Bonemeal – Cairns #45

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From around November 'til April, a seasonal stream flows over the land. Heavy winter rains can swell it into a brown torrent a foot deep and fifty feet wide that can roll six inch diameter rocks along the streambed for a few hours. This rocky streambed is flanked by cutbanks one to two feet high with level terraces beyond. I have a hypothesis that the bottom of this drainage was once a more level, less rocky, oak tree-stabilized floodplain and that overgrazing led to the land’s eroding into this shape. I dream of shifting some geological balance that will allow life to stabilize the streambed so that the gully gradually fills in, raising the streambed until it becomes almost level with the flanking terraces. That would push much of the flow out onto the terraces where grasses and trees would so spread it out that it would flow slowly with little, if any, erosion.

So I’ve tried to increase the abundance of plants growing in the streambed. I’ve walked the streambed in late summer looking for seeds to help scatter. My favorite is bricklebush because it raises against the flood a short but resistant thicket of stems. Bricklebush seeds were found in far greater abundance than its flowers until I learned this plant’s heat of summer secret of flowering at night, its incredible perfume pulling insects through the dark. Milkweed also fills the streambed each summer but I could never find any flowers or seeds. I vaguely knew that milkweed had an unusual flower so I wondered if I just didn’t recognize the plant’s flowers and seeds. Summer after summer I would look, without success.

Each winter I cut willow stems and drove them into the streambed gravels. Each spring I would watch them leaf out and grow until late July when they would wither and die. The water table must be dropping below the roots of the young cuttings so one summer I installed a dripline to keep the willows watered. They grew until late July and then withered and died. Something more than water was going on that I did not understand.

One winter a larger than normal flood blasted away part of the streambed, exposing 2-3” thick rubbery hoses of roots. I had no idea what they were but I examined them, fascinated by how such massive roots had always lain just a few inches below the surface, forming a strong and stretchy web binding the sands and gravels into a greater, unified mass that could hold fast beneath the floods. More is going on during a flood than I can see. Later, when milkweed plants emerged from this root system, I bowed my head with a humble smile. I had been championing willows and bricklebush, shrubs with woody stems that held their ground in the winter floods. Scaredy-cat milkweed never showed its face during the flood season. Not until May did it emerge from the
sands to grow weak stems that withered into crackly stems by October and were washed away in the weak floods of early winter. I had judged them as of not much help, not knowing of their fire-hose roots stretched by each pounding flood but holding firm.

A horticulturist friend of ours had walked this land with us when we first moved here. He said that the soil of our area was deficient in phosphorous. Based on his advice, we had bought bags of bonemeal and worked it into our garden soils. He also mentioned that the rocky streambeds would be even more deficient but there was no practical way to work it into the streambed. Bonemeal dissolves very slowly. If I scattered it in the streambed during the rains, the floods would wash it away. If I put it in the streambed after the rainy season, the dry bonemeal would just lie there unchanged through the hot dry summer until next winter’s rain washed it away. There was just no practical way to fertilize the rocky streambed.

The shallow stream of April flows from deep pool to deep pool. These quiet pools had formed where the stream curves and the brown winter floods crashed against the outside bank of the turn. The flood whirls as it changes direction, drilling a pit into the streambed, excavating a void which, when filled with water, we see as a pool.

Each May the stream gradually dries up and, section by section, disappears until only the deep pools remain. “Dries up” is not quite accurate because the stream is still there. It has just receded beneath the surface. If I dig down where the stream “disappeared,” I come to water within a few inches. The water percolating through the gravels beneath the surface flows much more slowly than water flowing over the surface rocks but the stream is still “flowing.” In the same way, the quiet water in the pools is also still flowing. The pools are “windows” opening into the subsurface flow.

One spring I realized that these pools, these pits drilled into the streambed, opened an opportunity to insert phosphorous into this slow-moving flow of water. During the several weeks these tranquil pools remain, they can be a place where phosphorous keeps dissolving, day and night, into ground water that saturates the entire width and depth of the gravels beneath the streambed. These pools offer the opportunity to infuse a fertilizer that might touch every root within the streambed. None of the fertilizer would wash away to be lost.

So I filled a jar with bone meal and tossed a couple of handfuls into each of the remaining pools. Over the next few weeks, I could see some of this powder still lying at the bottom of the shrinking pools because bonemeal dissolves slowly. And then the ponds dried up and another long hot summer began. Except this summer, hundreds of milkweeds flowered! My willow cuttings survived! The change was so dramatic that I had to go search the books to find out what phosphorous actually does.

Just as phosphorous forms the skeleton of the body, it also forms the skeleton of the DNA molecule which carries the genetic code essential to reproduction. This code, residing in the nucleus of each cell, also directs the continuous assembling of the proteins forming within each cell, and hence our body. The code is not in the phosphorous but the phosphorous helps form the stable skeleton upon which the code can be built and kept amazingly stable over thousands of generations and recombinations. Without atoms of phosphorous, a plant can’t make DNA. The number of available phosphorous atoms determines how many cells a plant can make, how much pollen it can produce, how many seeds it can produce.

