Gnamma #88 - Fog Ontology

For the past six years I’ve lived near San Francisco, a place with a particularly charismatic fog presence. (“Karl”). In the subtle seasonality of coastal California, fog is also one of the better markers of time: the chilly and damp conditions of “Fogust” (now) contrast with the starkly clear bluebird days coming soon in November. People who say the Bay Area doesn't have seasons are just bringing the expectation of dramatic continental climates to a place that's running a different system.

Fog can be difficult to define, even, at a quick pass. Is it different from a low-slung cloud? At what threshold do we go from damp condensing air to… fog proper? The slippery, airborne phenomenon, a flavor of "occult precipitation"--fog challenges us because the word denotes a “thing” that really sits across a few spectra of environmental effects.

(source)

Gnamma #85 - Aquifer Warfare

(NOTE, this newsletter was originally sent on February 10th 2024, via a brief stint using the Mailerlite software which I ended up hating. It is being reposted for completeness of the Gnamma archive.)

Newsletter title nomenclature credit goes to my friend N.Z.

Amidst the ongoing death and desecration in Gaza, it's a hydrologist's nightmare to learn that Israel is flooding subterannean tunnels with seawater, ostensibly in attempt to flush Hamas out of them. Introduction of salt into the subsurface soils and waters will lead to decades, if not centuries, of difficulty soil health and the use of subsurface water (aquifer water) for drinking or agriculture.

I was in Los Angeles last week (one of the upsides of working remotely in my postdoc thus far!), so Elena and I snuck in a visit to one of my all-time favorite little institutions, the Center for Land Use Interpretation. The Center was immediately on my radar when I moved to Los Angeles in Fall 2018, I think via a recommendation by a friend-of-a-friend who loved its quirky nature and its both real and performative institutionality. This manifests as an layer of bureaucratic aesthetics over what is really a passionate and artistic dive into critical geographic and (landscape) architectural theory.

The show on display at CLUI right now is Tulare, a series of photos, videos, maps, and words on Lake Tulare. To say whether Lake Tulare "exists" or not today depends on what exactly you're waiting for, but the lake loudly announced its re-arrival in the extremely-wet 2023 at the southern end of California's Central Valley, causing widespread flooding. The lake has since retreated, divvied up into evaporation, groundwater percolation, and surface water diversions (i.e. canals and streams). These diversions are part of how the region has now been lasso'd into agricultural use across in the former freshwater lake and wetlands. Intermittent lakes and rivers, with these large seasonal or multi-year swings in their hydrologies, are somewhat common in arid landscapes around the world. Tulare is just particularly huge (> 1000 square km) and intertwined with California water infrastructure and politics. The fertile and, most-of-the-time dried out lakebed is now the terranean jewel of the J.G. Boswell Company, the "biggest farmer in America" (thx Elena!), whose lobbying has had outsize impact on dam and levee and canal construction in the region. Ultimately, this same construction now mostly prevents Lake Tulare from swelling during wet seasons as it has done for millennia.

The dogged persistence of bodies of water is one of their attributes I most admire. Despite all the bulldozers in the world, it's just pretty tough to move enough dirt and rocks to meaningfully change how the earth's landscape is shaped, and water still flows and collects downhill. A lake drained out of existence by pumps and dikes exists as the potential to re-emerge, with enough melting snow pointed towards a shallow bowl-shaped geography, as happened last spring in Tulare. All of the earth's surface is always changing, but rivers, lakes, and wetlands (both freshwater and salty) are particularly dynamic; while water is inherently geographical, it is less fixed-in-place than many other physical landscape entities; plus its heft, cyclicality, and slipperiness make it difficult to engineer around. These dynamics challenge imposed management regimes or expectations for our environments to behave to our desires in many ways, some of which I've written about previously in this newsletter. Particularly, the ebbs-and-flows and murky edges of wetlands–including the tule reed landscapes of Tulare–contribute to their particular positioning as difficult landscapes, of sorts, to manage.

Gnamma #86 - Surfing and Books and...

On Wednesday I woke up at 6 am in San José del Cabo, Mexico; ate a breakfast of shrinkwrapped corn muffins, half a can of tuna, plus a gatorade; and proceeded to have perhaps the best surf session of my life.

I then napped, did groceries (the store was closed by the time I arrived the night before, hence the convenience-store diet), and plowed through Nat Young's book Church of the Open Sky, which is a memoir-of-vignettes about surfing. (Note, the author is the old Australian Nat Young, not the young American Nat Young--popular name for surfers?)

