Ambivalence

I have several questions.

1. Why was I compelled to buy this? 
2. Why does this label make me believe a drink that's mostly sugar is cool?
3. Why would Pepsi want to advertise that they usually use 'fake' sugar?
4. Why would Pepsi want to advertise that they will return to using 'fake' sugar?
5. Is "Throwback" what happens to you when you gain 40 pounds because you drink sugar water and then try to lift something without stretching?
6. Why was I compelled to buy this?

Works on Paper: Bright Sadness

10 years ago, I wrote a simple devotional for Lent, drawing on the rich expression of the Christian faith in churches more traditional, and Eastern, than my own. That devotional has been online ever since, and gets a lot of visitors every year, and every year I get requests for the materials to be used in communities around the world. Having it available on the web has been great: I'm always amazed at the way this work has touched people in very far away places. It has also been used and appreciated in my own Vineyard church here in California ... a church not very Eastern, and not very traditional.


I've just taken a leap and revised the material for a print edition, which I'm very happy about: I like being able to hold a physical book. It's available now at lulu.com. (If you are against holding dead trees in your hand, there is a half-price download for your reader.)

Though the devotional will remain online, the book has updated content, some extra woodcuts by Spyros Vassiliou, and doesn't require batteries. Nice!

It's for sale for $10. Check it out.

The New Smells of Winter

I've been scratching my head trying to figure out what exactly it is I smell, on my weekly evening bike commute. At least once a week I ride to an evening meeting on two wheels: I choose the bike over the car even when it's cold, dark, and rainy because I love riding through the chill. One longstanding blessing of winter riding has been the smell of wood fires. Not any more. I've written eulogies to natural wood fires, now increasingly frowned upon. I live in an area with lots of auto and industrial smog, a not coincidentally high rate of breathing problems, and therefore a high sensitivity to politically-correct burn behavior. I understand the need to put less smoke and stuff in the air, but I just can't be happy about the "green" solutions (gas barbecues, gas heaters), when they require the burning of petrochemicals to address an air quality problem caused primarily by the burning of petrochemicals.

Today, as I pedal around my town, I smell the wet rotting leaves (that's one of the good smells), yummy dinners of different ethnicities, and now, with increasing regularity, I smell burning wax. It took me a few nights out before I realized what it was. I mean I knew I was smelling burning wax, but I couldn't figure out why I smelled it so powerfully on the street, and over and over. Then I got it. DuraFlame. I'm smelling fake fireplace logs made from sawdust and wax.

And it really breaks my heart. I know these fake logs are supposed to be better than wood for burning. I know the numbers. 70% less stuff coming out your chimney. They are supposedly made only with natural waxes (at least today they are). But the only reason the burning of natural logs is bad is because of all the other crap that we load the atmosphere with on this overcrowded planet. I mean, really: does it have to be the wood fires that go? It's perfectly alright to keep my hummer, but I can't have a wood fire?

When you go looking into this strange fake-log market, you learn that there is an old-school version of the fake fireplace log. Pres-to-Logs were made from sawdust leftover from lumber production (so no waste, and no trees cut for the product) pressed into shape under high pressure, with no wax or other binders. Pres-to-Logs have been around for 75 years and are made by a company that makes pellets for wood burning stoves. Why aren't we burning those in Los Altos? I know: because they don't light themselves. Too inconvenient. I can hear the pitch now: "We're going to give Americans a fire they can light with one match and no fuss! All we have to do is make a product that is basically a massive sawdust candle." I can smell the lesser of two evils and DuraFlames are not it.

Even if Pres-to-logs are way better than DuraFlame, and they certainly are (I'll be looking for a local distributor for the next logless fire), they do not come close to the look and sounds of a natural wood fire.

I know that fake logs are better by the numbers, but the whole thing stinks. I mean that in every sense: it just seems wrong ... and these things are making my neighborhood smell like a fire at a candle factory. In my economy, if something stinks, it's probably rotten.

