Low-grade illness and a heavy schedule has kept me from fulfilling my own assignment to students: get outdoors, pay attention, write. Yesterday morning’s cool weather and dramatic light got me going. The Sierra Club’s outings web page promised a kayak trip up the Morro Bay Estuary to spot birds, but when I phoned the leader he said it had been cancelled because of uncertainty about wind and rain. The Morro Bay Natural History Association offered a talk about “Living on tectonic plate borders” which sounded appealing since I’ll have to lecture on Cal Poly Land’s geology next quarter. I took my down vest, windbreaker and packsack loaded with camera, binoculars, bird book, a loaf of sunflower seed bread and an avocado, and told Jan I’d be back in the late afternoon.

I arrived at the Marina early and walked to the point to gaze at birds, clouds and the distant dunes.

Rounding the lion rock, I came across two white egrets. I was transfixed by their yellow eyes and graceful head plumes but they werent interested in my company. They slowly flapped their huge wings, lifted their legs and flew across the flat water.

(more…)

I’d been looking forward to today’s Sierra Club hike throughout a challenging week filled with classes, student conferences, 90 minutes of testimony at a deposition and lots of meetings. Big Falls is a famous local attraction and I’d never been there.

I carpooled with Chris on the way to Santa Margarita. Dense fog met us at Cuesta Pass, and at our meeting place, people shivered in the cold. There were 35 of us eager to tackle the nine miles and 1700 foot elevation gain announced on the Outings page of the monthly Chapter newsletter. I asked if anyone was interested in having a copy with articles about the many activities going on during the month and a membership application. Fifteen people asked for it.

Ruby RAV filled with two more passengers for the last ten miles of car travel to the trailhead through Santa Margarita Ranch and out toward Pozo. Huge valley oaks, bare of leaves during the winter, loomed in the fog, their limbs arching over the road and dividing into gnarled branches looking like arthritic witch fingers.

At the trailhead the fog broke up and we took off at a breathless pace up the first long ascent through blue oaks and coastal scrub. The small trees were still bare, but black sage, California sagebrush and chamise were in fresh new leaf. People spoke about how hot and dry this hike was during summer. At the top of the first ridge, we took a break and looked out over the Santa Lucia range to Cuesta Ridge on the horizon hiding Edna Valley on the other side.

Heading downhill toward Lopez Canyon, one could see a series of parallel valleys to the south filled with fog. Other than a couple of water tanks and fireroads, nowhere on the whole hike were there signs of human habitation, not even a fence.

Occasionally the scrub and serpentine outcrops alternated with meadows, mostly gray with last years dead grasses, but showing the green of new growth hesitantly emerging. I saw hardly any of the annual grasses that filled the hills in the lower elevations; instead these were native perennial bunch grasses. Clearly this area had not been cultivated by the early settlers. The remains of the highway 41 fire of twelve years ago were still in evidence, but I thought that this area would soon welcome more fire, since in some places the scrub was getting thick and clotted with dead growth.

The group was large enough to spread for half a mile along the trail, and it was fun to watch people far below on the steep slopes crisscrossed by switchbacks. They moved in shifting groups, pairs and singles and conversation flowed easily.

It was not too early in the season for dramatic displays of red current

and Chris noticed one large shooting star growing right alongside the trail.

Soon we descended into a shady oak woodland of non-deciduous California live oaks. Then I noticed a series of pools beside the path that gave way to a trickle. For the next mile it dropped away out of sight but within earshot of its increasing babble. Suddenly we came out of the woodland to a crossing where the water flowed over smooth rocks and formed lovely pools surrounded by wooded canyon walls.

This was the most pleasing part of the trail, and all too soon we we arrived at the top of the falls, where some folks decided to sit and rest while others explored the lip of the falls.

The trail spiralled through woods down the fifty foot drop and returned to the base of the falls where most folks chose to eat lunch. There was a festive sense of arrival at a worthwhile destination.

I really wanted to swim in the pool at the base of the fall–in my underpants. I took off my boots and crawled out on a log hanging over the clear inviting water. I knew it would be chilly, but I expected to be able to immerse my legs up to the knees until the pain went away and the rest of my body acclimated. This method had worked to allow me to swim for an indefinite time in the cold water of local beaches. But I couldnt leave my feet in for more than a minute or two at a time, and after a quarter of an hour I realized that my plan wouldnt work. So I stared at the tumbling spray and listened to its sounds and resigned myself to a chaste encounter.

“What is a course of history or philosophy or poetry no matter how well selected…compared to the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen,” says Thoreau. (Walden p. 105) I tried to exercise some of that discipline this morning. Instead of going Christmas shopping I returned to the raceme of pink-flowered currant that I had looked at earlier in the week, now again illuminated by a horizon-hugging sun.

I noticed that the five petals of each blossom split into two layers, a longer outside one arching back and curling at its edges, and a shorter inside one that remained erect. The splaying outside layers gave the blossom its star shape. The inside layers combined into an open tube surrounding its golden pistil and stamens. I also noticed some changes since the last look:

seven of the blossoms were open instead of four. Five pink closed blossoms cupped a cluster of immature green buds at the raceme’s tip. As each blossom opened, it diverged from the central axis on its own outward stretching stem. The higher on the raceme, the more mature the blossom and the the more shrunken and curled the sepal which had enclosed it as a bud.

My revisited raceme seemed to be the oldest one on the shrub, its location best placed to gather the sparse sunlight and attract me with my camera. On other twigs I found younger growing tips. They revealed that flowers and leaves are originally enclosed in a single germinal container springing from the battered remnants of last year’s growth.

The subtle fragrance of Ribes sanguineum glutinosum, more leathery than sweet, occasionally wafted past but dissipated before I could satisfy my hungry nostrils. I wanted to be smaller, faster and more sensitive–like the bug that buzzed by me and dove into one of the blossoms. Then I understood that they had evolved to entice it into spreading their red and sticky seed.

I’ve often discussed with students the lines of Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned” that inspired Thoreau’s preference of Nature over Culture:

Come forth into the light of things
Let Nature be your teacher.
…
Enough of Science and of Art
Close up those barren leaves
Come forth and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

I’m still trying to figure out how to do that. Returning to the same flower after a few days and noticing some changes, spending enough time to really look at it and allow the bugs to show up, taking as long as I need to find the right words–that’s a start.

On the way to the back door to clean the mud off my shoes, I noticed a patch of sunlight on the wall of my excavation.

