forestofglory

Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 episodes 7-13— We finished the season! It was lot of fun. Though I did end up yelling “Biology doesn’t work that way! DNA isn’t magic!” at the screen a few times. There were some bits right at the end about unity vs justice that hit really hard because of political stuff, but which I really loved. And of course I still love all the characters so much, plus there’s few new characters that I love now.

Laid-Back Camp, Vol. 2 - Vol 6 by Afro— so writing my reading year in review inspired me to try to figure out a work around for the problems I’m having with the catalogue that are making checking out manga difficult. I have not completely succeeded, but I did manage to check out this series. This a lovely slice of life manga about high school girls going on camping trips featuring lots of pretty views and yummy camp food. A nice calming read.

Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation by Sonia A. Hirt— I was very excited to join an urban planning book club. This was the book selected for the 1st meeting I attended. I didn’t like the actual book that much. It was rather dull and repetitive . Plus while it mentioned racism once or twice it really failed to properly acknowledge and engage with how much racism has shaped US land use policy. However the book club meeting was great! Lots of people had interesting things to say about this book. (If you’d like to read about racism and zoning I’d recommend The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, the book club also mentioned Americans Against the City as a better book about similar topics)

Seven of Infinities by Aliette de Bodard — I really enjoyed this novella set in the Xuya verse and featuring sentient ships, memory implants, and a mystery.

TGCF dongua episode 2-7— Still watching this online with a group of friends. It is really pretty but also I had forgotten how quite how gorey the plot is, and seeing it rather than reading it really brings that home. But there’s enough of a balance of soft pretty bits that I can handle it.

The Four Profound Weaves by R.B. Lemberg— I really love Lemberg’s Bridverse stories so I was very excited to read this novella, which is set in that world. It was really good, featuring trans elders and magical weaving! But also the story dealt with a lot of heavy themes like abuse and athortiarism, and I found that hard going at times.

We have been having very typical Bay Area weather for this time of year and I love it. We get cool foggy mornings. Then the fog burns off and we have warm sunny afternoons. But its never really hot or really cold. In we have turned the heather off so in the mornings its a little cool in the house, so I where an extra layer. It's nice and cosy. I sit at my computer drinking tea and am just the right temperature.

This month I've been walking on sections of the Bay Trail twice. This a regional trail that's planned to go all the way around the edge of the bay. The sections I walked on where right by the water. It's nice to look out over the bay for that level. You can see the golden gate bridge and the the San Francisco sky line.

The Bay Area is just so pretty! I have been feeling lucky to live here even now when there are so few places to go.

The days are so long now! It's light before I get up, and light well after the kid is supposed to be in bed. It's been effecting both of our sleep schedules, but not too badly.

We have been having many picnics lately. We get takeout from somewhere and eat in on a blanket in the park. It's so nice. It still keeps us socially distanced, but we get to eat restaurant food and get out of the house for a while. The Bay Area is still pretty locked down. Open air dinning is just starting to be a thing here.

There was one bad thing that happened on a picnic, the kid got her 1st bee sting! She must have just put her had down right on top of a bee. It was unpleasant experience for us all. We took her right home, and got her an ice pack to help with the swelling and she sat with one hand on the ice pack and played phone games with the other for long time. She recovered quickly and seemed fine now, but shes a bit wary of bees on our walks.

Since things are slightly opening up we have formed a social bubble with my parents and brother. Our social bubbles are very limited -- we can hang out together outside while masked. But I have now gone on several walks with my family, which has been lovely.

The kid still loves visiting the fish pond in our neighborhood. This week they have added about a dozen little fish to the pound, which is very exciting. Most of them are orange, but a few are black and one is white with orange spots.

I’ve been thinking about race and the landscape, and how one can and can’t see race in my neighborhood. I live in the hills, in a neighborhood of big houses on big lots. If you stand between two houses can see the Golden Gate Bridge. In the way of expensive neighborhoods in the US not many Black people live here. Still when I take a walk there’s not much that I see that makes me think about race. The most notable things are the Black Lives Matter yard signs.

It seems quiet and calm. But of course this is a landscape that hides a lot of racial conflict.

You have to teach yourself to see the history of the neighborhood. Some things are easier to learn than others. You can learn to look at a building and guess when it was built. You can learn something similar with street plans, to see a grid of streets or cul-du-sacs and know when the town was planned. It’s trickier to put that together with the history of racial conflict and see who might have been excluded.

Here, maps can help. For most major US cities you can find a Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) map from the New Deal era. These “Red lining maps'' show where the government and banks would make loans, and where they wouldn’t. Looked at today, these maps show society’s systemic disinvestment in non-white neighborhoods. On the HOLC map my calm, green neighborhood was rated A1, the best possible rating, colored green on the map. Meanwhile my city's downtown was rated D, the worst rating, and colored red. You can’t see this as easily when you’re walking through my neighborhood, but it matters. It shapes the city.

What you can see on the ground is a history of investment in my neighborhood. We have nice sidewalks, well maintained streets, good street lights. This is the kind of investment nice white neighborhoods get.

You can also see race in the lack of police presence; there’s a combined police and fire station that I sometimes walk by, but unless I’m right in front of the station, I never see cops on my walks.

Going back further and further into the past, racism is still here. This land is the home of the Ohlone people. The Ohlone are still here, but the way they relate to the land and the land itself have changed. Before settlers came, there was vastly different landscape. It’s hard to see that landscape in the neighborhood I walk through. There is a glimpse -- in the shape of the hills. In the live oaks and redwoods that grow among all the introduced tree species. But not in the hard sidewalks and paved roads. Not in the clear property lines and title deeds. When I walk, I often stop to admire the oaks, but I don’t often think about the people who once depended on their acorns for food.

It's easy to walk around my neighborhood and forget racism that destroyed the Olhone's land and redlined this neighborhood for investment and others for decay all this history. But these days I’m trying to see, and to remember.

So it occurred to me that if I want to write more about nature and/or the built environment maybe it would be good to read more about those topics too. So thought I’d ask for recs. I sometimes have trouble reading the latest planning and ecology news because a lot of it is depressing and/or terrifying. At work I end up reading a lot of new articles about the Bay Area housing crisis and it wears me down after a while. But I’m sure there’s good stuff out there that I’m missing.

Here’s a couple of things along these lines that I’ve liked to give you an idea of what I have read on these topics recently. (And also because even when I’m asking for recs I love to give recs -- sorry!)

“Knowing Prairies” by Liz Anna Kozik This short graphic essay is an excellent introduction to some key conflicts in restoration ecology.

Braiding Sweetgrassby Robin Wall Kimmerer This book of essays by biologist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation about blending indigous and western ways of knowing is amazing about inspiring.

Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature by D. Graham Burnett This book is framed around a trial but its really a detailed dive into how people in 1818 NYC thought about whales a topic I found utter fansinating

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon This book blew my mind when I first read it. It is all about how the city is connected to the countryside, and explains how the expansion of the US frontier was driven but cities.

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein This detailed history of segregation in the US is really good but also very depressing.

Ok, most of those are book length, but I'll happy take recs for shorter things or sequential art.