Didn't make time to polish something this weekend. Enjoyed seeing friends in LA instead. (Julie Mehretu show at LACMA is wonderful!)

Life update: I've decided to add another semester to my Master's program, which allows me to write a Master's thesis and generally figure out possible PhD funding routes. It is, unfortunately, a bit of a stalling move, but one that I hope will set up next opportunities. I'll be in the Bay Area for another 6 months. 

Instead of any writing, here are some short reads that I would have liked to tie together into some thoughts on the responsibility and management of infrastructure maintenance. 

While you're reading, why not listen to Four Tet's set at the Lot Radio? I'm a guiltless Four Tet nerd, and this set is great! Some breakbeat in there.

Links below. Not all views my own necessarily. 
Infrastructure Obsolescence and Design Service Life
Publicly Owned Utilities Could Help Fight the Climate Crisis
Municipal Utilities Are Better Because They're Easier to Beat
Here's Why We've Failed to Figure Out Why Infrastructure Costs So Much
Toward a Social Infrastructure
Decision Scaling

Kicking the can,
Lukas

It's my birthday! I typically haven't enjoyed celebrating my birthday, but this year I'm trying more. Trying to celebrate myself more. 

We're entering the "desperate exhaustion" part of the semester. While I do feel this way, I've also been trying to invest more consciously in my mental health and take the time I need to do things. Trying to give myself the time I need, invest in mechanisms to help me focus, and just get enough damn sleep. 

I'm seriously pursuing some PhD opportunities right now. If I view a PhD as an opportunity to invest, full-time, in developing my conceptual models, my ability to ask pointed questions, and my network of people and ideas, it excites me a lot. PhDs can be stable (but low-paying) periods of life to develop your work and yourself. 

At their worst, PhDs put people in precarious positions, working under the thumbs of their advisors or labs, caught up in the machinery of asking questions irrelevant to society while dealing with a lot of egos. I am trying to avoid this. 

The typical mechanism for PhDs is to ask deep, specific questions, to chip away at some little corner of thought. I often think about Freeman Dyson's essay about how mathematicians fall into two types: birds (who bring a broad view and seek conceptual unity) and frogs (who look deeply and seek solid grounding). It is, of course, a false dichotomy but somewhat useful for discussion. 

I definitely fall in the "birds" category; few things excite me more than finding a moment of synchrony between ideas, or connecting the application of various types of study. Unfortunately, broad and interdisciplinary work is not often how PhDs get funded—typical mechanisms have preferred the frog. In seeking funding, it's not enough that I'm interested in estuarine sedimentation processes and flood risk infrastructure and management: I need to ask a specific question, about a specific place, that can be addressed in a specific way. I feel that some of this narrowness is truly necessary to make meaningful results, and some of it is unrealistic expectations of how the work will actually play out.

Dyson was famously anti-PhD, his reasons being the power politics of it as well as the typical slow timeline—too many years on one problem, when it fits more typical attention spans to keep moving.

This is all to say: I'm thankful to be in a field where there are plentiful decent-paying jobs outside of PhDs: I really get to choose. If I can find a grad school setup with good people and opportunities to think broadly, I think I'll go for it. 

In the clouds,
Lukas

Ready for more about sediment? Great. 

The San Francisco Bay Area has a deep and bizarre relationship with mobile sediments. It's a shallow, turbid bay, where sediments slosh in-and-out with the tides and arrive by way of small creeks and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. (N.B., the Delta system drains 2/3rds of the state of California, and the sediment therein.) The Bay's coastline is muddy, and its ecosystems intertwined with the state of sediment on the floor or in the water. That it sits at the center of one of America's urban hubs makes it all the richer. 

The anthropogenic part of the sediment story can start with the Gold Rush. From 1852 to 1884 (when it was outlawed), hydraulic mining was used to blast the Sierras with water to free up gold. The scale of this was insane. So much sediment entered the river system (that drains the Western Sierras to California's central valley, then to the SF Bay and the ocean) that it took until 1999 for it all to get pushed out. Over 100 years, dear reader! Marshy shorelines are very effective at catching and trapping sediment as it comes downstream—the coastline within SF Bay accreted dramatically as this plug of sediment worked its way through the system. (I've heard, anecdotally, that the geographic zone we now call Martinez didn't exist as dry land until after hydraulic mining.) 

The population explosion with the gold rush increased demand for land, and wetland "reclamation" (I hate this word) became popular. Reclamation largely entails dumping sediment on shallow wetlands, to turn them into dry land. At the time, the consequences of this (loss in marshland ecosystem services, seismic instability) were less clear and sediment was plentiful. So, we filled in the majority of tidally-inundated lands in the Bay and put farmland and houses on it. 

We then started the major Californian public works to control the rivers of this same sediment transport system. Dams, flood control, and water routing reconfigured the system and started to prevent sediment from moving downstream, into the Bay. 

Suddenly, in the 21st century, we find ourselves with a dearth in sediment: not much coming down through the rivers because of dams and diversions, and we no longer have the big stock of hydraulic mining debris to erode. Additionally, the marshes that are so good at keeping sediment around have been extirpated. In short, SF Bay is eroding. 

