About Harold Rhenisch

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With Weeds We Thrive

Posted on May 24, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

Our planet is alive. When life is removed from a living earth by fire, it is still there.

Indigenous Consciousness, Bella Vista

In this landscape, the Syilx learned to live as this grassland. The grassland and the Syilx became themselves together. Through attention, the Syilx maintained it. Then they were removed, so that it could be a wilderness, which could provide re-creation for a socially-constricted culture in the North American East. The process takes the above grassland and makes it into this:

Settler Consciousness, Bella Vista

Grass removed by plow. No life left.

The living earth, now a wilderness, is turned into land. As land, it is suitable for development into the image of social and personal health and renewal that was behind the entire resettlement project. That looks like this …

Agricultural Development

Ready for tomatoes and peppers. The plastic is to keep down weeds and to heat the soil, so that the crops are ripe earlier in a landscape not really suited for them. Because there are no living bacteria in the soil, the nutrients they provided are replaced by petroleum-based fertilizers.

After ten years of this, the fields look much like the urban image that grew up with them and of which this new plastic technology is a reflection …

Downtown Vernon, B.C.

Back Alleys looking like agricultural plow lines. Here, the only life is artistic. This is steam punk land, with old images recombined to make elaborate artworks. Look how the shadows of the sun are taking part, laying their own subdivision lines on the land. This is the real wilderness.

But even here, the living earth reasserts itself. In the following image, a birch tree planted in the 1970s as a steam punk reminder of wilderness and the indigenous earth it replaced, is setting the scene for the return of the living sun …

Dandelion Bed

Once the domain of the sterile petunia. Now with no landscaping budget (or interest), the weeds are reclaiming the land. In the wild city, the living, indigenous earth is reasserting itself.

Humans are in a conversation with the sun and the earth. They are not always leading the conversation. I see the future here: if humans can reclaim the wild city in the way cities do, as steam punk artists including the living, indigenous earth in their palette, following it rather than leading it, helping it in its work, this will once more be civilized land. Health is to be like the Syilx and to realize that there is only wilderness where humans make it.

The Okanagan Wilderness, Kelowna

This is the real Kelowna: a beautiful steam punk artwork of deep honesty and presence. The tourist brochures about lakes and vineyards are a different kind of steam punk art work, using 100 year old images to make images of health.

Humans love bling, but they also love life. The trick is to bring them together. Weeds and problem deer are a large part of the solution. Weeds can move out into the living earth and compromise its life, but the wild earth can also move into wilderness and bring it back to life. That kind of earth is all around us. If we follow it, we will find life.

A Damselfly in the Wilderness

Posted on May 23, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

I live in Oregon Territory. My part is owned by the Government of Canada now, but it started here, in the musings of an American in his last hours. His name was Henry David Thoreau.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance as it has never set before–where there is but a solitary marsh hawk to have his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.

Henry David Thoreau, Walking, 1862.

Sounds like this wilderness is a pretty beautiful place! There’s only one snag: it was recently cleared of its Indigenous peoples; the wilderness that Thoreau sees to the west of New England, and which the United States will soon populate, is a created object. Thoreau treats it as a refreshment for inbred intellects and a place for re-creating wild life within humans — which he identifies as “Indian” life. What Thoreau doesn’t mention, and likely didn’t know, is that it had to be achieved by killing those “Indians”, because they were in the way of this life-giving wildness. Ironically, they are to be honoured by creating wildness within American souls. And so we get this …

Vernon Rowing and Paddling Centre, Swan Lake

Settler culture re-creation on the shores of a Syilx food lake.

That is the point of North American history. It comes down to that image. For a time, there were dreams of growing food and healthy children on this earth, but, well, a look around the paddling centre (a former farm) will show you just how temporary that idea was …

… and a closer look will show you something amazing…

Damselfly in the Invasive Weeds

Still making a go of it after all these years; still turning the sun into pure spirit; still moving it around.

The earth just doesn’t give up! In contemporary Okanagan culture, the rowers, the weeds and the damselfly live in the same relationship to agriculture and its attempts to find a language halfway between local and distant cultures. They have all gone wild. The only difference between them is that the damselfly has moved from non-wild Syilx earth into wild Syilx-less earth, while the others have moved the other way. It’s the only one not looking for wildness, because it’s the only one already in it. In other words, the wildness was never in Syilx territory. It was in Thoreau’s head, and in those of his countrymen. all along. When you row on Swan Lake today, you are rowing in Thoreau’s head, laid as a map over the water and the land. Beautiful, eh!

