NATURE & CULTURE
A Personal Crisis
Alvin W. Urquhart
Prologue
I was an undergraduate student majoring in geography, I have been concerned about the ways humans have occupied the Earth. Looking at hill slopes, soils, vegetation, and rural and urban landscapes, always with questions about how they got to what we see today, has kept me busy searching for answers. With greater experience in the world, the sights have become more numerous and the questions and partial answers have kept growing.
As I began to teach about what I saw and the questions for which I had some answers, I needed to find a personal philosophy that could help me justify what should be important in my teaching and in living a good life. That philosophy has evolved into the version that I present in Part I.
To understand how I came to behave and believe as I do, I have had to think about the events, people, and places that have most influenced me. Those thoughts are recorded in the autobiography that is Part II.
In Part III, I apply my perspectives on the human environment to what I see as the major crises of human existence today. Contemporary views of order in the Western World—especially science, materialism, capitalism, and humanism—offer humankind a faith that the material world can be made subject to the cultural world in an unceasingly inclusive manner. That this faith may be misplaced and crumbling at its edges is seen by those people who recognize the possibility of the destruction of human life through uncontrollable or unexpected environmental alterations resulting from the use of nuclear weapons, by human induced global climate change, or by the release of substances or organisms that are toxic to humans. But this faith may also fail because it offers a limited, if not false, perspective on the position of humans in global ecosystems.
In the Epilogue, I present a personal way to address the double bind between behavior and belief and to find personal environmental sanity in the 21st Century.
I wish to thank Stan Cook, Chet Bowers, Dan Goldrich, Ray Mitchell, Dale Kramer, Dan Gade, Jon Cruson, Charles Martinson, Clyde Patton, and Sarah Urquhart who read and commented on all or parts of this manuscript in an earlier form.
Part I
NATURE, PERSON, CULTURE
Introduction
Many years ago I realized that I viewed the world from several distinct perspectives. Sometimes I looked for ‘truth’ about something; other times I asked myself how best to get along with my family and friends; and yet other times I simply tried to best express my own feelings, ideas and emotions. Surely, I thought, these were all valid perspectives even though they sometimes seemed to contradict one another. I wondered why that was so.
Within the culture I grew up, I came to think that I had a ‘mind’ that was distinct from a world ‘out there.’ I thought that the outside world followed its own course through the laws and patterns that scientists studied. But my ‘mind’ followed its own way, seemingly not concerned with the truths of science. I read, played the piano, built things, planted a garden, explored the neighborhood and nearby countryside, and thought my own thoughts, few of which had much to do with ‘truth.’ And, in turn, I wondered how my personal views and behavior related to the interactions I had with the people around me? These personal interactions did not seem to be a part of the scientific world nor were they a part of my own internal world. Instead, my thoughts of them were likely to be about how ‘we’ agree on what is appropriate or inappropriate to say or do.
In college, I came to see that these three perspectives might be associated with what were called ‘the humanities,’ ‘the sciences,’ and ‘the social sciences.’ In addition I thought of a practical world—the world of ‘how to’—as yet a fourth perspective. However, I continued to ask myself why so few connections seemed to link these broad realms of knowledge and why did I feel such a great divide in my thinking between rational thought and the direct experiences of my life? I wanted to know how I could integrate my disparate views of the world and so become whole in the ways I understood the world.
Only in 1951, when I transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, and enrolled in its Department of Geography, did I begin to find ways toward this reconciliation. In particular, in courses called “Conservation of Natural Resources” and “The Domestication of Plants and Animals,” given by Professor Carl O. Sauer, I found ways to link the cultural world with the natural world. He spoke of “the meeting of natural and culture history.” The link that he noted was based on the idea that
Man alone ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and thereby began to acquire and transmit learning, or culture. With each new skill he found in his surroundings more opportunity, or resources, to fashion products of use to himself, to improve his well-being, and to increase his numbers. An environment can only be described in terms of the knowledge and preferences of the occupying persons: natural resources are in fact cultural appraisals. [1]
Sauer’s ideas made so much sense to me that I felt that they had been my views all along. They hadn’t; but he had given clear expression to thoughts that until then had remained mere hints in my mind. Geography professors Carl Sauer, James Parsons, and Erhard Rostlund each recommended that I read books by Lewis Mumford, whose broadly conceived writings were highly integrative. I was particularly attracted to his ideas concerning technology and its relation to art and ideas.[2] Professor Clarence Glacken introduced me to the great depth of ideas about culture, nature, and environment in seminars and his massive study of the history of environmental ideas.[3] Sociology professor Wolfram Eberhard introduced me to the broadest ranges of natural, cultural, and social history through his courses on the nomadic societies of Asia. Other classes introduced me to the ideas of culture as seen by anthropologists George Foster and John Rowe and ecology and plant taxonomy as seen by biologists Herbert Mason and Lincoln Constance. I give great tribute to the grand ideas of these distinguished scholars who first inspired me in my search for a personal unity of thought.
My current framework of thinking focuses on the relationships among a person, Nature, and Culture. In this framework I see myself as being a subject who is experiencing and interacting with many other subjects while continuously becoming within evolving material and cultural worlds. I focus my thinking on the only subject I consciously experience–myself. And, using elements of traditional ideas, I try to show how I am part of a four-dimensional web of subjects and environment. This theoretical construct of my world allows me to look at both my material and ethereal surroundings as part of a seamless, ever evolving universe.
My ideas are drawn from several streams of thought concerning the ways in which humans relate to their surroundings: environmental and social determinism; ideas concerning human imagination, artistry, technology and craftsmanship; considerations of social institutions and of spatial patterning of human environments; many views of ecology and culture; perspectives of time as narrative, story, biography, history, and evolution; and concepts of events as conjunctures of time, space, and things. For purposes of explanation, I propose to organize my thoughts around the concepts of Person, Nature, and Culture. I break these concepts into component parts, discussing them as if they were self-contained and unconnected, and then recombine them into a larger, coherent system. Next I attempt to conjoin the personal self and its natural and cultural environments with other selves, whom I see acting in similar environments. Because many ideas are better expressed visually, I have created diagrams of the ideas that I try to explain in the text.[4] If you, like I, comprehend better some concepts visually, I recommend that you value the diagrams as highly as you might the text.
In this introduction I explain the ways in which I use such terms as material and ethereal environment, nature, culture, and ecology. In succeeding sections I proceed to describe my views of how a person is caught up in a world partly determined by external forces and partly created by a person’s own self. Next I note that the persistent patterns that guide and limit the flows of information between individuals and their surroundings consist both of social institutions, which are ethereal, and of spatial organizations or patterns, which are material.
The last two sections of Part I of the essay relate to the concepts of a person in place and a person in time. Basic to my understanding of place are ideas about the flow of information within networks or ecosystems that are focused on a human being. And basic to my understanding of time is the concept of event or actual occasion.
Basic Concepts
Trying to understand better the meaning of terms that have been used to describe the environment of humans can be very confusing. What is natural environment? What is social environment? What is physical environment? What is cultural environment? What is Nature? What is Culture? What is ecology? The answers to these questions must be based on fundamental assumptions about the world. Often, however, environmental terms are used without a clear understanding of the assumptions on which they are based. The unthinking use of the terms environment and ecology has made it difficult to come to a common understanding about the place of humans in the world. Especially confusing is the common use of the terms the environment or the ecology with reference to a view of the physical world as consisting exclusively of material objects and living creatures in an assumed given reality. The ideas of both Culture and Nature are also extremely varied as they are used in many different contexts. Therefore I self-consciously examine the ways in which I use these terms.
To me, environment is a very broad idea; it is whatever interacts with a subject in question through exchanges of information. In this essay I picture an individual human—an ‘I’, self, or ego—to be the central subject of a constantly changing flow of information of all sorts within networks or systems of both Nature and Culture. Thus the individual person is constantly exchanging an enormous amount of information with both Nature and Culture throughout his/her lifetime. Over time, some elements of these exchanges are relatively habitual or stable e.g. breathing, gravitational pull or your church and home; others are unique or fleeting, e.g. birth, weather patterns, or conversation.
Material and Ethereal Environments.[5] The human animal (Homo sapiens) constantly exchanges energy and matter with the material world of which it is a part. These exchanges are guided by flows of information created by differences in chemical, physical, or genetic states, both within the human animal itself and with the impinging objects to which it is subjected. We breathe, eat, drink, and move as our more common interactions with the material world.
As a part of a world of energy and matter, the human species is, by definition, adapted to or at one with its environment. If it were not, the species could not survive or continue to evolve. Human beings, like members of all other animal species, have their own special place in the material world. They are uniquely adapted and are uniquely limited in the ways they can respond ecologically and evolutionarily. Nature, as the material world is often called, both 1) accepts the habits and 2) is the accepted habitat of the human animal as it has evolved so far.
The material world consists of both 1) unmodified matter and energy– neutral stuff, or matter outside human control, and 2) humanly modified matter and energy–the physical world that human animals have themselves fashioned both consciously and unconsciously. Humans exchange information with both forms of material nature. As individual entities, humans are the evolutionary result of nature, modified by contemporary habits and practices.
Humans also participate in an ethereal world through constant exchanges of information with one another. The exchange of a human animal with his or her ethereal environment is guided by a flow of abstract and symbolic information that has been stored within the body/mind, and is expressed in speech, body movements, or cultural artifacts, all of which are part of the material world that has been humanly modified. Language, much behavior, and artifacts, even as they are expressed in the matter and energy of the flow of speech, body movements, or fossilized forms such as writing or solid, manufactured objects are essentially, by my use of the term, ethereal expressions.
Individuals must adapt to particular ethereal worlds if they are to survive. And individuals jointly share ethereal worlds in many forms, e.g. in families, small groups, and broad societies. These jointly shared groupings have cultural expression within which individual humans interact subjectively. Humans are creators or innovators. The extraordinary ability to create a seemingly limitless ethereal world distinguishes humans from other animals. Because language and other forms of symbolic behavior are limitless, the ethereal world may be expressed in infinite ways. The ethereal world, when compared with the material world, is almost ephemeral because it changes with every individual and every action. As Edith Cobb in her extraordinary book, The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, expressed it, each human, especially in childhood, is potentially the peak of a new evolutionary line even as he or she is bound to the gradual evolution of the human animal species.[6] In other words, ethereal surroundings can change rapidly, potentially with each human’s uniquely unfolding patterns of ideas and symbols, while the exchanges of matter and energy between the material world and a human are more regular and set, less open to change, and contribute little to rapid evolution. The world of Nature, where the survival of the human species–not individuals or even communities of people–is at question, is more prescriptive of conditions that support human life than is the ethereal environment. Both ethereal and material worlds are dynamic environments of humans.
Nature and Culture. Even if one has faith that Nature is ultimately orderly and that humans are able to objectively discover that order, we also act as if Nature were chaotic or a puzzle to unravel. The unknown may remain bewildering—a part of wilderness–or we may discover Nature’s order by regularized searching. Today, science is the major key to our processes of searching, finding, and imposing a human sense of order on Nature. Because humans have evolved in particular ways, they sense forms in Nature. But the ordering of those forms, I believe, is imposed by regularized description and searching rather than being inherent in Nature. Especially some scientific views of nature are imposed. [7] In the past, order was often considered the domain of God; or gods and humans were shown or allowed to see that order at God’s or a god’s will For example, in the Christian world as early as the 4th Century, nature was seen as a book that could be read.[8]
Nature may also be seen as a wilderness in which humans may occasionally immerse themselves, exchanging their self-consciousness of particular cultural orders–including scientific order–for unself-conscious peace, serenity, and unity on the one hand or panic and terror on the other. Roderick Nash has clearly laid out many of these views in his book, Wilderness and the American Mind.[9] Whether Nature is viewed as orderly–but largely undeciphered, or wild and untamed, I prefer to think of it as `neutral stuff’[10] that, for the most part, remains outside the power of the human mind or body.
In contrast with a neutral Nature, I see Culture as the world of order that has been created by and deposited in the minds of humans. For the purposes of this essay, I view whatever knowable order there is in the world to exist within the minds of humans. By my definition, order is any reproducible or communicable thought or idea and representation of those ideas and thoughts in artifacts.[11]
Any extensive collection of those ideas, thoughts, and artifacts that are being exchanged systematically may be called a culture. In other words, cultures are separate clusterings of ideas, thoughts and artifacts which bring order to human existence. Underlying each culture are worldviews that broadly unify a clustering of ideas and values, I see all cultures as being ultimately interconnected in time and space although they may not be directly linked through contemporary events, thoughts, ideas, or artifacts. An overarching ethereal environment that encompasses many or all cultures may be expressed as Culture, sometimes as Cosmic order.[12]
Ecology and Ecosystems. Ecology and ecosystems are terms first used by biologists; they commonly define ecology as the study of a biological community that lives in and interacts with a particular place or a particular physical environment over time. The systematic interrelations of that community and its physical environment constitute an ecosystem. Biological ecosystems usually focus strictly on the relationships of a set of interdependent organisms and their immediate physical environment. The spatial boundaries of ecosystems are arbitrarily placed where steep gradients separate strongly interacting life forms and environmental conditions from areas in which the conditions are seen as being of little influence on the identified community being studied. The basic concept of ecosystem that I use is the idea of a complex network of interactions that link its various parts, both material and ethereal.
A human individual is a biological unit or individual holon, i.e. is made up of many smaller parts that in its wholeness act as an integrated unit and with some degree of consciousness. And an individual human is also a member of a social holon such as an ecosystem that links him/her to other distinct biological holons and physical units. But unlike most biological communities, human ecosystems are not defined by geographic limits. The ecosystem within which the human individual exchanges information is extraordinarily great because humans are members of extraordinarily extensive ethereal environments, which extend over broad space and long periods of time. Human individuals and their environments, both material and ethereal, are indeed part of ecosystems but, unlike most biological ecosystems, are neither geographically specific nor limited to natural phenomena. I use the concept of human ecosystem even though it is radically different from the systems concept used by many biologists because it is the best way I know of looking at humans as part of an environment that includes Nature, Culture, and Person
Ecosystems focused on a human probably induce strong, persistent, far-reaching exchanges with the material world because these exchanges of matter and energy have been built into the human animal as it has evolved along with all other organisms. Exchanges of symbolic information within a person’s ethereal world, however, may appear to be stronger simply because they are fundamental to consciousness or the awareness of being human. Thus I discuss person’s ecosystem largely within the context of a culture.[13]
Before considering a human as inextricably embedded in a web of continuously evolving environments, I want to think about the ways in which human individuals may be seen as synthesizing intermediaries between both material and ethereal environments- between Nature and Culture. First—let me look at the determining environments of an individual person.
The Determining World
Material Environment. (The left hand side of Figure 1.) A person experiences a material environment through his or her senses.[14] In this perspective, I equate a material environment, whether modified or not by humans, as what F.S.C. Northrop describes as “a vast, spread-out going-on-ness, vague and indeterminate at its outer fringes, ablaze with diverse colors, and issuing forth manifold sounds, fragrances, and flavors,”[15] not as a predefined object or collection of things. The material environment stimulates the physical matter that makes up an individual.
Because of the physical (genetic) make-up of the human individual, humans are able to accept and respond directly to only a narrow range of all possible external forces, sensations, or potential information of their material environment. That range is unique to humans and differs fundamentally from that of dogs, ants, daisies, mosses, granite, or water, for example. The exchanges of information between a human and his/her material environment are customarily explained in terms of biochemistry, biophysics, and genetics. Bio-psycho processes are also used to explain the translation of sensations from outside to inside the human envelope or body.
The limited range of outside stimulations that a human animal can experience determines much about the existence of the individual. It, of course, also limits the ways in which humans can observe and describe or define Nature.[16] The continuous series of exchanges between the material environments and a human animal in the course of its life are molded by the array of sensations received and selected. While recognizing the basic importance of the countless exchanges of matter and energy between the human individual and his/her surroundings, I do not want to try to elaborate here on the intricacies of those mutual transformations. They are better left to physiologists, biologists, neurologists, and psychologists, among others, who have extensively described them in scientific literature.
Because many sensations that are received and passed on to the brain through the major sensory organs–the eyes, ears, nose, the mouth, and the skin–may be done so consciously, these exchanges play an important role in our symbolic as well as our material life. As Mark Johnson has shown in his book, The Body in the Mind, the sensations produced by the form and movement of the human body itself are major ways linking the environing material world with many basic symbolic forms of our ethereal environment.[17]
Ethereal Environment. (The right hand side of Figure 1.)The determining world of humans is also ethereal, i.e. a part of the world of ideas, values, thoughts, feelings. In addition to reacting to the sensations emanating from the material world, humans respond to symbolic patterns created by themselves. Many animals may be thought to have spirit—from the Latin spiritus meaning to breathe; however human animals do more than breathe. They are also ethereal—from the Greek ether meaning to ignite or blaze. Because my focus is the human animal, I have chosen to use the term ethereal rather than spiritual environment. The ability to communicate symbolically through bodily movement, language, and artifacts indicates that humans respond to ethereal expressions in many ways that may be seen as deterministic, the symbol largely determining the reaction. I have broken down these processes of acculturation into two categories: learning and socializing.
By learning from symbols, syntax, semiotics, and what is meaningful to other humans, individuals gain access to the values, customs, and technology of a culture, the shared knowledge of a community. The study of these processes is the realm of linguists, psychologists, educators, and ethnologists. Most learning, of course, is implicitly gained in the processes of maturation and acculturation. Explicit or conscious processes of learning are more formally acquired and contribute to that part of our ethereal environment that does not appear to be natural to its possessor. Learning symbolic patterns is the way of gaining access to the order that is provided by the worldview of a particular culture. And learning the terms of cultural discourse is a way the conscious human animal can keep the chaos of an unknown nature at bay by trying to humanize or bring order to it.
Because humans are social animals, much of the process of acculturation is absorbed in the fitting into a life with other human beings. The opportunities and necessities of symbolic exchanges are enhanced by close contact with other humans. Thus the common elements of culture are maintained by close social relationships within a community. Indeed much cultural symboling is devoted simply to exploring, developing, and maintaining social patterns with related humans. Because symbols, to be important or useful, must be shared, the ethereal world is dominated by the process of socializing, especially socializing the young and new members of a community.
The ethereal world of Culture, like the material world of Nature, determines the human animal; but unlike Nature, is impressed through the processes of socializing and learning which attempt to bring cultural order to the community of shared lives.
Internal World. (The Person in Figure 1.) At every moment of existence, each individual human has unique material and ethereal environments because of his or her unique position in time and space. As well, each human animal has a unique genetic inheritance. Further, each human combines in unique ways the sensations received from the material world and the symbols learned from the ethereal world, in the process creating a unique set of percepts and concepts.
Sensations constantly bombard the human animal becoming part of it through a propensity to turn the instinctive animal patterns of perception into symbols–language and concepts.
Symbols begin to become a part of human existence even before birth. And these symbols gain greater meaning with experience. Experience, which joins sensations with symbols, gives meaning to those sensations and provides the basis for metaphorical language. Experience that results in the emergence of general meaning from specific instances of symbolic thought generates concepts. And the joining of sensations, percepts, symbols, and concepts results in the animal that is human.
Therefore each person retains his or her own collection of concepts as well as his or her own depth and breadth of each concept. In a similar way each person has developed percepts that influence the selection and intensity of sensations received from the material world.
The person combines the symbols, derived from his/her ethereal environment with the sensations, received from his/her material environment, forming both perceptions and conceptions which he/she will then use in further interactions with both Nature and Culture. Humans are physically tied to the material world by their experiences as well as by their biological constitution. They are embedded in their ethereal world by the very symbols they use to construct cultural order. [I am not here concerned with the experience of subtle, causal-formless, witnessing, and non-dual states of consciousness.]
So far I have presented a view of physical and cultural environmental determinism. Let’s now modify those raw determinisms with the perspective of what I call a creating person.
The Creating Person (Figure 2)
A person becomes creative, rather than determined, when he/she 1) articulates his/her conceptions, and projects them into the existing ethereal world of others, or 2) identifies or actually modifies part of the material world. I see all humans as being creative by their very existence as self-transcendent creatures who are part of open biologic and symbolic systems. In an open, self transcendent system, creativity occurs when an existing individual (gestalt, event) maintains its basic form yet is transformed by the addition of something new, i.e. individuals are changed but are still recognizable as emergent from a previous form.
At the heart of human creativity is the use of the open, self-transcendent systems of natural language (the language of everyday discourse.) In the use of natural languages one cannot speak and listen without interpreting the symbols of another–without comparing one’s own forms with those of the speaker. Creativity comes from the process of reconciliation of forms which are merely homologous and never identical. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By elaborate on the processes by which personal conceptual systems are acquired through the metaphorical structuring of experience.[18]
Within my conceptual framework focused on a human animal that is located in both material and ethereal worlds, I stress four basic processes of creativity: imagining, innovating, making, and naming and categorizing. The distinction among the four is often blurred, especially between imagining and innovating—the creation of new ways of doing or manipulating symbols. Imagining and innovating are here considered as processes of altering the ethereal world while making, and naming or categorizing are viewed as processes changing the material world. First I will look at ways in which new order is created or a culture is modified–the processes of etherealization.[19] Then I look at the ways in which humans intervene in their material environment–the processes of materialization.
Etherealization. (The right hand side of Figure 2.) Cultures are constantly being modified by the minor variations in the ways in which the concepts (gestalts) a person presents differ from those that other people receive and in their turn re-present. That language allows this to occur is, of course, the very basis for learning and socialization–the transmission of culture–as well as for the incremental remaking of cultures.
Humans, but especially children, are constantly mapping experiences and comparing them with the maps offered them by family and peers. The new maps–the new gestalts–may differ significantly from the old maps and still be understood and useful or affective, i.e. they may be creative and in turn change ethereal environments. Geniuses, with childlike wonder and spirit, are also able to map new territories and creatively extend or transform perceptions of older orders. During childhood and other periods of openness to wonder these common, creative processes are potentially ripe for great change.[20] Then, creativity emerges in the making of new order out of disorder or an old order. Newly imagined values or innovative techniques, when accepted by others or when they modify other people’s values or methods, alter a culture.
Imagination and changes in values. The dictionary defines imagination as the result “of forming mental images of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality.” It also carries the sense of “an idealized or poetic creation.”[21] Within these meanings, imagining is a form of analogical thinking in which a person becomes creative through the use of metaphor. And when these metaphors, expressed in self-transcending language, can be understood by other people, the values which underlie cultural order may be altered. When enough people accept the new images, a new cultural order may emerge to become the basis for the dominant socialization processes of society. This is the process of etherealization described by Lewis Mumford. He follows the creation from personal dreams, through apparitions, images, idée’s forces, incarnations, incorporations, and finally to embodiments in the material world.[22] The grand imagination of Jesus about a loving god, of Francis Bacon concerning the utopia of science, and of Thomas Jefferson about democracy, among many other examples, truly altered the course of the ethereal world order of most of us alive today. Most imagining, however, results in far less dramatic changes in cultural order. Nevertheless imagination, usually unremarkable and little noticed, results in small incremental changes in even conservative cultures.[23]
Innovating techniques. Creativity may also be expressed by the innovation of new techniques or ways of arranging cultural forms or cultural values. Technology is derived from the Greek, technologia, meaning systematic treatment of an art. Techno– is the combining root form meaning art, craft, skill. Technology is the capability of disposing over form and is the method by which art or artifacts are fashioned. Techniques are the communal order of technology.
Seen as the possession of all humans, the creation of techniques is part of the way in which cultural evolution constantly proceeds. Of course, the universal technology of humans is natural language through which we transcend our animal status. All humans use a natural language by which they transform not only themselves but their society and less directly their material world. Other languages, such as those of science and mathematics also express much of technology. And of course the development of digital technology has radically transformed the contemporary ethereal environment. As with imagining new values, developing new techniques can be spectacular in the hands of genius. Simply think of the marvelous creations of the poets, novelists, and composers who established new genres, of the engineers or the architects who combined old elements into new forms, and of the computer theorists who developed the stunning ways in which we can now organize data.
In many cases it is impossible to separate the genius of imagination from that of technologic innovation. Nevertheless, I believe it important to distinguish between the technologists’ manipulations of forms and the image makers’ creations and applications of symbols. I believe that imagining is concerned with the etherealization of wants, attitudes, and needs whereas technology is concerned with the etherealization of behavior, skills, and abilities.
Materialization. (Left hand side of diagram 2.) Humans are also creative when they impress themselves on the material world through the processes of 1) naming and categorizing or 2) physically rearranging matter and energy. The resulting categorizations of Nature as well as physical artifacts become a part of the material world of everyone who comes to use or interact with them. I think the process is well described by Suzanne Langer who writes of the seeing of form in Nature, i.e. the subjectification of Nature (in my terms, the naming and categorizing of Nature); and of the giving of form to feeling, i.e. the objectification of feeling or the creation of art (in my terms, the making of artifacts.[24] Unlike Langer, I call all artifacts creative, even if banal.
Naming and categorizing. Our human world is united with the material environment in little understood ways. Because we are part of Nature and participate fully in its continuity and evolution, we respond to information, or as Gregory Bateson phrases it, to differences that make a difference in our existence.[25] At an unconscious level we respond to material forms and events within Nature. At a conscious level we, as order-seeking cosmic creatures, may become aware and recognize forms and events within Nature, giving them symbolic form, most commonly in our natural (everyday) languages. The amazing diversity of languages in all their individual complexity, vocabulary, grammar, literature, and uses attests to the creativity of humans in their perception, categorizing, and conceptualizing of Nature.[26] Science has become the modern era’s most creative procedure for naming and organizing nature. Indeed, it has become so successful that science is often mistakenly thought to be the only way of truly knowing about Nature.
The names we give objects, the terms we use to describe events, the ways in which the world is divided into categories, and the standardized ways in which each person views the material world of nature is to create order by imposing a cultural worldview on the material environment and to establish what is powerful. C. A. Bowers[27] notes that the act of naming is one of the primary functions of words and exercises the most basic form of power. He writes:
What is not named remains part of the horizon–that is, undifferentiated background of the phenomenological world characterized by silence and inattention. What are named become the focus of intentionality, and the object of thought and speech. Beyond this elementary expression of power, the process of naming involves illuminating certain features to the exclusion of others and suggesting relationships between what is named and what is already familiar.
The individual human who expands the learned and socialized patterns of his/her culturally defined worldview by developing or applying names to previously undifferentiated phenomena or events is creative. As examples, think of the creativity associated with the enormous expansion of language that has accompanied recent biological discoveries or developments in information technology. But creativity will be recognized as such only so long as the new symbols are communicated to fellow humans.
The Remaking of Matter and Energy. Through the use of fire, of plant and animal domestication, the building of settlements and development of the Industrial and Technological Revolutions, as well as in the creation of great art, humans have had great success in fashioning matter and energy that has radically transformed the natural world. New values, technologies, and categories which express new human needs, wants, attitudes, skills, abilities, and behaviors have become material. The result has been the nearly complete remaking of the natural world in which humans live. The creativity of individual artisans, craftsmen, and ordinary farmers, fishers, and homemakers has been overwhelmed by the institutionalized productions of large-scale industries which command immense amounts of fossil fuel energy in the transformation of incredible volumes of matter.[28] Humans have been recreating the material world in which they live, if not always with much feeling, at least with great quantitative success.
One only needs think of the technical applications of the great builders of dams, freeways, bridges, skyscrapers, power lines, even whole cities to understand the magnitude of the creative alteration of matter and energy by contemporary humans. But also think of the millions of individuals in Western society who fashion their homes through their command over so much matter and energy that it would stagger the minds of their ancestors. The conscious fashioning of matter and energy by humans is so obvious to most of us who have lived in the past several decades. Often expressed in terms of growth and progress, materialization has become a dominant creative end of modern society. At the same time, however, the unwanted results of growth–pollution, rapid entropy, extinction of species–are also materializing.[29] (This is the principal theme of Part III.) Painters, sculptors, dramatists, writers, architects and other artists have also remade nature through their creation of material artifacts that exhibit great feeling and emotion, enriching the experience of humans.
The Intervening Environment. (Figure 3)
Worldviews or the cultural orderings of the world do not float in ether; rather they are expressed through social institutions which maintain the traditions and continuities of their members as well as serve as their memory banks. Social institutions are intermediaries of the creative imaginations and technologies of their members. In a comparable way, much of the material environment is not experienced directly by individuals but instead is experienced as part of the humanly created forms or organized patterns of space/time. Social institutions and the patterns of organized space mediate between the individual and his/her material and ethereal environments. The intervening world is the way individuals are interconnected in space/time.
The Ethereal World of Social Institutions. In the ethereal world, the mediating structures are human social institutions. These institutions maintain and distribute the flows of values and techniques. Humans learn and socialize within institutions where they also present and test out new concepts. The ideas of Edward Shils are especially appropriate in this regard. In his book, Traditions, Shils writes of memory as “the vessel which retains in the present the record of experiences undergone in the past.”[30] The family, the church, and the school “taken together have been the chief maintainers of tradition in any differentiated society.” They are the bearers of collective memory. The army, business firms, and political institutions also maintain traditions but in a more specific sense. The State and other governmental institutions are especially important in the modern world.
Shils stresses the conservative nature of social institutions but at the same time recognizes that change is inevitable because of the individuality of institutional members and of the external circumstances affecting the institution and its members. Most of everyone’s life is played out in a social context which is embedded in the traditions and memory of cultural values and techniques. Culture is structured through social institutions.
The digitalization and computerization of information has resulted in the creation of cyberspace. Social institutions associated with these new technologies are emerging rapidly. Facebook.com, Amazon.com, Google, and EBay are examples of some of the older cyber institutions. The relation of individuals to these institutions is in flux.
In the process of etherealization, a person’s imagination may change the purpose and direction of social institutions. His/her innovations in technology may also alter social institutions by changing their design and structure. And an individual’s creativity becomes manifest through the acceptance of his/her ideas by other individuals within the social institutions to which he/she belong.
Organized Spaces. The mediating structures of the material world are organized spaces where humans act out the dramas of life. In the same way that social institutions are the bearers of memory and tradition in the ethereal world, patterned spaces are the maintainers of memory and tradition in the material world. Shils notes many categories of artifacts, which are spaces fashioned in matter, in which the past endures into the present. He includes monuments, buildings, layout of physical space (including roads, dwellings, and cities), coins, artistic works, documents, and records.[31] Artifacts, the organized creations with spatial form, are a constant memory of the humanly-fashioned world in which we live out most of our lives. Many spatial patterns of human events are relatively conservative; but in the modern and post modern worlds, new spatial patterns have multiplied rapidly through the materialization that is associated population increases, consumerism, and technological change. And most individuals contribute to these changes. In addition, the words, categories, and metaphors that are associated with the proliferation of social institutions and the making of artifacts gives evidence to materialization that thousands of persons have created.
Everyone is a member of society and thus belongs to many social institutions. And everyone participates in events, which have spatial patterns associated with them. These institutions and spatial patterns envelop individual humans, yet may be changed by the creative actions of individuals. The social institutions and the organized spaces in which our lives unfold are both 1) determining in the sense of the traditions they impose and 2) changeable by individual creative acts or through lack of care.
I have now expressed views of 1) environmental determinism, both material and ethereal; 2) personal creativity through a) imagination, b) innovation, c) naming and categorization and d) remaking of the material world; and 3) the role of the mediating structures of social institutions and organized spaces. Next, I present ideas about how these components of environments are linked with a person.
A Person in Place—Networks of Connectivity. (Figure 4)
Every person is inextricably connected to both the material and the ethereal world. The individual is the active processor of information and an intermediary between these two interrelated realms of environment. Nevertheless, neither symbolic patterning nor physical sensation meets solely in the mind/body of the person. They also reside in the memory of the social institutions and the organized spaces and artifacts of a person’s environment. Concepts and percepts are embodied in each individual and are also recognizable in the created physical forms and the languages of society. Social institutions may be said to mobilize individuals–the actual agents of change. Patterned spaces restrict or influence the action of individuals acting either as themselves or as part of collective efforts.
Although only the individual person is a true intermediary between the material and the ethereal world, he or she may better be seen as the focal point of a network or web, broadly conceived to include all impinging and affected environments within which he/she exchanges information through imagination, innovation, categorization, manufacture, as well as through experience and learning. As an example he/she belongs to many institutions. (Figure 5) Or he may be seen as socially connected to many individuals, each one of whom has his/her own material and ethereal environments. (Figure 6)
Communication network. All living matter, which constantly exchanges information, is part of an extended network or ecological web. And since all living things are “organized” they must contain “messages” built into them–they are a part of what Gregory Bateson calls “mind.[32] He notes that: 1. A mind is an aggregate of interacting parts or components. 2. The interaction between parts of mind is triggered by difference. 3. Mental process requires collateral energy. 4. Mental process requires circular (or more complex) chains of determination. 5. In mental process, the effects of difference are to be regarded as transforms (i.e. coded versions) of events which preceded them. 6. The description and classification of these processes of transformation disclose a hierarchy of logical types immanent in the phenomena.
The exchange of messages is the recognition of differences that result in change. These exchanges are not limited to conscious differences but may be events that trigger automatic responses which can set in motion a chain of further significant differences with what may result in dramatic changes elsewhere in the ecologic system. Bateson’s “mind” thus extends throughout the whole of the concepts of evolution and ecology. But humans are also able to step aside and look, think, and act on the basis of their conscious awareness of “mind.”
Humans make use of an extremely versatile range of body expressions to communicate as well as creating and displaying artifacts that encode their messages. But even more importantly, humans encode messages in a grouped sequence of elements–syntax–which means that propositional or declarative statements with nearly infinite powers of conveying meaning can be created.
Both human movements and artifacts along with encoded linguistic expressions frame intensive social interaction. In ritual proceedings both displays of material artifacts and the use of vocalizations and bodily movements express human behavior.”[33] Ritual or habitual actions take place within both the ethereal and material worlds. Many of the messages are exchanged within the structure of the human body, others with other living creatures. Yet probably the most creative exchanges are among humans, especially in the form of linguistic discourse. Discourse gives humans the ability to express their creativity and to respond to the creativity of others in a continuing dialogue which is distinctively human.
Discourse. The primary role of discourse is to bind people together through the use of natural language. Furthermore I believe that discourse also connects through exchanges of information between humans and the material environment of symbolic artifacts, scenes, and sensations. The power to control discourse of individuals is limited by both social and artifactual environments. It is the ultimate power of discourse to overcome the unknown chaos of both Nature and Cosmos and to reassure individuals of their cultural connections with other humans. Without discourse children die from lack of attention and mature adults go mad from sensory deprivation.
For Michel Foucault discourse is more than simply the “interjection between thought and words;” He recognized a series of principles which regulate discourse. There are 1) rules of exclusion–what one can speak about and what one considers reasonable and true; 2) internal rules–commentary, authorship, disciplinary authority; and 3) rules of employment–where, who, and when particular sorts of discourse can be used.[34] I would add—digitally facilitated discourse is limited by access to the appropriate technology.
Human discourse provides the context for bringing order to life through symbolic interaction. But also linguistic discourse limits greatly the information that the human creature exchanges. It provides a shield against what may be seen as chaos of the unknown and is the fundamental basis for human thought. It lies within the narrower contexts of both social institutions and spatial organization of the material world.
Communication networks that tie a person to both his/her material and ethereal environments are extraordinarily complex. The flows of information follow intricate pathways with their varying resistances, gateways and openings. The terms and means of discourse are presented by social institutions and organized spaces. This communication system provides a person connection with the unknown materiality of Nature and the ethereal order of Culture. This is an intricate web of messages—a sort of ecosystem–focused on the individual. What makes each individual human is the unique way in which he/she is interconnected within an ecosystem in a never-ending discourse of language and sensation.
A Person in Time–Human Events and Changing Environment
Events. Human exchanges of information in both the material and the ethereal worlds must also be placed in temporal contexts. By using the concept of events, both spatial and temporal dimensions can be combined to extend ideas about understand human interactions with material and ethereal environments.[35]
Event, from the Latin, evinere, to come out, has a basic meaning of “an occurrence or the fact of taking place.” In philosophical terms an event is “that which occupies a restricted portion of four dimensional space-time.”[36] And when distinguished from its synonyms, event carries the connotation of “a more or less important or noteworthy occurrence”. By these terms, an event is something that has been distinguished in time and space because we think it noteworthy, and we are ready to give it a name. This use of event also means that what we usually call objects may also be seen as events.
In the context of this essay, I want to think of the individual person as a particular event that is linked to its contextual events through overlapping occurrences, i.e. events which at least partially occur in the same space/time. The elements of the material world, in the same way as the individual person, may also be seen as events which are linked along pathways that temporarily join the paths of yet other events, i.e., they are events of overlapping duration. Every individual person is conjoined in time/space with a particular assemblage of matter, energy and information, i.e., material events. However, the flow of each of these material events, i.e., how they are linked with their own preceding and succeeding events, proceeds at its own rate and along its own pathway. And their rates vary greatly–often on the order of several magnitudes–from the rate along which the environed person is proceeding down his/her own path. Thus, a person’s material environment is constantly changing. The time frame of the person is different from that of the material events which may become part of the person’s environment. Environment therefore must be considered as a dynamic context whose elements (coincident or overlapping events) relate to the environed human in a constantly changing mix, not as a monolithic collection of events called “the environment “or “the ecology.” Members of each species move along their particular pathways at more or less similar rates of occurrence largely governed by genetic character. For example, humans, from conception to death, all experience events at rates which differ greatly from those experienced by an amoeba or a redwood tree. As well the forces that control non-living entities also move along at their own rate.
