tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post5583104895425168334..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: Charles O'Rear: Land of Dust and PlentyUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger14125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-55685783724101090902014-05-19T05:33:08.652-07:002014-05-19T05:33:08.652-07:00Every image, every word in this post is an educati...Every image, every word in this post is an education. Thank you Tom. And there's a thesis to be written on how birds figure in BTP. These have a great silent power - witnesses, chorus, victims, survivors (just, maybe).Barry Taylorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02121653352771218338noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-88602228780955571302014-05-19T05:27:37.801-07:002014-05-19T05:27:37.801-07:00You might find William Vollmann's Imperial of ...You might find William Vollmann's Imperial of interest. It's massive, but worth the read. http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/58062/BDRhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06557941385560728052noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-80536567556580659142014-05-18T19:52:31.210-07:002014-05-18T19:52:31.210-07:00And as to the regularity of the boundaries -- in t...And as to the regularity of the boundaries -- in this country, simple rectilinear property lines have always seemed the best way to divide up into owned bits all that nobody can ever really own without the imposition of force.<br /><br />The Colorado rises in the Never Summer Mountains of Wyoming. Once upon a time this great river drained into the Gulf of California. No more. As it runs along, it is drained down to a trickle in a series of "diversionary projects" -- places that rob the river along its way. There has always been great competition for rights and contracts, compacts and the like. But now as the climate of the region has changed along with the increase of demand upon the river system, the question arises, not so much will the water hold out, as when will the water run out.<br /><br />Because out this way, as Marc Reisner wrote in 1986 in Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water, there's still<br /><br />"a lot of emptiness amid a civilization whose success was achieved on the pretension that natural obstacles do not exist... Thanks to irrigation, thanks to the Bureau [of Reclamation]... states such as California, Arizona, and Idaho became populous and wealthy; millions settled in regions where nature, left alone, would have countenanced thousands at best... what has it all amounted to?... not all that much. Most of the West is still untrammeled, unirrigated, depopulated in the extreme... Westerners call what they have established out here a civilization, but it would be more accurate to call it a beachhead. And if history is any guide, the odds that we can sustain it would have to be regarded as low.<br />.<br /><br />"Were it not for a century and a half of messianic effort toward [manipulation of water], the West as we know it would not exist... Confronted by the desert, the first thing Americans want to do is change it. People say that they 'love' the desert, but few of them love it enough to live there... Most people 'love' the desert by driving through it in air-conditioned cars, 'experiencing' its grandeur. That may be some kind of experience, but it is living in a fool's paradise. To really experience the desert you have to march right into its white bowl of sky and shape-contorting heat with your mind on your canteen as if it were your last gallon of gas and you were being chased by a carload of escaped murderers... One does not really conquer a place like this. One inhabits it like an occupying army and makes, at best, an uneasy truce with it.<br /><br />.<br /><br />"The whole state thrives, even survives, by moving water from where it is, and presumably isn't needed, to where it isn't, and presumably is needed. No other state has done as much to fructify its deserts, make over its flora and fauna, and rearrange the hydrology God gave it. No other place has put as many people where they probably have no business being. There is no place like it anywhere on earth. Thirty-one million people (more than the population of Canada), an economy richer than all but seven nations' in the world, one third of the table food grown in the United States---and none of it remotely conceivable within the preexisting natural order".TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-53530280319557675622014-05-18T19:52:04.120-07:002014-05-18T19:52:04.120-07:00WB,
Huw makes us feel the plight of the drowned v...WB,<br /><br />Huw makes us feel the plight of the drowned village of Capel Celyn in that curious way some songs have of being moving though you can't make out a bloody word of what they're actually saying. Some of the commenters seemed to be understanding it well enough, though I could not make out a bloody word of what they're saying -- except the one commenter who laments that when Huw visited Bala youth camp in 1970 he declined to sing this song, on grounds it needed "a gitar mawr". And of course there's that one kindly Anglophonic commenter Alan Hughes, who approves the instrumentation just as is -- "bongos gret!" But a bit of further digging helped to clarify matters. "Dŵr", I now have learned, means Water. And as Huw himself has explained the song, it "describes the feelings of a Welshman returning to the valley where he was reared only to find his people had been expelled and the valley flooded to make a reservoir to supply water to English cities". <br /><br />Fair enough I say. The English be damned!TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-53151146520269203382014-05-18T19:09:05.888-07:002014-05-18T19:09:05.888-07:00Nin,