DuraFlames have no power here

Camera Obscura

I love the West Coast. It is among the oldest coastlines in the world, and it looks it. This impression is confirmed with a look at maps of the way the continents have drifted, tumbled and collided around the globe over millions of years: the west coast of North America has always been pointed out, facing the huge expanse of the Pacific Ocean. In light if this, it seems to make a kind of poetic sense that the West Coast was the symbolic goal of the Manifest Destiny, the prize in the drive to conquer the North American continent and the frontier. I've always had this sense that the history of technology in California and the West was just an extension of the migratory drive westward of the American pioneers. The Pilgrims and their heirs achieved their Manifest Destiny, and the land has been conquered, for better or for worse. But now, with all the land gobbled up, what do we do with our insatiable drive to discover, to conquer? We keep going.

And where is there to go? Why, into space of course. Up into outer space, and down into inner space. Symbols of the extension of our frontier can be seen from the freeway which runs between San Francisco and San Jose. The most obvious is Stanford University's massive radio telescope which towers over the 280 corridor. The Dish, as it is known around here, takes our drive to conquer and points it out to space. The Dish, and all the world's telescopes and antennas, scan the next swath of territory, looking for signs among the stars that we can keep going. A mile down the freeway, for those who are driven to discovery on a different scale, is the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the Dept. of Energy's two-mile long linear accelerator, which runs under the freeway and plumbs microscopic space, searching for pathways to knowledge in between the atoms.

Most of us don't get to go on these journeys--the pathways of science are as obscure to us as was the way west to Louis and Clark, before they started up the Missouri. We don't understand the meaning of the intergalactic hiss that the Dish records or the significance of the images the Hubble takes, as beautiful as they are. We don't know what to make of the dance of the charmed and strange particles that leave their trails on the target at the end of the particle accelerator. But when we see pictures of stars, or of scattered pieces of atoms, we take some comfort in the fact that someone is searching out new trails, that hidden truths may be revealed.

But I wonder if we are ever capable of arriving, of ending the journey. Having come to this place, to the edge, as it were, can we just appreciate it as a place? Can we ever stop searching and just see? Or is every place just a waypoint? Are we bound to urgently press on? I'm willing to accept that some are called to always search the horizon for new routes, but this straining impulse, this expectation that there is more to discover, more to do, is so deeply rooted in the psyche of everyone who has come to California that it is nearly a disease.

As an antidote to this straining, this looking beyond, there is a place on the coast near here where you are encouraged simply to see. Where you are not encouraged to map out new trails, or to imagine what lies over the horizon. Having arrived, you are invited just to see the beauty of it. In this place is a kind of old-school technology that is also an anti-technology. It's a kind of camera, but one that doesn't fill your shelf with albums or your hard drive with JPEGs. The images it produces do not require or even permit analysis. It is the Camera Obscura.

The Camera Obscura looks from the outside like a cheesy tourist spot: the Giant Camera of the old Playland at the Beach amusement park on the seaward side of San Francisco, built in 1946. But as cheesy as it looks, it is a thing of wonder: a dark room containing a six-foot wide parabolic wooden surface painted white that captures a projected image from outside without electricity, chemicals, or WiFi. The image is often moving, gently rotating with the turning of the lens which sits on top of the building, and as it is reflected via a prism down onto the table, we see the scene outside (the Cliff House behind the Camera, Seal Rock, the beach, and the open sea) panning and turning all at once on the circular surface. It can be a little disorienting, a bit hypnotic; it is certainly beautiful.

The round table on which the image is projected is about the same diameter as the target end of the two-mile long accelerator inside SLAC, as the sensor that hangs suspended in front of the Dish to catch it's magnified space signals, and as the mirror in the Hubble Telescope. But the images it captures are less obscure than these, less abstract. What you see on the table in front of you in the Camera Obscura is immediate and intimate, it is the Place Where You Are. No interpretation is needed. You can't study it, because it's moving and changing and always different. You experience it.

A quick view with the lens at rest.

The table is perfectly round, here viewed from the side.

Technology always promises access to things while simultaneously distancing you from them. The Television delivers programming from around the world but you are still stuck sitting in front of a glowing box in a darkened room. Jet airplanes can move you to the other side of the planet in hours, but you have no sense of the journey--of what you flew over, or through--only a sense of discomfort at having been squeezed into a tube and then squeezed out in a place where everything is different. The internet gives us access to all the world's information, but requires us to keep our eyes fixed on a flat screen, and our ears plugged and wired.

