The Good, Bad, & The Ugly

Mantis religiosa

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

This big beautiful girl is one of many Praying Mantids (Mantis religiosa) we've encountered while doing yard clean-up around mom's place during the past 12 days. They are in the process of depositing their foam-like egg cases right now (see photo below) after which they will die. Each egg case or sac can contain up to 300 eggs. Praying Mantids are an insect species beneficial to humans because they are voracious predators of other insects, many of which are damaging to flowers, vegetables, and fruit.

If you're not convinced of the predatory skills of this amazing insect you can see photos of one that actually captured and ate a hummingbird (click here). Yes, she may be a lovely long-legged green-thinking biocentric female but I wouldn't want to get too close to her if we were any where near the same size.

Mantis religiosa Egg Sac

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

What's Scary About This Picture?
Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Many people think insects are ugly or scary looking, especially big insects like Praying Mantids, but to me they're elegantly beautiful in design and fascinating to behold. What's creepy looking to me in this picture is my hairy old arm...


Melanoplus sanguinipes
Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom


Another handsome colorful bug in abundance here is the large Migratory or Spur-throated Grasshopper (Melanoplus sanguinipes), but this insect is a pest to humans, notorious because of it's appetite for agricultural crops, grasses, leafy vegetables, fruits, flowers, buds, and even tree bark. My guess is that these critters are a challenge to control with organic methods when you're surrounded by miles of cornfields, but, not surprisingly, these grasshoppers are a favorite food of the Praying Mantids above, which, I'm sure, is why the mantids are also here in such great numbers.

Innocent Dragonfly is Crucified on the Grille of a Jeep Cherokee!

Click on individual photos to enlarge
All photos © 2010 jim otterstrom

Sacrificed to a machine, the haunting corpse of a dragonfly hangs by its wings from the crossbar of a 1995 Jeep Cherokee grille on August 6th, 2010.

I was quite taken aback when I discovered this unfortunate victim of an automobile suspended from a plastic cross---it's fragile body perfectly preserved in graceful form---too reminiscent of familiar images of a more well-known crucifixion.

Most bugs splat unceremoniously into oblivion when they're hit by several thousand pounds of machinery speeding down a highway, leaving us not much to think about except cleaning up the mess, but somehow this magnificent little creature, even after death, has managed to tell us something about the beauty of its existence, and the tragedy of its passing.

Yes, it's just another bug, one of billions lost each day to the unintentional recklessness of human activity.

Yet, perhaps this tiny innocent member of earth's living community has also died for our sins, by our hands, so that we might once again be patiently reminded by Mother Nature of the destructiveness of our way of life.

How many messengers does Nature's Creation need to send us before we finally get the message?

We have already wiped out 98% of our old growth forests, 99% of our native prairies are gone, 80% of the rivers in China no longer support fish life, and 90% of the large fish in the worlds oceans are gone.

Earth is currently losing between 150 & 200 species every single day, and I can only wonder at the bountiful diversity that once graced this planet before our species came stumbling along into fossil fuels, industrialism, and the age of the infernal combustion machine, which may well render the planet uninhabitable for oxygen breathers.

I'm certainly not religious in any traditional sense of the word, but take another close-up look at this dragonfly, it has a message for us, and, it even looks as if it might have been praying when it died...

...praying, possibly, for the rest of us.

So, just in case, I'm keeping it in a box until Easter.

~

Photographed on a cloudy afternoon with a Canon SX10IS on a tripod; manual function, super macro setting, ISO 80, f/8.0, at 3 tenths of a second. Contrast & brightness slightly modified in Photoshop CS3. Some images cropped to show detail.

'MAYDAY! SOS! MAYDAY! SOS! MAYDAY! SOS!' I'm Trapped In A Psychotic/Psychopathic Civilization Of Serial Killers...

Click on photo to enlarge - photo credit unknown, image courtesy of Erv Nichols

Warning!

Rant Ahead!

~

"Take the rag away from your face, now is the time for your tears"

from 'The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll' © 1964 Bob Dylan

~

It's way past time we took the rags away from our eyes and looked directly into the horrific reality of our petroleum addiction.

Ours is an insidious addiction, mostly hidden from us beneath layers of lifelong denial, which enables us to mindlessly murder our mother, the living earth, with the sick vengeance of a deranged serial killer.

We talk a good line though, like so many addicts in denial do, claiming to care most deeply about our families and the environment, about freedom, democracy and the quality of life. But our actions speak much louder than our words, and those actions prove us to be hopelessly dependent upon the destructive extraction and consumption of the world's ever more scarce resources, a cultural co-dependency created over a dozen or so decades by mixing great quantities of oil with our short-sighted desire for comfort, convenience, self-gratification and security.

Our habitual dependency upon this ever more frenzied oil-driven civilization of reckless consumption has undermined democracy and freedom at home and around the world. It's destroying our environment and ruining the future, not only for our children, but for every species on earth. So we lie to ourselves when we say we care about these things above all, because it's obvious that what we really care about is stuff.

We want a continual fix of stuff; more, bigger, cheaper, labor-saving, convenient, stylish, sexy stuff!

Americans are fond of the term, "Put your money where your mouth is", and we do exactly that. Just look at the billions of dollars you and I have squandered on the destruction of Iraq in our country's futile attempt to monopolize their oil.

