Andrew, our local Sierra Club Chapter director, sent out an email several days ago headed “All Hands on Deck,” urging members to attend the County Board of Supervisors meeting scheduled for Election Day.

It was considering a proposal for a vast and ill-planned subdivision on the Santa Margarita Ranch, the last intact old Spanish Rancho in California, a splendid tract of land just a few miles out of town.  The proposal, which required a 1200 page Environmental Impact Report including the revelation of 10 class one unmitigable negative impacts, had been presented before the Planning Commission a month ago, drawing spirited opposition from neighbors and environmentalists among others.

The Chair of the Commission had pulled a procedural ploy to force a vote after only a couple of hours of hearing, requiring the rest of the Commissioners to either approve or reject the application before considering the Environmental Impact Report in detail.  The majority rejected the plan, but either way, the developer won, since the project could immediately be appealed to the Supervisors.

The current Board majority was recently voted out of office because of their outrageous bias in favor of developers, but still could approve this project in the month before their terms ended and the new, more environmentally friendly board was seated.

The item was placed at the end of the agenda, close to the time that the Board would have to adjourn to allow for the ballots to be counted in the County Building.  Jan dropped me off there around 3:00, on the way to setting up her Election Night party at Linnea’s. I sat in the Chambers and wrote down what I wanted to say.  It turned out that the County Staff’s rebuttal of the Developer’s appeal was so lengthy that the meeting was adjourned before public comment even started, and the hearing was continued until November 18.  But at that point my remarks will have lost their timeliness, so I’m recording them here:

It’s an ironic coincidence that the Board of Supervisors is considering this proposal after many years of controversy on a day that marks the end of an era in our country.

It’s an era that’s been repudiated by most candidates for public office up for election, including both candidates for President.

The era that’s ending is one of private gain over public interest, an era of mortgaging the future assets of our children and grandchildren for the present benefit of the wealthy and well-connected few.

It’s an era of ignoring the consequences of untrammeled economic growth for our immediate environment and our global climate system.

Thankfully that era is coming to conclusion.

The strategy of the appeal in front of you is to get the present Board to act today to overrule the determinations of its own Planning Commission and staff in favor of land developers before the newly elected Board is seated in two months.

This strategy is a desperate effort to avoid the kind of change that the nation, the state and the county are now eager for. This strategy is an effort to allow the loosening hand of the past to retighten its grip on the future.

I ask the Board to reject this backward-looking appeal.  Doing so will allow time for the developers to create a new proposal that will not create ten class-one negative environmental impacts nor require an appeal of staff and Planning Commission findings.

A time of waiting.

The email Jan sent this morning to all the people who aided in her campaign:

Thank you for all your hard work on my campaign.  All precincts have been walked, all signs posted, all letters to the editor published, all events beautifully hosted and productive, and all campaign materials distributed. We have all done our level best, and win or lose, deserve to take a bow. See you tonight at Linnea’s 8-11!

Gratefully yours,

Jan

Sunday morning I got a call from Megan, one of the students I’ve worked with on Focus the Nation at Cal Poly for the past year.  She was in Las Vegas walking precincts to get out the vote for Obama but wanted to let me know that she’d found a couple more volunteers to talk to residents and distribute flyers in student residences for Jan.  Cassidy biked over on Sunday and took a couple of hundred and spent three and a half hours canvassing Sunday night, and Tyler biked over yesterday and took 150 to pass out in Mustang Village before his 2pm class. (more…)

I needed a day off from Jan’s City Council campaign and from websurfing about the national election.  I kept remembering my Yom Kippur retreat in the woods, longing to return from the life of action to the ways of pleasure and contemplation.  So, on another “impulse from a vernal wood,” I decided to head for the coast with camera, journal, and a new book that just arrived from Amazon, Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist.

The inland morning fog was lifting as I left San Luis Obispo, the first time in a week that the unseasonable Santa Ana heat has abated.  I looked forward to moving in and out of the marine layer during my walk through the intertidal zone of the air and to watching tricks played by the Autumn light.

At 9:00, I start from the parking lot and head up the Coon Creek trail.  It meanders around crazy sandstone formations at the canyon’s mouth and tunnels through thick vegetation stuffing the watercourse. (more…)

Hi Guys

The race in Nevada was great.  Desert.

here’s a link to the sustainability conference coming up in SV: http://www.sunvalleysustainability.org/sus_tour.php (scroll down to fifth item)
Our spec is on the tour.

If you get a chance to go to Barnes and Noble see if they have a copy of Sun Valley Home.  Our house and family is in the latest issue.  Check the last page. http://www.sunvalleymag.com/Sun-Valley-Home-and-Design/Fall-2008/Urban-Urbane/index.php?cp=2&si=1#artanc

I hope the campaign will be followed by champagne.

Love,  JOE

One email, two links.  Our son, age 37, has earned professional fame and recognition.  He’s become an architect without architecture school. The author of the article in Sun Valley Home and Design Magazine calls the staircase he created “an almost transparent work of art.”

