The Creative Economy and a Living Earth

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

Here’s how the earth came to be alive up on the hill.

Spider Making the Most of Invasive Knapweed

Here’s how the earth came to be dying up the hill. An investment company hoping to transform a section of living earth into a piece of “land” which could be sold socially blasts it to bits to make roads and building lots. Now that a rare remaining grassland was a part of social life and no longer a part of the living earth (it was now “land”), the company could sell it as a cost to society. To make this cost as large as possible, a vineyard was planted. Its presence made the earth around the development seem like a piece of Provence (a social image) and the “land” seem like a piece of New Mexico (a social image of a hot place). These attractive social ideas were incorporated into the architectural and landscaping plans of the development. They had the potential to increase the land’s cost to society, which would then be private profit for the developers. For complex reasons to do with global economic factors, a collapsed real estate market, and so on, the development went bankrupt. At that point, the final phases of the vineyard development were abandoned, although the sagebrush and native plants had already been scraped off of them and piled up to the side. In other words, it had already been transformed from life into “land”. At this point in the development of a piece of living earth into a monetary engine, the project’s capital investment was written off, and the developers moved on, free of encumbrances. Well, almost. They left behind a life-debt, from the earth’s perspective, and a creative debt. Here’s what the creative debt looks like:

Bamboo Stakes, Rotting Away

These stakes were likely harvested in China and bundled and shipped at great expense. As this creative input and the life-debt behind it was never put to use to help raise young grape vines (by saving on labour costs — another social cost contributing to greater profit for the development company) it was ultimately wasted. Instead of leading to social life, as a substitute for original earth-life (which would have preserved and expanded the creative capacity within them), these stakes became only capitalized objects, discarded as easily as the capital debt. Unlike the debt washed clean by the bankruptcy process, however, this debt remains. Here’s some more of it…

Vineyard Infrastructure … Mostly Ruined Now

Strangely, the laws around private property are so strong that the banking companies left with the abandoned project never sold off this material (while it was still useful) so that the creative input that went into it could be used, to help clear its life-debt. Instead, it was treated like the capital that invested in it. Capital, though, is a social concept. The earth’s debts are not so easily erased. There is, however, a way to do it, that gives some hope for the future. For one thing, the wire still holds its creative potential. In the bank of creative potential, it still has a positive balance in its account.

The rest of the story is what is happening around that stack of wire. Here’s a closer look …

Yes, humans are messy, and this form of economic organization is messy, but that’s not the point. Look more closely …

Yellow Clover!

You see that? The “land” creation process made a desert of blasted bedrock, yet life is establishing itself there. Not social life. Not human life. Not the original grassland. Not a vineyard. But life. New life. With new goals. In this case, the great debt this “development” created within the living earth can be partially erased by observing that in what is supposed to be “Provence” and “New Mexico” and “hot” and a “desert”, new crops are showing up, capable of living on dead land without irrigation or soil and making it alive. The creative potential of the bamboo has been wasted.

The removal of the slopes from the earth to create a vineyard to increase property costs was a waste. The death of the land and its now-rare grassland was a waste. All of these wastes are debts. Nonetheless, the earth can be returned to this place, and it can be alive again, with the input of human creative energy. In other words, by giving human social energy to the earth (rather than using the alienation of a living earth to create social debt which can then be turned into private profit), humans can help the earth give them a creative profit: a living development, with an economy of life stronger than the life that was here before, and a social life in tune with the earth. There can, one day, be profit here again, but it will be in the life created out of developing human error and transforming “land” back into living earth, complete with new crops, new reclamation strategies, new systems of earth-based economics, and new lifestyles. It is too late to go back. We can, however, go forward with hope. If we chose not to, we are choosing death…

Death

Transformation of a Living Earth of 1000s of species and great water efficiency into “Water Smart” Rock Landscaping and invasive knapweed and a few strands of cheatgrass, and nothing else.

…instead of life …

Life: Beautiful Natural Grasses (Foreground)

Doing a better job of aesthetic gardening than the “Provençal” plants in the back.

I mean, look at the beautiful colour of this stuff…Lavender looks no better, but this stuff can grow here without water, and can host insect worlds. Of course, even the knapweed, for all its sinister, hellish qualities, does a better job of that than lavender…

Crab Spider, Nicely Camouflaged

Let’s work with the earth. Let’s live.

The Future Economy is Here

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

On Friday (click), I mentioned that the future is here. Now. Not tomorrow. Not on the second Tuesday after the signing of the Keystone Pipeline Accord. Right now. Look up. There it is! It is just a matter of learning to see it. Here, this is what it looks like, in case it’s night or your window has curtains…

Lambs Quarters in the Spring Sun

In a world of monocultural agriculture, in urban configurations that include huge amounts of waste space, and in which most space is not productive of life, the earth sends forth lambs quarters to heal the soil. To capitalist agricultural traditions, this is called a weed and is actively suppressed. So is the economy that it supports.