We keep pushing sediment around regardless. "Beneficial Re-Use" is the buzzword for taking sediment that is dredged for some operational purpose (typically, to keep shipping channels deep enough for big boats, which happens at SF's Embarcadero, at the Port of Oakland, and up the Sacramento deep water channel) and using it elsewhere, often to make new wetlands or coastal levees. Here's an example of where Port of Oakland sediments go. It's called "re-use" because the alternative is the surprisingly-common strategy of just dumping it in deep water offshore.

This, however, comes intertwined with some nasty legacy issues, namely, we've been awful about what we've dumped into the Bay. San Francisco Bay sediments suffer from high levels of mercury (above already high natural baseline conditions), PCBs, and radioactive material. Any movement of contaminated sediment smears the contamination around may impose additional health risks to flora and fauna and triggers a heap of paperwork. 

At this point, the sediment system that the San Francisco Bay represents is a full manifestation of anthropogenic forcing overloading, then underloading the natural hydrology.  Most landscape processes work when the parts are connected, but we've disconnected wetlands from the tides, and dammed up the rivers between their source and their end. To keep the whole sediment budget balanced, there is a ton of work to do. 

Caked in mud,
Lukas

Shy on time this week. Here's an update on a research question I'm working on. 

"Estuaries are low-pass filters," said Ana Vila-Concejo at a talk I attended up at Bodega Marine Lab in June. An estuary is the region where a river empties into the ocean, characterized by brackish water and complex interactions between the saltwater- and freshwater- side dynamics. What she was talking about is how the mouth of an estuary filters signals coming from the ocean. 

If you stick a pressure sensor underwater near an estuary mouth, the timeseries will tell you a lot. You can see the water levels go up and down on long timelines (i.e. 14 days for spring-neap tidal cycles—synched to lunar phase—and 6.2 hour fluctuations for tides themselves) as well as short timelines (infragravity waves, swell, boat wakes—from a few minutes to a few seconds). 

Water's ability to carry sediment is positively related to the amount of energy in the flow; for this reason, when flowing water slows down, it tends to dump sediment. This is why surfers love river mouths: river water suddenly decelerates when it hits the ocean, and the river drops its sediment. This sediment gets shaped by waves into sandbars, which then produce surfable waves. The sandbar's shallowness makes waves break, which effectively destroys the energy in the wave. It is only the longer-period fluctuations that do not break, and thus "get past" the sandbar, snaking further up the estuary. Hence: an estuary is a low-pass filter. 

But it is exactly the longer-period fluctuations (tides, specifically) that modulate how "deep" underwater a certain sandbar is, a control on the stringency of its filtering. At high tide, with the sandbar further underwater, it removes less high-frequency signal; at low tide, with the sandbar closer to the surface of the water, only the tides may get through. 



I'm looking at a set of pressure sensor timeseries collected in Tomales Bay—a lovely, straight embayment that follows the San Andreas Fault line—to see how the mouth of the bay filters different frequency bands, across different tidal levels, at a few locations in the Bay. Exactly how the filtering happens is dependent on the unique bathymetry around each sensor. I'll be looking for patterns. 


Above is what installing a sensor looks like. On a lucky, gorgeous day! I am seriously interested in estuaries, please ask me about them.

Tidally varying,
Lukas

I attended State of the Estuary Conference this past week, which brings together a broad spectrum of people: policy-makers, hydrologists, biologists, activists, and specialists of various angles. And we're all talking about the system of water moving from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the San Francisco Bay—one of the United States' largest estuaries. 

At this conference and in reading some recent journal articles, I have been trying to pay attention to the language we use for the interface between natural processes and the engineering/regulatory mechanisms that seek to control them. The tides rise and fall regardless of what bill is being passed in Sacramento, and we don't really know if we're going to have a wet or dry year in California until we're actually having it. But, in true American fashion, we'll try to assert dominance of our landscape regardless, and I think this sensibility exposes itself in the language we use. 

One phrase that came up a lot at the conference is "ecosystem function"—basically, identifying if the typical processes are occurring within an identified system or sub-system. Ecology, academically, sits at a difficult intersection of expectations: held to scientific standards of reproducibility and quantification, but typically grounded in observation/description and grappling with unbounded, non-hierarchical systems of flora and fauna and geography. 

The discussion of ecosystem "function" often reduced the estuary to an asset, squeezing the tangled patchiness of ecology into an economic quantization of what is going on. Translating ecosystems into "ecosystem functions" and assigning dollar value to each seems to be the default technique for weighing ecological health against the industrial uses of the system (transit, fresh water, and agriculture in the case of the conference). The SF Estuary struggles to be commodified due to its own dynamism and year-to-year variability—economic and regulatory norms often take an approach devoid of context when considering how to divvy up flows, resources, and decision priorities, expecting the flows to be steady and true and ahistorical in terms of justice. Most of the American West suffers the same, per Cadillac Desert—the Colorado River Compact speaks to this.

I found the conference exhilarating. Everyone in the room seemed to understand that ecosystem "function" is really just an easy and occasionally effective proxy for ecosystem health in a broader view. I left feeling inspired by so many people who have dedicated their careers to managing this system from all angles, making it healthier, and making it work for a more populous California. 

