I had a conversation a couple months ago with a new person, and their first question for me was "what's your niche?" I almost flinched. Academia is certainly a game of niches, and most professional environments want to slot people into specific roles, too. I love having many interests and the cross-pollinating potential that follows and there's plenty of media out there that celebrates being a generalist, but from where I sit, it is still an uphill battle to wear the badge in everyday life. 

The rub is the weight in entertaining so many futures and keeping up so many threads. One approach to lighten the load is to reduce an interest into a passing fancy: this is the path of the dilettante, practically a dirty word (I once used it for myself in a professional context, yikes). I'm keen on finding other ways to dissolve the weight, to be able to sit at the intersection of many things and have the tension be a source of energy rather than strain. I appreciated some of the language in Ava's recapping of a recent book on the subject, which draws a line from my "extremely logged-on" youth—in which the internet gives a sense of "infinite browsing" and infinite potentials—to an inclination towards a lack of commitment to a certain body of knowledge. (tl;dr: it's all out of fear.)

Increasingly, I've been trying to log off: I know that my happiest days are those in which I forget to go online because work is urgent or interesting and my friends want to go surfing or drink some wine. Less noise cultivates focus. But I grew up online and have too many connections with lovely people through the internet for me to fully remove my online presence: instead, I need to find a strategy that helps me maintain sanity. Instagram and its ilk are FOMO machines, and they exacerbate the struggle I have to maintain a strong sense of self. I think that if you know what you are prioritizing in life, it makes it easier to absorb or deflect or respond or ignore the online deluge. But answers to questions such as "what do I like?" or "what am I here to do?" have generally been slippery to me: I have days where I feel like a half-baked character, ready to absorb whatever next ingredient I consume. 

With this in mind, when I read an essay on Main Character Energy, which starts by rephrasing a TikTok: "You have to start romanticizing your life", my ears perked up. The piece identifies the directive as a way to capitalize on the central-tendency form of celebrity on social media, to battle the unsatisfying returns of being "shapeless online." There is so much value in non-performative celebration of self by construction of some kind of narratives (perhaps episodic rather than grand, thanks again, Ava). I *think* this is pretty basic self-care kind of stuff, but it feels more important than ever to have a few tools against the atomized incentives of the media landscape. Narratives of self also cannot come at the expense of group solidarity: this kind of balancing act was called out as "squads" by the folks at Other Internet: narrative-building and identity with others at a human, rather than corporate, scale.

(From the peak of my Styleforum days, I remember a guy who would post short sci-fi stories with himself as the main protagonist. Each short story was coupled with an outfit. I found it ridiculous at the time—despite the cool outfits—but now I see it as a useful tool, an opportunity for those who disapproved show themselves the door and for the author to help himself inform and support his choices. A very distilled example of "main character energy".)

The PhD experience is tough: it is incredibly atomizing, provides little information on pathways for the future (unless you're totally committed to academic work), and, in my experience at least, demands pushing at the edge of your skills. I have to learn new skills every day to do my job—which is awesome but also exhausting. There's failure every day, and this also wears at the sense of self. 

Thinking about "main character energy" returned me to my childhood, filled to the brim with video games. Some of my favorite video games were Tales of Symphonia and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, both of which include organizing teams of characters to complete grand quests. My favorite characters in both were those who could both fight using the physical weapons as well as use magic. (In Tales of Symphonia, all but two characters only could do one or the other, essentially; in FFTA, you had to really carefully develop characters to do both). One of the most interesting characters in the Final Fantasy universe, to me, is the Blue Mage, a class who learns skills not so much by practicing them (as most classes do), but by being hit with them from enemies' attacks. Blue Mages end up with a wide repertory of unique skills, but only because they suffered through being on the receiving end. I don't see myself as a victim of any attacks—but a narrative built on learning through failure and celebration of a wide array of skills does sit right with me. 

With age and practice, my "niche" is clearer than ever, and I'm getting better by the day at putting up boundaries to help me actually prioritize what I want to, but the "Blue Mage" mentality also really helps me think that there's still a lot of space and value to my wide-open approach to the world. 

Getting hit,
Lukas


p.s. This post morphed a lot; I originally wrote it about my "depressed boys chat," which wasn't actually a single chat group but rather the handful of 4-8 independent long-form texting conversations I had over the past winter with some men in my life of a similar age. The common thread is that all of us were depressed, lowercase d at least. Common threads are loneliness, aimlessness, lack of agency. I've written here about how I'm responding to some of that (and I'm lucky to feel anything but lonely: frankly, overwhelmed by the social demands of my vaccinated social circles). But I am looking to learn more about  how people characterize the various flavors of loneliness (i.e. in youth vs old age or a "lonely around people" vs truly-remote loneliness) and its intersection with masculinity. Let me know if you have any recommendations. 

 

In the span of one day, I was able to see two land art pieces: Michael Heizer's Double Negative and Ugo Rondinone's  Seven Magic Mountains. They straddle Las Vegas and, in-between them, I enjoyed some chicken tenders in a Vons parking lot, feet dangling out of my car's hatch back as I witnessed a rare desert rain. That's where I started thinking about the comparison of the two. 

Double Negative was a pilgrimage destination for me, and Seven Magic Mountains just happened to be on the way, and this seems to fit with what they are respectively attempting to do. 

