Mapping "The Last Island" | Emergent Elements

With an end-of-September deadline to pre-record my “Musical Space, Geographical Time” talk for October’s NACIS meeting (they’re requiring pre-recording for anyone considering presenting remotely), my musical mapping experiments with The Last Island are winding down. So this should be either the last or second-to-last post dealing with the topic (maybe to your relief)—soon I’ll be back to focusing on geographical journeys in paint and real-life.

The three following musical elements—key brightness, relative key (i.e. key variability), and relative “height” (i.e. “height” variability)—all have to do with the concept of "key.” (Relative “height” incorporates other characteristics too, as I’ll say more about below, but key is an important component.) I’ve been going back-and-forth on whether these three aspects of key are actually distinct or “real,” not just for listeners in general vs. myself but even to my own ears. And I’m not sure that’s even resolvable. So the point of mapping and describing them separately is largely to raise that very question. As usual I’m always anxious to hear your thoughts!

I think of these three elements as related in that they, like “key” in general, are “holistic” or “emergent” characteristics of music. They tend to be properties of the entire score rather than individual voices, and tend to be established over extended lengths of time rather than a few beats or bars. There are exceptions to both of these tendencies: in theory a set of voices can play in one key while another set plays in another, following multiple “paths” (this is something I do play with in The Last Island, see below); and it’s possible for key or “height” to be defined over just a beat or two depending on context. But these elements generally aren’t systematically quantifiable voice-by-voice or bar-by-bar as other elements are.

Maps of key brightness, relative key, and relative “height,” aligned with the geographical elements they’re meant to evoke. (For complicated reasons I’m now calling them “geographical” instead of “environmental.”)

Key Brightness

Do certain keys sound “brighter” that others? Doing some research would probably clear the question up further, but based on personal experience and informal conversations it seems to be the case. It’s probably more perceptible to certain ears than others (my having near-perfect pitch—though somehow over the past few years consistently a half-step off—is a likely factor), and which keys sound brighter or darker to those ears probably doesn’t follow a consistent pattern. I think it’s fair to say that to pretty much everyone all the time, major keys sound brighter than minor keys. But that’s a function of intervals rather than some hard-to-define characteristic of absolute pitch. While I tend to hear keys with lots of sharps/flats as darker, that could be a subconscious association with black keys on the piano, and it doesn’t always hold true.

So my process of selecting bright vs. dark keys in writing The Last Island, or evaluating it later in places where there was less intent involved, was based mostly on gut impressions. Later I tried to fit them into a quasi-scientific system; looking back at my cryptic notes (below) I’m having trouble figuring out exactly how I went about it. But a system did come together, relating to number of accidentals as I mentioned above.

The takeaway from the key brightness map (the central black-and-white band on the sheet of parallel maps above), in terms of how it corresponds with the geographical elements it’s meant to evoke, isn’t as straightforward as with other musical elements that I’ve shared before (like attack and instrumentation). Those other elements show an overall intensification building up to and then down from the musical/geographical “climax” point. But I think what does come across in this one is darker keys corresponding to 1) darker forested landscapes in the middle third of the piece and 2) the ominous mood at the very end as deforested landscapes “appear,” in both the slides and the music, in the distance. (That location in the distance explains the hatched dark-and-light zones at the tail end. Certain voices play in a dark key depicting that distant but encroaching destruction, while the rest play in a brighter key to represent the for-now-preserved foreground.)

Relative Key

I’ve been thinking about key brightness as an “absolute” quality—you can sense how bright or dark a key is even if you hear it in isolation. But with relative key (above/to the right of brightness on the sheet), the relativity is the point—what matters is key changes, or key variability, not characteristics of the individual keys. (For the mathematically-minded among you, taking this a step further would mean drawing a map of the derivative of the key, rather than the keys themselves as I've done above.)

So in this case I’ve represented the different keys as colors along the rainbow spectrum rather than on a greyscale. Similar keys, like C major and G major or C major and A minor, are denoted by similar colors so that the more dramatic the key change, the sharper the color contrast. A greyscale would’ve shown those contrasts too, but each shade of grey by itself would’ve suggested an “absolute,” intrinsic level of something, whether that’s brightness or some other quality. Color indication, however, seems appropriately arbitrary (though, having synesthesia, now that I think about it these colors could in fact represent some absolute quality of each key—maybe a future map?). Plus, key changes are fundamentally changes in musical “color” that outweigh the probably less perceptible changes in brightness. Having said all this though, I’m not totally sure that what I’m perceiving as a “color” change isn’t actually a “brightness” change. Again, I’m not even sure that’s answerable, for my own ears let alone everyone else’s. Think of these as possible ways of experiencing key, whether or not they’re actually distinct.

I wrote key changes into The Last Island to evoke a combination of things: 1) shifts in scenery or atmosphere (overlaid with considerations of brightness as described above), 2) physical exertion/movement of the traveler/listener, and 3) the complexity or “energy” of a particular scene. The zone of rapid key changes around the climax point represents a mix of all three of these. Overall, more and sharper changes in key/color mean a heightening of sensation, which like in the earlier maps tends to correlate with a cumulative intensification of the physical environment. (I don’t claim any originality in using this technique—you’re probably familiar with what’s been disparagingly called the “truck driver’s gear-shift” in pop music, where half- or whole-step key changes are inserted to heighten emotion. I did try to be more subtle than that in most cases.)

Back to the question of representation—using the rainbow gradient, as opposed to another type of color gradient, has some issues. Not all segments of it (say, yellow vs. blue) are of equal “strength” to the eye, and so contrasts between those sections aren’t either. It follows that in the map, the apparent degree of contrast between different keys likely doesn’t quite correspond with reality (if there is a reality to all of this to begin with). So I’ve made a version using a smaller segment of the rainbow spectrum—red to yellow—which doesn’t eliminate the strength disparities but might at least limit the range of contrasts that could be misleading. The two versions are lined up below.

Relative key, full rainbow gradient. Sharper color contrasts represent sharper contrasts between keys.

Relative key, red-yellow gradient. Are the contrasts easier to compare even though their range is limited?

Relative “Height”

I mentioned that I used key changes to represent physical movement/exertion—that usually means climbing uphill (I’m thinking this imaginary island rises to at least 10,000 ft.). But the sensation of elevation change in the piece isn’t just a matter of key change; it’s combined with rising or falling melodic lines as well as harmonic changes that don’t necessarily represent key changes. (The combination of those elements also indicates “height” in a broader sense than geographical elevation, incorporating emotional as well as elevational “heightening.”) Because of that mix, composing and then mapping changes in “height” is largely intuitive and I’m not even positive that it’s a real thing at all (the reason I’ve put it in quotes). And again, there is a question of whether the” key” component can really be separated from the two other key-related elements. But for experimenting/mapping purposes I’m doing it for now.

The obvious way to map “height” is with a rising/falling line, and that’s what I did at first (turned into the “section-cut” drawing below). But that’s different from all the other maps, which use a color gradient or a greyscale to measure different intensities or levels, including even the geographical elevation map. Though geographical elevation change is a form of spatial variation, the whole concept of musical mapping deals with 2-D/horizontal space. The “vertical” dimension of music that I described with the 3D model in my first music-related post is a function of the stacking, layering, and simultaneity that music allows; it doesn’t represent vertical position in physical space. So except where I’ve wanted to break elements into the different musical voices or instruments (as in previous posts), these maps of musical elements are meant to represent views from “overhead” rather than “from the side.”

Relative “height,” represented in its most literal sense by a rising/falling line.

So on the sheet, I’ve instead represented relative “height” with a color gradient. Like relative key it’s meant to focus on height change rather than an absolute or intrinsic quality; in this way it’s different from the geographical elevation map, where I’ve used a greyscale.

But as I explained above with relative key, the rainbow gradient can be confusing since all zones of the gradient and the contrasts between them aren’t perceptually equivalent. Using a smaller zone of the gradient wasn’t really an option this time since there are many more “height” changes than key changes and I needed the full range to capture that subtlety; so I ended up just going with the grayscale. Here I’ve compared it with the original rainbow version:

Relative height, rainbow gradient.

Relative “height,” greyscale.

I think the rainbow version definitely emphasizes the changes (overall variability), especially the more subtle ones. In the greyscale version the “climb” right before the climax point, two thirds of the way through, overshadows everything else. The gradual darkening (“intensifying”) shifts the focus from variability to the absolute “height” of the different zones, which doesn’t have much meaning in the musical sense. If you took the lightest and darkest portions of the greyscale map and listened to those segments of the piece one after the other, you wouldn’t necessarily perceive a “height” difference: it’s mostly the musical transitions that evoke those differences, and of course there would be no transition in that case. But maybe the color version just isn’t intuitive enough as a representation of “height,” lacking any indication of absolute “highness” and “lowness,” even if it’s meant to representing something less concrete.

Ok, there’ll be maybe one more of these music-related posts to come, but soon I’ll be taking you to Australia for a while….

Darren

Highlands

This example of a dry-to-wet gradient is, in its own way, as dramatic as the one I shared in my recent post on the Lomas de Lachay in Peru. The dry end here isn’t a barren desert as it is there, but the wet end is much wetter—in fact, too wet for native trees to grow.

San Cristóbal Island from the boat.

San Cristóbal Island in the Galápagos is one of the archipelago’s four inhabited islands and one of those that are large and high enough to support moist highland zones above the arid lowlands. The precipitation comes largely from fog rather than rainfall, essentially the same fog that feeds the lomas formations on the mainland. The cold Humboldt Current, which flows up the coasts of Chile and Peru and then heads westward past the Galápagos, is a chief factor responsible for the fog and low rainfall in that entire region. On the mainland though its effect is amplified by other conditions (related to latitude and topography) that reduce rainfall to nearly zero along the coast; the “desert” lowlands of the Galapagos look lush in comparison, and the highlands do receive enough actual rainfall, in addition to the fog drip, to support forests as opposed to the “wet savannas” of the lomas. But above those forests, as I said earlier, precipitation is high enough that no native trees have evolved to survive, resulting in a shrubby or boggy landscape which at the highest elevations (the “fern-sedge” zone) is somewhat reminiscent of the moors of the United Kingdom.

Cacti and lava rock in the lowlands of San Cristóbal.

Another view of the lowland arid zone, notably with the vegetation in leaf (this scene would typically be grey/brown for half the year).

Miconia shrubland in the treeless highland zone, on the hike up to El Junco lagoon.

The misty shores of El Junco.

But as I wrote in my previous post on nearby Santa Cruz Island, these wet highland environments are critically endangered. On San Cristóbal the native highland forests, composed of trees of the genus Scalesia in the daisy family, have been completely eradicated by agriculture and grazing (though there are reports of a few trees clinging to an inaccessible cliff face somewhere). Of the treeless zones above that few pockets remain, and those have also been degraded by cattle and invasive grasses filtering in from adjacent pastures. One of these pockets (or possibly the only one, at least that’s accessible) exists around El Junco lagoon, a crater lake containing the archipelago’s only source of fresh water. It’s not the island’s highest point but at 700m it’s close to it—though that elevation seems like nothing considering its dramatically different climate from the coastline.

Aerial view of San Cristóbal with the route(s) of travel depicted in the worldview below. Except for the segment north of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno (the main town and the provincial capital) and the loop around El Junco, which are hiking trails, the route consists of the island’s only long-distance road, about 25km long. The oval-shaped area of darker green identifies the wetter highlands, which might stand out more against the lowlands if the image had been taken a different time of the year. This view includes about half of the island, containing the entire highland zone. (Satellite image from Google Maps.)

Since the native forest in-between has been replaced by agricultural/grazing land, the half-hour drive from well-preserved arid lowlands to comparatively intact, saturated highlands (and then back down to arid) along the main road doesn’t represent an ideal ecological gradient. But, the dry-to-wet transition is still obvious and surreal, and it inspired the worldview below.

Highlands, watercolor on aquabord, 24”x36.” As mentioned above the arid zone looked relatively lush when I was there, so except where I could incorporate cacti it was a challenge to make a clear distinction between the lowlands and highlands while staying relatively true to the experience. I ended up playing up the browns and purples in the arid scenes and using more yellowish greens (mostly to suggest stronger sunlight).

This work depicts something between what I’ve been calling a “wandering” (lacking a clear, linear path of travel) and a “journey” (based on such a path) because that 25km trip actually cobbled together multiple trips and detours—both the yellow path above and the abstracted red path below are simplifications. Plus you’ll see the abstracted version is messy to diagram since portions of it extend beyond the frame. My main reason for diagramming it anyways is to illustrate, compared to the actual route on the aerial photo, how much I’ve distorted the overall shape and length in order to emphasize the parts of the experience that made the strongest impression, namely the highland zone around El Junco. This area felt like the destination or “resting point”—a special, mist-shrouded world unto itself—even though the trip actually continued on to the opposite coastline.

An animated journey through Highlands, along an abstraction of the actual (yellow) route. It begins as a hike through the semi-desert from Muelle Tijeretas (a diving site) to the main town of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, where it picks up the road, rises into the cultivated highlands and passes through the village of El Progreso (mostly hidden beneath the clouds in the aerial fragment). The road emerges into the treeless highlands, where the trip follows a roughly one-hour hike up to and around El Junco lagoon. Returning to the road, the journey runs downhill back into the arid lowlands, ending at the beach at Puerto Chino.

Another aspect of the experience that I found inspirational, besides the precipitation gradient, relates to the juxtaposition of natural and manmade landscapes. In this case though, unlike the urban-wild edges that I’ve focused on in other works, it wasn’t a sharp juxtaposition that inspired me but rather a much softer form of proximity that had the same empowering effect. As I’ve said before I find sharp edges between natural and developed landscapes empowering because the former is “wild” but at same time “humanized” by virtue of being both small and isolated. In this case though, while that small-and-isolated condition definitely applies, it’s not easy to perceive since both landscapes are treeless—the island of native landscape has no clear boundary. That sense of humanization is a result not of constriction but of “integration”—the native landscape is merged into the non-native one while still maintaining its identity as “native.” I’m using quotes there because again that nativeness is relative; invading grasses and probably cattle browsing and trampling have turned significant areas of the original shrubland into something a lot more pasture-like, which definitely plays a role in the blurring of the boundary. (So does the persistent mist.) But given the naturally treeless nature of that landscape combined with some degree of denial, I could still tell myself that it represented something special and generally intact.

This is a pretty nuanced perspective (though maybe not much more than my usual take on things) that’s complicated not only to put into words but to convey in paint. I tried though, particularly in the center-bottom fragment which depicts the ferny rim of the lagoon in the foreground grading into pasture below and beyond. That scene didn’t come from one particular photograph, since no single one captures the impression of ambiguity that I’ve described. But the four below, all shot within that fuzzy boundary zone, taken together should give some sense of it.

The fact that I was moved by this ambiguity is an example of the tension I express in most of my works incorporating human-dominated landscapes, between the alternately empowering and destructive aspects of environmental manipulation. But since in this case that manipulation doesn’t involve sharp edges, my guess is that neither of those aspects comes out very strongly in the work—outwardly at least, the composition is more about the precipitation gradient. And from that perspective I certainly wish the only treeless landscapes on the island were the ones that evolved that way.

Darren

Mapping "The Last Island" | Note Length

Ok, back to “musical mapping” temporarily. As I’ve said I’m proposing a talk for this fall’s Annual Meeting of the North American Cartographic Information Society on the relationships between musical and geographical space and ways of “mapping” those relationships, applied specifically to The Last Island. Again these ideas tend toward the academic, and the mapping part is still a work-in-progress, so my main goal in showcasing them here is to pace myself and test them out; I’m mostly curious as to how well the imagery communicates the broad points even without all the explanation. Maybe parts of it are interesting purely as artwork? (Probably not yet.) If the whole thing is too abstract, then just listen to the piece if you haven’t yet—I’ve heard enough reactions that I can promise you’ll find it soothing :-) .

