2. Nature Sounds Society 28th Annual Field Recording Workshop 29 June at Yuba Pass
3. "California, then and now" project - you can contribute
4. When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
5. Political attacks on Planned Parenthood pose threat to well-being
6. For My Daughter, by David Ignatow
7. SciAm: Natural Gas - climate challenge/clean energy myth of dams
8. Register for Muir's March, families too
9. I would love to live like a river flows...
10. This dewdrop world...
11. Transit of Venus June 5/coyote pups in GGP
12. Battle against yellow starthistle victim of budget cuts
13. Dead trees, biodiversity, and the black-backed woodpecker
14. Regional Parks Botanic Garden summer class schedule - yummy/Andie Thrams
15. Pier 70, Blue Greenway and Crane Cove Park and Open Space Advocates workshop 6/20
16. How to be wise. It's easy
1. The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places, by Bernie Krause
Bernie Krause might be the Zelig of 20th-century electronic music. Run your finger down the back of LP jackets from the 60s, squint hard, and you're likely to find Krause's name popping up in small print on all sorts of albums. If you were a musician who wanted a shot of techno-gimmickry from that decade's newest toy - the Moog synthesizer - chances are you'd have hired Krause. The Doors and the Byrds did. Or if you were a filmmaker who wanted a certain effect that only electronic gadgetry could summon, you might have put him on your payroll. Those slow-mo helicopter whumps in the opening scenes of Apocalypse Now were brought to you in part by Krause.
But Krause's The Great Animal Orchestra might come as a surprise. Since completing a doctorate in bio-acoustics more than three decades ago, Krause has become one of the world's most outspoken - and unusual - environmentalists. Part anthropologist, part technician, part musiciann, he lugs his recording equipment around the globe, seeking to capture the vanishing soundscapes of oour rapidly changing Earth. If you ever wanted to hear ants sing, beavers cry or corn grow, Krause is your man. His book movingly conveys his anger at the unseen toll that human-generated noise has exacted on the natural world - and why this matters.
Western music, according to Krause, has divorced itself from its primary inspiration: the natural world. In clear-cutting forests and paving over meadows, we've managed to deprive ourselves of a decent tune to whistle past our graveyard.
He begins his story with a journey to Lake Wallowa in Oregon in 1971, where a Nez Perce elder offers him a music lesson. Crouching by a stream on an autumn morning, he is instructed to remain silent. As gusts of wind whip past, the air is filled with a mysterious "combination of tones, sighs and midrange groans...a cross between a church organ and a colossal pan flute". To his surprise, he discovers it is the sound of wind blowing across the tops of a cluster of nearby reeds. "Now you know where we got our music," concludes the elder triumphantly. "And that's where you got yours, too."
Krause lovingly invokes the sacred experience of the natural soundscape. He extols the "wonder of the terrestrial orchestra" and draws repeated comparisons to the greatest works in the western canon. For example, a dawn chorus of birds, baboons and insects is "so rich with counterpoint and fugal elements" that it reminds him of Bach. An orchestra of birdsong in the stillness of the morning is still one of the great shows on Earth.
Review by Paul Mitchinson in Washington Post
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2. June 29-July 1, 2012 - Nature Sounds Society 28th Annual Field Recording Workshop - Yuba Pass
The Nature Sounds Society (NSS)’ 28th Annual Field Workshop will be held June 29-July 1, 2012 (oprtional overnight backpack 7/1-7/2) at San Francisco State University's Yuba Pass Field Station, in the Sierra Nevada. Each year, this workshop brings together dynamic speakers and trip leaders with participants interested in learning various aspects of nature sound recording and the use of nature sounds in art, science, and music.
Our featured speakers this year include Dr. Bernie Krause, author of the recently published and New York Times reviewed The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places. Dr. Krause has been recording nature for more than forty years; his world-spanning work includes more than fifteen thousand species and four thousand hours of wild soundscapes. Scott Huber, birding by ear expert Education and Research Coordinator at CSU Chico Research Foundation will also speak. Klas Strandberg, inventor of the famous Telinga microphones, will come from Sweden to talk about his life and work. Steve Sergeant, Sierra Club trip leader and wilderness EMT, will lead an optional overnight backpacking trip immediately after the Workshop. Other presenters include sound designer and inventor Dan Dugan.