Furthermore, the molecular “battery” that cells use to energize all their functions and creations is ATP (adenosine triphosphate). Without ATP, life coasts to death—and every molecule of ATP requires three atoms of phosphorous in order to create three phosphates. The energy that drives life is stored in these phosphate bonds. The more phosphorous atoms that are available, the more energy life can store and use. We talk about solar energy as the energizing source of life but the transformation from solar to biological requires atoms of phosphorous. Without phosphorous, solar energy would only blast a barren surface.

I had grown up thinking that fertilizer was stuff that did something to a plant. But it is more fundamental than that. Fertilizer becomes the plant. Fertilizer is the elemental building blocks for making the molecules that do important work within a plant’s cells. Like the dark percolation of water past snaky roots beneath the streambed, these atoms of phosphorous are part of an invisible flowing, vibrating level of molecules weaving the world into forms and binding it together. The seemingly abstract world of chemical formulas and diagrams becomes mystically palpable as my eyes see milkweed plants flower where they have never flowered before.

I say “mystically palpable” because this story happens at a level (not touched by sight) where sight can not go. Our eyes feed directly into our brain. When we understand, we say “I see...” But this story of phosphorous we have to feel with a less used part of our understanding, a part that can go down into the darkness where water slowly pushes through the gaps between packed sand grains, flowing over the cold surfaces in response to forces invisible but tangible in the dark packed sands. Forces pushing water outward and downward so that every single surface beneath the streambed, every sand grain, every root hair is wetted by water within whose film passes an occasional atom of phosphorous. The rocks are oblivious to this passage but the roots pull them in and months later, we see thousands of milkweed fluffy seeds sail forth at summer’s end.

Mom and Dad had always been very matter of fact about what they wanted us to do when they died. So when our family gathered following my dad’s death, everything unfolded as scripted. We received his cremated ashes on a quiet summer day and drove up into the local mountains to scatter them in the special place they had chosen. We gazed out over the beautiful “hills of home,” his wife and two generations of their descendants. It all felt right in a spiritually sweet way. Then my brother, the eldest of us three children, handed the box to me.

Now, I don’t want to slide into black humor, but I suddenly found myself in a situation so culturally loaded with ignorance and taboo that the potential, in hindsight, for crude movie humor becomes staggeringly enormous. There is a huge, yawning gap between the culturally-widespread phrase of “spreading his ashes” and the specific moment of being given a cardboard box and, while the rest of the family is watching solemnly, doing—what exactly? The box was dense, heavy, not at all like wood ash. What’s inside? I had no idea. Suddenly, there I was, left holding the box, responsible for leading the family through this mystery.

With no idea whatsoever of what I “should” be doing, I opened the box and found a clear plastic bag sealed with a twisty. I undid the twisty, put it in my pocket, and opened the bag. It was filled with what looked like gritty beige sand heavy with a taboo against touching this stuff. What do I do—just dump it out on the ground? I mean, how many of us have been given guidance on how one scatters ashes? Instead we are given cardboard and plastic to protect us from being touched by this mystery of Dad slipping away.

Mom and Dad had always been honest with us about death. To not feel his death honestly felt unworthy. So I reached into the bag to take up a handful of ashes and the moment my fingers touched, I knew... This white sand had a dry, chalk-like texture so distinctive that I instantly knew I was touching bonemeal. The purest, whitest bonemeal I will ever handle. No greasiness like on a soup bone; all that had been burnt away in a flame so purifying that only the most elemental essence of bone remained to be crushed into a grit that was chemically too strongly bound (the stuff of skeletons!) to be crushed into powder. I lifted it aloft, marveling at the feel of my dad’s body sifting through
my fingers.

Dad’s DNA had pulled this phosphorous into his body to support him throughout his life. These bones had anchored his hard-working muscles. With these teeth, themselves now ground up, he had ground the fish he had caught, the pheasants he had shot, the roasts and potatoes and popcorn his earnings had bought. And now, as it sifted through my upraised hand, my dad became one with the magic of the milkweed. His molecules are seeds that will bring flowers into existence. He is a flower from whose seed pod emerges seeds drifting in the wind.

This feel of bonemeal slipping through my fingers felt so right. I passed the box to my brother who reached in and released another handful. The box was passed around and Dad slipped back into the great world, slipped past two generations of skin cells built from and still containing the bonemeal-anchored DNA code he has passed on. We are passing through this world. The world is passing through us. Taboos say “don’t touch” but we must touch it because it can’t be seen, this flow that joins beneath the surface.

Afterword: 9 PM, May 21, 2006 - I’ve just returned from an evening roaming in my hills. I took a sandwich bag of fertilizer and ceremonially scattered the molecules lightly as I contoured the upper perimeter slopes of my new watershed. Some places caught my eye as being able to do more so they received more. And now I will send this story out into the internet world. May it be bonemeal for your spirit.

