The Vigorous North

Oil Companies Get Weird

2009-07-08T21:50:00.009-04:00

Climate change is doing strange things in Texas.

In the panhandle town of Sunray, Valero Energy Corporation operates an oil refinery that dates to the 1930s and is capable of processing up to 170,000 barrels of oil a day into gasoline, asphalt, and other petroleum products. The refinery is a large industrial operation that uses a lot of electricity: a typical monthly bill runs to about $1.4 million.

Strange neighbors: photo by Michael Schumacher of the Amarillo Globe News.

So Valero recently decided to upgrade the refinery with a $115 million investment that will cut its energy costs dramatically. This month, Valero began operating six wind turbines on the site, which is now also the company's first wind farm. Unlike other wind farms that sell their power into the regional power grid, this one will be primarily devoted to powering the large refinery right next door. By the end of next year, Valero plans to add another 27 turbines, which would make the wind farm capable of powering the entire refinery whenever the wind is strong (the company expects this to be the case 40-45 percent of the time).

Unlike prior efforts from Big Oil (remember the "green" gas station?), this one seems to be a legitimate business effort, not a greenwashing public relations stunt. The company's publicity for the project amounts to a no-frills corporate press release buried in the depths of Valero's web site, and little else. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, the refinery's manager dismisses warm and fuzzy motives for the project: "We didn't build the wind farm so we could get into the wind-energy business. We built the wind farm so we could support the refinery and run it more economically."

Of course, the wind farm is still being used to produce gasoline, and the combustion of refined oil for transportation accounts for nearly a third of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. But the wind farm replaces energy that Valero had previously bought from Wyoming coal-fired power plants and had delivered over hundreds of miles of transmission lines (along with significant energy loss along the way). So, even though Valero is still manufacturing atmospheric poisons, at least they'll be burning a lot fewer atmospheric poisons in the process.

And here's another story of weird behavior from an oil company: ExxonMobil, the fossil fuel giant that's historically been the most outspoken denier of global warming (the company continues to fund global-warming-is-a-hoax conspiracy theorists at places like the Heritage Foundation) last month announced a partnership with an electric car company to make a fleet of rent-by-the-hour battery-powered cars available to the public in Baltimore.

ExxonMobil has invested $500,000 in the project, which is roughly how much money the company takes in every 45 seconds. Still, it's strange to see them investing in technology and a business model (carsharing) that are designed to reduce demand in their primary product. ExxonMobil is making a very small hedge against the risk that they'll turn into the next Chrysler or Kodak.

It's probably too soon to say for certain, but all of this seems to me to be another indicator of an unsteady climate: when even corporate oilmen from Texas start taking renewable energy technology seriously, could it mean that Hell is freezing over?

The Big Box Aviary

2009-06-30T15:50:00.002-04:00

Photo by flickr user PhotoJeff.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that house sparrows love home improvement warehouse stores:

These birds have set up housekeeping in Home Depots, Lowe's, and other big-box stores around the industrialized world. But here's the really amazing thing: from Maine to Virginia, England to Australia, and points in between, house sparrow populations everywhere have learned the motion detector trick [fluttering in front of automatic door sensors] to let themselves in and out of their cavernous homes. In other words, it appears that all these far-flung flocks have independently discovered how to use technology to their advantage.

Home improvement stores offer near-ideal habitat for sparrows: there are none of the housecats that decimate bird populations elsewhere in the suburbs, no hawks, no weather, and there's an abundance of birdseed.

The Monitor article reports that one Home Depot employee in Maine put up a decoy owl to scare away the birds from turding on the kitchen and bath display. Other stores have installed fine-meshed nets around the ceiling rafters to prevent the birds from nesting.

Search "home depot sparrows" on flickr for few photos of the birds in various stores around the nation.

ACES: American Clean Energy and Security Act

2009-06-26T13:43:00.004-04:00

There's a climate change and renewable energy bill being debated right now in DC, and it might even have a fighting chance.

Do yourself a favor and call your representatives to help it win. Think of it as a sort of retirement plan: a small insurance policy against famine, drought, and failed states to go along with your 401(k).

1Sky has the phone numbers.

Heavy rains and the fecal ocean

2009-06-24T18:10:00.005-04:00

A public health advisory:

In the past week, most of the northeastern Atlantic seaboard has received several inches of rain. The storm drains and sewers of the region's cities have been overwhelmed by millions of gallons of runoff, carrying whatever garbage was lying in the gutters and frequently discharging a mix of raw sewage and street runoff in older cities' combined sewer systems.

So (and I'm sorry to be such a bummer), even though it's finally sunny and warm, it would be kind of gross to take a dip in the ocean right now.

Here in Portland, for instance, the East End Beach has been under a pollution advisory for most of the past week, and was closed completely over the weekend. In New York, several beaches in the Bronx and North Queens are under advisory or closed, and a number of beaches around Boston in Massachusetts Bay are either closed or nearing the health limit.

