Mother Earth has something to say.

As we drag our heels toward colossal, eco-wise change, we knock off the days and hours before our sweet earth just can't do it anymore. She just can't adjust to the daily thrashing, the synthetic hounds of damnation, the push off the man-made cliff.

"Let me be beautiful before I die."

And she will be beautiful before she dies. Her final sea waves will hurl up,in perfect, muscular form. Her hardwood forests, drawn and quartered by our unrelenting speed and greed, will splinter and flatten with the scream of angels, and her ice storms will crackle and walk with frosted magnificence. This final anger will shuttle us to a place we certainly don't want to go. The current static state of sweeping environmental policy, and the march of global industrial enterprise will surely lead us there.

Folly of Man

I think I knew a great deal about "folly of man" early in life, say 5 or younger. It happens when you are terrified of a certain parent in your life. A part of you grows up fast and sharp. The rest of you lags leagues behind. But you do know fear, crystal clear, and that is transformative. Folly articulates in all ways and today I'm thinking about political folly, environnmental folly and those who love to kick around the powerless and snatch what is pure and good in life. I'm thinking about the reckless talk of socialism on the news and in the papers --socialism being defined as anything for the common good. And that is folly. Our earth is melting, the U.S. economy is in a sink hole, our hungry are painfully hungry, we pray we don't get "really sick" because we can't afford to be really sick, and college cost for our children soars to an unprecedented high. And throughout, our overseas enemies eye us with unending fascination -- savoring these days of turmoil. To the very "right-minded" we can torture foreign prisoners not charged with any crime, and do so on U.S. soil with cruelty to spare, but nationalize health care?, my God, such a "socialist crime" against our liberties. Ample servings of folly all around.

Boccaccio's Bats

From Boccaccio's The DECAMERON, " It is a wondrous tale that I have to tell: If I were not one of the many people who saw it with their own eyes, I would scarcely have dared to believe it, let alone to write it down, even if I had heard it from a completely trustworthy person. "

The bat plague is going on larger unnoticed and yet if it remains unstoppable, the consequences are truly grim. As the death toll rises, the amazing eco-work these misunderstood creatures can no longer do, will take the modern world by surprise. And yes! We take so much for granted in the here and now. We sneak many a wrongful environmental act and think it goes by with less than a response. But it has impact and it is noticed.

Who has patience for this story? Not the stuff people on the street really want to know. Too much anxiety already surrounds us - our financial world is crashing and our unknown next president looms on the horizon -- but we are tethered to an animal kingdom we think we are no longer members of. And shall be till the end of time. We cannot be so smug. We cannot want our bland, well-behaved lawns and our gardens of meek flowers so weed-free that we take the world down.

Scientists are taking a hard look at the role pesticides might be playing as the bats are felled by disease. And, interestingly, Prospect Park in Brooklyn has turned into a safe haven for fragile populations of bats. The lucky ones. Here, park management eschews pesticide use and has returned indigenous plants and trees to park environs.

If the industrious bat vanishes, the insect world will lose its cool and what follows is crop annihilation and virulent forms of disease. Let not our human arrogance to push nature aside take us to this place.

As Boccaccio wrote in Florence, 1348 - "How many noble men, how many beautiful ladies, how many light-hearted youth, who were such that Galen, Hippocrates or Asclepious would declare them the healthiest of all humans, had breakfast in the morning with their relatives, companions, or friends, and had dinner that evening in another world with their ancestors!"

Disease can move like a torrent and we have to obtain the figure-out wisdom plus the willingness to change behaviors. Tall order.

More Public Art

The above image represents the work of Canadian-based artist Thom Sokoloski. His extrordinary public art projects animate shared common spaces in fascinating ways. Titled the Encampment and placed on Roosevelt Island, New York City, this particular project was a highly involved participatory exchange between history, personal recollection, artifact and more. We need these great artists to stir our minds and hearts -- free of charge, barred to no one.

Who would know this beauty now?

