Reflections in a River

Introduction

As the Los Angeles River flows 52 miles through the heart of Los Angeles, it passes through varied communities, representative of the region’s diverse nature. It flows also through time, expressing shifting priorities, aspirations, and relations. Los Angeles owes its existence to the river just as the river owes its current form to the changing nature of Los Angeles. Looking into the river, one can observe the reflection of a city. In that reflection, the city’s underlying values emerge. In this thesis, I explore the changing relationship of the Los Angeles River and its community, as indicative of an evolving sociopolitical landscape.

The Los Angeles River, as it currently exists, resembles a sewer as much as anything natural. Most of its 52 miles have been channelized (encased in concrete) to prevent flooding and ensure the safety of surrounding residents and businesses. Only in times of heavy rain is the water that courses through to the ocean derived from natural sources. Usually, the trickle that runs down its central drain is pumped out of a sewage treatment facility. Along much of its path, industrial activity and undesirable residential areas border the river. Few of the thousands that pass over the river on any of the several freeways during their daily commute notice its presence. Fewer still appreciate it as the reason for Los Angeles’ existence.

Yet beneath the river’s, at best, unassuming appearance, there lies a relatively recent resurgence in concern for its well-being; as well as that of the Los Angeles residents who could benefit from its revitalization. Activists’ calls for a re-imagined Los Angeles River have begun to hold sway, and numerous projects along the river’s banks are beginning to mark a new phase for the river. Parks and bike trails newly line its banks. Its concrete walls will be redesigned, where prudent, creating a more welcoming, natural river. The city has approved a master plan for the corridor, ensuring that development will be in accordance with revitalization’s goal.  And a more holistic approach to watershed management has begun, recognizing the relationships between water conservation, ecological health, livable neighborhoods, and community involvement.

These changes have not escaped the notice of scholars, who, according to Blake Gumprecht in The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth, “have taken to the river like egrets in search of crawdads.” (Gumprecht, 286) The amount that has been said and written about the river has further increased dramatically since the book’s 1999 publication. More recently, in an article on the revitalization efforts, Jenny Price documented, “Since 2000, the campaign to bring [the river] back to life has quickly become the most ambitious, well-funded, and widely supported vision to revitalize the quality and equality of life in Los Angeles.” Why has the river attracted such attention? What about the revitalization project has made it such a bastion of hope?

Perhaps the answer lies in the river’s history, which, up until this point, could be fairly characterized as a steady fall from grace. Where the river once flowed freely, in harmony with a respectful civilization, its nature has been fundamentally altered by successive human efforts. First, the river’s prized water was extracted with increasing efficiency to meet human needs. Once little remained of its essence, the river was incarcerated, to defend against the danger of unrestrained nature. Finally, the channel of the river, itself, became the danger, relegated to the margins of a totalizing society. The river, as giver of life, has been repaid by having its own stripped away.

These changes to the river were not at all contingent. Rather, they were deeply embedded in societal evolution.  Neither, however, were they inevitable, as no force exogenous to society has determined the flow of history. Society’s development is a product of the individuals of which it is composed. In fact, there is no more fundamental component engendering the nature of society than the self conception of its members. In turn, the structure and goals of a society reveal how its citizens understand themselves.

To understand the change in this self conception, I turn to one of the most influential philosophers of the 20^th Century, Martin Heidegger. A part of Germany’s continental tradition, Heidegger was fundamentally concerned with man’s relation to Being—the essence common to all which exists. He undertook to understand the ontological status of people under the condition of modernity and explored how such a condition did or did not allow for authentic human Being. While thorough and sustained attention is often required to gain understanding of and from Heidegger’s philosophy, I attempt to provide a functional understanding of his key concepts as they are introduced throughout this text. By exploring the changing ontology which has undergirded the relationship between the Los Angeles River and its surrounding communities, a greater understanding can be gained of current revitalization efforts, as well as of the broader environmental and political landscape of Los Angeles, and, perhaps, beyond.