Functioning,
Lukas

I was at a ceremony this weekend celebrating a death in the family, thinking about people and ancestry and residue. A person is not just their body and mind: a person is also carried by memories of them in others, their physical affects, and the networks that build and evolve in the wake of their life. My dad told me about how after his father died, there was dry cleaning to pick up—he called it a "residue" left in the world in the form of a dry cleaning stub. 

Using the word "residue" struck me in this context, because I've been using it somewhere completely unrelated: my life-cycle class. Early in the semester we had a reading that said that "waste is just a residue that civilization hasn't figured out what to do with yet" (Graedel & Allenby 2003). I like the phrase for its optimism and viewpoint, and it rang in my head for a while. "Waste," linguistically, can enable a willingness to set aside, to ignore, to make pretend about finite systems in what is really a grand flux of material through the world; "residue" feels like a remainder that wastes are both present and (potentially) useful. 

I was reminded of a class I took back college, on Complex Analysis. There's a "Residue Theorem" in this field (it follows from Cauchy's), and I remembered finding the proof very fun. I was amazed that the output of an integral on a closed loop on a connected chunk of complex plane—a set-up rooted in continuity of the domain and operation—could yield an effectively discrete output (effectively a sum of coefficients of a Laurent series corresponding to the orders of singularities that lie within your loop). 

I found myself in the back of a car driving around suburban Michigan thinking about residue in these three ways. No grand message here, just hoping to squeeze a poem out all that "residue" can evoke. 

Sticking around, 
Lukas

I maintain an are.na channel of "readings I think about frequently"—just a list of articles that seem to come up a lot in my thought and conversations. There's a member that just barely doesn't make it on there, but that has come up a few times recently: this Interview Magazine piece with Gedi Sibony. 

I learned about Sibony when he came and spoke at Brown, my (and his) alma mater. I don't think his work is starkly novel—it fits within the contemporary sculpture trend of things next to other things (thanks Danielle—here's an example.)—but I loved how he articulated his practice. 

The work resonates with the well-trod "i like what you've done with your trash" and the "zoomed-in image by artsy person on instagram" territory. Despite how easy it is to mock, I enjoy work like this because I think it encourages a practice of seeing art and beauty in the ephemeral arrangements of the everyday—a mission I believe in. 

Sibony's work picks up parts of sculptural narratives from previous decades: if re-use in the formal art world starts with readymades, and industrial materials in sculpture pushed further by the modernists, Sibony is just weaving these threads together in the 21st century. What I appreciated most about Sibony's practice is that he emphasizes a practice of moving around the materials in space, seeking novel arrangements, working somewhere between object and architecture. While he does have shows in prototypical white-cube fashion, I get the sense that at any point the studio setup could be interpreted as a piece—a focus on the practice, rather than the product. 

Sofie Ramos' practice is similarly about arrangement and rearrangement in space and time (also a Brown grad, go bears?). She has a form and color palette much different than Sibony's, however—seemingly more grounded in postmodernism's exuberant disorientation. Despite this, I think their bodies of work have a similarly dark tones. In sharing a practice, there's less excitement for a grand gesture of completeness, a monument to celebrate; rather, the subtler joy of a good and fleeting moment in time. Both of their practices address the detritus of industrial production, too, and thereby draw attention to its starkness and grotesqueness, for Sibony and Ramos, respectively. 

Support your local studio practice, and keep an eye out for sculpture. 

Rearranging,
Lukas

Out of interest in the sustainability of civilization on earth, I'm interested in the adaptability of infrastructure. 

"Infrastructure" is a slippery term, and I am not interested in making it any less complicated. There are some classical ideas of what "hard" infrastructure looks like: roads, railways, dams, energy grids, water systems, etc. Soft infrastructure manifests as procedures, norms, and regulations. There's something in-between, too, assemblages of physical and cultural systems that uphold cultural narratives, or orchestrate their parts to maintain resilient collections of ideas (memes!). From this lens, institutions are infrastructure, inasmuch as they become integral parts of cultural activity and archive. I like this definition, from a Real Life Mag article: 

One early 19th-century definition was “the installations that form the basis for any operation or system.” But another approach is to view infrastructure as context — that which establishes a relationship between one thing and other things. Infrastructure creates adjacency where it wouldn’t otherwise exist, frequently in the form of a physical connection. For instance, the massive Denver International Airport, opened in 1995, put an otherwise relatively remote city at the doorstep of the world, replacing a small regional airport with a major international hub. Urban street systems link houses, stores, and workplaces, defining neighborhoods and cities as coherent entities. Airports and roads, however, are only the most tangible examples of infrastructure. Organizational schema like geographic coordinates or the Dewey Decimal System are also infrastructure, as is the internet and everything it comprises, at a global scale.

My only adjustment to "infrastructure is that which provides context" is to require some level of scale: I don't think infrastructure is that which provides for only one person, it needs to be broader, something identifiable at a cultural level. 