Beach water quality is determined by the number of enterococci bacteria found in a 100 milliliter sample, which is highly correlated with the number of other pathogenic bacteria that are often found in sewage, including fecal coliform. The federal limit defined by the EPA is 35 colonies per 100 mL, but keep in mind that the federal standard has been influenced by lobbyists: Hawaii, the state with the strictest water-quality standards, posts warnings on its beaches if its testing samples find any more than 7 bacteria in 100 ml of water.

So, for instance, you might not want to swim at Boston's Carson Beach, even though its open, since the sample taken yesterday found 31 colony-forming units of enterococci. Scarborough Beach State Park found 20 colony-forming bacteria in its sample on Tuesday. And even in relatively isolated areas of the coast, weird stuff is washing up on beaches - for instance, dozens of used hypodermic needles on a beach in Harpswell, in midcoast Maine.

So, as tempting as it is, I will not be visiting a beach this afternoon. If I were you, I'd lay off the bottom-feeding bivalves and crustaceans for a week or two as well. Luckily, the ocean is good at washing itself out with several tides every day, and if the dry weather continues I might take a dip this weekend.

Here are the public health websites where you can read up on bacteria counts and beach advisories for the Northeast's major cities:

Maine Healthy Beaches
Massachusetts Bureau of Environmental Health
New York City Beach Quality Reports
New Jersey Ocean Beach Information - NJbeaches.org

Alpha Site: the Navy's nuclear Grand Central, in the suburbs of San Francisco

2009-06-23T12:00:00.002-04:00

Here's a ground-level photo of yesterday's mystery site on the eastern fringes of Concord, California, from flickr user topherus:

Looking at the map, I noticed that these rails all led to the US Naval Station Port Chicago, about three miles away on the shore of Suisun Bay (the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta). A quick search uncovered this globalsecurity.org blurb about the base:

The Detachment’s primary purpose is the loading and unloading of large quantities of weapons and equipment from cargo and pre-positioning ships. This differs substantially from most other naval weapons stations and detachments, where weapons are loaded aboard combatants, amphibious vessels or replenishment ships one at a time or in very small groups. Base infrastructure is uniquely suited for bulk quantity operations with one floating crane, seven shore cranes, 1 superstacker, one Rough Terrain Container Handler, 342 forklifts, 101 miles of railroad track, and 79 miles of roadway. During wartime conditions, Detachment Concord has the capability to load 4,500 tons of munitions per day.

This is how frightened we used to be of the Communists: imagine building all this in order to send hundreds of bomb-packed boxcars to explode over Siberia on a daily basis, because the Russians were also planning to send hundreds of bomb-packed boxcars to explode over California on a daily basis. Stuff like this gives me some comfort in knowing that our global society isn't quite as batshit crazy as we were during the Cold War.

The base's inland portions, including those pictured above and in yesterday's post, are massive weapons bunkers, designed to transfer boxcars full of explosives into storage, and then onto waiting Navy ships. The area is currently in the process of being decommissioned, and in the course of planning for redevelopment, newly-declassified details are emerging. One "community representative" at a recent meeting learned from the Navy’s “Historic Radiological Assessment” team that nuclear missiles were stored in these bunkers, and moved through these railyards on a fairly regular basis. The "Halfway to Concord" blogger reports:

The area of these bunkers can be seen from Willow Pass Road as your approach Highway 4 looking South East, there is a set of bunkers set aside surrounded by a double wire fence with telephone poles surrounding it with floodlights on them. It was called in various documents: the Alpha Site or in RAB records as Site 22 Bunker Group 2...

The period of atomic weapon storage was ended “long ago”, but the implication elsewhere is that they removed more than 25 years ago and maybe into the late 70’s...
In the main ‘Bunker City’ area [pictured above] opposite the Dana Estates there were 6 bunkers that housed ammunition for the Phalanx Weapon System that used depleted Uranium bullets. This material is about 1/3 denser than lead, which is why it makes for a better bullet for this weapon system.

The author also notes that, in the city's redevelopment plan, much of the base would be sold off to housing developers to house 33,000 new residents. The area of these bunkers, the Grand Central station of Cold War naval warheads, would become the site of "low density ‘Estate’ style housing," which is Californian for "McMansions."

Other than the fact that Contra Costa County has averaged about 100 foreclosures a day for the past year, building new, radioactive trophy houses is probably a fantastic idea! Hey, Californians: here's some inspiration from ye olde East Coast.

PS- Kudos for commenter Jake D. in the previous post for guessing correctly what these were.

Alpha Site: Concord, California

2009-06-22T19:20:00.004-04:00

I was looking at Contra Costa County, California for another project when I spied this odd-looking place, just east of the city of Concord:

View Larger Map

"Graveyard," was my first thought, which turns out to be not far off. Zoom in and you'll see that the grid is traced with railroad tracks. Any guesses as to what it could be? I'll post the answer here tomorrow at noon.

Making C02 Visible

2009-06-19T15:15:00.004-04:00

This morning, a huge new billboard went up near Penn Station in New York, devoted to keeping track of how many metric tons of greenhouse gases are in our atmosphere at any given moment. The clock started this morning at 3.64 trillion metric tons, based on estimates and reports from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

You can track the clock online here, at the Deutsche Bank's website. As I write this, another 1,000 tons are being added into the atmosphere every second. The billboard doesn't say so, but the survival of civilization and most life on earth relies on stopping this clock and beginning to turn it backwards in the next ten to twenty years.

