Nobody would be more surprised by this feat of survival and service than Rob Martin and George Kohl,
cofounders of a short-lived ‘70s St. Louis experiment called Environmental Response. After their own organization broke apart on the shoals of burnout and identity crisis, the two men conducted a survey of these new-fangled local service organizations meant to help heal the earth. During
the months surrounding the first Earth Day in 1970, eighteen environmental centers emerged, and Martin and Kohl examined eight of these, including Berkeley’s, founded in May 1969. The survey they issued in April 1973 is called “The Goddamned Report,” and it’s interesting reading nearly forty years later, not least because some of the challenges they identify remain true today.

The idea behind ecology centers (during the ‘70s and ‘80s, 44 centers would be founded across the nation) was to offer information and education rather than partisan politics. The centers would provide meeting space and networking to specific-issue action groups and to the public at large, serving as a community resource and library combined. A switchboard would answer informational
calls, like-minded people could meet each other in a comfortable environment, and activists could research answers to burning questions that would provoke cries for environmental reform. As Martin and Kohl wrote, “the Ecology Center concept was clearly a product of movement-oriented thinking,” with committed, passionate people kindling concern for the environment in communities that welcomed the center’s presence, responding with money and volunteers.

Yet exhausted staffers, lack of direction and concrete goals, and disappointment over lack of support characterized many centers in the early years. Only three years after the first Earth Day, “The Goddamned Report” pronounced the ecology movement dead, the concept of coordinating organizations obsolete, and criticized an attempt at a multi-service approach. Of their own experience in St. Louis, Martin and Kohl wrote: “A few remained, continued the fight (for that is what it was) but the two of us left. Gradually. At first it was our spirit that turned on us, and then our minds. We stepped back, as if out of a furious athletic contest, and climbed into the bleachers from where we began to see, so plainly, the errors we had been making all this time.” The authors advocated dropping the name “ecology center,” closing down the centers, and regrouping to adopt a couple of carefully chosen goals to fight entrenched industry and government interests. This, they said, would be the second phase of environmentalism.

Like Time magazine’s “God Is Dead” cover, the movement’s obit proved premature. Sometimes you just have to wait for others to catch up. What Martin and Kohl labeled unattainable is what Berkeley’s Ecology Center has accomplished over its decades of service: “Notions of broad-spectrum organizing, “ wrote Martin and Kohl of the center concept, “of involvement on all levels of community power structure; of financial support from a committed citizenry; of a wide variety of
activities and services; of trouble-shooting and educating and organizing and researching and publishing all done simultaneously. They are dreams now, not realities.”

Debates about the efficacy of spectrum-based vs. issue-specific focuses persist, as do questions of how to assign priorities and fund vital programs. Yet today the Ecology Center continues to fulfill its original mission of providing the public with reliable information, hands-on training, and models for sustainable living. Programs include Berkeley’s residential curbside recycling, the Berkeley farmers’ markets, the Farm Fresh Choice food justice program, the EcoHouse demonstration home and garden, the Ecology Center store, a library and information center, classes and climate change action groups, and this magazine. The Ecology Center also sponsors nine other nonprofits, such as the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives and the Indigenous Permaculture Project, and puts on an annual summit to showcase Berkeley sustainability programs and initiatives.

Which goes to show that it takes dreamers as well as pragmatists to change the world.

“I’d been selling at the market for a number of years,” he says, selling raisins, grapes, and organic dates. A people person, Lumpkin helped other vendors and volunteered for organizational duties. In the mid-’80s, the vendor-operated market ran out of steam and went on a couple-year hiatus. During that time, Lumpkin and Biz Marcus, who picked up leftover produce from farmers for the nonprofit agency Daily Bread, worked to restart the market. When the Ecology Center took over market administration in July 1987 and started the market back up again, Lumpkin joined the farmers’ market committee (now called the community advisory board) and soon stepped into the co-manager spot.

During that time, the Ecology Center, which had been run as a collective requiring consensus for decisionmaking, also went through a transformation. Each program had a manager, as it does now, but there was no overall administration. “There was an office manager,” explains Lumpkin, “but that person was more about communicating between people. Everyone had his or her own program, and no one took care of organization-wide business. People made sacrifices of time and energy to
keep the collective functioning. We talked it around and around and a lot of us, including myself, didn’t want to go that direction. I really liked the collective model; I don’t like to have bosses, but on the other hand, we needed someone to take care of stuff. Things were falling through the cracks.” After talking it around and around over a period of weeks, Lumpkin says it became obvious that the collective had to give way to a top-down management process, and recycling manager Kathy Hutton
became the first executive director of the Ecology Center.

Even with a management structure, running a center divided into separate programs can be challenging: how is it determined what work gets done and how that work is supported? “It’s hard to prioritize in that kind of model,” Lumpkin says. “I was thinking back to one change that cut two ways. When we had [information manager and board member] Karen Pickett, we had someone very
involved in forest and wilderness issues. She brought that expertise to the information department, connected us to Headwaters and Earth First!. Since she left, we’re not so connected to those things anymore. But Karen’s program, Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters, became our first fiscally sponsored project, and now we umbrella all these other organizations. We’re able to help make them happen without having to staff them.”

Lumpkin feels that the Ecology Center’s strength today lies in its broad-based, nonpartisan focus. “We’re not in such a tight niche,” he says. “We do our specific hands-on programs, and those things set us apart. Mainstream environmental organizations aren’t there to answer people’s questions on a variety of issues, and we are. And we’re also there to demonstrate with programs, especially recycling and the farmers’ market, an environmental model.”

The center has enough flexibility to try new ideas. As the special events coordinator, Lumpkin schedules and oversees events connected with the market, such as the holiday crafts fair and the string band contest. “What you see now are the things that worked, like the fiddle contest,” he says. “I tried to start a bunch of different things that didn’t continue because they didn’t get enough attendance. I had a vision of an ecological culture that I wanted to have an influence on, and I wanted
us to help grow that. The Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival is rooted in an environmental set of values, and it remains the closest to my vision. I wanted to celebrate the seasons, do equinox and solstice events, but I could never make them work. I had to go with what worked rather than
be driven by my personal vision.” Last year’s festival, held at the end of September, was the fourteenth annual meet.

The farmers’ market still invigorates Lumpkin. “It’s one of the sweetest places on earth you can spend your time,” he says. “When I’m up at the market, many people I know not by name but by face smile at me just because I’ve been associated with the market for so long. Between selling and managing and doing the special events, it’s been over 25 years. I don’t have that anywhere else. It’s just a feel-good thing.”

1989: “One thing about the Center… it was then and it still is. There aren’t many community-based organizations that have stayed in existence. Why? Because there’s still a need for it. It has not gotten diverted from its basic purpose. It has not blown apart like other groups. The Ecology Center plods on. Nothing shocking… nothing extreme. It didn’t take a good guy/bad guy approach. It showed how things should be done and expected people to catch on.” —Peter Heylin
First board president Peter Heylin worked one day a month at the center; board members in the early years took turns staffing Saturdays. Heylin cofounded bottle-recycling facility Encore! in 1975, which Wine Business Monthly deemed an effort “ahead of its time”; recycling wine bottles became more difficult after the introduction of pressure-sensitive labels. In summer 2009, a Napa-based venture with high-tech equipment capable of removing the labels kicked into gear.”