The best indication of the water situation i...Nin,<br /><br />The best indication of the water situation is always the response of the animals. Nobody includes them in the contracts, compacts, projects and arrangements. This year the deer coming down out of the hills into the city streets have become bolder than ever. That's because it's so dry. After being run over in the street I myself have had a hard time making it up the steep unstable steps, but to the deer a mere hillside is no problem; it's take the risk or die. They are here all the time now, browsing. In fact, today, within a few hours, there was first a violent car crash right out front here on the freeway feeder, totalling three cars... and then, once the tow trucks had hauled away the wreckage, the deer were back, prancing down the same lethal stretch of speedway with ears pinned back, sniffing the exhaust fumes.<br /><br />Yesterday the temperature in El Centro in the Imperial Valley reached 107 degrees F.<br /><br />Not all that unusual.<br /><br />My first visit to the Imperial Valley came in 1951, riding through the desert in the back seat of an old De Soto. The dry heat seemed vaguely unreal. A shimmering haze rising from the parched bare ground. We pulled in at a roadside joint, mainly for the shade. The next mistake was swallowing some desert roadhouse barbeque.<br /><br />Up to that time I had thought of California much as a million other fools had done -- as a paradise.<br /><br />Now we're told to expect a "super El Niño" in this coming winter.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-37075554292484606912014-05-18T16:35:40.180-07:002014-05-18T16:35:40.180-07:00So sad, all of it. From the small to the large. ...So sad, all of it. From the small to the large. Water, the issues are everywhere, even where it rains nonstop. Our river here that I walk by is completely devoid of life this spring. Last year, there were something like ninety plus nesting herons. I have seen a few herons walking in the water, looking down at the clear and lifeless water . . . Nin Andrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12643167108589844026noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-60155722365412390842014-05-18T13:56:38.939-07:002014-05-18T13:56:38.939-07:00The regularity of the boundaries is the thing that...The regularity of the boundaries is the thing that makes me shiver.<br /><br />I remember being taken to visit the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD1F9vcXAh4&feature=kp" rel="nofollow">reservoir in Bala</a> by my father and him telling me of the ruins of villages beneath.<br /><br /><br /><br />Mose23https://www.blogger.com/profile/01100756913131511440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-62260123660874631062014-05-18T12:42:45.905-07:002014-05-18T12:42:45.905-07:00Hazen, yes, the irrelevance of the anomalous beaut...Hazen, yes, the irrelevance of the anomalous beauty -- that's what I meant by "...if we were somehow able to detach the historical meaning of what we are seeing from the immediate visual experience..." Such detachment would probably require that we be watching from another planet, one on which the fate of the Earth didn't matter in the slightest to whatever intelligence is doing the watching.<br /><br />Trouble is, we're limited to the view from and on this one -- which is getting uglier by the minute. <br /><br />"The Imperial Valley: we can be sure that it wasn’t indigenous people who fastened that name to a segment of the planet. Nomenclature reflects the problem; it's something we use to blind ourselves."<br /><br />Exactly. Imperial Valley. All-American Canal. The death of a part of the earth, calculated in detail, over a period of time, for short-term profit ... all reflected in the deceptions built into the nomenclature.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-70287703810821886382014-05-18T11:12:42.938-07:002014-05-18T11:12:42.938-07:00These images tear at the heart; they provoke a sub...These images tear at the heart; they provoke a subtle state of alarm because of what they signify. Their beauty seems almost beside the point.<br /><br />The Imperial Valley: we can be sure that it wasn’t indigenous people who fastened that name to a segment of the planet. Nomenclature reflects the problem; it's something we use to blind ourselves.Hazenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13417573435195561519noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-31356186676093212552014-05-18T10:58:52.626-07:002014-05-18T10:58:52.626-07:00Red,
Yes, and if that sounds bad, just imagine ho...Red,<br /><br />Yes, and if that sounds bad, just imagine how the equation has looked from the Mexican side of the border...TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-91643790879656627482014-05-18T10:30:55.193-07:002014-05-18T10:30:55.193-07:00Mind-boggling frenzy of self-destruction.Mind-boggling frenzy of self-destruction.Poet Red Shuttleworthhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06053848100740944133noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-34560348739523505432014-05-18T10:00:10.635-07:002014-05-18T10:00:10.635-07:00Thanks Curtis, hadn't seen that till just now....Thanks Curtis, hadn't seen that till just now.<br /><br />I know what you mean about this --<br /><br />"I think it's the way they remind me of my first trips on airplanes, not being able almost to believe what I was seeing."<br /><br />With some things, especially big things, distance may be essential to any kind of accurate view.<br /><br />This survey seems particularly relevant now, when the long-worried issues relating to water -- who owns it, and how it shall be used -- are more pertinent than ever out here, in what was once and bodes to be again a great desert.<br /><br />(And yes, I'd certainly agree that, if we were somehow able to detach the historical meaning of what we are seeing from the immmediate visual experience, many of these aerial shots would definitely qualify as great works of "abstract" art.)TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-71163850050620575062014-05-18T09:49:01.492-07:002014-05-18T09:49:01.492-07:00Followers of this site will recall a post from a y...Followers of this site will recall a post from a year and a half ago in which we saw a similar long-view photographic method employed to survey the transformation of the California coastline.<br /><br /><a href="http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/2013/01/charles-orear-california-coastal.html" rel="nofollow">Charles O'Rear: California Coastal Development: The Creeping Advance</a><br /><br />These photo surveys were made at a critical time, when man-made changes in the land and landscape were determining a new course of history for the West.<br /><br />At that time, Chuck O'Rear commented:<br /><br />"Nice to see my photos after near 40 years. This is the first effort I've seen to describe in photos the California coast problems."<br /><br />I think he's right about that, and that his coastal survey remains the most authoritative and informative picture of a sweeping process of change.<br /><br />The same can certainly said for this "big picture" of development in the Colorado River watershed and the Imperial Valley.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-3615100130838439092014-05-18T09:14:03.499-07:002014-05-18T09:14:03.499-07:00It feels strange and awkward to say this, but some...It feels strange and awkward to say this, but some of these are about the most beautiful color photographs I've ever seen. I think it's the way they remind me of my first trips on airplanes, not being able almost to believe what I was seeing. CurtisACravanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00315707533118640284noreply@blogger.com