[ Lost in the Landscape ]

sun and smoke

Here’s a quick invite to any­one in the area to check out my piece in the cur­rent Juried Bien­niel at the William D. Can­non Gallery in Carls­bad. The show runs through March 18.

This is a still from a video work in progress that uses still images that I took star­ing into the sun dur­ing the big Octo­ber, 2003 Cedar Fire that was the largest of sev­eral firestorms that burned through this part of California.

This past Octo­ber we didn’t get the intense dry winds from the desert that often hit that time of year. Instead, we’ve been get­ting those Santa Ana winds now, mak­ing for a warm win­ter, with humid­ity down into the teens or sin­gle digits.

I’ll take a warm win­ter over a hot Octo­ber. But the intense fire weather will be back as sure as this is Cal­i­for­nia. No par­adise is perfect.

February 04 2011 | Categories: art | Tags: Cedar Fire • fire • smoke • sun | 3 Comments »

written with clouds

On Sun­day we were work­ing out­side on a project and hap­pened to look up at the sky. A plane had been sky­writ­ing, spread­ing some adver­tis­ing copy in the sky to the north–some sort of ad for Geico insur­ance, I think. After that text was done, up popped this message:

Here’s the same pic­ture turned upside down if you’re not one of those peo­ple who read books inverted:

“Be fire safe?”

Here in San Diego we often don’t obsess about fire until after the end of sum­mer, when the land around us has gone with­out water for six months and the hot desert winds blow from the east. The end of Octo­ber is clas­sic fire sea­son for us, the time of year when the firestorms of 2003 and 2007 rav­aged this part of the state. But last month’s Santa Bar­bara fire and this lit­tle bit of public-service sky­writ­ing got me think­ing about the place of fire in the local ecosystem.

Three meet­ings ago, the local chap­ter of the Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Soci­ety hosted wild­fire ecol­o­gist Richard Halsey. Direc­tor of the Cal­i­for­nia Chap­ar­ral Insti­tute, Halsey has been work­ing to try edu­cate the pub­lic about new under­stand­ings about fire. In addi­tion to the insti­tute, he’s been a strong voice in the media, and has authored the book, Fire, Chap­ar­ral and Sur­vival in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. (Town Mouse & Coun­try Mouse did a nice post on Fire this month, which included some good quotes from Halsey.)

Any­one who thinks that plant soci­ety meet­ings are slow, drawn out affairs wasn’t at the meet­ing I attended. Halsey and one of the other biol­o­gists invited to speak went mano a mano over some of the ideas that rep­re­sented a break from what is still being taught in schools.

I’m no biol­o­gist, but at least some of Halsey’s points made sense to me. Here’s a short list of some of what he had to say:

• The notion that “chap­ar­ral needs to burn” is a crock of bat guano. Although the ecosys­tem is adapted to com­ing back after a blaze, it doesn’t need fire to thrive.
• When areas burn more fre­quently than the plants liv­ing there are adapted to, how­ever, many orig­i­nal plant species die out and inva­sives begin to move in. Type con­ver­sion of chap­ar­ral into a weedy grass­land of exotic species can begin.
• Exten­sive fire breaks gouged into a nat­ural area are a mag­net for weed species that can take over the ecosys­tem. (See the pre­vi­ous bul­let point.) Of all of these points, the other biol­o­gist made the strongest argu­ment against this posi­tion of Halsey’s, cit­ing a study where areas with aban­doned fire breaks revert almost com­pletely to their pre­vi­ous species after a cer­tain num­ber of years.
• A new study look­ing at ocean sed­i­ments in the Chan­nel Islands shows that large fires have occurred in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, but were sep­a­rated by far greater num­bers of years than we’re see­ing today. Vir­tu­ally all the fires we’re see­ing today have been caused by humans.
• A leg­end of the local Kumeyaay peo­ple men­tions a par­tic­u­larly dev­as­tat­ing fire sev­eral hun­dred years before the arrival of the Span­ish in Cal­i­for­nia and Mex­ico. After the fire, the Kumeyaay had to live in the desert for an entire gen­er­a­tion before the land west of the moun­tains was hab­it­able again.

