Nature

The Sultan’s Turban.

Art, Economics, Nature
Mar 26, 2025
1 Comments

– In memory of my friend, Dutch-American painter Henk Pander. You are missed. –

Henk Pander Remembering Haarlem (1922) Painted a year before his death on April 7, 2023.

***

Walk with me, and you’ll get rewarded with a fun fair ride, or a gigantic ice cream cone or a wine tasting at 11:15 in the morning on a Monday – up to you. I, of course, had come to photograph the tulips and the never disappointing sartorial choices that people make when they visit the fields.

On my way to the Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm, I drove by one of those traffic control machines that flash speed numbers at impatient drivers. Mine said instead: Great Job! I must have been, for once, under the speed limit, but could not help be irritated by patronizing traffic machines that are now talking to me. But I digress. Let us leave quibbles behind and indulge in beauty.

Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm South of Portland, in March 2025.

Claude Monet Tulip Fields at Sassenheim (1886)

Vincent van Gogh Fields of Tulips (1883)

What used to be a farm with a small store where you could get cut flowers and order bulbs for next year’s planting, is now a consumer’s paradise, with a fun fair, hot air balloon rides, endless booths for food and trinkets.

You have to book tickets on line and decide on a fixed time slot for arrival, so that the acres of parking lots can be managed by the staff. But you know what: it’s fine! Let people have fun in a world that offers little of that, let the kids squeal and the adults delight in a whiff of spring and distraction from daily worries. I certainly had a blast and was grateful to hear so much laughter.

The fields were a bit behind, given the strange weather patterns of this winter, with field color concentrated only in one corner, but found in planters generously spread throughout. What was in bloom showed most frequently shapes that no longer resemble much the sultans’ turbans, etymologically the root of the word tulip, from the Turkish language.

Jacob Marrle Four Tulips: Butter Man, Nobleman, The Great Plumed One, and With the Wind. (1635)

Erkin Tulpen in blauwe Kom (2018) He is a contemporary Dutch realist painter who goes only by one name.

Yellow was definitely coming up, opening wide to a surprisingly warm morning.

Gerhard Richter Tulpen (1995)

Picked this painting despite the ongoing “let’s make them guess” style of this artist (I’m not a fan, as you know), with multiple options including a view from a moving train, fading of memories, or vision problems – which was what I thought about during my stroll. The farm had a sign out that suggested you could borrow glasses that would help overcome color blindness and help enjoy the full glory. I had to look it up, once back home, if these glasses really are able to keep what they promise – and wouldn’t you know it, only IF you have a mild version of the common red-green colorblindness (and not an absence of color receptors,) do they have an effect, enhancing contrast vision more so than color vision per se. (Ref.)

Lots of workers in the fields, picking flowers for sale, transporting goods, weeding, guarding against visitors flaunting the rules. Hard work on a still cold and damp ground.

Lots of appropriately themed garb.

But nothing beats the beauty of the blossoms – or, as a matter of fact, the breeding of new stem colors.

Max Beckmann Stillleben mit Ausblick aufs Meer (1938)

Paula Becker Modersohn Stillleben mit Tulpen in blauem Topf.

One tent housed a wood worker who made traditional Dutch Klompen out of poplar wood.

It made me think of the long history of Dutch colonialism, agricultural brilliance, and the 17th century tulip mania that ended in an economic crash. One thought about speculative bubbles led to another, and here I was wondering why so many young men are so attracted by crypto currency speculation, meme coins, and, for that matter, sports betting.

Anonymous The sale of tulip bulbs (17th Century)

For one, it is interesting to see that there are endless postings on the web where tulip mania and crypto speculation are compared and scathingly disentangled – the former bad, the latter good, in very LOUD voices… Of course, if you dig, you find opposing views and people quite worried about another bubble, eventually bursting and dragging the investments of young men down with them. The numbers are staggering – both in terms of how many young men are drawn to day trading, crypto and betting (relative to women and older populations,) how many of them consider themselves addicted in one form or another, and how much money they gain or loose in short amounts of time.

Roughly one in three young people has traded in or used crypto (when I can barely define what that actually is.) The new administration is helping, in terms of loosening banking restrictions, or active encouragement in investing in these kinds of currencies (Trump just yesterday introduced a new cryptocurrency, the Stablecoin.)

Listen to the expert (and this link leads to a smart, short piece on the psychology of crypto attraction):

Still, the bro-economy exploits its users’ penchant for risk. Crypto companies and betting sites do not generate value; they take cash from their users, reshuffle it, and redistribute it, while keeping a cut for themselves. Postmodern trading platforms encourage excess, making their margins on esoteric trades and superfluous volume. The casino lacks guardrails, not to benefit the bettors, but to benefit the house.