While digging I find the life of the seasons in the mineral as well as in the vegetable and animal. A few weeks ago, this same ground broke the tip off the steel pickaxe. Now my spade sinks into the damp earth like a scoop into ice cream.

The rains have been slow this year, only two since June. But the native garden I’ve been cultivating since 2001 has matured. Last spring I removed the drip irrigation system I’d used to get it established, and except for one ground soak, I refrained from watering during summer and fall. All 68 varieties survived and most have remained green, proving their adaptation to arid conditions, subsisting on fog, dew, and bits of moisture their roots capture deep in the parched clay soil. Buds were fattening on a buckeye I’d planted a couple of years ago and another had started to leaf.


But this made me nervous. With so little water in the ground, would they deplete their energy with premature growth? I checked my authority on California Natives, the website of Bert Wilson, proprietor of Las Pilitas nursery, and found that Aesculus californica is “tolerant to drought but needs regular water for the first few years.” Remembering Bert’s general abhorrence of watering, this warning seemed urgent. I hooked up the hose and gave the two little saplings a normal season’s worth of precipitation.

The next morning, Sunday, I was gently awakened by the gurgle of rain in the downspout on the wall by my bed. I put on a wool sweater and hat and went out to enjoy it. I climbed the ladder to the roof and cleared the gutters of curled Eugenia leaves and spikey liquidambar seedpods. I rooted up dandelions that had sprouted in the front yard. I transplanted ten bunches of Idaho fescue stored in pots after I’d cleared them off the hillside I’ve been excavating with pick and shovel to make room for an extension of Jan’s office. I cut huge clumps of deergrass straw and spread the leaves and seed stalks on the muddy paths. I filled the wheelbarrow with raked leaves and sprinkled the crackling residue on the spoil I’d been dumping alongside the house to raise the ground level. The porous mixture absorbed the water puddled on the dense clay, protected my shoes, and made a deep-textured carpet of autumnal tweed.

I knew that the thirsty plants would respond quickly to the rain, and next morning I went out to look at the new growth.

This is ribes sanguineum glutinosum, or pink flowered currant. The specimen between the neighbors’ towering second story and our roof has grown 10 feet, as fast and as tall as the Redwood next to it. Another in total shade under the fence, which I planted to replace a vigorous non-native tree I cut down, has only reached two feet, but is also showing new leaves. The two in back, on the steep north facing slope where there’s very little soil, have reached about four feet. Bert says “This Ribes is more drought tolerant than most of the drought resistant plants of the trade, but in a native garden plant towards the wettest section… .”

Plants for a Future, a British permaculture site reminds me that sanguineum and glutinosum stem from the latin words for “bloody,” and “sticky,” and informs me that its fruits are edible though not tasty. From Native Plants of Montara Mountain I learn that this Ribes belongs to the Grossulariceae family, which contains currants and gooseberries. The vivid language invites a bit of rearrangement

Leaves: alternate, palmately-lobed, hand-like, soft, veined, with edges curving under.
Flowers: pink, five-petaled and stamened, funnel and star shaped, racemes in hanging cascades at ends of branches. Calyx fused to the pistil.
Fruit: Fleshy, red berries ripening to dark blue; developing below the calyx lobes in clusters, with tan seeds inside.

It includes two beautiful words I pursue in the Dictionary

Raceme: An inflorescence having stalked flowers arranged singly along an elongated unbranched axis, as in the lily of the valley…from Latin racemus, a bunch of grapes.

Calyx: the whorl of sepals…collectively forming the outer floral envelope…enclosing…the developing bud

Compared to these technical descriptions, how little of this plant have I described or perceived, even with the assistance of the camera. I need another look.

[This report was published in the October 2005 Issue of The Santa Lucian]

I just returned from the Sierra Summit that took place in San Francisco September 8 to 11. My wife Jan and I had decided to attend privately to strengthen our connection to the national organization in this dark time and to learn from a luminary lineup of scheduled speakers. When some of our chapter representatives couldn’t go, I became a delegate in return for half price on the registration fee. The delegates’ job was to bridge a gap between leadership and grassroots and to democratically select goals guiding action and budget decisions over the next five years.

We drove up on Thursday morning with Chris, who’d agreed to become a much in-demand under-30 delegate, checked into a cheap hotel in Chinatown, walked to the Moscone Convention center, and fell in with thousands of well-dressed members of the California Dental Association. Finally we found our way to “Moscone North” and what was billed as “Sierra Club’s First Ever National Environmental Convention and Expo.” http://www.sierraclub.org/sierrasummit

The prospect of a four hour priority setting session after a long drive and no lunch in a cavernous banquet hall was not enhanced by lengthy “motivational” harangues by two professional facilitators with deep southern accents. Though the leader admitted that he had no environmental involvement of his own, he assured me that he did not normally work for energy companies like Exxon, but only churches and financial institutions. Sitting at tables in groups of ten, the seven hundred delegates were put through a series of ill conceived icebreaking exercises and endless questionnaires, and asked to prioritize vague, confusing and overlappingly phrased goals.

Midway through the session, delegates started speaking up, expressing bewilderment and resentment. Carl Pope, Sierra Club Executive Director, convinced the audience not to give up and the facilitators to talk less and listen more. By the end of the session a general consensus among delegates was reached: the first two priorities for future national action and budgeting were 1)build a clean and safe energy future with improved efficiency and renewable resources and 2)build vibrant communities assuring environmental justice and reducing sprawl.

This selection makes significant changes in sequence and wording to conclusions drawn from pre-summit surveys. It signals a shift from primary emphasis on recreation and wilderness preservation and clearly reflects the impact of Hurricane Katrina. That impact was reinforced by the surprise announcement that the Convention would be addressed at 8:30 next morning by Al Gore. He had turned down our invitation because of a previous commitment on the same day to talk about global warming to an insurance industry convention in New Orleans.

The onslaught of Katrina is an apt metaphor for the Bush administration’s onslaught on the world environment. The speeches I heard at Sierra Summit on Friday and Saturday gave evidence of an energy that might be able to resist and protect from these storms.

