I had the chance to fast-forward through a documentary that I hope to sit down and view all the way through within the next few days. Owning the Weather, a 2009 film by Robert Greene, looks at the queasy science of geoengineering, in which scientists and charlatans attempt to modify the earth’s weather.
As one cautionary tale the films presents the story of rain-maker Charles Hatfield who was hired by my city of San Diego in 1916 to bring it rain after four years of drought. Hatfield set up his apparatus on the eastern edge of town and got to business seeding clouds. Within a month it had rained 35 inches and 14 people were dead in the ensuing flooding. [ Edit, April 28: This story might well be a case of a charlatan taking advantage of a natural weather occurrence. Whether this sort of weather modification actually makes a difference in practice is in dispute. ]
Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, is interviewed and gets some of the better lines in the film:
“One of the great sadnesses and proofs of the extent to which which we’ve let global warming get completely out of control is [these geoengineering proposals] don’t sound quite as crazy anymore…
“The 20th century taught us a lot of things. And one of them is that scientific hubris can get us in a hell of a lot of trouble. Any sort of solution that we could introduce that was actually going to lower the temperature of the world several degrees—you know, whatever geoengineering solution—is inherently a big scale scary as hell.”
Interestingly much of the film is shot indoors, where there’s human-made weather, or looking out at the world from the climate controlled space of a car interior. All that reinforces one of the film’s points that we’re a culture that has cut ourselves off from what the environment brings us naturally.
I spend four days a week in a large, climate-controlled, open office. Some people are always cold, some always warm. No one can agree on the perfect temperature. Just extrapolate that out onto the entire earth and you can see that coming up with a scheme to modify weather so that everyone is happy is bound to be an impossible task.
What if Siberia decides it wants to grow tropical mangoes and geoengineers a frost-free climate? Or what if Dubai decides they want snow to ski on? What happens to the rest of the world?
Boy was that a shaker… 6.9 on the Richter scale, centered about 120 miles away. The one that devastated Haiti recently at 7.0 was just a tad stronger, but fortunately ours struck in the sparsely populated desert in Northern Baja. [ Edit, 5:12 p.m.: The quake was upgraded to a 7.2. ]
This was just a little over half an hour ago and it brought the neighborhood outdoors. Some people were actually outdoors because they didn’t feel safe inside with the shaking. Others were out to talk to the others. “Did you feel it?” everyone was asking. We all knew the answer but it felt like we needed to be outside to decompress. We were hoping nobody got injured.
I was back in my studio, working on an image in Photoshop. As the shaking got worse I decided it’d be prudent to dive under the desk as my little desktop speakers toppled. When I got up I checked the ugly back-of-the-fireplace wall I’m still trying to decide what to do with. Part of it is unreinforced brick, so a strong local jolt would probably bring part of it down. This shaker was far enough away it didn’t happen. Darn.
Oh we just had a little aftershock, a 5.1, 90 miles away. And yes, the ugly wall is still standing.
On my last little outing to my city’s largest open-space park, before the recent rains, while I wasn’t busy looking at sycamores, I was heading up the trail to Fortuna Peak, one of the highest point in the city limits. At 1291 feet in elevation and with good trails all the way, it’s no serious mountain climb, but the view from the top gives you views from the ocean to the west to the first ranges of real mountains to the east.
Many of the local wild parks have signs warning you about the dangerous fauna in the area—mostly rattlesnakes. Here the sign cautions hikers about the mountain lions that live here on the park’s more than 5000 acres and in the adjacent open space.
I’m used to being the top predator almost wherever I go. Even confronting a sign like this, I still manage to don that cloak of invincibility stitched through years of never confronting anything that might challenge that sense. I’m also a pretty statistics-driven person. I might think about how you’re many times more likely to meet your end by lightening strike on a golf course than hiking through land like this. Many more people die from smoking than they do through mountain lion attack.
For me, knowing that there are mountain lions in the vicinity adds to the adventure. Somehow this park feels more authentic, more alive, more complete because of it.
It brings to mind the only solo backpacking trip I’ve taken through Utah’s Cedar Mesa backcountry. Five minutes after entering the wilderness area I encountered the only human I was to see for the rest of the trip as he was leaving. Ten minutes into the trip I was crossing a stream bed still moist from an afternoon thunderstorm. As I stepped into the sand I noticed one immense, perfect paw print next to my boot. A mountain lion had passed this way in the last few hours. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling a quick stab of fear at that moment. Welcome to the wild.
