oak was barely known outside the small Ceiriog valley and the community of ancient tree experts. It was mentioned by George Borrow on his journey across Wales in 1862 but, like most other ancient trees in Britain, it was never fenced off or protected, and no one was ever asked to pay to see it – although Huw Williams's grandmother used to put out a collection box for the local Cheshire home, sometimes raising £5 a year. "It was just our tree, part of the landscape. We were very proud of it," said one woman from the valley the next day. Last week, some of Britain's specialists on ancient trees gathered at Pontfadog for a post mortem.

"It was the national tree of Wales and one of the oldest oaks in Europe. I'm desperately trying to find people who can help in propagating from the tree by either grafting or micro-propagation in order to maintain its genotype. Kew Gardens have said they are interested," said Simpson.

In fact, the tree could have been saved for many more years. Last year a group from the Ancient Tree Forum visited Pontfadog and, seeing it was vulnerable to a big wind, put together a list of actions costing £5,700 that they thought might have protected it. Despite a petition of 6,000 signatures to the Welsh assembly, no money could be found.

Wonder if tree lovers in this country could call on a group such as the Ancient Tree Forum to save a great old tree, if they feared one was in trouble somewhere in this land.  

Want to boycott Koch Bros. products? There's an app...

The 21st century has another technological moment. Yesterday a new application for mobile phones was released. It can reveal to a shopper with a smartphone what products profit the fossil fuel billionaires the Koch brothers. The app, called Buycott, is eighteen months in the making, and actually is designed to reveal the corporate structures behind products, so it's not necessarily anti-Koch brothers...or even liberal.

Clare O'Connor writes for Forbes:  

"Even more impressively, you can join user-created campaigns to boycott business practices that violate your principles rather than single companies. One of these campaigns, Demand GMO Labeling, will scan your box of cereal and tell you if it was made by one of the 36 corporations that donated more than $150,000 to oppose the mandatory labeling of genetically modified food."

What can you say about this software but -- that's cool. (Well, we could add that the Koch industries take in $98 billion a year, according to Forbes.) 

The Driven American: Unable to wander freely

From Edmund White's gloriously thoughtful The Flâneur::

The flâneur [city walker/wanderer] is by definition endowed with enormous leisure, someone who can take off a morning or afternoon for undirected ambling, since a specific goal or a close rationing of tme is antithetical to the true spirit of the flâneur. An excess of the work ethic (or a driving desire to see everything and meet everyone of recognized value) inhibits the browsing, cruising ambition to "wed the crowd." 

Americans are particularly ill-suited to be flâneurs. They're good at following books outlining tours of Montparnasse or at visiting scenic spots outside Paris...but they're always driven by the urge towards self-improvement.

A couple of assumptions are embedded in this concept: that the wandering should take place in the city (as described in Walter Benjamin's epochal Arcades project) and that the drifter, if you will, shall be alone. But is either necessarily the case? Perhaps for Benjamin, an urban philosopher.

It's interesting to posit the counter-example of Jack Kerouac, who certainly made a life and great work out of his wandering, but does have that "driven" aspect that White describes, and even made a bit of sport of his inability to wander idly in his great and underappreciated Dharma Bums. 

A pic of Kerouac typing from the Orange County Regional History Center.

He wrote in that book:

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.” 

Navy meteorologist convinced that global warming is real

Last weekend I wrote a story about a conference in UCSB on sea level change in the Ventura County Star. To quote Rear Admiral (ret) David Titley, a meterologist who once was a skeptic but now believes in climate change: 

“I’ve told the Navy and Congress that we should expect a global sea rise between now and the year 2100 of about 1 meter,” Titley told a hall full of students and others Friday who attended the conference, called “Risk and Uncertainty and the Communication of Sea Level Rise.”

“If I’m wrong, I’m probably wrong on the low end,” he said.

Titley is an easy guy to like, and has a good story: after all, he lost his home to Katrina. But he says that didn't influence his opinion on climate change: for more, here's his TEDx talk. 

Brower: Wilderness a place to rescue yourself

"For [David] Brower [who led the Sierra Club] wilderness was the place "where man could be alone, where you could rescue your self from what Ortega calls the other -- all the extraneities that pile on you too deep." 

