Water

The photo is a bit of a cheat to make it work for Skywatch Friday (note the sky reflection), but it's also a fitting illustration of elements from earth to air to fire to water. The "birdbath" is actually a former copper fire pit, which was rendered useless as such when a huge branch from our neighbor's tree fell on it. But it makes a nifty spa for the feathered folk who visit my potager, and the sundial makes a nice launching pad for frolics. Earth is represented by the rocks (from a cairn of Sierra samples my father pinched from some hapless geologist's cache many years ago). The air and water symbolism is rather more obvious.

The coalescence of themes in blogs and life never ceases to amaze me. Here I am, sitting down to prepare this week's contribution to the Farm and to end my recent attempt at theme-blogging (The Elements Project). But during this week I've also been updating a course I teach on myth, and water--the element du jour--keeps showing up as I select new readings and augment the slide shows. Water is a pretty powerful metaphor, after all, and it's a basic component of stories about origins and creation. It's also a topic I've written about frequently on the Farm (Good News and Bad News in the Water Wars, among others), and it'll probably creep into future posts as well. If I'm repeating myself, think of this as an update.

Yesterday I got tired of heat and work, and indulged in a bit of what I call "Valley porn": looking through the Owens Valley real estate offerings and fantasizing about winning lotteries and settling down on a couple of hundred acres, preferably with a trout stream running through. Water (and sometimes the lack of it), in fact, has been an abiding theme in my love affair with my home ground.

I probably need not remind anyone that the sprawling southern Californian megalopolis we call Los Angeles owes its very existence to water that once flowed freely through the Owens River Valley. LA would have been much smaller had William Mulholland not purloined the rights to water flowing between the Inyos and the Sierras and built the aqueduct that enabled population growth to the south. The old adage "blood is thicker than water" was transformed into "blood is water" when it comes to making a huge city possible on land that could not otherwise have supported all the millions that now occupy the region.

There are, of course, many sides to this story, but I've lived with it for long enough to know that every time I travel home I see signs of increasing dessication, and for fifty years I've watched the joshua trees from the south marching up the valley, harbingers of encroaching desert. It's always been desert--but the oases are becoming fewer and farther between.

In fact, I love the desert. There's nothing like dry, granite sand, sagebrush, and creosote bush to make one really appreciate water in the first place. I even harbor a special fondness for the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which flows by the Cottonwood Power Plant where I spent summers and holidays until my grandfather died and my grandmother moved to town. The "Innapennants" (Firefly joke) in my family had harbored no long-term animosity toward the city of Los Angeles, and my grandfather worked for them for over twenty years until, as my uncle recently noted after a visit to the old plant, he "left feet first, as did the chief operator before him." My uncle also reported that the city had put up water meters next to the houses there--no more free water for anybody.

As I mentioned in the introduction to More News From Nowhere, the water situation in the Valley isn't all bad news--at least for the nostalgic few like me who are glad it didn't turn into one big long city on the way to Reno and Tahoe. The median income in the area is low, but there's work in the tourist industry, and a few ranchers and others make decent enough money to build half-million dollar houses up in the Alabamas (as I discovered in my romp through the properties-for-sale ads).

One of the more ironical aspects of valley life is that a fairly new employer has set up shop in Olancha, just south of Owens Lake: the Crystal Geyser water bottling people, who truck water pumped from underground snow-fed springs down to folks in LA who apparently don't like the taste of the river water.

As I've recently been reminded, the relationship between water and life shows up constantly in creation myths, and these stories have been around for as long as human beings have been around to tell them. Like fire, water has both its creative and destructive elements; although life comes from water, nearly every mythic system contains a flood story. When the gods don't get it right, they send a flood to wipe the slate clean so they can start all over again.

Every religion I've ever been involved in also uses water as a symbol of birth and rebirth. When I was six months old, I was baptized with water from the River Jordan (according to the certificate) in the First Congregational Church in Pasedena, California. In Japan, at age 7, I was re-baptized Catholic (my mother had converted some years earlier, and my brother had been baptized at birth), and then in my mid-twenties I got the Christian all washed off in a mikveh in Allentown Pennsylvania while three Orthodox rabbis waited politely behind a door to hear me say the blessing that made me Jewish.

