BERNEVAL

I like to categorize these fixtures in the Alex Wilson Community Garden as vernacular architecture.

A visitor to the community garden can look up and see against the wall of the building adjacent to the garden a pipe.

Following the pipe down its curve leads to stacked tubs.

An ingeniously simple system to capture runoff for watering the garden.

I particularly like the stacking of the tubs and can imagine the overflow from the top one filling the bottom two.

There is a piece of urban legend associated with the AWCG water system reported by Gayla Trail: “Apparently when the system was first constructed, and before it had a protective mesh top, a friend of a friend arrived at his plot one day to find a nude man emersed in the “tub” taking a bath!” http://yougrowgirl.com/water-for-all-occassions/

And so for day 1378
21.09.2010

The Alex Wilson Community Garden has a sign at its entrance. On that sign is an Ojibway proverb (“The bush is sitting under a tree and singing”), a quotation from the writing of Alex Wilson and Wilson’s date of birth (1953) and death (1993). The sign is reproduced in Public 41 Gardens (2010). The article in Public by Richard Brault concludes with quoting the passage and thanks to that I noticed that the sign is missing a sentence. It is a rousing call to action. Brault quotes:

We must build landscapes that heal and empower, that make intelligible our relations with each other and the natural world: places that welcome and enclose, whose breaks and edges are never without meanings. Nature parks cannot do this work. We urgently need people living on the land, caring for it, working out an idea of nature that includes culture and human livelihood. All of this calls for a new culture of nature, and it cannot come soon enough. [our emphasis]

Brault’s quotation has the bit that the sign omits (Nature parks cannot do this work). [Brault however unlike the sign is inaccurate: drops “connects” from “heal, connect and empower”; substitutes a “this” for a “that” in “All of that call”.]

The “nature parks” reference is important because in his book The Culture of Nature Wilson is at pains to emphasize that creating more wildlife preserves is not the best way forward to forge new relationships with the land. Here is the lead in to the call to action:

In an era of ecological crisis, it’s no surprise that many of these contradictions are being worked out on the land itself. My own sense is that the immediate work that lies ahead has to do with fixing landscape, repairing its ruptures, reconnecting its parts. Restoring landscape is not about preserving lands — “saving what is left,” as it’s often put. Restoration recognizes that once lands have been “disturbed” — worked, lived on, meddled with, developed — they require human intervention and care. We must build landscapes that heal, connect and empower, that make intelligible our relations with each other and the natural world: places that welcome and enclose, whose breaks and edges are never without meanings. Nature parks cannot do this work. We urgently need people living on the land, caring for it, working out an idea of nature that includes culture and human livelihood. All of that calls for a new culture of nature, and it cannot come soon enough.

R E S T O R A T I O N
Nature parks cannot do this work.

And so for day 1377
20.09.2010

Alex Wilson
The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (1991)

My own notes to a passage align on one side terms from my then current interests and on the other side keywords from a passage I read.

What was I reading? This:

Restoration projects actively investigate the history of human intervention in the world. Thus they are at once agriculture, medicine, and art. William R. Jordan of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum writes:

[…]
I now see restoration as providing the framework for a system of rituals by which a person in any phase of cultural evolution can achieve a harmonious relationship with a particular landscape.

These are not new ideas, but they are ideas newly current in the culture.

Wilson proposes “a new environmental ethic”.

Restoration actively seeks out places to repair the biosphere, to recreate habitat, to breach the ruptures and disconnections that agriculture and urbanization have brought to the landscape. But unlike preservationism, it is not an elegiac exercise. Rather than eulogize what industrial civilization has destroyed, restoration proposes a new environmental ethic. Its projects demonstrate that humans must intervene in nature, must garden it, participate in it. Restoration thus nurtures a new appreciation of working landscape, those places that actively figure a harmonious dwelling-in-the-world.

As a gay man reading a gay man, then and now, I can say that the take on the elegiac exercises chimes in with the collective response to AIDS — the very cultivation of new modes of being there for each other. Building gardens was one of those ways. See the work of Douglas Chambers chronicled in Stonyground: The Making of a Canadian Garden. It did encompass preservation – the oral history of memory traces – and the creation of a working landscape.

And so for day 1376
19.09.2010