It's a fun, quick read, perfect morsels for light vacation reading between surf sessions. However, other than some touching spiritual notes at the beginning of the book, there is little depth in its pages. Young himself defers to William Finnegan's Barbarian Days as the titular example of exemplary surf writing. I told my girlfriend Elena that I found Young's book akin to an old guy's unprompted rambling stories of his youth, and she said that's somewhat how she found Finnegan's book, too. Maybe it's just how these words land differently to a surfer or not, but to me the main message is that damn, there's really very little good writing about surfing. But maybe I'm just overdue to subscribe to The Surfer's Journal.

Our arrival in Melimoyu began hazily, with an iPhone alarm sounding over snores through a greasy, faux-leather, fluorescent-lit cabin following a 9-hour overnight on a ferry. The boat had been heaving through the darkness of night—soothing, I thought, even between attempts of sleep—as we traversed the tumultuous Gulf of Corcovado. I read snippets of Roberto Bolaño's satirical and dark novella, Nocturno de Chile ("By Night in Chile" translated title), between naps, and the dark rantings about the nature of the long skinny country and its literary world seemed both close at-hand and far-away as I folded myself into a remote but undeniably Chilean corner of the place. The dock in front of us, we gathered our bags, tucked into our jackets the last warmth of sleep, and stepped outside into the cold, dark, and wet. 


Both Nocturno de Chile and Travels in a Thin Country (which I mentioned in #74) address Chile's relationship with itself. Despite being very different in content and author, they share the sentiment that Chile has a strained relationship with itself culturally. It is an isolated country, itself somewhat difficult to traverse; its biggest neighbor, Argentina, seems to incite an ongoing inferiority complex of cosmopolitanism. And to enter the realm of Chile's most famous cultural world of the 20th century (authors/poets Mistral, Neruda, Donoso, Allende, Bolaño himself), it seems like a stint abroad was necessary for fame or, in Mistral's case, a byproduct of her success. The protagonist in Nocturno de Chile writes essays about the Chilean authors of his time but describes it as "embryonic" cultural scene, while he and his circle of literary friends focus more on European references. Perhaps the literature was just (is still?) young, and the world of Chilean writers too small and separated to do anything but look elsewhere in the world for context. 

I felt embryonic too: exiting the ferry boat and entering the fjord was a sort of primordial fever dream. It was barely dawn, and the low, metallic sky was squeezing out something between rain and fog. In any direction we could feel the looming presence of the mountains and volcanoes, but their contours were shades of black too obscure to differentiate. The hollowness of cold and poor sleep blended with the vacuous nature of awe and we piled our bags into a boat. We had been greeted by a frank, chipper man named Alex whose garb suggested he was prepared for this dampness every day, and he quickly piloted our boat across the fjord to a lodge where we would spend the next few days. More sunlight made its way diffusely through the cloud layer as we moved along the surface of the water, and suddenly it felt like we had crossed the ethereal threshold between night and daybreak. A tractor waded into the waves to help bring us to shore dry, and we stumbled, weary but now awake, into the bright, clean, and dry wooden lodge. Regardless of any descriptions I've read about Chile's backwoods, few things speak stronger to a sense of civilization than food and hospitality at the end of the earth. 

A fjord is a type of estuary (where a river meets the sea), and we were there to study a phenomenon that mostly occurs in estuaries: internal waves. Just as "surface waves" (like what surfers ride) are at an interface of two fluids of different density—water and air—there can be be "internal waves" at the interface of two different masses of water. The waters in fjords often exhibit strong stratification, with less-dense freshwater from local rivers floating atop a more-dense layer of saltwater. Where these two different layers meet, waves can occur. My colleagues had investigated this system as the internal waves were visible from aerial imagery (they show up as broad bands of smooth and choppy water, as the internal waves heave water to the surface and smooth out the texture).

The bodily reality of environmental fluids field work (wet, labor-intensive, geographical in nature) has attracted me as someone with a strong predisposition to living in my head. My role on the trip was mostly support, however (tie some knots, look at some data, help guide some decisions) so I had time to think and stare off into space. Nocturno de Chile was sticking with me, reminding me of my humanities side. Simultaneously, it plainly probes the role of the intelligentsia in the world: it is an ouroboric critique of the insular literati in Chile as well as the value the church, with the protagonist's ostensible profession (priesthood) yielding little benefit for anyone and his greatest achievement (teaching Marxism to Pinochet) a dead-end that nobody notices. Bolaño's belief systems (leftist revolutionary and atheist) and feelings towards his motherland (distaste) are on plain view, the protagonist a metaphor for Chile itself. 

