An Urge, an Instinct, and the Path Ahead

“At any moment somewhere in the world millions of migratory animals are on the move. From fleet-footed antelopes to colossal whales and featherweight butterflies, an extraordinary variety of species embark on long and difficult journeys across land, through rivers and oceans, and in the air.” — Ben Hoare, from Animal Migration: Remarkable Journeys in the Wild

Nature’s diverse migrations all seem to follow the classic outline of age-old literature and mythology. A hero embarks on a great journey, and soon encounters unexpected adventures and mishaps along the way. Obstacles are overcome, and our hero reaches the journey’s end — somehow older, wiser, and at least for now, fulfilled.

The fall season seems like a particularly apt time to mark and celebrate the ancient migratory routes of countless species on earth. The urge always seems greatest as the seasons change. Pictured above are two of the Land Library’s favorite new books on animal migration. National Geographic’s Great Migrations provides a wonderful visual tour of the intrepid travelers of land, sea, and air. Ben Hoare’s Animal Migration: Remarkable Journeys in the Wild traces the routes of more than fifty species across the globe, highlighting many migratory hot spots that are under threat from human activities. Both volumes make you want to learn more — if only to stay out of the way of ancient routes beyond our understanding.

From The Grapes of Wrath to the migratory patterns of caribou, salmon and wildebeest, the phenomenon is all the same — an instinctual move toward a better world. Here’s a few more Land Library volumes that recognizes the hero’s journey, no matter what species you are:

Sea, Air & Land: Voyage of the Turtle by Carl Safina (tracking the migration of the leatherback, loggerhead, and green turtles), The Migration of Birds: Seasons on the Wing by Janice Hughes (a perfect place to begin for all avian-in-flux), and Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd by Karsten Heuer (an account by a Canadian wildlife biologist, who followed a caribou herd from their wintering home to their calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge).

The classic story line of migration has not been lost on the authors and illustrators of children’s books. Here’s just a few of our favorites from our Waterton Canyon Kids Nature Library:

They Walk the Earth: The Extraordinary Travels of Animals on Land by Seymour Simon, and The Peregrine’s Journey: A Story of Migration by Madeleine Dunphy

Going Home: The Mystery of Animal Migration by Marianne Berkes, and The Serengeti Migration: Africa’s Animals on the Move by Lisa Lindblad

For more on the migratory inclinations of all of us on earth, please visit a couple of our previous posts!

–Neglected Histories, Moral Uncertainty, & the Harvesting of the West (migrant workers & the Great Depression)

–Pronghorn Passage (with a terrific film clip of the challenges pronghorn face along their ancient Wyoming migratory route)

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The Most Unlikely of Dreams

“The last train ran on the High Line in 1980, reportedly pulling three carloads of frozen turkeys. With the end of train traffic, a self-seeded landscape began to grow among the gravel ballast and steel rails atop the out-of-use structure. Grasses, wildflowers, and shrubs took root and slowly took over the High Line.” — from High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky

In the 1930′s, an elevated railroad spur was built on Manhattan’s West Side. The High Line allowed for the efficient and safe transport of freight, without disturbing the street traffic below. But, with the growth of interstate trucking in the 1950′s, the High Line declined, and nature slowly took over.

This derelict structure was soon seen as an eye-sore and blight upon the neighborhood. In 1999, with demolition looming, Joshua David and Robert Hammond formed the Friends of the High Line. They imagined something different — a Park in the Sky:

“When we started we knew very little about preservation, architecture, community organizing, horticulture, fundraising, working with City Hall, or running a park.
Our lack of expertise was a key to the High Line’s success. It forced us to ask other people to help us. It was these others, who rallied around us, guided us, and did the work we did not know how to do, who made the High Line possible.” — from High Line

This unlikely urban tale is wonderfully captured in Joshua David and Robert Hammond’s High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky — a personal memoir of how High Line came back to life as one of the most innovative urban parks in the country.

For more, here’s an inspiring 4-minute film clip on the improbable history of the High Line!

