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

 

I couldn't quite jam on any particular topic this week, so instead I'm going to share some quick half-baked thoughts.

1. Living in the Bay Area I feel exposed to so many mobility startups: Scoot, Lime, Bird, Jump, and more (all layered on top of Ford's GoBikes program). I think that what we're now calling "micromobility" is super important in resolving some of the first/last mile friction, but the clearest solution, to me, is just owning a fucking bicycle. (Maybe an electric bicycle.) They're already disposed towards play and right-to-repair; they're ubiquitous, they're cheap, they're efficient, and they take up very little space. I don't think that dockless/ownerless model does well for nurturing skills, care, and attention. But, classically, it's difficult to drum up excitement for something that is old and ubiquitous. (cc Clive Thompson)

2. Confronted with a given dichotomy, my general impulse is to sublate it. (Thanks, Hegel.) i.e., to the extent that a dichotomy presents a paradox when both poles are valid (due to Law of the Excluded Middle), we can resolve or at least ameliorate this by adding a dimension of conceptual space to our system. I believe this should be a fundamental part of any philosophy/mathematics education! 

3. Have there been more recent extrapolations on Oldenburg's "Third Place" theories? Updates for the 21st century, where our phones (or surveillance otherwise) complicate privacy and public spaces? I have been enjoying going to the clubs in San Francisco recently as places to be different selves, and feel like I am finally learning firsthand how important these physical spaces can be. Thinking that the distinction of anonymity in spaces (or disconnection from social or economic context) needs more attention. 

4. Interlinked with the above, perhaps, I've been thinking about how I feel too young to have internet nostalgia, but here I am regardless. Like many others in my socio-intellectual spheres, I grapple with how to use the internet mindfully, and many conversations on this revolve around reducing the amount of time and energy invested to online spaces and investing more in the physical spaces we inhabit. I support this, but also credit an incredible amount of my development as an adolescent to a huge investment of energy to talking with strangers on the internet. I got to try out many interests and meet a lot of people despite being bored and stuck in a white upper-middle class exurban single-family home in the Midwest. There is so much value in weird internet spaces, still, but I'm not sure where exploratory conversations can manifest today. For those lucky enough to be in cities or with mobility, third (fourth?) spaces can provide this place to explore identity—but for those without, the internet's social spaces are still invaluable.  

Not this, not that, but both,
Lukas

Hey, I made it halfway through the year writing my newsletter every week. I'm proud of that! 
I'm still spending half my time in Santa Cruz, half my time in Berkeley. Still in the throws of the decision on where to move, what to do when I graduate in December. Here's a good song. Now for the thing. 

~

I was hired for the summer to work on a specific project, studying erosivity of the bed of San Francisco Bay. Great precedent work by many researchers make us confident that the Bay is eroding. (The Bay naturally loses sediment to the ocean, but a lack of inflows—due to damming and construction in its watershed—mean a reduced sediment influx to the Bay, so its sediment budget isn't balancing.) This is bad for the integrity of the Bay's wetland habitats, which are meaningful for flood protection, bird populations, and water quality. The specific goal of my project is to nail down some parameters to inform bay-scale models using Delft 3D. 

Coastal erosion, like many things, is tricky to model because it is made out of processes that act across various spatial and temporal scales. The coast erodes a little bit every time a wave hits it and every time the tides move in-and-out. River flows erode their banks, and can affect coasts around estuaries. Especially in a mediterranean climates like California's, strong differences between summer and winter, where the latter brings storms, which bring rain and strong winds, lead to annual-scale erosion dynamics. Cliffy coastlines are also inclined to failure (in the sense of landslides, slumping, and cleaving). Wave, wind, tidal, and flow-driven erosion are slow-moving and relatively easy to forecast; cliff failure is sudden and hard-to-predict. 

This complicates metrics that might be used in management scenarios. For example, if you are building somewhere along the California coast, you want to make an appropriate setback to ensure that your building is still safe after so many years of coastal erosion and sea level rise. How quickly is the coast moving inland? We can probably find a value (for a specific location) using satellite imagery or long-form data sets. But these numbers average over both the continuous erosion processes and the sudden cliff failure; e.g. one might get combined value of 3cm per year via continuous erosion of 1cm per year and then one sudden event which dropped 1m of coast in a 50-year observation window. So is 3cm, in this imaginary scenario, accurate? Or should we separate the different processes? It quickly complicates both management strategies and numerical models. 

I had an internship back in 2012 where my biggest project was to research how to best make a single metric that would represent how vulnerable a particular geographic area was to natural disasters—any and all natural disasters. (We very much acknowledged how a single metric for this is super reductive, but there was still value in having it.) 

OECD refers to these as "Composite Indices"—where multiple types of processes and values get rolled together into a single number through of averaging, normalization, and creative combination. Heterogeneous metrics are really hard to do effectively, but the people who work in (social) risk management seem to be on the forefront, as far as I can tell. 

