Los Angeles Hikes

Just got back from a vacation to southern California, which provided some material for a freelance project I'm working on. I think that I hiked more in Los Angeles during one week than I have all year here in Maine.

It's a strange, wonderful city.

Foreclosure Farms

Growing food in abandoned city lots? That's so 2007. In the post-recession landscape, the edgiest agricultural trendsetters are growing cannabis in suburban foreclosures. 

"Houses that sold for $1 million before the crisis have been turned into grow houses, equipped with the high-intensity lights, water and air-filtering systems necessary to produce potent, high-quality marijuana," reported the New York Times in an article this spring.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the BBC reports that local police found over 7,800 cannabis farms in the UK last year.

A foreclosed house in Vallejo, California, where illegal wiring for grow lights caused a fire on the second floor. Photo by Jim Wilson for the New York Times.

It's the logical next step of the "urban farming" fad. Abandoned inner-city lots for growing vegetables are becoming increasingly difficult to find. So what's an aspiring inner-city homesteader to do?

Drive 'till you qualify. There's a bounty of abandonment beyond the city limits. Find a nice quarter-acre lot with a nice lawn and privacy from any nosy neighbors, a good school district where well-to-do students will pay top dollar for your product, and five spacious bedrooms for your grow lights.

Who says the American Dream is dead? It just needs some pharmacological assistance.

Waves and Radiation: from Moscow, Maine to Moscow, Russia

In the late days of the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force acquired miles of forestland in northern Maine to erect an enormous array of steel antennae, designed to listen over the horizon for aircraft and missiles approaching from beyond the iron curtain.

The installation, ironically enough, was located in a sparsely-populated town called Moscow. The steel towers have since been scrapped, but Dave of coldwarrelics.com paid a visit a few years ago while they were still intact, and got these amazing photos.

Naturally, the Soviets had their own over-the-horizon radar installation pointed at us. That array happens to be located near Chernobyl, inside the Exclusion Zone. It still stands amidst irradiated, wild forests, a mirror-world reflection of Moscow, Maine.

Images from English Russia.

Officially called "Duga," or "Arc," for the shape of its coverage area, this array was known in the western world as the "Russian woodpecker" for the rapid thumps it broadcast into short-wave radio receivers. In the 1970s and 80s, civilian radio enthusiasts in the western world could hear these signals clearly, and were even able to triangulate their source to a location near Kiev. But beyond that, little was officially known.

In this 1982 BBC Horizon documentary, ostensibly about the technologies of Nicola Tesla, a Canadian bureaucrat named Andrew Michrowski speculates that Duga was a "Tesla magnifying transmitter" broadcasting psychoactive waves into the western world to interfere with our brains.

The beginning of this clip provides an audio recording of the woodpecker signal, followed by some entertaining Cold War conspiracy theories:

A partial transcript:

Michrowski: Because it is the same frequency, the same frequency range, and also the same kind of activity that goes on in our brains. That is the terrible thing about the Soviet signal: the capacity to impose on the way people, quote, think. This thinking that I'm talking about is the thinking of being peaceful, the ability to be calm, the ability to rationalize, [they] are all affected from a purely mental point of view by signals of this nature.

Narrator: Is there any defense? This personal transmitter puts out 7.8 cycles a second, which Michrowski says is a natural planetary frequency the body is tuned to. [...]

Michrowski: This is being used as far as we are aware by the German Civil Service... It is mainly a protective mechanism to ensure that the German Civil Servant, especially on external affairs duty, is able to keep his composure, in negotiations especially with other people and other countries. To make sure that they're not influenced.

To the BBC's credit, the documentary gives a more enlightening explanation of over-the-horizon radar technology once Michrowski stops hawking his protective organic radio wave device (at around 3:20 in the clip above). 

These huge radar arrays, one located in the expansive forests of our cold northern frontier, the other located in a radioactive zone of exclusion, don't broadcast any signals any more. But as rusting relics of the 20th century, they still exert a morbid allure, inviting us to speculate about hidden, secret purposes they might once have had.