It is amazing. Wherever the soil is removed from life, which is a complex series of mutually-supportive relationships unfolding in time (an economy, if I’ve ever heard of one), lambs quarters and other colonizing plants sprout, to begin the process of regeneration. That’s our clue to regenerating our economies. We just need to look. If we look, we might see lambs quarters showing us the precise place in the living earth where true profit can be made and true healing can begin, with beautiful lambs quarters salads and cooked dishes to replace spinach and all its cello-packed long-distance trucking hydrocarbons. Healthy for the soil, healthy for local economies, healthy for the atmosphere, healthy for farmers, and healthy for our bodies. Take a look at this dry hill…

Lambs’ Quarters and Its Buddy Wild Lettuce Doing Their Magic

The soil is dust at this time of the year, but they are deeply rooted and thrive on natural water. No water infrastructure required. Got that? No tax burden. No capital costs.

And if we look around, we might see another wet season crop finishing up at the beginning of the dry season:

Desert Parsley

This is the plant that kept the Syilx alive on this land for eight thousand years of spring hunger. This is the one they burned the grasslands for, to keep the cycle of renewal in a youthful, productive phase.

Do you see? Once the land has been let go for a few years, it starts to look like this:

Sagebrush Getting Out of Hand…

… but the balsam root (a food crop) still doing well. Mind you, only a few crops are thriving here.

Up close, that sage really looks like this …

Sagebrush

A monocultural desert.

That’s why succession agricultural is the way to go: as the first colonizers are replaced by food plants, which are replaced by woody plants providing shelter and food for winter birds, the full richness of what the land can provide is spread over time — about 15 years of it. After that, it’s time for renewal — not plowing, just clearing away, and then …

… the desert parsley will be doing more than hanging on. This is a form of agriculture that creates a living economy. Rather than future potential being stored in capitalized mutual funds or in heavily indebted water systems or in monetary objects of various kinds, they are stored in the future creative potential of the land. Human creative potential is directed towards ensuring the health of those investments. Instead of investing for the present, and passing the debt on to our children, we invest in the future and pass the profits on to our children. In this respect, monocultures like this …

Dwarf Royal Gala Apple Walls

… are also forms of economic organization. In this case, heavy capitalization. This 20 acre orchard likely has a capitalization of four million dollars, and a return on investment of approximately zero. It is, in other words, an economic system that doesn’t work in any practical sense. What you see in the above image is the creative potential of the wild earth to produce life (a complex system of inter-related relationships) reduced to a small number of species, including grass, dandelions, mallow and a few other wild plants trying to heal the soil, and dwarf apple trees. The idea is that by concentrating all of the creative potential of the land into one product, it can be produced in abundance, and the difference between a complex living system, in which the life energy here were shared with many species, and this model, in which only one species (humans) benefits, the investor (the farmer) can use the excess as profit, and turn it into money (a social relationship.) The next year, the land can produce the same wealth again. Well, that system is broken. The only profit being taken here is by the capital systems (banks, chemical companies, post companies, trucking companies, packing companies, supermarkets, and so on), leaving the farmer, the land, and all the hungry people and animals unserved. Here’s where the profit goes …

Farmer Spraying Poison to Thin His Apple Trees

When I was a young man, we did this work by hand. It was a major source of employment. In order to keep food cheap, it is now done by poison and, logically enough, thousands of people in this community go to the food bank to try to keep from starving. The farmer is using a canister spray mask c. 1970, a pair of gloves, an old shirt and a turban as protective gear. Good luck on that.

You see how that works? In a fully-capitalized form of agriculture, fully-privatized and removed from community (employment), profit must be extracted by reducing social costs (which were once the profit), rather than merely reducing competition for life energy. Humans with no access to the life energy now have to pay for it. Well, it doesn’t have to be so. The land is shouting the future to us:

1 Hour Before Spraying

Ignore the apple blossoms. They’re not the future. They’re just debt. The future is the dandelions growing between the rows. In the current model, they are mowed down to prevent soil erosion.

That’s how to see the future. Look at what is being ignored, yet which is still alive. Until 20th Century Industrial Chemical Farming (largely a Nazi invention … really), dandelions were a source of salads, wine, syrup, coffee, and medicinal herbs, with great value. Surely, 2 out of 3 rows of apples returning NO profit to earth or humans but only to non-living systems (which must remove life energy from earth and humans in order to concentrate that profit) could be removed, to leave more space for dandelions, and a series of succession plants building on their healing of the land, OR 1 row could be cropped in an annually-regenerating crop of aromatic saplings for meat and fish smoking facilities, eliminating food refrigeration costs and providing shelter for birds, OR 1 row could be given over to community gardens, or … well, one could go on, because the current system does not produce life or profit, so you can do anything else and add wealth to town. Tomorrow, I will expand this story. Today, though, I wanted to make an initial economic point: 1. any form of agriculture is a form of economy, written large; to understand the economy, look at what’s in front of you; 2. in industrial agriculture, profit is the life energy removed from living systems, with the flaw that 3. the living systems cease to regenerate and systems become old, tired and no longer capable of supporting complex life (such as humans or slugs), and 4. for living systems this is the deal breaker, because the alternative is a dead planet. However, 5. successful economic systems renew and 6. the living economy is attempting to do just that. By observing the opportunities it is taking, we can see the opportunities that we can take, for renewed economic profit, renewed living environments, and renewed social and personal health. When humans become impoverished and are the weeds in their economic system, they need only look to the weeds …