Heidegger’s standing within the intellectual community has been justifiably tainted by his involvement with the Nazi party, though he was certainly never an unqualified supporter of that regime. Extensive discussion of the nature of his involvement has taken place. Some have argued that Heidegger’s decisions to accept the rectorship at Freiburg University from 1933 until his resignation in 1934 and to offer lectures supportive of the Nazi movement were motivated by a desire for personal gain and an hubristic belief in the ability of his own ideas to influence the course of the movement. He had become energized by the awakening of the German spirit, but “by the mid-1930s, his opposition was principled and substantial” (Caeser 209). Hannah Arendt, Heidegger’s student and prominent political theorist in her own right, explained Heidegger’s support for the Nazis by declaring him an “idiotes,” a political imbecile. Others have maintained that any attempt to explain away his involvement without questioning his philosophy amounts to “nothing more than an elaborate apologetic” (Caeser 209). For the purposes of this thesis, I have found it appropriate to read Heidegger critically, benefitting from those aspects of Heidegger’s thought which still ring true today and departing from his path on less fortunate views that he espoused. To clarify, Heidegger never approved of genocide or the militaristic aspects of Nazism, nor does his philosophy support totalitarianism. However, the nationalism that he at times supported cannot be dismissed as unrelated to the type of horror unleashed by the Nazis.

My feeling is that Heidegger’s philosophy was in some ways ahead of his own, less ontological viewpoints. His nationalism can be understood as a holdover from the contingent traditions that he claimed to have discarded with Nietzsche, whose radical individualism couldn’t be further from a collectivistic mentality. Neither does such a view square with Heidegger’s promotion of individual authenticity. By repairing to those more fundamental aspects of Heidegger’s thought, I have attempted to decouple the man’s faults from his philosophy’s virtues. I follow Arendt, who took a similar approach as she expanded on the political ramifications of Heidegger’s understanding of human Being. Hopefully, the views pervading this thesis speak for themselves as incompatible with any kind of totalitarianism.

Heidegger’s distaste for America as the site of modernity, well characterized by James Caeser in Reconstructing America, represents another questionable point in his thought and, at the same time, makes his philosophy more applicable to this thesis. As a symbol, and to some extent as a country, America represented, to Heidegger, modernity at its fullest. And this he deplored. His characterization of America can be subsumed within a larger preoccupation with “the bucolic romanticism that Heidegger often found irresistible…” (Thiele 187). Finding much to dislike in modernity, Heidegger often resorted to a backward-looking gaze, again failing to live up to his own pretensions as the philosopher of the “not yet.” While Heidegger encouraged extended encounters with mortality and nothingness, as that from which life and Being spring, he seems to have ignored the possibility that an extended encounter with the modernity of his time might give rise to a similar phenomenon with regard to some of the fundamental ontological categories he identified, such as Being-in-the-world, Being-with-others, care, and the reigning mode of revealing. Thus, while Heidegger often sought recourse from modern man’s spiritual deficiency in a supposedly innocent past, such an attitude can be supportive of the sort of chauvinistic, otherizing, conservative backlash in which he found a temporary home.

It could be argued, to take advantage of Heidegger’s own language, that he chose to “rebel helplessly against [technology],” which “comes to the same thing” as “a stultified compulsion to push on blindly with technology” (Question Concerning Technology 25-6). The “freeing” alternative that he proposed is to “open ourselves expressly to the essence of technology” (Question Concerning Technology 26). Heidegger’s understanding of technology will be further explored below, but it is to some extent synonymous with modernity, and thus it can be shown that some of his tendencies strayed from his own philosophical course. We can trace the German nationalism and romanticism that plagued parts of Heidegger’s work, such as his questioning how to defend “against the on-rush of the alien,” and his answer that one must “awaken unceasingly the bestowing and healing and conserving powers of Home…where origin and the customs fostered from ancient times determine human existence”(“Messkirch’s Seventh Centennial” 45). But in this case, we need to escape Heidegger the man and instead pursue his philosophical approach, which quite clearly does not support a totalizing movement. Questioning and openness are more deeply rooted in Heidegger’s philosophy than reactionary conservatism, and, once again, it is my hope that the latter can be filtered out through a critical gaze. In this interpretation, I draw heavily from political theorist Leslie Paul Thiele, whose understanding of Heidegger has permeated this work.

However, Heidegger’s identification of America as the site from which modernity emanates makes his exploration of modernity particularly salient to an understanding of the ontological forces at play in Los Angeles. In adopting such a viewpoint of America, he was far from alone. Indeed, it is hard to deny that America has had a great amount of influence on the rest of the world.  In fact, this relationship parallels the relative consensus of scholars treating Los Angeles about the city’s relationship to the rest of the nation. According to Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz, Los Angeles stands in “the same quasi-utopian relationship to the rest of the United States as America as a whole had stood to the Weimar imagination of the 1920s” (Davis 48). He explained that, between World War II and McCarthyism, “Los Angeles was the address in exile of some of Central Europe’s most celebrated intellectuals…,” especially those from the Frankfurt School, who had been heavily influenced by Heidegger’s thought. “With few exceptions they complained bitterly about the absence of a European civitas of public places… (Davis 46-7). They saw “Los Angeles as the crystal ball of capitalism’s future” (Davis 48). From Davis, we see that Los Angeles is far from unknown to the continental tradition. Furthermore, there is precedent for the city’s relationship to its physical public realm as a relevant dimension through which to view its philosophical status. And as many have argued, the city offers particular salience for studying the status and direction of modernity.

