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2010 08 29 Life Comments (0) Permalink

Now I’m Doing Something With My Time

It’s like being punched in the stomach.

First, endless weeks of being entirely responsible for my own time. Maybe interacting a person or two every day. Making every meal from scratch. Gorging on books, devouring good series. The most stress came from part-catering a bridal shower for two-score people, and the most excitement came from running around Cape Cod with Thomas, Mary, Judith, and Steve. Only the occasional RISD email or a day-trip to Providence reminded me that all this doing-nothing time was enjoyed in anticipation of important doing-something time.

I just had no idea how intense that doing-something time was going to be.

Welcome to RISD. Already, three weeks into the summer program, I feel like I’ve been here for months, if not years. I’ve gotten used to 9-9 days, plus a few nights staying up to witching hour to finish a “site plan, perspectives, and a model” given 18 hours before the due date. I’ve been driven to tears and I’ve held my classmates when they felt too like giving up, all of us soldiers in a war of paper and graphite. Together we’ve covered plant identification, river morphology, soil geology, site surveying, orthographic projection, isometric and perspective drawing, plaster-casting, charcoal sketching, woodworking, and canoeing. All this in the face of having to do it for three. full. years.

Yet whenever I have a spare hour… what can I do that is more fulfilling and creative than this? What socializing is more satisfying than working through difficult problems with a bunch of highly talented folks from every age and background? What is more relaxing than a waking up from two hours of sleep and a dinner of chocolate with a fuzzy-headed morning run? (Well… maybe not that last one.) The admissions office has placed a mantel on our shoulders that is intimidating and comforting at the same time. They’ve chosen us twenty-five to succeed at one of the top landscape architecture programs in the country, and though that is one big vote of confidence, we still have to live up to it.

I have a couple rules. Health has to be of equal importance to any work I have, because otherwise I’ll get sick and feel miserable and I won’t make it. That means making time for sleeping and running and nutritious food-eating. Next, I should be invested in my work. It should be awesome, because if I’m just doing it to get it done, I will resent my creations and they will become colorless crumples in turn. If I’m bored I’m doing it wrong. (Frustration, on the other hand, is unfortunately legit.) Lastly, if I ever feel too daunted, I just have to imagine that I’m the hero of an epic fantasy, and I’ve been given a difficult task not because it is fun or easy or even possible, but because I’m the best hope we have for saving the world.

It’s not quite as simple as taking the Ring to Mount Doom, but in a way landscape architects are vital to managing humanity’s impact on the planet. We help create land use policy, we manage how people live with floods and storms and earthquakes, we create greenways and artificial wetlands and places where humans can connect with the rest of nature, and we bring together folks who butt heads like rams in springtime — ecologists, engineers, home-owners, policy-makers — and get them to communicate. Right, so suddenly struggling with this blasted paper model ‘til 4:30 am doesn’t sound so tough, does it?

I want to change the world. I want to make it beautiful from the inside out. I want to come up with ideas and execute them and be surprised at just how cool those ideas are, and I want other people to admire them when I’m not there. And I have to believe that my efforts won’t be entirely absorbed by the wrinkled napkin of the industrial world. Somehow I don’t think RISD is going to knock sense into me as much as follow these foolhardy dreams with the upmost conviction.

What I have I gotten myself into?

2010 08 10 Sketches Comments (0) Permalink

Disembodied Warrior

2010 08 09 Sketches Comments (0) Permalink

Rejected

2010 08 08 Sketches Comments (0) Permalink

Rock or Mushroom

2010 08 07 Sketches Comments (0) Permalink

Little Gardener

2010 08 06 Sketches Comments (0) Permalink

Bubble Blowing Tortoise

2010 08 05 Sketches Comments (0) Permalink

Death & Taxes

2010 07 14 Philosophy Comments (0) Permalink

Exercising Morality

In response to Emrys Westacott’s “Does Surveillance Make Us Morally Better?”

My research on shoes and chairs suggests that dreams of being perfectly relaxed and fully supported are wild goose chases that lead to atrophied muscles and malformed body parts so weak they need ever more support just to exist without pain. By analogy, “the discomfort of moral tension” may be that tautness of honed muscle that is that is more capable and better at working under its own strength. If people rely on surveillance to keep themselves in check, then they will need increasing amounts of it as their weakening senses of morality lead them to cause disputes at smaller and smaller levels.