Anyhow, as I've said before, one of the biggest hazards of climate change is the fact that it's hard to perceive: unlike other pollutants we've dealt with, CO2 is invisible and odorless, and you can't feel the effects of a multi-trillion-ton blanket in the atmosphere until a category four hurricane is at your doorstep.

The carbon counter helps with that problem. I'm also encouraged by the fact that the billboard's being paid for by a major global bank: as Mindy Lubber wrote today in the Huffington Post, the costs of greenhouse gas emissions aren't on anyone's balance sheet, which makes them a huge financial loophole in the global economy. Tallying greenhouse gases on a huge billboard in the world's financial capital is a step in the right direction (and it gives Deutsche Bank a measure of credence in the carbon accounting and trading businesses that are expected to emerge once the United States passes a climate bill).

This is just a couple of blocks away from the well-known "debt clock," which hasn't been successful enough to forestall the addition of another digit when the debt went over $10 trillion last fall. This counter will never need another digit: if our atmosphere accumulates that much carbon, there won't be anyone around to keep the lights on.

Cartographic Tattoos

2009-06-14T19:19:00.005-04:00

Of the several hang-ups that prevent me from inking myself, a big one is how a tattoo will last your entire life: no matter how much you may change as a person, you'll always have some emblem of your past stamped on you. A note to my 70-year-old self: you might be cringing at the turn-of-the-century prose here, but you owe me some thanks for not embarrassing you with a puckered White Whale on your flabby bicep.

Nevertheless, here's a tattoo that strikes me as more interesting because it's almost explicitly designed not to stand the test of time: the cartographic tattoo. Here's one of the city of Portland, via the Strange Maine blog (an 1891 map of the city is on the right, for comparison):

Sure, the cartographic tattoo has some of the same hazards: what if the wearer moves out of town? Or loses her interest in maps? But as the person changes, so will the city: the tattoo will maintain its interest as a historic artifact of how we understood the city in the early 21st century. The city in the tattoo, and it our contemporary mind's eye, is defined by its coastline (in blue), and its highways and principal streets (in red). The railroad lines that featured prominently in the nineteenth-century map are absent from Julia's tattoo, and the coastline has changed, too, as low-lying marshland got filled between the Civil War and the establishment of wetland protection laws in the 1970s.

But fifty years from now, the city's maps will have changed again. The coastline will be somewhere else, as rising sea levels inundate some of the land-filled neighborhoods again; maybe some of the highways will have be gone, and transit routes will figure more prominently. The pleasure of looking at a historic map and reflecting on how a city has changed, in this case, would be amplified by talking with the person who is tattooed. "Hurricane Gordon back in 2012 destroyed this bridge, here. The government couldn't afford to rebuild it so they decommissioned the freeway," she might tell you. Or: "All this was solid ground until 2020, when I was living near this mole, here. That's when they restored the marshes that are there now."

More: Portland, Maine in historic USGS topographical maps

The Strange Maps blog also has a post about a woman who inked an 1896 map of Hannover, Germany on her entire back.

The High Line in 2009

2009-06-11T17:20:00.009-04:00

The High Line, which I wrote about at the end of 2007, opened to the public this week as a newly-landscaped public park. It looks pretty great:

Photo by joevare on flickr.

But it's interesting how the context of the High Line has changed since its current incarnation went under construction two years ago. Back then, Manhattan was in the middle of a real estate boom for the ultra-wealthy. The overgrown High Line was a romantic idiosyncrasy - a few acres of overgrown, abandoned meadowland that held itself aloof from the city's real estate obsessions.

The High Line was initially pitched as a new park by a few activists who wanted to preserve this beautiful bit of wilderness in their neighborhood. Here's what it looked like back then:

Photo: Jason Levine

The idea may have come from the grassroots, but the High Line became a reality at the hands of developers and politicians who wanted an amenity for the wealthier, less wild neighborhood they envisioned in place of the industry and empty lots of the old Meatpacking District.

Construction began near ground zero of the real estate boom. Workers scraped away all of the High Line's wild growth and replaced it with new soil beds and plantings according to architectural plans designed to mimic the abandoned landscapes they were replacing. Meanwhile, a new forest of ultra-luxe high rises began to rise in the surrounding neighborhood, fertilized by the new high-concept park.

Then, of course, the housing market fell to earth - which, for Manhattan's real-estate space cadets, was a very, very long way to fall. Suddenly, the old High Line's overgrown abandonment wasn't a such a novelty: we began seeing the same triumphs of nature in suburban backyards and half-finished construction sites all over the country.

They're still building new high-rises around the newly-opened High Line, but it's a lot less certain, now, about who's going to pay millions of dollars to live in the skyscraper with the car elevator (it lets lucky residents park their cars on the same floor where they sleep*).

Photo by meganificent on flickr.