Pineapple Weed

Growing in the iron-hard soil of a roadway (with the frilly leaves). Zero water. That’s a bit of wire weed (looking very flush with spring water) with the broader leaves, poking through. You cannot kill wire weed, and you cannot pull it out without explosives. Well, I exaggerate, but, tough, right?

Pineapple weed flowers make a far more beautiful tea than chamomile tea, it grows everywhere you let it and many places you don’t, and has the beautiful and relaxing aroma of fresh pineapples. Water requirement? Zero. Wireweed is an ancient herbal remedy and a key ingredient in Vietnamese cooking. At the moment, these crops produce zero dollars for the economy, but they could produce millions, with almost no capital cost. The future is here. It just needs to be seen, because once it is seen the path to wealth and prosperity is very clear. Contemporary agricultural practices are tired and old, and at the end of a cycle. They require more and more input for less and less return. Yet, new crops are everywhere (and renewed economic models), and require almost zero input — except for the creative input of seeing them.

Arrow-Leafed Balsam Root Seed Crop is Ready on the Hill!

While “cultural tradition” says it’s not yet time to plant a garden.

Making the Future Now

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

Two days ago, I spoke about the great lie that lies behind contemporary economics. It involves a fruit marketing company, originally designed to erase lies but now in the thick of them, and a beer can scaring a coot in a spring flood creek. My friend Tamara reminded me that such stories are hurtful to human hope. Thank you, Tamara. I will now try to restore that hope, because I never meant to weaken it. It’ll take me a few weeks, but I’m excited about the prospects. You can read the original post here. Now follows the first attempts at a new vision, based on the principle that the future is with us. All that stands between us and a new world are words — or, rather, the lack of them. I am now going to make an attempt to find some of them. Here goes. First (sorry, Tamara), let’s start with an assessment of where things are.

Davison’s Orchard, Vernon, British Columbia

After 90 years of farming in the valley, the colonial orchard continues to devour the earth.

The Davisons are a hardworking, devoted and successful farming family, in a country where most farmers have failed. That is deeply honourable. Nonetheless, the image above shows the contemporary economic condition very clearly: in order to make profit, the living earth must be destroyed and translated into an artificial version of itself. Monetary systems, both capitalistic and communistic, work on this principle. Humans have been so successful at this, that it has come to the point at which the choice is very clear: either the earth becomes a simplified, artificial machine, or humans adopt a new economic method, which allows the earth to produce life once more. I am solidly behind the latter model, because I don’t think the first model will lead to anywhere other than poverty, in all sense of the word. But I promised hope. Look, here’s hope:

Davison’s Five-Year-Old Williams’ Christbirne Orchard

Don’t look at the pear trees, look at the grass. There is the hope.

If a capitalistic economic system requires profit to be drawn from the land, on the principle that the land will continue to produce life and energy, freely, without input, which can just be drawn from, the future economic system will realize that profit comes from creating complex webs of life, rather than only complex social relationships, because the webs of life are obviously not going to keep on without help. The image above shows how this might take place. This farm creates pears, which people purchase as part of a harvest celebration in September. It also, however, creates a large amount of green material, which is mowed down and considered waste. A future economic system, one that works towards maintaining the earth, will reward investment not on the profit that is drawn from the land, but on the increase of diversity within the land itself. Simply put, the profit that is derived from the efficiencies of chemically destroying competition for the pears and easy access for machinery on the land, will be compensated by harvesting dandelions, grass, and a large number of diverse wild plants between the pear rows. As a benefit, wild bees will pollinate the fruit, birds will thrive, and this monocultural zone will produce two kinds of profit: profit for the farmer, and life for the earth. Instead of profit being derived from objects, such as pear trees, it will be derived from the creative potential of the land. This will work in a practical sense, because the crops grown on that land will not require heavy inputs of water, which cost both human society and natural environments a great deal. It’s possible, it’s do-able, and it’s exciting. All that stands between us and a living earth is greed and stupidity. Against greed, we can act collectively. Against stupidity, well. Have a look.

Smokebush (Valanidh)

In Bulgaria, Valanidh (a variety of sumac, in the mango family) is a mainstay of the health system, and a very profitable herbal crop. In Vernon, British Columbia, it is a decorative plant, which grows too quickly for poorly-planned aesthetic gardening and so is hacked back with clippers until it is ugly, defeating its purpose. Yet, it is still full of life and beauty.

