Big Brother Raids R-Own-Ranch & Condemns Property!!!

At Home On The Smith Family's

'R-Own-Ranch' in 1980 Click on photo to enlarge - ©1980/2010 jim otterstrom

Photo left to right; Thelma Smith, Edgar Smith (gramps), Karen Smith (Miller), Peggy Otterstrom, Jim Otterstrom, Ed Smith, Debra Smith, Clark Smith, with Boots & Chewbacca in front.

Just before Peggy and I moved to Big Bear this is where we lived, in that army surplus quonset hut, on the Smith family's 60 acre 'R-Own-Ranch', a secluded paradise two miles up a dirt road from Mulholland Drive in the Santa Monica Mountains near Malibu Canyon Road.

We moved here shortly after we were married, and the ranch is also where we started our own family, Jimmy came into the world during our time here.

We were quite happy living alongside this down to earth Old Calabasas family who welcomed us into their lives as if we were born & raised right there with them.

Most of us worked for the Post Office, either in Calabasas, or Woodland Hills, which is how we became friends, and we held many unforgettable postal gatherings up at the ranch---far from the rat-race---where people could relax and let their hair down without bothering the neighbors, because there weren't any.

At these large pot-luck get-togethers there was often live music provided by musician friends---from young rockers, to aging big band era players---the majority of whom were working at the Post Office too. The family also---long before my days there---had rigged up a fenced (with chicken wire), night-lighted (with salvaged flourescent fixtures), volleyball court, Ma & Pa Kettle style, where, old & young alike, would often play into the wee hours of the morning.

On more normal quieter nights, the family always gathered in the living room of the original old home-built house where four generations of Smiths would gregariously indulge themselves in hours of playing Scrabble, Monopoly, or any number of board, dice, or card games, until way into the night, and there was also a game room with a pool table off the living room overlooking the vegetable garden.

I loved sitting in on those games and listening to family tales about things like hiking miles to the old Calabasas School on a trail which led from the ranch, over the mountains, and down to the quaint little town of Calabasas. But, I don't believe I ever once beat my ol' buddy, Ed Smith, or his sister, Karen, at a game of Scrabble. Those two were just too damned sharp, but then again, they played the game almost every night for much of their lives.

That's the kind of thing families used to do when they lived in remote rural areas, far from the nearest neighbor, before cable or satellite TV, or computers.

I was absolutely charmed by this unassuming family of self-reliant old-fashioned folks who still lived---even during the 1970s, '80s, & early '90s---much as they had throughout the 1940s & '50s. I felt like I had come home, and I still think of them as family, and their 'R-Own-Ranch' as the country home I always longed for.

During our few years there most of the activity centered around the main house, which apparently came into existence around 1927---long before there were enforced building codes in those unincorporated areas---with several rooms obviously added on, maybe as late as the early 1950s. Also, of course, was the war surplus quonset where Peggy & I lived---which had been erected in 1956---35 years before the city of Calabasas was incorporated. And there were a couple of small trailers there too, available to family members who sometimes came and went depending upon their situations at any given time.

Living at the ranch was always an adventure, and definitely not for the faint of heart. The day we moved in was during the midst of a wet winter, and the private road leading up to the ranch had just washed out about a 1/2 mile down from the house, so Peggy and I had to trudge back & forth up that last muddy 1/2 mile with all of our belongings. That would've been late 1979, the year I bought my first 4-wheel drive Toyota, for obvious reasons.

The Smiths owned a tiny, ancient, rickety Caterpillar bulldozer which could, periodically, be patched into some semblance of working order to assist with road repair during washouts, which came in handy because the 1.2 mile dirt section of the road was almost completely wiped out twice during our 3 year stay at the ranch. Those are rewarding and memorable experiences in my life, working side by side with the Smiths to rebuild their road, and this is also when Peggy learned how to use a chain saw and I got to know her rugged hard-working side.

Then there were the fires. A couple of years before we moved to Big Bear a fire broke out to the north of us in the middle of the night, near highway 101, and we were awakened by a call from the fire department warning us to be prepared because it was moving in our direction.