Musk and Trump have given young men something to aspire to. But their ascendance makes the stricter regulation of the bro-economy unlikely—and, in the case of crypto, makes deregulation a sure thing. Guys are about to lose billions and billions of dollars a year on apps designed to obscure risk and keep them coming back for a dopamine hit. Trump and Musk can afford to lose huge sums. Most young American men cannot.

Jan Brueghel the Younger Allégorie de la Tulipomanie (1640)

Oh, let’s just return to the beauty out there, and not fret, for five minutes.

Claude Monet Vase of Tulips (1850)

Emil Nolde Tulpen, (ca. 1940)

And one of my favorites:

François-Emile Barraud Parrot Tulips (1931)

***

I was not the only one who found joy.

And Easter around the corner.

The pug, on the other hand, was sort of done with it…

As was he.

Careful, Bigfoot, even the curbs have tulips…

Music today are variations on a famous composition by Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt who died in 2012. The piece is called Canto Ostinato (1979). Here is a version for four pianos, recorded live in 1984 and here is one I really like from 2017 at a world music festival, with incredible singing.

Finding Gifts.

Yesterday was a good, a surprisingly good day. I had gone to Sauvies Island, rather than giving in to fatigue, and found myself with an embarrassment of riches. It was as if all of nature conspired to wait for me and shower me with extraordinary beauty, wherever I turned. The wetlands looked like a Dutch landscape painting from the Golden Age.

The willows glowed like little lanterns against soft air.

32 egrets (I counted!) grazed in a field, occasionally flying off to a better spot for hunting.

Sandhill cranes overhead and hopping around in their elegant, if short-lived, staccato dances tugged on my heart strings – I so love these birds.

Ducks joined them.

Swans moved northwards, will I ever see the tundra again? No. That’s ok. Can’t be greedy.

Snow geese rose with a cacophony of noise when spooked by a raptor. When they eventually settled it looked like huge white blossoms tumbling down onto the ground.

And then a pair of eagles decided to show off, noisily announcing their arrival, or yelling at each other, what do I know, maybe they’re courting. Not mutually exclusive, I hear.

So, just for today, I’ll revel in nature’s gifts, leaving politics aside. In that spirit, music will also be enchanting, a new find of an L.A.- based Jazz trio. Little guy below hops in rhythm….

Hope and Ashes

Would you like to walk with me, or, as the case may be, drive from Oregon’s West across the mountain passes to the High Desert? We’ll see varied beauty of landscapes moving from winter to spring, with remnants of snow offset by greening pastures and budding trees.

Once we have crossed Mt. Hood, the Sisters’ and Mt. Bachelor’s snowcapped peaks form the background for grazing horses, some looking decidedly in search for a prince. Soon you start driving along the Deschutes river, not yet raging at full strength expected after the snowmelt.

If you are curious enough for a small detour, we can visit the Pelton Dam, which impounds the waters of the Deschutes to create the deep Lake Simtustus, filling a narrow canyon about 7 miles (11 km) back to the Round Butte Dam built in 1964. The water is intensely green in parts, despite blue skies, making you wonder about algae. The surrounding rock formations are majestic. See me wince when I assume the name “Simtustus” honors a Native American, and then learn that it does indeed, but one who scouted for the U.S. Army during the 1867–68 campaign against the Paiute Indians. The Snake War, as it was known, has been ignored by historians, concentrating on the contemporaneous American Civil War and its aftermath, instead. Yet the Snake War was statistically the deadliest of the Indian Wars in the West in terms of casualties. By the end, a total of 1,762 men were known to have been killed, wounded, and captured on both sides. By comparison, the Battle of the Little Bighorn produced about 847 casualties. The Paiutes fought bitterly against the encroachment of colonial settlers onto their territory.

Driving further South, we eventually land in Sunriver, a community near Bend, and a favorite vacation spot for outdoors enthusiasts and families who love being in nature with their kids, but also enjoy the amenities of pools, nature centers, tennis and golf courts, maintained bike paths and the like.

One of the most amazing natural sights, next to deep ponderosa pine forests and the river itself,

are the lava fields produced by one of the largest High Desert volcanoes, the Newberry Volcano. Three million years old, it covers more than 2,000 square miles and sent basalt flows down the canyon of the Deschutes River as far as 65 miles from the main crater (overall it just looks like a mountain chain rather than a dome.)

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) considers it to be a very high threat volcano because of its recent volcanic activity (within the past 1,500 years) in an area where numerous people live. Up until now it has been regularly monitored to detect seismic activity, measuring swelling or deflation of the ground, and trying to detect distinctive volcanic earthquakes caused by molten rock (magma) movement beneath the volcano. Who knows if those services have fallen prey to Musk’s chainsaw as well. (I checked, the answer is YES.)

It is a strange feeling to walk on top of this sleeping giant, something I last did a decade ago, and now again, as if nothing had changed in-between, except for my (reduced) speed and level of fatigue after a ridiculously short hike. I was then and still am a speck in space and time, a particle, a glimmer, given the dimensions of this geological behemoth. And I am still in awe of the beauty around me, the sense of grandeur between the expanse of the High Desert landscape and the height of the surrounding mountains.