Los Angeles has also been characterized as prognostic by many outside of that scholarly tradition, by theorists and more positivistically-oriented political scientists alike. It has been called an “exaggerated version of the broader American story” (Wolch, Pastor Jr., and Dreier 3), a “bellwether of urban America” (Sides 9), a “suggestive prototype” (Dear 52), a “harbinger of [other cities’] urban destinies” (Marks, Gearin, and Armstrong), “the city of the future” (Deverell 2), and a “model and trend-setter for the twenty-first century” (Sonenshein 19). While it is beyond the scope of this thesis to comprehensively evaluate the validity of those claims, their prevalence should serve to encourage special attention to the historical direction of Los Angeles.

Especially in many of the dimensions considered in the following text, Los Angeles has shown itself to be ahead of the curve. The pattern of development in Los Angeles was characterized by sprawl before most other places. The city utilized an extensive system of electric railways before, even, the automobile’s ascendancy (Fogelson 85-107).  In addition, the city is “the nation’s most multicultural city” (Gottlieb 2005, 41), a situation which has been accompanied by examples of extreme racial tension, such as the Watts and 1992 riots. Los Angeles has served as a focus for environmentalists deploring the degradation that urban development has brought the natural world. These critics have been spurred on by the city’s smog problem, dating back to 1943, and myriad other ecological crises. At the same time, the city is the birthplace of some of the most powerful progressive (as well as reactionary) movements in American politics, most recently in the realm of labor and community organizing. Given these circumstances, Los Angeles is an interesting city to consider in an increasingly cosmopolitan world, which has, in the past, come to resemble Los Angeles in many ways.

In the West, there has generally been a steady ascent of individualism, nowhere more manifest than Los Angeles. Heidegger’s philosophy presaged a shift in the direction of that ongoing evolution, which is perhaps being witnessed now in a new approach to politics, the public, and nature. Similarly, the fate which has befallen the Los Angeles River is representative of the relationship between human populations and nature around the world.  By examining the theoretical underpinnings of the river’s history and its current development, we can situate environmental issues within a broader framework, integrally related as they are to philosophical ideas concerning such issues as technology and the public realm. I hope to demonstrate that these ideas have real-world implications. Beyond its sometimes elitist dismay at humanity’s spiritual deficiency, Heidegger’s exposition of our ontological nature portends more immanent ramifications. Furthermore, given the gravity of the many environmental issues facing humanity, attempted solutions demand an understanding of the malaise from which the problems arose. Indeed, to become a thoroughly sustainable society requires engagement with our fundamental goals and self-understandings. In this light, environmentalism requires not sacrifice—although individual consumption will most likely have to decrease—but societal advance. By living more authentically as individuals and together as a society, we can concurrently restore nature and ourselves. Revitalization offers more than a gift to nature, more even than a desperately needed community asset; on the river’s surface, the possibility for societal redemption glistens.

The River in History

“Yes, Los Angeles, yes America, there is a Los Angeles River. And it is grand. It is long. It is powerful.”

-Patt Morrison

 

Before the arrival of Spanish settlers, the Los Angeles River basin was already home to “one of the largest concentrations of Indians in North America” (Gumprecht 26). The Gabrielino civilization relied heavily on the river’s waters for their way of life. They accepted and respected the river as it existed in nature. They hunted the animals and gathered vegetation it supported, and bathed in and drank its running waters. The tribes’ spiritual link with the river was expressed through their daily pre-dawn bathing ritual and the myth of Itaru, in which a coyote’s pride is damaged by losing a race to the river, teaching him humility and deference. The myth’s lesson reinforced the harmony that existed between man and nature in that time (Gumprecht 34). Native Americans chose to settle on high ground, avoiding the river’s periodic floods and occasional complete changes of course. Indeed, “the Gabrielino understood the importance of the region’s waterways but also knew their dangers” (Gumprecht 29).

Spanish settlers were initially puzzled by the Native American’s choice to settle on high ground, with their limited knowledge of the river’s temperament. Their arrival marked the beginning of the river’s being “challenged forth,” in Heideggerian terms. El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles was established in 1781. The Zanja Madre (“Mother Ditch”) was opened the same year, supplying water for agricultural purposes. No longer was the river to be accepted as given; instead, it would be improved for human benefit. While the river granted the fertile soil that allowed the isolated settlement to thrive, it is important to note that the settlers took advantage of forced Indian labor such that “the early agricultural success of the pueblo has been largely credited to the work of the Indians. The original colonists have been widely characterized as lazy” (Gumprecht 46). Thus began the commensurate exploitation of nature and humanity at the banks of the Los Angeles River.

