Wyzga On Words

Green Reduces Stress.

 

Environmental psychology researches the value of open space on humans.  Apparently, a stroll in the out-of-doors or just looking at green spaces helps reduce our stress level as well as supplying  much-needed time for exercise, solitude, contemplation, reflection, perspective, a break from the daily, noise-driven routine, and the like.

Check out GardenVisit.com to get away for a week or a moment.

And summer being the time of fresh produce plenty, visit pick-your-own places at Pick-Your-Own.org. As children and gardeners can attest, there's a special joy in getting our hands dirty.

Earth Music - The Animal Orchestra.

Last week at Juniper Moon Farm I was trying to sleep in the yurt out in the pasture after a long day pitching manure, scouring a chicken coop, mending fences, gathering eggs, and a plethora of other truly wonderful farm chores that invigorate the heart and spirit as well as muscles you did not know you had.

Overhead the moon was full.  Outside the temperature had dropped to a frosty 40+.  Somewhere in the woods an owl hooted, a whippoorwill "sang", and a  mocking bird made a mockery of the still country night.

Unbeknownst to me, this was "Earth Music" as celebrated in Bernie Krause's book, "The Great Animal Orchestra."

Click here to read a thoughtful review of Krause's book as written for the NYTimes Book Review by Jeremy Denk, who seems to love the music of the outdoor wild places nearly as much as Krause.  Excerpt.

"Bernie Krause’s new book, “The Great Animal Orchestra,” is not about this beastly symphony; it is about the symphony of beasts that surrounds us, a vast orchestra in the process of being silenced, perhaps even more endangered than our human animal orchestras.

Krause’s term for this symphony is “biophony”: the sound of all living organisms except us. He is a man with a calling. After a stint with the Weavers (he replaced Pete Seeger), a foray into electronic music and some not-too-surprising drug use, by “Hardyesque chance” he ended up in the Muir Woods recording nature sounds for an album. Now he is high on hippo grunts and insect drones, having spent decades recording and archiving wild soundscapes. He chronicles his life choices and epiphanies, guides us through nature’s sonic treasures, makes interesting assertions about the musicianship of animals (human and nonhuman), and begs us to pay attention.

In Krause’s world, everything is seen through the lens of sound. He even maps by ear. In one fascinating passage, he surveys a Costa Rican jungle, dispensing with the “100-meter square grids,” which anyway “nonhuman animals don’t understand.” He ends up with “amoebalike shapes, each an acoustic region that, while mutable, would tend to remain stable within a limited area over time.” Yes, I thought, as irritable honks floated up Broadway and through the window of my apartment: we all live on mutating maps, in the land of the audible, whether we like it or not. Krause offers endless odes to sonic nuances: the timbres of waves crashing on the world’s beaches, the echo effects brought on by dew, the acoustics of night and day, the dry, hot rattles of deserts, the way baboons bounce their voices off granite outcroppings, to send them deep into the forest. But at the same time that he wants us to feel sound’s sensual pleasure, he wants us to respect it as an indispensable tool of knowledge. Krause records a forest, before and after environmentally sensitive, “selective” logging. Though the forest appears mostly unchanged to the eye, the soundscape is devastated; the true damage can only be heard.

Krause spends many pages challenging the human monopoly on musicianship. He asserts that in the wild, animals vocalize with a musicianly ear to the full score of the ecosystem — a mix of competition and cooperation. Since animals depend on being heard for various reasons (mating, predation, warning, play), they are forced to seek distinct niches: “Each resident species acquires its own preferred sonic bandwidth — to blend or contrast — much in the way that violins, woodwinds, trumpets and percussion instruments stake out acoustic territory in an orchestral arrangement.”

I did sleep well that night and every night thereafter - even the one where I was on a two-hour watch: roll out from under the woolen blankets, pull on my BOGS, trek across the pasture flashlight in hand, and squint out across the darkened fields to make sure none of the pregnant ewes were in labor.  It's all a matter of listening to the music of the earth.

 

Nothing Is More Important Than This Moment.

On the work station of a hair stylist I used to frequent was a framed photograph of himself and his new bride running through the waves of the Pacific Ocean just moments after they said "I do!" to each other.  While the photograph was lovely as only a wedding moment can be, what was more memorable were the words engraved around the frame: "Nothing is more important than this moment." 