Yet I am also aware of human achievement, if lasting so many fewer years, reaching across millennia nonetheless. Thinking here of a poem related to volcanoes, by a smart, formerly East-german poet who weaves into his dry observations allusions to Greek mythology and writing – knowledge transmitted throughout the generations (although who knows if we will see it on U.S curricula after this administration is done, installing the Christian Bible as a textbook instead…)

Active

Then someone says crater and you’re tumbling down.
A word from ancient Greek, a fragment, it means
The pitcher, in which they mixed water and wine.
The volcanic abyss, Empedocles’s tomb.

No more than a word, a splinter, and you see the sandals
Perched on the crater’s rim. Peering down through
The hole in the skullcap at the grey matter.—These pallid
Pockmarks puncturing the map of the moon.

You just hear the word crater—there’s a crack,
And the ear conjures myths out of ceramic and molten rock.
Hephaestus, the smith, in scenes with figures of red.
Or Hades, dragging Persephone down to the dead.

BY DURS GRÜNBEIN
Translated by Karin Leeder from the German, below

“Aktiv”

Da sagt jemand Krater, und schon stürzt du hinab.
Ein Wort aus dem Griechischen, Bruchstück, es meint
Einen Krug, in dem mischten sie Wasser und Wein.
Den vulkanischen Abgrund, Empedokles’ Grab.

Ein Wort nur, ein Splitter, und du siehst die Sandalen
Am Trichterrand. Starrst durchs Loch in der Schädeldecke
Auf die graue Substanz. – Diese riesigen, fahlen,
Im Mondatlas abgebildeten, pockennarbigen Flecken.

Du hörst nur Krater – es knirscht, und das Ohr,
Aus Keramik und Lavaschutt, zaubert Mythen hervor.
Rotfigurige Szenen mit Hephaistos, dem Schmied.
Oder Hades, der Persephone in sein Totenreich zieht

Newberry National Monument – Lava lands

The poem is, unfortunately, rather badly translated, which is surprising given the talent and caliber of this award-winning translator.

In my own understanding of the German, the first line describes a rather more violent, instantaneous crashing than tumbling down the slopes of a crater at the mere mention of the word. This sets the tone for the juxtaposition of “active” and “reflexive” or passive, that runs through the poem. In the second verse, the word crater is no longer a fragment but compared to a shard (not a splinter, fitting way better into the theme of the ceramic pitcher). At the end of the verse the poet refers to actually printed maps of the moon on which huge pallid flecks look like pock marks and which hung in children’s bedrooms during the poet’s youth . In the last verse, the translator uses “crack” instead of “crunch”, which is far more applicable to the crumbling lava and ceramic mix that conjures myths. But maybe I’m nit-picking. Let’s look at the references that really make this a memorable poem.

Both meanings of the word crater, volcano and ceramic pitcher, weave through the poem. Both are provided with references to Ancient Greek mythology, from writing, or found in the imagery painted onto the vessels.

The reaction to the mention of “crater” is linked to Empedocles, a philosopher who, as far as we know, was the first to offer a theory about the connection between light and vision, something picked up and developed later by Euclid. He was a strict vegetarian, had some significant ideas about human psychology and was said to have jumped into an active volcano to prove that he was immortal and live on as a God, leaving his sandals at the rim to “prove” that he had departed. There are numerous version about his demise, some claiming he faked it, others attributing it to an erupting Vesuvius which blasted his sandals up to the rim.

Empedocles’ example of a voluntary jump into the abyss provides a clear contrast to the narrator’s sense that he is inescapably falling into the depth. His imagination is active, but the experience is reflexively forced on him.

The next allusions pick up the theme of catastrophic endings by active means or passive experience. Remember who Hephaestus was, so often depicted as a red silhouette on a black vase? He was the God of fire, volcanoes, metalworking, artisans, metallurgy, carpenters, forges, sculpting, and blacksmiths, creating all the tools needed for unleashing war. And if that was not enough, he also brought a first gift to man: Pandora and her miserable box. All of it drowning the world in evil by active design. Contrast this with Persephone, who was abducted into the Underworld, tricked into eating some pomegranate seeds so that she had to stay there for most of the year, no active resistance possible.

Then again, not all is black and white, or red on black, as the case may be. Persephone still helped to bring spring and harvest about together with her mother, upon her temporary jaunts back into the world, and was Queen rather than pure victim in the underworld.

And Pandora, sent to us by a God who also provided us with habitat and tools as well as the weapons of war? She used to be a life-bringing goddess in early renderings of the Greek cosmos (in fact her name means “all-giving”), before she was eclipsed by the death-bringing human Pandora. And in contrast to the misery she unleashed, one thing stayed permanently in the box, not irretrievably dispersed across the corners of the earth: HOPE, still available.