We could create an industry around this plant in 3 years. All we would have to do was to put the pruning clippers away and work together, rather than apart, and work for practical ends, rather than pretty ones. But that’s not a loss. Practicality of this kind is beautiful in itself, and will result in beautiful, free-growing trees, right within urban space. It can be done. It can be done easily. That our university is not working on this is to its shame. That our city prefers to talk about 100 million dollars for road and water infrastructure is only an indication that words are lacking for the future that is already here. We who walk these roads and hills will have to lead the way. I find that inspiring.

True Green and False Economy

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

What passes for environmentally sound practices today are deep reflections of an economic system, but they’re not green, and they’re not going to ensure either the survival of the earth or of our children. Right now, the City of Vernon, British Columbia is debating whether to keep spraying treated sewage water over indigenous grasslands, golf courses and soccer fields in infilled wetlands or to just pour it into Okanagan Lake. The issue is cost. The reason for that is that “land” and “water” are considered “raw materials”, which are “capital” in an economic system that mines the earth’s creative potential, without ever replenishing it. What I learned in Iceland over the last two months is that “land” and “water” are not raw materials, and creative potential is the only potential there is. An economic system that is complacent about wasting that potential has no future. The one green option in Vernon, to rebuild the grasslands so that the water is moved by the sun and gravity again, at reduced cost and leading eventually to no cost at all, or true wealth, is not part of the debate, although it should be leading it. Here, let me show you. Below is an image of Okanagan Landing, taken this morning, looking Southwest from the Bella Vista Hills.

Now, let me show you the image again in an annotated version, so you can see clearly the story it tells.

A Story of a Lost Environment

The indigenous grassland in the foreground has retained at least some of its capacity to move and store water and to process it into food. The vineyard to the right has mined this environment for three raw materials: “sun”, “land” and “water”, in order to increase the sale prices of the houses on the subdivision above them. The water in the lake is fossil water, left over from the melting of the glaciers 10,000 years ago. It regulates the climate, and ensures that life can live on the hills. It is not for use. The infilled wetlands and the lost grasslands above them are irrigated with water removed from the system that feeds the lake through its forests, grasslands and wetlands. It costs millions of dollars to do, against the millions of dollars of free profit from the land that the earth would otherwise have provided. What’s more, almost all of this earth has been alienated from public use, for now and forever in the future. Now, let me show you a different economic model. This one’s from Iceland.

Just one of the Kazillion Un-named Waterfalls in Iceland, Suðurdalur

Now, take a look at the annotated version below, to see the story this piece of earth tells.

This was once home. Although the over-grazing induced by poverty led to the depletion of the original birch forests here, the Icelandic system of retaining the creative capital of the environment has allowed for reforestation, without impacting future creative uses of the land, including such public uses as tourism or recreation. Future wealth has been created. What wealth was there in the past has been retained. This isn’t always quite what it seems. Here’s what that waterfall above looks like from the current road below …

Every bit of wealth that has been removed from the cycle of this piece of earth, in the form of capitalized equipment of one form or another, has been used until it is out-dated, in the fashion of such products, and then is banked, so that the creative potential within it can continue to benefit the farm. It was never the product that was important, but what went into the product. The shape of a piece of metal is more valuable than the metal itself. Here’s that reservoir of creativity again, this time with my little rented Yaris. Someday, it will retire to a farmyard like this — where it will be no less valuable than it is today, ready for its creative energy to be mined for new purposes.

None of this is junk. In a fully capitalized system, such as the one in Vernon, this material would be melted down and recapitalized as new material, and all of the human ingenuity it contains would be lost, as would the original investment, which came from sheep grazing these hills. As such, the above image is actually an image of environmental sustainability and green thinking. So is this…

Ruined Farm, Reyðarfjörður, Iceland

Notice that the old turf-wall system has been incorporated into the new Post-World-War II system of using discarded American military materials. Ingenuity is something that Icelanders are loathe to waste, and which Canadians discard readily because in Canada’s economic system that ingenuity and the creative potential of the land it draws upon has long ago been mined, capitalized, and replaced. That all costs money. Not only that, it costs earth. I’m not romanticizing here. I mean, there are ruins in Iceland. For example, here’s a ruined turf house in Reyðarfjörður…

And here’s the ruin of the post-War concrete house it was replaced with …

Like the turf house, it was not built to last, because it was not removed from a natural process. It spent no creative energy. It only gave it form for a time. The thinking that went into the construction of this house utilized old scraps, such as the iron bar that used to tie the wall together above this window that looked out from the kitchen, next to the stove.