Early bird registration ends 6/5! For more information and registration forms, please go to http://www.naturesounds.org/announcements/index.html or call Dan Dugan at (415) 826-9776, e-maildan@dandugan.com
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3. “California, then and now” project
Please let me know if you would be interested in helping with this new endeavor: “California, then and now” project which will locate photographs of beautiful, wild, serene places in California from earlier days and show them in juxtaposition with what they look like now (overbuilt, condominiumized, ruined by overpopulation, etc.). We may also collect sound samples (birds, relative quiet) and juxtapose those with traffic, loud music, etc.
Californians for Population Stabilization - Jo Wideman <jowideman@capsweb.org>
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4. When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice, Terry Tempest Williams
Terry Tempest Williams' new book, When Women Were Birds, resonates with her signature gift -- the ability to salvage beauty from great heartbreak. Like her acclaimed memoir Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, When Women Were Birds is also a brave and deeply personal story. In Refuge, Williams reflected on her mother's death from cancer and the simultaneous flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Sanctuary in Utah. Now, 20 years later, Williams reveals another haunting facet of her family history.
Williams' mother died at age 54. Now 54 herself, Williams discloses what her mother shared one week before she died: "I am leaving you with all my journals. … But you must promise me that you will not look at them until after I am gone." When the time came, Williams found "three shelves of beautiful clothbound books." One by one, she opened the journals, only to find that each was completely blank.
Leavened with honesty and introspection, When Women Were Birds is a 54-chapter exploration of Williams' pursuit of her own voice -- her lifelong determination to "speak the truth of our lives at all costs." Williams takes readers through her struggle to understand her mother's unfilled journals. Describing watershed moments in her own life, such as how a speech therapist corrected her lisp in fourth grade, she articulates each insight like the poet that she is. "I did not find my voice -- my voice found me through the compassion of a teacher who understood how poetry transforms us through the elegance and lyricism of language."
Williams candidly recalls anecdotes from her experiences as a daughter, granddaughter, spouse, teacher, and the mother of a recently adopted child. She describes symbolic encounters with birds: An owl foreshadows danger, a hawk reminds her how death can swoop down any moment, and a painted bunting provides comfort in grief. She devotes chapters to artists and activists who have inspired her, including painter Gustave Courbet, composer John Cage, and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Wangari Maathai.
True to form, Williams stitches this patchwork of topics together using a single thread fastened to family and place. As she does so, she leads readers across the vivid landscape of her life -- to the California seashore, the Sawtooth Wilderness of Idaho, and of course, back to the Utah wildlands she calls home.
Hand on stone - patience
Hand on water - music
Hand raised to the wind - Is this the birthplace of inspiration?
Terry Tempest Williams
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5. Protect Women's Health
Political attacks on Planned Parenthood pose a threat to the well-being of millions of women in the U.S.
Image: Illustration by Thomas Fuchs
Almost 100 years ago Margaret Sanger opened a tiny birth-control clinic in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, N.Y. Poor Yiddish- and Italian-speaking women, overwhelmed by large families that they could not support, would come for advice about how to avoid pregnancy and the dangers of horrific, sometimes life-threatening, self-administered abortions. The clinic taught women to use the diaphragm. Nine days after it opened, Sanger and two other women who ran the center were jailed for violating a New York State law that prohibited contraception.
This clinic eventually grew into Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest nonprofit supplier of reproductive health services to women and men. A century after its founding, the organization is again at the heart of one of the most divisive issues in American political life. It has come under attack by Republican presidential candidates seeking to revoke the group’s federal funding—almost half of its $1-billion budget comes from federal and state sources. Last year the House of Representatives voted to withdraw some of its support, although the measure was not sustained in the Senate. (Backing for the group, initiated under the Nixon administration, has not always been a partisan issue.) In March, Mitt Romney, the GOP’s presumptive presidential candidate, vowed to end federal funding if elected. This is a worrying prospect for both women and public health.