With a high pace of civilizational change—whether by internet communication, global trade, or climate change—our infrastructure must change, too. This is why the prototypical "hard" definition of infrastructure will be stressed and forced to change in the 21st century; it's difficult, expensive, and slow to reassemble our built environments in response to year-to-year changes. Sometimes, destruction is what's necessary—while at the USGS, I learned about Elwha River Restoration, a trailblazing project in dam removal and ecosystem processes. Other times, it's about careful re-purposing. University of Western Australia is pushing research on how to decommission offshore oil platforms, and it looks like some of them can be responsibly turned into artificial reefs. (It boggles my mind that end-of-life of many systems is not explicitly planned. Absolutely idiotic. I worry that the costs of decommissioning may be offloaded to federal funds, rather than paid for by those who profited from the platforms.)

In short, the 21st century looks exciting when it comes to infrastructure adaptation. This topic is not well-structured to me, now... I'm interested to learn more about Japan's relationship with turnover in the built environment; about how to think about what infrastructure means to nomadic civilizations; about what more dynamic and fungible "hard" infrastructure could actually look like; and about how we may first see it coming out of less wealthy countries. (There are people working to keep our organizations adaptable with the pace of change, too. Super fascinating—more on that some other time.) This brings us back to familiar territory, again. I love going in loops. 

Providing context,
Lukas

Five months after this newsletter, not much as changed—I still don't have a lot of clarity on what I'll do / where I'll go when I finish my master's program in December.

I was given a full-time job offer, doing research on sediments, last week. I waffled, in classic fashion. The role, in subject material, is ideal and the people are good. But it would have been slow, and it's in a town I dislike, with not much to do except outdoorsey stuff. It would have been yet another move to a new place, necessitating finding new people. Ultimately, I said no. 

One way I'm starting to characterize possible futures is thinking about resonance—what life path will resonate most with who I am as a person? How can I help myself be myself? And, ultimately, not only to amplify me, but the possible effects of my work? 

In some ways, my turning the job down represents a professional sacrifice to prioritize my current lifestyle. It racks me with guilt to type those words, yikes! I feel I need to answer so many questions: is my current lifestyle OK? How can I change? What early-career sacrifices will help me do the best work, later on? What's the role of ambition? (Every time I think about "ambition" I think about the Kanye line—"he got that ambition, baby / look at his eyes / this week he's mopping floors / next week it's the fries." Whatever this says about me, I leave up to you, dear reader.) Do I follow the footsteps of specific people? Do I aim for broad, public work? Or deep, niche work? Or the other way around? 

None of the questions are novel—I'm just going through ye olde quarter-life crisis, and wanting to share. I have a lot of agency, a lot of institutional support, and good social support too—so really, I have the power to steer my own boat right now. 

Given that, at least I know a lot about what I want: I want to be able to surf a lot. I want to do science or engineering work close to my areas of focus. I want to talk to policymakers, or maybe be one, later on. I want to read books on the weekends, I want to go dancing on weeknights. I want to support teaching work, and programs for kids. I want to be able to see art without a long drive. I want to be able to spend time with my friends. I'd like to be able to afford a plane ticket now and then. "Oh, I wish I had a suntan / I wish I had a pizza and a bottle of wine / I wish I had a beach house / and we could make a big fire every night" (dripping idealism, dear reader). I want to have a less solipsistic approach to it all, but I also want to try to be happy. 

Triaging, 
Lukas

One reason I am glad to be alive in the 21st century is that I feel a high level of public skepticism around objectivity. I mean objectivity as in scientific objectivity—the idea that we can make statements about metaphysical truth based on logic and observations of the world. I do not mean to denounce the role of science—I'm a scientist and not at existential odds with myself; I just mean to acknowledge that, dang, it is a relief to acknowledge that metaphysical truth can't be accessed. 

Empirical science always deals with rectifying the discrepancies between models of the world and what is actually found, whether by incomplete models or sampling (map-territory relationship issues), lack of falsifiability in a model (ala Copernicanism), and the compounding effects of assumptions and bias in the schema, whether implicit or explicit. (My boss recently said "any calibration is interpretation" with regards to data processing.)

Theoretical sciences (i.e. mathematics) also fall victim to the final item above, despite people often assuming that math is some kind of system not invented by humans. Mathematics is dictated by the language and forms we use to manipulate its entities, all of which are subject to the same limits of interpretation and context of language. I'm very interested in what acknowledging such could do to change and improve the nature of mathematics. We're also Post-Gödel, so the hope for some constructed airtight system of logic is shot. Delightfully, we trudge onwards. I articulated more nuanced thoughts on the role and interpretation of mathematics in an essay a few years ago, "Math & Mysticism."

I am what you'd call an instrumentalist—I believe in the ability to distinguishing good science mostly in terms of how much the work is as consistent and replicable as possible while the narrative the science proposes is graspable, communicable, and follows reasonable logics. Truth, today, is the thing we see from the most possible angles, that which corroborates itself most clearly. 

I highly recommend "MOVING TOWARDS A FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY OF MATHEMATICS."

Wrong,
Lukas

Gnamma a little bit early this week as I will be offline this weekend. 