Gavin Newsome, the radiant mayor of SF, welcomed the Sierra Club to his “49 square miles surrounded by reality” by asserting that cities can act when federal and state governments fail to address environmental issues. San Francisco has required all retired city vehicles to be replaced by hybrids, has embarked upon an aggressive green building program, and has been the first city to adopt the Precautionary Principle as a guiding policy. http://www.sfenvironment.com/aboutus/innovative/pp/

In his introduction of Al Gore to a packed hall of about 2500 people, Carl Pope told us he had just returned from India where a hardly reported storm dropped 37 inches of rain on Bombay the day that Katrina hit New Orleans. Carl witnessed that within seven hours 15,000 Indian troops were on the streets helping survivors, within 15 hours all buses in the neighboring states were mobilizeed for rescue and evacuation, within 8 hours, everyone in Bombay had food and water, and within two days plastic packaging was banned because it was discovered that plastic waste had blocked sewers and storm drains. The contrasting fate of the Gulf Coast, said Pope, was sealed on a November day in 2000, when the Supreme Court decided the case of Bush vs. Gore.

The gravity and eloquence of Gore’s speech are impossible to convey. I urge you to read or listen to it at http://www.sierraclub.org/pressroom/gorespeech/. He put Katrina into the context of the gathering storm preceding World War II prophecied by Winston Churchill. We have tasted the first sip of the bitter cup that awaits us, he prophesied. Four years ago it was vacation time when dire warnings about the prospect of an attack by Al quaeda and identification of students at flight schools with no interest in learning to land were provided to the President. This summer there were warnings about what could happen if a large hurricane hit New Orleans. Three years ago, there were dire warnings that FEMA was being rendered helpless. He asked us to draw the line connecting the emotions we felt when we saw the images of Abu Graib and the emotionswe felt when seeing the people in the Superdome and then to draw the line connecting those responsible for both tragedies.

Gore compared the warnings about Hitler wilfully ignored by the British government and the West and the warnings about global warning wilfully denied by the American government, quoting Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” He insisted that we have the vision and know-how and technology we need to address global warming, but we lack the political will. “But political will is a renewable resource,” he concluded, and the audience came to its feet and roared.

The glimmer of hope kindled by Gore’s conclusion exploded into sunshine during the next presentation I attended, a talk by Bill McDonough, the author of Cradle to Cradle and prophet of the Second Industrial Revolution. His maxim is “how do we love all the children of all species for all time?” McDonough often works with people the Sierra Club is aligned against, such as the Ford Motor Company, for which he designed a green assembly plant in Dearborn Michigan. McDonough and his company devise products, buildings, industrial processes and cities according to standards that require zero waste and zero pollution. He showed us some of his ecotopian plans for the construction of seven new cities commissioned by the government of China which he said has adopted Cradle to Cradle as their industrial policy. Less optimistically, he alerted us to the fact that the world’s oceans are rapidly lowering in Ph, and that if the present trend continues, by the year 2100, calcium carbonate will dissolve, destroying all coral and molluscs”the bottom of the food chain. If you want to know more about McDonough, a seminal thinker on Sustainability, try http://www.mcdonough.com

While McDonough spoke to an audience of 800, six other presentations were taking place simultaneously. For the late afternoon session, I attended a small one on “engaging youth” mounted by the Sierra Student Coalition. These young people organize projects like “Victoria’s Dirty Secret” exposing the practises of the catalog industry which is destroying boreal and appalachian forests to produce the junk mail. SSC may be able to help us start a local group bringing together high school, college and university student allies.

Delegates convened again Saturday morning from 7:30 to 11:30 to prioritize means to achieve goals prioritized the day before. First place went to organizing people locally to take action. Second was creating new allies and coalitions. Others included supplying environmental expertise, getting people outdoors, public education, bringing legal action and creating media visibility. Delegates were then treated to a lengthy study by Harvard Professor Marshall Ganz on how the club could increase general effectiveness (NPLA). He concluded we need motivated well trained leaders and lots of attention to engaging new members in club activities. If interested, see http://www.clubhouse.sierraclub.org/committees/oegc/workplan/index.html

Saturday’s highlight for me was the plenary session featuring Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Security was extensive and the great hall was even more packed than for Gore. Hoarse with laryngitis, at times desperate with anger at others ecstatic with ardor, Kennedy repeatedly brought me to tears. This is a person you could follow to the barricades. Presented with the Sierra Club’s William O. Douglas award, he spoke at length about his childhood relation with Douglas and then went on to indict the present administration”headed by the worst environmental president in history who has corrupted all agencies by heading them with the bought dogs of the corporations who finance his campaigns. A former NY state assistant attorney general who spearheaded the salvation of New York’s Hudson River, Bobby’s son spoke about his three sons who suffer from asthma brought on by the unprosecuted criminal activities of corporate polluters. He talked about the subversion of the free market by the corporations that now control government. He talked about the ignorance of what’s going on caused by the corporate media’s refusal to report it. He talked about his own success at awakening and converting Red-state audiences. And finally he rhapsodized at length about Saint Francis, the Bible, religion and nature. You can find an early version of this speech at http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1120-01.htm

A quiet and lyrical coda to this Riverkeeper’s jeremiad came in a presentation by Robert Hass entitled “River of Words.” Another local as well as national hero, Hass used his position as former US poet laureate to create an organization promoting environmental education for children. As he does with his students at UC Berkeley he encourages teachers to take their students outdoors, to cultivate their senses and encourage their observations of nature, to get them to follow Aldo Leopold’s advice to “think like a mountain,” and then to have them write poems and draw pictures about their experiences. This traditional but nowadays rare approach has generated thousands of submissions from around the world which his organization makes available online and in published collections, and which in turn generate more rivers of words. Rather than reading his own lovely nature poems, Hass spent the hour showing and commenting upon exquisite examples of the childrens’ work. For more information on this project see, http://www.riverofwords.org/index.html

There was much more at this amazing conference than can fit here. The impact of what I heard and saw is still not absorbed. And though I have doubts about the effectiveness of a very abstract exercise in deliberative process, the sensation of simply being together with so many people of like mind, common loss and shared aspiration–people for whom I immediately felt affection and respect–will nourish me for a long time.

Preparing for my next quarter’s class, Ecolit: Reading and Writing the Landscape, I modified the Journal writing requirement to include a weblog option. At least twice a week students must write an entry. I must follow suit.

I’ve been going to Nature Explorers with my grandson Ian every Thursday morning. Its a program for kids up to age 8 and their parents and grandparents, part of the Coyote Road School in San Luis Obispo. The school focuses on outdoor education and nature study with an emphasis on tracking that derives from the educational philosophy of Tom Brown’s Tracker School.

