Cityscapes

City lights, courtesy of NASA, visibleearth.nasa.gov

Cities are living entities, imitations of natural ecosystems and individual organisms.  Cities have motion and vertical relief like forests; they have intricate twisted lines of communication and transportation not unlike nerves and arteries in the human body.  Also, like the body, their motion peaks in the day, then tapers in the night but never quite ceases.  Cities get sick, they grow and contract, they age. 

There is a certain beauty in a city, but it is sort of a sickly beauty – a bit too gaudy here, too shiny there.  City beauty just doesn’t compare to the beauty of a forest.  A city is not layered enough, nor does it smell as good.  Cities don’t decay or evolve at the right pace, they don’t re-mineralize their dead, they largely don’t purify and then re-consume their own waste water.  They develop opportunistically, like a forest, but use more rigid shapes and motifs than a natural ecosystem, lacking the reserve of millions of years of selection for genetic diversity and efficiency.  In a city, chaos is in tension with organization, whereas in a forest chaos and organization happily co-exist.  Only hardy individuals survive well in cities, but they too can eventually burn out because the pace and energy of city life is ruthless.  However, everything thrives in a forest, from the mighty conifers which will yet live many centuries more to delicate ferns breaking from a crack in bedrock to bacteria spinning and mutating and multiplying in soil and water.  Forest extinction and death bring new life and new opportunities for adaptation.  City growth focuses on large external infrastructure first (filling in the smaller places later), and often expands at the periphery at the expense of the core.  Growth in a forest is always occurring at the smallest levels, building up infrastructure from minute processes.  When disturbance strikes a patch of forest habitat, regeneration begins there and then, it isn’t exported to another neighborhood. 

Cities could be so much better if they look lessons from forests.  They could grow out of the land, keeping the native contours of the terrain and the native species already adapted to that spot of ground.  They could better keep the rhythms and colors of soil and plants and sky.  They could replace grey with green, like the green garden roofs appearing in some places.  They could rely primarily on local resources without sucking dry the life of other places.  City builders could learn that progression is more about continuous adaptation to change within the constraints of finite resources than accelerated growth that eventually collapses.

Little creatures

Over the winter break, the family took two day hikes in the Suislaw National Forest that runs along the coast range of central Oregon. Virtually all of the coast range is heavily forested (absent intensive logging, of course). It is wet and very green. Common trees include Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, hemlock, cedar and alder. Timber extraction has dramatically impacted many of these forests, degrading the aesthetic beauty of the landscape and probably affecting a number of ecosystem processes as well. Brown clear cuts dot hillsides right up to the scenic views of the Pacific; other recovering patches of forest here and there are manifest as carpets of homogenous dense evergreens.

Three small patches of wilderness have been staked out in the Suislaw, preserving small bits of land from this cycle of clear cutting and regrowth. Narrow ribbons of forest along streams and estuaries are protected too from logging, but visually, these bands of intact forest seem way too narrow.  Functionally, can they maintain cool temperatures and the right wood and sediment environment necessary for salmon?  Do the thin corridors provide enough habitat for large animals? 

I love hiking in dramatic landscapes (and there are certainly some left in Oregon's coastal range), but the less magnificent forests have treasures too. The key is to zoom in. Colorful fungi clinging to downed wood, carpets of mosses, and lichens of a range of interesting morphologies are common throughout the coastal forests. No matter the plainness of the forest cover, the little creatures can mesmerize. The beauty here in the coastal forest understory is manifest in shades of green and brown because the bright colors of flowering plants are generally uncommon. Close inspection reveals an array of forms in the carpets of lichens, mosses and ferns, but figuring out who is who is an intimidating task.

My best friend when it comes time to look at the little creatures is my macro lens.  I like trying to kneel or lay on the cold, sometimes wet ground, a few inches from the little creatures and try to steady my hand to capture something up close and amazing.  Moss sporophytes, powdered brown sori on the underside of fern fronds, insects, gills on the underbelly of mushroom caps, tiny flowers, water drops that appear like little crystals. A few shots of recent encounters with little stuff...