The mission of H.O.P.E. is to turn
the prow of our entropyship, the Earth, back upstream so that Earth's evolving
consciousness may explore the headwaters of the Universe for billions of
years to come. The work of H.O.P.E. is to make visible the larger relationships
we live within - relationships that inspire visions of wonder and works
of hope.
Cairns #36
End of the Long Nights, 2004
While taking the garbage out on Christmas night
Christmas on Thursday is tricky because that’s our normal
garbage day. They probably won’t pick up the garbage until Friday but if
we miss it this particular day, then the following week is a disaster because
the weeks on either side of Christmas stuff our one garbage can. If I miss
the Christmas garbage pickup, I’m in trouble for weeks. So I had pulled the
garbage can down our long gravel driveway to the road on Christmas Eve. I
hadn’t heard the garbage truck go by. If they were going to come on Friday,
that gave me a chance to try stuffing all the wrappings from this Christmas
in this week’s pickup which would allow a wide open container for next week’s
deep cleaning of the household. So I went walking down the driveway on Christmas
night to check if the garbage was, indeed, still awaiting pickup. Sirius
and Orion were brilliant in the cold, clear sky. And suddenly I remembered
that I was living within this crystal clear, vast universe.
This is the big picture that frames the deep questions.
The garbage is real, yes, but how it can overflow the mind. There are layers
and layers of thought attractors like jobs and mortgages and the news that
all have a place but which can overflow us to the point that we forget that
we have been born into a space so staggeringly vast. We know this, at least
as phrases of astronomy, but it can be tucked into boxes of memories and
concepts where the deep feelings gather dust.
Another part of this big picture is that this “discovery”
of the vast universe emerged only in the last few centuries. Humans discovered
it by thinking about deep thoughts which led to careful observations which
led to noticing things which led to further deep thinking which led to other
careful observations. Along the way these thoughts led us to create tools
to strengthen our observations but basically we are having an extended conversation
with the universe we find ourselves within. It’s a very interesting conversation.
As the beauty of Sirius and Orion shone through my garbagy
thoughts and reminded me of deeper things, I felt the memory of a younger
me gazing at the stars, wondering why we were here and what was the purpose
of life? And that memory was stopped by a pride that declared, “Congratulations.
You’ve found your answer to that question now. It’s no longer an issue.”
But the brilliance of Sirius energized a new voice that
said, “You’ve found an answer to your old understanding of the question.
But if you will stop congratulating yourself and simply look at the stars,
you’ll realize that your answer does not dispose of the question. Instead
it creates the opportunity for you to experience it at a new, probably deeper
level.”
The previous level at which I had grappled with this question
involved the Second Law and its apparent “glass ceiling” barrier against
hope. (Garret Hardin paraphrased the three laws of thermodynamics as “You
can’t win the game. You can’t even break even. And you have to play.”) Last
week, I overheard a kid say, “We’re all just going to die anyway” in a tone
of voice of you can’t get your hopes up too high or think too heroic of ideas
because “we’re all just going to die”. It’s the “just” that expresses the
science-born barrier against hope that gives the modern twist to the question
from the stars. In my book, I describe the process by which nature has led
me past that barrier, by which the Second Law has emerged as an ally.
But out in the dark winter night, the stars called me
again to their question and I sensed that “the answer” appears very different
beyond the barrier. My first hypothesis to this fresh framing of the question
is to practice expanding my self-awareness beyond my body. To feel the web
of back and forth causes and effects that connects my life with the rest
of the world and (1) practice expanding my awareness of these webs further
out from myself and (2) practice a mindfulness in action so that the causes
emanating from me are increasingly benign and nourishing to the world. What
that would look like a thousand years from now or what further barriers that
would lead to I don’t know but it feels like appropriate action for right
now.
Wings on Point revisited
The “End of the Long Nights” issue usually has an entry about playing with
storm runoff because this is California’s rainy season and by now I’ve usually
spent several weeks out playing in the rain and runoff, thinking about these
issues. The entry tends to be long and esoteric, more of a chance for me
to organize my thoughts than to communicate. This is that entry. Feel free
to skip it if it becomes opaque. Last year I described
a new work in the main stream channels, much lower in the drainage than I
ever considered working before. That work has grown considerably this rainy
season. Here is the meta-pattern. The current in a stream tends to shift
from side to side. The current rubs against the outside bank of each curve.