Just a couple of weeks ago (in the Air post) I was grousing about how water has been responsible for the increased use of air conditioning by raising regional humidity, and lamenting our inability to use evaporative cooling instead of heat pumps around here. Thanks to my daily dose of Good, however, I'm now aware of a new technology that promises to reduce electric power use by 90%, and that uses a system descended from the old swamp cooler--and that "works well in both Gulf Coast humidity and desert heat." Systems like this could also make it easier to get off the grid, since (according to the Miller-McCune article), 14% of American electrical use goes to air conditioning.

As most of Texas continues to suffer drought ranging from severe to exceptional (except for our little area of north Texas where we've had enough rain this year to move us out of any category), the wild fires will continue to burn, and water shortages will make it harder to endure them. I feel a little guilty when I water the veggies, but try to make up for it by not taking showers when I don't have to go out in public. Only a year ago, I reported (in the above-mentioned post on water wars) that Texas as a whole was drought free for the first time in recent history.

If we don't get rain soon, we'll probably be nudged back toward the "abnormally dry" or "moderate" drought categories; but McKinney seems to have learned some hard lessons about water, and wise-use policies are now part of everyday life. Some fairly effective television ads from the Water IQ campaign have started appearing, too--with coins representing water, flowing, for example, into a storm drain. Even more evocative, I think, are the Save Water, Save Life ads that are showing up all over the world--one of which quotes Ben Franklin: "When the well's dry, we know the worth of water."

Lets hope that all those folks who're anxious to adhere to the tenets laid out by the Founding Fathers can be as frugal with their water use as they want to be with my tax money. The deficit that really endagers our children and grandchildren involves water, and I can't think of a better example of a public good than making sure we use what we have wisely.

Image notes: the photo was taken with the Camera+ app for my iPhone4. It doesn't quite make the smart phone into an SLR as it claims, but some of the features are very useful (zooming, for instance, and the cute borders). I'm really enjoying the higher resolution, which can be augmented even further by another app: 8.0 MPX Simulator.

Air

The image that opens this post shows exactly how difficult it is to break the elements up into tidy little packets, because it illustrates the interpenetration of components like air and water--the composition of clouds.

But the original perspective I wanted to pursue for this series--to borrow shamelessly from Sigmund Freud--is "civilization and its discontents," and the modern human interaction with air points to the constant modern war between need and want.

We love our air, but our desire to regulate its temperature, our inability to keep from spewing crap into it that may be damaging our genes and our general health, and our utter disregard for how we use it in general affects every aspect of our being.

We can imagine living without land, perhaps (although even living in space would involve finding a substitute), but air is right up there with water in the "absolute necessity" column. We can't live without it, but it also seems to be more and more difficult to live with what we're doing to it.

Compound that with natural events, like volcanic eruptions, and we frequently end up trying to breathe an unfortunate soupy concoction of all four elements: earth, air, fire, and water.

At this very moment, in Colorado and New Mexico, citizens are breathing a mixture of smoke, fire retardant chemicals, water used to put out the fires, and dust blown by the wind and the fire into the mix. In other parts of the world, folks are breathing ash from volcanoes in Chile and Eritrea (during a bit of a respite from Icelandic eruptions).

Sometimes the ash in the atmosphere can produce beautiful effects, as it did during yesterday's lunar eclipse, or in the nineteenth century when Krakatoa's reach into northern Europe colored paintings by Edvard Munch. Even as inconvenient as modern travel becomes during eruptive phases, however, volcanic activity rarely contributes significantly to climate change, unlike the persistent effusion of CO2 from human activity.

Our search for alternative sources of energy that don't contribute to the CO2 load actually led us to use air to generate our power. Wind turbines are sprouting like so many daisies (or dandelions, depending on your perspective) all over the world--even here in Texas, which now generates an increasingly significant portion of its electricity from wind, and has the potential for much more.

An article in the Daily Poop today even compared the development of wind power in Texas and in Britain. The likelihood that Brits will soon begin to use much more environmentally friendly energy sources stems in part from the very real threat posed by rising sea levels if global temperatures continue to rise. Add to that the fact that England's fossil fuel prices are significantly higher because, despite abundant sources, costs are rising.

Texas still gets cheap natural gas (well, cheap in the financial sense; nobody can convince me that hydraulic fracturing is safe in the long term because the technology itself stinks--in more ways than one), and will continue to draw electricity from plants fueled with it because Texas itself lives, eats, and sleeps with the oil and gas industry. The state spends a good deal of its time officially denying the reality of climate change, and despite its investment in coastal economics (fishing, oil production, and tourism) it fails to worry about sea levels at all.