Next: Wildness Moving Back to the City; culture and respect moving back to the land.

Finding the Earth through Industrial Engineering

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

Here’s where a couple of ideas come together: creative economy and steam punk. By creative economy, I mean this:

Sculpture Installation, Gibraltar Mine

Cultures vary, but creative use remains constant. In Iceland, old industrial sculptures like this are carefully preserved for the creative potential in all their tempered and angled and fitted iron bits, which can be recombined into almost anything, in something like constructive chess. In Canada, where creativity is not seen as practical, such industrial sculptures are usually melted down into pig iron and remade into barbecues and lawn furniture, for a new life shaping humans to their wills. Occasionally, though, one or two escape to live a wild and happy life as targets for hunters and general social and personal anger.

By steam punk, I mean a couple things. First, pure art (portraits of nature to be contemplated, not manipulated within the world; the world in this art form is to be approached socially, with the hope that all good things will follow from that.). This “art” thing can be beautiful:
Back Alley Behind the Curry Pot Restaurant

Vernon, Cenotaph Square. A place designed for enjoyment by ghosts, in a society designed to live within the deeds of the dead.

And what do ghosts want? Why, to escape the square into life, of course! It’s a brutal irony, but leads to beauty. Here, a soldier blasts out of the natural gas valve-shaped human at road level, through the heat of the curry, by passing jail, with his feet on the British Flag, into a trench that separates him from the Okanagan hills, ready to take on whatever Germans he finds there, of which there appear to be none, but mud. Lots of mud. Obviously the method is a little wobbly, despite its beauty. Here’s some steampunk updated for installation into the world today …

Highway 97, Vernon

What a glory of lines and poles and wires. This is steam punk sculpture at its finest. Some of the highlights are the dry-cleaning sun and the telephone switching box sunflower, both of which replace their living counterparts, in order to more accurately display the way in which in a steam punk world, social relationships, and especially past relationships to technology and the latent creative energy within objects trumps the natural world.

It might sound like I’m being grim, but I’m not, because there is a different latent energy within those objects, apart from their recycled, reforged steel forms, and the 19th Century German colour engineering that went into the brightness we see here, and which was essential for the deadly pyrotechnical shows of the Great War between civilization and Kultur, which lasted from 1914 to 1945. This latent energy is the sun and the sunflower themselves. At the moment, they have been magically inserted into this steam-punk landscape, like ancient spiritual amulets. It is that magical energy that remains. What I find exciting is that here, at the heart of steam punk, there is a path to the living earth. When released, it will still be a part of steam punk, and will set this vast, intricate sculptural machine into the life it longs for.

Vernon Alley, across from a design studio

Every day is sends out its message for life. Life is not found in opposition to the steampunk world, but through its door. Now, that’s pretty cool.

The Social Life of Steam Punk

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

Last week, I proposed that the Okanagan city of Vernon was the steampunk capital of the world. I suggested that it is a giant art installation, in fact. When walked through as openly as it displays itself, I suggested, it can provide a series of tools for creating productive urban and earth-based spaces. This week, I’d like to show you a little bit about how this works. First, a couple examples, to demonstrate just how innovative the steam punks in Vernon are. For instance, in the pre-steampunk world, the following image would have represented a gas fitting under some air conditioning ductwork in the back of a parking garage…

In the social world of Vernon, however, it is art — and not just art but an image of the human mind and body, decorated and tattooed and re-imagined in response to the space in which it finds itself. To clear up the tattoo thing, here’s a nice tattoo installation waiting for final setting in the jewel of a human body (in old language: garden) …

Swan Lake Garden Centre Beauty

Photo: Anassa Rhenisch

So, tattoo in one language; garden ornament in another. The reason for the big discrepancy between reality (tattoo) and the official version of reality (garden schmuck) is that contemporary mythology states that humans are individuals acting in self interest and coming together as units of economic production to produce large units of economic production, which are called cities, which have “social spinoffs”, such as economically-generated recreation sites, schools, “safe communities”, hospitals, and …

Happy Two-Dimensional Tattoo Ghosts

Vernon Post Office

In this model of individual-based social organization, “government” is a form of economic administration, that sees individual-based economic transactions as the primary relationship between all humans, and social life being a kind of automatically-generated result, much like this …

Portrait of Vernon Social Life: Living Sculpture

Materials: asphalt, automobiles, buildings, and some truly beautiful work with electrical transformers and their hanging abacusses. The National Gallery of Canada could do worse than buy all this up and install it for posterity.

