Watershed Weekend

Finally got to meet Pulitzer Prized poet Robert Hass, this past Saturday, at the Watershed Festival in downtown Berkeley's Civic Center Park. What an honor! Ari Simmons, fellow Berkeley geographer and environmental planner, had suggested I consulted with Hass on my Master's thesis, Stewardship Stories for Watershed Justice. I had also heard of him through my work in watershed stewardship, along with the Festival, but never had a chance to go.


The Watershed Festival, co-sponsored by UC Berkeley's English Department where Hass teaches, Poetry Flash, Ecology Center, and Ecocity Builders, is in its 14th (15th? Who's counting?) year celebrating environmental poetry, music and activism. The day started with a ritual: a walk up Strawberry Creek on the UC Berkeley campus. It was such a luxury to spend a Saturday morning listening to the gurgles of the creek, the strains of the poets, the chit-chats of the birds, and this year, the campus creek steward-in-charge.



Tim Pine from environmental health and safety showed us the latest in campus stormwater management, pervious pavers installed in a parking lot to allow rain to infiltrate and help remove all that crap - motor oil, brake pads, etc - that rain washes off.


Kirstin Miller, Ecocity Builders executive director, brought along one of the oldest storm drain stencils around. Richard Register had designed one for Derby Creek, a creek in Berkeley that's almost entirely been buried and hardened into storm drains.

Richard's one of a few souls out there who fought early on for creeks to be daylighted, or unearthed from their graves under cities. The urban creek restoration movement started right here in Berkeley, with one of the nation's first daylighting projects at Strawberry Creek Park in the west part of the city.

I got to meet Carole Schemmerling the next Sunday; she was commentator on a creek restoration expedition I co-led, highlighting 30 years of creek restoration in Berkeley, part of the College of Environmental Design's 50th anniversary. Schemmerling was there from way back when, and told us stories of fierce battles and unwitting victories along the way.

Big lesson from Momma Schemmerling: Direct action works! One of the biggest concerns neighbors may have about daylighting a creek is creating a corridor for crime and drug dealing. A landscape architect on the tour asked if daylighting the creek has increased or reduced such illicit activities. Carole recounted how one used to find a line forming on Saturday morning at the porter potty at Strawbery Creek Park, people waiting their turn to buy some drugs. That is, until two teenage girls came along, sick and tired of cleaning up the syringes, paper filters, cigarette packs, and all the crap left behind by drug users at the park. That fateful day, knowing the drug dealer was inside with a client, the two girls toppled over the porter potty, and ran the hell away!

We started at Strawberry Creek Park, daylit in 1985, then hopped on to Codornices Creek by the soccer fields at Gilman and 5th Streets, daylit in 2005, to another daylighting project a couple blocks upstream at University Village completed with just $25,000 and thousands of hours of volunteer labor, and finally at the Blackberry Creek restoration project, completed in 1995, an outdoor science and discovery lab for students and toddlers from the adjacent Thousand Oaks elementary and neighborhood.
Codornices Creek restoration

Blackberry Creek restoration (also post-project appraisal site for my river restoration class -- see my paper here under Alameda County).

Can I just say, I Heart NY?

"Did you go see the High Line?" Liz and I, wide-eyed, chorused - demanded - Ming, fellow architect and urban design enthusiast. Our faces fell when Ming indicated the negative.

I'm dreaming of my next trip to New York. I dreamily let jagged and dead-straight lines take me up and down Manhattan's brand new floating linear park, the High Line. If it can be called a park. It's a disused elevated rail line. It's a runway. It's a tourist destination. It's a vista point. It's an incubator for creative energies and kick-ass high-profile youth art classes. It's some sort of symbol of grassroots idealism materialized decades - and tons of argumentative breath - later.

Every time I visit, the city's grime, blare, and in-your-face energy scrape me raw, then wrap me up in a coat of adrenaline. I get high. The mad rush of train-takers and taxi-wavers push me through the day no matter my literal and figurative baggage. Granted, I don't have to live it 365 days a year and this is probably a romanticized, visitor's view of New York. The visitor's privileged view.

The visitor's privilege will also have me wander the halls of the natural history museum and space center. I really wanted to go but did not get to the last time, Sep 2007.

This month's Landscape Architecture magazine then served on a silver platter another reason to go, the new West Harlem riverfront park, 2.4 acres of green along the Hudson River, where "geometric shapes and tilted lawns are in dynamic tension with one another."

I'm inspired by this urban participatory policy project with street vendors. I think I've just found my new hero, Candy Chang. What awesome projects!

