Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


There is a lot in the this book that resonates with someone that has spent enough time in the outdoors in one place with themselves to make grand conclusions about one's own insignificance.


Some of my favorite quotes from the book:
Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite.

The beauty of Delicate Arch explains nothing, for each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful (p45).

A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature like Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us- like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness- that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship (p45).

Industrial Tourism is a threat to the national parks. But the chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists. They are being robbed and robbing themselves. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks and will never escape the stress and turmoil of the urban-suburban complexes which they had hoped, presumably, to leave behind for a while (p64).

We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places (p65).

A ventursome minority will always be eager to set off on their own, and no obstacles should be placed in their path; let them take risks, for godsake, let them get lost, sunburnt, stranded, drowned, eaten by bears, buried alive under avalanches - that is the right and privilege of any free American (p69)

A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in the his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether not we ever set foot in it (p162).

Grand Canyon, Big Bend, Yellowstone and the High Sierras may be required to function as bases for guerrilla warfare against tyranny (p163).

In any case, when a man must be afraid to drink freely from his country's rivers and streams that country is no longer fit to live in (p202).

But the love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need - if only we had the eyes to see (p208).

No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilizations itself (p211).

Henry Mountains, Utah

Its a great country; you can say whatever you like so long as its strictly true- nobody will ever take you seriously (p293).

And thus through language create a whole world, corresponding to the other world out there. Or we trust that it corresponds. Or perhaps like a German poet, we cease to care, becoming more concerned with the naming then with the things named; the former becomes more real than the later (p322).





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Philippines and Taiwan Photos (2010.01)

27 day stint in Taiwan and the Philippines. Here are a few tempting photos. It was amazing!!

Philippines:
More photos of the Philippines at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/damon_tighe/sets/72157623344784827/




















Taiwan:
see more photos of taiwan:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/damon_tighe/sets/72157623455846184/

Book Review: "House of Glass" by Pramoedy Ananta Toer (2009.07.08)

House of Glass by Pramoedya Ananta Toer


  rating: 5 of 5 stars


View all my reviews.

The final piece of the Buru Quartet. Excellent change in perspective in this novel compared to the first three of the Quartet. Not only a shift in Narrator, but an almost meta-textual analysis of the first 3 books. Pramoedya is a great crafter of not stories not only in content, but in structure.

Poem: from Santa Fe and some photos (2009.05.28)

12:30am 2009.05.28 Santa Fe, NM. Fusion club

the air breathes
soft and high
and I am alive
ethanol courses
actions recourse
and the stars shine
ambivalent
in the black blanket
punctuated with bolts
New Mexico
Old and New
falters forever
in capitalism
in Santa Fe
in error and
perfect existence

12:40am 2009.05.28
Turquoise cuts adobe
in mid day light
and at night
they-
grey, stand in contrast
to the shadows
to the shallows
we don't dare illuminate
for darkness penetrates
this place
in the bowls and souls
deep seats and retreats
it bleeds and seeds
the next generation -
infinite penetration
of half dead frustration
Santa Fe

12:50am 2009.05.28
sell, sold, soul
so you remember
the past-
the commoditized
capitalized product of this town,
where Heroes fought
Savage Indians,
but scratch that hatch
it ain't sellable
brine it
shine it
design it
legitimize it (the past)
-build it (the past) and they will come
but once they've cum
its all undone.

1:05am 2009.05.28
Rockies rock bottom
Santa Fe by day
find a way to masks the resource pull
that in time shall levy its toll
in drops absent
water limited
this town fate scripted in
Chaco and Bandelier and Other(s)
places far and near
How small our imagination is
for the teachings of history

1:20am 2009.05.28
Coral colony of clouds
coral the Jemez on the horizon
in the high dry sky of New Mexico
the germinating seed of Huxley's anti-Utopia
The land of life in protest


Santa Fe contrasting Adobe


Iris and cliff in the Jemez


The Buckets swimming hole in Jemez


Clouds over ABQ


Porch adornment in Santa Fe

My Nerd Job: biofuels and shipworms (2009.05.15)

So we just got samples today of shipworms for single cell micromanipulation. Why in the world would anyone be interested in shipworms and their symobiotic bacteria? These little worms are extremely good at breaking down wood and the reason they are good at breaking down wood is the bacteria that associate with their gill structure produce cellulases that degrade cellulose, a major component of wood. If you can degrade wood into into component sugar you can ferment it and turn it into a stiff drink or a biofuel. Possibly enzymes from these bacteria could lead us away from using corn and other food stocks as feed stocks for a biofuel infrastructure in the US, not to mention that most of plant biomass is cellulose so having access to it would greatly increase the effeciency that we could take a crop and turn it into fuel.