1999: “A lot of people got their start being turned on to other people, resources and ideas at the Ecology Center, and then went on to do other things. It would have been different had the Ecology Center not been there for people. One of the reasons it’s hard to track is because the way that the Ecology Center functions is to not really ‘own’ much of anything, in terms of campaigns and issues, but to try and be a resource and a springboard. I think that a lot of the people that worked on Styrofoam or plastics issues, or started community recycling centers, or brought projects into the schools, or started community garden groups, or creek restoration groups, wouldn’t necessarily credit the Ecology Center. There was this general sharing of ideas without ownership. It was a different way of spreading the word. The point was to get it out there and spread it as widely and as far as possible, and I think, given what we see today, that was very successful.” —Karen Pickett, Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters

2010: “One thing that I value most about the structure of the Ecology Center is its flexibility. We’re able to offer so many services to so many people. We provide essential services such as waste reduction, sustainable food production, community food security, and nutrition. We can offer highly affordable classes on sustainable activities such as urban gardening, gray water systems, soil fertility, energy savings, carbon footprint reduction, and so many others. Our programs promote youth empowerment, community organizing, and environmental justice. We are able to model and teach sustainable practices while we actively participate in policy and planning discussions. It’s exciting to be involved on so many levels at once, and I feel our ability to reach out and help people is only growing.” —Raquel Pinderhughes, president, Ecology Center board of directors

YEARS OF SERVICE
May 1969:
Berkeley Ecology Center founded by a photographer, a commercial pilot, two schoolteachers, and a
water expert, Ray Balter, who was also a printer and hoped the center could sustain itself through commercial printing. The Ecology Center opened at Allston Way and Oxford, with a bookstore, library,
meeting rooms, offices, and a print shop.

Earth Day, 1970:
The Ecology Center receives its 501c3 status, the first such organization in the nation to apply for and receive nonprofit status.

1970:
The Ecology Center receives a federal grant for one year to run a recycling center at Sacramento
Street and University Avenue in Berkeley.

January 18, 1971:
Two Standard Oil tankers collide under the Golden Gate Bridge, and hundreds of volunteers rush to save oil-soaked birds and wildlife. The Ecology Center is a focal point for coordinating the volunteer effort.

Early 1971:
The Ecology Center reorganizes as a membership organization with a staff of three, a nine-member
board of directors, and two honorary directors. “By paying the staff next to nothing for ninety hours
a week we managed to get out of debt,” said thenboard chair Peter Heylin.

1972:
Conscientious objectors arrange alternative service at the Ecology Center; besides staffing the center, many of the early recycling volunteers were COs. A speakers’ bureau is established.

1972-73:
A second recycling center opens at Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Dwight Way. A third site opens at Channing and San Pablo Avenue. In June 1973, the Ecology Center inaugurates curbside pickup of newspapers. In October, the Ecology Center sponsors the first National Recycling Convention
in San Francisco.

1973:
Issues of the day include opposition to a proposed southern crossing of the bay and a proposed mall on the Berkeley Marina. The Ecology Center champions waterfront preservation, protection of
Sunol Regional Wilderness from development, and helps campaign for Proposition 20, which creates the California Coastal Commission.

1975:
The Ecology Center inaugurates ENCORE! (Environmental Container Reuse) to recycle wine bottles. That facility is first housed in West Berkeley, then Emeryville, finally at 2nd and Gilman Street.

1978:
The center moves to a small storefront at College Avenue and Derby Street, causing a cutback in meetings.

1979:
California Waste Management Board advances $90,000 to establish multi-material curbside recycling, adding cans and bottles to pickups.

1979-80:
Campaigns include opposition to Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, initiating urban farming days at the student farm on Oxford Street, compost distribution, plant pest identification classes, rabbit raising demonstrations.

1983-84:
Urban Ore, Community Conservation Center, and the Ecology Center form the Berkeley Recycling
Group to negotiate contracts with the City of Berkeley. The city awards recycling contract to Engineered Waste Control (EWC). After a battle, Berkeley voters choose Measure G, keeping
recycling in the hands of the Berkeley Recycling group. Measure G also mandates fifty percent recycling over a five-year plan. In 1984, Berkeley recycles 25 percent of its solid waste (1,490 out of 7,800 tons a month).

1984:
The Ecology Center loses its lease and moves to cramped quarters in the University Avenue Co-op. The new home leads to a rejuvenated center thanks to the synergy with the co-op and its members.

July 1987:
Farmers’ Market organizers seek sponsorship of the Ecology Center for a new Farmers’ Market.

1988:
Farmers’ Market expands to year-round schedule and is running at capacitywith thirty farmers. Most farmers leave a box of produce for the Daily Bread Project, distributing food to the needy. Ecology Center Recycling Manager Kathy Evans receives the top recycling award in the state, Recycler
of the Year.

1989:
The Ecology Center helps pass Berkeley’s Stop Styrofoam Campaign, leading to a local ban and inspiring communities around the country. Recycling curbside collection goes from monthly to weekly. In November, the Ecology Center moves to its current home at 2530 San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley.

1992:
The Ecology Center newsletter becomes Terrain magazine.

1999:
A Berkeley health report shows diet-related disease in low-income neighborhoods, which historically have less access to healthy foods. The Berkeley Food Policy Council, of which the Ecology Center is a
member, proposes Farm Fresh Choice, a program to bring fresh produce into lower-income neighborhoods. Farm Fresh Choice becomes an Ecology Center program in 1999.

2005:
Coauthoring Berkeley’s Zero Waste policy with city staffers, the Ecology Center helps start the Bay Area Zero Waste working group and the California Product Stewardship Council.

2006:
The Ecology Center adopts the Berkeley Eco-House. Founded in 1999, the EcoHouse serves as a
demonstration house and garden where community members can learn about accessible and affordable ways to adapt existing spaces. Classes and tours are held regularly on-site.

2006:
The Ecology Center hosts the first annual Sustainability Summit, held in the fall, to showcase efforts of the city of Berkeley, nonprofits, and individuals to improve sustainable practices. Subsequent events are sell-out affairs.

2008:
Climate Change Action groups begin meeting at the center in August. Participants learn how to minimize their carbon footprint and how to lead groups of their own at work or in their neighborhoods.

2010:
The Ecology Center signs a ten-year recycling contract with the City of Berkeley.

In a reversal of convention, Dutch agriculture scientist Arie Kamphorst’s 2008 blog posts are gathered here in paperback form, with a few added postscripts from 2009. Blog posts should be short and pointed, and Kamphorst’s succinct style is suited to the form. In a post titled “Traffic jams,” Kamphorst writes, “In the Netherlands, the most densely populated country in Europe, many measures have been considered to solve this problem [traffic jams]. Stopping the growth of the population and of the economy is not one of them.”

In this slim, easily digested volume, Kamphorst demonstrates that the wealthy countries of the world cannot continue business as usual without dire impacts on life on this planet. The book is especially interesting for US readers, who often do not have access to information such as the amount of acreage in Africa being purchased by Asian countries to provide ag land for their citizens. This book will scare you, and it’s meant to: how much do you know about the desertification of Southern Europe and global warming’s domino effects? Humans have a great capacity for denial, and Kamphorst tries to counter delusional thinking, such as that nuclear power plants will keep the party roaring. This is a good gift book for reality-seekers everywhere. Pass it around.