Though still an off-road motorcyclist, he’s become a green builder. His blurb at the Sun Valley Sustainabiity Conference tour says, “We are treating LEED as a necessary component of responsible development, not an expensive additional feature.” He builds “relatively modest” homes in one of the world’s most exclusive locations.

Though still one of the boys, he’s a family man.  The magazine article brings honor to his wife and children.  And through a June article in the Idaho Statesman featuring him as outdoorsman on a backpacking trip, he brought honor to his son, his nephew and his dad.

An Address to the Estero Bay United Methodist Church
October 19 2008

Introduction

Thank you for inviting me here to speak today. I’m honored to be part of your series on Religion and the Environment.

I’ve taught courses at Cal Poly on Environmental Literature and on the Bible as Literature and in Literature. This is a place where those topics converge.

Two Books: Scripture and Nature

There’s a powerful idea set forth in the writings of St. Augustine and earlier, that God created the universe as two books: the book of Scripture and the book of Nature. Scripture and Nature are both expressions of God’s word; both are intelligible codes that decipher and reinforce one another. This idea of the two books has been propounded by thinkers who attempt to reconcile theology and science, from St. Thomas Aquinas in the twelfth century and Galileo in the seventeenth, to present day exponents of creationism and intelligent design.

But rather than as philosophy or theology, I’d like to explore the idea of the two books as a poetic metaphor”a figure of speech that stimulates the imagination. Here it is elaborated in Psalm 19:

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.
There is no speech or language
where their voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun,
which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion,
like a champion rejoicing to run his course.

The statement that the heavens express the greatness of God includes an enthusiastic outpouring of figurative descriptions of the sun: it’s a bridegroom before or after consummating his love, it’s a race horse in action. These go beyond just elaborating the point about God. With sound effects and imagery they awaken the experience of the sun’s brilliance and energy in the reader’s mind. Both nature and the author of scripture are exuberant poets. Both the world and the word are books of poetry.

A close look at its language as poetry illuminates the first chapter of the Bible, Genesis 1. It chronicles the process of the creation as an orderly, intelligible, symmetric, and progressively more complex sequence of steps, each building upon the previous one.

And it characterizes the process as the creative effort of a poet:

the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.”

The creator starts with a dark confusion over which he hovers tentatively, gathering his wits, perhaps waiting for inspiration. Then he finds words, then he utters words, then he materializes the words, then he evaluates the outcome, then he names his first creation like the title, or a section of a larger structure.

Genesis dramatizes the work of the creator in carrying out this process: it is deeply satisfying. He regards each of his accomplishments separately as “good,” and at the conclusion of the whole process, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” The effort is also depicted as tiring. “By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.”

The language of the narrative draws attention to itself, becoming more expansive and lyrical as the story proceeds from the 48 sparse words of the first day, which differentiate light and darkness, to the sixth day’s 260-word description of the ecological web of relationships among all living creatures. Yet it also retains a uniform pattern of meter and parallelism to emphasize the coherence between the parts and the whole.

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The holiday began with Ian cutting chard leaves and eating them cooked, then playing the letter game with me on the floor after supper.  A return to the rapport we used to share when he spent more time here, not just intervals between school and home.

I’ve anticipated this holiday for weeks, though  I wasnt sure I’d be able to get away.  I didnt pack my gear until just before leaving last night. I’ve been longing for a respite from the campaigns–Jan’s and Obama’s–and from my own compulsive clicking on  the news of world economic collapse.  I’ve found surcease only while working in the garden and on my upcoming talk on “God and Nature” for the Methodist Church in Morro Bay.

After Dennis took Ian home last night, I pedaled across campus toward Poly Canyon.  Car, bike and pedestrian traffic bustled on the approaches to the new residential complex at its mouth.  The parking structure, swimming pool and athletic field lights cast a garish glow on the huge eucalypti and the mountainsides, but halfway up the canyon it was replaced by moonlight and the hooting of owls. Beyond the Peterson Ranch buildings, I crossed paths with two other bicyclists wearing headlamps as bright as an automobile’s.

I parked the bike by the dirt road near the junction of the south and middle forks of the creek at the base of Cuesta Ridge, a spot insulated from noise and open to a broad sky.  The cricket sounds were overtaken by the rising and falling roar of a crowd way back on campus, probably a soccer game.  By the time I’d finished unpacking and fiddling with my camera, the roar disappeared, and the chorus of crickets returned, now with its own throbbing pulse, like the sound of the stars. Through my binoculars I saw black shadows of mountains on the bright side of the half moon’s dividing line and white summits peeking through the dark side.  As I settled into my sleeping bag, a family of coyotes yodeled to one another across the valley.  Overhead, a shooting star stitched in and out of existence.

I awoke at 2:30. The moon had set and Orion stared down at me. I rested my camera on my shoe and took a fifteen second exposure with manual focus at 1600 ISO.