Our former president said, "the American way of life is not up for negotiation", and we've forcefully demonstrated that anyone who gets in our way is totally screwed.

As we display increasingly antisocial behavior in our relationships with the other people and species we share the planet with, we reveal that, in fact, we have become a psychotic/psychopathic civilization, a species of sociopathic ecocidal maniacs to put it bluntly.

Yes, I mean all of us! The symptoms of psychosis are clearly defined; a loss of contact with reality, grandiose delusional beliefs, paranoia, defensive aggression, thought disorders, hallucinations and antisocial behavior.

Our disease is systemic throughout society, a classic substance-induced psychosis resulting from our 150 year addiction to petroleum and its associated derivatives.

We can no longer imagine living without our daily fix of oil even though every shot we take further destroys the world which made our lives possible in the first place.

Through our addiction to this cheap abundant (although quite temporary) energy packed substance, we've fooled ourselves into believing we're super-beings, exempt from the laws of nature and the limits to growth. In other words we have lost contact with reality.

Under the influence of the happy-juice we call oil we've experienced a euphoric rush that has kept us obliviously stoned for a century and a half, which by comparison, leaves the high from any other addictive substance paling to utter insignificance.

The manic hyperactivity induced by that rush of oil into the arteries of our society allowed us, in very short order, to transform our primal insecurities, and our creative wet dreams, into a monstrous civilization whose monolithic edifices will stand for centuries as eroding monuments to the ostentatious arrogance of a narcissistic species gone mad with self-absorption, over-consumption, and obsessive compulsive disorders.

We have deluded ourselves into the grandiose belief that this pile-of-crap civilization we've plastered across the planet is a modern miracle, evidence of our manifest destiny as masters of the universe.

We Americans make up only about 4.5% of the world population yet we consume 25% of the world's resources. We are the world's number one trash producers, generating 40% of humanity's trash, and we're number two in climate altering CO2 emissions (just recently displaced from #1 by China), responsible for over 20% of global atmospheric accumulations.

We are---and have been for over a century---the development model for a civilization that has spawned the 6th greatest extinction episode in the 4.5 billion year history of earth and it is estimated that we are now losing around 200 species a day, or 70,000 species a year, through habitat loss and the pollution of ecosystems.

You and I are the ones responsible for this latest round of extinctions; for the climate change happening now; for the melting of the polar caps and glaciers; for the coming rise in sea levels, and the subsequent displacement and homelessness of billions of human beings.

We may also be primarily responsible for the very existence of those unsustainable billions of people because of increases in the world food supply created by our development of an international industrial/agribusiness model.

A model completely dependent upon the petrochemicals used for fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, a model which also requires the production & maintenance of gargantuan fleets of farm equipment and transportation networks to produce those agricultural products and get them to markets around the globe.

All of this has unleashed global-wide opportunities of unprecedented magnitude for greedy profiteering by a select few at the expense of everyone and everything else. So, as a matter of course, the world economy is now managed by a gang of legalized thugs & racketeers, rivaled in greed and ruthlessness only by illegal drug cartels, fundamentalist religious fanatics, and an emerging flotilla of Somalian pirates.

~

"Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king"

from Sweetheart Like You - © 1983 Bob Dylan

~

Capitalism is a Ponzi/Pyramid Scheme which robs the larger populace of the commons to benefit a handful of elites, where obscene profits perpetuate unlimited growth on a finite planet. One of the results has been the contemporary hallucination that our destruction of the planet somehow makes us wealthy.

The wealth of America is now nothing but an imaginary bubble kept aloft by the printing of money, which becomes ever more worthless by the moment. Before long that debt bubble is going to burst into flames like the Hindenburg Blimp, as we might gather from the precedents unfolding in Iceland, Greece, Portugal, and Spain (not to mention California---the 5th largest economy in the world---which is essentially bankrupt).

The perpetual wars we're now waging have deepened not only our national debt, but our national paranoia as well, resulting in over 6,700 military installations--- bases, warehouses, or support facilities in nearly 150 countries (under the guise of defending freedom & democracy)---all to enforce our world dominance and gain control of dwindling resources in the interest of "national security", or what I call our assumed national supremacy.

Meanwhile, here in the "land of the free, the home of the brave", we have the highest per-capita imprisonment rate in the world, 25% of the incarcerated human beings on planet earth are behind bars right here in the good ol' USA.

Is this the definition of Democracy and Freedom?

Is this what the Statue of Liberty stands for?

We all know better...

True freedom lies in the unspoiled bounty of nature where all species are created equal, where those who can't, or won't, adapt to the limits of their environment eventually perish.

We're so deep in denial of our collective addiction that we've kept shooting petroleum into the bloodstream of our lives without facing those limits until we have, quite suddenly, found ourselves up against a wall, with the limits of our ecosystems staring us in the face, point blank.

Perhaps this will wake us up, most addicts need to bottom out before they can face reality and attempt some sort of recovery, but sometimes it's too late for that, when the damage is beyond repair.

So, go ahead my fellow addicts...

Drill Baby Drill!

Buy Baby Buy!

Drive Baby Drive!

Kill Baby Kill!

...but beware, our chickens are coming home to roost.

~

My name is Jim, I'm in recovery from the Petroleum Age*

*Thank you, Chellis Glendinning, for the societal recovery concept.

Transitions - Seasonal and Otherwise...