Let me elaborate my thoughts about the material environment further by distinguishing 1) events described within the physical world and which are discussed in objective terms of matter and energy and 2) events of the world of life, which are described in subjective terms of differentiation. The basic distinction I make is between the logical or formal systems used to describe the physical world and the open or self-transcendent systems used in describing the living world.[37] And individual humans–as events themselves–are moving through a constantly changing mixture of events sometimes best described in the terms of the world of life, and sometimes in terms of the closed systems of the physical world.
The Physical World. The physical world of matter and energy (or the world of physics and chemistry) is one that we often think of as following definite laws or as being deterministic. I am primarily concerned here only with a selected range of these physical events, those that impinge most directly on individual persons in their lifetimes. At the level of direct human experience, we have usually thought about matter and energy in terms of determined impacts or forces or chemical reactions. Some of the lawful changes (which are but forms of habitual or determined recurrent events) occur slowly, others more rapidly, some over longer, others over shorter, periods of time. We also concern ourselves as individuals with those physical events that happen in the longer time frame of human awareness and memory–those most obvious to normal human perception, for example, weather events or climate, or water movement in a stream. And as scientists, we may bother with long term events such as perturbations in the hydrologic cycle which have resulted in the formation of millennia-long lasting ice caps and climate change. Physical geographers–experts in the sciences of certain physical events whose pathways intersect those of humans–must also understand physical events at those scales that illuminate the occurrence of impacts, forces, and chemical reactions which determine the larger scale physical events whose pathways are of more direct concern to humans’ paths.
The Living World. The events of the living world can be described differently than those of the elements of the physical world in that they depend upon the presence of flows of information and need not be seen solely as determined by existing physical forces or chemical reactions. An individual (cell, person, individual holon) has a context and in turn is a context for other individuals. The events of life, in contrast to the world of matter and energy, depend on acting differentially upon receiving information, not upon inevitable or habitual reactions to physical impacts or forces or of chemical compounds and elements. And because these events of life are conditioned by differences, they are often described in terms of probabilities, not laws.
By their presence as information-receiving and self-regulating identities, humans are both context and components of the events of life. They both respond to and create “differences that make a difference.” And that raises anew the questions of how the human animal is linked with other events and what are the more important scales at which an understanding of human events should be sought?
I think that the more significant answers, at present, are being developed by those ecologists and biogeographers who are concerned with the ecosystems of soils, water, air, and plants–the most variable components of the physical world that are most directly linked with the human metabolism. Their questions are basic to an understanding of how the human animal is part of and sharing information with the overlapping events of humans and nature, e.g. How do these biological ecosystems work? How do soils form? How does plant succession proceed? How have plant and animal distributions changed?
Maybe we can reach more satisfying answers if we consider that human events are also made up of a series of ethereal events that interact with the natural environment in significant yet different ways than the lawful ways of physics and chemistry or the probabilistic ways of life.
The Cultural World. Symbolic communication creates distinctive cultural worlds in which humans play out most of the events they identify as important. Cultural communications–language, artifacts, and other symbols–link individuals and cultural events
In recent decades the development of sophisticated forms of electromagnetic means of communication has resulted in the creation of cyberspace, which exists entirely within computers. Cyberspace is located neither within the material world nor within the bodies of those engaged in cyber communication. The cyber world is truly ethereal within which neither the physical location nor the authority of its users necessarily has importance. The social institutions that arise within cyberspace and the relationships of the participants in cyberspaces to one another or to the material world are only now beginning to emerge. Simply look at the complex social networks that exist within the world of Facebook.com.
The channels of communication cross over from the ethereal world into the material world. Ideas, values are expressed in the names, categories and artifacts of the material world. Whereas the openness that underlies all living forms are highly self-regulatory, the openness of linguistic discourse, especially through electromagnetic digital means, has the ability to transcend its origins and create radically new forms. The self-transcendence of natural languages and of artifacts allows culture to change rapidly, especially in those cultures that value innovation.
Some cultural events are nearly instantaneous, as in conversation where the sounds that represent words disappear as fast as they are uttered. Others, such as the Great Pyramids, long outlast the culture of their makers. All relate humans to one another and are tied to place. Cultural geographers and anthropologists are usually more concerned with cultural events, such as institutions and artifacts that are at a larger scale and more long-lasting. (By contrast, drama critics and newscasters are concerned with short term cultural events such as a particular performance of a play or a presidential press conference.) These symbols, institutions and artifacts arranged in space, have location–indeed may be the nucleus of what we call a place–and are where many individual human pathways of events come together; and thus they become significant cultural environments. They are the places where special human communications or movements are concentrated. They become linked to other places through movement or flow of symbolic information–special humanly created pathways for the rapid flow of signals which trigger events.
Institutions form the more important situational webs in which humans are embedded. Society, religion, culture, economics, politics are the institutions through which humans funnel their pathways of events. (Figure 5 above) The artifacts (buildings, monuments, books, roads, fields, factories, dams, etc.), in other words, events associated with these institutions, create lasting symbolic information that influences subsequent human events as well as physical events that in turn set other natural processes on their own paths.
The question of the connections between the events of institutions and artifacts is best answered, I think, by the use of The Pattern Language[38] as expressed by Christopher Alexander in Timeless Way. Alexander and his co-workers have devised a series of “patterns” to guide the creation of forms or artifacts which support events associated with humans and their cultural institutions. He writes “the patterns of events are always interlocked with certain geometric patterns in space.” Patterns start by describing an event, determining how it is related to both its context and its constituent parts. Good patterns–those that support life–are expressed by spatial and temporal arrangements of parts which resolve the conflicts or tensions that exist in particular contexts. His methods involve a clear identification of 1) events, 2) the location of those events within the context of other events–the natural and cultural environments, and 3) the creation of spaces which will support the symbolic communication of the institutional events. [39]
For example, the artifacts of the Baroque City supported a particular form of political and social power, as do skyscrapers today. Well-designed nursing homes support the well-being of those being nursed, and good classrooms support learning. They are events that satisfy individual humans. But other institutionalized events, for example, clear-cutting a tropical rainforest also channels additional physical events such as greater heat transfer and soil particle movement. And the paving over of large lots for the parking of cars increases the surface run-off of water as well as providing a place to park automobiles.
Cultural environments are the world of ideas and artifacts that are expressed in both the material and ethereal environment. The linkage of events by cultural symbols has allowed distant times, places, and peoples to be connected because human artifacts and language may persist beyond the lifetime or geographic reach of their creators. Human institutions and major built forms are stable cultural environments that may be mapped over long time periods and across wide spaces. Institutions and built forms both limit and facilitate the events that connect pathways. In our contemporary cultural environment, extensive technology and control of symbolic information have given humans great command over the remaking of matter and energy and institutions, thus channeling cultural events in many ways. The emergence of communication in cyberspace is transforming the range of the ethereal world. How it connects with the material world is only now becoming evident, especially in military, financial, and artistic applications.
Narrative, Memory, Foresight. Several conventions may be used to arrange events temporally: narrative, biography, history, evolution. One way of describing a series of events through the use of language is a narrative or a story. A narrative selects a particular pathway to follow a sequence of events. The choice of the pathway is, of course, artificial (artful) and is determined by the narrator, who is guided by convention, imagination, memory and foresight. Imagination, a form of creativity, can make up events which overlap with those of memory or foresight.
Memory, which is extraordinarily well developed in humans, allows the joining of events which would not otherwise overlap. It extends the duration of events, allowing both physical and cultural environments to connect or reconnect in unique ways. Through the symbols of decaying isotopes, fossils, or cultural artifacts such as written records and digital archives, past events can become a part of a person’s current event. Especially ethereal symbols, which are inscribed in memory in true or fanciful form, can reenter a person’s environment, joining a personal narrative with events of remote times and places.
Foresight can extend or project a narrative to link it with physical, mindful, or cultural events, which are projections of yet other series of events. These projections–individual narratives extended in time/space–guide actions and behaviors, setting up the course of overlapping pathways of several series of events.
Of course, the narrative is also guided by the fundamental processes of experience, socialization, creativity, placement in social institutions and organized space, the metaphorical conceptual system, and the adopted rules of discourse. The essence of narrative is the serial linkage of those events deemed significant by the narrator, whether he/she is storyteller, historian, scientist, creative artist, or teller of an anecdote. The time system(s) of the narrator establishes the series of events, which are environed by other events of overlapping duration.
Biography. In the broadest sense, a person’s biography is a narrative about a creature with memory and foresight, one who lives in constantly changing institutions and constantly re-organized spaces. Memory and foresight are human characteristics that guide the pathway of each human individual; they aid in the release of humans from instinctive and determined linkages with other events of which they are a part. The events consisting of social institutions and spatial structures of each person have their own flow of change and sequence, reflecting not only their changing human membership but also the changing pathways of Nature. A person’s cultural geographical biography charts a unique path through changing institutions driven by a changing ethereal world and through changing arrangements of the material world in which his/her ecological/linguistic discourse has involved him/her. [See Part II of this essay.] The continuing link is the individual human creature who maintains its animal form while transforming itself from conception to death.
By extension, a biographical narrative of any identifiable “it“–an atom, molecule, cell, organ, organism, population, community, or ecosystem—may be composed by assuming the perspective of an “it” and following its pathways. The numerous events with which the individual identity overlaps in its pathway of existence are the environmental context of the biographical narrative. Of necessity, narratives are merely limited selections of a series of linked events of the identified “it” or individual, i.e., short stories.
History and Evolution. When narratives focus on two or more people they become a cultural statement. When expanded from we, a small community, or a narrowly identified geographic place to being tied to a larger region or some grand event they become histories of a particular period or geographic region, they become the traditional concern of historians, regional geographers, ethnologists, or human ecologists. A special form of narrative termed structuration has been of concern to many geographers and sociologists. It follows the (biographies) pathways of many individual persons as they are structured in time/space by social institutions and organized geographic spaces. These narratives are told by academicians who see an indivisible merging of the society, time, and space.[40]
And of course, even broader scale narratives are based on identified stories of life on earth itself–now usually told as the story of evolution. The earth itself may be seen as a self-maintaining entity with its Gaia story.[41] Even the emergence of the physical cosmos—the story of the big bang may be seen as the grandest of narratives.[42] Some creation myths can also be seen as histories or parts of grand narratives.
For me, the narrative that has become of greatest importance to humans is the recent history of the human species, which has become increasingly enthralled with applying the ethereal products of the modern age. In particular, the “Western” ideas of scientism, humanism, and capitalism have been coupled with an unrelenting technology to release previously unimagined energy, which is used to transform inalterably not only the cultural environment of all humans but also the material environment of all life. The material world has increasingly been forced to respond to the productions of the human mind which are creating effects both beneficial and deleterious to the very survival of the human species.
But an alternative narrative must challenge Western natural and social sciences as well as many basic concepts of modern humanistic concern. Because these traditional views are at the root of both unaesthetic and anesthetic growths in both human society and a broader mindful nature, the entrenched understanding of the underpinnings of our dominant ways of thinking demand drastic revision if not major conceptual reorganization. This is the theme of Part III of this extended essay.
Summary
In Part I, I have reviewed the several perspectives with which I view the relations of persons, Nature and Culture.
First: Individuals are animals that are composed of the material world but also experience it as a part of its material environment.
Second: The human animal has a mind that uses symbols and has feeling and emotions, all of which develop through learning and socialization.
Third: Individual humans are creative by imagining new values and innovating techniques.
Fourth: Individuals also are creative as they categorize and name events in Nature and as they make artifacts that modify the material world of Nature.
Fifth: Individuals exist in social institutions through which most of their ideas and concepts are guided or funneled.
Sixth: And as individuals play out their lives, they are guided and restricted by the spatial organization of the material world, especially by artifacts.
Seventh: The process of etherealization is creative as it progresses from dream to apparition, idée-forces, incarnation, and incorporation into social institutions. The final process is the embodiment of the incorporated idea into spatially organized matter, (materialization.)
Eighth: Individual humans are part of an extraordinarily extensive ecosystem, which has both material and ethereal expression. Within an individual’s ecosystem, significant information is constantly exchanged.
Ninth: As the exchanges are in constant flux, they may be seen as events, which link both time and space.
Tenth: The events of an ecosystem may be described in terms of narrative, story, biography, history, and evolution. When focused on impinging and overlapping events, which in turn are parts of yet other events, ecosystem events demonstrate the true complexity of environment.
Individual humans are but one gestalt, made up of many events, and part of a vast environment of overlapping events. The stories are more beautiful and filled with emotion when they are relevant to the individuals and groups to which they are told. In Part II of this essay, I will tell my story in the terms I have laid out above and create a personal environmental biography. And in Part III, I will attempt to tell a story in environmental terms about the contemporary event of the creation of Bads as we humans try to create a good life. Finally, I will express views of essential changes needed to avoid some of the worst Bads.
Part II
Autobiography
The questions I now want to address are: What are the events that have contributed to the gestalt that is Me? What are the social institutions that have filtered my existence? What are the spatial arrangements that have influenced my pathways through life? In what ways have I been creative? In what ways have I modified the material world? What are the narratives that make up my cultural, geographical autobiography? And how am I connected to other events that overlap an ecosystem that is focused on me?
I view myself from within as well but also try to see me as if I were an observer. I try to show how I relate to dominant American worldviews and to the particular experiences of my generation. And I want to indicate some of the objective facts and their systematic organization that link me to a larger material world.
My narrative starts with my childhood and family and continues through my formal education, my adult life and my life in retirement. I look at the socialization and learning that has influenced me and at the spatial (geographic and artifactual) settings of my life. I write about the ways I have altered the cultural and material worlds. And finally, I look at the ways I have uniquely accepted worldviews as a member of the “Depression Baby” generation.
Early Life—1931-1949
Family Life. I was born into a middle-class American family at the beginning of the Great Depression. My mother and father already had two daughters, four and six years older than I. Although without regular employment during part of the Great Depression, my father worked odd jobs, making enough money accompanied by much scrimping to keep the family with food and shelter. I do not remember being deprived in any way during what must have been grim times for my parents. I was a much loved and protected child. My mother much later told me that she had worried much about how to raise her first child, Janice, with just my father for emotional support. Her second child, Joann, was gravely ill much of the time as a baby and thus a constant worry. (There were no sulfa or other anti-bacterial drugs available.) But with me, Mother said that she was going to enjoy and love a healthy and happy baby. Thus I was given a warm, loving start to life in a household that maintained, often barely, adequate food and shelter.
As I remember, not only was my mother caring, but as I grew older, my sisters were as well. The three of them were the main focus of my early life. I remember my father almost exclusively as merely a presence, not a close participant in my childhood. I now know that he was working very hard, often at backbreaking jobs, just to keep his children from being hungry. My parents were not demonstrably affectionate, at least in front of me.
I have been told that I was an easy child to get along with. I was healthy and good natured. Not being a very adventurous child, I was also obedient and quite self-contained. Family life was almost always calm and regular. The spats among siblings were minor and discipline was not corporeal. The family always ate meals together and at regular times. I don’t remember doing many activities outside the home or neighborhood with the exceptions of holiday outings and yearly vacations to the Oregon beaches or mountains. We visited my maternal grandparents most weekends for very short visits. By the time I was born, they had moved to Portland after the retirement of my grandfather.
The ethics of my parents reflected in many ways those of their parents (and in turn mine.) My father’s father, who had been born in 1868 in Ontario to Scots immigrants, had worked his way across the United States as a blacksmith for a railroad. He settled in Sherman County, Oregon, owning a ranch in Erskine, and later a store and finally as the postmaster of Moro. He knew how to work hard, as did my father, for whom hard work became a fundamental driving force. (My paternal grandmother had died before I was born. I am told that her death greatly affected my grandfather’s spirit for the rest of his life. I primarily remember him when he lived with us for some months for the pinochle games he played with my sister and me when we got home from school.) I know nothing about my grandfather’s immediate family. My father was the third child of six; he was the first child in his family born in Oregon. He grew up in Moro, graduating from Moro High School before attending Oregon Agricultural College (now Oregon State University) in Corvallis for two years. He returned to Sherman county where he worked on the family farm. He moved to Portland after marrying my mother.
My mother’s father came from a Quaker family who valued education highly. Born in Indiana in 1856, Grandfather Cox had attended Kansas State University before he and his four brothers came west. Three of his brothers had graduated from Haverford College and his youngest brother, after whom I am named, from Stanford. All Cox brothers had taught school or university at least during one part of their lives. (Two at Stanford University, one in Santa Rosa, San Rafael, and Oakland, where he was assistant superintendent of schools, and the fourth in Honolulu.) My grandfather–named Horace Mann, after the 19th century educator—taught at many schools in Oregon, including at the George Fox Academy in Newberg. In 1878 Grandfather Cox came to Oregon where he worked in stores, farmed, as well as taught in several schools before he settled in Arlington, Oregon, in 1901 and worked his way from being a clerk and bookkeeper to manager of the local bank. He married, Joie Hamer, one of his high school students in Echo, Oregon. Grandmother Cox, born in Missouri, came with her family to a farm near Elko, Nevada, when she was two years old. Her family moved to Echo, Oregon, when she was ten. She married at seventeen. I first remember her when she ran a variety store in Portland, to which my grandparents had moved upon my grandfather’s retirement. Grandmother Cox enjoyed writing poetry and painting, activities that my mother also came to enjoy, especially after my sisters and I had left home.
My mother and her three sisters reflect the upbringing of a family that valued education and art. Her oldest sister, Elma, became a milliner. Although she had not gone to high school, Elma’s two sons completed graduate college degrees, Carl, becoming a career naval officer and Frederick an artist and university professor. Esther, her second sister, studied and taught music, was a professional pianist and organist, and composed music. Her son, Ted, became an electrical engineer. And Janet, her younger sister, taught English in high schools in Oregon and Oakland, California. Mother, born in 1902 and the third daughter, was in the first graduating class of Arlington High School. She attended Willamette University for a year before transferring to Oregon Normal School (now Western Oregon University) in Monmouth where she received a teaching certificate. She taught school in Moro, Oregon, where she met my father, and in The Dalles, Oregon, until she and my father married. This familial background that valued education and art was an implicit part of my life.[43]
I learned to read before going to school. My mother and both of my sisters often read to me. I have strong memories of my older sister reading the Sunday funny papers to me. In grade school I very much liked going to the school library as well as to the Montavilla branch of the Multnomah County Library, where I regularly took out as many books as they allowed.
I started to play the violin when very young but gave it up when I found that playing the piano was more interesting. My Aunt Esther gave me lessons most of the time I was in elementary school. I enjoyed reading and playing folk and popular music although I was little interested in performing or practicing enough to become a pianist. I could carry a tune but never sang except at school or to myself. What I am saying is that I learned to value reading and playing the piano when I was young. This reflected, I believe, the emphasis on learning and artistic activities that allowed me to spend time pleasantly by myself.
In contrast to many American families, I had almost no exposure to activities associated with either church or sports. I cannot recall either of my parents ever attending a regular church service. And I cannot recall ever playing ball, walking, swimming or other physical activities with either of my parents. I only attended Sunday school occasionally to see what my friends did on Sunday mornings. And I rarely attended any sporting event preferring to keep statistics on the Portland Beavers baseball team while listening to the radio and reading the daily newspaper, the Oregon Journal. Thus, for me, the rituals of religion and sports largely remained as an observer rather than as a participant.
School, starting with kindergarten, remained throughout my life, until retirement, a major focus of my life. I eagerly anticipated the approach of Labor Day and fall because it heralded the joyful return to school. Even today, the lengthening days of late August and September seem the highpoints of the year.
Elementary school was a rich feast (and a breeze) for me. My public school, John L. Vestal grade school, was quite new, having been built to satisfy the recently growing population at the eastern edge of the city of Portland. However, being a ‘depression baby’ meant that there were fewer of us than the children born in the 1920s; therefore there was lots of room for us in school. The teachers were still there to serve the large boom of students who preceded us. In addition to the home room classes we had regularly scheduled special classes in music, art, auditorium, library, health, and gymnasium.
My schoolmates were nearly all lower middle-class, white, Protestant kids. There must have been a few children from poorer families, but they were not distinguishable from the rest of us at the time. I remember a couple of families who had escaped the Dust Bowl conditions of the Great Plains and a couple of families whose fathers were Pullman porters. But I was unaware of serious class or economic distinctions probably because almost all of the parents of my classmates ‘worked’ and were not ‘professionals.’
I was well-prepared before I came to school and never felt challenged beyond my abilities. I was ‘the bright boy’ in most classes, excelling in all of the academic subjects and confident in all but sports activities. And even there, I was self-assured enough not to be greatly disappointed when I was chosen last for softball or football teams. I had few close friends and got along with all of my classmates. I received encouragement from my teachers, probably because I did well in class and was never a disciplinary problem. My mother was always supportive; and she participated actively in the P.T.A. to insure that her children were well taught, and the school well supported.
I learned well the ways of school and how to take tests, to write to please, to quickly pick up the classroom routines, to not be bored, and how to ‘get along’ with both teachers and classmates. I believe, now, that all but one or two of my teachers were excellent; I remember them clearly and fondly.
My sisters and I walked about one mile to school until I was old enough to ride my bicycle. I received my bike on my eighth birthday. It was second hand, repainted and put in good order by my dad. What a joy that birthday was! Grades five through eight corresponded with the Second World War and the settling in to a newer home my parents were able to buy on the east slope of Mount Tabor. It was a little farther from school, but easily reached by bike. And I could still visit my friends who now lived somewhat farther away.
Because both my parents had jobs during WWII—my mother in the shipyards, both before and later as a salesclerk in the largest department store in Portland, and my father in a wholesale plumbing supply warehouse—I was on my own between the end of school and their arrival home at about six o’clock. My sisters were in high school and worked as well. I had a paper route that kept me busy for a couple of hours after school and provided me with pocket money. It gave me experience with many people in the neighborhood, some of whom were extraordinarily kind, others sometime ‘dead beats.’ I had to be home to start dinner which usually meant simply peeling and boiling potatoes and sometimes going to the store for last minute items that were on the list left by my mother.
As a child, my sisters and I all had chores around the house; and we needed to take care of our pet dog. The first chores I remember were watering the house plants, dusting the furniture, and cleaning up the messes left in the yard by the dog. The last family dog was completely in my care. She even rode in a basket on my bicycle when I simply went for ‘a ride.’
Our next-door neighbor, an immigrant from Sweden, was very good to me. She let me trail her around her yard. Many flower names I first learned from her. My dad also had a garden in a neighboring vacant lot. I enjoyed helping him there. He let me grow pumpkins that I later sold to neighbors at Halloween time. As I grew older, I mowed lawns and weeded gardens. The most memorable times that I had with my grandfather Cox, who was 75 years older than I, was walking through his large, immaculately kept vegetable garden and fruit trees, many of which contained several grafts. These experiences in garden, yard and orchard were pleasant and may account for my continuing joy in working in yard and garden and making beautiful landscapes.
During the summers in WW II, I picked raspberries (at 4 cents/box) to make some money for movies and odds and ends. I also mowed the large lawn of the family of my sister’s future in-laws. That family, the Matsens, and my own did many things together and I, as the youngest and only boy (my future brother-in-law, Ken, was in the Army), felt a part of that family which was very generous and warm. I sometimes felt that it would be great to be a son and brother in that family. In fact, I was treated as such anyway.
I think that the impact of WW II, when I was age 10-14, was primarily through reading the newspaper and listening to the radio. I was fascinated with the maps of the location of our troops and of the battlegrounds and front lines. The pictures of the strange places in Asia, Africa, and Europe were exciting, especially as shown in Life Magazine and the newsreels that accompanied the weekly movies I went to. They followed the earlier interests I had had with the tales of visits to Alaska and Mexico that one of my teachers had made. I also remember van Loon’s Geography and his Story of Mankind.[44] I was given an atlas by my mother, and I copied many of the maps. After the war, I tried to collect all of the available road maps, which were given free at gasoline service stations. It was, I believe, the interest in maps and foreign places that I developed during the war that helped set the course of much of my life.
I grew up in detached single-family houses located near the eastern edge of Portland, Oregon. The first house that I remember was a modest, two-bedroom, rental house in which I shared one bedroom with my two sisters. As we grew older, I slept in the basement, sharing it with the laundry trays, ironer, washing machine and clothes lines, as well as the sawdust bin which held the fuel for the furnace and water heater. We had a backyard with fruit trees, lawn, and small artificial lily pond. Vacant lots were common: the one next door was used for our vegetable garden. Behind, the vacant lot was overgrown with scotch broom that sheltered paths and hiding places. The house was four blocks north of Glisan Street, along which ran the Montavilla streetcar line, which extended from downtown to East 90th. Glisan Street had businesses that grew up near the streetcar stops scattered along its length. Because my sisters and I twice daily walked along Glisan Street from 71st to Vestal school, located between 80th and 82nd, I remember many of the stores—Balsinger’s Drugs, the Mobil gas station, the Evergreen market, a variety store with its Oshkosh B’gosh overalls sign, Bill’s barber shop, the Granada theatre, a couple of second-hand or junk stores, to name but a few of the shops that existed in the first four decades of the 20th Century. Most of the houses and the few churches in the streets that ran parallel or at right angles to Glisan Street were built during the same decades.
When I was 10, we moved to a house that was just a few years old. It was located on the eastern slopes of Mt. Tabor, along the Mt. Tabor streetcar line. Unlike the rented house, this had two stories and a separate garage. I had a bedroom to myself. From it, I could see Mt. Hood and the Cascade mountains. From the dining room, Mount St. Helens was visible. Living here gave me a sense of what a mountain should look like—a snow-capped, conical feature that rose up above tree covered hills. This three bedroom house was a symbol that our family had become firmly fixed in the middle class of America and put the Great Depression behind us. Located not far from the edge of town with vacant lots behind and across the street, yet with direct access to downtown by electric streetcar, this house remains for me the standard of success.
Because my family had a car—first a Model A, then a 1936 Chevy sedan, and after the War, a 1948 Chevy—my father drove to work. The family often took Sunday drives into the countryside to the east of town. Berry fields and orchards and other small farms lined the roads east to Gresham, the county fair town. We explored the old Swan Island Airport on an artificially expanded island in the Willamette River. During the Second World War it was converted to a shipyard occupied by the Kaiser Corporation. We drove up the Columbia River Highway past waterfalls and the new dam at Bonneville, the first of many large dams in the Pacific Northwest. For me they were Northwest symbols of Progress and thrilled me with the big projects that were transforming America. We drove on the roads to Larch Mountain to pick huckleberries and to the Sandy River on the road to the mountains. And we drove to Bend and to Eugene, to visit my aunts.
Each year we vacationed at the Oregon coast, sometimes taking bedding, cooking utensils, etc. and staying in small cottages near the beach. In particular I remember cabins at Canon Beach, Rockaway, and Long Beach, Washington, which was reached only after a long wait for the ferry across the Columbia River at Astoria. When I was older, we stayed with the Matsens at their old cabin at Gearhart or their new cottage at Lincoln Beach. On weekends or holidays, we went to their forest cabin in federal lands along the Zig Zag River in the Cascades.
Driving to the beach, digging for razor clams, jumping waves in the cold surf, getting sunburned while digging in the sand, building bon fires in the evening, playing hearts and pinochle, pitching horseshoes, and enjoying the good food set my standard for many years of how to enjoy a holiday. The beaches were not crowded, and the small seaside towns were places to spend a little time and money for saltwater taffy, for looking into tourist shops, and maybe buying an ice cream cone.
When still quite young I rode the streetcar and busses to my music lessons, and when in high school, to ball games at other high schools. I was always fascinated with public transportation; and with cheap student fares—five cents—I rode all over town. I collected transfer slips; each line having its route and stops printed on it. These adventures were really very tame. The bike rides were on streets that were safe and little travelled. The streetcars, busses, and trolley busses were also safe and frequent. And Portland’s downtown was compact, busy, and safe. And wider excursions were family affairs. My first long trip was to the San Francisco World’s Fair on Treasure Island in 1939 and on to Los Angeles, San Diego, with a day trip to Tijuana, Mexico. And in 1948, my parents, a neighborhood couple, and I toured the great national parks of the West. On the latter trip, I collected many state highway maps, which were produced and given free at the service stations.
Because the vacant lots near my house were gradually being built on after the Second World War, I was fascinated with the ways houses were constructed, in particular with architectural and lot plans. Earlier I had drawn plans for world’s fairs, having been intrigued with the guidebook to the San Francisco fair. I sketched out house plans after visiting construction sites. Much earlier I had liked playing with Lincoln Logs and an erector set, which had once belonged to my brother-in-law. And I collected the pop-up cards that were included with packages of Parliament cigarettes. They depicted world famous buildings.
As a boy, the physical object that most influenced me directly was my bike. I was also strongly influenced by radios, first the family’s and then my own, which I kept in my own bedroom. Later I bought a 45 rpm record player with money from my paper route earnings. Possibly the eagerness to own and listen to my radio influenced my choosing to major in radio technology in high school. The spinet piano that my parents bought for me, of course, was very important. Of much lesser importance were other play things. I built model airplanes and boats but never with great success. I didn’t seem handy with Xacto knife or airplane dope. I think now that I was more fascinated with the plans and scale model drawings than I was with the process of building. Building and repairing things never interested me much. Although I had to repair my bike, I usually found the process very frustrating. And even in my high school shop classes, the ‘hands on’ activities rarely satisfied me.
High School Days. I made a major break from school and neighborhood friends when I decided to go to an all-boys’ technical high school. I have tried to understand why I chose to go to Benson Polytechnic rather than Washington High School, which was my district’s academic high school and to which both of my sisters had attended. I may have looked to the men who preceded me as examples. My future brother-in-law, Ken, and the only male first cousin that I knew moderately well had both graduated from Benson. Also, I was, at fourteen, still a small boy, who was not prepared for the sexual tensions that went on at a co-ed school. And in retrospect, I may have not consciously recognized my homosexual feelings but still expressed them by choosing an all-boys’ school.
Rather than majoring in foundry, blacksmith, carpentry, electric, machine, automotive, or aviation shop, I chose ‘technical radio,’ because in addition to ‘shop’ we could take a complete academic program that prepared one for college. I took a college prep program and also found time to participate in school plays and student governance.[45]
I attended most sporting events by myself until I gained friends from my classes. During my last two years, the radio shop classes met together several hours each day thus I got to know my fellow students quite well. Nevertheless, because we lived in neighborhoods that were scattered all over the city, we didn’t get to know each other outside of school activities. The social and economic backgrounds of my fellow students were mainly lower middle or lower class. This was, for Portland in the 1940s a fairly diverse mix of students. Many students were looking for vocational training with as little academic work as possible. Others were interested in technical training with supporting academic subjects so that they could go on to engineering careers. And a minority, such as I, was planning to attend college not knowing what we might study.
In high school I continued as ‘bright boy.’ (I received all A’s.) But I had learned to remain inconspicuous among my classmates. Activities with classmates focused on sports teams, interest groups, or clubs. I ran for student body treasurer, probably because the office was uncontested. However, it allowed me to be part of the student government. I was also co-editor of the yearbook, again a job that few wanted but allowed me to be involved with all elements of the school without conflict with the ‘in group’ of athletes or student leaders. Even so, I was asked to join the “in club” which included the major “jocks” and socially more active students.
At home, I became, practically speaking, an only child because my older sister, Janice, worked and Joann attended college. My parents benefitted from the post-war boom with better incomes and ability to buy ‘goods’ unavailable to them during the Depression and WW II. They had a new car, new appliances, and the ability to take vacation trips.
As I grew older, I continued the warm relationship with my sister Janice’s in-laws. I still mowed their lawn and as I grew stronger, worked in their commercial greenhouses which produced cut flowers, carnations and chrysanthemums. The gang of young men, friends, and relatives of my brother-in-law, of which I was much the youngest, was hard-working, exuberant, and playful. Inspired by the practical joking atmosphere set by the owner, we enjoyed the hard work because it was recognized. I had to learn to accept the practical jokes played on me. I was innocent and took myself too seriously, so the lesson of joking was alleviated by the warmth of the atmosphere. My father sometimes joined in kidding me. In fact that is probably the closest form of relationship with him that I remember.
The period of 1945-1949 was one of national expansion, of progress, of growth, and of the expectation that the future would be better after the grim days of the Great Depression and WW II. For me, it was a time in which doing well in high school was most importance. I learned to really enjoy reading for my English classes, to find chemistry and physics fascinating, and to participate in school activities. My mother eventually quit working and my father found a new job where he was better appreciated and compensated. During my last year in school, he was sent by his employers, Consolidated Supply Company, to Spokane to set up the warehouse for a branch of the company. Later he became the manager of the company’s branch in Walla Walla, Washington. He and my mother moved from the home I knew in Portland shortly after I left for college.
Summary of Early Life and High School Days. I was most strongly determined by living in a supportive family in a lower middle class American suburban neighborhood. I was a healthy, intelligent boy who felt secure in both my family and schools. I learned ways to excel in schoolwork and satisfy my parents’ expectations and was sure enough of my abilities to socialize with my classmates. I did not make strong gang or group alliances; instead, I was quite independent, if sometimes lonely. I was sexually naïve, neither dating nor feeling the need to interact with girls my own age.
My world expanded from house to neighborhood, from family to school. And from bike and public transportation I got to know the larger city and nearby neighborhood. And with family auto trips, I became acquainted with western Oregon and the Cascade Mountains. My awareness of the wider world came from reading newspapers and listening to the radio. Especially significant world events became important to me through following the battles and troop movements of the Allied Forces during WWII as shown in the short news reels that accompanied the weekly movies that I attended.
Young Adulthood—1949-1955
Oregon State College (now Oregon State University). Once I had gone to college, I never returned home except for brief holidays. And home, as I had known it, vanished when my parents moved from Portland. College life and friends came to dominate my experiences. I had chosen to attend Oregon State College in Corvallis, Oregon, upon graduation from high school in part because it was inexpensive. I had received both a high school graduation award and a State of Oregon scholarship. I saved money from working in the greenhouses, as a house boy at a sorority house, and as a desk clerk at Crater Lake Lodge in the summer. My sister, Joann, and her husband also attended Oregon State. In retrospect, I now see that Oregon State was a safe, next step in leaving home and becoming independent.
I lived only one term in a dormitory. My roommate was a returning veteran of WW II, who was much more experienced in the ways of the world than I. I felt uncomfortable in the dormitory and was recruited to join a social fraternity. I joined because it was less expensive than the dorm and it was noted for having the highest grade-point average of any living group on campus. I fit in well and formed close bonds with my fellow pledges to the fraternity. For the first time in my life, I felt that I was really a part of a group of like-minded people. Fraternity life was enjoyable. It involved duties, such as keeping the house and property clean and maintained, helping in the kitchen and serving meals, as well as supplying the joys of buddies and common activities. Dances, serenades, and interfraternity sports as well as card games and long conversations were all exciting to me. My fraternity brothers, all of whom were very active in many college activities, encouraged me to join college service groups. Unlike many fraternities and colleges, drinking was strictly prohibited on campus and in all campus living units. Only very occasional picnics off campus were the scene of any beer drinking.
I dated primarily to participate in fraternity or college dances and parties. But college girls little attracted me sexually. I much more enjoyed the camaraderie of my fraternity brothers. In fact, I was asexual in my thinking. I dated just enough to show my fraternity brothers that I was not a ‘faggot’, a term if applied to anyone would have meant great derision or ostracizing. I had learned well to follow the social mores of the fraternity. I had gotten very good academic grades and I had participated extensively in several college activities. As a result, my ego was greatly raised when I was chosen to represent the fraternity in the college men’s sophomore honor society.
I had hoped to become a science or chemistry major because I had liked best my chemistry and physics classes in high school. But at Oregon State, introductory chemistry lectures were large and impersonal. Labs consisted of set experiments taught by assistants in windowless, smelly rooms. Calculus was done by rote. I did well on assigned problems but never understood what the subject was about.
I found economics dull, probably because it was one of the 7:30, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday classes. The instructor was resentful of the hour as well. Psychology, philosophy, and history classes were OK, but the classes were large and the textbooks dull. I also took several geology and geography classes whose instructors simply repeated what was found in the textbooks. However, unlike the texts of most of my classes, I found the geology and geography texts to be interesting because they gave me a vocabulary that I could use to describe the natural world around me. As well they used maps, which continued to intrigue me.
Because I knew well how to prepare for and take examinations, I did very well academically. I would have had a near perfect GPA if I had not receiver Bs and Cs in swimming, golf, and folk dancing. Two years of ROTC were required of all male students. Because I had been a ‘technical radio’ major in high school, I was accepted in the Signal Corps unit rather than the engineering or infantry units.
In 1949, Oregon State College enrolled about 4500 students and had been enlarged by many students enrolled under the G.I. Bill. Classes were very large; and classrooms were filled to overflowing. Some classes even met at 7:30 a.m. on Saturdays. This was the college depicted by Bernard Malamud in his novel, A New Life. The town of Corvallis was a county seat of a small, conservative agricultural county. Oregon State College was founded as a land grant institution in the late 19th Century. Corvallis was my introduction to small town America in the 1950s. The Willamette River bordered the town to the east, beyond which were broad agricultural fields. The downtown was compact; suburban growth was still in the future. The campus extended from downtown to the college’s agricultural fields. The town and campus were not overrun with cars. Students walked to class, to their residences, and to the churches and movie houses downtown. The campus had large brick buildings surrounding grassy, park like quadrangles. The football field had a small grandstand on one side and temporary bleachers on the other. Basketball was played in the old, very small college gymnasium. Pleasant middle-class houses and fraternity and sorority houses on tree lined streets surrounded the campus. The fraternity and sorority houses were attractive buildings. My house was built in southern antebellum style and like other houses, was more impressively furnished than the homes of many of its occupants.