“The other day, walking to work on the High Line, I felt like I was in some kind of Dr. Suess garden as I went past the foxtail lilies, with their tall yellow plumes; the serviceberry trees, full of edible berries, and the smoke bushes, with their feathery puffs tossing in the wind. I know the names of these particular plants, but I don’t know the names of most of the plants. It’s not about the individual plants — it’s the overall effect. Some people think of parks as being an escape from the city, but the High Line works because it never takes you away from New York. You are not in a botanical garden. You can hear horns honking. You can see traffic and taxis. It’s knitted into the city. And you’re not alone. You’re walking up there with other New Yorkers.” — Robert Hammond, from High Line

“We were inspired by others, and I hope the High Line will encourage people to pursue all sorts of crazy projects, even if they seem, like the High Line once did, the most unlikely of dreams.” — Robert Hammond, from High Line

For more on the High Line, be sure to visit the Friends of the High Line website!

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A Long and Sympathetic Search: Maynard Dixon and the West

“From 1900 to his death in 1946, Maynard Dixon roamed the American West’s plains, mesas, and deserts — by foot, horseback, buckboard, and ultimately, the dreaded automobile — drawing, painting, and expressing his creative personality in poems, essays, and letters in a quest to uncover the region’s spirit.” — Donald J. Hagerty, The Life of Maynard Dixon

Early on, Maynard Dixon and the American West became inexorably linked. In 1901 he joined fellow artist Edward Borein on a rugged horseback trip through several Western states. What he saw changed his life, and can still be traced in the many paintings, sketches and illustrations that would follow.

Donald Hagerty has captured the remarkable life and work of Maynard Dixon in two recent books. The Art of Maynard Dixon is a large-format monograph, and the next best thing to viewing Dixon’s work in galleries across the country. As much as we love this hefty book, our favorite is Hagerty’s The Life of Maynard Dixon — an illuminating biography that is also one of the most brilliantly designed books we’ve seen in many years. Color images of Dixon’s paintings and illustrations accompany nearly every page of this incredibly rich biography.

The Life of Maynard Dixon is also full of black & white photos from Dixon’s life — here’s Dixon with his wife Edith Hamlin, a noted San Francisco muralist.

Hagerty also documents the more commercial work Dixon undertook. Dixon’s illustrations were featured in several magazines such as Sunset, Scribners, Colliers, Century Magazine, and McClures. To make ends meet he also crafted billboard images such as The Apache Trail via the Southern Pacific, 1917 (pictured above).

It’s a great joy to see the full range of Dixon’s work preserved in Donald Hagerty’s books!

This is the land of mesas, laid down in layers of colored sandstone, red, yellow, pink, and creamy white; carved and hollowed by the recession of forgotten seas; their sides often sheer, or broken into strange isolated slabs, turrets, buttes — the blind blunt architecture of a pre-human world. — Maynard Dixon

Here’s a short film clip, where you’ll have the chance to meet Donald Hagerty and learn more about the life and work of Maynard Dixon:

My object has always been to get close to the real nature of my subject as possible — people, animals and country. The melodramatic Wild West idea is not for me the big possibility. The nobler and more lasting qualities are in the quiet and most broadly human aspects of western life. I aim to interpret, for the most part, the poetry and pathos of the life of western people, seen amid the grandeur, sternness and loneliness of their country. — Maynard Dixon

White Buttes, Utah, 1944

Through long and sympathetic searching, he learned how the almost imperceptible contours of flat plains rise and fall as they flow toward the horizon and how the architecture of mesas and buttes marches rhythmically over the landscape, swelled with the freedom of a deep blue sky. — Donald J. Hagerty, The Life of Maynard Dixon

Open Range, 1942

I do not paint Indians or cowboys merely because they are picturesque subjects, but because through them I can express that phantasy of freedom of space and thought, which will give the world a sentiment about these people which is inspiring and uplifting. — Maynard Dixon

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Riding on the Chill Mountain Air

You can feel a definite chill in the air now, and for the past few weeks, Rocky Mountain meadows have been filling with elk in rut, as the mating season reaches high hormonal gear. Part of the bull elk’s strategy is to impress the females with their high-pitched bugle call. Bugling is most common early in the morning, and late in the day. No description can match the other-worldly sound itself:

For much more on elk, the Land Library strongly recommends the Smithsonian Institution Press’ North American Elk: Ecology and Management (pictured at the top of this post) — a 1,000 page tome on all-things-elk.