We’ve been to Bishop’s Peak, Reservoir Canyon, Cuesta Park, Laguna Lake, the Sand Spit and Morro Bay Estuary, a few of the hundred wonderful natural preserves within 20 minutes of home. All the kids are enthralled with these sessions, especially Ian, and the adults seem to enjoy them with just as much enthusiasm. There’s alot of philosophy and expertise that goes into the program, but each excursion feels casual and slow paced and leaves plenty of time for adventure and pure fooling around.

Alot of what goes on is similar to what happens in my University classes, although less information is conveyed. As a student rather than a teacher, however, I find myself marvelling at the knowledge of wildlife, vegetation, and Indian lore drawn upon by Dave and Evan, the leaders, especially the kind of reading of the landscape they do with the kids by studying the inscriptions left by animals in tracks, scats, and bones.

Each session has ended with some unscripted but dramatic sighting–yesterday, the last of the quarter, it was a peregrine falcon mobbed by a merlin–the two raptors noisily squabbling overhead at the Morro Bay Marina in the estuary. The week before it was discovery of the skeletal remains of a seal or a sea lion on the Sandspit. The week before, a kestrel sitting in the sun for his portrait at Laguna Lake.

Most of the students and parents attending Coyote Road classes are being home-schooled. I remember that one of the most well informed and talented writers in my ecolit class two years ago was home-schooled in North County. A full generation below me, the Coyote Road parents and instructors seem to have resurrected or retained the spirit of the sixties and seventies whose demise I’ve mourned since returning from exile in Canada in 1979. But at Tuesday night’s general meeting of the Sierra Club, I saw more traces in the presentation about his Environmental Studies curriculum by a Paso Robles High School Teacher, Mark DeMaggio.

Overnighting under the Valley Oak above the tracks after a class hike. This vast tree, so old with such new and vigorous sprouts.  A jet below the crescent moon makes a brilliant vapor trail in the colorless sky, a cloud of gnats dancing in front of me not interested in blood.  The afterglow from class, students ranged at many distances talking quietly, writing, staring.

Tomorrow I meet with someone from RMI to strategize about having her consult with Cal Poly to promote sustainability.  At night a party at my house for Writerspeak visiting novelist, before that an opening of Andy’s show at the gallery and on Saturday a reception for the student volunteer of the year and her mentor, me.

The darkening evening is damp and cool, the sound of the distant freeway drowned out by the train just below this hidden garden. Crickets join the meadowlarks.  The vapor trail pales and the crescent moon brightens.

My tired feet aching to get out of boots. Comfy in sleeping bag on Thermarest chair.  Dark grey fog, like smoke coalescing in the west.

Where is the wildlife? I haven’t moved in an hour. Two planets flank the moon.  The stars are pleasure points.  The fog gone and so are the gnats.  Pink and blue on the horizon.

I take pictures almost daily. How will I manage them? Does preserving the past make it stale? I prefer that to losing it.

Good night Jan.

Reviewed for “Books at High Noon,” Cal Poly University, San Luis Obispo, March 20, 2001, by Steven Marx, Professor of English.During the discussion following, the two proposals offered at the end of this review were supported by representatives of the faculty union(CFA), the staff union(CSEA), students(ASI), and the Cal Poly Land Faculty Seminar. At a meeting on March 29, these proposals were supported by a representative of the Cal Poly Administration’s Centennial Celebration organizing committee.

Introduction

Thanks for coming. Not only are you taking time during finals week crunch, but attending a talk by a speaker named Marx on the topic of Capitalism sounds like risky business.

The book is Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins. I read this book the first time last summer, after tuning into a talk on National Public Radio by Paul Hawken one night while washing the dishes. I put down the sponge, turned off the water and just stood there, not wanting it to end, feeling that this was the kind of speech that could change the world. I had a flashback to 1965, standing in the kitchen of my graduate student house in East Palo Alto listening to voice of Mario Savio coming through the radio from the Sproul Hall steps in Berkeley.

Then I remembered that Rob Rutherford, professor of animal science, kept talking about Paul Hawken–how his ideas are important, how great it would be if he could come speak at Cal Poly. So I went down to The Novel Experience and bought the book.

Before I read it I checked its website–http://www.naturalcapitalism.org–for information on the authors:

“Paul Hawken began his career as an entrepreneur in the 1960s, when he founded Erewhon Trading Company, a natural foods wholesaling business. He went on to co-found Smith & Hawken, the retail and catalog company, in 1979, and Datafusion, a knowledge synthesis software company, in 1995. His next book, The Ecology of Commerce (1993), has become a classic text on business and environment, and continues to have a large impact on government and business.”

“Amory and Hunter Lovins are visionaries who have been around long enough to see many of their ideas become reality“and as consultants and advisers to many of the world’s largest corporations, they have helped shape the futures of the electricity, oil, real-estate, automobile and semiconductor sectors. Co-CEOs of Rocky Mountain Institute a nonprofit natural-resource thinktank, they have written dozens of books on resource policy and business, including Factor Four: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use (1998).”

All three of these authors can be classified as environmentalists, but what distinguishes them and their method of proceeding is that they are equally business people and economists. Much of the book is an argument about accounting, supported by numbers– like the opening section of Thoreau’s Walden, which he titled “Economy.”

Though it’s long, dense and heavily documented, the book is clearly organized, well written and crammed with lively anecdotes that made it hard to put down. I also found it profoundly unsettling–not so much because it documents familiar bad news about the dangers of our present course, but more because of its good news of promise and possibility. Reading it makes you ardent to do anything within your power to spread the word and to help bring about the changes it advocates.

Like Rob, I found that this book is particularly suited for where we are right now–at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Its message that “there is no true separation between how we support life economically and ecologically” and its revelation of the environmental, political, and moral significance of good engineering, design, resource management and business practices could lead our university to a new and higher mission statement for its second century of growth.

Each of its fifteen chapters can stand on its own, but cumulatively they build to a climax. The first chapter lays out the overall thesis with a historical perspective and an outline of general principles. Later chapters divide the subject into categories like Transportation, Real Estate and Construction, Agriculture, and Climate. The two penultimate chapters return to more general observations, and the final chapter ends with a discussion of the importance of disseminating the book’s ideas on university campuses.

Incidentally, the book can be downloaded chapter by chapter from the website.

Summary

Chapter 1, entitled, “The Next Industrial Revolution,” outlines the thesis developed in the rest of the book. The authors envision an industrial transformation occurring now as comprehensive and revolutionary as the First Industrial Revolution which began in the middle 18th century–the revolution which gave rise to modern industrial capitalism and vastly expanded the possibilities for material development.

