Non-newsflash: lawns aren't green

Urban parks and suburban lawns are bad for the climate. This week, that topic has been the subject of a media blitz triggered by a new study at UC Irvine titled “Carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions in urban turf”.

Truthfully, I’m disappointed by the tone of mild surprise adopted in every article I’ve read. The fact that your classic American lawn is bad for the environment is very old news. Watered year-round, kept emerald green by chemical fertilizers and dandelion-free by herbicides; trimmed and tidied with gas-guzzling mowers and leaf blowers – this is not an environmentally sustainable space! For decades, native plant gardens, rock gardens, and urban natural areas have been promoted by green thinkers.

The UC Irvine study helpfully quantifies the damage (at least as it occurs in Southern California), but the media it has received does its audience a disservice. While an academic discussion has been going on about the possibility of sequestering carbon in turfgrass, that conversation hasn’t filtered into the public consciousness. By claiming that the study “dispels” the notion that “urban "green" spaces help counteract greenhouse gas emissions,” that very notion is in fact created by bulldozing over a nuanced subject.

For example, “urban green spaces” can be forests, gardens, green rooftops, managed natural areas, lawns, and golf courses. Some of these have a positive environmental impact; others have a negative one. Lumping them together is a mistake.

The study itself, which has not yet been released to the public but is in press in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, appears to capture the nuance of the subject, specifically addressing previous studies that have documented lawns storing carbon, but haven’t looked at the emissions associated with tending them. The study shows that nitrous oxide emissions from lawns are comparable to those found in agricultural farms, which (according to the press release) are among the largest emitters of nitrous oxide globally. And nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas that's 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

In ornamental lawns, nitrous oxide emissions from fertilization offset just 10 percent to 30 percent of carbon sequestration. But fossil fuel consumption for management, the researchers calculate, releases about four times more carbon dioxide than the plots can take up. Athletic fields fare even worse, because — due to soil disruption by tilling and resodding — they don't trap nearly as much carbon as ornamental grass but require the same emissions-producing care.

“It's impossible for these lawns to be net greenhouse gas sinks because too much fuel is used to maintain them,” study author Amy Townsend-Small concludes. Which is indeed useful information – but perhaps the media should be asking who is making the counterargument that inspired her research? And why?

Climate in the spotlight

Climate is the hot topic at this year’s American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, happening this week. Roughly three hundred separate talks mention the subject. How does climate change alter wind-generated power production? Does planetary orbit affect climate change? What was climate change like in the past? And how does it impact salmon, pikas, skiing?

There are oblique talks and posters composed primarily of acronyms, and practical sessions on prediction and prevention. There are many scary graphs with red lines that keep going up.

“Humanity has transitioned from passive bystander to an active agent of change in the climate system,” said Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Berkeley. “We can no longer plead ignorance.”

Santer, who is a co-author of the report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, went on to decry the recent Climategate scandal. And indeed, in this environment, the dubious content of a few emails seems to pale beside the wealth of earnest evidence. The world as we have known it is changing; the drastic effects we have made in our atmosphere are indisputable. The connection between these two facts is a questionable thing to question.

Already we are seeing increases in heavy downpours, rising temperature and sea level, rapidly retreating glaciers, thawing permafrost, lengthening growing seasons, lengthening ice-free seasons in the ocean and on lakes and rivers, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flows.

This year, 16,000 students, professors, researchers, policymakers and land managers are at the country’s foremost convention on earth sciences. Does this sound dry? Earth sciences affect everything from food to water to electricity to recreation. And all of these are affected by climate change.

It’s a sobering thought.

Goby on the rocks

Tidewater Goby by JacobaCharles

The man from Channel 7 news kept asking the biologist why anyone should care about the survival of a small fish called the tidewater goby.

He was one of several dozen news media and government scientists standing on a springy field of marsh plants on a late October morning. The occasion was the release of the endangered goby into a long-unused habitat, and there was much clicking of cameras and offering of microphones. It was unusual to see such an unsexy little animal getting so much attention.