There was a fire hydrant on the property near the main house---the cost of which was surely added to the R-Own-Ranch tax assessment, but the fire department would no longer allow their equipment up the narrow road to protect just one old house. They did however offer to provide us with some fire hose, a nozzle, and a bit of safety instruction if we wished to defend the place ourselves, an offer we gladly accepted.

Over that tense ensuing day the fire moved slowly toward us and some of the Smiths decided to drive down and talk with the firefighters stationed by the big fancy houses at the lower paved section of the road near Mulholland Drive, to see if they might change their minds about sending a truck up. What happened instead, was that a sheriff wouldn't allow the guys back up the road, which left me and Peggy, along with Thelma Smith, probably in her late 50s then, and her son Clark, in his early to mid teens, to defend the place.

I suggested to Peggy that she should leave and told her I was going to stay and fight the fire. She said, "I'm not going anywhere without you"! So, Peg and I followed the fire department advice, wrapping our heads & faces in wet towels as the fire advanced over the hill and moved in upon us. We kept the house and everything around it soaking wet, and when the smoke got too thick we'd adjust the nozzle to a fine spray over our heads and breathe, through the wet towels, the oxygen that was emanating from the misting spray of water falling around us. A few times I had to leave Peggy in charge of the hefty fire nozzle so I could run back to the quonset and use the garden hose to extinguish small fires that had ignited in knot-holes of the leafless deciduous 'Trees of Heaven' growing along the side of the metal building, which was otherwise rather impervious to fire. That's when I discovered how strong and courageous Peggy is.

The fire burned around us for a couple of hours but eventually moved on and the Smith homestead was spared for the time being. Then, in March of 1983, just a few days before Peggy & I moved away, another fire headed toward the ranch, and we were prepared to man the hoses again, but the previous fire had cleared most of the underbrush so this one just burned on past us.

Sadly, in 1996, a third fire finally burned the original family home to the ground while the Smiths stood by helplessly at the bottom of the road where the police, once again, wouldn't allow them up to defend their uninsurable property.

The quonset hut and trailers survived though, and members of the family, including Thelma's now 70 year-old brother, Lloyd Smith, and his son Gary, continued living on what was left of their scrappy beloved ranch, until, completely unannounced and unexpected, "on July 8th, 2010, the Calabasas Community Development Department, its building officials, code enforcement officers, other employees, personnel and agents, Los Angeles County Animal Control, and armed Sheriff’s deputies — a total of 14 people, eight of whom still remain unidentified despite requests for the City to identify them — descended en masse on one of Cold Creek’s founding families in the heart of undeveloped upper Stokes Canyon, 1.2 miles off the beaten track"*.

*Excerpted from the Las Virgenes Homeowners Federation August, 2010 newsletter. Read the whole creepy story about the raid here.

In more decent times and places, in an America once striving toward democracy, these human beings---long-time historic pioneering residents of their community---would've been treated with a modicum of courtesy and respect, instead of like common criminals. Their old non code-compliant homestead would've been considered grandfathered, and partially exempt from today's strict regulations, and they would've been officially notified as to whatever health & safety issues required immediate attention and given some time to come into compliance.

But no, 11 days after the raid the Smith family's electricity was cut off, and 7 days after that the water too, leaving 70 year-old Lloyd, and his son Gary, homeless. The bastards even came and capped off the fire hydrant!!!

Because, as you can plainly see, the Calabasas of today is a miracle of modern Capitalism, where destructive profiteering defines progress, and appallingly ugly subdivisions of enormous disgusting "mansions" are smeared all over the once lovely hillsides that the Smith kids wandered on their way to school.

There's no room in Calabasas any more for down home folks like the Smith family, or in the rest of the Santa Monica Mountains for that matter, it's all gone to shit now! And the robber barons who run the world these days don't even have the decency to come in and make the family a fair offer for their land. They just send in a bunch of lackey bureaucrats to do a little dirty work, raiding, condemning, and evicting elderly life-long residents, probably figuring they'll be able to get what they want for almost nothing, while these people are suffering under duress. And I sorely suspect they may well succeed, because ordinary folks just don't have the resources it takes to fight powerful monied interests.