As recently as 2003–2004, when I was work­ing a pho­tog­ra­phy series on the 2003 Cedar Fire, I put together an artist’s state­ment for that body of work that included the sen­tence, “The land needed to burn, to regen­er­ate.” Halsey has con­vinced me that it’s time for me to rethink that position.

James SOE NYUN. Hill with Wild­flow­ers, Cuya­maca Ran­cho State Park, 6 Months Later, 2004. Chro­mogenic print, 15 x 18 3/4 in.

May 26 2009 | Categories: landscape | Tags: fire • fire ecology | 3 Comments »

santa barbara botanic garden has burned

Here’s an update on con­di­tions, taken from the com­plete press release by the Santa Bar­bara Botanic Garden:

Fire offi­cials accom­pa­nied Botanic Gar­den Pres­i­dent Dr. Edward Schnei­der through the Gar­den, allow­ing him to assess the build­ings and grounds. “The good news is that the Meadow, Dis­cov­ery Gar­den, Tea­house, Desert and most of the Red­wood Exhibits are untouched,” said Dr. Schnei­der. “Unfor­tu­nately, the his­toric Camp­bell Bridge, the beloved Pritch­ett Path, the pop­u­lar Red­wood Tree Ring Exhibit, Oak Wood­land and Porter Path Exhibits were either destroyed or heav­ily dam­aged.” Fur­ther dam­age was also sus­tained in the ripar­ian cor­ri­dor canyon as the fire spread from Tun­nel Road down to Mis­sion Creek.

…Yes­ter­day, the Gar­den con­firmed loss of struc­tures on its grounds. The 1908 Gane House, the pro­posed cen­ter­piece of the Botanic Garden’s build­ing project, the Vital Mis­sion Plan, was destroyed. The Botanic Gar­den had hoped to reha­bil­i­tate the large Craftsman-style home and to seek his­toric land­mark sta­tus for it. Also lost in the fire was a deck over­look­ing Mis­sion Canyon Creek, a lathe house, and the Director’s res­i­dence and garage.

Orig­i­nal post:

I’ve been dis­tressed to read over the last cou­ple days that at least part of Santa Bar­bara Botanic Gar­dens has burned in the Jesusita Fire that’s tear­ing through the com­mu­nity. Has any­one heard any­thing more detailed?

This morning’s Los Ange­les Times described how the garden’s Gane House has burned:

In Mis­sion Canyon, the century-old Gane House at the 78-acre Santa Bar­bara Botanic Gar­den was engulfed in flames, leav­ing lit­tle more than three brick chim­neys standing.

“We’re very heart­bro­ken,” said Nancy John­son, the garden’s vice pres­i­dent of mar­ket­ing and gov­ern­ment rela­tions. “We were hop­ing to restore it to its grandeur.”

Lost inside were all the gar­den­ing tools, hor­ti­cul­tural mate­ri­als, the metal shop that made tags to iden­tify plants, the over­stock of books pub­lished by the gar­den, and the office con­tents and com­put­ers of the head gar­dener and facil­i­ties main­te­nance man, John­son said. Bio­fuel gar­den­ing truck parked out­side also appear to have been destroyed.

And yesterday’s Sil­i­con Val­ley Mer­cury News ran a news wire story that mentioned:

[Carol] Ostroff said she evac­u­ated Tues­day and stayed with friends nearby until they too had to evac­u­ate on Wednesday.

“The wind kicked up, and we watched this firestorm on the hill,” Ostroff said.

Ostroff, who along with her hus­band acts as care­taker for the Santa Bar­bara Botanic Gar­den, sells tinc­tures and herbal wreaths from her home gar­den at the local farmer’s market.

“My gar­den is my life,” she said. “If I lose my gar­den I’m out of a job. My husband’s out of a job too.”