The civic administration of Vernon has even stated this principle clearly for its citizens, as the principle that economic competition is the greatest good, all interhuman relationships should be monetized, and those that cannot be run for a profit by “business” are the only things with which civic administration should concern itself, and only because they are cost-inefficient, and so worthy only of taxation, rather than the other form of taxation called profit. The result is this:

Door Museum Piece Sculpture, Vernon

A portrait of time and poverty and the ingenuity humans bring to it with the help of an old shoe. Steam punk all the way!

The error in this method of privileging private taxation over public taxation is basic. The error is the belief that each human is an individual. It is a beautiful dream, but, as ever-practical humans show in their daily interactions …

One Way Sign Glowing Like the Holy Grail

… the resulting aesthetic of competing physical artworks engineered from economic opportunities creates a world which humans react to by recreating as images of themselves. In short: the world you stick humans into is the one they recreate as images of themselves. Rather than being individuals, humans are social mirrors. It is a beautiful thing, which leads to the cities humans live in. Individualism doesn’t do that. It’s just a particular way of interpreting what humans do, which is starting to lag behind human innovation, and this…

Sculpture of Human Memory

Barred Door, recycling materials, gas valve, poor dead soldier boy with his gun trained on … Vernon? Sure ain’t anywhere that Vernon soldier boys fought in the Second World War. Someone has a sense of humour!

Back in his essay Walking in 1862, Henry David Thoreau suggested that “wilderness” was where civilized “man” (sorry, his term) went to re-create himself [sorry!] through contact with the wild forces of physicality. Some time has passed and now the term is understood as recreation, an art form which includes soccer fields, beaches, parks, and hockey rinks, like this beauty, which is the public face of a tire company …

Kal Tire Centre, Vernon

Back porch or escape hatch.

See that? The wildness is now contained in a building, and is represented not by the earth but by ritualized violence within a game played by physically robust humans attempting to shoot a small black rubber puck into a small net. This is a form of art, and another part of the steampunk mystique. Where do individual humans live in all of this beautiful and rather blinding artwork? Why, out with the other creatures…

Tracks Left by a Mechanized Human (truck) in Last Summer’s Burn

And while humans like me gush at the beautiful colour of all that, there’s another beauty moving into the space we all don’t really have our eye on, the one where we live as bodies, one on one, with the other star creatures …

Hawk Skeleton Weed

Moving in, to obliterate everything else.

And that’s the thought for today: when humans mistake the role of individual life for social life and spend all their time making beautiful steampunk art works within the galleries of their streets, they allow the social space they actually share with other creatures of the planet to be over run by destructive aliens, and wind up squeezed out of them. To put that another way, if we treat the living earth as a steampunk artifact, it will be, but we will not be making that art; it will be making us, and, I promise you, we won’t like it. The beautiful thing is, we have a choice. It’s not about giving up the wonders of steampunk life, but it is about accepting it, celebrating it, and learning our boundaries. Here’s a hint about that: whenever the world seems random to a human, that dear creature might do well to accept that it is looking at it with the wrong art glasses. Do you really think it’s random that a city that puts its farmer’s market in the parking lot of a hockey rink sponsored by a tire company winds up with a farmer’s market that looks like this?

Random? No way. It’s art.

A Pair of Butterflies at Dusk

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

This is a beautiful couple. Can anyone help me with a name for them?I think they’re hairstreaks of some kind … but which one? And that flower! What is that? It’s pretty beautiful itself. Anyone? I love being stumped like this. I can say this much: go for a walk at dusk! You just never know what you’ll find. In my case, literally!

Photographic Punk: Another Look at the Urban Okanagan

Posted on May 18, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

Yesterday, I shared a vision for my city, Vernon, in the North Okanagan, based around the notion of steampunk, an art form usually praised for funky flea market jewelry made from recycled watches, and novels with computers, dragons, and zeppelins all flying around together having great, low-tech adventures. I see this exciting new way of considering urban space to have the capacity to unite communities into common vision (because it is already universal) and to provide as well clear terms for creating healthy interfaces with the earth, using terms rooted in young, popular culture, where any future will be created. While I work out some more detailed principles, I’d like to leave you with a thought. It’s about photography. These are all images of humans. What you will see as you scroll down are (bear with me here) four humans. Have a look at the beautiful creatures…

Human #1

A steampunk creation of brick, asphalt, a power pole, paper for recycling, a glass window, a magnificent art work of natural gas piping, and some handsome sturdy posts, as part of the human-automobile war. This human lives in an alley between the Vernon Art Gallery & Civic Parkade and a discount clearance outlet selling anything and everything in no particular order.

