Best of all worlds

The other day I went to the local farmers market at Cabrillo Community College. It was an unseasonably warm day, one of those little islands of sunshine that usually pop up in January. I was helping the animal shelter promote cat adoption, so I was there for half the day.

At one point, I decided to talk a walk to the top of the college, which is built on a hill. The gardening department is on top, quite a climb up from the street, and when I go there, I found a bench overlooking the Monterey Bay. I sat down and just took it all in. I could see the hills of Monterey and Carmel, looking like islands rising from the sea, and the smoke stacks of the Moss Landing power plant seemed to be coming up out of the morning mist, which spread out in shades of pink and cream. Santa Cruz was filtered through a thin curtain of fog, and everything look photo-still and peaceful.

On the way back down, a path along a row of classrooms was lined by maple trees, leaves yellow, gold and redish-brown. Leaves were still on the trees and also on the ground. On that path were two small boys, bundled up in winter wear, each holding a balloon on a length of ribbon. It was like an old Norman Rockwell scene.

Then, a bit later, back in the car and driving up an off ramp, a red tail hawk flew in front of me and hit the ground, wings out and neck arched. I couldn't see what it had caught, but I knew it had it's breakfast.

Now, two days later, as I walked the neighborhood in the early morning, I saw the first buds and flowers on trees along the road. It is, indeed, the best of all possible worlds.

automobile economy

While I’m certainly no expert on banking or Wall Street, I know enough basic economics
to sense what has gone wrong. It has to do with what kind of economy we choose. Unless you’re a hunter gatherer, you basically have three choices: Socialism, Capitalism or some mix of the two.

Socialism doesn’t have the financial incentives for innovation and success, but it creates equality, the equality of financial stagnation. Capitalism has periods of boom and
bust, the boom making many people rich, the bust causing many to go broke.
Capitalism with regulation cushions the up and down motion, hopefully avoiding the nasty booms and busts.

It’s like the early attempts to build an automobile. People bolted the body to
the frame, and everything was secure and controllable, but the ride was so rough that you couldn’t go over five mph. That’s sort of like socialism.

So, people installed springs, softening the ride. However, when the car hit
bumps or holes, the car would alternately bottom out and send the passengers
through the roof, plus making steering almost impossible. That’s sort of like
capitalism.

Then someone invented the shock absorber. The car was still able to go up and
down on the springs, but it was kept from full compression and full
extension. That’s sort of like capitalism with regulation.

I’m sure that even the guys in banks and on Wall Street know this. They just don’t want to admit it.

what are our rights

Our “rights” are a constant source of discussion, making one believe that we are naturally endowed with a list of these, and the only argument revolves around which items are on the list. The reality may not be so simple.

Looking at the natural world, it’s hard to find anything resembling rights. From birth on it is a struggle to eat and to keep from being eaten. A creature’s survival depends on luck and on how good it is at these two things. Lions don’t have a right to a fat gazelle, and gazelles don’t have a right to plentiful grass or to immunity from lions.

What humans consider rights are part of the social overlay we place over the natural world, something that imposes our concepts of order on what we perceive as natural disorder. Like most other items in human culture, these are artificial, in that they do not occur naturally. We build certain rights into the structure of our societies. For example, most societies feel one has the right not to be murdered, so they impose severe penalties on murderers.

When the Declaration of Independence claims, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” they start the sentence with “We.” In this they are saying that our culture, our society, our leaders hold these things to be true. They did not claim that this applies to people in far away places, bob cats, inch worms or oak trees.

Not all societies have our long list of rights. In some places, the king or chief has most of the rights, and the people have the right to do whatever doesn’t displease the leader. The old Soviet Union believed most rights were reserved for the collective, not the individual, and the collective was embodied in the leaders. Other societies base all rights on their religious books.

Naturally, we prefer our long list of rights, but even in our society some people would rather sacrifice some of those for a bit more order and security. In times of war, we tend toward order and security, and the degree and timing of the return to rights is always debated. The bottom line being that there are no set of rights that seem natural and proper for every human and for every occasion.

We can add to our list or subtract from it. We can have the right to universal medical care, equal civil rights for all, rights of the poor equal to those of the rich, rights of women regarding child bearing and many others. We can even lose our rights and allow someone to enslave us.

We, individually and as a people, have to decide what rights we are to have, and then we must secure these and defend them, once secured. We can secure them by force, which often backfires on us, leaving us with fewer rights, or we can secure them through legislation and jurisprudence. We can also convince others that our list of rights is best, and then we build a consensus which changes our society’s point of view. We can stand up individually against transgressions against our rights, or we can act collectively. However we choose to do it, and whatever list of rights we deem proper, we must do it, for without a conscious social act, we revert to the natural world, where the concept of “rights” has no meaning.