Though the Spanish period saw the river developed to meet expanding human needs, its fundamental character was not yet changed. But as California was admitted into the United States in 1850, Anglo immigration to Los Angeles ensued, and further steps were taken to maximize the river’s potential. The river was instrumental to Los Angeles’ early development, as the nearly exclusive source of water for irrigation and drinking. For that reason, nearby real estate became expensive while land without access to irrigation was practically worthless. The unrelenting demand for an expanding water supply, in a predominantly agricultural region, led to the river being increasingly managed and set upon. Over time, private pipes replaced communal Zanjas, sewage was directed into the ocean, dams and reservoirs were built, and the river was employed to power a water works.

The river’s transformation from resource to what can, in Heidegger’s language, be termed “standing-reserve” was well underway. That is to say, human activity was increasingly drawing on its energy and defining its character. For Heidegger, standing-reserve is an integral component of the essence of technology, which is, in turn, a fundamental aspect of our age. Technology is a form of revealing, in the mode of enframing. Revealing is the disclosing of Being, which can be thought of as the essence common to all entities that are, as we understand them. “And yet the revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiēsis,” Heidegger tells us. “The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such” (Question Concerning Technology, 14). That which has been set upon in this way is termed a standing-reserve. It has been efficiently subdued and appropriated, enframed.

It is no accident, however, that pursuing a relationship to the world solely characterized by mastery has had adverse effects upon the humanity and the world. With his great sensitivity, Heidegger was able to detect the danger of enframing in its incipient stage, as it appeared ontologically in human Being. Only later did science reveal it as a threat to actual (ontic) human survival—in the form of environmental degradation, climate change most obviously—in addition to human ontological potential. But Heidegger did not see enframing to be wholly negative, nor did he advocate its renunciation or a return to a previous way of life. He stated, “The essence of technology is in a lofty sense ambiguous” (Question Concerning Technology, 33). This ambiguity can be observed in the changes that supplied water to a growing community.  Residents at the time certainly saw their efforts as improvements, yet they paid little attention to the long-term impacts of the process they set in motion.

Enframed Channel

“The way we treat rivers reflects the way we treat each other.”

–Aldo Leopold

 

The city’s first railroad connection arrived in 1876, and immigration followed rapidly thereafter. Many immigrants, who made up the vast majority of Los Angeles’ population at the time, came to Los Angeles in pursuit of “the good life,” which consisted of single-family houses, economic prosperity, and an unobtrusive government (Fogelson 144). This shared goal has in many ways shaped the city’s development. Los Angeles’ promise functioned similarly to the “American Dream,” which attracted a similar migration to the country from around the world.  As this was taking place, many Americans were moving west. The geography of Los Angeles left it an “improbable site for a major urban region,” blessed with little water aside from a temperamental river, and no natural harbor, like San Diego to the south (Wolch, Pastor Jr., and Dreier 4).

Rather, immigrants were lured by the city’s many boosters, whose rhetoric was comparable to “John Winthrop’s image of the shining ‘city on the hill,’” which did so much to shape symbolic America (Caeser 165). Already, Los Angeles was fulfilling its place as the most “American” of American cities, putting it on the path to becoming “a world of individuals” (Wolch, Pastor Jr., and Dreier 1).

As the city’s demands for water increased, “the river’s reserve dwindled and, little by little, its surface flow disappeared”(Gumrecht 83). This was effected through increasingly efficient exploitation of the river’s water and its subsurface flow. By 1903, the Los Angeles River’s flow was approaching its limits, and the city appropriated a second source of water by tapping groundwater reserves in West Los Angeles. The Owens River Aqueduct opened in 1913, transporting water 226 miles. It supplied Los Angeles with seven times as much water as the Los Angeles River provided, allowing for an accelerated pace of immigration, and “making it easy for residents to forget about the stream that had supplied the city for more than a century” (Gumprecht 105). As the city gained access to other sources of water, the river’s “care or improvement”  was no longer seen as necessary to Los Angeles’ development (Gumprecht 113).