Maybe we feel like being sucked into craters, drowned by evil that has existed amongst humans since people started to record their histories, left with a torched and jagged, infertile landscape. But we have choices: the choice to think of something as providing sustenance rather than demise (pitcher vs crater), the choice to focus on hope rather than conditioned fears that drag us down the slopes of the volcano. And we have all this because the ancients laid out the maps, and our schools taught us the history. The grey matter might be pockmarked, but it can still be put to use. Let it be active and lead to the right moves.

Chem trails in just the right position….

Music today is a life version of Genesis’ Dance on the Volcano. Here is another song from that album that remains one of my favorite of years gone by, Trick of the Tail.

Intermission

Nature
Mar 5, 2025
3 Comments

I am taking a few days off. I will leave you with this from Rebecca Solnit.

Going to pay a bit of attention to the weather. See you next week.

Here are the songs of a wayfarer….

And another one in the interesting people department….

Art, Nature, Politics
Mar 3, 2025
0 Comments

It is March, spring is around the corner and nature is slowly waking up. Dainty snowdrops do their ballerina imitation.

Croci clusters shine in cheerful purples and yellows, attracting early bees.

Early azaleas beckon with soft pinks.

And hellebores rule my friend’s garden, compact, round, frilly or solid, joyfully dotting the landscape.

March is also Women’s History Month, and I’d like to remind us all how much gardening was tied to the Suffrage movement, or any other progressive social reworking since the earliest 20th century. (Much of what I summarize today I learned from George McKay’s book Radical Gardening (2011) and the splendid Smithsonian website about Women’s History in American Gardens.)

Gardens and Garden architecture was for the longest time considered a man’s world. Just think about Winston Churchill commenting to Siegfried Sassoon in 1918: “War is the natural occupation of man … war – and gardening.” In the late 1800s, however, women started to form garden clubs, push for public parks as a health issues, and engage in the conservation of native plants.

No longer content to embody a sentimental and idealized single vision of women posing decoratively in gardens or with plants (as many of the period paintings do that I am introducing below,) women started to use their collective power found in new organizations centered around gardening to support social change.

Frederick Carl Frieseke Lady in a Garden, (ca. 1912.)

The first garden club in the US was founded in 1891. Next, the American Society of Landscape architects saw one female founder in 1899, Beatrix Farrand, who was soon joined by several other women. Soon several schools and colleges dedicated to landscape design and agriculture opened for women. In 1914, the Smith-Lever Act funded the deployment of home demonstration agents – mostly women – to teach up-to-date agricultural, gardening, and food preservation techniques to families of all races living in rural areas. One of the goals of the project was to “develop leadership abilities in rural women and girls.”

Jane Peterson Spring Bouquet, (ca. 1912)

During WW I, there was a mobilization of a Women’s Land Army to harvest crops and produce food during World War I as men left to fight overseas. The organization later leveraged women’s role in the war to win voting rights for women. During WW II they were instrumental with Victory Gardens, soon recognized by the USDA.

Matilda Browne Peonies (cira 1907) They grew in an Old Lyme garden. The woman in white is thought to be Old Lyme, CT resident Katherine Ludington, portrait painter and noted suffragist.

Similar, sometimes more radical, developments happened in Europe. In Great Britain, for example, the Women’s Agricultural and Horticultural International Union was founded in 1899 (nowadays know as Women’s Farm and Garden Association.) The founders were believers in universal suffrage. Soon a Women’s Land Army was established there as well, increasingly popular during WW II with “‘land girls’ central to the anti-fascist ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign, with their gendered perspective and an emancipatory rhetoric.” Suffragists, all. And very much in consensus with Suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst’s statement: “We are here, not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.”

Violet Oakley June, (ca. 1902)

By then, the Suffragettes, more actively engaged in militant action of all kinds, had also blazed a path. As McKay writes: “Suffragettes were gardeners, suffragettes targeted gardens for attack—in each instance horticulture was politically positioned.”

The most prominent attacks happened in 1913, when Suffragettes attacked the Orchid House at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, and burnt down the Tea Pavilion a bit later. Three greenhouses were smashed, and rare and delicate plants, under bell-glasses, destroyed. The gardens were targeted in implicit or explicit acknowledgement of their link with empire, tradition, and male establishment. The women tried to point to their refusal to be “rare and delicate plant”, severing the link between flowering plant and old-style femininity.

The attack on Kew Gardens is one of the most famous incidents for women’s suffrage. It illustrates the political nature of gardening and its symbolic meaning, just like the example of Kew’s role in the British Empire. Destroying flowerbeds and greenhouses seems insane, unless the gardens and the destruction of them by ‘female vandals’ are seen in terms of the power relations in society. Just as the orchid can symbolize extreme wealth, so a flower-bed can express the power of patriarchy in the political order. (Ref.)