Double Negative has no directional signs (I was following Google Maps / the MoCA directions), no interpretive plaque, and exists tucked behind a mesa, pretty easy to miss. It's about as remote as you can get in the United States outside Alaska. In the 50+ years since Heizer carved the canyons, they have done exactly what they were meant to do: erode into the landscape and behave much like any other canyon would. That is some of the point of the piece: it becomes a particular destination that demands you ask how the landscape will respond over time, even though you could do the same at any arbitrary cliff edge. It's difficult to take a picture with the piece, to get good perspective on its volumes. Maybe it is just hard to capture and photograph a hole (but this does a good job). I was there entirely alone, aside from a cow grazing on the mesa when I woke up. 

Seven Magic Mountains, on the other hand, has signs that tell you where to get off Interstate 15, where to turn, where to park, as well as plaques that indicate the artist and his intent. The piece is squeezed between two enormous metropolitan tourist destinations. It stands tall in the valley floor with its fluorescent colors: you can see it from the freeway. It's virtually built to be instagrammed, as energetic colored forms that stand totemic, in dialogue with more traditional sculpture forms. I was surrounded by folks taking selfies and doing photoshoots, with the obelisks serving as backdrop. I wonder if the paint gets touched-up as it chips. 

I am exhilarated by Heizer's challenge of how to interact with his piece. I spent my time at Double Negative trying to sleep and then make coffee despite the howling winds; essentially, figuring out how to co-exist with the environmental conditions, and I can intellectualize this into some kind of joy. At Seven Magic Mountains I took a selfie, walked around for a few minutes, and got back on the freeway. I wonder how it would have been different if I had stayed a while, sitting with the piece longer. 

I hold enough romanticism for the 60s/70s land art movement that I feel favoritism to Double Negative, and that Rondinone's piece and its cultural context are garish in comparison to Heizer's understated expression. But I also think it is insane to say that anything is showy relative to the audacity of scale that Heizer has brought to his work, and I perhaps didn't approach Seven Magic Mountains with a very open mind. Telling coworkers that I was visiting Double Negative exposed the weight of explaining just what the fuck it is and why I would care: Heizer's piece mostly exists an intellectual experiment for those in the know. In contrast, Rondinone's is broadly enjoyable: when I show pictures of the piece, it is immediately clear "what it is" and how to interact with it; it's candy colorations need no overthinking to be fun. 

Quoting Jordan Carver's essay on Land Art vs. Google Maps: 

The status of the image as integral to land art, earthworks, and other works of art not easily accessible for average viewers was not unrecognized before [Rosalind Krauss wrote her essay, Sculpture in the Expanded Field]. In 1971, when Gregoire Müller asked Smithson about the importance of photography for works made in the land, he responded, “I think we are actually talking about multiple ways of locating a thing, and one way to locate a thing is to circumscribe it with a photograph. If you are flying over a piece, you can see its whole configuration in a sense contracted down to a photographic scale.” 

Seven Magic Mountain's discoverability and legibility work to unite the piece and its photograph, which simplifies some of its relationship with its audience. It told me of its existence while I was going 80mph on my way to a bachelor party in 2017. For Double Negative, I needed to know of its existence to interpret it as art. Photographs of the work are the only thing that actually got me to make the dead-end journey to visit the site of Double Negative; the photograph preceded my reading it as an art object. Seven Magic Mountains was along for the ride, no explanation needed. 

Globalization, the internet, and subsidized air fares have shrunk, dramatically, the distance between being aware of something and being able to touch it and see it in-the-flesh. Heizer's piece is dependent on the existence of this distance to preserve its mythos. (This hilarious story, which is where I learned about Double Negative for the first time, plays with exactly the distance and information dynamic: what if there was a second Double Negative—a double double negative—that visitors would see first as they drive down the dirt road in search of the "real" Double Negative?) Heizer's piece still hides its intent, pushing its discourse into furtive art-world corners. In contrast, Seven Magic Mountains has embraced the dissolution of that distance and opens itself up to anyone who happens to be driving between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

Sunburnt,
Lukas

p.s. some photos of each site doing what they do best: 

 

In a group chat recently we had a conversation about loving and hating museums, and there was some agreement that going to a museum is less about the art and more about the spatial experience of "being in a museum." 

This really resonated with me. I do, flatly, like art: I was only a class or two away from an art history concentration in college, I love reading about art, and I go out of my way to see it, too. Despite this, I've often had a hard time articulating exactly my tastes and preferences for fine art, and how or why it meshes with my tastes in dance-ey spatial-ey performance art. This conversation helped me acknowledge that yea, I almost prefer museums to the art, and the art I do like explores the feeling of the body in space, the relations between body, space, form, architecture. This is part of why I like community work spaces so much: full of people, tools, and physical constructions getting reconfigured over time. 

In summer 2015 I spent some days in Paris and I was able to visit Brâncuși's studio which speaks directly to this: his "mobile groups" are performed sculptures, impermanent arrangements of different shapes in space that slowly or sporadically get moved around and reworked. I lapped it up. The fraught finality and commodified positioning of an art "object" can be so frustrating; like the relational postmodernist I am (you have full permission to shoot me for saying that) I am excited by the un-collectability and more nuanced value assessments of ongoing, performed work. To me, this approach embodies more of a maintenance mindset: Brâncuși keeping the sculptural arrangements moving could be viewed as an act of care, providing moments to touch and attend to the constituent parts. It becomes  an act of gardening—not an object but a process.

When I moved to the west coast, I became more interested in land art, and landforms in general. I backed my way into being an environmentalist out of a love for sculpture, recognizing that the forces that carve and shape landforms are just as fascinating; you just swap the artist's intention for the emergent dynamics of the world. Large-scale land projects require maintenance as well: this is what led me to go into civil engineering. But, we too often budget and plan for one-off projects instead of investing in a system of maintenance and care; this pattern writ large has done the human race no good. 

