Many good posts on systems, boundary critique, climate.
…where systems thinking really gets interesting is when we include ourselves as part of the system we’re describing. For example, for the climate system, we should include ourselves as elements of the system, as the many of our actions affect the release of greenhouse gases. But we’re also the agents that give some aspects of the system their meaning or purpose – the fossil fuel extraction and production system exists to provide us with energy, and one could even argue that the climate system exists to provide us with suitable conditions to live in, and that ecosystems exist to provide us with food, resources, and even a sense of wonder and belonging. The interesting part of this is that different people will ascribe different meanings and/or purposes to these systems, and some would argue that to ascribe such purposes is inappropriate.
Robert Krulwich for NPR writes about cartographer Harold Fisk’s visualization of the river’s historical paths here.
This is a map of the Lower Mississippi’s evolving floodplains, lifted from cartographer Harold Fisk’s 1944 report, Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River.
You can download the report in its entirety, including numerous maps like this one, from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers web site (if you’re looking for maps like the one up top, you want to click the link on the lefthand side of the USACE website that says “Fisk 44 Oversized Plates.” (thanks io9)
Went kayaking with Joan Lundell, recent grad from PNCA MFA in Collaborative Design and Sasha Davies of Cyril’s fame; Joan generously hauled her boats up to Cathedral Park where we set off, and in 4 hours of drifting and poking around, got as far as the edge of Swan Island. It’s doleful out there, especially on an overcast day. Across the river, what look like gas storage tanks read like a cluster of blank mosques. Homeless camps dot the shore. “Aquatic squatters” live in boats in Willamette Cove, near-permanent transients in the heart of LWG’s superfund remediation plan, ducks are drifting, dogs are chasing sticks into the water, and people are fishing.
I’m confused by the directive that you’re not supposed to walk in the sediment, where most of the superfund site’s toxins are embedded. This is where people are camping, and dogs are being walked. And none of this gets back into the water, next to a swimming beach? Nothing stirs it up, not even “prop wash” – propeller agitation from the tankers that come up and down the river collecting grain and depositing cargo from overseas?
1. Talked to Dr Elaine Ingham, chief scientist at the Rodale Institute in PA (formerly at OSU). She’s a Soil Diva: an energetic, brilliant, committed soil expert and the author of my favorite quote from the film Symphony of the Soil*:
“It’s Times Square on New Years Eve in the soil, all the time”.
I already found out that half the microorganisms I drew are “bad guys,” which really upset Dr. Ingham. I clearly need some schooling. I’m going to learn this fall, soil analysis and microvideography, at least superficially (bad pun sorry I bet soil can engender lots of those) .
* I’m indebted to Stefani Bardin for turning me onto the film.
2. I went to Pomarius, Peter Schoonmaker’s brother-in-law’s nursery in part because it’s spectacular (and full of foreigners:) but also because the city’s doing sewer lines and there was a big cut outside along the curb, in which a lot of clay was exposed. So we grabbed a shovel and started to make for the trench when a worker came and forbade us to get in there – and dug the bucket of clay up himself. Stinky, but awesome. Now I have material to test this winter til I get back out on the river.
He also gave us a tour inside the manholes – flowing waters, nasty pipes suggesting toilets (as Timothy Morton likes to say, “There’s no there there”), and stagnant shit under the nursery’s plein aire dining area, with strange stumpy crickets clustered around the upturned lid…
My hosts Sasha and Michael, the proprietors of the brilliant wine and food spot in the SE, Cyril’s at Clay Pigeon Winery, think I make all this stuff up, just ride my bike all day long and come home with weird stories:)
Left: magnified view of the area just north of the St Johns Bridge; Right: lower Willamette / Columbia River framing North Portland with Sauvie Island and Washington State at the top
I started work on a way to visualize the Willamette and Columbia Rivers, flanking North Portland, the 11 mile superfund site and the startling fact that so many uses and agents (typologies, species, agendas, wants and wills, actions and reactions) are actually crowded together. I’m not at all certain of this method, but I am currently set on remaining agnostic to differences and placing no value or codification on the system as a whole. My methods include:
An accurate tracing from USGS topographic maps (just the river ways currently), which taught me a lot both through the intimacy of drawing the rivers – how the shore moves, how it got moved, where it got straightened and filled in by the USACE. You can see some older maps here. Drawing offers time and movement, and tracing offers freedom from too much interpretation.
I got some atlases from Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (thanks to Sallie Edmunds) which were very helpful start points at understanding the various use-values of the shoreline.
To actually get tangible information (cars, chemicals, spa services, cement factories:
– Use the 2001 Willamette River Atlas to keep the whole picture in hand,
– Then go to google maps, where I can determine a shoreline address by using their “what’s here?” feature,
– Input that address into portlandmaps.com, navigating that rich interface (need to find prostitution? noise, garbage, hazards or elevation? This site can help you), to see what businesses are within a 1/2 mile radius of the spot I found. I hope I’m wrong and there’s a GIS database that lists all leaseholders as well as leasees, as many of the major real estate holdings are simply “Port of Portland” or “Toyota” and they rent out space. This also is a getting-to-know-you strategy.
-The shoreline can be further researched by going to the Oregon DEQ’s Land Quality Environmental Cleanup Site Information Database, and inputting some of the big land holders I found on the River Atlas, (like Schnitzer Steel) which is a goldmine (snort) of the perhaps less desired agents of influence like barium, lead, antimony, which have leached from prior practices.
I can sense how this map could obsess me – going through the sites is minor sleuth work, and although it’s exhausting, it has rhythm. Something(s) is missing though, which I look forward to unearthing.