Click on image to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

Ice on the lake cracked, buckled, and melted this year, like always, even as world credit markets remained frozen solid.

The lone Bald Eagle circles intently above the marsh, fishing, unconcerned with the global financial meltdown.

A pair of finches cheerfully weave their nest into the first 'a' of the pharmacy sign, as if Rite-Aid was expected to survive another quarter.

Tilted toward the vernal equinox, the frosted earth warms slightly; wild onions dispatch eager shoots skyward, heedless of greenhouse gases or climate change.

I imagine myself standing in a bread line, during the first Great Depression, finding cheer in tufts of grass growing from broken concrete.

I envision a Final Great Depression, and eventually, masses of lovely wildflowers blooming among the skeletal remains of Wall Street, and the Pentagon.

Spring is on the wind, General Motors is bankrupt, and Peak Oil is upon us.

Take heart, friends of the earth.

Change is in the air…

~In Our Butterfly Garden, This Very Week~

Western Tiger Swallowtail

Papilio rutulus

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

I love how this Western Tiger Swallowtail is embracing the Rose Sage (Salvia pachyphylla) flower with its right fore-leg while drinking up nectar through it's straw-like proboscis. Enlarge to see details

~

Three Beauties Feeding on Rose Sage Nectar

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

Some years ago I was in our local birdwatcher store, Wild Wings, browsing through a book on butterflies when a wrinkled little woman, well into her 90s, came up to me and gently placed a feeble hand on my arm.

Looking me in the eyes, and obviously a bit distraught, she asked me what had happened to Big Bear's butterflies.

The old gal had grown up here, moving away decades ago, and was back with relatives revisiting her childhood home for the first time.

She told me that when she was a little girl, during every summer, the entire valley would be aswarm with a mass of butterflies and she couldn't understand why they weren't here in those numbers anymore.

Her remembrance created a wondrous picture in my imagination but the urgency in her question caught me off guard, and before I could respond, the relatives came and whisked her away.

It was one of those moments that stick vividly in my heart, and I wondered how much of her memory was idealizing the place of her childhood, and how much was reality.

Since then, I've often thought of all the square miles of our high-mountain Bear Valley meadows which have been replaced by roads, lodges and ski resorts, shopping centers, homes, small businesses, the golf course and the airport. I think about weed abatement regulations and how much of the wild flora in the valley is now cut to the ground just as spring is unfolding.

And, I remember the Mourning Cloak (Nymphalis antiopa) butterfly I saw laying eggs on a willow branch in Rathbun Creek. I was cleaning litter out of the creek channel one spring, as part of a community project, when I noticed yellow-fringed wings slowly folding and unfolding just a few inches in front of my eyes.

The butterfly seemed oblivious to my presence as she meticulously deposited dozens of tiny eggs, one at a time, in a spiral pattern around the branch of the willow (click here and scroll down to see a Mourning Cloak laying her eggs).

I watched with fascination until she was finished laying her eggs, making a mental note of the willow's exact location, and planned on coming back regularly to monitor the progress of the eggs.

Two days later I discovered that all the willows along Rathbun Creek had been cut to the ground by a giant weed-whacking machine, the branches chipped, shredded, and hauled away.

My thoughts then drifted sadly upstream and down, wondering how many millions of insect eggs, butterfly and otherwise, were lost through our obsessive/compulsive meddling in Rathbun Creek alone.

One of the primary purposes of Earth Home Garden is to provide habitat for the native species of Big Bear, and to expose other people in our community to the joy and ecological benefits of gardening with native plants. The number and variety of birds & butterflies visiting our garden seems to increase with each passing year.

Ecological Food For Thought...

The Progress Of Destruction

The Heart Of The Matter

Click on image to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

A friend once sent me a link to a composite photo of the nighttime lights of North America as seen from space.

She found the photo to be very comforting in the fact that she could see the lights of all the places in America where she had friends.

But I found the photo to have a somewhat opposite effect on my emotions.

It caused a discomforting knot in my gut!

I saw the lights as countless gaping holes in the biotic communities of the continent I call home.

The more numerous, and brighter the lights, the bigger the holes in the living diversity of the natural world.

To most people, I suppose, these lights represent progress in the development of humankind.

But, to me, they dramatically illustrate the destructive imbalance between human organisms and our environments.

Where there are lights, there are buildings, shopping malls, sprawling suburbs, monstrous cities, millions of acres of roads slathered in asphalt & concrete, factories, plastic, landfills & waste management facilities, power generation plants, sewage treatment plants, schools, hospitals, prisons, machinery, automobiles, internal combustion engines, wrecking yards, toxic chemicals, pollution, oil fields, corporate headquarters & the seats of governments, police stations, courthouses, military bases and nuclear weapons facilities.

Every second of every day the exponential growth of our human creation lays waste to more of the biosphere as our species races forward in its relentless destruction of the planet.

What we're doing to planet Earth literally mirrors what insects did to the ravaged leaf above. We are eating away large bits of our habitat, but, we have no other leaf, or, in our case, planet, to migrate to when this one is stripped bare.

The results upon the victim are similar to those of a plague of locusts or a rampantly malignant cancerous growth. And, unfortunately, our victim is this magnificent place we call home, the sole source of our sustenance.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Our imaginations are simply boxed-in, blinded by the overwhelming monolithic hierarchical structure of the civilization we were born into.

