Islands | La Gomera

La Gomera, with points of interest along the north-south journey depicted in Divide. The dashed line roughly traces the wet-dry divide itself.

My last post focused on my impressions of Tenerife, the largest and tallest of the Canary Islands. Here I’ll move on to La Gomera—smaller, lower, and older with much more eroded topography overall. (You might compare Tenerife and La Gomera to the Big Island of Hawaii and Kauai, respectively.) Reaching only about 5000’ La Gomera lacks pine and alpine zones, but its contrasts between wet and dry are in fact even more dramatic than on Tenerife. The upper elevations of the northern half of La Gomera are mostly contained within Garajonay National Park, protecting the world’s largest remaining tract of laurisilva (a unique form of temperate cloud forest), while its southern half, particularly at lower elevations, is mostly semi-desert if not true desert.

So, while the lowlands are generally drier than the uplands throughout, there’s a clear and dramatic division between the northern and southern halves of the island. Hence the title of Divide, which depicts a sequence of experiences traveling across the island from north to south. (Unlike Great Walk, which represents a linear journey along a single defined route in New Zealand, Divide is more haphazard in that it combines travel along several different drives and hikes.)

Divide, watercolor on paper, 20”x20”.

The journey begins in the town of Hermigua (#1 on the annotated version) in an agricultural valley near the north coast with a more-or-less Mediterranean climate. Hiking up into the valley the climate gets wetter and the fields give way to laurisilva, at first scrubby with scattered date palms (#2) and then growing taller and more lush approaching the National Park. In the Park itself (#3-5), it towers in the river valleys but takes on a more windswept character along the ridges.

At the southern edge of the park comes the “divide” itself. Sadly the island’s highest point, Alto de Garajonay (#6), wasn’t also a figurative high point of the experience. In 2012 a fire ravaged the southwest corner of the National Park including the peak itself, leaving only bare trunks, and at the time I was there clouds obscured views of the arid southern half of the island. (I based the painted view on an image from one of the interpretive displays, rather than one of my own photos.) Yet the low stature of the trunks, plus a few small patches of scrubby but intact vegetation, did reveal a change from the much more luxuriant forest just a few meters to the north.

After driving east to escape the fire damage, I dropped below the divide and out from under the clouds, and found another intact patch of what looked like low transitional forest (#7) between the rainforest and semi-desert. It seemed to weirdly evade description—scrubby but not “dry” like a dry forest, yet also not “wet” like the stunted forest found along ridgetops in the National Park. It had been difficult for me to visualize what that transitional zone would look like, and it turned out to be similarly difficult even when I was there. Given the uniqueness of the locale, I think that’s exactly how it should’ve been.

From a point just south of that transitional forest was a view of the Roque de Agando (#8), a famous granite peak surrounded by bits of similar scrubby vegetation, and a glimpse of the drier valley beyond. From there I drove through a progressively more barren landscape to the town of Playa Santiago on the southern coast, from where a short hike led to views of desert gorges and coastline (#9).

Lower reaches of the laurisilva with scattered Phoenix canariensis.

Laurisilva in a stream valley, Garajonay National Park.

Scrubby transitional forest in the vicinity of Alto de Garajonay.

Transitional forest just below the divide.

Desert coastline near Playa Santiago.

The experience of the “divide” itself (the transitional forest) made the strongest impression on me, mostly because the wet-dry transition is so rapid as to make the transitional forest clearly an edge rather than a recognizable ecosystem in itself, creating that empowering feeling of straddling two environments typically many miles apart. It felt as if fire and other impacts had spared those few tiny patches just for me. Still, those patches are isolated, no longer connected to intact habitat on either side. Needless to say I was frustrated that I hadn’t somehow “known” to visit the island before the 2012 fire when such connections, with trail access, did exist in the vicinity of Alto de Garajonay. It underscores the delicacy of these island environments, and it’s thankful that the fire didn’t spread further into the National Park.

Forest burnt in the 2012 fire, with Alto de Garajonay in the background.

And now I disappear to Chile for a month and a half (assuming the country doesn’t spin any more out of control before I leave in a week)—but first, for those of you in the Bay Area, a final reminder for my Open Studio this coming weekend! (Information below, and note that because it’s my birthday the day after, not to mention Halloween, I may up the ante on the goodies….come help me celebrate!)

Darren

Islands | Tenerife

View northeast across Tenerife, Canary Islands, from Pico del Teide.

In my last post I introduced the idea of nature as “island”—the pieces we have left are small, isolated, and rare. For better and worse they’re precious objects that, even if isolation once kept them safe from our impacts, we now “control.” They’re fully within our physical grasp (i.e. their fates are in our hands), but our perceptual grasp as well. The former is dispiriting yet I find the latter empowering; together they make up my “protective impulse” driving the worldviews.

(There is a negative aspect to that perceptual control too, however. The feeling of being dwarfed by nature’s scale and mystery, of being overpowered by it rather than it by us, puts our humanity in perspective and is one of the reasons we “need” a nature that exists apart from us. That feeling has become very difficult to experience today. It doesn’t factor much into the worldviews (though you can find it in the great majority of nature-themed art), but I should make it clear I wouldn’t think twice about giving up that feeling of control for getting those endless tracts of nature back if we could.)

There are many kinds of islands, but for now I’m going to spend some time on oceanic islands and their ecological “sub-islands.” As I’ve mentioned, oceanic islands as a whole tend to be biologically unique given their historical isolation, but often their height also give them a surprising internal diversity of climates and ecosystems. Experiencing the diversity of a continent compressed into a few square miles might be the ultimate example of the empowering feeling I’ve been talking about.

I’ll start with the Canary Islands (named for dogs, not birds), where in 2014 I visited the islands of Tenerife, La Gomera and Lanzarote. Located off the southern coast of Morocco, they incorporate seven main islands and make up two provinces of Spain. They’re part of the ecoregion known as Macaronesia (“Islands of the Fortunate”), encompassing the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries, and Cape Verde.

These four volcanic archipelagos share a number of biological characteristics that are unique to the region, most notably a form of temperate rainforest known as laurisilva because it’s dominated by species in the laurel family. This forest type was once widespread in the Mediterranean region but contracted to the Macaronesian islands during an earlier period of drying climate. Today it’s found in upland parts of the higher, wetter islands, in small pockets where agriculture hasn’t replaced it. Toward the southern part of the region, desert or semi-desert is more dominant. The Canaries, located at roughly the latitudinal midpoint of the ecoregion and with the greatest ranges in elevation, feature a mix of both in addition to alpine landscapes.

A number of horticultural staples (especially in California) are Canary Island endemics or natives. Here is the endemic Phoenix canariensis (Canary Island date palm) on the island of La Gomera.

Wild grove of date palms, La Gomera.

Most species of aeonium are endemic to the Canaries, especially rocky areas at wetter elevations.

A famous dragon tree (Dracaena draco) specimen on Tenerife. Native to the Canaries and Morocco, most exist today only in settled areas.

Tenerife is the largest and tallest of the Canary Islands, containing Spain’s highest peak and the world’s third-largest volcano—12000’ Volcan Teide. The island’s elevational range has also created the archipelago’s most diverse assemblage of ecosystems, including desert along the southern coast, laurisilva on the northern slopes of the volcano and of the northeastern peninsula, forests of Canary Island pine (Pinus canariensis) on the volcano’s southern slopes and upper northern slopes, and alpine desert in the Caldera de las Cañadas at the top of the island. The native vegetation that remains is reasonably well-protected, but much if not most of it has already been lost to agriculture and coastal development, and the laurisilva in particular will be threatened by a newly warming and drying climate.

Euphorbia canariensis in the Malpaís de Guïmar, a lava field on the dry south coast.

Laurisilva on the northeastern peninsula.

Pinus canariensis and lava field, approaching the Caldera de las Cañadas.

Just below the summit of Pico del Teide, rising out of the Caldera. A gondola takes you most of the way up from the Caldera floor, but visitor access to the very top is limited.

View across the summit crater of Pico del Teide and the Caldera below (the far edge of the Caldera is the chain of mountains in front of the clouds). For scale, you can see a group of geologists working inside the crater, just left of center.

Pico del Teide from the plane at sunset. (My visit to the top came before the snow.)

Reveal, completed this past spring, captures my experience of Tenerife’s diverse environments, with a focus on sightlines between the summit and lowlands. I was on the island for about a week with very changeable weather and the high elevations often hidden in clouds; this particular work depicts a “version” of the island when those sightlines were clear (hence the title), providing that world-shrinking experience that I find so moving. Given that the crater of Pico del Teide is relatively tiny—only about 300’ across—that experience included a sense that the entire mass of the island was being “gathered” up into that tiny point. (That feeling would’ve been much weaker had the peak been simply a summit without a crater. I think that’s because the shrinking sense is more empowering with clear evidence of volcanism—the landmass involved isn’t simply an entire island, but one created by forces that are powerful and dangerous rather than empowering. Until the next eruption at least, they feel “tamed.”)

Reveal (watercolor on paper, 30”x50”).

The plan is to at some point create another work, maybe entitled Concealed, in which cloud cover instead masks these landscapes from one another. This was more often than not the case during my visit, and the resulting experience was empowering in a different way that I’ll get into after that work comes into being. Mostly likely that’ll be after I manage to make another trip to the islands to fill in some gaps with the photography, and to add another island or two….