Creating wilderness

One of the most personally satisfying things I’ve ever done was to help create wilderness. I hiked in beautiful, unspoiled country, took pictures and notes, drew lines on a map, and a few months later we had new wilderness.

I was volunteering with the Ventana Wilderness Alliance and The California Wilderness Coalition on the Wilderness 2000 program. We were concentrating our efforts in the northern Santa Lucias, a land of mixed oversight. These mountains above the Big Sur coast have BLM, National Forest, and Wilderness lands, plus scattered private lands. One can walk among the various federal designations and not see the difference.

Our plan was to survey wild public land, put it in a big bill, and send it to Congress, followed up with a public support campaign, along with lobbying. The result was Congressman Farr’s, “Big Sur Wilderness and Conservation Act of 2002," which created over 50,000 acres of new Wilderness. So, with a map, a notebook and a camera, I got to “play God” and help create new Gardens of Eden.

Late December seemed more like summer as I climbed the Coast Ridge Road out of the Ventana Resort in Big Sur. It’s a steep, dirt road that’s used by the Forest Service and the few land owners. You can’t drive or bike it, but you are free to hike it for twenty miles along the ridge. About four miles up the road is an unspoiled piece of forest nicknamed Outlaw.

The walk to Outlaw passes through cool, second growth redwoods before it opens to the grassland hills. The ground undulates away to forested canyons, down to the highway and the sea.

Outlaw sits between the Coast Ridge Road and the Ventana Wilderness. The Terrace Creek Trail descends into Outlaw and drops two impressive miles to the Pine Ridge trail in the Wilderness. It begins in hillside meadows studded with oak and madrone and drops into redwood groves with cascading waterfalls.

The few homes on the ridge were deserted, and without other hikers I was alone with the sounds of nature. The air was thin and clear in a way peculiar to sunny winter days. The smallest details from miles up the coast seemed only yards away. The dirt road undulated along the corrugated ridge. I took photos down toward the Big Sur Gorge below. Then I walked most of the way down the Terrace Creek Trail, almost to the campground and the wilderness.

Terrace Creek Trail was in disrepair. Downed trees requiring climbing and scrambling. In the wooded canyon, the terraces in the creek became visible, long cascading waterfalls that dropped to the Big Sur River below.

Outlaw wasn’t the only parcel I surveyed. Logwood, another, larger parcel, was a bit further up Coast Ridge Road. It also extended down toward the Big Sur Gorge from the road and had all the qualities of a wilderness.

At the Boronda Ridge trailhead, the rain and wind almost changed my mind. I lacked rain gear, and there might not be enough visibility to survey and photograph. But, the rain was stopping, and I could turn back if things got uncomfortable.

Within minutes the sun started to break through the clouds. Before long I was so warm I had to remove my sweater.

The ridge was vivid green from the rains, and along the trail were tiny violet flowers. Too small to survive in the meadow, they’d found a niche on the abandoned roadway. The trail occasionally turned from the exposed ridge to stands of oaks and a brief respite from the wind.

An hour up the trail, I stood on a rocky outcropping. The wind had whipped the ocean to a silver-gray meringue. A couple of hundred feet below me two deer looked up and watched me until I moved on.

Coast Ridge Road was deserted. Walking north, I looked east toward Logwood Creek. I found an abandoned road going east, down toward the creek. I followed it until I was sure it was impassable. The large fallen tree and young madrones in the roadway convinced me.

Having hiked almost to Outlaw, I turned back south, towards Cold Springs Camp, at the southern extreme of Logwood. The wind in the trees was so loud that I turned around often, thinking a truck was coming. The pines were leaning and shaking, and I was concerned about falling branches. The solitude and the howling of the wind gave an eerie, surreal quality to the five mile walk.

The wind was getting stronger, and the temperature was dropping, and I was anxious to find the De Angulo trail. The first part of the trail was treacherous, a steep trail bed of loose rock. Even below the rocky section, the piles of leaves, freshly wet from the rain, made the trail slippery, and in places the trail had broken away leaving it the width of a single boot. The dark stillness of occasional wooded patches was a welcome change.

I stopped to enjoy the view. The cloud cover was cumulonimbus piles rushing by. The shadows of the clouds on the ocean were like lines of ghostly, gray, giant amoebae marching southward across a mirrored sea. Sunlight streamed through the clouds in fan-like rays. I might have stood there the rest of the afternoon, but the moments of sunshine ended suddenly with gusts that almost knocked me off my feet.

I was almost seven and a half hours into the hike before I saw other humans, a young couple coming up the trail.

On the last two miles of the way down, I experienced hail, rain and even snow. And at that point I was greeted by two dogs, who walked up as if they knew me and took it upon themselves to escort me the rest of the way to the highway, as if I were somehow expected, as if this entire drama was staged for my enjoyment or education.

It was an exhilarating and satisfying way to help the environment.