This territory touches on statistics of rare events, too ("extreme value theory"). Again, we run into the risk of, for example, making year-by-year management decisions based on numbers that actually represent the kind of events that happen only once or twice a century. For data sets like this, it's useful to remind oneself that "averaging" doesn't mean just one thing. Finding a descriptive "average" metric must be a conscious decision about how you expect the data to be, and what you need the number to represent. Folding together heterogeneous processes, metrics, and methods into single numbers can be useful, but turns descriptive complexity into simple values and thus carries a risk of its own. 

Slowly, then quickly,
Lukas

I spent the weekend in Los Angeles, as a place to work a little bit but mostly see friends and re-center myself in my favorite city. 

I find myself having to justify an affinity for LA nearly anywhere I go (but especially in the Bay). My parents were confused when I moved, but I think that their understandings were rooted in memories of what LA was portrayed to be through the 1992 race riots and before the Clean Air Act had really kicked into gear—slightly more apocalyptic. 

The social world I lived in before the moving West was full of Northeast Ivy League bullshit and otherwise inherited from my parents (cerebral, university-centric). This sphere did not seem to think much of Los Angeles, probably because its cultural production is not seen as high-brow enough to be accepted by Brahmin standards. Or maybe because Los Angeles makes little sense, from an urban planning perspective if your reference points are Boston, New York, DC. Or maybe because LA's legendary vapidity is assumed to create an intellectual wasteland of vice and appearance. 

I read Geoff Manaugh's post about Los Angeles just a couple days before I moved to the city (having never been before), and can't imagine a better tone-setting read. It celebrates how you can find anything in LA if you drive around the right block. In this vein, I've enjoyed collecting quips about what I call "LA Phenomenology"—how can a short paragraph speak to the deep plurality, dynamism, and strangeness of this place? 

I found most critiques of LA to be both true and not true, which is one of the reasons I became intellectually attached to the place. LA is incredible at self-narratizing, which leads to a wonderful weave of narrative and reality in the city—where the line between the two becomes irrelevant. Lots of people have opinions about what LA "is" and how LA "feels," and these could seem true or false depending on how far you drive along the freeway. I don't mean to deny that every city has plurality within it; my particular experience of Los Angeles' forced me to reconsider my terms of engagement with a city. LA forced me to slow down to the pace that the freeways permit and meet it on its own terms, closely examining my assumptions about the place versus what was actually going on, in front of my eyes: a highly navigable city full of thoughtful people, deep roots, and fascinating ecology. 

(I need to credit at least some people in furthering these thoughts. My friend Tristan has been my primary influence on theorizing Los Angeles. One of my first conversations on the subject was at a cafe in La Jolla with Sascha Pohflepp, who passed away recently. He welcomed me warmly to the bizarreness of Southern California and was the first to tell me about Reyner Banham—I am so thankful that our paths crossed.) 

A discussion I've had a few times in the Bay revolves around Northern vs. Southern California water rights. In order to supply drinking water to their populations, San Diego and Los Angeles share an artificial watershed that is 1.5 times the area of the state of California. ("Artificial Watershed" here being the combined natural watershed and area that delivers water via hydraulic infrastructure to the place.) They are sucking the Owens Valley and Colorado River dry. Northern California, just by being more rainy but also having more proximity to Sierran snowpack, has much smaller artificial watershed. Northern California views Southern California as parasitic as it pulls precious water down the Aqueduct that otherwise could have stayed where it was, upholding ecological or hydrological process rather than fulfilling urban uses. 

Of course, we can't undo Los Angeles. Southern California is fully terraformed, home to millions, and a key cultural player—cutting the water supply would be an extreme human rights abuse. Sustainability in water and otherwise will be some difficult ongoing complex of cultural shifts, technology, policy, and luck. "Sustainable Cities" are both slippery to define and difficult to achieve—is a sustainable Los Angeles one that is affordable? That has enough water? That produces zero waste? That celebrates a diverse population? All of the above and more, of course, I hope, but hard triage decisions are upon us. 

I found Los Angeles lovely not because it "works" in the sense of how Monocle magazine thinks a pleasant city should work, but because I reframed its demonstrated dysfunction (celebrity-centric culture, ignored public transit, punishingly walkable streets, landlord-as-investor model) as fertile symptoms of the difficulty of making a city address its own reality and be livable. Perhaps I love Los Angeles because I feel like if LA can make it, anywhere can. 

Getting gas at the Arco on Figueroa where the 5 and 110, and Arroyo Seco and LA River, meet,
Lukas

Lots of thoughts stewing recently, but I failed to make time to write this week. The past month of insanity is finally wrapping up, though: work has stabilized, I have a phone, car is functional, and my head is starting to screw on straight. I feel like I can start having long thoughts again.

I spent the weekend camping in a gulch near Mono Lake with a bunch of people who'd never met, trying to find a sense of community in the arid landscape. It was a great reset and a reminder that the Sierras are there if I want to make the drive. By default I tend to go to the ocean for respite, but there is a different kind of solace in sharing time with our granite giants. 