Swearing – Cairns #22

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I rarely swear. It usually doesn’t bother me if other people do but my avoidance of swearing originates in a specific moment on a cross-country hike on the flanks of Mt. Lassen about ten years ago. It is a challenge to keep one’s consciousness elevated during a hard, sweaty, uphill stretch. The mind can wander and mutter to itself. My mind was doing that and I gradually became aware that swear words were coming into consciousness quite often. All of a sudden, I perceived a direct correlation between my tendency to swear and the current direction of my mind/spirit. I suddenly realized that the rising of swear words within me was feedback that my mind was moving in a direction I did not wish to go, a direction of less awareness and more “at the mercy of things”, with more of a negative attitude toward my experiences, and with a sloppy slurring of speech into generic packaged expressions. This was an important distinction: the swear words are not bad. But the arising of them in my consciousness is feedback that I’m straying off course. I suddenly saw that awareness of swearing could form a guardrail. This realization was so direct and strong that I stopped climbing and took a vow on the spot. What made the vow unusual was that it wasn’t a vow to not swear. Swearing can come into speech so quickly (especially if I hit my thumb with a hammer) that I didn’t believe I could keep that vow and what makes a vow a vow is that it is kept forever. Besides, my realization made me aware that it wasn’t avoidance of swear words that was the point. Instead, the vow was to be aware of swearing rising into my consciousness or speech and to respond to that rising with a heightened attention to direction manifesting in part as a heightened precision in speech (which includes a default setting of not using swear words).

Cairns #2 – Cat twist of the Second Law

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Helping turn the prow of our entropyship, the Earth, back upstream so that Earth’s evolving consciousness may explore the vast headwaters of the Universe for billions of years to come.

Cairns #2 – Beginning of the Long Days, 1995

What is H.O.P.E.?

H.O.P.E. is the seed of an organization. Its title is an acronym for Hands-On Phenomenological Ecology. (More on what I mean by that in some other issue.) Peter Drucker emphasizes that all organizational planning, all strategies start with the mission of the organization. I had a pretty good idea of specific goals for H.O.P.E. But on a three day snowshoe solo on Mt. Lassen’s 15 feet of snow last month, I began seeing it within a bigger picture. And so I would like to present, in this issue of Cairns, the big, big picture mission statement of H.O.P.E.

The poetically-expressed Mission of H.O.P.E.

All planets and stars in the universe can be thought of as spaceships, hurtling through the three dimensions of space. But there are other dimensions. The Earth is more than a spaceship. Earth is an entropyship that has been Sunsailing for billions of years against the universal current that flows towards greater entropy.

Currently, however, our entropyship is drifting downstream towards fearsome rocks. People are abandoning their hope, cursing the time into which they were born. But rather than cursing, we can give thanks for being born into heroic times, being given the opportunity to do the inspiring work of turning the prow around. If we can turn it, then that ship, carrying evolving consciousness, can sail upstream for billions of years more and explore the headwaters of the Universe. The stories of that turning will be told to each new generation for billions of years. These stories will be told to communicate some of the lessons the next generation will need to keep the ship headed upstream and to inspire them to their own heroic deeds.

And so the mission of H.O.P.E. is the turning of the prow.

The Twisting Cat

What follows now has been very difficult to write. I wanted to express these ideas explicitly in Shifting but it kept coming out so stiff and pedantic that I couldn’t make it fit within the style and structure of Shifting. The reason this newsletter is several weeks late is because I’ve been trying for more than a month to capture what I feel is the magic and importance of the “twisting cat” for our culture. What follows might not read like my usual style. I welcome feedback on whether this makes sense, whether it is standard fare that you knew already, whether it seems important at all.

I’m sure all of you have heard (and possibly tested as a child) that cats, no matter in what position they are dropped, will always land on their feet. A child might not be able to explain why this ability feels “magical”. A scientist could; it feels “magical” because it seems to contradict the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum – a major conservation law of physics. How can something with its feet up land with its feet down with nothing to push against? Though the twisting of the falling cat seems to contradict the Law, in truth it conforms with the Law. The twist is impossible without that law. In a similar way, life has evolved a cat twist way of relating to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This “cat twist” by which life “gives more than it takes” is one of the tools needed for turning the prow.

The Second Law

The Second Law is about how the quality of energy changes over time. There are several ways to express the Second Law. The way I express it in “Gaia sermons” is “It is easier to destroy than to create.” An engineering formulation is that no transformation of energy is 100% efficient. The most popular formulation of the Second Law is that any closed system can not experience a decrease in entropy – popularized incorrectly as “What’s the point? The Universe is going to run down in the end, anyway”.

However, since no living thing is a “closed system”, I dwell on a formulation of the Second Law I find more interesting because of the relationship between living systems that it requires: Any decrease in entropy within a local subsystem can happen only at the expense of a greater increase in entropy in the larger encompassing system.

For example, a cell can only survive if it can harvest the greater system it exists within, the body. Every cell depletes the very system it is dependent on. Therefore, the body can only survive if it can obtain food faster than the cells harvest the energy within the food. For a baby, this means suckling and draining the possibilities from the mother. But mother and child form a sub-system of a greater cultural system whose long-term survival is totally dependent on the survival of the babies growing up within it. So that greater cultural system harvests energy from an even greater system (the ecosystem) and brings it to the mother so that the inflow of energy into the mother is great enough to “undo” the increase of entropy within the mother so that she can sustain a flow of energy into the baby great enough to “undo” the increase of entropy in that baby so that the growing baby’s body can sustain a flow of energy into each cell great enough to “undo” the increase of entropy in each cell.

