I was walking into an office building and noticed the landscaping: concrete, ivy, wood chips, and tidy, evenly-spaced.... hold on a second. I want to say "evenly-spaced flowers" but I'm the kind of guy that would want to drive over there and double-check before writing that they were evenly-spaced. They sure felt like they were evenly-spaced.
So, where was I... Oh yeah, so the landscaping in this interior-building alcove was all about control. The concrete controls the buried earth and prevents anything from growing there and allows dirt and foot traffic to be easily controlled. The ivy is a weedy and invasive plant that controls everything else--nothing else will be able to grow where the ivy is, and the gardener
just needs to keep it trimmed into its own area every week. The wood chips are like the concrete, preventing weeds from sprouting, however they are much more flexible than the concrete which allows for even greater control--allowing one to plant flowers in it, for example. Tidy, evenly-spaced flowers even. Flowers that can be changed out once a month for whatever is currently blooming. Almost like changing a display in a department store window--disposable landscaping.
At the entrance to Helen Putnam Regional Park the next day, I was looking down the street. The open-space park was on one side, and tidy, evenly-spaced pastel-colored stucco residences were on the other. At least they felt evenly-spaced. I noticed the landscaping on the right side: lawn--easy to control if you mow, water, and fertilize it, while it does its job and controls everything else. Neatly-trimmed hedges and shrubbery--again, easy to control if watered and trimmed regularly, and its dense foliage prevents much else from growing underneath. Occasional trees--not evenly-spaced but sparse, allowing some vertical structure but not so dense that shade and leaves would be a problem. Concrete driveways and sidewalks, of course, not to mention the curbs and gutters and asphalt-paved street. The "no parking" signs controlling the vehicles of the non-permit-holding park visitors clearly were an important source of control for the people living here. And the lady across the street behind us was enjoying the gorgeous day by putting out this month's flowers in the wood chips in her front yard. She might even have been spacing them evenly.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the street, beyond the fence--the fence is necessary, you see, to keep the park visitors from running straight up the hill from their cars without going over to the paved entrance path--beyond the fence was a grassy oak-studded hillside. Wildness lives here. Kept in its place, of course. The park's managers engage in control just as carefully as the residents across the street. Vegetation and recreation management. Almost all the grass is probably non-native, introduced hundreds of years ago (by accident? Or an act of control?) by Spanish and Russian invaders. The introduced grasses smother and control the native herbaceous vegetation. Wildfire control is a huge industry that has a lot more to do with control than anything else. The sign next to the trail map mentioned Oracle Oak, a hybrid between Interior Live Oak and Black Oak--certainly hybrids stymie botanists' attempts to control plant names and control the definition of a species.
Elsewhere, flood control and erosion control projects are erroneously called "restoration" projects in order to sell the control of streams and rivers to the public.
Everyone has things they want to control. Republicans want to control women's bodies. Is this really surprising? It shouldn't be--Republicans always seem to be getting caught with the strangest fetishes. Perhaps they long for the days when they controlled their wives and daughters and now hope that the government can do it for them. Or maybe that issue is more like a pawn in a political chess game, where control of the chess board is obtained by frequent and aggressive attacks on one's opponent. If you put someone in check often enough, they are always reacting and don't have a chance to mount a counter-offensive.
We control things and outcomes that we believe to be important.
Parents control their children. This morning I was watching parents walk their children to school from the crowded parking lot, holding hands, minutes after the line of cars turned up the school road. My sister and I walked 6 blocks to school without our parents, and by ourselves sometimes when one of us was sick. I wonder how different a person I would be if I never had that daily time alone and away from my parents--what if they had held my hand every day on the way to and from school? I probably only was wondering this because I listened to this episode of On Point last night about how differently French parents raise their children.
It seems like wealthy people and wealthy countries--those with greater capacity to control and much more to lose if control is lost--engage in control more than those less well-off. Maybe that is why the wealthy, motivated by greed, are more likely to cheat. Is it any wonder that the U.S. acts like it is above international law? This article also explains why there are so many cheaters on Wall Street. Corporate interests need to control our government because it gains them so much and they have so much to lose if they don't. I do think that this L.A. Times article gets the motive wrong--I think the value of $10 is less to a wealthy person than a poorer person, and since they place less value on it, they don't realize the impact of stealing it as much as a poorer person does. If you live in a forest you will place a lower value on wood than if you live in a prairie, and you might not think it so wrong to "borrow" some wood from the wood pile of a prairie home.
Which gets back to control. You are going to try harder to control scarce resources than abundant ones. In aboriginal times, people were controlling important resources. It is no different today. We need control over the sources of our food, water, energy, and other raw materials. We need to control threats to those resources such as pollution, waste, and unreasonable or inefficient use. It makes sense to spend more time controlling that which is valuable or scarce.
The thing is, wildness is now scarce and valuable. But you can't control wildness, any more than Republicans can control someone else's body (I recently read that the abortion rate is higher in countries where it is illegal--a fact which shows that their efforts are more about control than about decreasing the abortion rate). You may like to think you can, but you can't. If you want to restore wildness, you need to decrease control. You need to restore natural processes. If you want it to happen quickly and there are specific values you want to manage for (it is hard to let go), heavy-handed control may be necessary for a time, until invasive species are eradicated and human-made structures are removed. But once the disturbances are removed, and the impacts from decades of control are repaired, and the natural processes are set in motion, we need to get out of the way. As much as possible. Which is a different sort of control--self control.
Some things can't be restored. Climate change and invasive species set ecosystems on new trajectories and in certain situations it could take far too much energy (or too long) to reverse that. If saving an ecosystem or a species means exercising complete control over it, what are we really saving? Is it worth the trouble? Are we just delaying the inevitable, or are we buying time until our efforts will be no longer needed? It makes sense that instead of restoration, we should aim for "realignment," a term Forest Service Scientist Connie Millar uses to describe managing for changed conditions which preclude the return to an earlier state. It asks "what is sustainable given today's conditions?"and heads toward that moving target instead of a fixed condition that existed once in history that may no longer be attainable.
It is important to acknowledge that fire suppression is often the disturbance that needs removing, and flood control is the disturbance that needs to be stopped. For ecosystems adapted to such "disturbances" such as flood and fire, the occurrence of floods and fire is not a disturbance but the control of them is. Restoring their natural recurrence (frequency, timing, magnitude, duration) is the goal.
The best book I've ever read about control is John McPhee's The Control of Nature. I highly recommend it. I firmly believe that there are no natural disasters, only man-made ones, and often they occur where we are trying to push nature's limits the furthest and exert the most control. That book shows the folly of fighting nature. We must work with the forces of nature. Nature is in control and our efforts are puny and temporary in comparison.
We had an earthquake the other night. I love earthquakes and all rare extreme natural events. What better way is there to inspire awe in humans (and to learn about natural processes) than to witness the power of nature. Extreme occurrences that become disasters when people fail to plan for them are not a problem--they are the guide for what to design for. If major floods and hurricanes and tornadoes and droughts and earthquakes and fires and volcanic eruptions and landslides occurred as often as winter storms, adapting and preparing for them would be as easy as putting on a winter coat before going outside. We would be familiar with them because they would happen so often. We would have to be prepared because they would happen several times a year. The only reason disasters happen is because we are not prepared because we forget. "Disasters" or extreme events actually help us prepare for the next one and help limit overdevelopment and overreaching. Extreme events are good for us and connect us to each other and limit our control of the Earth.
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