My Guerrilla Garden in San Francisco

The concept of “guerrilla gardening” is getting more play in the media these days (see the June 8, 2008 New York Times article) as people realize how many micro-plots of land go untended even in high-value urban real estate areas. My own epiphany in guerrilla gardening came in the spring of 2007: after years of thinking about tending a 16 by 24-foot weedpatch on a sunny slope in front of my apartment in San Francisco, I finally got to work. After much sweat, elbow grease, and blisters on my tender information-worker hands, the result is a spectacular succulent garden.

I favor drought-tolerant and I'd like to favor California natives but I'm a sucker for any cool looking plant or anything someone gives me. I also favor rocks, which I've gathered up mostly from empty lots and construction sites around the neighborhood. Check out my Flickr set documenting the creating and growth of this garden.

Below: a slide show of all my garden photos; click to advance.

Technorati Tags: California, garden, GuerillaGarden, GuerrillaGardening, SanFrancisco, succulents, urban, xeriscape

The many sides of the "housing crisis" — it’s later than you think in California and Texas

We bemoan the loss of pristine nature.

We cherish it, enshrine it in national parks, visit it, protect it, photograph it, promote it.

And yet will will lose more and more of it, because that is the way things go.

More and more people, with our ravenous appetites for novelty. New continents, new forests, new ports, new riches to harvest, new people to conquer.

A smaller world in 2008 than in 1492.

All the gifts of Nature, it seems, are to be brought under the whip of Mankind.

# # #

 

 

The Unforeseen, executive produced by Terrence Malick and Robert Redford, premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Called “the best film at the festival, hands down,” the film documents the struggles between development and preservation of Austin Texas.

 

View the trailer, reviews and latest news at  http://www.theunforeseenfilm.com.

2008 Theater Showings:
March 7 - Boston - Kendall Square Cinema
March 14 - Los Angeles - NuArt
March 14 - San Francisco - Lumiere
March 14 - Berkeley, CA - Shattuck
March 28 - Austin, TX - Alamo South Lamar
April 4 - Seattle, WA - Varsity
April 11 - Denver, CO - Landmark
April 18 - Philadelphia, PA - Ritz Theater
April 18 - San Diego, CA - Ken Cinema
May 17 - Columbus, OH - Wexner Center for the Arts
more cities coming soon....

And another movie about suburban sprawl: Radiant City.

# # #

And in today's Los Angeles Times: “A stoic little town faces tomorrow. A massive housing project may mean the end for Neenach, in the Antelope Valley.” Be sure to watch the Times's video, which is beautifully produced and photographed. They simply listen in on some of the folksy wisdom of Sigfried Carrle, a 76 year old man who moved out to this rural setting in Los Angeles County years ago.

Listen to a discussion on KCRW radio today, where they speak with New York Times business columnist Gretchen Morgenson:

The Housing Crisis Is Eating America's Economy
Home foreclosure may become an industry in itself. Today's New York Times features a California company called You Walk Away, which is looking for clients whose mortgages are now worth more than their houses, so they can't refinance to meet rising payments. For less than a thousand dollars, You Walk Away will show them how to deliver their problems back to the bank by foreclosure. Part of the problem is the idea that housing is not just a place to live, but a gold-plated investment whose value just keeps going up. What goes up must come down, leaving tens of thousands of people with increased payments on loans worth more than their houses. Are greedy banks and investors at fault? What about homebuyers themselves? And what's the impact on an economy that depends on consumer spending?

Don't tell me you didn't see this coming.

 

Technorati Tags: Austin, nature, oil, OilAddiction, overpopulation, pollution, sprawl, suburb, suburbansprawl, Texas, TheUnforseen, traffic

Lunar Eclipse of 20 February 2008, from San Francisco

Turned out that Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2008, was a good evening for an eclipse. In the middle of a series of rain storms, the weather cleared for a while in San Francisco and right on schedule the full moon arose in the east, already obscured by Earth's shadow. Here it is, viewed from San Francisco's Potrero Hill. Also, check out my photos of the Aug. 28, 2007 lunar eclipse.