In the new economy, the High Line feels a lot weirder. It was meant to be a futuristic preserve for New York's past - especially its overgrown lots and abandoned industrial infrastructure. Now that the park is open, though, the ultra-slick High Line feels a bit out of place. Instead of evoking New York City's past, the High Line looks more like an expensive simulation of conditions in inner-city Detroit, or of a foreclosed backyard, or of any of the thousands of newly-defunct car dealerships nationwide. Those conditions were rare in New York City two years ago, but now that they're fairly commonplace in society's consciousness, the High Line seems more artificial and contrived.

This sounds harsher than I mean it too: lots of park landscapes are artificial and contrived, and also successful. I'm actually very much looking forward to visiting this new park, and I'm excited that so many New Yorkers had the vision to recognize and preserve this bit of wilderness in the middle of the city.

My point is that even though every sapling, rusted rail, and clump of wildflowers is in its place according to the architectural plans, the High Line Park that opened this week is quite different from the High Line Park that was designed two or three years ago. Our experiences in society shape our experiences of nature, and society is changing a lot right now.

I hope that there will be many more parks like the High Line, and I expect that one of many silver linings of this recession is that there will be. What better place to think about our society's changing relationships with nature than on an overgrown ruin of the old economy?

* Re: the car-elevator condo: I don't understand how people willing to pay for a drive-in elevator - in order to minimize their exposure to public places - are expected to benefit from their proximity to a park like the High Line. It seems as though they'd be just as happy - if not happier - living next to a heavily-guarded prison. Or in one: after all, in the real estate market for multi-billionaire captains of finance, prison cells are probably one of the fastest-growing segments.

Death by Transcendentalism: The Mast Head

2009-06-09T22:05:00.003-04:00

A few weeks ago I wrote about Amy Stewart's backyard poison garden, and how the idea of nature as something that can restore your spirit, as in a garden, is still a relatively new one compared to the idea of nature as something that's going to kill you.

I don't think that these are inconsistent ways of thinking about nature. But I do think that acquainting us with death is one of the things that makes nature interesting, and even spiritually uplifting. Most gardens are the landscape equivalent of muzak: feel free to space out, they tell us, and just enjoy the scenery. But the poison garden commands respect: if you value your health, here's a botany lesson you won't ignore. Life in the poison garden is a lot richer than in a corporate campus planted with pansies.

Anyhow, the poison garden's rebuke to tiptoeing through the tulips reminded me of Herman Melville's famous lampoon of transcendentalist space-cadets, in Chapter 35 of Moby Dick: The Mast Head. I was going to incorporate this passage into the previous post, but it really deserves its own. More from Ishmael:

It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the other seamen my first mast-head came round.

In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost simultaneously with the vessel's leaving her port; even though she may have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years' voyage she is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her--say, an empty vial even--then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the last; and not till her skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.

...

Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I -- being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude, -- how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships' standing orders, 'Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time.'

And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent- minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold* not unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates: --
'Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!
Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.'
Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient 'interest' in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses at home.

'Why, thou monkey,' said a harpooneer to one of these lads, 'we've been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here.' Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature...

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

*I had to look up Childe Harold: it's a romantic narrative poem about a seafaring traveler in foreign lands, and Lord Byron's first big literary hit.

I Endorse This Book: Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino

2009-06-05T08:03:00.001-04:00

I've been reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities for a few months now. In short vignettes, Marco Polo describes the cities of his travels to their emperor, Kublai Khan, who has never seen the cities and never will. The cities Polo describes may or not exist, or the stories he tells may be numerous descriptions of the same place. That's not the point, though: Calvin0's fictional Marco Polo demonstrates that cities - or places in general - exist primarily in our perceptions and imaginations.

If ten people were to describe modern-day Boston to Kublai Khan, the Khan would imagine ten separate cities. The St. Louis experienced by someone who arrives by a cab ride from the airport is completely different from the St. Louis experienced by a hitchhiker, which, in turn, is different from the city experienced by one who arrives by riverboat.

Similarly: most people see our cities as agglomerations of buildings, roads, shops, and people, but with this blog I try to shake up our everyday perceptions of the places where we live. What Thoreau found at Walden Pond (which itself was no backwoods hermitage, but a working landscape on the edge of town) is available to any of us today, no matter where we are. All we need to do is perceive the wildernesses where we live, whether in empty lots, in the underground watersheds of sewer lines, or in the complex ecology of an economic system.

Environmentalism is all about being more perceptive about the world around us. Invisible Cities is about being more imaginative in how we create and interpret those perceptions.

It's an amazing, brilliant book, but one that is taking me ages to finish. I find that after finishing every 2-page description of one of the cities, I need to put the book down and think about it for a few days. On the other hand, I know that when I do finish it, I'll feel a sense of loss for not being able ever to read it again for the first time. Well done, Mr. Calvino.

Victory gardening for renters

2009-06-03T17:51:00.001-04:00

For the past couple of summers, I'd been raising cucumbers, herbs, peppers, and tomatoes on my fire escape. Last year's garden is pictured at right, early on in the season. A few weeks after I took this photo, though, the landlords called and asked me to move the plants, since the garden violated fire codes.

So this year, I'll be raising herbs and a few tomato plants on even more limited real estate, on a shelf inside the southwest-facing windows. This way, I'll only be blocking my fire escape from the inside, which is perfectly legal.