The SBBG has been an impor­tant force in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia native plant hor­ti­cul­ture, hav­ing intro­duced many inter­est­ing addi­tions that are a part of many gar­dens. My gar­den alone has Salvia leu­co­phylla ‘Amethyst Bluff,’ Galvezia juncea ‘Gran Canon,’ and Artemisia cal­i­for­nica ‘Canyon Gray.’ I hate to see such a resource turned to ashes.

May 08 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: fire • Santa Barbara Botanic Garden | 3 Comments »

gbbd: the garden and beyond

It’s spring, all right. The gar­den con­tin­ues to bloom away man­i­cally, but the out­door places around town have been no slouch, either, when it comes to flowers.

This Gar­den Blogger’s Bloom Day, hosted by May Dreams Gar­dens, fea­tures a gallery of some blooms from the gar­den mixed in with blooms from Mis­sion Trails Regional Park in San Diego.

In the top photo from Mis­sion Trails you can see that the yellow-flowered deer­weed, Lotus sco­par­ius, has col­o­nized many of the sunny areas that burned four and a half years ago. As the land­scape recov­ers, other plants will come in and stake their claims. The sec­ond image from near the top of For­tuna Peak shows that other areas are also recov­er­ing from the fires, though slower than far­ther downslope.

You can hover over each image below for its name, or click it to see a larger photo. While you can prob­a­bly tell what’s a wild plant and what’s in the gar­den, there’s an answer key at the end if you’re into quizzing your­self. (A few of thee are tricky in that they’re local native plants that have been incor­po­rated into the gar­den.)

Answers:
Wild, gar­den, gar­den;
gar­den, wild, wild;
wild, gar­den wild;
gar­den, gar­den, gar­den;
gar­den, wild, gar­den;
wild, gar­den, wild;
wild, wild, wild.

April 15 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape | Tags: Add new tag • fire • fire ecology • flowers • gbbd • in bloom • Mission Trails Regional Park | 5 Comments »

the yellowstone fires, 20 years later

It seems a lot of my recent posts have had some­thing to do with fire. Liv­ing in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia dur­ing the fall, fire is a con­stant worry at the edges of the city. This year saw some bad exam­ples, but we’ve got our fin­gers crossed that the worst is over.

When I vis­ited Yel­low­stone last spring, reminders of the mas­sive 1988 fires were every­where, with fire-downed trees still to be seen through­out the park. But there were also signs of recov­ery every place you looked. Some places the fire looked like a dis­tant mem­ory, other places it looked like only last month, a reminder that in a land dom­i­nated by cold and snow much of the year, recov­ery can come slowly.

I took a lot of tourist pic­tures that trip. I also turned the cam­era on some of the acres in the park where the burns were still a strong pres­ence. Four of the images will be part of the upcom­ing 2009 Juried Bien­nial Exhi­bi­tion at the William D. Can­non Art Gallery in Carls­bad, in North-County San Diego. The jurors of this year’s show, Stephen Hep­worth, Cura­tor of the Uni­ver­sity Art Gallery at UCSD, and Sue Green­wood, Direc­tor of Green­wood Fine Art in Laguna Beach, selected forty-eight works by twenty-seven artists.

The pub­lic open­ing is Decem­ber 13, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., and the show runs through February7 of next year. It’s a city-run space and is attached to the pub­lic library. Admis­sion is free. Stop by if you’re in the neighborhood!

Here are a cou­ple of the images that will be in the show. The first, “Burned Slope II,” fea­tures a site in the north of the park where recov­ery seemed just about the slowest.

A pho­to­graph can describe things clearly. You can see the slow decay of the wood, along with sub­tle signs of regeneration.

But I’m also inter­ested in a pho­to­graph that can reach for things that aren’t at all about quan­ti­fy­ing the world. I like how the slope here gives you a sense of simul­ta­ne­ously look­ing down on the scene as well as out across it, mak­ing the space–and maybe even time–seem ambigu­ous, like a puz­zle need­ing to be worked out slowly.

The sec­ond, “Hoop on Burned Tree,” was shot behind the employee hous­ing near Tower Falls. The scene made me laugh. When life give you fire and burned trees, well, why not take advan­tage of a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion and make your­self a bas­ket­ball court next to a scorched pine?