Maybe that’s a bit too much macho posturing on my part. If I were attacked by one of these cats, the first thing the authorities would do is to go after it. People would demand it. My recklessness would lead to the destruction of one of these elusive creatures. But I’m not a mountain lion’s favorite food, and these signs always seem like a park authority trying to limit their liability. Really, what are the odds of suffering any harm?
The wilds today didn’t offer anything so dramatic as mountain lions. A few other hikers were out, some of them totally fit and practically running, others looking like they were there because of a New Year’s resolution. Almost nothing was in bloom, but white-flowering currant (Ribes indecorum) provided bright accent marks along the trail to the top.
Once on top the view expands all around you. Look north and you see open chaparral and the runways of Miramar Air Station several miles away. Military installations may take up a certain amount of a city’s land, but they often manage to preserve open space in ways that suburban sprawl doesn’t.
Turn a little east and there you begin to see the ranks of foothills leading up to the Cuyamaca and Laguna ranges that divide the county, coastal region on one side, desert on the other. Yerba santa and black sage provide the foreground.
After I returned home from the hike I finally opened up the latest issue of Orion Magazine. One of the pieces, “Spectral Light” by Amy Irvine, describes a city family that has moved into a area in the Southwest as they come to grips with living in an area that is wilder than they ever imagined. Definitely got me thinking. It’s worth picking up the January/February 2010 issue to read it, or you can listen to the author read her piece or download the podcast [ here ].
It must be the season for oddball science studies to be published. The latest one is about the development of a method to let plants send text messages. The idea is that a sensor attached to the plant could let you know when the plant needs something. With technology like this, soon you’ll never need to step into your garden again to check on your plants. Somebody tell me why this is a good idea.
Will it be long before tomato plants have their own Twitter accounts? Actually, the future is already here. And in fact the future happened way back in June of 2008. That was when a tomato plant in Boston began to tweet. (If there are piles of poodles with MySpace and Facebook pages, why shouldn’t a tomato twitter? A tomato plant’s keyboarding skills are probably no worse than a poodle’s, so it shouldn’t require any more assistance from its owner.)
This particular plant’s tweets didn’t last two weeks. It was a stunt of course. But if you were to take the tweets seriously and do a forensic study back through the tweets, it’s pretty clear what killed the plant: overwatering.
I was out picking kale. In one pile I had the leaves for dinner, in the other the older leaves that were going to get recycled. Pretty interesting colors to the leaves, I was thinking… (Color toys below from Colourlovers.)
Along with the flowers, spring brings its share of insects. I could do without the ants that are now beginning to explore the interior of the house, but the sphinx moths that started to appear in huge numbers last week are about as cool as any bug out there.
There are dozens of other sphinx moths, including the adults of the notorious tomato and tobacco hornworms, familiar to almost anyone who’s tried to grow a tomato plant. The caterpillars of the white-lined sphinxes, however, don’t seem to have the reputation for going on the same sort of sustained rampages against our vegetable gardens.
The way these large, muscular insects maneuver and hover over flowers as they feed reminds you of hummingbirds, and in fact they’re also called “hummingbird moths.” As with hummingbirds, they enjoy nectar-rich flowers, such as this Hot Lips sage. You can see these moths feeding during the daylight, but the populations really come out after the sun sets, forming quietly buzzing clouds at dusk or before the sun rises.
In no way do I consider myself an insect photographer. I quickly found out how frustrating it can be to photograph fast-moving moths with a camera that refuses to focus in the dark. These are the only two photos I kept out of a couple dozen tries.
This second image is no stunner, but you can begin to make out the amazing long tongue that the moth uses to lap up the tasty nectar.
If you’re into insect photos done as well as anyone out there can do them, you should take a look at the work of Bob Parks. He was working at San Diego’s Museum of Natural History when I first met him ten or so years ago. I don’t know of anyone as passionate and devoted to bugs and photos of bugs. That passion shows in his technically outstanding and patiently rendered pictures. There’s a nice biographical writeup of him at the SDNHM site.
The bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin (on February 12, 1809) is approaching. How many other people have contributed more to our understanding of natural history? I say, it’s something to celebrate!
Here are some botanical-themed anagrams using the letters of his name. They were generated using the Internet Anagram Server, a totally magnificent way to waste spend your waking hours. (With 7974 anagrams to choose from I’ve probably missed a few other choice ones.)