The Camera Obscura, as a piece of technology, is no different, even if it operates on principles that have been understood for millennia: the image on the table is of the place where you are, but you are also not there. You're inside a dark room looking at a projection of an image of the sea, not standing on the beach looking at the sea with your own eyes. Yet like all cameras, the Giant Camera of San Francisco helps you see things differently (or see them for the first time), and unlike the portable cameras we all carry, this camera preserves a feeling of immediacy and authenticity because the camera is bound to the place. You never really suffer that technology-induced isolation. You can hear the sea through the walls.

The Camera Obscura is also made of lovely, low-tech things: essentially glass and wood. A five-inch wide glass lens projecting on a six-foot wide table with a concave wood surface. Apart from the motor that turns the lens assembly, there is no electricity, no Intel Inside, no HD screen.  In the Camera Obscura, you are the computer that processes the image, and if your capacity to remember hasn't suffered too much from our culture of hyper-literacy, then you will recall this trip to the coast as a distinctly satisfying one.

Visit the Camera Obscura:

1096 Point Lobos Ave
San Francisco, 94121

 37°46'41.64"N
122°30'51.22"W

(Satellite view): bit.ly/giantcamera

Hey Kids! More on Fractional Foods

In my last post, I wrote about the weird world of "half products", processed food pellets that are not edible until expansion by microwaving, or some other process. After reflecting on what makes a product natural, or whole, I had another chance to analyze the claims of a "multi-grain" product. Today, to my great surprise, I opened our cereal cabinet to find a box of Froot Loops. The cabinet had never behaved in this way before. The cabinet usually contains boxes with names like "Soy and Flax Clusters", a product more appropriate to a house where 40-somethings will eat, without question, whatever they find in the cabinet.

Where the Froot Loops came from, I did not know. But I knew that I had to have some. What a thrill to open a cereal box again and find that heavy foil-laminated inner wrapper that only the sweetest cereals merit (Soy and Flax Clusters only have a wax-paper liner). What a thrill to gaze upon the bright rainbow of colors made possible by science! Look at it! Did I mention that Froot Loops are multi-grain?

Printer-Ink Registration Marks on Packaging ...
Rainbow of Frooty Goodness ...

Separated at birth?

My initial thought as I chomped down on my first spoonful since 1986, was that the cereal wasn't as sweet as I remember. But when I looked at the box and reassured myself that sugar was indeed the first and main ingredient, I knew it must be pilot error. Then I saw it: I'm using no-sweetener-added soy milk! Silly me. I am out of practice. So what else is in Froot Loops? Of the three grains listed, only the last of them is whole: the oats. Add to these--in increasing amounts--white flour and refined corn (think: sugar), but don't overdo it because real sugar has to be the number one ingredient, then add some partially hydrogenated oils, and you have a concoction that only a mad scientist would feed to children.

So why is this stuff in our cabinet? Turns out my wife, a children's pastor, found them in our church resource room where she stages the chaos of her Sunday morning kid's church supplies, and decided that the risk of children eating the stuff was not worth the benefit of making pretty necklaces and decided to dispose of it in a OSHA- and EPA- approved manner, i.e. put it where I would find it. She forgot to mention that the sell by date was almost a year ago. I swear I wouldn't have known that by eating it.

Half Foods

Behold the mighty Triscuit: Symbol of Whole Food. Mostly unchanged for 100 years. Ingredients: whole wheat, soybean oil, salt. Compare that to heavily processed, science-fair, "home-style" monstrosities like anything from Pepperidge Farm. I know ... delicious. But read the ingredients of their cookies with a Tylenol chaser. Interesterified Oil? Huh? Wow ... uh, how interest-ing. How terrify-ing.

Of course I recognize that Triscuits are a processed food: Triscuits don't occur in nature. At least with the Triscuit it's pretty easy to imagine the steps between harvest and your snack cabinet. And I'm ok with certain, low-tech processing: when we pull a fresh-baked loaf of bread out of the oven, we are eating a processed food. I don't have any qualms about saying that cooking technology improves on nature. After all, when God visited Abraham and Sarah, they didn't just pour a handful of wheat into the hands of the Holy One. They kneaded it into dough and baked fresh bread, and my guess is that God said something to the effect of "it was good". Fresh bread is a benefit of technology. If fire isn't a technology, then the oven that harnesses it to make bread is.

But there are processed foods, and then there are processed foods.

