World-Wide Matel

A lot of detail and some good history, but I didn’t like it. The tone bothered me. The story is told as a narrative of loss. In that it is like many such books and that is certainly a perspective you can take.

But I think narratives of loss miss the important parts. The world is perpetually changing, with some things bursting into existence and other flickering out. You emphasize the comings or the goings and it makes a very different story. Similarly, there is struggle that leads to success or failure. This can be framed as worthless energy spent or a growth. Another theme was what I might call the stolen land idea, which depends on zero sum thinking. This says that if you get, you must take from others. There is sure enough a lot of that.

However, in California’s case we need to take much more account of the creation. There is no such thing as a “natural” resource. There are potentials that depend on human effort, intelligence and innovation to get. California is blessed by nature, but the California we appreciate mostly results from human interaction with that blessed land. It is not just a gift or a lucky throw of the dice.

Another book I read about this was “Water to the Angles” about the construction of the Los Angeles aqueducts. I liked that book better. It was more hopeful. LA is a desert. It is prosperous because of human effort.

Nothing lasts forever and yesterdays solution is often today’s problem. This is something I like, BTW. Having challenges is what makes life interesting. What I don’t like is pessimistic tone. I felt this book had too much of this.

California is a wonderful place. We can easily imagine how it might be better, but we owe a lot to those who made it what it is today.

audible.com   The Dreamt Land Check out this great listen on Audible.com. A vivid, searching journey into California’s capture of water and soil – an epic story of a people’s defiance of nature and the wonders, and ruin, it has wrought “A stunning history of power, arrogance, and greed.” (Kirkus Reviews, starred) M…      

fancied myself a classical scholar for a few years. I spent many hours in libraries. During my grad school years, I literally spent many more time at Memorial Library than I did at home. The idea of finding and preserving the wisdom of the ancients was more than exciting. The idea of scholarly centers had a spiritual significance. I got over that the extreme case, but not completely and I am still very much interested in centers of innovation, which is similar but not the same, as I will explain below.

“The Map of Knowledge” came as kind of an echo from my past both because of the subject and because I found it at a physical bookshop, the new Barnes & Noble near our house. I have been buying mostly at Amazon lately, although I have determined to buy at the physical location more often. Must support what I think is good.

As the title implies, the book maps the movement of centers of scholarship from around AD 500-1500 and describes centers of learning, such as Alexandria, Baghdad, Cordoba, Toledo, Salerno, Palermo & Venice. I was a little surprised that the author left out Constantinople, but the author explained that Constantinople was an imperial capital and a place where lots of texts ended up but was never particularly a center. Beyond that, her narrative sort of depends on the idea of the moving center that preserved the wisdom of the ancients.

Alexandria was the home of the great library. It was partially destroyed when Julius Caesar attacked Alexandria, but restored, but it fell into decline even before the fall of the Roman Empire. The problem was Christianity. We rightly think of Christian monasteries are centers of learning, where monks copied manuscripts to preserve knowledge, but when Christianity was still competing with Paganism, Christian leaders viewed ancient wisdom with less enthusiasm. It was associated with paganism and in fact the great literature WAS pagan. Many of the books were destroyed by a Christian riot in AD 415, where the mob also killed the famous female pagan philosopher Hypatia. The Muslim conquest finished the job. Alexandria stopped be a center of learning.

Bagdad was a true center of learning and they assembled the largest library up to that time. The catchment area was larger than Alexandria’s, since Baghdad pulled in wisdom from the East, from India, as well as from the West. It was at this time that the Hindu-Arabic numbers we use today were developed, along with the widespread use of zero. It was an organized “House of Wisdom.” It was all destroyed when Mongol armies destroyed the city in 1258. The Mongols burned and tossed manuscripts into the river. It was said that the water turned black from the ink, mixing with the red from all the blood. It was probably the worst destruction of knowledge in human history. Many of the texts were lost forever.
Cordoba was a wonderful and diverse place with Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars. In addition to texts, the rulers of Cordoba developed practical arts like the use of water, irrigation and agriculture. The Muslim rulers of Spain brought in seeds and seedlings of arid adapted plants, and semi-arid Spain was one the most productive places in the world. Cordoba’s time in the sun was bright but brief. A coup brought an aggressively narrow minded ruler. He came under the influence of Muslim fundamentalists and destroyed all the texts they could get, except those associated with medicine or mathematics. Some books survived when scholars fled with them to neighboring cities like Seville, Granada, Zaragoza & Toledo.