In truth, there are few good answers to Channel 7’s question. Gobies are at risk of extinction because of humans, and yet - like so many other plants and animals – offer nothing that most people value. They are not attractive or tasty; they are not a source of medicine or fuel. All gobies do is live a short, quiet life in the lightly salty waters where fresh streams meets the sea. They nibble on algae and get devoured by larger fish. Each male digs a nesting burrow in the gravel for his lady, who will lay several hundred eggs and then leave him to tend them. Newly hatched gobies live for about a year, and then they die. And no person picnicking on the bank is any the wiser.

Unlike the biologist, a spokesman for the US Fish and Wildlife service was happy to tell reporters why people should care, citing one of the basic principals of ecology. Every species is like a single thread in the fabric of our ecosystem, spokesman Al Donner said. With each thread that vanishes, the fabric becomes weaker. If you lose too many, the very thing that provides all our goods and services – the environment that allows us to thrive – will weaken and collapse. We need to save even the seemingly insignificant, Donner concluded, because this system isn’t designed to be a monoculture with just a few plants and animals.

The thread we call the tidewater goby lives in small, scattered patches all up and down the California coast, from San Diego to Del Norte County. The patches are scattered because this fish’s habitat needs are specific: the water can’t be too deep, or too salty, or too fresh. This keeps each population separate from the others – most of the time. Genetic evidence shows that occasionally, by some method we may never understand, fishy romance can occur between gobies from different lagoons.

By the mid 1990s, coastal development and other problems had caused goby populations to dwindle statewide, and the fish was added to the endangered species list. The goby’s problems were many, and worst in the southern part of the state. Wetlands had been dredged, diked, drained and developed; streambanks were hardened with rocks and cement; dams were erected. Tide gates and levees blocked occasional flow between separate lagoons. Habitats that had once been naturally fragmented became artificially fragmented. And, according to a recent study by a Humboldt State University student, gobies’ genetic diversity declined correspondingly. In other words, no more romance across borders. Tidewater Romeo never even got to meet Tidewater Juliet. Isolation led (as it will) to inbreeding.

No one knows exactly why the goby vanished from Tomales Bay in particular. Development is minimal, but the area does have a long history of agriculture. The records say the fish was here, and then it wasn’t. Until a few years ago it hadn’t been seen in the Tomales Bay area since 1953. Then, biologists doing preliminary surveys for a wetland restoration project discovered that a few of the fish were still living in a brackish slough that drained into the bay. Now the restoration project is complete, and the gobies have expanded their range to include the newly created wetland.

Last week, some fish from the slough were captured and driven to another brackish lagoon ten miles up the bay. As the cameras rolled, a woman knelt by the muddy water, scooping gobies out of a five-gallon bucket with a bright blue aquarium net. They were immediately invisible among the reeds of their new home, where they just might settle in, snack on some algae, and stay for good.

Carbon farming in West Marin

Someday, the ranches of West Marin could become a battlefield in the fight against climate change through reducing the carbon dioxide in the air. Rangeland soil could become a tool used to sequester atmospheric carbon, a major greenhouse gas.

“Our earliest soil survey results strongly suggested that management can enhance carbon sequestration, which is very important,” said John Wick, director of the Nicasio-based Marin Carbon Project. “Based on that we designed a set of experiments here on my ranch and on the sister site up in the Sierra foothills.”

Wick and, a team of local scientists, ranchers and nonprofit organizations, formed the Marin Carbon Project last year. The Marin Community Foundation recently gave them a $240,000 grant as part of their new “Climate change strategic initiative” that was launched earlier this month.

“The majority of that has gone to set up, execute and begin doing analysis on John Wick’s property,” said Torri Estrada, manager of the foundation’s new initiative. “They are doing controlled experiments with different applications of land management techniques on the ground and demonstrating which of those are carbon neutral, sequester carbon or emit carbon. It’s really basic research.”

For some, the idea that dirt could hang on to carbon for long enough to make a difference to global warming is counterintuitive. But the idea makes more sense when you realize that all soil contains organic matter – and that is roughly 50 percent carbon. All living plants trap carbon in their flesh, pulling it from the air to build new cells. After the plant dies, the carbon-rich stems and roots become part of the soil when they are buried or decomposed.