The dogs joined a grim list of wildlife, livestock, pets, and humans poisoned by blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria.
That green slime is nothing new—it evolved some 3 billion years ago, during the Archaean era, the first organism to produce oxygen as a waste product. What is new is that in response to dryer, warmer conditions, some of those algae species—especially the few toxic varieties—are proliferating in inland waterways. Scientists, public health officials, and water managers are worried that climate change may amplify a growing problem in California.

“With climate change, with hot, still conditions, the water supply sets up as big incubator cookers,” says State University of New York biochemist Grey Boyer. Boyer considers Northern California at high risk for the varieties of algae that manufacture a toxin. Algae enjoy conditions that describe us to a T: heavy winter rains that wash high-nitrogen fertilizers into creeks and rivers, followed by long, dry summers that dry up those creeks and rivers into quiet, isolated pools and shallows. As global climate change takes hold, some scientists believe toxic events may occur more frequently, and over a longer span of months.

Biochemist Boyer has worked with toxic algae species for forty years; he started out investigating marine red tides, a similar phenomenon but a different species of algae. The blue-green version, he says, comprises thousands of species, with only twenty or so capable of releasing toxins. The general consensus of algae experts, Boyer says, is that while blue-green algae as a whole will love the warming trends of climate change, the conditions are even more likely to favor the poisonous crowd.

The first recorded cases of human illness from cyanobacteria toxins occurred in 1931, along the Ohio River. According to Ian R. Falconer, in his book, Cyanobacterial Toxins of Drinking Water Supplies, the previous year had very little rainfall, and a tributary of the Ohio developed a heavy algal bloom. When rain finally came, that water moved into the Ohio and began making its way downstream, sowing symptoms of vomiting and diarrhea as it went. The most serious case of poisoning involving people took place in 1993, when a newly flooded reservoir in Brazil developed an immense cyanobacterial bloom, and 88 people died.

According to the World Health Organization, health impacts from blue-green algae can be immediate or devilishly long-lasting. For example, one toxin causes liver damage; in 1998, 117 kidney patients in Caruaru, Brazil, developed liver disease, and 47 died, after dialysis with water later found to contain cyanobacterial toxins. People with already damaged livers, such as those with hepatitis or cirrhosis, or children with smaller body weights, are more at risk.

Cyanobacteria offers frustrating conundrums to public health officials. Few of the species are toxic, but it’d take a scientist with a microscope to determine if a specific piece of floating gunk is releasing neurotoxins or not. “It’s a challenging thing to properly warn the public,” says Humboldt County environmental health field inspector Harriet Hill. “We can’t monitor all the freshwater bodies of Humboldt County. All we can tell people is to avoid areas that have blooms of algae.” The county posts warning signs at beaches and at events such as Reggae on the River. She says that she now gets a hundred calls a season, “mostly asking if we’re monitoring this river or that site. People are quite aware that there’s a potential for dog illness.”

Potential is the right word. Blue-green algae is everywhere and nowhere. Says SUNY professor Boyer: “It’s found in every environment, from soil, to water, to melt ponds in Antarctica. It’s small and robust, and it also has the capability to photosynthesize. Some produce spores that travel in the air, some have resting states like seeds. Some can survive for decades if not centuries. It’s hard to get it not to spread.”

Yet it’s ephemeral by nature. ‘We’ve had a half-dozen or so dog fatalities in this area,” he says. “We go back a half-day after the dog dies, and we can’t find anything. The wind blows the blooms to shore. The dogs swim through the water, lick their fur, and give themselves a concentrated dose.” And while dogs have other sources of drinking water, wildlife may not. “The algae takes a couple weeks to set up a big bloom,” says Boyer. “Animals have little choice if it’s the only water: You drink it and die, or you don’t drink it and die.”

Unfortunately, cattle like the taste of the mats of scum left on the shoreline. Recently a range bull died close to a reservoir on the Klamath River, and the suspicion was that he’d been felled by neurotoxins. But it couldn’t be proven, as the bull’s cells were too decomposed to measure the toxin. Humboldt County’s Hill says that initially Fish & Game officials were skeptical that blue-green algae had caused the dog deaths at Big Lagoon because wildlife did not seem to be affected. But Hill and Boyer note that it’s hard to measure wildlife deaths: Sick animals may head back to dens to die or their bodies may be eaten, leaving no trace of the toxin’s effects.

Some local scientists are investigating if the blooms can be harmful to people who come into casual contact with them. California Department of Public Health research scientist Sandra McNeel works with toxins of many sorts—molds, mushrooms, and more. She remembers receiving a call from a public health nurse in a North Bay county, asking if there were tests to determine if a patient had been exposed to blue-green algae toxins. “Our office tends to receive calls that don’t have an organizational home,” McNeel explains, and says that her interest was piqued.

She and her group devised a still-unreleased study on recreational exposure in two reservoirs on the Klamath,
Irongate and Copco. “We wanted to know if the toxins produced by blue-green algae in water became air-borne, and whether people swimming, waterskiing, or boating might be exposed to toxins by the inhalation route,” McNeel says. The study looked at two populations—people doing water activities at Klamath, and people playing in the waters of Lake Shasta, which doesn’t have trouble with blue-green algae. Participants gave blood samples and a nasal swab before and after going out on the water. Results are expected sometime in October.

McNeel notes the difficulty of tracking the toxins: “Most of the toxins reside inside the algal cells as long as they’re alive. You can take samples at various times of day and get totally different readings. And some [algae] can vary their own buoyancy so they can rise during the day to take advantage of sunlight and then sink during the night. It makes it hard to characterize what’s happening, especially in large bodies of water like reservoirs.”

What is the likelihood that blue-green algae will be a future bane? On the plus side, there have been no dog deaths in Humboldt County since 2004, which Hill attributes to successful warnings. On the minus side are factors Northern California has in abundance: heavy winter rainfall, high-nitrogen fertilizer use near into rivers and streams, long, dry summers that can turn tumultuous winter water courses into still pools and ponds. With our hot, dry summers and increasing likelihood of drought, California is a high-risk area for algae of any sort, especially for the toxic species.

“As a scientist I get uncomfortable speculating,” says McNeel. “But there’s good support in the literature to say that as our years get dryer and hotter, as water levels decrease in rivers and reservoirs and the Delta, that lower water levels and increased water temperatures
provide a better environment for blue-green algae to bloom.” She explains that with longer hot seasons blooms may start in May rather than July, and extend later in the year. Toxic blooms could even impact drinking water in reservoirs, as they have in Australia; in 2007, Sydney lost half its drinking water to a large blue-green algae column. Boiling or chlorine cannot remove toxins. In the future, water sources such as reservoirs may need to be covered, as photosynthetic algae requires light to grow.

Boyer says it’s unclear why some species are toxic. “We do know that it’s not to produce toxins to affect humans or animals,” he says. “It may be that [the toxins are] internal regulatory compounds, to control ion balance or a response to salt stress.” Sea-level rise—another result of climate change—may improve conditions for toxic blue-green algae for several reasons: shallow water, fertilizer runoff, still conditions, brackish water. “There’s a concern that with global warming, the salt will increase [inland],” Boyer says. “There is some concern that more brackish water will select for more toxic species.”

That seems to be happening already in the Delta. “The Delta rarely had blooms until about five years ago,” Boyer says. “Now it’s fairly common.” He notes that it’s hard to pinpoint causes, though he believes it’s a combination of less flushing action from the Sacramento
River and more fertilizers washing into the Delta. It’s easy to picture how this could become worse: Many scientists expect climate change to exacerbate storms, which could cause periodic flooding and fertilizer load runoff. When the weather changes, shallower water and pools become perfect spots for blue-green algae growth.