Although I expect the greenhouse effect of the windows will give me a longer growing season, the amount of space I have is considerably smaller. But I recently found a great blog devoted to gardening in small spaces: Eight Square Meters is all about maximizing the yield of food that the author can grow on his 8-square-meter apartment balcony in Dublin, Ireland. The latest post has handy pollination tips; here's some advice on maximizing the yield from potato plants in boxes, and here's a photo of his "greenhouse," which actually looks like one of those dust-covers you'd use in a wardrobe.

Good stuff! I'll post some photos of my own indoor garden as soon as I get all of the plants potted and situated.

"In wildness is the preservation of man."

2009-05-26T22:49:00.006-04:00

Last night, I finished reading The Thoreau You Don't Know, Robert Sullivan's new biography of Henry David Thoreau. It took me a while to get through it. My previous conception of Thoreau was most influenced by the memoir of essayist John Gould, Maine's Golden Road, in which Gould both compares himself to Thoreau a lot and also makes fun of him mercilessly as a clueless, Harvard-educated character, a guy who brings an umbrella to climb Mt. Katahdin and uses it to measure the dimensions of a moose along the way. It's very funny, although, in hindsight, it's a bit unfair to Henry David.*

This is exactly the kind of preconception this book tries to change, and though it took some effort on my part, it was worth it. For me, the high point came near the end, in a chapter where Sullivan visits Walden Pond State Reservation. Here's a passage:

The problem - if I have not said this too many times already - with the Thoreau so many people know is that he perpetuates a separateness between man and nature. We see the nature of Walden Pond as separate from the nature of the railroad tracks. We see that nature at the beach on the pond, which we try to keep litter free, as separate from nature in our driveways, where our car has a leak and the oil seeps out and down into the street and away to who knows where ... We see our individual actions as separate from the actions of our community... when we are all creatures in the same landscape, a herd, a mass of men and women. With a Thoreau who is separate from us, then we don't see our actions, the how we live, as relating to Thoreau's nature, which is in town, right where we live.

...

The understandable human tendency in nature writing to celebrate the extraordinary in the natural environment makes other places seem less than extraordinary, or bad, or ratty... But exceptionalism ends up being anti-Thoreauvian, as well as unfair and unjust, as applied to other species, or places, or even neighborhoods. Exceptionalism leads to trash incinerators being sited in low-income neighborhoods and eventually to the loss of the mundane that makes the extraordinary possible.

I was getting the feeling more and more that in the city I might find nature in a lot more places than I might have looked for it before, that the wildness was more important than wilderness, that wildness was everywhere, if I looked for it, the search being part of what makes wild wild. "In wildness is the preservation of man."

The Thoreau You Don't Know reveals a Thoreau who is more interested in finding nature inside the unremarkable town where he lives - in the cut of a railroad embankment, in managed woodlots, and in the industrial ice-harvesting operation that runs on Walden Pond during his time there. The real Thoreau called on us to embrace a more honest relationship with nature and each other, so that both our souls and our economy could prosper.

Sullivan's book makes me feel as though I've found a kindred spirit in plain sight, and it successfully convinced me to give Thoreau's books and essays another chance after my shallow and partial high-school-era reading.

*Footnote: Speaking of high school reading, Gould's daughter, Mrs. Christy, was my 10th-grade English teacher, and gave me Maine's Golden Road as a graduation gift. Also, when Stephen King was a tenth grader, he got his first writing job working for Gould at the community weekly paper in Lisbon, Maine. According to King, it was there that Gould taught him everything he needed to know about writing successfully.

Observations

2009-05-24T20:40:00.003-04:00

Things seen today while lounging in the grass at Fort Allen Park:

An osprey headed west, possibly to one of the nests near the Coast Guard base or the Casco Bay Bridge, and carrying a fish in its talons
The Java Sea oil barge (which has been here since Thursday), swinging on its mooring near Little Diamond Island
The Baltic Captain I arriving in harbor, and a smaller barge docking alongside (presumably in order to take on bunker fuels)
Wild strawberry (fragaria virginiana) blooming in the mown grass

Death by Transcendentalism: The Poison Garden

2009-05-21T17:53:00.006-04:00

At right: hellebore in Amy Stewart's backyard. Photo courtesy of the New York Times.

Nature is pretty, but it can also kill you. In fact, whether by man-eating lions or microbes or cellular decay, it probably will.

This doesn't jive well with the modern environmental movement. How can someone revere and dote on their inevitable murderer? The idea would baffle the Puritans, who used the the word "wilderness" almost as a dirty word, synonymous with death, torment, and terror. For Boston's founders, anything west of modern-day Copley Square was the domain of Satan.

But two hundred years later, their descendants embraced the wilderness and established the philosophical underpinnings of modern environmentalism. When nature wasn't threatening to starve or maim you, they found, it could make you feel pretty great: like a transparent eyeball, or a "part or particle of God," to use phrases from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Nature."

The wilderness became a spiritually and morally uplifting place as soon as humans tamed the wilderness.