Recently, I did some writing for a friend who is importing natural mediterranean-style snacks for sale in the U.S.. He's going to be selling to retailers, so to get a line on the language and concerns in the marketplace, I did a little investigoogling on snacks. Yummy? Not so much.

It's always a little disorienting when entering a completely foreign culture, and this was no exception. There are risks to peeking behind the curtain that separates the food on our table from it's origins.

My first stop was the Snack Food Association web site (sfa.org) where I was tempted by such mouth-watering foodie writing as The Essence of Quality Potato Chips ... the authoritative 3rd edition of the Pretzel Quality Manual, and the SFA/AOCS Edible Oils Manual, 2nd edition. It is not only not appetizing to listen in on the corporate back-room talk about foods I share with my family: it's creepy. It's a little bit like suddenly realizing there's a one-way mirror in your dining room hiding lab-coat-wearing technicians who watch how you chew. You say, "Mm. I love these chips, they taste great." ... they say, "optimized mouth feel and end-flavor target-mix".

It gets weirder. The Snack Food Association has a magazine: Snack World.

In the August 2009 issue of Snack World, I found an news-item for J.R. Short, A family business that wants a seat at the dinner table as your "maker of extruded intermediate pellets". What is an extruded intermediate pellet, you ask? Extruded intermediate pellets are known in the business as half-products, because they still need to be cooked, or as J.R. Short so appetizingly puts it, expanded. Extruded Intermediate Pellets, says their web site, "deliver on whole-grain/multigrain and fiber nutritional content claims with a great tasting crunch ... available in a variety of pellet shapes that can deliver great bag fill and perceived value". Pellet shapes?? Bag fill?? Did I just click through to the UPS store?

Maybe we should just take a step back. Deep breath. See, here in America, we're trying to end a decades-old addiction to refined grains in our diets. We're learning that too much white bread is bad for us in the same way that too much sugar is. We know we need to eat more whole grains. Easy to say, but how do we do that? I don't know about you, but I have never in my life been in the same room as a whole grain ... not that was still whole anyway. For the majority of us, if the supermarket doesn't feed us whole grains, we will likely die in our wonder-bread sins. So in order to satisfy our new passion for whole foods (and for living more 'naturally' in general), the food companies must provide products that contain mostly whole grains (mostly, because all that's required for the food to be labeled "whole" is for the first ingredient to be a whole grain of some kind ... the rest of it can be sawdust and saccharine. Most people do not know or care if the thing is really 'whole', only that the package speaks authoritativly to the problem). A company that provides whole grain snack foods is church-like in our pseudo-enlightened world. We secretly imagine them to be providing food for the body and soul.

The J.R. Short company is not actually that company. They are the company that provides the extruded pellets to the company that provides your whole grain snacks. J.R. Short takes powdered grains, seeds, and vegetables--any kind you want, in any combination--and processes them into a paste. And then they sqeeze that paste into whatever shape is required by the food company, which then expands them and tosses them with some powdered flavor. When you browse the products on the J.R. Short company web site, with a little imagination you will recognize things you've eaten out of a bag recently. These are not your father's cheeze puffs.

You may have noticed that what used to be trashy snack food is now yuppie feel-good health food. What's the difference? Simply that processors like the J.R. Short company have replaced whatever was in the cheeze puffs with sexier raw materials. Now, grains or legumes like lentils, flax, barley, and soy join the old standbys-- corn, wheat and rice. Add in vegetable powders from seaweed, carrot, beet, or broccoli and various other "complimentary" ingredients, and J.R. Short will squeeze your custom easy-bake play-do into twists, tubes, shells, ribbons, chips, little balls and beads, even a custom logo-shape ... all of which they call pellets. Hungry yet?

I've got to admit I find this kind of cool in a dial-a-product sort of way. We're not just living in the age of easy information, but the age of easy productization. I can dream up a design and be wearing it on a t-shirt within the week, then sell it in my online store, where you can get the same brilliant design on a teddy bear or a coffee mug. I can write a book and be reading my own first-edition hardcover within a week of uploading the content. Buy my album on MySpace ... watch my movie on YouTube.