But things may be changing as more and more people seem to be realizing that the way we live just doesn’t work, and doesn’t feel good either.

Life on Earth is a vast assemblage of complex organisms, but we're all evolved from one single-celled common ancestor.

We are one family,

The Family Of Earth.

And, our species lays claim to sentience, consciousness, and self-awareness.

So, as I daily witness the continuing degradation and destruction of the biosphere, the loss of diversity, of natural habitat, and the species who live here, I can’t help but sense that these holes in our biotic communities are also metaphors for holes in our hearts. For the longing in our souls and our spirit. A longing to be whole, to be complete, to be home.

And I believe that some of us are beginning to understand this, and that many more feel it subconsciously.

Yes, the future may still hold a place for humanity, for the surviving descendants of the Agricultural, Industrial, and Petroleum Ages.

The Ages of Empire and World Domination.

Once the heavy burden of this all-consuming civilization is lifted off our backs, perhaps the collective memories of our DNA, our native intuition, will help us remember that there are many ways to live.

And certainly, among those ways, there are some which are sustainable, which would allow our species to continue living, in much more realistic numbers, through ages to come.

Are the lessons we're beginning to learn about our dysfunctional relationship with our environment guiding us toward imagining and desiring a Biocentric Age?

If so, then an Age Of Biocentrism could one day become reality, a sort of natural succession, as impellingly adopted as have been the aforementioned Ages of human history which have paralleled our ever-evolving consciousness.

A definition from Wikipedia

Biocentrism (from Greek: βίος, bio, "life"; and κέντρον, kentron, "center") is a term that has several meanings but is commonly defined as the belief that all forms of life are equally valuable and humanity is not the center of existence. Biocentric positions generally advocate a focus on the well-being of all life in the consideration of ecological, political, and economic issues. Biocentrism in this sense has been contrasted to anthropocentrism, which is the belief that human beings and human society are, or should be, the central focus of existence.

~

Nighttime Lights of North America

Click on image to enlarge - courtesy of NOAA

This is not the photo my friend sent several years ago. That one had an all black background.

But you get the idea...

~

Post Script

The leaf in the image at top is from a Hollyhock that's growing near a faucet in the garden.

It caught my eye, and my imagination, for several days before I realized what it reminded me of.

I decided to scan it and was then moved to write this post.

Nature, speaking through me, I guess you might say.

I chose today for this post to participate with Sonia in her Ecological Day at her blog, Leaves Of Grass.

For The Contrary Goddess...

Buddha and the Mushroom Click on photo to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

Fellow blogger, The Contrary Goddess, gave me a "tiny challenge" I couldn't resist.

"Name 100 species which live in your neighborhood", she asked.

Well, here's 117 native (or migratory) species which are residents or visitors to our own yard, and I've barely scratched the surface of the bird and insect visitors.

As I find the time I'll be adding the scientific names to the list below and will include links to various botanical websites for plant profiles.

Earth Home Garden Species

1. Common Yarrow

(Achillea millefolium)

2. Wild Onion

(Allium sp.)

3. Indian Hemp

(Apocynum cannabinum)

4. Rock-Cress

(Arabis pulchra)

5. Prickly Poppy

(Argemone munita)

6. Crimson Columbine

(Aquilegia formosa)

7. Narrow Leaf Milkweed

(Asclepias fascicularis)

8. Green Striped Mariposa Lily

(Calochortus invenustus)

9. Wild Morning-Glory
10. Indian Paintbrush
11. Ash Gray Paintbrush
12. Thistle
13. Miner’s Lettuce
14. Virgin’s Bower (Pipestem)
15. Wild Hyacinth (Blue Dicks)
16. Fireweed
17. California Fuschia
18. Stream Orchid
19. Fleabane
20. Yerba Santa
21. California Buckwheat
22. Pine Buckwheat
23. Sulfur Flower (Sulfur-Color Buckwheat)
24. Wright’s Buckwheat
25. Western Wallflower
26. California Poppy
27. Wild Geranium
28. Gilia
29. Rydberg’s Horkelia
30. Western Blue Iris (Blue Flag)
31. Granite Gilia (Prickly Phlox)
32. Mountain Aster
33. Humboldt Lily
34. Lemon Lily
35. Blue Flax
36. Brewer’s Lupine
37. Grape Soda Lupine
38. Dwarf Lupine
39. Giant Lupine
40. Tarweed
41. Pineapple Weed
42. Coyote Mint
43. Coyote Tobacco
44. California Evening Primrose
45. Anderson’s Penstemon
46. San Bernardino Beardtongue
47. Firecracker Penstemon
48. Bumble-Bee Penstemon
49. Scarlet Penstemon
50. Mountain Bugler
51. Showy Penstemon
52. Desert Blue Bells
53. Mountain Phacelia
54. Sticky Cinquefoil
55. Buttercup
56. Southern Goldenrod
57. Apricot Mallow
58. White Hedge Nettle
59. Stinging Nettle
60. Hedgehog Cactus
61. Beaver-Tail Cactus
62. Cane Cholla (Snake Cholla)
63. Prickly-Pear Cactus
64. Utah Service-Berry
65. Greenleaf Manzanita
66. Silver Wormwood
67. Great Basin Sage
68. Rubber Rabbitbrush
69. California Flannelbush
70. Fremont’s Bushmallow
71. Western Choke-Cherry
72. Antelope Bush
73. Sierra Currant
74. Rose Sage
75. Apricot Mallow
76. Snowberry
77. White Fir
78. Incense Cedar
79. Mountain Mahogany
80. Western Juniper
81. Jeffrey Pine
82. Singleleaf Pinyon Pine
83. Quaking Aspen
84. California Black Oak
85. Pygmy Nuthatch
86. White-Breasted Nuthatch
87. Mountain Chickadee
88. Western Bluebird
89. Steller’s Jay
90. Northern Flicker
91. White-Headed Woodpecker
92. Anna’s Hummingbird
93. Rufous Hummingbird
94. Western Tanager
95. Wilson’s Warbler
96. Yellow-Rumped Warbler
97. Mourning Dove
98. Acorn Woodpecker
99. Hairy Woodpecker
100. Violet-Green Swallow
101. American Robin
102. Black-Headed Grosbeak
103. Rufous-Sided Towhee
104. Band-Tailed Pigeon
105. Lesser Goldfinch
106. Dark-Eyed Junco
107. Cassin’s Finch
108. Mourning Cloak Butterfly
109. Giant Swallowtail Butterfly
110. Painted Lady Butterfly
111. California Sister Butterfly
112. Monarch Butterfly
113. Western Gray Squirrel
114. California Ground Squirrel
115. Merriam Chipmunk
116. Western Toad