David Petersen, an author and naturalist from Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, has written a very insightful homage to North America’s elk (also called wapiti): Elkheart: A Personal Tribute to Wapiti and Their World. And no elk-shelf would be complete without Olaus Murie’s classic study, The Elk Of North America. In 1927, Murie, a field biologist for the old U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, undertook the first study of elk in the wilderness of Wyoming’s Teton Mountains.

In 1966, Olaus, and his wife Margaret (Mardy) published a surprise best-seller, Wapiti Wilderness, which describes their adventure-filled years of living in the Tetons, studying elk, and forever remembering distant bugle calls on the frosty autumn air.

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Garden Cities of To-day

In the past few months, we have done numerous posts on food and the city. Just last week we wrote about the farmer’s market movement, and before that we touted several recent books on our greening urban landscape.

There’s no hotter topic today than urban agriculture — growing healthy local food in a myriad of neglected city spaces. Garden Cities: Theory & Practice of Agrarian Urbanism by Andres Duany presents a visionary outline that harmonizes urban and agrarian environments. But how to blend homes, industry, and agriculture?

The answer to that question can be found in the new book Carrot City: Creating Places for Urban Agriculture by Mark Gorgolewski, June Komisar, and Joe Nasr. This thickly illustrated book profiles 40 projects (both conceptual, and actually built) that show how important architecture, landscape design, and urban planning are to the future of urban food systems. Carrot City demonstrates how industrial wastelands along highways and railways can be transformed into productive patches of healthy produce. Community gardens can be tucked under raised highways, or scattered across a network of edible front yards. Other projects successfully employ living walls and productive green roofs. Interior spaces offer great potential as well:

Niagara Community Food Centre — Toronto, Canada: a proposed market/greenhouse to be built along the city’s rail corridor (designed by Jordan Kemp Edmonds). The Greenhouse (pictured above) will employ rainwater harvesting, solar energy, and a geothermal storage system.

And talk about building both community, and a healthy food system! As we wrote just last week, schoolyards are, slowly but surely, transforming asphalt into something new:

The Edible Schoolyard, P.S. 216, Brooklyn, New York, a design by the Work Architectural Company: Schools offer a unique opportunity to energize families, and train the next generation of urban farmers!

Carrot City is an inspiring book, full of innovative ideas. Here’s two of our favorite books that move beyond the design phase, focusing in on a particular city, and the practical lessons learned along the way:

Growing a Garden City, Jeremy Smith’s story of how Missoula, Montana embraced the local food movement with city gardens, community-supported agriculture, and farm work-therapy programs. (This past year, Jeremy gave a wonderful slide show based on his book, for our ongoing Rocky Mountain Land Series). Also pictured above, here’s invaluable lessons learned from one of America’s pioneering urban food systems: Greening Cities, Growing Communities: Learning from Seattle’s Urban Community Gardens by Jeffrey Hou, Julie Johnson, and Laura Lawson.

There are many, many excellent books on this vibrant topic, including this classic book, from more than a hundred years ago:

Sir Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-Morrow was first published in 1898 (with the original title of To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform). Howard’s passionate vision called for towns free of slums, and enjoying the benefits of both town and country. Howard’s work inspired the Garden City movement of the last century, and his influence is still being felt today. Ebenezer Howard’s unique approach is well captured in his intriguing Group of Slumless, Smokeless Cities diagram (picture above) that accompanied the 1902 edition of Garden Cities of To-morrow.

For other great resources on the urban food movement, you might want to link back to a few our our earlier posts!

–Think Vertical (vertical farms in the city)

–Tools for the Urban Homesteader

–The Endless Bounty of Once Neglected Land (the English Allotment system)

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