Now--brave new world--I can decide that I want a snack chip in the shape of my face made of organic beets, buckwheat, defatted soy, triticale, and sea salt, choose between a "hearty crunch" or a "light and airy crisp" and in no time take delivery of little plasticized extrusions--ready for me to "expand" into a finished food product by frying, hot air popping, or microwaving--in 20 or 50lb bags. Got a party coming up this weekend? Choose the "2,200 pound capacity super sack". Woo.

I should have known that the warm feeling couldn't last. You know what I'm talking about: I'm eating whole grain foods! I'm in touch with the earth! I'm living an authentic life! My foods are crafted by flour-dusted artisans who shuffle around a kitchen warmed by a wood-fired brick oven! Innocence dies hard.

As an antidote to this unappetizing and slightly callous peek behind the food processing curtain, I offer this video of a real flour-dusted bread-making superhero.

warning: contains some language, appropriate to the subject but maybe not to your dining room. To which of these two enterprises would you rather give a seat at the dinner table?



from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

Priceless

Mini R/C Helicopter: 22 dollars

AA batteries: 5 dollars

The following mang-lish instructions: priceless

"This remote control has already installed to protect the device, if want the flight, please open the switch, the indicator would be shining, after operating the pole to the motive to heading up to push then pull to go to most next, the indicator is often Bright, at this time remote control normal usage of ability."


I should probably leave well enough alone, but I ran this English through Google's translator, then took the resulting Chinese and ran it back, just to see if two wrongs might make a right. Strangely, some of the instructions sound better, but with flashes of what sounds like political propaganda.

"The remote control has been installed protection devices, if you want to fly, please turn on the switch, indicator light flashes, it will operate under the motivation, leadership of promoting, and then evacuated to the most, this indicator is often a bright future, at this time, normal use of the remote control"

100 Catalogs

We started stacking catalogs on Thanksgiving day. The pile didn't get as high as we thought it might, but today (December 24) my daughter and I counted 100 catalogs. These catalogs are filled with clothes (by far the majority), shoes, books, toys, food (popcorn, spices, english muffins, fruit), snowboards, computers, cameras, fleece jackets, jewelry, GPS-enabled golf rangefinders, exercise machines, and endless pages of cheap branded trinkets that will self-destruct 15 seconds after you tear off the wrapping. Our bank sent us a catalog (that's where you can get the GPS-enabled golf rangefinder). There are even catalogs selling sheep and other livestock to give (in someone's name) as charitable gifts to poor families--these catalogs are among the smallest, and that seems good to me, though I'm not entirely sure why.

There are 26.6 pounds of paper here. Zoe looked up the number of households in the U.S. and did a little math for me. In America, we're close to 15 million households. 26.6 pounds times the number of households in this country gives us roughly 3 billion pounds of catalogs. In one month! Be sure to check out our new eco-sensitive clothing line ....

Imagine how big our pile would be if we actually bought stuff from catalogs.

The Old Fashioned Way

Remember when new jeans came in one style and that style was "new"? (What an OLD man thing to say.) I can remember weeks of chafing and mailing tube stiffness when breaking in a new pair of jeans--only slightly less painful then breaking in a new pair of leather hiking boots. And when you'd really worked those denims for a good long time (like, years), they acquired a beautiful, velvety-soft, sky-blue, wonderfulness. Today, thanks to the wonder of whatever dark magic happens in jean factories, we never have to break in clothes again.

I like soft pants. Who doesn't? I admit it: I'd choose faded jeans off the rack and leave behind the dark blue cardboard that is a fresh pair of 501s. But it's kind of sad to me that I'm paying equal or more to buy clothes that have been washed with rocks and will therefore have a shorter lifespan. Aged cheese? Good. Aged wine? Mmm. Aged pants? Wha? Where can I get me a brand-new car with a thousand miles on it, covered with dents and scratches? Rockin!

Now. I think the jeans pictured here are pretty good in a combat-boot-goes-to-the-prom sort of way, and I think the girl in them is pretty great in that kind of way, and in many other ways too. But wow.

Every now and then, me and the kids (this one, who's 16, and the boy, who's 13) get a little punchy and end up wrestling on the floor, which is getting more and more dangerous ... for me: I've broken parts of myself ... and the 13 year-old recently took me down in the kitchen with one move. I can't count all the times these kids cracked skulls while wrestling on the bed in the early years. We all know the risks! And I thought we shared an equally casual attitude towards our wardrobes: I mean, look at those pants. But what do you think happens at the first sound of tearing? She shrieks: "You're tearing my jeans!" Oh really.