Today I see another hair stylist.  The first one relocated after his marriage dissolved as quickly as the sand under the waves he and his bride splashed in.  Who knows what happened to the photograph in the frame.

These many years later I recall the inscription when a sister interrupts me in the middle of work; one of the Feline Four brings a pipe cleaner "mouse" she just caught for praise; the front door bell rings to announce a visit from the local Jehovah's Witness evangelizers; the camellia blooms but I'm in a hurry; a Downey Woodpecker taps outside my window but I figure it will come back another day - when I have time to listen; the phone rings with a solicitation for some charity; and so on.

We're all busier it seems than we have ever been before.  We are the generation of multi-tasking multi-taskers.  Just watch what folks are doing as they drive their cars on the freeway. 

I'm not perfect.  I don't have all the answers.  I don't even have all the questions.  The best I can do is remember to pay attention because "Nothing is more important than this moment."

 

The Sounds Of Silence Mean More To Us Than We Know.

It's been a dog's age since I've gone cross country skiing in a snowy woods. The silence was so profound you could hear a snowflake fall and meet up with another. Even now I can summon the peace and tranquility of that memory in my mind.  It takes effort to separate myself from the hum of civilization.

More and more we are assaulted by noise.  We may think we are doing a good job of blocking it out or coping or managing.  But the truth of it is we may not really appreciate what good the sounds of silence do for our souls; especially those found in nature.

I am encouraged by the work of folks like Davyd Betchkal, Denali Par and National Preserve's physical-science technician as he locates and captures "nature's soft voice before human sounds completely drown it out."  Kim Tingley reporting for the NYTimes trekked along with Betchkal and has a remarkable story to tell in "Whisper of The Wild."

What compositions would nature play without us?  Excerpt.

"An undeveloped swath of land nearly the size of Vermont, Denali should be a haven for natural sound. Enormous stretches of wild country abut the park in every direction save east, where Route 3 connects Fairbanks to Anchorage. One dead-end and mostly unpaved road penetrates the park itself. Yet since 2006, when scientists at Denali began a decade-long effort to collect a month’s worth of acoustic data from more than 60 sites across the park — including a 14,000-foot-high spot on Mount McKinley — Betchkal and his colleagues have recorded only 36 complete days in which the sounds of an internal combustion engine of some sort were absent. Planes are the most common source. Once, in the course of 24 hours, a single recording station captured the buzzing of 78 low-altitude props — the kind used for sightseeing tours; other areas have logged daily averages as high as one sky- or street-traffic sound every 17 minutes. The loudest stretch of the year is summer, when hundreds of thousands of tourists flock to Denali, embarking on helicopter or fixed-wing rides. Snowmobiles are popular with locals, and noise from the highway, the park road and daily passenger trains can travel for miles. That sort of human din, studies are beginning to suggest, is imperiling habitat — in Denali as well as wilderness areas around the world — as surely as a bulldozer or oil spill. But scientists have so little information about what landscapes should sound like without human interference that trying to correct the problem would be like a surgeon’s wielding a scalpel without knowing the parts of the body, let alone his patient’s symptoms. To restore ecosystems to acoustic health, researchers must determine, to the last raindrop, what compositions nature would play without us." 

More importantly, human chatter is severing the link with nature.  Everything is connected to everything else. Excerpt.

"Indeed, though soundscape ecology has hardly begun, natural soundscapes already face a crisis. Humans have irrevocably altered the acoustics of the entire globe — and our racket continues to spread. Missing or altered voices in a soundscape tend to indicate broader environmental problems. For instance, at least one invasive species, the red-billed leiothrix of East Asia, appears to use its clamorous chatter to drown out the native European blackbird in Northern Italy. Noise can mask mating calls, cause stress and prevent animals from hearing alarms, the stirrings of prey and other useful survival cues. And as climate change prompts a shift in creatures’ migration schedules, circadian rhythms and preferred habitats — reshuffling the where and when of their calls — soundscapes are altered, too. Soundscape ecologists hope they can save some ecosystems, but they also realize they will bear witness to many finales. “There may be some very unique soundscapes around the world that — just through normal human activities — would be lost forever,” Pijanowski says — unless he and colleagues can record them before they disappear. An even more critical task, he thinks, is alerting people to the way “soundscapes provide us with a sense of place” and an emotional bond with the natural world that is unraveling. As children, our grandparents could hope to swim in a lake or lie in a meadow for whole afternoons without hearing a motorboat, car or plane; today the engineless hour is all but extinct, and we’ve grown accustomed to constant, mild auditory intrusions. “Humans are becoming an increasingly more urban species, and so we’re surrounding ourselves with concrete and buildings” and “the low hum of the urban landscape,” Pijanowski says. “We’re kind of severing the acoustic link that humans have with nature.” [Emphasis added.]