I finally finished Mark Reisner's seminal Cadillac Desert, which I'd been slogging through all Summer. It's a now-outdated (1986) political and physical history of water management in the American West, and sits on the shelf of most hydrologists I know (whether or not they've read it). It's thorough and, at times, lively, but dense and repetitive. Reisner's history is a biting portrait of the hubris, greed, and short-sightedness of many water projects in the West, but he also acknowledges that some of the water projects are the necessary lifeblood of large cities in California south of Humboldt. 

The final chapter of Cadillac Desert ends with an scornful quote from Raphael Kazmann's Modern Hydrology: 

[T]he reservoir construction program, objectively considered, is really a program for the continued and endless expenditure of ever-increasing sums of public money to combat the effects of geologic forces, as these forces strive to reach positions of relative equilibrium in the regime of rivers and the flow of water. It may be that future research in the field of modern hydrology will be primarily to find a method of extricating ourselves from this unequal struggle with the minimum loss to the nation.... The forces involved... are comparable to those met by a boy who builds a castle on the sandy ocean beach, next to the water, at low tide....[I]t is not pessimism, merely an objective evaluation, to predict the destruction of the castle....

What struck me most about this passage is the sense of combat between "geologic forces"  and human construction. An earlier newsletter touched on the nature of building objects with geologic lifespans. Sometimes this feels like battle of endurance—human-made structures trying to weather natural conditions for millennia. Can it be more of a dance? Where it's less about the preservation of fixed entities (a sculptural mode) and more about continuous, unfolding processes (a "performance art" mode, perhaps)? The difficulty often comes in embracing destruction when it is necessary—cultural mechanisms that embrace end-times feel few and far-between to me. In mostly-unstated ways, Reisner's book encourages the abandonment of some of the Western water systems due to the economic and ecologic havoc they drive. (More to say, some other time, on the first large-scale dam removals now happening on the West coast.) Geology (and meteorology and more) have made certain places extremely fertile for civilization but, at some point, these global-scale dynamics will move on, and we should keep moving, too. 

It's hard to find good examples of large-scale projects that encapsulate what I'm looking for; the conditions are probably unique to the affordances of any geographic location. I don't want to perpetuate the Dutch hegemony on hydraulic engineering, but the Sand Engine (out of the Building with Nature initiative) is one example in the right direction: accounting for natural oceanography and sediment flows in the area to encourage the local beach system to self-manage towards some preferable state. At some point, over a long time, components of the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt delta will shift, and the whole project will need to be adjusted, or abandoned, for the dance to continue. 

FWIW I highly recommend Manaugh's writing on the subject, or this essay by Gacnik. I haven't read Lippard's essay on stones (yet!!!) but I think working with local stone is a manifest way to practice geography on a geologic timescale. 

Following the fault,
Lukas

The final semester of my Master's program is beginning. It is going to be a really busy semester—classes, teaching, research, job hunting—and hope I still have the time to write these each week. I will try, but they may get shorter. 

I'm in two classes: Physical-Chemical Processes in Wastewater Treatment, and Life-Cycle Analysis (LCA) of Civil Systems. The first is a standard-fare class on how contemporary plants treat wastewater before it gets discharged; the second is about how to assess and compare the lifecycles of infrastructure systems. 

They are both broadly about "system dynamics," but in very different forms. The focus of the wastewater processes class is on man-made water treatment plants—highly engineered closed systems in big windowless buildings across the country. These systems are designed to be efficient, reliable, and predictable: completely controlled. We can model them as fairly straightforward chemical systems, with fairly predictable outputs, using basic stoichiometry and differential equations. These systems are complicated, but they are not complex. 

The second class, meanwhile, seeks a much broader scope. It asks: when we build a wastewater treatment plant, what are the known costs, and then, what are the externalities that we can assess? What are the unintended consequences? There is, of course, a case of the unknown unknowns: much of the "work" of effective and responsible LCA is to turn unrecognized unknowns into known, even quantifiable entities. 

I'm taking the class partially to be able to put "LCA" on my résumé (hire me, agencies dealing with coastal infrastructure!!!) but more-so because I am curious how this professor teaches the process of uncovering the 4th quadrant (one of Taleb's terms for the unknown unknowns). And, for systems that are infrastructure-scale (federal water projects, electricity distribution systems, transportation networks, etc), where do we draw the bounds around the system? 

(This is the farce of a lot of sustainability success stories—they are successful only because they draw a line in the sand exactly around the achievable scope of success; the failures have been externalized. For instance, American recycling programs are only a success the waste leaving the country means success; they're a failure if you nail down how much material actually gets turned into something new.)

"The system is always larger than itself," I like to say. An aqueduct is not only an aqueduct, but the material/industrial ecology that led to its construction, the water running through it, the people who built it, the people who maintain it, the knowledge systems that support it, the people who pay for it, the people who reap its benefit, the people who bear its wounds, the ecosystems it supports, the ecosystems it destroys, the roads it re-routs, its mark on the landscape, the legacy it leaves. And more. But somewhere you draw the line. 