One positive note: Apparently freshwater fish are unaffected by the toxins. “They ingest the toxins,” says Boyer, but “they get rid of it as fast they accumulate. We’ve looked at thousands of fish samples. It’s hard to find toxins in fish.” But fish are not off the hook: “What usually happens,” Boyer says, “is that the algae grows and then dies, the decomposing bacteria uses up the oxygen [in the water], and the fish can die from low oxygen.”

So far, blue-green algae flies under most people’s worry radars, but that may change if the blooms find their way into city water supplies, and if creeks and rivers become danger zones. Hill points out that although algae can adapt to the likely conditions of global warming, it will not be so hospitable to nearly any other form of life. “Here’s something that can fix nitrogen from the air,” she says. “It’s got some traits of bacteria and some of algae, and it’s thought to be the first form of life. Imagine, the very species that produces our oxygen may be the last species left.”

On this day, Jordan gives a talk that leaves him choked up, unable to continue. His work, images of huge piles of garbage in his “Intolerable Beauty” series (2003-2005), of the wreckage after Hurricane Katrina (“In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster,” 2005), and the two numbers projects (“Running the Numbers,” 2006-2009, and “Running the Numbers II, Portraits of Global Mass Culture,” 2009), attempt to radio home to a society in which people matter less each day, and the amount of material we consume is astonishingly, grotesquely enormous. Portraits like these: two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes; 426,000 cell phones, the number retired in the US every day; 28,000 oil barrels, the volume of oil burned in the US every two minutes; one million plastic cups, the amount used on airline flights in the US every six hours; 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, representing the number of Americans in prison in 2005. Terrain’s cover image,
“Organ in Canal near Venice,” is from the Katrina photos; “Oil Barrels” (opposite) is from “Running the Numbers.”

Jordan worries that no one is able to understand the enormity of these numbers. As he said at TED, “I have this fear that we aren’t feeling enough as a culture right now. There’s this kind of anesthesia in America… If we can feel these issues more deeply, then they’ll matter
to us more than they do now”—a condition Jordan believes is necessary for each of us to alter our own assumptions and behavior. Unlike many artists, Jordan is in a headlong fight against abstractions. His final words bring it home to the audience: “I’m not speaking abstractly about this. This is who we are, in this room, right now, in this moment.”

I interviewed him by phone at his studio in Seattle, in August.

Both your parents are artists. What was that like?
Well, my mom was more the obvious artist. She’s a watercolor painter. My dad would take the photographs, so that was the basis of her paintings. She would hang a big sheet of watercolor paper on the wall, project the slide, and loosely draw the outline, and then she would put it on her studio table and start painting. I loved watching the blocks of color flow in. That’s where my interest in color came from.

My father did travel photography at a time you could actually sell travel photos, and then he became interested in fine art photography. My dad’s photography was on the side. He was a businessman in New York. We had a really nice house and a financially stable life in Connecticut, but he hated his job. He could never take the risk of fully living and doing what he loved. I just saw it eat him away. He’s now filled with regret.

I fell for the same story back when I was really young. I was encouraged by my parents to do one of the three respectable careers: become a doctor, a lawyer, or a businessman. I failed out of calculus. I was interested in law, had taken a business law class and connected with it.

I ended up going to UC Santa Barbara, played jazz piano, did a lot of hanging out in the music department. My first wife was doing a graduate degree in Austin, so I went to the University of Texas and finished up my undergraduate degree there and went to law school. I spent ten years as a corporate lawyer.

I had an interest in law because a long time ago I had been falsely arrested and charged with a terrible crime. It was a terrible mistake, but I ended up spending time in jail. Then they decided they didn’t have enough evidence and just dropped it. It just evaporated. I was nineteen at the time and it was very traumatic. It was like getting mugged in an alley. I always had this desire to get a black belt—and that black belt was going to law school. But at the age of forty, I realized I was on the same track as my father of being an angry, regretful man.

With the help of a good therapist, I started looking at all these issues. For all the years I’d been a lawyer, I’d been stuck in the fear of failing as an artist. I spent huge amounts of time photographing—I did five bodies of work that have never been exhibited anywhere. I wanted to do it full-time, but I was afraid of giving up that income and stability.

But then there’s this other fear that’s far bigger and more motivating—the fear of not living my life, not taking the risk. Lots of people tell me how courageous I am, but the truth is that I’m still motivated by fear, just a different kind of fear. In 2003, I bailed out of the legal profession.

One thing that happened to me early on is that I had successful exhibitions in LA and in New York at hugely respectable galleries. It was an intense experience early on, the kind artists wait all their lives for. I had enough of it fast that it was really exhausting. I think a lot of people get a little bit of fame, and they want more, then they realize it’s a huge burden. I got body-slammed. I realized that’s not the point of all this, though it’s incredibly seductive. Fame feels like it brings security when actually it doesn’t at all.

It’s been really interesting and scary lately because I’ve been operating on this illusion of being a famous person as if I’m exempted from the economic crash. My income has pretty much vanished. I’m in a very frightening place right now.

I haven’t really had to struggle with the issues that most artists have to struggle with. I want to be freely creative, but there’s no money coming in. How do I hold on to my principles and ideals and at the same time support my family?

I’ve had a personally hard time lately with watching what’s going on with Obama and the movement. No one really knows what to call it, the green movement. I sense a lot of hopelessness. We thought that once we elected Obama things would go our way. But Obama seems to be in a straitjacket. He wants to pass an energy bill, but those coal companies are hacking away at Obama’s energy plan. The energy plan that’s proposed now is pathetic. It’s the most flaccid attempt at doing something. I don’t think it’s because Obama has sold out. The great turning that we’ve all been working towards isn’t happening.

There’s a lot of appeasement going on as well, like as long as I ride my bike to work then I’m OK, that’s all I can do. And there’s not many people doing even that! Meanwhile, the scientific community is calling for radical change. The first warnings were about people in the future, long after we’d died, like we were going to do something nice for our grandchildren, maybe. Now those worst-case scenarios are the mainstream scenarios, and the time frame is that twenty years from now we’re all screwed if we don’t do something now. People tell me not to scare people, that my call to action should be hopeful. But my own experience is that I am motivated by fear if it’s the right kind. Yes, it’s scary to change, to do some radical act like taking over our government and appointing a council of elders, of eliminating corporations, things we really need to do, but maybe it’s getting scarier to think about not doing it. Once the consequence
of not acting looks scarier than the consequence of acting, then maybe we’ll be able to do something radical. That’s my hope at least.

What was it like for you to take the Katrina photos?
My Katrina photos came after the “Intolerable Beauty” series, with the hurricane hitting soon after coming off a series of exhibitions. I was there for two weeks the first time, and then I went down again. The first few days I was there, all I could feel was shock. It took me a while to get my bearings and experience a sense of grief. It was incredible to look around and see the incredible devastation and realize this is my own country. It erased my sense that Americans are immune from the disasters we see in other countries, and it also made me realize that we can be abandoned by our own government. Of course, many other people have experienced
that abandonment their whole lives, but I had not.

In the “Intolerable Beauty” series, I photographed giant piles of garbage. In that series, I tried to capture the scale of our mass consumption. As I stood in front of these piles of garbage, I thought I was seeing the scale. But as I studied more about it, I realized the enormity of this problem is taking place on so many different levels. I’d read these stats—20 million barrels
of oil, the huge amount of trees, plastic—and then I’d read the cultural symptoms—the high suicide rate among wealthy professionals, the millions of Americans on antidepressants, the millions of people addicted to prescription pain killers.