117. Western Terrestrial Garter Snake

Wake Up Call - Earthquake At 4:14 A.M.

~A Mild 4.0 - This Time~

Click on map to enlarge

All maps in this post are courtesy of the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

I added some of the text to personalize the information.

Peggy and I were jolted awake by a shaking rattling house at 4:14 this morning.

It was a relatively mild quake but it served, once again, to remind us of where we live and what we can expect from the geology of our locale.

As life-long residents of Southern California, and most particularly, because we've always lived on, or at the edges of, California's Transverse Range and the infamous San Andreas Fault , we're both well experienced with earthquakes.

The above map shows significant earthquakes in Southern California over the 25 year period between 1970 and 1995. I have added the numbers 1 through 4 to the map to show where I've lived my life, in close proximity to the most frequent and strongest quakes. Peggy has lived her life in the same places, except that she was born in the San Fernando Valley, where we grew up within a few miles of each other.

Todays little temblor (shown on the USGS shake map below) was a polite wake up call for us to make sure we're as prepared as possible for the impending disaster somewhere ahead of us.

In the last map of this post I've highlighted an oval which shows a 100+ mile section of the San Andreas Fault that is way overdue for a major quake, and, where we live in relationship to the fault.

It's not a matter of if, but when.

You can read a related National Geographic News article, by clicking here, which explains the known history of this segment of our infamous fault, and what we might expect in the very near future.

This isn't lunatic fringe doomsday prophesy, it's the factual reality of the geology of places like this, which straddle the edges of tectonic plates.

Today's Mild Temblor

The closer you are to the red areas on the above map, the more frequently you can expect earthquakes to occur.

Click on the above map to see the highlighted overdue section of the San Andreas Fault, which could very well bring us the next Big One, if the, also overdue Hayward Fault, in Northern California, doesn't beat us to it (again, you can see a related National Geographic News article by clicking here).

Fires! Floods! Earthquakes!

Why would anyone, in their right mind, want to live in the crowded, congested, expensive, smoggy, crime-ridden sprawl of Southern California when they also know, for certain, that some catastrophic disaster always lies just ahead?

Well, I can't speak for the millions of people who came here from somewhere else, for the climate, the scenery, a job, or to make it big in Hollyweird, whatever. In fact, it wouldn't break my heart if they all went home.

Because...

For me, it's simply about Place!

And, regardless of those who would question whether I ever had a right mind to be in, I'm going to explain why place is important to me anyway.

I was born here 62 years ago, at the west end of this gorgeous range of transverse mountains. And, if overdevelopment, sprawl, pollution, squalor, and outrageous prices hadn't driven me off, I'd still be living with the fires, floods, and earthquakes of Santa Monica, Reseda, or Topanga Canyon.

But somewhere along my journey I realized that we can't keep trashing the places we call home, and then just move on, because, as we should understand by now, we're about to run ourselves completely off the planet.

So, instead of invading someone elses part of the world (maybe even yours), I'm hanging on here, at the easternmost end of my home on the Range, where I can still afford to live, where I'm familiar, and where I'm surrounded by the relatively unspoiled beauty of Southern California's San Bernardino Mountains.

A few minutes walk from our dwelling, in any direction, takes me home to the nature of my place.

Fires, floods, and earthquakes define Southern California every bit as much as our beaches, mountains, and deserts.

They're the interacting forces of nature, which together, created the once gorgeous wide-open freedom of this place we call home.

Plate tectonics built these mountains and coastlines, while floods carved the canyons and filled the valleys with rich fertile soil, and wildfires groomed the dense forests and chaparral, allowing magnificently diverse gardens of botanical inventions to evolve into existence, along with a corresponding abundance of animal species.

The Transverse Range of Southern California is my home, I love and respect this place deeply. What is good for the nature of these mountains is also good for me.

So, naturally, I would also have a great respect for wildfires, floods, and earthquakes, the most fundamental building blocks of my place.