Darren

Separate | Small | Singular

Drawing Boundaries

Before moving on from the stream-of-consciousness theorizing of my last few posts as I promised, I think it could use a quick recap. (Skip past the six bullet points if you’ve already had your fill! But it does lead in to what follows.)

• The concept of nature apart from humanity has more reality in the mind than on the ground, given 1) how thoroughly we’ve transformed the planet, and 2) that arguably we can’t be separate from nature if we came from it in the first place. Taken to their extremes, these would mean respectively that “nothing is natural” and “everything is natural”—functionally the same thing.

• These two claims are often used to portray pristine nature as having limited value and relevance.

Rainforest of Tijuca National Park, Rio de Janeiro. Protected and experienced as a “wilderness” area despite having been re-planted 150 years ago and today facing numerous pressures from the surrounding city.

BUT:

• The “nothing is natural” claim would require an impossible-to-define point in human history when nature suddenly disappeared.  (When exactly did humans technically start changing the climate?) Naturalness is a matter of degree.

• And—even if “nothing is natural” and non-human nature is purely a cultural construct, cultural constructs by definition have cultural importance. The importance of the image of nature to our well-being has been widely demonstrated.

• And—even if the idea weren’t important, the second, “everything is natural” argument can be turned around to show that the idea doesn’t even have to be important:  it’s as “natural” and justifiable as anything else.  

SO:

• Ultimately it doesn’t really matter whether nature is part of us, we’re part of it, or some degree of either one. We can justify preserving what we perceive as pristine if we decide it’s the right thing to do—for us, for other species, or both. It’s a matter of values, reinforcing innate biophilic tendencies, not of philosophy or fact; even if the facts are clear to everyone (far from the case), the bigger challenge is getting enough of us to agree on what that “right thing” is.

Needless to say I believe that right thing to be some degree of separation, and from here on I’ll use “nature” and “natural” to mean “relatively free from obvious human impacts.” (Still loaded terms, but for those who don’t believe in using them without scare quotes, hopefully less loaded than before.) That separation obviously has a built-in spatial component—it requires clear physical boundaries—and that’s my segue back to the worldviews.

From Edges to Islands

All of the worldviews deal with edges, not just in terms of the fractured representational style but the places they represent. I led into the human-nature relationships discussion with depictions of sharp contrasts between nature and civilization (Hidden Valley, Páramo and Lagoon), and that type of edge is the most directly relevant to that discussion. But edges are tied to the preservation theme even when civilization’s out of the picture. Nowadays, whether or not they’re human-created, they almost certainly define endangered “islands” of nature. Edges imply not only separation but relative smallness and isolation.

Edges on the slopes of Mt. Taranaki, New Zealand—nature-meets-agriculture and nature-meets-nature.

Harbour Island (watercolor on paper, 18”x18”). Inspired by Rangitoto Island, Auckland, New Zealand—a city-nature edge overlaying a natural land-water edge.

The shrinking extent of the earth’s remaining natural areas enters both sides of the human-nature debate: on one hand it compels us to draw boundaries around what’s left, but on the other it’s used to justify the futility of obsessing over those remnants. Though I don’t subscribe to the second perspective, both of them actually correspond somewhat to my two aforementioned motivations for creating the worldviews:

1. concern over the fragility of natural remnants, and

2. the empowering sense of control I feel in experiencing a given natural environment from edge to edge, in other words the very smallness and fragility of those remnants.  

I say “somewhat” because #2 doesn’t mean at all that I’m advocating further shrinking of those remnants (or would oppose enlarging them)—quite the contrary—but rather that I experience a small and strange silver lining in the currently precarious state of things. So those motivations may seem contradictory in terms of how I feel about that current state of the environment, but not in terms of what I think we should do about it.  

I think of my “protective impulse” as resolving the contradiction between the desire to preserve nature and the desire to feel a sense of control over it because protectiveness is a form of control. (Similar to the way trying to keep a place untouched by humans is itself a human act.) Yes it’s treating nature like a precious object, more valuable than ever for the very reason that there’s so little of it left, which can distract us from other crucial environmental issues and has troubling social parallels. But I think it gives me a small glimmer of pleasure and hope—as precious objects can do—within a more general feeling of despair.

This could well be just my personal worldview in the wider sense of the term. But I wonder if it could also help inform a larger environmental ethic of concern (if not alarm) tempered by a conviction that the flip side of our domination of the planet is that we do still have some control over its fate (and ours). For a short time at least.

The Nature of Islands

More to come later on how attitudes toward the human-nature relationship relate to ideas about space and scale. For now though, I’ll keep the focus on islands—specifically in the traditional sense of being defined by water. Island nature tends to be rare and endangered not only because of islands’ relative smalless: particularly in the case of distant volcanic islands, eons of isolation have produced high levels of endemism, and topographic relief has created dramatic variety of environments and their associated species within islands (ecological “sub-islands”) as well as between islands and other landmasses.

Harsh but delicate volcanic alpine landscape of Haleakala Crater, Maui.

Remnant patch of Maui’s little-remaining native cloud forest at the other side of Haleakala Crater.

Both despite and because of geographical isolation, the natural rarity of these species and ecosystems has been magnified many-fold by human pressures: not used to outsiders, island species are particularly susceptible to invaders (human and non-human). And on top of that threat, as on continental mountains, the finely-tuned climatic conditions of islands will be hit particularly hard by global warming.

The worldviews I’ll describe in the next few posts capture the precious yet precarious nature of islands—special and distinct yet no longer protected by expanses of water. Some of the islands are real, but idealized in order to emphasize what’s still left and reflect some of what’s already been lost; others are imaginary but inspired by real places. Here I’m introducing a few of those real-life islands, some that have already inspired worldviews and some that soon will. Enjoy!

Darren

Low, scrubby lowlands of Lord Howe Island, Australia, with Mt. Gower (far right) in the distance across the lagoon.

Mist forest at the top of Mt. Gower, an ecosystem unique to Lord Howe. Well-protected and mostly intact, but it won’t survive a drying climate.

Semiarid lowlands of San Cristóbal Island, Galápagos.

Saturated treeless highlands of San Cristóbal. The habitat type is rare to begin with, and the few bits that have escaped cultivation are highly degraded.

Semiarid coastline of La Gomera, Canary Islands.

Rare and endangered laurisilva (temperate cloud forest) in the La Gomera highlands.

Realities of Nature | "Just" an Idea?

My last post dealt with reasons the image of pristine nature or wilderness, regardless of its basis in reality, is essential to our well-being (and why even determining its “basis in reality” is problematic). Here I’ll wrap up this particular set of foundational ideas, at least for now.

Cloud forest of Scalesia pedunculata in the highlands of Santa Cruz Island, Galápagos. Only miniscule bits of this habitat remain. If any place on earth deserves to be preserved as a “living museum,” the Galápagos would be it.

Giant groundsels (Senecio kilimanjari) on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Rare montane species like this one will be severely threatened by climate change—to what degree is it worth trying to soften the impacts, if it’s possible at all?

As I brought up before, a number of writers and designers see wilderness as having limited value and interest because it’s only an idea. At best it’s boring and simplistic, not worthy of our intellectual or aesthetic attention. At worst it misleads people into thinking that “real” wilderness completely apart from humanity actually exists, moving them to treat it as an exotic “other” to be either defeated and exploited as the enemy (as has generally been the case historically) or idolized as a collection of increasingly small and precious objects at the expense of the much more needy remainder of the planet. It’s true that this concept of the exotic other has unfortunate cultural parallels, driving the double-edged sword of colonization and (think “the noble savage”) glorification. And it’s a valid concern that heavily-impacted environments, like agricultural areas and urban ecosystems, are undervalued or written off. Yet focusing on the heavily-impacted at the expense of the least-impacted is like letting our museums deteriorate while we devote attention to troubled neighborhoods; I doubt anyone would argue with humanity’s entire tradition of venerating objects, or that we can’t value the museum and the neighborhood at the same time. Yes there are very valid arguments over degrees of preservation and the best allocation of resources: we may decide that saving a rainforest from invasive species (let alone a drying climate) isn’t worth the economic cost compared to restoring an artwork or a monument. But, that still reflects a weighing of cultural values. The view that wilderness as a cultural construct isn’t worth valuing or thinking about at all seems to ignore, a bit ridiculously, the fact that a cultural construct by definition has cultural meaning.

Timanfaya National Park on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. This entire volcanic landscape essentially came into being with eruptions in the early 1700s, and the activity continues to this day. We generally aren’t under the illusion that places we consider “wild” or “untouched” didn’t and won’t always exist as we know them now.

Note that I don’t advocate freezing a natural environment in time, like a painting, against non-human changes and cycles (where it would even be possible). Ecological and geological change is actually used to illustrate the artificiality and superficiality of the wilderness image, and yes that image usually doesn’t include something like hurricane devastation (setting aside for now the issue of climate change’s role in hurricanes). But, though catastrophic change does happen, the contemporary understanding that environments are always in flux (as opposed to older conceptions of stable “climax communities”) doesn’t imply that nature is always unpredictable, never reaching states of equilibrium or exhibiting cyclical patterns. And as with the decaying hut that doesn’t destroy the image of the primeval forest, the idea of wilderness isn’t so fragile as not to survive some degree of physical variability. If a natural fire regime were (re-)introduced into a western national park, and people were educated about its importance to the ecosystem, the environment’s existence wouldn’t lose its value even though it might get fewer visitors. Nature’s dynamism isn’t an earth-shattering idea to anyone who knows that trees sometimes fall and leaves move in the wind, and it doesn’t make nature not worth preserving in its own dynamic state. (Plus again, even without the image, the physical reality matters too. Just because a forest goes through processes of death and regeneration doesn’t mean we’re automatically justified in inserting our own processes, as if the very changeabilty of both nature and culture supported their inseparability. Yet I have seen that argument made.)