Some of the carbon that is trapped is prevented from re-entering the atmosphere. “It’s very chemically sticky,” explained Dr. Whendee Silver, a scientist at UC Berkeley who is heading up the Marin Carbon Project’s research. “It can bind onto soil surfaces, it can bind onto other organic matter surfaces. When it does that it’s hard for the microbes to break it down.”

Since the plants vacuum carbon out of the air and bury it under ground, researchers want to see how they can maximize the amount of carbon that is trapped. Traditional agricultural methods actually deplete levels of soil carbon.

“There certainly is certainly the potential to increase soil carbon in many regions and we can say that in Marin confidently,” Silver said. “What we can’t say yet is that we can’t walk into a ranch and say, ‘This is exactly what you should do.’”

This is the question that the Marin Carbon Project is trying to answer. And the methods they use aren’t rocket science – applying compost, rotating pastures and using a different kind of plow are all being studied. So far, they’ve been getting good results.

“This is an amazing model for leadership,” said Estrada. “People came together and put a vision together and are spending the time to commit to something that we thing has a lot of potential but hasn’t been fully demonstrated yet.”

“You’ve got to invest in the tried and true things but you’ve also got to invest in some things that might be a little more risky but have the potential to make huge impacts,” he added.

Someday, this research could lead to a profit for ranchers through “carbon farming” and participating in a carbon market, but today that’s still a long way off.

[Originally broadcast as a news report on KWMR radio news. Click below or go to www.kwmr.org/news to listen to the audio version.]

Carbon Farming by JacobaCharles

A colorful history of Tamalpais

Inverness Park artist Tom Killion and poet Gary Snyder spoke to a full house at Book Passage in Corte Madera on Tuesday night. The pair recently co-authored Tamalpais Walking, a multifaceted portrait of a much-loved mountain that blends poetry, history and Japanese-style woodblock prints.

“You learn a lot, that’s one of the great things about the book,” Snyder said. “It really deepens what the mountain is in our landscape.”

He’s right. Leafing through Tamalpais Walking is like discovering a mythical version of home. Everything is familiar – pipeline trail, Potrero meadows, rock springs – yet each page is full of the unexpected. The sweeping views and brilliant colors of Killion’s prints have a timeless quality, and Snyder’s tales of exploring the mountain with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and other Beat writers bring modern legends to life.

“Later I went alone over the rocky hill – swarmed by gnats – and being curious went along Mickey O’Brien trail to Laurel Dell, a lovely flat meadow glowing green in the afternoon sun and a good camp,” Snyder wrote in a journal entry from 1956. “Stopped and thought about what I’d said to Jack about human history, remembered that Nature is inexhaustible, why should I fret about a few years of men?”

In addition to their personal perspectives, Killion contributed a chapter on the history of the mountain. The early poets and preservationists who gave us the Mount Tam that we know today – from its undeveloped slopes to the Legend of the Sleeping Lady – are illuminated. The mountain was easily visible and accessible from San Francisco, which made it both a muse and a destination from early on.

“Standing sentinel above the Golden Gate, where snowmelt and rainfall culled from Shasta to the southern Sierra meet the salty Pacific, this mountain has been a gatepost for myriad immigrants entering San Francisco Bay,” Killion wrote. “For those who have stayed and built their cities along its shores, Tamalpais beckons with the mystery and delight that high places evoke. Dark bar across San Francisco’s northern horizon, touching the winter clouds, rising above tongues of summer fog. Just a mountain, but fixed in the imagination of a city”

Tamalpais Walking is the second book produced by the two authors, who share a love of wilderness and influences from Japan. Their first book was The High Sierra of California, a book of prints and writings from the mountain range that has been another focus for both Snyder’s and Killion’s art and recreation. A similar project focused on Mount Tamalpais was a natural next step.

Both Snyder and Killion have long relationships with Tamalpais. Killion, who now lives in Inverness Park, grew up on the foot of the mountain. “It was the most important landscape of my life,” Killion said. “The formative landscape is always the one that you take with you, and there it was, looming over my childhood world.”