Maximum erosion occurs at these places (A and C in the following diagrams)
because the force of the concentrated current collides against the bank.
Because the streambed is scoured deepest at these curves, these places are
seen as deep pools during low water. Unless you’ve been out in the rainstorms,
it’s hard to realize that the quiet pools of spring are born in the maximum
muddy turbulence of winter.
Coming out of the curve, the current is loaded with its
maximum load of sand, gravel, and rocks. Simultaneously, the current must
begin crossing from one side of the channel to the other. This crossing takes
place at an angle which means the width of the current is wider than the
width of the channel.
This spreading slows the water enough for larger rocks to drops out. This
creates a spiral of cause and effect. The dropped rocks fills the channel
here which spreads the water out which slows it down which causes rocks to
drop out which fills the channel and spreads the water out.
I’ve studied alluvial fans, deltas and point bars as depositional
features but I’ve never studied riffles in this way. Because the channel
spreads and becomes shallow here, I can walk and work here in the middle
of a flood. This is the best time to understand their dynamics. It is also
the best time to work because erosive power is exponentially related to discharge
rates. If I build a structure during low water, it will probably be blasted
away at high water but if I build structures in the midst of high water,
they have a good chance of surviving (with periodic maintenance).
Notice that these riffles are a deposition that looks
like a “wall” angling the current towards the inside bend of the next curve.
As the peak flows starts to subside, the less loaded water then starts to
“gully” through this depositional feature, notchng it. However, at high water,
I use the largest rocks in the riffle to create lines that lead some of the
crossing water to the side so that it flows slower.
Based on a year’s experience, I hypothesize that this
work will grow on itself. When water is led on a slower path, some of its
load drops out. More sand and silt fills in between the larger rocks that
tend to dominate this depositional feature. These smaller materials make
the area more hospitable to plants after the floods recede. As more of water
is spread more uniformly over the riffle, the post-flood gullying diminishes.
This leaves the riffle as a higher barrier to surface flow than it did before
my work. This has several implications. (a) The pool behind the “dam” stands
higher and remains longer. (b) This water nourishes (through sub-surface
flow) a broader section of the riffle for a longer period of time, extending
the growing season. (c) Plants help knit the feature into a more integrated,
resistant structure. So after a spring and summer of growth, this feature
will act to create even more deposition the following winter that will raise
the feature into an even “higher dam” . (d) As the dam rises, it creates
slack water back near the curve which absorbs some of the colliding force
of the flood against the bank. This decreases side-cutting erosion. My ultimate
hope with this particular work is that as the riffle feature rises, there
will come a time when it pushes the flood surge out onto what I assume is
the abandoned flood plain. This will reduce the amount of water flowing in
the channel, taking some of the exponential edge off of the erosive power
within flood surges.
Leaves in drainages
A lot of the drainages where I work are steep and narrow with a gully at
the bottom and blue oaks growing along the edge. The leaves drop just around
the time of the first rains. Thanks to a combination of wind and rain, many
of the leaves move downslope into the channel bottoms. From there, runoff
flushes most of them out of the system. However, as my work slows the runoff,
the runoff lacks the power to overcome the surface adhesion binding the broad
wet leaf surfaces to one another. The leaves pile up along the channel bottom,
forming leaf dams several inches high every few feet. These leaves are like
a cheap, quick soil in terms of runoff. They can’t support many growing plants
in themselves but they can retain a tremendous amount of water. Their adhesion
is strong enough to resist the flow of the runoff so that the runoff is slowed,
deepening and spreading out the runoff. Books talk about soil forming an
inch a century. But leaves can create this proto-soil at the rate of inches
per year in the most erosion-prone places.
Working with the leaves made me aware that I had something
a bit wrong when I’ve talked about how spreading water out slows the flowing
water down because of friction. Probably a lot of the slowing happens not
through friction but through adhesion. Water sticks to itself. Wet surfaces
cling to one another. These forces are probably more powerful than friction.