For a quick recap of the mapping approach (much more detail here if you dare), I’m analyzing the piece in terms of three categories of elements: environmental, visual (painted), and musical. The three categories correspond/align with each other to varying degrees, i.e. the music evokes the painted imagery (the slides in the video) which in turn depicts natural environments/landscapes along the island journey. Since I wrote the piece before selecting the visual imagery, setting up the framework for this mapping process, or knowing that I was going to do either one of those things at all, those correspondences vary in their strength and clarity. Even if the composition had come at the end instead of the beginning that might still be the case, given that slavishly tying the choice and progression of musical elements to, say, rainfall or elevation might not have produced the most listenable piece; that would've been a bad outcome despite my OCD compulsion to treat it like a research subject. (I’m realizing that it fits in well though with my cartography-not-painting framing of the worldviews.)The point of the mapping exercise then is two-fold: 1) to figure out the best ways of visually representing those correspondences, so that they can be absorbed more quickly and clearly than in the 12-minute duration of the piece, and 2) to get a visual sense of how strong those correspondences actually turned out to be, given what I just said about not obsessing too much about them during the composition process.

Turning to the maps/diagrams themselves, again think of the bands representing the environmental elements as abstractions, layered on top of one another, of the island landscape seen from above (and seen from within in the painted slides). Think of the musical elements as abstractions of the printed musical score, standing on edge as it winds through the visual/physical landscape. And given the length of the diagrams I’ve oriented the image vertically; I’ll be referring to top, bottom, left and right as if you were looking at the sheet horizontally. (Go to the website to see slightly larger versions.)

Musical Elements: Note Length

The maps I shared before illustrated the “structural elements” of theme and path—in quotes because they’re not musical “elements” themselves so much as frameworks for organizing what I consider the actual elements of pitch, tempo, dynamics, instrumentation, etc…Here I’ll go into two of these actual musical elements, attack and tempo, grouped together because they’re both aspects of note length. (“Rhythm” is too, but since I’m more concerned with general variations in note length from measure to measure or section to section than from note to note, I don’t plan to deal with it.)

1. Attack. I still need a better term for this—I mean it as the number of discrete notes, whether of the same pitch or different pitches (“note” implies pitch, so that term won’t work) begun or “attacked” within some given time interval such as a measure. (A note tied over from the previous measure doesn’t count.) I’ve tallied the number of attacks per measure for each voice/instrument (each voice/instrument represented by a horizontal band), and depicted the count on a grayscale gradient from light (1-2 attacks per measure) to dark (27-32 per measure, unscientifically increasing the range at the upper end assuming that adding a note is less perceptible when there are more of them).

   The outlines of varying thicknesses around some of the boxes represent effects (occurring somewhere in that measure) where it’s impossible to count the number of attacks or where the notes are played so quickly that it’s hard to evaluate how important they are—think of these as another layer of activity on top of the tally of “regular” notes. From thinnest to thickest outline, again representing a gradient from least to most activity, these are 1) grace notes, 2) rolled chords or glissandi (mostly on the harp), and 3) trills (including rolls on percussion).

   (Incidentally I’ve arranged voices/instruments differently than in a standard score, ordering percussion, strings, winds, and brass from top to bottom. With this arrangement the map gets “thicker” where the percussion and brass are the most active, rather than just denser (with internal gaps getting filled in). Thickening seems a bit more impactful at a glance than densifying, plus the typical score arrangement is completely arbitrary for what I’m trying to communicate.)

2. Tempo. Number of attacks per measure only captures ones aspect of note length, because measures don’t all take up the same amount of time even if the time signature (number of beats) is constant. So, the relative tempo speeds need to be illustrated as a separate map or layer. There’s an easy way to do that: since I’ve set up the diagrams for time to progress at a constant rate from left to right (see the ticker tape at the top of the sheet), bar lines (measure divisions) will be farther apart at slow tempos than at fast tempos, and if they contain fermatas (holds) at any tempo. Analogous to the attack diagram, this results in a darker/denser appearance (i.e. more activity) where the tempo is faster.

As with the theme and path diagrams, the vertical lines are my attempt to call out the alignments and misalignments between the different types of elements; basically they represent the edges between experiential zones. This time I’ve added a higher level of zone, separated by the thicker lines, labeled at the top of the sheet as “chapters.” Think of these as broader divisions of the musical narrative based on activity or mood; in the video the labels appear on the first slide of each chapter.

Ideally the attack and tempo diagrams would be superimposed to create a more complete picture of note length at glance. I’ve tried this (see the sheet below), but the bar line density fades into the background unless I thicken the lines so much as to be distracting. I’ve also tried subdividing the measures with additional lines to further darken/densify the fast tempos, but that just makes everything look darker. Another option, which would take a lot of work but I might do it anyways, is to merge the note tally and beats-per-minute components of each measure into a single number—so for example a measure with 8 attacks but a tempo twice as fast as some chosen baseline tempo would functionally have 16. This would create a more concise and accurate illustration of note length, but also more opaque. (For any of you who can visualize this before I re-calculate a few thousand measures—thoughts?)

Despite all this complexity, I’m hoping what’s clear is a broad-brush correspondence between “high intensity” zones across environmental and musical elements. The zone where elevation, temperature, rainfall, and tree cover are cumulatively greatest/highest—most saturated in terms of color—roughly lines up with the shortest note durations in terms of attack and tempo and what I consider to be the “climax” of narrative at the beginning of the “Emerging” chapter, namely emerging from the cloud forest into the high, bright moorland zone. (This makes me think I might add “sunlight” as an environmental element?)

There is one somewhat obvious misalignment here—the fastest tempos (densest bar lines) actually occur well before the climax point. The chapter label “Climbing” provides a clue though, and later maps will illustrate it better: this could be considered the most “energetic” part of the piece in terms of physical exertion and mental anticipation.

Slow and Fast, Long and Short

Part of me is questioning my decision to represent time linearly from left to right, so that slow tempo zones get stretched out in space and fast zones get compressed. It seemed the most logical way to go at the time. But shouldn’t slower speeds, loosely representing slower walking speeds and less coverage of space, look more compressed and therefore static on the musical map? And consistent with what I said earlier about the map looking “thicker” in zones of greater intensity, shouldn’t a faster traversing of space appear wider on the page, so that overall the map looks “bigger”? I’ve gone ahead and tested out this other option, which I’ve labeled “distorted time” (again, note the ticker tape) and placed side-by-side with the original “constant time” version on the sheet below. In both cases I’ve overlaid the tempo map (the bar lines) with the attack map as I suggested above.

I’ve also added the visual element (the row of slides from the video) back in to show that the time distortion also has the effect of (slightly) un-distorting space: the slides are a little more equal in size relative to the constant-time version. Overlaying the musical score/”journey” on a traditional physical map without any perceptible spatial distortion, as opposed to one of my worldviews where certain landscape fragments can be enlarged to imply more time spent there, would be possible with the distorted-time version because it’s the score that would be instead compressed or stretched out.

I haven’t decided yet which version is the better visual representation of relative travel speed and, combined with the light-to-dark attack gradient, overall intensity of experience. Any thoughts on which map shows the middle section of the score as more “active” than the beginning and end?

Going with the distorted-time version might mean that the tempo diagram disappears and gets incorporated into the attack diagram in the way I described above—multiplying the attack tally by some factor representing relative tempo. Otherwise the two diagrams, whether superimposed or not, contradict each other: shorter note lengths mean darker in terms of attacks but lighter (more widely-spaced bar lines) in terms of tempo.

Alright, more musical maps to come later—probably with a little less theory involved!

Darren

Fog Meadows

In my previous post I described a particularly dramatic wet-dry gradient—along a roughly six-hour hike from cloud forest to desert on Robinson Crusoe Island off the coast of Chile. At the beginning of that same 2019 South America trip I visited what might be considered an even more striking example, in the Lomas de Lachay Reserve a few hours north of Lima, Peru.

The Lomas de Lachay Reserve entrance at the Panamerican Highway, about 100m above sea level.

The heart of the Reserve and oasis at about 400m.

A Google Maps view of the Reserve during the non-fog season, with the main path highlighted (the straight part is the gravel entry road). The fog is heavily seasonal, generally present from June to October; during the rest of the year the entire landscape turns brown, here still visible as darker than the surrounding desert. Actually I had visited this site before, back in 2001, during the dry season and had vowed to return someday during the “right” time of year. I surprised myself a bit by actually following through on that twenty years later. But as you’ll see below, I sort of missed the mark again by getting there in late October at the very tail end of the wet season when the landscape was not at its most vibrant.

Lomas literally means “hills,” but it also refers to a particular environmental condition that I’d consider one of the ecological wonders of the world despite its obscurity: along the nearly rainless coasts of Peru and northern Chile, the foothills of the Andes intersect the coastal fog layer to create lush islands of green surrounded by barren desert. These oases, sometimes called “fog meadows,” are very scattered and restricted, having to do as much with the shape of the topography (trapping the fog more effectively in certain areas) as with elevation.

Lachay is considered one of the best examples of these; the fog creates a gradient from barren desert through grassland, culminating in a sort of wet savanna dotted with lichen-draped trees. While it can’t be called a forest, large shrubs are mostly absent, and those trees are oddly skeletal (I haven’t read anything suggesting that they’ve died, but I saw no evidence of leaves), the contrast between beige and florescent green is still surreal. (For some reason the ecological effects of the fog seem much stronger in Peru than Chile; to the south the lomas are characterized more by profusions of cacti than by continuous carpets of green.)

The walk from the highway to the center of the oasis (where the loop begins) takes about an hour and half, climbing roughly 300m, with an additional hour or so to reach the ridgeline 80m above and then loop back around.

At the Reserve entrance, on the Panamerican highway, the landscape is completely devoid of visible plant life.

Entering the reserve, groundcover-like plants (a couple centimeters high) appear after just a few meters of elevation gain. During the height of the fog season, when the moisture spreads consistently over a larger area, this zone would be green.

The groundcover gradually transitions to taller grasses and herbs…

…that become denser and greener.

Seen looking back downhill, the gradient is particularly striking given the gentleness of the slope.

At the center of the oasis the trees appear; a month or so earlier this landscape would’ve been even greener. The ivy-like species, climbing the bases of the trees and covering much of the ground, I suspect is exotic, though I couldn’t find out for sure. About half of the reserve’s plant species are non-native, the result of past grazing activity plus some unenlightened land management practices.

The trail up to the ridgeline, increasingly rugged, passes by clusters of bromeliads.

Approaching the ridgeline the vegetation dries out again, probably because this late in the season the fog isn’t as concentrated as in the valleys lower down (to the right).

On the north side of the ridge (to the left in the ridgeline photo above) the landscape becomes even drier with every meter of descent, with barren desert again farther below and in the distance. Cacti appear on the upper slopes where the fog spills over the ridgeline to some degree.

Looping back down into the valley, looking back southward toward the desert and the coast. Again a few months earlier the foreground would be even greener, and most of the dark brown in the distance would be green as well.

Fog Meadows (watercolor on paper, 36”x48”) captures my experience of walking this route through the Reserve.

The journey, animated. As in my other works depicting distinct routes of travel, you can see that the path (in red) is a greatly distorted version of the real thing (in yellow above), shaped by compositional considerations as well as the relative “experiential weight” of the different segments.

There was an advantage to visiting the Reserve when the extent of green was more limited (reduced to small pockets) than it would’ve been at the height of the fog season: smaller “islands” tend to mean more accessible edges, in this case above the oasis as well as below. But the photograph below—on display in the visitor center—shot from the same ridgeline as my photo above but fully green during the foggiest part of the year, makes me want to go back yet a third time to experience that even sharper wet-dry contrast. Given current events I’m still going to take my time planning another international trip, but since climate change will certainly disrupt the finely-tuned fog patterns there, I know I shouldn’t wait too long.

Darren

Robinson Crusoe Island

To give you—and myself—a break from the more academic tilt of recent posts, this time I’m going to write about a particular place/worldview as I’ve done in most of the earlier entries in this blog. And while I still plan to tie up loose ends with the “musical cartography” and “long gradients” topics in the near future, of course there’ll be more of these place-focused posts as I keep producing work and hopefully start to travel again….

This one will deal with Robinson Crusoe Island, in the Juan Fernández archipelago about 400 miles off the central coast of Chile. (Daniel Defoe’s novel was inspired by the adventures of the sailor Alexander Selkirk after he was marooned there.) There are two other islands in the archipelago, but only Robinson Crusoe is inhabited and simple to visit—“simple” being relative though given that the trip requires a very expensive and erratically-scheduled flight from Santiago. I went there, with thankfully no scheduling issues, at the end of my month-long trip to South America in fall 2019.

Robinson Crusoe Island, with wet east side and dry west side (the barren areas east of the main ridgeline muddle the picture a bit—they’re generally the result of deforestation and erosion rather than aridity).

San Juan Bautista, the only population center in the archipelago, on the east coast of Robinson Crusoe with the island’s main ridgeline behind. This coastline has a Mediterranean climate, but essentially all of the island’s native lowland vegetation has been removed or replaced.

One reason for going was my usual obsession with sharp ecological contrasts on islands. Unlike the imaginary one depicted musically in The Last Island, Robinson Crusoe is relatively small and low, covering about 20 square miles and rising to just over 4000’, and so it doesn’t rise to alpine heights; but the topography is dramatic, generating a rainfall gradient from sea level to the ridgetops as well as a striking rain shadow effect across the island’s western peninsula. The other attraction is an endemic palm, Juania australis, very ornamental but notoriously difficult to cultivate. It’s one of Chile’s two native/endemic palm species, the other being the much better-known Chilean wine palm (Jubaea chilensis) from the mainland.

A rare specimen of Juania australis in the cloud forest.

Me with another palm specimen in habitat.

Unfortunately both of these features of the island, and other aspects of its biological richness (its rate of endemism is higher than that of the Galápagos) are less salient than they once were. Deforestation, invasive plants and animals, fire, grazing, and erosion have greatly reduced the extent of native ecosystems and heavily degraded the pieces that remain. That was especially evident at the eastern end of the island (the area around Cerro Pascua on the map).

Panoramic near Cerro Pascua, where a combination of deforestation and runaway fires (lit intentionally, though I forget the reason—I don’t think this area was planted or grazed) has left all of the lowlands and much of the highlands barren and eroded.

Wooden dams have had some effect on slowing erosion in these gullies.

One of the pockets of forest that has escaped the fires.

Even where the tree canopy remains, the understory is completely bare and dessicated in most places due to foraging by exotic animals, especially rabbits.

Another forest pocket, in this case cloud forest, clinging to the ridgeline.

Large areas of forest have been mostly taken over if not replaced by invasive trees—in this view, that includes all of the bright green on the lower slopes (the native trees are more purplish).

That was all very depressing to see. Luckily though, I had an extremely knowledgeable and accommodating guide who made it all very worthwhile and brought me to a few of the more pristine, harder-to-reach areas. One of those is a pocket of relatively intact cloud forest (images following) without an official trail, below another part of the main ridgeline near Cerro Damajuana. (The palm images above are also from this area.)

You can see a few scattered palms in the lower right.

My visit ended with a roughly six-hour hike between the wet and dry sides of the island, from the town on the east coast to the airport (and my flight back to the mainland) at the western tip. Technically it began at Mirador Selkirk, an observation point on the main ridgeline; the uphill route from town is entirely through exotic vegetation and given the limited time until my flight I traveled it before sunrise. But even across the ridgeline few parts of the overall route have escaped degradation, including what must’ve originally been a transitional dry forest/savanna zone at the lower edge of the forest. (From earlier posts you’ll know that I find ecotones like this to be especially entrancing, but they’re particularly (and for me frustratingly) susceptible to human impacts given that they tend to be both topographically accessible and wet enough to be useful for non-preservation purposes.) But despite this, the contrast between the extremes is probably just as striking as it used to be.

View across the cloud forest to the arid western tip of the island, from Mirador Selkirk (an observation point) on the main ridgeline. Pockets of the forest ahead are in decent shape but essentially everything behind, from the town up to and including the ridgeline vegetation in the foreground, is exotic. And, like on the eastern part of the island, the bright green vegetation is also not native.

A relatively intact area of cloud forest just below the ridgeline.

Looking back at a few Juania australis on the ridgeline, one of the few places where clusters of them have been able to survive (elsewhere it’s just one here and there).