From Nature's Altars, p216

This is my way of saying I'm going to hit the Pacific Crest Trail, for just a few days, just enough to get my feet dusty.

Have left a few posts for your entertainment...after all, here in SoCal, there are some unique aspects to the PCT. Here's a sign near Campo, where the trail starts, not far from the border. 

Actually good to see some signs of caring. What for some of us is a chance to question our reality -- because quest is after all at the heart of question -- is for others a chance at a new life. 

I can't help but sympathize with those will to roll those dice. 

What makes this New York subway pic so disturbing?

It's a question. I really don't know...but I do think this pic is scary. 

Is it because we can't tell if this is a man or a woman? Is it because we can't tell if he/she is just surprised, or really angry? Is it the surreal aspect -- the fur coat versus the scuzzy subway, against the sunset backdrop?

To me this looks like a shot from a video game. Just before all hell breaks loose. 

From a slideshow of subway pics from l970's New York. It was different back then, I can attest. 

Love as a force of nature: Jeanette Winterson

From an untitled post at Soaked in Soul:

"I used to be a hopeless romantic. I am still a hopeless romantic. I used to believe that love was the highest value. I still believe that love is the highest value. I don’t expect to be happy. I don’t imagine that I will find love, whatever that means, or that if I do find it, it will make me happy. I don’t think of love as the answer or the solution. I think of love as a force of nature - as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is live-giving. And when it burns out, the planet dies. My little orbit of life circles love. I dare not get any closer. I’m not a mystic seeking final communion. I don’t go out without SPF 15. I protect myself. But today, when the sun is everywhere, and everything solid is nothing but its own shadow, I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love - all love - love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a café. Myself, even, which is the hardest thing of all to love, because love and selfishness are not the same thing. It is easy to be selfish. It is hard to love who I am. No wonder I am surprised if you do." -Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

Haven't read this book. Review in the Guardian makes it sound far stranger than the quote. Pic references the lighthouse keeper in the book, and comes from Jeffrey Sullivan. It's of the Walton lighthouse in Santa Cruz, lit for Christmas.

Why gay men like Marilyn Monroe: Caitlin Flanagan

Caitlin Flanagan, the writer, has a lot of nerve, and the arrogance can grate on a reader. (And maybe grated on her editors at The New Yorker too, which might explain why she's not there anymore.) A writer who reviewed her most recent book went on air with her and Tom Ashbrook a year ago and wrote eloquently in Salon about "creepy condescension" of Flanagan, not to mention her "Michele Bachmann-esque disregard for the facts." 

Yet and still, Flanagan can hit a nerve. Be curious to hear what others think of this recent idea of hers, in a review of a couple of recent biographies in the Atlantic, that the legend of Marilyn Monroe was more or less the product of Elton John and Bernie Taupin's 70's classic pop song Candle in the Wind. (Which is when Monroe became a star for my generation, really, before the over-the-top Norman Mailer hagiography, the picture books, the unpublished nudes, etc.)

To wit: 

The song evokes a particular emotional state, one familiar to readers of, say, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. It celebrates the aching ardor that a certain kind of gay man can feel for a beautiful, tortured woman, whose plight is to be dependent sexually and emotionally upon the often brutal and brutalizing force of straight-male lust. The song has a coherent inner logic, even if it doesn’t match up with the facts of Marilyn Monroe’s life. Nobody else set her on a treadmill, and nobody else created the superstar she became; full credit for both achievements goes, deservedly, to Marilyn, who worked as hard for fame as anyone who’s ever achieved it. But it’s the suffering itself that matters; it’s the idea of some shadowy malevolent force sending a delicate soul on a dark journey that was the appeal of the song and that was the true birth of Marilyn Monroe as one of the greatest Hollywood stars of all time.

Swept away by this idea, I start to imagine (if Monroe had not died young) a somewhat older and harder-working actress taking the stage in "A Streetcar named Desire," bringing her beauty and her suffering to the role of Blanche DuBois. An appealing thought, no? And allegedly Williams himself saw her in the role of Baby Doll, so not completely crazy. But Tennessee set me right, in a harsh appraisal:

I wanted to love Marilyn: I fall for myths, too. She was fragile and she was beautiful and she was silly. She was the lost kitten in the rain, or the kittens who were born on Carson McCullers' bed in Nantucket--you wonder who will take care of them, because you know that you cannot, and you cry like the child you were who saw the dog run over and the town move on, uncaring and serious about getting their needs attended.