For some people, Planned Parenthood has come to symbolize abortion, which it has provided since 1970. But in all the rhetoric, facts have sometimes gone missing. For instance, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona declared last year on the floor of the Senate that abortion accounts for “well over 90 percent” of what Planned Parenthood does. The actual figure is 3 percent. (Planned Parenthood clinics perform one in four abortions in the U.S. but use no federal funds for this practice.) To some abortion opponents, that 3 percent is reason enough to gut the organization. If a future Congress and White House were to do so, however, it would drive women once again into the back alleys, without necessarily decreasing the number of abortions.
Stripping Planned Parenthood of federal funding would also sacrifice the 97 percent of its public health work that has nothing to do with abortion, from which many people benefit directly. One in five American women have used the group’s services, and three out of four of its patients are considered to have low incomes. In 2011 it carried out tests and treatment for more than four million individuals with sexually transmitted diseases. It supplied 750,000 exams to prevent breast cancer, the most common cancer among U.S. women. And it performed 770,000 Pap tests to prevent cervical cancer, which was a leading cause of death among women before this screen became widely available. Planned Parenthood is one of the most important public health care institutions in the country, even aside from its work in rational family planning.
Family planning has benefited society in numerous ways. It has saved lives, opened new horizons for women and kept populations from soaring. Since 1965, the year the Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut law that made access to contraception illegal, women’s ability to plan and space out pregnancies has contributed to a 60 percent decline in maternal deaths. By 2002, moreover, only 9 percent of births were unwanted, compared with 20 percent in the early 1960s. As a major provider of contraceptives—it furnished birth control to two million Americans last year—Planned Parenthood serves as “America’s largest abortion preventer,” as one Chicago Tribune writer pointed out.
Access to birth control in the U.S. has helped narrow the income inequality gap between men and women by as much as 30 percent during the 1990s alone. The pill has given women greater choice about when to have children, freeing them up to acquire career skills. By 2009 women procured more than half of all U.S. doctoral degrees, compared with 10 percent in 1960. The health and well-being of a society correlates highly with the status of its women. In many parts of the Middle East, Asia and Africa, women are now making gains, to the betterment of all, in access to education and jobs—both contingent on family planning. Now is a particularly bad time for Americans, as citizens of the world, to forget what we have accomplished at home.
(JS: I lost the attribution for this item.)
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6.
For My Daughter
When I die choose a star
and name it after me
that you may know
I have not abandoned
or forgotten you.
You were such a star to me,
following you through birth
and childhood, my hand
in your hand.
When I die
choose a star and name it
after me so that I may shine
down on you, until you join
me in darkness and silence
together.
~ David Ignatow ~
(Against the Evidence: Selected Poems 1934-1994)
(for Erin, on her Birthday)
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7. SciAm
CLIMATEWIRE: "Golden Age" for Natural Gas Might Prove Climate Challenge
Burning more natural gas might also mean more greenhouse gas emissions causing more global warming
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=23&ms=MzkyNzc5MzcS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTQ0NzUwMjk5S0&mt=1&rt=0
CLEANTECHNICA: Tropical Dams Dispel Clean Energy Myth
Tropical reservoirs are a methane factory that continuously removes carbon from the atmosphere as CO2 and returns it as methane, with a much greater impact on global warming
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=29&ms=MzkyNzc5MzcS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTQ0NzUwMjk5S0&mt=1&rt=0
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8.
REGISTER NOW
MORE ON US
FIND US ON FACEBOOK
Join our mailing list!
SIX TRIPS TO CHOOSE FROM
• 7-Day Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne
• 7-Day Valley to Valley
• 7-Day Backcountry's Backcountry
• 4-Day Tilltill Out'n Back
• 4-Day The Kids Trip
• 1-Day Wapama Stroll
Thinking about a summer vacation? Join us on one of the best adventures of the summer: Muir's March. It's the perfect family vacation!