A bit further downslope, with an endemic species of Gunnera in the foreground.

Dropping below the forest into (non-native) grassland and ranchland. This zone might’ve been naturally treeless, but was definitely more structurally and biologically diverse.

Moving further west as the landscape becomes progressively drier.

A few rainforest species, like these tree ferns, hang on in scattered spots of the dry zone where there’s groundwater.

The hike ends at the airport, in the desert at the western tip of the island.

Mirador, the one watercolor so far inspired by Robinson Crusoe, traces this journey from wet to dry (but oriented bottom-to-top). The distinction between intact and degraded vegetation is more ambiguous in paint than in real life, but I do play up what I imagine the landscape might’ve looked like by “restoring” it in places where the difference would stand out. (You might notice that a few of the views borrow from other parts of the island.)

Mirador, watercolor on paper, 48”x28.”

The journey from wet to dry (bottom to top), animated view-by-view.

It was interesting to compare impressions from Robinson Crusoe and the Galápagos, in terms of environmental value and situation. Both places have extremely high rates of ecological diversity and species endemism that face serious challenges from human activity. The Galápagos is more famous given its charismatic fauna and its Darwin-associated history, plus the fact that such a high percentage of its environment is relatively pristine (or at least can be perceived as such); if or when its species and landscapes start falling off the edge in ways that the tourists can’t overlook, I know it’ll be a gut punch for me and most people who are conscious of these things. But on Robinson Crusoe I found myself wondering: If or when these last remnants of cloud forest are taken over by invasives or dried out by climate change, how much will that truly matter, to me and to anyone else who’s paying attention? (The island residents themselves seem relatively conservation-conscious nowadays, but they don’t live their lives lamenting what’s already been lost or depressed about what might be to come. Most visitors probably see things the same way, and maybe even most biologists.) There are plenty of other places that are much further gone, and the world has easily moved on….

Darren

Mapping "The Last Island" | Structure

For this fall’s NACIS conference (the North American Cartographic Information Society), I’m proposing a talk along the lines of the ideas I introduced in my last post—the relationships between musical and geographical space, and what those relationships mean for “mapping” both in parallel. Below is a brief recap of those ideas followed by some of my early experiments in applying them to The Last Island, my orchestral composition that started me down this “musical cartography” road.

Both visual and musical depictions of a geographical/environmental “journey” involve travel through time, as well as through space in the sense that the music “picks up” and plays back characteristics of that space as the sound moves through it just as paint or photography does for the eyes. Last time I used a 3D model (shown again below), incorporating a hypothetical musical version of the ecological journey I’ve depicted in my watercolor Divide, to illustrate this structural relationship. The third dimension is represented by the height of the printed score, and certain musical elements that have a “vertical” component. So the main difference between the two mediums isn’t that music is temporal while painting is spatial; it’s that the musical journey is completely “directed,” a one-dimensional path that winds through two dimensions whereas the path of even a “linear” visual journey is itself always 2D to some extent.

Obviously I’ve had a long interest in these journeys generally, which has led to most of my latest worldviews plus most recently The Last Island (which became a multi-media project but began as a solely musical representation of an imaginary island ascent). I’ve been experimenting with methods of “mapping” the piece along with the visual/geographical elements that it’s meant to evoke, in terms of both overall structure and more detailed elements. The goal, both for my own enrichment and possibly for this conference talk (if my abstract is accepted!), is to find out 1) which of those methods best illustrate how the different elements of each medium shift along the journey, and 2) how well those shifts parallel each other given that I wrote the music without the intention of lining it up with any visual imagery. The results aren’t very digestible yet, and so this post is mostly a way to mark some progress and to give an overall sense of how cartographic/design thinking might be applied to music in a very methodical, detailed way. I’ve been working on a series of diagrams (“linear maps”), a selection of them shown in the image below. Skip down to that if you’d like just a quick sense of what I’ve been up to, taking from it what you will, but keep reading if you’d like to get a bit more deeply into the weeds with me….

Overall Setup

Analogous to the 3D model from last time, the sheet of diagrams aligns environmental, painted, and musical elements built up upon each other in that order. Though I broke the rules by adapting the painted elements to the music rather than the other way around, you can think of this ordered layering as representing an “order of operations”: environmental elements (in this case imaginary) inspire the painted representation which in turn inspires the musical representation. (Given the length of the diagrams I’ve oriented the image vertically; from here on I’ll be referring to top, bottom, left and right as if you were looking at the sheet horizontally).

So why no 3D model this time? As I explained last time, The Last Island doesn’t actually lend itself so well to a 3D representation, given that a 2D visual version (a painting/worldview) of that particular island journey doesn’t exist—I can’t show it as a curvy visual/musical path through 2D visual/geographical space. Instead the visual component is just a linear sequence of images taken from many different worldviews, strung together after the fact for the multi-media video, representing a straightened-out and “deconstructed” version of what would otherwise be that curvy path. Technically I could still build a 3D model using that linear sequence—it would just be a very skinny 2D “plane” without any meaningful component of width—and I might still end up doing that at some point in order to clearly distinguish between horizontal and vertical and for another reason I’ll mention below. But since I haven’t done that yet, note that on the sheet:

• The environmental elements in the bottom half, like the painted elements, are each represented by linear bands. In a 3D model they would each appear as a different component of that skinny horizontal 2D plane, separated out. (It would probably take multiple models to illustrate clearly.)

• The bands representing musical elements are abstractions of the printed musical score— components of the vertical dimension in a 3D model (like in the generic example from last time), separated out.

Environmental Elements

These include the following from bottom-up, arranged to represent a sort of (very simplified) “order of operations” like I described for the sheet overall:

1. Elevation

2. Rainfall (a function of elevation)

3. Heat (also a function of elevation)

4. Tree Cover (a function of heat/rainfall). I could’ve also called this “biomass” or “plant density”; if I were being scientific about it I’d probably break it into several different elements.

5. Landscape (or ecosystem; a function of all the above). I’ve divided this into “foreground” and “beyond,” applicable to the painted images that include a view into the distance or represent a “mental detour” (more on that later). Though I haven’t labeled it on the diagrams, all of the elements above also incorporate these “foreground” and “beyond” components where applicable.

Painted Elements

Each individual landscape in the sequence of paintings is sized according to its duration in the video. This does make most of them too small to read—you’ll just have to watch the video again!—but it’s the result of equal space intervals representing equal time intervals. (If I ever turned this sequence of images into a 2D worldview I would need to consider whether to size them in the same way relative to each other—in the watercolor compositions I do typically size the fragments based on their psychological “salience” but there are many more factors involved than the amount of time “spent” in each landscape. This also raises the issue of this being way too many images to fit into one painting; it’s another result of having put the imagery together after-the-fact, wanting to make sure the video imagery keeps moving.)

Musical Structure

I’ve labeled the two music-related diagrams as musical “elements,” though they aren’t elements so much as larger components or devices that organize other elements within.

1. Paths. I mentioned that music, unlike visual representation, restricts experience to a single path through space (and of course time). And though that 1D path may wind through 2D space, in the case of the The Last Island that “space” is also just a 1D (linear) strip of imagery. But as I began to ask in the previous post, could multiple musical paths progress at the same time, evoking 2D space even if each path is itself straight/linear? What if The Last Island didn’t just depict one journey but two simultaneous journeys, or—more nuanced—one journey that jumps back and forth between two (or even more) different paths, suggesting a physical journey interrupted by “mental detours” to another place? Or more accurately, a mental journey (since none if this is really “physical”) interrupted by “meta-mental detours”? (This all raises of who is actually doing the “journeying”—is it the listener or is it someone imagined by the listener? Or multiple someones in different places? I won’t get any more caught up in this now, but I think it’s either a fascinating question or a silly one.)

   I didn’t think about this idea of multiple paths in a very methodical way while writing The Last Island. But there are certain zones where, based on sufficient “divergences” in some combination of elements (key, register, instrumentation, pitch, and possibly others), parts of the score could be thought of as splitting off from the rest to evoke a different place. Generally that place is actually forward or backward on the same path, suggesting the imagining of places to be visited (anticipation) or places already visited (memory), rather than a different path “off to the side.” But I think that’s overthinking it (if all of this isn’t already over-thinking); the concept of spatial “thickness” is the same.

   In the Path diagram, these anticipation/memory “detours” are represented by the light rows of arrows, and the divergent paths are in dashed boxes. Sometimes those paths are made up of certain layers in the score, and at other times all layers; the mind is either partially or completely “wandering.” The heavy dashed lines show how these “tears” in the path align with parallel shifts in the painted and environmental elements. Picture the paths in the dashed boxes as receding into background, and the painted/environmental elements between the dashed lines as shifting over, per the horizontal/vertical distinction I had to clarify earlier given the lack of a 3D model. (This is the case I alluded to where that model would have been useful.) Also note the lighter dashed lines and darker rows of arrows labeled “view ahead.” These demarcate distant places, again forward or backward, that are actually visible from the main path so that they don’t require “mental detours” of the same degree. In these cases there’s no break in the path.

2. Theme. Writing The Last Island based not on a particular worldview, but still inspired by the idea of environmental edges and contrasts along a journey (rather than continuous, imperceptible change), I divided the piece into into discrete sections each identified by one of two themes defined mostly by melody (a combination of pitch and rhythm) but with a harmonic component as well. The choice of two themes, rather than a different one associated with each successive ecological zone, frankly had a lot to do with having had two pre-conceived themes already in my head; but, it also meshed well with my interest in the wet-dry dichotomy in particular. With that starting point, and at the same time also wanting to depict the more ecologically complex experience of an island ascent, I landed on the idea of “mental detours” and distant views that I described above: “traveling” psychologically back-and-forth multiple times between dry (Theme A) and wet (Theme B) places in the midst of an “actual” linear journey inland and uphill. It’s that underlying, continuous inland/uphill journey that makes the themes different each time they return, inflected or overlaid by any number of musical elements that evolve through space and time without obscuring the thematic identities.

   These musical “zones,” defined by clear edges and contrasts, then informed a largely parallel ecological zonation pattern in the sequence of images, and in turn the diagramming of ecological elements that would produce the landscapes in those images. Again, this inspiration went in the wrong direction and I didn’t write the music with the intent of slavishly adhering to a visual or physical precedent. That’s why the boundaries between thematic and ecological zones don’t always line up. It also explains, partly, why from about 7:30 onward the association of Themes A and B with dry and wet respectively breaks down. But there’s a conceptual justification too. Aligned with the dry forest zone between about 6:30 and 7:30, transitional between dry and wet, the two themes overlay and become confounded in the process, losing their respective dry and wet associations for the remainder of the piece.

More updates on this “mapping” process to come soon….

Darren

Musical Time & Space

I still have a few more posts to add to my “long gradients” series—moving on to the experiences of other patterns and places, since I think I’ve said all I have to say for now on how they might be represented photographically or otherwise. But having recently finished my orchestrated version of The Last Island (click the image to the left and then hit play on youtube if you haven’t had a chance to watch/listen yet!), and toying with the idea of proposing it and “musical cartography” more generally as subjects of a talk for this fall’s NACIS conference, I’m taking a break from long gradients to write a few music-oriented posts. I’ll wait till the next post to focus on The Last Island—how I structured the piece based on spatial ideas about the geography it evokes as much as my relatively limited musical composition/theory training. The post you’re reading now will be more theoretical, thinking about a general framework of how musical, visual, and geographical space interact. While it might turn out not to have much bearing on the next post, it’s been necessary for me to work through that thinking.

The purpose of these two music-themed posts is mainly to organize my thoughts and possible ways of presenting them, and to get a sense of the ideas’ potential from my own perspective and also maybe yours. I know these recent musings have been on the drier, academic side—frankly I’d never intended to shy away from that sort of thing in this blog—but don’t worry, imagery from incredible parts of the world will soon make its way back into the mix!

Musical vs. Physical Space

I’ve often thought about how musical “space” relates to physical space, whether the latter is three-dimensional (the “real world”) or two-dimensional (maps, photographs, and other depictions). At first thought music as a medium seems distinct in that it relies on the temporal dimension—music couldn’t exist if time stopped. But if you think about it a bit more, this apparent distinctiveness isn’t right: Your visual (or tactile, olfactory, etc..) experience of a place, or of a visual representation of that place, is no less about the passage of time than a musical representation of that place would be. Hiking in the Grand Canyon, standing still at the edge of the Grand Canyon while exploring it with your eyes, or exploring a photograph of the Grand Canyon with your eyes are all essentially equivalent to “exploring” it by listening to Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite—all are explorations that have duration, just made using different senses. These different modes of exploration are also tied up in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, inspired by the composer’s ambling through an art gallery. His physical act of walking, the movement of his eyes over each painting, and someone else’s listening to the piece are all parallel or intermingled temporal experiences (though the musical version likely condenses or extends the duration of the physical experience).

Of course the physical, visual experiences of the Grand Canyon and art gallery do have crucial spatial aspects, in 2D and/or 3D, that the musical experiences don’t. But music does have spatial components, whether that’s the physical 3D space of a concert hall or the 2D form of the printed musical score. Those are obviously different things than the 3D canyon or gallery, or 2D paintings of the canyon or in the gallery. But being the over-thinking person that I am, I was interested in figuring out how these different types of physical form and space “line up,” in the same way that the progression of time in listening to a piece of music corresponds to the time taken to experience a physical place or visual representation of that place.

The rest of this post will address this question with regards to a particular real place that I’ve talked about before (the island of La Gomera in the Canaries), the visual representation it inspired me to create (Divide), and a hypothetical musical composition inspired by my experience of that visual representation and in turn by the real place. The Last Island—even though it incorporates a musical composition I’ve actually written—wouldn’t work for laying out this theoretical framework because the imaginary island it’s based on doesn’t exist in the form of a map/worldview.

Aerial photograph of La Gomera, Canary Islands (Google Maps).

(Psycho-) Geographical Space

If you ignore the vertical dimension (elevation/altitude), the two dimensions describing the “real” island of La Gomera are of course length/distance—whether that’s degrees of latitude and longitude, meters, or some other unit. Together these dimensions form “geographical space.” Within that space an infinite number of environmental elements—elevation (as measured by contour lines), temperature, precipitation, species composition, etc…—that vary with distance can also be measured. An aerial photograph of the island, no matter how “accurate,” is technically a map—it leaves out tons of information, makes “decisions” about color and the like, and is a flat representation of the earth’s curved surface. Even your view of the island from a parachute would be a mental map of the place—your eyes and brain would be making various decisions and distortions. But since the goal of the image isn’t to reflect human prejudice or experience, think of it here as representing “the real place.”

Divide (watercolor on paper, 20”x20”)—a spatially-distorted re-imagination of La Gomera’s geographical space.

Divide, though, is fully intended to be a distortion of the real thing, and of course I’ve very intentionally been calling it and my other worldviews (my views of the world) maps. Not only has the geographical space of the island been re-imagined in painted elements (added to the two axes in the diagram) correlating with the distribution of environmental elements; that re-imagined space is no longer fully linear, as indicated by the crooked arrows. Essentially each landscape view/“fragment” takes a single vantage point and blows it way up, roughly proportional to its importance in my mind based on how I experienced that spot in real life. The work is a physical map, representing a mental map of the island that’s been highly inflected by memory, preferences and value judgements, and the places I happened to visit when I was there. Geographical space has actually become psycho-geographical space—it sounds like academese but it really just means physical space that’s become distorted in the mind and then on paper by experience. (Technically all space is like that, but again I’m focusing on intent.)

Divide with path of travel overlaid in red, and the different views numbered in succession. Note that in this case travel can go in either direction.

The psycho-geographical space of Divide with “musical elements” incorporated into the two axes, adding a musical component to the route of travel through time (and space). Below I’ll say more about the musical elements themselves and what I mean by “horizontal.”

“Travel” Time (& Space)

Now I’ll get back to the issue of time—the temporal dimension of experiencing/representing a place whether musically or visually. I’ve described before how in many of my worldviews the eye and mind are meant to “explore” the places I depict in roughly linear “journeys” paralleling how I explored and remember the real locales. Though a viewer’s eyes won’t automatically follow the path I intend them to, as you’ve seen I often take the opportunity to highlight the route I had in mind when creating the work. On La Gomera and in Divide that was a generally north-south journey across the island from wet to dry.