Lore has it that Columbus got an extra year long stay in the Bahamas because shipworms ate up his boat so bad that he could not sail back to Europe until all the wood had been repaired.

So here is the process (Hands are Dan our collaborator):

1) Capture a worm from a piece of wood. The worm is right at the tip of dental tool


2)Dissect the worm to get out its gill where the bacteria associate



3)Pulverise the gill to free up the bacteria. Below is the gill aparatus:



4) Look at the bacteria under the microscope:



5) Capture singe bacteria:



6) Lyse open the cell to get the DNA and amplify it.
7) Sequence the DNA and find gene for cellulases

Down the Road:
8) industrialize the cellulases for use at biofuel plants
9) Drive down US consumption of foreign oil. Create a fuel that cycles carbon instead of digging out of the ground and putting it in the air.

Mt Diablo with Doris and Nancy (2009.04.30)

Flowers are still going on Mt Diablo. Doris, Nancy, and I did Back Creek to Murchio Gap and then came down Donner Canyon Road.


Mt Diablo Fairy Lantern. A type of Globe Lilly that exists on Mt Diablo and no place else in the world. They will probably be up for another 2 weeks if you would like to get a view of them.


Chaparal Broom-Rape. Its kind of ugly, but interesting at the same time. Unfortunate name though.


Clustered Broom-Rape. This was all over on the Donner Canyon Road.


Oak and departing cloud. Good way to end the evening

Pacific Northwest Trip (2009.04.17)

a quick little photo tour of me and Doris's escape to the pacific northwest:


silver Falls State Park (Thursday, after a 10 hour middle of the night drive)


Double Falls at Silver Falls State Park - Temperate Rainforests Rock.



Tulip Festival outside of Woodburn, Or. Yes that's Mt Hood in the background


Moss covered rocks in the Columbia Gorge near Portland, OR


Dustin and Jane @ the Screendoor breakfast joint in East Burnside. The monster pile of food infront of Dustin is a chicken and waffles. I think it just might be a whole chicken. Dustina and Jane were kind enough to put me and Doris up for 2 nights


ironic that my favorite picture of the trip comes from Dustin and Jane's kitchen


Ecola state park. We weren't suppose to be down here, which made it that much better


Haystack rock from Ecola state park


an american classic. Harley and Mt Shasta at the Weed rest stop

A weekend of notes in Damon’s Infinitely small world:

A weekend of notes in Damon’s Infinitely small world:

Friday Night –

Bump into Aron who use to live in my building at Café Madrid. Had some food and caught up a bit. Chelsea (his girlfriend) had a sculpture being displace at 21&Grand for art murmur. I was catching “Notorious” at the Paramount with ~8 people organized by Adam T.

Saturday-
Showing Nancy around SF and…

1)    See Adam T’s ex-girlfriend Jill at Union square while me and Nancy at the random items we bough in Oakland China town. I got the shortest hello of my life from Jill, who looking back was never super friendly towards me.
2)    Ran into Kristen from the JGI at Union Square…her son was in the choir that was performing that afternoon.
3)    At the SFMOMA I realize I hear a familiar voice and its Sharon who use to live in my building working behind the counter.
4)    Didn’t see someone I knew, but the kindness of strangers is also important. Nancy and I were walking by Davie’s Hall when the symphony was in intermission. I tried to buy tickets from the ticket booth at half price since it was half way over, but got stone walled by the clerk, so went outside and tried making friendly with people leaving. My first attempt completely failed since it was an old couple that had just turned off their hearing aids. Nancy just laughed as they gave me absolutely no response as if my presence did not exist. Luckily this calamity gathered the attention of tow middle aged intermission-leavers who gleefully gave us their 2nd row orchestra front and center tickets. Quite easily the best tickets I’ve ever had…close rival to the free box (entire) box seat that I once scored in college with a date, because we came in late. 