Who could ever have imagined that soundscapes are worthy of protection - or would need to be?  But that's what it's come to.  Excerpt.

"Only recently, however, have governments from Japan to the European Union begun to recognize natural sounds as a resource requiring protection. When Woodrow Wilson created the National Park Service in 1916, it was to “conserve the scenery”; not until 2000 did a Park Service director issue systemwide instructions for addressing “soundscape preservation.” In 1986, a midair plane crash above the Grand Canyon National Park — where sightseeing tours had operated virtually unchecked for almost 70 years — prompted Congress to pass the National Parks Overflights Act, requiring the Park Service to work with the Federal Aviation Administration in remedying the “significant adverse effect on the natural quiet” that aircraft there appeared to be having. The act also called for studying the impacts of overflight noise on other parks.

Initial research returned alarming results. In Yosemite, planes were heard 30 to 60 percent of the day. In the Haleakala volcano crater in Maui, 8 to 10 helicopters passed overhead per hour. What’s more, other experiments showed, much as the M.I.T. study did, that noise affected the way visitors saw landscapes: when volunteers viewed photos of natural vistas while listening to helicopters on tape, they rated the scenes less picturesque than they did under quieter conditions. By 2000, the National Park Service had staffed a division to gather data on park soundscapes nationwide and create, with the F.A.A., air-tour management plans at 100-plus locations. More than a decade since — partly because of disagreements between aviation and conservation interests — no such plan is in place, though many parks have begun looking for ways to trim other noise, turning off idling shuttle buses, curbing car traffic and investing in less uproarious maintenance tools. Grand Canyon managers, after nearly 25 years of laboring, last year proposed amendments to the timing and routes of sightseeing flights that would make the park somewhat more serene."

Who lives and who dies can be a matter of who is the loudest.  Excerpt.

"Species can fight for airtime in a limited bandwidth by changing their volume or frequency, or by rescheduling the timing of their calls. But there’s no way animals can alter their ability to listen — for their very survival — if human noise conceals, for example, the twig-snap of a prowler or the skittering of prey. In the United States, where more than 80 percent of land is within two-thirds of a mile of a road, the listening area available to most creatures is rapidly shrinking. Beyond hunting and hiding, even invertebrates use the gabbing of unwitting cohabitants for navigation. Sightless, earless and adrift in the open ocean, coral larvae seek to settle on tropical reefs by swimming toward the throbs of muttering fish and snapping-shrimp claws. Eurasian reed warblers en route to southern Africa at night flutter blind over pine forests, sand dunes and the Baltic Sea until, hundreds of feet below, the cheeping of other warblers signals the presence of sustaining wetlands. If those aural cues disappear, the species that heed them may be floating and flying without a compass." 

I was asked recently, "What can we do to help the honeybee situation?"  I replied, "A hive in every backyard is one grass roots approach that's quick, cheap, easy and is working."

For just a moment, stand in the quietest place you can find and listen.  Maybe all you will hear is the beating of your own heart.  That's critical.  Because if we fail to stop killing the planet, what's the point of anything we are working on, right now?

 

 

Punishing Protest: What Is Happening To Confront Non-Violent Civil Disobedience?

   

For those who are considering taking part in non-violent protest, eschew protest, defend protestors, and all the rest of us who live in these United States, if you missed this eye-opening discussion click on the title following to listen to the audio of the one-hour discussion hosted by ORION Magazine:

Punishing Protest: Patrick Shea and Heidi Boghosian Discuss Law and Civil Disobedience

February 23, 2012

Summary: What is the justice system for? Activists from the Occupy movement to climate justice camps are regularly made examples of by courts while bank and oil company executives avoid prosecution for real crimes. During Orion's latest live web event, Patrick Shea, a lawyer who defended climate justice activist Tim DeChristopher (see "What Love Looks Like" in the January/February 2012 issue of Orion), and Heidi Boghosian, director of the National Lawyers Guild, discussed what activists engaging in nonviolent protest can expect from the justice system.