We’re working on the primary sculptural principle that sculptures are representations of the space of a human body in time, but those are big words for something that photography has made simple. Here’s our second human:

Human #2

Empty flower planter and dry fountain at the Vernon Museum & Archives. Budgets are tight. Flowers and water appear to be the first thing to go. Even though dry, though, the human still appears to be doing well.

It is one of the principles of photography that everything it captures takes on significance. It is an industrial, machine process so perfectly pitched to human consciousness that it fools us every time. It is, in other words, a form of sculpture. More on that in a second, but first, human #3…

Human #3

Recycling waste cowering for shelter around a sturdy pole, becomes, when meshed with a muralized wall, a human, bravely facing the future, although with a certain amount of unease.

It was Mary Shelley who first created the steampunk world, right when photography was invented. Her creation, Frankenstein, was a novel cobbled together out of experiences, ghost stories, and folk tales. It’s star, Frankenstein’s monster, was cobbled together out of dead body parts, reignited by a spark of electricity, and wanting a life of its own: pure steam punk! Also, pure photography. Here’s Human #4.

Human #4

A particularly bright-eyed specimen, with very intriguing body alterations and decorations. A splendid example of steampunk. Backside of the Royal Canadian Legion.

Now, one might wish to call these humans “robots”, but I’d prefer that we called them images of contemporary Vernon citizens. I think they’re beautiful, and can be brought together with the other, fleshier humans, who live amongst them, to create a new language. I am intrigued by how photography, which in a way (through its industrial nature) led society down the path towards being divorced from the earth, can now lead us back by helping us to see where its effects sit within our cities. I think these photographs are sculptures. I think Vernon itself is one giant spiritual photograph, one that is dynamically alive, as here in the one functioning civic fountain …

Notice the Clock!

Photography traditionally achieved its effects of aestheticizing the world through the addition of time: a photograph of anything 100 years old is automatically art. It’s a fascinating effect. Now, though, we have the Vernon Post Office …

A Woman’s Tree Fear

… the effects are immediate, and time has saturated all aspects of the urban environment. See how I got to steampunk? All those lockets and earrings made from old watch gears, and all those thousands of people streaming around to garage sales on Saturday, are all playing an interesting aesthetic game with time. The tree above is not, and that’s what’s interesting. This difference means that there is great latent power within this aesthetic, and I’d like to accept the challenge of trying to find words for it and to bring it to healthy life. I’ll leave you with one more thought, while I think further on this. Here’s the local farmer’s market …

Tents, Cars and People in a Parking Lot

One part of future economic health.

And here’s another…

A Pot of Tea (or, a Farm of the Future, or Human #5)

Back Alley in Vernon, with muffler, pineapple weed, and a used coffee cup. In the steampunk world, which adds articles together to create temples of time, nature is trying to get into the picture. The steampunk image is currently looking to the past, and to a very dirty industrial one, too. The plants are pushing the image into, what… life punk?

Let’s follow it!

Next: I hope to have some clear terms for this form of art and future making.

Vernon: Steam Punk Capital of the World

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

Steam punk is a branch of writing and art (especially jewelry and sculpture, romantic novels and visual poetry) that recombines materials from the age of steam and iron, and sets them in the contemporary world of petroleum and electrons. Here’s what www.steampunk.com has to say about all that:

Take place in the Victorian era but include advanced machines based on 19th century technology (e.g. The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling);
Include the supernatural as well (e.g. The Parasol Protectorate by Gail Carriger);
Include the supernatural and forego the technology (e.g. The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, one of the works that inspired the term ‘steampunk’);
Include the advanced machines, but take place later than the Victorian period, thereby assuming that the predomination by electricity and petroleum never happens (e.g. The Peshawar Lancers by S. M. Stirling); or
Take place in an another world altogether, but featuring Victorian-like technology (e.g. Mainspring by Jay Lake).