From July 29th through August 4th, over 150 hikers, climbers, bikers their kids and other Restore Hetch Hetchy supporters will converge in Yosemite National Park for Muir's March - Restore Hetch Hetchy's largest event of the year. This year we are once again offering 5 stunning guided backpacking routes for all levels of backpackers. Several routes are specifically set aside for families and all are professionally guided. These trips are free but each participant must raise a minimum amount of funds for Restore Hetch Hetchy prior to departure.
All 5 trips will culminate on August 4th, where we backpackers will be joined by 100+ day hikers of all ages and sizes.
1-day Hike: Make it a family camping trip!
Due to popular demand, we have increased the number of spots for families and individuals who want to participate in the 1-day Wapama Stroll. This is a terrific opportunity to bond with your grandchildren, nieces and nephews and/or your own kids. And, it's a great way to teach the young folk in your life about environmental activism and philanthropy.
Each participant (individual and family alike) will receive:
• Two nights of camping within Yosemite National Park
• Two meals: "Muir's Feast" on August 3rd & "The Restoration Picnic" on August 4th
• A Patagonia hiking shirt and a CamelBak water bottle
In order to participate an individual needs to raise a MINIMUM of $90 and a family needs to raise a MINIMUM of $190.
The team here at Restore Hetch Hetchy is happy to answer any questions you have. Email or call Aaron Chandler at aaron@hetchhetchy.org or 415-956-0401.
What better way to make a difference in the world than to spend time in Yosemite. Join us as we walk in the footsteps of John Muir - Join us on Muir's March!
GOT QUESTIONS?
Call 415-956-0401 or email aaron@hetchhetchy.org
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9.
Fluent
I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.
~ John O'Donohue~
(Conamara Blues)
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10.
“This dewdrop world,
it is a dewdrop world;
and yet, and yet....”
Issa
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11. Miscellany
Transit of Venus across the Sun's face
It happened 8 years ago, then won't repeat until 105 years...in 2117, an unyielding pattern
http://losgatos.patch.com/articles/watch-the-transit-of-venus-on-tuesday
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Coyote pups in Golden Gate Park
This blog says there may be 5 pups in the park.
http://richmondsfblog.com/2012/05/29/photos-coyote-pups-in-golden-gate-park/
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12. California budget cuts hurt long battle against invasive weed threat
It doesn't take a botanist or even a nature nut to identify yellow star thistle along a favorite hiking trail. Every outdoor enthusiast has felt the familiar stab of introduction.
The invasive weed can reach 6 feet high with stiff limbs that seem to sprout daggers from every pore. Each arm is topped with a crown of inch-long spikes – and one showy yellow flower – that seem perfectly placed to stab a shoulder or poke an eye.
Yellow star thistle is public enemy No. 1 in the California weed world, found in every county but one and covering as much as 14 million acres. It is blamed for altering native landscapes, turning meadows into deserts and even killing horses, which are uniquely vulnerable to a toxin in the plant's leaves.
"Yellow star thistle is kind of like the state weed," said Doug Johnson, executive director of the California Invasive Plant Council, a nonprofit research group. "There's tons of it."
A coordinated effort across 14 counties has made strides in recent years to keep star thistle out of the Sierra Nevada, one of the few California regions the weed has not yet penetrated entirely. But now star thistle appears poised to win that battle, too, with a powerful ally on its side: state budget cuts.....
http://www.sacbee.com/2012/05/26/4517821/budget-cuts-hurt-long-battle-against.html#disqus_thread#storylink=cpy
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13.
"Although you'd never want to do it, you could remove all the birds and still have a forest. But you can't have a forest without invertebrates. It won't function anymore. The ants are the glue that holds it all together."
Myrmecologist Brian Fisher, California Academy of Sciences
"Quite simply, the terrestrial world is turned by insects and a few other invertebrate groups: the living world would probably survive the demise of all vertebrates, in greatly altered form of course, but life on land and in the sea would collapse down to a few simple plants and microorganisms without invertebrates."