Oregon State College was very important to me because I found out that I could be accepted in social groups and that the academic and extracurricular activities in which I participated were valued by others. I also learned a bit about life in a small town, both its attractions and limitations. However, the great social attractions of Oregon State were not enough for me. Academic life had been a disappointment. I was stimulated intellectually by neither my classes nor instructors. I discussed this disappointment with some of my fraternity brothers and found that several of them agreed with me. I then looked for some instructor with whom I could discuss this feeling. The only teacher that had really stimulated me was my English composition and literature instructor, Rose Combellack.[46]
Mrs. Combellack recognized my frustrations and suggested that I might find the University of California, Berkeley, to be stimulating. She had also been the instructor of one of my buddies. He, I, and two other fraternity brothers went to Berkeley during the Spring break of our sophomore year. We were excited by the people we met there and by the numerous activities of the San Francisco Bay region. Three of us took the California entrance examinations and applied for admission. We were all accepted and moved to Berkeley in the fall of 1951.[47]
University of California, Berkeley. As an independent person, the most influential decision I made was to transfer to the University of California. The intellectual patterns and the friends that I met there have been important the rest of my life.
I needed to complete a bachelor’s degree in two years beyond the two that I had finished at Oregon State. To do so, I had to consider how to finance the greater expenses of being an out-of-state student,[48] how to complete two more years of ROTC, which I wanted to do to avoid being drafted and sent to fight in the Korean War, and how to complete the University requirements which were much greater than those at Oregon State.
The finances were satisfied by being accepted into the Signal Corps unit of advanced ROTC, which had a monthly stipend attached but with duties of additional class work, weekly drills, and a six-week long summer military training camp at Camp Gordon, Georgia. During my first year in Berkeley, I lived off my summer earnings as a desk clerk at Crater Lake Lodge. With my two buddies from Oregon, I lived in very inexpensive rental rooms where we prepared and ate our meals. During most of my second year I lived in a room in a private home for $15/month and had my meals provided in exchange for cleaning bathrooms in a group-housing building. And to finish all of the requirements of classes at the end of the second year I borrowed $500 from my parents.
Because I needed to complete two courses in American history, two years of foreign languages, ROTC credit classes, and an academic major for which I lacked most prerequisites, I needed to enroll for 21 or 22 credits each semester. The class load simply meant that I had to study hard and not participate in many nonacademic activities. More difficult was finding a stimulating major that I could complete in two years.
I thought of the ideas and courses that had most interested me. I focused on my childhood interest in maps and the interesting geography and geology textbooks that I had read at Oregon State. After an intensive study of the University of California Catalog, I discovered that I could major in geography, a university academic field that I had not known existed. My first meeting with a faculty member in the fall of 1951 was with the undergraduate advisor of the Department of Geography, John Kesseli. Professor Kesseli was a tall, lean man with a full head of wavy, silver hair. His gruff, heavily accented German-Swiss voice was accompanied by piercing blue eyes.
I arrived at his office several days before the fall semester began. Professor Kesseli asked me where I had attended college my first two years. When I replied, Oregon State, he said in his particular accent, “Corwallis? Why didn’t you stay? We don’t want you here!” I was greatly taken aback because my decision to come to the University of California and to major in geography had been the most important decision I had ever made. I became upset, somewhat angry, and replied “I left Oregon State because I didn’t think it very stimulating and that I thought that the University of California would be. I am going to stay, whatever you think.” Professor Kesseli broke into a big smile and said, “Well, OK! Let me put you through your paces.” It was obvious that he wanted students with spunk and who would question the teacher’s authority. Professor Kesseli did “put me through my paces” in his classes in map reading and geomorphology. He practiced the Socratic method of teaching and one had to be prepared to answer his penetrating questions without hesitation. I responded well to his methods; they truly involved me directly in the learning process. Through a growing mutual respect, he and I became good friends until his death.
I did not realize when I chose my major that the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, was the most distinguished geography department in the country. Its chairman, Carl Sauer, was honored throughout the world. As I mentioned in Part I, his classes The Conservation of Natural Resources and The Domestication of Plants and Animals as well as The Geography of Latin America were truly inspirational. They offered me the intellectual stimulation that I had not found at Oregon State. Each course was a carefully thought-out story that was founded on a consistent philosophical background. Professor Sauer had gathered the evidence that underpinned his ideas from broad readings in geology, history, anthropology, and archeology. He synthesized the evidence with sound speculation and great verbal skill. He was not highly theoretical as was the fashion in most social sciences. Instead he wove stories about the ways objects and ideas were geographically distributed and ordered historically. His stories were the most thought-provoking of any I had ever heard. I even tried to record his classes in writing as close to word for word as possible so that I could reflect on his ideas, sometimes much later.
Erhard Rotund, who taught courses in introductory cultural geography and the geography of the United States and Canada, was a large, white-haired Swede who had a heavily accented voice. He had been a seaman who came to an academic life in middle age. From him, I learned that teachers, even in very large classes, could take individual care of students. I still remember the detailed comments he made on written assignments. Sometimes his comments were longer than the student’s original paper. He introduced me to studies in soil erosion, deforestation, fisheries depletion, and regional variations within the United States and Canada. From Professor Rotund I first learned of Aldo Leopold’s book, The Sand County Almanac, which may be thought of as the first popular account of ecology. It was the first book, other than textbooks or atlases that I felt compelled to buy with my limited finances.[49]
John Leighly taught climatology, meteorology, cartography, and the history of American geography. Professor Leighly was the most traditionally scientific member of the department. From him I learned about the processes that create weather and climate and the ways in which map projections are derived. A brilliant man but an extremely dull lecturer, John Leighly was precise in his speech and writing. The careless use of punctuation or of which and that did not slip by his scrutiny. He loved to talk about current events and was a gracious host to the students from his classes, which he often held at his home. He led me to respect the care for accuracy that a good teacher must have.
The fifth professor in the Department of Geography, James Parsons, taught a field class that took its students all over the San Francisco Bay region, some place new every Saturday. “Parsons” or “Jim” as we called him had started as a journalist. He carried with him throughout his life the curiosity about everything he saw or read. Field trips with him were constant discovery. Professor Parsons stopped frequently, often precipitously, whenever he saw something that struck his interest. He asked class members questions about what they saw; and he asked strangers who part of the local scene what they could tell us about the place. I learned from him that every place is interesting and that curiosity and lack of inhibition in asking questions will contribute greatly to understanding the world.
As an undergraduate student who took classes with many advanced graduate students, I was surrounded by intelligent intermediaries with whom classroom ideas could be discussed. And on a spring break field trip to Sonora, Mexico, with five graduate students I was stimulated by their enthusiasm to explore new places with the knowledge that they had gained as nascent professional geographers.
Truly my choice to study geography at the University of California transformed my life. I found intellectual stimulation beyond my wildest expectations. I found extraordinary teachers. And I found fellow students who were as interested as I in learning about the world, especially from the perspectives of geography.[50]
Not only was I stimulated academically at the University of California, but I was also exposed to the wide array of theater, music, and political activity of the region. For me, who had only known neighborhood, small town and small city, the abundance of cultural activities of the San Francisco Bay region was more than I could take in, especially because my work and academic schedule was demanding. Nevertheless, I was introduced to the possibilities that were to be found in one of America’s great metropolitan areas.
With the exception of 1953-1955 when I was in the US Army, Berkeley was my home and geographic focus until 1960. Gradually Portland became the past, and Berkeley became my present and future. When I was an undergraduate student no freeways or large shopping malls existed in the Bay Area. San Pablo Boulevard was the main artery through the area connecting Sacramento and the north to San Francisco. Berkeley was linked to San Francisco and Oakland by the ‘F’ Train. And San Francisco, ‘The City’, was accessible by bus, car, and the interurban train over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and by the Southern Pacific ferry between the Oakland Mole and the Ferry Building in the City.
The natural environment of the Bay region was marvelously interesting to me. Dominated by the San Francisco Bay itself and surrounded by high hills, the region as a whole could be viewed from many vantage points throughout the area. I remember staring out of classrooms at the grand scene. As I walked home from classes, I caught glimpses of the Bay and felt part of the larger scene. My senses were activated by the smells and pleasant aromas of the diverse trees and flowers that scented so many of the walks through campus or the residential neighborhoods (and from the roasting coffee as one approached San Francisco on the Bay Bridge.) On campus the eucalyptus trees emitted their distinctive and pervasive smell. The way in which the hills behind the campus changed from the yellow/brown of dry grasses in late summer and fall to the brilliant greens of newly sprouting grasses after late fall/early winter rains was the key to understanding the seasonal changes of California’s Mediterranean climate. In the late summer, the unique coastal fog that often rolled in to smother the region offered a clue to the cold offshore ocean current and the temperature inversions associated with it. And to me, a western Oregonian, the short period of grey, winter rainstorms reminded me of home.
My impressions of Berkeley were mainly confined to the streets within a half mile of the campus of the University of California. This area was largely built up between 1900 and 1930. I lived and walked through most of the streets northwest, south, and west of the campus. In addition to the residential neighborhoods, commercial activities were found along the major streets that led to or were adjacent to the campus: Telegraph, College, Shattuck, and University Avenues. Usually, I preferred to walk along residential streets because they were tree-lined and the homes often had pleasant, flower filled front yards. I also enjoyed walking along Telegraph Avenue with its groceries, restaurants, cleaners, bakeries, and other businesses that catered to both neighbors and students. Especially attractive to me, in large part because I had never seen such before, were the many bookstores, in particular those selling used books. When I and my Oregon buddies moved northwest of campus, I often walked along Shattuck Avenue, the main commercial street of downtown Berkeley. Usually, however, I preferred the residential streets east of Shattuck because, like the area south of campus, they had many older homes, often of distinctive redwood style. And west of Shattuck Ave. the houses were interesting to me because many of them were of a distinctive ‘Mediterranean stucco’ style common to the 1920s.
During my second year in Berkeley, I first lived in an older apartment building on University Avenue. My walk to school was on University Avenue, which was lined with commercial activities that were marginal to the central business district and included an auto dealership, an older movie theater, a large grocery store, and many small shops. I often took a less direct route to see what was playing at the several movie theaters in central Berkeley. And finally, I lived in one of the large, older redwood homes the once lined College Avenue a few blocks south of campus.[51] Apartment buildings and fraternal organizations’ buildings were the norm on College Avenue as it approached the campus.
The University of California campus stretched downhill from the crest of the Berkeley Hills to the central business district of Berkeley. The upper slopes were not part of the main teaching campus, which was bounded on the east by the football stadium, astride the Hayward geologic fault, the International House, the Greek Theatre, and a large dormitory. The campus proper lay on the foot slope at the base of the hills. Strawberry Creek, which flowed in a steep canyon through the hills, was confined to landscaped channels through the campus. The campus was originally laid out, mid foot slope and had good views of the city and bay below. The center of the campus was the broad formal quadrangle with its tall campanile, which can be seen even from San Francisco.
The classroom buildings, the offices, the library and other major buildings were widely spaced and formally placed along winding roads and carefully maintained open spaces. Many of the buildings were built of white stone or covered with light-colored stucco. Some of the buildings were monumental with an eye to beauty as expressed in the style of ‘beaux arts’. A few were of the Bay Area redwood style. And the large new labs, classroom and office buildings were recently constructed in a less ornamental post war style. Large glens with shady spots and groves of redwood and eucalyptus trees provided many places to sit, relax, and be by oneself. Temporary buildings to house the increased demands of an expanding student population after the Second World War still occupied several of the open spaces.
I was focused on Giannini Hall, the home of the Department of Geography. Giannini Hall was part of a complex of three buildings mostly associated with the School of Agriculture. These buildings were sited on a knoll above the north branch of Strawberry Creek. Giannini Hall contained the office of the Dean of Agriculture and had a spacious foyer and wide halls, although the Department of Geography was tucked into a small suite of offices at the back of the building on the second floor and was most commonly reached by a back stairway. In particular I remember the lacey Olive trees near the entrances and an extraordinarily beautiful gingko tree, which, each fall, precipitously dropped its brilliant yellow leaves in a perfect golden circle on the deep green lawn that sloped away from the building.
I also spent many hours in the Doe Library, the stunningly beautiful main university library with its magnificent formal reading room and beautiful smaller room filled with comfortable chairs and a great collection of books to be read simply for pleasure. On hot days the library was cool and on rainy days it was good to curl up in a comfortable chair with a good book. Large lecture halls in Wheeler Hall were the location of a couple of my required classes. Wheeler Hall was located near Sather Gate, then the main entrance to campus, which had only recently spilled out onto Telegraph Avenue with the construction of a new administration building.
The spaces I traversed or used in Berkeley and the larger San Francisco Bay Region made me aware, for the first time, of the ways in which extremely great wealth could be concentrated in public buildings and spaces, in large homes in well landscaped neighborhoods, and in huge commercial structures in dynamic business districts. I had known the concentration of local banks, commercial and public buildings, and a few areas of expensive houses in Portland, but I was unprepared to realize that wealth could be expressed in the urban landscape as strongly as it was in the San Francisco Bay area. In my daily life, I became aware of the value placed on and expended by the State of California on the monumental buildings and extraordinary library of the University of California. And when I occasionally visited the City of San Francisco, I was amazed by the extent of the neighborhoods of expensive homes, in the large numbers of big stores, offices and public buildings in the downtown, and of the museums and Golden Gate Park. Of course, the expenditure of wealth on the Golden Gate and Bay bridges was impressive and visible from many places throughout the region.
And it made me feel good to participate in this concentration of wealth which could build beautiful buildings, create pleasant neighborhoods of large homes, and maintain magnificent parks and tree-lined streets. Yet the natural setting was not overwhelmed. The overriding character of the Bay Region dominated the landscape. The combination of natural and cultural features provided me with a great sensual experience that supported the stimulating intellectual journey I had started at the University of California.
Army Days—1953-1955. In June 1953 I received my Bachelor of Arts degree with highest honors in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the US Army Signal Corps. While I was travelling to basic officers’ training at Fort Monmouth, N.J., the Korean War ended. This meant that I would not have to serve in wartime. I remember the training, not for its technical instruction which soon became outdated, but for the experience of military authority, the meeting with other recent college graduates from all over the country, and for the opportunity to see the cultural, political, and financial heartland of the United States.
I found it easy to follow both the military routine and the prescribed training schedules. As an officer, I shared bachelor officer quarters with a fellow trainee, had access to the officers’ clubs on the base, and had weekends free to visit New York City, the beaches and towns of northern New Jersey, and to take an excursion to Washington, D.C.
The officer trainees with whom I lived on a daily basis were almost all from middle class backgrounds and had attended state universities, not prestigious private colleges. Coming from the South, New England, the West, and Middle West, we had regional accents and preferences yet realized that we had common American ways that overrode the regional patterns. We were part of similar social institutions and had socialized within similar middle-class institutions. We were part of a progressive America with prospects of full participation in good careers and the American dream. We were all 21 or 22 and looking for and finding good times in the greatest of American cities, New York City.
For me that meant visiting museums, going to Broadway shows and the Metropolitan Opera, and walking the streets of the city from the Battery to Harlem and the East River to the Hudson. The walks let me observe the great diversity of ethnic backgrounds, wealth, and ways of living and working in a close proximity to one another. While I had been aware of differences in wealth as shown by the concentration of large homes, public buildings, and corporate headquarters, banks, and luxurious stores in San Francisco, I was unprepared to see the scale of these landscape features in New York City and Washington, D.C. And I reflected on the economic and governmental systems that they made manifest in the material and artifactual worlds. But I also became aware of the landscapes of urban poverty that was expressed in New York’s deteriorating tenements and the decaying row houses of Baltimore that lined Highway 1.
After signal officers’ school, I was sent to Fort Lewis, Washington, and a signal battalion that was in and out of training as its personnel were brought in and then soon sent out to Japan or Korea. I was made adjutant to this holding unit. The commanding officer, a colonel in the Army Reserve, was scheduled to revert to his permanent rank of master sergeant in the Regular Army as the Army downsized after the end of the Korean War. The administrative officer was simply putting in time and was ineffective. The supply officer was an alcoholic. And I and the assistant adjutant, who had been a fellow trainee with me, were inexperienced in routine administration. In other words, the officers were little motivated, inefficient, or marginally functioning in a unit that had little to do other than shuffle papers and men on their way to the Far East.
For me, life was a dull routine of dealing with the daily paper requirements of Army regulations and forms. I slept and ate at the BOQ and officers’ club, looking forward to frequent opportunities to visit my family in Portland, a couple of hours away, or to visiting Tacoma and Seattle, both of which seemed familiar in their similarities with Portland and the rest of the Pacific Northwest. I did not use any of the communication training I had received in four years in the ROTC or at Fort Monmouth. Little skill was needed as Battalion Adjutant, especially as the master sergeant, assigned to the battalion headquarters did most of the actual work. Life in the Pacific Northwest was familiar to me; my fellow officers were not stimulating or challenging. Thus, I and my friend, the Assistant Adjutant who had grown up but a couple of miles from me in Portland, requested a transfer to a unit that would be more demanding.
We were granted our request. George Frisbie was sent to Darmstadt, Germany, and I, because I had a top-secret intelligence clearance, was sent to SHAPE (the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers, Europe) headquarters in Paris, France. I was to be a communication officer attached to an American Army Signal Battalion. SHAPE, the military wing of NATO, was staffed largely by high-ranking officers from all of the NATO nations. For the first couple of weeks, I was assigned to the Communication Center, but was soon replaced by a more experienced British lieutenant. Since I was already attached to the signal battalion, I was reassigned first as an Assistant Adjutant, and then as the Motor Pool and Mess Officer.
As the responsible officer my duties were to supervise very experienced, long-term master sergeants, who relished their assignment to a unit that was freed from strict application of US Army regulations because it was not part of a regular line of command. The unit was allowed great flexibility in carrying out its support functions. The two master sergeants were very capable, experienced, intelligent, hardworking, and did not require my supervision. In addition to this responsibility, I was assigned to carry out routine classes for battalion personnel in such things as driver safety and relations with the natives.
The only demanding duty I had was to co-ordinate the logistical establishment of signal communication facilities in an exercise involving the movement of SHAPE headquarters into “the field.” This meant dealing with all of the units that would need communications for the simulated move. I became competent in finding out what administrative units needed and in getting the services they needed from the signal battalion. I assume that I performed well because I was promoted to First Lieutenant on schedule and was asked several times if I would consider becoming a Regular Army officer. (I did not need a second thought to say that I did not want to remain in the Army.)
My Army service was routine; I learned how to operate easily within a military organization. But the value to me of my time in France was not military, but cultural. Because the unit was uniquely attached to an international organization, the associated officers lived “on the French economy” and were given funds to rent accommodations. At the time, Paris was considered to have a high cost of living; therefore, officers were also given extra funds to allow for the additional cost of finding accommodations. Designed to support the expectations of high-ranking officers, the funds for lower ranking officers were extremely generous. Four of us bachelor lieutenants rented a very large and well-furnished apartment in Versailles, a couple of miles from the headquarters. We hired a maid who not only cleaned but prepared meals when we wanted to entertain. The monetary allowance was more than adequate to live at a scale that, at least, I had not experienced before.
Living in France, in particular Paris exposed me to a culture quite different from that of America. Luxury and opulence were apparent in Paris, the economic, political, and social center of France, yet large parts of the population were still recovering from the effects of WW II. Especially in some rural areas people were still rebuilding their homes, towns, and personal economies. I felt strongly the contrast of the condition of their lives with that of my relatively luxurious, subsidized life in Versailles.
The events of the past were evident everywhere I looked. Sumptuous public and private buildings, museums, theaters, churches, monuments, gardens and parks, and majestic boulevards reflected the social institutions that had been centralized in Paris. I was in awe of the way that this centralized power was reflected in the landscape. I was daily reminded of the former power of monarchy as I drove home past the gates, buildings, gardens, and geometric boulevards leading from the palace at Versailles to my apartment a few blocks away.
I was also impressed by the intimate life of the residents of many of the arrondisements where less affluent people lived. Small shops, restaurants, bars were intermixed with the tightly packed residential buildings that lined narrow streets. And people filled the streets much of the time. This pattern of neighborhood life and buildings was as foreign to me as were the grand monuments of the central city. Both were far cries from the homes, neighborhoods, and downtown of my youth in Portland, Oregon.
Weekend excursions or visits of a few days took me to the French countryside, the Rhine valley, Rome, London, and Oslo. These visits left me with a tourist’s impressions, that is, I could say simply that I had been there and seen a few of the major monuments and attractions, but little more. In Paris, as well much of my experience was that of a tourist, largely because I spoke little French. Nevertheless, I worked and lived there for most of a year and had to relate what I saw to my own life and thoughts.
Graduate School at the University of California—1955-1960
Academic Life. I was discharged earlier than planned because the Army was being rapidly reduced in size following the end of the Korean War. I returned to New York in style on the USS United States, then the fastest ocean liner that crossed the Atlantic. I bought a new car from a Chevrolet dealer on Broadway and drove across the United States to the West Coast. Not having made plans for my life after the Army, I returned to Berkeley and inquired about getting a Master’s degree in Geography. I was eligible for the GI Bill, which could pay for most of my education. I found an apartment in a private home on Summer Street in which I lived by myself for most of the next three years. It was within walking distance of the campus and had good views of San Francisco Bay. The classes that I needed for my program did not start until fall; thus, I had a summer to do as I pleased.
My advisor and friend, Professor John Kesseli suggested that I enroll in an eight-week, field course offered by the Department of Soil Science. The class consisted of six or eight students, who majored in soil sciences, and Professor Frank Harradine, who had experience both as a teacher and as part of the massive field study that surveyed the soils of California. We traveled hundreds of miles throughout California, from the Klamath Mountains in the north to the deserts east of San Diego, from the Pacific Coast to the Sierra Nevada. Every day we stopped many times, dug 4-5-foot-deep holes with a soil auger, and recorded detailed descriptions of the characteristics of the soil, the specific geomorphic and geologic conditions of the surface and surroundings, the climate, natural vegetation, and the land use of the site. We recorded additional information from road cuts, made cross sections from the mountains to the coast, and systematically categorized each recording from the nearly 500 stops we made.
On weekends or during brief respites from the field we organized our notes and records into reports that reflected our understanding of how the diverse soils of California could be grouped into meaningful geographical suites. The soils field course was the most important class I have ever taken. It let me see how I could combine systematic visual observations of the natural (physical) world with a series of categories from many different disciplines. And it demanded intense focus of the body/mind in its execution. It required an understanding of the social, political, and economic forces that were impressed through land uses by agricultural, forestry, and urban institutions. The experience taught me that every spot in the world, from an area with a diameter of a few inches and only a few feet deep can be interesting and is related to an expanding network of material and ethereal worlds beyond.
I remember little of the remainder of the summer of 1955 except for a couple of camping trips that I took. For the first time I went by myself into areas that might be called wild or natural. The experience was notable for the feelings of awe and wonder that I did not have words to express, even to myself. I realized how little I knew of plants, animals, stars, insects, rocks, and water and how they came together in beautiful combinations. At the end of the summer, I met several English graduate students, who, like me, were just starting their graduate education. They became close friends. The summer of 1955 was the base on which rested the next several years of my life.
The three years from the fall of 1955 through June 1958 were the most stimulating years of my life. With the background of my undergraduate years as a foundation, I was poised to discover the richness of ideas that the faculty of the University of California had to offer. Graduate seminars, classes, and interactions with other students stimulated me more than I had ever before experienced.
Courses. With more time to experiment with courses outside my major, I took classes in several different departments. The study of nomadic societies of Asia was given by Wolfram Eberhard, who was later to become a member of my dissertation committee. Professor Eberhard was German by birth and education but had taught in both Turkey and China before coming to the University of California. He studied and did research on the social characteristics and history of nomadic societies throughout Asia. My research paper for his class was a study of the origins and spread of equestrian nomadism in Central Asia. It was the first time I had had to use sources written primarily in German.
From Professor George Forster, I took a class that compared cultural practices that had originated in Spain with those that had been transformed in Latin America. The course was a great introduction to understanding ways in which cultures can be modified by powerful, new political and religious forces, especially as seen by the receiving culture. The class stimulated my interests in Latin America, which remained dormant until my retirement some forty years later.
A course by Professor John Rowe, at the time the leading archeologist of Andean culture, introduced me to the ways an archeologist may look at the world. Although he gave some emphasis to the beginnings of civilizations in the Old World, I remember more about his reconstruction of former Andean civilizations from intimate knowledge of found artifacts. Unlike several of my other teachers, Professor Rowe was little prone to speculate about possible links between found objects; instead, he introduced me to a way of looking at physical evidence, strictly in and of itself, without speculating how it might be connected with other objects that were not directly linked to it physically.
Courses in other departments of the University introduced me to the natural world. Probably the most stimulating to me at the time was Professor Hans Jenny’s course in the factors of soil formation. Hans Jenny was native to Switzerland. Having taken the summer soils field course, I was eager to learn more about how the great diversity of soils was created. The course fixed in my mind the fundamental importance of soils as major ways of focusing interests in mineral, organic, climatic, geomorphologic, and human worlds. As a focus soils link the cultural and physical worlds directly. Professor Jenny was stimulating not only in his theoretical genius but also in his field studies of the soils of the north California coast.
Less stimulating, but highly informative, was Professor Norman Hinds’ seminar in geomorphology. His approach used current, basic geologic literature, which helped me fill in ideas I had been first exposed to as and undergraduate. In the 1950s, geology was very conservative and had not yet exploded with newer geophysical and technological understandings.
My graduate class in plant ecology given by Professor Herbert Baker was exciting in the ways in which it explored the emerging concepts of the interrelationships among plants, animals, soils, water, and climate. And in a practical sense, my plant taxonomy class given by Lincoln Constance made me collect, identify, and then classify plants that grew in the nearby California countryside. In the process I became aware not only of plant identification methods, but also of ways in which plant species, genera, and families were connected through the processes of evolution and local plant ecology.
Within the Geography Department, I was excited by the research seminars in which I participated. The first seminar that I took was offered by Professor James Parsons. It explored the many ways in which early ‘native’ farmers cultivated crops through the use of the periodic shifting of fields (milpa agriculture) which could maintain long-term productive farming communities. Many of the seminar’s participants investigated a particular cultural group or region to try to understand the local farming processes and their effect on the land. I researched the great variety of terms that were used to describe this form of agriculture. Because shifting field agriculture has been widely used, many techniques have become associated with it, often with unique names to describe its sophisticated methods in different parts of the world. I learned to explore the stacks of the library of the University of California in my search of ethnographic and agricultural literature. Because every search led to a discovery, I came to love this form of library research. The love remains today.
One of Carl Sauer’s seminars explored the processes of plant and animal domestication. The American Geographical Society had recently published a series of lectures about the origins and dispersals of domesticated plants and animals given by him.[52] These lectures, based on the limited archeological and ethnographic evidence then available, were highly speculative. They outlined the possible geographic centers of domestication and the geographic routes by which domesticated plants and animals were diffused to new areas. They provided a geographic perspective to the topic which students of the seminar might expand.
Each member of the seminar chose a particular plant or animal to follow from its possible site of domestication to its current distribution. I chose to investigate the domestication and keeping of honeybees. I followed the record of beekeeping through ethnographic literature that depicted or described beehives and the uses of honey and beeswax. Although I had largely limited my research to apis mellifera, which is an Old-World bee only later introduced to the Americas by Europeans, I also searched the literature on New World, stingless bees, which were also a source of honey.
The second seminar that I took from Professor Sauer dealt with pre-Columbian transfer of plants, animals, and other objects between the Old and New Worlds. Because I was doing research on West Africa in preparation for field work, I was allowed to look at the links from both South Asia and the Americas to West Africa. The seminar was important for me to explore the ideas about the long distance spread of objects, ideas, and peoples. It introduced me to the evidence of possible theoretical connections between places and of the limitations of fitting evidence to theory. Carl Sauer’s fascination with geographical interpretations of cultural origins and diffusions has also become a fundamental approach to my understanding of cultural geography. To map the geographic location of objects or ideas at various historical moments and to subsequently interpret their distributions is for me one of the fundamental ideas of geography.
Another of my graduate seminars focused on the interpretation of major geographic patterns of distribution and the natural processes that created them. John Leighly’s seminar explored some of the emerging ideas that connected oceanography and climatology. Although I was unable to follow some of the geophysical processes, I became aware of the processes of short-term climate changes and their relation to ocean currents, temperatures, and salinity. The ideas informed other ideas from Sauer’s classes about longer term climate changes, especially Pleistocene changes in sea levels and shorelines.
In some ways Professor Kesseli’s geomorphology seminar on the processes of hill slope and valley formations was one of the most important to my academic career. This focus on geomorphology and later, my master’s thesis on a geomorphologic topic were major reasons that I received my first two university teaching positions. John Kesseli had translated excerpts from a German geologist’s newer approaches to understanding how land surfaces and landforms were modified. Walther Penck’s entire book had recently been translated just prior to the seminar. The members of the seminar studied Penck’s ideas on the ways in which the forms of hill slopes are related to base levels, i.e. the level to which streams were eroding adjacent lands. These ideas were in large part revolutionary at the time. They did not support the dominant ideas of the ‘aging’ of landscapes from ‘youthful valleys’ through to ‘old age’ plains.[53] I had never seen how these earlier ideas could be anything more than descriptive and a part of a not very adventurous geology. Thus, when a possible way of explaining (not simply describing) most landforms surface features was made available to me, I “ate it up.”
A seminar on the beginnings of American environmental thought given by Clarence Glacken was fundamental in introducing me to the roots of the environmental movement that only later emerged. I was fascinated by the wealth of environmental ideas that were to be found in the early Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, the subject of my seminar research. The ferment in the early days of the United States extended to thought about humans’ relations with nature. Professor Glacken’s monumental work, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, had followed the earliest environmental thought in the Western world up to the beginning of the 19th Century. During the 19th Century environmental ideas began to explode, going in many directions. It was the beginnings of this explosion in America that the seminar addressed. I returned to these ideas many years later when I developed a course that explored late 19th and early 20th Century environmental thought.
The years 1955-1958 formed the intellectual base for most of the years that followed. I became part of the traditions focused on 1) ecology and evolution; 2) cultural and natural history; 3) the making of both cultural and natural landscapes, and 4) the cartographic representation of geographic distributions from the scale of a house or building with its surrounding fields or neighborhoods to worldwide patterns of distribution of both cultural and natural phenomena.
Teaching. The graduate seminars and courses provided many of the ideas and approaches that I used throughout my academic life. They introduced me to unending pathways to follow with enthusiasm and pleasure. The other major part of my early graduate student days was as a teaching assistant in introductory courses in physical and cultural geography. These basic classes brought home to me the fundamental factual bases of academic geography. They stood me in good stead as a teacher. Throughout my years of teaching, I especially enjoyed teaching introductory cultural geography, although the nature of my teaching steadily evolved.
Cartography, as practiced in the 1950s was largely a pen and ink, hands on method of making maps. Although I have always had a love of reading maps, I had little interest in making cartographically beautiful maps because they demanded patient, meticulous use of liquid ink and clean paper, which I seemed to find many ways of smudging. Nevertheless, I was a teaching assistant for both John Leighly and John Kesseli, when they taught the upper division class at Berkeley. I learned a great deal from them about how to make maps but have become enthusiastic about producing good maps only with techniques developed through the use of computers.
Field work—Jamaica. A major part of the graduate program in geography at the University of California was to do field work in a foreign country. The idea behind this was that a cultural geographer, in particular, had to broaden his perspectives beyond those of America. Fortunately for me, grants to study abroad were relatively easy to get. Carl Sauer was in charge of grants to Caribbean countries that were supported by the US Office of Naval Research. The grants did not need to relate to the Navy’s operations. I was offered a summer field grants to study karst (limestone) landforms in central Jamaica. I knew little about limestone formations but studied the literature intensively. Little had been written about Jamaican limestone topography, so I approached the study naively. Before leaving for a two month’s study I had obtained good aerial photos of the area from Kaiser Aluminum Corporation, whose interest was in the aluminum ore that overlay some of the limestone.
In Jamaica I found accommodation in a boarding house in Mandeville, which was the largest town near the Cockpit Country, a very rugged, nearly impassable limestone topography in central Jamaica. In the early 19th Century, the Cockpit Country was a place in which runaway slaves hid. Its name derives from the very high, steep walled limestone hills that surround hundreds of deep depressions. The soluble limestone is undermined by underground caves and stream channels. No water flows on the surface. Because I was imbued with ideas about slope formation as related to base levels, I tried to apply the ideas I had learned in Professor Kesseli’s seminar. The base levels were the underground streams. Solution of the limestone hill slopes in this tropical area was rapid. The resulting hill slopes were straight or slightly convex. The initial points of erosion, where solution occurred most rapidly, were located in the nearly thick, level beds of limestone where minor faulting or fracturing had occurred. Solution was most active at the juncture of the fractures which were arranged in two series that were aligned nearly at right angles. The Cockpits usually drained to underground streams, the base level of the hill slopes. Although I was only partially successful in understanding tropical karst topography I was able to organize the results of my observations into a master’s thesis.[54] I also learned a great deal about how to work with aerial photos in the field and to convert my results into maps. Possibly more importantly, I learned how to work by myself in a foreign country.
Social Life as a Graduate Student—1955-58. Several of my colleagues and I met almost daily for dinner at the university cafeteria. David Harris, Elinore Magee, John Beattie, Yi-Fu Tuan, and David Fox formed the regular core of the group although not everyone attended every day. David Harris, Elinore Magee and I started the Geography graduate program at the same time. Yi-Fu Tuan had started the program a year earlier, David Fox a year later. John Beatty was a beginning graduate student in English History.
David Harris is English and had received an undergraduate degree from Oxford University. Yi-Fu Tuan, from a nationalist Chinese family had also received an undergraduate degree from Oxford. His initial emphasis at Berkeley was geomorphology, writing a dissertation on pediments in Arizona. Elinore Magee had an undergraduate degree in Economics from Berkeley. More recently she had been working for the Bank of America in San Francisco. Later she wrote a dissertation based on field work in the Balsas river basin in Mexico. John Beattie and David Harris roomed at the same house and became friends through that connection. We were all within a year or two of the same age and were united by our interests in the ferment of ideas at Berkeley in the late 1950s and by the congeniality we found over dinner and many Friday night sherry parties and weekend meals at a couple of local bars. Although we went our separate ways as we individually met other people, for me, this group and other friends at the University were the primary ways in which I initially connected to a rich academic social life.
In 1957, Elinore Magee introduced me to her roommate, Elizabeth (Beth) McGehan, who had worked with her at the Bank of America. Beth had graduated from Mills College, in Oakland with a degree in English Literature. She had worked at Sather Gate Bookstore in Berkeley and at The Bank of America in San Francisco. Beth had just been accepted to enter the Boalt School of Law of the University of California. She often joined us for weekend activities.
Besides this closely linked group, University of California geographers were bonded by the generous gatherings of Professor Jim Parsons and his wife Betty. They opened their home at the top of the Berkeley Hills to numerous parties on holidays and on the occasion of visits by eminent scholars. Clarence and Mildred Glacken also held yearly social gatherings for all graduate students in geography. Occasionally Erhard Rotund and his wife Esther also entertained local geographers. And a sumptuous yearly party, given by Anna Marie and Adjunct Professor Edwin Loeb was always anticipated. The secretary of the department, Westher Hess and her physicist husband Bill regularly had small groups of geographers to their home. These social bonds strongly reinforced the intellectual strengths of the Department of Geography.
In yet another way my social life connected with other geographers. Although I knew that I had homosexual feelings, I had largely suppressed them. In the 1950s homosexuality was still classified by psychiatrists as a disease and might be criminally prosecuted if expressed publicly and the military services banned homosexuals for serving. Therefore, I knew no community of people who felt the same as I. As an undergraduate I had found identity with a geography graduate student. Ward Barrett had left a teaching position in New York to come to Berkeley to study as well as to discover the underground homosexual community of San Francisco. He knew of my feelings toward him even as he kept me at arms’ length until I had returned to Berkeley from my army duty and he from field work in Samoa and New Zealand. In the meantime I had been approached by another graduate student, Tom Pagenhart, who was then working in Sacramento. Ward and Tom let me express my sexuality more openly as well as being interested in the same sorts of academic ideas as I.[55]
From 1955 to 1958, my social life focused on my friends on campus and on the eating and drinking places of Berkeley and nearby Oakland. I lived nearly three years in a room in a private home on Summer Street, below the Berkeley Rose Gardens and tennis courts. My usual route to the University was down Arch Street, which was lined with pleasant homes, including those of Professors Sauer, Kroeber, and Leighly. Because I had a car, I and friends explored nearby parts of California—The Delta of the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers, the Gold Country along Hi-way 49, the wine country of Sonoma and Napa Valleys, Highway 1, north and south of San Francisco, and Yosemite and Lassen National Parks.