December 04 2008 | Categories: art • landscape • photography • places | Tags: basketball • Carlsbad • fire • William D. Cannon Art Gallery • Yellowstone National Park | 4 Comments »

landscaping against fire

Linda lives in inland San Diego, although nowhere near the extreme east­ern fron­tiers of the county. Still, dur­ing the Octo­ber 2007 wild­fires, she was evac­u­ated for sev­eral days when the flames came close to her home.

Recently a book­let showed up at her house. Enti­tled Will You be Pre­pared for the Next Wild­fire?, it listed the steps you can fol­low to make your home more fire-resistant. Inter­est­ingly more than half of the pam­phlet was ded­i­cated to landscaping.

One of the main ideas the pub­li­ca­tion lays out is to develop “defen­si­ble space” around your house. The photo below shows the basic con­cept bet­ter than any words could [ source ].

The other land­scap­ing tips deal with select­ing the best plants to have near your house. Two pages of fire-resistant trees, shrubs, ground­cov­ers, vines and peren­ni­als round out the recommendations.

Being the plant expert that I am (yeah right…) I did notice a cou­ple of lit­tle proof­read­ing glitches with the pam­phlet. There’s a photo of some­thing labeled “coy­ote bush,” but the plant is some­thing alto­gether dif­fer­ent. Also, there’s a typo in the plant lists that calls some­thing a “bush ger­i­man­der” instead of a “bush ger­man­der.” (It seems to be a typo some­how befit­ting a book­let pro­duced by a polit­i­cal entity: a plant that’s the lin­guis­tic hybrid of a ger­man­der and a polit­i­cal dis­trict drawn by ger­ry­man­der!) But those are minor quibbles.

Check out all the good infor­ma­tion at the San Diego County’s Office of Emer­gency Ser­vices. It might help you save your house next fire season.

November 13 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: defensible space • fire • fire-resistant landscaping | No Comments »

after the fires

After San Diego County’s fires of 2003 moved into new areas, I was one of those tacky dis­as­ter tourists who went into some of the recently reopened areas. It’s inter­est­ing what moti­vates peo­ple to do things of the sort. An acquain­tance with doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­pher aspi­ra­tions scours the world for dis­as­ter, and has gone to wit­ness famine in Africa and Asia, and was in Banda Ache in 2005 not long after the pre­vi­ous December’s tsunami. What can you wit­ness in times like that?

I wasn’t look­ing for human suf­fer­ing. Also, I had no inter­est in the mawk­ish Hallmark-card exploita­tion of some weird sort of notion of human dig­nity that emerges in des­per­ate times. I was pri­mar­ily inter­ested in the fires as one whop­ping dose of real­ity of the power of nature, just as I have this fas­ci­na­tion of vol­ca­noes and earth­quakes, not for the ter­rors they can unleash on us humans, but more for a much-needed dose of human humil­ity. I think that we humans are blis­ter­ingly arro­gant as a species and need to be rat­tled into con­scious­ness about our place in the universe.

You can make some of these dis­cov­er­ies while gar­den­ing, observ­ing the world and uncov­er­ing your place in it. But I guess I’m dense enough that it takes some­thing cat­a­clysmic to give me the rest of the story. Dunno…maybe it’s the same kind of need that dri­ves peo­ple to moun­tain climb­ing or NASCAR…

So there I went, out into the burn areas, mostly to the back­coun­try, but also around my neigh­bor­hood. Look­ing back at the pho­tos I took I think that I was look­ing to find some sort of order or beauty out of the mess. Was it look­ing for some sort of reas­sur­ance? Or maybe some­thing approach­ing accep­tance? Mak­ing peace with the real­i­ties of the world?

La Jolla Panorama with Smoke I, Day 3, 2003.