A huge portion of the strain that was put on the city’ water resources resulted from the irrigation of lawns and gardens for single-family homes. Rather than valuing the riparian habitat created by the river’s natural flow, they tapped its reserves to create ordered gardens around their private homes. Industry took root along the river’s banks, tasked with the production of commodities to be consumed individually. The industry, in turn, dumped its refuse and polluted waste into the river’s channel. In this sense, the river’s exploitation manifests the privileging of the private at the expense of the public.

But the river was not yet ready to concede defeat, nor to let itself fade quietly into neglect. Southern California has been consistently plagued by devastating floods, which have claimed many lives and destroyed millions of dollars worth of property. This danger was exacerbated by the city’s rapid development, which heavily encroached on the river’s flood plains. Developers and residents alike, in their hubris, felt that the river posed no threat: “A little stream like that, they assured themselves, could certainly be controlled” (Gumprecht 156). The city, lacking the desire to supervise growth and fearing that courts would strike down any law which impaired the “liberty of contract,” extracted from the 14^th Amendment, enforced no zoning codes to prevent building in the flood plains, despite the costs it entailed to both residents and the city.

The river consistently reminded residents of its danger, and they responded by calling forcefully for expanded flood control. A battle was waged from the mid 1800s until the completion of the river’s encasement in 1959. It took over a hundred years for the threat to be subverted precisely because the negative liberty prized by residents both impaired collective action and led to the multiplication of the threat through encroaching development and manipulation of the river. As its current was extracted, the river became less able to carve an appropriate channel. Although the flooding invariably cost the city more than flood control measures would have, (especially if the latter had included restriction on flood plain development) the inability to muster support for necessary collective action hindered flood control efforts. In 1926, voters rejected a bond issue which would have prevented much of the damage in the flood of 1933. In 1927, a taxpayer bond revolt led to the rejection of bonds across the board. In 1934, even after devastating floods, voters again rejected bonds for flood control. And those few measures which managed to garner sufficient support were mostly developed to appease criticism, rather than effectively manage the river’s danger.

The repeated failure of local attempts to control the river was finally turned around with the work of the Army Corps of Engineers, who successfully subdued the river’s threat. Although earlier appeals to the federal government had been rejected, the government embraced a more active role during the height of the Great Depression, and the Works Progress Administration finally accepted the challenge. Work was largely halted during World War Two, but resumed and accelerated throughout the 1950s. Perhaps this explains the river’s current resemblance to the interstate highway system, which was being constructed at the same time. The river was buried under an estimated three billion tons of concrete. The Corps designed the river so as to ensure maximum water capacity, at maximum speed, using the smallest possible right of way. Were it not for the expanded role the government assumed for those decades, the river would potentially still be a natural threat to Los Angeles residents. While the river had originally brought both opportunity and threat, its value was circumscribed by the availability of alternative sources of water. All that remained was danger, and thus the river’s essence would be completely destroyed for the sake of man.

But the real danger, Heidegger tells us, is the “destining of revealing.” Revealing is the disclosure of truth, and yet there are multiple ways of revealing truth, whether as a standing-reserve or by bringing-forth, which is a more poetic approach. Destining is the ordaining of a mode of revealing. “Yet when destining reigns in the mode of enframing, it is the supreme danger” (Question Concerning Technology, 26). Many of the examples Heidegger gives of enframing evoke environmental degradation: coal mining, “the mechanized food industry,” and, relevantly, the Rhine river as “water power supplier.” He was less concerned with environmental well-being, however, than the “supreme danger” that “[man] himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve” (Question Concerning Technology, 27).

And in Los Angeles, enframing took the form of the negative liberty to master one’s private sphere. Collective action was rarely pursued for any end other than the furtherance and preservation of the atomized societal landscape. It arose in response to economic trouble and an outside menace, in both cases because of their potential to dislodge the march of negative liberty as the enframing of our human potential to shape our destiny.

The river’s repeated flooding can be seen as the world’s persistent knocking at the doors of Los Angeles’ single-family homes, to which we retreat, fleeing from “nature” in the face of our true nature, characterized by Being-in-the-world. We are not always comfortable with our worldly nature. Indeed, anxiety arises from our feeling of homelessness as creatures thrown into the world. When we flee from anxiety, it is into the publicness of average everydayness, where we find “tranquilized self-assurance” (Being and Time 233). We find comfort in our daily routines, occupied by important, yet ontologically insignificant concerns. This is paralleled by Hannah Arendt’s disdain for the “social,” and economic, as apolitical and trivial. She fails to recognize the social as a necessary precursor to our higher, ontological calling as beings capable of the destining of revealing. The problem arises when we pursue the social—remain mired in average everydayness—at the expense of the increasing possibility of more authentic Being. Authenticity requires anxiety to be confronted directly, such that the true nature of Being can begin to reveal itself

