I live in Berkeley, California, and over the years have posted a lot of photos taken of my neighbors' front yards. Most often I've photographed the yards on Fulton Street, a residential street running north/south between my neighborhood and the southwest corner of the UC Berkeley campus (it's on my "walk to work" and "walk downtown" path).
Over the last week we've had some drier days and some wetter days as the rains associated with El Niño have begun. The new year, the pewter-gray skies, and the softened light has reawakened my attention to the plant life of local front yards, and to the odd blurring of seasons that January rains after four years of drought have brought on. So I thought I'd share some of what caught my eye this past week or so...
Here's Fulton Street, looking north. Doesn't seem so remarkable in a wide-angle view, does it?
Much of the neighborhood does look like winter, or the Bay Area's snow-free version of the season at any rate.
But there are more seasonally ambiguous tableaux as well.
Blackberries and pears hanging on from summer and fall, respectively:
And then there are the jarring glimpses of early spring ...
... none more jarring than the early-blooming magnolia trees.
Thanks as always to Berkeley's many dedicated front-yard gardeners!
People across Northern California are determined to voice their demand that the U.S. government do the right thing at the COP21 talks beginning in Paris later this month. "COP21" is the 21st annual meeting of the "Conference of Parties" under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Since early summer I've been working with a diverse coalition of labor, social justice, environmental, and faith groups under an umbrella we call the Northern California Climate Mobilization. We're organizing a march and rally in Oakland, California on Saturday November 21st, and we're expecting a tremendous crowd. Details on the web site if you're local to the Bay Area; RSVP on NCCM's Facebook event page.
What do we want? Here are the highlights from the mobilization's Points of Unity:
Challenging climate catastrophe
the Northern California Climate Mobilization demands
A global agreement to implement
dramatic and rapid reduction in
global warming pollution
Keep fossil fuels in the ground!
100% clean, safe, renewable energy!
End all fracking, tar sands mining and pipelines, offshore drilling, arctic drilling.
Stop expansion of the extractive economy. Wind, solar, geothermal power now.
No coal exports or crude-by-rail bomb trains in Northern California.
A dramatic and rapid reduction in global warming pollution is necessary to create:
A world united to repair the ravages of climate change
A world with an economy that works for people and the planet
A demilitarized world with peace and social justice for everyone; where Black Lives Matter; with justice and respect for immigrants and migrants; where good jobs, clean air and water, and healthy communities belong to all
350.org is calling for a Global Climate March on the weekend directly preceding the start of COP21, Thanksgiving weekend in the U.S. -- and people across the world are mobilizing. (Because we judged it would be harder to turn out a crowd on Thanksgiving weekend, NCCM decided to hold our mobilization the weekend before, on November 21st).
At this stage of global dialog, not to mention current global awareness of climate change induced or inflected crises -- from California's drought to Syria's war and its associated, harrowing migrant crisis -- it's hardly necessary to recap the fact that humans have induced a set of existential threats to our entire biosphere.
But it's probably worth pointing out some of the circumstances and threats that make climate change and climate justice local issues for the Bay Area (cribbing liberally here from a set of talking points that NCCM is developing):
The Bay Area, with the rest of California, is enmeshed in a four year drought. Our air has been smoky all summer from wildfires burning through our treasured wilderness, farms lie fallow for lack of water, residents are radically conserving at home (this last is not a bad thing, but its necessity is noteworthy).
El Niño conditions may relieve the drought by the end of the coming winter, but warming water and storms have already begun to wreak havoc on our offshore ecosystems: dead whales and emaciated seal pups are washing up on our beaches in unprecedented numbers. Untold damage is being done to our fisheries. On October 15th, a "1,000 year rainfall event" dumped torrents of rain on Southern California in an hour, causing a mudslide over Highway 5 (the principal north/south route along the entire west coast of the U.S.) that closed the interstate for 45 miles of its critical length.
