WayWest

Overnight our park is gone

I live in Los Angeles about a mile from where a huge brushfire burned more than 800 acres Tuesday in Griffith Park. Miles of trails and dirt roads thread through the 4,200-acre park, and I hike there almost daily with my energetic pup.

"Brush fire" doesn't convey the size or speed of such burns. While the park has no big timber, its steep slopes are thick with tinder-dry chaparral. Vaqueros, the early Spanish cowboys, invented leather "chaps" to keep their legs from being shredded by the head-high stuff. That park chaparral torched like lighter fluid early Tuesday afternoon, apparently from a single cigarette.

From my house this morning I can see the particular trail I usually hike. The scrub oak, toyon, and manzanita flanking it are gone, replaced by slopes of ash. Little bits of gray fleck our neighborhood, reminders of how the winds shifted all night long.

We're fine of course—a freeway and the LA river separate us from the slopes. Amazingly no one was injured and no buildings burned, thanks mostly to heart-stopping night flights by water-dropping helicopters.

In a city like LA, incredibly diverse but also incredibly socially stratified, Griffith Park is one of the few places used by every class and ethnicity. Truly a people's park. What it will be after the fire is a big question right now.

I hope all of us who use it can provide some answers.

Nature in L.A: trashed and treasured

In an essay that's part of an eventual book, essayist Jenny Price precisely captures the mixed feelings of loving nature yet living in Los Angeles:

There are many places in L.A. you can go to think about the city, and my own favorite has become the Los Angeles River, which looks like an outsize concrete sewer and is most famous for being forgotten. The L.A. River flows fifty-one miles through the heart of L.A. County. It is enjoying herculean efforts to revitalize it, and yet commuters who have driven over it five days a week for ten years cannot tell you where it is. Along the river, the midpoint lies roughly at the confluence with the Arroyo Seco, near Dodger Stadium downtown. L.A. was founded near here in 1781: this area offers the most reliable aboveground supply of freshwater in the L.A. basin. It’s a miserable spot now, a trash-strewn wasteland of empty lots, steel fences, and railroad tracks beneath a tangle of freeway overpasses: it looks like a Blade Runner set that a crew disassembled and then put back together wrong. It’s not the most scenic spot to visit the river but may be the finest place on the river to think about L.A.

Like so many writers who come to Los Angeles—and I moved here seven years ago—I have succumbed inevitably to the siren call to write about the city. The long-established procedure has been to explore why one loves it or hates it, or both, and to proclaim loudly in the process that L.A. is the American dream or the American nightmare. The tradition tempts writers with a combination of navel-gazing and arm-waving that proves impossible to resist for too long.

Of course, I am a nature writer—a unique brand of writer that has felt no compulsion whatsoever to write about L.A. and even less to live here.... But I have ended up here happily... exactly because L.A. has become the finest place in America to think and write about nature.

More urgently, L.A. is the ideal place to tackle the problem of how to write about nature. In the past twenty-five years, the venerable American literature of nature writing has become distressingly marginal. Even my nature-loving and environmentalist friends tell me they never read it. Earnest, pious, and quite allergic to irony: none of these trademark qualities plays well in 2006. But to me, the core trouble is that nature writers have given us endless paeans to the wonders of wildness since Thoreau fled to Walden Pond, but need to tell us far more about our everyday lives in the places we actually live. Perhaps you’re not worrying about the failures of this literary genre as a serious problem. But in my own arm-waving manifesto about L.A. and America, I will proclaim that the crisis in nature writing is one of our most pressing national cultural catastrophes.

I love L.A. more than I hate it. I wasn’t supposed to."

(Via The Believer magazine.)

Markets, truth and wisdom

In discussing his new book, Plan B 2.0, Lester R. Brown offers up this gem:

There's a quote by Oystein Dahle close to a decade ago now, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was for many years Exxon's vice president for Norway and the North Sea. He said, "Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth." That's a lot of wisdom distilled into those two sentences.

(Via Wired News)

Jared Diamond on the West's Choices

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond, in a Montana appearance promoting his newest book, Collapse, cuts straight to the conundrum facing that state and all the American West:

What I see going on in Montana is the increasing collision of your two essential core values,’ Diamond said. Those values being, ‘quality of life and love of beauty,’ and ‘individual rights, property rights and freedom from government regulations.’

The two would be relatively easy to mesh, Diamond said, if 1,000 people lived in Hamilton and the Bitterroot and Missoula Valley’s stopped growing. But that isn’t going to happen so we will have to fight to figure out a way to reconcile our values, or change them if need be.

Of course, as Diamond notes, the real rub is how we get there from here—particularly in a time when reconciliation of any kind seems deeply out of fashion.

(Via New West Network, by Courtney Lowery)

Best Gamers Found in White House

In a long, blistering piece for Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. details how the Bush administration is sabotaging the laws that have protected America's environment for more than thirty years. (Laws largely passed at the urging of the Nixon administration, btw.)

Kennedy goes beyond simply listing the legal rollbacks and weakened laws—of which there are many examples. To his credit, he spotlights in detail the administration's deliberate stealth mode and methods. "Under the guidance of Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the Bush White House has actively hidden its anti-environmental program behind deceptive rhetoric, telegenic spokespeople, secrecy and the intimidation of scientists and bureaucrats."

In particular, the language used brilliantly by the administration consistently creates a picture of making the environment better—even as its actions undermine existing standards. In a 15-second news feed—the source of most Americans'news—the rhetorical pollution flies right under most voters' radar. Equipped with the speed, discipline, and strategies of the best video gamers, the Bush folks are the best in the breakneck game of news/image management.

Inside silver lining of hydrogen-fueled cars: a dirty cloud of coal

Why is it not surprising to discover a dirty cloud inside the silver lining of hydrogen-fueled cars? Well, aside from some environmental groups who insist it's the perfect solution, consider who else keeps touting hydrogen-fuel-cell-driven cars as the answer to our vehicle emissions problem: President Bush and General Motors. In opposing the imposition of strict new milage mandates, they argue that the real solution, the one that everyone will love is hydrogen—and it's right around the corner. Ah yes, the old bait and switch of why settle for good when perfect is soon to come?

In a fine bit of journalism, Matthew Wald of the New York Times, explains how all that hydrogen will get made—with dirty coal. And who owns the coal company? Mostly Bush supporters. Read it and weep at how good this administration is at selling what no one should be buying.