Interestingly, this raid was conducted around the same time an out-of-state owner of 300 acres somewhere in the vicinity of the Smith property, was inquiring about having his land incorporated into the city of Calabasas for development purposes, and would it surprise anybody if the Smith acreage just happens to lie between his land and the rest of what is already contiguous to Calabasas?

Whether this turns out to be the case or not, you can bet your ass that somebody's got an eye on making big bucks off the corpse of R-Own-Ranch, where generations of Smiths, through their labors of love, toiled away for 60 some years on their remote little plot of paradise, enlarging their home, one room at a time, planting gardens, building ponds, repairing roads, paying taxes, and raising their kids, all by themselves, without the need for pre-schools, playdates, or ritalin.

As for the people who live in all those sterile new giant Calabastard enclaves---those anti-coyote, anti-clothesline, anti-cesspool civilized newcomers whose filth & excrement flows through a nasty maze of pipes to some oft malfunctioning sewage treatment plant before being dumped into the Santa Monica Bay; whose countless Hummers, Escalades, and Navigators foul the air above the sacred mountains I once called home---I feel sorry for you and can't even imagine living in one of those oversized crapboxes and calling it a home.

In my eyes R-Own-Ranch is a victim of the same corporate driven oppression which has subverted democracy all across America by buying off the government, rewriting the rules to benefit the rich, and redistributing the wealth of a once thriving middle class---who were the backbone of the country---to a small percentage of the population, which is why the gap between the rich & poor is wider today than ever before, and growing by the hour. Pure raw evidence of the class wars the entire world is in the midst of.

And, for the record, these are my own opinions, and neither my thoughts nor my memories were verified, approved, or authorized by any member of the Smith family.

My anger and indignation over human beings subjected to this kind of treatment is my own, and I'll speak my mind about it anytime I damned well please, especially when it hits this close to home.

Finally, to all the members of the Smith family; to Ed & Cindy, Karen & Dan, and all your kids; to Thelma, Lloyd, & Gary, and all the rest of you. Peggy and I hope you will find a way to get 'R-Own-Ranch' untangled from this nightmare. We will always feel like a part of your family and this is very painful for us too.

Edgar Smith in 1980Click to enlarge - © 1980/2010 jim otterstrom

The late, Edgar Smith, patriarch of R-Own-Ranch who bought the place in the 1940s.

'Smitty' in 1980Click to enlarge - © 1980/2010 jim otterstrom

The, late, 'Smitty', son-in-law of Edgar, husband to Thelma, was the sole rural letter carrier for Calabasas, delivering the mail to every residence for several decades.

Peggy in October of 1981 Click to enlarge - © 1981/2010 jim otterstrom

A very pregnant Peggy, with our goat, in front of the R-Own-Ranch vegetable garden in October of '81.

Peggy on Friday, November 13th, 1981 Click to enlarge - © 1981/2010 jim otterstrom

Peggy, in front of the quonset with Smith family dog, Chewbacca, about 16 hours before our son Jimmy was born, and check out the cat on the tin roof above the door.

Quonset Bathroom - 1981Click to enlarge - © 1981/2010 jim otterstrom

The quonset bathroom during a facelift I was doing on the place while we lived there.


Remodeling Our Bedroom - 1981
Click on photo to enlarge - © 1981/2010 jim otterstrom

Ed Smith, grandson of Edgar, son of Smitty & Thelma, helps me (in the middle) with the drywall in our bedroom while, Debra Smith, looks on from the doorway to the bathroom.

Peggy - 1981 Click to enlarge - © 1981/2010 jim otterstrom

Peggy, just days away from motherhood, poses for me in our newly remodeled bedroom in the quonset hut at R-Own-Ranch.

Postscript

If you think this post simply describes an unfortunate isolated incident please follow this link to see a short audio slideshow about ex-Marine & Viet Nam vet, Joseph Diliberti, a stunningly creative human being who may lose his 4 acre property in San Diego County, as well as his magnificent hand-crafted ceramic home, under somewhat similar circumstances.

This kind of stuff happens every day, to good people all around the world, who are victimized by the thievery of empire builders who are now beginning to run out of resources to steal; and by classism, elitism, racism, and sexism.