Years after the end of the Cold War, after the power has been shut down, their psychoactive properties finally begin to take root, affecting our thoughts and imaginations — not with a pulsing radio signal, but with the eerie quiet of an empty meadow and rusted wires stirring in the breeze.

I hope to visit the Moscow site later this summer, and hopefully to find some good local lore about the site. I'll keep you posted on this blog.

Ten thousand public bikes bloom in Manhattan

Later this summer, New York City city will roll out thousands of publicly-owned bikes parked at stations, spaced a few blocks apart across three boroughs, where visitors, workers, and neighborhood residents will be able to borrow a bike for short-term rentals.

Lots of other cities have already pioneered the bikesharing idea (even Houston, Texas managed to implement bikesharing before New York did, with a much smaller 3-station downtown network that opened this spring). With origins in Paris and Montreal, bikesharing has always had a tinge of utopian socialism to it, promoting the shared use of public property over privately-owned vehicles.

But it's a socialist idea that works brilliantly, thanks to mobile technology: users can use their smartphones to locate bikes and a station near their destination, while bikeshare managers can locate lost or broken bikes with GPS, and dynamically track which stations need more bikes due to high demand. Lots of new business startups seek to duplicate the same communistic idea of letting people share their private property (whether spare bedrooms or automobiles) in exchange for small rental payments. Bikesharing makes cycling in cities easier, cheaper, and more fun, resulting in more people riding bikes for short trips in the cities where it's been established.

Private property, it turns out, is a hassle to take care of. But new technology allows people to enjoy the communitarian benefits of shared property thanks to the capitalist accountability of credit card security deposits and rental payments.

New York City's state-owned bicycles wholeheartedly embrace this ironic marriage of utopian environmentalist socialism with hard-nosed capitalism. They've been named "Citi Bikes," after Citibank, which contributed a $41 million for the naming rights.

Wall Street quants riding to work like Maoist factory workers (although even Maoists own their own bikes) will do so astride bikes plastered with the Citibank logo, and pay at stations that prefer MasterCard, another corporate sponsor.

And so here is a photo, via Streetsblog, of three transportation policy wonks (from left: NYC Deputy Mayor Robert Steel, Alta Bikeshare CEO Alison Cohen, NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan) and three billionaires (Mayor Michael Bloomberg, MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga, and Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit).

In a few more years, bikesharing stations will be as much a part of our stereotypical vision of the generic urban landscape as newsstands and bus shelters are today.

The Language of Waves and Radiation

“The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers.

[...] They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.”

-Don Delillo, from the conclusion of White Noise

Our grocery store is finishing a remodeling project. The place feels different in ways that are hard to place — the changes are subtle enough that you can't remember what it looked like before, but the cumulative effect is of being someplace that's at once familiar and strange, as though pranksters moved your bedroom furniture a few inches while you slept.

When I visited yesterday, the changes raised all sorts of questions: how many focus groups and research studies went into determining how high this shelf is, or what kind of lightbulbs to use? And where is the yogurt?

And yet, the overall effect was effective: the colors seemed brighter, the aisles more spacious, my appetite for groceries stronger.

It reminded me of Don Delillo's White Noise, which has a number of amazing passages about supermarkets. I came home and skimmed the book for those passages again, and found my favorite, the one quoted above, which occupies the very last page of the book. A pretty amazing conclusion: an apotheosis of the consumer experience.

White Noise Critical: Text and Criticism (Viking Critical Library)
by Don Delillo

So it felt even more wonderful to experience the same sensations in real life, and be aware of them. Was this desire to consume more a subconscious reaction to the new environment that retail analysts and architects had designed explicitly for that purpose?

Or maybe the physical details of the remodeling are irrelevant, and the simple awareness of the remodeling itself — the mere idea of the remodeling — was enough to convey expectations that I should buy more, in order to blend in with the consensus of (real or imagined) focus groups and balance sheets. To be in harmony with the language of waves and radiation.