A hypothetical piece of music, playing out in time to evoke the spatial but equally temporal experience of exploring some aspect La Gomera, could trace the same journey as the dotted red line (or a different one for that matter). In that case the visual (painted) elements, and in turn the environmental elements that vary with distance in geographic space, would be correlated (in some way that’s been chosen by the composer) with musical elements that evoke those spatial variations. Of course these musical elements don’t really “exist” in that 2D space in a meaningful way except along the travel route, where a musical composition would essentially bring them into being and to our ears. Everywhere else they exist only as potentialities—options “out there” for the composer to select where (and when) they intersect with a chosen musical path through time and space.

If it’s thought of as a musical in addition to visual journey, that path needs to run in just one direction (unless you do some fancy things with a recording). And to make it more comparable to The Last Island (in ways you’ll see later) I’ve also added the aerial views into the sequence of experiences and extended the route to double-back on itself and return northward to the wet part of the island, importantly not suggesting part of a physical journey but rather an imagining or reminiscing.. So this end part of the journey would be purely psychological not just for the viewer-listener but also for someone physically traveling the earlier part of the route.

Musical Elements, Horizontal & Vertical

So what are these “musical elements”? I haven’t done enough research to know whether there’s considered to be a “correct” breakdown or if one is even possible. But for my purposes now and especially the next post, I’ve made an attempt at a categorization that can inform an analysis of musical “spatiality” or “dimensionality” in general and in relation to how I’ve composed The Last Island. I’ll get more into it next time (they may now seem like somewhat arbitrary distinctions and divisions), but essentially I think of those elements as tempo, duration (incorporating rhythm and articulation), key (key change and duration, and key “mood” or “brightness”), pitch (range, diversity and register), instrumentation, voices (the number of different musical “lines” playing simultaneously), and dynamics (volume). There’s also the broader concept of motif or theme, corresponding partly but not entirely with “melody,” which is inflected by these other elements. Motifs, inflected in various ways, can be used to structure a musical composition into sections or “zones” just like environmental elements can be organized into ranges that structure a place like La Gomera into temperature, precipitation, or vegetation zones on an ecological map, or as I’ve done with the landscape fragments in Divide, “experiential” zones.

To better organize my thinking I’ve classified these seven elements (putting motif on a higher level) into four general categories that include various combinations and aspects of the elements:

• MOTION (tempo, duration, key, pitch)

• TEXTURE (duration)

• COLOR (duration, key, pitch, instrumentation)

• WEIGHT (voices, dynamics)

These aren’t perfectly distinct from each other and like the seven elements I don’t claim they’re “correct,” but in the process of working through my thinking they have been holding stable—some indication that they aren’t arbitrary.

Again each of the seven musical elements can correlate, however the composer chooses, with environmental/visual elements that vary horizontally (as in parallel with the ground, not just left-to-right on your screen) in a 2D representation of the earth’s surface. This means that just as the viewer’s path of travel (like the dotted red line in Divide) through psycho-geographical space passes though various combinations of those environmental/visual elements, a piece of music tracing that same path passes through various combinations of those musical elements that also vary horizontally as the music plays out. This horizontal variation through time and space happens to align with the horizontal dimension of a musical score on the page.

So then what does the vertical dimension of a printed score (or of music generally) represent? I’ve spent some time trying to figure out if there’s any agreement on what can be classified as vertical vs. horizontal components of music, and there doesn’t seem to be. It does seem clear, though, that as on the printed page, these two dimensions have some reality, and that musical elements exist on some fuzzy continuum between horizontal and vertical. Tempo and duration—reliant on the passage of time (and when overlaid on the map, movement through space) for any meaning—are clearly horizontal, but most elements are some mix of vertical and horizontal, and all are horizontal to some degree because by definition they vary over time. Pitches, for example, create various effects through vertical stacking (roughly, harmony) as well as being spread out horizontally on the page and as the piece plays out (roughly, melody, depending on how prominent the musical line is). One way to visualize the difference is through another cartographic analogy. On any map using various colors, values (black to white), or patterns (e.g. lines or dots) to illustrate zones of different elevations, climates, or any characteristic, all those colors, values, or patterns have a flat, “horizontal” component because they fill spaces spread across the page. But only the patterns are dependent on the sizes of the shapes they fill in; a given spacing of lines or dots wouldn’t show up in a space that’s below a certain size, while for color or value it would make no difference. Similarly a one-second snippet of music would probably give no meaningful indication of tempo or note duration but would provide at least a one-dimensional—vertical—indication of pitch or instrumentation. (Of course, just like the space on the map couldn’t be so tiny that the eye can’t perceive its color, that snippet of music would need to have some minimum duration; you can’t eliminate horizontality completely.)

Applying this concept of horizontal and vertical dimensions to my four broader categories of elements, it turns out that motion and texture are purely horizontal (incorporating duration and tempo plus the time-dependent aspects of key and pitch), while color and weight contain aspects fitting into both the horizontal and vertical dimensions. For the sake of space and simplicity I’ve used these four broader categories to label the musical axes, horizontal and vertical, on the diagrams.

Divide again, with a representation of an actual musical score aligned with the path of travel through time (and space). Here the vertical musical axis has been added in, and the horizontal axes are now more literally horizontal (lying flat). Note that this vertical axis has nothing to do with a vertical visual or environmental axis (representing, say, topography)—that’s been compressed into the 2D painted representation.

I pointed out earlier that the musical elements could be considered to exist throughout 2D (horizontal) space as potentialities, waiting to be picked up by a composer’s “path of travel” through it. Now that I’ve shown how an actual musical score fits into the 3D system, you might ask if there could be any printed musical equivalent to the horizontal 2D plane. For traditional music I think the answer is no. But there are contemporary scores, like some by John Cage, that are meant to be read and performed like “maps.” They’re collections of marks, often without any connection to standard musical notation, arrayed across the sheet like an abstract painting. The idea is for the performer to produce whatever sounds they evoke as the eye wanders across them in no particular direction. You could say that the marks represent these potential musical elements waiting to be picked up, with the route of “travel” created in real time rather than in advance. So what would the vertical element be in this case? I think that each mark would have its own vertical component, represented by dynamics and other aspects of the various elements as I explained above, but this would not be part of the score itself—unless the composer wanted to try somehow scoring the piece in 3D. You could also imagine multiple copies of the “map” layered vertically, each taken by a different performer; that would create multiple “routes” winding through the 2D space, layered vertically.

Multi-Media: Combining the Visual and Musical for the Listener

This whole idea of aligning musical and visual journeys on an actual map of some sort (in Pictures at an Exhibition it would be a map of the art gallery) raises the question of how visual imagery could be integrated into the act of listening to music meant to evoke a spatial journey (whether it’s a recording or a live performance). The Last Island combines the orchestral sound with an animation of still images representing the visual component of an imaginary island ascent, though as I mentioned in my last newsletter I do plan to explore other means of integrating the visual and musical media. Theoretically something like the 3D model above could be part of a presentation/performance if the viewer-listener could “fly though” it virtually as with digital architectural models.

The idea that you might use the model as part of the work/performance rather than just an explanatory tool also makes me wonder if there could be more creative possibilities for depicting the musical path itself. One might be making the path discontinuous as I’ve shown in the modified model below, if pieces of that journey are “psychological detours” like the extended end of the La Gomera path where the mind can jump around on the map however it wants. Another could be designing the journey to pass through multiple parts of the map simultaneously, along parallel paths or branching paths. That would represent, say, half the orchestra evoking one place while the other half simultaneously evokes another. The Last Island does that in one spot (sort of) as you’ll see later, but a more established example might be Borodin’s On the Steppes of Central Asia which actually was part of my inspiration for writing The Last Island. The piece is built on two melodies, one representing a group of Russians and the other a group of Mongols as they approach and then pass one another on the steppes. The melodies first alternate, then are played simultaneously. I can imagine somehow modeling this as two separate musical/visual paths of travel on a map, flowing in opposite directions through time and space.

A modified musical route through Divide, with the gap and disjointed piece at the end evoking a mental “jump” back in the direction already traveled.

But since The Last Island, for the time being, relies on animated still images to accompany the music, for a smooth segue between this post and the next one I’ve translated my hypothetical musical depiction of La Gomera into a similar sequence of still images:

Divide deconstructed into individual views (numbered at the bottom per the map) that could be animated to accompany the hypothetical musical composition as in The Last Island. The two horizontal axes from the model and maps above, representing psycho-geographical space, are here merged into a single axis that still incorporates both musical and visual (painted) elements. Those elements vary in tandem as the listener-viewer travels forward through time (and space) in the direction of the dotted red arrow representing the straightened-out travel path from the map/worldview. The vertical musical axis stays vertical, aligned with the score. All the arrows have become straight lines because geographical space here is one-dimensional—itself more of a path than space.

So that’s the theoretical framework, again mostly for the sake of getting it laid out in writing and in front of some eyes other than mine. If you’ve gotten this far and particularly if you have musical or cartographic leanings, any thoughts on whether it’s 1) intelligible and 2) interesting (maybe it’s all common sense once you think about it?) would be greatly appreciated!

Next time I’ll go into how my vision of the journey depicted in The Last Island drove my arrangement of the various musical elements in the orchestral composition.

Darren

Long Gradients | Transects (cont.)

In my last few posts I described how the most promising way of capturing and “compressing” long gradients (ranging over hundreds of miles) in temperature or precipitation would be a photographic transect made up of ground-level views shot at even intervals along the gradient and arranged in a sequence. I’ve mentioned that to add interest, clarity, and context, that sequence could be complemented by additional types of imagery. Here are some more thoughts on what that larger display might include:

1. The photo-transect itself, combining enough views to create an “average” picture of the gradient that outweighs local irregularities. This could be anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred views depending on the length of the gradient (a few hundred to a few thousand miles) and the size of the interval (say between 1 and 10 miles).

2. A baseline—the first image of the transect repeated over and over, “measuring” the gradual change in the transect that would be otherwise imperceptible photo-to-photo. For example each image in a rainforest-to-desert transect would be aligned with the initial rainforest image.

3. Gradient milestones marking significant moments, like the first appearance of a certain species. It would take the form of a single image here and there aligned with its location in relation to the transect. Those images could be duplicated images from the transect, additional images where the transect interval or route happens to miss those locations, or a combination.

4. A very, very long overall aerial photograph with the route of travel highlighted.

5. Zoomed-in aerials—enlarged portions of the overall aerial—each aligned with each image in the transect (essentially an aerial counterpart to each transect image).

6. Data, like graphs showing spatial changes in temperature/precipitation or the ranges of various species along the gradient.

Diagrammatic exhibit incorporating a photo-transect (in this case along a precipitation gradient) with supporting imagery, numbered according to the above outline. In actuality it would be much, much longer.

In the process of writing these posts I’m coming to the conclusion that if I ever do have a chance to document one of these long gradients more methodically, this approach probably wouldn’t be very engaging to someone not already interested in the subject. Aside from being challenging to create and then fit onto a wall, the result would probably be information overload. I’m not intending it to be artistic—it would be more along the lines of something you’d see in a design exhibition—and that might be the problem. I’ve explained why the “fractured” style I use to represent short gradients wouldn’t work in this case, but I think I might need to sacrifice some subtlety to move back in that more creative direction.

I’m confident that some version or subset of the outline above can be made to work—all that information could be useful in some form. But I thought I’d mention a different kind of “measure” of these gradients which could still capture the subtlety of the gradient while mostly avoiding the subtlety and complexity of vegetation as a measuring device: built form. On this past winter’s cross-country road trip the idea occurred to me to use Google Maps to count the frequency of rectangular vs. circular farm fields in a band along the highway, as an indication of increasing aridity traveling east to west (the two forms use different methods of irrigation). You can observe and quantify the presence or absence of a certain built/designed element much more easily than, say, a tree species that can vary in size and health (should the first instance of a species count as a “milestone” if it’s just a seedling or if it’s half-dead?). The choices are discrete, if not binary. There are a number of other built elements, material and stylistic, responding to temperature or precipitation that could be quantified in this way. On the trip I also noticed that at some point in Oklahoma, stone or brown-painted highway overpasses started replacing green-painted ones. I wasn’t paying full attention and so I’m sure there were more bridge designs than that, but the fact remains that they’d be relatively straightforward to categorize and count. This type of documentation wouldn’t necessarily require a photo-transect at all, probably just an aerial image overlaid with symbols: The sense of immersion provided by on-the-ground photography would much less important to conveying building patterns than conveying vegetation patterns. (And in some cases the counting itself could be done with satellite imagery or Google Street View rather than all that field work.) It still wouldn’t be a work of art, but it would be more manageable in every way.

A wet-dry gradient illustrated by quantifying the frequency of rectangular vs circular fields, represented respectively by blue and red dots on an aerial photograph. (Satellite images from Google Maps.)

In graduate school, reviewing a proposal (ultimately unsuccessful) I’d written to create one of these photo-transects, a professor noted a particular tunnel through the Alps that acts as a dividing line between “northern” shingled roofs and “southern” tiled roofs. If the boundary really is that sharp, then it actually represents a “milestone” along a temperature/precipitation gradient that’s certainly more gradual even if the climates on either side of the mountain or ridgeline above that tunnel are distinctly different. As with a vegetational milestone, that would be especially powerful—the boundary would distill and compress a much more subtle climatic gradient into a clear, single line.

That should wrap up my thoughts on representation for the time being—next time I’ll have more to say, and show, on other long gradients around the world….

Darren

Long Gradients | Time Travel

In this discussion of long gradients, I’ve been talking about “compression” in spatial terms—photographically representing continent-scale vegetation patterns within the space of a few feet of wall. But this compression is essentially about time rather than space—the many hours needed to experience the real-life gradient by vehicle versus viewing a photographic transect in the “space” of a few seconds or minutes. And as I mentioned in my introductory post on the topic, even the car trip version, if relatively speedy and uninterrupted, can have a miniaturizing effect, needless to say compared to doing it over weeks on foot. I sometimes wonder if, when cars and trains first came about, the average person found this to be one exciting aspect of the new technology. (I’m sure geography- and botany-minded people did.)

Airborne

This idea of compression-through-speed might also raise the question of why flying (at least for me) doesn’t produce an even stronger compressing effect than driving. I think flying does give most of us a surreal, world-shrinking feeling in the sense of going to sleep over one continent and waking up over another. But I’m referring more specifically to what’s happening on the ground in-between—it isn’t the same as theoretically traveling by land at the speed of a plane. But, going back to photo-representation, what about a transect from photos taken from a plane, requiring many fewer images than if shot from a car? Or, for that matter, satellite views like those of the central U.S. that I posted earlier? Those visuals would be lacking something too, for the same reason my worldviews nowadays are fractured into landscape and aerial perspectives rather than just the latter: The compressing, empowering effect depends greatly on an earthbound, immersive experience. Detachment from the ground changes it qualitatively.

But having said that, I’d guess that early astronauts’ captivation by their first views of earth from space was not just a new realization of the planet’s fragility but a feeling of omniscience—“complete knowing.” (As I’ve talked about, my worldviews actually grow out of both those feelings.) An airplane, despite affording a much narrower view of the earth moment-to-moment, does provide some degree of that omniscience; at the same time it remains relatively “earth-bound” in comparison to a spacecraft, plus more closely bound to the typical human experience. All this has been in my mind for a long time, and so on a cloudless flight from D.C. to San Francisco in 2016, somewhere over Kansas it occurred to me to attempt a photo-transect from the air. For the remaining three hours I took a picture every two minutes, an interval that left no gaps and produced only a small amount of overlap between views.

The flight path and photo locations, produced in Lightroom. Each number on the orange rectangles represents the number of photos taken near that spot (they’re grouped together only because I’m zoomed far out).

The photographic transect (from upper left to lower right) along the flight path in the map above. If I hadn’t made this for screen viewing I would’ve arranged them in a single row—or maybe, now that I’m seeing it, the stacking doesn’t necessarily muddle the effect?