The first one is so concise and poetic it makes haiku look verbose.
I was heading back to my desk at work on Thursday and noticed a cluster of my coworkers looking out a window. There’s a little access road right outside. Usually it doesn’t have a full-grown eucalyptus tree fallen across it, but this day it did.
I don’t have my camera with me most of the time, but Declan had his. He was part of the volunteer crew who wrestled the tree to the curb, but he also managed take these shots.
Not much later the building’s safety person had issued a warning:
Just a heads-up, literally: high winds are blowing down eucalyptus branches and trees around campus. About an hour ago, an entire tree broke off and fell across the access road… (Very fortunately, no people or vehicles were in its path.) Until the winds die down, please be sure to watch and listen for breaking branches and avoid walking through the eucalyptus groves.
The UCSD campus is home to over 200 thousand of these trees in plantings that date back a hundred years, back to a eucalyptus mania when eucalyptus were planted all over Southern California, including three million just a few miles up the coast in what’s now Rancho Santa Fe.
If you live in this part of the state you’ve probably heard the stories: that the trees are call widowmakers because they drop their branches if you look at them wrong, that they’re just giant non-native weeds that take up valuable space…bad things like that.
I wonder if the bad rap on the first count is entirely deserved. For sure, some eucalyptus are brittle, and there have been three times in the last year alone when I was within fifty feet or thirty seconds of being taken out by falling eucalyptus. But with almost a quarter million of them on campus and millions of them in town it’s inevitable that a few of them keel over or fall apart. Are they that much worse than oaks or other trees that people plant by the millions?
I did a quick and totally informal survey of some headlines, eucalyptus versus oaks. Maybe the eucs are totally bad news. May they’re not that much worse than other species. Whatever the case, they definitely can be gorgeous trees.
Shadows cast over towering eucalyptuses (Eucalypturs kills woman in Old Town San Diego, The San Diego Union-Tribune—January 8, 2003)
Half of the incidents above involved pickup trucks. Weird. Maybe that’s the deadly combination: pickup trucks and large trees. Like mobile homes and tornadoes…
I don’t usually post a pile of recipes here, but Friday night I was faced with a nice bunch of golden beets that needed to be used. I made a loaf with the beet greens and then grated and sauteed the beets with a parsnip.
The mother recipes I began with were out of Jeannette Ferrary’s and Louise Fiszer’s The California-American Cookbook: Innovations on American Regional Dishes. But since I was missing some ingredients and had some others on hand, the final preparations ended pretty different from the originals. Both seemed like good ways to honor ingredients that are now in season.
John usually only grudgingly accepts beets at the table. However, he thought both of these were keepers, so I thought I’d better write them down before I forget what I did.
If this were a proper food blog, I’d have waylaid the plates on the way to the table before serving them. But the food was long gone before I had a chance to think of that. Maybe I should have posted photos of the dirty dishes after all the beet concoctions had been devoured…
Loaf of Beet Greens
Olive oil
Beet greens, tops of 1 large bunch (ca. 3 large beets), including stems, chopped
1/2 cup shredded cheese (I used Trader Joes’ Quattro Formaggi)
1/4 pound good firm tofu, cut in 3/8 inch cubes
salt
pepper
small sprinkling of nutmeg
Preheat oven to 350. Saute beets, onion, garlic and chili in oil until wilted, ca. 5-8 minutes. Salt and pepper to taste. Remove from heat.
Mix eggs, cheese, tofu and nutmeg in bowl, and then stir into beet green mixture.
Pour into greased loaf pan and bake 25 minutes. Allow to set 10 minutes before serving.
Serves 4
Root Vegetables in Tequila Lime Butter
3 tablespoons butter
3 large beets, golden beets preferred, ends removed, peeled and grated
1 medium parsnip, peeled and grated
zest of 1 lime
juice of 1/2 lime
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons tequila
salt
pepper
2 tablespoons minced cilantro to garnish (optional)
In a bowl mix together lime juice, zest and sugar. In a saucepan saute beets in melted butter over high heat for 3 minutes. Add salt and pepper. Add tequila, and then lime mixture, and cook for 3 more minutes. Serve garnished with cilantro.
There are lots of blog design elements, but one of the most important is the main text that people read. Here are a couple attempts at coming up with an online typographic style that looks a little more oldschool, more pre-computer.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
So do they look on the right track?
This is a greatly condensed version of a much more technical post. Click “continue reading” below to see the full version. continue reading »