If you lived along the Yangtze River in China, they came and took millions of your ancestral homes for a huge dam to power the industrialists factories, an engineering monstrosity which, at best, will silt over in a dozen decades or so. If you live in Tennessee, they may soon come for the coal under your feet---if they haven't already done so---removing the mountian tops around your home, destroying the landscape and displacing the wildlife who live there, while ruining the watershed and poisoning your water and your air. If you live in Sumatra, and survive a tsunami, they will come and confiscate your land, replacing your fishing villages with luxury resorts. If you live in Central America, they will come and confiscate your homeland for banana or coffee plantations and put you to work in sweatshops making designer shoes or T-shirts for a few bucks a week. If you were a Native American, they might have brought you gifts, like blankets intentionally infected with smallpox, to kill off your people and take over your land with much less resistance. If you live in Iraq, they will come and destroy your country to procure the oil you're sitting on.

And the list of victimization goes on forever, from East Timor, to the Tar Sands of Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast of America; from the brutality of the British, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, & American empires, to the murderous history of religious fanaticism; from the Crusades, to witch burning in America, and the horrific radical muslim fundamentalism of the Taliban.

I believe, as Dan Quinn wrote in his best-selling novel, Ishmael, that some humans are takers, and some are leavers, and for the past 10,000 years or so, the takers have been winning big, but I think they are running out of time. The planet can't afford them anymore...

'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.

Looking Back From The Future, Part 1:

A Cargo Cult Shrine...

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2007-2009 jim otterstrom

...to the Myth of Unlimited Fossil Fuels.

As oil became scarce and expensive, toward the end of the brief but fantastic 200 year Petroleum Age, people built shrines to the oil and automobile culture, continuing to drive their gas-guzzlers in the belief that some new technology would soon produce a cheap replacement for the once abundant fossil fuels which made such extravagance possible.

Unfortunately, they were wrong...

The historical photograph above was made at an actual working tire and wheel store, in one of the 10 most affluent well-educated counties in America, during the early years of the 21st Century.

Such folly seems unimaginable today as those of us who remain scavenge the grotesque ruins of that addictively consumptive oil-addled civilization for tools and materials to help make our humble lives of meager subsistence a bit easier.

But even now, scattered on the fringes of crumbling cities, there are deeply religious and highly volatile cargo cults who maintain vigils and conduct Sunday Prayer Services in ancient Gasoline Station Temples (This custom is rooted in practices beginning as early as 2008, as archived here and here).

Devotees can sometimes keep electric lights on, during sunny days, with scavenged jury-rigged solar panels and the few, dim but priceless, still working LED bulbs they've managed to scrounge.

These poor souls will explain to you, with a desperate distant gleam in their eyes, that they must keep the places "open for business" as much as possible because nobody knows for sure when the big tanker will return to fill their underground reservoirs again.

Twice a year, in late December and early April, you'll see hundreds of the devout, chanting and singing, as they make their sacred pilgrimages to distant rusted out refineries, or long dead oilfields, where they burn effigies of M. King Hubbert.

It's a pitiful and somewhat scary experience to encounter these fanatical groups who cling so mindlessly to obsolete mythologies.

But don't ever ridicule or make fun of their beliefs and rituals, they are known to become violent when confronted with conflicting viewpoints.

Anonymous journal entry

December 12, 2163

© 2009 jim otterstrom

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…

Tuesday Afternoon...

Sandalwood Drive, 2:20 P.M.

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

This was the view this afternoon looking north, on Sandalwood Drive, toward Big Bear Lake.

There are large tracts of undeveloped commercial property on both sides of the road here and I dread the day they are developed.

I thought I'd post this picture for posterity, so future generations can look back and assess the results of what we call progress.

~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.

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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.

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

Homo colossus - A colossal failure of values

Click on photo to enlarge-photo by an unknown passerby

A post-election rant...

At 8:30 this morning, during a 5-mile nature-walk with Dallas, I found myself staring at this advertising poster on the front of a gas station mini-mart.

It reminded me of television, of consumerism, of Capitalism and economic growth, of propaganda and corporate funded mind-control, of the recent elections, and, of the colossal failure the human species faces.

As I stood there dwelling on thoughts of colossal import, pondering the species known as Homo sapiens, I remembered sociologist William R. Catton's term for our species as it exists today, Homo colossus.