I understand the transcendentalist point of view. I've had chills run down my spine from the freedom of being outside, have been struck dumb at spectacles of nature among craggy mountaintops and on the sidewalk of Broadway in Manhattan, and understand perfectly what Emerson means when he talks about a transparent eyeball.

Even though most of us can't experience the howling wilderness as the Puritans experienced it - park rangers, cellphones, and rescue helicopters having replaced large predators in the woods - I'd argue that getting us closer to death is still a pretty important part of nature's spiritual and moral value. Really understanding nature requires that you understand how insignificant you are, and how tenuous your life is, in the grand scheme of things. Being reminded of those facts constantly and violently - say, as a settler in the New World - probably would feel hellish. But it wouldn't hurt our well-fed, post-industrial, economically-panicked society to confront these facts more often.

Which is why I'm so jazzed about author Amy Stewart's poison garden, which is profiled in the decidedly un-wild "Home and Garden" section of the New York Times today. While working on a book about common poisonous plants, Stewart planted a garden of them in her backyard. Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities is "a fine gift for owners of country houses who have become altogether too smug about country life," according to the Times article.

Here is an impeccably cultivated garden in a suburban backyard. By all appearances, it seems to be the Puritan ideal of what nature should be: thoroughly civilized and under control.

But in fact, many of these plants are capable of killing you: digitalis, or foxglove, which can cause anorexia, nausea, and vomiting; castor beans, which, when raw, contain toxic ricin; and datura, a hallucinogen that can cause fatal cardiac and respiratory distress.

Eat any of them, and nature will violently express its callous indifference to your existence. It's a backyard botanist's version of extreme rock-climbing: a garden designed to put you ill-at-ease with nature. Honestly, I wouldn't want a garden like this for myself. But I love that it's out there, and I believe that I'll read the gardener's book as well.

The Overseas Shirley

2009-05-20T22:21:00.003-04:00

This oil tanker frequents the Portland Pipeline Corporation's oil terminals in South Portland, and was tied up to the Maine State Pier in downtown Portland for a few days this past winter for some repair work. She was last here on April 20th.

Shirley is also a felon, unfortunately.

According to MarineTraffic.com, the Overseas Shirley arrived in Portland early this morning after a stop in Halifax. Curiously, after departing from Halifax on May 14th, the Overseas Shirley took a northeasterly course towards Newfoundland, and was steaming towards Placentia Bay on the morning of May 16th, apparently destined to arrive at the Come-By-Chance oil refinery in Arnold's Cove. On the morning of May 17th, however, it was recorded steaming south out of the bay, about 10 miles away from the refinery - apparently it was either a very quick or a cancelled trip to Newfoundland's sole oil refinery.

Instead, the Overseas Shirley came here, to Portland, apparently to deliver crude oil into the Portland Pipeline and on to a larger refinery complex in Montreal. According to this Canadian history site, the Come-By-Chance refinery has had financial troubles in the past, probably owing to its geographic isolation. It seems likely that the Overseas Shirley filled its tanks with crude oil in Halifax (where, as in Portland, there are huge "tank farms" for oil storage), took some of it to Newfoundland, then delivered the rest to Montreal via the Portland Pipe Line.

Portland's harbor functions primarily as a foreign waystation for the Canadian oil industry. The United States is famously addicted to oil, but in this particular commerce, Maine plays the role of a junkie and of the cross-border mule.

Premium/Flavored/Enhanced

2009-05-13T10:17:00.006-04:00

Via Planet Money.

The American economy has taken some hard knocks lately, but at least it's still able to quench our thirst for getting mind-fucked with an overwhelming array of meaningless choices.

And now, please enjoy this advertisement:

Detroit, Land of Opportunity, The New New World

2009-05-11T21:06:00.004-04:00

Corine Vermuelen-Smith is a photographer who makes me want to move to Detroit:

Her photographs show a city that's reverting back into a frontier: a wide-open landscape of open prairies and land that's free for the taking.

The once-mighty tribes of the Big Three are shadows of what they once were, and their ruins are scattered everywhere. What remains of them is confined to government reservations. Their downfall wasn't smallpox or colonial crusades, but cheap credit and complicity in the SUV trade.

Above: empty-lot farm on Pierce Street.

The Detroit that remains looks like a ruin to most perspectives. But in the images of Vermeulen-Smith (who happens to be from the Netherlands), it looks a lot like a New World. Yeoman farmers reclaim abandoned lots to grow crops, and Detroit's homeless fashion tidy homes in the wilderness to live strikingly similarly as our national demigods, the western pioneers.

The recession is a new American revolution. From these ruins of the old economy grow a new manifest destiny, and it should lend hope for us all that this one will be more frugal, resourceful, and honest than the one we had expected.

The Beach of Shredded Auto Parts

2009-05-03T19:36:00.013-04:00

On Portland's western waterfront, between the Casco Bay and Veterans Bridges, lie the remains of a railyard that was abandoned sometime in the late 20th century. Along the collapsing granite seawall on one section is a mound of reddish soil, which, upon further inspection, isn't soil at all, but a finely-ground mixture of old rubber hoses, wire casings, nuts, washers, bits of fiberglass, and plastic.