Philip Leslie Hale The Crimson Rambler, ca. 1908

Two of the Suffragettes were captured and sentenced to prison for more than a year. Both went on hunger strikes that were undetected for almost a month, leading to such precarious health status that both were released from prison, after unsuccessful and risky attempts to force feed one of them, Lilian Lenton, an activist who scores in my “interesting people I’d like to have met” department.

She was a dancer, and committed Suffragette at an early age – “deeds not words.” She believed that arson attacks on symbolic locales would create a crisis that would make people re-think power relations. When she was force-fed in prison with a tube through her nose down her throat, she aspirated food into her lungs and got seriously ill. The government then passed the Cat and Mouse Act (in reaction to multiple Suffragette hunger strikers who they did not want to become martyrs,) which allowed for the early release of prisoners who were so weakened by hunger striking that they were at risk of death. They were to be recalled to prison once their health was recovered, where the process would begin again.

Lenton became famous for escaping the authorities multiple times after release from prison by using the most daring costumes and escape routes, earning her the nickname the Leicester Pimpernel. “She fled the city in a delivery van, dressed as an errand boy. Taxis took her to Harrogate and then Scarborough from where she escaped to France in a private yacht, although she soon returned to Britain, setting fire to things again.” She served in Serbia with a hospital unit during WW I, and was awarded the French Red Cross medal. She lived to the age of 81, seeing the fruit of her activism with the eventual right of all women to vote (The Representation of the People Act (Equal Franchise) of 1928).

Mary Cassatt Children in a Garden (1878)

Am I saying arson and destroying plants is a good thing? Am I saying political activism that employs radical means after other things failed, has historically moved movements about equality and justice forward? Am I saying individuals can make a difference, when their role becomes symbolic of a “David vs. Goliath” struggle? Am I saying we need models of previous progressive movements in our own learning-curve, when trying to defy a re-introduction to patriarchal hierarchies and norms (check out the proposed SAVE act, people!)?

What do you think I am saying?

Anna Ancher Fisherman’s Wife Sewing (1890)

Here is a list of militant tactics presented by the BBC, of the documented actions of Suffragettes.

“Whether you agree with direct action or not, the suffragette’s militant tactics had a great impact on the government and society. Some of the tactics used by the WSPU were:”

smashing windows on private property and governmental buildings
disrupting the postal service
burning public buildings
attacking Church of England buildings
holding illegal demonstrations
burning politicians’ unoccupied homes
disrupting the 1911 census
ruining golf courses and male-only clubs
chaining themselves to buildings
disrupting political meetings
planting bombs
handcuffing themselves to railings
going on hunger strikes

Historians still argue whether or not the militant campaigns helped to further the women’s suffrage movement or whether it harmed it. But presumably they’ll agree, crocheting won’t do the job. And we did get the right to vote. For the time being.

Mary Cassatt Lydia Crocheting in the Garden (1880)

I’ll tackle that debate another day. For now, let’s enjoy the spring bloom!

And listen to Elisabeth Knight.

Helpful Advice.

Walk with me, but bring the gloves, on a brilliantly sunny and cold day at the wetlands. Puddles covered with ice, ponds slightly frozen, fallen leaves coated with sparkling crystals putting to shame any jewelry store – display.

My avian friends are warming up in the sun. For every heron at rest, there is an egret flying to the next perch, surveying their realm.

The sky occasionally fills with geese spooked by some raptor, and I wish I could add the sound here of them chattering and honking, a spectacular chorus. Eventually they come to rest, returning to snoozing.

I, on the other hand, have not been snoozing this week, driven by a sentiment probably shared by many of you: What can we do? I have been reading quite a bit, soaking up good advice from trusted sources, and making use of many helpful sites that display what we need to know in straightforward and legible ways.

Much of the advice overlaps: inform yourself, pace yourself, don’t give up in advance, protect the most vulnerable, engage, build and cherish community from the ground up. Two things I found particularly helpful:

Ask yourself what your strengths are: not all of us are able or willing to do public work, or join committees, or have the resources to support causes financially, or get engaged in elective office. We all have something to contribute, however. If you like baking, organize bake sales. Agreed, chocolate chip cookies are not going to defeat fascism, but a community nourished by seeing members contribute in whatever ways they can, will be more resistent and more effective in coming together and taking the necessary steps.
Focus on your interest. You cannot fight on every front. Pick the arenas where you have the most expertise or the most passion, and join efforts there.

In my case, I have a platform with this blog where I can summarize both relevant sources and write about my interpretations of them. I can do much of the reading you don’t have time for, and pick the best pieces with a critical eye on informational value, not necessarily ideology. I am also deeply interested in science and climate crisis, so that is where I will be particularly involved. Note, though, it really is up to everyone – if you are interested in protecting immigrants, DEI-or women’s rights, or fight against racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism or newly established prison camps, it matters. There is no hierarchy of what needs to be protected- there is much under attack and requires advocates.