Fieldwork in Angola and Dissertation Research. In June 1958, Beth McGehan and I married. In June, I had also received my MA degree, passed my doctoral examinations, and had been given a grant from the Office of Naval Research to study in Angola.
I prepared for field research focused on land use among the indigenous peoples of southwestern Angola. I had chosen the area in the tradition of 19th Century explorers: to look for a place that was little known to most of the world. I chose an area first by looking at an alphabetical list of countries, and then going to the library of the University of California to see what materials about the area were available. The UC Library is one of the largest research libraries in the country and had a budget that allowed it to expand its collections extensively. Not getting beyond the ‘A’s in my list of countries, I fell to looking for materials on Angola. I wracked the library stacks; but other than a very few highly generalized works, Portuguese government documents, and accounts of the history of overseas colonization by Portugal, could I find much published data. An American geographer had published contemporary studies of the ports of Angola. Some American missionaries had written of their experiences in central Angola. Anthropologists had written a handful of ethnographies of Angolan tribes. The most extensive ethnographic account had been made by Carlos Estermann, a Catholic priest who had lived in southwestern Angola for many years. However, his work, published in 1951 and 1957, was not yet available in the University of California Library.
For me the most interesting account of Angola was a geomorphologic and natural history study by a German, academic, Otto Jensen. Through his writings and those of the South African geologist, Lester King,[56] I could understand how the landscape surfaces of Angola developed. The planalto of southern Africa, which has been relatively geologically stable for long periods, has hill slopes and plains as described by Walther Penck and which I studied in John Kesseli’s seminar. Further, because King’s views had worldwide implications, I was reintroduced to the ideas of continental break-up. Those ideas had earlier been sketched out for me by reference to the ideas of Alfred Wegener, who recognized the similarities between continents and had written a much maligned book, The Origins of Continents and Oceans. This study as well as the description of the uni-familial species, Welwitshia mirabilis, which grows on the Namib Desert, further whetted my appetite for going to this little known part of the world.
On the basis of the limited available knowledge at my disposal, I thought that Angola would be a good site for geographic exploration. I applied for and received a grant of $5,000 from the Office of Naval Research. I sold my three year old Chevrolet, and later received $500 from my wife’s aunt and uncle. Beth and I prepared by deciding what to take with us. Two changes of clothing, boots, sunhats, a small but extensive collection of medical supplies, including malaria prophylactics, strong antibiotics for both internal and external uses, and water purifying equipment. I took an umbrella tent and two cameras, one for black and white photography and a 35 mm Argus camera for colored slide film, as well as fifteen rolls of films sealed in moisture proof containers. We loaded these things along with several books and office supplies into one foot locker. In addition we carried a tent pole and two pieces of hand luggage. The $6,500, supplemented by my GI Bill college payments had to last us from the time we left Berkeley until we returned a little over a year later.
We travelled by plane and train across the United States, making our final travel arrangements to Lisbon, while staying at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. Our trans-Atlantic trip was on the Greek Line’s Olympia. We landed in Lisbon late at night and found a pensão, which served us as a base while I looked for an inexpensive way to get to Angola, studied Portuguese, and visited the governmental offices where I hoped to find assistance for my research in Angola. Because Angola was still a colony, I also had to get special governmental approval to stay in the country
The least expensive way to go to Angola was on a small, aging passenger ship, O Cuanza. First class, deluxe passage consisted of ten cabins, each with its own toilet and direct access to a deck. The thirty-five ordinary first class cabins had a small porthole, a wash basin with fresh water, and bunk beds. Two toilet rooms, separated by gender, and one bathroom with salt water showers served the first class passengers. The toilets leaked on the floor; and the lighting sometimes did not work. All first class passengers ate in their private dining room in which a string quartet sometimes played classical music. Beth and I traveled ordinary first class.
Second class passengers slept in even smaller cabins and had access to some deck space. Third class and supplementary passengers occupied a few cabins, which served four to six people, or slept in open dormitories. Poor Portuguese peasants were sent to Angola, hoping to find a better life than in Portugal. They were to be carefully monitored in Angola because Portugal under its dictator, António Salazar, feared anti-colonial unrest.
At a maximum of 15 knots, the ship took twenty-one days to go from Lisbon to Luanda with stops at Dakar and Pointe Noire. Shortly after boarding an older German couple overheard Beth and me commenting on the small size of the cabin. It was a fortunate meeting. Frau and Herr Smit had created an extensive coffee plantation out of the native forests of the northern highlands of Angola. They, as had other Germans, left Germany in the 1920s, looking for a better life than they had had in post WW I Germany. We communicated in a mixture of German (I had taken a year of German as an undergraduate), Portuguese, which Beth and I were just learning, and English, which Herr Smit had learned when he was a trader in India. We became good friends and were treated royally on their plantation when driving north or south between southwestern Angola and Luanda. We also became friends of the Costa-Ramos family, a Portuguese engineer, his wife and two boys, who were on their way to a small town in southern Angola. We, they, and the Smits all played cards, which let us get to know each other better on the long voyage. John Kemball, an Englishman who was traveling south to manage a British trading company in Luanda, also befriended us and later helped us get ready for our travels south in Angola. Later we got to know his wife, Rachael and his children.
We landed in Luanda, the capital city and most highly organized place in Angola. Luanda had paved streets, a beach front promenade with patterned mosaic sidewalks, a la Rio de Janeiro, several hotels and restaurants, and other three and four story buildings,. The center of the city was largely Portuguese. Most Africans lived in the shanty town that ringed the city. In addition to being the center of government activity, Luanda was an export/import trading center. Several American families also lived in Luanda because Gulf Oil Corporation operated oil fields in Cabinda, a Portuguese territorial enclave that lies north of the mouth of the Zaire (Congo) River.
The Smits graciously made arrangements for us to stay at the Hotel Turismo, the best in town. However, our limited budget soon made it necessary for us to find cheaper accommodations. Beth negotiated a smaller room that was usually occupied by an assistant manager. It was less well appointed than the usual hotel rooms but clean and much less costly.
Through contacts made by John Kemball and an Irishman, Mr. Klein, the manager of Casa Americana, a major American trading company, we found an aging Jeep which was to take us to southwestern Angola. The Jeep had to be repaired several times before we sold it just before leaving the country. I scoured the town for other needed supplies. I was very frustrated to discover that no word of our expected arrival had yet come down from Lisbon. Only after a couple of weeks did I become a person with a legitimate reason for being in Angola. I later learned that Lisbon made inquiries about my research by contacting the Portuguese Consul in San Francisco, who in turn contacted my professors at Berkeley. It had been a typically slow bureaucratic process. However, once I was recognized as a professional researcher by O Instituto de Investigacão Scientifica de Angola, I was introduced to several people who might help me in my study. Especially important was the arrangements made to lend me a vehicle with driver and camp boy. We met them in Nova Lisboa, and they accompanied us throughout our time in Angola. In addition, they lent us camping equipment, not only for our own use, but cooking utensils, camp beds, and camp chairs as well.
Sr. Cruz de Carvalho was to introduce us to officials in the government outposts in southwestern Angola. He was based in Nova Lisboa and knew most officials in southern Angola. Cruz de Carvalho was polite and helpful at first but became less so possibly because he wanted to be elsewhere, doing other things rather than help me. He thought that I should carry out a written survey and use questionnaire in my project, an approach I was unprepared to do. I had first wanted to inspect fields, farms, and settlements and then ask questions of the local residents. However, my Portuguese language skills, like those of almost all of the native Africans I had hoped to interview, were inadequate for my intended purpose. I found that interviewing or understanding in any detail the agricultural activities of the indigenous peoples would be extremely difficult. And I was little interested in studying the farms and trading of the few Portuguese colonists in the region. Furthermore, many of the Portuguese to whom I was initially introduced viewed the native peoples as inferior and from whom little useful information could be learned.
After arriving in Sá da Bandeira (now called Lubango) I realized that I would be unable to carry out either the research that I had planned or the research that Sr. Cruz de Carvalho thought I should do. From that time on Sr. Cruz de Carvalho and I had a strained relationship that only ended when he finally left us entirely on our own. I developed a new research plan that depended primarily on my own direct visual observations. I had noticed that each tribal group that we had visited had distinctive house types, field pattern, storage facilities, and cattle corals. My project became the visiting, sketching, measuring, and photographing of several farms, buildings, and settlement patterns within each tribal area. The settlements consisted of large familial homesteads, focused on a cattle coral and surrounded by agricultural fields. The family homesteads, made up of many small buildings, grouped together in traditional patterns, were widely scattered, no two directly adjacent.[57]
The Portuguese officials of the lowest geographic subdivisions were often generous in helping me by instructing one of their native police officers to show me typical settlements within their jurisdictions. Occasionally a Portuguese veterinarian or agronomist was of great help because of their knowledge of local crops, cattle, diseases, and indigenous soils and vegetation. But by far the greatest aid was given me by Padre Bernardo Keane, a long-time catholic missionary at Chiulo. He asked his catechist to show me good sites to visit and to interpret between the native language and Portuguese. Father Keane, an Irishman, helped in translating between the catechist’s Portuguese and my English. The catechist was very helpful, knowledgeable and friendly.
We camped where water was available within walking distance. In the dry season, the water sources were widely spaced. All water for cooking and drinking as well as for washing body or clothes had to be both filtered and boiled. This became the unending task of my wife, Beth, and the camp boy, Pedro. We usually camped in the same spot for several days while I visited and mapped nearby settlements. Every two or three weeks we headed back to Sá de Bandeira for rest and recuperation. (Our young marriage suffered simply because of the rigors of simple day to day life.)
Sá da Bandeira (Lubango), the capital of Huila province was a small provincial city with limited services. However, it was the largest Portuguese settlement in the southern part of the country. It was located on a rail line that connected the interior of southern Angola with the port town of Moçamedes. For Beth and me, it represented civilization for the time we spent in southern Angola. It was the place where we could soak the grime of the field from our bodies in long warm baths. It was where I could get the Jeep repaired and supplies replenished. It was where other people prepared our food and washed our dirty clothes. It was where we could receive mail. And it was where we met several young Portuguese men, who could help us to understand the ways of colonial Portugal and with whom we could laugh about life.
Although we met several Portuguese families who worked for the colonial government, for the most part we simply enjoyed the relief we felt in visiting with educated, literate people, who likewise found us interesting in that we interrupted their isolated life in the “mato” or “bush”. However, our best knowledge of the colonial social and political activities came from occasional incidents we observed in the local “postes”, from some discussions with Father Keane and the three Irish medical nuns at the mission of Chiulo where we stayed for three weeks while I was sick with malaria, and especially from the young men in Sá de Bandeira, who wanted to ride around town with us because only isolated in our Jeep did they feel safe to speak openly. They were afraid that the Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE), the national agency in charge of the defense of the Portuguese state, had its spies even in this remote part of Angola.
Although fifty years have passed, impressions and memories of my experiences in Angola remain strong. Probably the strongest is my introduction to cultures in which traditional rural practices still existed and which had been only indirectly influenced by colonial intrusions. This was a Third World area with little modern goods or services. More importantly, the area showed the deterioration of local traditional activities because many men were forced to work in the fish factories along the coast, on Portuguese farms, or in building roads. Many native men went to South Africa to work in the mines to earn money or to escape forced labor in Angola. The effect of these migrations was the deterioration of most activities usually carried out by men and by the increased dependence on women to maintain most of the agricultural practices. Women traditionally tilled, planted, weeded, and harvested the fields; but men traditionally cleared the fields, built the buildings and kept the cattle. Then, boys, rather than grown men increasingly herded the cattle, sheep and goats. In general, the native connections with the world of trade were limited to agricultural products—sorghum, millet, maize and cattle—in exchange for kerosene, padlocks, machetes, and other minor bits of hardware.
Control by force, or the threat of force was very evident. We saw men knocked about in their own homesteads by native police. We saw a truckload of men brought into a “post”; heard them being beaten; and saw them leaving in the same truck unable to hold on to the sides because the palms of their hands had been beaten raw by paddles which had holes in them. We were told by one of the Catholic fathers that men of the tribal group with which he had spent many years, were killed by native police, who were told to bring back the ears of those they had killed as evidence that adequate punishment had been meted out to the tribal group, some of which had earlier decapitated the Portuguese Chef de Poste, who had directed his men to steal the cattle of the tribe when they had refused to sell them. Cattle had been the major source of wealth and prestige of this tribal group.
In Sá da Bandeira we saw three, large flatbed trucks loaded shoulder to shoulder with African men who had been used as forced labor and who were being brought into a jail that was so small that not all of the men would be able to lie down for a night’s rest. Some of the Portuguese who lived in town were in fear of being imprisoned for saying something that might be considered against “the State.”
Eventually, I was firmly, but politely, asked by the Governor of Huila Province, to conclude my studies quickly and leave the province. The reason may have been that an African from Southwest Africa (now Namibia) who spoke English had been caught in the province. He was said to have asked for “o señor, doctor Americano.” I, being the only American in the province must therefore be the man he was seeking. During a time of anti-colonial unrest elsewhere in Africa, Portugal did not want outside agitators to stir up revolutionary thoughts in the native population.
I saw the disparity at all levels between Portuguese colonials, private citizens or governmental officials and the native population that lived in southwestern Angola. In spite of the Portuguese claims of a policy of assimilation of educated Africans to citizenship, it was largely meaningless in southern Angola, where Portuguese education was largely unavailable, even if desired, to the African population. Social and economic power lay with the colonial Portuguese and political power lay with the home country through its colonial tentacles. Economic development in Angola was very limited. Outside of Luanda, Nova Lisboa, Benguela, Moçamedes, and Sá da Bandeira, none of the roads were paved. The longest stretch of paved rural road was a sixteen mile stretch leading east of Luanda. A few miles of a north-south road were being graded for eventual use by the military. My eyes were opened forever to the great contrasts in culture between the modern, capitalistic ways of America and Western Europe and the small, largely self sustaining isolated communities, just then being shattered by external forces.
On a personal level, I felt social connection with the Portuguese with whom I stayed or visited. They were part of the cultural world common to European traditions. To converse with them was to find relief from the extreme isolation of our daily life in “the field.” To have sympathy with the restrictions on their freedoms imposed by a dictatorial state was necessary to understand some of their actions. And at the same time to be confronted by some of their actions as power holders over the native Africans was mind-wrenching. Only when talking with English and American expatriates did I feel at ease even as I realized most of them were unaware of the life and plight of most native Angolans. I had felt exhausted by the difficulties of camping in the African bush and by the frustrations of dealing with a dictatorial colonial bureaucracy in its remotest posts. Loss of weight and energy caused by a restricted diet and malaria had left me weak and tired. And the isolation and lack of community support in Angola had left our marriage in need of repair.
With great relief Beth and I left Luanda for Lisboa on O Mozambique, a much newer, faster, and larger passenger ship than O Cuanza. On our way home, we visited Professor Parsons and family in Seville, sailed on to London where we visited our friends David and Helen Harris and then to Cambridge to visit John and Susan Beattie. I had enough material to write a dissertation, if not theoretically important, at least descriptive of a little-known part of the world that was poised for radical changes as colonialism was replace by civil war and eventually by a highly corrupt new nation state.
Early Teaching Days—1960-1969
After we returned to Berkeley from Angola in the fall of 1959, Beth found an apartment and a job. We reconnected with supportive friends and family and I began writing my dissertation. During the winter and spring of 1959-60, I looked for academic employment and found a one-year temporary appointment as an instructor in the Department of Geography at the University of Oregon.
The next phase of my development was the introduction to full-time teaching. From the fall of 1960 until the fall of 1963, I taught at four different universities: the University of Oregon (1960-61); Michigan State University (summer 1961); Dartmouth College (1961-1963); and University of Wisconsin (summer 1963). My strongest memories of this period are of constant preparation for classes, which were soon over, and new preparations required. In addition, I finished writing and editing my dissertation. The settings for this activity were pleasant campuses set within pleasant small cities or towns.
University of Oregon–1960–1961. My first appointment at the University of Oregon was as a one-year replacement for Forrest Pitts, an economic-urban geographer with a regional specialty of East Asia. When asked if I could teach some of his courses, I replied “If having read Love is a Many Splendored Thing and The Good Earth is enough to teach the geography of East Asia, I can do it. Because they also wanted me to teach geomorphology, they could excuse my lack of experience in the other classes that needed teaching. That first year I taught geomorphology, a three-term course in economic geography, the geography of Asia, the geography of Africa, as well as classes in introductory physical geography. Because the salary was only $5,400, I also needed to supplement my earnings by teaching an evening extension class in the geography of Africa. With late night cramming and early morning outlining and assembling of my notes, I was able, barely, to present nine different lectures each week. Needless to say, the writing of my dissertation was largely passed over for the year.
My departmental colleagues, Clyde Patton, Gene Martin, and Fritz Kramer were all very supportive. Sam Dicken, the Head of the Department was on leave, but had set the tone for the heavy teaching loads. Carl Johannessen also held a temporary position, which turned out to be permanent. Sam, Clyde, Fritz, and Carl had, received their PhDs at UC, Berkeley. Gene had been at Syracuse University where Clyde had previously taught. The academic society within the department carried on the spirit of the Geography Department at Berkeley. That spirit was reinforced two years later when I rejoined the department and Edward Price, also a Berkeley PhD, became the Department’s new Head. Indeed, this was the epitome of an ‘old boys club’ which prospered when applicants for jobs were few, universities required professors to have a doctorate, and very few US universities offered PhDs in Geography.
The University campus, like the town of Eugene, was growing rapidly. In 1960, the University of Oregon was still largely an undergraduate college with several booming professional schools. However, graduate programs in the arts and sciences were expanding. New PhD programs were largely supported by grants from the federal government. Classes were large and classrooms were crowded. Condon Hall was the home of a combined Geology/Geography Department as well as of the Psychology Department. The geology and geography programs were split in 1962 and geography admitted its first PhD student in1963. Demand for space for both teaching and office use was increasing. As a result, many temporary buildings were scattered around the campus. My office was in a Quonset hut located on one of the inner campus quadrangles. Some classes were also taught in buildings left over from the Second World War.
My social life was mainly within the Department. We ate bag lunches and went to coffee together. My wife and I regularly met with other families associated with the geography faculty. I walked to campus each day from an older house at 19th and Willamette Street. Willamette was the main commercial street that extended south from the small, but busy central business district. 18th Avenue was, in 1961, the start of the residential area of south Eugene.
Because my appointment at the UO had been for only one year, I looked for a new position from the moment I arrived in Eugene. By the end of Winter Term, I had secured a two year appointment as an Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. To pay for the move to Dartmouth, I found a summer teaching job at Michigan State University, where I taught an introductory course and the Geography of Africa. Because I had just taught these courses, I was less pressured to devise all new materials and had time to write on my dissertation. The experience in East Lansing was enhanced by its being the location that summer of the national meetings of the Association of American Geographers. I got to meet geographers from all over the country and to hear professional papers which gave me new perspectives. I also experienced two and a half months of hot, humid summer days and nights of Middle West. It was memorable because Beth and I had a non-air-conditioned attic flat, which never cooled down.
Dartmouth College 1961 to1963. We arrived in Norwich, Vermont, a week or so before the Fall Semester at Dartmouth College began. Bob Huke, the Chairman of the Department of Geography, arranged for us to rent an apartment in a colonial house facing the village green. A Congregational and an Episcopal Church, the village school, and a row of two-story colonial houses faced the green. The town’s only general store lay a short distance up the main street, which was lined with more colonial houses and huge, old trees. Norwich Township focused on the village from which roads led away to scattered old farmhouses, some pastureland, and abandoned fields that had grown back to woods which were laced with stone walls and old house foundations.
New England’s autumnal blaze of color had just begun, and Beth and I felt that we had found the classic New England site that had scarcely made it into the 20th Century. Further explorations in the surrounding countryside served to reinforce the pleasures of having found a peaceful retreat from endless “progress.” As we came to meet our village neighbors, our feelings were strengthened by their open friendliness. Our appreciation of the area grew the longer we lived in Norwich. The beauty of the fall was succeeded by the glorious clear blue skies of winter that alternated with fresh falls of snow that accumulated foot on top of foot. The town was prepared for winter. The roads and sidewalks were cleared by early morning and winter activities were geared to snow. The short spring of late April, although muddy, was bright with anticipation of the rapid onset of summer, with its green exuberance.
While still planning to remain at Dartmouth, we searched for and found a rural property in nearby Thetford. It had an1810 Cape Cod style house as well as the original 1770s farmhouse and thirty-five acres of woods and pasture. Only in winter could another house be seen from the property. Living in Vermont was the most pleasantly comfortable memory of my married life. Beth and I were learning how to enjoy our life together. We had adequate money, new but close friends, and we began to fit into the life of a community, both village and college. After a difficult year in Africa and with the pressures of starting teaching and earning money to finance our moves, we finally, at age thirty, felt we were on the path to a good, fulfilling life.
Dartmouth College, during the early 1960s was an all-male school, almost exclusively for undergraduates, with a couple of professional schools including a major teaching and research hospital. Hanover, New Hampshire, was a small town that basically served the College. Well-financed and endowed, Dartmouth was the most isolated of the Ivy League schools. The student body was chosen from a large pool of applicants from all over the country. Every student was fully capable of undertaking a rigorous academic program. As an instructor, I could demand and expect all of my students to perform well. Students took two courses each semester as well as some short-term classes. I found the academic schedule ideal.
I taught only four different courses my first year at Dartmouth: Geography of Africa, Geomorphology, Cultural Geography, and Cartography. Because I had taught all of these courses before, I was able to spend much time filling in the many gaps in my knowledge and organizing the material into more coherent and interesting presentations. I found that I did not need to review much of the material in textbooks in class because most of the students could actually comprehend it with little explanation. The teaching process was becoming more and more fun. More time could be spent talking with individual students, who responded well and with interest.
My new colleagues had taught at Dartmouth for many years. Al Carlson was a boisterous, easy going man who had become wrapped up in the promotion of the “Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee” region of New Hampshire. His interest in scholarship had dwindled greatly since his graduate student days at Clark University. Van English was the model of a gentleman-teacher. He also had received his PhD from Clark. The dynamo who led the department was Bob Huke, a WWII veteran who received his degree at Syracuse University, by writing a PhD dissertation based on field work in Burma. Bob was a gregarious, generous, enthusiastic teacher and organizer. In addition to the regular staff, two temporary positions were held by Donald Lynch who was finishing a dissertation on the USSR at the University of Washington, and Peter Fielding, a New Zealander, who was a PhD candidate in economic geography at UCLA. Don has long taught at University of Alaska; and Pete finished his teaching career at University of California, Irvine.
I commuted daily across the Connecticut River from Norwich to Hanover with Bob Huke and Frank Ryder, a distinguished professor of German, who later taught at the University of Indiana and the University of Virginia. Beth had a part-time job with Dartmouth’s Polar Institute. Beth and I socialized with Van and Fran English and Bob and Ellie Huke from the geography department. We became good friends with Frank and Shirley Ryder and Mel (Mary Louise) and Dan Clouser. Dan taught philosophy, later at Carleton College and then at the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania.
During both years I taught at Dartmouth, Clyde Patton urged me to return to a full time faculty position at the University of Oregon. The first time he asked, I said ‘no’ because I was enjoying teaching and was finding a comfortable niche in both the local academic and village life and because I had signed a two-year contract. By the second year, my feelings about Dartmouth College had changed. Although the Geography Department was a democratic community, the College administration was highly autocratic. It was dominated by old Dartmouth graduates who assumed the air of being superior to other people. These elitist ideas were directly opposite those of the democratic, open academic community at the University of Oregon, where the faculty in open meetings discussed and directed the curriculum, the academic standards, and other problems of the University. There a faculty committee was also primarily responsible for the promotion and tenure of its colleagues.
The contrast between the political climates of the two institutions was sharp. The one at Dartmouth was autocratic if benevolent. At the University of Oregon, I found a society, which was the most open I have ever experienced. Beth and I discussed at great length the choice between staying and leaving Dartmouth. The joys of life of the Norwich community were strong; the benevolence of the College was great. They had to be weighed against the problems that Eugene and the University of Oregon faced as they both continued to grow very rapidly. Possibly our decision to leave was strongly influenced by several of our friends, who were also considering taking positions at other universities. With sadness in our hearts, we decided to leave the good life of Vermont and New Hampshire and return to the bustle of Eugene and the University of Oregon.
To pay for our return trip in the aging 1951 Packard that Beth’s father had given us for our initial move to Eugene, I accepted a summer teaching job at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The teaching schedule was light; the University’s faculty apartments were pleasant; and we joined some of the younger geographers of Wisconsin in the happy dinner parties, picnics, and summer life in southern Wisconsin.
University of Oregon 1963–1967. With my dissertation completed, the hard work of establishing eight or nine new courses under my belt, the security that comes with being wanted by professional colleagues, and the easing of financial worries, the pressures on my marriage lessened. Beth was pregnant with our first child after having experienced a couple of miscarriages. My salary, $6,400, would allow Beth the chance of staying home and not working. With the low interest rates of an Oregon Veteran’s Home Loan we were able to buy a small two-bedroom house, located on Alder Street a few blocks from the University campus. A new phase in life was about to begin.
I settled into teaching and department life at the University of Oregon. I was able to improve my courses through greater library research and time for preparation. I also had the support of my colleagues, Clyde Patton, Gene Martin, Ed Price, and later, Ev Smith. Their intellectual and social support continued throughout my academic career at the University of Oregon.
In a small department, all faculty members advised students, both graduate and undergraduate majors as well as lower division students who had not yet declared a major. One of the departmental chores that I often performed and liked was that of ordering of library books and maps of interest to geographers. The Department met weekly over lunch at which time we discussed departmental or university issues. We enjoyed good camaraderie as well as business at our lunches, which were held at a different site each week.
I taught courses in geomorphology and introductory physical geography until Anke Neumann, and later Bill Loy, was hired to teach these classes. I continued to teach the geography of Africa and cultural geography until I retired years later. Ed Price and I developed an upper division sequence in cultural geography that became the mainstay of my teaching career, later merging with another current of my teaching: environmental thought.
The University faculty met as a whole once monthly. It was responsible for determining the University curriculum and other broader academic issues. The faculty of both the Department and the University was very active in running the University. Anyone who cared could, and often did, speak in the meetings. The result was an awareness of most aspects of the functioning of the University. Faculty governance was direct and as close to participatory democracy as I ever known. Through the meetings as well as occasionally eating lunch in the faculty club, I came to know faculty members from many departments.
Beth and I worked hard at setting up a good home for our first child, Sarah, who was born five months after we arrived in Eugene. Her birth and babyhood was a focus of our marriage. Fortunately, Sarah was a very easy child to care for. She was the center of our domestic life. I also took great pleasure in preparing my first garden and yard since leaving my parent’s home. Between teaching and domestic activities my life was full, enjoyable and stable. We had wanted a second child but were unsuccessful in conceiving because of an Rh factor incompatibility. However, we were able to adopt a newborn baby through the efforts of a lawyer who acted on behalf of a young, single girl who did not want to keep her child. Helen came home to us directly from the hospital. She was a beautiful, healthy baby but became highly colicky. Nevertheless, after a few fretful months, Helen became an active, playful and bright addition to the family.
Ahmadu Bello University, Nigeria–1967–1969. In 1967 I was asked if I would like to teach at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria. I saw this as an opportunity to learn about a different region of Africa and to improve my knowledge of African geography. Beth was also enthusiastic about going to Nigeria, whose political fortunes she had been following since its independence from Britain. Recently, the Southeastern Region of Nigeria had seceded from the Nigerian federal government, declaring itself the independent nation of Biafra. This precipitated a civil war which was largely fought in the southeastern part of the country. Zaria and most of the Northern Region was not a battlefield after most Ibos—the largest ethnic group of southeastern Nigeria—fled back to their traditional homeland after many Ibos had been killed in violent riots in several northern Nigerian cities.
Because Ahmadu Bello University was considered safe and had adequate housing and medical facilities, we decided to accept the offer. Our travel expenses and a salary supplement were to be provided by the Overseas Educational Association. My salary was provided by the Nigerian government. The University of Oregon granted me a two-year leave of absence. Beth, Sarah, then 3, Helen, then 1, and I arranged passage on a Ferrell Lines freighter, The African Lightning, which left Brooklyn and stopped in Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Dahomey (now Benin) before lying offshore several days until a dock was available at the harbor of Lagos.
The Friday night we arrived at the docks, a Biafran plane bombed Lagos harbor, setting some storage facilities ablaze. The confusion that reigned in the port the following morning was great in part because The African Lightning was docked next to a Russian freighter that was loaded with military supplies. I was anxious to get my family safely out of the docks area and on our way to Zaria. The representative of ABU who was supposed to meet us and arrange our flight to Zaria did not show up and no Nigerian customs officials were to be found. So, with the help of a Nigerian who had come to meet a friend on the ship, we were able to load ourselves and our possessions—suitcases and a 50-gallon drum containing clothes and household items—into a taxi that successfully took us through a gate in the dockyard by offering its guard a dash. This was our first of many experiences with “the dash”, a bribe that greases the wheels of most official and business operations in Nigeria.
As soon as I was able on Saturday morning, I had arranged for a room at a nearby hotel. There, Beth and the children could remain while I arranged to ship the 50-gallon drum to Zaria by rail and bought airplane tickets to Kaduna, the nearest city to Zaria that had an airport. Because we had no Nigerian money to pay for the hotel or for a taxi to the airport, Beth went to a bank to exchange the $500 that her aunt had given her as an emergency fund just before we left the United States. All banks and government offices closed early on Saturdays, therefore if our departure was not to be delayed until later in the next week, we had to complete these preparations before12:30 p.m.
We calmed ourselves Saturday evening and Sunday, packing for the early morning Monday flight to Kaduna. I telegraphed Ahmadu Bello University of our arrival time, thinking that we would at least be met in Kaduna. After “dashing” the boarding officer to let us get on the plane, we left Lagos airport. No one met us in Kaduna. Fortunately, a US AID officer who was stationed near Zaria was met by a car and driver. He took us under his wing and offered to drive us the eighty miles to ABU. No one met us at the University; but fortunately, the University’s guest house could accommodate us until a house on the campus was made ready for us.
Ed and Monnette Thatcher, members of the Eugene Friends Meeting in Eugene to which Beth belonged, helped us get settled into the area. (Ed was on leave from the University of Oregon Library). Bob and Bonnie Ferrens were also at Ahmadu Bello University, where Bob chaired the Department of Architecture while on leave from the University of Oregon. They also helped us become familiar with the Zaria region.
We were the first occupants of a new house in a new senior staff housing area. It was flat-roofed, stuccoed, and enclosed an open patio. It had not been completely cleared of building debris; nevertheless, we were happy when we were able to get enough furniture and supplies to move in. We hired three African men to help us: a steward, who lived in a small house near our house, a “small boy,” who helped in whatever way we needed, and a gardener, who was to establish and maintain a vegetable garden. The housing area was occupied by other expatriates who taught at ABU, three English couples, an Irish priest, another American with an Irish wife, a Brazilian couple, as well as a Nigerian administrative officer and his wife. The area had only recently been cleared from the savanna bush landscape which extended miles to the south across the Kubani River. Cattle often passed through as did many farmers and cattle raisers on their way to the nearby town of Samaru. The main part of the university’s campus was about a mile away and although I often walked across the open landscape to the campus, more often I was driven at least one way in the Volkswagen bug that we had bought from my American predecessor in the Department of Geography.
Academic Life. Ahmadu Bello University was the first full scale university in Northern Nigeria. It had been created by merging several existing academic, research, and other facilities in Zaria and Kano. Founded in 1962, it was still a small university in 1967. [58] The University was modeled on the British system in which students specialized in two or three subjects, majoring in only one. I got to know the majors in geography quite well because they spent much of their life in the Geography Department. They were capable students who had done well in secondary school exams. Advancement towards a degree was largely based on end of term examinations. The students were from many parts of Nigeria but, at the time, largely from Kwara State, which had been the southernmost part of the old Northern Region of Nigeria. Many of these students spoke Yoruba and were Christians. Very few students came from the northern states, which were largely based on the 19th century Muslim, Fulani emirates. Western style education was less important in these areas. Today, the student body is drawn from all of Nigeria, reflecting a greater diversity than that of most other universities of the nation.
The Department of Geography was chaired by a British-trained, Indian climatologist, Dr. P.N. Hore. The other two geographers were Michael Mortimore, an Englishman, who was interested in land use and economic geography of Kano and Zaria, and Hans Van Raay, a Dutchman interested in cattle raising and trade in northern Nigeria. I taught the Geography of Africa and introduced students to American ideas about cultural geography. We all participated in talks and discussion about geography, supervised student research projects, and led field trips to other parts of northern Nigeria.
When the University was not in session, I travelled to several parts of northern Nigeria, partly as a tourist, and partly doing research to see how northern Nigerian cities were laid out on the ground. I also did research in the archives in Kaduna, where I discovered plans and official documents that described the layouts and factors that created the British colonial towns located adjacent to the old, walled, traditional cities. I also walked the walls, streets, and pathways of the urbanized area of Zaria; and I talked with officials of the old city of Zaria, the merchants of the commercial centers, and other residents of other parts of the urban center. As a result I was able to piece together a topographic history of the contemporary urban area of Zaria and of several other cities of northern Nigeria. My study was published by the Ahmadu Bello University Press in 1977. [59]
Social Institutions. Other than the University, the most important social institutions in which I participated were those of an expatriate community located in a modernizing segment of Nigeria. I was aware of the continuing traditional cultural ways of the local Nigerians; however my life was embedded in the culture of Western Europe and America as it adapted to life in a formerly colonial state which was emerging as a nation-state. Many traditional Nigerian ways were changing slowly; however, the University and the commercial sectors of the area were rapidly changing from their colonial roots to more modern ways based upon elements of “western” capitalism and nation statehood. And while I was in Nigeria, the civil war, which was underlain by political, ethnic, religious, economic, and regional differences, strongly influenced the politics and economy of the nation.
Because I was one of the few expatriates who remained at ABU in Nigeria during the summer intersession, I was asked to evaluate applications for admission to the University, judging them on their academic merits. Nevertheless I was made fully aware of the politics of admission. In particular, I was told to look favorably on students from northern Nigeria who spoke Hausa or Fulani. The best educated secondary graduates came from southern Nigeria, where greater emphasis was given to educating all students and where many more secondary schools existed. (Because of the civil war, no applications were from Biafra, where western style education may have been most highly valued.) I did my best to uphold the basic standards of academic merit while realizing that it was probably more difficult to weigh potential success at the University when the educational and social backgrounds of the applicants were extremely diverse. I submitted my recommendations but never heard whether or not they were valued; nor did I even receive acknowledgement of my service. Later, when I had written an unsolicited letter of recommendation for a colleague, the vice-chancellor, himself, told me that I was “to confine myself strictly to teaching and nothing else.” I had used my values as an expatriate American professor to take part in a Nigerian university that was modeled after a British pattern but administered by native Nigerians. The confusion was great because the institution was in a constant state of flux.
Personal Life. Because expatriates were part of a very small society, we were more closely concerned with each other than we would have been in our own countries or cultures. We were more caring of each other’s needs, forming rapid and strong bonds. We may have been more isolated because the ongoing war limited the availability of goods and services. International news was limited because Nigerian papers and media were more concerned with local events. And many major American and European events were reduced to headlines in the inner pages of the papers. My isolation was much greater than I imagined at the time. America had changed radically during the period I was in Nigeria. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated; LBJ had decided not to run for another term as president; riots disrupted the Democratic national convention in Chicago; and the Viet Nam war caused increasingly great divisions within the US. I was largely unaware of the emotional and social unrest created by these events.
Our expatriate community talked of local things; ate dinner at each other’s homes, played cards, went walking, swam at the club pool. We organized play reading groups; we went to the cinema at the Lebanon Club; we went to Kaduna for major shopping trips. Most Sundays, Beth and I participated in a silent Quaker Meeting which was attended by eight to ten people. Potluck dinners and a social gathering followed at the home of whoever hosted the meeting.
Almost my only interaction with students was in class or in the common room of the Geography Department. Because most of the students were strangers to the local culture and society, they in some ways were also expatriates. Like me few of them spoke Hausa, the local language. They usually spoke English in class or with others whose familial language they did not know. Many of them felt that they were strangers in a strange land.
The most intimate daily social interaction I and my family had with Nigerians was with Gabriel, Bala, and Tinamu, the three men who worked for us in the house and garden. We felt responsible for their health and general welfare as well as for that of their immediate families. We paid them the going salary rate but, in addition, made sure they got medical treatment when needed. We provided them with work clothes. We trained them in their jobs and for better jobs. We taught them how to drive. We searched for employment opportunities for them. And especially Beth worked very closely with them on a daily basis. She taught Gabriel to cook. She taught Bala the necessity of cleanliness. She helped them to learn more English. Our steward, Gabriel, lived with his family in a building adjacent to ours. Bala, his assistant, and Tinamu, the gardener, lived in nearby Samaru village. We saw them everyday. They played with our children, who loved them dearly. They were part of our family, yet were in many ways dependent on us. It was not a permanent social institution, but in many ways the most important one for my family while we lived in Zaria. And from them we learned friendliness, resourcefulness, and how to maintain good spirits even in the daily struggles they faced in entering a rapidly changing society.