Over and over and over, the Icelandic writer Gunnar Gunnarsson pointed out that poverty is the greatest wealth. Those are the words of a man whose mother died of poverty when he was eight and who had so little economic wealth when he was young that it wasn’t a part of life at all. What then did Gunnar mean? Among other things, he meant this:

Beach Wrack, Reyðarfjörður, Iceland

To any man who lived on what he could scrounge from land or sea, this rope would have been great wealth. It is now garbage, because it has no capital potential and thus, in a capitalized system cannot be exchanged for wealth. The seaweed that would have once fed the man’s sheep, is also now waste upon the shore — although it is as fully wealth as it was once in the past, and perhaps will be some day again. Gunnar meant more than that, though. He also meant this:

Multiple Generations

Stock buildings (foreground), fence, turf house, and boat shed by the water … this was Gunnar’s Iceland: a country where wealth that came from human creative energy meeting the creative energy of the land was built up over time. Its products (wool, lambs, children and so forth), were created directly out of this energy. In other words, they were creative products, not the physical ones that capitalization demands. As such, they could be sold without diminishing the land’s capacity to provide more creative energy — something impossible in a capitalized system, in which the wealth follows them, extracted continually from the earth, which is compensated only with money that can only be spent on products that lie outside of the land’s cycles and which must be continually replaced, generation by generation. This is what the Vernon model has done by removing water from the earth’s own economy and placing it in a technical framework, which must nonetheless be paid for by the land. These price includes a social cost, as real as any other economic input. Not only is the transformation of water into a utility economically unviable in the long term, but it costs this:

Close up of the Water Fall I Showed You Above, Suðurdalur

Without beauty and mystery, there is only enslavement and poverty. Let me put that another way: once the creative potential of earth has been spent, it loses all beauty and mystery and ceases to be earth. It becomes a product, and the people who live upon it become products as well. In the economic system in Vernon, British Columbia, every piece of earth gets removed at a certain point in history and “developed” — usually into subdivisions, and is no longer a part of the earth’s economy. Building that economy, however, is the goal of environmental sustainability. As the Icelandic model shows, it can be done in a couple ways, at least: one is to maintain an economy built on creative physical energy rather than on capitalization; another, perhaps more practical in our present age, is maintain that creative physical energy within the products already paid for and developed, such as this:

Horse-Drawn Manure Spreader, Skriðuklaustur, Iceland

This piece of antiquated machinery represents the lives of hundreds of sheep and many men and women and horses who lived and worked here. It also represents the energy of its designers and creators, and of the men who mined the ore and the others that smelted it into the iron that made it, and the others that shipped it here. Withdrawals can be made from this bank of energy in the form of useful pieces of fabricated steel, which represent the social and creative energy that went into them, and which can be recombined into articles of new cleverness, not new machines, per se. Withdrawals can also be made more directly on the social capital of this machine, by turning it into art, or history, or tourism, or a deep sense of belonging, or respect, or a connection with one’s ancestors. That is what it is to be a human on this earth and of this earth. It is not a world of things. It is not a world of raw materials. It is a world of creative potentials, in which the economy is creation. The earth keeps giving us chances. It’s time to run with some of them. Here’s one…

Not Green but Yellow and Blue

The photo doesn’t show it, but that’s a wild bee with a neon blue abdomen, on a dandelion growing in an overflow beach parking lot near Okanagan Lake. The bee lives on wild land, while domesticated bees are dying out. The dandelion has colonized land that humans have thrown away from their capital plans. It has, in other words, brought creation to it, and holds within it the potential for several new industrial ventures, which will enrich the creative potential of the land in the same way that the flower has by growing here, rather than than making withdrawals from it that it never intends to repay. Well, the earth is telling us that it is time to repay our debts. It doesn’t want our money. It wants us to create within its own economy. Rebuilding the earth would be a use of economic capital that would show a tremendous return on investment. Here, for instance:

Saskatoons in Full Flower

Another industry in potential. They live on free water.

… and here …

Remains of Indigenous Gardens, Bella Vista

Yet more industry in potential. And what are our politicians talking about? Sewage and money. Incredible.

The Beauty of Light in Water

Posted on April 1, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

Out of darkness, light. A few weeks back, I marvelled at water, and it’s here again, but look at it now …

Stream Below the Hengifoss

Flotsdalur, Iceland.

Is it water? Is it light? If so, they are not like any water or light contemporary words have made. Look:

Light Mixing With Water

… or is that Water Mixing with Light?

That’s cooked volcanic clay as a streambed. Here they are again, in a view from a mammal that can’t seem to hold steady or stop breathing and that left its tripod back in the car, but maybe it’s best that way …

Through such attention the planet sees itself. I love that.

Looking Back Upstream

Salt Lithography

Posted on March 21, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

I have mentioned the need for a new Enlightenment, one which includes the earth. The following images show, I think, just where it might begin. This is a variation on the art of lithography from Iceland. Here it is not a human artist inking stone to print on paper, but the sea writing upon the snow with the land as a pigment (in this case ground volcanic basalt). I found these transitory prints written in a heavy spring snowfall as the tide was coming in at Sauðarkrokur in the Skaga Fjord.