I went to a museum a couple weeks ago, my first time in a space like that since the beginning of COVID. I still love that shit, but mostly I'm thankful that these days I can go outside and move plants around. 

Rearranging,
Lukas

Let this message serve as a commitment to begin writing regularly again—I'll aim for biweekly. 

I don't have a great track record in terms of commitment to completion: I tend to have far too many unfinished projects sitting around, and WFH has only exacerbated my difficulties in focusing, with no particular spatial demarcator of the work day. I'm being a bit dramatic here—I'm still getting some things done—but many days feel like they widen the rift between what I'd like to be doing and how I'm actually spending my time. This has been intertwined with a mire of depression that ate up all of fourth quarter 2020, and it took longer than ever to resuscitate the methods I know to get out of that mode. Routine, physical activity, sunshine, eating well, connection with others, exercises in agency, and, ultimately, a belief in myself. (It seems so simple to write it out, but I'm also just gliding over the fact that we're in a pandemic and there was an attempted coup and some personal complexities...) The turning point out of a depressive episode always seems to be the moment when you recognize that you want to be better, that you want things to change, and that you make a plan towards it. 

I used to think of that desire to "be better" (i.e. not depressed) as a one-and-done thing. Naively hoping that by getting through a depressive episode, I'd be in the clear forever. I believed I could change myself in a way that would stick without continuous maintenance. At a broad level, I do believe in the human ability to change but that it becomes more difficult with time (something something neuroplasticity). And, well, depression is a beast. I realized recently that my first serious depressive episode was around when I was 18. (I think—I also had low feelings as a kid, but I remember that less clearly.) That means I'm a decade into this process which will probably last until I die. A long-term outlook on depression is new to me, and I'm trying to embrace it: to understand that I'll revisit it periodically like a long-lost moon. 

Ava's newsletter has been a source of resonance recently, as she brightly articulates some of the trials of being in this late-20s zone, where there can be tension between a youthful desire to change and a more mature sense of knowing oneself. But this is not really a binary of flowing water versus frozen ice; I think it is about configuring a practice of self that includes knowing what can change and how to make the change happen. Action for change can begin in an instant, as long as it is revisited and maintained. You've got to launch, and then do the work to stay in orbit. 

I passed one of the big exams in my department's PhD process recently. It's an annoying but useful mechanism, to articulate a research direction with longevity; ultimately, it served as a great exercise in actualization, asking me to celebrate and sing myself. The exam is in the rear-view mirror but much like my moods, its implications are not limited to a single occasion: the work from here is about setting up a system to maintain a sense of movement and progress to hone ideas and findings. A commitment to the subject as well as myself; another instance of revisiting and maintaining and orbital dance. 

This newsletter feels far more narcissistic than I'd like—sorry for that. I've been spending so much time with myself through the pandemic that I feel pretty sick of my own bullshit, sick of this depressive loop around my own bullshit. My bullshit is an orbit of itself, but one that requires building centrifugal force to escape, in search of other commitments to myself and my research and my communities.

Here's to the nurturing of the orbital dynamics of our inner lives. 

At escape velocity, 
Lukas

p.s. A bit of a narcissistic dive no doubt, but I am motivated to revisit Seeing is Forgetting The Name of the Thing One Sees. Irwin's fundamental love for his own curiosity is inspiring, and a practical form of self-love that deserves more celebration. 

p.p.s. What I wrote here is a very individual-scale view of depression, and I'm aware of some of the larger societal/biological forces that drive the phenomenon—they are just outside the scope of what I wanted to write. 

 

I've been surfing a lot recently. This fall season has been stellar for surf in the Bay Area, and one of my 2020 resolutions was to get pitted for the first time. I made it, today at the storm drain at Vicente in San Francisco! Thankful for the small personal victory. 

I've been switching boards a lot recently, too. I have a 7'6" Bonzer, and 6' quad fin, a 9' performance longboard, and now, thanks to Callil, a 9'4" log. I've taken each out in the past month or so. I've been casually looking at other surf vehicles too, noticing a few folks out on surf kayaks in the lineup—a relative novelty—and investigating mat surfing. There's friction between folks who choose different vehicles: the surfers hate the boogie boarders, and the surfers have the stand-up paddleboarders, too, goes the stereotype. The foil boarders are the worst—they can catch the waves so early! And I'm sure everyone hates the surfers too. (The real purists are the bodysurfers—shoutout.) Really, it's mostly just annoyance at people choosing to do something different, some small meaningless beef between people all fighting for the same wave. Even between short and long surfboards there's a world of difference in approach. 

But mostly I've been riding my 7'6" board. I'm 6'2" and despite having a 6' board, the 7'6" which feels like the closest to the proportions of my body. For various reasons, I've named the board "Buddy"—it feels like a second version of myself when I'm out in the ocean with it. (It's also the board that I push the hardest, as it is built best-equipped for intense conditions: a true partner in hard times.) I made some repairs to the board recently, and I thought of performing surgery on a human body. 

These thoughts and the recent flurry about this obelisk in Utah reminded me of John McCracken. While I was a docent for the RISD Museum in college, one of my tours included one of McCracken's canonical "plank" pieces—a Grey Plank that lived in the modern wing of the museum. The Plank was a hard object to make engaging for a casual audience: it can seem so simple and stupid. Part of my spiel on the Plank was to note that it is about the proportions of an "average" human, in width and height. And, by resting on the floor, it interacts with other human bodies in its presence rather than existing as a monument, up on a pedestal, outside "human space." He's playing with historical associations with sculpture and bodies, I thought. What I found most engaging about the Plank is how a seemingly inhuman object—rectilinear, polished to perfection, mechanical grey—can feel human in its proportions, casual position in space, and reflection—acting as a mirror to the viewer. 