Catton wrote, in his groundbreaking 1980 book, 'Overshoot-The Ecological Basis For Revolutionary Change';

"The more potent human technology became, the more man turned into a colossus. Each human colossus required more resources and more space than each pre-colossal human. Contrast the environmental impact of the Central Ohio Coal Company and its huge machines with the environmental impact of the Stone Age people who inhabited the same area a few centuries before. The Indians had not necessarily possessed any more virtue; they simply used cruder tools. They were non-colossal.

The same kind of problem would be much easier to recognize if mankind were afflicted with some kind of mutation that had the curious effect of causing children to grow to twice their parents' adult size---so that they required twice as much food and fiber per capita to sustain life and comfort. Suppose, further, that the effect were somehow cumulative, so that each generation grew twice as large and voracious as the preceding one. Quite obviously, the world's carrying capacity would be much less for later generations of giants than for earlier generations of runts. Just as obviously, neither conventional political rostrums nor revolutionary agitation could do much to remedy the situation.

Perhaps we would know this if we ceased to call ourselves Homo sapiens and began to call ourselves Homo colossus. If we were accustomed to thinking of a human being not just as a naked ape or a fallen angel but as a man-tool system, we would have recognized that progress could become a disease. The more colossal man's tool kit became, the larger man became, and the more destructive of his own future."

...and later in the book.

"History will record the period of global dominance by Homo colossus as a brief interlude. Our most urgent task is to develop policies designed not to prolong that dominance, but to ensure that the successor to Homo colossus will be, after all, Homo sapiens. Developing such policies must be so enormously difficult that it is not easy even to accept the urgency of the task. But the longer we delay beginning the more numerous and colossal we become---thereby trapping ourselves all the more irredeemably in the fatal practice of stealing from the future."

Those words were written nearly 30 years ago and no such consensus for change has emerged. On the contrary, population growth, consumption habits, resource depletion, species extinctions, widespread pollution, toxic contamination of food & water supplies, and global warming are all spiraling, exponentially, out of control.

But wait, Jim! Haven't you heard the good news?

There's been a "paradigm shift" in Washington!

Great change is on the horizon because the democrats have trounced the republicans in the American political arena.

Hogwash! When's the last time you heard a democrat argue against economic growth or global Capitalism?

Here's a quote describing the differences between democrats & republicans by another author, Rita Mae Brown, whom, much to my liking, speaks truth with a rather down-to-earth bluntness.

"The difference between the two parties is the difference between syphillis and gonorrhea. Neither one of them has a very compelling program for America. They don't question our whole economic base, and I'm not talking about being socialist or anything like that. What we need to look at is whether our economy is safe for the earth."

As far as I'm concerned, you can apply that very analogy to Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, Libertarianism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.etc. etc., and any other anthropocentric notion that separates Homo colossus from his place among Nature and her universal laws.

What would be needed for our long-term survival is a profound, species-wide, paradigm shift (combined with a lot fewer people), because, as long as we place ourselves above Nature, instead of within her, the ways in which we live our lives will continue to be a disease upon (or at dis-ease with) the earth that supports us.

And, evidently, that paradigm shift isn't going to happen.

It's become quite obvious that, as a civilization, we are incapable of understanding the colossal changes we need to make in ourselves if we wish to continue as a viable species. Eventually though, forces beyond our apparent control will greatly reduce our numbers, and, for the sake of our species, as well as the diversity of life on earth, I hope that happens before we ourselves end up on the ever-growing heap of extinctions we are causing.

So, did I vote?

Yes, I always vote...

...although, in recent memory, I haven't voted for anything, or anybody, that had much of a chance of winning. Yet I keep on voting lest those creeps in power think I just don't give a damn. I go to the polls and make my contrary little statement of displeasure with the status-quo, no matter how inconsequential that statement is.

It's kind of like the words, and time, I've wasted here today, when the above picture already said it all...

Still, I often feel a need to speak my mind, and, as I said in my October 11th post, "I’ll take protest and dissent over war or collapse any time", but that doesn't imply that I usually get my way, because world events almost never go in the direction I'd like to see them go.