There is no State of Nature in which everyone drives as fast as they can and steals from their grandmother: where there are no governmental laws, people still form regular patterns of behavior. Yet if people are constantly hemmed in by Big Brother, the moment they find an opening, I bet it will look a lot like an unguarded cookie jar. Without any sense of why endless cookies are bad for them, they would greedily empty the whole thing (and drive as fast as they can and steal from their grandmothers). Replace cookies with the Forbidden Fruit, too. What’s more, like some salaried boring-as-hill day job, both risks and rewards have been eliminated… leaving the employee with no motivation and no enthusiasm for justice and human goodness. Or refilling the printer ink. So I predict, anyway.

Life will find a way. Complex systems such as human societies are full of fractalesque holes and exceptions that can’t be covered by a finite set of rules. That’s why I don’t believe 1984 could happen: language is too complex to be completely white-washed. Likewise, there will always be situations which strain a moral code to the breaking point. That’s why we need strong moral muscles. We should be able to use neighbors, not cameras, for checking in on what’s really important. The BP folks cared more about the government regulations than about the poisoning of fish and children those regulations were supposed to prevent.

We need to exercise our empathy, too, because morality is fundamentally connected to it. That we shut ourselves off from, say, animals cough proselytize cough — but also human suffering abroad, in other strata of society, and desensitizing ourselves to violence in video games and the media — can only weaken our abilities to connect with the world around us in meaningful ways. Yes, it’s sometimes painful, but with sensitive feet and minds, nerves ablaze, I think our experiences will be richer for it and we’ll stop and do the right thing when it needs doing. That’s why Probity is so much more awesome than Scrutiny: the surveillance is integrated into the social network as we ask each other to be good people. We get rewarded with respect and friends and support rather than punished by an electronic eyeball. And we care enough to strive for our ideals.

From up here on my soapbox, you all look like ants! I hope my two cents won’t smoosh you from this height.

2010 07 09 Life Comments (2) Permalink

New England Paradise

I’m living in a tropical paradise, weather-wise. It’s incredible — in the sense that people find me unbelievable when I say I like this hot-humid stuff. Maybe I run a few degrees cooler than most people, but with a light breeze and bit of shade, I’m in paradise.

Thomas is off in the fantastical story-worlds of Wayfinder, my Doctor without his companion. But I had my own adventure over Independence Day weekend — Kyle invited me to his grandparents’ lakeside house in Connecticut. We ran in the wooded trails behind his high school, with the sweetest air I’ve tasted. I met his myriad friends and family, lounging with them by the dock, staying up late launching Roman candles from our hands (pretend you didn’t read that, oh parents mine), and sleeping in our middle-class tent town. I ended the weekend with a bunch of new friends of my own!

One by one the girls got invited to a photo shoot by Kyle’s photo pro mom, Laurie Klein. It looked so silly as they floated in the water sticking their faces through gauzy fabric, but it felt bad to get left out — until I poked my head out of my book and promptly found out how much fun it was to be a model! Having a camera on me made me feel so glamorous, without a hint of flattery. And the photos afterwards were miraculous. Miraculously spooky! We four were transformed through the gauze and the infra-red into monsters, witches, drown victims, ghosts, and in my case, a creepy black-eyed little girl. The camera is a Transmogrifier.

Now, all you sensitive vegetarians out there were secretly cringing this summer holiday as their fellows scrape the grease of the innocent off their grills. (I get carried away with the words sometime! Woe to the folks who were eating eggs the morning I accidently put forth my chicken-menstrual-cycle comparison.) I, on the other hand, was happy to go against the grain (but really, I’m just going against the meat) and celebrate the Fourth like the Torrie I am — too much of a pacifist to think that a few political gripes were worth full-on war with all the suffering and death that entails, and thus unable to get behind the pride which winning that war is supposed to inspire. But you know what? With succulent vegetables and sweet corn on the grill, and a few vegetarians to wink at over the perfectly seasoned portobello burgers, I wasn’t all that unpatriotic. And we can all get behind big colorful explosions.

Happy summer, everyone!

2010 06 14 Life
Philosophy Comments (0) Permalink

Ecosystems and Secret Gardens

Last Thursday, Doug Tallamy came to the Cambridge Public Library as part of his book tour. His book, Bringing Nature Home, is about the importance of using native plants in our gardens, and he was introduced by the founder of the local Grow Native Cambridge group, Claudia Thompson. I mention Ms. Thompson because I actually got to meet her at the Secret Gardens of Cambridge yesterday — hers was my last stop on the open-garden tour (at which point I had been walking straight from 10 in the morning to 3:30 in the afternoon, with only a couple of handfuls of almondy native juneberries as fuel and still an hour from little Lee Street).

