Hannah Miller
Change agent.
"The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return."
� eden abhez
Diagram
The planks are about 8 to 10 inches wide, the ones that rib the exterior walls of your home in San Francisco, and your neighbor’s, and your entire neighborhood and in fact most of of the homes in this purplely beige light blue Victorian city. Running horizontally, always painted over so perhaps you never really think about them, anonymous as they are under the festoons of fog-resistant pastels.
“Most of these houses are made of redwood,” said the tour guide on Saturday, right off Market Street near where Mint Hill used to be (it’s more of a Mint Bump now, it was downsized.)
Joel Pomerantz pointed at the anonymous planks on a house next to us, and a house across the street and down the block, all over a hundred years old. “This is our forest.”
That’s what San Francisco is. A city made of a felled redwood forest.
What was it like, I wonder? The Bay Area in 1776? Eight-hundred-year old redwoods thundering down the Peninsula in a forest so dark and secretive and primeval and rich that it was easier to sail from San Francisco to the capital Monterey than get lost in the woods on the way.
A time when San Francisco, in its first of countless booms, was growing tenfold in five years, and all one had to was walk a little south of San Bruno, cut down three trees, and you were set; a time that gave Redwood City its name - not, as I had imagined growing up, to honor the redwoods, but because it was the port where you would go to buy them. The lovely people of San Franciscans piling into Muir Woods like a bunch of stoned Eagle Scouts every weekend, how little do we know of the very houses we inhabit: their provenance, the laws of the things, the order that made it so. How intricate this system, of surveys and rights and the land of no basements.
What is a city of no basements? What is a city where no one ever has to go into the basement, where there is nothing in the basement, there is only the undergirding of sand? Where the houses are built to spin?
The redwoods of which they were made survived decades of earthquakes before they were sawn and tamped into the form of a house - tough trees, solemn motherfuckers, disinterested in rain, living to eternity if it weren’t for the forest fires that would rage through, bringing sex and death at once like they were rockstars. And now - being the beautiful, human artifact that is the city of San Francisco. Assuming they don’t mind being a thing made by man. There are certainly worse fates. The city will last a long time, because of them.
The tour I was on was “The Hidden Waterways of San Francisco,” a walking tour of some of the shape of the land and watersheds that existed at the time of the Spaniards plopping down their military and the Mission built, in my tour guide’s phrasing, “to get enough Ohlone slaves to feed the soldiers.” The Mission of our Lady of Sorrows was actually built between two creeks - one named Old Sorrows Creek, running east down 16th Street to the Bay, for the humans to drink from, and the other, Sorrows Creek, running east down 18th Street, for the cattle to drink from. A lot of Old Sorrows drinking still goes on on 16th Street now, but of a different sort.
Both of the creeks dumped into a saltwater lagoon on Folsom Street - fed also by, I discovered, a third creek, underground, that starts on my block of 22nd Street between Valencia and Guerrero - if the map is correct, almost literally under our house! (I close my eyes at night in the kitchen when things are quiet and try to hear it gurgling, just the faintest sound, it is like a ghost river. That is my basement.)
In the city of San Francisco if you find a creek or spring on your property you are required by law to hook it into a pipe and connect it to the sewer system. If you look at the Public Utilities Commission map of the city’s natural waterways it hints at the prior-to-development beachy sandy San Francisco, when the land looked hilly and windy like Marin, with mile-long dunes running east-west off of the Western beach (Haight Street was a giant long dune, running east for miles).
The water makes sense on this map, running down between hills in Noe Valley, pooling in the Marina, cattails sticking up. Water is the ordering principle of the land. It is what chooses the plants, runs the curve for the hills, travels silently in the darkness under the roots and up out through the light catapult of the leaves. It is the language. It is the liquid. It is the Way.
How oblivious have we been, then, to smash a gigantic ceramic plate on top of this expanse of delicately-ordered dunes, so that every rainstorm would plunge its water off the rim in a brutal flush?
