Growing up in Portland, Oregon
I grew up in Portland, Oregon, during the Great Depression, My family always had food on the table and a roof over our heads even as my father was without steady employment. In some ways, Oregon was still a frontier. The forest of the nearby Cascade Mountains were clothed with old-growth forests. Stump farms were still to be found. Salmon, trout, and Dungeness crabs were abundant in streams and ocean. The New Deal unleashed the technology that resulted in Bonneville Dam and the electrification of the Columbia River Basin. Communications by telephone and radio became common. I majored in “technical radio” in high school. By the time I had finished high school in 1949, new goods and services were widely available. I was fully acculturated to the modern world of growth and progress while nature was still abundant.
College and University: Corvallis and Berkeley
I went to Oregon State College to learn information, facts, and traditional subjects–math, chemistry, physics, science, and a scattering of liberal arts. Classes were taught in a mechanical way, often directly out of text books. They were boring. Looking for advice, my English instructor, Rose Combellack, suggested that I might find the University of California, Berkeley, more to my liking. I did. Its Department of Geography, chaired by Carl Sauer, and a faculty of extraordinarily breadth opened my eyes to ideas completely new to me. John Leighly was a climatologist who had also studied the history of urban landscapes. John Kesseli was a German speaking Swiss whose detailed geomorphological field work was complemented by grand-scale theory. James Parsons, employed originally as a journalist, was a marvelous observer in wherever.; Erhard Rostlund, a Swede who read prolifically, was an dedicated and enthusiastic teacher and who he introduced me to Aldo Leopold’s new book and to H. Hugh Bennett’s tome on soil and agriculture in the United States. As a graduate student, I learned patience in scholarship from Clarence Glacken , whose studies in the history of environmental ideas remain unmatched.
Professor Sauer told the most marvelous stories of the history of land use both in the United States and Latin America. He read widely in geology, biology, anthropology, archaeology, and history. He introduced me to major writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially as their thoughts related to the ways humans interacted with land. He suggested the latest books by thinkers with non-conformist ideas. He questioned the popular ideas such as development, growth, progress, and the role of reductionist science. He urged us to take courses in ecology, geomorphology, soils, social history, rural sociology, as well as history of the areas we found interesting. Geographic field work and asking questions of locals with few preconceived ideas was encouraged. I learned to think of his teaching that geography was the meeting place of cultural and natural history.
To be thrown into this world of ideas by excellent teachers, writers, and thinkers set me off on a wonderful career. I haven’t had time to follow up on many of the ideas to which they introduce me. Unfinished papers and thoughts still live in my mind and filing cabinet. My field work in Jamaica and Angola in preparing my Masters thesis and PhD dissertation let me observe directly my professors’ ideas in the real world outside the modern worldviews of American and Western societies.
University of Oregon and Environmental Studies
At the University of Oregon I specialized in cultural geography teaching courses on geographic patterns of diffusion of major patterns economic activities and classes concerned with geographic landscapes. After two years teaching cultural geography and studying landscapes of Northern Nigerian cities, I returned in 1971, to a society that I no longer recognized. The political and social unrest of those years made me realize that my teaching needed to be revised to emphasize the importance of the disruptive ways in which humans were treating the Earth. I needed to expand the ideas of my Berkeley education.
I developed three new courses: 1. the ways that people altered their landscapes in ways consistent with their cultural views; 2) the ways in which people had negatively altered their landscapes; and 3) the history of environmental thought. I was also inspired by the fervent that Rachel Carson, the Club of Rome report, and for me in particular, the broad-scale ways in which Howard Odum had applied the ideas of energy to ecology.
With the support of my colleagues in the Department of Geography; Dan Goldrich, a political scientist; Stan Cook, an ecologist; Chet Bowers, an innovative philosopher of education; Glen Love, who specialized in nature writing; Dick Gale, an environmental sociologist; John Bonine and Mike Axline, both professors of environmental law; and later, John Baldwin, an ecologist in the Department of Planning, we organized an Environmental Studies program. By 1980 we had developed a Masters program that immediately attracted over 300 applicants of whom only ten were selected. All of the students had had non-academic experiences that they brought to the program. Each developed a unique course program with at least three mentors. My involvement with that program as director and mentor was the highlight of my academic career.
By the time I retired from the university in 1994, I was firmly convinced of the imminence of the collapse of society as we knew it. Since that time, I have tried to understand more clearly the role of energy in its ecological context. I have also been concerned with the ways in which humans in small communities and individually can survive. I continue to look at the ways landscapes reflect the history and beliefs of their occupants.
I have assembled some of my writings in this blog. The posts on environment look at the driving forces behind the imminence of the collapse of modern civilization and how we got here. The posts on landscape are quick shots at places I have been; and the posts on art and artifacts are thoughts on folk art and art in my collection.