A Beautiful Image of Old Route 9 in Fishkill, New York

It is good to know the beauty certain landscapes once possessed. When the 1-84 highway came thundering through back in the 1960s, this tranquil scene was gone forever -- a vista swept-clean. Construction workers on that highway detail unearthed artifacts of pedigree - each a piece of our human history - blown to the four winds - lost to personal collections, the auction block, attics or the trash.

Lost

I dreamed I found the Fishkill Supply Depot last night. First, I found its magazine, a wonderful dome-like structure of brick, carved into Round Mountain. In the dream, thousands came to marvel at it and it was suddenly significant.

I do think about this place, this compressed Revolutionary War military city, lacking honor, lacking its physical space. I keep getting drawn to this story. There is something about disenfranchised historic places. They have their own power to draw you in even with their stories immobilized.

A Visual Curiousity

Again, back to Route 9, a New York highway.


How curious. Someone had the beautiful idea to put a greenhouse on the grounds of the 1974 Dutchess Mall.
What inspired that? Now, in 2008, it sits imprisoned behind a chain link fence.

One should ask why?

The beaten down path

Above: On Interstate Route 9, a view of the old Dutchess Mall in Fishkill, New York, built over a one-of-a-kind Rev-War National Register Historic Site. Below: A "For Sale" sign-- one of the many to blanket the road.

Route 9 is a well-traveled Hudson Valley road that curls up from Westchester and cuts a wide multi-lane swath in Dutchess County. It's most bland, or I could say, its most corrosive commercial visuals can be viewed on a section of the road that starts in Fishkill, New York and ends in Poughkeepsie. Some rather brilliant Dutchess County planners, who oft say "off the record" that their innovate county planning recommendations are seldom followed, refer to this swath of road as the "bloody scar". One can see how they arrived at this scathing name.For here is where the homogeneous "big-box" stores rein, where multitudes of Dunkin Donuts, Burger King and MacDonald shops dot the once green and graceful terrain, a terrain now restrained by tons of blacktop.

One of the more dismal aspects of this Route 9 landscape is the commonplace felling of trees. As these construction products rolled out from the 1960s and continue forward, many a brilliant, centuries-old, large tree faced, "will face" its removal from the human viewscape.These trees are magnificent green works of art in their own right; living and sustaining life.An environmentalist friend of mine told me how often, nothing living within its mighty boughs is held sacred. He recounted a story of young, baby eagles being thrown to their deaths from their nest in an ancient tree, least their survival impact a construction project work schedule.

There does remain a patchwork of ragged green lots on Route 9, most of them brandishing large "FOR SALE" signs, "COMMERCIAL ZONING" in large print. For now, these undeveloped lots remain micro hold-outs for refugee wooded creatures, scrambling for some place to call home.

As much as I hate what Route 9 is, on this particular stretch, it fascinates me as well. Here is the laboratory of homogeneous USA, the place referred to by writer James Howard Kunstler, as the "geography of nowhere." His book, by the same name, sets a certain visual template for change of this particular and very American phenomenon. Much more to delve into on this topic.
Posted by MF at 10:54 AM 0 comments

This blog is centered around the physical environment of the United States, the world we look at every day -- its fragile history, its sweeping beauty -- ever threatened by expansive commercial construction plans -- and its mosaic of divergent life, from the wild to the tame. But it will also choose to recognize the innovative, and the people with the sentiment for a finer, visual future within this environment. Visual decisions for a finer world impact us deeply and ultimately give us all a more enriched space in which to explore.

Jump the banks of the Hudson River and walk inland. There unseen, lies a historic world, forgotten in so many ways. 10,000 years of American Indian culture, vanished. Revolutionary War artifacts, lying in static clusters. under the blacktop. Museums under the earth, under the Wal-Mart and the Home Depot. Good to acknowledge what is underfoot.

One of the topics I will keep returning to in this blog is the Fishkill Supply Depot. A fascinating piece of Revolutionary War history, recklessly tossed aside. Curious regional choices made in the decades since World War II have broken many of the threads that bind us to an interesting past, and certainly hinder our celebration of it. Posted by MF at 8:23 AM 0 comments
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