Winter Is Dark For A Reason.

Winter Is the Best Time

    by David Budbill

Winter is the best time
to find out who you are.

Quiet, contemplation time,
away from the rushing world,

cold time, dark time, holed-up
pulled-in time and space

to see that inner landscape,
that place hidden and within.

"Winter Is the Best Time" by David Budbill, from While We've Still Got Feet. © Copper Canyon Press, 2005.  Other poems by Budbill.

Outside My Winter Window.

The maple standing guard over my backyard is nearing 65 years old. I guess it was planted by some nostalgic East Coaster.  Today the naked branches bear no resemblance to the leafy canopy that will swell to brilliant cooling green all over again in summer.  I believe they will - I know they will.

Through the open window comes a persistent tapping.  Out on a branch is an acrobat of a bird.  I check my Audubon Bird Guide.  It's a Downy Woodpecker.  The sound is like a trill to my ear; the Cornell Lab of Ornithology says different: more like whinnying.  Listen for yourself.

One bird watching.  What a pleasure to get lost in of a Sunday afternoon.

Give Yourself 30 Minutes Of Unplugged Time.

Imagine this scene.

Imagine that you taking out your smart phone and snapping a photo of this scene.

Again.

And again.

And yet again.

Until the sky is black.

What did you see?

Nick Bilton found himself at the Pacific Ocean doing the same thing as he ruefully reports to us in his NYTimes piece, "Disruptions and the iPhone."

Bilton's experience reminds me of a line in a Jimmy Buffet tune about a couple traveling on vacation, "[t]aking pictures just to look at then they finally slow down."  Maybe we're afraid that we'll forget what we see.

What if forgetting is part of the deal and important for our mental health, our imagination, problem-solving, and creativity?  Excerpt.

“Even with something as beautiful as a sunset, forgetting is really important as a mental hygiene,” said Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor of Internet governance at Oxford University and the author of the book “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.”

“That things in our past become rosier over time is incredibly important,” he added. “As we forget, our memories abstract and our brain goes through a cleansing process.” Mr. Mayer-Schönberger said that keeping a perpetual visual diary of everything could slow down our brains’ purging process.

Constantly interacting with our mobile devices has other drawbacks too. There are more pictures in my iPhone of that 45-minute hike at Pacifica than most families would have taken on a two-week vacation before the advent of digital cameras.

As a result, I had no time to daydream on that hike, and daydreams, scientists say, are imperative in solving problems.

Jonah Lehrer, a neuroscientist and the author of the soon-to-be-released book, “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” said in a phone interview that our brains often needed to become inattentive to figure out complex issues. He said his book discussed an area of the brain scientists call “the default network” that was active only when the rest of the brain was inactive — in other words, when we were daydreaming.

Letting the mind wander activates the default network, he said, and allows our brains to solve problems that most likely can’t be solved during a game of Angry Birds.

“Like everyone else, I really can’t imagine life without that little computer in my pocket,” he added. “However, there is an importance to being able to put it aside and let those daydreams naturally perform the cognitive functions your brain needs.”

Funny to look back on all those times the teacher chided the day-dreamers, the silly-hearts, the kids who stared out the window and think that maybe they had it right all along.  I think I'll stare out the window and be a little distracted.

What Landscape Architects Can Teach Lawyers & The Rest Of Us About The Compelling Power Of Narrative.

My dear friend, Paul Mandell [Principal Planner - Capitol Area Architectural and Planning Board (CAAPB); St. Paul, MN] has for decades shared my love of narrative. 

The other day Paul sent an email with a YouTube link, as follows:

"Hey, Di!  Check out the full youtube video. Click here.   Your Gospel about the narrative  and the value of the story is catching on… maybe the quoted LA Times person heard you somewhere and picked it up."

It takes only a few moments to visit the ASLA MN Narratives in Landscape: "An exploration of how the use of narrative contributes to the successful promotion of Landscape Architecture projects for the American Society of Landscape Architects in Minnesota."  Those few moments may change forever how you present any matter to any listener or decision-maker.