Physical Setting. Most of the events in my life in Nigeria took place within the enclaves of the University and its nearby housing complex which were connected by a road and trails through the bush. The buildings were similar to modern concrete structures that could be found in many other tropical countries. The landscaping of the University consisted of common tropical plants. The next most usual events in my life took place on the roads in the commercial areas in Zaria and Kaduna. Because I explored many parts of the landscape of Zaria, I came to understand the setting of the urban region and its surrounding agricultural lands.[60]
In July 1969, we left Nigeria by plane from Kano, flying over the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea to Rome and, the next day, to Florence. We stayed in a pension in Fiesole and took daily excursions into Florence. Its greatest attractions for us were the beautiful, clean displays of fruits and vegetables in the central market. This was the welcome we most enjoyed in our reacquaintance with Western society. Of course the rich artistic heritage of Florence and Western Europe was intellectually enriching; nevertheless, our spirits were most raised by the availability of items and cleanliness of everyday life in a modern society.
One event of my experiences in Florence stands out sharply. I visited the building in which one of the world’s earliest (1657) scientific societies had met. It was filled with the artistic and sophisticated scientific instruments of the time. And when I came out, photographers were interviewing people about their impression of the moon landing which had just happened. I could not but reflect on the juxtaposition of my experience in Zaria, the science of 17th Century Florence, and the technological marvel of men walking on the moon. From Zaria to Florence to the Moon—it was mind boggling! [61]
We continued a family vacation in Holland with the Van Raay’s, in Wales with our housing area neighbors, the Hendersons, and with the Harris’s, our friends from Berkeley. Before flying home we spent a week in the English Lake District on a working farm near the home of Beatrix Potter, where she created Peter Rabbit and Mrs. Tiggy Winkle. These three weeks of vacationing bridged our life in Nigeria with our return to America.
University of Oregon—1969-1980
Arrival in Eugene was bittersweet—sweet to see many friends and a familiar landscape but bitter because our house, which we had rented while in Nigeria, was dirty, had fleas, and a long neglected yard. After cleaning the house and putting the yard in order, we began to think of finding another house where Sarah and Helen each would have her own room.
We settled into a new house on Agate Street. It was only two blocks from campus and twelve blocks from my office. I could walk through the campus, enjoying its calm, green beauty. I continued to teach my regular classes in cultural geography and the geography of Africa as well as introductory courses. Academic life in the Department of Geography was stimulating because several, extraordinarily well qualified graduate students were supported by federally funded fellowships. Little changed in my approaches to teaching for the next two years.
However the atmosphere of the University and the nation differed radically from what it had been two years earlier. Discontent with the politics of the Vietnam War was rising to fever pitch. I scarcely recognized the attitudes and thoughts of my colleagues and students. Protests, demonstrations, near riots, sit-ins and teach-ins were the norm at the University. And, in April, 1972, the ROTC building was burned, streets were barricaded, and the National Guard surrounded the campus. Often teaching scheduled classes took back seat to discussing national concerns as they played out on the campus.
City and Campus Planning. Upon return to Eugene and the University, I immediately became involved with both University and local planning issues. I was made chairman of the Campus Planning Committee and a freeway was proposed for the block next to my home. The University of Oregon was developing a plan to directing its physical expansion. And the Eugene-Springfield area had just unveiled its 1990 Plan, which was to guide its development for the next 20 years.
The 1990 Plan addressed several elements of great general concern to me: population growth, resource use, nuclear power, and citizen participation in decision-making. I was particularly concerned because it incorporated a transportation plan (the Eugene/Springfield Area Transportation Study or E-SATS) that proposed building a network of freeways that was denser than that of Los Angeles. The freeways were to encircle both the campus and the city’s central business district as well as line the banks of the Willamette River. One of the proposed freeways was to be located only one and a half blocks from my house. I realized that the environmental impact on the University and the Willamette River would be huge and that the planning tools that had been used to design the proposed network of freeways were highly flawed. I helped lead public opposition to this particular part of the 1990 Plan. We were successful in stopping the building of the freeways, however, not because of our efforts but because federal and state funds were not available to build the highways.
Other issues of the 1990 Plan also demanded my attention, e.g., assumptions about the amount and desirability of rapid population growth, the location of projected expansion of built up areas, and their impact on the natural environment. Conflict arose between many people who supported all growth in general because it meant more jobs, business, and economic expansion and other people who were concerned about the environmental dangers and incremental costs of urban sprawl. The plan addressed these issues indirectly in anticipation to State planning goals that would require an ‘urban growth boundary.’ Urban growth boundaries were to be designed to limit urban sprawl and preserve rural farm or forest lands. As a geographer concerned both with the ways urban areas grew and the desirability of preserving rural landscapes, I became directly involved in the politics and culture of these discussions. To a lesser extent I was a supporter of the citizens group that opposed the building of a nuclear plant by the local public utility. Four possible sites for a nuclear power plant were identified within fifteen miles of Eugene. Fortunately a ballot measure which limited the utility’s authority to construct nuclear power plants in Lane County was successful.
I was also involved with a specific planning proposal to change the zoning from residential to limited commercial of property located directly across the street from the house I had recently bought. Through opposing the zone change, which would have allowed the building of a dental clinic immediately next to a city park, I came to understand the intricacies of the Eugene planning laws and of the role politics play in local issues. The zoning change was denied because of the astute detailed understanding of the particulars of the case by the lawyer of a wealthy businessman, whose property overlooked the site.
Campus Planning. The most important issue facing the Campus Planning Committee was the search for an architectural or planning firm to develop a long-range plan for the campus. As chairman of the committee, I became deeply involved with understanding the desires and role of University administrative officers, members of the faculty, who wanted to get new facilities, as well as members of the committee, which included architects and landscape architects with professional experience. After interviewing several nationally recognized firms, we chose “The Center for Environmental Structure” which was led by Christopher Alexander. Alexander and his colleagues worked closely with the Campus Planning Committee in designing The Oregon Experiment, [62]in which specific ‘patterns’ were to be used as guidelines for the ‘users’ of new or altered buildings. The ‘patterns’ are physical descriptions associated with particular events at all scales from details such as presence or absence of light and shade to concerns with the form of neighborhoods. Each pattern describes the physical solution to a particular event, always in the context of its component patterns and of the patterns within which it fits. As a cultural geographer, I was bowled over by the ways in which the ‘pattern language’ let me better understand the relationships between the physical world and the cultural events that it may support. And the plan was to be used directly by the users of the proposed change in facilities. Not a master plan, The Oregon Experiment is a planning process which depends upon user participation in designing all projected changes in the campus. As a campus planner, I learned much about the ways in which a conservative institution—the University—reacted to this radically new creative approach to changing its physical expression.
During the years 1969-1971, I became influenced strongly by the local social institutions within which I actively participated—the University of Oregon, the City of Eugene, the metropolitan and State of Oregon planning organizations. Within the constraints of their legal and political positions, I encouraged new ways of thinking about citizen participation, transportation planning, and other actions that would alter the local physical landscape. On a national level, my concerns about the destructiveness of the Vietnam War led me to become aware of national political issues as I had never been before. These changes in my thinking have been a major part of my concerns ever since.
Gradual Transitions—1971–1976. In 1971-1972 I was granted a sabbatical leave to complete my manuscript on northern Nigerian urban landscapes and to do research on traditional African house types at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. The Urquhart family moved first to Highgate in London and because of the high costs of living in London, then to the village of Burtersett in Wensleydale, North Riding, Yorkshire. John and Jill Gibson’s[63] stone cottage was in the heart of the village. It was unoccupied and offered freely to us. Stone walled pastures surrounded the village. Heaths covered the higher hills which were crossed by a Roman roadway. It was an ideal place for me to write and was but a few hours from London by local bus and train from York.
On a walk to the shops of Highgate, Beth had discovered the house of Mary Kingsley, an 19th Century African woman explorer, who had written extensively about her travels in West Africa. Beth had read her books and admired her writing and her adventures as a single woman who trouped courageously through country largely unknown to Europeans. A local librarian helped Beth find more information about Mary Kingsley and set her on an extensive research project, which she continued after we moved to Yorkshire. As I could go to London to continue my research while Beth watched Sarah and Helen, she could go to Liverpool to meet Harold MacMillan and do research in the unpublished letters of the MacMillan Publishing Company, the major sponsor of Miss Kingsley’s trips, while I stayed with the girls.
Sarah and Helen, then 7 and 4, attended the local school in Hawes, the nearest market town. Although they took a bus to school with the other village children, I usually walked across the pastures when we needed provisions that the tiny village shop did not stock. The peaceful setting of Burtersett gave us the opportunity to experience village life as strangers with whom the locals were eager to gossip about their neighbors as well as talk about their own lives. It was, in some ways, comparable to our life in Norwich, Vermont: both small villages with many natives whose lives had been bound together for decades, yet who were thrust into a rapidly changing modern society that was not space-bound to the local landscape.
The sabbatical year was tranquil. The research was interesting. We enjoyed the life of the village and the walks in the Yorkshire countryside. Yet we had television, read London papers, and visited English towns and cities.
Academic Responsibilities—1972-1980. Upon my return to the United States, I became Department Head in which capacity I remained until 1975 and again in 1979-80. The administrative duties required much time. Nevertheless, I continued to teach all of my regular courses as well as serve as the Program Chairman for the Association of American Geographers for their national meeting in Seattle in 1974. In 1979-1989 I was president of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers. Throughout this period, I enjoyed working with several students on their research for graduate degrees. I was chief advisor for six PhD Dissertations and nine master’s theses.[64] I also continued my interests in neighborhood, city and campus planning issues.
National unrest had stirred my conscience and I developed new classes that I thought were more directly relevant to contemporary society than my traditional geographic interests. The 1970s saw a dramatic increase in interest in ‘environmental’ issues. Although Rachael Carson had stimulated interest in the early1960s, the real ferment in concern emerged in the revolutionary period of the 1970s. President Jimmy Carter gave national importance to many environmental and energy problems. At the University of Oregon several experimental environmental classes stimulated hundreds of eager students. However, few permanent changes in the University’s curriculum occurred. University support for faculty time to teach environmentally related courses was not forthcoming. Only those few senior faculty members who could and wanted to reorient their existing classes or seminars responded to the national concerns about environmental issues. An Environmental Studies Center had been formed by a group of interested students and faculty. It collected the burgeoning amount of ephemeral and governmental materials about environmental issues and created a library for material that the University Library did not collect. The University gave it space in a peripheral building north of the Millrace. However, the University eventually wanted that space for other uses and was about to evict the Environmental Studies Center. I was concerned that the University gave Environmental Studies such a low priority that I, as chair of the Geography Department, was willing to allocate some departmental space to house the Environmental Studies materials. I was also able to convince the Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, to provide funds to hire a half-time secretary to give administrative help to the students who volunteered to maintain the collection.
Domestic Concerns and Social Life. I became more concerned with family matters as Beth’s life increasingly began to focus on alcohol. She refused to face her dependence on drinking, going so far as to discontinue going to our family doctor, who had established a major drug and alcohol rehabilitation program in Eugene, instead she found a doctor who did not recognize her disease and who prescribed tranquilizers for her. As Beth escaped into alcoholism and became incapable of an active role in home and marital life, I took over most parental responsibilities. More and more of my time was spent taking care of the girls and keeping the house. In the process I become a classic example of an enabling family member. Finally realizing that Beth was unable to give basic care and love to Sarah and Helen, I filed for divorce and custody of the children. The shock of this action made Beth immediately go into a recovery program where she gained some control over her addiction and was able to function outside of herself. However, I was unable to bridge the emotional gulf that separated us. We were divorced in 1976 and Beth was awarded custody of the girls.
I was permitted visitation rights on weekends and access to the girls at specified holidays. I moved to an apartment, where Helen and Sarah could stay with me on those occasions. Our relationship was strained because, I believe, they blamed me for the break-up of the family. Beth refused to act in any way as an intermediary between me and Sarah and Helen. She would not even pass messages from me to them. To contact them became extremely difficult when Beth, Sarah, and Helen moved to Oregon City when Beth’s job was transferred to Tigard.
My principal social life was with a group of graduate students and with Ev Smith and Clyde Patton, my longtime friends and colleagues. I had been introduced to jogging by Bill Preston, one of the graduate students whose dissertation I was supervising. I found running to be a great way to calm the stresses I felt during my divorce and the breakup of my family. We often ran across the Willamette River in Alton Baker Park. I continued running for pleasure and began bicycling to the campus when I moved to a large apartment on East Amazon Drive
I dated several women, only to realize that I had largely repressed my homosexual feelings throughout eighteen years of marriage. I sought help in understanding my emerging awareness by contacting two faculty members whom I knew were openly gay.[65] They helped me by letting me talk about my feelings and by introducing me to other gay men. For the next three years, 1977-1979, I began to come to terms with my sexuality. I had lived as a heterosexual man in a largely heterosexual society, for most of the time in which even psychologists labeled homosexuality as a disease.
I was attracted sexually to several male colleagues and students, all of whom were ‘straight.’ Thus my sexual passions stayed repressed; I reconciled myself to a life as a single, probably celibate, gay man. To this end I eventually adjusted my living quarters by buying an 800 square foot house on Washington Street on the northwest slope of College Hill. The yard was undeveloped. I planted fruit trees and a vegetable garden in back and forty-three blueberry bushes in the front yard. I continued to bicycle to campus and run in the South Hills.
A sabbatical leave in the spring of 1979 allowed me to collect my thoughts about the future of my academic and personal life. I drove across the United States, stopping in Laredo, Texas, before going into Mexico by bus to Monterrey, San Luis Potosi, Zacatecas, Morelia, and Mexico City. I continued across the southern United States on my way to the meeting of the AAG in Philadelphia. My car was irreparably wrecked near Columbia, South Carolina. I rented a car to go to the Philadelphia meetings, and with Ev Smith, after returning to South Carolina to buy a car, drove across the country on back roads and highways, only once on a freeway. We visited former students, checked out the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, which had recently closed, and we talked ‘geography’, visited small towns, and enjoyed rural landscapes. I returned invigorated to the University, which along with the rest of the country was soon to embrace the conservative philosophy of President Ronald Reagan.
University of Oregon—1980 to 1994
My last fourteen years on the faculty of the University of Oregon were elaborations of many of earlier activities: administration of the Department of Geography and the Environmental Studies Program; teaching and the evolution of courses in environmental geography; teaching introductory classes in geography and graduate seminars in environmental studies; supervising master’s theses and doctoral dissertations; doing research and giving presentations on the evolution of the landscapes of Eugene/Springfield and of the Willamette Valley; and dealing with issues of local urban and campus planning.
Academic Life. I was chair of the Environmental Studies program from 1980 to1982 and again from 1990 to 1993. I and other concerned faculty members gave time and effort in establishing an interdisciplinary master’s degree program focused on environmental concerns. This hard core of dedicated faculty included Stan Cook, an ecologist who had established the first permanent interdisciplinary course in environmental studies; Dan Goldrich, a political scientist who had organized a major study of the ways in which student environmental concerns could be integrated into the University; Glen Love, a literature professor, who taught classes in “nature” in literature; Dick Gale, a sociologist who introduced courses in environmental sociology; Chet Bowers, an educational philosopher whose studies focused on environmental education in its broadest sense; John Bonine and Michael Axline, who led environmental interests in the Law School; and, after 1980, John Baldwin, an ecologist who was hired by the Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management to teach and do research in environmental policy and planning. The graduate program was approved in 1982 and John Baldwin was named its Director. He was the major driving force in promoting environmental issues at the University until his death in 2005.
The interdisciplinary program attracted extraordinarily good students from all over the country because no other university had developed such a flexible, yet rigorous master’s degree program. For the ten students we admitted each year, two or three hundred applications were received. Most students that we admitted were older and had had work experience that allowed them to know how the University’s program would help them. The weekly seminars that all of the new graduate students attended were lively and exciting. Guest speakers from the faculty of many departments introduced the students to the diverse perspectives of environmentalists. The seminars stimulated conversations that often continued long after the seminars were over. Since no two students had the same specific interests nor took exactly the same classes, the spontaneous discussions in the Environmental Studies Center and over coffee or beer, were diverse and informative as well as socially bonding. The Program’s students and faculty also met informally at pot-luck dinners, usually at my home. For me, this program was the most interesting and stimulating of my academic career.
I developed a proposal for a very demanding undergraduate program which required both a full major in an established department as well as broad major in environmentally related courses, seminar, and thesis. But it did not receive approval by the State Board of Higher Education because the University administration and the State Board gave environmental concerns low priority. The times were not right; the recession of the 1980s and the anti-environmental agenda of President Reagan did not bode well for environmental issues.
From 1987 to 1990 I again chaired the Department of Geography. As was the common departmental practice, all seven of its faculty participated fully in administering the Department. We continued to meet once a week over lunch to discuss the needs and concerns of the moment. Everyone was a member of several committees, e.g. committees for graduate admissions, graduate and undergraduate advising, curriculum, faculty search, promotion and tenure. My role as department head was as an intermediary on routine matters between the Department and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
During the years before my retirement, I was the principal dissertation advisor for nine PhD candidates, chief thesis advisor for ten master’s candidates in Geography and was on the program committee for eleven Environmental Studies master’s candidates.[66] Although working with these students was very demanding, it was also extremely rewarding. Their research was fascinating and my close personal connections with them were gratifying. Their research enriched me intellectually and their personalities enriched me emotionally.
My most satisfying classroom teaching came through the gradual refinement of three upper division and graduate classes in cultural geography. Geographic Landscapes was focused on the ways in which humans have created the physical settings in which they work and live. I emphasized the desires of cultural groups in transforming the natural world. Environmental Alterations focused on the negative impacts that humans have on the natural world. The course I called Historical and Contemporary Views of Environment focused on the ideas and attitudes that major thinkers, primarily in the 19th and 20th centuries, have had on recent environmental thought. These three courses represent my complete transition from the cultural geography I first taught to one that emphasized the environmental concerns I now found most relevant. I also continued to enjoy teaching classes in introductory cultural geography which, in addition to basic ideas, required field projects that demanded mapping and personal observations of local landscapes.
My research interests in the historical development of the physical and cultural landscapes of Eugene and the Willamette Valley continued and were reflected in my classroom teaching and in my presentations to both academic and local groups. I also created a series of maps to illustrate the history of the massive cutting over of the forest lands that border the Willamette Valley and presented papers on the broad scope of ideas of cultural geographic ideas that Carl Sauer developed during his lifetime and of the concepts about landscape that J.B. Jackson’s presented in his privately owned journal, Landscape Magazine.
Planning Concerns. Because the economic recession during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan affected Eugene greatly, the mayor of Eugene, Brian Obie, and the president of the University of Oregon, Paul Olum, got together in 1984 and decided that the University could help the local economy by converting open space that the University owned along the Willamette River into a massive research facility to be known as the Riverfront Research Park. Although no actual tenants for the proposed facility were identified, the dream was carried forward in conceptual drawings; and legal procedures were started to change the zoning of the area.
Earlier, I had been involved in the development of a campus plan for the riverfront site. That plan, which had been approved by President Olum in 1983, was to create a series of sports fields and an ecologic study area. I was concerned that the Riverfront Research Park proposal did not follow the planning procedures that the University had adopted in the Oregon Experiment. Instead, it reverted to heavy handed, top-down ways of making planning decisions. But more importantly, my main concern was that the proposal flew in the face of the State of Oregon’s planning legislation to maintain the Willamette Greenway, whose primary purpose was to protect the use of all lands adjacent to the Willamette River from intensification or to reclaim abandoned wastelands. This issue was so important to me because it clearly was local and dealt with major concerns with which I had been dealing ever since freeways had been proposed for the banks of the Willamette River.
In 1984, after failing to convince the President and the Campus Planning Committee of the deficiencies of the proposal and their rejection of alternative sites for a research park, I felt that I needed to oppose the proposal as it worked its way through the metropolitan planning procedures. To change the zoning of the existing Metropolitan Plan, the planning committees and governing bodies of the cities of both Eugene and Springfield as well as of Lane County had to approve the proposal. I submitted oral and written testimony to each of those bodies, never successfully. I then submitted written legal briefs to the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA), who sent the proposal back for modifications. After going through the same procedures with a modified plan, which was adopted by both the cities and the county, the Land Use Board of Appeals rejected my arguments. In 1987, I and other opponents unsuccessfully carried that appeal to the Oregon Court of Appeals.
At the same time the City of Eugene, with the backing of the University, proposed to include the Riverfront Research Park within a much larger urban renewal districts, whose primary purpose was to provide funds for infrastructure within the research park. My written and oral objections to that proposal had to be made to the planning commission and City Council of Eugene. They were rejected as was an initiative ballot measure to oppose the urban renewal district. In 2011, twenty-seven years after the initial proposal, the area of the Riverfront Research Park within the Willamette Greenway has yet to be developed. The idea of making money on the project has fallen far short of its optimistic beginnings; and the hastily conceived proposals of the mayor and university president remain merely dreams. The site of a proposed research facility was, in 2011, relocated from the riverfront area.
My multi-year involvement caused me to learn about the intricacies of the planning processes of local governments and of the judicial processes of the State government. I learned how to write legal briefs, which the judges of LUBA said were better than most they received from practicing attorneys. More importantly I also learned that basic issues may depend on narrow legal interpretations rather than on merit and that when dreams of economic development conflict with existing environmental conditions, especially during a period of economic recession, environment takes a back seat.
From 1985-1986, I was a member of the University Faculty Advisory Council to the President, which met weekly with Provost, Richard Hill, and President, Paul Olum, to discuss matters that concerned either the President or the Faculty. As chair of the Council in 1986, I also met with the President to set the meetings’ agendas and discuss other University business. The principal concerns of the University administration and of the faculty were the finances of the University at a time of greatly reduced funding by the State. No other major crises developed during my time on the committee. Although general faculty meetings were still held, few faculty members attended and their “town hall” democratic character diminished. The Faculty Senate came to assume much of the power of the general faculty meetings while the Faculty Advisory Council dealt with day-to-day concerns.
Personal Life 1980-1993. In late fall, 1980, my life changed radically when I met Michael Shellenbarger. We were intimately connected for the next 12 year until Mike’s death in February 1993. At a concert of the School of Music, my friend, Jack Powers, introduced me to Mike, a gay man who taught architecture at the University. One month later, Mike asked me to the next concert in the series. We went for coffee after the concert and talked for hours. and were immediately attracted to each other. We had very similar interests, attitudes, and backgrounds, although Mike was six years younger than I. Mike was born and grew up in Plattsmouth, Nebraska. He received a degree in architecture from Iowa State University and first practiced in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He later received a master’s degree in architecture from Columbia University and worked in New England. He married, lived and worked in Connecticut where he designed a large elementary school before being asked to join the Department of Architecture at the University of Oregon in the 1970s.
While in Eugene, Mike taught courses in building materials and construction, historic preservation, as well as conducting architecture design studios. Much of his time was devoted to being the chair of the Historic Preservation Program at the University. During a yearlong leave from the University, Mike designed the Contra Costa County jail while working for a San Francisco firm. He also served on a Eugene School Board committee that considered reorganizing and closing schools. Mike and his wife, who was the ombudsman for the City of Eugene, bought a large, old, California bungalow style house on Olive Street, which they shared with several other new Eugeneans. By the time I met Mike, he had divorced, his housemates had moved, and he had nearly completed the renovation of the house in its authentic historic style.
Mike had attended several counseling and discussion programs which explored sexuality, especially for gay men. These discussions helped him greatly to understand his homosexuality; and when we met he was able to share with me his understanding of some of the issues of sexuality that I had been experiencing. Because of his newly gained skills of openly addressing his sexuality and associated problems of interpersonal relationships, he was able to lead our early relationship in an open, positive way. Throughout our life together we were able to confront any disagreement or confusion we might have immediately, openly, and without any resentment or anger. Although this had been my approach and experience with my academic colleagues, it had never been true in my marriage. Mike and I never argued, instead were able to talk through calmly and without rancor all of our potential disagreements.
For four years we daily alternated between staying at his house on Olive Street and my house on Washington Street. We ate breakfast and dinner together, slept together, and usually rode our bicycles to the University at the same time. We entertained together, sharing hosting at the pot-luck dinners of both students and faculty of the Environmental Studies and Historic Preservation Programs. We enjoyed biking around town, working out at a local gym, playing duets on the piano, and Sunday coffee and brioches at the Metropole Bakery in the Fifth Street Public Market.
We also traveled together. Mike had a sabbatical leave, 1982-83, in which he studied the construction of older masonry buildings in England and Spain. I took leave of absence for the winter quarter, 1983, and joined Mike in Spain where I reconstructed the topographic history of Seville from the evidence that still remained in the urban landscape as well as from written urban histories and old maps. We visited several other cities in Spain, Portugal, and France on our way to London where, in the spring quarter, I taught classes to American students from universities in the Pacific Northwest. I lectured about the landscapes of London and England and guided weekly tours of typical areas of London. The following summer, Mike and I traveled throughout Great Britain.
In the summer, 1984, we drove to Mike’s family home in Nebraska returning by way of the American Southwest. In summer, 1985, we flew to New York City where Mike did library research in Columbia University on ‘tuck pointing’ in brick buildings and I explored the urban landscape of “the Big Apple.” In 1986 we attended the World’s Fair in Vancouver, B.C. and camped in national parks on Vancouver Island. During the winter and spring quarters of 1987 I had a sabbatical leave to study the landscapes of Galicia in northwestern Spain where the climatic patterns are very close to those of western Oregon. Mike took a leave of absence to study the use of granite in the buildings of Galicia. Almost all structures are made of granite, from walls around fields to grain storage buildings and most homes and public buildings. We rented a car in Frankfurt, Germany, and drove through France and northern Spain to Vigo, our headquarters for exploring most of the paved highways of Galicia.
Having been asked to give a lecture in the Geography Department of the University of Tübingen, Germany, I, accompanied by Mike, drove from Spain through France to Tübingen, taking different routes than we had in 1983. In Tübingen we joined a travelling seminar of German graduate students of geography, going to Austria, Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland before returning to Eugene. In subsequent years we travelled to California as well as other places in Oregon and Washington.
After several months of unexplained pain, Mike was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in the spring of 1992. He immediately began chemotherapy to which, unfortunately, he did not respond positively. By the fall he had stopped treatment for the cancer and was treated simply to relieve pain and discomfort. Mike never stayed overnight in hospital, remaining home for care throughout his illness. Unable to leave the house after Christmas, he received hospice care until he died at the end of February 1993. I was Mike’s caregiver throughout his illness, going with him to all doctor’s visits and chemo treatments as well as during his last months at home in bed. Mike always had a positive outlook and continued to address his and my concerns immediately as they arose. In many ways we became increasingly close throughout his illness. We talked joyously of the good life we shared, even as he became more dependent on me for his care. We talked openly of death and how to face it. We were both thankful for the most emotionally satisfying years of both of our lives.
Mike’s death left me with a feeling of great loss. I was given great emotional support by Stan and Joan Cook, Ev and Sally Smith, and Jack Powers as well as by many other friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. My work with students in the Environmental Studies Program and the Department of Geography helped fill my days. As executor and principal beneficiary of Mike’s estate, I expended energy that let me continue to understand what a good person he had been and how fortunate I was in having been his soul mate for over twelve years. At a memorial service for Mike, organized by his colleagues in the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, his students and fellow faculty member offered good tribute to Mike’s professional career and friendships. I was able to find great release in telling of his and my deep love for each other and in describing how our day-by-day activities were joyfully in accord. I still feel blessed to have experienced the deep love we had for each other. I learned from Mike, both how to love and how to enjoy every moment of life.
I taught one academic year after Mike’s death, retiring in June, 1994. I had thought that I would then take a year off and return to teach one-third time for several more years; but that was not to be. I did not return to teaching because I found that many enjoyable activities filled my days and that my finances exceeded my needs.
Retirement—1994-2011
Social and Personal Life. During the summer of 1993, I came to know a younger Mexican man, Anastasio (Tacho) Flores, who by chance had heard me speak at Mike’s memorial service. Tacho had gone there to meet one of Mike’s students. Later in the spring, he came to my office and told me how he too had lost his lover to cancer a short time before and had moved to Eugene from Los Angeles. At the time I thought little about his seeking me out because I was still grieving Mike’s death. However, in late spring, I attended an outdoor pot-luck dinner for older gay men at the home of the student that Tacho had gone to meet at Mike’s memorial service. Anastasio was there and made sure that I remembered him by giving me his telephone number. However, when several weeks later I called, I found that the number was incorrect. Only by chance did I later meet Tacho when we made arrangements to visit one of his friends who lived at the Oregon coast. On the trip we found that we were strongly attracted to each other, in part because of the similar emotions we were feeling about the loss of our lovers and in part because we found each other physically attractive. We continued to see each other and, eventually, decided to live together.
Anastasio had grown up in a large middle-class Mexican family that lived in a small sugar-factory town in the state of Puebla, Mexico. He had gone to secondary school in Mexico City and had come to Los Angeles to continue his studies. Tacho met his lover, a former Catholic priest who then worked for the city of Pasadena and, in his off time, was an excellent landscape painter. He encouraged Tacho to develop his artistic skills, while working part-time as a teacher’s assistant for the Los Angeles school district. After his partner’s death, Tacho left Los Angeles and moved to Eugene.[67]
Anastasio was driven by several passions—sculpture, tennis, cooking, and physical fitness. He particularly enjoyed carving in stone, taking classes when he could at both Lane Community College and the University of Oregon. He was an excellent tennis player and taught me the basic skills of the game so that we could enjoy playing wherever we found an open court. Tacho took care to work out religiously and was always concerned with keeping his body in shape. And he enjoyed cooking good Mexican food, having learned much from his mother as well as experimenting with new dishes whenever he had the chance.
Anastasio was a good travelling companion. During the Christmas holidays of 1993, we flew to Mexico City, from which we went by bus to Oaxaca, Puerto Escondido, and Cuernavaca before I flew home and he continued to the family home in Atencingo. After I had retired in 1994, we drove to Yosemite and King’s Canyon National Parks. The following winter, we spent three months travelling in Mexico, mostly in Colima and Puebla. Later that year we drove to Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Rainier National Parks. In 1996 we visited the states of Vera Cruz, Tlaxcala, and Puebla, Mexico, and in 1997 drove the length of Baja California. In1997 we visited both Vancouver, British Columbia, and New York City. In 2001 we explored art galleries and museums in Amsterdam, Brussels, London, and Paris.
Our relationship was strongly reinforced by our mutual sexual attraction. We both came to enjoy physical sex as we had never before experienced it. We shared domestic life, however as I became the exclusive economic provider, Anastasio became more dependent on me. And he spent little time as a sculptor, his self proclaimed career. Tacho had also expressed a strong interest in becoming a chef and was accepted as a student at major culinary schools in San Francisco and Vancouver, B.C. However, after a very short time in residence, he left both schools. Because I did not want to continue to enable his dependency on me, I gradually emotionally separated myself from Anastasio, finally completely separating from him in 2001.
Through the Eugene Men’s Forum, a group of middle aged and older gay men who hold pot luck dinners twice a month, I have become friends with other men whom I see often. Most important among them are Scott Downey and Fred Dodge. Scott, formerly a professional skate- and snow-boarder, now a building contractor and I have jointly owned, remodeled, and sold or rented six houses in Eugene. Fred, a former Lutheran minister and social worker, now lives in a cottage that Scott built behind my house. We share patio, yard, and garden and often go to concerts together. The three of us often eat together and share companionship.
Jon Cruson has become on extremely close friend with whom I share my thoughts during our regular meetings over coffee. Jon, a printmaker and painter, has introduced me to the art world of Eugene and Oregon. We have taken many short trips together in the Pacific Northwest as well as travelling to Alaska on the Alaska Ferry, to Puerto Rico in 2009, and to Oaxaca, Puebla, and Mexico City in 2011 and 2012.
Jack Powers, the man who introduced me to Michael Shellenbarger, remained a very close friend until his death in 2011at the age of 91. We usually met for lunch at least once a month as well as seeing each other at the Chamber Music concerts of the University of Oregon’s School of Music. Jack had taught Spanish literature at the University and had enjoyed playing violin in a local chamber quartet. He always enjoyed good conversation in which he shared his literary insights. He, like I, was an avid gardener and bird watcher. We went on a bird watching trip to the San Juan Islands, Washington, and, with his partner, Don Kelley, to the Hawaiian Islands.
Two or three times a week for the last ten years or so I have met a group of older retired men for morning coffee. We banter, joke, and kid each other as we talk about the day’s happenings, sporting events, domestic relationships, aging bodies, and whatever else may come to mind. Our backgrounds are varied and include a dentist, a physical trainer, a secondary school history teacher, an engineer and developer, a university professor, a former shop owner, a forester, and a legally trained man of many experiences in business. I come to the coffee hour because we are always assured of laughing at the vagaries of life and can empathize with each other as we grow older together.
In 2001, Dan Goldrich and I decided to ask four other retired men to join us in forming a book group.[68] The six of us, all teachers who had received PhDs, have been meeting once a month for the past 10 years. Before discussing the month’s novel, we talk about local and political events of the day while drinking wine and nibbling on nuts. Because we have had similar life experiences and grew up at about the same time, we understand much of each others’ perspectives and our discussions are spirited.
After talking together but once in the past thirty years, I contacted Charles Martinson, one of the more interesting geography graduate students of the 1970s. We started to correspond by email and later met in Arizona to go camping in the Chiracahua Mountains, Carlos’—as I call him—favorite natural area. Since that initial camping trip, we have met again six times in some of the more natural areas of southwestern United States. Our camping trips to Owens Valley, California, Organ Pipe National Monument, Zion National Park, southwestern Colorado, and Gila National Forest, New Mexico, have been filled with the beauties of careful observation of nature and with extensive discussions of human existence. After writing a doctoral dissertation based on living a year by himself on one of the Aleutian Islands and teaching geography at San Fernando State College, California., Carlos lived much of his working life in False Pass, Alaska, before eventually retiring in Bisbee, Arizona. He has travelled, lived, and studied Buddhism in India. Carlos is an excellent photographer of the natural world, especially of wild flowering plants. Through the beauty of his photos, he hopes to inspire people to respect and love nature as a way of preserving and conserving our natural habitats. He lives extremely modestly but keeps abreast of the world through the internet. Carlos has introduced me to a very wide range of ideas, especially about consciousness, evolution, and Buddhist thought, and the integral philosophy of Ken Wilber. He is my cuate (buddy) friend!
I continue to be sustained both emotionally and intellectually by my long time friends and colleagues, Ev Smith and Stan Cook. Ev and I regularly talk of geographical interests that we developed during our teaching days and of neighborhood matters that started when we both lived in the South University Neighborhood.[69]
Stan and Joan Cook and I have travelled on several bird watching expeditions: in 1990 to wildlife refuges in Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona; in 1997 to Great Bend National Park, Texas and the Copper Canyon, Chihuahua , Mexico; in 1998 to the Amazon and Andean regions of Ecuador; in 1998 to Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Puebla; in 2000 to Australia, especially the Blue Mountains; in 2002 to wildlife refuges along the Columbia River and later to southeastern Oregon; in 2003 to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Oregon. Stan and I spent a month in Oaxaca in 2006, tracking down sites where his father had photographed rural villages and soil erosion in 1939. And in 2009 we travelled together by bus from Santiago, Chile, to the Atacama Desert and the Andes Mountain near the Bolivian border. We then flew to the Chilean Patagonia and bussed back to Santiago. In both Mexico and Chile, Stan and I were interested in observing geology, vegetation, and cultural landscapes. As an ecologist, his knowledge of plants informed me greatly. We speculated often as to the nature of the countryside we passed through. Stan’s unending curiosity about the natural world coupled with his concerns about the human use of resources makes him a highly valued companion for me. Our decades long friendship has been so close that I think of Stan as the brother I never had.
In 2001 I reconnected with Dan Gade, who had taught geography for a year at the University of Oregon in the 1960s before moving to the University of Vermont, where he taught until his retirement. Dan had done research in the Peruvian Andes near Cuzco for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin. He continued his interest in Latin America but also did research in southern France, Spain, and Madagascar, and Quebec. His interest in cultural geography is extraordinarily broad. He has an insatiable curiosity which has piqued his interests about many diverse topics. Dan had planned a trip to Bolivia to inquire about shamanic uses of psychedelic drugs and also to investigate wine growing in southern Bolivia. When he asked if I wanted to join him, I did not hesitate. We enjoyed visiting Sucre, La Paz, Potosi, and other cities on the Bolivian planalto and Andes. A year later we planned a trip to the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, where we visited Belo Horizonte and other colonial mining towns as well as the historic routes from the mines to the Atlantic coast. And in 2007 we met in Montreal, Canada, where Dan showed me some of the delights of that city, Quebec City, and other interesting parts of the surrounding Quebecoise rural landscape that he had come to know from his base in Vermont.
Family. In 1973 my parents returned to Portland upon my dad’s retirement at age 72. He died in 1991. My mother, who had taken up painting and other artistic activities when they moved to Walla Walla, Washington, in the early 1950s, continued painting almost to the end of her life at age 101. She inspired me with her involvement in life even as she became less able to move around and hear well. She read the newspaper daily; she read novels; and she kept close track of all of her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. I discovered among her many creative works very thoughtful poems and ideas that expressed her deep concern for the natural world and the meaning of life.