When states do wake up and start planning, they often pursue remedies that might in themselves prove unwise. Just last week the New York Times featured an article on what Chicago is doing to prepare for higher temperatures, and noted that they're already thinking about adding more and more air conditioners to buildings being erected--although they also plan green roofs for those same buildings. As Stan Cox and others have pointed out, however, conditioning the air engenders a never-ending cycle; hotter temperatures produce the desire for cooler indoor air, but the heat extracted ends up raising the temperature outside, generating more "need" for air conditioning.

At the core of all this is the perennial issue that I wrote about last week in "Dirt": increasing populations of people spreading out over the land, choosing to live in places that aren't always capable of sustaining them.

For example, in north Texas, the number of reservoirs built to supply an ever-growing demand for water increased by over a hundred between 1960 (when I was living in west Texas) and 2000. Just since I moved here in 1979, another 44 have been constructed, according to John Wier, Historical Chair of the Ft. Worth Branch of the American Society of Civil Engineers. The relationship between these reservoirs and air conditioning is subtle, but the added moisture load contributed by these artificial lakes increases the relative humidity substantially, and makes the air feel hotter and heavier because the cooling effects of sweat in drier air don't work.

While driving across north Texas in 1969 on the way to Pennsylvania, we used a swamp cooler that hung in the window of our VW Squareback to keep us comfy. Nowadays, evaporative coolers don't work around here (although they're highly effective in the California desert), because the humidity is too high. Electric air conditioners succeed in cooling us off in part by extracting moisture from the interior air and--you guessed it--transferring it back outside. It's not difficult to see how the very act of using these appliances contributes to dampening (ahem) the desire to spend much of the summer out of doors. The only advantage to this I can think of is that summers are quieter because kids aren't outside playing--they're inside playing video games in their climate-controlled media rooms.

Once again, the elements collide: land, water, air. It's unfortunate that many folks don't even think about how their daily lives affect the future, and how small choices like raising the thermostat on your A/C a few notches can have a significant effect on climate and energy use.

Over the years we've tried our best to reduce our reliance on refrigerated air by using our attic fans (although one's no longer functioning; it's high on the summer to-do list, along with insulating the attic), not installing central air (we're waiting until we have to upgrade our gas furnace, and will then have a geothermal unit put in), and being really frugal with our use of window units. We only have three, and right now, at 1 pm with the temperature at 90 F, they're still not on because there's a nice breeze blowing through the house and the sun's not coming through the west windows yet.

By 2 or 3 pm, all that will change, the windows will be closed, the shades pulled down, and the doors to this room shut (or curtains pulled across doorways). The unit's thermostat will be set at 82, and I can grade comfortably for the rest of the afternoon. Whenever possible, we open things back up when we go to bed; but if the humidity's too high, we can't sleep, so the A/C in the bedroom stays on all night, powering on and off as the temperature hovers around 80. The rest of the house stays open, and the whole place stays cool through the morning. This works for most of the summer, and on occasion, when the humidity goes below 45%, we can shut it all down and just sweat to keep cool.

When I mention all this to folks I know, they roll their eyes and affirm their belief that conditioned air is a fundamental right (like carrying guns in public places, and driving jacked up pickups) in Texas. But reading Stan Cox's book, Losing Our Cool, might help the more reasonable among us to change their ways, especially since many of the remedies he suggests are simple and effective.

Air is a genuine need; hyper-cooled air, like that in most of the buildings we work in, is not only a luxury, but a character-softening luxury. I wouldn't be surprised if the decline and fall of Western civilization hasn't been engendered by Sesame Street at all, and could instead be laid at the feet of air conditioning.

But that's another rant, and it's getting toward time to shut down the house and crank up the coolant so I can get all those projects graded.

Happy Skywatch Friday to anyone visiting who's managed to make it this far.

Image notes: The lunar eclipse was shot on June 15 by Chris G. and posted on Wikimedia Commons. The color was deeply red in many areas because of the current high volcanic ash content in the atmosphere. The clouds are from my interminable collection, begun when I discovered the nice folks at Skywatch Friday and started contributing on a semi-regular basis.

Dirt

Many human creation stories start with dirt, with our having come from the earth. The god of the Judaeo-christian tradition makes the first man from Eden's red earth and names him Adam after it. Native American stories from the Southwest see the attachment as more communal in the sense that human beings as a whole emerge from under the ground, making the earth a literal home. The small depression called a sipapu in Basketmaker pit houses and their descendents, Pueblo kivas, symbolizes this emergence; and the houses themselves are partly dug into the ground, providing a physical connection between earth and sky. At any rate, this is my excuse for starting with earth, rather than air, in this series of (be)musings.