I see the beginnings of a language here, and here …

Contemporary artists search for the lack of signification, yet this is the universe …

It’s just that it’s not a humanist meaning. Look at how the snow erupts in volcanoes when pressured from the sides! Stunning.

Next: A Language of Light and Shadow from Hofstaðir

Telling Stories through Photography

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

When I started these notes, I wanted to record explorations of a near-desert caught in the winds of the mountains far inland from the sea. The salmon, I thought, were the ones to make it clear that this land is also the shore of the sea. They are. The process of assembling evidence for a book of united science and literature about place has given me an unexpected gift. Now I see the story. It is made out of water and light.

Water and the Sun, five billion years on.

Photography works like photosynthesis, carrying energy from one side of a barrier to another, in this case from the moment of observation to the moment of reading. Like photosynthesis, it moves energy, and stores it. That is the story of water in this world, as well.

Here is the first principle of earth writing, which I have drawn from this experience: if you start from the building blocks of the earth, you will find the earth they have built. If you start from a photograph — an image of light and of a human — and tell its story, you will tell a story that is an image of light. The human you will tell will be light as well, even when that light appears dimmed by fog and seemingly without a human in sight:

Icelandic Sheep in the Rain, Seyδisfjördur

Dim or strong, the spiritual energy of light is not diminished. Photographs are spiritual records. They create representations of both the world and a human state of mind — especially those points at which they are the same thing.

The writing of the future is writing that will either accommodate the earth within its processes or continue to turn from her. Telling this story in mixed words and light holds some hope for the path of the earth in this time of environmental peril. Perhaps we could call this approach logosynthesis. At any rate, writers have turned from her from too long. It is time to go home. That’s why I’m in Iceland this spring.

Next: pictures from the north.

Principles of Innovative Water Capture Technology

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

To harvest water from the air, turn two dimensions into three…

Cedar Fence, Enhanced by Lichen

Efficiently harvesting snow and absorbing it for later use.

If you like, though, you can also turn three dimensions into two, like this …

Anti-Deer Wrap Collecting Snow

This is a technology existing in potential only. Currently, the snow is being lost.

Here is another grid that goes a little further, and begins to turn the two dimensions into one …

Anti Critter Fence

Part of a subdivision’s green plan, efficiently gathering snow and channelling it for harvest … which is currently not being done.

Here’s another technology in potential that turns three dimensions into two, and then into one …

Just Another Rock Pile? Hardly

One dimensional cheatgrass, growing from a two-dimensional soil surface, watered by a three dimensional scree slope. Think of it as a channelled form of evaporation, that captures carbon as it rises into the air.

Here’s a technology that transforms one dimensional space into three, and then back again…

Sagebrush in the Snow

One dimensional snow, blowing horizontally, is gathered by the screen of a sagebrush and transformed into three dimensional clots of snow, each big enough to form one water drop when the sun comes out. Each one is now big enough to use water tension to avoid evaporation, and runs down the one dimensional stem to the two dimensional soil when the wind shakes the branches.

Here is a variation on the theme that combines several of these technologies into one structure…

Young Ponderosa Pine Sifting Snow Out of the Air

Photosynthesis takes place at the boundary between atoms, forcing them to transfer electrons across a membrane, in the same way our lungs breathe by equalizing pressure between negative and positive oxygen states across a thin membrane. Here the boundary membrane is dimensional, but the principle still holds: energy transfer takes place on boundaries. Where boundaries are created between dimensions, energy can be concentrated, for use. Here is what is currently being done with this energy, using a technology trapped in infancy…

Snow Going Down the Drain

There isn’t even a generator here to create electricity. There is nothing. An expensive snow gathering mechanism has been created, but not to gather and concentrate energy — only to discard it.

These drains are a hundred metres apart. Each one will power a lightbulb. If that’s what we want to do. As for the rest of what is happening on the hill around this road, well … our future is there, as easy to grasp as this …

Where the Drains Go, Vernon Creek Estuary, Okanagan Lake

Humans have successfully turned a complex system into an abstraction: potential water. The gulls are individualizing it and making use of it along the way, before breaking up for their summer.

We can learn from gulls.

Grass, Desertification, Allan Savary and Carbon Storage

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

Allan Savory is brilliant. He talks about grass. Believe every word he says, but if you live in Western North America don’t believe a word of it.

Source

If you would like to see Savary on Ted Talks (It’s worth it. He speaks well and from a deep base of knowledge), here you go, just to whet your whistle. Below this video, I will explain why, for the critical western grasslands in which I live his message is both dangerous and wrong. Here you go:

Sav0ry’s talk is based on two assumptions. They’re not unreasonable assumptions, but they’re assumptions nonetheless. The first is that grasses form sods. They do, but not here in the west. Here they form bunches. That is a huge difference. The second is that apex predators of grasses are large ruminants, like cattle, and their predators are lions and wolves and such things. Again, that’s great. It works on the Canadian prairies. It doesn’t work in the west. Here, apex predators of grasses do this kind of thing:

Logging Pile, Ready for Hauling into Winter Storage

Well, winter came too quickly, I guess, before the work got done.