My ex-wife, Beth, died of oral cancer in 1998. She had moved to Marin County, California, where she lived with her widowed mother and owned a children’s bookstore in Sausalito. My older daughter, Sarah, left her mother’s home in Oregon City to live with me while she finished her last year of high school. She enrolled at the University of Oregon, completing a joint degree in international studies and history with a minor in French. She had spent her “junior year abroad” in Poitiers, France. After graduation she worked in a local bookstore before moving to San Francisco, where she also worked in a bookstore. She completed course work for a master’s degree in museum studies at San Francisco State College. As part of her program she interned at the Museum of California in Oakland, where she was later employed as an educational specialist for the museum’s history outreach program. Upon the death of both her grandmother and mother, Sarah bought a small California bungalow in Berkeley, which she remodeled and developed a garden landscape, mainly with plants native to California.
Sarah met and for several years lived with Jeff Holmes, who was a research biologist at a laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco. Jeff wanted to teach biology and after several temporary jobs in San Francisco found a position at Warren Wilson College, located near Asheville, North Carolina. In 1999, Sarah and Jeff married and moved to a ranch style house set on the wooded slopes above a small rural valley near the college. Sarah found or created several interesting jobs and developed many connections with people in the local community as well as at the college.
I had driven Sarah, her orchids and cactus plants, to Ashville when she moved from Berkeley. Subsequently in 2000, 2002, 2003, 2005, and 2006 I visited Sarah and Jeff, each time exploring new landscapes in North and South Carolina, Virginia, or Georgia. In 2002, Sarah, Jeff, and his son, Kevin, spent the Christmas holidays in Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Palenque, Mexico. In 2004, for her 40th birthday, I took Sarah on an Elderhostel tour of the archaeological ruins of Yucatan. She was the delight of all of the ‘elders.’ In 2008, Sarah, Jeff, and I drove to southeastern Oregon and on to Boise, where Kevin was graduating from high school. And in January, 2009, Sarah, Jeff, Kevin, Jon Cruson, and I visited the northeastern coast and mountains of Puerto Rico. In 2011, Sarah and Jeff divorced and Sarah moved to Kelso, Washington. Sarah is self assured, competent, intelligent, and resourceful. I enjoy her company greatly and am informed by her wide-ranging interest in literature, art, antiques, garden plants, and birding. She is alert to the moods and emotions of those around her. Sarah is calm and well balanced psychologically and takes care of her physical health. She is one of the best women I have known.
My younger daughter, Helen, who was a great joy as a child, has been of constant concern to me since she was a teen ager. When she and Sarah moved to Oregon City with their mother, she found little direction or guidance. Helen was a mother at 15 and had another child but a few years later. She and the children’s fathers used drugs and lived hand to mouth. Helen moved to Eugene when her mother moved to California. She completed a GED high school degree and attended briefly a now defunct business college. However, Helen lived serially with several men who never assumed responsibility for themselves, let alone their mate. Helen inherited money from her grandmother’s estate with which she bought a house and car. Without a job, and with a steady outflow of money for drugs, she eventually had to sell the house and car. Her children were removed from her care by the State of Oregon and her life continued to deteriorate. Twice since then, Helen has been “clean and sober” for short periods of time. Both times I worried excessively about the probability of her remaining so. Possibly feeling guilty for not having given her better guidance when she lived in Oregon City and realizing that she would never become truly independent without help, I paid her debts and fines so that she could get a new start on life. But she defrauded me both times and I realized that I was simply enabling her to continue to live irresponsibly. Because I wanted to reduce the anguish I felt while helping Helen, I learned to practice silent meditation. Meditation helped me live more calmly during stressful dealings with Helen’s crises but failed to quell my feelings of stupidity in not recognizing the ways in which I allowed myself to be manipulated into enabling her. To maintain my equanimity, I no longer respond to Helen and have told her not to contact me again.
Activities in retirement. Because I realized that I was especially good as a caregiver for Michael, I thought I might also be a good caregiver for others. I became a member of the local organization that supported people living with HIV/AIDs and educated the local community about HIV/AIDs. I was the organization’s liaison with the Acorn House advisory board, which oversaw an AIDs hospice. As hospice care became less necessary with the discovery of better treatments for HIV and AIDs and other ways of supporting people who were living HIV were developed, the two organizations merged. Probably because I had administrative experience at the University and knew how to run a meeting efficiently, I was made co-chair of the joint organization. The other co-chair was skilled at fund-raising. I left the board after the two organizations merged, we hired a new executive director, and we initiated efforts to rent expanded office space. I later trained to be a hospice volunteer for the local hospital and for a short time visited dying men. After only a few months, I quit volunteering because I was only used to relieve primary caregivers rather than offer care to dying patients.
I became a volunteer at the University Museum of Natural History. Although I gave several tours of the museum’s exhibits and I lectured to other volunteers on an exhibit of ancient pottery from Mexico’s west coast, I found my niche as a gardener of the Museum’s courtyard display of native Oregon plants. Because the courtyard was partially destroyed by new construction of a nearby building and an area adjacent to a new wing of the Museum was available for extending the native plant garden, I was given the opportunity to design and select plants for the new garden areas. After its establishment and early care, I turned the garden over to other volunteers. As is the nature of volunteer organizations in which one shows active interest, the Friends of the Museum asked me to join its board of directors. Again, I was able to use my administrative skills as the secretary/treasurer of the board to improve its financial arrangements as well as keep its minutes.
On the neighborhood level, I joined Ev and Sally Smith and Nancy McFadden in initiating a proposal for creating the South University Neighborhood National Historic District. The core of the South University Area was one of Eugene’s premier housing areas in the 1920s and 1930s. Almost all of the houses in the neighborhood had been built before or immediately after World War II, and thus were more than fifty years old. The growth of the University was changing the character of the neighborhood in that increasing numbers of students were being accommodated in apartments and older houses. Our committee grew to include many other residents; and because of our participatory approach to achieving the proposal, we were given the annual award for historic preservation by the State’s Office of Historic Preservation. Nevertheless, implementing the proposal was thwarted by misleading and false information circulated by neighbors, who felt threatened by the possibility of additional government regulations. One of the opponents disrupted neighborhood meetings and spent over $100,000 in petition and legal fees to prevent the plan from being implemented. The mayor of Eugene, who had to forward the proposal to the State office, delayed action, largely at the request of the wealthy opponents. As a result the designation as an historic district died.
When I moved from the South University Neighborhood to the College Crest Neighborhood, I prepared a landscape history of a large area of south Eugene which included both the College Crest and Friendly Area neighborhoods.[70]
My individual activities have been varied. In the 1980s, I started working out in a gym and have continued thrice weekly workouts. For many years, I regularly walked up Mt. Pisgah, a 1500’ mountain in a nearby county park. I also helped build hiking trails within the park. During the 1990s I regularly played tennis, usually with Anastasio Flores. When I retired, I enrolled in several colored pencil, watercolor, and acrylic painting classes through the Lane Community College extension service. I used the skills I learned there to make watercolor sketches and colored pencil drawings on many of the trips I have taken. In 2008, I attended a watercolor Elderhostel in the mountains of Queretaro, Mexico. From the many photographs, sketches, and drawings that I have made on my trips, I have selected many to modify and enhance on my computer using Adobe Photoshop software.
After retirement I began to spend time watching birds, first in the patio of my home, later in local areas, and then elsewhere in the United States and Latin America. I do not keep a list of birds that I have seen; instead my joy comes from the peace, quiet, and patience needed to locate and sight birds. Bird-watching attracts me because it requires alertness to natural landscapes and habitats, vegetation and individual plants, as well as to the sounds of individual and flocks of birds. I attended several Elderhostel trips focused on bird watching: Port Aransas, Texas, on the Gulf coast; Ecuador, with trips to the Amazon headwaters and the slopes of the Andes; the San Juan Islands; and to Mexico City and Oaxaca, Mexico. I have also enjoyed watching birds in Peru, Greece, on safari in Zambia, Botswana, and Namibia, and in the Blue Mountains of Australia. Whenever I travel with Sarah, Stan Cook, or Carlos Martinson, bird watching has always been a focus.
Off and on in my retirement I have written on the project of which this is a part. I have revised it several times as friendly readers have offered their criticisms. I write by hand and then transcribe my manuscript to the computer, only then revising my words before asking others to read this extended essay.
Homes and Gardens. The house at 1820 Olive Street that I inherited from Michael Shellenbarger was much too large for Anastasio and me. This 1913 California bungalow with a full basement and carriage house had two, bedroom suites, two additional bedrooms, and a studio/TV room. When I retired, I looked for another home as far away as Las Cruces, New Mexico, the Coast Range of California, and several places in Oregon, but, in 1995, moved but twelve blocks to the east to 1045 East 20th Avenue. It was the newest house in the South University Neighborhood, having been built in 1992. An architect-designed house, its interior was well-laid out, but had a rather non-descript outside, with the exception of an enclosed patio that opened south of the living room. To the north, west, and east only five feet separated the house from a six-foot perimeter fence. On the south an attached two-car carport jutted out toward the street.
I redesigned the kitchen and added a full bath to the first floor. I also had removable Plexiglas panels built to convert the front porch into a winter greenhouse where tender container plants could be saved from the winter frosts. I added large planters for flowers and bird feeders and a bird bath to the existing patio. I extended the attractive open cedar fence that divided the front yard into a small, sunny public garden and a shady private area lined by an alley fence. A new gate and fence separated the carport from the shady garden. By adding low stone retaining walls, decorative gravel paths, a concrete bench and statue of Buddha, and shade tolerant plants, the area gained the sense of a Japanese garden.
I was also able to buy thirty feet of blackberry-covered property to the north. After clearing the tangle of berry bushes, I had raised wooden decks built outside the living room and studio. I then installed sliding glass doors from the living room and French doors from the study/studio to the decks. Because this area faced north, I planted most of it with shade tolerant native Oregon plants, reserving the shadiest areas for perennial fuchsias, which are natives of the cooler parts of southern Chile. As a result of these efforts, I created three outdoor rooms which could be used all year round. In addition the living room and studio had become much more light-filled and connected with the organic world of plants and birds.
When Anastasio and I separated, even this house became too large and I sold it, moving to a garden apartment complex adjacent to the Willamette River where my gardening was restricted to containers on a small north-facing patio. Although I was content with apartment living, I later moved to a house that Scott Downey and I had purchased to remodel and sell speculatively. The house at 1165 McLean Boulevard, located near the foot of the College Crest section of the south hills of Eugene, needed to be completely rebuilt and the blackberries that overtopped part of it had to be removed. Scott and I completely redesigned the floor plan of the house, leaving only one room in its original position. We incorporated the former garage and back porch into the living area and opened up the living and kitchen areas. Everything from the foundation to the roof was rebuilt; the insulation, wiring and plumbing were replaced. Only the basic exterior frame of the house was retained.
I liked the new house so much that I decided to live in it. The property was large enough that we could also build on it a secondary dwelling for Scott’s mate, Fred Dodge. Using Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language, I designed an 800 square foot cottage that faced south onto a patio that Fred and I could share. Unlike my previous two houses, the house and cottage received full sun, whenever it appeared. Only the areas immediately north of the carport and a small storage shed were in perpetual shade. I planted hydrangeas or fuchsias there. The backyard that surrounds the patio, was planted with ‘ecolawn’, a combination of grass, clover, and yarrow that needs much less fertilizer, water, and mowing than most lawns of grass only. Mixtures of perennial and annual flowering plants border the lawn. Open metal fencing mounted within wooden frames separated the yard from the raised bed vegetable garden to the south. These open structures, like one that partially shields the patio from the view from a neighboring house, are covered with vines and a climbing rose. Decorative pottery planters cluster together on the patio. The whole of the yard between the two dwellings is fenced from intrusion by deer.
Because parking is not permitted on the street, much of the area in front of the house is covered with compressed gravel where cars may park. The property is shielded from the street by shrubs and trees as well as perennial flowering plants and self-seeding annuals. I have planted rhododendrons and an ecolawn directly in front of the house. Between the lawn and the street, I have planted a perennial garden backed by a decorative, six-foot, open cedar fence. The southern perimeter of the property is planted with a hedge of blueberries. A fig tree is espaliered on the south side of the shed in the backyard. Hanging baskets of fuchsias and begonias line the pathway to the cottage.
Scott and I have jointly bought and completely remodeled other old houses. We have designed and constructed new landscapes around them. These projects may be seen as our efforts to preserve old houses and integrate them within their neighborhoods. For me, they are the most evident ways in which I have been directly creative in altering the artifacts of the physical world.
General Influences
Both worldviews and unique generational life experiences play major, if indirect roles in shaping lives. For me, the worldviews associated with the New Deal and the Second World War strongly influenced me. And my membership in the generation that grew up during the Great Depression and the Second World War gives me and my cohorts a unique perspective on life.
Generational Perspectives. Those Americans who were born between the late 1920s and the end of World War II (1945) have experienced a unique trajectory through life, as has every other generation. The generation that was born before the Great Depression has recently been called “The Greatest Generation.” The generation of people born after the Second World War is known as “The Boomer Generation.” We “Depression Babies”, sometimes called “The Silent Generation”,[71] have been until our older years, the wasp waist of the American population pyramid, i.e. both earlier and later generations have been more numerous.
During the early years of the Great Depression, we were babies or very young children and largely unaware of the larger world around us; instead, we were, as are all very young children, focused on our immediate families and intimate contacts. As we grew older and went to school, our classrooms had already been built for our more numerous older brothers and sisters. And we were taught by experienced teachers. We were too young to be part of the military forces during World War II and only older “Depression Babies” were likely to have served in the Korean War. We were concerned but unenthusiastic about being drafted. The war did not command the patriotic fervor of World War II and its direct participants were mainly concerned with their personal survival. I was enrolled in college ROTC throughout most of the Korean War, being on active service only at its very end. However, those of us who did serve received the benefits of the GI Bill. Later, my generation was too old to be drafted into the Viet Nam War.
Our parents began to prosper during and after World War II as the postwar economy grew to satisfy the wants of returning veterans and the pent-up demands that followed wartime shortages and unfulfilled demands of the depression. For veterans and non-veterans alike, opportunities for college education greatly increased. For me, ROTC paid much of my college expenses and the GI Bill paid much of my graduate education. Later veterans’ benefits financed a loan to buy my first house. Postwar prosperity with an expanding economy meant that jobs were relatively plentiful. Even before I had completed my dissertation, I had the choice of several teaching positions because universities were growing, and the pool of available teachers was still small. As universities grew, especially with federal grants for education and research, it was relatively easy to obtain tenure, good salaries, and other benefits. Retirement funds were invested profitably in the expanding financial markets and have provided, for most of us, better retirement incomes than for earlier generations and probably for the Boomer generation.
People of my generation have had educational, employment, and retirement opportunities that opened at critical stages in our lives. Schools and colleges were good and accessible to us; jobs opened up as we became young adults; careers progressed profitably as we became mature adults; and generous benefits awaited our retirements.
Worldviews. Dominant worldviews that prevailed during the life cycles of the “Depression Babies” have also strongly influence my thinking. These views become apparent in political debate. The roots of my political and economic beliefs are based in the worldviews that Franklin Delano Roosevelt expressed during his more than three terms as President of the United States—my first thirteen years of life. His explicit views of strong government intervention in economic activities and societal problems overwhelmed and largely superseded the views of the preceding decades during which largely unfettered market forces within a Christian society were thought to offer the necessary authority to create a prosperous society. The “New Deal,” with its rational approaches to both society and natural resource use, was underlain by pragmatic views of making life for all Americans better. When applied, these views resulted in increasing employment through government programs such as the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps. They also developed greater mechanisms of social support through minimum wage laws, the social security program, and the emergence of stronger labor unions. Major natural resource programs resulted in the building of hydro-electric dams such as Grand Coulee, and Boulder. The creation of entities such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Bonneville Power Administration, the Rural Electrification Agency, the Soil Conservation Service, and the expansion of the scope of the Corps of Engineers transformed many parts of the country. Progressive views of government also were important in building such iconic structures as the Golden Gate and Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridges in California and the George Washington and Triborough Bridges in New York. World War II united the country to a common national purpose while awakening thoughts of external threats to “the American way.” Isolationism was replaced by commitments to co-operation within a world of nation states.
From my youthful perspectives in Portland, Oregon, I was impressed by the harnessing of the Columbia River through the building of Bonneville, Grand Coulee, and subsequent dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers. I was fascinated by the reports of the Dust Bowl as it was brought home to me when some of its undernourished refugees enrolled in my grade school. And I became aware of the wide range of progressive activities of the government with the arrival of Life Magazine with its extraordinary pictures. Through its pages I was made aware of soil conservation measures to counter the rampant soil erosion in the country. The depression was made evident to me by the unemployed men who occasionally came by our house, looking for odd jobs. I was told not to go into nearby Sullivan’s Gulch through which the mainline of the railroad passed and in which ‘hoboes’ camped out.
During the Second World War, I was impressed by the national unity of support expressed in the newspaper, on the radio, and on the ‘news of the week’ show as part of the movies that I regularly attended. And as I played the piano and listened to the popular songs of the day, I was engrossed in the emotional themes they wrote about, everything from “When der fuehrer says we is de master race. We heil Pst! Heil Pst! right in der fuehrer’s face” to “When the Lights Come on Again, All Over the World.” In contrast to today, I was impressed by the way Americans united, putting up with rationing of gas, meat, sugar, and other staples of life. Also, I remember well my fellow classmate’s efforts to collect such items as newspapers, coffee cans and other metals to support the war effort. We Americans united in buying US government savings bonds and filling books with saving stamps that eventually would be traded in for a $25 bond that cost $18.75. But I also remember with some bewilderment when my Cub Scout den mother disappeared into a Japanese internment camp. I was impressed with the horrors of war, again through the pictures in Life Magazine and in movie newsreels.
My father, who was a member of the Teamsters’ Union, voted Democratic. My mother usually voted Republican. Politics, let alone the worldviews implicit in each political party’s ideas, was little discussed in my home. Therefore, my beliefs were more influenced by my participation as a schoolboy in the society surrounding the New Deal and World War II. My family subscribed to—and I later delivered—the Oregon Journal, which was more left-leaning than the Oregonian newspaper. I now think that probably influenced me to support Democrat views.
I gradually became attentive to conflicting worldviews when in high school. I had first become aware of Oregon politics when Wayne Morse, as a Republican, became Oregon’s junior senator in 1946. I came to respect him for his independent views, often voting against the party leaders when he was still a Republican. Although Oregon had voted four times for FDR, the state legislature had remained almost exclusively Republican. In particular, I remember a classroom discussion about the Taft/Hartley labor law, which Morse opposed because of its attempt to restrict labor unions. Morse left the Republican Party and became an Independent in 1952, when Eisenhower chose Richard Nixon to be his Vice-Presidential running mate. Morse had strongly opposed Nixon because of his major role in the House Un-American Activities Committee which used scare tactics in its search for communists and communist sympathizers.[72]
In high school I participated in a boys’ state program that modeled the Oregon State Legislature. I sought out the desk of Richard Neuberger, then one of very few Democratic Oregon state senators and later the first Democrat US senator from Oregon since before the First World War. I admired his independent views and those of his wife, Maureen, who was a member of the Oregon House, and at the death of her husband, appointed and then elected a US senator.
In 1952, when I turned 21 and was first eligible to vote, I registered as a Democrat, influenced greatly by hearing Adlai Stevenson’s witty, intelligent, and literate speeches. He had earlier spoken out in support of Alger Hiss—as had Wayne Morse—and felt strongly opposed to the ideas of Richard Nixon. And his worldviews largely supported my existing incipient political ideas and swept me into the political paths I have followed since that time. My college friends were also Stevenson supporters.
The McCarthy hearings of the House of Representative’s House Un-American Activities Committee were in session when I was in the Army stationed at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. An officer based there had testified before the committee. As a result, the post commander assembled all officer trainees where he told us we needed to watch what we said, especially those of us from hotbeds of communist sympathies—the Universities of Chicago, Columbia, and California. His remarks made me realize for the first time that I might be judged simply for being part of a major American institution.
During my days as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, I was surrounded by other students who valued governmental support of education and research. And some of my professors were outspoken in their liberal views. My education in the Department of Geography was particularistic and relativistic in emphasizing historical and cultural approaches rather than the statistical approaches then basic to many of the social sciences. The ideas of “progress” and “development” were questioned. The worldviews and values of other cultures were a focus of study. I increasingly found myself opposed to the then dominant worldviews that emphasized the ideas of American superiority, American-style democracy, and efforts to spread American style development around the world. I think now that I did not question the role of the US in Korea in stopping the takeover of South Korea by the communist forces of North Korea and China. I was simply more concerned with what I saw as the inevitability of my serving in the Army in Korea.
I was greatly upset by the presidential visit of Dwight Eisenhower to the Portuguese fascist dictator, Salazar, when his visit to the USSR was prevented by the shooting down of an American spy plane over Russia. I was then in Angola and saw first-hand the fascist authoritarian rule that Salazar had imposed on Portuguese lands and was appalled that the US president would show his support for Salazar and his authoritarian government. My year in Angola alerted me to the great injustices created by colonialism and the dangers of imposition of foreign ways that were culturally insensitive. That the dominant American worldview was largely culturally insensitive made me opposed to American use of military force in Viet Nam, especially as it was joined with virulent and irrational anti-communism.[73] Thus I felt out of the mainstream of American worldviews during the presidencies of JFK, LBJ, and Richard Nixon.
In 1962, Rachel Carson reignited the conservation worldview when she published Silent Spring, first as a three-part article in the New Yorker and then as a highly controversial book. In many ways its publication marked the beginning of the environmental movement. I found it gave heart to me and ideas of conservation I first felt in the 1930s and later when I was a student in geography at Berkeley. The massive volume, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, which was based on papers given at a 1955 seminar lead by geographer Carl Sauer, biologist Marston Bates, and writer/critic Lewis Mumford, was the center of many discussions when I started my graduate education. From 1962 the environmental movement grew, reaching a high point as encouraged by President Carter.
Unfortunately, this increase in environmental awareness of human use and misuse of the natural world came at a time of disillusionment with the Viet Nam War. For me, however, environmental concerns subsequently dominated my academic activities. As a result, I redirected my teaching and my administrative activities to encouraging greater awareness of the possible consequences of some of the implications of this worldview.
Environmental concerns fell from favor during the administration of Ronald Reagan, only becoming a major focus with increased concern for human induced global warming and Al Gore’s prominent efforts to alert the world to environmental changes. Other major shifts in the priorities of the worldviews of Americans also came with the leadership of Ronald Reagan. He began the process of rejecting the role of government in providing social services and regulating economic activity and, at the same time, increasing the role of America as the dominant military power in the world. These ideas continued through the following administrations, culminating in the supporting actions of President George W. Bush. They continue in the Republican Party’s opposition to President Obama’s modest attempts to use governmental tools to provide a more egalitarian and communitarian society.
In summary, several worldviews hold sway today in America. A basic appeal is given to a unique identity of America. The nation, as represented by the flag, the national anthem, and the pledge of allegiance, is a separate authority within which the American Constitution prevails. America may be seen as the major source of power in the world with the duty, if not the right, to exert that power whenever beneficial to America or even to those people or nations that it thinks would be better for its exertion.
The view of a God-centered, mainly Judeo-Christian, religion informs most American’s beliefs, although the role and interpretation of God may be many faceted. A strong strain of that belief is based on a literal interpretation of English translation of the Bible. Yet other beliefs rely on an historical reading of the Bible. Some American Muslims may also interpret the Koran literally. Other spiritual and philosophical beliefs play roles in American worldviews.
For many, the fact-based, theory-tested view of science may dominate a secular view of the world. For others, an economic theory that a ‘silent hand’ should regulate our economy prevails. For yet others a form of social Darwinism or individual libertarianism dictates economy and society and should reign supreme in the secular world.
The views that emphasize individualism contrast with those that stress communitarianism play out in many variations. Social Darwinism and Libertarianism vie with ideas of community and social development.
Conflict exists between the views that Nature is a bank of resources to be exploited by humans and that Nature should be protected from exploitation so that evolution will not be overwhelmed by human disturbance.
And integral views that try to recognize all of the many worldviews are gradually emerging. They approach the world from multiple perspectives: subjective/objective; individually/collectively; from within/from without. Above all, these emerging worldviews place the implicit or expressed values in their contexts and not as absolutes.
Influences Unique to Me. People and social institutions. Probably the strongest, long-lasting influences on me have come through my childhood family and its roots. My father’s family, immigrants from Scotland, impressed on my dad that hard work would eventually be rewarded. I admire my father who struggled for work during the Great Depression and continued working until he retired at age 72. My mother’s father, who grew up in a Quaker family, valued education and a peaceful community. Art and literature were valued by my mother’s mother. My mother passed these ideals on to me.[74] My family maintained a successful lower middle-class way of life, owning a modest home, furnished with durable furnishings and electrical appliances. My father purchased new, inexpensive cars every few years. Like my parents, I have owned modest homes and simple furniture, most of which were second hand and assembled or finished by me. Education, reading, and appreciation of art and music have remained a part of my life. The conservative values of the Great Depression combined with ideas of progress of the immediate post WW II years have instilled in me the ideas that working hard and living modestly were to be practiced.
The second cluster of influences of greatest importance in my life came with my decision to transfer from Oregon State College to the University of California, Berkeley. At OSC I gained confidence that I was skilled academically. From living in a fraternity at OSC I became assured that I could get along easily with other people my same age and background. But the inspiring teachers in the Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley, truly stimulated my intellect and set me on course to my life’s work. Their encouragement to always look for the context of facts and ideas as well as to command knowledge of the origins and truth of those facts and ideas has remained fundamental to my approach to life. Especially important to me was their attempt to join natural facts and natural history with cultural facts and cultural history, always in the setting of particular places. The faculty encouraged the use of library research, direct field observation, and the use of maps. The ideas I gained from their classes were the basic to those on which I later built my teaching and research.
My years at Berkeley were also important in establishing life-long social connections with other students who introduced me to appreciate a wide range of classical music and literature as well as new ways of socializing. Several of my close friends were foreign students who had somewhat different backgrounds and experiences than I. I learned that my homosexual feelings were acceptable, if not made public. And I found a wife who was eager to be a part of my intellectual and social life as well as share the intimacies of living together.
Life in the San Francisco Bay area introduced me to urban life and landscapes as representing concentrations of power, resources, and social, cultural, and ethnic diversity and inequality. Even though these pageants of life became more visible to me, I largely maintained the modest, lower middle class ways of my childhood and youth.
My limited field experiences in Jamaica and my army life in France introduced me to cultural ways and landscapes outside the United States. Only with an extended time in Angola did I realize the largely unbridgeable differences between life in the “western” world with life in the less-evolved cultural, social, economic, and political world of the more remote parts of the colonial world. Beth and I had to cope with living a bare, stripped down western existence with only infrequent external support. We learned the difficulties of living with only one other person with whom we could easily communicate. And much of that communication had to deal with obtaining food, water, and shelter. Nevertheless, the contrast with our lives and those of the native Africans was extreme. From discussions with the colonial Portuguese, we also learned much about the meaning of the concepts of freedom, democracy, and political dictatorship. We witnessed the destruction of traditional cultures and their associated landscapes as they were being penetrated by the tip of the tentacles of “development.” We came to question the belief that American or ‘western’ worldviews are suitable for most Africans. Ever since, I have questioned the assumptions of American power in attempting to change other nations or peoples.
In Nigeria we were involved in the beginnings of the creation of a nation-state in a formerly colonial region, which had a long history of urban centered emirates. As long standing local ethnic, cultural, and political differences were playing out, modern ways were increasingly being introduced, no longer by a colonial power but by ties to a globalizing world economy. We also saw the results of engaging in civil war and the depth to which corruption pervades Nigeria’s society. I saw directly the struggles to introduce the culture and values of western style higher education. Conflicts in diverse worldviews within Nigerian societies were always close to the surface.
My years of teaching at the University of Oregon were most strongly influenced by my colleagues in the Department of Geography and by the open, democratic nature of the faculty and administration of the University. My colleagues always supported one another. We reinforced the academic values of open, diverse, and broadly inclusive research. We encouraged students to do field-based research and to take classes from many different departments with the end of their experiencing both cultural and intellectual diversity. We encouraged each other by lunching together, participating in weekly tea/seminars, and socializing with graduate students. We operated administratively almost exclusively by group consensus. In many ways we were like a family in which all members were treated as equals.
At the level of the University, I enjoyed the open, transparent workings of the faculty and administration. This contrasted greatly with my experiences at both Dartmouth College and Ahmadu Bello University. This openness continued even during the social conflicts that surrounded the Viet Nam war, the demands for greater human rights, and the increasing awareness of environmental disruptions. As the size of the University grew and the President assumed more power, the ‘town meeting’ democratic governance was replaced by an indirect legislative body.
I was impressed by the openness of the City of Eugene to citizen participation. I felt welcomed, if not supported, by the many civic bodies I was able to address with my planning concerns. I was always given opportunity to express myself both in speech and writing. And the court system of the State of Oregon was also accessible. I have felt that my legislative representatives have listened to and largely understood my views. A tradition of good, honest, open government has prevailed throughout most of my life in Oregon.
Organized Spaces. Having grown up living in modest single family houses, I have come to believe that a good life can be had in modest circumstances. But I also believe that much American housing is wasteful, extravagant, and self centered. Until the 1980s, I felt comfortable with the housing in Eugene; however since that time I have found the landscape of new housing areas in Eugene to be immodest to say the least. The physical setting of the University of Oregon and the City of Eugene has strongly influenced my perceptions of what is a desirable landscape. While on the active faculty of the University, the campus was mostly made up of a series of two and three story buildings which were set around a series of grassy, tree-lined quadrangles. Sports fields and a cemetery completed the main campus area. With increased size—from 8,000 to over 20,000 student—and with increasing importance of athletic facilities, the University has greatly expanded its sports complex and dormitory space while still trying to retain a walkable campus and maintain a cohesive community. The facilities for intercollegiate sports have grown disproportionately large and largely separated from the main campus.
At a larger scale, the City of Eugene remains accessible to me by bicycle. I commuted daily by bike throughout my teaching career. By car I can travel to and enter all ceremonial, cultural, and recreational facilities in less than twenty minutes. The ‘urban growth boundaries’ of Oregon cities have lessened urban sprawl and made access to more open landscapes readily available. My experiencing the extensive number and size of public parks in Portland, Eugene, and the San Francisco Bay Region has underlain my belief in the value of providing public access to open spaces and natural landscapes within highly urbanized areas. My appreciation of nature has also been enhanced by having had access to hiking and biking trails in nearby mountainous, forested and coastal areas, which are within an hour of home.
Living in many diverse landscapes has made me aware of the unique character of all places. In the ‘western’ urban tradition, San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, Seville, Vigo, Spain, Portland, and Eugene stand out. Living in these cities has made me aware that they are great concentrations of regional, national, or international wealth. These urban areas have been formed by processing and servicing the resources of their tributary regions and by concentrating the management and accumulation of economic, social, political, and artistic wealth. The physical, artifactual urban forms reflect the current as well as the historical events that these processes created.
By contrast, rural landscapes of farms, forests, and prairies have increasingly become primarily simply the source of urban wealth. However, even within these tributary regions, farms, villages, and smaller processing sites are still sites of local homes and factories that create their own distinctive forms in the landscape. I think of the landscapes of Norwich, Vermont, Wensleydale, Yorkshire, England, Galicia, Spain, and the Willamette Valley of my experience. As an example, I have studied the rise and fall of the timber industry in rural Lane County, Oregon, and have seen the results in rural landscapes of old growth forests, clear-cut hill slopes accompanied by erosion and stream run off, new and maturing stands of Douglas fir trees, and factories making lumber and paper pulp. With ‘globalization’ of activities the resources that were formally more localized now support metropolitan areas in ever more remote distant places; and rural landscapes are now largely unwittingly the result of decisions made in distant cities.
My personal experiences of nature have been mitigated through humanly created and modified landscapes and their associated events. These landscapes have historical depth, which has been created by the events that occurred throughout their existence. Just as restraints on my actions have been placed by all of the social institution of which I have been a part, other restraints on my behavior have been place by the physical landscapes in which I have lived. Everything from the placement of windows in my house to the ways I experienced the unpaved roads through the ‘bush‘ landscape of southwestern Angola is a part of who I am and how I will experience life from now on.
The ways of my experience based on events in cyberspace are greatly changing my life. Although my connections in cyberspace have increased the number of events I may experience, their quality is simplified because the physical forms, the landscapes of their context, have been reduced to sounds and pictures on two-dimensional screens.
Part III
A Person in the Contemporary World Ecosystem
The Context of My Autobiography.
My autobiographical narrative has shown how I have been connected to social institutions and particular places in the context of my generational cohorts and the general political/economic conditions of the United States in the last eighty years. However, this personal narrative still must be tied into the much more extensive and pervasive cultural and natural ecosystems of modern America.
I have been largely unaware of the indirect impact that I have had on the natural world. For example, in my lifetime I have owned twelve automobiles and eight houses. Without thinking about this ownership, these purchases have linked me directly with broad patterns of consumption of natural resources used in the manufacturing and construction processes.
I have had several bank and retirement accounts, certificates of deposit, and mutual funds. Rarely have I thought that these financial activities connect me directly with the world of corporate investments and capital markets except as the market rises or falls.
My travels by car, train, and airplane directly tie me to energy consumption as does the heating and cooling of air and water in my daily household life. And rarely do I question that my comfort or ease of movement has resulted in costs to Nature.
My long association with universities has provided me with gainful employment; yet through their connections with state and local governments and students’ tuition they are tied to major natural and cultural ecosystems, which impact much broader natural and ethereal environments.
My patterns of consumption for food, clothing, shelter, and health care also bind me to extensive agricultural, industrial and commercial networks. And internet technology ties me to ever expanding global networks, whose impact on the natural world has scarcely begun to be assessed.
I participate in all of these activities, rarely paying attention to the impact that they have on the complex material and ethereal world. Having grown up and lived in a period of great material abundance and prosperity in the United States, I have viewed the world with an unexpressed optimism that those conditions would continue with but minor tinkering by political and economic powers. I mostly participate in that tinkering by voting for elected officials and by choosing what I buy. In other words, I have largely accepted, unthinkingly, the worldviews which I absorbed growing up as an American in the 1930s and‘40s. However, now I have discovered that tinkering is not enough and I have had to completely rethink the ways in which I and others in American society act out our lives.
When I attended college at the University of California, Berkeley, I gradually became intellectually aware that those common, basic worldviews were no longer adequate to maintain healthy and prosperous societies. Concern for the consequences of a rapidly burgeoning population and of increasing demands for consumption have compelled me to radically rethink the ways I view the world. I find that the dominant worldviews of the Western World as they have developed in the past two centuries are no longer adequate to confront the coming ecological crises, indeed, they will exacerbate them.
As I see it, contemporary worldviews have resulted in an overwhelmingly successful materialization of the imaginative ideas of humanism, scientism, and productive capitalism. Coupled successfully with new technologies, human orderings of the cosmos have, during the last four hundred years transformed fleeting apparitions in the minds of a few Europeans into 1) broadly accepted categories of what is the nature of Nature and 2) has resulted in a collection of humanly-fashioned material objects, which blanket the earth’s surface. Individual human beings in most regions of the Earth have come to experience a physical world that is largely of human making just as they have increasingly learned and become socialized into a cosmos of European derivation.
The simultaneous discovery by Europeans of two New Worlds—the continents beyond Europe and the ideas and techniques of modernization—resulted in the diffusion of a European worldview as well as access to previously unimagined physical resources. These ideas and their newly created resources have been diffused widely, if unevenly throughout the world. At first, the new ideas became embedded in Northwest Europe, gradually spreading elsewhere in Europe and, with European settlers and colonists, elsewhere in the world. Now, all nations are caught up, to a greater or lesser extent, with the ideas of European origin. The result has been the physical transformation of nearly all of the earth—its land, air, and waters.
Starting with the fifteenth century explorations of the coast of Africa by the Portuguese, continuing with the search for easily obtainable wealth of other older civilizations in Asia, and exploding with the scramble to gain control of the New World of America, Europeans began to impress their ideas tangibly on lands and peoples which they saw primarily in terms of wealth or resources for the taking. The power of the Europeans was, in the long run, overwhelming and all of the results discussed by Schmookler [75] emerged. In some cases native inhabitants were killed, died of disease, or retreated to yet more remote places. In others, the Europeans simply assumed political and economic control. In yet other cases, the indigenous populations adopted the ways of the powerful Europeans and joined in processes of the materialization of capitalism, science, and humanistic ideals. And these ways were increasingly coupled with 1) industrial technology, which for human ends enslaved the immense biological energy locked up in coal, oil, and gas, and 2) communication technology, which spread European ideas even further and with increasing rapidity.
In Europe during the 16th through 18th centuries, the processes by which new scientific, social, and economic institutions emerged were so effective that earlier institutional environments were replaced or subsumed by new institutions. These institutions and their members acted out their roles, creating new material worlds both in Europe and wherever else in the world they became established. Newly reorganized spaces and artifacts transformed or replaced older less well-expressed or maintained organized forms of matter and energy both in Europe and its overseas colonies. Diffusion of new, applied technology and of newly forming values brought a new organization of space, the dimensions of which were scarcely imaginable at the beginning of the modern era. And the newly organized material spaces steadily pushed back Nature—wilderness or the neutral stuff from which resources were formed.