Tracing paths of energy with this viewpoint gets one thinking of things in terms of nested subsystems. From an energy point of view, these nested subsystems are “self-similar”, meaning that the same nesting structure and the same energy relationships are found, no matter what scale one is looking at. For example, if we put one of the subsystems “under a microscope”, it would look the same.

It would contain other subsystems which, if put “under the microscope”, would contain even smaller subsystems. Similarly, if one stepped back, one would find that the larger containing system would look like the diagram of this system and that it occurred within a larger system which, when examined, also looked like this diagram and so on.

For example, the larger system, in this diagram could be labeled Solar System. The system could be Earth. One of the subsystems could be labeled Biosphere and a subsystem within that could be labeled Green Plants. Or I could label the larger system Human Body and the system would be labeled Circulatory System and one of the subsystems could be labeled Heart and a subsystem within that could be the Ventricles. But no matter how this diagram is labeled, the constraints of the Second Law will be similar. In every case, a decrease in entropy in any subsystem can only happen if there is a greater increase in entropy within the larger encompassing system.

The pattern that repeats in system after system is concentrated energy gradually becoming less concentrated, less useful as it spreads out into a myriad of smaller and smaller subsystems until it dissipates in the smallest subsystems as random molecular motion (heat).

The Challenge of the Second Law

Since any living subsystem that continues to increase in entropy will die, the Second Law requires all living things, in order to survive, to harvest energy from surrounding (sub)systems. This is normally thought of as killing something and eating it. It can also mean grazing on a plant or picking a berry and eating it. But a cat that curls up in a sunny place is harvesting energy – as is a person who kills an animal for its warm, insulating fur or feathers. Cutting firewood is harvesting energy as is drilling for oil.

This harvesting is an important, irreplaceable part of all ecology that has shaped all life. We call this characteristic of life “competition” and any ideology that tries to eliminate it has not fully accepted the nature of the universe. In a diagram, competition might look like this:

The competitive component of nature – the drawing of boundaries between “Us” and “Them”
and harvesting “Them” or diverting energy flow from “Them” to “Us”
or preventing “Them” from harvesting “Us”

Notice that the coyote family will try harvesting the energy from several other subsystems that exist within the larger ecosystem. Each of those other subsystems will try to avoid being harvested just as the coyotes will try avoiding being harvested by the mosquitoes and humans. The coyotes and the humans will both try harvesting more of the chickens than the other would prefer.

All ecosystems will contain this characteristic of competition. Smaller systems “boost themselves” by harvesting surrounding systems. One survives at the “expense” of the greater system. One tries to take and harvest more than one has to give.

However, this model does not express life’s full relationship with the Second Law. It leaves out something very important. If a culture models itself on this incomplete picture (as I believe our culture is increasingly doing), it will create interactions that will send it in a very different direction than people want it to go. I describe this process in Shifting’s chapter “The Downward Spiral”. The double whammy of exponentially rising population and technologies creating new “needs” which lead to exponentially rising consumption has shifted regional balances around the world. For more and more people, the greater ecosystem they live within is decreasing in possibilities.

If competition is the only way known to respond to a decreasing ecosystem, people will concentrate on drawing boundaries between “us” and “them”. People will try securing a larger chunk of the diminishing pie. But this scramble will cause the pie to shrink faster. More people will develop a mental state of the future as discouraging; this psychological orientation makes solutions increasingly difficult to either see or implement.

The Second Way

What we need to do (one of H.O.P.E.’s goals) is to increase understanding about the second way life responds to the Second Law. Let me introduce this second way by imagining a monster machine whose sole purpose is to harvest all the energy within the world and transform it into random chaos. Something like a ten-mile high rototiller that creeps over the Earth chewing up everything and spewing out noise, dust, and heat. Imagine that the machine is somehow tapped into all sources of solar energy in an automated way so that the machine can crawl along for ten billion years, criss-crossing the Earth so that every few centuries every square foot will be crumbled once again. The machine is built and the machine is started. Now imagine a person climbing onto the machine and turning it off with a flick of a switch.

All the biological processes (eating, digesting, thinking, moving) involved in flicking that switch will obey the Second Law. When the person is seen just as a system unto itself, the act of flicking the switch could only be done at the expense of an increase in entropy in the greater system. But, when one takes into consideration, the flows and transformations of energy that will occur all over the planet over the next ten billion years as a result of that finger switch, one has to conclude that the Second Law “ran backwards”, that a small increase in entropy within the person’s body led to a massive decrease in entropy in the much greater global system. That finger flick “gave more than it took”. Like the cat twisting, there is no violation of the Second Law.

A more mundane relationship happens in our body everyday. Every cell takes from the body more than it gives – when measured in terms of entropy. However, the harvesting of the body’s energy supply by the cells allow the cells to do work which, when properly coordinated, sustain the body and allow it to move over the land and harvest more energy from the environment. So if the coordinated work of cells allows the larger system of the body to bring in more energy which then cascades down through the nested subsystems of the body, then the transformation of energy into work and back into energy (from the cell’s point of view) is more than 100% efficient.