We in the Bay Area have families in the Philippines, Pakistan, Africa, Syria, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, New York, Alaska, and other places where extreme weather events are taking lives and displacing people today. Climate change and climate justice are global issues, and everyone is impacted, everywhere.
And so the Bay Area is turning out on November 21st, as COP21 approaches. What's mobilizing where you live?
On Saturday -- on my way to a march protesting the transport of Bakken oil via "bomb train" through Richmond, California and other cities and towns -- and within lethal range of homes, schools, churches, shops, and workplaces -- a coal train was slowly rolling south (toward the Port of Oakland) as I stepped off the BART train. Its engine was too far ahead to see from the platform. After hauling my bike down the stairs, through the station, up some more stairs, and peddling to the corner of W. MacDonald and 16th, where I met and chatted with a friend, then finally headed west toward the march's starting point ... yep, that the train was still chugging past.
That was dispiriting.
On the other hand, the march that kicked off at Atchison Village, stopped at the entrance to Kinder Morgan's Richmond railyard, and wound up with a rally at Washington Park, was spirited and colorful. The photo below shows Forest Ethics organizer Ethan Buckner speaking to the crowd at Atchison Village.
In Richmond, the fight against crude by rail is the latest example of the fossil fuel industry’s blatant disregard for the climate and the health and safety of communities of color. We know we don’t need this toxic and explosive extreme oil - already, our communities are building solutions for climate resilience and social justice. Together, we demand an end to extreme fossil fuels as we usher in a just transition to a clean, equitable, and thriving economy for all. This summer, the fight against oil trains is heating up across the Bay Area, California, and North America. Richmond is on the front lines of two major oil train fights: first, environmental justice leaders have been fighting to shut down the illegal Kinder Morgan oil trains terminal, which was permitted behind the backs of the community. In addition, the proposed Phillips 66 oil trains terminal in San Luis Obispo County would bring an additional 2.5 million gallons of toxic, explosive tar sands oil daily through the city. Already, the climate justice movement in Richmond and beyond have been stepping up to fight both projects. Now is the time to turn up the heat.
The threat to people and planet posed by our deeply-embedded reliance on fossil fuels to power economies around the world isn't going to be neutralized easily. Anyone who has paid the least bit of attention to climate change politics over the last fifty years knows that. Regular people need to engage en mass if we're going to successfully drive a wedge between politicians and the massive energy companies that grease their every lubricious surface.
Later this year, the United Nations Conference of Parties will have its 21st annual meeting, in Paris this time around (COP21 is one of the meeting's several appellations). Here in the Bay Area, organizing has begun for a mass action to demand "a global agreement to implement dramatic and rapid reduction in global warming pollution" (from the emergent coalition's Points of Unity statement, to be finalized later this week and published online soon). The coalition keeps tweaking its name, but this week it's the Northern California Climate Mobilization.
Talking about the weather used to be small-talk, right? Nowadays there's something more sinister in the topic, at least from this observer's frame of reference. The sun is shining in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it creeps me out.
If you were strolling around Berkeley, California between eleven and noonish on Christmas Day 2013 it wouldn't have been a stretch to imagine yourself in the southern hemisphere. The sky was blue, the sun shone, the Campanille sounded across the city, the thermometer read in the high sixties. South of the nearly-deserted campus, magnolias were beginning to bloom.
Since then, a bitter cold and billions and billions on snowflakes have descended on the midwest and east coast. If you live in these regions, you don't need me to tell you this. If you live where I do, there's nothing in the air to suggest how nasty a turn this winter has taken on the other side of the Rockies. Here's what the National Weather Service had to say as of yesterday evening:
The coldest weather in years will be making its presence known from the Upper Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic region for the beginning of the work week. The polar vortex, a mid-upper level cyclonic feature normally present over northern Canada, will be displaced unusually far to the south over the northern Great Lakes and southern Ontario. Owing to the deep layer of the cold air mass, this will provide for an incredibly strong surge of bitterly cold Arctic Air along with gusty winds. The Upper Midwest will be affected first by Saturday night, and the brutal conditions will continue pushing southeastward to the Ohio Valley and Mid-South by Monday, and to the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic by Tuesday. Particularly noteworthy will be the extreme wind chills and nearly unheard-of daytime highs that are forecast. A huge expanse of wind chill warnings are in effect from Montana all the way to the central Appalachians, with wind chills on the order of -20 to -50 degrees expected! Afternoon highs on Monday for parts of the Midwest states and the Ohio Valley will fail to reach zero degrees!