Here’s the left half of a dip­tych taken on the third day of the fires from the top of Mount Soledad, a view­point that on other days gives you a view of the ocean, down­town San Diego and the moun­tains to the east. This was day three of the fires, with the flames now prob­a­bly no closer than ten miles away. But that day most of what you saw was the air, thick with smoke and the color of burnt caramel.

“Tim Loves Julia” Rock, near El Cap­i­tan Reser­voir, Day 3, 2003.

Taken the same day as the pre­vi­ous image, this was out just a cou­ple miles from where the Cedar Fire began. With the winds blow­ing east-to-west, the air was sur­pris­ingly clear imme­di­ately over­head but the smell of ash was every­where. This boul­der with the graf­fiti was prob­a­bly about as close as I got to look­ing at that human dig­nity thing. I won­der if Tim and Julia are still together. Or was this just some drunken mid­night out­ing with a six­pack and a can of spraypaint?

My first tourist pic­tures turned into a small pho­to­graphic series, The Fire Works. Over the course of sev­eral months I vis­ited many areas that had burned and looked for the signs of change, restora­tion or recovery.

Mis­sion Trails Park II, 3 Months Later, 2004.

After three months and a few rains things were still black­ened, but the green was start­ing to come back.

Mis­sion Trails Park VI, 3 Months Later, 2004.

Taken the same after­noon as the pre­vi­ous image, the signs of recov­ery are a lit­tle more sub­tle in this pic­ture. Imme­di­ately after the fire the rocks were black. Now they’re washed white. In a large print of this image you can see lit­tle seedlings return­ing to the park.

Rock and Branches, Cuya­maca Ran­cho State Park, 6 Months Later, 2004.

The Cuya­maca Moun­tains expe­ri­enced some of the most intense burn­ing. But add some time, sun­light and water and you end up with one of the more spec­tac­u­lar spring wild­flower blooms I’d seen in a few years.

Hill with Wild­flow­ers, Cuya­maca Ran­cho State Park, 6 Months Later, 2004.

…And this is one of the last images I took in the series, the fol­low­ing May. With the major­ity of the pines in the Cuya­maca Ran­cho State Park wiped out, restora­tion was far from com­plete. It may take longer than my life­time, and things will never be exactly as they were. But nature is doing what it does and doing it beautifully.

This project was a real eye-opener for me. You can read about the trans­for­ma­tions that occur after a fire and appre­ci­ate the facts. Still, there’s noth­ing like get­ting out into the areas that were affected to give me a much deeper appre­ci­a­tion of the changes.

After 2007’s fires, how­ever, after watch­ing too many days of dis­as­ter cov­er­age on tele­vi­sion, I had no incli­na­tion what­so­ever to repeat my post-fire sur­veys of 2003 and 2004. I stayed in the house, turned on the HEPA air fil­ter I’d bought after the ear­lier fires, and tried my best not to let the hor­rific news cov­er­age get to me. Some­times you feel that a human being has seen enough.

Speak­ing of things that humans prob­a­bly shouldn’t have to ever live through, let me plug a book by one of my recent cowork­ers, Paul Har­ris, who’s recently pub­lished Diary From The Dome: Reflec­tions on Fear and Priv­i­lege Dur­ing Kat­rina.

Paul went as tourist to New Orleans, look­ing to spend a laid-back week tak­ing in what the South­ern city had to offer. Instead he ended up in the mid­dle of Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina, evac­u­ated to the Super­dome along with thou­sands of the city’s res­i­dents who couldn’t find a way out of town. You’ve heard or read of some of what hap­pened there, but Paul gives an espe­cially har­row­ing account of the the expe­ri­ence. He saw and lived through things none of the press reported, includ­ing how being a white tourist gave you priv­i­leges that none of the major­ity black res­i­dents were offered. This book will open your eyes.

October 19 2008 | Categories: art • landscape • photography • places | Tags: Cedar Fire • fire • fire ecology • Hurricane Katrina • Paul Harris | 1 Comment »

fire season

I’ve been think­ing a lot about fire lately. I blogged a few days ago about start­ing an infor­mal exper­i­ment to look at ways to start seeds that require fire to ger­mi­nate. And lately we’ve been expe­ri­enc­ing the sort of dan­ger­ous fire con­di­tions that you only see in the autumn here in South­ern California.