While in the fjord, I was in a beautiful place, eating fresh seafood and bread every day, enjoying jokes about technical questions with friends. I'm having a better time in Chile than Bolaño did, perhaps, the product of being a privileged visitor and 22 more years of change. (The book is from 2000.) I couldn't help but think about the role of the critic, and the uphill battle to argue for the value of criticism against a sea of problems at lower rungs on Maslow's pyramid. I'd love your suggestions and conversation on the topic. But I see a void of writing (criticism?) around environmental relations that genuinely builds new language, standards, and narratives for the 21st century. To me, lots seems too quippish, sappy, or built upon an outdated assumption of human-nature dualism that is tough to shake.

One of the great joys of the flavor of environmental science I do is the assembly of the analysis. My team has baked-in expectations of the behavior of the system into how our sensors work, how our models run, and what we expect to see with our own eyes. This constrains us, applying blinders to what we can sense in the environment, but also allows us to participate in our understanding of the world. We get the gratification of either being correct or being surprised, both of which are interwoven with our self-awareness of our own knowledge. (That's a lie—there is often frustration when something goes awry, but of course it usually offers a lesson, too.) Chile has a great opportunity to be a leader in this kind of science, given its strong universities and pride for its incredible geography: this it should own without self-consciousness. 

Early in Nocturno de Chile there is a metaphor about an estuary and the literary community of the protagonist's host and friend: 

It occurred to me that my host was, without a doubt, the estuary in which all of our land's literary craft, from dinghies to freighters, from odoriferous fishing boats to extravagant battleships, had, for brief of extensive periods, taken shelter. [...] But in fact, I reflected, [his] house was a port.

Firstly! A reminder that I am fundraising for City Surf Project as part of a group of friends around San Francisco to surf this upcoming Saturday, June 18th, which is International Surfing Day. Please donate! We have less than a week to meet our $1000 goal! 

• depth of water over time (so I can see the tides go up and down, for instance)
• suspended sediment concentration ("SSC")
• various wave properties (e.g. mean wave height, peak wave period—ask me about how these get calculated, it's cool)
• fluid velocity (very rad sensors let you see this in 3D)

Acequias are communally-run water systems (aqueducts or ditches) in Iberia and Spain's former colonies. They are most notably present in the American Southwest, especially New Mexico. There are some similar forms elsewhere—levadas in Madeira, indigenous technologies (like puquios) in the New World, and more—but I will use acequias as a bit of a proxy term. Their history seems to be tracked to the qanats of Persia, brought to Iberia through Arab expansion, then to the Americas with Spanish colonization. 


Acequias are coupled hydrologic-economic-social systems, whereby water, a scarce resource in arid and semi-arid climates, is allocated for agricultural use by communitarian societies. The "water democracies" they are related with historically give voting rights to those who use the water on their land, and enforce management and maintenance duties via social contracts between the acequia corporation members. In drought times, the water scarcity is taken as a collective burden, and water is managed to as to balance collective needs, aquifer recharge and the sustainability of the entire acequia system. They are networked, whereby individual plots cannot necessarily be turned off and on without impacting the integrity of the rest of the system, which helps in upholding a collectivist attitude (ref).

That is the ideal at least. Water in arid places is an impure public good: the systems that carry it can become levers of power which exclude, uphold class divisions, and drive unequal labor practices: they are social systems first, technological systems second. And with any social system, broad strokes governance procedures ignore the messy reality of dealing with specific people and roles in an ever-changing environment, exposing how much effective management by people requires emotional intelligence and trust. Equitable service by and maintenance of the system requires it to have memory of the roles of its constituents, and to respond in reasoned ways to the events that affect them, the social context of exchanges between people, and the lands and ditches themselves. The networked infrastructure must be an active, living assemblage: it dies in the absence of social relationships upholding its value (and maintenance). Both of these papers bring up how critical it is for people to have a shared moral fabric to keep systems sustainable in generational time or longer, which may be religious or familial in nature. For my western social class, it is common that neither religious nor family ties are particularly strong: what social fabrics can be woven today to honor good-faith infrastructure maintenance? 