The clouds did mostly stay away for the rest of the flight, but given the iffy lighting and the fact that I started the project already halfway across the country, the result turned out to be of limited value in terms of capturing the wet-dry gradient. Yet I think it’s effective just in showing how many images like this it takes to seamlessly cover half the country, and there is a compressing effect in that being fewer than I would’ve expected. The lack of gaps between images does in one way give it more impact than any remotely practical earthbound transect could. And, again, it beats even a single, seamless view from space because of that closer connection to earthly experience. If I ever manage to end up on another daytime, cloudless, trans-continental flight with a window seat away from the wing and a better phone camera, I might try it again.

There could be a few ways of splitting the difference between slow-and-earthbound and fast-and-airborne, in terms of the real-life experience of traveling the gradient as well as a photographic transect that you could create from that journey. One is high-speed rail, which I haven’t ridden in years but can imagine could be the best of both worlds (maybe across China, which has a similar forest-to-desert gradient as the U.S.). Another comes from a documentary I saw when I was young about the “African Flying Boat”—a low-flying plane used by the British Empire to link its colonies. My memory’s probably distorted but I recall that it flew just above the treetops. There are probably good reasons why it isn’t still around, but I remember being entranced.

Animated

So, there are factors other than speed—particularly “groundedness”—important in creating a compressed experience of gradients whether out in the real world or through some form of representation. But in terms of representation, the issue of temporal vs. spatial compression brings up a second question: instead of a hard-to-display photographic transect, why not a video? I think the answer is that, even though a photo-transect on the wall would still take some amount of time to take in, video is by definition a time-based medium no matter how long it runs. Theoretically a photo-transect could be absorbed in an instant, depending on how far back you’re standing. My mental image of a thousand-mile distance being compressed and then “laid out” spatially is much more powerful than a sped-up version of traveling that actual distance. (It reminds me of another image, stuck in my head from A Thread Across the Sea by John Steele Gordon—1,000 or so miles of future trans-Atlantic cable coiled up—compressed, in its own way—in the hull of a ship.) But a video could be much more practical to display, and even though temporal duration is a problem regardless of what that duration is, you can always try speeding it up. So I decided to give this a try too, though in this case along a short gradient: rainforest to alpine desert on the first half of my 2011 Kilimanjaro ascent (7,700’ to 13,500’).

This 2.5 min. video from my Kilimanjaro climb (the Lemosho Route) is really an animated photographic transect—a succession of still photos (taken at about every 50’ of elevation gain) laid out in time rather than in space. Shooting continuous video would’ve been barely possible, not to mention a bad way to experience the climb. Plus, along a short, elevational gradient, variations in slope mean that continuous shooting wouldn’t accurately capture vegetation changing in response to elevation.

For a long gradient the frame interval would be based on distance rather than elevation—definitely a much larger distance than the average distance covered between each of the frames in this animation, meaning that the total number of frames may or may not be larger.

I also made a second version of this video with much shorter frames—it’s basically a 17-second green-to-white blur.

The Kilimanjaro ascent, accelerated.

Though I might’ve gone overboard with the speed in this accelerated one, I do think it’s more effective than the slower version in encapsulating the gradient. But because of the aforementioned benefits of “laying it out,” of wanting viewers free to absorb it at their own speed, and of my interest in the challenge and novelty of making it legible, informative, and displayable, I still think the non-animated transect idea has more potential. Next time I’ll have some final thoughts on possibly where and how, for long gradients.

Darren

Long Gradients | Photographic Transects

Last time, using the example of my recent road trip from California to Maine and back, I delved into the topic of long gradients—spatial changes in vegetation, such as from wet to dry or temperate to tropical, only visible across many hundreds of miles and not mainly the result of elevation change. These gradients are harder to take in than the much more compressed variety (generally elevation-driven) that I usually focus on, but for me the fact that the climatic forces producing long gradients are essentially invisible compensates for the overwhelming scale and gives these gradients a similarly empowering, “world-shrinking” effect.

For years I’ve been thinking about how to depict gradients like this—in a way that makes them easier to experience than through many hours on the road but somehow still communicates their large-scale reality, since it’s the very fact of this compression that would give the representation its power. My typical method of representing small-scale gradients—fracturing them into a handful of scenes and juxtaposing them to sharpen the contrasts between—wouldn’t be ideal for larger-scale patterns. Those fractured compositions wouldn’t be able to incorporate enough pieces to convey the nuance of fine gradations without becoming impossibly long and narrow. Plus, there’s a point at which this sort of depiction moves beyond the realm of aesthetics and more firmly into photo-documentation. Making it visually interesting would still be important, but it would need to be composed in a way that’s more methodical and less about creating pleasing geometries.

The most obvious method would be a linear sequence (a transect) of photographs taken at even intervals along the gradient. I made a very non-methodical attempt at this during the westbound leg of the road trip —more on that below. The closest I’ve come to a methodical version is instead along a short, elevational gradient—on Santa Cruz Island in the Galapagos, about 600m of rise across a 20km distance (shared in an earlier post about that island.) I felt that this was only minimally successful. One reason is that the result, below, has limited legibility without dramatically enlarging it; another is that, keeping a constant interval of roughly 30m of elevation gain between photos, many of the views end up capturing anomalous conditions that aren’t very representative of the gradient as a whole. It also raises questions about where to stand, which way to point the lens, and how much to include in each view. In particular, if travel is by road, asphalt tends to fill up a large percentage of each frame.

A photographic transect across the northern half of Santa Cruz Island from the arid coastal zone into the wet highland zone (traveling from bottom to top, north to south).

A transect down a long gradient would face these same issues of interval, vantage point, orientation, and extents, but magnified. Focusing on the issue of intervals, based on distance rather than elevation: there would need to be enough images to capture the typical condition of a given zone of the gradient, accurately conveying the overall rate of change. But “accuracy” depends on how fine a grain you’re talking about. Zooming out, the rate might look relatively constant, but zooming in, it increasingly won’t, as discontinuities (or “anomalies”—elements that seem misplaced) become more prominent. Even if the overall climatic gradient from wet to dry or cold to warm is relatively smooth, variation in local conditions like soil, topography, or moisture, and randomness in weather events or seed dispersal, create patchy distributions of species. Zooming in far enough, islands and edges overwhelm gradual transitions, resulting in what I think of as “tension zones”—areas of extra rapid change—and “milestones”—the clear beginning or end of a particular zone, or where certain species drop out or first appear. For instance if you could travel east to west across North America pre-agriculture, trees wouldn’t become more and more widely spaced until they disappear completely; rather, the continuous forest would start to break into patches that become smaller and smaller, around water sources or protected areas. Photos taken along the gradient might end up calling attention to discontinuities like this or missing them completely, and either one of those could make the representation more or less “accurate” depending on how you’re defining accuracy (how zoomed-in you are). The smaller the interval chosen, the less likely either of those outcomes, but it might also be possible to work some flexibility or complexity into the methodology to compensate. The main sequence of photos, shot at even intervals, could depict the overall (“zoomed-out”) gradient, while a secondary one (placed alongside) could capture tension zones or milestones that would be otherwise left out.

A tiny outpost of Valdivian (Chilean temperate) rainforest in Fray Jorge National Park, surrounded by desert. Fed by coastal fog, it’s many hundreds of miles north of the rainforests of Patagonia. Crossing the abrupt forest-desert edge it’s the anomalous island character of the forest that stands out, but zooming way out, you could think of it as a milestone marking the rainforest’s northernmost limit along Chile’s north-south gradient from dry to wet.

The lush interior of the forest pocket.

This all becomes even more complicated given that few long gradients on earth still maintain anything close to a continuous natural condition. Certainly none of them exist along major roads. So most large-scale gradients in natural vegetation, broken up by cities, agricultural land, and various smaller disturbances, are even less smooth that they would have been originally. The problem isn’t necessarily the “unnaturalness” itself—climate affects vegetation patterns, in ways worth observing, even where we’ve largely created them—but instead the greater complexity of the patterns. The more impacted and heterogenous the landscape, the more photographs (at a smaller interval) are probably needed for a meaningful representation, since the goal would be to capture as many conditions as possible and essentially create an “average” picture of the landscape, smoothing over most of that small-scale heterogeneity. Though the tension point and milestone concepts can still apply to human-dominated landscapes (more on that later), they tend to be obscured by land use or planting decisions that have little to do with localized natural conditions let alone larger-scale climatic constraints.

So these long gradients are tough to capture in two dimensions in a way that’s representative of reality on some chosen level, as well as digestible; that’s true for many reasons aside from the fact that they require big investments in time, organization and/or gasoline. This recent road trip was the first time I’ve made any attempt at it, specifically along the central segment (with the clearest and most linear part of the wet-dry gradient) of the westward, southern route, roughly between St. Louis and Albuquerque. In fact I’d say it barely counts as an attempt, particularly given what I’ve just explained regarding the challenges of human-created patchworks. (There are some large, quasi-natural, forest areas remaining toward the eastern end of that segment, but in the Great Plains farmland has mostly obliterated any trace of the original forest-and-prairie mosaic, and further west ranching has certainly had a major impact on the character of the steppe and semi-desert landscapes.) The effort was pretty much an afterthought, and not at all methodical. I took about 80 photos over 1300 miles, nowhere near enough, and at no regular interval. Except for a handful they leave out most of the Missouri and New Mexico ends of the segment for no other reason than that it didn’t occur to direct my attention there, plus we crossed most of the Texas Panhandle in the dark. And, photographing through the car window on the freeway is not ideal for composing views.

Satellite image (overlaid on a rainfall gradient) of the central segment of the drive; the yellow numbers identify the locations of the photos in the transect below. (Satellite image from Google Maps; rainfall map from https://gisgeography.com/us-precipitation-map/)

Landscape transect along the central segment of the westward drive, the photos numbered based on their locations on the diagram above. One challenge with this type of representation is making it legible given the size of the photos—and this one has many, many fewer than there ought to be.

The photos show a mix of landscapes that generally progress from forest to field to grazing land from east to west, but given the relatively small number of views, not in the frequency that they actually occur. So instead of being able to use dozens or hundreds of photos to show how that frequency (the average mix) changed from east to west, I selected views that each individually captured a sense of that average mix. Once I pared those down to represent somewhat even intervals, I was left with just seven—not very useful except for the record. You can see the overall transition there, but the transect obviously doesn’t capture any nuances of the gradient, including two tension points that I picked up on: the relatively rapid drop in forest cover around Oklahoma City, and a quick transition from grassy plains to cactus-y semi-desert right before (appropriately?) the New Mexico border.

More thoughts on representation next time….

Darren

Patches of forest like this are common in eastern Oklahoma, but less so than further east (and they have a “drier” aspect to them)—they’d only work in the transect if it included enough additional views, in the right ratios, to show the patches in this context.

These two views about 20 miles east of the New Mexico border are less than three miles apart. They’re not actually that different from each other, but to me the right looks like the Great Plains and the left looks like the West. (The shrubs are cholla cacti.) I could’ve included this “tension zone” in the above transect if every one of the views had been spaced at a similarly small interval rather than the current average spacing of about 100mi.

Long Gradients | Introduction

I was lucky to be able to spend last November and December on the Maine coast, not a bad place to be living more-or-less in quarantine, and being still nervous about air travel my partner Aaron and I drove both ways from California. (We brought all of our food with us and were extra fastidious about selecting and sanitizing hotel rooms.) People enjoy—or avoid—long road trips for many reasons, but for me the main attraction is (you guessed it) observing the changes in vegetation, even where most landscapes are human-dominated. Most of the climatic gradients I’ve talked about so far have been on a much smaller scale—typically small islands and mountains—because the reason I find these gradients so empowering to begin with is that they represent typically vast and overwhelming phenomena made comprehensible. The sharper the transition from hot to cold or wet to dry, the easier it is to grasp. But this trip reminded me that gradients on the scale of a continent are exciting too in their own way, and in one sense even more so. The key is to experience them at the right speed and distance.

La Gomera in the Canary Islands—a dramatic example of a small-scale climatic gradient (my typical focus).

Small-scale temperature and precipitation gradients usually exist because of dramatic topography, creating a rain shadow effect or altitudinal zonation. Contrasts over longer distances can of course be created by topography too—think of the landscapes on either side of the Rockies or Sierra Nevada—but they don’t have to be. The transition from the moist forests of the eastern U.S. to the semiarid high plains (steppes) happens over only minor or barely perceptible elevation changes. And the routes we took on this cross-country trip, I-80 eastward and (for most of the way) I-44 and I-40 westward, pass north and south of the Rockies so that the steppe-to-desert transition also happens with relatively minimal topographical variation. These gradients, then, seem superficially to exist for no reason—the conditions that create them, having to do with complex interactions between the atmosphere, oceans, and landmasses, aren’t part of the experience. Paradoxically this lack of an obvious physical feature to compress the gradient—the very fact that it’s something more planetary and “unknowable” in nature—for me partly compensates for the great distance involved.

But obviously in extending over many hundreds of miles, long gradients like this are hard to experience. Along the two routes we took, the portions with a relatively linear and perceptible change—roughly from Wyoming to Illinois and then back west to New Mexico—covered between 1,000 and 1,300 miles. (Things do get wetter and drier further east and west of those places, but less obviously so, and the pattern becomes more complicated and influenced by mountains.) Traveling those routes requires more than a spur-of-the-moment drive, let alone a hike. But doing them in a relative hurry, as we did given that Covid discouraged us from making more rest or hotel stops than necessary, did have a compressing effect—embodied by that frequent “can you believe we were in x only a few hours ago?” feeling. (Later on I’ll mention why this has to be done on the ground, “close at hand”; flying is a very different type of journey.)

Our two routes across the U.S., overlaid on a precipitation map. The thicker yellow lines represent the segments (mentioned above) where the gradient is most obvious, for simplicity and familiarity’s sake from Cheyenne to Chicago and St. Louis to Albuquerque (roughly bisected by Omaha and Oklahoma City, respectively). The yellow box in the legend highlights the precipitation bands that fall within these segments. (Map from https://gisgeography.com/us-precipitation-map/)

I’ve focused quite a bit, as you know, on the small-scale type of gradient in the worldviews, but I’ve only dabbled in the continent-scale variety—in a later post I’ll go into the topic of capturing the latter in two dimensions, in terms of this road trip and in general. For now I’ll just share a few images to provide a taste, and say that my standard “fracturing” technique isn’t necessarily the way to go.

Below I’ve aligned strips of the satellite view along my selected segments of the northern and southern routes (the thicker lines in the diagram above) with the precipitation map. The idea is to frame the green-to-brown gradient along the two routes in a way that I think is more revealing than just the overall U.S. satellite map would be. Had I created it before the trip it might’ve led me to compare my experience on the ground with what the aerial view would predict. Doing that now based on memory, combined with the fact that significant portions of the driving were through snow or in the dark, isn’t ideal, but it’s still interesting to try. (In fact from here on I’m going to cheat a bit. The part of the northern/west-east drive where most of the perceptible change happens—between eastern Wyoming and central Nebraska—was all either at night or snow-covered. So I’m going to substitute my memory of that drive with an even older memory of the same trip but in the opposite direction—from the time I drove it, in just as much of a rush, on my move from Cleveland to San Francisco ten years ago. Missing that chunk of the view this time around was very frustrating, and I’m genuinely curious if this ever bothers anyone besides me. At least I do have that other memory to fall back on, but the west-to-east experience can’t necessarily just be replaced by the reverse. I’ve learned from other places that each direction has its own takeaways.)

Green-to-brown gradients along the two routes (the thick yellow lines in the first diagram), with the six cities at the start-, end-, and mid-points outlined in black. The yellow numbers show the locations of the photos below. (Satellite views from Google Maps)

A few views from the car driving westward along the southern route (from bottom to top) giving a taste of the wet-to-dry transition. The numbers identify their locations on the satellite view in diagram.