Conversation with the World
One of the things I love about my erosion work is that it is a conversation
with the world. I do something, the world responds, things change which leads
to new understanding on my part which leads me to change my actions and the
world responds. If it responds in the way I anticipated, I feel I understand
that part of the world and our conversation go can deeper. If the world responds
quite differently, I have to adjust my thoughts in an unknown direction.
KMUD, March 5th, 7:00 PM
Speaking of conversations, I had a lovely conversation
last November with John Christionson as a guest on his radio show, Attuning
to Nature on KMUD public radio. John has asked me back for a second interview
on March 5th at 7 PM Pacific time. If you would like to listen in, the show
is accessible through RealAudio over the internet. You can download RealAudio
at the KMUD website: www.kmud.com
Resisting the Trance
One student in my Constitution class wrote something to the effect that there
are two groups of people: those who support us and those who are against
us. I wrote a big NO in the margin and gave a logic lesson. The only way
to validly split something into two (and only two) groups is A and not-A.
Teenagers and not teenagers. Americans and not Americans. Living and not
living. But very rarely is this done. Instead, people will say there are
two groups, A and B. such as either you are with us or against us. NO. That
is not valid. The valid statement is Either you are “with us” or “not with
us”. “Not with us” is very different from “against us”. The group of “not
with us” will include “against us” but it will also include the three day
old baby, the kid in Iceland who has no opinion, the spouse of the terminally
ill cancer patient who is preoccupied, the person who says a plague on both
your houses, a person who maintains they are fundamentally with you but not
in the way you want them to be, the person who thinks the whole controversy
is a bit silly.
Another way of saying it is if you divide the universe into two groups,A
and B, there will be a very important, often unnamed, third set: “neither
A or B”.
A week later I came upon an editorial written by a guy
named O’Reilly defending Fox News that he works for. In the editorial, he
wrote that Fox News is accused of being biased but this can not be because
a recent poll shows that the great majority of the viewers are distributed
across the political spectrum. What? If one of my students had written this
editorial, I would have written a NO next to this and had him rewrite it.
His rebuttal to the accusation has nothing to do with the accusation. Who
is watching the show is irrelevant to whether the show has bias. The gap
in logic is appalling and yet an editor lets it pass. Worse, the logic is
so awful that I can’t help but assume O’Reilly knew he was being a sophist..
Like I’ve mentioned before, I feel like we live thick within the fumes of
organizations trying to generate a trance of non-critical acceptance.
P.S. In Cairns’ last issue, I recommended the New York Times and mentioned
the test of does a news source have predictive power. One thing that the
Times has been running articles on is concern that China’s economy has entered
a bubble phase. This started as short articles two years ago on specific,
obscure events but the articles have grown broader, more interconnected,
and more concerned because the hot Chinese economy is the major buyer of
American debt. If there is a Chinese bubble and it burst, it could have serious
implications for America’s ability to finance its hemorrhaging deficits.
I don’t know if your sources of news have been talking
about this and I don’t have firsthand knowledge whether the Chinese economy
has a dangerous bubble in it. But in practicing the rigor of testing my own
news source, I offer this specific example for judging whether it has predictive
value.
Meadow reminder
A tentative date for a several day wilderness sharing
time in “my” meadow in Lassen National Park: Monday, July 12 - Friday, July
16. If there is extremely heavy snow, this date might have to be changed.
(So far it looks like it might be a very snowy winter in the mountains.)
Come spend time in some land with a lovely shape and abundant opportunities
to play with water. Come explore what it means to be alive within this amazing
universe.
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My book, Seeing Nature: Deliberate Encounters with the Visible World, may
be ordered from me. Prices are $16 for one book, $29 for two books, $64 for
5 books, or $112 for 10 copies. My movie, Spirals of Hope, is available for
$10 ($25 for three) as either a video or DVD. All prices are postpaid and
include any sales tax. Mail orders to Paul Krafel, P.O. Box 609, Cottonwood,
CA 96022-0609
Cairns of H.O.P.E. is free by e-mail <paul@krafel.net>.
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