Very cool stuff. A popular way of crafting some good steampunk is to hop on down to the flea market and scrounge up some broken watches and costume jewelry, and do your magic to them, like this:

What’s not to love? You can view the rest of this Australian Maestro’s gallery here. Well, here’s the thing. I’m living on the edge of a city in the grasslands, and for a year and a half I’ve been talking about the lost world of the grass, and trying to show how it’s the future, while wandering through the houses and vineyards that have been plunked down in the middle of it like some bad body jewelry. Well, I’ve just had a brainwave. This is steampunk!

Steam Punk in the Hills!

OK, maybe more waterpunk, but still, right?

You see, this city is flush with crafty artists and self-proclaimed avante garde writers, who are busy … making old things, in old ways. The truly avante garde poet Jason Dewinetz, for instance, pretty much gave up poetry to devote himself to a letterpress. He has never been so happy. You can find his award-winning design work at www.greenboathouse.com. Here’s one:

One of the first books Jason did, before he was in the dungeon of Okanagan College and out at the Greenboathouse just up the lake from my house now, and long before I moved here, was this baby. First, the proud papa…

… and then the book …

And for a sample of this translation of Shakespeare into a kind of steampunk nrrgh? Here you go: click. At the time, I was trying to work out some things about oral language, but what I did manage was to translate myself into Vernon, capital of steampunk. It’s not just Jason. It’s Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff, too. He’s a stand-up comic who teaches writing things at Okanagan College, hangs around Jason’s dungeon, and hosts chapbook making afternoons at Vertigo Gallery in Vernon. Here’s one of Jason’s books…

This tradition of using Victorian etchings in new and wild ways as a new art form and a daughter of poetry and excellent glue-stick technique has roots in the first world war, and wouldn’t you know it! So does Vernon! In fact, in Vernon, the men of the entire Interior, between the Coast Mountains and the Rocky Mountains, a country as big as West Germany, were lured into a makeshift camp on the grasslands, trained for a few weeks in marching and lunging, and then sent off to France, where they all died. And that was the end of that. Well, you might think so, but not in Vernon. Now it’s steampunk. Look:

In Vernon, the War has Just Begun!

See the Steampunk touch? The mirrored wall beside it, complete with tagging and this photographer’s legs and worn-out hiking boots? Excellent, Vernon!

In fact, the war is everything to Vernon.

Note the Steampunk Hand-written Addition!

That’s one tagger I owe a cup of coffee. It was a French soldier who shot my Great Uncle Alfred through the head and sent him down the long road of a private post-war battle with the German Post Office and, gasp, eventual incarceration in an insane asylum in Sweden, no less. Not a boy from Vernon. No, they were all dead by the time Verdun rolled around.

My resolute hatred of war aside, I think this steampunk thing is the key to local society. After all, here’s a local alley…

The Last Two Straws

The installation would be nothing without the tire. Pure steampunk!

Even the local art gallery is in on the act. It is right now trying to get funding to move out of its parkade before the local museum gets funding to move out of space built 50 years ago and as tiny as a crypt, while the politicians are trying to insist that they become one building, with one great big cold storage for all their paintings and artifacts (this was a fruitgrowing town once, and cold storage knowledge runs deep in the veins). Here’s what it looks like from the street…

Annual High School Student Show, Vernon Art Gallery

While the kids are being taught about the ancient aesthetic thing of art (In mnany places, contemporary with the pre-World War I era, but in Vernon definitely a NOW thing), the passing traffic is driving right through their paintings. Really…

Pure Steam Punk.

Note the lack of “plant art” in the “planting box frame”. For “art”, the writing is on the wall.

You see how that works? No need for a multi-million dollar gallery. Just a cold storage and a bunch of polished windows, and we’re in. Meanwhile, over at city hall, the wise councillors are into a little steampunking of their own…

Civic Fountain

That’s an elm seed (an invasive weed) and a dead mosquito and … eeyew.

You see how this works? Vernon is so steampunk, that everything is steampunk here. Even nature. Now “nature” is not a word I use when I’m in the grass, but down in town, where it’s an aesthetic thing, well …

See the Man Walking Up in the Tree?

I wish I could do that. Very futuristic! And the civic offices? Aha!

Former Flower Planter

Now a weed planter, framing the reflected “nature” in the office window… no different than the art gallery with its cars, but grass and dandelions. Wow. Just wow. Brilliant use of media, guys! I owe this landscaper a coffee, too. And as for the War That Will Not End, even it is fought in Nature …

Note the Flag!

