places to go...things to see

This quote was in my word of the day email, another attempt to wrap our bony fingers around art’s neck:
"Much art today has abandoned the ambition to please the viewer
aesthetically. Instead, it seeks to shock, discommode, repulse,
proselytize, or startle."
Roger Kimball; Art Without Beauty; The Public Interest (Washington, DC);
Apr 15, 1997.

Last night (wed), I attended one of Shaping San Francisco’s Spring Talks: Nature in the City. For all purposes it promised to cover a topic which combines a couple of issues I’ve been thinking much about as of late: urban design and ecology. Unfortunately the speaker was inexperienced and verged on the extremely dull. He hammered on about the alienation of the urban with nature a little to often- plus that point of view is old hat- I expected something a little more scientific. I also thought he would go into more detail about places within the city to go and "experience" nature, which he did in a small way. I do applaud the speaker’s enthusiasm in bringing this issue to the public, and he did have the foundations in creating a compelling talk- perhaps after a few months with the Toastmasters, he will gain the needed public speaking skills. The woman who followed him, Ruth Gravanis, was a far superior speaker, however after nearly an hour of the first guy, and she wasn’t informing me of what I already did not know, so I left.

Anyway, I did learn some cools facts about Douglas-Fir beetles and Spotted owls in my readings- here’s it is below- and also about amazing forest here in CA that I would like to visit soon…and I have been reading a lot of Bruce Chatwin's essays- the one I found particularly interesting was about nomads- more at a later date.

Douglas Fir Beetle-
the Douglas-fir beetle employs a half-dozen distinct acoustic signals. The males employ distinct chirps, indicating: (a) approach to the egg gallery entrance containing a female, (b) imminent copulation during courtship, (c) rivalry with other males, and (d) situations of stress. The female generates a distinct chirp when constructing and guarding her egg gallery (Ryker 1984). Toward Synthesizing Artificial Neural Networks that Exhibit Cooperative Intelligent Behavior: Some Open Issues in Artificial Life by Michael G. Dyer http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~dyer/Papers/Alife94Position.html

Northern Spotted Owl: “the right ear larger than the left to help triangulate sound”

Northern California Coast Range Preserve (NCCRP)

Located in the San Francisco Bay area, this biosphere reserve includes a highly diverse complex of evergreen sclerophyllous woodland, coastal, estuary and marine ecosystems. San Francisco is a focal point for coastal industry and trade. Tourism, some agriculture and fisheries, transportation, manufacturing, military installations, and research and educational institutions are also important to the regional economy. The primary aim of the biosphere reserve is to develop a commitment to ecosystem management among the various management agencies. Given the intense human pressure of the area, the conservation of biodiversity is very challenging. Of particular concern is to raise environmental awareness among the diverse urban communities.

Major ecosystem type :temperate rainforest

Major habitats & land cover types: At Angelo Reserve)Mixed forests (including mixed evergreen, California bay, tan oak, madrone, upland redwood, upland Douglas-fir, Pacific yew, and knobcone pine); woodlands (including Oregon oak, black oak, interior live oak, and mixed north-slope cismontane); mixed chaparral (including chamise, montane manzanita, whitethorn, tobacco brush, buck brush, interior live oak, and north-slope chaparral); bald hills prairie; grassland; freshwater seep; coastal winter steelhead trout stream; coastal salmon stream

(At Big Creek Reserve)Coastal strand; coastal bluff scrub; coastal scrub; ceanothus shrub; sage scrub; rocky scrubland; chamise chaparral; coast range and streambank woodland; stream-mouth woodland; sycamore-(draw woodland; coast live oak forest; mixed hardwood-coast live oak forest; mixed hardwood-canyon live oak forest; Ponderosa pine-Hoover's manzanita woodland; Ponderosa pine-mixed hardwood-coast live oak forest; Ponderosa pine-mixed hardwood-canyon live oak forest; Ponderosa pine-coast live oak forest; coulter pine forest;Santa Lucia-fir woodland; redwood streamside forest; redwood-mixed hardwood forest; pure redwood forest; aquatic (both freshwater and marine) habitats

UNESCO biosphere sites-

http://www.unesco.org/mab/BRs.shtml


Bruce Chatwin
http://www.prospector-utah.com/chatwin.htm