Thick fog on Nov. 7, the day the Cosco Busan hit the Bay Bridge

Below: 8:23 a.m. on Nov. 7, 2007. The fog is thick on San Francisco Bay. In 7 minutes, a giant ship, the Cosco Busan, will collide with the Bay Bridge, spilling 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel into the Bay.

Below: 8:56 a.m. and the fog is thick on San Francisco Bay. Little did I know that some 25 minutes before I made this photo, the Cosco Busan ship had hit the Bay Bridge.

Desert dumping

I'm constantly amazed at how we as a society are willing to tolerate blatant environmental abuse. Can we not instill in ourselves a sense of caring for the land, sea, and sky? And can we not afford to clean up its defilement by careless and callouse human action? We could, if we made it a priority.

I would suggest that our priorities are messed up.

Report desert dumping in the Antelope Valley here: call (888)-8-DUMPING between 7 a.m. and 5:30 p.m.,  Monday through Thursday.

Technorati Tags: environment

Facts about California's Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta Levees

What: Earthen berms built on peaty marsh islands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta region in California, roughly an hour northeast of San Francisco, bounded by the cities of Sacramento, Stockton, Tracy, and Antioch (Google map). The San Joaquin River and Sacramento River converge here; smaller bays part of the system include San Francisco Bay, San Pablo Bay, Suisun Bay, Grizzly Bay. The delta was originally marshland; reclamation was made by the building of levees, begun by Chinese laborers in 1850s, finished by 1920.

above: photo from NASA's Earth Observatory

Below: sunset on the Sacramento River; the levee running through the middle of the photo is topped by Highway 160.

Area: 1,100 square miles.

The Numbers: around 70 reclaimed islands and tracts, surrounded by 1,100 miles of levees. 35% are project-maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers; the rest private- and local reclamation district-maintained.

Farming: 500,000 acres of prime agricultural land.

Water: surrounded by 700 miles of waterways.

Fauna: over 100 species of waterfowl and wildlife; numerous fish species, both resident and anadromous varieties.

Who uses the Delta:

• important deep water ship channels to Stockton and Sacramento
• natural gas production fields
• East Bay Municipal Utility District (water supply) has three Mokelumne River water pipelines that cross the Delta from their origin in the Sierra Nevada foothills
• power transmission lines
• water transferred through Delta channels for intake into the State Water Project and Central Valley Project at the Delta's south end
• railroad tracks
• Several islands have people living on them
• The islands crucial to preventing saline (ocean) water intrusion in the Delta

The Problem: Levees and island surface sinking because the organic peat soil is highly compressible. Many islands are now 15-20 feet below sea level. Islands are expected to subside to 21-48 feet below sea level in 50-100 years. Subsidence rates are between 1.6-3 inches per year. Danger of levee collapse increases with subsidence because water pressure on levee increases.

Levees are being degraded by several factors:

• pumping water out of the islands aids subsidence; dry, tilled peat soil subject to wind erosion
• wakes from boats, especially recreational boaters in speedboats
• cavities formed by burrowing muskrats and beavers
• scouring action of river and tidal flows
• age — many levees are over 100 years old
• wind erosion
• soil movement
• earthquake
• vegetation — plants can masks levee condition from inspectors; falling trees may tear holes in levees.

Levees break and flood the islands they protect. Major islands were flooded at least 18 times in last 60 years. Franks Tract flooded in 1936 and 1938 and was never reclaimed (now a State Recreation Area), as with Donland Island.

Value of agricultural land and crops not worth the reclamation costs. Farmers are unwilling and unable to pay for repairs by themselves. In recent decades, farmers have been switching to lower value field crops like corn, making the agricultural land even less worth preserving.