It's not my goal in life to control the forces of nature, it's my goal to try and learn to live in harmony with them.

Our small cabin is a sturdy wood frame structure which came through the 7.3 magnitude Landers Earthquake (July, 21, 1992 - 4:57 A.M.), and the 6.4 Big Bear Quake a few hours later, relatively unscathed.

Most everything inside the house was damaged or broken from the severe shaking, yet aside from a hairline crack in the foundation, and some slightly tweaked kitchen cabinets, the structure is still sound.

That doesn't mean the place will make it through the next shaker, especially if it's an 8+ magnitude 'mother of all quakes' along the San Andreas Fault some twenty miles from here.

And, a wood frame house doesn't seem the ideal structure to inhabit in a fire prone alpine forest either, does it?

We're also in a bit of a flood plain and have twice experienced our home becoming and island in two-foot deep floodwaters.

Fortunately the builder was aware of that problem and built our place nearly 3 feet above ground but some of the neighbors aren't so lucky.

Still, the unpredictable and extreme weather predicted as part of global warming & climate change could bring us heavier rains than we've ever known before.

If this house is eventually destoyed by fire, flood, or quake, and I live through it, maybe I can construct a dwelling more compatible with the forces of nature (or go back and reclaim my cave in the Santa Monica Mountains).

Architect Nader Khalili, of the Cal-Earth Institue in nearby Hesperia, has had the plans for this environmentally friendly earth home (click here) approved by the County Of San Bernardino.

The house was structurally tested and proved to be very earthquake and fire resistant, and, if thoughtfully situated would withstand floods too.

A wood frame home in a forest makes about as much sense as mobile home parks in the hurricane ravaged gulf coast states, or in tornado alley, or as skyscrapers, freeways and bridges do in earthquake country.

Nature can accomodate us quite sufficiently if only we would live in accordance with her counsel, or even with plain old common sense.

Any species long term survival is all about how they adapt to the opportunities, and the limitations, of the places they inhabit. Humans have a relatively brief history, as species go, yet we have already forgotten how to live, in, and of, our places. We now live upon, and separate from them.

I believe our relationship with our place should be an open reciprocal exchange, like a good marriage. Instead, we conquer the nature of our places, subduing them, like an abusive spouse dominates a potential partner. And when our places become stifled and debased by our control, we covet the wild, free, beauty we see elsewhere, and move along to consume new horizons which soon resemble what we left behind.

In our relentless quest for power, control, and omnipotence, we have essentially divorced ourselves from nature and the ability to love our places for what they are. We mold and form those places to be subservient, something nature's not capable of being.

But the lessons of our time tell us with blunt urgent clarity that we cannot continue living out of context with the nature of our place, whether it be Los Angeles, New Orleans, Greensburg Kansas, San Francisco, Big Bear Lake, or Planet Earth.

Today, on so many levels, we humans are confronting the dire consequences of trying to subjugate nature.

The immediate reality of a grossly overpopulated world, addicted to an economic system that demands growth in the face of rapidly dwindling resources, and the now perpetual wars being waged to gain control of those resources, is sobering and scary.

"Go Forth And Multiply" worked OK, I suppose, until we overshot the carrying capacity of our whole blessed biosphere!

We are now face to face with the man-made calamities of global warming, ozone depletion, climate change, rising sea levels, depleted fisheries, mass extinctions, peak oil and a subsequent economic collapse, as well as nature's relatively benign fires, floods, earthquakes, volcanism, hurricanes & tsunamis. And none of this is lunatic fringe doomsday prophecy either, it's here now, whether we like it or not.

We've been like the Mr. Magoo of cultures as our myopic clumsy civilization bumbled its way into a self-made disaster which threatens the entire globe.

Whereas, throughout human history, extreme events in the natural geology, or weather, of any given place typically affected only those areas. Places where more attuned beings, living with an accumulated, respectful, historical knowledge of their places, might avoid the worst aspects of predictable natural events (like the Sea Gypsies of Surin Island did during the 2004 Indonesian tsunami).

So, the very hard realities of humankind in this Twenty-First Century A.D., and our dismal failure in adapting to our ecosystem, should be our true Wake Up Call. Nature will regenerate much of what we've destroyed (sometimes by fire, flood, and earthquake), and create countless new life forms too. Mother Nature is generous and will even include some of us in the future if we will only cooperate.

A big part of my earthquake survival kit (or should I say, my generic, one-fits-all, disaster kit?) is my awareness of the inevitability of it all. I am mentally prepared for it and will not be disoriented or confused as to how such events could happen. And that applies equally to the ecological and economic cataclysms now unfolding all around us.

In the very near future the unwieldy materialistic lives we now know will have ceased to exist. For much of my life I've seen this coming and I fully understand why we're on the verge of societal collapse. So, if I actually live to see the worst of it, at least I won't be stumbling around in a dumbfounded state wondering how it happened, or why.

I realize the dizzying momentum of all this is overwhelming to many people, but our collective lack of will to change course still pisses me off!

It's not something we want to envision, but young people, alive right now, are going to witness the human population of Earth decline, substantially, to something resembling sustainable numbers.

That is a prediction based on a lifetime of open-minded witness to the verifiable down-to-earth facts of the realities we live with, not on some end-times religious dogma.

I'm not predicting the end of the world, just the decline of the human species.