He liked to explore the wild-seeming mountain, and from an early age wanted to make woodblock prints of it.

“When I was ten, my parents gave me this little book of Hokusai prints of Mount Fuji,” Killion said. Inspired by that book, he developed an urge to create his own prints, capturing Mount Tamalpais in Hokusai’s style.

“I always saw a parallel between Mount Tamalpais and Mount Fuji,” Killion mused on Saturday, standing on the overlook where he sketched the first version of the print that can now be seen on the title page of his new book. “It is a world of little people – no cars or construction projects or big freeways – and wild mountains.”

He first began making prints as a teenager – he was probably 15 when he did the first one reproduced in Tamalpais Walking. Though he went on to pursue a successful academic career in African history, he never stopped making prints. Seven years ago, he left academia to pursue his art full-time.

“I had this strange combination of being interested in a quite a few different things but being able to focus myopically and stupidly on this one thing,” Killion said. “And it’s a weird thing to get good at because it takes a lot of work. It’s a very labor-intensive art form.”

The woodblock prints also were key to his friendship with Snyder, which began in 1975 when Killion offered his first book, 28 Views of Mount Tamalpais, to the poet.

“I really loved it and told him how much I appreciated the mountain,” Snyder said. “We started seeing him from time to time and staying in touch.”

Snyder’s own relationship with Mount Tam began as a young man. Though he was born in San Francisco in 1930, he grew up on a farm north of Seattle. At 18, he hitchhiked through San Francisco to meet up with his girlfriend on his way back to Reed College in Portland. The two went camping on Mount Tamalpais and wound up walking and hitching all the way to Tomales Bay, “taking the easiest way through the chaparral like a pair of little god and goddess critters.”

Over the two decades, Snyder lived in the Bay Area when he wasn’t traveling or living in Japan. Whether he was living in Marin, Berkeley or San Francisco he always wound up on the mountain. For a year or more he lived in a cabin in Homestead Valley.

“I would walk right out the door of that cabin and I’d be all over the mountain,” he said with a gold-capped grin. “All the way to Stinson and Bolinas. I did a night hike every evening when I was working on building a house with my father.”

But before he went to Japan, he added, he was “just a normal hiker.” While working at a Zen temple in Kyoto translating Buddhist texts for an American heiress he discovered an old tradition of circumambulating mountains as a walking meditation practice. He later saw similar rituals performed in other countries such as India and Nepal, and along with Ginsberg decided to bring the ceremony home to Mount Tam.

Like the poets, trailbuilders, preservationists and playwrights who are also given voice in Tamalpais Walking, the lighthearted-yet-serious ritual the pair developed was one more way for a people to make the mountain their own.

“Why Tamalpais?” Snyder asks in the book. “Because it’s there, you might say. And it blessedly balances the magic city along the tight-rope of the fault line.”

Point Reyes Books will be sponsoring a reading, lecture and book signing by Gary Snyder and Tom Killion at Toby’s Feed Barn on June 20. The event is a benefit for the North Bay Conservation Corps. Tickets will be available by mid-May.

(Originally published in the Point Reyes Light)

Art lovers' guide to Proust

There are 300 references to paintings in Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time, and Eric Karpeles knows them all.

“I don’t think there’s anything missing,” Karpeles said about the amount of detail in his recently published book, Paintings in Proust. He was barefoot on the deck of his home in Bolinas, sipping coffee on a Monday morning. “I wanted to err on the side of having more rather than less.”

The project began as simple curiosity, melding his loves of art and of the daunting French novel. As he re-read the series for the fifth time, Karpeles began to slip scraps of paper between the pages at every reference to a painting.

“It’s such a rich tapestry of ideas, images and philosophy. I have a lifetime of experience with this book, and there were references that I still couldn’t come up with,” said Karpeles, a sturdy man with an easy smile. “At some point, I realized, ‘This is a book.’”

The result is a colorful and densely compact companion guide to Proust’s work. Every page offers a passage from In Search of Lost Time that includes mention of a painting, as well as Karpeles’ introduction to where you are in the plot. On the opposite page is a high-quality color reproduction of the piece.