The gains of this First Industrial Revolution have been achieved at immense cost to the earth.

• Since the mid 18th century, more of nature has been destroyed than in all prior history.(2)
• In the past 50 years, the world lost one fourth of its topsoil and one third of its forest cover.(4)
• In the past three decades, one third of planet’s natural wealth has been consumed.
• Every living system on the planet is losing ability to sustain the continuity of the life process.

The fact that stronger resource extraction technology still makes prices fall on natural commodities creates an illusion of prosperity because we are drawing our income not from earnings but from principal, from inherited wealth, or what the authors call Natural Capital.

What is Natural Capital? It’s the store of commodities produced by nature in its 3.8 billion year development process–commodities that we consume, like water, minerals, oil, trees, fish, soil, and air. It’s also all living systems–grasslands, savannas, wetlands, estuaries, oceans, coral reefs, riparian corridors, tundras and rainforests. These living systems supply not only nonrenewable resources but indispensible services, such as

• regeneration of atmosphere
• flood management, water storage and purification
• soil fertilization
• waste processing
• buffering against extremes of weather

Awareness of Natural Capital–the economic value of Nature as a system–extends the traditional economists’ definition of Capital as stored value. Added to their two forms of 1)financial capital–cash, investments, monetary instruments–and 2)manufactured capital–infrastructure, machines, tools, factories–are 3) natural capital–resources, living systems, ecosystem services and 4) human capital–labor, intelligence, culture and organization. Though it’s hard to assign monetary value to ecosystem services such as oxygen production by green plants, for which there are no substitutes at any price, the authors observe that the recent $200 million Biosphere experiment in Arizona was unable to maintain oxygen levels for 8 people. They estimate that these services worldwide are worth $36 trillion annually–about the same as the gross world product(5). They also report a recent World Bank study which found the sum value of human capital to be three times greater than all financial and manufactured capital.

Industrial Capitalism only includes financial and manufactured capital in its accounting and neglects to assign any value to our largest stocks of capital–natural and human. It portrays the creation of value as a linear sequence of extraction, production and distribution. Raw materials are introduced from “somewhere,” labor uses technology to transform resources into products, which are sold to create profits. Wastes are excreted “somewhere.”(7) This method of accounting leaves out the costs of extraction and of waste production to the environment. And the environment is not a minor factor but “an envelop containing, provisioning and sustaining the entire economy.”(9)

The new industrial system of Natural Capitalism employs an expanded set of values that include accounting for natural and human capital. It proposes four strategies to address its broader picture of economic activity.

1. Radical resource productivity–that is industrial efficiency. This slows depletion at one end, lowers pollution at the other end and creates more jobs in between. Through the use of industrial technology labor productivity increased 200 fold between 1750 and 1820. Today, the “Factor 10 club” of governments and business foresees a tenfold increase of productivity from resource use promoted by improvements in technology and design.
2. Biomimicry, which eliminates the very idea of waste by redesigning industrial systems on biological lines. “Spiders make silk strong as Kevlar but much rougher, from digested crickets and flies, without needing boiling sulfuric acid and higher temperature extruders. The abalone generates an inner shell twice as tough as our best ceramics, and diatoms make glass, both processes employing seawater with no furnaces. Trees turn sunlight and water into cellulose, a sugar stiffer and stronger than nylon and bind it into wood, a natural composite with higher bending strength and stiffness than concrete or steel. We may never grow as skillful as spiders, abalone, diatoms, or trees, but smart designers are apprenticing themselves to nature to learn the benign chemistry of its processes.”(16)
3. A service and flow economy. This involves shifting from a perception of wealth as goods and purchases to a perception of value as desired services and satisfaction of human needs. “Manufacturers cease thinking of themselves as sellers of products and become, instead, deliverers of service, provided by long-lasting upgradeable durables.”(16) For example, the Carrier Corporation now sells “coolth” rather than air conditioners–they own and service and upgrade equipment(17), and “Interface Corporation¦leases warmth, beauty and comfort of floor covering services rather than selling carpets.” In Europe, the principle of Intelligent Product Systems makes manufacturers responsible for waste if their product cant be recycled, so products are designed to be reincorporated into “technical nutrient cycles” in which nothing can be thrown away. Such systems use less energy than extraction of new materials and provide more jobs.
4. Investing in Natural Capital. This involves developing markets for activities which enhance and restore the environment, and it needs to be done internationally since degradation of environment“global warming and attendant storms, for example–is an international consequence.

The rest of the book describes “an array of opportunities¦that are real, practical, measured and documented” by which the second industrial revolution is going forward and the principles of natural capitalism are taking hold.

Chapter 2, called “Reinventing the Wheels,” prophesies an impending transformation of the automobile industry, the largest component of the modern economy worldwide. The technical and policy issues addressed by this chapter have direct bearing on the teaching and research carried out in Cal Poly’s Mechanical Engineering and Urban Planning Departments.

The authors claim that this industry is “well along the way to a Factor Four or greater breakthrough in resource productivity and is beginning to close its materials loops…”(22)

Modern cars are extremely inefficient, using only 20% of their fuel to turn the wheels and of that 95% moves the car, and only 5% moves the driver.(24) Lovins’ Rocky Mountain Institute designed a Hypercar (and put it into the public domain making it unpatentable), which reverses those efficiency ratios by being ultralight, low drag, and hybrid in propulsion. Once these cars, now in production, are successfully marketed, “oil will become uncompetitive even at low prices.” Even more radical resource productivity will be created by hydrogen fuel cell technology, which literally can take fuel out of the air and leave only water and oxygen as waste.

To realize this productivity and promote the sale of environmentally clean automobiles, the authors propose a system of “feebates” administered at no public cost by governments. Fees imposed on energy inefficient cars pay for rebates on those which which do less harm.

Other solutions to the “excessive automobility” which costs everyone involve reconfiguring transportation systems to make parking and driving bear their true costs–in road construction and maintenance, resource depletion, traffic jams, pollution, and accidents, fostering genuine competition between different modes of transportation. In addition to improving public transportation, sensible land use can be promoted over actual physical mobility.(41) “Most American building regulations require developers to provide as much parking for each shop office or apartment as people would demand if parking were free….diverts investment from buildings into parking spaces, making affordable housing scarcer.” Instead builders should be required to provide perpetual transit passes.

Chapter 3, entitled “Waste Not,” exposes the scale and consequences of Industrial Capitalism’s failure to follow the natural principle of recycling. This chapter’s topics represent the concerns of our Environmental Engineering, Facilities Planning and Operations departments.

