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Displaced Pasture
  Jump (Adam) by Dutch artist Job Koelewijjn. Watch him and a companion surgically remove the patch of Dutch countryside — soil, ditch, worms and all — from its quaint surroundings.
World Wetlands Day
Today is World Wetlands Day, the anniversary of the signing of the Convention on Wetlands, or the Ramsar Convention, in Ramsar, Iran in 1971.
 Throughout history, wetlands have been vilified, feared and ostracized as the breeding grounds for malaria, yellow fever, and probably the entire menagerie of Ancient pestilential miasma. Considered useless, a wasteland, an obstacle to a civilization's Manifest Destiny, power, and glory. Cursed by architects, e.g. Vitruvius, and civil engineers for their anti-classical instability and suppleness. Deemed a cesspit. Sulfuric. Methanous. A neverending putrescence that poisons the air of nearby cities. The abode of the Swamp Monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the boogey-man; the hiding places of escaped murderers and pederasts; the secret rendezvous of satanic occultists; and where incestuous cousins come for their tryst. Dante and Milton have certainly demonized them. The embodiment of sin and impurity. The darkest expression of a corrupted inner self. The anti-Eden. That wetlands came under nonstop systematic military-agricultural-industrial eradication programs, that suffocating them out of their own hydrology has been a cause célèbre of empires and nations since time immemorial, should thus come as no surprise. Because to destroy wetlands is to be civilized.  Fortunately, we now realize the myriad benefis they offer to society. And there truly are many: a defense against hurricanes, tsunamis, and the less energetic but no less destructive normal ebb and flow of ocean waves; a water purification system, or “the kidneys of the landscape”; a habitat for fish and wildlife, some of which are endangered; a “biological supermarket”; flood storage and mitigation; a key biogeochemical recycling complex; an atmospheric filtration system; an ecological phytoremediating machine; a cheap alternative to municipal waste water treatment. Etc. Eat your heart out, green roofs!  So perhaps today, one should offer lengthy benedictions and some offerings, maybe a lamb or two, in celebration of this joyous occasion. Or even sacrifice a virgin. Wetlands are that deserving. Happy World Wetlands Day! World Wetlands Day 2006 Ramsar Convention on Wetlands Wetlands @ EPA
Meteorological Alchemy
 Cloud seeding, or the manipulation of clouds by chemical means to change precipitation patterns, is scientifically unproven. Even purported successes are said to rest on shaky statistical proof. Nevertheless, many still see great potential in appropriating it as an effective water resource management tool in places where fresh water supplies are dwindling due to overpopulation and climate change. Which is why, as the Associated Press reported last month, Wyoming is committing $8.8 million to a 5-year project to gauge its viability with unprecedented scientific rigor.  “Like most other Western states, Wyoming is rich in oil, gas, coal and other mineral deposits. What it lacks is simple: water. “So, like other Western states, Wyoming is trying to conjure up rain by embarking on a cloud-seeding project to bolster mountain snowpack -- the reservoirs of the arid and semiarid West -- and create more water from spring and summer snowmelt.” If Wyoming follows past tactics, expect to hear about fleets of aircrafts or ground-based anti-aircraft guns and rockets impregnating cloud systems with “a fine spray of silver iodide crystals” to coax extra inches of water out of them. Atmospheric sorcery.  Weaponized droplets to win the war against desertification and to stave off any future cataclysmic Hydrological War between arid Western states and the Great Lakes states and provinces. Perhaps landscape architects will form outrageously successful sky writing businesses or become celestial propaganda insurgents under the employ of Voice of America. Here Comes The Rain Again: or, Post-Oil Middle East, Part II
Lithic surveillance
It seems that a fake rock, The New York Times reports, may briefly reignite the Cold War between Russia and the UK: “A grainy black-and-white video, broadcast on state television on Sunday night and shown repeatedly again on Monday, was said to show a British diplomat picking up a fake rock that was said to conceal a communications device used to download and transmit classified information through hand-held computers.”
 Placed near a leafless tree to add, I suppose, more naturalism to an otherwise fabricated still life, “the rock, the size of a watermelon, and the device, said to be able to transmit and receive data at distances of more than 60 feet, were seized near Moscow, prompting a search across the city for similar device.” One has to wonder how many other rocks and stones and boulders were overturned, inspected and shaken, provoking perhaps mildly amusing Heidegger meets Monty Phyton soliloquies: “Is this fake? Hello? Is this thing on?” (In Russian.) Or how many deciduouses and evergreens were stripped and frisked. Knowing how trees can be great masters at disguise, I imagine this militarized tree hugging love fest may have played out on an unprecedented scale. Perhaps in a decade or so, we will be told that the entire Yellowstone National Park has been the real ECHELON listening post all along.
Atlantis Rising
Geologic archipelago-making rendered in months rather than the usual billion or so eons.
     Trailing Suction Hopper Dredgers
South Central Farms
 For over a decade, a group of mostly immigrant families has been tilling a colorful patchwork of thriving farms in one of the most industrialized landscape of Los Angeles. Out of concrete and asphalt, a community of urban farmers have cultivated a whole variety of fruiting trees, cash crops and vegetables. Growing in the shadow of power lines and skyscrapers are avocado, guavas, bananas and peach trees, as are sugarcane, corn, cactus, lettuce, winter squash, broccoli and lettuce. The list surely contains a lot more, but all are harvested not just for food but also for medicine and to supplement low incomes by selling them. But all of that — perhaps the largest urban community garden in the US — may be uprooted, paved over and replaced by a supersize warehouse not unlike what is already littering the place.  South Central Farmers South Central Farms: The Documentary
Helltown USA
 Since the summer of 1962, a fire, fueled by rich anthracite coal deposits, has been burning beneath the mining town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. Nonstop.  From Offroaders: “The fire was started in a garbage dump over an open coal seam in May of 1962. The fire was reported and seemed to be quenched at the time, but actually continued underground. There are many additional versions of the original cause but the garbage pit and the date are probably right. First bid to extinguish the fire was $175.” “By 1983, the government said the fire was advancing on three or four fronts. Proposed trenching of the area might cost as much as $660 million with no guarantee of success. One of the larger trenches would have bisected the town roughly from east to west. A government buy-out was proposed instead of the trenching and there was a referendum held. The homeowners voted to accept the buy-out 345 to 200. Only those whose names were on the deeds could vote. From 1962 to 1984, $7 million had been spent. In November of 1983, $42 million was voted for the buy-out.” “By 1991, this area had been increased by about three-quarters. Worst case scenario would be about 3700 acres and [burn out in] a hundred years.”   Perhaps not since the entire Appalachia region hovered above a fault line hundreds of millions of years ago has the ground below smoldered, a glowing ember of iridescent orange, while fissures and fumeroles spewing poisonous gases dotted the landscape above. You feel the heat in your feet. The smell of sulfur lingers in the air. The town, appropriately enough, resembles a “post-nuclear war wasteland.” Or yes, Helltown USA — an important itinerary on the municipalis non grata travel circuit — a stopover on the way to Chernobyl and the flooded villages upstream from the Three Gorges Dam.   If it weren't for the signs warning us of the coal mine fire, I'd probably guess we're witnessing the birth pangs of a new ocean.    If you cannot make it to Centralia, there are, apparently, other coal mine fires in Pennsylvania and all over the world, particularly northern China, eternally coursing their way through the serpentine subterranean tunnels and mineral veins. The Centralia Project Unseen Danger: A Tragedy of People, Government, and the Centralia Mine Fire Centralia Mine Fire @ Roadside America Photos of Mine Fires Coal fires by Anupta Prakash Petroleum Sublime |
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