(more…)

After reading email and news, at dawn, I check the new vegetable bed.

The lettuce is arisen!

Five days after planting.  The seed packet says 7-10 days to germinate.  Perfect late September weather  has speeded the process–midday in the nineties and cool nights.  I’ve kept the beds damp.

I also greet last year’s food surfacing from the compost in the soil—-peach pits, bits of egg shell.

And the chard thrives–another  meal soon.

Peter emailed this from Canada under the subjectline “Harvest Time”:

On Sep 25, 2008, at 10:58 PM, Scott wrote:

SHOCK (Bush) doctrine all over again — good lord, no shame?

I replied:

Yes, but does this perspective now put us in bed with the right wingers that McCain is playing to?

Naomi Klein says:

“What Gingrich’s wish list tells us is that the dumping of private debt into the public coffers is only stage one of the current shock. The second comes when the debt crisis currently being created by this bailout becomes the excuse to privatize social security, lower corporate taxes and cut spending on the poor. A President McCain would embrace these policies willingly.”

But the right wingers now are blocking that dump.  Do they want to force the markets to drop further to increase Shock enough to not only cancel debate but cancel the election?

Is any of this going according to plan, or are the plans off?  Are Cheny and Bush and Paulson being outflanked by their own buddies?

What unthinkables are now being thought?

Please do not vote for a blank check to be provided to Paulson and company.  He and his cohorts are the problem not the solution.  Their insistence on the present emergency and the need for a gift of  700 billion dollars of taxpayer money is the latest and most outrageous example of  “Disaster Capitalism.”  The U.S. Congress has fallen for this before: the Patriot Act, Iraq, the Surge, to our growing regret.

It is your job to check and balance the Executive Branch, especially in cases like this when that branch is attempting an economic coup d’etat.  This amount of taxpayer money could do more good for the economy by being distributed to pay off people’s mortgages and providing them with health insurance rather than being handed over to those carrying out an immense extortion scheme.

Yesterday was the equinox.  I planted lettuce mix in the shadiest corner of the new vegetable bed I built next to the deck, with Chris’ help.  We dismantled the ziggurat on the top of the hill I constructed out of railroad ties to get additional materials for this and the two additional beds I’ll put in just below it.  Doing this physical work is an antidote for my growing sense of personal futility stemming from:

• the less than erratic progress of the Cal Poly sustainability projects I’m involved with
• my inability to get adequate mastery of SC accounting and fundraising
• the demands of Jan’s electoral campaign, even though I’m not taking any real responsibility and just doing support work
• several weeks of computer foulups
• the impending doom of one more stage of takeover of the country by a syndicate of mafiosi–this time the Wall Street crooks commanded by Paulson and Bernanke. What’s been going on this week is a sequel to the hair-raising horror story by Naomi Klein I’ve been reading for the last month: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Days to germination: 7-10

Days to Harvest: 40-60

This planting is about hope and the illusion that I can do something to provide for our needs outside the collapsing system.

The terrace for the beds next to the front deck is the only place on this north-facing lot that gets enough sun to grow any vegetables.  I put in the first bed to grow cherry tomatoes when I took out the ivy and first built the ziggurat. Here’s Ian getting into them six years ago:

Basil and lettuce and snow peas and chard have done fine.  Pole beans and squash and peppers not very well because of the lack of sun.  I put in another bed after extending the terrace with fill from the excavation of Jan’s office extension two years ago. But I never properly leveled or fastened the railroad ties, and lately they started separating as a result of the ground settling and soil expansion with watering. I pounded in fence posts to stabilize them temporarily, but that fix didnt work and looked terrible.  I got sloppy about planting and watering and harvesting, so for the last few months, all that remained was a patch of chard that I wouldnt even bother to harvest.  I also refused to water the gardens all summer to see how far they could be stressed.  The front didnt look that bad, a range of dry colors and textures offset by the brilliance of the California Fuschia.  But the back hill looks wasted, in the side yard the fifteen foot redwood died, and cobwebs covered plants and every nook and cranny of the house, many of them around the front door. While precinct walking I’ve noticed how sad those cobwebs look on other people’s places.

So cleaning them up and reviving the garden and planting vegetables is serving as my bailout. Today I put in spinach and trimmed the carex in the side yard and started watering it and the strawberries and the remaining redwood and the dried up Fremont Iris and the Yerba Buena.  Tomorrow I’ll complete the planting with Arugula.  I’m heartened by the survival of the chard.  I’d transplanted it to the lower bed while demolishing the top one and then two weeks later retransplanted it back.  With regular watering during the interval, it produced enough fresh leaves to supply the main dish for supper last night.

I wanted to stay focussed on the pure pleasure of placing those seeds in the soil–this activity being the goal of much preparation–but it wasnt easy to stay in the present.  I tried to revere those little bundles of promise and and ask for their blessing.