Water quality is threatened in summer when low outflow fails to repel saline intrusion.

If an island becomes flooded, water loss through evaporation over the flooded area would exceed what agriculture uses over the same area; this would require State Water Project and Central Valley Project to make greater releases just to flush out the Delta before water could be exported.

Two situations:

1. Levees in central Delta are locally maintained and constructed over a long period of time by private interests or local reclamation districts. The landowners can not afford to maintain their levees without public assistance.
2. Levees along deep water ship channels are maintained by Army Corps of Engineers; these are the “project levees.” Built to much higher standards, they are in adequate condition and no major work is needed to preserve them.

Solutions:

• State Legislature committed in 1973 to maintaining the levees in their present configuration.
• Most important reason to maintain the levees is to protect the SWP/CVP water supply from saline intrusion.
• Army Corps of Engineers wants to maintain only valuable/necessary levees. They prefer a “polder” scenario, creating huge new linked islands with fewer waterways and thus fewer levees to maintain.

Further reading:

• Article and photo from NASA's Earth Observatory
• California Advances Funds to Army Corps for Critical Levee Repair
• California's Levees Vulnerable to Breach (NPR)
• California Town Weighs Cost of Flood Protection (NPR)

Technorati Tags: ArmyCorpsOfEngineers, delta, DeltaRegion, flood, leveefailure, levees, Sacramento, SacramentoRiver, SanFranciscoBay, WaterSupply

Californians sure do love their cars... don't they?

From my “Auto Carnage” series.

the machine in the garden // the garden in the machine

Inside the virtuous/insidious circle of machine and nature. The duality of inside and outside. Taming the wilderness and lamenting its loss. Time measured in dollars; extinction measured in species. Lush green and chilling metal. Shoeboxes and hilltops. Pixels and cells.

Choking the seas with our plastic garbage

The Los Angeles Times published an article today about the gigantic patch of floating plastic garbage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, twice as big as the state of Texas: “Plague of Plastic Chokes the Seas; On Midway Atoll, 40% of albatross chicks die, their bellies full of trash. Swirling masses of drifting debris pollute remote beaches and snare wildlife.” The article is part of their Altered Oceans series. From the article:

Nearly 90% of floating marine litter is plastic — supple, durable materials such as polyethylene and polypropylene, Styrofoam, nylon and saran.

About four-fifths of marine trash comes from land, swept by wind or washed by rain off highways and city streets, down streams and rivers, and out to sea.

The rest comes from ships. Much of it consists of synthetic floats and other gear that is jettisoned illegally to avoid the cost of proper disposal in port.

In addition, thousands of cargo containers fall overboard in stormy seas each year, spilling their contents. One ship heading from Los Angeles to Tacoma, Wash., disgorged 33,000 blue-and-white Nike basketball shoes in 2002. Other loads lost at sea include 34,000 hockey gloves and 29,000 yellow rubber ducks and other bathtub toys.

The debris can spin for decades in one of a dozen or more gigantic gyres around the globe, only to be spat out and carried by currents to distant lands. The U.N. Environment Program estimates that 46,000 pieces of plastic litter are floating on every square mile of the oceans. About 70% will eventually sink.

Below: beer-swilling morons left this trash pile on a beach in Half Moon Bay, California, August 2003. In the background is the Ritz-Carlton luxury resort hotel, where I once prevented a paying customer of theirs — a wealthy man on the golf course — from deliberately hitting his golf balls into the ocean for cheap thrills.

Boy, you give people paradise, and they just f**k it up.

Suburban sprawl in California: panoramic photos

For your consideration: panoramic (extra extra wide) photographs of suburban sprawl developments around California: San Ramon 2004 · San Ramon 2006 ·  Clayton ·  Antioch · Santa Clarita · Valencia · Tassajara Road and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Technorati Tags: california, clayton, exurban, realestate, residential, sanramon, southerncalifornia, sprawl, suburb, valencia