A light gap, probably caused by a tree fall, in the cloud forest of Reserva Los Cedros in Ecuador. I doubt such changeabillity would threaten most people’s image of a rainforest, if it isn’t already part of that image.

Uluru in central Australia is sacred to the region’s Aboriginal inhabitants, and any landscape architect would take an interest in that significance (let alone respect it). Why not the same for the Western veneration of “pristine” nature? Because it’s more recent or fickle? The two cultural meanings may not carry equal weight, but the latter shouldn’t be just brushed aside as superficial. (Drawing on Mick Abbott, “Practices of the Wild: A Rewilding of Landscape Architecture,” in LA+ )

Getting back to my assertion that cultural meaning has meaning—in other words, that it should have a say in how we treat the environment—I shouldn’t have to argue that it’s common sense. But since there are those who don’t seem to think it is (or to be more generous, who don’t seem to have given it much thought), I’ll go ahead and do so based on one of their own arguments. If our inseparability from nature is in part based on the fact that nature produced us, then cultural meaning and values—and our ability to make conscious decisions about our future based on them—must themselves (as products of evolution) be “natural.” And that includes how we choose to define or treat nature, even if it’s as a wide and diverse continuum of human impacts, with little basis in physical reality, that incorporates places we view as sufficiently untouched that we try to keep them that way. In other words, if that continuum is in fact mostly in our heads, then the wide and diverse continuum between us and microbes also collapses—everything we are and do is just as natural as they are. Either neither continuum is real, or they both are.

Ultimately it doesn’t really matter. As you can see, the debate over whether or not we’re part of nature becomes tedious, and in fact we don’t really need to resolve it in order to demonstrate that cultural meaning means something. Either culture is part of nature and therefore deciding to protect nature is at least as natural and justifiable as impacting it, or it isn’t part of nature and so we can preserve nature as something separate from us. It’s really all semantics—what does “separate” actually mean?

Replanted rainforest in Tijuca National Park, Rio de Janeiro. Despite it’s human history, the park feels as natural as any—and that’s what should matter.

Again, it depends on whether we’re talking about physical reality or mental reality—I won’t rehash all of that mostly because honestly by now I’ve gotten myself a little confused about the whole thing. But, I’ll bring in McKibbin’s view (in The End of Nature) that collapsing the human-nature continuum into an everything-is-natural perspective just seems intuitively wrong. True, no one can argue that we and everything we do and make don’t operate within the same natural rules of physics and chemistry as everything else, but how many of us would actually consider that relevant to our day-to-day lives? Maybe some would (and again I’m egregiously ignoring what many traditional societies believe regarding these issues), but I’d predict that more likely they say it to justify some destructive action rather than feeling it. I think the point here is that denying the value of that mental reality—what “separate” feels like to us—is denying that humanity means anything at all.

In one sense at least, though, I’d agree that we can’t separate ourselves from the rest of the planet: all of “us” now share a common fate. It’s less a philosophical human-nature relationship than a functional one, and Nash (Wilderness and the American Mind) asserts that it’s this realization that has recently convinced us (though not enough of us apparently) to think of nature as something separate, or in fact something that we need to now think of as separate if it and its psychological benefits are to be kept anything close to intact on any meaningful scale. The desire for separation is as functional as the current planetary situation driving it. It doesn’t grow out of a particular belief in the naturalness of that separation due a belief in the naturalness of everything; it’s just what we feel we need to do. In any case, though, we’re just back again to the recognition that all this philosophizing isn’t very useful in guiding our ideas and actions on conservation or preservation: we should do what we decide is best for humanity, and hopefully the people making the decisions are the ones who agree with you (or me) about what that best thing is.

So, I may have just succeeded in showing that most of this and the last two posts just went in a big circle. But I think that turned out to be the point: arguments that humans aren’t somehow special (and that nature isn’t therefore distinct and special too) won’t lead us anywhere useful or good.

I will be doing some more philosophizing later on, but it’ll be more spatially grounded—to the worldviews on paper and to patterns of design and development in the real world. First though, back to imaginary islands for a little while, since I need a break too.

Darren

Another scene from the Galápagos—forest of Opuntia echios var. gigantea at Tortuga Bay, Santa Cruz Island. “Museum-quality”?

Realities of Nature | Continuums of Pristine

Parque Nacional da Tijuca with Rio de Janeiro in the distance—the world’s largest replanted tropical rainforest (and largest urban park). I’ll have a lot to say about this park in future posts, as in many ways it gets to the heart of what “natural” and “wild” mean to us today.

This post will go into more depth on the topics I introduced last time dealing with “nature” or “wilderness” as an idea vs. a reality—or more accurately I’d say, different types of realities. I realize that this gets far into the weeds, but more than anything else it’s a way to help me get some foundational ideas (mine and others’) organized and in writing before I move into more spatially-oriented thoughts on human-nature relationships in the worldviews and in real life. Thanks as always for coming along for the ride, and a reminder that comments are welcome!

Also, a note that these ideas reflect a mostly Western, if not American, perspective. Global attitudes toward nature might be converging in some ways, but the reality is complex, and ethnicity and socio-economics certainly factor in as well. While I have some general knowledge of this diversity, currently I’m not in a position to go into any depth. At some point I may, but for now the Western perspective is most relevant to my own experiences out in the world and to creating the worldviews, so it’ll remain my focus.

Is “pristine” nature as a physical reality truly gone? Did it ever exist? Does it matter?

Mo’omomi Preserve (foreground) on Molokai. It’s relatively intact, but with a few exceptions the rest of island’s native vegetation has been replaced by exotics. The Reserve boundary is marked by the fence in the upper right corner; is this place “pristine”? Maybe it depends on which direction you’re looking.

As I introduced in the last post, nature apart from humanity has more reality today as an idea than as a physical state given the degree to which we’ve transformed the planet. My take (not original, but far from universally held) is that this doesn’t make it any less “real,” or any less worthy of attention and at least some degree of protection.

Before I get into the reasons why pristine nature has value as an idea, I’m going to argue that even if it didn’t, in fact it isn’t only “in our heads.” To claim that it’s gone from the physical world isn’t technically in dispute, but only if we use an all-or-nothing concept of “pristine” that could never have any practical meaning as long as humans have existed. By any definition the earth before humans was pristine (if we’d been around to call it such), but after that, where did pristine end and not-pristine begin, in both space and time? What about when the very first humans started breathing and changing the composition of the atmosphere, on a level that was obviously negligible but also not zero? (And which primates do we even count as being the “very first humans”?) What about the Americas, or even the other side of Africa, when those early humans were hunting and gathering? What about Hawaii when it was first discovered by the Polynesians but not settled? The rest of Hawaii when part of it was settled? Mt. Everest right after it was first climbed? After the first hundred people climbed it? After the first discarded oxygen tank, but from a spot where it wasn’t visible? Mt. Everest today?

Me in primary (never cut) rainforest on the island of Dominica. Hurricane Maria probably did significant damage here a few years later; is the likelihood that it was made worse by climate change high enough that “pristine for most practical purposes” no longer applies?

The point is that either all of these places were still pristine (and all places now still are too), none of them were, or there’s a continuum of meaning. Neither of the first two options makes any intuitive sense—there’s little or nothing pristine about Manhattan (unless it’s just all natural; more on that later), and the entire world wasn’t suddenly human-dominated at the dawn of our species. So that leaves the continuum option: there’s no such thing as pristine or not-pristine, only more or less so. Pristine nature today may indeed be a cultural construct—even just by virtue of our delineating it—but to say that construct is never coupled with any degree of physical reality, and therefore deserves no special status, is using a meaningless definition of “pristine.”

Of course climate change sheds a new light on this continuum. I’d argue that it doesn’t change it qualitatively in the physical sense; Bill McKibben in The End of Nature claims that it does, given that until now our impacts always had a boundary of sorts, but I’ve tried to show that the physical reality of that boundary was itself always a matter of degree. (The psychological boundary is a different story, and I’ll get to that below.) But there’s no question that the quantitative change in the definition of pristine will be profound, if it isn’t already in certain places. If a purist definition doesn’t make sense given that it’s impossible to say where it begins and ends in time and space, it’s quickly becoming much easier to say where it ends, and so that purist definition is no longer quite as useless. From a strictly ecological perspective, protecting let alone talking about nature apart from humanity is still a matter of degree, but those degrees are dropping away as they climb on the thermometer.

The psychological continuum

Hot springs area in Lassen National Park. I’d guess that for most visitors, the boardwalk doesn’t destroy the image of nature operating on its own terms.

Temperate rainforest along the Milford Track in New Zealand. Introduced mammals have had significant ecological effects here and throughout the country, but the untrained eye wouldn’t know it. How meaningful is that knowledge to the experience of the landscape?