"Within the social and cultural domain of qanats, we cannot find a single motivation as a driver for the existence and functionality of qanats. This is because qanats are more than just economical, technical or even agricultural assemblages. Inside the qanat’s social ecosystem the political, religions, technical and socio-cultural institutions have been faithfully linked together." (ref) 

I have an enormous slew of questions and thoughts on these kinds of water systems. Mostly curiosity: there is very little information I have found on actual governance patterns of acequias or qanats. Things are so vastly different here in California, where the greatest water infrastructure on earth (?) is completely alienated from its users' daily needs and social fabric. I am somewhat curious if I can find a creative grant program to fund me doing some visits and research on these topics. I wonder how much these deeper-time histories of collective infrastructure governance can inform stuff happening today, whether in environmental economics or crypto. (Or, both?) Time will tell. Thanks to my friends AWS and TA for some conversations around these ideas. 

Relatedly, I am giving a Sandbox✦ talk at TRUST next week! It is on Tuesday, November 9th at 11am PST. My talk is called GREEN SPACE AS INFRASTRUCTURE SPACE, here is a blurb:  

Pressing material and political incentives are encouraging wider application of environmental economics to ascribe value to environmental processes. By accounting for the “ecosystem services” they provide, more and more landscapes can be valued, celebrated, and maintained as “green infrastructure”. In California, the state’s terraforming project and water infrastructure are nearly one and the same, but water scarcity threatens the abundance mindset. How far can we abstract a landscape into an infrastructural, economic entity? 

I've just begun preparation for my PhD qualifying exam. In my department, this is the biggest pinch point of the entire doctoral program, and it entails mapping out the nature of my dissertation and providing supporting evidence that I have everything for it all to happen. I'm interested in many things (can you tell?) but ultimately my dissertation will be about salt marshes. 

Marshes are high priority for attention under climate change and environmental collapse because of the myriad "ecosystem services" they provide (sometimes also called "environmental services"). These include: providing crucial habitat for various species which support broad food webs, filtering out toxins as water moves through them, sequestering carbon, and ameliorating flood risk to local areas. Ecosystem Services is a bit of an anthropocentric term in how it positions the environment as subservient to humans, valued only for the typical kinds of civilizational activities the ecosystem can support (ala infrastructure services), but seemingly a necessary designation in order for capitalism to value these places. 



Does a marsh support the GDP? If this wiki page is any indication, it's been an ongoing challenge to assess ecosystem services the way we might assess a new outlet mall—as an investment by its developers and with some kind of revenue per square foot. I believe that a lot of this is due to the intelligibility of benefits by engineered versus natural features on the landscape. A new shopping mall is a planned, designed space with particular measurable physical and economic metrics in mind: a spatial and intellectual parameter space that is articulated in advance by engineers and planners on top of a razed ("empty") lot. At the core of engineering is the drawing of a system boundary around the system, and relative neglect of that which falls outside the system. This approach means that in any system, we essentially only measure that which we anticipate, that which we know how to measure, and that which we follow after the system boundaries have been drawn. All the rest are externalities. As far as metrics go, monetary values of goods and real estate are concrete numbers which are closely monitored and comparatively "easy" to reckon with (sorry, economists). When we want to pin monetary values to environmental metrics and their effects, a lot more complicated work (or a broad set of assumptions) is required to quantify the metrics and their repercussions, given that most ecological processes do not obey firm boundaries in space or time.

What I mean to draw attention to is that it is really quite hard to measure and causally relate all of the things that any given land cover does to the world around it, because hydrologic and ecologic processes are patchy and happen across complicated micro-, meso-, and macro-scales. They defy the typical ways that civil engineering projects are measured as successful or not—as within the bounds of a designed system. It's difficult to say what processes in the world need to be included or not in the accounting. (I am a proponent of afforestation efforts in general, but as I wade into the literature a little bit more, I have learned that the devil is truly in the details when it comes to net carbon budget effects.)


This difficulty comes to a head in carbon markets as well as what I will broadly call "green infrastructure." By the EPA's definition, green infrastructure only means when grey (i.e. concrete) flood control infrastructure—storm sewers and flood control channels—can be replaced with more green space. Soils and plants are, generally, good at absorbing water and playing this role, but they may not function within a narrow parameter space that is preferable to engineers. I think the denomination "green infrastructure" deserves to be at least a bit more expansive: there is solid evidence that green coastal margins (beaches, marshes, mangroves) provide more effective, resilient, and dynamic flood protection than concrete seawalls. In the near future, as technocratic carbon sequestration projects will grow to a scale similar to our water and energy infrastructure (optimistically???), I hope that natural carbon sequestration will also be considered a part of "green infrastructure." 