In other words, there is feedback involved. The subsystem harvests the energy within the larger system. This energy allows the subsystem to do work, some of which feeds back to sustain or increase the rate at which the larger system can harvest energy from an even larger system. This is the paradoxical twist. If a subsystem can use the energy that flows in from a larger system to change the nature of the larger system in a way than increases energy flow through both the larger system and subsequently the subsystem, does that subsystem take more than it gives or give more than it takes?

The Second Law describes the inevitable fate of any particular packet of energy. But it does not define the relationship one can have with a continuous flow of energy. So on Earth, we do have a flow of energy cascading down through the nested subsystems until it “fades away” in random molecular motion. But we also have that cascading flow entering into smaller subsystems and empowering those subsystems to do work that loops back to larger subsystems in a way that increases the flow of energy through that larger subsystem – which then leads to more energy flowing through the smaller subsystem which does the work that loops back up to the greater system which leads to…. Feedback is powerful. It makes predictions of the future unreliable which is why I remain so hopeful about humans and the Earth.

The cooperative component of nature – a subsystem using the gift of energy

flowing from a larger system to perform work that increases

the ongoing flow of energy into larger systems.

So part of our work is to point out the myriad ways life uses its harvested energy to do “ecological service”, work that loops back up to the larger systems within which life lives. To be inspired by oxygen bubbles arising from pond plants and beavers and salmon. To sing praises to the miracle of rising soil and each day’s transpired moisture returning each night as dew. To marvel at the ways life has found to decrease the entropy of the Earth – the largest subsystem life can influence and the subsystem on which all life is dependent.

Transcending a Problem with the Environmental Movement

One of the greatest problems facing the environmental movement is that too many people within it lack an inspiring vision for the role of humans on Earth. Too often I hear, especially from children, “Humans just destroy everything we touch. It would be better for the planet if we didn’t exist.”

To which I sing, “No! We are part of life. We are part of this planet. We are surrounded by wonderful opportunities to contribute to the creative power of this planet.” We should celebrate the gift of being mobile consciousness with eyes, hands, and tools by which to dance with the Earth. And one of our greatest allies is the Second Law because it defines a direction that gives shape to the Universe. And defining that direction nourishes upward aspirations, nourishes visions that help the spirit soar, and inspires one to challenging work.

Let the Earth nourish our work. If we can turn the prow, then the psychological orientation of people to their future changes in a profound way which revisualizes all other issues. If we can turn the prow, then the change in outlook will be so major that many “unsolvable problems” become irrelevant.

The Day-to-Day Work

How does this lofty but somewhat abstract mission guide the day-to-day work of H.O.P.E.? Here is one small example. As an educator, I don’t like the way ecology is taught in schools – too much focus on “eating”. Predator-prey. Food chains. Teeth adaptations. Life as eating and being eaten. This slant on ecology helps prepare students for thinking of their life as being a “consumer”.

But what is life for? What does a life accomplish beyond consuming possibilities or being food for somebody else? This gets into Gaian creation which is where the heart of ecology is. The relationships that build and sustain ecosystems. So in a pond ecology curriculum I am working on, we make simple bubble collectors that float on the pond. We plug the narrow end of a funnel with candle wax and then attach the funnel to a ring of Styrofoam so that it floats with the narrow end point up. With a permanent marker we calibrate volume (in cubic centimeters) from the top down. The funnel catches oxygen bubbles being given off by photosynthesizing aquatic plants. This provides a relative measure of the amount of life within the pond. It is fascinating to watch the collector gather more bubbles on a sunny day than on a shady day and watch the trend of increasing oxygen production throughout the spring. Life creates as well as consumes.

As I told a church group last week, “Christians say we were created in the image of God. We were made in the image of the Creator but we have allowed our self-image to be degraded to that of a consumer. We are more than that.”

Last Words

As I move along my life path, I encounter certain spiritual obstacles that gradually rise into consciousness and with which I struggle, often for several years, until finding a way past them. I call these obstacles “koans” after the Zen riddles. Sometimes a quote from another person who has struggled with and resolved the same question is all it takes to get me past that obstacle and moving again. Here is one of my favorite such quotes (as retrieved from memory) from E.F. Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful – though not occuring in that book.

“I’m often asked whether I am optimistic or pessimistic about the future. If I was optimistic, I would grow complacent and stop doing the work. If I was pessimistic, I would fall into despair and stop doing the work. The best thing is to ignore the question and do the work.”

Watershed Awareness – Cairns #1

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Helping turn the prow of our entropyship, the Earth, back upstream so that Earth’s evolving consciousness may explore the vast headwaters of the Universe for billions of years to come.

Cairns #1 – End of the Long Nights, 1995

The following is part of a closing talk I gave at an Adopt-a-Watershed teacher inservice. I allude to some watershed concepts presented during the preceding 5 hours. However, if you have read my book, Shifting, you will be able to follow along.

