The satisfaction is the same between this and all the world’s treasures. With my forehead to the wall of water, ten feet from where I live in the white hot core at the center of this wild flowering earth. All my senses saturate to drown the addled and anesthetized, poisoned creature behind my digital gaze. Ten minutes here to drink and feed a lifetime of my hunger to come. The ingredients for this antidote, the three spheres between us, the moon and the sun are here always perfect. All miracles are possible as I, the new serpent, slide in magnetic delight back under.
What is a Forest? I am intrigued by the most basic questions, and their accompanying, very complex answers. I took on this question and posted my result as an essay up now at www.coyoteandthunder.com, entitled "The Living Forest Body". The crux of my thought experiment is that I might extract the forest-concept from any specific and localized, place-based ecosystem to present the larger idea as a series of living, biochemical relationships, not unlike our own body's experience of existence. The essay itself is heavy-handed conservationist theory; if I were a braver poet, I could declare that you - that perfect, unique and specialized balance of sky, mud, old trees and salamanders - you yourself are the beautiful forest by which the whole world breathes, dances and realizes itself and its essential, creative potential.
Now in Bee Vision! Across the ocean of time that is the scope of evolutionary biology, the parade of adaptive revolutions, one after the other, as species within different trophic levels of the same ecosystems dance and maneuver to better use what another has to offer, the invention of the pollinator stands as one of the most poetic. With the coming of the flowering plant (125 million years ago) the first insect pollinators followed immediately; surely this stands out as one of the most mysterious and synchronous moments in all the long history of terrestrial life. So integral has the flower/pollinator (and bees are the primary type of pollinator) relationship become that bees (Apidae,) a family of animal life, are a keystone element for the global biosphere – with their removal, it collapses. It is important to note that most relationships between flowering plant and pollinator is unique and specialized, stressing the imperative of maintaining biodiversity. While 1,600 of North America’s 4,000 species of bee have been found in California, most have seen a population decline of between 50% and 90% over the past thirty years. While chemical pollution and invasiveness are among the drivers of this downward trend, the loss of natural forage sources and habitat fragmentation, both symptoms of over-development, are the leading causes. Organizations like @mojavedesertlandtrust, with stated goals of habitat restoration and local activism are yielding results that will radiate out for generations to come. Contact @californiacouciloflandtrusts to find out where your local land trust is, renew your membership and get involved in this, the future of the movement. #beekind
With the artist-draft turned in and we begin the arduous. tectonic, editing process, I stew with the thing I’ve made: a systems theory, a personal journey through art and analysis that is about more than what it is actually about. The infrastructure of California water, specifically surface water systems - a braided knot, an artifact of superimpositions over the state’s natural circulatory network that is as dazzling as it might be precarious. My focus is on the riparian ecosystems that harbor so much endangered, endemic life and my relationship to it, not only as a thirsty artist with so many of his own opinions, but a citizen involved in unpacking the truth. Sometimes the process appears as a fight, at other times a celebration.
Jeweled lily, ornament of the sun expressed in the secret mountain places, found where joy needs the most voice. Between the spring and the dramatic, even mournful parade of ecology’s succession, how quick the water reclaims and adorns the scarred land with its unstoppable, living vignettes. The tilling devastation, only a harbinger of the gifts renewed. #thomasfire
I got the next book turned into my publisher yesterday. At just 200 pages, it’s a horse pill of a topic in a tiny little deliverable: water in California. We’ll see how this falls apart or together in the next year before it is edited and released. Stay with me: I’m sure to overshare many pieces of this journey towards my understanding this thing, California’s relationship to the manufactured waterscape of its own invention, however artificial, however at once hopeful, all-encompassing, and desperate. Now I’m back on the central coast, the sensitive land so recently scarred by last year’s fire. The green, sprouting sheen across every mountain slope feel like pieces of me. I’m spending days and nights reading the stars, the rivers and the birds to put together the next work. Always the next work. I sit by trees dripping fruit over stately cactus in the air that with its Mediterranean kiss, explodes perfume into my mouth. Here, sprawling is the work of old and elegant oaks, not the lazy disfunction of urbanity.
My father, the astrophysicist. Every afternoon after school we would work and invent math. Mom was off building her psychotherapy practice and Dr. William Kaufmann, iii, would train his son in calculus. My given name is William John Kaufmann, IV. After this life, I’m left with only seeing a bridge between what I am and the natural world that I know. I miss you every day dad, and am ever so grateful that in my work, we get to continue our conversation in what it is to speak truth to power in the nature of the universe, empirical science and beyond.
In the salmon dream, if there is a bright, swirling center of the universe, this is it. The gravity of all the snow in those dear Sierra Nevadas coming to meet its prismatic, brackish next phase is luminous under the gate. I trust this. I trust this place. The plan from Sacramento to further twist the water from its already overtaxed rivers, thirsty for their freer, former selves is hidden in words like “fix” and “eco” and comes falsely with looming pretense. Water, always the commodity, rarely the honored vehicle of all life. If genuine restoration is the goal, the solutions of conservation and efficiency are at hand, reflected in our hearts that sing, have sung and will always sing trust in this place. @restorethedelta
It has been a hundred years that my heart was buried in the still water. Every evening at sunset I see a thousand cranes rise from the reservoir and on their wings, the valley empties. In the morning, the bear’s dream of their return with sapphire eyes uncut on salmon’s tooth. In a thousand years, the liquid granite will begin to forget the thirst stains marring the holy bowl across the outstretched song of the river, beneath the arboreal pulse of the restored place that was meant for sky, not flood.