Some of these apex predators of grasses build cities of crystal under the warm, sunlit snow, with long highways, streets, sleeping areas, waste disposal grounds, and so forth. Others just go underground and do the carbon sequestration and organic decomposition work that Savary applauds his ruminants for:

Sun Over a Tilled Field, Turtle Mountain

Here’s a closer view of that tillage:

Notice How Tilling and Grass Keep the Sagebrush at Bay

Put cattle on this ground in large numbers and the sagebrush gets way too thick. Soon there is no grass and grazing is a disaster. If you concentrate too many cattle where cattle want to go, you get this:

Cows Love a View!

No grass, though. Just rock. They ate the grass. Note all the sagebrush. That’s there because they ate that grass, too.

Granted, good pasture management would just keep the cows off of hilltops like this. Here’s what a 5-year-old, naturally-seeded rock slope can look like without cows:

Bunchgrass Will Grow Anywhere…

… but cows pull it up by the roots. It doesn’t grow well that way. It does not grow back, in fact. It is, by any measurement, the end.

Now, part of Savory’s argument is that grass does best when grazed quickly by large numbers of large animals, who trample it, urinate on it, defecate on it, and move on. It works excellently on sod-forming grasses. Here, in contrast, is bunchgrass without grazing:

Bunchgrass Hill, Okanagan Landing

No cows required.

In fact, there are large animals that use that slope, but they just use it as a trail area. They don’t like eating grass. Here’s one of them:

Deer Above Okanagan Lake

That’s a not-unmanageable balance of sagebrush and bunchgrass.

Deer eat this stuff:

Wild Cherry, Deer-Chewed

It grows here and there in the grass, in hollows and arroyos. The only thing you have to worry about with deer on the grasslands is that humans don’t get the idea that they like grass and fence them off from lowland shrubs. Deer love to move up and down the slopes with the seasons, to access shrubs as gravity and temperature ripen them at various times. It takes a shrub 10 days to put out a new shoot and many weeks to put out new buds. Deer need to move down the grass to maintain a foraging regime.

What do humans do? they plant lush deer browse and then force the deer onto the grass.

Note the Fence in the Foreground

Ouch. It’s like a supermarket with a locked door.

All that food, and what is a deer left with?

Deer in the Grass

Nothing to eat here. All that happens is that the deer are so concentrated that their sharp hoofs wreck the soil structure.

Deer like to make trails. That’s their thing. When the trails lead nowhere, they make thousands of trails, crisscrossing the whole hillside and eroding it to bits.

Thousands of Deer Trails With Nowhere to Go

It’s like pacing in a cage in a zoo.

There is, however, much truth in what Savory says, as long as we keep in mind two things. First, the apex plant in this landscape is bunchgrass. It is like the canopy of the rain forests on the coast: the structure on which the real, organic life of the place is based.

Rain Forest, Wos, Vancouver Island

The trees are carbon storage towers on which the real life of the place is anchored.

Here’s the real life…

Campbell River Mosses, Campbell River, Vancouver Island

This is where the rainforest is alive. This is where carbon moves.

It’s the same with the bunchgrass. Its dead stalks must not be trampled, because they collect rain and snow to support the plant through drought, prevent the growth of other plants in the intervening space, crowd out sagebrush, and allow for flowering plants, who harvest subsoil water, bloom briefly, then hibernate for most of the year, and keep the whole thing going. Don’t look to the grass for carbon. Look to the microbes in the soil, look to the flowers…

Mariposa Lily, Farwell Canyon

Taking its turn. As flowering plants succeed each other in the spaces between the grass, they support all the insects and birds — and humans — of the grass. Cows eat these things first of all. Then they eat the grass.

Here’s a cow, placed on a recently burnt grassland by a man who should have stayed home and fed it a lettuce…

The Tragedy of Human Arrogance …

… and the fascination with fire. Okanagan Landing

Fire might have been a traditional control for such grasslands, and was used by the Syilx and Secwepemc people for many thousands of years, but it isn’t any more, because with the introduction of cheat grass, and 90 years of a burn ban, the fires burn too hot. Here’s what that grassland looks like now…

Burnt Grassland, The Next Spring

It’s not dead. It’s just that no native plants are thriving here. What is coming back is this:

Cheat Grass

This is no answer. Cattle won’t touch it (it’s sharp), it uses all water, denying it to the natural plants of the hillsides, and it’s a dead carpet by mid-July, creating just the kind of oxidizing, global-warming enhancing mat that Savary warns against.