My family hangs our laundry out on the line to dry. I collect it by walking out to the clothes line, and moving out along it, gathering the laundry. When I get to the end of the clothesline, I carry the basket back into the house.

One day I wondered whether it made any difference if I did it another way. What if I walked out to the other end of the clothesline first and gathered the laundry as I worked my way back toward the house. When I get to the end of the clothesline, I carry the basket back into the house.

Is there a difference between these two paths? (In the ensuing discussion, most people think there is no difference.)

The walk from the house to the near end of the clothesline with an empty laundry basket is the same in both routes. The walk back from the near end of the clothesline with a full laundry basket is also the same in both routes. The walk along the line gathering the laundry is also the same. The direction of this walk is different along the two routes but they both begin with an empty basket, cover the same distance, and end with a full basket of the same weight.

The last segment to compare is the walk along the clothesline when I am not gathering laundry. In the first route, I walk back along the clothesline with a full basket. In the second route, I walk out along the clothesline with an empty basket. On a big laundry day, this difference could be 30 pounds of laundry being carried 100 feet. There is, indeed, a difference between the two routes.

Now, let us examine two different ways water can flow through a watershed. I pass out six toy blocks to each pair of people. Let’s pretend that each of these blocks represents a unit of water (say, an acre-foot) that fell on our watershed and is going to flow off it. There are many ways this water can flow off the watershed. It can flow off one block at a time – let’s pretend that means that one unit of water is flowing off every hour. Or it could flow off two units per hour and take three hours to leave the watershed. It could all flow off in a stack of six and be gone in an hour. Does it make any difference how that water flows off the land?

Before we answer that question, let us apply something we learned today. Erosive power is an exponential function of stream volume. There are different ways to measure the ability of flowing water to erode and each has its own mathematical relationship. But let us simplify that and for this example, let us assume that the erosive power within our stream is to the fourth power of the volume that passes each hour.

For example, if we had one unit pass each hour, then the erosive power of each unit is 1x1x1x1=1. Since there are six units of water, there will be six units of erosive power acting in that stream.

Now imagine that two units of water flow past each hour over a three hour period. Then the erosive power flowing each hour is 2x2x2x2=16. In three hours, there will be 16×3 or 48 units of erosive power. Same amount of water as in the first case but eight times as much erosive power. Test other situations and find out how much the erosive power can vary.

After a few minutes discussion with their partners, the teachers report that the greatest erosive power happens when all six units flow off in one hour. There are then 6x6x6x6 = 1296 units of erosive power.

The same amount of water. But flowing out of the watershed in a different way gives it very different erosive power. Now, can you think of something people do that changes how fast rain flows off of an area? Discussion.

A very common way is to pave an area. 0% of the rain soaks in. It all runs off and runs off almost instantaneously. The larger the paved area, the more dramatic the effect. This winter, several people died in the L.A. area when the first big rain fell. The papers said the storm drain system hadn’t been able to handle the runoff. And yet it had handled it the last time a big storm had fallen. In truth, what had happened was that a massive amount of that area’s watershed had been built on and paved in the time between monster storms.

The same thing happened in the Philippines several years ago. A large storm fell on an area and a surge of runoff wiped out a streamside village. The water came up so fast that many of the inhabitants were drowned without warning. The crucial point was that the storm was not a record-breaking monster storm. The village had been there for centuries and many storms had fallen on the watershed. The village had never been wiped out before – which is why the inhabitants drowned without warning this time. The only difference was that since the last large storm, the watershed had been clearcut.

So, like gathering the laundry, the path rainfall takes off the land does make a big difference.

Here is another laundry story. I break up “doing the laundry” into four jobs. The first part is putting the laundry in our washing machine. The second part is hanging the laundry on the line to dry. The third part is gathering the dry laundry and bringing it back into the house. The fourth part is sorting the laundry and putting it away. This fourth part is my least favorite (especially matching the socks) and so is often put off for some time after the third part. Often the first three jobs have been done to several loads of laundry and I have a large pile of dry laundry before I finally get around to doing the fourth job.

One day last summer, I was doing job three, “gathering the laundry off the line”. I was proceeding mindlessly along, dropping each item into the basket when I suddenly noticed a pair of matching socks hanging close to one another. I hesitated…and paired the two socks before dropping them into the basket.

I realized my mind made a transition – from “gathering the laundry” to “doing the laundry”. From doing “job 3” to awareness that each of these jobs was a subset of a larger job. By being aware of the larger job, I could do the smaller job in a way that harmonized better with the larger job.

Watershed awareness is like that. When we see our actions as part of a bigger work, we can see more opportunities for our work to harmonize with the larger work. So I would like to take several minutes to describe part of the bigger picture we live within.

I then spent about 10 minutes describing the process described in Shifting by which life has created soil and by which soil holds and slows the rains which creates more opportunities for soil to grow and which allows more of the rain to be recycled which creates more opportunities for life to expand. Here is one segment of this part that is not in Shifting .