You too can easily adopt narrative to unify, educate, persuade, promote, and delight. 

"Stories are the most powerful form of discourse, stronger than logic, stronger than reason, stronger than bare fact.  Stories explain, justify and inspire in a way that abstract reasoning just can't do.  We would not have that much of a perception of reality without first constructing it in a narrative."  [Peter Brooks, Reading For The Plot.]

 

 

There's Something To Be Said For Resilience, Research, and Self-Reliance.

What a dismal year this has been.  Retirement portfolios (hah!  the very idea) continue to hemorrhage, able-bodied workers have been cast aside, 20% of our children live in poverty, we are being over-taken by relatively poorer and less democratically adept countries like China and India, and no one who is supposed to be leading us - or would like to lead us - has a clue about what to do. 

I am reminded of an old cartoon.  Picture a man in a business suit, briefcase in hand propped up like Flat Stanley against a city building.  The caption reads, "Paralyzed by the fear of success."

No one is going to do it for us - we may as well do what we can with what we have.  More and more Americans are taking matters into their own hands - and what began reluctantly may end up being preferred.

Read and be inspired by Susan Gregory Thomas writing for the NYTimes, "I Went Back To the Land to Feed My Family," as she adds one more story to the stack of those being written by Americans who have taken it on the chin but refuse to go down.  Excerpt.

"I’m not interested in being hip or a hippie. Nor does my happiness particularly hinge on artisanal cheese. (Odd, perhaps, given that I grew up a stone fruit’s throw away from Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif.)

As a 42-year-old Brooklyn mother of three, what I care about is lunch, and feeding my family on a tenuous and unpredictable income. And so I have 20 fresh-egg-producing hens and a little garden that yields everything from blackberries to butternut squash to burdock root.

My turn with spade and hoe started a few years ago when I found myself divorced and flat broke. My livelihood as a freelance writer went out the window when the economy tanked. I literally could afford beans, the dried kind, which I’d thought were for school art projects or teaching elementary math. And I didn’t know how to cook.

Luckily, my late father had hammered into me that grit was more important than talent."

In that spirit, there are people spading gardens on rooftops, in backyards, and in weedy, over-grown patches in the neighborhood.  Others are discovering the healthy thrift of Community Supported Agriculture and farmer's markets.  Chickens share yard space with the household pet.  And bees are coming back into their own with a hive or two squirreled away, humming, helping pollinate those gardens and producing honey as a result.

Is it all rosy?  Heck!  Not by a long-shot!  In this household we have slashed, burned, eschewed, and are now down to shaving any and all expenses.  As my mother reminded us for decades as she and my dad raised 7 children on a shoestring, "We're rich - we just don't have a lot of money." 

Maybe part of this coast-to-coast churn is realizing that "America Is #1!" may have worked in the past.  But it does not today.  What does it mean to be "#1" when our economy is in shambles, we cannot educate our children, what prosperity we had is squandered on foreign wars, industries hibernate, factories rust, and in an effort to gouge every little red cent the banks once again want to extort fees for using the debit cards they promoted as a cost-savings to check writing? 

It's a mess. More and more of us are turning away from "America Is #1!" to ask what do we want as a country?  Is being #2 really so bad?  It doesn't hurt AVIS who capitalized on the ranking.  How do we measure ourselves?  In Gross National Product?  Goods consumed?  Landfills topped off?

What about beauty?  What about resourcefulness?  Imagination?  What do we really want to be best at?   And, do we need or even want to lead?   As Thomas decided, all you need is a little hunger.

"It is a lot of work. You have to be organized and able to improvise on your feet. But, frankly, it’s awesome. Before we embarked on this Waldenesque life, the only thing I had ever used my hands for was picking up a book or typing on my keyboard; today, my family and I are living our own scrappy take on President Obama’s promise of “Yes, we can!”

Even if things turn around financially, I don’t think I could stomach going to Whole Foods (except maybe for olive oil) because my biggest revelation in terms of self-sufficiency is this: It is no big deal. You can tell yourself anything is too difficult, or you can just do it. And you do not need to reconstruct your worldview or take issue with others.

You just need to be hungry."

In the spirit of "less is more," what changes are you and yours making?  What 365 small steps are you taking to get you to next year in some way better than you are today?