In the early 17th Century, Francis Bacon, in his book, The New Atlantis,[76] viewed the application of science and technology as the means to create a Utopia of a good material life. His views formalized, elaborated, and suggested how to institutionalize emerging scientific thinking. European science that fledged in the written correspondence of a few individuals, developed with a scattering of scientific and natural history societies, and emerged with systematic publication of papers in formal publications.[77] In the 19th and 20th centuries, of course, science became institutionalized in universities, governmental and private research organizations and corporations. Ever since Bacon’s day, utopian views of science have grown, today becoming one of the most widely accepted secular views of the world.
In the early 20th Century, Lewis Mumford described a more fully elaborated Utopia which he said was based on three ideals or worldviews, calling them ‘Idolas of the Modern Age.’[78] First, there was the utopian idola of consumption, privilege, and possession—maybe today exemplified by the mini-mansions in exurban areas and their lesser version of large homes in the suburbs. Second, there was the idola of an engineered and laissez-faire economy that supported manufacturing and the selling of goods, still well represented today by chambers of commerce, Wall Street, associations of manufacturers, and many in government. The third idola described by Mumford was a view of urban agglomerations (megalopolitan regions) within nation states, where consumption would be reconciled with production by creating structures that would ease the movement of goods and services. This idola became material with the highways that increasingly connected all parts of the country. With the coming of digital technology, these structures of interaction have leapt the bounds imagined by Mumford. They now exist in cyberspace, with its near complete lack of ties to places and must be considered more recent utopian vision. Consumption and privilege, a capitalistic industrial and commercial economy, and free movement of goods, services, and ideas still underlie most views of a good place—Utopia.
Americans are embedded in a complex democratic/capitalistic society with strongly entrenched worldviews and institutions which reflect these early 20th Century visions of Utopia. Growth and Progress as utopian ideas were based on increasing consumption of ‘goods’ in an urbanizing world. They supported the material betterment of millions of people. Attitudes and behaviors associated with contemporary American society were appropriate to the prosperity and increasing life spans of Americans in the 20th Century. However, it is increasingly apparent that along with more and more “goods” have come more and more ‘Bads’—pollution, rapid entropy, biological extinctions, and climate changes—at the expense of Nature and human health. In the terms that I expressed in Part I, social institutions, supported by dominant Western worldviews of what is a good life—a Utopia, have rapidly initiated values and techniques to create the ‘goods’—the values and artifacts—that facilitate “progress.” Growth and more goods may have improved the human condition for those with access to them; however, they have largely come at the expense of the natural world through the increased consumption of raw materials, especially of combustible energy sources. We are now becoming aware of dystopias—bad places—that question our older utopian ideals.
As Mumford wrote in 1922:
The more that men react upon their environment and make it over after a human pattern, the more continuously do they live in Utopia; but when there is a breach between the world of affairs, and the overworld of Utopia, we become conscious of the part that the will-to-Utopia has played in our lives, and we see our Utopia as a separate reality.[79]
Today we can see that ‘the world of affairs’—the real world—may come into conflict with ‘our ‘long-standing will-to-Utopia.’ The material world of Nature no longer reflects the ideals of our ethereal world.
Alternate worldviews that value non-human nature have existed; but they have been largely overwhelmed by the “idola of the Modern World.” The vast material transformations of today are the result of these utopian ideas and values and their associated institutions. Materialization of these idolas has been so successful that valuing the natural world has played but a minor role until very recently. (The preservation of national parks and wilderness areas was an exception but only as it considered Nature separate from everyday life.) However, these utopian worldviews are no longer sustainable as they conjure up parallel dystopian places. Bill McKibben alerted us to the possibility that no part of the natural world has escaped the hand of humans. [80] Heralding these dystopian views were George Perkins Marsh who wrote Man and Nature in 1864[81], the 1955 symposium, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, and Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring. Since that time, the trickle of dissenting views has grown to a great flow of “environmentalists” and “environmental” organizations.[82]
The ethereal world in which major institutions perpetuate the worldviews of their participants is made material through technologies, grammars, and by new vocabularies. The desired artifacts and physical alterations of the material world may be seen as Goods—a physical expression of our utopian ideals. But as the volume of Goods increases exponentially and Goods incorporate more of Nature, we have become increasingly aware of the intrusion of Bads on our lives. Some institutions have been organized to give voice to people who are concerned with the intrusions of Bads on their lives. (Figure 7) Early examples were the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society. Since the 1970s a whole range of institutions, often labeled as environmental groups, have developed 1) technologies to mitigate the impact of goods and 2) systems of thinking about the relation of humans and nature, e.g. ecology and sustainability.
Today, the recognition of Bads and the rapid encroachment of the human world on wilderness are often expressed in terms of contests between older utopian views of the modern world and the rapidly emerging views of the “environmental movement.” At present, concern about human induced climate change is possibly the most contested issue. Commonly, these contested worldviews are seen as being polar, e.g., economic growth versus environmental protection. And the worldviews of pre-modern societies are scarcely considered important.
Growth in the Modern World
I believe that the scale of the conflicts between the Ethereal and Natural worlds has not been adequately understood. Most of our institutions and their members have grown up with modern utopian views which were adequate for the world of the early 20th Century. However, the scale for which they are adequate has changed so radically that extreme disruptions of both human societies and the natural world are bound to result unless new utopian views arise and materialize. I will look at the changing scale of three major events that show the need to develop new worldviews: 1) population growth, 2) increasing use of material ‘resources’, and 3) the loss or destruction of Nature.[83]
Population growth. The impact of the sheer number of people now living on the earth presents the heaviest pressures on the natural world, especially as people make increasing demands on material resources that have been created, discovered, and exploited. Yes, indeed, I am a Malthusian of sorts. I firmly believe that we are deluding ourselves with the optimistic assumptions that either that the world population growth will peaceably level out and stabilize in the near future or that the planet’s carrying capacity will expand to meet the increasing needs of all of the Earth’s new inhabitants.
I want to look at worldwide population growth at several scales to help make my point. First look at the long course of humans on earth. I care not whether we start with Australopithecines, Homo erectus, or Homo sapiens—two million years ago, 350,000 years ago, or 30,000 years ago. For the sake of the diagram that I show in Figure 8, let’s look at the growth of population from 10,000 years ago to 2000 a.d.
Before this period and extending into the distant past humans continued to gain culture—language, religion, art, dance, rituals, and small social groupings, but because of limited numbers and limited technology the breaking into the earth itself did little to disrupt the evolutionary and major ecological systems of the earth. I do not want to glorify the human experience of the thousands of years before the agricultural revolution. However, it was a period when human societies little intruded the natural ecosystems except by the use of fire.
The conquest of the Earth by farmers, herders, warriors, explorers, traders, adventurers, missionaries, capitalists, mark the events when humans became aware of overcoming space, territory, and environmental resistances through the use of machines, which were, according to Lewis Mumford, at first based strictly on organizing human labor and only later dependent on inventions made of earthly matter and fueled by the Earth’s stored energy.[84] Human populations responded with exponential growth that continues today. [85] With ever increasing power, machines have been so successful in disrupting the very fabric of the land, air and waters of the earth that with some truth it may be said that no part of the Earth is now completely natural. The chroniclers of the last 3000 years, including even those of the last fifty, could not foretell that the success of the civilizations that they have described so well might create landscapes that are so changed as to become nearly unrecognizable even to many alive today. New sources of energy which have been discovered in the last 150-200 years have supported the explosion of human populations and the development of institutions devoted to concentrating the solar power that had long been stored in fossilized organic matter.
But let me return to my autobiography and the population changes that have occurred within my family. I gain perspective about the importance of an historical and environmental view of the world by using the recent genealogy of my branch of the Clan Urquhart as my base. My great-great grandfather Donald was born in Scotland in 1800 and died in 1860, His son John was born in 1820 and lived 76 years until 1896. My grandfather Robert was born in Ontario, Canada in 1868 and died in 1950. My father Orin was born in 1901 in Oregon and died in 1991. I was born in 1931 and if I live as long as my parents will live at least until 2021. My daughter Sarah was born in 1964 and with the same genetic life expectancy could easily live until 2050.
Seven generations of Urquharts (of which I have known four) have lived since 1750. These more than two hundred years are but a blip in the existence of humans on the earth, yet they have seen a seven fold increase in populations—from about one billion to over seven billion, today. [86](Figure 9)
The world’s population had not quite reached its first billion when Great-Great Grandfather Donald was born; and even then, the population was twice that of but 200 years earlier and about four times greater than the 250,000 inhabitants of the Earth in 800 a. d. By the time that my Great Grandfather John migrated from Scotland to Nova Scotia and on to Ontario, maybe 40% more people were alive than when his father was born. Those 400 million are more people than the total of all who lived on earth before the 15th Century. No wonder my relatives migrated from the overpopulated, marginal lands of the Scottish Highlands. And still another 400 million people were alive on earth when my grandfather worked his way from Canada to Wisconsin and then across the United States, finally settling in Oregon shortly before my dad, Orin, was born in 1901. By the time my younger sister was born in 1927, there were two billion people on earth—twice as many as when Great-Great Grandfather Donald was a boy. And there was another 100 million when I was born in 1931. And 3.7 billion were living when my daughter, Sarah, was born. Today, the world population at 7 billion is nearly double that.
One hundred and sixty years of change is also reflected in the demographic transition of the Urquhart family. In Scotland, later in Canada and the U.S. the Urquharts had experienced steadily improving health and longevity: 60 years for Donald, 76 years for John, and 82 years for Grandfather Robert, 90 years for my father. And the birth patterns also reflected their times. Great Grandfather John had 9 children, Grandfather Robert had six children, my father had three children, I had one child, and daughter Sarah has had no children. (My slightly older sisters, however had nine children between them, reflecting the post World War II births of the “baby boomers.”) Thus, the Urquharts paralleled the Euro-American population movement through the demographic transition into nearly stable populations.
When as a young college student in the 1950s I was shocked to read that demographers projected that the world’s population might actually reach 3.6 million by the end of the 20th Century. (In 2000 there were 6.3 billion, an underestimation by 75 %.) I also read in a textbook, China, Land of 500,000, [87] of an alarmingly overpopulated nation. (China now has over 1.3 Billion people.)
Consistently longer-term demographic projections of the world’s population have been drastically wrong. Even today, with better statistical information, long term population projections must be viewed with skepticism and a full awareness of their limitations. Population projections are not predictions. They are abstract, aseptic, generally upbeat, and made with little concern about global or regional economies. Nevertheless, population is going to continue to increase in the near future because of the very large numbers of women of child-bearing age.
In 2011, the population topped seven billion and was still increasing by about 94 million each year, which was the population of the entire world just before Athens rose to greatness. Projections for the year 2050 range from a low of 7.5 billion to a high of 10.5 billion people. (Figure 10) From the birth of my Great, Great Grandfather Donald through the probable lifespan of my daughter Sarah—250 years—the population of the earth will probably have increased over tenfold. Since the birth of my father in 1901 until 2050 the population will probably have increased by nearly seven times. And in my lifetime the population of the earth may increase by more than four times.
Since 1900 the population increase has been supported by increased food supplies, expanded measures of both public and private health care, and greater access to broad ranges of goods and services. All of these interrelated activities have at their base the command of massive amounts the earth’s natural materials at a scale unimaginable in all prior human time.
Use of Nonfuel Mineral Resources. Not only has the population of the world grown from less than one billion in 1750 to over seven billion in 2011, but the consumption of mineral resources has also increased dramatically. The graph prepared by the Global Rockhound Community shows the use of raw, non-fuel mineral resources in the United States from 1900 to 2006.
Especially noteworthy is the greatly increased use of construction materials such as stone, sand, and gravel since the end of the Second World War. Although much smaller in volume, the production of metals has also dramatically increased, again especially since the 1950s. For example, worldwide copper mine production from 1900 to 2008 roughly parallels that of the consumption in the United States of all non-fuel minerals. (Figure 12) Similar trends show for worldwide steel production. (Figure 13) The history of primary aluminum production since 1950 is similar to that of most other major metals. The recent rapid increase in aluminum production has primarily been in China. (Figure 14) The mining of rock phosphate has also increased greatly since 1950, dwarfing the production of other fertilizers. (Figure 15)
And mineral resources such as rare earth oxides, which were little used before 1965, have been brought into production, especially with the rapid growth of the communication and computing industries. (Figure 16)
Energy resources. Energy minerals have grown concurrently with the increased consumption of non-fuel minerals. During the last twenty-five years, the production of energy has paralleled the increase in population, increasing more rapidly between 1945 and 1980. (Figure 17)
Beginning with the use of coal to power steam engines in the late 19th century, demand for fossil fuel energy has grown. Especially in the last sixty years the consumption of petroleum and natural gas has surged. (Figures 18)
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/1/22/04219/1102
In the United States the rapid growth of primary energy consumption of petroleum and natural gas preceded the growth worldwide. (Figure 19)
Per capita consumption of new mineral materials. It is one thing to indicate the rapid increase in new mineral materials but yet another to show the impact each of us has on the consumption of new earth resources. The great magnitude of per capita consumption was first brought home to me in the Global Report to the President that was commissioned by President Jimmy Carter and appeared in 1980. [88] The diagram that appeared in volume III indicates that in 1975 each U.S. citizen required about 40,000 pounds of new material annually, that the energy produced by the consumption of petroleum, coal, natural gas, and uranium was the equivalent of the energy that might be produced by 300 persons working continuously for each U.S. citizen, and that the U.S. consumption of all new minerals was about four billion tons. (Figure 20)
Using statistics from the US Geological Survey, the US Energy Information Administration, and the US Census Bureau, the Mineral Information Institute (an affiliate of the Society of Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration) 89] has compiled comparable tables of per capita consumption of new minerals for each year since 1995. The peak year of consumption in the United States was 2006, just before the collapse of the housing industry and the start of the general economic recession. Over 7 billion tons were consumed in that year—3 billion more than thirty years earlier. During his lifetime a child born in 2006 might be expected to consume over 3.7 million pounds of new mineral materials. (Figures 21) US citizens consume more per capita than citizens of all other countries; however, the worldwide per capital consumption continues to grow even as the world’s population has burgeoned.
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Since the 19th century and particularly in the last sixty years, the Earth has been viewed as an unending provider of material resources. The costs of resources have been seen simply as the cost to discover, extract, transport, and use the resources, as well as the cost of financing the necessary transitions. In industrial societies natural resources are cultural evaluations that see Earth’s materials almost exclusively in terms of their economic value to humans. Only recently have serious attempts been made to place these economic evaluations into the broader context of the Earth’s natural ecology.
Loss, Degradation, and Pollution of Natural Ecosystems.
Human use of nature has greatly modified natural ecosystems. In the last section, I wrote about major extractions from natural systems, commonly referred to as natural resources. But only in the recent past have humans become greatly concerned for the wastes created in the processes of extractions; waste products were disposed in lands and waters with low value to the contemporary society. Little used lands, streams, lakes and the oceans were simply dumping sites. With increasing populations and need for more land and water for human use, many of these sites have come to be seen as polluted. The term pollution like the term natural resource is a cultural evaluation and not an intrinsic characteristic. Pollution and habitat changes have led to extinctions or great diminishment of biotic species. Many articles and books that describe these changes have appeared in the last thirty to forty years. I find that William Meyer’s book, Human Impact on the Earth,[90] is especially good at presenting ideas about pollution, extinction, and resource extraction in an easily readable form. It is largely based on material from the book, The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years,[91] which looked at many ‘environmental’ problems in a more detailed fashion. Walter Dodds’ Humanity’s Footprint: Momentum, Impact, and Our Global Environment[92] is a recent, readable discussion of human impact of the Earth.
Extensive bibliographic material as well as significant commentary on environmental changes is found on many sites on the internet. I believe the sites for Paul Chefurka and Bruce Sundquist to be extremely useful. [93] Resource depletion has a very long history. Humans have long disturbed natural ecosystems, sometimes in major ways. For thousands of years fire has been used to stimulate or discourage plant growth in hunting and land clearance for agriculture and pasture. Agriculture has transformed wild lands wherever crops have been grown. As population has increased, especially in the last three hundred years, new fields have been created to the extent that almost all suitable cultivable cropland is used. The amount of crop land has remained at about 18 million square hectares since about 1980. (Figure 22) With modern population growth and limited availability of good, arable land, the per capita cropland is declining. (Figure 23)
At the same time, forested land has decreased from 54 million square kilometers in 1700 to 46 million square kilometers in 1993. (Figure 24)
As population grew, pressure to use marginal lands increased. Soil erosion on these marginal lands has also increased especially in the dry land fringes of the Earth. The amount of soil erosion that has actually occurred is extremely difficult to determine because there are no good base lines to use in comparison with present conditions of the soil. Erosion of soils has also accompanied forest clearance, whether for new cropland, pasture, or wood products. Current estimates of human induced soil degradation show 1,966 million hectares have been affected, often on the best soils for agriculture.[94] Figure 25 shows the soil erosion in the United States as of 1992.
As cropland approached its maximum extent, more and more fields were irrigated in attempts to increase crop yields. Between 1950 and 2003 the amount of irrigated land grew from 94 to 277 million hectares. This expansion has resulted in the drying up of streams in some areas and the lowering of ground water tables in others. Salinization has also become a major problem associated with irrigation. Combined with the rapidly increasing use of fertilizers and pesticides demanded by the ‘green revolution’ of agriculture, irrigation waters contain chemicals which leach into adjacent streams and groundwater, lowering their quality.
Domestic and industrial uses of water have also increased. In many regions, the availability of fresh water is a major problem. With increased population the global per capita availability of fresh water is now decreasing. (Figures 26 and 27)
With industrialization people have moved to cities. Because many cities were originally founded to serve as commercial centers for surrounding farmlands, modern urban uses have often expanded onto good cropland.
I will not discuss other pollutions of air, water, and land because many recent studies now highlight these Bads. The sources cited above refer to many of these studies; more recent examples may be easily found on the internet. Among the many studies, those relating to climate change have demanded most attention in the last decade because of the dramatic effects that atmospheric pollution will have on global natural ecosystems that directly affect human life. Carbon dioxide, in the past 200 years, has increased at a rate 10 to 100 times greater than at any time in the last 500 years. It and other greenhouse gasses can be directly linked to the burning of fossil fuels. (Figure 28)
The increase in pollution of the atmosphere, the oceans, and fresh water, the consumption of mineral resources, and the results of the industrialization of agriculture and animal production, as well as the commercialization of forestry and fishing can all be related to changes in the rate of energy use, especially the consumption of fossil fuels.[95]
Ecological Thinking about Energy and Human Activity.
Of particular importance in linking human activities with disturbances of natural ecosystems are two lines of thought:
1.) The accounting of ecologic change in terms of transformations of fossil fuel energy from natural sources to human use;[96] and
2.) The comparison of the ecological reserves of the earth with the demands on these reserves of services—the ecological footprint.[97]
Each of these approaches offers a way to measure human activities and natural ecosystems with a common unit—the first in terms of emergy and the second in terms of global hectares.
Accounting for the transformation of energy for human use. While searching for a better way to understand the flows of energy in natural ecosystems, Howard T. Odum realized that social and economic systems as well as natural ecosystems could be evaluated in common energy terms. Every process and activity on Earth manifests energy, mostly ultimately derived from the sun. Odum named and described a unit of energy that could be applied to all kinds of products and services, whether natural or human. He called that unit ‘emergy’ (spelled with an ‘m’ and measured in solar calories or solar joules). Emergy is “the available energy of one kind that was previously used up directly and indirectly to make a product or service.” [98] Emergy is the memory or history of energy used in making a product or service, but is no longer available.[99] For example, solar energy is used in producing green plants; some of the energy of those green plants may by converted to wood or peat, which may, by geologic processes, be converted to coal, petroleum, or gas, futher concentrating and localizing the stored energy. Further transformations may may concentrate the stored energy in producing electricity in a power plant. That electricity may then be used in further concentration of energy, originally derived from the sun, in the production of many products and services. Emergy was used at each stage of the transformation. In ecological terms, solar energy is used by producers, which in turn are transformed by series of consumers into intermediate products and services, and in the process, further consuming and concentrating energy.
By using the concept of emergy, all energy used in making a product or service–both available energy and emergy used in prior transformations–may be accounted for at all stages in the transformation of products or services, not simply the available energy used in the latest stage of transformation. As transformations take place in the creation of new products or services, energy is used up and can be remembered as emergy in the transformed product of service. Odum calls the “calories of available energy of one form previously required directly or indirectly to generate one calorie of another form of energy transformity.”[100] As energy is used in each stage of processing, transformity increases. With greater transformity in creating a product or service, less energy remains available for further work; the remaining energy is of higher quality. This higher quality energy may be used to create yet higher quality products and services or may be needed as feedback to further concentrate lower quality energy sources.
The real energy costs of a product at any stage of its transformation may be accounted for by using the concepts of emergy and transformity, measured in units of solar power. All products and services contain concentrations of energy and can be compared on the basis of their transformity, or embodied energy as well as the energy that remains concentrated in the product of service. Emergy and transformity measure work at all scales on a common basis. Thus, emergy can be seen as “real wealth” generated and transformed by nature (and humans), not merely the available energy expended at particular late stages of production for which money has been transferred.
Real wealth (intrinsic energy value) comes directly and indirectly from natural resources and should be measured in emergy, not energy nor money. The real costs of food, clothing, housing, health services, and information need to include emergy that was used in all stages of production. Money, by contrast, is a human creation and is not related directly to emergy, which is a measure of nature. If money is not paid for energy derived from the real wealth of a natural system, its contribution to the human economy of nations, institutions, humans, and information will not have been adequately considered. The monetary cost of natural resources enters the market economy mostly through expenditures for discovery, extraction, transportation, and transformation not from its real value as natural capital. Indeed, Odum states that “market values are the inverse of real wealth contributions from environment and cannot be used to evaluate environmental contributions or environmental impact.” [101] In market based economies, value is attached to products and services in which energy has already been highly concentrated. The energy already used in their production—emergy—has been ignored. The greater the transformity in the production, the more concentrated the energy. Emergy, or real wealth, is largely excluded from market value; and the true value of basic natural ecosystems, which supply the energy for all transformations, is largely ignored.
Figure 29 diagrams the interface between Nature and Economy—where monetary value meets real value. The left hand side of the diagram represents Nature, including 1) the sources of both renewable and non-renewable energy and materials, 2) their combination in natural ecosystems and 3) their cultural evaluations as natural resources. The source of renewable natural energy is primarily solar power. Non-renewable fossil fuels and raw minerals constitute natural storage. Both renewable energy and non-renewable energy and materials combine in natural ecosystems, some of which are valued by humans as natural resources.
Some natural resources are converted to crops, fisheries, timber, grazinglands, mines, etc. becoming economic resources. Economic resources are the natural part of the interface between Nature and economy. Money from the sales of the processed products of economic resources flows in from the market economy. And the purchase of goods and services to process the economic resources flows out to the market economy. The exchange of money for sales and the purchase of goods and services is the human part of the economic interface.
Flows of energy and money at the interface of natural ecosystems and the main economy
Money is not exchanged for the actual energy of the natural ecosystems that are consumed in the main economy. Emergy, which is present at all stages of the transformation from its natural sources to its consumption in the main economy, is not accounted for in economic terms until it is seen as an economic resource, i.e. transformity is not considered. The monetary costs of energy first appear only at the interface between Nature and a market economy.
The crux of the idea that I want to emphasize here is that the basic value of natural resources are left out of most economic considerations. Real value, measured by emergy, is excluded from consideration of market value. We have lived in a period of resource abundance where the value of natural resources does not reflect the emergy that they bring through their transformation. As the patterns of global energy production have shown, ever more fossil fuels have entered the systems of resource processing—agriculture, forestry, mining, etc. However their fundamental contribution—natural capital—prior to extraction and processing has been given little, if any, economic value. In essence, in most economic considerations the energy contained in the resource has been thought to be free. But it is not free; it is in limited supply, especially in readily available concentrated forms. Most energy sources that have fueled modern economic growth are non-renewable, of limited extent, and their real value as natural capital has not been adequately considered.
Other than the economic uses in which money is exchanged, nature and the human economy also interface indirectly. Clean air, clean water, wilderness, and wild products rarely enter the market economy directly and remain undervalued until they are in short supply, are lost, or become polluted. The costs of pollution, extinctions, and exploitation of natural systems are largely excluded from market values and costs. Not to include the real wealth that clean air and water bring to society makes sense only in a world of unlimited land and energy and natural systems that can easily absorb the damage that results from their use or pollution. To ignore the cost of absorbing waste products, particularly of CO2, underlies solutions to reversing climate change. Today we must recognize that energy and material systems are in limited supply. The Earth’s resources are not infinite. The costs of maintaining energy and natural systems need to be included in the main global economy.
The energy that is stored geologically in fossil fuels cannot be replaced in human time. As energy source materials become in shorter supply, more concentrated forms of energy will be used as feedback to transform less concentrated forms of fossil fuel into more usable forms. Diverting highly concentrated energy from producing high value products and services will make them even more expensive. Economies of growth have been underlain by large stocks of real wealth. But when real wealth is only accounted for in terms of its price in the human money economy, little thought is given to its real costs in terms of emergy. Increased demands coupled with the decline in the reserves of minerals and energy fuels, can only mean that the underlying real wealth of modern society must eventually decline.[102]
By using the concept of emergy, the difference between the real value of energy and the market value of energy within the main market economy becomes apparent. Emergy represents the true energy costs that have supported growth economies. When an accounting of the true costs of concentrated forms of fossil fuels and minerals is made, it becomes obvious that economies based on growth must expect radical disruptions when the natural sources of energy and material resources decline. This accounting will become increasingly apparent as highly concentrated fossil fuels become less available.
Ecological Footprint. Another form of accounting for the relationship between human activities and natural ecological systems has been developed by The Global Footprint Network.[103] They have devised a method for comparing the human Ecological Footprint with the Biocapacity of the Earth’s ecosystems.
“The Ecological Footprint measures the amount of biologically productive land and sea areas an individual, a region, all of humanity or a human activity requires to produce the resources it consumes and to absorb the carbon dioxide emissions, and compares this measurement to how much land and sea area is available.”[104]
Biocapacity, or the ability of an ecosystem to produce useful biological materials and to absorb CO2 emissions, is calculated with the total area of bioproductive land or water available, weighted by the productivity of the land, in yields per hectare. Biocapacity represents the ability of the biosphere to produce crops, livestock (pasture), timber products (forests) and fish as well as to uptake additional carbon dioxide in forests. In short, it measures the ability of terrestrial and aquatic areas to provide ecological services.[105] (Figure 30)
(Demand) Ecological Footprint = Population x Consumption/person x Resource + Waste Intensity
(Capacity) Biocapacity = Area x bioproductivity
Overshoot = Ecological Footprint – Biocapacity
Figure 30
The calculation for a Global Ecological Footprint, i.e. the ecological footprint for the Earth, measures both the demand for ecological resources and the capacity of several types of productive land to support human demands. Both demand and capacity are measured in terms of the global average areas: the global demands needed to support specific human activities and the global bioproductivity of particular types of land. These measurements are expressed in units called global hectares, which are defined as “hectares of bioproductive area with world bioproductivity.” The ecological footprint, or demand, is computed by combining population, consumption per person, and intensity of resource use and waste emissions.
Global biocapacity measures bioproductivity of ecological resources and waste assimilation in global hectares by dividing the total amount of a resource consumed in a land use category by the yield per hectare, and by dividing the waste of CO2 emitted by the absorption capacity per hectare.[106] Using a common unit, i.e. global hectares, allows for different types of land to be compared using a common denominator. Equivalence factors are used to convert physical hectares of different types of land and water into the common measure of global hectares.[107]
Ecological Footprint Standard 2009 addresses the uses of source data, derivation of conversion factors, the establishment of study boundaries, and the communication of findings.[108] By using these standards, The Global Footprint Network organization has determined global, national, and regional ecological footprints. They found that the global ecological footprint first exceeded the biocapacity of Earth in 1975. By 2007 the total global ecological footprint was 18.00 billion global hectares. The global biocapacity was then only 11.9 billion global hectares. This meant that there was an ‘overshoot’ of approximately 50%, i.e. that humans demanded a bioproduction equivalent to that of 1.5 Earths to support their patterns of consumption. (Figure 31) In the United States, the ecological footprint of the average resident was 8.0 global hectares, i.e. an overshoot of eight times the biocapacity of the global average.
By far the greatest change between 1961 and 2007 was the decreased ability of the Earth’s ecosystems to sequester carbon dioxide emissions. The Carbon footprint increased 11 fold in the twenty six years between 1961 and 2007. (See the blue area in Figure 31)
The great advantage of using the Global Footprint methodology is that it uses a common measure—global hectares—to express both the history of human demands on Earth ecosystems and the biocapacity of those ecosystems. It does not measure carrying capacity but instead compares each year’s existing demands with that year’s productivity. Both demand and productivity are adjusted for the conditions found for any particular year. Because each region or nation has a different mix of bioproduction types as well as different human consumption demands, the distinction among nations, regions, and different sets of regions or nations can be shown. [109]
Section summary. Odum’s development and application of standard measurements of energy—emergy and transformity—from source to particular product of service, especially at national or global scales, provide insights into the interface between energy and the human economy. This allows real wealth—natural capital—to be included in economic studies, which at present, is not.
The research of The Global Footprint Network has been able to compare the production demands of humans with the biological production of natural ecosystems by using a common unit of measure—the global hectare. The units of measure of Odum and The Global Footprint Network allow the interconnections of human society and natural ecosystems to be compared in ways crucial to better understand present world economies and ecologies.
Projections
Monitoring Ecological Changes. Monitoring the limits of natural systems is being studied by many organizations. In particular I recommend looking at the web sites of The Stockholm Resilience Centre,[110] The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, [111] The Biodiversity Indicators Partnership,[112] The Worldwatch Institute,[113] The National Environmental Accounting Database,[114] and The World Wildlife Fund.[115] Projections of needed changes in policies and behaviors rest upon the observations, compilations, and assessments of such organizations.
Early projections. In the 1950s M. King Hubert showed that oil production would peak within a few decades[116]. In 1968, Paul Erhlich predicted economic downturn would be caused by overpopulation and resource shortages.[117] In the 1970s, Rufus Miles,[118] N. Georgescu-Roegen,[119] and Earl Cook[120]wrote of the problems of continuing economies based on growth. Such studies have since multiplied. Computer models of the interactions among human demands on resources have shown the probable results of continued demands of growth based economies. Especially noteworthy were early models of Howard T. Odum in Environment, Power. and Society published in 1971. He noted that as long as energy and material reserves continue to freely feed economic production, assets and information will continue to increase; but as reserves of nonrenewable resources are depleted or are found to have a high cost, the assets and information, i.e. products and services, will also decline but with a lag time as their storage in the main economy is used up.
A more sophisticated model was developed by Donella and Dennis Meadows et al. in their 1972 study, Limits to Growth.[121] An updated version of their model appeared in the Smithsonian Magazine. (Figure 32)
These projections show a downturn in products and services, population, and food per capita within the coming decades of the 21st Century.
Suggestions to continue or reverse current trends. Other models of the future show continued expansion of energy supplies. They rely on conversion to renewable energy, the continued discovery of cheap energy resources, or upon technological innovations that greatly reduce the costs of concentrating lower grade energy sources; still other studies rely on developing fusion or fission energy safely and economically.
If successful alternatives to fossil fuel energy are created by new or improved technologies, yet other technological breakthroughs will still be needed. Energy comes in many forms, each appropriate for particular types of uses. New or alternative forms of energy must also be suitable for a wide variety of products and services: heat, transport, lighting, manufacturing, communication, etc. Other material resources will also require new technologies to use lower grade sources or to find and use replacements.
Even if cheap energy supplies are found in whatever form, their use will continue to disrupt natural ecosystems. With continued or increased streams of products and services that are based on concentrated energy from whatever source, additional technologies will be required to absorb waste products that result in biological extinctions and the pollution of land, water, sea, and air. However, if the world’s population and standards of living continue to increase, successful new technologies will only delay the timing and nature of the disruptions of the natural world. I firmly believe that no series of technological solutions can be developed that can simultaneously find new, inexpensive energy supplies, find substitutes for depleted mineral resources, and at the same time reduce the ‘Bads’ of continued growth.
One of the more detailed plans to develop alternative sources of energy as well as policies to conserve energy has been presented by the World Wildlife Fund. [122] Its goal is to reach 100% renewable energy supplies by 2050 and simultaneously to reduce the total world demand for energy. Its proposals require major, immediate changes in both public and private policies worldwide. Without projecting a particular future, many other studies also suggest ways of modifying current policies and behaviors that would damage natural ecosystems less while permitting social stability. Possibly most of these studies would fall under the category of searching for sustainability. And as was indicated in a 1996 study:
“Cultural sustainability depends on the ability of a society to claim the loyalty of its adherents through the propagation of a set of values that are acceptable to the populace and the provision of those sociopolitical institutions that make the realization of those values possible.” [123]
The most basic policies needed to maintain sustainability have been outlined by Richard Heinberg.[124] His five axioms of sustainability are:
- Any society that continues to use critical resources unsustainably will collapse.
- Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained.
- To be sustainable, the use of renewable resources must proceed at a rate that is less than or equal to the rate of natural replenishment.
- To be sustainable, the use of non-renewable resources must proceed at a rate that is declining, and the rate of decline must be greater than or equal to the rate of depletion.
- Sustainability requires that substances introduced into the environment from human activities be minimized and rendered harmless to biosphere functions.
Other policies needed to attain sustainability have been spelled out in some detail. They embrace both socio/political and natural/ecological aspects.[125] The Earth Charter[126] recognizes the necessity for changing minds and hearts and the roles of all institutions. It outlines the action needed to “bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace.” Elizabeth and Howard Odum have presented a long list of policies that would be needed to adjust to the declining availability of energy and mineral resources—their policies for a ‘prosperous descent,’. [127] They suggest such things as maintenance and replacement rather than new construction; lowering the rate of depreciation; providing incentives for eliminating luxury use of energy; redefining progress as adaptation to earth restoration; decentralizing organizational hierarchies and populations; using emergy as a basis for trade rather than free exploitation of resourcesl; using capital investments for downsizing, and on and on. Their list gives an idea of the radical changes that would be needed to attain a society/economy based on sustainable energy sources.
Heinberg’s axioms of sustainability, the Odum’s the World Wildlife Energy Report, and The Earth Charter require huge changes in policies and behavior if they are to be successful. However, their suggestions are unlikely to succeed because they require governments at all levels and people in their private lives to change long-standing, deeply ingrained attitudes and behaviors. They fail to show how existing attitudes and behaviors can be changed. By inference, their basic assumption, as with many optimistic studies, is that an awareness of the need to change will be adequate for individuals, institutions, and governments to rise to the challenge to alter long standing policies and behaviors.
Resistances to change. The major problem for the future of the world’s natural ecosystems and the development of sustainable societies is the continued strength of belief in economies that are based on growth. And the support of growth economies is based on the use of high-grade energy. Continued use of massive amounts of energy and the other resources it processes means that the “Bads” of extinction, pollution, and rapid entropy will continue until the energy sources decline. And overshoot of the ecological footprint of humans on global biocapacity, already a fact, will continue to increase into the near future.
M. Wackernagel and W. E. Rees sum up the difficulties of changing individual and societal beliefs and behaviors that fail to recognize their impact on natural capital.[128] Their article is the best discussion of the extraordinary difficulties in changing today’s global ecological footprint to match the biocapacity of the Earth. The following discussion paraphrases Wackernagel and Rees’ outline.
Individuals and society cannot perceive slow changes that have global impact; even for some observable ecological changes, they are uncertain about their causes. Most contemporary decisions exclude ecological reality. Contemporary cultural and spiritual traditions contribute to an exploitative relationship between society and nature, the belief that more, now, is better, and that industrialization is good for all parts of society. Modernity expresses a split between body and mind, nature and culture. And faith in human ingenuity overrides ecological knowledge.
Wackernagel and Rees indicate that barriers to understanding ecology have been erected by the belief that money is the dominant measure of wealth and that resource prices are society’s main indicator of resource scarcity not biophysical abundance. Monetarized values nearly exclusively determine market prices, not ecological necessities of life-support. Science, which is excellent at analyzing clearly defined problems, is weak in understanding the complex problems of integrated global systems. Yet science remains the principal way of understanding nature. And scientifically based technology is believed to be able to overcome even ecological problems and sustain growth.
Society and individuals believe that they live in open systems with little or no restraint from nature; and most decision makers live in their own world, blind to even their own personal impacts on nature. Beliefs that societies should follow individual practices also often lead to resource depletion.
The separation of the fundamental bases of human existence, e.g. food, clothes, shelter, and services from the basic resources from which they are derived, leads to ecological ignorance. The derivation of much information from electronic means blunts the connectivity of persons and the living world. And the globalization of economies tends to lessen the importance of local economies and ecologies and increases the disparities in valuation of natural resources inherent in international trade. Furthermore, property rights of individuals and nations are valued over conservation of nature and sustainability of communities.
All of these beliefs and behaviors create formidable obstacles to the understanding of problems of both local and global ecosystem exploitation and degradation. To eliminate these constraints would require extraordinarily great changes in contemporary views of the world. I do not anticipate any of these changes to occur soon; and I remain pessimistic about major reforms in my lifetime.
Radical futures. No one can predict with any accuracy how the conflicts between humans and natural ecosystems will play out. Societies, economies, politics, and natural ecosystems interact in unknown ways because of their extraordinary complex inter-relations. Nevertheless, the changes that inevitably will occur will be radical as long as the dominant world outlook continues to emphasize economies of growth and increased standards of living. No historic parallel exists for the economic growth of the last several decades. The consequences of a decline in growth economies also has no historical model. A good road map for decline does not exist.