David Lynch's Nature Film

Hollywood types supposedly love making heavy-handed ecological allegories to brainwash us into being more considerate and thoughtful. It turns out that David Lynch was no exception. Here's a short film about inner-city wildlife in Lynch's signature "neo-noir" style, from 1991:

A Relic from the Gold Rush Space Program

A couple years ago I wrote about the Mannahatta project, an effort to reconstruct the pre-colonial ecosystems that existed on Manhattan Island, and the gorgeous computer-generated birds-eye-views that it produced.

Now, a Californian geographer named Mark Clark has made a similar speculative map, showing most of California as it might have looked from space in 1850 (via the Strange Maps blog):

What's most striking to me is how edenic the Central Valley looks with its original rivers and marshes streaming snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada into the lush swirl of marshes in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta in the north, or, in the south, into the long-lost Tulare Lake, once the largest freshwater body west of the Great Lakes.

Now, the same landscape is all massive monoculture farm fields spotted with dusty, heat-blasted cities like Bakersfield and Fresno. Even more remarkable is that most of the transformation happened within a single generation during the early 20th century. Why aren't there more Hollywood blockbusters about this story?

And speaking of native Californian hydrology, a friend recently turned me onto the L.A. Creek Freak blog, which is all about trying to restore watersheds and their ecological functions in the Los Angeles metro area. I'm actually planning a visit to southern California early this summer — if any Californian readers want to leave tourism suggestions in the comments, or just say "hello," it would make my day.

High-Rise Forestry

This pair of luxury housing high-rises under construction in Milan includes beefy cantilevered balconies that have been designed to support hundreds of fully-grown trees and shrubs.

Architect Stephano Boeri boasts that the project "is a model of vertical densification of nature within the city." The trees that will be suspended off of its balconies are equivalent to a hectare's worth of flat-land forest, while the homes inside the buildings represent five hectares' worth of single-family homes in the Italian suburbs.

It's called Bosco Verticale, or Vertical Forest.

These construction photos are by Daniel Iodice, and come from the Stephano Boeri Architetti website:

And a close-up of the tree boxes:


Here's the architect's vision of how the buildings will look when complete:

The plantings, which will include holly oak, European wild pear, and a mix of shrubs like Cain Apples and hawthorns, seem to have been chosen for their tolerance for constrained soil conditions and for their ability to improve the environmental quality inside and around the towers — shading the windows on hot summer days, insulating the apartments from city noise and particulate pollution, and filtering the apartments' grey water.

I first saw this project on the Green Futures blog, which included this critique:

Alexander Felson, Director of the Urban Ecology and Design Laboratory at Yale University, agrees that “there will potentially be microclimate and air particulate removal benefits”, but warns that the “overall energy required to construct a building that would support both trees and the wet weight of soil” places some serious question marks over its overall sustainability. He favors a more modest approach focusing on green roofs.

True, all that beefy steel and concrete required to hold up trees on an Italian balcony probably required the environmental sacrifice of a good chunk of China.

Still, I think Dr. Felson is missing the point (maybe he just can't see the forest for the trees?). This is a luxury high-rise, after all. While the architect Boeri is clearly interested in sustainability, he's also interested in creating a nice place to live for wealthy Milanese city-dwellers who can pay his commission. There are lots of luxury high-rises — the vast majority of them, actually — that blow their budgets waste construction material on much more masturbatory design flourishes.

What I find most interesting about these buildings is their approach to re-introducing wild nature into the city. I write about that idea often on this blog, but this project takes it to a new level (literally) by marrying a forest with a skyscraper. It's not merely creating a park that's geographically delineated from the rest of the city: it's integrating a forest with one of our most anthropocentric infrastructures: a high-rise apartment building.

That's pretty cool, not just for the people who live there, but for everyone in Milan who will be able to look at a vertical forest in their city's skyline.

Notwithstanding the technical questions of the construction project's sustainability, the buildings still presents an extremely bold vision of a sustainable city — a city in which nature is prominent and integrated into daily life.