These look like the remnants of scrapped automobiles that were sent through giant shredders at junkyards, then shipped by rail to this location. But the railyard went out of business, and the barge that was supposed to take them to some distant landfill never came.

So the temporary waterfront landfill became a permanent beach of shredded auto parts. Decades of oceanfront weather eroded the junk even further: now, the rubber is brittle to the touch and the metals are entirely rusted.

The junk has undoubtedly been leaching all sorts of toxic meatals into the adjacent Fore River Estuary for all these years: cadmium, lead, copper, zinc, and other poisons common to our automobiles. Yet, miraculously, a few scrubby juniper and aspen trees have managed to take root on the mound of shredded cars:

Economic delerium and architectural fever-dreams

2009-04-28T15:03:00.005-04:00

"In the center of Fedora, that gray stone metropolis, stands a metal building with a crystal globe in every room. Looking into each globe, you see a blue city, the model of a different Fedora. These are the forms the city could have if, for some reason or another, it had not become what we see today. In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city.."

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

For some reason (perhaps for solidarity among dying industries - they still print an Automotive section as well), the New York Times is still publishing an entire "Real Estate" section on the weekends. But Sunday's edition included an article that was highly worth reading: a feature on the unbuilt architecture of the Roaring Twenties.

The speculative binge of the late twenties seemed, for a time, like a great boon to architects and tall buildings. "In Manhattan in 1928, plans were filed for 14 buildings of 30 stories or higher, but by the next year the number was 52," writes author Christopher Gray.

Then reality set in when the stock market crashed at the end of 1929: "of these 52, just 19 would be built [in the midst of the Great Depression]. This ambitious cohort included designs that were indeed completed, like the Waldorf-Astoria and the Empire State Building."

At left, a 1929 proposal for a 100-story office building for Metropolitan Life next to Madison Square Park. Had it been built, it would today be the tallest building anywhere on the East Coast.

Most of our city skylines owe their existence to artificial economic booms of the past century. But the unbuilt visions can be even more impressive: like the fever-dreams of a delerious patient, we look back and wonder what they were thinking.

There are more examples from Houston, Texas in the early 1980s, when a boom in oil prices was generating spectacular real estate speculations for the city where most oil companies are still based.

The Bank of the Southwest proposed the 82-story skyscaper at right in 1982. When OPEC let loose its oil supplies in the mid-1980s, the oil price collapsed, along with Houston's economy and this proposal. A few months later the Savings and Loan crisis put the nail in the coffin for builders.

Of course, a lot of what happened in 1929 New York and 1980s Houston is happening again today, everywhere. In the delerium of an economic boom, architects and developers rushed to outdo each other with tall buildings and famous architects. Some of those architectural hallucinations are still being built, just as the Empire State Building was finished in 1931 (New York's current-tallest skyscraper didn't turn a profit until 1950).

Others buildings will enter the world of reality as deformed, misshapen siblings to their boom-era blueprints. Witness the Las Vegas condo hotel that, in February, responded to the foreclosure crisis by amputating the top 21 stories from the building mid-construction. The developer of that project, appropriately enough, is MGM Mirage.

But most of these dream-buildings will be unbuilt and forgotten. "The Missing Skyline," a recent post on Curbed, is a good survey of the New York City that New York City might have become if the infection of financial insanity had been allowed to continue a bit longer...

Time warps

2009-04-22T20:22:00.004-04:00

Portland Daily Photo blogger (and fellow Bonny Eagle High School alumnus) Corey Templeton has been doing some really neat photographs of historic postcards framed by the same locations in contemporary Portland:

Above: looking up Congress Street towards Congress Square.

Congress and Oak Streets. The old Columbia Phonograph is now a yoga store where you can drop lots of Benjamins on your path to enlightenment.

There's a whole group of people worldwide doing these framed photos on Flickr. In some, the historic pictures bear very little resemblance to the modern scenes that surround them (poor Lansing, Michigan). In others (especially those from Europe) there's little difference between the old photos and their modern-day frame. To my mind, the best ones, like these from Corey, combine recognizable buildings in both views, but contrast the two scenes with markedly different people, costumes, storefronts, and vehicles. Check out the awesome Strand Theater marquees in the top photo - they're long gone now, unfortunately.

Find more at www.flickr.com/groups/lookingintothepast/

The Maine Mall...

2009-04-16T11:04:00.001-04:00

...is bankrupt.

More accurately, the Mall's owners, General Growth Properties, whose business consists entirely of owning and operating hundreds of shopping malls nationwide, is bankrupt, thanks to crushing debt from over-inflated real estate speculations and plummeting enthusiasm for Made-In-China pap.

That's the thing about a recession. Why go to the Gap or Hot Topic to feel insecure about yourself, when you can merely contemplate your employment situation, for free?

So what's this mean for South Portland's wasteland of junk-food franchises and big box stores? The Mall itself will likely be sold at a bargain-basement price to satisfy General Growth's jilted creditors. But the outlook for the neighborhood doesn't look good. The old Circuit City, which has been abandoned for only a few weeks, already looks like a transplant from Chernobyl. Here's a good overview of the direction in which our malls are headed...