One problem with having different scientific disciplines is that it decreases the chances of viewing the same phenomenon from different perspectives. For example, photosynthesis is usually restricted to biology classes so we learn it like this: 6 carbon dioxide molecules + 6 water molecules + light = 1 glucose molecule + 6 oxygen molecules (O2). But to consider it from a geological point of view, let me do some poetic rounding off to transform the equation to this: Atmospheric gas + liquid water + sunlight = a solid + atmospheric gas. Realize that the glucose molecule produced by photosynthesis is the precursor to cellulose, lignins, humus – all the special structures of life that, upon their decay, mix with weathered rocks and change it to soil. Therefore, one last round of poetic rounding off yields: air + water + sunlight = soil + oxygen. Where does soil come from? Most of it comes out of the atmosphere. Photosynthesis is a process that converts atmospheric carbon dioxide into soil all over the world….

So we are a small part of a vast process of life which has, over a half billion years, covered the bedrock with a soil that absorbs and recycles the ocean’s gift of fresh water that permits life to grow ever more vigorously. Life has created possibilities that were unimaginable a billion years ago. This is the bigger picture of the work we live within. “Making a living” is to this great work what “dropping dried laundry into the basket” is to “doing the laundry”.

I want to share one last story with you, a story from when my oldest daughter was two years old. I was playing with some blocks when she came along and started knocking them down. A game developed where I would stand them up and she would knock them down. She laughed as she tried knocking them over as fast as I could stand or stack them. Her laughter grew until it became almost fiendish with its delight in destruction. I was growing a little dismayed by her destructive streak when I suddenly had a cosmic insight.

Zephyr had never played with these blocks before. They had never held interest for her before because she lacked the dexterity, the patience, the strength to do anything interesting with them. But my standing and stacking the blocks put them into a higher energy position which made dramatic changes (knocking them down) easy to accomplish. Her weak, clumsy hands were capable of creating dramatically significant changes in the blocks when they were standing up. The blocks became interesting. She begins interacting with the blocks. As she plays with them, she will develop the dexterity, she will build the strength, she will cultivate the patience to stack them and build higher.

We humans are like a two year old. We find ourselves in a world full of things like those standing blocks. Things like deep soil, magnificent runs of salmon, wind-baffling trees, and 27″ of recycled rain. In our toddler-like explorations, we discover that we can knock these things down. And we delight in knocking them down faster than they can be stacked back up. This is a cause for both despair and hope.

Hope because we are discovering that we have the power to change the environment. If previous generations had been asked whether they had the power to change the environment, they would have said “no” (if they could even understand what the question meant). But we now know we have the power. True, we discovered this by destroying the environment. But now we know we have the power. And once we know we have the power to knock things down, we can start wondering “do we have the power to build things up? What would “building up” look like? What would it feel like?” And we can begin developing the patience, the dexterity, the strength, the understanding to ally ourselves with all the other lives that have been building and stacking for hundreds of millions of years. Surely, if bacteria, earthworms, and beaver can do it, we can do it too.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
I am beginning this quarterly newsletter (next issue will be early May) to both give me a regular deadline that will help me be more productive in my writing and to engage more actively in dialogue with a broad network of people doing good work in a diversity of ways. There are a host of visions welling up within. Communicating them is an important step in helping the worthy visions become part of this world.

Scree

Posted on by pkrafel Posted in Uncategorized — No Comments ↓

Throughout my forty years of teaching, I’ve often ruminated on specific instances when I learned something from a teacher. What was it about that interaction out of thousands of classroom hours that fixed in my long-term memory? What did the teacher do? Was there a certain quality about the lesson being taught? Is there something I can learn from this that will help me teach lessons that stick?

 

By far my most significant lesson was Mr. Kalman, my tenth-grade teacher of Rhetoric. It was the mid-60’s; the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was heating up in Vietnam. One day Mr. Kalman entered the classroom a bit late – we were all sitting, quieting – and he abruptly asked “Would you rather be Red or Dead?” (A well-known phrase back then was “I’d rather be dead than Red” [living in a communist regime]. Like fish to bait, many of us rose to the choice and started arguing justifications for our position. I was in the midst of it, feeling smug in the superiority of my position. At some point, one of the quiet students said, “I’d rather be neither. I’d rather be free and alive.”

“So would I,” responded Mr. Kalman.

I protested. “But you didn’t give us that choice.”

“But you had it!”

Punched deep. Life transforming. 

 

In May of my senior year, I registered by mail for the classes I would take next fall at the college I had accepted. English Literature and European History were required but for my other two, I chose Calculus and German. A few weeks later, I realized I was just continuing along the same path I had taken to get into college. (“You didn’t give us this choice.”) But now I will be in college; I can make my own choice. Am I just choosing these classes because they were the ones chosen for me all through high school? I didn’t really like German. Why should I keep taking it? (”But you have it!”) What are the choices I really have? What would I really want to learn about – for myself? The moment I asked that, I knew one answer. Astronomy! The college had astronomy classes with real telescopes. I switched from German and calculus to astronomy and philosophy.

I had fallen enthralled to astronomy my senior year of high school. It started with a book my brother had lent me called Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. Most of the book was depressing urban drunkenness but in the midst of that, Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder) takes Kerouac mountaineering in the Sierras. They camp the first night on a tucked-snug granite ledge overlooking the world.