The next several hundred years will be the age of ecology. We will learn how remediation becomes restoration and moves to stewardship for the conservation and preservation of biosphere-system-balances that make human life possible. Since the late 18th century when we entered the era of the carbon economy and began the veiling of the whole surface of the planet in a thin layer of combustion's residue, then again in 1945 when we upped the ante on the process and deposited another layer of strata in the form of radioactive particles that marked the beginning of humanity's nuclear age, we entered a new, geologically detectable age of the Holocene, the Anthropocene, or as E.O.Wilson warns, the age of loneliness. If in fact it is to be an age of loneliness, as the so-called sixth massive extinction that is proceeding at a rate corresponding directly with the exponential growth of our species, we will only witness its beginnings and not its far reaching effects as our existence is supported by a network of all life that reaches to touch all pieces of the biosphere. With collective vision, we are together drawing another path through this labyrinth, one that is at least locally alive more now than it was fifty years ago. From this context, a painting of a river otter, and relating a simple tale of their precarious resurgent population across the San Francisco Bay Delta, is far more than just a cute, aquatic predator regaining a foothold - it is a symbol of us recognizing the way to our future legacy is by examining, supporting and reinforcing the legacy of nature's past. As much habitat as we can afford to return to wild, endemic patterns is investment into our own, rich and resilient future. #biophilia
Transcript of speech in full: “What a dear and excellent honor it is to receive and share this award with my publisher HEYDAY books, a team that found me with this, my snowball under a black gate that read Abandon all Hope and they not only proclaimed that I had a chance but formed that snowball into an avalanche. All potential infernos were transformed into green, rolling country.
It was HEYDAY that saved this book, this project, from the decorative doldrums that it might have floated into were it handled by a less capable, a less visionary house.
Now the California Field Atlas is unleashed as a manual of conservation, a handbook to furthering geographic literacy as a baseline towards a much larger plan for society and its collective, ecological resiliency.
HEYDAY connected me with this electric network of citizens, hungry for this kind of nature-first narrative, for whom the study of ecology is the study of family, and where people belong to the land, the land does not belong to the people.
There are those of us who understand, and I imagine there a few of you in this room tonight who do, that the common good will quickly become the new measure of wealth, and the common good will be defined as leaving the most intact, optimized systems of biodiverse resources and habitats. Through this we reward ourselves and our complicated species survives the perilous bottleneck of its own evolutionary adolescence.
Thank you to the Commonwealth Club and thank you to HEYDAY for joining me in this dance – this dance that so often appears simultaneously to be both a fight and a celebration, as I suppose, any great dance should.”
#californiafieldatlas
Delivered by Obi Kaufmann at the 87th annual Commonwealth Book Awards in San Francisco, June 12th, 2018. The California Field Atlas won the Gold Medal for Significant Contribution to Publishing.
Eight months since the publication of the #californiafieldatlas. Eight months since I left this box of flowers at the garden gate. Eight months on tour up and down, left to right, traveling through and across the human ecology of California. More rewarding than presenting the work itself is the audience I am able to become before this electric network, a community ready for this nature-first narrative. I listen to the choir of neighbors ready to be counted in a nation that draws its strength from a healthy relationship with all systems of the natural world. In the next one hundred years, as our society turns from extraction to replenishment as the primary attitude toward this giving-land of plenty, into a post-carbon economy, we will reject more and more the rhetorical miasma set as a divisive agenda upon us from the swarm of professional politicians. The solutions to all manner of our ecological dilemmas are already on the table. Disregarding the vocal extremes, we are one and we are not afraid of the work it will take to continue this, perhaps the most important conversation we can have.
Dear Tony, more than one tear has fallen into my coffee this morning as I sit painting your portrait in blue. In my zodiac of heroes, you share short company with likes of Wallace Stegner, Georgia O'Keeffe and Led Zeppelin as artists who were able to penetrate my myopic heart and alter something metabolic deep within me. Your work opened me to a greater understanding of the world and your disposition and your swagger I badly emulate every damn day. You were a gentlemen's gentleman, a rare voice for contemplative activism in the din of the reactionary overculture that you infiltrated with great deftness and grace. Now we begin the tired analysis of the why and the how of your passing, the stream of drugged-this and medicated-that. I am not interested in any of it. Your work is deathless and this place is less rich now with out its continuance. Thank you for the grand portfolio and the wider vision you gave. Tonight we will mourn and we will celebrate, and I'll leave a beer for you on the kitchen table. #anthonybourdain @anthonybourdain
New essay at www.coyoteandthunder.com "Cycles in Geographic Literacy." Look at nature enough and cycles begin to dominate. Folding back in, recycling, reforming and being spat back out in some transformed configuration is the closed course of all elemental function. All energetic-source vectors follow in the shape of the globe and head far off toward some vector of their own invention and momentum to only come back around again. Ecologists describe energy as a consumable force that is unidirectional – a giving momentum from one trophic level to the next until it is spent. The spending of energy is better thought of as a release of constituent components, mineral and abiotic units that are always recycled and used again. In my work, I examine the relationship between art and science, which in my mind is the play between meaning and truth and apply that research to one object-field-system of study: California. The course of my study is mechanically, a puzzle of endless depth, width and breadth despite the topographic finiteness of the land area itself. The end of my work is societal atonement with California’s natural world; an equilibrium between human extraction and replenishment based on more-than-knowledge, but a deep understanding rooted in love to protect and restore. To give back the gift.
