Book Review: The Well-Tempered City

November 9, 2024 ~ melaniereynolds ~ 5 Comments

Hello Nature-Led Friends!

Sometimes life is rough. We just have to do the best we can. Through dark times I have two mantras to help get me through it: “It won’t always be like this.” For better and for worse, change is inevitable. The second thing I remind myself of is “As long as there is another day, it is a chance to make things better.” Sometimes, you just have to put a bad day to rest and start anew the next day. If you are going through tough times right now, believe me when I say that I care about you and that I wish you the best.

^{The Well-Tempered City: What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach Us About the Future of Urban Life By Jonathan F.P. Rose, Printed 2016}

Book Review: The Well-Tempered City: What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach Us About the Future of Urban Life by Jonathan F.P. Rose

This book starts with an introduction into what we can learn about ancient civilizations and includes a concept called meh, loosely translated as “an activating energy and the source of rules that guided the spiritual, social and moral basis of [what was] the Ubaid culture” allowing it to become the first society to develop a framework of integrative systems that we now call Urbanism.

I smiled every time I read the word meh, because I have a friend who’s a one-word guy most of the time and that word is “Meh.” Intonation of the word could imply that a proposed idea is good enough that he is willing to do it (i.e. go to a specific restaurant or movie.) He is neither excited nor unexcited about the idea. If you ask him how something was, and he says “Meh.” that usually means it could have been better. If you are fortunate enough to propose an idea that he really likes you are rewarded not with a “Meh.” but with a “Definitely.”

I feel that a lot of urban initiatives these days are met more with the kind of “meh” my friend prefers, a “wait-and-see” energy of approach then an “activating energy” for integrative social rules. Maybe it’s a bit of both. Anyone whose had more than a few rotations around the sun learns to approach things with cautious optimism.

The five qualities of a well-tempered city (p.20):

Coherence – an integrated framework that unifies a city governing sections of departments, programs and goals.
Circularity – transforming linear systems into regenerative ones.
Resilience – the ability to navigate forward when stressed.
Community – social networks that strengthen the individual in mind, body, and spirit.
Compassion – creating a healthy balance between individuals and the collective well-being of the community at large.

Folded within these key qualities is how they relate to the nine “C’s” that made early human evolution to civilization possible:

Cognition, cooperation, complexity, culture, calories (food), commerce, control, concentration and connectivity.

Overall, a really good book that offered relative case studies to make each point. I learned so much! It felt like a college course wrapped in a book. I took a lot of notes and tabbed a lot of key sections that pertained to areas I was most interested in as you can tell from the book picture above.

Here are three things I learned about that really interested me:

The Traffic Paradox (p.235)

More lanes create less efficiency, not more due to the Braess Paradox and the Nash equilibrium theory.

The basis of this is that drivers have a self-serving interest to take the shortest route possible from point A to B until so many people take that route that it is no longer shorter for anyone.

For a three-minute visual explanation of how this works visit this YouTube link: https://youtu.be/O8Wi1ZC_yL8?si=0HUdAC7tfLoHfcZx

This paradox is an excellent reason for why cities need to provide alternate means of transportation for city infrastructure. I’ve never been the kind of person interested in fancy job titles. It was always important to me to find a tolerable job with a tolerable commute. I spent the first half of my working life commuting to jobs that I could do by walking or taking a bus that rivaled or beat the commute time of a single passenger vehicles. Given the option, a safe walking route is always my preferred method of travel. One need not expend a lot of time or money working exercise and fresh air into their day when it’s imbedded into their daily routine. It also increases the opportunity for social interactions outside of school or work.

From Entropy to Emergy (p.238)

Eugene Odum and his brother Howard wrote the first Ecology book in 1953 describing ecosystems as communities of organic and inorganic elements. In this kind of closed circular system, the eventual entropy of one thing leads to the emergy or creation of newly stored information. “While entropy is always wearing down a system, emergy helps build it back up.”

Gardeners know this process well by gathering dead plant matter and wood chips to decompose, thereby releasing there nutrients as “newly stored information” in the form of compost to spread around young or existing plants.

Humans have learned to do this with paper products such as cardboard, but we need to do better at incentivizing more circulatory systems that benefit both humans and nature. My personal opinion is that one our biggest failings as modern societies is allowing plastics to be extracted and used so excessively for a lot of things that ultimately end up being cheap pieces of crap that can’t be recycled. The oil and plastics industries have powerful lobbying groups that allow our shared future resources to be exploited for meaningless crap. As a consumer, you speak with your purchasing power. In a market economy founded on supply and demand use your money as your voice wisely. If you don’t like something, make it unprofitable to support. It’s clear we can’t wait for governments to regulate appropriate solutions.

Photo by John Guccione http://www.advergroup.com on Pexels.com

Easterlin Paradox (p.345)

Richard Easterlin a USC Professor wrote “The Economics of Happiness” in 1974 which found that more money increased happiness in those previously in low income or poverty situations, but that more money does not increase happiness for the affluent.