This is the problem which characterized Los Angeles in its mindless pursuit of growth. Despite growing prosperity, the feeling of homelessness prevailed. For a long time, residents fled into publicness, precluding the public realm in the process. By contrasting these two conceptions of publicity, we can begin to understand the historical transition from the contingent and unquestioned truths that characterize publicness to the possibility for authentic Being that enables an increasingly democratic public realm. Publicness can be understood as conformity in an ontological sense; the self is undistinguished and inauthentic. It is possible to be ontically individualistic and yet ontologically collectivistic, by living a solitary life, all the while failing to develop an authentic sense of self. On the other hand, it is possible to pursue a questioning relation to Being, deeply aware of one’s own contingent position in the world, while living in community. This occurs in a public realm, populated by individuals. Such a public realm is fragile, arising out of freedom and dissolving in the face of mastery or fixed hierarchy.

Revealingly, the lack of a public realm in Los Angeles was accomplished with the aid of technology: automobile transportation and television-oriented leisure are obvious examples, contributing to encapsulated life. The essence of technology preceded these mere technological devices, yet their totalizing effect has accelerated the onset of widespread anxiety and alienation.

Reaching the Abyss

“The Los Angeles River today is like a scar on the landscape, a faint reminder of what it used to be.”

– Blake Gumprecht

When confronted directly, anxiety gives way to wonder and philosophic questioning. Understanding the groundlessness of Dasein—Heidegger’s concept for that Being which is distinctly human through its ability to be concerned with Being itself—Nietzsche advocated a creation of the self according to the dictates of the will to power. His answer epitomized a stance of mastery, and gave birth to postmodernism.

For years, Los Angeles has been characterized by postmodernism, as argued by scholars such as Michael Dear in “Postmodern Urbanism.” In his article, Dear points to Los Angeles’ endless, meaningless tracts of housing, and unconstrained forces that have dominated the urban landscape such that the “traditional logics of earlier urbanisms evaporated” (Dear 50). No longer can the city’s form be neatly categorized as emanating concentrically from the center. No longer does a definite, centralized power structure guarantee to the city a cohesive rationality. The postmodernism of Los Angeles also reveals itself in the stunning inequality of its residents: when solely concerned with fashioning the self, there is little room to invest in others, who become intractably distant.

And yet, despite its naïve response, postmodernism must be applauded for staring into the abyss in the first place. Through a confrontation with meaninglessness, postmodern thinkers have deconstructed societal traditions that have served to perpetuate relationships of violence and hegemony. Those who were seen as different had threatened the ability to retreat into publicness. For the true examination of dissimilar cultures can only ever lead to the realization that one’s own culture is contingent, which is commensurate with staring into the abyss of meaning. In order to avoid this, safety has been sought in the comfort of community based on similarity, which is fundamentally exclusive. According to Iris Marion Young, “In the dynamics of racism and ethnic chauvinism in the United States today, the positive identification of some groups is often achieved by first defining other groups as the other, the devalued semi-humans” (Young 13).

This is especially important within the context of Los Angeles, where fleeing from the public sphere has often and crucially meant fleeing from the Other. This can be understood quite literally in the sense of “white flight”: “early suburbanization emanated partly from the refusal of middle-class whites to live near people of color and new immigrants” (Pulido 82). Los Angeles has developed “racialized containers” (Deverell 9) in a variety of overt and covert forms to maintain a distance between ethnicities and to keep the other “expressly visible, lest they disappear into the polity, into the neighborhoods, into the city of the future” (Deverell 10). This same dynamic has also led to the “privatization of public space” and the destruction of the public realm out of safety concerns (Davis 227). The public realm, by its very nature, allows equal access to all members of society and necessitates a comfort with otherness that has been lacking in Los Angeles.

Again, the river has figured prominently in this effort as a “critical dividing line… between races, classes, neighborhoods” (Deverell 93). Indeed, both “Mexicanos and industry were continually pushed eastward from the central Plaza, toward the Los Angeles River” (Pulido 83). Its association with minorities has further colored its perception in the minds of Los Angeles’ politically dominant white residents, further justifying its neglect.

At the same time, the postmodern deconstruction of systemic prejudice, while incomplete to say the least, serves also to weaken the bonds that tie homogenous groups together. Without a fixed, external other, otherness becomes decentralized. In Nietzsche’s radical individualism, there can be nothing but otherness. But the lack of particular devaluation of certain groups does not necessitate a lack of community. It is, rather, mastery that must relent if the other two are to be found compatible. Though postmodern thinking has frayed community bonds, its deconstruction of homogeneity as a basis for community is necessary to allow for a healthier, inclusive incarnation. The deconstruction of racial containers is deeply embedded within the rise of ontological individualism as contrasted with publicness, which has allowed shared prejudices to be revealed. In turn, that deconstruction accelerates the rise of ontological individualism within formerly subjugated groups.