Here are Robert Reich, Dave Troy, and Timothy Snyder with pragmatic advice lists. And here is a helpful conversation between Jen Rubin and Heather Cox Richardson.

Here is a nifty google drive action tracker listing all the Executive Orders and memos proclaimed so far, grouped by targets. That allows you to inform yourself about your area of interest and what is currently affecting the status quo.

***

Given one of my interests, science, here is another bit of news (in more detail in Paul Krugman’s assessment today):

As of now there is a new communications ban from HHS. The gag order includes the publication of scientific information, including reports that are already done, prohibits emergency alerts for pandemic information, or rising health risks, including weekly data on respiratory disease developments.

Meetings and report releases for the National Vaccine Advisory Committee and the Presidential Advisory Council for Combating Antibiotic Resistance are canceled. HHS is searching for DEIA programs and threatening anyone who disguises them. They are asking for people to report colleagues.

NIH study sections are canceled/postponed. These are the sections that approve grant proposals and provide funding for institutional research. This affects more than 300.000 researchers and 2500 institutions. All travel is suspended and conference publications must be approved in advance by a presidential appointee. That affects nearly $50 billion of scientific research.

Pausing public health communications and research means delays in responding to emerging threats, like H5N1. But these measures also have an economic impact. Public health protects more than health—it safeguards our economy. Disruptions in systems can ripple across industries, as we’ve already seen with avian flu and egg prices.

Note that every $1 spent by NIH generates $2.46. For example, in 2023, $47B in NIH spending generated ~$93B. Halting it all will cost us money, create worse health outcome and might motivate all the scientific talent that is now losing their grant funded jobs to go elsewhere. As of now, it is all gone, with health and education directly implicated.

If you click this link, it offers map and you can tap on your state and find out what is affected by the new administration’s directive towards the National Institute for Health (NIH). Here are the OR and CA impacts, respectively.

Before we are getting too discouraged, here is the long read for the weekend that argues the world isn’t as bad as you think. I agree with much of it, but also want to point out that it is psychologically much harder to relinquish a right or protective matter that you already held or is available to you, than experiencing improvements of a state of need. If we know we can protect our children with vaccines or health risk alerts and they are subsequently blocked by political maniacs, it is a huge blow, individually for all the little ones I love and societally for what the future will hold.

Music today dates me since I still saw it live – album by The Band. RIP Garth Hudson, who died this week.

Eaton Fire

Nature
Jan 8, 2025
9 Comments

Since so many of you have inquired, for which I am truly grateful, I want to just answer a few questions.

My son and family in Altadena escaped the fire unharmed, but lost their house and all of their belongings. They are currently staying with a family friend some 20 miles away from the active fires and, importantly, the smog. We have no clue what will come next, and are taking it a day at a time, just mindful of the privilege to remain physically intact and surrounded by a strongly supportive network.

When this is all over and the kids are settled – wherever remains to be seen, I would love to rebuild the little one’s library that was turned to ashes. If any of you want to have an eye on Thriftstore treasures of children’s books, please keep us in mind. I am happy to pick up and/or reimburse and store at our house here in Portland. Age range 3 – 8, she devours everything, particularly nature oriented themes.

I will go silent until l have processed all this a bit more, but hopefully will be back on track next week.

These are apocalyptic times.

Fluke

Nature, Psychology
Dec 27, 2024
3 Comments

You never know. Here I was planning a quiet walk in one of my favorite places on earth, the place where I go to air out my soul. It reminds me of the landscape of my childhood, flat as a pancake, skies low, agricultural fields and watery flats seamed by alders and willows.

A landscape best caught in black and white for its riches of patterning and contrasts of shadow and light. A reminder, too, that black and white belongs to photography and not thinking, the need to fight rigidity of both, really, thought and feeling. A landscape that has changed across the decades of my visits without losing its essential beauty, a pointer towards aging gracefully. A place you all know by osmosis, given how often I have posted from there throughout the seasons.

Weeping Willows

I meant to contemplate 2024, in all its horrors as well as gifts, its losses and riches, and above all this sense of “What now? How do I meet the challenges before us, without losing a sense of hope and integrity? How to combat the worries that tend to overtake me? The irritability with my uncooperative body? “

It was not to be. The minute I hit the footpath on Monday, usually a solitary walk towards a dike, I saw throngs of people, strangely moving at speed back and forth, as small groups, excitedly chattering. What was going on?

A field sparrow! There’s supposed to be a field sparrow! The chance of a life time to scratch if off a Western birder’s life list, since the bird resides in the Eastern US and must have made a wrong turn. Or two. Is it here, in the blackberry patch? It is there, hiding among the reeds?

What’s a field sparrow, you ask? Beats me. It looks (and I never saw it live, had to look it up in my guide book) like a million other sparrows, even when I learned to watch for the eye rings and the pinkish beak.