Regardless of how we interpret the range of real human impacts on the environment, needless to say they aren’t all perceptually the same. Plenty of altered or even entirely artificial landscapes and ecosystems are considered untouched, either because we think they actually are (like in a remote and mature second-growth forest) or because we want to overlook the knowledge that they aren’t (as might be the case with invasive species). “Pristine” exists on a continuum in our minds just like it does on the ground, but it also incorporates the literal meaning of the word that most of us can envision for certain places. McKibben notes that our image of untouched is “durable”—a boardwalk or an abandoned, decaying hut might not ruin that image (though interestingly a discarded coke bottle might. Maybe this is because the hut symbolizes nature “prevailing” but the bottle is a harbinger of the opposite?)

There are a number of reasons the image itself, whether based on something close to or not so close to physical reality, is worth our consideration. In Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Frazier Nash discusses the importance of just knowing something out there exists that’s “not us”—whether or not we’re actually there. E.O. Wilson’s concept of biophilia suggests that our connection to the biological component of that something is innate, evolved, and essential to our well-being. Even more broadly Nash writes that nature perceptually apart from us, as the source of humanity and the “baseline” for evaluating it, gives meaning to civilization as a whole. Just as wilderness has no meaning outside of us (as no “idea” can), civilization would have none without the continuing existence of “pre-civilization.” Nature isn’t just beyond us but also bigger than us. Above all, even though it makes us feel small and precarious, it also gives us consolation to know that we’re not “on our own”—and if this sounds akin to religion, McKibben does make that analogy.

Again, climate change distorts all of this, or at least it will. In terms of nature’s meaning and relation to us, I agree with McKibben’s claim that there’s been a qualitative shift. We could always at least imagine somewhere completely beyond human influence, regardless of how small or how far away, but now we can’t. Since the purist definition of “pristine” does have some psychological reality, that realization doesn’t just knock a few degrees off the continuum—now everything is human, and we are on our own. Only denial in some form (whether it’s “climate change doesn’t exist” or “it does exist but I can’t come to terms with it yet”) is keeping that realization from dawning on all of us; I’m still somewhat guilty of the second type of denial but that’s quickly changing. As that happens, I’m not sure how much and how fast it’ll change my own views on what I consider natural and worth preserving—honestly I prefer not to give it much thought yet. Hopefully the relevance of the ideas I’m exploring here won’t be completely obliterated.

It looks like I’ll need one more post to wrap up this set of background concepts, so stay tuned. After that, I’ll return to the worldviews for a bit before spending some time connecting them to these larger ideas.

Darren

The “fern-sedge” zone atop Santa Cruz Island in the Gálapagos—too wet for native trees to have evolved, but not for invasive quinine trees (standing dead in the middle ground, killed by chemical control) that are transforming this landscape into forest. Preventing or reversing such impacts is difficult and expensive, and climate change will make it all but impossible. But, scientific losses aside, how much of a psychological blow would it be if these islands ceased to be special?

Realities of Nature | First Thoughts

Rainforest on the island of Dominica—secondary (previously cut), but most wouldn’t know it without first visiting a primary forest. In fact the secondary forest, with a lusher understory, looks more quintessentially “jungle-like.”

I mentioned in an earlier post that in this blog I won’t stay away from loaded terms like “nature,” “natural” and “wilderness” (for now I’ll use them interchangeably). They’re often considered simplistic and misleading because they suggest something fully apart from humanity, despite the fact that we’re inextricably linked with it physically and psychologically. It’s true that pristine nature is no longer an ecological reality, and that even when it was, our very act of protecting and even defining it as something outside of humanity made it “human” in a sense. But as you’ll see, it isn’t so simple to say (as many do) that the concept of wilderness has no use or meaning—if it’s all in our heads, that’s simply a different kind of reality, and one that fills a crucial psychological role.

In the worldviews I think about and depict nature as special and distinct, which means intact at the small scale (e.g. no invasive species or cut trees) but not necessarily at the larger scale (e.g. when it’s isolated by or juxtaposed with “civilization”). And, by portraying it in the first place, let alone idealizing it in these ways, it’s become something more than just a physical thing out in the world. So while these issues have been on my radar for years, I’ve recently been giving a lot more thought to the question of what “natural” really means to me and to humanity, especially given how quickly the answer is changing given today’s environmental realities.

New Zealand’s Kahurangi National Park (depicted here in Great Walk) has experienced relatively minimal human impacts over the centuries, notably having avoid a proposed scenic road in the 1970’s. But is it less “natural” now just because we’re deliberately keeping it that way?

This is the first in a series of posts (not necessarily consecutive) that’ll look at this bigger question—they’ll be a little more “academic” than those focusing specifically on the worldviews, but I find that my motivations for the works don’t have much substance without a larger theoretical context. (It’s part of the reason I find the term “artwork” too reductive.) Recently a few people have told me—and I agree—that the future writing projects that this blog is intended to jump-start should take the form of a memoir, which I plan to use as a way to personalize my more academic interests (essentially, what plants and ecosystems mean to us symbolically and the ways those meanings are revealed). So as always, especially those of you in the design/environmental fields who might think about these topics more than most, I’d love to hear your impressions. (And don’t forget that you can leave comments below—these days I’m longing to get into some in-depth discussions that aren’t political arguments on Facebook!)

Erg Chebbi in Morocco. The Sahara was once lush, likely desertified in part by overgrazing. How “wild” does that make it?

Physical vs. Cultural Reality

The Peruvian Amazon. It’s becoming increasingly clear that traditional land use has had widespread effects on forest structure and composition.

It was while studying ecological anthropology in college that I first realized the range and extent of historical human influence on the planet. Nearly all of it has been impacted to varying degrees by habitation, cultivation, hunting and gathering, fire management, or some combination of those, if not by development and urbanization. Until recently there were certainly places—Antarctica, high mountain peaks, uncolonized/undiscovered islands—where those impacts were absent or negligible, but with the accelerating effects of climate change there’s no part of the earth that can any longer be considered untouched. At least in the sense that humans have been “created” and shaped by nature, and have in turn shaped it from the very beginning, it’s true that we’re just as much a part of it as every other species.

Approaching the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Places like this have stayed essentially free from human impacts until recently, but the glaciers are fast disappearing. How long can the wilderness image survive this (not to mention the hordes of climbers)?

Despite all this, as I first explored in depth in an environmental philosophy class, Western culture has always had some concept of a “pristine,” non-human nature, which over time has alternated between hostile and benevolent, corrupting and redeeming, worthless and precious. This idea of wilderness has persisted even though it’s become less and less of a physical reality, because we’ve been able to convince ourselves that somewhere out there (whether or not we’ll ever see it) that reality still exists.

The fact that climate change is now destroying that reality completely, as Bill McKibben describes in The End of Nature, will have profound implications for wilderness as an idea; how quickly that happens will probably depend on how quickly the effects become widely perceptible. For now I think it’s fair to say that even for those of us who don’t deny that climate change is happening, enough (myself included) are in emotional denial to keep idea of a pristine nature hanging by a thread. Regardless, both because and in spite of the disappearing physical reality of that nature, and the fact that it’s no longer our mortal enemy except when it fights back, the idea has become all the more essential to our psychology—now in the most benevolent, redeeming, and precious sense. Nature may be a cultural reality and not a natural one given that there’s no longer anything truly apart from us, but it’s also a manifestation of that inseparability—nature is now as much a part of us as we’re a part of it.

How Inseparable?

Bluff Knoll in Stirling Range National Park, Western Australia. It was established to protect one of the last remnants of a global biodiversity hotspot, but given its long history of Aboriginal use plus the current spread of fungal die-back (mostly by shoes) and difficulty of replicating the natural fire regime, it’s far from pristine.

In graduate school for landscape architecture fifteen years ago, these topics all came up again but with a particular and (as I saw it) concerning angle, if not agenda: if humans are inseparable from nature, meaning pristine nature is just a cultural construct, then there’s nothing to stop us from continuing to erase the distinctions that still remain. Back then landscape architectural practitioners and theorists, increasingly in my program at Harvard but also notably at Penn, inspired by environmental writers like William Cronon (“The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”), latched on to this attitude to justify a focus on natural process rather than form or image. If nature’s always in flux, the argument went, and cultural processes are part of that flux, our (or the designer’s) job is to encourage natural and cultural processes to work together for the benefit of both.

The spatial mixing and merging that would result from such functional integration was considered not only “natural” but good, “interesting” and “honest.” It would create a non-idealized representation of humans’ “real” place in the environment, unlike somewhere like Yosemite that’s artificially and misleadingly frozen into a static, romanticized image. As for the few places that are truly close to untouched by humanity and everyone agrees we should leave alone: they were seen as out of sight and out of mind, not worthy of our interest in why they’re important to us or why we might like to design things next to them.

I should stress that this viewpoint was particular to a few academic programs focused on being cutting-edge, and probably not shared with equal enthusiasm by everyone within them. Also, in landscape architecture at least it seems to have lost traction (or at least the discussion fell off) around 2013, replaced by concerns related to social justice. But these issues aren’t going away, and given that pristine nature is now truly only in the mind, the view that any sort of physical separation between civilization and perceived wilderness should be created or maintained will likely continue to face opposition. Maybe in some cases it should. But going to grad school after being immersed in deep and nuanced college discussions of these topics, and with more of an interest in the non-human environment than most of my colleagues, I found these arguments for further “merging” over-simplified and even lazy. “Separate” in this context has many meanings and degrees which have changed over time and are changing even faster as we speak. Much more to come on this!