Postmodernism has also deconstructed the duality between positive and negative freedom, locating freedom instead in the “ongoing struggle against the techniques of subjectification” (Thiele, 67). It is an active notion of freedom that attempts to reclaim the self from enframing processes through resistance. “Postmodern theorists reply that they take an oppositional stance to modernity’s domineering structures, though they insist that there is no neutral metaposition from which to grasp those structures in toto, nor is it possible simply to leap outside of them. Although global theorizing may be impossible, local resistance and action are not” (Contesting Earth’s Future, 95).

As this effort took hold in Los Angeles politics, “community politics came to be seen primarily as a politics of resistance… Such a politics took on a more reactive nature in the desire to keep others out… through an agenda of exclusion, protection of homogenous neighborhoods or local areas, or enforcement of immigration regulations” (Gottlieb 2005, 65-6). Examples include gated communities and anti-immigration policies as well as opposition to affordable-housing projects, homeless shelters, and transitional housing. The language of “no growth” is in line with a population that has become disenchanted with development and the accelerating pace of advanced capitalism (Dear 50). However, the grassroots politics to which it gave birth, in the form of homeowner’s associations, for example, also presages the potential inherent within postmodernism’s disclosure of freedom as an active process. Rather than a state to be achieved, freedom is a process to be performed in the effort to reclaim the self. The thrust of these efforts was characterized by reactionary xenophobia, but they nevertheless carved out the channel through which a more constructive conception of freedom could flow.

The duality between man and nature, the deconstruction of which is ongoing, was also a feature of modernity. The deconstructive process has threatened traditional environmentalism by leveling a series of critiques at its fundamental tenets. The environmental justice movement has criticized traditional environmental groups for disregarding impoverished and minority communities, who are saddled with the worst impacts of environmentally destructive societal behavior, such as the toxic waste dump sites in Los Angeles (Pulido). William Cronon, in Nature’s Metropolis, argues that environmentalism has privileged the wilderness seen as untouched by human activity—though, increasingly this does not exist on the planet—at the expense of nature and environmental responsibility where we live. As Robert Gottlieb, a scholar who has devoted great effort to river revitalization, explained, “Nature’s Metropolis argued that the urban forces that transformed Chicago also transformed the countryside, challenging the idea that nature could be set apart from its connection to human activity” (Gottlieb 2007, 3). There have been many more critiques of traditional environmentalism, but they tend to converge on a new form of environmentalism which is more integrated into everyday life and more interwoven into the political, societal, and economic fabric of human society. Nature simply cannot be regarded as something distinctly apart from ourselves. Indeed, there is no easy fix to continuing environmental degradation—and with it the decline of our planet and our species—which is necessarily treated as an “externality” by any traditionally liberal sociopolitical construction. Such a fix is especially unattainable by an environmental politics of resistance, given its lack of appeal beyond the liberal elite and its inability to present a viable alternative to unsustainable development.

In Los Angeles, nature revealed itself early and emphatically as integrally related to human behavior. The city has the worst air quality in the nation and experienced “the first smog attack in 1943.” Although concerned citizens first focused on the lack of open space and preserved nature in the formerly Edenic city, “the ‘parks and recreation crisis’ had,” by 1940, “become a comprehensive environmental crisis… floods and sewage spills were accompanied by massive beach erosion, land subsidence, and saltwater intrusion into the underground water supply” (Davis 66).

The Los Angeles River has served as a reminder of environmental degradation through its role as water supply for a thirsty region. As Los Angeles residents deal with water shortages and concerns of sustainability, they have increasingly come to realize that “human habitation on a metropolitan scale has only been possible through a widespread manipulation of nature, especially the control of water resources in the American West.” (Dear 59)

Postmodernism has clearly accomplished much more than what is summarized here, but we can see the way in which it has opened the floodgates to a more intimate understanding of Being. Only once contingent, unexamined norms are deconstructed can reconstruction begin to take place; by letting what is, be. Thiele declares that “the decaying fruits of postmodern civilization bear the seeds of disclosive freedom” (Thiele 92). In Los Angeles, the fruits of racial tension, community-based resistance, and environmental neglect bear the seeds of a new embrace of diversity, grassroots political action, and environmental internalization. In Heideggerian terms, we can loosely refer to these as Being-with-others, disclosive freedom, and Being-in-the-world, though they are all of course interrelated as products of a questioning relation to Being. Though the transition seems to have required an extended period of anomie and apathy, the path is now cleared for the construction of social relations out of fundamental human characteristics.

