Out of Town!

I'm heading up to the Russian River, where fellow Compactors John and Rob have a place that I'm lucky to utilize. Going with me are my bike, computer, and some reading. I can't wait to get the hell out of the city for a few days. I'm going to visit 3 state parks: Armstrong Woods, Sonoma Coast State Beach, and the Austin Creek State Recreation Area. Redwoods, the Pacific, and hopefully some swimming, woohoo! I'll do some reading for my project as well. But not much else. No internet, no cell phone service, but more open space to enjoy.

How amazing

is my new poster?

I got this today from a retiring teacher, who was having a garage sale on Guerrero St. The poster was part of a water conservation series created by East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) in 1976. The poster encourages the gardening of California native plants over other species because local flora are drought tolerant, requiring zero to very little water in the summer. On the back each species is listed. I wish I could hang up both sides at once.

Corporate agribusiness and the governator are resurrecting plans for the Peripheral Canal, which could be as wide and long as the Panama Canal! Given my new poster and these developments, it must be the 70's ... not that I was alive then. And yet, water history of California is clear: This is a dry state with rampant development. We've had the same water problems for decades. Right now, powerful agribusiness is gearing up for a huge fight over water. Cynically framing the debate as "fish vs people" these moneyed players have hired powerful PR firms, including one that has worked for AIG and Blackwater, as documented here.

My own cousin recently sent around a conservative rant against a bunch of things, including the use of water for fish in California. Given my study of California water resources and actual experiences with it, I felt it necessary to offer my Missouri cousin some resources on the issue. Missouri is humid with annual precipitation around 800mm. Until you spend a year plus in an arid or semi-arid climate, you probably can't imagine going 6-9 months without a single rain, but it happens here. Funnily, London, perceived as super wet, only gets about 580mm/year. Georgia ~ 1200mm/yr. Los Angeles County ~ 380mm of rain per year ... and 10 million people.

Three years of lower than average rainfall have renewed calls for the Peripheral Canal, new dams, and allowing fish to perish in the failing Bay-Delta. It's worth noting that rainfall estimates come in averages, whereas nature fluctuates in the distribution of its bounty. In other words, low rainfall should not be unexpected! We've developed the West based on poor estimates, literally alotting more water than exists. Take the Colorado River Compact, in which we declared that states in the Upper Basin (CO, UT, WY, NM) would receive 7.5 million acre-feet per year and states in the Lower Basin (CA, AZ, NV) would also get 7.5 million acre-feet. Oh, and according to an international treaty, Mexico will get 1.5 million acre feet. That's a total of 15.5 maf. But research shows that the Colorado River offers about 13 million acre-feet per year. Similarly, this canal is currently proposed as being bigger than the amount of water that can possibly be diverted from it!

Corporate agribusiness and our fanciful politicians need to turn off Second Life and rejoin the rest of us in this arid reality. Much of California is dry, very dry. Upping supply will only delay needed conservation measures. It's time to renegotiate antiquated water contracts. It's time to make it financially sensible for agribusiness to modernize irrigation systems rather than waste it, producing field fallowing salt in the process.


In some counties, individual houses pay more per gallon than agriculture for water. If we're going to subsidize water to the extent which we currently do in California, let's subsidize modernization of irrigation systems. Every sector of the economy is troubled at the moment. I'll worry about agriculture more than the rest when I can go into the Valley midday and not see spray head irrigation throwing our precious water into the parched air for evaporation. I'll feel sorry for agribusiness when I stop finding perfect food in skips. And I'll begin to forgive policy and profit makers when I'm damn sure that the SFBay Delta will not go the same way as the Aral Sea (image below) or the Colorado River Delta.

New Freeshop in London

A building on (non) Commercial Road was recently squatted to provide a space for London Free School's weekend of classes on housing and practical squatting. The space has been retained for the purposes of providing a free shop. If you're in London, check it!

Here's the announcement from the crew.

"Non commercial House is a building that has been occupied originally for
the London FreeSchool Weekender on squatting, housing and gentrification
http://londonfreeschool.wordpress.com/

We kept the building, with the project of doing a Giant FreeShop!

The Grand opening of Non Commercial House will be taking place tomorrow,
the 5th July. The freeshop will open at midday and we will be having food
/ film from 5:30pm...

Bring items you no longer require that are clogging up your home. Take
stuff you need that someone else has abandoned. Come along to get help
fixing your bicycle or just for the food / film...

We live in a society of over consumption and waste. Non Commercial House
aims to offer an alternative based upon cooperation, mutual respect and
sustainable living. It is not only about objects but about sharing! We
hope to have various workshops and discussions taking place over the
coming weeks.

Children are very welcome within the space.. we are hoping to have a kids
section of the free shop with free toys / clothes and hold family friendly
events.

During the events, the space is drug-free, including alcohol and smoke.
There is a yard available for the smokers.

The ground floor is wheelchair accessible. However, the only toilet in the
building is on the top floor and not.