The transformation of the natural waterways of San Francisco from their wild state to what exists now has been a reordering, radical and brutish, of ways of water that supported all life to a grotesque steel-and-plastic “system” of pipes hundreds of miles long to bring water predominantly one species and spirit away its filth.
And how much uglier of an order. Industrial, boring, free of grace, ignorant of the need for generosity.
I feel sorry for the rainwater in this city; if it’s not lucky enough to land on a greenroof or one of the new city-encouraged sidewalk swales, it enters a drainpipe, bangs its head against all sorts of awful right angles in these rusty pipes, not being able to spread out, being shoved in all sorts of unnatural directions before being “treated” with some various chemical, then shunted back into someone’s home, loaded up with more chemicals and human feces, and then shunted back to a “treatment plant”.
In attempting to impose our order, we have ruined the most precious order of all. I would hammer through everyone of these impervious surfaces myself, if I could, but I think that would result in sirens, and code violations, and there must be a better way.
Rain softens even concrete, given enough time, and the thing is, whether we humans like it or not - water still orders our world.
Map, San Francisco in 2070, scifi by Burrito Justice:
Mad Urbanism: A science fictional map of San Francisco as an archipelago city
125 thousand years ago, San Francisco was an island. And soon it will be one again, thanks to rising sea levels. Excellent San Francisco blog Burrito Justice has just posted their latest masterpiece —
Listening Tour, Week One
If the San Francisco Bay were your right hand - with the Peninsula and San Francisco sticking up like a thumb and the East Bay the index finger of Hayward, Oakland, and Berkeley, then their meeting point at the south end of the Bay would be the salt marshes, miles and miles of them, that span the Edwards National Wildlife Refuge.
The marshes run a flat, yellow, greenish brown, water and salt and mice and spiny plants and the oddest curviest billed birds, from Newark, in the north, curving south around the muddy arc of the Bay and then reaching north again, almost a third of the way up the Peninsula.
This region is suburban and very developed, with fake adobe condos and tract homes, with upwards-and-onwards glass-and-steel Internet industry office parks with black lots full of SUVs and Priuses both. The wildlife refuge seems like a lazy, dawdling expanse of sky and bay, decadent in its use of space, as if Nature herself, upon being invited to sanctuary, had rolled out as close to the gently flowing water as possible, pinned white egrets in the straw, and given back with joy what the human mind so lacks now, filled as it is with electronic gnats: the sanctuary of the dome, the place where the Bay rests, the invisible majestic life and death of the mud, the long space, the empty space, the drawn out notes. Permeation. Sand. Rock. Clarity. The Clarity. There is only one Clarity. That is what Clarity means.
If you drive down 101 from San Francisco you often get glimpses of the marshes. The Dumbarton Bridge ties the south and north sections of the park together, with a pale and narrow structure, like a gull flying low over the water. Driving into the main marsh, in Newark, the waters of the Bay give way to narrow stone and mud dividers, that curve like snakes, dividing the various marsh segments from the salt ponds that have been operating here for 150 years.
From there, the water eases into mud, then gradually into marsh, with its dappled grasses, very quick mice, occasionally exploding purple sage, and a hill or two. Seen from space, each pond displays a slightly different color, depending on what species of algae are hanging out there in that level of salinity, what wavelengths of light are reflected by their billions of tiny translucent bodies.
On Sunday, when I was there, there were rafts of stormclouds coming from the east and west of us, one of those dramatic atmospheric moments you get on the expanse of the marsh, when there are rolling armies of water in the air, a clear center, a fierce and humorous wind, and mountain peaks for them to burst their bellies on.
“Do you get more storms coming from the Pacific or from inland?” I asked the ranger. He said mostly they come from the West, unless they are northern storms that come down from the Sierras and move west.
“If you see a rainbow in the morning, that means the rain’s coming from the West,” he said. “If you see one in the afternoon, the rain is coming from the East.” You see the sun behind you.
