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12/9/04 Can't Get There from Here
7/29/04 Political Speechmaking  
7/26/04 Words of Praise
6/22/04 Hygene and its Discontents
6/21/04 Summer Solstice -- Financial Fog
1/16/04 No Free Speech at Any Price
1/11/04 New Year's Notes, Cows and Bikes
11/18/03 Pull the Bull
10/20/03 Gardening Delights
8/26/03 Of Elves, Otters and SUVs
8/17/03 Great News on the Population Front
8/8/03 Energy Distribution in Iraq
5/14/03 Taxing Issues
4/20/03 Keeping Santa Cruz Weird
1/28/03 When the "A-Ha!" Moment Scares the Crap Out of You
11/10/02 Elfin Visions
11/2/02 Invisible Demons
5/15/02 Liquid Fuel from Sunlight, Seawater and Fresh Air

11/10/02

Elfin Visions

I wrote the first draft of this on August 23, 2002. I was flying back from visiting my grandparents.  I reflected on some issues raised in Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, by way of the imagined landscapes of J.R.R. Tolkein.

I look out the window and see Koyaanisquatsi.  The glow of a million lights, the sun’s fires that steeped in the earth long ago, lighting the way to chaos and ruin.  This is not the city of the future.

What does the city of the future look like?  It looks like Lothlorien (http://members.shaw.ca/lothlorien/main.htm, http://www.lordotrings.com/tour/lorien.asp, http://fan.theonering.net/middleearthtours/lorien.html) or Rivendell (http://www.lordotrings.com/tour/rivendell.asp, http://scv.bu.edu/~aarondf/rivimages.html, http://fan.theonering.net/middleearthtours/rivendell.html) -- lit by firefly glows, not built from sawn timbers and molten steel, but grown from the living trees that support it.  Magic happens in this place, techno-mage impossibilities wrought by our understanding of living systems.  Reflecting pools and coruscating leaves act as computer monitors and communication devices. 

In this future world there are intact, natural forests, and there are cities, with new living species that work the magic humans wish.  The main labor of humans is to gather what the city grows for them, and to monitor its health.  These new species must not be allowed to spread like cancer, swallowing the old diversity.  Forest and city must thrive as neighbors, neither invading the other, though sometimes exchanging goods and services as all healthy ecosystems do.  The forests filter the water into the wetlands, providing nutrients to aquatic plants, eaten by fish that are fed on by raptors, who nest in and fertilize forests.  Life dances as it always has.  What would be new is the ways that humans, their industries, and their cities can join in this dance.

I now have a more interactive space at my Xanga blog. I will work on adding each entry here to that site, and provide a link from each one here to each one there for now. Xanga will include more brief notes and personal ramblings. I still welcome your comments via e-mail (with your permission, I will post them). E-mail me at: apegrrl@ 
rattlebrain.com

or post a comment on my Xanga site

please feel free to spread these memes, but be nice and give credit where credit is due - refer people back here to the apegrrl This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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