Marilyn was also annoying and cloying and demanding. She knew her power and she abused it, but in the demonstration of it she degraded herself and she knew this, so the spiral of destruction deepened and intensified. Do not think for a moment that I do not see this in my own behavior and that of others: I am only offering a sobering lesson.

But maybe it's that "sobering" -- like the harsh glare of a white spot light on a black stage -- that gives Monroe her power. Without the suffering, what is the point of her beauty? Just another dumb blonde. 

Norma Jean in Griffith Park, before she became famous, from a Time collection.

 

What to do about cigarettes, and why: Mayor Bloomberg

Mayor Bloomberg thinks cigarettes are bad for you and should be kept out of sight, like porn:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, fresh off a defeat in his campaign to limit large servings of sugary drinks, proposed legislation Monday requiring stores to put cigarettes out of public sight and to increase penalties on the smuggling and illegal sales of cigarettes. 

Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference that the proposal would make New York the first city in the nation to keep tobacco products out of sight. He said smoking remained a leading cause of preventable death, killing 7,000 New Yorkers a year.

As an ex-smoker, I enthusiastically endorse Bloomberg's condemnation of nicotine-delivery systems. As an example why, here's a dismayingly great (and alarmingly painful) essay about loving your dad, a smoker:

We pleaded with him, of course, to treat himself better – though always with trepidation, since the subject annoyed him and, if pressed, could send him into a rage. Most of the time we did not even get to the subject, he was so adept at heading it off with a joke: when a man who is quite visibly at risk of heart attack, stroke and cancer crushes out what is left of a six-inch mentholated cigarette before getting to work on a lethal fried meal ("a hearty repast" as he would have called it), clinks his knife and fork together, winks at you, and says, with a brogue, "Heart smart!" you are disarmed.

From a memoir by John Jeremiah Sullivan, in The Guardian.

It's important to point out that Bloomberg's "nanny state" measures have effectively reduced smoking in New York City, saving many lives and much money. From the New York Times story today:

Unlike some other changes whose effect has so far been uncertain, like the ban on artificial trans fats and the posting of calorie counts in restaurants, the consequences of the smoking limits seem fairly clear-cut.

The adult smoking rate dropped to 14.8 percent in 2011 from 21.5 percent in 2002, at the beginning of the Bloomberg administration, Dr. Thomas Farley, the city’s health commissioner, said Monday. The drop was particularly steep among young adults, which suggested, experts said, that they were not picking up the habit in the first place.  

And here's someone who cares not a whit about your health, from her talk at CPAC:

Is it just me, or does touting a Big Gulp make Sarah Palin look really stupid? 

Why Obama should ask a farmer to lead on climate change

The acerbic Timothy Egan of the NYTimes has an interesting idea, re: the politics of climate change:

It’s one thing to persuade hipsters in Portland, Ore., or Brooklyn to grow organic — hey, how cool is an artisan radish — in their rooftop gardens. It’s a much tougher push to get Big Ag, made up mostly of stubborn older men, to change its ways [re: climate, especially since it may be costly].

But imagine if a farmer led the cause against climate change. Franklin Roosevelt chose Hugh Bennett, a son of the North Carolina soil, to rally Americans against the abusive farming practices that led to the Dust Bowl. Big Hugh was blunt, smart and convincing. “Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people,” he said, without apology.

Egan goes on to highlight Oklahoma rancher Clay Pope, who in a YouTube plea to the president points out that FDR took on the Dust Bowl in his l938 State of the Union address. FDR warned that farmers did not have an inherent right to devastate the future by mismanaging their lands. Pope sees the same lesson today.

"It's not our inherent right to burn up our natural resources while altering the very climate that allows our civilization to thrive," Pope points out.  

So encouraging to hear such good sense from a man of the land.

Speaking of climate change and ag, here's a graph of the risks seen in this state, from "Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change in California Agriculture," a report put out last year by Louise Jackson et al of UC Davis. 

Report finds that the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the Salinas Valley, the corridor between Merced and Fresno, and the Imperial Valley were at greatest risk in California.