It was surprising to see how different her meandering backyard garden looked both from native-minded Pacific Northwest gardens, which go in for the grasses and smaller-leafed shrubbery, and from the lawn-with-a-border types in the old colonial estates. In terms of design, I much prefer the ones with a canopy layer that blocks the view somewhat, encouraging you to go in further and explore — gardens that indeed feel “secret”, as the title of the tour suggests, and perhaps a little wild. Mount Auburn Cemetery a great example, with its hills and trees creating myriad pockets of peaceful contemplation. In fact, it was the first cemetery in the US to be designed by a landscape architect, the first to follow in the European Rural Cemetery Movement that substituted wilderness-like parks for constricted church graveyards. This tradition continued to gain popularity and became the inspiration for the National Parks. The values here were to preserve nature as a space shared by humans, other animals, and plants, and a space that benefited us as much as them.

This was the sort of thing that Tallamy discussed in his talk: the need to bring back these shared spaces, and even more importantly, our desire to have them. Currently the National Parks are just too small and disconnected to protect most species, and the vast swathes of urban and agricultural “desert” lead many to become “functionally extinct” — no longer participating in their local ecosystems. Tallamy said that a third of all bird species are “imperiled”, in danger of becoming functionally extinct. Already many species are undergoing local extinctions due to habitat loss, something that is nostalgically captured in the book Ceremonial Time. Ecosystem collapse is a huge problem that directly impacts humans because we depend on many “ecosystem services” that we import into our cities and suburban sprawls, things like oxygen and the pollination of food crops. Instead of living off the interest, Tallamy says, we are dipping into the principle, which in this case is the carrying capacity of our landscapes.

He says sustainability is like pregnancy: you can’t be a little pregnant, and you can’t be more sustainable. The carrying capacity of a landscape is how many species and individuals it is able to sustain indefinitely. Biodiversity increases the carrying capacity, creating more habitat and food opportunities, and weaving a redundant food web that can better adapt to change. Front and back yards take up a tremendous amount of real estate, and so have a tremendous capacity increase a region’s biodiversity, but all too often these end up as wasted space. Empty swathes of grass. Carefully pruned rose bushes. Imported fancy-pants plants. Landscapers and horticulturalists are trained as “painters”, not as systems thinkers. They’re not trained to care.

There’s no better example of this than the fact that most people want insect-free gardens. Now this is crazy, as Tallamy explains, because insects are the basis for most food webs, since they make up a large portion of the diets of everything from birds to bears. So we spray everything and pull out the natives that serve as bug habitat, and then bemoan the loss of birds and butterflies. Yet even the bugs themselves aren’t necessarily ugly — Tallamy put up some slides of caterpillars crawling around in his backyard that looked like exotic sea slugs! The trick is to attract enough insects to attract their predators. He showed data showing that native plant gardens had the same or less aesthetic damage than those with conventional non-natives. And they certainly attracted way more birds — Tallamy said that while some people go on bird walks to spot the great plumage on display, he just has to go look out his bathroom window.

Tallamy’s audience already cared about plants and animals. After all, they were garden enthusiasts. But the problem is that most people nowadays don’t experience the outdoors — and so they don’t develop an emotional relationship with it. One of the things I see a lot, whether in discussing veganism or politics or philosophy, is a lack of empathy. Empathy is a muscle that gets bigger with exercise, but I suspect many people neglect to do so because it hurts. Extending empathy means feeling more of other people’s pain, other animals’ pain, and the pain of entire ecosystems collapsing around us. Yet it’s worth practicing empathy because otherwise we harden ourselves to the things we really ought to care about — and as it becomes a large-scale phenomenon, we find that we ourselves join the suffering because no one cares about us anymore, either. And although ecosystems don’t form emotional attachments to us, they do care for us in some pretty fundamental ways.

While I dream about tearing up roads and putting in a network of high-speed railways and replacing agricultural pastureland and monocultures with food forests, building thriving habitats in our yards is a much more realistic goal — and judging by the beauty of the native-focused gardens I saw around Cambridge yesterday and the abundance of wildlife I saw in Tallamy’s photographs, I predict no one will want to be left out of (what he calls) the new Suburban National Park. He ended with an anonymous quote that I immediately took to heart: “Gardening is a way of showing that you believe in tomorrow.”