Here in Northern California? Mild. Clear. Dry. A cousin in Orange County reported seventy-seven degrees where she lives on Sunday. The photo at left is sunset on Saturday evening at Half Moon Bay (higher res on Tumblr, at One Finger Clicking). I drove along a stretch of about ninety miles of Highway 1 on Friday, and back again on Saturday. Both days there were surfers in the water from Pacifica to Santa Cruz.
I'm not gloating, mind you. Like I said: there's something sinister about the weather this winter, whether it's bitterly cold and snowy on the east side of the continent or summery and dry on the lower stretch of the Pacific side of the country.
A diarist who goes by FishOutOfWater posted an analysis on Daily Kos on Friday, titled Extraordinary Jet Stream Track to Alaska Led to Record Dryness in California in 2013 [thanks to LK for the link]. The meteorological graphics taken from the NOAA go a bit over my head, but this table (also from the NOAA, image copied from FishOutOfWater's post) is pretty clear when it comes to the debt California is incurring for our shirtsleeves-in-winter weather:
California water supplies were in good shape entering 2013 but they are rapidly deteriorating now. Snowpack levels are just 20% of normal on January 3, 2014 according to automated measurements. There's no end to the west coast drought in sight. The Climate Prediction Center outlook for California is for worsening drought for the next 90 days. The January outlook is very disappointing because January is frequently California's wettest month.
And as long as I'm quoting, here's another DKer whose handle is ontheleftcoast, summing it all up in a comment to the above-linked post:
We really don't have models for how this is going to play out. There's just no way we can predict what's going to happen at this point. Climate Chaos is here and we're going to have to deal with it. Draught one year, massive floods the next, who knows what in the following year. And the severity will be like nothing we've seen. Every couple of years will see "1000 year floods" or "once in a life time events". W[e] didn't just break the sky, we annihilated it.
If you were strolling around Berkeley, California between eleven and noonish on Christmas Day 2013 it wouldn't have been a stretch to imagine yourself in the southern hemisphere. The sky was blue, the sun shone, the Campanille sounded across the city, the thermometer read in the high sixties. South of the nearly-deserted campus, magnolias were beginning to bloom.
With apologies to friends and family in the frigid Midwest and along the East Coast ...
South Hall from the foot of the Campanille
Sproul Hall through Sather Gate
Dana Street, empty but for a single car, from the plaza outside Haas Pavillion
The magnolia trees beginning to bloom, along Fulton Street
Magnolias budding and blooming under cerulean skies
I know June's almost out, but I'm getting toward the end of a six-day workshop so I thought I'd go easy today. Kind of reprise the self-publishing thing, but as a photo retrospective.
For a while I've been posting photos onto Tumblr of flowers I encounter every day as I walk or ride my bike through the streets of my neighborhood in Berkeley, California. As I've said before, people in Berkeley -- omitting my black-thumbed self, I'm afraid -- are terrific and generous gardeners. We've got some of the loveliest front yards of anyplace I've ever been. Anyway, in May I posted some color-themed collages: white, red, pink, purple, yellow.
Today, in this blog post, I'm picking a 'best of' each color. Feel free to visit One Finger Clicking, on Tumblr, for more...