Then there's me. This old pair of Levis has finally reach the point of structural failure. It's possible these jeans are 20+ years old. I should be happy that I now have holes. No more of the shame that attends those whose pants are unventilated. I should feel different, but all I feel is a draft on my left knee. I tell my daughter with desperate pride that I put tears in my jeans the old fashioned way ... I earn them. What an old man thing to say.

The Geography of Hope

Some months ago, I posted an essay about how a ranger scolded me for walking 10 feet off the trail at Palo Alto's Arastradero Open Space Preserve. This preserve is in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, a wide-open place where one wouldn't expect the kind of "keep off the grass" rules associated with strips of city park. The title I gave the essay communicated my feelings on the matter ("Signs of The End").

But, I can admit now that I was of two minds on the matter. It still seems ridiculous to be told to stay on the trail in such a wild place. But soon after I wrote the piece, I felt a prick of conscience, and a sense of responsibility to tell the other side of the story. Why? Because I keep going back to Arastradero ... on foot, on mountain bike, alone and with my family. I find myself enjoying that same trail, and many other trails along the San Francisco peninsula again and again, and I began to have new thought share space with my semi-righteous indignation. I realized that I have very little to complain about. I live in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, in the high-tech center of the modern world, and yet ... I am surrounded by simply beautiful natural spaces, forever preserved against development or modification beyond the laying of trail. I have in fact enjoyed open space along the Peninsula for my whole life, in all four seasons, in rain and shine, day and night. I've slept under oaks, prayed on benches, sat writing in journals, and stared without a thought into wilderness ... all in settings that allow my heart and mind and soul to drop their guard and to breath.

Room to breath. This is one of the themes in the language of open space. You come across the phrase frequently in the history of one of the largest of the agencies that oversee open space in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District. I wanted to get to know this organization, to meet the people who keep this land for me, and to learn what it takes to preserve open space in a region that the rest of the world associates with high home prices and high technology. How do they do it?

I confess that when I met with Leigh Ann Maze of the OSD, I was looking for dirt (no pun intended): I wanted to hear all about the fights over who gets the land and how it is used. I guess I imagined a great battle over each acre: developers and technologists on one side, and sandle-wearing soldiers in the open space army on the other. Maze couldn't satisfy my need for drama. She said it might get a little hot in the nitty-gritty negotiations over a particular parcel of land, but she's not really aware of any great philosophical divide on the Peninsula. The overall impression I got from talking to her is that the OSD enjoys a lot of favor in the Bay Area. She suggests that open space is a part of what attracts people to live here, and that even the developers recognize that being able to see trees on the mountains increases the value of the homes down in the suburban sprawl between highways 101 and 280.

So it may be that some experience it as a tension, and others as harmony, but either way, there's no argument over whether it is good to have open space here at the end of America's westward expansion. You might expect to see an insulting profusion of development here, in the same way you see great mountains of boulders at the terminus of ancient glaciers. After all, people keep coming .... Instead, land dedicated to open space is increasing, not as much as in the early days, but still increasing each year. Anne Koletzke writes in Peninsula Tales and Trails, a guidebook to the district, that the Bay Area has one of the largest systems of public open space to be found in any urban area in the United States.

But it wasn't always that way. Journalist Jay Thorwaldson, in the foreword to Peninsula Tales and Trails, describes looking down, as a youth on horseback, from the ridges of the Santa Cruz Mountains as the "valley's endless apricot and prune orchards [gave] way to homes and highways in a sad, but seemingly inevitable, roll of market demand and economic reality. Before silicon became the heart of computers," and a significant driver of development for the region, "this was called the 'Valley of Heart's Delight.'" In 1970, the threat was very real. But Thorwaldson was on hand to document a local, citizen-driven campaign to preserve open space. He himself influenced that campaign through editorials which urged these early environmentalists to find a way to buy the land they wanted to protect against development, a strategy also promoted by Wallace Stegner, a Stanford professor and novelist who contributed important ideology to the movement. If you want to preserve open space, the argument went, you have to own it, so that you can keep it open for ever.