“The critical difference between industrial and biological processes is that living systems are regulated by …feedback loops.”(49) In nature there is no such thing as waste. But our present economy consumes and disposes of unthinkable quantities of unrecoverable natural capital:

• “The US still gets 3/5 of its aluminum from virgin ore, at twenty times the energy intensity of recycled aluminum, and throws away enough aluminum to replace its entire commercial aircraft fleet every three months.”
• “The amount of waste generated to make a semiconductor chip is over 100 000 times its weight. Two quarts of gasoline and a thousand quarts of water are required to produce a quart of Florida orange juice 50
• “America wastes or causes to be wasted nearly 1 million pounds of materials per person per year. This figure includes 3.5 billion pounds of carpet landfilled…28 billion pounds of food discarded at home…3.7 trillion pounds of construction debris.”(52)
• Highway accidents cost us 150 billion a year
• Highway congestion 100 billion a year
• We spend 200 billion a year in wasted energy–just because we don’t employ same efficiency practices as in Japan
• We waste 250 billion on inflated and unnecessary medical overhead
• Our recordkeeping procedures for a ridiculous tax code cost us 250 billion a year.
• We also waste human capital: a billion workers in the world cant find jobs while “the U.S. has quietly become the world’s largest penal colony”–nearly five million men are in jail, awaiting trial or on parole.

Chapter 4, entitled “Making the World,” presents antidotes to this grim picture with principles and examples of industrial design that provide a better stream of services from smaller flows of stuff.(62) The kind of innovation described by this chapter is the concern of Cal Poly’s Department of Industrial technology.

The principle is fully developed in the German concept of extended product responsibility–the manufacturer has to take product back at end of its life. “In short, the whole concept of industry’s dependence on ever faster once-through flow of materials from depletion to pollution is turning from a hallmark of progress into a nagging signal of uncompetitiveness.”(81)

• Chemical engineers have cut US chemical firms’ energy intensity in half since 1970.
• The mass of an average European yogurt container dropped by 67 percent during years 1960-1990.
• Refrigerators now save 87 percent of their 1972 energy cost.
• High-temperature processes are replaced with gentler, cheaper ones based on biological models that often involve using actual micro-organizations–like those that Professor Cano at Cal Poly is developing for Bioremediation with Unocal.
• “Distributed intelligence” controls industrial processes with decentralized and sensitive instruments.
• Materials are saved with net shape manufacturing–rather than assembly
• “Disposable” cameras are actually recycled.
• IBM remanufactures computers.
• Xerox makes every part of its machines reusable or recyclable.

Chapter 5, “Building Blocks,” applies the principles of Natural Capitalism to construction and real estate development industries. This is a chapter for our Architecture, Construction Management, and Regional and City Planning departments.

Green buildings, like the high-rise Amsterdam bank described by the authors, use 92% less energy and create greater worker productivity and satisfaction by use of proper placement and orientation, passive heating and cooling principles, and full insulation. Such buildings are designed by a “charette” process of collaboration that crosses traditional professional boundaries.(87)

A major obstacle to true economy is created by the fact that architects and engineers are now paid on a percentage of the cost of buildings rather than on the basis of what they save in cost. The way to overcome such obstacles is to replace disincentives with financial incentives for conservation, for instance,

• overcoming the “split incentive problem in which one party selects the technology while another pays its energy costs,” for example with lease riders for fair sharing of savings between landlords and tenants
• changing the home appraisal process to evaluate a house’s energy efficiency
• requiring “feebates” for new energy hookups–energy efficient buildings get rebates paid by higher fees on energy inefficient ones.

The same kind of incentives–crediting developers for reducing automotive trips and numbers of cars per family–can promote real estate developments that “challenge the American habit of ceding community design to traffic engineering.” Such challenges are have been dubbed the “new urbanism,” and include neo-traditional village-style layouts, with neighborhood grocery stores, mixed-use occupancy, and narrower, tree shaded streets.

Chapter 6, “Tunneling Through the Cost Barrier,” and Chapter 7, “Muda, Service and Flow,” explore more abstract issues of economics that have to do with positive feedback loops in long term planning and financing of resource productivity. Both refute the generally accepted notion that increased efficiency is purchased at a rate of diminishing returns, and show rather that the tendency is toward incremental snowballing.

Chapter 8, “Capital Gains,” returns to the accounting principles of Natural Capitalism and proposes ways to overcome the obstacles to their implementation. Issues of accounting, subsidy and tax policy here are within the purview of Cal Poly’s faculty in Business, Economics, Political Science, and Natural Resource Management.

Economic benefits and services provided by natural systems include:

• oxygen production(183)
• biological and genetic diversity maintenance
• purification of water and air
• storage cycling and distribution of freshwater
• regulation of chemical composition of the atmosphere
• maintenance of migration and nursery habitats for wildlife
• decomposition of organic wastes
• sequestration and detoxification of human and industrial waste
• natural pest and disease control by insects, birds, bats etc
• maintenance of genetic library
• fixation of solar energy and conversion into raw materials
• management of soil erosion and sediment control
• flood prevention and regulation of runoff
• protection against cosmic radiation
• regulation of chemical composition of oceans
• regulation of local and global climate
• formation of topsoil and maintenance of soil fertility
• production of grasslands, fertilizers and food
• storage and recycling of nutrients

Yearly monetary values for such services can be calculated at

• $1.3 trillion for atmospheric regulation of gases
• $2.3 trillion for waste processing
• $17 trillion for nutrient flows
• $20.9 trillion from marine systems especially coastal environments

No matter how uncertain these specific amounts, establishing values for natural stocks and flows is the first step of incorporating them into planning, policy and public behavior–of getting people to recognize that these services require investment for preservation and replacement.

Obstacles to such investment in natural capital are perverse and often hidden subsidies by governments that promote abuse and waste–to the tune of $1.5 trillion per year.(161) For example:

• $6.7 billion paid by the German government to subsidize Ruhr Valley coal for jobs. It would be cheaper to pay off workers and close mines.
• $464 billion per year provided by the U.S. government for automobile industry subsidy–including road construction and the cost of the Persian Gulf war
• Subsidies to restrain surplus Agricultural production of $330 Billion year, including $800 million per year to tobacco farmers
• Huge grants to mining, logging and waste disposal industries, which encourage waste and discourage resource efficiency, including the U.S. Forest Service, “the worlds largest socialist road builder.”