Toledo became the center translation and transmission to the West. Scholars from Western Europe came to look for old texts and translate them from Greek or more often Arabic.

Salerno and Palermo became centers for learning largely due to the influence of the Normans. The Normans were among the most interesting people in the middle ages. They were the descents of Vikings, given land by the King of France in return for keeping other Vikings out. Most of us know them from William the Conqueror and his 1066 conquest of English, but other branches of the family were active in the Mediterranean. They ruled Sicily and Southern Italy for nearly 200 years and were very open to all sorts of influences.
The last center mentioned in the book is Venice. Venice for a long time was the link between east and west. When the Turks finally conquered the Byzantine Empire, many of the scholars fled to Venice. Of course, the Venetians already had a fair amount of Byzantine stuff both from trade and from their pillaging of Constantinople during the 4th Crusade. The famous bronze horses at San Marco were plundered from Constantinople.
After the development of printing, knowledge was more widely distributed and the centers for learning and copying became less important. Experience of Alexandria, Baghdad & Cordoba indicate that a better strategy is to spread texts out rather than concentrate them in one place where they might be destroyed all at once.

The centers of learning idea beg a question of whether it was always a good idea to preserve the knowledge. I am talking about the science here, not the literature or art. Ancient science was wrong, and its persistence may have held back innovation and progress.

Medieval people had too much respect for authority. Most would accept the anatomy of Galen or the astronomy of Ptolemy w/o checking it themselves. This was a problem even before the fall of the Roman Empire, when the texts were easily available. Science stagnated. When you think you have found the final truth, you stop looking, and people thought they had found the final truth.

Near the end of the book, the author quotes a German scholar called Paracelsus, who in 1527 told his medical students to throw away the old books and instead turn to the “great book of nature,” i.e. look for themselves.

Maybe that goes too far. It would be better to use the old texts skeptically and critically. But when you treat books as precious, a type of dogmatism develops. It is possible to be too respectful.

Anyway, the book is worth reading and it got me thinking.

amazon.com   The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found

Robert Caro has been criticized for writing this book, not for anything in or about the book itself, but rather because critics don’t want him to divert his time and energy from finishing his series on Lyndon Johnson. His final volume is in the works and has been for many years. Caro’s books on Johnson are nothing short of superb. But he is getting older. The Grim Reaper may be unimpressed by the need for a few more years to finish his life’s work. Maybe Caro is thinking along these lines, at least metaphorically. It must be frightening to be so close to finishing something so monumental. There will be no coda.

“Working,” however, is a great book just by itself. Caro talks a lot about how and why he writes and fills in lots of interesting information about Johnson and Robert Moses, the subject of his first great book, “The Power Broker.” Caro says that he found his purpose when studying Moses. His purpose is NOT biography. Biography is the means to the end of understanding power, and in Johnson and Moses he shows how that works.

Power does not always corrupt, according to Caro, but it always reveals. Johnson & Moses were great men in what they achieved. They were also selfish, cruel and ruthless, as well as often petty, although it is sometimes hard to know whether that pettiness was just that or a technique of power.

Johnson, for example, has especially soft chairs installed for guests in his office. The guest would sink way down, and Johnson could enjoy a higher position. It was also awkward to get out of those chairs, which put the guest in embarrassing situations. In his swimming pool at the Johnson Ranch, Johnson would stand just at the deep end. He was a tall man taller than most of his guests. The shorter guests would have to gulp for air or tread water, while Johnson could stand above them in majesty.