Surfboards are not quite reflective, but they are much the same in their construction. The museum's description even mentions that the construction of McCracken's Plank is similar to that of a surfboard: layers of resin, polished smooth. The association between surfing and the Light and Space artists isn't new; Robert Irwin drew associations between his work and the particular perfect shine of polished cars and surfboards in the Southern California light.

In all this, I wonder if a gravitation towards surfboards is because, out of the various surf vehicles, they seem to be the option closest to the size of the human body. And we're built to be attracted to body-esque forms. Or, if not that, perhaps I just like seeing the waning sunset reflecting off the wet board surface; the intoxication of that cool, smooth resin. 

Parked at Great Highway & Wawona,
Lukas

I've been following Drew Austin's newsletter for a bit now, and he has written pointedly and regularly (unlike me!) on the mutations in urbanism and population dynamics we are starting to see in 2020. 

So many of his posts are great points from which to start conversation, but his notes on how people navigate "where to live" as escapism or genuine need to relocate or some other complex of motivation particularly resonated. As people move, the condition of participating in multiple concurrent realities hit me as poignant, because an increasing portion of my presentation of self is happening through multiple concurrent videoconference and chat windows, and I know I'm not alone in that. Splitting our selves into various worlds—digital, physical, or ones that are both or in-between—adds new layers of consideration to the necessity of place. (I also loved the delicious paragraph on Los Angeles' unique urban condition, of course.)

Mohsin Hamid's _Exit West_ is Berkeley's "On The Same Page" program book this Fall, meaning that 8000 Cal-bound undergrads (plus me) all read the book this Summer. (I can share the audiobook if you want it, email me.) I wonder exactly when the administration made the pick, but it's well-timed for the rapidly fading-from-view Summer 2020, as a reflection on migration (blurred between forced and discretionary) and the idea of escape through black rectangles. Technology plays a meaningful but ultimately small role in the book, giving us little to work with in how Hamid thinks about how to build and maintain relationships _through_ the black rectangles, rather than through the meatspace on either side. 

I found the book refreshing in its plain language and straightforward relationships between how the characters felt and how they acted. (I admit to not reading enough novels!) As the protagonists move through various worlds, they navigate interpersonal change, material chaos, and desperation with a clear-headed approach that comes only with self-reflecting honesty and thought, work that goes unmentioned in the book. Anyone navigating the beasts of 2020: economic and health devastation, deceit (political and public), rapid changes in information, or just lack of ability to read their colleagues' body language via Zoom, can probably attest to needing clarity of a similar sort, whenever possible. 

Helen recommended this podcast, which helps get me closer to my point: as we all navigate the COVID fugue (layered with other more regional disasters, e.g. the fires in the American West), our personal and communal trauma follows us. We can't escape ourselves, but we often use places as placeholders for life phases, and we can return to a phase of comfort, or throw ourselves into something new, or some more nuanced in-between (nothing is mutually exclusive), in our search for clarity. Most everyone I know who has moved since March has done so to be close to loved ones and communities, or to be in a place that feels like home. A few brave souls made solo moves into the unknown. We're seeking clarity and direction and groundedness, and surefire ways of doing so are by connecting with communities and places we trust. 

"Places we trust" as actual geographic locations have only increased in their ability to cut through the (often disorienting, but not altogether negative) plurality of simultaneous digital spaces. Cities remain the sites of cultural action, virtually by definition, and the clarity of mass-scale direct action (direct democracy?)—which manifests in the largest scales in cities—seems to be resonating with many.  Physical reality can cut through the political information war raging on our black mirrors, if not our back yards. 

Inherent in the ability to up-and-move to greener pastures (or even to be a tourist), is an extractivism that is complicated to work against. (I touched on this earlier in the newsletter.) I personally have a little forest of trees that I am lucky enough to have continued relationships with, places I can keep returning to, places to keep going home again. But, as my brother has advised me, there are depths of relationships that are only gleaned through ongoing commitments rather than a passing saccade. I wonder what kind of depths and balances can be struck, or if being "cosmopolitan" in the 21st century is reserved only for the shameless and out-of-touch. 

I'm about to head back to LA for a while, my favorite city in the United States, despite its farcical denial of the liberally-minded urbanism that produces the kind of city Tyler Brûlé enjoys. Something about "both the region and the state of mind" of Los Angeles seem to sit right with me; we'll see if that is still the case. Idealism abounds. I hope you are making what you're looking for. 

In three worlds, maybe four,
Lukas

It has been a while! What an insane few weeks. My semester is almost over. I committed to staying at UC Berkeley for a PhD. I hope you are healthy and staying sane. Here are some thoughts about something else. 

I generally believe that engineering has a lot to learn from architectural theory, and I'm going to fumble around to make some connections here. There is almost zero "engineering theory" that I know of, and when I say theory in this context, I mean the discourse in which a field turns a critical eye on itself. The best read I've seen is Florman's The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, which is from 1996 and serves mostly to humanize the engineer in the eyes of others, rather than actually change how the profession reflects on its impacts on the world. 

I'm training to be a civil engineer, which is partly why I find a connection to architecture feasible—they're adjacent fields, concerned with the built environment. The architectural lens has proven good at "articulating wicked problems" (Thanks, Toby) and generally generating discourse around its own importance, almost to the extent that architecture theory can be its own worst enemy: 21st-century architects are expected to nurture a holistic, hyper-aware sensibility, and are then given extremely little power or leverage to act on it. They are forced instead to respond to often-banal market demands. 