But you know what? It completely changed my mood, my outlook that day, this fluke of a bird appearing out of nowhere, this fluke of me arriving at the island at just that time. It was invigorating to see people as a community, whipping out their phones to call birder friends to come on down, people showing each other photos they had taken half an hour earlier, discussing the rarity of the event, people carefully placing their tripods for heavy cameras as not to interfere with their neighbor’s, and a general sense of camaraderie, excitement and passion suffusing the air. Most importantly, regardless of the current fires sweeping the world in all their manifestations, there was this bond to nature and the wonders it offers, the willingness to stand or run in the damp cold for hours on end to catch a glimpse of a TLB (tiny little bird in my “couldn’t identify it for the life of me” vocabulary.) To be free of worry for a small window in time.

The excitement was contagious and I kept smiling for the rest of my walk, long after leaving all of them behind, entering the wetlands and communing with slightly larger birds instead.

Tuesday a library book arrived from the longish wait list, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and why everything we do matters, by Brian Klaas. I had ordered it after reading an essay (today’s Long Read) by him that hooked me, and that you might find thought-provoking. Judging by the first half read so far, the book is interesting, written in ways completely graspable for the layperson, filled with fascinating examples, but also slightly too repetitive for this reader who likes to roar through new information.

Mist in the air

Take a typical example: Stimson, U.S. Secretary of War in 1945, persuaded President Truman not to drop the nuclear bomb on Kyoto, much against the resistance of the military brass who believed it to be the ideal target, not least because its university was the intellectual center of Japan. Why did he care? He had had a wonderful visit there with his wife in the fall of 1926, seeing it in all its historic and seasonal beauty and felt that it needed to be preserved. A total fluke. He fought for the city being spared on multiple occasions until Truman relented. It had to be Hiroshima and Nagasaki instead.

The upshot, so far, is this: we need to revise our thinking about issues of chance, the order of things, and our ability to control the way life unfolds. Infinitely complex systems like our interconnected world can be affected by minute changes, as chaos theory predicted (think butterfly effect). Every one of us should likely take less pride in our accomplishments and feel less guilty about our failures, because pure luck (the very definition of chance) affects any old outcome. It’s hard to accept the notion of random drift – then again, maybe it’s liberating? Just think of the possibility that something completely random could happen that shifts the world’s current embrace of war and authoritarianism…

As the Kirkus Review observed: The book can provoke existential unease, but it also helps explain the cockamamie nature of the way things are, and it’s an always-interesting read.

That about captures it!

And who knows, maybe the fluke of my encounter led to eating less junk food that day since I was feeling more upbeat. That in turn might improve my immune system, leading to more cancer fighting power. A random bird the cause for added years of blogging…. I’ll take it.

Long live the field sparrow!

Music today adheres to the more traditional views of orderly, controlled and willful creation with the representation of chaos at the beginning: Haydn’s Die Schöpfung.

Orange to the Rescue.

Art, Nature
Dec 20, 2024
2 Comments

Walk with me. You have the choice of pouring rain (Tuesday) or bright sun, unseasonably warm (Wednesday.) On both days, the highlight of the visual riches in the woods and marshlands was the color orange – in many variations, sometimes subdued, sometimes fiery, at all times enhancing the cooler hues in the landscape with a pleasing contrast effect. Ever up-lifting.

In the visual arts, orange has been around for a long time. The Egyptians used it for tomb paintings, despite the fact that the pigment they employed, realgar, was derived from monoclinic crystals and was highly toxic. Medieval monks colored their manuscripts with it as well, ignorant of its effects on health.

Orange really took off in the 18th and 19th century, after Louis Vauquelin, a French scientist, discovered the mineral crocoite, which led to the production of the synthetic pigment chrome orange. The Pre-Raphaelites paved the way, with the Impressionists not far behind. Van Gogh took it to extremes, and Expressionism pledged itself to this intensive hue. Abstract artists of our own time made good use of the color as well. Below are some of my favorite examples, paired with what nature has to offer, in every which way as visually rich as what sprang from painters’ imaginations.

John Constable The Hay Wain (1821)

Sunsets are, of course, a perennial favorite. Not to be found this week, alas.

Caspar David Friedrich Das Große Gehege (1832)

Reflections rule.

J. M. W. Turner, Fighting Temeraire (1839)

The most famous of the orange suns,

Claude Monet Impression, Sunrise (1872)

and vineyards echoing the color choice.

Vincent van Gogh Red Vineyards at Arles (1888)

Light, captured,

Emil Nolde Coastal Landscape Date unknown

landscape abstracted.

Richard Diebenkorn Berkeley No 46 (1955)

Color reduction.

Mark Rothko Orange and Yellow (1956)

The strangest of them all – the man’s head below the woman’s face detectable in her lap only with a bit of help, covered by orange tresses, that might be the burn of love or loss, who knows.