On Page 156, for example, Karpeles describes the book’s narrator in a drawing room full of people who don’t share his admiration for a Elstir, certain fictional artist. Below this context is the translated passage from Proust.

‘A masterpiece?’ cried M. de Norpois with a surprised and reproachful air. ‘It makes no pretence of even being a picture, it’s merely a sketch.’ (He was right.) ‘If you label a clever little thing of that sort “masterpiece,” what will you say about Hebert’s Virgin or Dagnan-Bouveret?’

On the facing page are Hebert’s gilt-edged, dark-eyed Madonna and infant. Flip forward to another introduction, another passage and a demure bowl of roses. Flip backward and see a luminous tangle of grapes, butterflies and geraniums. And so on.

Designed as a reference tool as well as a visual treat, a list of artists in the back includes minor references that the publisher opted not to print. There one can learn that only a single reference was made to Hebert in Proust’s entire novel, whereas Sandro Botticelli was mentioned seven times—six of which are illustrated in Karpeles’ book.

It’s a spectacularly sweeping introduction to art history, as well as to Proust. Dip into it as an unseasoned reader and you get a taste of the novel without the intimidation; dip into it as a scholar and even obscure details become vivid.

“It breaks the book down to digestible, readable portions,” Karpeles said. “A 4,000 page novel is hugely intimidating to most people, and they won’t approach it because it’s too big or too daunting.”

Though Karpeles speaks reluctantly about his accomplishments, compiling this book is just the latest in a lifetime of daunting undertakings.

As a child growing up on the fringes of New York City, he had an early facility with drawing and painting. His parents enrolled him in a program at the Art Student’s League. From age eleven on, he spent his weekend mornings painting and his afternoons exploring the museums of Manhattan.

Despite his attraction to art, Karpeles described reading as his “salvation.” At 17, a teacher introduced him to Proust—and he was immediately hooked. “I knew from the beginning that you could live in that world. And I guess that’s what I was looking for: an alternative universe.”

In college, Karpeles veered away from his familiar practice of art and pursued the life of a classical scholar. It seemed, to him, more challenging. He went to Haverford College and then to Oxford, where he studied ancient Greek for a year. But ultimately art drew him back.

“It was in London that I finally decided to be a painter,” Karpeles said, smiling. “It was one painting. A Cezanne landscape. That was my moment.”

From then on, he embraced painting as his life’s work. A painting fellowship took him to France for two years in his early 20s, where he lived in Cassis and Paris, and read Proust in French for the first time.

Karpeles returned to spend a restless half-decade in Manhattan before settling on a farm in the rural rolling hills of Pennsylvania in 1984. There he built a barn-like painting studio, where he worked for the next two decades.

All of Karpeles’ canvases are large, but his accomplishments include two monumental room-sized works: the Sanctuary Project, designed to be a supportive space for people touched by AIDS, led the Rockefellers to commission a nondenominational Chapel of Hope and Remembrance. Both are meditative swashes of color that speak of galaxies, clouds or even the textures of pavement, lichen, skin.

To stand in front of one of Karpeles’ canvases in the austere Bolinas studio where he now works is to confront a wall of color and emotion—dense and yet also full of light. It can take him over a year to finish a single painting, and the process of time and thought is visible in each one’s carefully balanced and refined chaos—an observation that makes Karpeles think of Proust.

“For him, art became a bulwark against the ravages of time,” Karpeles said. “Paintings held time, and the world moved around them.”

(Originally published in the Point Reyes Light)

Paula Fava explores the elements using encaustic, wax

In a room that smells faintly of tar and honey, charred colors play across large wooden panels. This is the acrylic, encaustic and mixed media work of artist and former San Francisco firefighter Paula Fava, of Inverness Park.

“I’ve always been attracted to fire,” said Fava, who was raised in a house behind the fire station in Sacramento, and dreamed of being a firefighter from the time she was five. But that wasn’t an option for little girls in the 1950s, so she grew up to study modern dance and journalism instead.