As I began to more clearly see the enormity of this problem, I realized that my “Intolerable Beauty” series was just touching the tip of the iceberg. I had run up against a limitation of the photographic process. There is no such thing as the photograph of the Mt. Everest of crushed cars because all these waste streams are divided up among thousands of locations. It’s like global warming, there is no way you can see it. It was a real challenge for me. I want to go deeper but I can’t figure out how to do it. It’s an invisible phenomenon. That was the seed of the idea for the “Running the Numbers” series. I wanted to depict the actual quantities of what we consume. And after I did a few. I realized I could also do images of social justice issues.

Which piece shocked you the most?
I have to say it’s the prison uniforms. The actual installation is just shocking. Each uniform in the piece is tiny, the size of a nickel on its edge. You have to practically put your nose on the piece to see what you’re looking at. And to hold those 2.3 million uniforms, it’s 10 x 25 feet. You have to understand that I see my work for the first time when I see it in an exhibition. Otherwise I see it on a computer. That prison piece took me a really long time to do, building the image piece by piece. I thought I got what it meant. But when I saw the actual print installed it was just absolutely shocking, that there were that many Americans imprisoned.

Really, they all have that effect. It’s so hard for us to understand gigantic numbers. It’s assumed that when we talk about these huge numbers that we comprehend them. But I don’t think we do comprehend them. There’s a disconnect going on. We don’t feel anything about these gigantic numbers, and it creates this cultural anesthesia. When the killings were happening in Rwanda, and we hear there are 800,000 people murdered, what does that mean to us? But if we saw their dead bodies stacked in a series of stadiums, if we could actually see those murdered people, we would act.

Talk about the tension between aesthetics and message.
I started with that question in my “Intolerable Beauty” series. I began using beauty to provoke an uncomfortable conversation. If I took ugly photographs of something ugly, people would just be repelled. If I took beautiful photographs of a frightening subject, people would be drawn into the aesthetics of the image, and the message would clobber them while they were unaware. It’s a technique that’s been used for centuries in art and photography. But when I exhibited that work in 2005, it was frustrating because most of the conversations were about how beautiful the images were, and there was very little about the message. In my cell phones image in “Intolerable Beauty,” I made several choices about aesthetics: I put it in perspective, I arranged the cell phones in a swirl, and although most were black, I had some colored phones that gave the piece activity for the eye. So for the “Running the Numbers” series, I decided to get away from that and just make a random pattern of phones, all of them silver. I wanted to just purely illustrate the quantity and get away from the beauty. But it turned out that just the sheer visual perplexity of the image has a beauty in itself.

The jet trails image was just a random pattern, but again, there’s a strange kind of beauty. People say it looks like ice crystals. So my own idea of beauty has changed a lot. But it also made me think about how we can face the horror of our world and still allow for joy. I tend to get into this place where I don’t allow myself to enjoy life because there’s so much bad stuff happening. Now I’m coming to a place where I can feel joy. We can allow ourselves to enjoy life and appreciate the miracle we’ve all been given and to appreciate humor and beauty. So that’s a subtle message I’m trying to put into my “Running the Numbers” series. I find personally the more I can open myself to the horror and really allow myself to feel the full range of feelings about what’s happening, then my ability to feel the good aspects opens up in the other direction. If we live in denial, if we try to avoid knowing about it and our role in the horror, then there’s falseness to the joy.

Chris Jordan’s photographs can be seen on his Web site, chrisjordan.com, and his TED speech can be viewed at ted.com.

Ron Pugh, a US Forest Service special agent in charge of illegal activities on public lands, has spent the past few years concentrating on illegal marijuana grows. Marijuana “gardens”—a misnomer on a grand scale—are responsible for the majority of thirsty straws draining rivers and creeks that cross public lands. Pugh flips up a slide showing the spread of illegal grows across the nation. “This, “ he says ominously, meaning Mendocino and Humboldt counties, the crown jewels of US marijuana production, “is not even one of the heaviest pockets.”

In 1995, foreign nationals, mostly Mexicans, began growing marijuana in Southern California mountains and parks. By ’97, grows had spread into every national park on the West Coast. In 2001, those grows expanded from California, Oregon, and Washington into Idaho, and now are spreading like a giant ink stain across the center of the country’s park and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands all the way to the East Coast.

Says Pugh about the sheer volume of grows, “This is not a hippie thing.” He’s come prepared with a list of comparisons between a “hippie”grow and a DTO site—one maintained by a drug trafficking organization. A traditional garden on public lands, Pugh says, has one or two growers and fewer than fifty plants. The gardener, who lives locally, hikes in every other day or so, carrying water for his plants. Firearms are uncommon, and locations are predictable. “They’re within a quarter mile of a road,” Pugh explains, “and they’re rarely uphill. White guys are lazy.”

The DTO sites, on the other hand, are as remote as the growers can get, often three miles from the nearest road. They contain an average of 6,600 plants, tended by an average of seven growers who live in tents the entire season, from May to October. The growers are aided by scanners, radios, night-vision goggles, an arsenal of weapons, and truckloads of plastic pipe to divert area streams to their plants, sometimes from as far as a half-mile away. When they abandon the site in the fall, they leave behind mountains of trash, about as much trash as a small city dump.
What they bring in is just as bad. “They smuggle in pesticides from Mexico,” Pugh says, “more potent than you can buy here. And believe me, they don’t care about the creeks.” When Pugh describes growers mixing chemicals directly in the creek to pump onto their plants, a moan ripples through the audience.

In a later email exchange, Pugh says that he’s had trouble getting people to understand the ramifications of the crisis: “That’s why I go to great effort to point out that we aren’t dealing with `just marijuana,’ but a huge environmental issue,” Pugh says. “Basically everyone cares, to some degree or other, about that.” Pugh gives his presentation about twice a month, he says, to spread the word to new people: “When they become informed,
they become outraged,” he says. “And outraged people demand action.”

The US Forest Service is not a drug agency, though recently DTO sites were reclassified as crime scenes, which allows inter-agency cooperation with local and national law enforcement. The agency can now sift through trash for phone numbers, receipts, and other tips that could extend criminal prosecution past the hired help and up to the drug lords at the top of the chain. Pugh evokes laughs when he quickly corrects himself while explaining how the combined law enforcement effort needs to locate Mr. Big—“or Ms. Big. Well, I’m pretty sure it is Mr. Big.”

Pugh emphasizes that while the marijuana grows are an enormous drain on resources both financial and environmental, they are also a huge safety issue—after all, these are public lands where anyone can hike. If you stumble on a scene, Pugh advises, retreat immediately and call for help; during this past season, DTO growers killed two hunters on BLM land in Humboldt County.

The Forest Service has no funding for cleanup and depends upon volunteers to help out. Pugh estimates that it takes $5,000 per acre to remove DTO infrastructure and another $5,000 to restore the site. “Eradicating these grows is a number-one national priority,” he says, explaining that he’s met with state and federal Congressional delegates
frequently over the past two years and that Dianne Feinstein, a member of the Senate Committee
on the Judiciary, is particularly concerned.

Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman supplies the local picture, noting that the county’s per capita sales of rat poison are the highest in the nation; growers buy rat poison by the pallet because watering the grow sites attracts rodents. This poison ultimately contaminates the soil and creeks while poisoning raptors and other animals that eat the dead vermin. DTO growers also routinely shoot wildlife.

Most of all, they consume water. “As you go downstream on the Eel, the river should grow,” says Allman. “Instead, it gets smaller because people are pumping into storage tanks and directly into gardens.” Allman estimates that 3.6 million pot plants are grown on public lands—“That’s 3.6 million gallons of water a day,” he says, “pumped out of our creeks and rivers.” Allman pledges to respond to anonymous GPS reports of pumps and hose: “I’ll pull pumps,” he promises. “We’ll fly tributaries. I want to see the salmon come back.”

Salmon are equal opportunity victims, not just impacted by foreign nationals growing pot on public lands. As fisheries and watershed scientist Patrick Higgins points out, many of us are killing the creeks and rivers by supporting agriculture that relies on illegal diversions and unpermitted dams. Higgins, from Arcata’s Kier Associates, comes armed with graphs showing the number of illegal diversions and dams outnumber permitted diversions all along the North Coast and in Napa and Lake counties.

Higgins recalls fishing in Mendocino County’s Outlet Creek during the ‘60s, when it was loaded with steelhead. By 1996, because of illegal drafting, parts of the creek were dry in the summer, stranding fish in deep pools—pools from which diesel pumps lift water daily. Higgins says there are 1,700 illegal diversions in Marin County alone. Flyovers show illegal ponds everywhere, for vineyards and other agricultural uses. The Napa River used to have Coho salmon, the Navarro is dry, and so is the Gualala. Creeks dry between pools that often become clogged with algae that grows in the too-warm, too-still water. When the algae blooms, it releases a nerve toxin that has poisoned dogs and wildlife.

By email, Higgins sent a chart showing the difference in fish populations during El Niño and Niña years—populations fluctuate depending upon drought and full water flows. Through drafting and illegal dams, we’ve created a couple decades of drought-like conditions, even though we’ve actually had wet years like 2005. When a real drought comes along—as it has now—the fish are already stressed and in historically low numbers. “We have a regional crisis,” Higgins says. “There’s something called public trust. We all own the fish, and we all own the water. We’ve lost public trust in this culture.”

Higgins has a laundry list of those not “minding the store,” including the California State Water Resources Control Board: “seldom seen and completely ineffective,” he charges. The water board says that because of limited resources, its enforcement style is informal. It tends to respond to violations by issuing retroactive permits for illegal diversions that may have existed for years: “They send people a postcard or an email and call it informal enforcement,” Higgins says. He calls for profound reform, including requiring that all diversions carry a permit and that management of surface and groundwater be turned over to a state agency with public trust as its watchword. Illegal dams should be torn out, he says, and unpermitted diversions penalized by administrative fines of $500 daily. “It’s just a grab,” Higgins concludes. “When you disturb landscapes, the landscape reacts. If you change the nature of a watershed, you change everything.”

Yet at a roundup meeting held in Mendocino County’s Laytonville in July, fire officials seemed almost ebullient, explaining that the fires had swept through grasses and scrub but damaged few large trees. In fact, said the officials, you couldn’t ask for better fires; decades’-worth of overgrowth burned in days. The end result sounds a lot like what Jensen and McPherson advocate in Living with Fire. Don’t fight wildfires; instead let them burn out scrub, dead wood, and undergrowth, saving older trees and returning fire-prone habitat to what it is meant to be.

The two write that during the past decades of fire suppression, we have aimed to defeat fire, not live with it. Humans have a healthy fear of fire, and elected officials and fire marshals find it popular—or mandatory—to adopt a zero-tolerance attitude towards blazes on wildlands and parks. Rather than accepting the reality of living in the West, where fires have burned for millennia and vegetation and animals have adapted to fire’s successive and certain return, we allow property owners to build in wildlands and on the borders of national and state parks and then assume the obligation of protecting that private property at astounding costs, including the lives of firefighters.

Living with Fire lays out the downside of fire prevention policies. The two authors argue that firefighters’ lives must come first, not protection of private property. Fifteen lives were lost fighting the lightning fires, and the fight cost well over $210 million. Much of that money was spent protecting private homes and businesses. That figure doesn’t include the work that remained to clean up the effort of fighting the fires. Fighting fires has a drastic impact on the land, far more than the effects of periodic fires sweeping through. Diesel spills and chemical bombardment leave contamination behind, while bulldozing roads and firebreaks creates erosion and sediment in creeks and rivers.

McPherson and Jensen favor a more sensible approach, especially in these years of drought and economic stress—learn to live with periodic fires. Remodel your house to make it as nonflammable as possible, and follow the hundred-foot thinning rules, removing most trees and vegetation over four feet tall within 35 feet of your home. In the outer 65 feet, you eliminate grass, weeds, and dead wood, replacing it with natives and drought-tolerant species. The inner circle is irrigated, creating succulent, hard-to-burn growth, while the outer 65 feet is mostly dry, at least after the natives get established.

Guy McPherson is professor of natural resources and ecology at the University of Arizona. Sara Jensen (recently married, now Sara O’Brien) works as a private lands conservation associate for Defenders of Wildlife. I interviewed her at her home in Portland, Oregon.

How did you become interested in fire and fire management?
I wrote my MA thesis at the University of Arizona on similar material. One chapter is adapted from my thesis. Guy McPherson was my master’s advisor, and he had written material, some too political for him to publish. Guy suggested we write a book together, but it didn’t fit together as easily as we thought it would. I rewrote it with Guy’s help.

Guy likes to lead with the political side. We toned it down a little bit. To have the science taken seriously we had to make sure we weren’t being unnecessarily idealistic in the writing. It’s easy to make enemies with this topic.

What would you do if you could institute three policy changes?
I would want to see a huge national campaign on thinning brush and small trees around your house and a call to shelter in place during fires. You reduce the flammability of your home by having a nonflammable roof, using appropriate building materials, not keeping your woodpile or propane tank next to your house. And you clear the area around your house. As long as houses are more flammable than forests, we’re not going to make advances in dealing with forest fires.

Then we need a broader campaign to educate people about fire. We’ve come a long way in the past few years, but we need to do more to help people develop a tolerance for fire. And I’d like to see them leave the wilderness and roadless areas alone. I have more sympathy for the thinning argument living in Oregon than I did when I was in Arizona. But I still think thinning is not a landscape-scale solution. We’re not going to thin the eastern side of Oregon and reintroduce fire. In the vast majority of American landscapes on public land, you’re going to have to reintroduce fire. The cost of fighting fires and the damage from fighting them is just too great to bear. You’d want to see those areas treated with fire or more or less left alone.

Guy and I and another colleague wrote an article about the environmental impacts of fire suppression. Once you start thinking about it, it’s overwhelming—scooping water out of wetlands, using diesel around creeks and rivers, road cuts.

If I’m going to be an idealist, I think we need a new governance structure to deal with long-term problems. Fire suppression seems to work on the same time scale as elections and budgets. We need a structure that deals with long-term planning and solutions. All agencies struggle with this problem. They work on a budget year, and you’ve gotta spend the money or not. It’s really constraining in terms of reintroducing fire. It’s crazy to spend all this money to put fires out.

I work almost exclusively on climate change now, and a lot of the problems and solutions are the same: trying to figure out how to make natural systems and social systems interact without colliding. The sticking points are the same.