One of my favorite conversation topics goes something like, "if you were running a school, what would you want every student to learn?" Unequivocally, as cheesy as it sounds, I think "systems thinking" should be on the docket for every kid. What are the tools for systems thinking? Calculus notation is typical but awful—fortunately we have more and more digital interfaces for symbolic manipulation, but it is often still limited to technical, rational systems. Broader systems, as complicated, open-ended tangles of relationships, may lend themselves to other modes of expression and understanding, but still, what's a methodology for choosing a methodology? Any finite methodology will be finite in scope. (Unless "think of everything" is a methodology.) 

Dr Tsing, in "The Mushroom At The End Of The World" talks about the bias, common in scientists, to favor clear and discrete cause-effect relationships for research, a bias against "descriptive" modes of research. But in systems where it is difficult to grasp all the ins and all the outs, or systems where the limits of the system itself are fuzzy, descriptive science is the best we can ask for. Accordingly, most of the LCA class is open-ended writing and case studies.

(How many times will I reference Tsing's TMATEOTW in this newsletter? Time will tell. I love how the book, and Odell's "How To Do Nothing," seem to have captured a lot of people I consider peers. Making publics.)

I am a collection of feedback loops,
Lukas

 

Last week I touched on how much of our thinking is spatial in nature—but even that sentence supports an ontological difference between "us" and "the world." A paragraph from Dan's website says it better: 

We are our environments. Our cognition is distributed in the environment. We are the relationships and spaces that surround us. We think through our friends and collaborators and our spaces. If we drew a closed loop around our thought in space, most of it would be outside of our bodies.

I forgot to bring this back to cars. A funny aspect of my experiences in California is that because of the relative ubiquity of car ownership, meeting people often comes conjoined with meeting their cars. Along with each person comes a bubble of space that they're responsible for: cars carry impressions of their owners in how they drive, how they look, what's piled in the back seat. 

I was in a minor car accident this week. My car—a source of freedom, a source of pride, a tool for field work, and a partner-in-crime for life in out West—is at the end of its life.  I'd love to shed car ownership (as a logistical and financial hassle), but need to carefully weigh how car rentals could get me surfing as much as I'd like for a reasonable cost. 

I recently crossed a little threshold: I have now lived in my current apartment for over a year. It is the first time in over a decade that I have stayed in the same living space for over a year. Few things bring me as much joy as setting up a space that enables behaviors and thought; then, with time, spatial rhythms can develop through feedback between the spatial constraints and the activities therein. Habits emerge, some out of intention, some on accident. I can stumble into the kitchen and get coffee going with my eyes closed; my desk is a habit field to help me do a certain kind of work. 

Sometimes these habits get shattered, in small ways or large, intentional or not. The night before a trip, I put my keys under a gift I need to remember, breaking my typical habit (keys-by-the-door) in order to remember something I know I might forget, thereby offloading the remembering to my environment. I often feel the need to return home to get good, deep thinking done. It is reassuring to be in my own space, with any tools I may need nearby. It helps me remind myself of myself.

I had a brief conversation with Nic two weeks ago about taking a walk around the block with a mug from your own kitchen, thereby extending the feeling of home space—breaking the typical domestic habitat of the mug's life. 

This past weekend, a large branch fell off a tree just outside my apartment building. A chunk of the street got cordoned off until city services were able to move it, and in the meantime it gave me a secret permission to stand, unbothered, in the middle of the street. It was my first time seeing my building from that vantage point. The sense of partial ownership or stakes that I feel for my building suddenly extended further, flowing over the curb and into the street, just by virtue of being able to stand in a new place. 

The experiences was a reminder of how trivial it was to break a cognitive wall (that of the strong boundary between "my" building and the street). Here, it was as simple as taking a few steps into a place that I typically interpreted as cordoned-off. 

Something as mundane as rearranging furniture can bring the same thrill, but this is all within a pretty standard view of how domestic spaces "should" be used. I want to throw a house party where the kitchen is the bedroom and the bathroom is on the balcony. 

Standing in the street,
Lukas

This poem cam into my lap this week (via Pieratt & Kottke) and hit me square in the chest. 



I had many thoughts to share about this poem and where it intersects with my work and Berry's ideology. About what we think of as necessary sacrifices for sustainability, on individual-scale vs cultural-scale sacrifice, on pastoralism, on leverage and affecting change. But it got preachy and self-indulgent and then I get in my head about performativity and ugh!!! Forget it.

One of my biggest goals in writing here weekly is to "make public," inasmuch as you all, reading this, are now a social body with some stake in the topics. 

I would love if you can bring these questions to a close friend to talk about them and about what answers might actually look like. See how firm an answer you can mutually agree upon to answer each of Berry's questions. See what aspects of the questions you'd like to refute, or what aspects make you squirm. 

Back to you, 
Lukas

P.S.: Two readings this week are swimming around the same headspace for me, if you want more: one, two. 

Not much to say this week. I am traveling and if I wrote about what I'm thinking about, I'll sound like a broken record: how to connect with landscape, how to spend time with my friends, how to decide where to move. 

I'm writing from the East Coast, per attending a wedding in Rhode Island. The East Coast is "reality" to me (due to how I grew up, my family being here, and other norms), which is both grounding and anxiety-producing in as much as life feels higher-stakes here. If I fuck up in California, I just move "home." If I fuck up at home, I won't be sure where to go. This is an irresponsible viewpoint, though—I don't want to fuck up anywhere. 