I’ve witnessed this firsthand having grown up low income and later working in an exclusive member-only club where members were required to make no less than $80,000/year (in 1998) and be sponsored by two existing members of the club. I started the job in 1998 at the height of the dotcom bubble in Seattle, WA where tech was making new millionaires seemingly overnight. The “new money” were often young tech entrepreneurs launching their first IPOs and expecting everyone to know who they were and have people cater to their every whim. They were loud, obnoxious and often travel entourages. The “old money” were people who were more often born into wealth. They were polite and reserved. Time was a luxury. If they couldn’t be bothered to wait for your assistance they would come back later or have someone else take care of it on their behalf. They had no need to yell.

The club had hotel rooms, and I worked the front desk. The rooms often sold-out months in advance especially during Huskie football season. I was handing one of our long-time members his morning paper when a young techie came up expecting my full and immediate attention. I asked the long-time member if he needed anything else. The young guy huffed impatiently. I gave him a sharp look and said, “You will wait your turn.” The older guy chuckled, tucked his paper under his arm and told me to have a nice day as he walked away. The young guy didn’t even last a year at the club. The dotcom bubble burst not long after. Nearly every new member that year was purged from the member roles before New Year’s. The young guy had no idea he’d rudely interrupted one of the richest men in the world and one of our longest-standing members.

I’ve had the opportunity to ask multiple people with famous names; “What bothers you most about being rich and famous?” They’ve all said in some variation that it’s hard to trust people. They said that everyone wants or expects something from you all the time. You can go anywhere in the world, but you can’t trust that anyone genuinely cares about you as a person. It seems reasonable to assume then that what you gain in monetary significance can cost you in a kind of spiritual deficit (i.e. honest connections with other people.) Some people aren’t bothered by the tradeoff, but it would bother me.

Final Thoughts:

I definitely recommend this book! There’s really so much to it that what I’ve provided here is only a small sampling. If you’ve read this book, I would love to hear your thoughts on it!

Thank you for visiting!

Blowing away the storm

October 10, 2024October 10, 2024 ~ Patricia Lezama ~ 1 Comment

Hello, this morning I woke up with a fog over me, as if a gray cloud with raindrops and thunder was announcing a storm. I then decided not to exercise at home, because if it was going to rain outside later, I preferred THAT to being trapped by the gray cloud in my head. So, I decided to arrive an hour early to my workplace and go to the park for a walk, open to possibilities, attentive, and observing my surroundings. I noticed the plants, the ground beneath my feet, and I remembered that nature speaks, that life arises from death, that everything is a cycle; something must die for something else to emerge, everything regenerates in life and existence.

In these photos I’m sharing, I capture what my eyes saw this morning and what completely changed my attitude.

In this photo, something is born amidst the dead; something blooms in a barren landscape. It doesn’t matter if it’s a predatory plant—at this moment, my attitude doesn’t judge or criticize whether it’s a weed or not; I simply see that it’s something green blooming in the midst of death, a plant that stands tall and fertile.

There’s a tree that once was large and leafy, now serving as shade and nourishment for the small plants growing around it, accompanying it in homage. Nature not only speaks; if you go further, it even wants me to smile, and in a comedic way, a bird drops one of its feathers among the bushes to make my memory play and make me sing: ¨One of these things is not like the others,

One of these things just doesn’t belong,

Can you tell which thing is not like the others

By the time I finish my song?” or invites me to play, “Where is the feather?” (like in Where´s Waldo?).

I smile, continue my walk, my cloud clears just like the horizon, and I await the rain, to wet, to relieve the drought, to nourish, to wash away and lighten the dark clouds of others, making them emerge from their caves. In the end, everything begins with a small decision: do I stay or go, do I observe or close my eyes, do I laugh or not, do I write these lines or not, do I post or not?

And here it is, and here I am, I go on being.

The Art of Tracking: Search & Rescue

August 26, 2024 ~ melaniereynolds ~ 7 Comments

The Art of Tracking: Search & Rescue

By Melanie Reynolds

Yesterday was a good day. On Wednesday (Aug. 21st) a 66-year-old man with Parkinson’s Disease and Dementia had gone missing from a nearby city. Three days went by with no luck and Friday had been nearly non-stop rain all day and night. The situation was becoming desperate. The Sheriff’s helicopter and search and rescue team hadn’t found him. A few drones had been used, but still no luck. They called off their search. The family reached out by social media asking for any and all willing neighbors to come out and help.

It seemed like most people only had thoughts and prayers to offer. That wasn’t good. I know I shouldn’t be judgmental. I don’t know their lives, responsibilities or commitments, but for me, thoughts and prayers will never be good enough. I hold myself to a high level of expectations that I don’t expect from others. My friend Takeshi once said I was the most Samurai person he’d ever met; to which I consider the highest form of a compliment I’ve ever received.