Engineering suffers little of this existential crisis, but I think it deserves some of it. So here I am, writing. Environmental engineering (the program I am in, which often falls under the umbrella of civil engineering) is actually a great leverage point for such, because it serves as a doorway to bring in that which terrifies the engineer: messy and open systems. Engineering's technocratic worldview comes intertwined with its approach to define the bounds of its system and control only that system, taking little responsibility for the "out-of-scope" externalities. Good environmental engineering requires an awareness of ecology, which acts to introduce both revolutionary thought and non-systematic dynamics to engineering projects. This scope of the system can get cracked wide open, demanding a more nuanced awareness of the limitations of the "control volume" worldview that engineers often have. At Berkeley at least, much of the department's activism and critical thought comes out of environmental engineering, and this is my theory why. 

I recognized that I enjoyed architectural theory when I picked up an edition of Log Journal in the summer of 2015. The edition—33—was about object-oriented ontology, and I ate it up, amazed at the breadth of what could fit under the term "architecture." 

Ian recently lent me Log 47, subtitled "Overcoming Carbon Form," which couldn't get me more excited, now that my day-to-day work is about civil engineering and the after-effects of our carbon-based lifestyles. Elisa Iturbe's introduction, which seeks to define "carbon form," reflects on an argument you have likely heard before: that the fossil-fueled age has lead to specific conditions in the built environment that expect fossil fuel-driven "normalcy" to persist. The built environment of carbon form is made of asphalt and plastic, demands the car, and generally indexes carbon-based fuels. Iturbe investigates the vast spatial ramifications of carbon form, married to the expectation that cheap oil is a platform on which to build the future of humanity. Civilization has diverged from this narrative, but we continue to have so much momentum... some estimates see that, even amongst huge halts in activity from the global North during COVID-19, carbon emissions plow onwards with only small (<10%) drops.

I was reminded of an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson where he reminds us that "California is a terraformed space," what I think of as a near-total manifestation of "carbon form". I, of course, mostly think about how we have made similar assumptions about water supply. Water infrastructure is perhaps California's grandest act of terraforming, and it is built on unreasonable guesses as to the volume and stability of precipitation in the American West. What are the spatial repercussions of these infrastructure systems? 

Amidst these questions, I finally sat down to read Koolhaas' Junkspace. Maybe he was prescient, or maybe I've only started paying attention recently, but the writing seems as (dizzyingly) relevant as ever, as he reflects on the "latent fascism safely smothered into signage" and confusion of "intention with realization" in our media landscape, no less our public architecture. Drew Austin noticed this too, and draws attention to junkspace's drive to make consumption the primary mechanism by which we can experience "public" space (COVID-19 notwithstanding!). 

I noticed, as I read Koolhaas' "essay," that I craved addressing something else, something closer to the spaces the civil engineer spends time: the landfill, the freeway underpass, the water treatment plant. Junkspace, the essay, revolves mostly around the supersystems of postmodernity as they pertain to the public face of the built environment—Koolhaas calls it Public Space (tm)—despite the text starting with "junkspace is the residue mankind leaves behind". Residue connotes refuse, and the global North rarely needs to look at its refuse twice; I do not think residual spaces are the typical forms of public space to the practicing architect. Residue gets swept away, to the convenience of the client. The "Residue Spaces" generated by the mechanisms of junkspace and carbon form are more interesting to me, as they are often not designed with human experience or consumption in mind. The trash heap, the forgotten corner of a site, the things we outsource to expert systems, hidden to the typical person. (People care about the things they know, no?) Spaces outside of the control volume. "It always leaks somewhere in junkspace"—where do the dregs collect? I am speaking of the parcels of land that don't become humanized because of infrastructure service easements or because they are sites for our waste and logistics. These "leaky" spaces are necessary, in the same way the junk drawer is a necessary by-product of organizing the kitchen: you need a place to capture the rest, to relieve pressure build-up of the system of control. 

(There are two other terms that I feel the need to address: Easterling's "infrastructure space" and Augé's "non-place". I think Easterling and I are interested in a similar topic—the residual spatial products of large-scale systems—but she writes at a level of abstraction and globalization that I cannot quite attend to, yet. Augé's non-place is about transience, but at its core is still about human-scale designed spaces, rather than the incidental and un-occupied.)

Locally, this has manifested in my love for Los Angeles' ubiquitous flood control channels, and for the Bay Areas's junk coastlines. The East Bay is riddled with residue spaces on the bayfront: the enormity of the Port of Oakland and its access parameters for container ships and trucks leaves many parcels of land relatively untended. Two of the most accessible bits of coastline are former landfills. In stark contrast to California's expensive and prototypically beautiful ocean coast, the Bay's muddy, less-desirable shoreline has been the site of disposal (mine tailings, nuclear waste) or industries that required distance from population centers (explosives, sewage treatment), and other infrastructural needs. 

The creation of residue spaces is mostly a mechanism for displacing the unpleasant components of our society away from the people who have the ability to complain. What Francis calls the "re-localization of harm" in this fantastic piece on the state of mining network effects. You can read America's approach for caring for its people in the proclivity for un-housed people to live in residue spaces, or in the frequent spatial overlap of contamination, poor infrastructure, and disadvantaged neighborhoods. In its compartmentalization of the problem into only the "technical" (physical or chemical), and externalizing of the ways in which the residues of engineered systems overlap with lived space, engineering can fail to support equity. 

Residue spaces can be places for environmental hope, though, in lieu of their neglect. Flora and fauna fill these spaces regardless, and they can serve as refugia for species that are getting squeezed out of their other habitats. (Recall that the matsutake is mostly thriving in formerly industrially-logged forests.)