Darren

Primary (never cut) cloud forest at Los Cedros, northwest Ecuador. It’s pretty close to “pristine,” but given the forest’s reliance on mist and rain, climate change will surely change that. Psychologically, when and how will that start to matter?

Relict Nature | Lagoon

At the risk of frailejone overload (can there be such a thing?), I’m devoting another post to my experience in Ecuador’s El Angel Ecological Reserve. The previous post dealt with one of the two zones of the Reserve that I visited; this one will deal with the second, Voladero Lagoon.

Frailejones overlooking the lagoon.

The lagoon, surrounded by frailejone-studded slopes, is accessed by an hour-long loop hike from the road. Here the plants are taller and more numerous than in the area around Polylepis Lodge, giving the place a particularly otherworldly atmosphere.

In the resulting watercolor Lagoon, I depict this piece of páramo as a true wilderness relict although (as with Polylepis Lodge) it’s situated close to one edge of the Reserve with “civilization” visible only on two sides. For some reason, when I was there I pictured the hills enclosing the lagoon to be surrounded on all sides by cultivation. This could’ve been because that ring of hills prevented distant views beyond the far side of the basin and I could imagine fields on the other side.

Páramo meets civilization.

Lagoon, watercolor on paper, 36”x36.”

Another factor giving a more “tamed” feel to the landscape, at least on the day that I happened to visit, was the less gloomy weather compared to the first zone. That the sun was often out, and nothing was hidden in clouds, made the landscape seem less foreboding and more accessible. (On paper I take some liberties with this, adding mist in some areas for variety, but still keep most of the views sunny.) Paradoxically though this meteorological softening of the wild-cultivated boundary also sharpens it. The strikingly surreal vegetation, juxtaposed with agricultural fields, seems all the more surprising when not overlaid with the meteorological conditions that maintain its harsh boggy habitat.

In other ways too, the fact that aside from the frailejones the overall look of the páramo isn’t dramatically different from the surrounding environment lessens the contrast while also intensifying it. The topography of the Reserve is more rugged than that outside it, but not compared to the rock formations of Hidden Valley. And, away from the tiny areas of remaining polylepis forest and patches of introduced trees between the fields, the contrasting landscapes are both non-forested. So the páramo felt relatively approachable and “knowable” in a way that at the same time made it seem even more wild, surreal and remote. In turn this gave me a greater sense of empowerment, in the way that taming a lion would feel more gratifying than taming a squirrel. (I don’t love this “taming” analogy but it pretty well describes “Motivation #2” for the worldviews—making wild places more comprehensible by isolating and compressing them.)

Darren

Frailejone (in the sunflower family) in flower.

Relict Nature | Páramo

Picking up on my last post on remnant natural environments surrounded (perceptually or in reality) by human-dominated landscapes, this one will look at another example—from the páramo of Northern Ecuador, where I spent a few days in June 2018.

Typical páramo landscape with frailejones.

Frailejone with bromeliad to the left. The bromeliads (genus Puya) have bright blue flowers, though I was too late in the season to catch them.

Páramo is a type of alpine moorland—cold, wet and windy—concentrated in the northern Andes above the treeline from Venezuela through Northern Peru. In parts of it the most distinguishing feature are the stands of frailejones (“friar’s ears”), tree-like members of the genus Espeletia reaching 20’ in height. Looking from a distance like giant succulents but in fact members of the sunflower family with spongy stems and soft, fuzzy leaves, these plants give the landscape a surreal and oddly animated look. (I find unbranching “trees” like these with a tuft of leaves at the top to be endearingly human-like, probably part of the reason I’m drawn to them.)

Historically the extent of the páramo ecosystem, and particularly frailejone habitat, was limited given its narrow temperature and precipitation tolerances. But today that habitat has been further reduced, and will be increasingly so, by the spread of agriculture and global warming-induced changes in temperature, rainfall and susceptibility to disease. The area that I visited, El Angel Ecological Reserve, lies between 11,950 and 15,640’ above sea level and is one of the few remaining accessible zones of frailejones in Ecuador (though there are others in Colombia and Venezuela).

View into the Reserve, overlooking the forested valley.

Inside the Polylepis forest.

I was fortunate to visit two parts of the Reserve. The first, in the area of Polylepis Lodge where I spent two nights, includes one of the last relicts of another type of ecosystem, a unique cloud forest dominated by a gnarled, orange-barked tree in the genus Polylepis. This forest filters into stream valleys like the one where the Lodge is situated, just below the páramo.

Despite the Reserve’s relatively small area, the experience of the El Angel from this accessible part at its very edge was more of butting up against civilization (in this case agriculture) rather than being surrounded by it. So the empowering feeling of being in a wilderness relict wasn’t dominant here, but the sense of the páramo rippling endlessly into the distance did reinforce the contrast between its “wildness” and the adjacent fields.

Páramo meets civilization.

The contrast was accentuated also by the mysterious and even mystical atmosphere of the landscape (which has inspired some creepy legends in local folklore), created by the shifting mists and the surreal forms and ghostly white of the vegetation. That the area supposedly also has a real element of danger—the State Department had posted an oddly specific warning about visiting the Reserve due to its proximity to the Colombian border—contributed to the slightly sinister feel, even though literally no one in the country, major tour agencies included, knew what that was about. Back home, putting the experience on paper around Halloween while listening to a “real-life” ghost stories podcast probably had a compounding effect on these impressions.

The worldview based on this part of the Reserve (entitled simply Páramo) focuses on the meeting of these wild and domesticated landscapes; I accentuate the contrast by bringing the town of El Angel right up against the Reserve despite its being some distance away by car. I also incorporate the internal contrast between the páramo and cloud forest landscapes.

Páramo, watercolor on paper, 32”x40.”

In a later post I’ll talk about the second zone that I visited (Voldero Lagoon) and the worldview it inspired, in addition to more general impressions from the trip. Even though I don’t like to focus on the “tourist” component of these experiences, I’ll end here with some tidbits about my lodging in the Reserve because it was an unexpected highlight. As the name suggests, Polylepis Lodge is nestled into the edge of the cloud forest, in the stream valley at the foot of frailejone-covered hillsides. It’s rustic yet has some touches of luxury and creative design.

Darren

The Lodge’s rustic “courtyard” with polylepis forest and páramo beyond. It has its own mini-museum of Pre-Polumbian artifacts; that’s one specimen in the center of the pool.

I was the only guest at the time (contributing to the “weirdness” factor), which meant I got a free upgrade to one of the jacuzzi rooms. The brownish stream-fed water took some getting used to.

The restaurant’s built over a canal that channels a natural stream, hence the partial glass floor.

Relict Nature | Hidden Valley

Looking north across cultivated land on Flinders Island from Strzelecki Peak.

In my recent post on Sanctuary, inspired by Strzelecki National Park on Flinders Island, Tasmania, I brought up the tension between two factors motivating my interest in relicts of native ecosystems surrounded by human-dominated landscapes:

1. These ecological remnants are becoming smaller and rarer due to habitat destruction, invasive species and climate change, driving me to depict and “preserve” them on paper.

2. On the other hand I also find these isolated pieces of nature exciting, similar to the way I’m generally drawn to environmental edges, contrasts and “islands” (whether encircled by water or by something else). A natural environment is easier for me to comprehend and appreciate when I can experience it in opposition to a contrasting one, creating a feeling of empowerment. In the case of nature surrounded by human-dominated landscapes, that sense of control takes on a “taming” aspect—not very consistent with the conservation angle of #1.

Applying these contradictory reactions to design or conservation in the real world would at the very least require more justification. In fact they tie into a few competing (sometimes heatedly so) contemporary approaches to design and planning, relating to a wider philosophical debate on the relationship between nature and culture—including what “nature” and “natural” actually mean. These are issues that I’ve had an interest in since I was in design school. While the worldviews grow more out of an emotional response to the nature-culture relationship than my intellectual take on it, creating them has led me to dive more deeply into those interests. I’ll be writing a lot more about them in later posts, as one purpose of this blog is to put the worldviews in a wider, more interdisciplinary context. For now I’ll add one more thing—words like “nature” and “wilderness” are highly loaded but I’ll be using them freely, without the scare quotes (even though some of my professors would be shaking their heads). My reasons for doing so go beyond just a lack of better terms. More explanation to come.

Hidden Valley, watercolor on paper, 24”x18.”

The town of Kununurra with the western half of Hidden Valley National Park (outlined in dark green), and the accessible portion around the actual “hidden valley” (in lighter green) that inspired the worldview.

Unlike in the real world, in the worldviews themselves I consider the tension between #1 and #2 to be inspirational in itself rather than a potential problem. In real life the natural environment depicted in Hidden Valley is far from encircled by development, but the “insular” feel of the place led me to imagine it simultaneously from both the “conservation” and “control” perspectives.