———-
I met David Jay this week. He is one of a small group of exceedingly admirable people who are attempting to democratize the scientific journal system, which is currently how academic careers are made, scientific research is funded, and human knowledge is thus crystallized.
The current journal-based system is full of ridiculous flaws - it’s undemocratic, with all of the problems that go along with that: fear of risk, burping and confused quasi-meritocracy, the eternal foolishness of trend-obsession magnified by the competitiveness and resource-intensiveness of the work. David and his friends will eventually win this one, it’s one more of another of those beautiful Internet inevitabilities where human beings relearn how to collaborate, work in community, and share, but there’s really something so inspiring to me to see it happen in science.
“Scientists have such a strong and deeply felt theory of change that they don’t even really ever verbalize it,” said David. I hadn’t asked him about it, he just said it. ”Their theory of change is there underneath all their work.”
I had not understood this. The conservative nature of the work had obscured this, for me.
“They work for four or five years on something, and most of the time it turns out to be wrong, or (and this is a problem exacerbated by the journal process) a bunch of other labs are doing the exact same thing, and so maybe their work is for nothing,” he said.
“But they do it anyway,” he said. “They say, ‘I just want to make a contribution,’” he said. ”That’s their theory of change. To make a contribution.”
——-
I also met Tamara Diamond, who introduced me to Mahon cheese (AMAZING) and led me down the labrinth of trying to market one particular green product… how to get some real estate in the human brain. (In her case, organic cotton. When and how and where can can one get people to pay attention to organic cotton, or imagine they will make more money by selling it to someone else?)
The number of decisions that we have to make on a daily basis is astonishing - as drivers, walkers, workers, purchasers of things, friends, lovers, readers, shampoo-users, talkers. This is more decision-making than human beings have ever had to make. It’s why we shut down so much. It’s why we like sitcoms.
Sometimes it seems to me that the best thing the environmental movement could ever do would be to sift focus from environmentally friendly consumer activity back to communities, our families, our friends and neighbors. Both of these things have to happen, of course, but in the West particularly there is always the lurking anomie of transience.
I suspect such a value shift would actually result in far more conscientious behavior towards the world of things. In some cases, it seems to have already done so (although I don’t like the prescriptiveness of do-gooder urbanism, which seems to invariably be practiced by white people from the suburbs like me.)
But it just seems like by rebuilding communities (and as wonderful as the Mission is, it is less than it could be) would really result in a behaviorial shift.
We would simply use and buy less, or think seriously about what we were making. That which we did use, we might think naturally more of the consequences of the purchase, for both ourselves and for everything else on this planet, jade plants, amoebae, rats, elephants, everything.
Reverence for life. If we can learn how not to capture shower spiders in a paper cup and take them outside, then there is no such thing as an Iranian who deserves to have a bomb dropped on them. Environmentalism is really at its best when it makes human beings more thoughtful of the impact they are having on others (including trees and people both.) Everyone on the MUNI 22 bus - they are my environment. Human beings are my forest. I would stop and stare at how amazing they are, I really could, if it wouldn’t freak them out. But I don’t want any of them poisoned, no more than I would want that done to trees. And they are certainly more interesting than any crap I could ever waste my life saving up to buy.
"The problem is that there can be no general or official or sectional or national imagination. The chief instrument of economic and political power now is a commodified speech, wholly compatible with the old cliches, that can distinguish neither general from particular nor false from true. Local life is now a wren’s egg brooded by an eagle or buzzard. As Guy Davenport saw, nothing now exists that is so valuable as whatever theoretically might replace it. Every place must anticipate the approach of the bulldozer. No place is free of the threat implied in such phrases as “economic growth,” “job creation,” “natural resources,” “human capital,” “bringing in industry,” even “bringing in culture,” - as if every place is adequately defined as “the environment” and its people as readily replaceable parts of a machine. Devotion to any particular place now carries always the implication of heartbreak."
� Wendell Berry, from “Imagination in Place”