Plenty more to say about residue spaces, and in more detail—but for another newsletter. 

Outside the volume, 
Lukas

One of the most striking features of California geography to me is the proportion of streams that are not perennial. My upbringing was entirely in humid places, where anything regarded as a "stream" basically always had water in it, at least as far as I looked. But common in any arid place are intermittent or ephemeral streams—where water flowing over the surface is not a given. 

For intermittent streams, water may come and go with the seasons. But In especially dry places, these streams become "ephemeral": the water comes rarely, and when it does, it often comes hard. A stream like this may be called a wadi, or an arroyo, or—my favorite, for its other English evocations—a wash. 

The wash is crucial to the native ecologies around it, but it poses interesting problems to geomorphologists and engineers. In much of the earth sciences sciences, there's an expectation that  landscape systems have some kind of "steady-state," a stable shape or behavior that systems tend towards, which realistically means some kind of dynamic equilibrium. Storms erode a beach, but then the waves and tides slowly build it back up; somewhere between lies a stable equilibrium. The timescales can be longer and more asymmetrical, however. Coastal landscapes respond to daily high tides; forests might respond to monthly wind storms; most landscapes are accustomed to yearly/seasonal change. As the extremity of the forcing events and the period between events gets larger, we must acknowledge that these systems have a "background" behavior that occasionally gets knocked out of sorts, rather than any kind of balance. Chaparral landscapes might have a prototype look and feel, but they are also built to burn every couple decades, after which they spend a year or two looking apocalyptic. 

It is around this decadal return period that poses problems to civilization, because it's a timescale that humans don't seem to plan very intelligently for. Yearly is easy to remember (birthdays, seasons, holidays); to remember a once-every-20-years event becomes a task of generational or institutional knowledge. Consider: a huge flood happens, and people retreat from the river for a few years. Then we think, why retreat? The land is fertile and water is close-by if we live near the river. But the flood will come again, and some octogenarian in the back of the room will be yelling that they told us so. 

There is a sort of fat tail, or "kurtosis" risk to humans lurking in any kind of landscape prone to sudden, rare, and dramatic events, like storms, fires, earthquakes, and floods; a complacency to the recurrent, but forgettably uncommon, disaster. For its relevance to water and the built environment, I find flooding the most interesting of these. My fascination lies interlinked with the time I spent living just blocks from where the Arroyo Seco meets the Los Angeles River in Northeast Los Angeles.

The Arroyo Seco and LA River are both channelized where they meet, which means that they have been paved over in concrete. In how I've learned to use the term "the wash," it's always in reference to one that's been paved over. Paving does a few things to the river: it fixes its geometry, preventing the river from moving across property lines and flood zones; it also makes the surface of the riverbed smoother, allowing the water to move faster. By accelerating the flow, the channel can carry more water and prevent nearby areas from flooding during heavy rains. 

Channelization is (generally) a great flood-prevention strategy, but it has downsides. The concrete disconnects the river flow from its bed, preventing any of the river water from sinking into the aquifer beneath it; similarly, it prevents the river from depositing (or eroding) any sediment on the bed; these combined effects dramatically affect the physical and ecological processes in the riparian area. Accelerating the flow, and preventing any exchange between the water and the landscape brings a torrent of dirty water downstream. In Los Angeles, this all ultimately flows out to the ocean at Long Beach, and is the reason why LA-area surfers know not to go for an ocean dip within a couple days of a rain. The Tijuana River, along with most streams in Southern California, is also channelized, but it empties out into a "natural" green wetland area before it reaches the ocean: the fast-moving water from the channelized portion has the potential to rapidly erode the wetland, and dump all of the contaminants that it has collected on its route to its destination. 

Despite channelization, life finds a way. And people do, too—the Los Angeles River is, perhaps, the most celebrated (in the sense of celebrity) flood control infrastructure on the planet. The whole city needs the wash to keep its role as a flood control measure, but some want to see it work as park, a social focal point, an ecosystem, too. Some like it as it is. Water flows downstream and life seems to follow it. Jenny Odell writes: 

I realized why it was so hard to define what a creek is. It’s not only that in some places it feels indistinguishable from infrastructure. It’s that a creek is just one form of water that needs to go somewhere, and water always needs to go somewhere. 

I love the wash as it is, for all its flood-prevention utility; I hate the wash, for paving over tender soils; I love the wash, for its bizarre concrete shapes; I hate the wash, for causing us to lose so much of our precious water; I love the wash, for its drama and power in the arid landscape. We need to un-pave some of our urban environments, for the long-term sustainability of our groundwater and surface ecology, but the mythos of the wash will persist. The FOVICKS site states, "there simply is no going back to a dirt bottom river without removing the town around it."

Ian and I have been noodling on the architectural ramifications of water infrastructure for a little while, and the wash is a perfect candidate for further scrutiny. Is the wash conceptualized as a natural space? As infrastructural? (akin to a freeway overpass?) What else can it be? How do we experience its length and scale and variety?  How do we aestheticize its vast concrete expanses and careful geometry, with grasses yet poking through? How is its value—or "revitalization" used as a tool for real estate valuation? How does it work, by itself and with the rest of the territory around it? Is the wash always downstream or upstream of something else? I prefer to think it can be a site of its own. 

Intermittent,
Lukas
 

 

I'm happy to say, I made it through a calendar year of sending out Gnamma every week. Some posts weren't much—some links, some scrap paragraphs—but some I felt great about. 