In Vernon, where World War II soldiers line up at the bus shelter, Canada is steam punk, too.

Now, I’m thinking that we could make common cause here. I could use the concept of steampunk to find an appropriate language for the colonial treatment of the earth in this place and put on some photography/text shows to blow the whole idea of nature wide open, so even Leipzig, champions of street art, would notice, Kevin and Jason could teach the stuff at the college, the museum and the art gallery could move in together and make steampunk displays of both artifacts and paintings in the same installations, and install stuff in windows to keep it all up to date, the taggers could be put on the gallery board of directors, the landscaper dude can be given a bag of dandelion seeds to work his magic on the civic lawns, and the road crew could use their mastery of abstract impressionism …

… to beautify the streets.

Green Light in Vernon

A head rush, for sure. There’s no limit. The cars don’t actually have to move…

They’re Waiting for Us to Catch Up!

Notice the excellent steampunk decoration of nature in the background. Exciting stuff!

Whatever else happens, the galleries and museums are going to need to reflect a culture in which the current galleries, the back alleys of town, are endlessly creative …

It Just Would Be So Much Less Without the Nature

Here too …

Clever Use of Asphalt and Cardboard

And here…

A Veritable Steam Punk Novel!

And pure mystery here …Mystery Wall.

It is time to honour the culture of this place, and to help it heal its war wounds by bringing it to a language that can mesh its exciting culture of power …

It’s Unclear Whether You Should Turn Left

and gas …

This Gas Fitter Should Get an Award from the Regional Arts Council

Especially for that drain.

… and power…

I weep for the joy of it. And for its exquisite use of line … Right to the Red Door!

…and (Hey, it is steam punk) Victorian lighting technology … In Vernon We Don’t Let in the Light. We Beam it to the Stars.

What a gas!

Not just a gas, but jazz…

The Power Lines of Vernon: A National Artistic Treasure

One of the earliest public art installations in the country, and, thanks to steam punk, excellently preserved. It makes those decades of a fruit industry all worthwhile!

And just in case you forget to …Breathe.

More of that private parking thing, though. I think humans are at war with cars.

This war must end!

No Cars, No Steam Punk!

Note the eyes in the back window.

After all, the cars, strategically placed, beneath walls painted with the right colours, with the right orientation to the sun … can become steam punk, too!

Vigilance is necessary …

… and nature could be treated with as much honour as the concrete it complements…

Weeds Trying to Steam Punk an Abandoned Planter for Shrubberies

Well, shrubberies were so 1970s. There was still money here. There was still a fruit industry. The museum had 50 years less steam punk to try to preserve. Time is part of every story here. And out on the outskirts, where something of the earth still breathes? Aha …

The Plastic Has Been Laid Down

Steam Punking the Land

It’s only here, where the city breaks down at its edges, that steam punking is a bad idea. In the city core, steampunking adds life. Out here, it’s just death. This soil has been stripped of nutrients, plasticized, chemically sprayed for weeds (yesterday, to prevent seed germination), and pounded back to rock …

Tractor Blight

Steam punk gone bad.

So, you see. Steam punk, the heart and soul of a city that so wants to have a big art gallery like those huge multinational global cities of artistic excellence like Kelowna! What? You haven’t heard of Kelowna? Well, you’re forgiven. It’s a strip mall of car dealerships that sits on top of a bunch of old onion fields, but here’s the thing: they have the steam punk bug too.

Stephen Foster’s Toy Portraits, June 22 to September 29th, 2013

Pure Steampunk!

Now, in Kelowna this stuff is called “Art”, but in Vernon it’s the streets. We have an incredible confluence of forces: museum, gallery, college, writers, print foundry, book designers, taggers, landscapers, road crews, and all the people who dress up like this …

Without Colourful People, Vernon is Just for Cars

… just to keep the colour thing working. Kelowna doesn’t have that. As for the toy Indians? They did that in Dresden a decade ago. But this art is on the street and its punk thing? They did that in Leipzig only five years ago, so, like, we’re ahead, right! Not only that, in Leipzig, they don’t have this …

Crab Spider Hunting on the Steampunk Weeds in the Steampunk Suburb

They had a life on earth 200 years ago. We still have it. So, when we go to the stars with our art, and our streets, we can make a new kind of city, in which art, streets, museums and galleries are all one thing. I mean, we’re already there. Sometimes being in cold storage for awhile is an advantage… if you seize it. Even Kelowna can’t do that anymore, even if you haven’t heard of it, even if you have. Think Green!