A key to Johnson, Caro says, was his inferiority complex. Johnson grew up very poor, the kind of poverty that really does not exist anymore in the USA. As a young man, he had a job on the road crews. Since he was big and strong, he would pull a kind of plow along the dirt roads, the kind of work that could be assigned to horses or mules. He never forgot that. I will not repeat the details that are in Caro’s other books.

Enlightening for me was when Caro discussed his interview style and method of working. Caro advises in-depth work, get to know the people well. He actually moved to the Texas hill country to get to know Johnson’s people and country. He says that you a researcher cannot be afraid to ask the same questions over and over. Answers vary. And it might be useful to get them into different settings. He describes how he got Johnson’s brother, Sam Houston Johnson, to open up by taking him to the Johnson house and having him sit at the family table. The memories came back, and he was more open.

Caro has no outside pressure to do his work, which is good and bad. He needs to self-discipline, so each day he dresses in a tie and blazer to go to his office for work. He has a quota of words, i.e. he does not wait for inspiration. He still writes much of his work with pencil or pen. Putting on paper, he says, is an adjunct to thought.
This book is sure worth reading, especially if you have read Caro’s other work. I just hope he gets that last volume of the years of Lyndon Johnson done before he himself goes off to glory.

audible.com   Working Check out this great listen on Audible.com. From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Power Broker and the Years of Lyndon Johnson series: an unprecedented gathering of vivid, candid, deeply revealing recollections about his experiences researching and writing his acclaimed books. For…..     Like

Walkable cities are more pleasant even for those who do not walk much. These cities are cleaner, safer and more sustainable than others, since the factors that make it walkable are very often just good.

Why don’t we have these cities more often?

Maybe the biggest reason is that cities are planned in pieces. Traffic engineers want to make the roads convenient and safe for cars, so they develop roads that move cars faster and more efficiently through cities. Pedestrians, houses, trees and stores are things that get in the way of traffic. By making the cities easy for people to get in and out, they are essentially draining the life blood from the city. The car is hard on the life of a city. The traffic engineers do their job well, but their piece is not the only one. Another piece are architects. They like special or beautiful buildings. Beautiful buildings are good, but the life of the city depends on the places between them. This they often ignore.

Density is an important factor for walkability and transit. All transit trips begin and end with a walk. If people cannot walk to and from, they must drive. Density does not always mean very tall buildings. In fact, smaller cities often cannot support high rises. But the density much be closer and maybe average 4-6 stories. A simpler fix is to allow more people in given areas. This might include so-called “tiny houses” and grandma or mother-in-law apartments. These allow homeowners to share living space. What is holding this back are zoning laws.

The author talks about “prospect and refuge”. Our species grew up on the savanna and we have a natural propensity to like those sorts of landscapes. Prospect refers to being able to see far. We want open space so that we can see danger coming or opportunity available. This is the open, grassy prospect. Refuge is that place we can go for safety – trees to climb or rock outcroppings to hide. Most people like a combination of open and closed spaces. We want “defensible space. This is why we dislike large empty squares of long straight highways.

There are some paradoxes of planning.  For example, laws forcing better gas mileage tend NOT to save gas because people drive more when they get better gas mileage.  Worse, it encourages sprawl.  Driving an efficient car matter less than driving less in general.
We can make our cities more inviting by keeping this in mind. People like colonnades, porches and overhangs. Cities that have these kinds of things on the edges of the streets attract walking. Defensible space is important too. No matter how wide the sidewalk, we don’t like to be near the fast passing cars. This can be remedied by allowing on street parking or by planting trees.