Gnamma has been a terrific opportunity to practice turning a half-baked thought into a (semi-?)cogent line of thought, in short time. I hope to keep practicing such. It has also been an opportunity to refine some realms of ideas. My goal was to have some redundancy present—it usually takes me twice to learn anything—and I think biggest things I circled around were about landscape and human activity on it. About the falsity of the nature-culture dichotomy, about how expectations of a steady-state "nature" are fraught, about finding ways to play at the same pace as natural processes. And I hope to keep pushing here, either in my studies or in a job or just in sending off this damn newsletter, because I believe that to be responsible squatters on planet earth we need to find ways to work with nature, so that 21st century climate change can be accounted for just via "the hard way". 

I really, really enjoyed getting responses. Thank you if you ever responded!! It's nice to know there are people reading on the other end, and a way to keep in touch with people far away. 2019 has been a bit lonely at times (often self-imposed, I admit!) but an earnest reply is a reminder that I'm no island (just a peninsula, maybe). I've long had a bit of a divide between what I talk about in-person versus online (also self-imposed), and this barrier has eroded this year. Gnamma has been a place to bring a bit more of my day-to-day to the friends I keep in touch with via the internet. The majority of my internet feed content, aside from the relative uselessness of instagram, is other newsletters, and I like to think I've been able to contribute to the fun email newsletter landscape of 2019, chugging along together. 

I started this newsletter as the result of a New Year's resolution for 2019. I don't intend to keep up a weekly pace here in 2020, but I do want to keep writing regularly; if I really start to lose steam, I may need to hold myself to monthly writing. Every week can be a tough pace in an otherwise busy period of life, but it can also be clarifying, forcing my hand to sit still for a couple hours every weekend. 

Thanks for following along. 

Periodically,
Lukas

 

Semester's over. The pressure cooker is off! I am trying to enjoy the terrific run of surf in CA right now before I go to the East Coast for a restorative two weeks of seeing friends. Maybe I can get some surf there, if there's a shop renting thick wetsuits...

Surfing is a joy. How many times do I need to say this? It's wonderful alone, it's wonderful with a group, it demands full attention and pushes the body to perform. I have put major stock in surfing as a place to play and feel a sense of progression in myself while my external validation systems have shifted, or been intentionally dismantled, in the past few years. I have realized that, if I want to surf as much as I would like to surf, I need to structurally re-organize my other commitments in life, and be willing to say no. Which is not my natural tendency. As such, surfing is a tool for me to practice focusing, in both short-term and long-term views. Focus is of utmost importance for me, right now, so I'm investing in keeping the hobby around.



I'm also wrapping up another PhD proposal. In some ways, I am writing it as an exercise in articulating some of the things I've written about in this newsletter, and pitching myself as the right person to develop the ideas. This seems valuable regardless of how I feel about PhDs (read: tepid); it's another act of focusing my energy into a particular direction. I'm trying to be very careful not to see the precision necessary in academic work as a limitation, but rather as an opportunity to put a series of carefully chosen words onto paper, with a more poetic sensibility. Logic, in the form espoused by the science community, is the performance of a line of thinking, and there is wide space around this straight line that allows me to bring in a wider scope of the things I care about (community learning spaces, physical fabrication, environmental anthropology, land art, etc). 

The details of a surf session are usually either blurry or inarticulable. (I have a pet theory that this is why surfing slang is so loose and silly—it's trying to describe a very strange, particular combination of conditions and feelings; it takes some dedication to articulate it well.) There's something about being in water, too: that immersive, all-body feeling that rinses the obligation of linear thought. I often think of an unassuming piece by Jenny Holzer in the permanent collection of the RISD Museum, a bronze plaque that reads "HIDE UNDERWATER OR ANYWHERE SO UNDISTURBED YOU FEEL THE JERK OF PLEASURE WHEN AN IDEA COMES". 

Submerged,
Lukas

 

The tone of last week's newsletter was a bit darker than I was aiming for. Roberto shared some valuable snippets in response, good things to keep in mind. 

I went to _another_ conference thing (it's been busy, this Fall) yesterday, the Gilbert Club. The Gilbert Club happens the Saturday after AGU's Fall Meeting, the largest earth science meeting in the world. It's a one-day shoestring operation and only vague agenda to give people a day to talk about geomorphology, which doesn't, perhaps, get as much attention as we'd like in the monster conference. 

I've found geomorphology lovely because it picks up on so many things I'm interested in. It's a field where various ideas can blend; synthesized understandings of geomorphic processes are a collection of geologic precedent, anthropogenic effects, and then a load of nuanced surface processes (that deal with hydrology, biology, and basic physics). Some of it can be approached through an analytical math lens (bringing back my love for partial differential equations), and some of it is purely observational. 

On Friday, I finished applying to a fellowship that would fund a PhD at Berkeley. The project is essentially "applied geomorphology"—I'm interested in using understandings of landscape-shaping processes to inform management and engineering work. The application was to get an understanding of sediment movement around the mouth of the Tijuana River Estuary; when the estuary gets plugged, the interior marsh water level rises and contaminants collect, driving local flood risk and killing fish.  I would help nail down what the main causes of this sediment build-up are, and how we could minimize it happening. 

This is the work that most excites me right now, if you can't already tell: the engineering, design, and science work that links human activity to processes that would be going on without us. 

A lot of what you might call this "applied geomorphology" has come out of the habitat restoration world, which has its strongest history in river restoration. This term, "restoration" came out of work done in the 80s when some of the benefits of natural systems became clear to the people who had previously paved or channelized rivers. Rivers began to get "daylighted" as we removed their bounding channels, and reconnected them to their floodplains. Rivers are amazing examples of self-organization, so in many instances, allowing the river to connect to its habitat—its sediment, local aquifers, debris, and ecosystems—is enough for it to return to functionality. 