In the modern world, connections with the land seem to have taken on the cloak of commerce. The preoccupation with "property values" has little to do with anything but finances--nobody's really talking about moral value. Around here, a common practice after the tax bill comes is to refute it, and the newspaper always includes advice on how to challenge your home's "value" on the tax rolls. Never mind its worth to one's family, and to life and memory. But this makes a certain amount of sense in a world where housing has more to do with status and fad than with the idea of home, the art of architecture, and the building of stable, sustainable communities.

When white folk decided that manifest destiny decreed ocean to ocean occupation of what became the United States, we took over other peoples' homes, evicting them from their property, and imposing an alien culture on land that had been sparsely but deeply occupied for thousands of years. And then we began building in places that most sensible natives wouldn't have chosen or, if they did, they would have been acutely aware of the danger of doing so and built accordingly. So upstart Europeans decided that they liked living by rivers, on bluffs overlooking the sea, in balmy climates, and other spots where nature periodically unleashes catastrophe in the form of floods, earthquakes, landslides, hurricanes, tornadoes, and the like.

Some people try to mitigate the effects of natural weather extremes by building houses on stilts, or by creating tornado shelters, but many more don't. Some accept the possibility of disaster as part of the cost of living along the Mississippi or in the earthquake-prone regions of California, or along the Gulf coast, but many more seem shocked when inevitable natural processes finally catch up with them.

Sometimes we can prevent disasters by building and planning wisely, but more frequently, it seems, desire gets the better of us, and we build unwisely, we over-graze, over-build, over-plant, or otherwise abandon common sense for reasons of ignorance or general lack of wisdom.

In west Texas this year, the juniper forests that had grown up over former ranch land (where cattle and selective burning had kept the problems at bay for generations) exploded into wildfires that destroyed thousands of acres, and hundreds of homes. The desire for shade in a hot climate meant that the well-adapted junipers were cultivated and encouraged; few seem to have paid attention to the chemical properties of juniper species. As one article on fire prevention in Nevada notes, "Firefighters often refer to ornamental junipers as little green gas cans."

In much of Texas, prairie grasslands have been replaced by the heat- and drought- tolerant junipers, and in some areas have been left ungrazed in order to conserve the land. However, as land gets sold off and parceled out to developers, fewer preventive measures are taken, and people end up living in a tinderbox.

Fire-climax vegetation such as juniper, chaparral, and pitch pine has to be carefully managed if people are to live on or near it--but human beings cling stubbornly to the notion that they can build any damned place they want to, only to weep at the loss when the inevitable overtakes them.

There are, in fact, few places that don't come with some kind of potential disaster attached. But some places practically beg for catastrophe because they're built up in areas that just aren't suitable for huge populations, such as Los Angeles--laid out as it is on its net of earthquake fault lines and with little in the way of water resources--or seaside communities with nuclear power plants in eastern Japan, or cities in Florida built on drained everglades and lying in the path of frequent hurricanes. Smaller populations or wiser fuel sources might well mitigate some disasters, but we insist on being stupid and ignoring probability.

In cultures where earth is seen as sacred, and viewed as the mother of us all, populations have traditionally remained small and people tend to know their environments much more intimately than the city- and suburb-bound throngs of Americans that pile up in cities. I actually don't have that much against cities (because concentrating the humans in smaller areas leaves more land open), except when they're inappropriately located. Cities might also have a deterrent effect on some kinds of weather (such as tornadoes), and localize damage rather than spreading it out over large areas as the recent tornado cluster in Joplin, Missouri did. The notion that tornadoes don't hit big cities is based on bad understanding of what tornadoes do (as this list of myths about these storms form The Tornado Project indicates), but urban sprawl does mean that more populated areas are subject to potential damage from big storms.

In my last post, I proposed a series of discursions on earth, air, fire, and water--but realized almost as soon as I started taking notes that one really can't consider any of these ancient "elements" in isolation from one or more of the others. Add in the related concepts of heat, drought, wetness, and cold (plus aether, the quintessence), and the whole project gets even more complicated.

Fortunately for us all, Richard Hamblyn has written a book, Terra: Tales of the Earth, Four Events that Changed the World, a much more ambitious exploration of the formative effects of natural disasters on modern conceptions of such things. The link is to Jonathan Keats's October 2009 review in the London Telegraph, which itself provides some interesting context.