The satellite views seem to show that the transition isn’t completely smooth, but rather most rapid around central Nebraska and central Oklahoma. That could be for a variety of reasons other than what’s actually happening on the ground—like coloration of the image, or the fact that we’re not talking about a simple forest-to-desert gradient but instead a much more complex mix of landscapes from quasi-native to completely managed, which complicates the green-to-brown representation. But I do remember the landscape seeming to transition most perceptibly from “familiar” (thinking as an Ohio native) to “less familiar” in that zone. More on this later, with more photos, in the context of representation. But needless to say there’s also plenty that can’t be perceived from the aerial—like the fact that the landscape seemed to take on a vaguely “rough” or “weathered” element in western Iowa and western Missouri (again, as if driving both routes in the westward direction), and then really felt like “the West” just before the Wyoming and New Mexico borders.

More to come soon!

Darren

Mt. Taranaki

In my last post I wrote about a journey through the volcanic central highlands of the North Island of New Zealand. This one will deal with another volcanic locale on the western tip of the same island, similarly a national park surrounded by agricultural land.

The distinctive profile of Mt. Taranaki, seen from the farmland below.

Google Maps view of the volcano and adjacent farmland, showing the circular national park boundary and concentric ecological zones

Mt. Taranaki (last eruption 1854) has an iconic conical shape that has produced the sort of formal clarity and definition that I tend to seek out in the natural environment. Part of that clarity is the nearly perfect circular outline of Egmont National Park, which contains the mountain. The visibility of the boundary is a function of land use—the contrast between the preserved vegetation inside the boundary and the cleared land outside— rather than environmental conditions, but the shape does derive from the form of the volcano. The clarity of pattern is also reflected inside the park, in the form of its ecological zonation. Reaching 2,518m (8,261’), Taranaki rises from temperate rainforest at the base through concentric zones of montane shrubland and grassland on the upper slopes, and finally bare rock around the summit. The summit and crater are iced-in for most of the year, which made them impossible to reach when I was there (November 2017), so in fact it was the mountain’s vegetation bands that captured my attention rather than its volcanic aspect. For me it’s craters that create the volcanic experience; Taranaki felt like a regular mountain.

Tree ferns in the rainforest on the lower slopes.

More rainforest, a little higher up, with the rare Cordyline indivisa (the spiky plants).

View downslope from the montane shrubland.

View of the summit from the grassland zone.

Looking downslope across the multiple vegetation zones.

I spent one full day at Taranaki, hiking to the lower reaches of the barren summit area where the snow began—that experience inspired Cone. The work depicts only one quarter of the full circle, because the hike only covered a tiny slice of the mountain and I didn’t have a chance to circumnavigate the whole thing by car to at least get some distant views of the rest. I’m hoping to make it back there someday during their summer so I can do that, plus of course hike all the way to the summit crater.

Cone, watercolor on paper, 36”x36.”

I don’t think of this hike as a discrete “journey” like the Tongariro Alpine Crossing—it was actually a combination of walks along various roads and trails, plus given the inaccessible summit it didn’t have a ceremonious destination point. For that reason I haven’t created an animated version of Cone, with the path overlaid, as I did for Alpine Crossing and will do for others—I don’t think it would be as effective or as reflective of the experience of being there. Still, the layout of the various view fragments is meant to depict a relatively linear progression upward through the various landscapes.

Darren

Tongariro Alpine Crossing

Mt. Ngauruhoe is Tongariro’s most iconic volcano and was the stand-in for Mt. Doom in Lord of the Rings. It last erupted in 1975. (The Alpine Crossing winds around the base of the volcano on the opposite side, at a much higher elevation.)

My previous post on San Francisco will be the last one for a while about “urban wilds,” but this one will still deal partly with a human element. Tongariro National Park, in the volcanic central highlands of New Zealand’s North Island, ranges from temperate rainforest to alpine shrubland to barren mountains and lava flows, all mostly surrounded by agricultural land. The full-day Tongariro Alpine Crossing, one of the country’s most popular hikes, passes through the vicinity of recent eruptions (the latest in 2012) and through some of the park’s most dramatic landscapes.

Near the start of the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, just after sunrise.

Reaching the crater rim of Mt. Ngauruhoe (about a one-hour climb, not officially part of the Crossing).

View of the Blue Lake from the summit of Mt. Ngauruhoe.

The Red Crater, at the midpoint of the hike.

The Emerald Lakes. Without the Ngauruhoe side trip I would’ve beat the crowds, but I was actually a little inspired by the way they created their own jarring human-wild juxtaposition—the pedestrian (literally) in the presence of the surreal. The lakes felt “domesticated” in a way that, as I’ve gone into before, I find empowering despite the negative impacts.

In places along the edges of the lakes, the water resembles turquoise smoke.

View back toward the Red Crater and, behind it, Mt. Ngauruhoe.

Beginning the descent toward the end of the hike, from alpine grassland below the lava fields down to forest and farmland.

Hiking the Alpine Crossing and driving along much of the park’s perimeter to and from the trail, I was struck by two contradictory impressions. On one hand was the sharp juxtaposition of the temperate, managed landscape of the park’s surroundings with the wild, inhospitable environment (in both the ecological and geological sense) of the interior. I remember in certain places alpine shrubland on one side of the perimeter road and farmland (presumably former forest) on the other side—it’s very possible I’ve played it up in my mind, but it was as if the transition didn’t even require a perceptible change in elevation. On the other hand, while the beginning and end of the trail do afford views of the park’s exterior (reinforcing the impression of contrast), for most of the hike the place felt like another planet—an exotic, self-contained world. In a sense the second impression reinforced the first by contradicting it, in that my memories of the landscape’s otherworldliness heightened the contrast with its more mundane surroundings when latter came into view again. But in any case the work that resulted from my Tongariro visit—Alpine Crossing—was an initial effort to capture the complexity of how I experienced these relationships between interior and exterior. (I have in mind a second, larger work that would explore this even more deeply.)

Alpine Crossing, watercolor on paper, 23”x20.”

Abstracted route of the day-long Tongariro Alpine Crossing, with each segment described below.

1. Beginning the hike at sunrise in alpine shrubland/grassland that soon gives way to bare gravel and rock.

2. Continuing through the volcanic landscape, approaching Mt. Ngauruhoe.

3. Reaching the summit and snow-filled crater of Mt. Ngaurauhoe, an hour-long climb off the main trail.

4. Descending the mountain again and continuing around the other side.

5. Overlooking and then weaving between the Emerald Lakes.

6. Passing by the Blue Lake.

7. And finally, re-entering the grassland and overlooking the final descent. The last hour or so of the hike passes through rainforest.

This work is conceptually most similar to Andes-inspired Lagoon, even though the latter doesn’t depict a volcano, in that both capture otherworldly islands of nature floating in agricultural landscapes. But while in both cases these ecological/geological islands have been drastically downsized in my mind and on paper—the Alpine Crossing in reality traverses only a small corner of Tongariro—Alpine Crossing reflects my perception of having actually crossed this island from one end to the other. It’s one of my earliest works, but it fits in with my recent emphasis on representing discrete journeys across landscape boundaries and transitions rather than what I call wanderings, or less directed and directional impressions.

Darren

Mt. Ngauruhoe again from the other side, peeking through the clouds at sunrise.

Urban Wilds | San Francisco

To finish up this “Urban Wilds” series as I began it (with a concrete example, in that case Rio de Janeiro), I’ll dive into a recent work, Peaks, inspired by my current home city of San Francisco.

Peaks, watercolor on paper, 42”x37.” The north peak—near the center of the composition, with the upside-down steps—is meant to be the focal point.

This worldview focuses on Twin Peaks—at around 900’ San Francisco’s second-highest point, consisting of two peaks (north and south) that give the place its name. The site is one of the city’s few open spaces that still retains the structure and character of the area’s original landscape—mostly grassland and shrubland particularly in exposed, elevated areas. Most of the city’s other parks have been forested or otherwise completely transformed. Species-wise Twin Peaks has been largely taken over by invasives, but that isn’t obvious to the untrained eye, and restoration efforts are ongoing.

The site’s elevation and its location near the city’s geographical center have made it an iconic landmark and a popular destination. As I’ve suggested in an earlier post its windswept, treeless landscape (in addition to affording 360-degree views) probably has some role in preserving a semblance of coastal California identity that has been otherwise obscured by artificial forests. But I think it has an even greater prominence in my personal experience of the city. First, I live close to the base of the slope—it takes less than 40 minutes to walk to the tops of the peaks. And second, as you’d expect, I gravitate toward it as a relict of a native local ecosystem.

The streets of San Francisco, with Twin Peaks in the distance.

The site’s prominence is one reason why in Peaks I’ve given it a particularly outsized place in the composition. But that emphasis, as well as my decision to feature it in the first place, of course also has a lot to do with my interest in the dramatic urban-wild contrast. Throughout this “Urban Wilds” series I haven’t said much about what type of landscape the “wild” part refers to except that for me it means an environment in a relatively natural state—not unimpacted by human activity (because there’s no longer such a place) but maintaining enough of the structure and composition of the original ecosystem for it to feel that way. To achieve what I’ve written about as the psychological and cultural benefits of bringing some amount of nature into the city, it doesn’t really matter what that ecosystem is. But to satisfy my own idiosyncratic fascination with the urban-wild contrast, which I explore in many of the worldviews, it does make a difference.

View of the park from the streets climbing the lower slopes.

The more unexpected the juxtaposition—the more “wild” the natural half—the more inspiring it is for me. My “Urban Volcanoes” series delves into my favorite example, which I experience as tamed geological power. Another example, ecological in this case, is the saturated, windswept páramo of Andes, juxtaposed with village and agriculture. As ecological examples go, for reasons that are hard to articulate, it’s these high, exposed, damp, and misty places that I find so entrancing when juxtaposed with civilization. (More so than, say, deserts, which are at least as inhospitable. It might be that páramo and other similar environments tend to be topographically isolated and inaccessible, and so I find it particularly exciting when they instead appear right at your doorstep.) But why am I talking about this in reference to a hilltop in the middle of San Francisco, treeless but not particularly high, cold, or wet? I think the answer is that the city’s famous foggy, blustery weather—not as perpetual as many people think, but definitely pronounced in elevated and exposed places—has inspired me to imagine Twin Peaks as more forbidding, exotic, and atmospheric than its physical reality would suggest. That imagined version seems to persist in my mind even when it’s sunny, and so I didn’t feel the need to alter the weather in the worldview (though someday I might create a foggy version).

A tiny glimpse of the park between buildings a few streets away.

Reaching the urban-wild edge.

The urban-wild contrast at Twin Peaks is sharp in the sense that generally the urban fabric does suddenly give way to the barren slopes. Even though much of the adjacent development is made up of detached houses, the edge is compressed enough that there’s no petering out into rustic buildings and dirt roads. And, some parts of the boundary are hardened by medium-rise apartment blocks. But on the other hand the shape of the edge is convoluted, with fingers of park and city intermingling, and the two landscapes aren’t topographically distinct—city streets climb far up the base of the landform. Also, though from adjacent streets the peaks do tend to suddenly reveal themselves between buildings or when rounding a corner, from farther away they’re more a fixture of the landscape. So the urban-wild edge here is complex: it separates two distinct environments, but at the same time it represents an interplay between the two that changes as you approach the edge and then cross it. It’s this complexity that I’ve aimed to capture in Peaks, as well as in other works inspired by similar contrasts.

Darren

City vista from below the north peak.

View of the south peak from the summit of the north peak.

Urban Wilds | Wilds Gradient

In my last post I presented the ecocity vision, conceived by Richard Register, as one model for sharpening the urban-nature separation while embracing a degree of natural “infiltration” into the city that could avoid reinforcing the historically oppositional relationship between “nature” and “civilization.” The concept can be applied to population centers of any size, producing ecocities, ecotowns, and ecovillages. With larger population centers, the idea is that individual neighborhoods within a city could be densified to open up agricultural land and natural habitat in-between, resulting in a sort of archipelago of urban islands forming a larger metro area. Richard’s “Bigger Bay” scheme for the San Francisco Bay Area is an example.

In this post I’ll share some of my own initial thoughts on a possible second, complementary approach to densifying large metro areas while allowing that same infiltration of natural elements. I’ll call it the “wilds gradient” model, illustrated generically in the diagram below. It could incorporate most or all ecocity principles, though it’s more hierarchical than the archipelago approach in that it’s structured by a series of concentric zones ranging from the highest percentage of urbanized space in the center to the lowest at the edges. In that sense it’s superficially similar to the geography of today’s (mostly dysfunctional) cities that typically grade from more dense at the center to less dense at the outskirts. The crucial difference is that the density transition within the wilds gradient is much less granular: it only shows up looking at the city as a whole. All pieces of urban fabric (the white areas in the diagram) in-between the bits of green, if you zoomed in on them, would appear to have nearly the same, very high density, resulting in a much smaller total urban area than today’s typical metropolis (whether or not you include the green parts).

The wilds gradient model shown diagrammatically, with the three concentric zones described below. White areas represent urbanization.

The wilds gradient model divides a metro area into three concentric zones as shown in the diagram above, each named after the shape or character of the “nature” preserved or created within:

1. Fingers. The natural environment surrounding the city would extend as fingers into the outermost zone of the city, each the size of many city blocks up to that of an entire neighborhood. Their shape and location would be determined by topography, hydrology, or other environmental factors, functional and/or aesthetic. The urban zones in-between (again, just or nearly as dense as the center city) might be considered “ecovillages” similar to the neighborhood islands in the archipelago approach, but they’d be more like urban peninsulas than urban islands. In this zone, the area of undeveloped land would be roughly equal to, or a bit less than, the area of developed land.

2. Islands. Natural spaces in this zone would still be relatively large (say, several city blocks) and would have a character as natural as the “fingers” in Zone 1, but they would be generally isolated within the urban fabric. These natural islands best fit what I’ve been referring to as urban wilds.

3. Elements. These natural elements would represent forms rather than spaces—they could be structures like vegetated walls and roofs, or individual plants, in any configuration but importantly part of the urban fabric (or forming a layer overlaid upon it) rather than outside of it. These elements could be situated within “green spaces” like tree planting strips or parks. But these spaces themselves wouldn’t be “natural” in the sense that the configurations of natural elements within wouldn’t re-create a natural environment either aesthetically or functionally. In fact, those configurations could tend toward geometric— clearly of the city—rather than naturalistic.

The configurations of all of these components could and would be much more varied and irregular than shown in the diagrams above. For example, depending on what existing natural features are being preserved (especially waterways), the shapes might tend more toward linear, continuous corridors, varying in width. The second set of diagrams, below, shows how the same zones might look overlaid on a real city, one with a configuration shaped by a real environmental context (in this case a linear system of ridges and valleys).

The wilds gradient model as applied to a hypothetical “real” city, overlaid with the same zones.

Note that I’m oversimplifying in referring to the entire non-urbanized area (the green area in all the diagrams) as “natural” in the sense of being unmanaged natural ecosystems. The majority of it would be, particularly the green area in-between cities outside the three zones. But the green area would also include some percentage of agricultural land and active recreational space (as in more traditional urban parks).

Fitting the wilds gradient into the “island civilization” approach to planning on a more regional scale.

Zoomed out to the regional scale, cities structured on this transition from fully “wild nature” beyond the city to fully “urbanized nature” in the city center would still appear as compact, isolated urban islands floating in a sea of preserved and restored natural ecosystems, not too different from a pure application of the “island civilization” concept. But zooming in to the city itself, from outer edge to center, that oppositional relationship between nature and city—where nature is seen as something alternately noble and threatening—is softened and inverted. Moving inward from Zones 1 to 3, nature is first intermingled with city, then surrounded by it, then fully “diluted” by it—a reflection and reminder of what our modern relationship with the natural environment has generally looked like. On the level of the entire city this could be considered a “mixing” of urban and natural along the lines of what the Landscape Urbanists propose. But as I said above, this is a matter of scale and perspective: zooming in, the contrast between urban and natural spaces is still enforced. My argument has been that keeping the two spatially separate is crucial from a conservation perspective and perfectly justifiable from a cultural one, but that in order to 1) maintain a sense of ecological identity and 2) to prevent this separation from devolving into the demonization or glorification of one side, we need to think about that condition of separation with more nuance. I think this wilds gradient model could be a way to achieve an environmental version of “separate but equal.”