But this language begs the question: return to what? An outdated ideal in restoration work (in America, at least) is to restore the river to what it might have looked like before European colonization. This idea brings with it The Pristine Myth and all its failures. Thankfully, increasingly, river "restoration" is about restoring process—allowing the processes that shape the system morphology and ecology to thrive. And sometimes this takes continued maintenance! 

Process-based restoration is, to me, a perfect example of applied geomorphology. Getting pervious pavers for your fucking driveway is an instance of applied geomorphology. The thing to focus on is allowing flows of energy in the landscape to connect in beneficial ways (whether upland erosion bringing sediment to  catchments or rain going into aquifers). The view of geomorphology that celebrates energy flows gets into exciting territory, a very information-theoretic view of the world. My friend DV introduced me to Bejan's Constructal Law, which I think applies to landscape processes across the board. 

There are ramifications everywhere. One of the most interesting, to me, lies in flood-control infrastructure. Arid California has done a lot of channelizing work, to deal with the rare but disastrous high-rain event. This is why the LA River is encased in concrete. I've already talked about how we can't "undo" Los Angeles, but I think that, with some geomorphologists, policy-makers, and engineers in the right room, we can build ideas about how to restore process while maintaining flood control benefits too. Some of those ideas, before they enter a gleaming room in downtown LA, might come from a pizza-fueled illegitimate conference with a bunch of nerds who like sediment. 

Reconnecting,
Lukas

When I graduated from college, most of my friends were in the arts or tech and tech-adjacent fields. My peers—upper-class, per the typical ivy league demographic—are extremely mobile. (Perhaps destructively so.) Most have moved a couple times as their careers get moving, scooting between the metro areas that tend to hold the tech, design, and art jobs. 

One of my goals in going into environmental engineering was to do work deeply grounded in the specific geographic conditions of the place of the work, to avoid becoming a yuppie bouncing between metropolises without getting deeply invested in them, uninvolved in local and community-driven work. 

But over the past decade this is exactly what I've been. I went from metro Detroit to metro Chicago to Providence (metro Boston?) to Los Angeles to the Bay Area, with stints in New York City. I suspect I'm looking for rootedness precisely because I haven't had it. I want to "Find a place [I] trust, and then try trusting it for awhile." 

My response to this has been that there are really only two career paths I think about: as an environmental engineer/scientist, or as a teacher, because they are precisely roles that cannot be done asynchronously, cannot be done remotely, and cannot be abstracted too far without losing their value. Something directly tangible. 

I went to the Storms, Flooding, & Sea Level Defense Conference this week in Oakland. The great part of the work discussed, the worst part of it, too, is that it is extremely hard to generalize. Every city is different, every port is different, every place is different—so we can learn lessons from our neighbors but not apply the same logic. There is so much work to do, first in understanding these hyper-local systems, and then acting on that understanding! 

(As an aside... many of the proposed policy actions for addressing SLR at the conference were, essentially, "waiting for the numbers" and waiting until we have high levels of confidence in our climate models, so as to not over-invest in infrastructure. I understand the political need to avoid setting aside too much money for hypothetical scenarios, but we know plenty to take action anyway. One speaker called this out, and encouraged people to make "tipping point plans," which outline actions taken at different levels of SLR as they come, per a Dutch approach, rather than waiting for far-off benchmarks. I recognize the limits and colonialism present in applying Dutch strategies, but also want to respect their cohesive approaches!)

If you have anxiety around "not doing anything" about climate change and have the ability to afford altering your career path, please do so, there are so many opportunities. Think hard about your communities' needs or things like the list of Sustainable Development Goals, and choose a problem (and place?) to work deeply on. I don't yet know yet where my next move will bring me, but I hope it's the last one for some time.

Rooting,
Lukas

I'm working on two research projects this Fall. I already wrote about one of them, now I'll say a bit about the other. 

Following-up on my summer work with the USGS, I'm looking for trends in physical properties of the sediment at the bottom of San Francisco Bay. Trends in time, space, and depth below the "sediment-water interface." The first two are straightforward; it's the latter I want to note right now. 

The conceptual model is that there is a line you can draw between sediment at the bottom of the Bay and the water that comprises the Bay. When we take a sediment core (see photo), we start at this line and then take sections from various depths in the sediment column. 


A complication in our sampling strategy is that this concept of a clean sediment-water interface is false. The sediments in the bay are all very fine, mostly mud and silt. These are easily picked up by the water, and in certain conditions, they can take a long time to fall back to the bottom. This means that, close to the sediment bed, there is a high concentration of sediment in the water, and the top layer of sediment is very "fluffy". The boundary between the water and sediment is more a gradient, from water, to sediment-rich water, to water-rich sediment, to sediment. 

When we scoop up a sample, we often drain water from the core. Ideally, perhaps, we could drain water from the bottom so that any sediment in the water would fall on to the top of the sediment—this collapses some of the gradient zone but keeps all of the sediment present. On a boat and in a hurry, however, it is much easier to drain from the top, which ends up  removing some of the fluffiest sediment in this gradient zone. This isn't a grave issue—we are aware of the limitations of our technique—but we are losing some of our most interesting information. 

This is a microcosm of an issue that has much bigger ramifications. In low-lying areas, a similar question arises: where do you choose to draw the line between water and land? This becomes a question of political territory, a question of engineering, a question of power. Here's an example from Southern Louisiana, below. The difference between solid ground and water is not so much a firm line, but a threshold that we choose to draw somewhere. 



Not one thing but a gradient,
Lukas

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