Paul Simon sang, "I get all the news I need from the weather report," which this newshound can't honestly say of himself. Still, at the risk of complaining about some of the easiest weather, generally speaking, in the continental United States: it's been a perfectly incontinent(al) March here on the Left Coast. After a weirdly dry winter, it was lashing rain on Tuesday of this week, as it was much of the week before.
I know, I know, break out the violins. The skies were clear and the sidewalks were dry by yesterday (Wednesday) afternoon, but I'm just sayin'.
Have you been watching Chicago's record heat this month? Eight, count 'em, eight days this month during which the thermometer hit 80 degrees or higher.
This. Does. Not. Happen. In. March. In. Chicago. At this time of year, 'normal' in The Windy City hovers in the 30s and 40s.
I'm reminded of T.C. Boyle's novel A Friend of the Earth, the present-time of which is set in 2025-2026 in Southern California. From the prolog:
The parking lot is flooded, two feet of gently swirling shit-colored water, and there go my cowboy boots -- which I had to wear for vanity's sake, when the gum boots would have done just as well. I sit there a minute cursing myself for my stupidity, the murky penny-pincher lights of Swenson's beckoning through the scrim of the rain-scrawled windshield, the Mex-Chinese takeout place next door to it permanently sandbagged and dark as a cave, while the computer-repair store and 7-Eleven ride high, dry and smug on eight-foot pilings salvaged from the pier at Gaviota. The rain is coming down harder now -- what else? -- playing timbales on the roof of the 4x4, and the wind rattles the cab in counterpoint, picking up anything that isn't nailed down and carrying it off to some private destination, the graveyard of blown things. [...]
Boyle's novel was published in September 2000, so we're sitting right now about halfway between its publication date and the novel's present-time.
From here in March 2012, old T. Coraghessan is looking pretty prescient. Gotta love the look in that photo, eh? Told you so...
Out here in California we're having what an optimist might call a "mild
winter." In a more pessimistic assessment, we could be heading for
another drought year.
In the middle of last week a friend posted a
lovely photo on Facebook of a sight I had the pleasure to witness on my
bike ride home from work: a crystal-clear sky at the cusp between
twilight and full-on night, moon diminished to a near-expired crescent,
Jupiter and Venus brightly aligned above.
This is a great week around the world to watch the sunset. MSNBC posted an article Saturday, 4 planets & moon dominate weekend night sky,
with a similarly gorgeous photo taken in Mooresville, North Carolina.
Catching the sight live here on the Left Coast was breathtakingly
beautiful, as our sky is frequently in the Bay Area. Makes a person
grateful both for the lovely place we inhabit and for senses to take it
in.
In
the moment it's easy to relish our sunny days, our nightscapes, the
blooming plums and cherries that stay brightly flowered for weeks on end
in the absence of rain to wash their petals to the ground. It would be
churlish not to be grateful for these pleasures.
For all my steady insistence, in this blog and elsewhere, that a responsible human and citizen is obligated to reckon with costs of our pleasures,
to account for our debts and to pay them, I won't deny that I'm
enjoying our 'mild winter' as much as anyone else. (At the same time, I
won't complain if the light rain forecast for this week is heavier or
more protracted than expected.)
Mild winters in California don't
imply there won't be a reckoning. Near term, if and as last year's
generous precipitation runs out of the state's reservoirs, we'll once
again face rationing. But greater reckonings lurk ahead, as the slow
swings of weather patterns make it harder and harder for humans to live
as densely as we do here on the rim of the Pacific Ocean (and elsewhere
on the planet too, perhaps sooner and more dramatically there than
here).
Thanks to dogenfrost for his lovely photo, shared via Flickr and Facebook, of the night sky on 23 Feb 2012 seen from the Berkeley Hills; and to Matthew Felix Sun for permission to use his photo of the heavens through the trees, taken from our back porch on 25 Feb 2012.
I write fiction, take an activist interest in politics and culture, and am a recovering information technologist. My novel Consequence was judged Best General Fiction in the 2017 Green Book Festival competition; please visit my website for more info. ~Steve
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