Today the OSD owns over 55,000 acres of land, most of which can be explored by anyone who lives in, or visits, the Bay Area. When land is purchased, the first goal of the OSD is preservation, ensuring that the environment in and around the land is protected. These concerns always extend beyond the boundaries of purchases. Wildlife (from ubiquitous deer and squirrels to endangered red-legged frogs) pass through open space preserves and policies within the boundaries must account for the through-traffic. The course of streams in preserves can affect local watersheds and species (including our own species) many miles downstream. At times, early 'improvements', such as logging roads (called by the OSD, 'cultural resources'), need to be reversed to halt the pernicious effects of erosion on the ecosystem.

A very few times, the OSD closes a preserve to human visitors. But the "goal is to keep them open," says Maze, though always with limited provision for human comforts. "We set ourselves apart from other parks: we like to keep the infrastructure to a minimum. ... You'll see dirt parking lots and pit toilets, but no barbecues, play structures, or picnic tables ... the whole system only has one overnight campsite. ... We call what we do ecologically sensitive recreation and education." This emphasis on letting nature be, and not filling it with soccer fields, golf courses, or other recreational infrastructure, is summed up by Wallace Stegner in his Wilderness Letter, who asserted that preserving natural open space has "no more to do with recreation [than] churches have to do with recreation." We need, he says, to learn the "trick of quiet" that our ancestors knew from time spent in the big empty plains. "We could learn it too, even yet; even our children and grandchildren could learn it. But only if we save, for just such absolutely non-recreational, impractical, and mystical uses ... all the wild that still remains to us."

Adding to the delicate balancing act that is managing a piece of nature, the OSD is a public agency and so is accountable to local public opinion, state and federal governments, policies including the Endangered Species Act, and other rulebooks overseen by agencies such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "There are a lot of layers," says Maze, "even for one little project of putting in a bridge ... we have to get permits from cities, counties ... and the public always want to weigh in. ... Ultimately it's the public's land; it's your land, your trails."



With all these obligations to balance, the OSD seems to work really well. They do a great job communicating to the public -- they have a quality website, good-looking publications, and were willing to talk to a snarky blogger like me (that "end of the world" post was not much of a calling card). And, of course, they do a very good job stewarding the land. My experience of the preserves is that they are consistently clean, accessible, and well laid-out. I know that takes work, even when the bulk of the land is trusted to natural processes. Finally, and maybe most impressively, from what I've seen, it appears the OSD manages and spends their considerable budget wisely.

It doesn't mean it's all sunny skies over the preserves though. The downturn in the economy has affected the OSD, like it has every other business. Grants and private donations have dropped, and to add insult to injury, even though the District manages it's budget very well thank you, the State of California is exercising it's "emergency right" to take money from "special districts" to deal with it's own budget shortfall. They are borrowing roughly 2 million from the OSD, "which legally they need to pay back," says Maze (uh ... good luck.) When I asked if the money taken from the OSD would at least go to save some of the state parks that are expected to close (again, good luck), Maze couldn't say, and she showed a remarkably goodnatured attitude towards Sacramento. "We look at it as an investment in the state."

For all this organizational complexity, federal policy, resource managment, state budget trouble, and, yes, the threat of development on currently un-preserved land, the OSD does an amazing job of giving the people exactly what was hoped for some thirty years ago: room to breath.

And though I don't like fences in the wild, I recognize the difficulty of protecting land, especially when the land in question is surrounded by forces hostile to it. Regardless of the relatively harmonious relationship between open space and ... crowd-space on the peninsula, I know that if the fences came down, the land would be lost. So I'm thankful for the activists who fought to purchase land to preserve it, and I'm thankful for the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, and other powers that protect land for me, even if it means there are some views I have to enjoy from the trail.

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope. -Wallace Stegner, The Wilderness Letter

A (low) tech writer principle: invest in the things you love. If that loose community of nature lovers back in the 70s had only come together to complain and had not put their money where their collective mouth was, the land between San Jose and San Francisco would be very different today, and we would all have a lot more to complain about.


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http://www.openspace.org/ (be sure to look at their Google Map mashup: the Preserve Finder, on the front page). And get your copy of Peninsula Tales and Trails at the OSD's website to support their work. It's a classic guide book.

A snapshot from space of the Regional Open Space District (with the open spaces labeled nicely, thank you Google):
http://bit.ly/openspaceba

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Photography by Karl Gohl and used by permission of the photographer and the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District.