At the same time government provides minimal support for clean technologies that can benefit the environment. One way of overcoming barriers to investment in natural capital is by tax shifting–a scheme that can appeal to conservatives and liberals alike. The authors propose to eliminate personal and employer taxes on labor–all income and payroll taxes–and to shift those taxes to sources of resource depletion, waste and pollution, like

• Emission of gases causing climatic change
• Nuclear power
• Toxic fuels
• Pesticides, synthetic fertilizers tobacco and alcohol, piped in water, old-growth timber, free-run salmon, irrigation water from public lands, all minerals from the ground, and waste sent to landfill or incinerator

Eliminating income tax would promote employment, since employees will not be as expensive to hire. Lower labor costs will reduce the rate of return required from investments and thereby benefit the environment, since the higher rate of return required on investment, the greater the likelihood of liquidation of natural capital.(166)

Chapter 9, called “Natures Filaments,” is of special interest to people in Cal Poly’s Natural Resource Management and Forestry programs, as well as to paper consumers in all departments and to building maintenance staff. It discusses the natural capital of forests, which is now being depleted for building materials and paper.

“The world consumes five times more paper now than in 1950”; we live in “a culture in which paper is universally available, priced at perhaps a penny a sheet and rarely paid for or thought about by its users.”(173) Sustainable forestry methods are known but not widely practiced.

Three ways for New Industrialism to deal with this waste of natural capital are to reduce demand, make production more efficient and increase recycling.

Chapter 10, “Food for Life,” raises issues that affect several departments in Cal Poly’s College of Agriculture, including Soil Science, Crop Science, Animal Science, and Agribusiness.

Judged by raw output, the industrialization of farming–or the Green Revolution–has been a triumph of technology, producing larger and faster maturing crops with high yield seeds, biocides, irrigation and nitrogen fertilizers.

But, according to the authors, this triumph has created deepening problems. Actual returns are diminishing and harvests are volatile. Two fifths of food production energy goes to processing and distribution and another two fifths to cooking and refrigeration by final users. Only one fifth is used on the farm, half in chemicals. We use ten times as much fossil fuel energy to produce it as food returns. The costs and liabilities of this system to our Ecosystem are unaccounted for.

• Soil, “the ultimate natural capital,” which the Chinese call the mother of all things, is being lost to erosion faster than it’s being produced, and is suffering overall reduction of organic fertility.
• Genetic diversity of all food crops is being reduced. For instance, India is replacing 30,000 native varieties of rice with one super variety; seed banks are being neglected(195); agrochemical companies are seeking to makes themselves the sole lawful proprietors of the world’s legacy of plant diversity
• There has been a twenty-fold increase in insecticide use since 1948“up to a billion pounds per year– but today insects get 13 percent of yield compared to 7 percent then.
• “Organic farmers recognize that healthy systems needs enough pests to provide enough food to support predators to so they can hang around and keep the pests in balance.” (197) Genetic engineers now put the Bt toxins that are natural pesticides into plants, but pests quickly evolve resistance, thereby eliminating the original natural benefits.
• Widespread monoculture reduces resistance to disease and adaptation to climate change. “Monoculture’s chemical dependence requires enormous amounts of fertilizers to make up for the free ecological services that the soil biota, other plants and manure provide in natural systems.”(197)

Solutions to these growing problems are provided by alternative agricultural practices employing principles of natural capitalism. As opposed to the Green revolution, “Ecoagriculture” substitutes good husbandry and local seed for otherwise purchased inputs. Resource productivity can be increased in biomimetic, closed-loop, nontoxic innovations such as

• crop drying using a no energy windmill vacuum in silos to create dry air flow
• sustainable barn architecture
• community supported agriculture
• substituting information for resources with close monitoring of soil moisture and biota(203)
• attracting wildlife to harvest non-food crop residues instead of burning them
• reconfiguring livestock raising with biomimicry
• “Pioneers of ecologically based grazing are showing it is far better to restore and maintain grazing by cattle and other animals on grasslands that typically coevolved with grazing animals and cannot remain healthy without them.”(207)
• restorative and biological farming organized on traditional family or village scale

Chapter 11, “Aqueous Solutions,” deals with issues of fresh water use and conservation of special interest to Cal Poly’s Agricultural Engineering and Environmental Engineering departments.

Chapter 12 outlines the problems of global climate change, to which some people respond with denial and others with hopelessness.

The authors present a plan not only for solving the problems but turning them into a business opportunity. They claim that the growing urgency and cost of global warming will push us in the right direction. The primary cause, the release of carbon into the atmosphere from burning of fossil fuels, can be reversed. U.S. growth in efficiency has actually lowered energy use, in contrast to projections in the 1970’s. But there’s a long way to go: America’s power stations turn fuel, still mostly coal, into an average of 34 percent electricity and 66 percent waste heat. In contrast, Denmark converts 61 percent of its power-plant fuel into useful work.(247)

According to the authors, increased efficiency and reduction of emissions can be achieved largely through the creation of business credits and incentives such as those developed in the 1997 Kyoto agreement. The sulfur emissions credit program has reduced them 37 percent in a decade, and the same policy can work with carbon trading, especially with the use of higher rewards for “early adopters.”

Chapter 13, “Making Markets Work,” outlines other business strategies to make environmental sustainability compatible with profitability. This chapter again is directed specifically to concerns of Cal Poly’s College of Business. “The goal of natural capitalism is to extend sound principles of the market to all sources of material value…[and] to guarantee that all forms of capital are as prudently stewarded as money is by trustees of financial capital.”

The authors proclaim that the remedy for unsustainable market activities is adoption of sustainable market activities. Such activities include creating markets in avoided resource depletion and abated pollution credits which will maximize competition in saving resources.(261)

One example demonstrating the feasibility and success of this kind of market is the toilet retrofit program developed in San Luis Obispo county. [This program is attributed to the City of Morro Bay, but it was also carried out in the City of San Luis Obispo.] When the city ran short of water, it required developers to save twice as much water at another place in town to get building permits. Two fifths of the houses got retrofitted within four years.

Another method is for Utilities to make markets in negawatts, allowing energy saving to compete against against energy production. “Every form of avoided resource depletion and prevented pollution is a potential candidate for an entrepeneur to find and exploit inefficiencies…the bigger the problem, the bigger the potential gain.”(280)

Yet another example of making markets work to promote sustainability is provided by the collaboration of climate scientists, who “Greenpeace introduced…to leaders of the European insurance and reinsurance industry. They are now investing in climate protection.”

