2022 Archive of RENATURED, Marina Zurkow's Research Blog

Here’s a mishmash of maybes, that got me really excited last week.

Meeting filmmaker Matt McCormick:

Seeing his awesome studio on River St between the cement and grain silos, just S of the Fremont St Bridge. With a hole in the parking lot chain link you have sneaky in/out access to the Willamette River, and possibly a site for conversations and some local tea:

 

 

Reading Garibaldi, A. and N. Turner. 2004. Cultural keystone species: implications for ecological conservation and restoration, and musing about what and who constitute culturally and ecologically significant (albeit geotemporally brief) keystone species (cows and concrete and corn, to name a few provocateurs):

Ecologists have long recognized that some species, by virtue of the key roles they play in the overall structure and functioning of an ecosystem, are essential to its integrity; these are known as keystone species. Similarly, in human cultures everywhere, there are plants and animals that form the contextual underpinnings of a culture, as reflected in their fundamental roles in diet, as materials, or in medicine. In addition, these species often feature prominently in the language, ceremonies, and narratives of native peoples and can be considered cultural icons. Without these “cultural keystone species,” the societies they support would be completely different. An obvious example is western red-cedar (Thuja plicata) for Northwest Coast cultures of North America. Often prominent elements of local ecosystems, cultural keystone species may be used and harvested in large quantities and intensively managed for quality and productivity. Given that biological conservation and ecological restoration embody human cultures as crucial components, one approach that may improve success in overall conservation or restoration efforts is to recognize and focus on cultural keystone species. In this paper, we explore the concept of cultural keystone species, describe similarities to and differences from ecological keystone species, present examples from First Nations cultures of British Columbia, and discuss the application of this concept in ecological restoration and conservation initiatives.
– Ecology and Society

Finding a motherlode of Willamette River Superfund info, which I’m aggregating here:

Connecting with Sara Huston, who, with her partner John, designs under the name The Last Attempt at Greatness. We are going to talk about some structures we might make, to serve really local things (like Willamette chai or English ivy).

Very little, I’m slightly embarrassed to confess, makes a place more vibrant than knowing how much of it is edible.

Since I went on Becky Lerner’s First Ways foraging tour near Alberta Street last week, neighborhoods and lawns have come alive. One of the many things I appreciated about Becky is her blindness to speciesism: she’s interested in eating, healing, and smoking the neighborhood, not deeming what’s native or foreign.
Read her blog, if not her book.

We did a 2 hour foraging tour, focused on what might constitute a psychotropic smoke mixture (noting illegal), but also nibbled and snipped (only street side, following the laws of usufruct*) our way through a mere 2 block radius, which included

 

 

 

Hen and chicks, whose leaves are edible

 

 

 

and American poppy, to make a sedative tincture.

* * * * * * *

*The ancient legal principle of usufruct broadly dictates that private property can be used for the public good so long as it’s not damaged in the process. This is of note to the urban forager, as it suggests that fruit and other plant foods grown on private land can be harvested by passersby. A stricter and far less hazardous foodie interpretation of usufruct means that ripe citrus tree, whose trunk meets the soil inside your neighbor’s yard but whose laden branches overhang the sidewalk, can be shorn of a few bits of fruit so long as you don’t harm the tree or any other property in so doing, or abuse the privilege; that is, take only as much as you can consume.

– LA Weekly, shout out to Fallen Fruit

A Superfund site is an abandoned hazardous waste site that poses enough risk to human and environmental health that the Environmental Protection Agency has stepped in to lead a clean-up effort. It’s also the name of an actual fund that no longer has any money in it*
– http://www.epa.gov/superfund/about.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova

 

 

* the Superfund law originally paid for toxic waste cleanups through a tax on petroleum and chemical industries. The chemical and petroleum fees were intended to provide incentives to use less toxic substances. Over five years, $1.6 billion was collected, and the tax went to a trust fund for cleaning up abandoned or uncontrolled hazardous waste sites. The last full fiscal year (FY) in which the Department of the Treasury collected the tax was 1995. At the end of FY 1996 the invested trust fund balance was $6.0 billion. This fund was exhausted by the end of FY 2003; since that time funding for superfund sites for which the potentially responsible party (PRP) could not be found has been appropriated by Congress out of general revenues. –http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund#Provisions

 

 

SO tempting to call it superfun/d, but the marvelous Christie Leece with her Superfund Salvage oh so subtly or accidentally came to a similar etymological epiphany already.

Look:

 

As for the clay, now I am teaching myself how to process it. I’m using the best online explanation I could find here.

So first, yeah, I found some clay. I was simply excited to touch the stuff and recognize it as clay: silky, powdery, and if you wet it and rubbed it between your fingers, you could tell, if you’d ever handled slip in a cushy predetermined amateur clay studio like the one I work in in Brooklyn. I’m not good at assessing clay yet; apparently you should roll the clay in question between your palms and if it turns into a worm, it’s good whereas if it falls apart or smears into palmy smaze, it’s not going to be very usable.

Back at PNCA, I’m using the ceramics studio to see if it’s usable, fireable, what it can do — if anything.

So that’s where I am. More to come as the clay does its thing.

 

+++

 

Update Aug 14

I processed all the clay samples from the four sites.

Willamette #2 I left as slip and Willamette #3 I had to amend with some Kentucky Old Mine #4 Ball (OM-4) clay, apparently from a mine in Kentucky.
I was told* that clay, in order to have any plasticity, must contain a variety of particle sizes or it will dry up and crack, as mine did when I laid it out on the plaster slab.

But as slip, it is surprisingly adherent and is not cracking.

Here are 4 slab-rolled hand-built stoneware cups, coated with slip from Willamette site #2:

 

Here are 2 pinch pot containers made from the Willamette site#3  clay amended with 20% OM-4 Clay. Even with the added clay, it was still quite lifeless so I knew that slab rolling for hand-built cups was not going to end well:

Next step: firing.

One bisque fire (no 2nd firing):

 

They are much brighter red than you see here.

+ + + +

* More info on clay elasticity:

http://ceramicartsdaily.org/community/topic/3087-clay-elasticity-or-not/
“For a body to be really workable, you need particles of various sizes. Grog, while rated at a specific mesh size, actually has particles of many sizes.”
Some suggestions from this forum include adding ball clay, which is fine, urine, beer, and bentonite.

 

Found a boat on Craigslist belonging to a retired lineman named Kent; he took me and Peter out from Cathedral Park, up through Multnomah Channel, around the top of Sauvie Island, down the Columbia along the south side of Hayden Island, down to Government Island, and back around Kelly Point to our start. Photos ins sequence can be found starting here on flickr.

My agenda was to start to get a sense of the usage overlays along the northeast and northwest sides of Portland, and also dip up just outside the city bounds, where agriculture is happening (on Sauvie Island). I also wanted to start experimenting with local clay, the river banks are full of it.

I sampled clay from the river banks at 4 spots:

1.
Lighthouse NE end of Sauvie Island
+45° 50′ 52.80″, -122° 47′ 20.52″

2.
+45°38’53”, -122°46’3″
Kelly Point

3.
+45° 34′ 18.75″, -122° 31′ 25.01″
Government Island

4.
+45° 35′ 11.95″, -122° 45′ 45.44″
Cathedral Park

5.
bond street sewer

6.
linnton shoreline