Her mother was an artist and a dancer, and as a teenager Fava picked up a camera and began to make art of her own through photography. She was always handy: if she saw something nifty, she would try to make it. And while working in marketing and public relations for a pager company, she started a small jewelry-making business with her sister.

The San Francisco Fire Department was opened to women in 1989 after an extended lawsuit. Four years later Fava applied and placed fifteenth out of 6,000 people who took the entrance exam. For the next fourteen years she lived her childhood dream.

“I’ve seen everything from people who committed suicide to horrible accidents on the Golden Gate Bridge,” Fava said. “And, a good amount of fires. Everything is so fast and furious when you go to a fire scene.”

One of the more memorable moments in her career included attended helping a woman whose legs had been shattered by a hit and run driver. Her legs were only held together by her black stockings, Fava recalled, describing how she talked with the woman who was drifting in and out of consciousness. A week later, she was told that she was the only visitor the woman wanted to come to the hospital.

“That really spoke to how we touch people’s lives and we don’t really know it,” Fava said. “Every day we all make an impact on each other and have no idea.”

While driving fire engines and working on haz-mat crews for her job, Fava remained inspired to take photographs and make art. On repeated trips to Hawaii she swam with dolphins, and began making silk paintings inspired by that experience that became prayer flags and altarpieces.

Fava began painting shortly after she moved to West Marin in 2001, when she took a class. It was one week after September 11 and ten days after her father died. “Art just exploded out of me,” she said. In the process she felt connected to her identity as a firefighter, to her father and also to her mother who had died years before.

“When I started painting I used a lot of yellows and reds, and made series’ that involved the towers and my father’s blue eyes,” she said. “Definitely it was a lot of processing—frustration, sadness, disappointment, an inability to go to New York and help.”

During that time, she also felt that her mom was nearby, a spirit sipping tea in a corner of the room while she painted. The next year she got married, and when she changed her name she took that of her mother—Fava—as well as her husband’s. Now she goes by Paula Fava as an artist, and Paula Fava Corcoran in her personal life.

In 2003 an Indian guru entered Fava’s life and art when she attended a lecture by Swami Sri Kaleshwar at Ions in Petaluma.

“I was raised Catholic and I haven’t disowned it,” she said. “But I was taught by my first nun that there is no wrong religion and I’ve kept opening my heart to what is out there.”

Over the last five years Fava has been to India four times to visit Kaleshwar, who is known as a living saint and a national treasure in India. “I’ll be honest: I’m still testing this all out,” she said. “But when something is working you want more of it. Everything that he’s offered so far as a healing technique or a teaching has worked; I can’t deny that.”

On her last visit, Kaleshwar invited his students to make a wish—a wild, outrageous, selfless wish—that would be his gift to them. Fava struggled with what to ask for, and after talking with some friends realized her wish boiled down to her art.

“Our teacher tells us that the biggest pain in the world is heartbreak. We all carry it with us,” she said. “I want people to be healed of heartbreak through just looking at my art.”

Last week—less than a year after making her wish—Fava’s first solo show opened at Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station.

“I’ve already had two strangers contact me, and they said, ‘I cannot believe this but I feel like it healed the pain in my heart,’” said Fava, who wrote of her wish in the artist statement displayed at the gallery. “To me, its like, ‘Gosh if it happened to even one person then that’s enough.’”

In the show, Fava used understated swathes of pigment and intricate Indian prints to explore themes of earth, fire, air, water and sky—the five elements in the Hindu tradition.

On one panel, white tones floats like smoke across a background of ashy gray. On another, a russet corner flares with the patterns of paper or a white-painted wall that has just begun to burn.

These are the pieces that Fava feels are the most satisfied with—and it’s no coincidence that they are fiery.

“It’s an earthy, guttural chemical reaction,” the Inverness Park artist said about her process of combining roofing compound with beeswax and encaustic pigments using a blowtorch. “I’ve always been earth and fire in my alchemical makeup,” Fava said. “Over the last few years and I’ve brought in water and air with all the spiritual work I’m doing, but I might have gone back to my roots with those last pieces.”

(Originally published in the Point Reyes Light)