 

Up out of the orange glow of our fire you could see immense systems of uncountable stars, either as individual blazers, or in low Venus droppers, or vast Milky Ways incommensurate with human understanding, all cold, blue, silver, but our food and our fire was pink and goodies.

 

Snyder brews tea and later, when the stars appear, pulls out a star map and they look at the stars.

 

As I came back our orange fire casting its glow on the big rock, and Japhy kneeling and peering up at the sky, and all of it ten thousand feet above the gnashing world, was a picture of peace and good sense.

“Japhy, kneeling there studying his star map, leaning forward slightly to peek up through the overhanging gnarled old rock country trees, with his goatee and all, looked, with that mighty grawfaced rock behind him, like, exactly like the vision I had of the old Zen Masters of China out in the wilderness.”

 

His words created a picture of an experience I wanted. I wanted to camp high in the mountains and look up at the constellations in the mountain-dark sky. Therefore, I needed to learn my constellations. So I went down to the library and checked out a star book.  I took it outside at night and there were the brighter stars outlining the major constellations.

 

I had always loved astronomy but it suddenly felt as accessible as the books on the library shelf. I checked some out, started reading them, realized that I was reading college textbooks and that I was teaching myself; I didn’t need a teacher. That was a profound lesson; I can do much of this on my own.

 

With this momentum, I breezed through the introductory astronomy class and the next year, I was the professor’s teaching assistant for that course. I gave planetarium shows and supervised the night-time observations with a couple of 8” telescopes. Four years later, when I applied to the National Park Service, I got hired partly because they were looking for someone who could give star talks. So Dharma Bums changed my life.

I loved being a ranger/naturalist. The highpoints of my two years in Denali were my Discovery Hikes. I’d introduce people to the joy of cross-country hiking by taking them into areas I had never been and just roam in search of beauty and wonder. One day I led an enthusiastic group of 10-15 hikers up through a steep, mountain meadow on the flank of Cathedral Mountain. I had never been up there; I didn’t know what lay ahead. We got to the top to discover that “our top” was detached from the higher peaks of Cathedral. To get over to them, we would have to cross atop a hundred foot long, pointed ridge flanked with steep slopes of loose scree sliding a thousand feet down on either side.

 

Scree slopes cover the sides of mountains that are made of rock that crumble into small pieces faster than they can be carried away. These rock fragments pile up and cover the mountain slope as steeply as they can. Nothing grows on a scree slope because (a) snowmelt quickly sinks through the loose rocks to far beneath the surface and (b) the unstable slope slides slowly over time, shredding any roots. So a scree slope appears bare, slippery, and hostile. On the other side of that ridge were broad grassy slopes leading to the true summit of Cathedral Mountain. But first we would have to cross that ridge so without hesitation I strode buoyantly out across the ridgeline. About halfway across, I looked back to check on my group. They were all huddled back at the beginning of the ridge. None dared step onto that steep ridge. “Oh,” I said, “you’re afraid you are going to fall off this mountain, aren’t you?” and Dharma Bums came flooding back to mind.

The day after the star map, Kerouac and Snyder hiked upward and reached the final summit slope in the evening. They clamber up the final scree slope but there comes a point when fear of falling overcomes Kerouac . He stops and huddles against the mountain while Snyder continues to the top. Kerouac hears Snyder’s wild yodeling from on top but continues hugging the mountain.

 

“Then suddenly everything was just like jazz: it happened in one insane second or so: I looked up and saw Japhy running down the mountain in huge twenty-foot leaps, running, leaping, landing with a great drive of his booted heels, bouncing five feet or so, running, then taking another long crazy yelling yodelaying sail down the sides of the world and in that flash I realized it’s impossible to fall off mountains you fool and with a yodel of my own I suddenly got up and began running down the mountain after him doing exactly the same huge leaps, the same fantastic runs and jumps, and in the space of about five minutes I’d guess Japhy Ryder and I (in my sneakers, driving the heels of my sneakers right into sand, rock, boulders, I didn’t care any more I was so anxious to get down out of there) came leaping and yelling like mountain goats or I’d say like Chinese lunatics of a thousand years ago, enough to raise the hair on the head of the meditating Morally by the lake, who said he looked up and saw us flying down and couldn’t believe it.”

I remember this as I look at my frightened group and realize I have the opportunity to pass on this experience and be to these people what Snyder was to Kerouac. I joyously exclaim, “This is a scree slope. You can’t fall off a scree slope.” and I leap off the mountain as far as I can and land upright 10 yards further down with the scree sliding a foot as it absorbs my impact. “It’s fun! It’s like a big sand dune!” I shout and they all begin jumping off, scrambling back up, leaping further and further, laughing and shouting in the ecstasy of the wilderness embraced. Then we casually ramble across that now-easy ridge, shake the pebbles out of our shoes, and continue to the summit above.

 

This passing on of experience from one generation to the next forms the heart of Axe Handles, a wonderful poem by Gary Snyder. Buy it. “How we go on.”

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