In “Human Capitalism,” the book’s next-to-last chapter 14, the authors dramatically shift emphasis from natural capital to human capital, applying the “…same design philosophy, to achieve the same elegant frugality, with which whole-system engineering meets technical demands by delivering multiple benefits from single expenditures.” This chapter in itself has the impact of a whole book. It’s a vivid and plausible description of a Utopia, one whose actual existence is confirmed by numerous city websites, another book by Bill McKibbon, and a video available locally at Insomniac Video.

Known as “the ecological city,” Curitiba is located in the Southeastern Brazilian state of Parana and has a population of about 4 million people–the size of Houston or Philadelphia. There, “responsible government in partnership with vital entrepenurship has succeeded better than most cities in the U.S.” They have implemented “hundreds of multipurpose, cheap, fast, simple homegrown, people-centered intiiatives…treating all its citizens–most of all its children–not as burden but as most precious resource.”

“Teasing apart the strands of the intricate web of Curitiban innovation reveals the basic principles of Natural Capitalism at work in a particularly inspiring way.”(307) Resources are used frugally. New technologies are adopted. Broken loops are reclosed. Toxicity is designed out, health in. Design works with nature, not against it. The scale of solutions matches the scale of problems. “The existence of Curitba holds out the promise that it will be first of a string of cities that redefine the nature of urban life.”(308)

Chapter 15, the final chapter of the book, entitled, “Once Upon a Planet,” leads right to where we sit today.

The change in accounting procedures which Natural Capitalism demands requires a change of mental models. The largest institution addressing mental models is our schools.(315) Colleges, universities and public schools can change their impact on the environment in two fundamental ways. “They create the citizens, MBAs, engineers and architects that create our world. At the same time they spend $564 billion a year to do so, including 17 billion annually in new construction on colleges and universities.” According to David Orr of Oberlin, a leader of the campus ecology movement, “…changing the procurement, design and investments made by our educational systems represents a hidden curriculum that can teach as powerfully as any overt curriculum.”

Conclusion

Many our University’s departments exist to address the subjects of this book. We are located where crucial intersections and practical applications can take place. We’re blessed with resources that are often treated with the outmoded attitudes of the old industrialism. If Cal Poly can turn around to become an “early adopter” of Natural Capitalism, we can help bring along the rest of the world.

I’d like to offer two proposals: First, that we follow Rob Rutherford’s suggestion and get one of the authors to speak here and start the ball rolling toward a campus conference on Natural Capitalism. Second, that we get Hunter and Amory Lovins’ Rocky Mountain Institute to be consultants on our recently adopted $500 million twenty-year campus capital expansion program known as the Master Plan.

Natural Capitalism is book thick with ideas, facts and figures presented by entrepeneurs and engineers. It’s a set of concrete suggestions for improving the way business gets done proposed by economists. It’s a diagnosis of what’s wrong with the planet and the way we’ve been treating it delivered by ecologists. It’s an exploration of the relation between nature and technology written by philosophers. Finally it’s a testament of faith that can awaken us to reality uttered by prophets.

That’s emphasized by the logo on its cover. What appears at first like a coiled steel spring, on closer examination turns out to be the springtime symbol of a fiddlehead fern. The book’s mission is confirmed by its epigraph, a short poem called “Loaves and Fishes,” which concludes: “People are hungry/and one good word is bread/ for a thousand.”

 

 

“Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year….We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies and odes,…for parliaments of love and poesy…nor for the advancement of science…Our occasion is simply a “friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. [In the hope that this love will thrive and persist,] I accept the topic which not only custom but the nature of our association seem to prescribe to this day–the American Scholar. Year by year we come together to read one more chapter in his biography. Let us inquire what light new days and events have thrown on her character and her hopes.”

Those, roughly, are the opening words of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard on August 31, 1837,” thereafter published under the title of “The American Scholar,” and venerated ever since as a classic document in both the realms of literature and of education. What am I doing getting up here in an academic robe and mouthing them as if they were my own?

Well, just as it was to Emerson, the title of this talk was given to me as one appropriate for the occasion. Thomas Patchell, your new president, invited me to speak on this topic at two oclock in the morning at McCarthy’s bar last June 4, after the cleanup of the English Department’s Year End Bash. I was too exhilirated or too tired or too drunk to say no. But from a more sober perspective there is a certain appropriateness. Though this is not Harvard, but Cal Poly, and though our meeting is sponsored not by Phi Beta Kappa but by Sigma Tau Delta, the Cal Poly English Honor Society, we too are celebrating the recommencement of the literary year and the survival of the love of letters in a less than congenial environment. And though the audience facing me tonight may not include the likes of Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and William Henry Dana, just back to Cambridge after his famous sea voyage to the Central Coast of California, it couldn’t be any more challenging to me than the one Emerson faced 156 years ago. He tells us that the custom of his audience prescribed that the speaker read a chapter in the biography of THE American Scholar. But since I’m a little short of Ralph Waldo’s measureless confidence, I’ll scale back the assignment and limit my scope to a chapter in the biography of the one American Scholar I feel qualified to talk about, myself. That will require about as much transcendental ego as I can summon up.

(more…)

[A lecture to freshmen on the last day of a year-long class in “Literature and the Arts in Western Culture” at Stanford University–June 3, l986]

Sisyphus’ setting, with its flaking rock and its hot barren landscape is the last of a long series of images of hostile wastelands we have been contemplating. Barren deserts, steamy jungles, blasted battlefields, rocky islands, polar ice floes, gothic swamps, wind-swept marshes, blackened cities make up the backdrop of much modern European literature–a setting appropriate to the period that brought us World War I and II and which may yet bring us nuclear winter. Most of these demonic landscapes are symbolic, representing as we have learned, the burnt-out quality of the modern: its loss of spiritual faith, loss of intellectual and moral clarity, loss of aesthetic pleasure, loss of belief in society, the family, the self.

But this symbolic imagery of physical desolation has a literal meaning as well, one that we have not encountered much in the works we discussed. Western culture, and probably world culture as well, has been involved since the beginning of the modern period not only in its own self- destruction, but in the destruction of the earth, the environment which has bred and nursed it. In “From a Plane,” a short poem included in your miscellany of poetry, Denise Levertov recognizes from the air “the great body…torn apart/ raked and raked by our claws” –treated by us like Lear and Gloucester by their ungrateful children. (more…)