Like the archipelago approach of fitting large metro areas to ecocity principles of density, compactness and three-dimensionality, the wilds gradient model would take on different forms depending on the particular urban and natural geography in question. Applied to the real world the two models would probably grade into each other, and they could probably even both apply to the same place at the same time at different scales. Regardless of the formal details, though, it’s important to recognize that the overall idea of compressing and densifying cities, while idealistic, can’t just be aspirational. I’ve been focusing on the less tangible benefits of doing so—namely reinforcing the separate yet linked identities of both urban and natural environments—but of course there are much more practical and consequential reasons that are becoming more apparent every day. There are certain to be heated arguments over the degree to which existing population centers can be reconfigured. But there’s no question that the future is going to bring a lot of building and re-building, and we can’t afford to do so the same way that we have been—with low-density sprawl.

Darren

Urban Wilds | Ecocities

Last time I contrasted two approaches to “designing” the human-nature relationship that are, essentially, diametrically opposed. The first is concentrating and/or contracting development into dense urban centers surrounded by nature—Roderick Fraser Nash’s “island civilization” model that I’d brought up earlier, and also embodied to some degree in the New Urbanism movement originating in the 1980’s. The second is dispersing development to create a relatively undifferentiated mix of urban and natural such that both terms essentially lose their meaning—the Landscape Urbanism movement from a decade later—supposedly a more honest representation of contemporary human-nature relationships that in theory inspires us to address environmental issues in a more productive way. I explained why Landscape Urbanism goes too far, but I’ve also talked about why the first approach is also too extreme, or at least an over-simplification—it pushes the natural environment too far beyond our daily experience. For the rest of this “Urban Wilds” series I’ll go into a few ways that the “island civilization” model could be tweaked or enhanced to bring nature (including urban wilds) into cities while maintaining the distinct identities of both.

The complex three-dimensionality of the ecocity vision takes some inspiration from European hill towns, like this one on Italy’s Amalfi Coast. (Photo by me.)

The approach I’ll describe in this post is the ecocity vision, developed by artist, writer and theorist Richard Register. The concept has some commonalities with New Urbanism, namely a focus on urban density and walkability, but it also has a number of distinguishing features. One is a focus on “organism-like” complexity and three-dimensionality in urban structure. Obviously a dense, compact city relies on a strong vertical element, but the ecocity goes a step further in its focus on multi-level connectivity through tunnels and elevated walkways. For example a sea of skyscrapers may be the ultimate in vertical design but, as Richard puts it, it’s essentially a two-dimensional city turned on its edge—in a social wellness sense not necessarily an improvement on typical suburban sprawl (we know the fate of many inner-city developments modeled on Le Corbusier’s “towers in a park” concept).

Ecocity concepts, developed by Richard Register, applied to the San Francisco Bay Area. At lower left, densifying the city of Berkeley into distinct ecovillages, with agriculture and natural habitat in-between. At right, a similar approach to the wider region—withdrawing from zones prone to flooding from rising sea levels—in a poster entry (called “Bigger Bay Ecotropolis”) for the 2009 Rising Tides competition sponsored by the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC). At upper left, an ecocity vision for downtown San Francisco. (Drawings by Richard Register.)

“Keyhole plazas” are an ecocity design feature meant to draw in views of the natural landscape beyond. (Drawing by Richard Register.)

Another feature, particularly relevant to the topic at hand, is the vision’s holistic emphasis on planetary health, giving cities and nature equal and shared value. Unlike Nash’s “island civilization” it obviously thinks of cities as more than a necessary evil or an afterthought, and unlike New Urbanism it treats the natural environment as more than a background or blank slate. This attention to the natural world takes two general forms. First, the environment beyond the city is incorporated into the urban experience though an emphasis on opening and framing views—views that exist in the first place because ecocities (and ecotowns and ecovillages) are sited and shaped in order to preserve and enhance them. And second, natural elements are more literally drawn into the city in the form of day-lit streams, ecological corridors, topographical features, or other spaces that could fit into my “urban wilds” category, plus on a more granular level as plantings of various kinds. Note that “drawing nature into the city” isn’t the same thing as “drawing the city out into nature.” Spatially these two moves may grade into each other, but while “drawing nature in” makes the urban edge a bit softer or more jagged, “drawing the city out” obliterates it (as with the Landscape Urbanism model). The ecocity model is one way to soften the “separate” in “separate but equal” just enough to maintain distinct, mutually beneficial urban and natural identities while avoiding the dangers of pitting one against the other.

Before and after: densifying a downtown and at the same time drawing in (or restoring) natural elements. (Drawings by Richard Register).

A major component of the Galápagos Evolution and Ecocites conference was to be a design workshop for an actual ecovillage in one of two locations in the Islands. Richard developed this concept for one such project on the outskirts of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno on San Cristóbal Island, with organism-like complexity and three-dimensionality providing ample shade and connectivity. (Drawing by Richard Register.)

I should add that Richard is a friend and collaborator of mine. I mentioned some time ago a project that he and I were working on together—an Evolution and Ecocities conference in the Galápagos Islands focusing on the interrelationships between biological and cultural evolution and ecocity design (particularly in terms of the “organism analogy” I mentioned earlier) in the archipelago and worldwide. The event didn’t end up materializing due to lack of funding, but hopefully the idea will be revisited in some form at some point in the near future. As Richard would emphasize, giving traction to these ideas is no small feat, but it’s becoming more and more critical every day for the future of the planet. (And for the Galápagos in particular, the pressures of development have become a much more serious issue for the Islands than most people realize.) He recently finished a book, The Gálapagos Islands: Evolution’s Lessons for Cities of the Future, covering many of the ideas that were going to be featured in the conference.

Richard is the founder of the International Ecocity Conference series, now having hosted a dozen summits around the world, as well as Berkeley-based Ecocity Builders and a new organization Ecocity World. He has written and illustrated 9 books and given talks in over 30 countries. If you’d like to learn more about the Galápagos project, the ecocity concept or Richard himself, please check out www.ecocityworld.org.

Darren

Urban Wilds | Extremes

First, an update on this fall’s virtual SF Open Studios! I’ll be participating in the Rose Event on Saturday, September 26th from 10am-2pm PDT, one of four live events together featuring 250+ artists. Anyone anywhere can join for free–click here to join/register as a guest (you’ll get email reminders if you register ahead of time). Drop by for some conversation and virtual visits to places that have inspired me.

In the meantime, please check out my new promo video! (You can find it here if nothing happens when you click on the image below.)

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In my last few posts I went into two possible benefits of bringing pieces of native ecosystems into cities, softening a little the “island civilization” model of a complete separation between urban “islands” and surrounding nature. The first is strengthening urban “ecological sense of place,” and the second is countering (symbolically at least) the oppositional relationship between city and nature that has led to such disastrous consequences for the latter—if not ultimately for both.  

Here and in the next few posts I’ll move toward describing what an approach that’s similar to “island civilization” in spirit but more nuanced in form might look like. To illustrate the danger of going too far in the opposite direction, but also because parts of deserve consideration, I’ll start by introducing a model from the design world called Landscape Urbanism which proposes essentially the polar opposite of “island civilization.” (Fellow designers might find this discussion a bit dated, since it’s mostly based on recollections from grad school two decades ago filled in by some more recent reading. Please feel free to correct or add anything you’d like to in the comments section of this post on the website—one of my reasons for this blog is to encourage these conversations!)

Honxing Community, Dalian, China, 2009, by Sasaki. A number of Landscape Urbanist tropes are visible here; even in cases where they’re more convincing than this, they need to be weighed against the costs of urban expansion. The arrangement of the buildings is inspired by ecological forms of the valley site, though in the ultimate example of aesthetics over ecological function, that ecology has been built over. The green roofs and interstitial ground plantings, even if they looked anything like the original vegetation, would obviously be no replacement for it. (Andrés Duany, “An Album of Images,” in Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents. Original image source: Sasaki & Associates, Intersection & Convergence.)

Landscape Urbanism, originating in the 1990’s, advocates for upgrading rather than halting or reversing the current trend of spatially blending nature and city (i.e. sprawl), as a way of both acknowledging and reinforcing the fact that our activities can’t be separated from natural processes, physically or conceptually. Being dishonest about this reality of inseparability, it claims, is actually detrimental to environmental health. Putting nature and civilization on opposing sides creates either outright hostility toward the environment or objectification and idolization of small parts of it that we consider “pure.” The latter results in neglect of other parts that are less intact or pleasing despite their still having ecological value. (And idolization itself can have its own harmful effects, as in “loving to death” our national parks.) In theory, spatially mixing the two extremes leads to a heightened, inescapable awareness of how we and our environment depend on each other for a healthy existence.

So rather than restoring ecological—and human—health through urban densification, Landscape Urbanism proposes that environmental patterns and processes act as the structuring element for a generally horizontal, dispersed “urban” landscape such that either everything or nothing is urban depending on how you look at it. In projects and proposals following this model, urban infrastructure is everywhere, but so is “nature”—from stream and wildlife corridors down to greenery on seemingly every built surface, with a focus on native species and “ecologies.” (The pluralizing makes me roll my eyes; in fact it’s a tame example of Landscape Urbanists’ often ridiculously impenetrable writing style—check out the now-famous Landscape Urbanism Bullshit Generator—which along with fancy graphics has been accused of compensating for lazy science. )

Plan of Charleston, SC. On the left, the compact, high-density city as it is, analogous to “island civilization” (in this case, nearly a literal island). On the right, a re-thinking of the city along Landscape Urbanist lines, with natural elements (waterways in this case) rather than streets as structuring elements. The latter is one-quarter as dense, with the other three-quarters forced to go somewhere else—say, to a nearby undisturbed wetland. Charleston wouldn’t be Charleston in the right-hand version, and those strips of coastal habitat would also be better off preserved in that other wetland than mixed with streets and buildings. On the other hand—no, it wouldn’t be Charleston, but it could be some other community that you know and find inspiring. Its environmental deficiencies are real, but it would go to far to say it has no value from a human, experiential standpoint. In designing new cities, it isn’t necessarily either-or. (Duany, “An Album of Images,” in Discontents. Original image source: Duany Plater-Zyberk.)

There are plenty of issues with this “blending” approach, stemming from what’s essentially an erasing of boundaries between humans and nature in the spatial sense but also between the needs of both. It seems to assume that merging the extremes of city and nature into various forms of garden (with native plantings in configurations that are difficult and expensive to maintain, and often too small or superficial to have much ecological function) will keep everyone and everything happy at the same time. This downplays the social and cultural benefits of dense, walkable, human-scaled urban fabric on one hand and the environmental benefits of extensive, unbroken natural habitat on the other. And those downplayed benefits are in fact mutual—dense cities mean less habitat fragmentation, as well as lower carbon emissions that are good for everyone and everything.

I also have problems with the more symbolic justification for erasing boundaries. As my earlier “Realities of Nature” series of posts concludes, our current condition of inseparability from the natural world (whether or not you believe it’s always been our condition) need not be a self-fulfilling prophecy—in fact that inseparability can be the very justification we need for choosing physical separation. And treating parts of the natural world as precious objects isn’t qualitatively much different than, say, preserving archaeological artifacts; we just need to make decisions about what’s feasible and worthwhile using the resources we have.

But I do think certain elements of Landscape Urbanism’s landscape-based approach can have a positive influence on more architecture-focused planning—such as The New Urbanism, considered LU’s competitor, which advocates for traditional dense cities organized around spaces framed by buildings and tends to see natural elements as less relevant in shaping design. (The sometimes-heated debate—see Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents, eds. Andrés Duany and Emily Talen—between the two movements seems to have fizzled early this decade, apparently because it came to be seen as largely theoretical and beside the point given that neither model is mutually exclusive and different contexts call for different approaches.) I don’t think there’s much of an argument that using locally-distinctive natural elements to shape the character of a city and to make nature a larger part of people’s day-to-day experience isn’t a worthy goal—even when those elements are primarily aesthetic, or “visual biophilia” as Duany calls it in Discontents. As I’ve said before, even if it’s hard to quantify, I’d say it’s undeniable that such visuals have an important effect on the urban experience. Biophilia is a real thing, and by definition it’s largely or entirely visual.

The Highline in New York City—one of the best-known examples of Landscape Urbanist-inspired design. It’s limited in scope, more purely landscape architecture than urban design, like the majority of such projects that have gotten built, but it’s shaped urban character through a decidedly landscape-based move. There have been the unsurprising issues with maintenance and installation—vegetation has been planted rather than “colonizing” on its own as planned—but the project illustrates how an urban space conceived as much as an ecological showcase as a recreational space can be successful (not to mention profitable from a real-estate perspective). (High Line, New York by Mike Peel licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.)

But bringing natural elements into urban areas—creating “biophilic cites” as Timothy Beatley calls it in his book of that title—needn’t and shouldn’t mean that city and nature lose their individual identities. Landscape Urbanism aims to correct what it considers the fundamental problem with “island civilization”- like approaches to design—a paradoxical devaluing of the environment as the result of over-valuing it as an exotic “other” that we try to preserve but then forget about. But taking the opposite approach ultimately leads to the same problem of devaluation: nature can’t be valued as nature if it’s become indistinguishable from everything else. (You might say that in so strongly giving identity to cities, it gives up its own.) And whether we view nature as “everywhere” or “elsewhere,” we lose sight of the fact that its continued survival relies on our restraint. The solution is treating nature as something in-between, or as multiple things at once. More thoughts on this to come!

Darren

Urban Wilds | Sacred and Profane

Before I get back to the topic at hand—for those of you who might’ve missed my Newsletter sent out on Aug. 11th, take a 12-minute escape from the chaos of the world and check out my latest project, an original composition for 2 pianos evoking the ascent of a fictional, endangered tropical island from sea to summit. It accompanies a sequence of snapshots cropped from my various worldviews depicting idealized and imagined islands and mountains. (I can tell that not many people clicked on it :-D.)

This blog is intended to be more about places than about me, and that’s true for this project as well. But I think it’s fair to say that more than anything else I’ve created so far, this video shows what I’m really about.

(Start with your volume way up and be patient—it begins very minimally at 0:26 and slowly builds. If you’re on my mailing list, go to the Aug. 11th Newsletter for more background on the music itself.)

Now, returning to the subject of urban wilds….

In my last post I wrote about identity, specifically an “ecological sense of place,” as one benefit of preserving islands of natural habitat in urban areas. This time I’ll lead into another potential benefit that’s even more abstract in that I doubt it would be possible to measure or isolate: such islands can act as a reminder that no matter how successful we end up being at pulling back from our current trajectory of destroying the planet, we’ll always be in control of its fate (at least as long as that fate doesn’t include our own destruction).

Though a broad generalization, it’s fair to say that throughout human history (especially in the West) civilization and the natural world have been trapped in an oscillating oppositional relationship, with one viewed “sacred” and the other “profane.” (Michael Dennis and Alistair McIntosh expand on this idea in “Landscape and the City,” Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents.) Cities were first glorified as tiny islands of virtue and security in a sea of mystery and hostility, but later came to be seen as zones of moral decay as urban life began deteriorating and technology began to render nature less threatening. Today, remnants of both these attitudes seem to coexist and compete. Power through growth and technology has produced in many minds a perception of human invincibility, translating into a feeling of superiority over a natural world seen as not necessarily hostile but still something to be subdued, with little to offer us. For others, that strength has created the sense that we’re destroying ourselves and taking nature down with us, an attitude driving us to place extraordinary value (arguably not always justified) on the pieces of it that we’ve spared. In both of these cases nature is seen as something “other,” to be either conquered or idolized depending on how much we fear it relative to ourselves.

New York City skyscrapers viewed from Central Park. Frederick Law Olmsted designed the park as an antidote to the ills of urban life.

The Ramble in Central Park, a “wild” landscape intended to impart what were seen as some of nature’s beneficial qualities: complexity and intrigue. It’s largely artificial, having been planted from scratch with largely non-native species, but has transplanting what would’ve been experienced as “wild nature” into the city had any effect on how the urban-nature relationship is viewed? More thoughts on that later.