“Art” is obsolete, but the green light is on!

Vernon! Steam Punk Capital of the World!

I’m serious.

The Scent of Spring

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

Here’s the queen of our wild flowers … it smells so fine, it finds you before you find it!In wild rose season, everyone gets to be a bee. Bees gather pollen after being lured by the scent… and humans? The intriguing creatures stick their noses into the centre of the flower and breathe in deeply. That’s just as practical as the bee thing. It can change your life, and your attitude to the world around you. Instead of creative writing classes, we can just send people out to breathe deeply.

They will return as humans.

All flowers found on Tuesday in Bella Vista.

Beyond David Suzuki

Posted on May 14, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

My friend Claude has reminded me of David Suzuki’s observation:

“We need air to live, we need water to live, we need food to live. If we continue to destroy all these gifts of the Earth, we will have no livelihood.” David Suzuki

By “We”, Dr. Suzuki means, I think, creatures like this:

Crowd in Hong Kong Source

Dr. Suzuki is an eminent politician. He knows how to influence humans. His “we” reflects that. To ensure the earth survives human self-absorption and over-population, however, this vision will need to evolve to include, among the ‘we’, this person…

Killdeer

Leading me step by step away from its nest. Waiting for me when I stop, moving when I move on.

And this one, too…

Look how its whole body breathes …

Western Tailed-Blue, Bella Vista

With my fellow earth people and the planet in mind, I’d like to expand Dr. Suzuki’s vision for the new century and the future that must be built:

We need air to live, we need water to live, we need food to live. We, the people of the earth, from the smallest bacteria to the largest whale, are these things. Whoever in this community continues to destroy these things and their living connections is separating life from the earth and individuals from community, thereby destroying life and sowing death in its place. We, the people of the earth, from the grizzly bear to the salmon and the human child to the black widow spider, the blue-bunched wheatgrass and the rocky mountain maple choose life.

If you can shorten that, I’d love to hear your version. Consider it a work in progress.

Bringing Life to the Political Table

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

Politicians represent humans and the workings of their societies. I believe that is just not good enough. For instance…

Not Represented by Politics

In a political process that is skewed towards dealing with human society separate from the greater society of which it is a part, many citizens of society have no voice. This yellow-bellied marmot, for instance, freshly up for his four months of sun. Did his appearance appear in the local newspaper? No it did not. There isn’t even a reporter covering the marmot beat. No articles on the quality of the balsam root crop this year. Nada.

One assumption behind the culture that creates human-centred political philosophies is that life will take care of itself — it’s a kind of an accidental thing that evolves and changes and adapts through a mysterious process called “wildness”. Well, when you live on a piece of land and it is your identity, there is no wildness You can only get to such a place if you assume that it is there for human use, and as soon as you assume that, you are not there. Behind that assumption is the one that humans and life are somehow different. Behind that is a notion about specialness and God (Adam and Eve munched the apple and then were kicked out of the garden.) God must be miffed to be so misunderstood. The garden is still here! Here God is, saying “deer”, and lo a deer walks across the grass, but politicians hear only “resource”. Anything else is for children. Sentimental, you know.

Half-Starved Doe

Denied a viable life by human predation on her food, shelter and travel needs, this is one half-starved critter with a nasty-looking sore on her other cheek. Locally, this is known as a “problem deer”. The suggestion is “removal.” Another word for that is “death.” Another is “no room on the planet for you.”

Here’s an idea: if it’s for children, it’s probably about right. If that doesn’t seem right, it means you left the garden and are looking for a canister of weedkiller and some rodent bait. That means you are the problem. Politicians, for example, propose ensuring the health and sustainability of the human societies they see as their business. Around here, the different ways of doing this are strangely reduced to a choice between “the economy”, which means building roads and buildings and green space, like this …

Multi-Million dollar Plan to create 4 blocks of Green Space With a Road…

… where there was a road before.This is “economy.” Vernon

… or through a thing called sustainable resource use, which is like saying, “We’re going to look after the earth…for people.” What, are we slave owners? After 17 months working on this project and paying attention, as best I can, to the land around me, I have learned a different road. Take a look …

Resource

No, not the arrow-leaved balsam root, or the last clumps of bunchgrass sheltering beside it, or the sagebrush, but the pile of old trees. Some kid came up from the orchards long ago and built himself a fort out of grassland trees. That’s a resource. You use it, it fills a purpose, and then you’re done. Meanwhile the ants, termites, birds and bees that lived in those trees are… gone.