Environmentalists are often charged with bringing frivolous lawsuits to prevent clearing out underbrush.
It’s hard to judge if that’s been the case. I work for an environmental group now, and Defenders of Wildlife has been pro-thinning in dry forests. There are some appropriate places for thinning. But I appreciate the fear: the common attitude is that if you give them an inch they’ll take a mile. And often that’s been true. I can understand the tendency to say we’re going to draw a line in the sand.

Who benefits from the Healthy Forests initiative? [The Healthy Forests Restoration Act, passed in December 2003, allows thinning and fuel reduction in federal lands and national parks. Environmentalists feared that smaller trees and brush would be ignored in favor of marketable timber, leaving behind logging roads, slash from timber cuts, and diesel contamination.]
I was kind of baffled by that. I’d be really curious to see who, if anyone, took advantage of those categorical exclusions. I think I know who it was designed to benefit, but the implementation of policy doesn’t always play out. If it was designed to open public forests back up to logging, I don’t know that it succeeded in that either. The timber industry is still struggling with small-diameter wood. So I don’t know if it really made any impact at all.

How do the roadless areas factor into abandoning fire suppression?
I wouldn’t want to limit it to wilderness or roadless areas. We’ve set aside large areas of land with the intention that they’re natural areas for posterity. I don’t see the reason to manage those lands for any private group besides the general public. There’s no reason to manage for oil companies, timber companies, or people who live along the edges and don’t want to deal with fire. What’s funny is that people have become more risk-averse. Or perhaps it’s that people have become less able to judge risk. You can’t get more risky than to build your house on the edge of a stocked forest. People’s attitude towards government agencies is that of a customer. They expect to be protected and given what they want. An attitude towards fire is that the government wouldn’t let me build here if it wasn’t safe. The government has played into that perception with its agencies to ensure food safety and to demand that people wear seatbelts, for instance. Now it seems that people have an inability to assess or cope with risk. It’s not clear to me what caused that.

Can you predict how global warming could impact fires?
Tony Westerling did a study in 2007 that showed a strong correlation between climate change and wildfire in the West. They clearly showed that on top of human mismanagement and fire suppression, there was a clear indication that climate change is making fire more frequent or more intense. What happens is that the fire season becomes longer; there are more fire-prone times. Plus a higher amount of carbon dioxide causes more plant productivity, so the forest is more loaded. Overall at least in Western US, it’s pretty clear that the fire picture is going to get more extreme. Some parts of the country may actually be wetter.

How does wildlife cope with fire?
Some cope very well. There’s an iconic photo of two deer standing in a creek as fire rages around them. A lot of wildlife can flee, a lot can cope. Of course, plants and smaller animals are not mobile. But we know that almost all of these species evolved with fire. Pretty much everything in northern America evolved with some level of fire. From that perspective, the problem is landscape fragmentation. A system that had a number of methods of coping with periodic fires just doesn’t have those options. I’d like to be able to tell people not to worry about wildlife, but realistically speaking, with species that are on the edge anyway, we can’t say that. I wouldn’t want to say that wildlife is not endangered, but you have to take the broad view. You’re not going to do species any favor by changing out their ecosystem. Fire is a key part of nutrient cycling—it defines the edge of sagebrush and juniper ecosystems. Where fire is excluded, now it’s juniper. [Because of fire suppression, juniper has encroached into meadows and clearings.] There’s no easy answer.

The California fires were expensive in terms of money, lives, and energy lost. As the global economy changes and energy prices go out of sight, we may not have the money to fight fires. What can we do to minimize the losses?
We won’t have the money to do this. If you were interviewing Guy, he’d say we won’t have the oil to do this. The answer is to make communities fire-safe and not try to make a whole ecosystem fire-safe. When you look at it like that, it’s hard to believe people do it any other way. It’s politically easy to try to suppress fire on public lands. Fire managers themselves are becoming smarter about dealing with defensible space. They’ve gotta do this in the context of political pressure and an angry public. It’s going to be a message that takes a long time to get out to people.

Have you cleared around your new house?
(Laughs) It’s pretty cleared, meadows in all directions. We have a little bit of shrub around the house. But it brings up an interesting point. Will we as homeowners be able to say, “I’m not going to clear around my house, and I don’t expect you to defend it either?” We need a whole new way of thinking about how to deal with private property and public agencies. For people with small properties, the solution is to have fire-safe houses. I was really encouraged when I was in Arizona. Some districts were starting to come up with cooperative agreements with the Bureau of Land Management and private ranchers on doing joint burns. It actually made it possible to burn large swaths of fire-dependent ecosystems. Once you get all the neighbors on board, the insurers on board, you could burn hundreds of acres, even thousands of acres. That gives me a lot of hope. It’s very encouraging.

Subtitled What You Can Do to Protect Yourself and Your Family, this book is an uneasy mix of an academic text and a nonfiction thriller. Once you delve past clunky subtitles (“Particulate Matter,” “Malaria and Climate Change”), you discover an articulate, enlightening description of each topic. The book is full of points I hadn’t heard: a 15-21 foot rise in sea level is very possible; there is only enough high-grade uranium in the Earth’s crust to power nuclear plants for sixty to seventy years; fifty million barrels of oil are needed to produce the plastic bottles containing bottled water in the US; dengue fever could affect half the world’s population; reforesting a piece of land would reduce more carbon than growing plants for ethanol on the same site. The authors are not afraid to make suggestions: they suggest that it may make more sense to reforest while reducing petroleum use than to switch to alternative fuels.

The authors, a Johns Hopkins public health physician (Parker) and a Johns Hopkins psychologist (Shapiro), follow a family through a few days in the future: the couple’s kids have asthma, the wife’s siblings escape from the West (no water) and from the Southeast (hurricanes and encroaching sea levels), and want to move in with Sis. Everyone’s overheated, stressed out, struggling to survive. A final chapter paints a happier picture of the same family, in which readers of today took the steps the authors suggest at the end of each chapter. These action plans are divided into individual, community, and national and international solutions. Climate Chaos
turns our attention from fright or avoidance to solid resolutions; its value cannot be overstated. —Linnea Due

Nature’s Beloved Son: Rediscovering John Muir’s Botanical Legacy
Bonnie J. Gisel, with images by Stephen J. Joseph
Heyday Books, 2008, $45

We tend to think of John Muir as a dynamic combination of 19th-century mountaineer and forward thinking environmentalist. This handsome Heyday Books offering reveals Muir as he saw himself—first and foremost a botanist—and in the process restores the worshipful study of plants to its rightful place at the center.

Muir began his investigation of plants during an age in which religion and science had not yet diverged. He could go “to the woods and fields to make acquaintance with God’s plant world,” and find flowers “revealing glorious traces of the thoughts of God,” as he put it. His botanical observations, quoted extensively here, remain emotionally charged with the ecstasy of his communion with nature. After Muir’s time, as science came to view natural processes mechanistically, Muir’s words took on a quaint and irrelevant shine. Today, as scientific awareness of the complex intelligence of all life grows, Muir sounds fresh and understandable again. Good timing.

Preeminent Muir authority Bonnie Gisel writes with admirable clarity of Muir’s beginnings in botanical study, of the considered decisions and surprise turns of fate that led him through his lifetime of travels in wild places. The book’s lavish reproductions of Muir’s actual pressed plant specimens accompany the text as it follows Muir from his student days in Wisconsin and Indiana, on through his thousand-mile walk from Kentucky to the Gulf of Mexico, and then his extensive ramblings in California and Alaska. Pages from Muir’s journals are included, many with leprechaun-like figures of himself. For example, one drawing shows Muir attempting to climb a Georgia grass that, if his scale is correct, stands a good 25 feet tall. In every drawing his plant press is strapped to his back or carefully laid nearby.

