October 1 2006 7:30 p.m.

Inside tent after a clumsy pitch in the early dark, flashlight hanging from a loop in the roof. The first time in dozens of overnights on Cal Poly Land I’ve brought a tent. Only a light rain, but enough to warrant it.

Left home on my bike at 5:30 to get settled by the sunset start of the holiday. Headed for the high ground and a view. But the overcast created a sense of quiet that made me want to stop and listen rather than look.

I parked the bike at the trail leading to Sycamore Glen. Normally dry this time of year, the creekbed was full of watercress and yellow monkeyflower, so wet I couldnt cross without getting muddy boots. My usual trail was overgrown this time, but I found a new one made by horses higher on the bank. The sycamore leaves were black green, thick, a foot across.

I walked slow and wide-eyed, ready for surprises. At the end of the little canyon leading to the Glen, I heard the plash of flowing water. There was the source: a broken steel pipe. On another visit I’d found a slump in the hillside grown over with rushes, and above it a break in this pipe where a plastic coupling had come undone. I’d repaired that and wondered how the landscape might change as a result. In the waning light of this afternoon I sauntered up the Glen and saw that the former little wetland had turned to dry grass.

I decided to return to the broken pipe and camp near the old oak where I’d stayed during my Yom Kippur fast three years ago.

The temperature is dropping. My eyes are drooping. Its only 8:00.

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Fossils in rock
Footprints in sand
Paths in a chamber of cloud.

A Report on the Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), October 4-6 2006

My only previous experience with Phoenix Arizona was a couple of years ago changing planes on a flight from San Luis Obispo to New York. On the descent to the airport I was arrested by the sight of an L.A. scale megalopolis in the middle of a vast desert patched with hundreds of golf courses, thousands of swimming pools and dozens of artificial lakes bordered by marinas and mansions. It struck me at the time that this must be the most ecologically unsound, resource-wasteful place on earth.

That impression was reinforced earlier this week, when I walked out of the air-conditioned “Sky Harbor” terminal into a 95 degree atmosphere which burned my eyes and clenched my chest. I had arrived to attend a conference of AASHE: The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. The choice of location seemed bitterly ironic.

Three days later, by the end of the conference, I understood that choice differently. The mistakes of development causing the present environmental crisis can only be rectified by massive transformations of places like Phoenix Arizona. And right there such transformations are beginning.

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