Roderick Fraser Nash’s “island civilization” concept (Wilderness in the American Mind) essentially proposes that we level the playing field, viewing neither side as the aggressor or the victim. This “separate but equal” relationship—islands of urbanization and cultivation surrounded by preserved and restored ecosystems—would give meaning and context to both nature and humanity. For humanity, it would preserve a “baseline” reminding us of our origins, against which we can measure our progress and to which we can return for inspiration and rejuvenation.

Yet we know how “separate but equal” tends to work out, at least when dealing specifically with people (and it’s not irrelevant that our alternating views of nature as sacred and profane have often included its “exotic” and “uncivilized” inhabitants, encapsulated by the idea of the “noble savage”). Fully realized, the “island civilization” model would restore the world to a spatial condition that originally led to, or at least reinforced, the development of that oppositional relationship. How might that spatial model be modified to embody a more productive relationship between nature and civilization while still keeping them spatially distinct? More to come on that soon.

Darren

Puerto Ayora, the largest population center in the Galápagos lslands. For the most part the town is compact and its boundary sharp (at least on the east side; the western half is a failed, partially-built lower-density development that should never have been approved).

Civilization meets nature at the edge of Puerto Ayora. The sharp edge feels like a dramatic threshold, underscoring the fact that you’re about to enter something different and special. Those adjectives are truly understatements in the case of the Galápagos environment—if there’s any place where the “island civilization” concept should be strictly applied, it’s here. But these islands haven’t avoided the image of an unequal “other,” whether that means inferior to us or superior; both attitudes exist and have brought their own problems. While something as straightforward and tangible as the form of the urban perimeter can’t be held responsible for reinforcing these attitudes, let alone generating them, there is value in thinking about how it might symbolize a more cooperative relationship. And if not here, than for larger urban areas in other places.

Urban Wilds | Identity

My last post on Parque Nacional da Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro’s urban rainforest, alluded to some of the social and psychological benefits of “urban wilds,” defined here as islands of native ecosystems in cities. In that case the city didn’t really have an option other than to restore and preserve the forest, given the importance of the watershed and the impracticality of urban expansion into the Massif (and presumably it was assumed that native plants would result in the healthiest forest possible). But in places where the direct practical benefits of preservation are less clear-cut, what is the actual value of carving out these relatively small islands of nature at the expense of preserving much larger tracts beyond urbanized areas? The wellness benefits of generic green spaces—from parks and gardens down to planted medians—are common-sense and have been well-documented. But to what extent should they at least partially exhibit the region’s ecology as it was before urbanization, anything from forest down to desert, though they might be considered less useful or ornamental?

Parque Nacional da Tijuca again, rising dramatically from the center of Rio.

As I explained in my Realities of Nature posts (long and involved, but here’s a summary), if we start from a common understanding that human and environmental health are inextricably linked, can be objectively measured, and are good things to begin with, then we can agree that sharpening the edges between nature and civilization by contracting our physical ecological footprint, creating a “divided canvas” as Roderick Fraser Nash calls it in Wilderness and the American Mind, is justifiable in an ideal world. That would mean, most importantly, densifying our cities into a series of well-defined urban islands surrounded by preserved and restored ecosystems. While we’re still far from that common understanding, and it’s arguable how achievable that ideal world is, among well-informed people with their values in the right place I don’t think it’s reasonably debatable as a goal.

If “island civilization,” as Nash calls this idea of boundaries around cities rather than boundaries around nature, is taken to its extreme, then technically it precludes preserving or restoring natural areas surrounded by urban development. In terms of direct environmental benefits, it’s generally true that a small piece of native nature has more value beyond the city—less exposed to human impacts, contiguous with much more extensive areas of habitat, and permitting increased urban density with lower auto emissions—than isolated within it. I think, though, that Nash would agree that this extreme version of separation would never be desirable let alone realized, at least for large metropolises. As Tijuca illustrates, most urban wilds exist partly if not mainly for practical reasons, but they may also have benefits that are less tangible—for city dwellers but also (indirectly) for the environment in terms of increased awareness and appreciation. The next few posts will look at these more abstract benefits of intermingling city and surrounding nature to some degree through the preservation or restoration of urban wilds—relatively small and accessible—versus a stricter separation between the two that concentrates all natural areas into much larger and more continuous tracts further afield.

I’ve said a lot about the feeling of empowerment that attracts me to edges and islands, particularly pronounced in the case of urban wilds. That’ll become relevant to the discussion a bit later on. But since I’ve never assumed that many others share that impression (though I’m always waiting to learn otherwise) let alone that it would ever drive planning or conservation policy, here I’ll focus on impressions that are likely much more widespread. These ideas will be speculative and broad-brush, given not only the intangibility of the benefits themselves but the fact that defining what is “inside” vs. “outside” the city, and what is “native,” can be complicated. In the latter case, “nativeness” depends on how large of an area, and on what time scale, we’re talking about. But even on an abstract level these thoughts can provide a framework for thinking about what the urban-nature divide actually means.

Twin Peaks, an iconic landform near the geographical center of San Francisco. The ecosystem is threatened by invasive species and foot traffic, but it represents a relatively intact remnant of native California grassland and shrubland.

The first benefit I’ll go into relates to “bioregional identity” or “ecological sense of place”—emotional connection to a certain region based on its native species and ecology. (I’m focusing on the “bio” here because I think talking about the “geo” is less illuminating and less useful—I doubt the positive influences of urban mountain scenery would come as a surprise, and in any case eliminating it isn’t usually an option. It would be interesting to determine how much of Tijuca’s iconic status has to do with its rainforest versus its topography.) There’s been a lot said and written about the concept of bioregionalism and especially the importance of regional and local identity more generally: our physical environments are important in creating a sense of belonging, and that sense of belonging is important to our well-being. The concept of biophilia, explained and popularized by E.O. Wilson’s book of the same name, isn’t explicitly about identity, but its claim that we have an innate, evolved connection to other living things would suggest that other species do have some role in creating a shared sense of place.

As the city’s second-highest point, visible from many neighborhoods, how important is the landscape of Twin Peaks to the city’s identity?

Buena Vista Park is another of San Francisco’s hilltop open spaces. Unlike Twin Peaks, and the majority of the city’s parkland not used for active recreation, it’s been converted to forest. It’s cooler, less windy, and arguably more interesting, but what has it lost as a result? Throughout the city there are controversial plans to return pieces of parkland back to their original open landscapes.

But so far I haven’t come across anything attempting to quantify how strong, prevalent or important that biological sense of place is, particularly with respect to cities. A few years ago I had some correspondence on this topic with U. of Illinois professor Frances Kuo, who studies the psychological and health benefits of urban greenery; she said that “everyone more or less prefers the landscapes in which they grew up, and savanna,” but that “I don’t know if that entails a preference for native plants, so much as for familiar plants.” She also noted that “preference is not necessarily the same thing as psychological benefits. So, for example, people may not like walking in an arboretum in the dead of winter, but they still derive psychological benefits from it, according to measures of cognitive function. So, while we have plenty of research on which landscapes people like, we can’t confidently predict psychological benefits from that research, and unfortunately, at this point we haven’t really conducted research on which landscapes people benefit most from.”

So apparently it’s a tough subject to study, and I would add that trying to distinguish a preference for familiar vs. native plants would probably be complicated by the likelihood that many of us without botanical interests or expertise assume that familiar plants are native. And, again, does “native” refer to just that particular urban region or to a wider area that might encompass multiple ecological conditions? And does it include species that have been there for centuries but were brought by humans? Results would vary a great deal depending on whom you ask, and how you ask the question. And it’s probably even more difficult to determine which concrete conservation measures accrue directly from these attitudes.

But I think it’s reasonable to assume that at least for some of us, and to some extent, an urban ecological sense of place is (or could be) real and important—we’d prefer that our natural surroundings, even specifically urban, not be homogeneous. It would be nice if we had some evidence beyond the anecdotal.

Darren

Urban Wilds | Rio de Janeiro

My latest “Urban Volcanoes” series of posts looked at islands of nature in cities through a mainly geological/topographical lens (with the exception of Rangitoto Island, which also has ecological significance). The next few will take a more ecological angle on natural relics in urban areas, though topography often has a lot to do with why they’ve been preserved.

In this post I’ll share an article, “The Other Urban Jungle,” that I wrote for the July/September 2018 issue of My Liveable City magazine. It’s an abridged and updated version of a much more in-depth case study I did on Parque Nacional da Tijuca in Rio de Janeiro, both the world’s largest urban park and largest replanted tropical rainforest, for the Large Parks: New Perspectives conference and exhibition at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 2003. You probably already know about this park through images of its most iconic attraction—the Christ the Redeemer (Cristo Redentor) statue.

My study of Tijuca grew out of a primarily design and academic interest in city-nature juxtapositions rather than an artistic one, and I haven’t yet created a worldview based it. But the park is highly relevant to my current pursuits not only because the contrast between dense metropolis and critical conservation area is so stark, in a way that’s significant from both cultural and environmental perspectives, but because its importance is so strongly tied in to the question of what “nature” and “wilderness” actually mean today (see my Realities of Nature posts for a lot more on that topic!).

Below is the full text of the article, along with some of my photography and a few archival images from a thee-week research trip to Rio in 2002.

Darren

The four sectors of Parque Nacional da Tijuca (my drawing superimposed on Google Earth).

View from near the summit of Pico da Tijuca, the park’s highest point.

Parque Nacional da Tijuca, sprawling over 3,953 mountainous hectares in the heart of Rio de Janeiro, contains arguably the largest urban forest and the largest replanted tropical forest in the world. Formally declared in 1961, the park is a unique and fascinating synthesis of culture and nature. Not only are playgrounds, ornamental sculptures and fountains, and picnic areas backed by rock faces rising five hundred feet above one of the world’s most endangered ecosystems; the forest itself is a human creation that, when set against the teeming metropolis encroaching on its boundaries, could not appear more “natural.” But Tijuca is noteworthy not only as an island of native forest in an increasingly dense and challenging urban setting; the well-being of the city itself has always been intimately associated with the fortunes of the environment that the park now struggles to preserve.

Tijuca rises from 80 to 1,021m in two ranges running parallel to the coast and together referred to as the Tijuca Massif—a dramatic landscape of isolated peaks, deep valleys, and vertical rock faces punctuated by numerous caves and waterfalls. The park’s four sectors of forest are relics of a rainforest that once extended from the Uruguayan border to the northeastern tip of Brazil. Known as the Mata Atlântica, this ecoregion is older and more diverse than its Amazonian counterpart and has been nearly eliminated due to its location in the most densely populated part of the country. 

Remnants of infrastructure from Tijuca’s coffee-growing era.

By 1840, most of Tijuca’s original rainforest, with trees reaching heights of 45m and diameters of more than 2m, had been cleared for coffee cultivation. Yet the Massif represented a valuable resource for the city not only because its cooler, wetter climate provided ideal growing conditions: its streams represented Rio’s only source of fresh water. With diminishing forest cover the watercourses began to vanish during the dry season and flood during the wet, and between 1824 and 1844 a series of droughts had made the situation critical enough to endanger the city’s growth. In 1861, a radical governmental decree called for the restoration of the watershed. The slopes were to be reforested with indigenous trees—a degree of farsightedness that is surprising and refreshing to discover existed at that time, given that a monoculture of fast-growing exotics would have provided more immediate results and would have been more efficient to plant. By 1871, 60,000 trees had been planted, with a survival rate of about 80%. In 1877, an unofficial decision was made to transform the Tijuca Forest, the most level and formerly most devastated sector, into a public park—an escape from the heat and congestion below incorporating plazas, roads, trails, bridges, fountains, and ponds in the style of Paris’ Bois du Boulogne. Also included, for the first time, were numerous exotic and ornamental plants in the vicinity of these features.

Cascatinha Taunay, one of the park’s main attractions, now and in the early 1800’s. (Engraving: Johann Moritz Rugendas, Cascatinha da Tijuca, 1822.)

Forest paths (not the same path, but in the same general area)—now, and in the late 1800’s soon after replanting. (Left photograph: Marc Ferrez, Pico do Papagaio, c. 1880?.)

Public amenities are well-integrated into Tijuca’s dramatic landscape.

One of the park’s small ornamental gardens (this one built around part of the original hydrological infrastructure).

View of Cristo Redentor in the distance from another ornamental area of the park.

Since the park’s creation, the forest itself has generally been left in a state of natural regeneration and is today overwhelmingly the dominant experience of the park, with designed spaces and structures covering less than 5% of its area. The replanted zones form a nearly continuous canopy and have regained a diversity and luxuriance that amazes many visitors (and even scientists) familiar with the site’s tumultuous history. Despite compositional and structural differences from the original forest cover, the present-day forest has been found to contain over 1500 species of mostly native plants, about 400 of which are considered rare or endangered. In 1990, the park was recognized by the United Nations as part of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest Biosphere Preserve. 

As the city has expanded and densified, civilization is once again exerting serious pressures on the park as an ecological system, including pollution, human-caused forest fires, illegal plant extraction, invasive species, and the overall strain of about 1.5 million annual visitors. Even more dramatic is the proliferation of shantytowns, or favelas, as rural poor and displaced urban residents have migrated to occupy Rio’s last affordable enclaves—erosion-prone ridges and slopes. Today there are close to fifty favelas situated on the perimeter of the Tijuca Massif, home to one-third of the city’s total favelado population. The resulting deforestation threatens not only the forest itself: every rainy season, the Massif unleashes several football stadiums’ full of silt and boulders onto the city below, often with significant losses of life and property.

A favela climbing the slopes of the Tijuca Massif.

The relationship between Tijuca and Rio de Janeiro merits special attention because of more than its complex history. It is likely that the encroachment of the city has, in tandem with the re-establishment of the forest, in fact conferred upon the park an even greater physical and psychological importance to the city’s residents. Today, passing within minutes from Rio’s dense neighborhoods and slums into the Massif’s luxuriantly green (and noticeably cooler) landscape, it is clear that the original importance of the park as a retreat from the city has not diminished. Even from miles away, Tijuca’s lush and evocative terrain seems to breathe life into this metropolis of over twelve million people, boasting more trees per person than any other city despite an overall scarcity of open spaces. The Massif’s ruggedly picturesque profile is visible from nearly every point and often dominates the urban landscape, contributing to Rio’s identity as one of the world’s most beautiful cities. Such natural beauty even compensates in part for the city’s harsh social realities, and raises quality of life to an extent that could attract forms of economic development—namely, clean and technology-oriented industries—with the capacity to improve the very social and environmental conditions that threaten a peaceful coexistence between park and city. Rio thus provides a particularly dramatic example of a city where growth and prosperity can be driven rather than impeded by protection of its ecological assets, protection that is potentially self-reinforcing in that its social and economic benefits may in turn facilitate stewardship of those very assets. 

Religious offering, technically prohibited but unofficially tolerated in deference to Tijuca’s multi-faceted cultural significance.

Massages right along the main park road.

Looking up at Pico da Tijuca from the city streets.

Tijuca, today managed jointly by the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (part of the Ministry of Environment) and the municipal government, is perhaps unique among urban parks in that the maintenance of its public image as both a pleasant and “natural” alternative to the city is mainly accomplished through the park’s embracing of the natural reconstitution and maturation of the forest, rather than more typical park maintenance practices. Ornamental garden areas are comparatively tiny, and there is no aesthetic “enhancement” of the forest itself. Despite the 2008 Management Plan’s comprehensive detailing of conservation, research, and educational needs and goals, however, resources are not adequate to support significant efforts to adequately combat ongoing threats to forest health and cover that are once more, within a century, expected to reach levels disastrous for the surrounding city.

Visitors at the Cristo Redentor.

Likely no other urban park in the world has had, over its history, a more diverse set of impacts and meanings than Parque Nacional da Tijuca. But despite past and present challenges, the contemporary visitor’s immediate impression of its landscape is not one of historical upheaval nor of current threats to its integrity. Rather, the unexpectedly lush and mature forest, on weekends teeming with generally respectful visitors truly relishing their surroundings, provides evidence that the perception of “wilderness” can still have a physical and psychological place in contemporary society, even (and especially) within an urban jungle of the more usual kind.