The work is inspired by the national park of the same name (alternatively called Mirima, in the Aboriginal language) in the far northeast corner of Western Australia,. The park features an “island” of dramatic sandstone formations right adjacent to the town of Kununurra; the accessible part of those formations is cut by a valley that contains the park’s entry road. But as much as the geology, for me what defined the wild character of the park was its baobab trees (Adansonia gregorii), the only species of the genus outside of Africa/Madagascar. There were in fact many baobabs planted in the town itself—an empowering juxtaposition too, if you consider each tree to be its own bit of wilderness “tamed” by sidewalks and parking lots. But despite this intermingling, walking among the baobabs and colorfully banded cliffs in the park I felt much more than a few hundred feet from the city streets.

Hidden Valley is highly idealized in order to accentuate nature/non-nature contrasts. The park is actually bordered by development only on one side and extends far beyond the “hidden valley” itself (the only part of the park interior accessible or visible by road and trail) in every other direction. But, given that the valley zone is the part that I could experience, the park felt like a much smaller, isolated piece of wild nature and I imagined development surrounding it on all sides. So on paper I shrunk the park down to just the valley zone, densified parts of the town, and surrounded the rest of the park with agriculture. Other artistic liberties included borrowing a palm-filled valley from another nearby site with similar geology (Keep River National Park)—I wanted to dial up the internal, natural contrasts a bit too—and adding more baobabs to the valley interior.

The park-town relationship can be experienced in multiple ways. From inside the “hidden valley” itself the town might as well be miles away, and yet because you know it’s there just beyond the wall of rock formations, the contrast is still felt. From observation points atop the rocks overlooking the town, and looking at the rocks from points within the town itself, the park feels a little less wild and isolated but the contrast is right there to see. Hidden Valley incorporates all three of these vantage points. This idea of “revealed vs. concealed” contrasts and the resulting impacts on feelings of insularity and empowerment are more just introduced here than explored, but later works and posts will go deeper.

Night-lit baobab outside a restaurant in Kununurra.

Overlooking the “hidden valley.”

One note on the “design” of the town, which is partly real and partly meant to match the part that is. Like most urban/suburban environments, from above and from within, it’s pretty banal (car-oriented, disorganized and scrappy). But I would strive for this effect even if I were designing the town from scratch, which I plan to do in some future worldviews. The reason I’m not inclined to represent avant-garde, master-planned cities alongside wilderness might have something to do with motivation #1 above—I see these constructed environments in a somewhat sinister light, and their being chaotic and lacking clear intentionality of design could reinforce the vulnerability of the relict environments they surround.

View of the park from the eastern edge of town, with young baobabs (the white sticks) on the slopes.

Natural relicts tend to have both an ecological and geological component—vegetation as well as landform —so the edge created by agricultural or urbanization coincides to some degree with a topographical edge that would’ve been there anyways, heightening the contrast. (Of course geology usually explains in part why these particular places have been preserved in the first place—rocks, slopes and cliffs will discourage development more readily than plants.) In Hidden Valley both components are significant; in the next post vegetation will play a more important role. Usually landform alone isn’t enough to draw me in, but later on I’ll have a lot to say and show about one important exception—volcanic cones.

Darren

Inside the “hidden valley.”

Great Walk | Worldview

This post picks up on the last one, describing my experience hiking the 78-km Heaphy Track, one of New Zealand’s seven “Great Walks.”

Great Walk, the work inspired by the trek, depicts a more purely linear journey than other worldviews to date, the main reason for the long and narrow format. As such it’s brought up considerations that haven’t come up in previous works, like endpoints, relative emphasis/salience of experiences along the way, and direction of “travel” and of the individual perspectives. (The orientation of the perspectives was determined mostly by compositional considerations, but I think whether the viewer is looking “ahead” or “backward” does matter to overall experience of the journey.) This approach is most applicable to places I’ve experienced on a single long hike rather than just wandering around without a single destination in mind. None of the other multi-day hikes I’ve done that don’t form a complete loop (the nearby Milford Track, Iceland’s Laugavegur trek, Mt. Kilimanjaro, the Inca Trail) have ended up on paper yet, but they will.

Great Walk, watercolor on paper, 25”x50”.

In sketching out composition options for Great Walk, I discovered that integrating moments covering the entire trek start to finish would result in an overly busy layout. I decided to leave out Day 4, downhill from the highest point of the trek to the finish, which I generally found to be less evocative and distinctive than the rest of the trip. Having already hiked uphill through the rainforest on the windward side of the route, the species were familiar and the overall feel of the forest was less luxuriant, particularly toward the end. Or, maybe I was just exhausted, kept awake all night worrying that my phone would die before the alarm went off at 5am, or I was just ready to return to civilization. In any case, I didn’t take many photos during those last few hours despite the sunniest weather of the trek.

Great Walk with a very rough overlay of the walking route. The numbers on the perspective views correspond to their locations on the satellite view below and the images representative of each experience.

Northeast corner of the South Island of New Zealand with the “painted” portion of the Heaphy Track in red. (The remainder of the trail, mostly the descent on Day 4, is in black.) The numbers correspond to the scenes depicted in Great Walk above and in the images below.

1. A dramatic beginning—Nikau palms along the beach.

2. Dry Riverbed behind the beach.

3. Rainforest behind the beach, with nikau palms.

4. Crossing a larger riverbed near the beginning of the ascent.

5. Climbing higher—view of a river valley below.

6. Montane rainforest—no more palms.

7. Climbing higher through “drier” forest.

8. Crossing the Gouland Downs.

9. The Gouland Downs.

10. Nearing the edge of the grassland.

11. Entering the forest again.

12. An understated end to the story (but not the walk).

13. View from the highest point of the trek, beginning of Day 4.

The big exception to this relative lack of drama/novelty on the last day was the view, from the exact high point of the trail just as the sun was coming up, of snowy mountains framed by tropical-looking heaths encrusted with ice. But I left that landscape out of the composition too, because I decided that the clearest “ecological narrative” from the uphill part of the trip was moving from the exotic and luxuriant to the familiar and subdued—the progression from “tropical” palm-fringed beaches to grassland and forest that at times looked not just “New Zealand temperate” but “Northern Hemisphere temperate,” seemingly a world away. As I wrote in the last post, this narrative might’ve felt more natural and dramatic in reverse, but in fact I like the subdued way that the journey in Great Walk ends, even if it’s a bit open-ended. Finishing with the sunrise vista would’ve been a return to the drama and novelty of the beach.

Having just written that though, I’m thinking that that alternative idea—bookending the journey with equally dramatic jungly beach and snowy mountain scenes—is also worth trying out. I might also work in an image or two from the downhill portion at the expense of a few from the uphill, but de-emphasized in relation to the mountain scene so that the work still “ends” (literally) on a high note. The descent would be treated as an afterthought, with the mountain view simultaneously representing the elevational climax of the journey announcing the beginning of that descent and what I experienced to be the end of the trip.

Darren

Great Walk | The Heaphy Track, New Zealand

Great Walk, watercolor on paper, 25”x50” (now with a proud new owner, my friend Richard Ervais!).

In fall 2017 I spent about three weeks traveling around the North and South Islands of New Zealand. Four worldviews have come out of that experience—there will be more!—including the recently completed Great Walk, inspired by the Heaphy Track in the northwest corner of the South Island.

The Heaphy Track is one of seven “Great Walks” throughout the country—multi-day treks of exceptional environmental interest maintained to a certain standard including electrified huts. The most famous of these is the Milford Track, which I did also, and you’ll definitely hear about that one too later on. But while the scenery was less dramatic, the Heaphy Track made a greater impression on me in terms of its diversity of species and ecosystems.

New Zealand with the Heaphy Track location in red.

The Heaphy Track (from the New Zealand Department of Conservation).

The 4-day “walk” (I love how the Kiwis call them “walks,” as if they’re everyday activities, and in fact they’re much more ingrained in the culture than something comparable in the USA) runs about 50 miles through Kahurangi National Park, taking in subtropical coastline, varied forest types, and high-altitude grasslands. It can be done in either direction; most walk east-west, beginning at the foot of the mountains and ending at the coast, though for logistical reasons I did it in reverse. As I’ll talk more about below, I was reminded that if such environmental journeys are experienced as narratives (which for me they always are), directionality matters as much as it would for a novel or symphony with its structure read or heard backwards.

Nikau palms along the coast, a few hours into the trek.

Rainforest with nikau palms behind the beach.

Day 1 began in the early afternoon in a light rain (actually much better weather than predicted), on a trail hugging the coastline just a few meters back from a string of beaches. Occasionally the sand is interrupted by rocky outcroppings lifting the trail upward for dramatic views along the coast, or by streams crossed by narrow suspension bridges. (Until a few years ago these stream crossings were done on foot, requiring close attention to weather and tides and resulting in more than a few tragedies.)

The most striking thing about this part of the South Island coast should be obvious from the photographs. Though at a latitude roughly equivalent to that of New York, thanks to a warm ocean current this coastline is home to the world’s southernmost naturally-occuring palm, the nikau (Rhopalostylis sapida), which is the dominant canopy species in the rainforest fringing these beaches. The nikau is noteworthy not just because palms in general are unexpected this far south, but because such a tropical-looking palm is even more surprising. Most of the world’s other hardiest palms—the Mediterranean fan palm, the needle palm, the dwarf palmetto—look decidedly non-tropical, with their shrubby forms and fan-shaped leaves. This is considered subtropical rainforest (or even temperate by some measures), but aside from the pleasant temperatures it feels as tropical as any in the quintessential “South Pacific.”