In response to the Summer's messiness, I've been trying to assume a higher mantle of duty, care, attention. It is a focusing mechanism. Go to the doctor! Save some money! Don't stay up too late! Give to your friends! Concentrating on the joys of caring for myself and the things I love is a path to growing into adulthood, and re-learning the West Coast as a new reality. A place that I can participate in, a place I can take responsibility for. When I fly back to my adoptive Golden State, can I bring reality with me? 

Walking myself home,
Lukas

 

I find that a lot of my conversations revolve around, in some ways, "extracurricular" stuff. Hobbies, relationships, travel. I want to get better at asking people about their work—what they spend doing for hours on weekdays—through questions that probe deeper than making small-talk.

There seems to be some friction in doing so because talking about work requires sharing the nitty-gritty of what you're working on, and there is the feeling that this doesn't matter to someone who isn't in the same field. I'm trying to remind myself that every conversation is an opportunity to learn about some unknown realm of ideas I wasn't previously aware of. There are juicy nuggets tucked into just about anything. 

So, this week, I want to tell you a little about why I find sediment transport so interesting. This is my deep-dive! 



Firstly, when I say "sediment transport," what I mean is the movement of granular material (e.g. pebbles, sand, dust particles) via a fluid (water or air, usually). Specifically, what I am studying is how sediment is moved by rivers, through estuaries, and along coastlines. Sediment ranges in size from boulders to mud particles, and these particles get pushed or carried by water moving due to wind, waves, tides, upwelling, and river flows. These flows apply a stress to the bed, at the interface between the water and the sediment, and this stress moves the sediment around. Exactly how to characterize where this interface exists is a fairly open question, especially for coarse sediment. 

This is the start of the messiness of sediment transport. Some particles are light enough to be essentially buoyant in a turbulent water flow—so once they're picked up ("entrained"), they will flow until the water goes still—then they will settle out to the bottom. Some particles are too heavy for this, and roll or "saltate" along the bottom bed. Particles bump into each other, change the properties of the water that carries them, affect how the bed is textured (i.e. making ripples), shield each other from the water that tries to pick them up, and occasionally clog their conduits. The particles are rarely homogeneous, meaning they will all move at different stresses and in different ways, and some particles flocculate together only to later get pulled apart again. 

 

I haven't been able to back-track how I came to reading this 2010 blog post by Lebbeus Woods, but I found that it wove together many of my feelings on hazards. (I'm a big Lebbeus Woods fan, he's also a Michigander!)

There are hazards that exist purely because of human design (intentional or not): murder, financial meltdowns, mechanical failures. But when we focus on natural disasters, they are always at an intersection of physical processes and human decisions. We've built homes in deserts where water won't come, roads across fault lines that will slip unanticipated, buildings in hurricane corridors where each storm is a reckoning. I don't believe in the possibility of "undoing" most of our decisions around where urbanity sits, but we can start with major cultural reframing to build more responsibly. 

Woods points out how blaming hazards like these on the physical processes allows us to remove fault from engineers, designers, policy-makers, and citizens—thereby anonymizing the human causes of the disaster and offloading cost, in the FEMA model, to the broader taxpayer base. Blaming nature perpetuates a man-nature duality, too. I believe we need to dismantle this dichotomy to find sustainable futures on earth. 

This line of inquiry—around disaster, mitigation, blame—is one of the many reasons I'm interested in New Orleans. (I'm ignoring many other cities that are equally interesting—I focus here because I romanticize New Orleans for its rich cultural context.) Every hurricane season, it seems, the city catches its reflection in the mirror and a glimpse of oblivion. Rising seas are coming regardless. Have you seen Glory At Sea! / Beasts of the Southern Wild? There is an attitude portrayed in these that flooding isn't an apocalypse, or even something you try to prevent. The water is always coming: you should just get used to living on a boat. 

I'll end quoting Woods' post again, with a statement that resonates with what I hope to work on for the next decades of my life: 

Most needed now are new ideas and approaches that go beyond the defensive reinforcement of existing conceptual and physical structures and open up genuinely new possibilities for architecture integrating earth’s continuing processes of transformation.

Getting wet feet,
Lukas

P.S. Lots of links to my own newsletter here. Feels kind of funny, but one of my goals in weekly writing was to weave together my lines of thinking. So it is partly for myself. 

 

I credit dk with getting me thinking about community kitchens through a conversation in September 2018 and an introduction to Berkeley's Three Stone Hearth. 

I'm a minimalist when it comes to cooking, and I mean that in the worst way possible: I'm a very utilitarian eater. It's only a result of friendships with people who have more nuanced and attentive relationships to food (or college dinner parties with Adriana and company) that I do anything but shovel food in my mouth. This is starting to change, but I always found the kitchen more of a bother than a creative place.

So, when I read, back in 2015 or so, the Soylent founder's post on getting rid of all AC current in his home—effectively removing the kitchen, which he felt was "the greediest consumer of power, water, and labor" in addition to producing "the most noise and garbage of any room"—I resonated with it. 