Week in pictures, so far (2009.04.02)

I'm getting lazy. I'm just giving pictoral essays of the week:

Sunday = Little Yosemite in Sunol East Bay Regional Park. The goal set forth by Adam was to go up Alameda creek to the waterfalls without getting wet. We did not succeed:

Reasons for not staying dry- tight rock canyons that you "had to" climb


Beautifully clear water - probably due to the high mercury content from local mineral deposits...extra bonus for falling in the water


Well tortured beech tree roots


Then on the way home I could see a fire from Oakland, so of course we had to check it out. It was the old hospital on Alameda island burning down. Me and Adam had let ourselves into it a couple years ago...super creepy. We were caught and asked to leave. The fire department just let the building burn all the way to the ground. Can you smell the lead paint? I can.


Monday: Mt Diablo

somehow dragged my ass out of bed early enough to join Linda, Katie and Scott for a 3pm hike at Mt Diablo. We did the waterfall trail and the water was barely going, but the wildflowers were in full bloom:

Blue Dicks and Scorpion Flowers looking North


The hiking Gang:


And of course the California Poppies are going well:


Tuesday: Serious lab time picking nuclei out of fungal spores that associate with roots (glomus). Hoping to take one of these nuclei out of the spore amplify the DNA up enough that we can sequence the bugger...ultimately to figure out why these fungus helps so many plants grow really well.

My first cracking of a spore with a glass capillary (500x magninfication):


Syto11 stained spore and hyphae. The green dots in the hyphae are also nuclei. All the ones in the spore have already leaked out.

Book Review: "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan


 

My review

  rating: 4 of 5 stars
    “What should we have for dinner?” Pollan asks of us in The Omnivores Dilemma. In a triad of analysis he attempts to answer or at least probe this question from three different arenas; the industrial food chain, organic/local non-industrial food making, and foraging. Ultimately Pollan finds none of these routes to the dinner table to be “perfect,” but an intellectualized meal at least allows us to not go ethically or morally blind to the food before us. Between the covers there is nothing surprising, Pollan simply expands those things we all suspect about our food and our food choices. I may be biased in this intuition since I inhabit the same physical and intellectual space as the author, but I’ve found many people from Montana, to DC, to Berlin who I believe have the same general instinct towards these things.

    Corn is the basis for America’s industrial food chain. The biologically successful plant feeds more people in more ways than one can enumerate. Everything from corn on the cob, to xanthum gum, to meat, to other industrialized derivatives finds its way into more pieces of every American meal than anyone can imagine, except for maybe Cargil or some of the other companies whose inventiveness have engineered the industrial food system we currently operate off of and which our government highly subsidizes. We find that most of or food comes into origin ultimately because of the coupling of the sun’s energy with corn’s C4 photosynthetic leaves, years of domestic selection followed by years of plant engineering, and the Haber-Bosch process that allows us to make immense amounts of nitrogen fertilizers from petrol. In the end this system is extremely efficient, simple, but limited because the inputs- especially nitrogen is a limiting reagent over time for this process.

    I’ve recently found many people who claim they are anti-corn. I’m sure many of them have read this book or other similar books like Fast Food Nation or other criticisms of the American industrial food chain. I find these reactionary responses ironic, because these people find it easy to blame a tool instead of the system that uses the tool. It’s the same sort of logic that argues that guns kill people, when really its people using guns that kill people. Corn I believe is simply one of the most successful organisms on the planet, it found a sort of symbiosis with humans that allowed it to spread all over the world. The symbiosis being so strong that humans have cleared away other competing species (forests and grass lands), so that corn may grow. Corn is a great grain. It stores well. Has lots of calories by weight and a decent amount of nutrients. There is also a minimal amount of people with allergies to it, unlike wheat and other major grains. So please instead of hating corn, please take up issue with the way we use it.

    With Organics Pollan finds, not unsurprisingly, that the word organic in diction has become a changeling under the control of government regulation. Organic use to embody concepts of locality, non-chemical based techniques, and thus alluded to a sort of non-industrial food system. However, due to consumer demand and scalability organic has become “big organic” or “industrial-organic” under the un-constraints of USDA labeling. Ultimately organic just means the inputs are just a little different from the normal conventional systems. Instead of chemical herbicides you may apply bacterial based herbicides, instead of storing greens with chemicals to keep them fresh you may just store the greens in bags pumped full of nitrogen gas to keep them fresh. The system looks the same, but the techniques are more complex and a bit more sustainable. Organic is a step in the right direction, but its not the end all. Think about the last organic piece of produce you bought. Where did it come from? How far away did it come from? How much petrol was spent bringing that food too you? Industrial organic has just cut down on the petrol from the fertilizer side of the equation, but has not pulled it off the transportation, so ultimately is also has the same risk as normal industrial food – the risk of oil.