For us to position the lifecycle of a marsh as if it were a grey infrastructure project requires improved quantifying of its infrastructural roles, which requires a lot more research! (I hope that my dissertation can contribute to this.) We still have a lot of big questions around how a marsh even "works." How does water flow through a marsh? hard question, incredibly. How fast does it sequester carbon? Uhh, this we can actually measure with some careful assumptions and cores, but it may come with wide error bars. How many species does the marsh support? Good luck counting butterflies. 

But we also don't really grasp all the impacts of paving over a marsh to build on top. Maybe the local flood risk will skyrocket, maybe the dandelions will love it. A wonderful conversation with AWS this past weekend also pointed to how the greening of grey spaces will often come with interest in "redevelopment" or up-zoning, and various good and bad and complicated repercussions will follow. The eco-utopian in me wants to believe that efforts towards replanting and ecosystem restoration (or, more generally, degrowth with its landesque repercussions) will come plush with unanticipated benefits that may be good for environmental health, and that we can ease through this awkward instrumentalization of ecological processes to justify their care. But some systems are complex to the point where we don't know what is good or bad for them a priori. And, through some logic of ecosystem services, good or bad for humanity. 

Producing revenue,
Lukas

Hi Folks, it has been a while. I probably do need to hold myself to one post per month! 

I'm in the meat of my Master's thesis, wrapping up the methodology and beginning to dive into the analysis and interpretation. I already wrote about what my thesis is, actually: seeing how ocean wind/swell/tide energy disperses through Tomales Bay. I'm interested in these processes out of sheer curiosity, but I am motivated to push on them because they are related to the resiliency of the landscape and the potential opportunities for habitat restoration along the shore. Highway 1 goes along the East side of the embayment, and Marin County is concerned for how erodible that shoreline is. Perhaps creating marsh habitat or installing oyster reefs can attenuate that erosion? Perhaps it can attenuate future flood risk? 

This kind of work is getting called "natural infrastructure"—recognizing that many natural processes achieve goals that humankind has often addressed with "hard" infrastructure. It can be a strategic tool to define the value of ecosystems in economic terms. I've most often seen the term applied to coastal erosion/flooding and watershed filtration. (e.g. the watersheds that serve most of NYC's municipal water are well-protected, allowing the soil to scrub the water as it moves through the watershed; this allows the city to worry less about expensive, intensive water treatment plants.)

"Infrastructure" is an expansive word. At first pass, what do you imagine? roads? rail lines? water treatment plants? landfills? power lines? potable water? what if we include local ports? cold-storage trucks? cellular networks? health care? housing? Do you consider flood control channels? sewers? catchment basins? In casual conversation, I find myself using "infrastructure" as a shortcut to say something along the lines of "systems that support some ongoing civilizational function." Infrastructure prototypically supports essential human services—perhaps things that allow people to live (and/or the economy to function). In a conversation with Pierie, we considered that "infrastructure is that which supports basic human needs" may be a useful description; that infrastructure should support food, water, shelter, health (sanitation), education, communication (and more...). In this sense, food deserts, lack of affordable housing, and subpar schools can be framed as infrastructural problems. I like this framing because a lot of prototypical "infrastructure" work falls on my field—Civil Engineering—but these are problems that won't be solved by "hard" engineering works (i.e. concrete and steel). They are complex social problems, and the engineer may likely not be the most qualified person in the room to steer the projects. This interview, with Dr Monica Smith, had a huge impact on framing this for me, some years ago. 

I went to a series of talks two weeks ago, and Caroline Chen said that "infrastructure is that which creates future conditions for construction," inasmuch as it "plugs" a parcel of space into the services that can make it useful, in an architectural sense. (A place for a building.) I think this line of thinking supports what most of us think too, that infrastructure is not an "individual" thing—you don't have "your" infrastructure: infrastructure is a tool for network service, a way to participate in a broader system. We typically assume that by participating in a network, we reap some benefits of a distributed system—that it will be resilient. We assume that by mass of collective buy-in, it will respond to collective needs (and possibly emergencies). We often assume that large scales for infrastructure permit efficiency and ease for the end-user, by becoming invisible (thanks Dan) and allowing the governance to be outsourced to a small, highly-informed group. (For better or for worse.) Obviously, there are exceptions of various scales. 

I feel I am outgrowing an old, more rigid sense of what infrastructure means, and am seeking to find the value in viewing other systems as "infrastructure" too. Intellectual infrastructure, perhaps? I do not want to stretch the term unnecessarily, but its use may help bring urgent and collective-minded thinking to a broader scope of topics. 

Serving,
Lukas