So I'll continue my elemental meanderings, but don't expect anything too profound given the end-of-quarter load, the onset of summer home-improvement efforts, and my own ongoing struggle to cope with dirt. Meanwhile, I'm off to a bookshop to see if I can snag a copy of Hamblyn's book.

Image notes: This is my cheesy effort to link this post to Skywatch Friday, which I visit all too infrequently these days, but is a wonderful place to see skies from all over theworld. The photo was taken in 2004 in the Owens Valley. The dirt road seemed an appropriate illustration for the topic, but the sky dominates--as it usually does in the Valley. Just another example of how hard it is to separate the elements. The four elements representation is from Wikipedia, because I was too lazy to draw one myself.

Bad Genes and Bad Air

One of the complexities involved in being human in the twenty-first century is that many of the ills that would have killed us in the past can now be cured, or at least ameliorated, allowing us to live longer--if, of course, we have the money to pay for treatment. I doubt if the current debate over health care reform would even be taking place if we didn't have the means to prolong our lives in spite of all manner of genetic predispositions.

The reason many of us are adamantly in favor of reforming whatever we want to call the "health care" system we use in the United States is precisely because it doesn't offer everyone access to treatment, so that the uninsured (with or without bad genes) live shorter and often more painful lives.

I was reminded of this situation when I received a text message from my daughter after her visit to our cardiologist--the one who was in charge of my care during my recent valve job. Not only has she inherited the same gawd-awful combination of genes that prevents the liver from processing cholesterol properly and led me to bypass surgery before I was fifty, but now she's got a heart murmur--an early sign of a problematic valve. Otherwise she's healthy--but even with careful monitoring, she may well end up having to undergo some kind of a repair procedure somewhere down the line.

Mind you, I really thought that by catching the cholesterol problem early and combining drug therapy with healthful eating habits and regular exercise, we'd avoid her having to go through all the surgical drama. With luck, of course, by the time her valve silts up there may be much less invasive solutions, and she may still dodge that bullet. But she also has to be extremely careful about how she lives her life, and about the choices many people simply take for granted--including providing me with grandchildren. Because she's well insured, however, she stands a good chance of living into old age (there are some good genes involved in this regard, thanks to my grandmother), as long as she stays employed.

The modern world combines wondrous medical innovations with an absolute morass of crap that can kill us in novel ways. Our distant ancestors, for example, certainly must have died from the genetic defects of all sorts. But nowadays, even though we can mitigate high cholesterol or other congenital problems, our chemically enhanced world also lays unexpected dangers at our feet.

I'm especially mindful of this at the moment, because I've spent the morning enduring the smell of paint-related solvent wafting through the house from an unknown source, and imagining myself succumbing in a few years to some weird kind of brain cancer as a result. Since I had no way to escape the odor, I moved in and out of the house and from room to room, trying not to breathe. I had planned to work in the garden, but didn't get much done because I kept having to retreat from the fumes. I'm just hoping that it was somebody's temporary project, and that an auto-body shop hasn't decided to vent toluene into the atmosphere or something.

We're constantly assaulted these days with odors we don't necessarily want to smell. "Plug-ins" and other noxious "air fresheners" are showing up all over the place--including outside the elevators in the building where I work. I'm hoping to put a stop to this as soon as I figure out who's responsible, because fake cinnamon-scented chemicals aren't any more pleasant to sensitive nostrils than the volatile organic compounds in oil-based paints, and they're probably just as dangerous.

Of course, we're not always aware of what's floating around in the troposphere, waiting to settle into our bodies' byways, affecting our own lives and those of our offspring. We've infected ourselves with petrochemicals to such a degree that we're no longer even conscious of how they pervade our lives. Just thinking about our dependence on plastics--and our inability to recycle them properly--is enough to make me want to find a cave on a deserted island. But then I'd still have to breathe the air--and even the most conscientious consumers can't do much about that. I guess that's why I'm so pissed off about the stench I've endured all day. I didn't create it--I wouldn't create it--but I don't have any way to avoid it.

This is probably one reason for my preoccupation with utopian philosophy; thinking about better ways of doing things at least offers an intellectual escape. When the modern world intrudes so inexorably, however, there doesn't seem to be much hope that we'll ever come to our senses--or what's left of them after we've fried our olfactory receptors with toxic chemical concoctions that some idiot thinks are beneficial.

Image credit: A nifty diagram of the atmosphere (in Portugese) by Marcelo Reis, via Wikimedia Commons.