The problems of resource growth and environmental pollution are global and demand international cooperation if they are to be solved. The continued insistence of growth and improved material standards of living, if pursued by even one or two major industrial nations or regions, e.g. The US, China, India, western Europe, can enlarge the global ecological footprint no matter what other nations do. Regional or national shortages of energy, water, food will create tensions among the various parts of the world. With shortages, infrastructure of roads, electric grids, and sanitation systems will occur. Education, social, and health services will radically change. I largely agree with Paul Chefurka, who presents his View from 50,000 feet,[129] a listing of major changes to the world in the next 75 years that is headed by his belief that
“Climate change will not be ameliorated by international agreement. This is due to the cooperation problems identified in the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ game, national and corporate self-interests, …and the complete lack of any realistic substitute for fossil fuels.”
Can you imagine the future if this view is realized?
Many questions quickly come to mind:
Will conflict over resources result in war?
Will social and economic inequities increase?
Will some regions of the world or some energy rich nations further their dominance by physical and economic force?
Will it become more difficult to maintain high quality services such as education for all?
Can health care be made available for everyone?
Can democracy and capitalism survive or will they continue to respond to short term conditions?
Can population pressures respond to local or regional shortages without massive migrations?
Will climate change cause massive dislocations of agriculture and people who live in coastal areas?
Will resistance to modernization, let alone to ecosystem disruptions caused by globalization, become increasingly destabilizing world peace?
The list of possible questions is unending and the problems that will arise are unpredictable. But major, unforeseen changes will inevitably come before the end of the century. The social, economic, religious, and political values that currently hold sway are not now up to the task of facing a world of declining energy, increasing pollution, and climate change. The utopian world of material wealth created by continued growth will be replaced as radical changes “rock the world.”
My Place in the World Ecosystem
As an individual, I have maintained my place within the great flow-through of material and energy resources in American society. As an average American, I consume about 40,000 tons of new mineral supplies each year. Using Howard and Elizabeth Odum’s figures, a person in the United States in the 1970’s was supported by the energy of 250,000 calories coal equivalent each day. That amount must have increased in the last three decades. As an average American, I consumed 22.7 barrels of oil and emitted 5 metric tons of energy-related CO2 in 2010. According to the Mineral Information Institute’s calculations, on average, directly and indirectly, every American consumes enough fossil fuels to generate the equivalent of 300 people working around the clock every day of the year.[130](Figure 20) And if everyone on the planet lived as I do, the world would have to have 4.3 times the biocapacity it has in 2007 to keep up with demands of our global ecological footprint.[131] And the footprint would be even larger—8 times the biocapacity of the Earth—if everyone lived like an average American. Thus it is obvious that as an American, I greatly exceed my share of fossil fuels, other minerals, CO2 emissions, and the carrying capacity of the Earth.
In my over eight decades on Earth, I have participated increasingly in interconnected global ecosystems. The networks of goods and services that reach me are ever more complex. I am ignorant of all but the last one or two stages of the intricate pathways and transformations of the goods and services that I consume. And I certainly have no good idea of the tranformities that have been made since the resources I consume were extracted from nature. In a similar manner, I am largely unaware of the pathways that my ‘waste’ products take beyond the local dump, sewage plant, or exhaust pipe. Greatly altered ecosystems radiate from me and every other modern person in complex ways of which we are ignorant or, at the very least, ignore. In other words I live, like most Americans, in a highly artificial world of altered ecosystems that are changing at a rate greater than ever before in the history of human kind.
I now live in a world of greater cultural making with both more goods and Bads than did any of my ancestors. The accumulated contents of my house, the artificial landscapes within which I have spent most of my life, the water I drink and the air I breath are all part of humanly disturbed ecosystems just as are the waste products of my modern life style. The greatest impact I have had on natural ecosystems has probably been indirectly through the support that I have received as a student and as a teacher.[132] But also important is the energy that went into maintaining my health—including one major surgery and several minor procedures—and my retirement, which is based on a pension and monetary investments in major corporations, financial institutions, and other organizations. And I am overwhelmed to think that about 300 fossil fuel slaves have supported me every day at least for most of my life especially when compared to the slave free lives of my ancestors.
I find it almost impossible to reconcile the objective facts of the energy and minerals that I have consumed as a modern American with the objective facts of the immense alterations of the natural ecosystems that have resulted from that consumption. I have enjoyed the fossil fuel slaves who have afforded me health, education, food from all over the world, and ease of movement in my daily life as well as with seven trips to Europe, three to Africa, eighteen to Latin America, twenty to the eastern North America, eleven to the American southwest, and many more to California and within the Pacific Northwest. Certainly my travels mean that I have given far more than my share of CO2 to the atmosphere and climate change. I have supported through my taxes (and military service) the non-productive costs in energy and matter of the Korean War, the Viet-Nam War, the Afghanistan War, two wars in Iraq, as well as participation in other military actions.
I have tried to balance my direct and indirect attacks on the Earth’s natural ecosystems, not by radically changing my participation as a fossil fuel slave holder but as a teacher. Throughout my career, I taught geography that emphasized the ways natural and cultural systems operated at the scale of whole human beings. Many of my courses required field observation of local landscapes by the students. I hoped that at this scale my students could begin to directly understand their relationship to the material world. My concern in geography extends from the scale of houses and yards to the entire surface of the Earth. I have been concerned with the distribution and origins of both natural and cultural phenomena that form the landscapes of neighborhoods, urban and rural countrysides and of the major regions of the world. When ‘environmental’ concerns became part of the thinking of many Americans, I shifted my academic emphases to both the good and the bad of the ways humans made their landscapes and impacted the natural world. I also began research and taught classes on the history and contemporary views of environment and ecology.
I have been part of several groups of people whose ideas about the relations of humans to nature overlap my own. Most important of these groups was one developed by several faculty members who organized support for learning about environmental issues at the University of Oregon. We first developed several classes, a small library, and a center where students who were interested in environmental issues could meet. Later, we developed a highly successful interdisciplinary masters degree program whose students met regularly with faculty members and fellow students to discuss their classes, environmental politics, and how to increase awareness of the importance of environmental studies in its many dimensions. The master’s degree program has been followed by an undergraduate degree program and an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program. These were my efforts to counter the environmental problems humanity must increasingly confront.
Reflecting on over three decades of teaching and two in retirement, I feel that I took far more from natural ecosystems than I gave. I only hope that some of my students still think about the ways humans have altered the Earth both for good and bad.
My many year attempts to preserve open space and an ecological study area along the banks of the Willamette River illustrate the barriers to understanding, even by the educated leaders of a progressive city and university, of the importance of natural ecosystems to the everyday life of their citizens and students. Economic dreams of building a ‘research park’ were only slightly modified by building ‘set-backs’ and height restrictions, bones thrown to satisfy environmental concerns.
Other of my efforts at changing the negative impacts on local ecosystems have been intense at times, but with little positive effect. I have felt very frustrated by the overwhelming resistance to channeling the politics of growth away from short term concerns of a money economy to long term concerns about maintaining or creating sustainable natural systems in my neighborhood, city, and state. I have found that in any contested political issue involving land use, short-term economic concerns outweigh those about natural ecosystems. If these attitudes are so strongly embedded at the local level, I find it difficult to see them change regionally and nationally. And when millions of people on Earth simply search for enough food to eat and places to shelter, it is understandable that they are little concerned with preserving natural ecosystems.
I am part of modern, American ways of consuming. But I also see nature in terms of ecosystems that interconnect throughout land, sea, air, biota, and human cultures. I deeply feel that my consumptive behavior contrasts greatly with my ideas about the ecosystems in which I am embedded. Thus I find myself in a classic double-bind in which most of my behaviors directly contradict the beliefs I have about how humans must live to sustain life on the planet. I and many of my friends continue in our modern lives even as we are aware of the great environmental disruptions we cause. We cannot escape from the society and culture in which we are embedded. We have lived ‘high on the hog’ even as we are aware that such ways of living exploits the natural world that must support humanity in perpetuity. And it is unlikely that people of my generation will have to adjust to the impending decreasing flow of energy through the American society. What I can do, however, is set forth some goals that might offer some perspectives for the future.
My Utopian Goals
With an unknowable future, but convinced that radical changes are inevitable, I resort to thinking in very general terms—Utopian, if you will. Maybe sustainability is the best term that is used today to describe an ultimate goal. And many specific policies and attitudes must be changed to reach that goal. However, my Utopian goals lie somewhere between specific policies and the ultimate goal of sustainability. These goals are the result of thinking about my overall philosophy expressed in terms of the relationship of Nature and Culture as mediated by a person, of studying the history of population growth, consumption of resources, and alteration of ecosystems, and finally of the personal way in which I am actually a part of the process of evolution.
My first goal: The earth must reduce its population if it is to be sustainable. To reach this goal, other than by Malthusian events, the world’s inhabitants must learn to see that they are intimately and systematically (ecologically) interconnected culturally, physically, and spiritually with nature and all other people on Earth. To learn that lesson everyone must realize that natural resources support his/her life. Maybe the most important way of gaining that knowledge is by living locally, using local resources which are consumed, renewed, and preserved locally as much as possible. These resources need to be thought of in terms of the lifetimes of overlapping generations. This is the local challenge.
Second: Highest priority must be given to providing everyone with adequate food, adequate housing, adequate health care, and adequate ways of finding pleasure in participation in body/mind and non-consumptive activities such as conversation and discussion, athletics, and arts of all forms. To reach this goal, consumption must be oriented first to providing necessities and reduction of luxuries, especially those that demand the use of much energy to build or use. And redistribution of regional surpluses must rise above regional selfishness. Economies can no longer afford to be based on growth. They must be based on support of life for everyone. This is the national and global challenge.
Third: Community must take precedence over individualism. However, to give emphasis on community does not mean that individual human rights should not be honored. Respect for individual integrity, expression, and belief must not be restricted except as they restrict the integrity, expression, and beliefs of others. Groups, like individuals, should not have their integrity, expression, and beliefs limited except as they limit other groups or individuals, or the sustainability of the natural ecosystems of which they are a part. This is the personal challenge.
If we humans are to arrive at lower populations, less consumption, and a much lower level of energy use, we must gain a conscious awareness of our intimate interconnections within nature. If we do not, we will find ourselves the unwitting victims of the unique hubris of thinking that we live in a world of our own creation. My hope is that the genius in each of us will lead to the creation of institutions and places that respect nature and honor the consciousness of humanity’s place within the intertwining complexities of both natural and cultural ecosystems. Then, our continuing place within the ongoing creative transcendence of the evolutionary processes will be assured for at least a while longer.
EPILOGUE
Recovery from Addiction to Environmental Exploitation
On a personal level, most of us are addicts in an addictive society but continue to deny our addiction. At the national scale, the best examples of our addiction may be
1) our demand for more energy at the same time as we realize that the use of more energy results in undermining the environmental and ecological well-being of life on earth through air pollution, global warming, and acid rain; and
2) our attraction to consumption of material goods—the products that fill our shopping malls, our auto and RV showrooms, even the increasing amounts of paper that fill our offices because of the miracles of modern electronic technology—while, at the same time, we find it impossible to rid ourselves of the wastes created in the processes of consuming without polluting the air, water, land and thus even our own health
3. our inability to see the unsustainable basis for our growth economy
At a personal level, aren’t many of us addicted to the trip to the mall in our average $16,500 car which gratifies us immediately but threatens, indirectly, our health, our habitat, our neighbors, and our society?
What are we willing do to support our addiction?
Will we go to war to maintain a flow of oil?
Will we eliminate the last tracts of virgin forests to get cheap logs for export or to create more grazing land?
Will we destroy wetlands to build parking lots, industrial parks, or housing tracts?
Will we discount the future and thereby limit the potential of our children in order to pay for the deficits created by our unbridled consumption?
Will we continue to pump CO2 in the atmosphere, inducing climate change?
We sound to me like crack addicts who are willing to sell their homes, restrict their kids’ futures and even diminish their own health to get that fix that allows them to repress the physical and mental anguish that lies so near the surface of their existence. But unlike the crack addict, whose addiction is condemned by society, our addictive consumption is tolerated, even encouraged by a society that is based upon competitive, capitalistic growth, characterized by Lewis Mumford as The Pentagon of Power—the five P’s of power, production, property, profit, and publicity. This is a view of the world in which the mind is separated from (and usually considered superior to) the body, the individual is exalted over the community, and humankind is placed in opposition to nature.
As a geographer, who has followed a career of environmental awareness, awakened and informed for more than fifty-five years by Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, but who is also the product of the American way of progress and growth, I am caught within an untenable epistemology or way of knowing and thinking about the world. Like the alcoholic, who wavers between drunkenness and an unbearable sobriety, I know that I can control my consumptive behavior if I really need to. Yet, like the alcoholic, I continue to go out and consume—to buy that new TV, that new digital camera and cell phone, that airplane ticket to Oaxaca, that wild salmon steak, that coffee in a paper cup. And everywhere I look, I see my fellow humans doing the same.
Yes, here I am, consuming air cooled in summer and warmed in winter by fossil fuel energy. And I can, indeed, easily ignore the environmental exploitation, pollution, and destruction that all of this consumption entails because it is overshadowed, here and now, by the personal pleasures of living grandly in the style of the early 21st Century.
Like the drug addict, must we “hit bottom” before we seek relief? I believe that for our society to hit bottom an environmental disaster of an unimaginable magnitude will have to occur. But individually, I believe, we may hit bottom when we are each convinced intellectually, emotionally, and especially in our personal bodily condition that the way we know and think about the world has failed to prevent the excesses of our addiction to exploit our natural environment.
Alcoholics Anonymous with its Twelve Steps and Traditions has led the way for many to overcome their addictions. It offers to those of us addicted to environmental exploitation a possible model of a way to a saner, healthier life. I am attracted to the way of AA because I have seen its positive effects on close friends and family members. I am attracted to the epistemology of the Twelve Step Method because of its effective approach to addiction. Forty years ago Gregory Bateson recognized the epistemology of AA as a successful approach to overcoming addictive behavior.[133]
The premise of AA is that once one has “hit bottom,” he or she can only admit that he or she is an addict and that his or her life is out of control. In other words, our actions cannot be made to correspond with our thoughts; in Bateson’s words, we realize that we are caught in the double bind of mind versus body; our mind and body are sending us conflicting messages that cannot be reconciled, and which are depriving us of sanity and health. That admission of addiction is the essence of Step 1 of AA.
If we cannot control our addiction with our current ways of thinking of mind versus body, we must come up with a new way of thinking—a new epistemology. Step 2 does exactly that through the recognition that we are part, but only part, of a Power greater than ourselves, a Power that is sane and healthy, a system in which mind and matter, humans and environment, are not opposed. In Bateson’s terms, this is recognition of cybernetic thinking. He writes:
“The self is but a small part of a much larger trial-and-error system which does the thinking, acting, deciding.”
The realization that we are merely part of a naturally evolving and ecological world is truly a humbling experience for those of us raised in the traditions of The Enlightenment and Modern beliefs which stress the power, rationality, and individuality of humans and humanity.
The next step toward sanity may be as difficult as the acknowledgement of our addiction that only comes after “hitting bottom.” To surrender to this new way of thinking—in the words of AA, making “a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understand him”—is for most modern Americans, seen as a great threat to our current ways of life. But viewed in the context in which every technological triumph disrupts some ecological or evolutionary relationship, often in startling and precipitous ways, one catches glimpses of disasters far more threatening than alterations of our current life styles. Continued human survival in ecologic and evolutionary terms surely rests outside our own control; our technological addictions only precipitate the disturbance of the many interrelated natural systems of which we are but a small part. Steps 2 and 3 of AA underlie the new epistemology with the conviction that we are merely “part of” something much greater than ourselves. I like to call the ‘Power greater than myself’: Gaia.
If we accept this new fundamental perspective, we can actively and honestly become part of it by physically acknowledging, and wherever possible rectifying, the wrongs we have done in the past. This is the essence of the next seven steps of AA. (See below) Step 11, a call to prayer and meditation, reaffirms our humility as part of an unimaginably larger system (“God, as we understand him” or as I prefer, Gaia.)
The Twelfth Step urges carrying the new way of thinking to other addicts who want to overcome their addiction. Maybe that is what I am doing: proposing that we apply the ways of thinking of AA to our relationship within our environment. I believe that we need to acknowledge that our behavior is addictive and destructive and cannot be overcome by continuing to view the world as we now do—we must “hit bottom.” We need to accept that humans are merely part of a larger system—a slowly evolving ecosystem or Gaia within which lies our continued health and sanity. We then need to inventory the world and what we have done within it in the light of that new perspective, humbly and honestly seeking help and trying to make amends for what we have done wrong. And we need to commune with that Force or Power or God or Gaia of which we are but a small part through prayer or meditation.
Let me repeat Gregory Bateson’s concluding paragraph of forty years ago:
“It is [***] asserted that the nonalcoholic world has many lessons which it might learn from the epistemology of systems theory and from the ways of AA. If we continue to operate in terms of a Cartesian dualism of mind versus matter, we shall probably also continue to see the world in terms of God versus man; elite versus people; chosen race versus others; nation versus nation; and man versus environment. It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this strange way of looking at its world can endure.”
As with the AA tradition, we addicts might remain anonymous—not to protect us from the displeasures and antagonisms of society, but to remind us to place principle before personality.
“Hello. My name is Al. I’m addicted to exploiting the environment. ***.
THE TWELVE STEPS OF ENVIRONMENTALISTS ANONYMOUS
We:
1. Admitted we were powerless over our exploitation of the environment–that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that we are but a small part of the evolutionary and ecological systems (Gaia) within which we may be restored to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Gaia.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to Gaia, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have Gaia remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Gaia to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of the environmental and ecological systems we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such systems wherever possible, except when to do so would further injure them or innocent persons.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with Gaia, praying only for knowledge of Her will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to others addicted to exploiting the environment, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Endnotes
- See especially the introductory section of (Sauer 1952) See also (Thomas 1956), which was the result of a conference organized by Lewis Mumford, Marston Bates, and Carl Sauer. ↑
- Among the many works of (Mumford 1934) ↑
- (Glacken 1967) ↑
- . The relevant diagram is listed at the beginning of each sub-section. ↑
- . “Material” refers simply to “being of a physical nature; relating to or concerned with physical rather than spiritual or intellectual things.” Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, (Springfield: G. & C. Merriam Co., 1975). I have deliberately chosen to use the word “ethereal” rather than “spiritual”. Although both words have the specific modern meaning of lacking material substance, I prefer “ethereal”, which derives from a Greek root meaning “ignite” or “blaze,” whereas “spiritual” derives from a Latin word meaning “to breathe.” It is the sense of flaring up or transformation that I prefer rather than the idea of the steady, continuing process of breathing that appeals to me. My choice is also inspired by Lewis Mumford, who uses the terms “etherealization” and “materialization” in The Pentagon of Power, 421-433, and as the underlying theme of Technics and Human Development: Vol. 1 of The Myth of the Machine, 1967).\ ↑
- . (Cobb 1977) ↑
- . See (Pankow 1976) He writes:”To the extent that science becomes tautological without knowing it and therefore insists on its claim to explain the outer world, it will try to transform the outer world according to its own image and in this way, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Its successes are then no longer successes in explaining an observed world, but successes in transforming an unobserved world into the preestablished form of scientific inquiry.” pp. 25-26.
You may prefer to view nature as ultimately orderly, but whose order we have not yet discovered. In either case–a discovered or imposed order–Nature exists but is bewildering until humans consciously relate to it. ↑
- . (Glacken 1967) pp.203-205. ↑
- . (Nash 1982) ↑
- . (Zimmerman 1951) He writes: “One can envisage [man] submerged in an ocean of `neutral stuff,’ i.e., matter, energy, conditions relationships, etc., of which he is unaware and which affect him neither favorably nor unfavorably.” p.8. In a footnote he attributes an awareness of this philosophic language to his colleague, David L. Miller. ↑
- . Every reproducible or communicable idea must be orderly; otherwise it could not be transmitted without drastically changing its meaning or symbolic value. With a changed meaning the old thought becomes something new and thus part of a different order. ↑
- . Kosmic order, the unity of all emptiness and form, may be experienced by some members of all cultures through transitory ‘peak experiences’, mystical or drug-induced; or through trained practices such as meditation or deep concentration. (Wilber 2007) ↑
- You may wonder why I use the concept of a human ecosystem when it is so radically different from the systems concept used by many biologists. I use this fundamental concept because it is the best way I know of looking at humans as part of their environment, but with the idea of environment seen as including nature, culture, and an individual understanding of the world. And I am particularly concerned with the increasing impact of humans on natural systems. ↑
- . (Tuan 1977) Tuan discusses the meaning of “experience” of nature. 29-31. See also (G. Lakoff 1987) ↑
- . (Northrup 1956) p.1055. ↑
- . The range of what may be observed has been enormously expanded by the technological devices that have been invented over the centuries. ↑
- . (Johnson 1987) shows how bodily experiences become the basis of metaphorical thought. ↑
- (G. a. Lakoff 1980) George Lakoff and Mark Johnson elaborate on the process by which conceptual systems are acquired by individuals through the gaining of metaphorical structuring of experience. ↑
- . (Mumford, The Pentagon of Power 1974) 421-433 and the underlying theme of Technics and Human Development. ↑
- . (Cobb 1977) ↑
- . (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary 1975) ↑
- . (Mumford, The Pentagon of Power 1974)421-433, in his discussion of etherealization and materialization more specifically writes of the process of dematerialization and the emergence of new ideas. The words he uses for the stages of materialization of the new ideas are dreams, apparitions, images, idée’s-forces, incarnations, incorporations, and finally, embodiments. Etherealization would be all stages of the process except the last embodiments. Dematerialization is the opposite of this process and may open the state for etherealization. ↑
- . (Shils 1981) ↑
- . (Langer 1967) pp.87 and 241. . . . “An artifact as such is merely a combination of material parts, or a modification of a natural object to suit human purposes. It is not a creation, but an arrangement of given factors. A work of art, on the other hand, is more than an “arrangement” of given things–even qualitative things. Something emerges from the arrangement of tones or colors, which was not there before, and this, rather than the arranged material, is the symbol of sentience.“ The making of this expressive form is the creative process that enlists a man’s utmost technical skill in the service of his utmost conceptual power, imagination. Not the invention of new original turns, nor the adoption of novel themes, merits the word “creative,’ but the making of any work symbolic of feeling, even in the most canonical context and manner.” ↑
- . (G. Bateson 1979) p 99. ↑
- . (G. Lakoff 1987) ↑
- . (Bowers 1987) p 11. ↑
- . The diagram which appears in The Global 2000 Report to the President of the United States, Vol. 1: The Summary Report, (New York, Oxford, Toronto, Sydney, Paris, Frankfurt: The Pergamon Press, 1980), 206, is particularly striking in showing that in 1976 over 40,000 pounds of new materials were consumed by each American. ↑
- . The negative categories themselves as well as the material transformations that are recognized as pollution or other “Bads” are now increasingly becoming recognized as a concomitant of the “goods” which have resulted from the applications of scientific values and technologies. ↑
- . (Shils 1981) p 50. ↑
- . (Shils 1981) pp 63-77. ↑
- . (G. a. Bateson 1987) pp 18-19. ↑
- . (H. T. Odum, Systems Ecology 1983) pp182-183. ↑
- (Foucault 1972) p 217 Michel Foucault, writes of:1. Rules of exclusion in discourse which include a.) what is prohibited, b.) what is reasonable and what is folly, c.) what is acceptable as true and false.
2. Internal rules of discourse which include a.) Commentary in which identity comes in the form of repetition and sameness, b.) authorship where identity takes the form of individuality and the “I“, and c.) disciplines which legitimize; and
3. Rules of employment or conditions of use which include a.) the rituals of religion, jurisprudence, therapy, and politics, b.) a `fellowship of discourse‘, c.) doctrine, and d.) social approbation.
Foucault writes that in the “West”, discourse has mainly appeared as simply the interjection between thought and words. Foucault believed that we must also recognize 1. a principle of reversal–the negative aspects of exclusion; 2. a principle of discontinuity–the absence of the unsaid or unthought; 3. a principle of specificity in which we impose upon nature; and 4. a principle of exteriority, in which we look to the conditions of discourse itself, and not burrow to its hidden core. These regulatory principles are opposed to traditional views of the history of ideas. ↑
- . For an extended philosophical discussion of event see Alfred North Whitehead, Concept of Nature, pp 185-197. His ideas are refined and elaborated in Process and Reality, an Essay in Cosmology, which Whitehead presented at The University of Edinburgh as The Gifford Lectures in 1927-28. It was republished in a (Corrected Edition edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne) New York, London: The Free Press, 1978.) ↑
- . (Websters Unabridged Dictionary 1961) (G. & C. Merriam Company, 1975), state that an event is “the fundamental entity of observed physical reality represented by a point designated by three coordinates of place and one of time in the space-time continuum postulated by the theory of relativity.” ↑
- . (Pankow 1976) See footnote 7 supra. This distinction may be the same as Karl Popper (Pankow 1976) makes between World 1 and World 2. The distinction may also be reconsidered in attempts to conciliate the philosophy of quantum physics with that of ecology. ↑
- (C. Alexander, The Pattern Language 1978) ↑
- . (Alexander 1979) ↑
- . (Gregory 1985) ↑
- . (Lovelock 1979) ↑
- . (Davies 1988) ↑
- As an adult, I took the Strong-Campbell Inventory that compares some 365 answers with those of people in over ninety occupations. My interests were most similar to occupations associated with music, writing, art, teaching, and nature, but only average or low when compared with other occupations. ↑
- (H. W. Van Loon 1921) (H. W. Van Loon 1932) ↑
- My training in the theory of radio technology and the practice of building radio equipment became largely irrelevant because vacuum tube radios were almost immediately replaced by those with transistors. Further, television became the frontier of transmission technology. ↑
- Mrs. Combellack taught at Oregon State because nepotism rules did not allow her to do so at the University of Oregon where her husband was a professor of classics. She had received a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and was better qualified than many of her male colleagues who, unlike her, were given full time positions at a higher rank. This was my first lesson in gender discrimination in academia. ↑
- We all received bachelors and masters degrees at UC, Berkeley. David Perry and I received doctorates there and subsequently taught at universities. Malcolm Putnam became a labor negotiator. ↑
- $500 in 1951. ↑
- I also bought a book of poetry, The Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman, that Mrs. Combellack had used in her literature class. It was my first introduction to poetry. And I bought Bartholomew’s Advanced Atlas of Modern Geography, Edition of 1950, which I still use on a regular basis. ↑
- Four other fellow students in my undergraduate geography classes went on to become chairmen of departments of geography in American universities: William Denevan, Donald Vermeer, Richard Nuysten ↑
- It and its neighbors have long been torn down as the University residential dorms moved into the neighborhood. ↑
- (Sauer 1952) ↑
- The views of William Morris Davis prevailed at the time. ↑
- (A. W. Urquhart, The Landforms of the Cockpit Country and its Borderlands, Jamaica 1958) ↑
- Ward and Tom became lovers and lived together until Ward left Berkeley for a teaching position at the University of Minnesota. Elinore, Beth, Tom, Ward and I became good friends and later more closely linked. Beth and I married in June 1958; Elinore married Ward in 1959. They later divorced. Tom married another long-time graduate student, Marsha McLean and taught at Hayward State, California. John Beattie married Susan, a student he met at Berkeley before they left for Cambridge University, where John completed a PhD in English History. They then moved to Toronto, where John taught until his retirement. David Harris married Helen, his English girl friend, finished his PhD in Geography at Berkeley, and began a distinguished career at University College, London, later as the director of the Institute of Archaeology. David Fox never married and had a long teaching career at the University of Manchester. Yi-Fu Tuan has become one of America’s most thoughtful writers, retiring from the University of Wisconsin after teaching in New Mexico, Toronto, and the University of Minnesota. His many books and essays display his unique humanistic interests and scholarship. After Ward and Elinore Barrett divorced, Elinore completed her PhD and accepted a position on the faculty of the University of New Mexico. She has recently completed several studies of the New Mexican pueblos and their relationships with the Spanish conquerors. ↑
- (Jessen 1936) (King 1951) ↑
- See my monograph, (Urquhart, Patterns of Settlement in Southwestern Angola, 1963) for the results of this study. ↑
- In 2011, with over 30,000 students, it is the second largest university in Africa, only exceeded in size by Cairo University. Dr. Audu, the Vice-Chancellor (the executive officer of the University) was a Christian pediatrician, from a small ethnic group and who was born just outside the walled city of Zaria and educated in Ibadan, Nigeria, Britain, and the United States. He later became the Nigerian minister for external affairs and its representative at the United Nations. Following a military coup, Dr. Audu was exiled only later returning to Zaria to run a medical clinic. ↑
- (A. W. Urquhart, Planned Urban Landscapes of Northern Nigeria 1977) ↑
- (Urquhart, Morphology of Zaria 1970)See my monograph (footnote 59) and the Occasional Paper Number 4, Department of Geography entitled Zaria and Its Region edited by Michael Mortimore 1970, for a description of the vegetation, soils, agriculture, markets, geology and history of the region. ↑
- See my article on the Origins and diffusion of Scientific organization. (Urquhart, Diffusion of Scientific Societies 1985) ↑
- (C. M. Alexander 1975) ↑
- The Gibsons were teachers in Zaria when I was at ABU. ↑
- Fusch, Towle, Klee, Williams, Malarky, Preston, Hilden; Spyrou, Reynolds, McConnell, Eagan, Sharrod, Wilson, Grassetti, Mehnert, Adams and on the committee of others ↑
- Dominic Vetri and Jack Powers ↑
- I chaired 16 PhD committees while at the University of Oregon: David Smith, Richard Fusch, Gary Klee, Jerry Williams, Deidre Malarky, William Preston, Clark Hilden, Susan Pommering, Henry Lawrence, Hershal Stern, Morris Uebelacher, Barbara Craig, Elizabeth Keeler, Gary Cummisk, and Lincoln DeBunce. In addition I chaired 20 Masters committees in Geography: Archie Mboghu, Michael Spirou, Wesley Reynolds, Millard Burr, Gregory McConnell, Eugene Organ, Sally Sharrard, Jeffrey Wilson, Paul Mehnert, Rodger Adams, Karen Yoerger, Elizabeth Keeler, Tawfiq Tabib, Richard Grassetti, Joseph Eagan, Richard Duerr, Sally Butler, Timothy McGrath, Eric Ewert, and Cindy Mendoza. I was on the Masters Committee of 11 students of Environmental Studies: Greg Ringer, Billy Sullivan, Sean Demerith, Mike Medlar, James Stickler, Todd Everts, Diane Albino, Kate Joost, Mike Schut, Suzanne Twight-Alexander, and Stefan Bjarnason. ↑
- Anastasio was given legal status (a green card) by the amnesty program created under the Reagan administration. He became a full United States citizen while in Eugene. ↑
- Stan Cook, Norman DeLue, Ray Mitchell, and Dale Kramer ↑
- SUNA ↑
- See my Landscape Change in South Eugene, Oregon; 2010; Blurb. This was my first experience at self publication. ↑
- The 1951 article in Time Magazine labeled those born between 1925 and 1945, ‘The Silent Generation’. In 1970 a Time article, people in their 30s (born between 1930 and 1940) were called the ‘Silent Generation’. See the entry, ‘Silent Generation’, in Wikipedia. No one of my generation has been elected President of the United States. Presidents G.H.W. Bush and Jimmie Carter were born in 1924 and Presidents G. W. Bush and Bill Clinton were born in 1946. They were either part of the Great Generation or the Boomer generation. The nearly 22 years that separate their births is greater than that of any other two presidential birth years in American history. ↑
- Morse finally became a Democrat in 1955. He later was one of only two senators who opposed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that gave Congress’s approval to enter the Viet Nam War. ↑
- Both of Oregon’s US senators were opposed to the Viet Nam War. Morse, the Democrat, even joined in support of the election of Mark Hatfield, a Republican because of his opposition to the war. ↑
- To single out individuals who have most directly influenced me besides my parents, I include my aunt, Esther Cox Todd, who was my piano teacher; Henry Matsen who gave me jobs throughout my teen age years; Rose Combellack, my English teacher at Oregon State college, who advised me to go to UC Berkeley; my University of California professors, John Kesseli, Carl Sauer, James Parsons, and Frank Harradine; my fellow students Elinore Barrett, John Beattie, David Harris, and Ward Barrett; my wife, Elizabeth Rodman Urquhart; my daughters, Sarah and Helen; my mate and lover, Michael Shellenbarger; my colleagues, Everett Smith, Clyde Patton, Edward Price, Dan Goldrich, and Stanton Cook; and University of Oregon graduate students, William Preston, Morris Uebelacher, and Charles Martinson. ↑
- (Schmookler 1984) ↑
- (Bacon 1915) ↑
- (Urquhart, Diffusion of Scientific Societies 1985) ↑
- (Mumford, The Story of Utopias 1922) ↑
- (Mumford, The Story of Utopias 1922) ↑
- (McKibben 1989) ↑
- (Marsh 1965) ↑
- When I first started teaching ‘environmentally’ related classes only a handful of ‘environmental’ books could be found on the shelves in bookstores and libraries. Today whole sections of bookstores are devoted to ‘environmental’ books. ↑
- I leave to C.A. Bowers in his extensive writings the devaluing and destruction of the “cultural commons. ↑
- (Mumford, The Myth of the Machine Vol.1 1967) ↑
- At the beginning of the Christian era the world’s population was a mere 150 to 200 million. ↑
- My great, great, great, great grandfather, John was born in 1739 when the world’s population was approximately 650 million—equal to the total amount of increase in the world’s population in the nine years before the beginning of 2012. In 1800 the population of North America was about 7 million. In 2010 it was 351 million, a 50 fold increase. ↑
- (Cressey 1955) ↑
- (Barney 1980) ↑
- ( Mineral Information Institute 2011) ↑
- (Meyer 1990) ↑
- (Turner 1990) ↑
- (Dodds 2008) ↑
- (Chefurka 2012) (Sundquist 2012) ↑
- (Wali 1999) ↑
- A summary of many of the changes may be found in ↑
- (H. T. Odum, Systems Ecology 1983) and http://www.emergysystems.org ↑
- ( Global Footprint Network 2012) ↑
- The ‘m’ in emergy replaces the “n” in energy and stands for memory. He measures emergy in terms of solar energy: solar emcalories or solar emjoules. ↑
- (H. T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-First Century, The Hierarch of Energy 2007)p 69 first appearing in (H. T. Odum, Environment, Power and Society 1971) ↑
- (H. T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-First Century, The Hierarch of Energy 2007)p 73 ↑
- (H. T. Odum, Environmental Accounting, Emergy and Decision Making 1996) p.60 ↑
- (H. T. Odum, Energy Basis for Man and Nature 1982)p 262 ↑
- ( Global Footprint Network 2012)http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/glossary/ ↑
- http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/glossary/ ↑
- http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/glossary/ ↑
- http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/glossary/ ↑
- http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/frequently_asked_technical_questions/#gen3In 2007 the equivalence measures were as follows (Global hectares/hectares): Cropland and Built up Areas—2.51; Forest land—1.26; Grazing land—0.46; and Marine and Inland waters—0.37. 1.00 being the global average of productive land and Cropland being 2.51 times more productive than the global average for all categories. Deserts, glaciers and….. are not counted as productive lands ↑
- http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/application_standards/ ↑
- http://www.footprintnetwork.org/images/uploads/Ecological_Footprint_Atlas_2010.pdf ↑
- http://www.stockholmresilience.org ↑
- http://www.millenniumassessment.org ↑
- http://www.bipindicators.net ↑
- http://www.worldwatch.org/ ↑
- http://www.emergysystems.org ↑
- http://wwf.panda.org Especially note the 2012 Living Planet Report. ↑
- (Hubbert 1949) ↑
- (Ehrlich 1968) ↑
- (Miles 1976) ↑
- (Georgescu-Rogen 1977) ↑
- (Cook 1976) ↑
- (Meadows 1972)http://wvoutpost.com/2012/04/05/mit-researchers-predict-global-economic-collapse-by-2030/ ↑
- http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/climate_carbon_energy/energy_solutions/renewable_energy/sustainable_energy_report/ ↑
- (Robinson 2001)pp.46-48 ↑
- (Heinberg 2010) ↑
- (Robinson 2001) ↑
- (Earth Charter Initiative 2012) ↑
- (H. T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-First Century, The Hierarch of Energy 2007)pp 289,291 and (H. T. Odum, A Prosperous Way Down, Principles and Policies 2001) ↑
- (Wackernagel 1997)This article is the best discussion of the difficulties in changing to sustainability or reducing the global ecological footprint to match the biocapacity of the Earth. For me it forms the bases for my pessimism about reform in my lifetime. My discussion paraphrases Wackernagels and Rees’ outline. ↑
- (Chefurka 2012) /50000_Foot_View.html ↑
- ( Mineral Information Institute 2011) ↑
- ( Global Footprint Network 2012) personal ecological footprint ↑
- (Odum 1996) calculated the emergy and solar transformity of each hierarchical level of education attained in human growth and development in the United States. (fig.12.5). The transformity of a highly educated person is extraordinarily great. ↑
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