The earth is not a resource. To say it is one is like saying that your mother is a resource, or your child, or the blood in your veins, or the spinach you planted in August (the stuff that overwintered under the snow for four months, and now, mid-May has made a spinach pie for eight, out of 6 spinach seeds (6!) — which is what I served here last night), is a resource. No, it is not a resource. It is life. If it were a resource, it would be so to something that is not-life. Is that you? Not-life?

Skeleton Weeds Given the Heave-Ho

If you’re not in favour of public intervention in the grasslands, if you consider it wild and consider that it will look after itself, or that the budget must wait because a new sports field in town has a 5 million dollar priority, then you’re in favour of the replacement of the grasslands by this noxious weed, brand new here and waiting for no political discussions.. If we don’t stop this evil of human neglect and carelessness now, the entire valley will be wiped out of half of its life within a couple decades. Next year is too late. My year-to-date: 2000 plants removed. That is 20,000,000 viable seeds removed from the wind. You want to know what evil looks like? It is this.

So, let’s have a look at something else popular with Green politics: “The Environment”. Have you ever seen an environment? Let’s look. Is this an environment?

Balsam Root and the Earth’s Deep Mantle Blasted to Make a Subdivision

Not an environment. Life the whole way. And some reshaping of the living earth to fit automobiles (non-life).

OK, is this an environment?

Arrow-Leaved Balsam Root Gone to Seed

Hardly an environment. Many insects live on and around and off of this plant, but that doesn’t make it an environment. It means that, together, the insects, the plant, the air, the soil, the microbes in the soil, the sun, the snow, the marmots, the deer and the rain are life. Life, lives all at once. A lot of it is living off of those balsam root seeds. To illustrate that, take a look at that image of the balsam root and the ruined “tree” fort that opened this blog, but two weeks later …

Balsam Root Seeds, All Gone

The deer have been by.

The seeds are hard to gather and shell, and once you’ve done so you have a lot of work for very little… if you’re a human. That might be worth it, but the deer do it easily. They just digest the whole flower head. There’s a point in there about wildness. In contemporary thinking, that deer is wild. In earth thinking, that deer is a person — as are cattle, politicians, and grocery stores. It means that it needs a voice in politics. Since it can’t speak for itself, we must speak for it. It doesn’t mean it cannot be used for food, especially since it is such an efficient and gentle harvester of wild sunflowers, but it might mean that it can no longer be harvested for sport, because it is us. Any use of deer for food is a sacred responsibility, that starts with looking after the earth as if it were our mother and our child. Any politics that talks about resources will fail. There are no resources. There is life, and there is death. There are only our sisters and our brothers. Some of them serve a role as food, but they still have a place at the table, on their terms, not ours. Oh, and as for the Garden of Eden?

After a Morning Rain

God didn’t kick us out. All he did was give a choice: live in the garden or live in the weeds. He was kind of hoping, though, that we’d choose the garden. Every morning we are presented with this choice anew.

Up to this point, politicians have largely been the kind of people who choose weeds. I’m not kidding. I found three election signs today, all hammered into the northern flanking motion of hawk skeleton weed in the valley, the number one threat to the long-term viability of the Okanagan Valley. It makes almost every other species here an endangered species — and not in some unforeseeable future. Obviously, the people working for these politicians did not know that there is evil, or that it must be dealt with now, not with talk or pounding in signs, but by doing the real work. In my speechlessness, I offer red arrows to show where the largest of the weeds (769 individuals in total) are …

So much for the social democrats. And …… so much for the Neo-Conservatives, and …

… so much for the other Neo-Conservatives. As for the Green Party, our most enthusiastic candidate from a city far away urges us to build an economy out of local food processing. That’s a good start. It will do amazing things for human social infrastructures. It still doesn’t subordinate humans to life, though, or bring life to the political table. When that party does that, then the economics of the other parties will become as foreign as the skeleton weed is now. I don’t want humans to continue to be that weed, or to continue to vote for it. Yes, vote for it. The state of the land is a direct representation of the state of our politics. That hurts, but sometimes it’s good to stare the truth in the face and then to start in on the real work, with renewed vigour.

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