Edward O. Wilson
“All the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn’t have a design problem. People do.”
William McDonough, architect and designer
Dead trees, biodiversity, and the black-backed woodpecker
The ruins of scorched or beetle-killed forests may not seem like ecological havens. But myriad species depend on standing dead or dying trees, including the black-backed woodpecker, which haunts skeletal forests in the West, Alaska and Canada. Its ebony dorsal plumage blends in with the charred tree trunks on which the bird rummages for juicy wood-boring beetle grubs, its principle prey.
The beetles are also adapted to scorched forest habitat; some species, called "fire-chasers," can detect forest fires as far as 30 miles away, using specialized heat receptors. They arrive in droves, mate, and lay eggs under the burned trees' bark. When the larvae hatch, they freely chew away at the defenseless trees.
But fire suppression, thinning and salvage logging on federal lands may be destroying this unique snag habitat. Fewer than 1,000 pairs of black-backed woodpeckers persist in Oregon and California, and fewer than 500 in South Dakota's Black Hills. The Center for Biological Diversity and three other groups asked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this month to protect those populations under the Endangered Species Act -- the first federal petition to recognize the importance of post-fire habitat, experts say.
High Country News 28.05.12
"You are a guest of nature. So behave."
Anon
"Insects won't inherit the earth--they own it now."
Thomas Eisner
"I had no idea there was so much going on in Heywood’s meadow."
Thoreau
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14. Regional Parks Botanic Garden 2012 Summer/Fall class schedule
http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=01091d83e4aa193c78a888704&id=5614b903e8&e=dc1584429c
Here is just a sample from the yummy classes:
Field Journal Series: Mastering Mini Landscapes
Drawing landscapes is a great way to connect yourself with a place and a terrific addition to a travel or nature journal. In this class you will learn the basics of composition and how to simplify detail and values, and you will master the five-minute landscape. Learn to draw trees without needing to draw every leaf and forests that give the sense of deep woods without needing to draw every tree. We will explore techniques with graphite, colored pencil, and watercolor, all of which are well suited for easy sketching outdoors.
Sunday, August 12, 10 am-3 pm
Instructor: John Muir Laws
Location: Meet at Visitor Center, Regional Parks Botanic Garden, and carpool to a spot within the regional parks
Please bring lunch
$100 members / $110 nonmembers
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Artist Andie Thrams:
http://www.andiethrams.com/
The Tilden Botanic Garden workshops are almost full this coming weekend, and many other courses have waiting lists. I'd love to see you in a class this year, so please don't delay, if you were hoping to attend.
Other big news: I am honored and delighted to be the first artist in residence for the Bunnell Street Arts Center in cooperation with the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies of Homer, Alaska. I will be based at the Peterson Bay Field Station, on the south side of Kachemak Bay, for the month of June. While there I will have the opportunity to work in one of my favorite habitats: the Sitka spruce-western hemlock temperate rainforest of the Pacific Northwest. I'll be posting images on my website later this summer, so stay tuned...
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15. Pier 70, Blue Greenway and Crane Cove Park and Open Space Advocates
Please find attached a notice for a Pier 70 Crane Cove Park community workshop to review and receive comments on Concept Alternatives that have
been prepared for the site.
The meeting will be on Wednesday June 20th at the Port of San Francisco, Pier 1 from 5:30 - 8:00.
The existing condition and opportunities and constraints analysis used as the basis for the concept alternatives was presented at the Port’s Central Waterfront Advisory Group in March. That analysis and other information on the project and site is available for review at www.sfport.com/cranecove park.
Please help us spread the word so we can get maximum stakeholder participation in the planning and design process.
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16. How to be wise
I joke with older friends who have gray or graying hair that gray hair is nature's way of letting people know we're wise. How else are they to know?
No longer a joke. I heard on Marketplace a couple days ago that athletes are wearing glasses with just plain glass, on the assumption that it makes them look more intelligent or learned. A black professor at Harvard wears them for the same reason. It seems to be a trend. Other professors die their hair gray so they'll be taken more seriously.
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