And I will leave you with this lovely installment of Maira Kalman's NY Times "And the Pursuit of Happiness.

5 Things Cities Can Learn from Burning Man

Excuse my obsession. See Time article here. Lots of mention of New York City.

1) Get rid of cars, except for art cars, the closest thing to public transit, and all travel 5 miles per hour.

2) Encourage self-reliance, including having everyone deal with their own trash.

3) Rethink commerce, build things together. It's a large scale community and there's nothing between you and the person you buy things from. This is the way what life is like when you remove that element.

4) Don't be afraid to use shame to foster virtue. You're only going to be virtuous only part of the time, and the rest of time it's regulated by those around you.

5) When the going is tough, bring in the artists. An overarching theme about the world guides the art every year. Next year the theme is metropolis, we need to explore urban issues more fully.

Bonus lesson: No matter how tough it gets, for the sake of civic morale, never cancel the fireworks.

Black Rock City, NV - Sustainable City?

Just got back from Black Rock City, NV and realized I haven't blogged in a while. I miss sitting down and being able to hear my own thoughts, something that was difficult to do amidst the din and distraction in BRC. This was my first Burn; I was lucky to be on the Michaelangelo Project scholarship and part of the Earth Guardians camp, burners who do outreach on Leave No Trace, alternative energy, greywater treatment, and other green stuff. Earth Guardians patrol for MOOP (Matter Out Of Place, BM lingo for trash), monitor burn platforms to make sure no toxic stuff gets in there, and lead geology and nature walks. (I mainly sat and looked pretty at the Help Desk, signed volunteers up, and gave out MOOP bags and bandanas.)

The question of the sustainability of Burning Man came up several times. The festival probably burns more than its fair share of greenhouse-gas emitting fuels. During the festival, countless fire and flame effects consume Man-knows-how-much propane. How wasteful to build egregrious edifices then burn them for mere symbolism. Before and after, 40,ooo+ people drive or fly to this god forsaken place in gas guzzling cars, vans, trucks, and RVs. Who's counting the plastic bottles of water burners bring to survive on the bone dry playa bed? How much electricity powers all the bright lights and loud sounds? What about the scattered ashes and cigarette butts of smokers, other MOOP? I found an aerial photo of Black Rock Desert today, where you can see the traces of the streets left behind on the desert floor. It would be interesting to do water, carbon and ecological footprint analyses for the event. Guess what? We get to decide as a community whether to carry on with this or not, and it looks like the Man is here to stay and burn -- burners have done lots to mitigate our collective impacts.

It's too easy to MOOP talk so I'm singing the praises of the city itself. Next year's theme is out -- Metropolis -- Woohoo!!! Many design features in the city could serve as a model for other cities. First let me just say, it was So nice to not deal with cars on the streets of BRC. I loved how you can bike and walk anywhere, and anyhow, you liked. The entire city, within the pentagon, is only 4.5 square miles. The Man is less than half mile from Center Camp and Esplanade, the main city drag. Another half mile and you're at the Temple. The promenade from Esplanade at 3:00 to 9:00 is just 1 mile, totally walkable and bikeable. (With so many distractions along the way, there's no saying how long it would take -- either felt like no time at all, or could be very, very long.) Then, of course there's the keyhole plaza of Center Camp, and the smaller plazas dispersed very geometrically at 3:00, 4:30, 7:30 and 9:00 where you can get to a ranger, ice, medical help, and your dose of public art. The fact that the city exists only a week, plus/minus set-up and tear-down time, adds to its sustainability -- I don't think it could sustain itself 365 days a year.

Best of all, I think, is how participatory everything is. You are the art. You are the city. As Our Great Lady of the Metropolis, Jane Jacobs, says, "Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody." (This quote by the way, has been on my email signature for months, and is now heralding next year's Art Theme.) I am so excited about next year's Burn.

The EG camp















A village of red swarmed the Flattery Camp, leaving the flatterers flabbergasted.















The Pirate Ship, Pink Parasol, and Omnibus to Nowhere. Not to mention the helium/LED baloons adrift by design.
















All the forces aligned








Bikes at center camp, BRC Post Office, where the Disgruntled Postal Workers give you shit



















Playa tennis, anyone?















The Night of the Rocket that Didn't Launch, "existing between yesterday's tomorrow and the future that never was..."















MOM, watching my bike in the dust storm















The Night of the Man Burn















The Night of the Temple Burn, with our Ancestors' blessing ("spiraling, tornado-like dust plumes that traverse the playa, either produced by wind or by heat from large fires")