Items can be dropped off anytime; knock on the door or leave them out front.

This is a non-profit, non-hierarchical space open to all and your input is
valued so drop by some time to get involved and let us know what your
ideas / thoughts are.

We hope to see you soon!

Non Commercial House
161 Commercial Street, LONDON"

Lake Merced

I finished up my vegetation sampling at Lake Merced on Wednesday. Perhaps I should say that I finished the fieldwork portion of the sampling: I still have some outstanding grasses from Twin Peaks to identify. I also have to go back to Bayview, Twin Peaks, and Glen Canyon to do some additional mapping with the dinosaur GPS. Again, I'm writing this post as my ArcGIS images load, however I hope to rectify that problem today by clipping the giant aerial photographs!

Of course it's gorgeously sunny out. Today is the Really Really Free Market in Dolores Park, where there will be thousands of people gathering for the Dyke March as well. I'm gonna have to go later.

Right now my mind is on Lake Merced, where I spent a week in the narrow margins between the roadway and the shoreline. If you look at the photo, you can see that roads hug the lake, leaving about 50 meters of dense scrub to the water edge in most spots. Larger areas are utilized for Harding Golf Course (obvious in the upper right part of the top image) and a shooting range on the west shore in the whitest area. It's difficult for me to say which of these exclusive, expensive visitor uses I despise more. The golf course takes up more space and required an 18 million dollar fiscal input a few years back, but the shooting range is an audible nusiance regardless of where you are on the lake. Both contribute toxins to the lake water and surrounding habitat, as if this heavily impacted refuge for birds needs more challenges after decades of manipulation and pollution.

I digress. There are lengths of narrow strips of habitat at Lake Merced, and some wider bits as well. The steep lake walls now support vegetation following drastic reductions in water levels. Like much of SF, the soil is sand, particularly on these dried out lake walls. Thus getting down to the willow stands often involved a lot of sliding. Getting back to the top, flat areas of the park can be like climbing sand dunes with slopes up to 38 degrees, dotted with poison oak in some locations. Most people don't go into these areas, which is great for the birds who call the lake home for all or part of the year. Dense stands of scrub, dominated by willow or coyote bush, provide excellent nesting habitat for scores of avian species.

I mentioned the cormorant rookery in a previous post, which is found not in the scrub but in a stand of invasive eucalyptus trees. It's an amazing sight to enjoy in a city. I counted 26 adult cormorants and two herons in this stand on Wednesday. In this pic you can see a heron flying away, several adult cormorants and their nests. The herons seemed a bit off, I don't understand why they were kicking it with the cormorants, often displaying their wings and generally distressing the cormorants. Maybe they eat baby birds or eggs. I dunno. Maybe I was misinterpreting the whole thing.

I was a bit surprised by the results of my research at Lake Merced. Overall floral diversity is low in willow scrub. I knew that. I saw that in Glen Canyon. But it's really low at Lake Merced. I suppose part of that is because the willows have moved so much with shifting lake levels. Very low floral diversity, but very high avian diversity. So many variables. Urban habitat is confounding. I'm worried about writing up this research. For now I'm going to tinker with some maps.

Notes on Skipping

I've gotten some questions about skipping (the British term for dumpster diving) so I thought I'd put some thoughts out there.

Lots of people skip, many of them skip way more than I do. In London I really only skipped food and some materials to set up my room initially. My friends skipped furniture, wood for bonfires, household things for new squats, and food, of course. We had one friend who would leave at night with the bike trailer and return it full of fancy things from Wasterose. After holidays we'd have way too much ornamental chocolate.

Some people cringe when you say that you skip food. Some really freak out, which is really silly. There's a big difference between marketable and edible food. When you go into a grocery store, do you buy bruised apples? Of course not! There are 200 apples in front of you and you're paying for it, so you sort until you find a perfect apple. I do the same if I'm buying produce. A lot of what I skip is is entirely edible, but some blemish makes it unlikely to sell. A lot of the rest is stuff that seems to have accidentally fallen into the skip! Eventually you get used to seeing perfect food in bins and the exasperation fades. But I've had about 50 conversations, post skipping, that started with, "What is wrong with this potato?"

Ok, so that's produce. Then there's packaged food. Note that many items have 2 dates on them. One is sell by, the other is use by. I mostly stopped eating animal products when I returned to California because we have such great food. (Ok, I mess up sometimes, like Monday night when I blindly took a slice of frittata at a big dinner. Geeze). But I will eat skipped dairy. If I find yogurt that is being tossed on it's sell by date, then I'll take it home and enjoy it over the next two days. Whole eggs in bins make me really sad. Often a carton or flat is tossed because a few broke and got the container a bit gross, but the others are edible. Consider that a grocery store doesn't have extra cartons on hand to re-package the useable food.