The eyeroll of his argument is that here are more important things at stake: I am not seeking an "optimized" lifestyle, I'm seeking a rich one. And the kitchen is a site of creation, of warmth, and of sharing—it remains one of the most important ubiquitous community spaces we have.

I've mentioned the importance of community spaces a few times in this newsletter, and I will continue to do so, because I believe they are a natural and necessary reaction to the splintered nature of American society (through demographic stratification, individual-centric metrics of success, and urban planning that punishes public spaces and promotes the car). They can serve as a critical piece in the search for meaningful social context. 

The communal kitchen is such a simple, elegant, and resilient form of providing and creating social infrastructure. Anywhere from a potluck in your cramped apartment to something revolutionary or state-supported. Removing the kitchen from the home on the basis of avoiding cooking seems deeply lonely; it is interesting that one might remove a personal kitchen out of a lively, daily use of a communal space instead. 

A permeable space is rare and difficult to nurture equitably, no doubt. I loved Joanne McNeil's recent newsletter on her relationship with Brazenhead books because it speaks to the joy and unfolding nature of a relationship with a place that seemed to find success in its open door. To be able to wander in and find what you might not have at home: a cross-section of people, extra physical space, a pile of new ideas and things to try. 

It's been three months (!) since I wrote about "my next big decision"—where do I go after grad school? Countless conversations with friends, family, and myself have helped me feel out my priorities a bit further. I've been taking stock of how all I really want to do, on earth, is spend time doing things with my friends. It can start as simple as calling someone over and turning on the oven. 

Out for a bite,
Lukas

I saw this tweet on are.na and it got me stewing. I basically want to pull out some of the thoughts that Christine started on. 

I am firstly concerned that, increasingly, top-down initiatives for protecting ecosystems will double as arguments supporting keeping out populations seen as the other—probably, those typically disadvantaged. I have not yet seen something explicit, but I can imagine a news piece about how the US-Mexico would help keep crowds out of our precious national parks or something similarly inane. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing touches on a case of this in The Mushroom At The End of the World, where the white, State of Jefferson-esque mushroom pickers of the Oregon coast ranges feel animosity towards the Southeast Asian immigrant pickers because they are perceived to not treat the forest as they "should", even when it seems the white pickers are more careless with their waste and not suffering the flight from persecution or military rule. 

There are some regions on earth where it is, in a broad sense, more efficient to have hubs of civilization. Places proximate to fertile land, building materials, and water; places with reasonable climates and not too many natural disasters. This is some of the argument for re-wilding large swaths of land—emptying them of humans to restore ecological function. Re-wilding is grounded in the Poppers' "Buffalo Commons" (to empty out the American plains) and EO Wilson's "Half Earth". (More info in these two channels.) Ideas about where people should be on earth, however, are intractable because of powerful and important cultural narratives (some peaceful, some violent): senses of homeland, holy land, ancestral heritage, or destiny in-place. To say that the Great Plains need to be fully evacuated would be a technocratic wiping-out of plains cultures. (Could a softer rewilding be effective and responsible? Yea—I think so. More on that some other week.)

I remember finding an online post a while back that went like this: to keep home energy use for heating and cooling low, we should just cram as many people as possible into the Bay Area because of its natural air-conditioning. (The same would go for any Mediterranean-climate locale.) The Bay Area is a sublime natural harbor, proximal to the Central Valley (good farmland if you truck in water from the Sierras), and adjacent to timber. The biggest high-risk natural hazards are fires (manageable) and earthquakes (rare). The perfect geographic location, however, does not magically neutralize urbanization's own set of obvious difficulties: densification versus NIMBYism, dissolution of pockets of cultural activity, and meeting the demand for housing. 

Just to complicate things further, the Bay, before huge population booms and the use of concrete, was an enormous wetland. Between 1850 and 2000, 2/3rds of wetlands in the Bay were drained or disconnected from the estuary via development. But we could use as much of that back as possible: wetlands are great long-term carbon sinks, very productive ecosystems, and natural barriers against sea level rise and nuisance flooding. Carefully considering how much of the space in this constrained geography should should be wetlands, port infrastructure, high-density housing, or otherwise, becomes a very tough arithmetic. 

Climate migration may be driven by a range of reasons: individual choice, fleeing poor conditions for healthier or more stable climates, push out of an otherwise functioning place because of regional environmental strife. We may start seeing more legal pressures to move into more efficient urban environments in the spirit of rewilding. Where will migrants be allowed to go? Able to go? It is hard to imagine a form of environmental conservation that does not involve drawing a boundary line—between the city and the wild, between restricted and acceptable behavior, or between one group of people and another. Making decisions around where people should ("should") live is an obvious lever to enforce control over what kind of lifestyles and what kind of people are deemed acceptable: redlining. 

Conversation further down this topic quickly gets into population and immigration control. (See the Sierra Club's history of opinion on immigration!) I'm not yet ready to dive into such, but I can see how the social landscape of self-professed environmentalists will fracture further across political categories. Environmental conservation is just another topic that can be used to leverage a variety of social agendas. 

Preparing for nobody,
Lukas