Edvard Munch Love and Pain (1893)

Music today is dedicated by me to this ill-fated couple….

In a season where light during the darkness takes on a certain symbolism, (Hanukkiahs and Christmas trees, I see you!) the brightness of orange is nature’s contribution – gratefully accepted. Even when drenched in rain.

Here is a Long Read, suggested for the weekend. Elad Nehorai, a former orthodox Jew who writes for the Guardian, The Forward and Times of Israel, asks us to think through the implications of how the American public reacted to the murder of the healthcare CEO. He offers thoughts on how we can bring about change with non-violence and what the civil rights movement had to say about the challenges with such an approach. I thought this is a worthwhile topic during a season where Christianity celebrates the arrival of someone who was supposed to bring peace on earth, no luck so far, and Judaism celebrates a miracle of sustainability during a violent civil war …. https://substack.com/home/post/p-153227333

Wildfires.

In 1998, author and activist Mike Davis published a book, The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. (I had reviewed one of his preceding brilliant analyses of the geography, ecology and politics of LA, City of Quartz, last spring here, which I mention because it gives you a short overview of the issues he was concerned with and how he approached them.) The new book included profound analyses of the danger, handling and, yes, politics of wildfires with an emphasis on Malibu.

20 years later, a Malibu fire started on November 8 and burned nearly 97,000 acres, destroying over 1,600 structures and resulting in three fatalities. More than 295,000 residents were evacuated and an estimated $6 billion in damages incurred. The folks at Longreads.com used the occasion to publish an excerpt of Davis’ book describing the history of fires at the Malibu coast, by consensus deemed the wildfire capital of North America, and a postscript he added in 2018.

Sunrise colors accentuated by smog from wildfires.

I was sent a link to the excerpt given that this week saw another Malibu fire erupt, the Franklin Fire, which seems to be less likely to develop into a monster fire like last month’s Mountain fire in Ventura County, or the earlier, massive Thomas and Woolsey fires, which exploded with disastrous winds that pushed flames for miles and grounded firefighting aircraft. Saved by luck only – the direction and strength of winds for once in favor of the fire fighters.

My own brush with fire on a California hillside this year still sits in my bones and occasionally keeps me up at night. Reading Davis’ chapter on the politics of California wildfires – the reasons why they occur more strongly and frequently, why they harm populations in inequitable ways, and why no-one considers stopping the rebuilding of houses and mansions on fire-prone hills – and even expanding further onto the wilderness – helped to focus my head on the issues, rather than give in to my soul that shudders at the memories. What he wrote in 1998 is more relevant than ever, a quarter century later.

One of the core issues lies with our approach to fire. Fire prevention tactics like nurturing large areas of chaparral and forest into old age, have actually created conditions for stronger fires, once they ignite. Horticultural fire-breaks near towns, like citrus groves and agricultural land have disappeared due to water issues or the need for more land for construction. And we insist that we have to focus on fire handling: ever new regulations specify flame retardant building materials and brush clearing, in essence “fire proofing” human habitat. More than half of new California housing has been built in fire hazard zones since 1993, with more than 11 million Californians, roughly a quarter of the state’s population, living in high-risk wildfire areas known as the wildland-urban interface.

Karen Chapple, an urban planning professor and director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Community Innovation suggests that rather than focussing on specific [wildfire] mitigation measures such as hardening homes, prescribed burns, fuel breaks, we should revise land-use planning, creating more sustainable settlement patterns around the state. (Ref.) This is particularly urgent in light of all the insurance companies now refusing to insure for damage or loss due to fire, given how costs have skyrocketed with more frequent fires. You could lose everything if you (re)build in fire-prone regions.

I very much encourage you to read the 15 minute excerpt of Davis’ book, it is grippingly written as well as informative, and might provide insights for all of us who are exposed to future potential catastrophes, given that climate change has upped the ante for fires now spreading into previously less likely areas, followed by landslides and flooding. Dare I add that the historian’s prescience, evidenced in historical unfolding of his predictions, likely extends to what now lies in wait? Here is a summary of another of his books:

“Davis’s 2005 book, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, argues that a combination of poor government planning and a consolidation of resources in the hands of profit-obsessed pharmaceutical companies has left the world—and especially its poorest populations—dangerously vulnerable to pandemics. (The book was widely praised for its foresight during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and it was expanded and republished that year as The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu and the Plagues of Capitalism.)”

What can we do, in an era when this morning’s news included the announcement that R.F.Kennedy’s advisor had earlier asked the F.D.A. to revoke approval of the Polio and Hepatitis B vaccines? Never mind the development of pandemic vaccines…. If RFK gets approved to be the new health secretary, he can intervene in the F.D.A. petition as well as approval processes. I refuse to say “we are doomed.” But we should seriously think about what can be done, because we very well might be – particularly our grandchildren – if this insanity rules the day.