Return to Inwood Hill Park

2009-04-13T21:11:00.004-04:00

Last weekend, a friend of mine recruited me to come down to NYC to lead a nature walk for some sixth-graders from Washington Heights. So I brought them to my old park-rangering haunt, Inwood Hill Park, for my first visit back there in almost three years (n.b.: my experience as an Urban Park Ranger at Inwood is more or less how this blog was born).

We walked up the hill through the old-growth woods in the Clove, climbed through the Indian caves, and we saw:

the red-tailed hawk
several cardinals
a downy woodpecker
lots of house sparrows and squirrels

It's hard to tell what the kids thought of it. They were very well behaved, but then, they were also attending a Saturday-morning educational program on their own free will. They definitely liked the caves, though, and they seemed to think that the cardinals were neat. I wish we could have seen the hawk attack a pigeon or something: then the kids definitely would have loved nature, forever.

Anyhow, the park is much as I remember it, although it feels much smaller without any leaves on the trees. There was one very exciting change, though. A crescent-shaped piece of the playing field next to the "salt marsh" (pictured above) has been fenced off, with signs announcing the following:

RESTORATION IN PROGRESS: This area is being passively restored to native salt marsh. Sensitive vegetation, including Salt Marsh Cordgrass (spartina alternafolia), is in the process of regenerating.

This is pretty exciting. Before it was filled in with gravel and debris from the subway excavations, this entire field had been an expansive, ecologically-rich salt marsh. Large oyster-shell middens in the park's woods attest that the marsh helped support, among other things, one of the Hudson estuary's more productive oyster beds in the adjacent Spuyten Duyvil Creek. In the decades since, the adjacent mudflat (which park personnel optimistically refer to as the "tidal marsh") hosted the last remnants of the old marsh around its fringes, but even these sad shreds were sorely abused with picnic garbage, combined-sewer overflows, and park workers who hacked the marsh plants down with machetes for unclear "safety" purposes.

It's funny how often "safety" gives pencilneck bureaucrats the fiat to act like dicks.

In recent years, the edges of the filled-in playing field have been sinking, as the decades-old landfill settles and as tides from the adjacent mudflats gradually rise higher. When I worked there in 2006, there were two big London Plane trees on this location. During the course of the summer, their leaves dried up and fell, as the trees' roots parched themselves on increasingly briny groundwater. Instead of adding new landfill and planting new trees, the Parks Department has decided to let it sink: a decision that will be a lot cheaper and do a lot more good to the Spuyten Duyvil's water quality.

More Glaciers of Portland

2009-04-08T21:01:00.004-04:00

Belatedly fulfilling my promise of more glacier photos...

The Fore River Glacier.
Just like other glaciers in the wild, the Fore River Glacier possesses an alluvial fan pattern that spreads out as it approaches the water.

The Bayside Glacier.
It's only a fraction of a size of last year's glacier, thanks to a planned office building and parking garage that was due to begin construction this spring. The construction project has been canceled due to the financial crisis. As long that the same crisis doesn't also cancel the city's Public Works Department, we can look forward to a Bayside Glacier returned to its former glory next winter.

The Sable Oaks Glacier.
A view from the summit of the city's main snow dump. More Sable Oaks Glacier photos here.

March 6, 1890

2009-04-07T23:26:00.004-04:00

The Portland Museum of Art had an opening this evening for its Biennial, and although there were many excellent things there, my favorite was this drawing, by an artist named Julianna Swaney, called "Central Park March 6 1890":

The man depicted is Eugene Schieffelin, who, as legend has it, made it his project to introduce all of the birds mentioned in Shakespeare to the new world in the late 19th century. He tried, and failed, to populate nightingales here "Believe me, love, it was the nightingale," Romeo and Juliet); he succeeded in introducing the House Sparrow ("Not a whit, we defy augury: there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow," Hamlet) and the European Starling, which was mentioned only once in all of Shakespeare's complete works:

Nay, I will; that's flat:
He said he would not ransom Mortimer;
Forbad my tongue to speak of Mortimer;
But I will find him when he lies asleep,
And in his ear I'll holla 'Mortimer!'
Nay,
I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but 'Mortimer,' and give it him
To keep his anger still in motion.
-Hotspur, in King Henry IV, part I.

And so, on March 6, 1890, Eugene Schiefflelin set free two flocks of starlings, the bird that Shakespeare considered to be an agent of torment, into Central Park. And the rest is history: the descendants of Schieffelin's starlings have multiplied themselves to a population of 200 million birds, living throughout temperate North America.

The starling has become a banner example of an unwanted invasive species. Yet Schieffelin was a member of the New York Zoological Society, and the American Acclimatization Society, a quasi-scientific organization that expressly sought to introduce non-native species into new ecosystems, in accordance with some scientific theories of the time. Without a doubt, he would have considered himself a conservationist.

In hindsight, we're prone to think of Schieffelin as an idiot. But on March 6, 1890, he was doing something he believed to be virtuous. As the birds flew out from the cage, he would have felt a sense of hope: the beginning of a new future. For all of the hassles it has caused in the years since, it must have been a beautiful moment.