The plant specimens—over 150 are included—are both awesome and underwhelming. On the one hand, just to know that John Muir picked this particular bird’s foot fern frond in Yosemite in 1869, dried it in his backpack press, and sent it off to the Missouri Botanical garden, makes us feel somehow like a fly on the brim of his hat, eerily intimate with his comings and goings. Stephen Joseph’s masterful digital cleanup and repair of the images leaves them so crisp and precise they could be real dried plants pressed between the pages of the book. Still, they remain flattened dried plants, most lacking the color and pictorial drama usually associated with lavish coffee-table volumes. On balance, even this monotony may aid the presentation, helping us slow down and
appreciate details, reminding us of plants’ ephemeral reality, and most of all making us want to go outside and
look at plants with the particular quality of attention John Muir modeled for us. —Gina Covina

The Recycling Movie

A kindergarten teacher in Shaker Heights, Ohio, made this movie with his 2008 class to encourage kids all over the country to recycle. Only six minutes long and set to a catchy tune, the movie manages to get the message across that recycling is key to preserving Earth’s resources. Teacher and filmmaker Craig Matis and Nancy Clark say that their school, Laurel Elementary, successfully integrates environmentalism into its preprimary and primary curriculum. Each classroom has receptacles for garbage and recycling material, and every year the preprimary class takes a trip to a recycling plant/landfill in Oberlin, fifty minutes away, to let children know where garbage ends up. This video is a great tool for teachers wanting to introduce students to recycling and disposal. The ideal audience ranges from preschool to second grade. Copies of The Recycling Movie can be ordered free. Send an email to Matis at cmatis@laurelschool.org or nclark@laurelschool.org —Scarlet Garcia

A week before Thanksgiving, disaster struck in the form of a four-footed feline: a bobcat killed seven of the birds, and Thode faced a $350 loss. It was not an auspicious beginning, but Thode, a member of Sonoma County’s 4-H, soldiered on.

The following year, he increased his poult order, raised his turkeys, and found a processor—someone who would slaughter and dress the turkeys for the table. Days before Thanksgiving, the processor had a stroke. Scrambling, Thode found someone else who charged twice as much, reducing young Thode’s profit by nearly eight dollars a bird. From that batch, he saved out four breeders, birds that were excellent examples of Bourbon Reds. In January, he brought them to Stockton, to the state’s biggest poultry show, where one was crowned State Champion Turkey. Four days later all four were dead, perhaps killed by the same nefarious bobcat.

It was another devastating blow for a twelve-year-old who loves his turkeys. But the young poultry producer’s fate was about to take a strange twist. That very afternoon he got a call from Slow Food USA’s Randi Sidner, who suggested that Thode and his 4-H friends raise heritage turkeys for the Russian River branch of Slow Foods.

What exactly is a heritage breed? These older breeds grow more slowly than commercialized breeds, which have been bred to make more money for the meat industry by putting on the poundage as quickly as possible. (Commercialized meat chickens grow so fast that some die of heart attacks at five or six weeks old, a month shy of slaughter.) Because profit margins rule the world of meat, heritage breeds have gradually died out, with poultry hobbyists their only champions.

But the hobbyists knew a secret: the slower-growing turkeys and chickens develop more taste over their longer lives. And that is right up the alley of Slow Foods USA, part of a worldwide movement begun in Italy, that advocates for local production of delicious and nutritious food, the sort of meals over which one wants to linger. In the turkeys’ case, growing great dinners is only part of the mandate; Slow Foods has partnered with the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy to promote breeds in danger of extinction. The breeds considered heritage by the ALBC are Beltsville Small White, Chocolate, Lavendar/Lilac, Jersey Buff, Midget White, Narragansett, White Holland, Black, Bourbon Red, Royal Palm, Standard Bronze, and Broad-Breasted Bronze. Of these, only the last is not in danger. Five breeds are considered critical, with only a few breeding flocks in the country, and two, the Narragansett and White Holland, are considered threatened.

Sidner listened to Thode’s sad tale, offered sympathy, and asked him to identify his biggest obstacle. Surprisingly, the bobcat didn’t take top honor—processing did. Thode explained that it cost too much, and the turkeys had to be driven off-site, which upset them and therefore Thode. Sidner said she’d deal with the processing problem if Thode would raise the birds. Thus was born the Slow Foods Heritage Turkey Project.

True to her word, the following year Sidner located a processor who owns a duck farm. He had a mobile trailer outfitted for processing birds, and he was able to come to Thode’s home. Thode, meanwhile, had recruited several others to participate in raising birds, including his younger brother David. That year they raised a hundred turkeys, some auctioned off at a Slow Foods event. Finally Thode made money on his turkey venture, in addition to, he says, garnering “Customers for life.”
Now seventeen, Thode and his 4-H partners raised over 200 turkeys this year, almost double the past output. Some friends, twins whose last name happens to be “Holland,” chose Holland Whites for their project, while Zachary and his brother David got a batch of different breeds from the hatchery. Thode continues to keep a few breeders, and the bobcat lately has not been a bother (knock on wood).
A question remains: if these heritage turkeys are in such danger of extinction, do you really want to eat one? The truth is that unless they have a commercial purpose, such as gracing holiday tables, their gene pool will eventually die out. Increasing their numbers as part of a food project is their best opportunity to continue as viable breeds. And why deny yourself a truly memorable slow dinner? “They taste so much better,” says Thode’s mother, Catherine.

Thode explains that all turkeys developed from the old Bourbon Red variety. The birds now used as commercial turkeys were selected to contain more white meat, around sixty to seventy percent of their total weight. This means they’re considerably drier when cooked. To combat dryness and increase weight, some turkeys are injected with liquid, but a lot of trouble goes on in American kitchens on Thanksgiving morning in an oftentimes-futile attempt to bring juicy meat to the table. Workarounds include brining, basting, and artfully arranged foil tents.

The heritage birds contain more meat per weight, and that meat tends towards a fifty-fifty split of dark and white. Dark meat bastes the white meat, so the heritage birds naturally turn out moist without being watery while tasting more like turkey.

Will heritage birds replace the commercial breeds? Not likely, as the growth difference is substantial. Commercial turkeys are big enough to process at three and a half months, reducing feed and housing costs for the producer, while a heritage bird might take twice as long. “The birds gain flavor over that period,” argues Thode. “Feed has a lot to do with [taste] too.” The Russian River heritage birds are raised outside and fed organic grains. They can eat seeds, scratch for bugs, and nibble leaves and other greens. And they embody the ground zero of sustainability: They can mate naturally. The giant plump white-meat breasts of commercial birds prevent the male from mounting the female; all commercial turkeys are bred by artificial insemination.

Thode’s mother, born and raised in Southern California, says she never thought she’d be raising turkeys—and the experience has had unexpected results. “That first year with Slow Foods, the processor came to us. The next year, we brought them off-site. It didn’t feel good. This time we’ve again found someone who will come to us. The birds are in their own habitat, and I know they’re handled humanely because they’ve never left my sight. I am very aware that commercial birds haven’t been handled like this, so the turkey project has been a metamorphosis for me. Now I find it hard to buy birds at the store.”