 

 

"Buy land, they're not making any more of it."

Is this quote, its attribution lost somewhere in the muck of cultural history (Mark Twain?), literally true? 

No! Humans increase the area of land available to them all the time. We erect multi-story buildings, build artificial islands, and reclaim shallow waters. The Mississippi has been called "the land-making machine" because of how it made new land in its delta by depositing sediment from upstream. I put this in the past tense because, now, upstream management and strong-armed engineering of where the Mississippi enters the Gulf are preventing the river from making land in prototypical fashion. Change is needed for it to go back to its historical ways. 

At a global scale, we are also running out of useful sediment. Both white, pillowy, instagram-ready sand and coarser gravel sand, useful for concrete, are scarce enough to warrant dark markets and large-scale international logistics. And we're consuming these sands faster than they can be created by nature's typical processes (wearing down shells of benthic organisms, erosion river rocks, etc). The sand floating in natural systems is no longer enough, due to urbanization and damming. Our wetlands just won't make it—they're going below sea level faster than they can lift themselves up. (If I had to credit any one particular essay with getting me to go to grad school, it's that one.)

This imbalance—the pace of anthropogenic forcing versus the pace of typical systems to adapting or replenishing—is the core driver of anthropogenic climate change. We're pumping CO2 into the air faster than it can be sucked back out by our oceans and trees; climate zones are moving faster than species can migrate, we're producing plastic much faster than it can decompose. From the temporal perspective of human lifespans, these are all linear processes, rather than a more sustainable circular system. 

(In a cosmological timescale, everything is linear, towards the heat death of the universe. But our little microcosm of Earth is a fun place to see if circularity is possible... or maybe it is more of a spiral, anyway.)

But that's not the point. What do we do today? I'm starting to work with a friend on a proposal sharing thoughts on adaptation for Los Angeles. I'm interested in prototypical adaptation—effective and ethical policy change, managed retreat, living coastlines, context-sensitive and livable built environments—but I'm also interested in changes of mindset that reframe adaptation. Perhaps beaches don't need to be sandy to be "pleasant" and perhaps your home flooding twice a year should be expected. Perhaps we need to outlaw ordering food to go, perhaps we need to locally decompose all of our own waste. Perhaps we need to slow down, and let the land catch up. 

Terraforming, 
Lukas

I started my summer job this past week, and my car broke down en-route to my first day. In the ensuing shuffle of towing, repair, car-swap, and pick-up, I've driven from Berkeley to Santa Cruz, up to the mountains and back to the sea, to San Francisco, back to Santa Cruz, and then all around again. It's been hours alone in a car. 

I'm the child of my father (a Detroiter) and product of the American Midwest, which is to say, I enjoy the act of driving and don't really flinch at long hours on the road. May was a really dynamic month, and I've appreciated lots of solo time on beautiful and well-maintained California roads to reflect, collect thoughts, and just look out at the world with the window rolled down.  We will see if I still find the drives refreshing by the end of the Summer, but for now, I love my car and I treat it like a little pod for thinking. 

I was reminded of a (possibly apocryphal) story of a conference organized without any events in it, particularly—the whole thing was made out of interstitial things (drink hours, meet-and-greets—but no actual presentations or workshops), and how it was a raving success. (I can't seem to find the source on this—I thought it was a Hans Ulrich Obrist quip, but no leads there.) It's going to be a scattered summer, where I live in Berkeley but work in both an office park in Santa Cruz and on a boat in San Pablo Bay. The interstitial moments—drives around the greater Bay Area—are going to be the only quiet time. 

Space is a tool for thinking with, and car dashboards are a particularly common case of a densely-wrought spatial interface for a particular task. I think most car dashboards post-2000 or so are garbage, where designs get more plastic-ey and electronically-controlled. I feel lucky that my 2002 Subie's dashboard is still dominated by physical buttons and knobs. I drive a manual and highly recommend it, if you want to be focused and put to use all four limbs while you drive. It's way more fun. More control and the demand of more of your attention brings driving closer to "flow" territory. Mostly I just want my dashboard to vanish. If you know a manual-transmission car well, you also know that you barely need a tachometer—it can all be handled through foot feel. 

I went through a phase as a kid where all I wanted to draw were dashboards—for cars, spaceships, and otherwise. Some of this later translated into LEGO builds. I loved following Car Interiors when I was on tumblr, and am pleasantly surprised today to find it still going. I think dashboards are fascinating because there are just so many design decisions packed into them—decisions about texture, density of information display, which of the car's systems need management—and it all has to be visible from one vantage point. 

(Deep LEGO cut for anyone listening: I still think Mladen Pejic's multiped mecha are the shit, and the cockpit arrangements are a major component of that...)

Thinking about multi-sensory interfaces for complex systems is one of the only things that gets me excited about AR/VR. I'm still shocked that surfing the web has the same interface as writing an essay (chair, screen, keyboard); I wish it felt more like driving a high-performance sports car. 

Throwing the clutch,
Lukas