When the dry Santa Ana winds scour west­ward from the desert an hour to the east, they can bring to Octo­ber some of the warmest days of the year. At the same time, as these dry, gale-force winds blow west­ward through the moun­tain passes, they breed dan­ger­ous con­di­tions for major wildfires.

Mon­day night, as I was leav­ing the office, some­one stopped me on the way out. “Have you heard about the fires?” he asked. The Los Ange­les area had been see­ing fires over the last cou­ple of days and now Camp Pendle­ton, forty miles to the north, was burn­ing. Peo­ple were being evac­u­ated from their homes.

Oh no. Here we go again, I thought. For­tu­nately, sev­eral days later, those fires all seem to be doused or at least on the way to con­tain­ment. But the fire weather is still with us.

It was almost a year ago when John and I were up on the roof deck, hav­ing an early din­ner, enjoy­ing a freak­ishly warm Octo­ber after­noon. Look­ing directly west the hori­zon was clear, but to both the north and south there were dark streaks of smoke. Dri­ven by the same desert winds that had made that after­noon so remark­ably warm, the smoke rose high into the atmos­phere from sources far­ther inland and streaked out over the ocean. Things were burn­ing, and it was look­ing bad.

Above: An enhanced NASA image of the San Diego County fires that first after­noon, Octo­ber 22, 2007 [ source ]

One of John’s cowork­ers lost his home that first night of the fire. Over the next sev­eral days, hun­dreds of thou­sands of oth­ers were tem­porar­ily home­less when they were ordered to leave their homes in the largest evac­u­a­tion in Cal­i­for­nia his­tory. In the final tally, a quar­ter of the county’s land had burned and at least peo­ple seven had lost their lives, includ­ing sev­eral migrant work­ers who were trav­el­ing on foot, north to their jobs. (Ear­lier this year pro­ducer Laura Cas­taneda put out a doc­u­men­tary, The Devil’s Breath, on some of their sto­ries. When the his­tory of the migrant work­ers is writ­ten, it’ll be full of the sort of heroic fig­ures and try­ing cir­cum­stances that pop­u­late the Amer­i­can nar­ra­tive of the set­tle­ment of the “wild west.” )

Last year’s fires had fol­lowed a set of even more destruc­tive ones in 2003. Those came closer to my house than last year’s flames–within maybe three miles–and that first morn­ing saw a hot rain of ash and even embers.

The pho­to­jour­nal­ists were rush­ing to the fire lines, try­ing to get a shot of the dev­as­ta­tion. But it was the vision of the sun veiled in smoke drew out my cam­era that first morn­ing. There’s a color to the light that comes with fire, a per­va­sive and almost sticky yellow-brown that reminds you of sun­set col­ors even in the mid­dle of the day, but the brown­ing effect is so pro­found that every­thing looks wrong. If I didn’t tell you that the images were of smoke you might con­sider the images beau­ti­fully atmos­pheric. I guess they are, but there’s that scary coun­ter­bal­anc­ing of some­thing being out of con­trol and dangerous.

(That vibra­tion of beauty and ter­ror goes straight back to eighteenth-century aes­thet­ics, and to early writ­ings of peo­ple like Joseph Addi­son, who remarked that “The Alps fill the mind with an agree­able kind of hor­ror.” This is rich ground that been mined by a num­ber of artists for the last quarter-millennium. In the pho­tog­ra­phy world, John Pfahl and Richard Mis­rach are just a cou­ple of those who have pro­duced sig­nif­i­cant bod­ies of work draw­ing on this con­flicted Roman­tic notion of the sub­lime. And as long as peo­ple have this notion of awe and pow­er­less­ness, there will be cen­turies more of art draw­ing from it.)

[ next, after the fires… ]

October 18 2008 | Categories: art • landscape • photography • rambles | Tags: 2003 • Cedar Fire • fire • Santa Ana winds | 3 Comments »