Savory is right, though. If we support our apex grass predators, in large numbers, the grass will thrive. Really. But it’s not cows. It’s people who live here:

City Alley After The Sunlit Snow Streets Melted Away

Here is one of the apex predators, one of the loggers from early on in this post, in the clutches of its own predator, two days ago on the back side of Turtle Mountain …

Vole, at the End of Its Logging and Tunnelling Days

And here is what the voles can do on the grassland, just like Savory says…

(This is a repost of a post from December, 2011.)

Amazing Vole Gardens

If you’re going to plant a garden, it’s a good idea to dig around and till the soil a bit first. Here’s a meadow vole doing just that, affectionately imaged by the US Forestry Service, and better than I could ever manage with a dog leashed to my arm:

Meadow Vole Coming Up for Air

Meadow voles are the true unintentional gardeners. They find a patch of fine soil, they dig down, build tunnels, snuggle in and keep warm, drag all kinds of plants in to store for the winter, nibble on them, spit out the sharp bits, and, being rodents and not too attentive to detail, forget stuff and drop things, and the result is much like this:

Vole Garden at Season’s End

Most of the vascular plant species of the grasslands are found in gardens like this. Without the voles sorting and concentrating plants, many pockets of deep soil would support a diminished number of species.

I once had a colony of voles that felled my spring wheat, laid the stalks evenly like timber in a log loading yard, then came back in the night and took it all underground. Where the voles haven’t settled and then wandered down to the riparian areas and dragged things back and packed them into their holes, it looks like this instead:

Anything But a Vole Garden

Only a few species brave these dry, shallow soils on their own.

But that’s not the whole story. Let’s look at the location of this vole garden, because that’s part of the story, too. First, downhill, we find a riparian area:

Riparian Area in the Grass

Various vole gardens lie in and above the area of light grass in the upper left of the photograph.

I suspect that the voles are well-enough established that they can feed adequately off of the lush gardens of flowers surrounding their dens, but that they are using these stream beds as gene banks and delicatessens. My evidence? Ah, this, for one:

Mint!

Growing wild on a high grassland slope without water, that isn’t mint’s first choice. I think there’s a vole out there with a sweet tooth who dragged mint from the riparian area on a happy day, and now it has established itself — although not long enough to go to seed just yet.

And, of course, if voles are altering landscapes, fertilizing soil, moving plants around and pushing the limits of where they will or will not establish, it’s not likely that they will go unnoticed for long. And indeed, they aren’t:

Coyote Trail Slipping Down to the Riparian Zone from the Vole Garden

A well-beaten path!

And this guy, too:

Hawk Checking Out the Vole City at Dusk (And Sizing Up the Photographer)

Hey, you never know.

Now take a look at what humans can manage when they look at a grassland slope and consciously and with all good intentions try to duplicate it:

Two Species, One Planned

Because nobody thought of the voles, there’s nothing here but a desert. The deer don’t even eat this stuff.

Voles are moving the water around in intriguing ways. The story doesn’t end here, though.

For sure. Here is a vole garden, sprouting the next spring (from this May 9, 2012 post):

Here it is a few years down the road:

Just like Savory said.

Hug a vole today. Your life depends on it.

The Beauty of Streams

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Harold Rhenisch

Words matter. In fact, words are matter, because they set up the boundaries of human activity. For example, what is this stuff?

They Call it Water

Hmmph.

It’s not water. It’s a stream. Look at how the trees stream in it:

They Call it A Reflection

Hmmpph.

Look at how the sun streams on it:

The Sun Usually Travels at the Speed of Light

But in a stream, it travels at the speed of a duck.

Speaking of cosmic forces, look at how gravity streams in this stuff:

This Stuff is Too Full of Life to Leave to the Hydraulic Engineers

As if life were a generalized principle, such as ‘water’.

Here’s what the hydraulic and civil engineers have managed to make of their invention called water after all this time:

Okanagan Lake in the Spring Time (Okanagan Landing)

You might as well play golf in it, because swimming is not an option. Look at that muck.

Speaking of muck, look at the shoreline…

Kin Beach, Okanagan Lake

Wading with the kids, anyone? (Note: this is not natural muck. This is a physical record, or earth-photograph, of human activity.)

A better question to ask might be: is life gravity, or is it light?

Vernon Creek Mouth, Okanagan Landing

Note the gulls on the estuary. Well, they’re tiny, but if you squint, maybe… can you see them now? Way out there?

Or is water just a stream, a lake, and life?

Sometimes the Old Words are Best

Like… Joy! For starters. Words matter.

Sometimes the old words are the best antidotes to the new ones. Sometimes, words are just not the answer:

Watercolour Painter at Play

(For more on this image, check out my sister blog, witual, by clicking: here.)

For our journey into worldlessness, check out the snow-capped mountains of late winter here:

Okanagan Okanogan

Uniting art and science in the earth.

Category Archives: Water