I would make time for a man whose time was running out. It was something I needed to do. When I was a bored rural kid in Eastern Washington tracking animals and trying to “get lost” were my hobbies. As I got older, I took some survival training courses and as of a few years ago joined a local volunteer program called Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) with a nearby Fire department. I have three emergency bags: one for home, one for van and one for hiking. I keep five tourniquets in my minivan alone. Some people even got tourniquets for Christmas five years ago. At least my stepbrother thought it was the best gift ever.

At the start of my search, I checked in at the table the family had set up in a grocery store parking lot. I asked if they wanted me to look anywhere in particular. They said he could be anywhere at this point, a needle in a haystack. I offered to start on the outer edge of the search boundary from the light industrial park back to the place where he was last seen. She told me to trust my intuition. I took two steps away then blurted out, I have tracking experience. I’ve been self-conscious of how much of a hillbilly I really am compared to the posh metropolitan areas of Seattle since I moved here twenty years ago.

To my surprise her eyes brightened. She introduced herself as the missing man’s daughter. She asked me to come back to the table, showed me a map and pointed at the last known sighting near a water tower in a heavily wooded area. “They (the Police) looked here, but its so thick with brush, please go back and look again.”

I dropped a pin on my phone and headed to the location. I noticed a police cruiser parked in a cul de sac facing the direction of the water tower. I parked, took my small backpack of essentials (food, water, a towel and first aid kit) and walked around the water tower to pick up a trail. In the US, our water towers are monitored by 24 -hour video surveillance and alarms to prevent tampering. I was very aware I was on camera and kept my body looking away from the tower and not at it.

The fact that it had rained so heavily on Friday was helpful. Both human and animal tracks were well-formed in the drying soil. I look for pressed down grasses that make a trail, broken branches, and any kind of human debris. I found bits of torn twill, but I’m quite sure our man wasn’t wearing a veil when he ran off into the woods. I found a bit of white jacket lining (polyfil), but he hadn’t been wearing a puffy jacket. I found two rabbits, a garter snake. Then I found a strong lead. A little stream that someone had tried to cross on Friday when the ground was the wettest. The mud was solidifying and holding the shape of deeply imprinted shoe tracks of someone who had gotten stuck and struggled to drag themselves out. His daughter had mentioned he was wearing black tennis shoes the same size as mine.

I followed clumps of mud up a hill in a pressed grass path. I felt like a hound catching the sent of its quarry. At the top of the hill the mud clumps had stopped, and I was intersecting the main walking trail. In the mind of a tracker, trampled and contaminated. I had four possible trails from that spot, so I started a pronged approach right to left looking for new clues to follow.

On the first prong I got about 35 feet when I came upon a heavily wooded hill that backed up to a neighborhood. Near the top of the hill was a coyote. I said, “Hey coyote, you seen a man around here?” The coyote was surprised to see me. I forget how quiet I can be. I was solely focused on listening for breathing, moans, growls and other things creeping about besides me. I also had the advantage of being downwind.

The coyote came within a few feet in front of me and sat tall. Polite coyote body language for “You shall not pass.” Behind her a pup ran from one side of the trail to the other. “Ah, I’m sorry to intrude. I’ll go back the way I came.” I made it clear I was leaving with no intent to come back. She didn’t follow. Prong two was a quick and short dead end with tall unpressed grass. Prong three and four weaved closely together and I found a couch and a bunch of bags of clothes that someone had dumped.

Prong four, my last good trail that was not the main trail led me to a cool giant mossy waterpipe. This was a great place to hide from the elements and dry off, but it was right at the edge of a steep and heavily wooded ravine. There were no fresh tracks under the waterpipe, but there was a wide swath of pressed down vegetation heading down into the ravine. He could have come here for shelter, slipped and rolled down into the ravine. It was at that moment I regretted wearing shoes and not my boots. My ankles wouldn’t have the stability needed to safely traverse down and climbing ropes would have been helpful too.

There was one offshoot trail from here. I took a quick look and discovered it was a black bear’s favorite path for stealing the neighborhood garbage and chose not to proceed any further. I walked back to my point on the main trail. My one-hour search had become two hours already. I wanted to keep going, keep looking. It’s hard to stop, it feels like giving up, but you have to know when to call it a day. In my mind I was mapping out a four-hour search pattern I would start from that point the next day. Around the same time, I started to hear a lot of people excitedly talking but I couldn’t understand what they were saying without getting closer.

I wrote it off as most likely a BBQ in one of the backyards of a house that abuts the main trail. By the time I reached my minivan I heard the sirens of emergency vehicles and the coyote family howling along with them. Could those sirens be for him? When I drove to the grocery store parking lot to ask a few questions no one was at the table. Hope began to bloom. By the time I got home and checked the search page it had just been updated that he’d been found! He was found breathing, but unresponsive just down from where I had stopped.

I’m happy to report that as of this morning he’s in stable condition in the ICU. It’s a good sign that he made it through the night. Part of me wishes I’d paid attention to the human commotion down the trail. That I could have been there to see the moments of his discovery, but I have a natural inclination to avoid crowds and linger on the edges. I was solely focused on finding one man who I expected to find among the bushes and his name was David.