Trees are the street amenity that all pedestrians like. It is less popular with traffic engineers. For them, a tree is a dangerous hard barrier that might cause injury if a car gets out of control. Of course, it is ironic that they prefer soft pedestrians to hard trees.
Trees are safer than non-tree lined streets. Sure, if you run into a tree it is hard, but the presence of the trees calms traffic. People drive slower in tree-lined places. They change behavior. Drivers respond to wide open spaces and they drive faster. So, if you goal is rapid driving, by all means clear the space. But that is not the usual goal in a pleasant city.
Our cities are shaped by choices, many of them not made consciously in context. The cities we most love are often not the ones we choose to build, as we focus on simple efficiency. The car is the enemy of the pleasant city and its benefactor. We have to decide when and where we want them, not just default to everywhere.

audible.com   Walkable City Check out this great listen on Audible.com. Jeff Speck has dedicated his career to determining what makes cities thrive. And he has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability. The very idea of a modern metropolis evokes visions of bustling sidewalks, vital mass transit, and a vibrant, pedestria…..

Soil is a living community, not just a pile of dirt. The best insight from this book is that plants and fungi are developing in the soils, and it is useful to think of the microbes as livestock. They have to be fed and kept healthy.

Unfortunately, some of the things we do to increase productivity can harm the life of the soil. More on that later, but first a little more on healthy soil.

Healthy soil does everything better. It is more fertile, absorbs and holds water better, erodes less easily and holds more carbon. The last aspect is salient these days. Good soils can be 7-9% carbon. Most of our soils today less than 2%. Soils alone cannot solve the problem of climate change, but there is a lot of capacity for carbon storage in soils. The big positive in this equation is that adding carbon to soil is just plain good for many other reasons.

We can add carbon to soil directly by mixing in biochar and organic materials, but this is not the most interesting part of what the author says. He talks about carbon being released by plants in a symbiotic relationship with soil fungi and mycorrhizae. The discovery of mycorrhizae is relatively recent and not all the relationships are well understood. I don’t know how much he is talking science and how much he is talking about his own experience, so the details might differ, but the general concept is sound and very interesting. The plants are essentially feeding the fungi and the fungi help feed the plants. In the process, they build soils and sequester carbon.

We can disturb these relationships with herbicides, pesticides and artificial fertilizer. Let me start with the caveat that the author does not oppose the use of all agricultural chemicals but says that we should use less and use them in more targeted ways. It is easy to understand how pesticides and herbicides would have negative impacts, but what about fertilizer? Artificial fertilizers impact the soil community by letting plants “cheat” on growing. They no longer need to draw so much from the mycorrhizal environment, causing the mycorrhizae to decline or die.

The main thrust of his book, however, involves five principles.

Limited disturbance. Limit mechanical, chemical, and physical disturbance of soil. – Tilling disturbs the structure of the soil. It cuts the roots and the mycorrhizae, makes it dry out faster and creates strata, where a hard layer is under the soils that prevents water infiltration.

Armoring the soil is one way to be resilient. The armor is the residue from a previous cover crop and a cash grain crop is growing through the armor. There should be little bare ground. This was one of the causes of the dust bowl. When soil is exposed, it washes or blows away. The author makes an interesting, almost poetic analogy. He says that what plants do is harvest sunshine. When there are no plants, all that is wasted and even becomes negative in drying.

Diversity. Different species of plants and animals occupy different ecological niches. A diverse community can support more total life and that life may be complementary. A diverse community is also more resilient against diseases, pests and stress in general. I drought will affect different communities differently.

Living roots. Keep living roots in soil as long as possible. This is related to the tilling above. Living roots help maintain soil integrity.

Integrated animals. This is a key point. We should probably eat less meat, since that is better for the environment, but eating no meat is bad for the environment. We need livestock to maintain healthy soils. Grassland ecosystems require grazing animals. There are better and worse ways to do this. Over grazing can destroy grasslands, but no grazing also destroys them. Best is “mob grazing” where large numbers of animals are put on the same place for a short time. They eat most of the grass and trample a lot more of it. You would think this is bad, but it puts the carbon into the soil and allows for better regeneration. The author is a fan of Alan Savory. I have written about him before.

Working in any natural system requires constant effort and constant learning. The author is someone like that. I learned a lot from the book and I also enjoyed a lot. I listened to the audio book on my way to and from a conference about clean water in Charlottesville. It was appropriate listening and complemented insights from the conference.