At the start of Day 2, the trail turned inland and began to climb. The palms became sparser and eventually disappeared, the exotic look of the rainforest sustained by tree ferns and giant heaths (genus Dracophyllum—in the same family as azaleas but looking deceptively like tropical houseplants). It was at this point that I started wishing I had done the walk in the more popular direction. Most people choose to end at the coast, because of the dramatic ocean views that open up on the last day plus the fact that the beach always feels like an appropriate place to end a long hike. For me though, given my obsession with palms, the reason had more to do with wishing I could have experienced the transition from temperate to tropical-like, seeing the palms slowly appear and then overwhelm. It seemed like a more natural progression, maybe because traveling from the more-familiar to the less-familiar is a storyline that tends to leave us with the strongest impressions. Briefly I decided that one day I would come back and do the walk again “properly”—though that conviction faded as I gradually realized the current progression was in fact creating its own unique narrative. More on that later.

Rainforest at a slightly higher elevation as the trail turns inland.

A gigantic southern rata, Metrosideros umbellata, with my hiking poles (bottom center with white handles) for scale.

Looking up toward the canopy of the tree in the previous image.

Giant heath (Dracophyllum sp.).

As the trail climbed higher and slowly began to level out, the character of forest became coarser, shorter, and “drier” (probably because of a change in soil type rather than precipitation), with decreasing species diversity. The tree ferns disappeared, though the occasional tropical-looking heath still stood out sharply against the tiny leaves of the surrounding foliage.

This and previous 3 images—the changing look of the forest as the trail climbs.

A boggy area of the Gouland Downs (the white on the trees in the background is a trick of the morning light, not snow).

Early on Day 3, the scrub gave way to a boggy, moody tussock grassland (the sky was mostly overcast with off-and-on rain) known as the Gouland Downs. While the landscape does look alpine in some ways, the absence of trees is due to the poor, wet soil rather than low temperatures—the elevation is only around 800m/2,600’—and in fact the grasslands are surrounded and broken up by forested hills, mountains, and rocky karst zones. Given the overall temperate look of the vegetation, I actually found the place vaguely reminiscent of a field-and-forest matrix in Europe or the Eastern USA, as English settlers apparently did too when they tried and failed to graze sheep there in the 1800’s. In any case the tropical-looking nikau forest felt a whole lot farther away than a day’s walk, a sense of separation amplified by the self-contained feel of the Downs—a special world unto itself. The forested mountains blocked any views or reminders of the more luxuriant environments below.

Looking across the Gouland Downs.

Toward the end of the day, the trail left the Downs and passed into the forest again—one very different from any of the previous types. Those were either scrubby or rainforest-y depending on the substrate; the higher-elevation ones certainly felt temperate, but still like Southern Hemisphere forests because of the unfamiliar species. This one felt like a typical forest in the northeastern USA—I think it was some combination of the spindly trees and light, ash-like foliage. It certainly seemed like I had temporarily left New Zealand.

The Enchanted Forest—mossy, gnarled beech forest in a karst (limestone) area within the Downs.

“Non New Zealand-like” forest on the other side of the Downs.

Day 4 began just before sunrise in a driving wet snowstorm. Reaching the highest point of the trip, first light revealed tropical-looking heaths with a light covering of ice, framing a view of snowy mountains across the valley that I would be following for the remainder of the walk. The weather improved, soon becoming sunny, as I descended again into ferny temperate rainforest. About 4 hours later I began to catch glimpses of an agricultural valley through the trees, the topography leveled out, and the trail exited the forest.

Sunrise vista from the highest point of the walk, with giant heaths in the foreground.

Heading downhill and back into the rainforest on the last segment of the hike.

The end of the trail, looking back toward the mountains.

In the next post I’ll describe how I distilled my experience of the Heaphy Track into Great Walk—stay tuned!

Darren

Sanctuary | National Park and Worldview

This post picks up where I left off two posts ago with Strzelecki National Park on Flinders Island, Tasmania, and the worldview it inspired. The Park protects the most intact and diverse ecosystems of the island, where I did a month-long artist residency at Mountain Seas Art and Wilderness Retreat in September 2017.

Strzelecki National Park, and the relatively pristine mountains and coastline adjacent, has only three interior routes. The 4-5 hour round-trip hike to Strzelecki Peak begins about a 15-minute bike ride from Mountain Seas; a much longer but basically level one follows a road and 4wd track just inland along the south coast; and an hour-long walk winds along the coastline north from Trousers Point.

I hiked to the summit twice, both times lucking out with the weather. It’s definitely in my top five day-hikes of all time, and isn’t difficult except for a few steep, rocky patches near the top. The trail begins in dry mixed and Eucalyptus forest, punctuated by bare or scrubby areas of granite boulders and cut by a dramatically lush, tree-fern filled rainforest gully. As the trail rises and approaches the sheer cliffs of the peak, the rocky areas become more frequent.

Rainforest gully surrounded by Eucalyptus forest.

View of Strzelecki Peak (above my head) from the lower slopes.

Mid-slope view down to Trousers Point.

Patches of montane rainforest start to appear, mossy and windswept. Where the soil allows, the rainforest becomes more luxuriant, though unlike the gully far below the tree ferns are short and ragged. It’s wet enough for them up there but almost too cold—an ecological “zone of tension” (there’s probably a proper scientific term for that?), world-shrinking in the way that I experience other ecotones but here in a particularly visceral way. Reaching the peak itself, the vegetation becomes drier and sparser once again, reaching tree-height only in pockets between the boulders.

Wind-sculpted rainforest approaching the Peak.

View of the Peak from below the last push.

Tree ferns near the upper limit of their range.

Rainforested slope just below the Peak.

View south from the summit.

The south coast walk is more homogeneous given the constant elevation, though it passes through impressive stands of grass trees (Xanthorrhea australis) and provides access to a number of completely empty, idyllic beaches and areas of coastal forest.

A few of the south coast’s many empty beaches.

Grass trees in dry forest along the south coast.

The short coastal walk from Trousers Point joins two more spectacular beaches, but the combination of windswept coastal heath, giant boulders (stained red by algae) and open views is unique on the island. I did that walk two or three times, the last on one of my final nights during a spectacular sunset that worked magic on the red ground and ochre vegetation.

Coastal heath vegetation, backed by windblown forest, near Trousers Point.

Coastal heath near Trousers Point at sunset, with Strzelecki Peak hidden in the clouds beyond.

After walking each trail once, I decided that although the interior of the park and adjacent natural areas is mostly inaccessible, I could work with the portion of it that, from the Peak trail and the perimeter combined with some satellite imagery to get my bearings and tie everything together, I could get a handle on. (This work of overlaying my experiential map onto the “actual” aerial map isn’t truly essential for the worldviews in paper, since I only have space to fit a few experiences that I decide are key to visualizing the essence of the whole. But the “artworks” are only an incidental, imperfect manifestation of my urge to structure and comprehend the natural world, rather than ends in themselves—hence the quotation marks. In my head, I’m driven to complete the experiential map as much as possible.) I took the satellite view of that “knowable” subset of the Park and sketched it as if it were its own true island surrounded by water, imagining that the new coastline would resemble the existing one. I then pared down my photos to the most representative and interspersed them among pieces of the aerial view that gave the most complete sense of the overall geography.

As always happens, the painted version diverged from the photos to varying degrees, most significantly in the coastal view in the lower right of the finished work. There I added grass trees that didn’t actually grow so close to the rocky water’s edge, “compressing” several experiences into one as a way to structure and intensify the overall diversity of the landscape. I decided on the cut/layered paper approach partly because I felt it would be truer to the compositional style and partly because I thought it would result in crisper edges. Both considerations ended up being not valid enough to justify the added complexity, but it was an interesting exercise to determine the layering order of the sheets—which views felt more “interior” vs. “exterior.”

The original plan was for this small piece (15”x15”) to act as a study for a larger one that would be more feasible to create back home after the residency. I never ended up doing that—I think Sanctuary works well enough as a stand-alone work—but ultimately I think there’ll be another one or two worldviews that come out of this experience. The one I currently have in mind puts the National Park back on Flinders Island, placing more emphasis on its real-life role as a refuge from mostly human impacts.

Sanctuary, watercolor on layered paper, 15”x15”

Looking north across the mostly cultivated plains of Flinders Island from the ecological sanctuary of Strzelecki National Park.

Sanctuary highlights a tension within my focus on islands and island-like, isolated environments. On one hand the worldviews carry a conservation-oriented message. The natural places they depict are now few and far-between, and the species and ecosystems within are in danger not just because by definition rare things face a more precarious existence than common things but because smallness and isolation bring unique vulnerabilities. A higher percentage of edge habitat means more exposure to harmful influences such as invasive species, light, and wind. Real or “ecological” islands historically isolated by water, climate, soil conditions etc…are particularly susceptible to invasive species against which they have no defenses, and their native species have nowhere to go when climate change makes their homes uninhabitable. Small population sizes are difficult to sustain not just because numbers are few but because genetic diversity is reduced. And many animal species require geographic ranges of a minimum size to thrive.