    The contrast Pollan brings into industrial organic is a farm called Polyface on the east coast. The farm arguably works at holding together something beyond organic; the concept of a farm that works like an ecosystem, feeds locals, is transparent unlike the industrial food system and a farm that is connected to its consumers and vice versa. Ultimately the farm boils down to growing grass. Grass in this case does not mean a monoculture, but a mix of native grasses. Grass feeds the cows that are moved constantly from field to field so as to maximize the feeding capacity of the grass, chickens follow the cows in the pasture by a few days – they eat the bugs from the cow shit which sterilizes the fields from pathogens, chicken shit and cow shit can then be used to fertilize the fields to grow more grass or grains of interest. The farm is ultimately a complex system of nitrogen and carbon cycling with the only input being sunlight at the outputs being very diverse. Farms like this use to exist everywhere when the US was first forming, but due to the industrial nature of our current farming model most of these farms have disappeared and become monoculture growers and not complex-culture growers.

    The last section of the book is dedicated to finding food in the natural world; foraging and hunting. At a grand scale, the scale of the number of people on this planet this is not a sustainable form of feeding people, but Pollan does it to remind himself of where we have come from. I believe the most important thing here is the reality check of how amazing culture is in preserving the knowledge of what we can eat from the natural world and all of the preparations (rituals) we must do around food to make it edible. At the same time foraging and hunting are more spiritually rich than the industrial food system, organic or even the ecosystem-farm, because one must confront continually the possibility of a mistake equaling death and also for the omnivore that the death of something else means life for oneself. A higher degree of honor and connection comes from hunting and foraging, because we must extend out beyond our human walls of cultivation and dip ourselves into the wild where we are not the ones in control, but simply dealing with what the universe presents us with. It is the difference in being an engineer and being a biologist. One attempts to create the world around them while the other is willing to roll with the punches.

    A thread that runs through the essays which I’m surprised Pollan did not break out into its own essay book is the use of animals and the ethical implications of their use in our food systems. In the industrial system Pollan bought a beef cow that is then slaughtered in an industrial factory, at Polyface farms he helps slaughter chickens, and in the final section he hunts and kills a wild pig in northern California. He attempts to confront Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation” but I feel he never completely answers up to Singer’s points, partly because Singer’s logic is extremely well crafted given the system of industrial animal raising coupled with Christian influenced anthropomorphic tendencies of American rhetoric.

I feel a better way of rebutting Singer is to step outside his rhetorical context and go to the rhetoric of science. If you were a vegetarian ask yourself where taxonomically your cut off is. What defines eating an animal? I know many vegetarians and the variants are high. Some eat fish, some eat only animals without a face, some eat mollusks, and the list goes on. Ultimately all vegetarianism (for me) boils down to some sort of anthropomorphism. Some of us don’t eat animals, because they remind of us of how much of an animal we are. Eating animals reminds us that we may just as easily eat each other or at least slaughter each other. Pythagoras, a strict vegetarian concluded humans had no hope of escaping killing each other if we were not able to keep ourselves from killing animals. I agree with Pythagoras in the logic but diverge in the practicality of the logic. I don’t think humans have the ability to “escape” the animalism of our nature, thus we shall kill each other and animals in infinitum. I don’t mean to be a downer here, but I’m just going upon history; simple deductive logic of all written history appears to point to the reality of humans as a whole not being able to leave behind killing and maybe we shouldn’t…? I’ve slaughtered a few animals in my life; many a fish, a chicken, a cow, rattlesnake, etc. The act of killing in order for the preparation of food brings many things into focus that no other experience can possibly encapsulate. It reminds one directly of our own mortality, that everything given a long enough time perishes by force or by fault. It also reminds us of our strangeness in relation to other creatures; the mere fact that we can think about our position in this system and not simply be oblivious to it. There is much more to decompact in this topic, but unfortunately I feel it would take a separate essay to organize it effectively, so I shall save that for another time.