For food, I have my preferences for skipping. In London I rounded up the stuff on the street after weekend vegetable markets. I cleaned up after produce stands during the week on my way home from uni or the Library House. In SF ... well, I like some nice produce spots that shall remain nameless. Some folks are way into grocery stores, of course. Slightly torn packages can land you with 5 lbs of rice, sugar, flour, or perfectly edible cookies. I hit a few grocery store skips every now and then but they're not my favorite. In SF I'm more likely to plow through green bins in search of vegetables.

Our culture of perfection has created a shitload of waste (and weird genetic modifications of food). Our culture of lawsuits and liabilities, and lack of common sense has delivered a lot of waste. In the spirit of the latter, I should say that skipping requires common sense. Grocery stores can be quite territorial about their trash, so be careful. Respect that other people are using these sources of food: Don't make a mess! Don't take more than you can use or distribute. Clean your food. If it needs to be cooked, then be thorough about that. I don't eat meat, ever.

If skipping seems too weird, maybe you can ask your local (as in small business) grocery store about their waste. My local shop used to let me go into the back and go through the produce that they were tossing. I still had to claw through the green bin, but it was inside and during the daytime, which might make some folks more comfortable. Local bread makers often give away their extras at the end of the day as well. Check around. Folks who love creating food or nourishing their communities don't like to see waste either. Often their hands are tied by bureacratic bullshit that prevents them from redistributing their goods en masse when they've moved past marketability. But on an individual basis I've found some shops quite reasonable.

A few weeks ago I was going through the green bins at a local shop when the manager, who I've known in the neighborhood for at least 5 years, came out. He said hello and went about his work. He probably had good faith that I wouldn't make a mess, and he knows that I still spend money in there, even if I look for free food as well.

Finally, don't let anyone make you feel like a criminal for skipping. The injustice is in the waste.

And in all the other crazy shit that feeds us:

Land Conversion
Water Diversion, Pollution, Theft
Habitat Loss
Animal Cruelty
Pesticides
Fucked Up Working Conditions and Wages
Oil
Distribution Inequalities
Worldwide Grain Prices
Genetic Modifications
Family Farm Destruction
Wasteful Subsidies

Crazy Crustacean

Today I was flushed out of the willows on the south side of Lake Merced by this mad crustacean. It scared the crap out of me, which is slightly pathetic given its size. But it just kept coming like a zombie. I was banging into willows trying to get out of the stand before it ... I dunno, tried to pinch my giant boot or something.

Anyone know what this thing is? Seen on the edge of a freshwater lake in San Francisco, about 1/2 mile or so from the beach at 3pm. As you can see, it has a black body and red legs. (If you click the pic it will get bigger.) It's aggressive attitude may not be apparent but this critter is not shy.

I also saw hummingbirds, double crested cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus), ducks, baby ducks, coots, damselflies, and marsh wrens. And pigeons and sea gulls. And lots of Salix (willow) and Rubus (blackberry). And mosquitos in droves.

Science and Wanting Again

I'm writing this post as my Mac loads giant aerial photographs into a remotely run Windows machine that allows me access to ArcGIS software. Animals produce young faster than I produce maps. Every time I zoom in or out of the photos, it takes 5-20 minutes for the image to reload. Complicating matters is the fact that the giant air photo files are on my Mac, forcing the remote Windows machine to access my hard drive. Yeah, that's because I don't have enough profile space through my university to put these files onto the remote server.

Is this making your head explode? It's making my head explode. My endeavors with science are always adept at proving Murphy's Law, if nothing else.

I asked for a disk quota increase at my university. Well, my prof did. I think that request might have been blown of by the IT folk cuz I never heard back. So my prof suggested that I cut the air photos (which are actually 5 different files per photo). To do this, I require a PC. Or Windows on my Mac. I don't actually have enough space to partition my hard drive to run Windows. So I need a PC. Back to wanting! Do I really want to get a PC just to cut some air photos? No. Will I? Maybe. I don't have time to load these things otherwise.

I could ditch the air photos, I suppose, but they're amazing! Yesterday at the office I was able to rectify the errors of the dinosaur GPS by zooming in to a level at which I could distinguish the parking signs I'd used for annotation during the fiel mapping. (nb I don't recommend using parking signs for such descriptors: There are too many of them!) As much as I'd love to work from the office, there's only one computer with Arc, and the staff have pressing things to accomplish. In other words, I'm kinda in the way at times, though no one ever makes me feel that way. I was on a roll yesterday, but had to quit about 30 minutes from finishing. And frankly, I like to do computer work at night, not during sunny days when the fieldwork is calling me!

But processing these maps is required before I can sample. Lake Merced is a patchwork of sites that I can't keep straight without decent maps. Even with decent maps I keep screwing it up.

Ooh, my image has loaded. Time to export and print. Time to hit the north side of the lake, where I'm working under a double breasted cormorant rookery. There's so much guano there that you can see it in the air photos. From across the lake it looks like someone has spray painted the tule and willows white. Photos soon!