And, whether you think this prediction qualifies me as a fringe lunatic doomsday prophet or not, history will corroborate the accuracy of this disturbing observation, if anyone's left to record it.

And, when my time comes, whether I succumb to old age, disease, or die as the result of one of these disasters---either natural or man-made---I hope to be right here where I belong, at home, in Southern California, the place I know and love.

In the meantime you will find me, for a good part of each day, outside, walking, and worshiping what's left of the lost paradise that once graced the west coast of Turtle Island.

postscript-

This post is now complete. My personal experiences with Southern California disasters, which I was going to insert here, will now be a future post.

A Visit To Nader Khalili's Cal-Earth Institute Of Earth Art & Architecture

Earth Dwellings - Outside The 3 Vault HouseClick on photos to enlarge

Forty-nine miles from our Big Bear place, in the Mojave Desert town of Hesperia, is world-renowned architect and philosopher Nader Khalili's Cal-Earth Institute of Earth Architecture building site. Peggy and I visited the Cal-Earth site yesterday where we finally got to see, first-hand, the beautiful and structurally sound earth-friendly dwellings that have been constructed there over the past 16 years.

Interior View Of The 3 Vault House

Click on photos to enlarge

Peggy was ready to move in to this one...

~

Below Is A Brick Dome At Cal-Earth With Wondrous Acoustic PropertiesClick on photos to enlarge

I can't describe what it's like to sit in the center of this dome and speak, or sing, or play your guitar, you'll just have to go there and see for yourself.

A visitor peers out the open ceiling of a brick dome
Click on photos to enlarge

A San Bernardino County Approved Earth Dwelling

Click on photos to enlarge

The small but cozy Hobbity looking home above has been approved by the San Bernardino County Department Of Building And Safety and plans are available from Cal-Earth.

A courtyard at the Cal-Earth site in Hesperia

Click on photos to enlarge

Cal-Earth Institute Of Earth Art And Architecture
For more information about Nader Khalili and the Cal-Earth Institute visit their website by clicking here and also see many more great pictures at their photo gallery here.

Through A Different Lens....................... 10 Years Car-Free

Click on photo to enlarge - image © jim otterstrom 2007
headlight lens © Ford Motor Company 1937

Today marks our 10th Anniversary of living car-free.

By "car-free", I mean that Peggy and I haven't owned a car since January 31st of 1997.

But, we have found it necessary to rent cars on several occasions, particularly during the time our son was hospitalized and recuperating after his near fatal car-wreck in 2005.

Still, cars haven't been part of our daily lives for those 10 years.

When we owned a car, we drove somewhere around the national average of 12,000 miles per year. So, according to this 'An Inconvenient Truth' CO2 calculator, our personal carbon dioxide output has been reduced by nearly 6.5 tons per year.

That's 130,000 pounds of CO2 over the 10 year period!

But, we must also factor in the approximately 6 thousand miles we have driven during that time, which means we need to subtract 6,500 pounds from that 130,000, bringing our net infernal combustion pollution reduction down to 123,500 pounds for the decade. This means we reduced our personal CO2 output by nearly 87%!

123,500 POUNDS!!!

Talk about a diet, now, to me, that's something to celebrate!

Yet, in a world of 6 1/2 billion people, does it make any difference?

Not really. Not to anyone but Peggy and I, and a small minority of eco-centric types whom, according to the status quo, would be defined as part of the lunatic fringe.

To a planet that's been around for some 4 1/2 billion years, and seen millions of species come and go, does it make a difference?

None whatsoever, unless you happen to be one of those species who have come, but not yet gone.

In a vast Universe of countless galaxies, stars, and planets, does it make any difference?

Nope...

...unless, by some miracle of chance, you have the good fortune to be currently alive and breathing oxygen upon the beautiful blue planet, Earth.

No, a few individual members of an entire culture which is addicted to conspicuous consumption and material gratification aren't going to make much of a difference, so why bother?

Well, that's a good question, and one I've asked myself many times.

Once you know that smoking cigarettes causes cancer do you continue smoking?

Many people do, and continue doing so, even when they're hooked up to an oxygen tank or permanently bedridden. I've seen people, whose vocal chords had been removed because of smoking related cancer, suck on cigarettes through a trachea valve.

That's what I call addiction, mental, emotional, and physical addiction.

Yet, this is supposedly a free country, and I would say that's their business, as long as I don't have to pay the associated medical bills.

So, what is the difference between a person who, through denial, apathy, illness, or self-loathing, commits suicide by ignoring their addictions, and someone who hastens the destruction of a planetary life support system through denial of their addiction and its consequences?

The only difference I see is that people who commit suicide through substance abuse are just hurting themselves, and those who care about them, where people who would poison an entire planet because they refuse to face their own addictions, are not only suicidal, but homicidal, genocidal, and biocidal as well.

Are we that oblivious to reality, and to our own responsibilities?

Do we just not give a damn, or do we feel too hopelessly addicted to our old habits? Or, are we just in denial that there is a real problem, and that each one of us is a big part of it?

Of the thousands of cars which drive past us every week, blowing exhaust in our faces as we walk around Big Bear, how many of the drivers ever think about what they're doing, or about our health, or the stench they're spewing into rarefied mountain air belonging to everybody?

Why is something like that legal?