But on the other hand, it’s the very smallness and isolation of these places that attracts me—not just because (like many people) I find rare and unique things particularly interesting, but because these places are easier to grasp. The smaller they are, the easier to explore and absorb. So a part of me actually likes the fact that so much of Flinders Island’s native environment can only be found within Strzelecki National Park, even though it also frightens me. This conflict has surfaced even more clearly in some of my more recent worldviews where I depict natural relicts within human-dominated landscapes—I find the juxtaposition simultaneously exhilarating and distressing. I get the sense that these are in fact the works that people are most drawn to, and I’m curious as to which half of the conflict—or possibly the tension itself as in my case, or something entirely different—has the primary impact. I’ll be posting a lot more on this particular question!

Darren

Strzelecki National Park at sunset, from the beach north of Trousers Point.

Exhibition | Ecological Niche

This blog won’t deal much with “news” but I’m making an exception for my first exhibition at Hang Art Gallery in San Francisco’s Union Square, running until May 15. I’m fortunate to share the spotlight with Veronica Diament, whose works are also botanically-inspired. Here’s the announcement plus a few shots from the Artist Reception on May 4—if you’re in the Bay Area, there’s still time to see the show!

In my next post I’ll return to my artist residency experience at Mountain Seas Retreat in Tasmania. Stay tuned!

Darren

Me with Floreana, inspired by the so-named island in the Galápagos.

Center and right, Ecuador-inspired Lagoon and Ghost Isle.

At right, New Zealand-inspired Great Walk, soon to be with its lucky new owner!

Sanctuary | Residency on Flinders Island, Tasmania

Sanctuary, watercolor on layered paper, 15”x15.”

The worldview that initiated my current series of work—watercolors in the “fractured” style integrating aerial and perspective views—is Sanctuary. Unlike the others it’s made of multiple pieces of paper, layered and glued onto a wood panel, and as the “archetype” I’m keeping it in my own collection for now. I created it (minus the gluing and mounting) at the end of a truly idyllic artist residency at Mountain Seas Art and Wilderness Retreat, on Flinders Island off the northeast coast of Tasmania, Australia, for the month of September 2017.

(In a nutshell, artist residencies provide artists of all types with opportunities to focus on their work in new surroundings, usually in the company of other artists and often with opportunities for presentations or exhibitions. They typically last anywhere from two weeks to six months, and while some come with an award or stipend, most work out similar to a very inexpensive hotel stay. This was the latter type, and I was the only resident with the exception of a photographer and his wife for about a week. The Retreat also caters to tourists, but it was still low season, so there were none at the time.)

This was actually my second residency of that summer. The first was at the Gullkistan Center for Creativity in Laugarvatn, Iceland, inland from Reykjavik—I’ll have more to say about it in later posts—a great place to explore my passion for volcanic geology and soggy, windswept landscapes. The second was at the opposite pole: yes Iceland and Tasmania are nearly antipodal, but the environments also couldn’t have been much more different, Flinders Island being subtropical and ecologically complex with the ocean ever-present. Given the island’s ecological and botanical diversity, its small size of 30 by 60km (I won’t get into my small-islands obsession here—check out my statement for that!), and admittedly the cushy accommodations, in researching it I thought it sounded too good to be true. But, it wasn’t at all.

Flinders Island has been largely cleared for cattle grazing, though with a population of less than 1000 it has significant pockets of native forest, wetlands, dunelands and scrublands remaining. The largest, most pristine, and most diverse of these is Strzelecki National Park in the southwest corner of the island, containing the island’s tallest peaks. Its elevation and varied topography have produced a stunning mix of ecosystems, from coastal scrub and dry forests to ferny rainforest gullies, cloud forests and rocky summits. The ruggedness of the landscape has kept it safe from deforestation and development, but the Park is and feels like a “sanctuary” in other ways too—some of its habitats are relicts from a period of wetter overall climate, and would be restricted to these mountains even if the entire island had been left untouched by modern humans. I probably don’t need to add that its refuge status is under threat from multiple directions—catastrophic fire (which has ravaged other parts of the island), invasive pests, and a warming/drying climate.

Guestrooms at Mountain Seas.

View into the National Park from my bedroom with usually cloud-obscured Strzelecki Peak (756m) in the center.

Walking trail through streamside forest at Mountain Seas.

Pond, forest and ocean view at Mountain Seas.

Mountain Seas couldn’t be more perfectly situated—right up against the main, mountainous sector of the park and a few minutes’ walk to the much smaller coastal sector (the southern end of it called Trousers Point). Each day for a month I woke to views of the usually cloud-shrouded Strzelecki Peak (756m) and passed through fields of wallabies and wombats and patches of tea tree and tree fern forest on the walk between my room and the Art Centre. Though it was often wet and windy (it was still the tail end of winter), the weather worked with the vegetation to give the landscape a moodiness that I found moving, and there were just enough perfect days to avoid monotony and allow exploration of much of the island by foot, bike and rental car. That, plus the dreamy perfection of my surroundings, and the fact that it was a mostly solitary existence (I encountered fewer than five tourists, and the Retreat’s two staff people were usually elsewhere on the grounds) gave the whole experience a surreal, meditative aspect that rarely comes to me effortlessly, living as I usually do in my head….

Wombat and…

…other deck-dwelling wildlife of Mountain Seas (with the sea in the distance).

One idea I had before arriving was to depict my impression(s) of the entire island by “compressing” its diversity into just one or several compositions—structuring and humanizing it as I’ve done with other islands, real and imaginary. But after doing some exploration I realized that the island didn’t feel compact or “cohesive” enough to provide a starting point for that sort of idealization: it lacked a unifying feature (like a singular mountain range), was too heavily altered, was mostly private inaccessible land, and despite my expectations simply felt too large to really comprehend. So I turned my attention to the National Park—much more manageable in size and in fact—ecologically and psychologically—just as much an “island” itself.

In the next post I’ll say more about the National Park and how my experience of this real-life natural sanctuary culminated in the worldview of that name. For now I’ll share two other works I began during that month (below), imagining the Park as its own literal island as I did for Sanctuary. Both are in a style, set aside for now in favor of the fractured worldviews, consisting of aerial views overlaid with layered laser-cut/etched plexiglass representing topography and waterways. Barnacle Island is much more generic, having been conceived before I studied and explored the Park in detail; Bat Island is much closer to the aerial component of Sanctuary, and depicts the colors of the rocks and vegetation as they appeared at sunset. Take a look at the mixed media gallery for larger images of both.

Stay tuned for more!

Darren

Barnacle Island, watercolor on paper with layered plexiglass, 15”x15”x1”.

Bat Island, watercolor on paper with layered plexiglass, 15”x20”x1”. The plexiglass in the center is layered like a topographical model; on the left side it’s a single layer etched with waterways and topo lines.

The National Park just before sunset, viewed across the lawn at Mountain Seas.

View of Mountain Seas (the most distant cleared area) and the coast from Strzelecki Peak. Trousers Point is hidden by the rock in the upper left.

Strzelecki National Park, with Strzelecki Peak shrouded in cloud, viewed from the beach north of Trousers Point at low tide.

Welcome!

From alpine grassland down to rainforest and farmland, Mt. Taranaki, New Zealand

Rio de Janeiro from the urban rainforest of Tijuca National Park

Dear readers,

Greetings! And thanks for checking out my worldviews—views of the world that go beyond traditional, disjointed representations of landscape. In doing so they also represent my particular “worldview” (as in a view about the world)—it’s described in depth in my statement, but I’m hoping this blog will go further by relating the works to real-life environmental patterns.

A note about the term “art”—as odd as it sounds, I try not to use it in relation to what I do. I don’t set out to create art objects for their own sake—rather I imagine worlds that I wish were really out there (or idealizations of ones that are), but since even as a landscape architect I can only do so much, objects are my only option. The works are incidental products of a much broader urge. (Now if only I could think of a replacement for “artist”….)

This blog will focus on:

• Connections between completed, in-progress or planned worldviews and actual edges, contrasts and sequences in the natural world and between “natural” and “constructed.” Given that all the works to date, and most of those still in my head, are inspired by places I’ve already visited, I’ll stick mainly to firsthand experiences. (All photographs are mine unless noted otherwise.)

• A more general look at ecological patterns, not necessarily related to specific worldviews but still emphasizing my own travel experiences, with some overview of the science but primarily with an aesthetic and psychological angle.

• General thoughts on edges (physical and metaphorical) between the built and natural environments, including whether we should be thinking of them as separate entities in the first place, and implications for design and conservation especially in this era of rapid environmental change.

Wet and windy páramo (alpine moorland) incongruously bordering farmland, El Ángel, Ecuador

My reasons for the blog are twofold. First, I’m always curious to what degree these interests (obsessions?) and observations are idiosyncratic vs. more widespread. Either way, I believe that nowadays they have implications far beyond my own head and what it produces, so besides creating the works themselves, I see it as my duty to share them as widely as I can. Second, I hope to embark soon on some form of larger writing project (in article or book form) expanding on these ideas, and these posts will help me to get things going.

So in light of all this, please don’t hesitate to leave your comments or questions—I’d love to get some conversations started!

If you aren’t yet receiving automatic email notifications of new posts and would like to, please subscribe at the top of this page, and please contact me using the form if you’d like to be added to my mailing list (since this blog won’t include much in the way of “news”). You can also add me on facebook or instagram (both @darrensears.worldviews) to stay up-to-date on upcoming projects and events.  

Many thanks and more to come soon!

Darren

Volcanic and wild Rangitoto Island seen from suburban Auckland, New Zealand