Should it be legal for me to shit all over everyone and everything?

What's the difference?

Legal or not, it's most certainly immoral!

Todays' infernal combustion automobile is probably the worst of our addictions, because of the magnitude of its destructiveness, but our disease goes much deeper than that.

How often have you heard the term "for the benefit of mankind"?

Humankind, blinded by its own cleverness, and imagined self-importance, values each technology primarily for the benefits to mankind.

Wouldn't a species with the slightest bit of common sense, and some desire for long-term survival, assess technologies primarily on their benefits to all life on Earth and the long-term health of their ecosystem?

Isn't survival considered a benefit to mankind?

We have grossly overpopulated the planet through the invention and use of technologies which supposedly benefit mankind. Yet it is becoming clearer every day that those very technologies may soon render our planet uninhabitable for those who would breathe oxygen, including the mankind they allegedly benefit.

And, once again, we turn to the technologies of an obsolete social & economic model---to the proponents of a failing civilization---for so-called clean car technology, alternative fuels, and renewable energy sources, so the worlds 6 1/2 billion people can, by 2041, become 9 billion (see chart here).

Contemporary wisdom as seen through the dominant lens:

For the good of mankind, all 6 1/2 billion of us, we will find solutions.

The global economy will not fail because our technology will find ways around nature's limits.

I wonder what percentage of the world population ever considers the consequences we face if this ever-expanding global economy of 6 1/2 billion people doesn't fail until our ecosystem does?

Can we even imagine the collapse of our entire civilization, the complete die-off of the human species, a total extinction of life on the planet, or an Earth that more resembles Mars?

Are we aware that the entire world is now embroiled in resource wars over oil, water, minerals, fish & game stocks, and arable land?

Have we paid attention to the fact that huge tracts of land recently used for growing food, or sustaining wildlife, are now being converted to growing crops for ethanol based fuels, or, that more than 50% of the pollution an automobile generates during its lifetime is produced during the manufacturing processes, or that we are in the midst of the 6th great extinction period in the history of our planet, and that habitat loss due to human expansion, industrialism, climate change, pollution, and resource extraction is causing those extinctions (I recently read that 13% of Americans have never heard of Global Warming)? READ THE LATEST CLIMATE CHANGE NEWS HERE (added 2/2/2007).

As the diversity of life on our planet diminishes, as the atmosphere deteriorates, and the pollution of our air, water, and soil increases exponentially, as world fisheries are depleted, and soil erosion claims more & more acres of farmland, how do we respond?

For the good of mankind---to provide jobs, housing, schools, and to accommodate more resource extraction in support of the teeming hoards---we build ever more subdivisions, shopping centers, and freeways.

WE'RE ON THE TITANIC!

We've bumped up against something and the ship seems to be listing a bit. But this is the "unsinkable" Titanic, a marvel of modern technology, and besides, the band is still playing, many of the passengers are still dancing, and the crew in charge says there's really nothing to worry about.

FANTASIA REVISITED!

Anyone who has seen Walt Disney's Fantasia will remember the Sorcerer's Apprentice, whose ineptness with technological wizardry, and Mickey Mouse tomfoolery, backfired when his creations ran amok, swarming uncontrollably with their own single-minded purpose.

WE ARE MICKEY MOUSE!

And unfortunately, like Mickey, we're desperately hoping that the wizard wakes up soon to save our sorry butts.

Only this is no cartoon, unless you believe what you see on television.

Much like the prism design of the headlight lens above, from a 1937 Ford---which aims light in a prescribed direction, for a relatively short distance---our vision today of what lies ahead is mostly defined for us by the corporate media propaganda machine of the dominant culture, and designed to focus our attention on economically specific, anthropocentric, elitist solutions. READ HERE HOW A CONSERVATIVE AMERICAN THINK-TANK IS WORKING TO PUT THIER OWN SPIN ON TODAY'S BEST CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE (added 2/2/2007).

I try to contemplate the future through a different lens than the one offered by those who would rule the world solely for the benefit of mankind.

Through this alternate lens (I might call it a full-spectrum lens), which is focused upon the Laws Of Nature and the needs of all living things, it becomes more obvious that there will very likely be zero automobiles in the not too distant future of planet Earth---bio-fueled, hybrid, hydrogen or otherwise.

But the clarity of Nature's lens is where I also find reasons to hope that life itself---with or without Homo-sapiens---might continue to evolve and flourish on Earth, regardless of the arrogant selfishness of todays' dominant species! (HERE'S AN ARTICLE ABOUT THE PROSPECTS OF LIFE ON EARTH (updated 2/2/2007).

And, like I've said before, hope is more powerful than despair.

My hope might actually evolve into optimism if I saw the faintest hint that individual human beings, in huge numbers, were willing to address their own addictions to destructive technology.

I still have plenty of addictions of my own, like hot-running water, indoor plumbing, electricity, refrigeration, music, photography, the internet, beer, wine, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

And I'll be working on some of those...

...but I'm already way over the automobile, and the stupid-ass television, which is nothing more than a brainwashing advertising platform for this whole conspicuously consumptive life-threatening mess.

An 86.7% reduction in our fossil-fuel burning?

123,500 fewer pounds of CO2?

Insignificant, maybe...

...but it's our small contribution to the future, to your future.

It's one simple thing we can do, and it feels good.

It feels right!

Love & Peace