We can see this transitional period clearly in the Los Angeles climate which ultimately gave birth to revitalization efforts. The mid to late 1980s was an extremely tense period in Los Angeles history, characterized as “violent, polluted, and anomic” (Sonenshein 23). Mike Davis illuminated these conditions in his 1990 book, City of Quartz. During the 1980s and 90s, Los Angeles was spreading out across the valley in new single-family developments, fleeing from itself. This process was accelerated by a “burgeoning fear of the city” (Davis 6). Davis attributes the fear to “social anxiety” due in large part to rapid population shifts. At the time, Los Angeles was the “fastest growing metropolis in the advanced industrial world,” and immigration was overwhelmingly “non-Anglo” (Davis 7). Meanwhile, the collapse of the middle class along with declining public investment led to the “deterioration of social and economic conditions in low-income communities,” increasing gang violence, and “overt expressions of racism” (Gottlieb 2005, 43). All these problems were set within the backdrop of “the travails of excessive sprawl,” particularly “the alienation of suburban life” (Wolch 3).

The city’s state of fear becomes manifest in the river’s concrete channel. Bodies have been found in the river’s stream, crime is prevalent near its banks, and the homeless call it home. Nearby residents have demanded “that government officials erect more substantial fences along its banks to keep people out.” (Gumprecht, 236) Indicative of the river’s perception among the larger Los Angeles community, Hollywood has consistently depicted it as a “hostile and forbidding place” (Gottlieb, et al. 2000). Even a revitalization brochure created by the city described the river as “unseen, inaccessible, and sometimes feared.” (Brochure) At the height (or depths) of postmodern LA can be located the birth of disclosive freedom.

Being-in-the-world

“But where danger is, grows

The saving power also.”

-Hölderlin, cited by Heidegger

 

The failure of postmodernism to arrive at an understanding of Being-in-the-world arises from the subjectivism which increasingly characterized Western epistemology and, subsequently, metaphysics. By reevaluating the underlying assumptions involved in epistemological subjectivism, Heidegger managed to escape the necessity of radical individualism. Dismissing the standpoint of detached observation that had previously characterized Western philosophy, Heidegger explained that in attempting to prove the existence of a world, one is already assuming the existence of a human being that can be considered apart from its world. However, human Being, characterized by its thrownness, is already pre-ontologically part of a ready-to-hand world before such philosophical interpretation can begin. Human Being is a Being-in-the-world.

But remaining focused on the individual, Heidegger did not reverse the course of Western thought in his writings. His thought can be seen as an extension of philosophical investigation into Being, surpassing Nietzsche’s inability to understand relations among individuals as anything more than relics of contingent tradition. Heidegger contributed an understanding of the self as situated within a worldly context. Thiele tells us that “the focus of human being’s self-interpretation is not a detached self, but a situated one. To be for the sake of the self is to care about worldly existence as a whole” (Thiele 53). Care, for Heidegger, is “the Being of Dasein itself,” a concern for the meaning of human being (Being and Time, 83). Thus Heidegger understands that “the world of Dasein is a with-world. Being-in is Being-with-Others” (Being and Time, 155). Yet, care cannot be said to be on the rise. As an ontologically essential aspect of Dasein, it has always existed. But it has often been found in a concealed state. Heidegger admonishes us to disclose the Being of Dasein, which is care, by actively searching for meaning within man’s nature, “finding dignity in a freedom that celebrates caretaking rather than mastery” (Thiele 72). Disclosive freedom is the ongoing unconcealment of human being.

Disclosive freedom is in one important sense a radical departure from former notions of freedom, which have in common “the identification of freedom with mastery… This mastery pertains to the higher self’s control over the lower self, with positive liberty; to the empirically demonstrable self’s control over its private domain, with negative liberty; and to the control of the artistic, agonistic self over its inevitably contested and protean constitution, with postmodern liberty” (Thiele 70). Though postmodern liberty is characterized by mastery, we can also see the seeds it bore for disclosive freedom in the form of an active conception of freedom. As artistic resistance to enframing processes that threaten an inauthentic self gives way to a positive effort to remain open to authenticity, disclosive freedom is born. The former is resentful of our worldly nature, the latter embraces it. Any effort at mastery, born out of resentment at our thrownness, will necessarily trample over Being and relegate it to its concealed state, resulting in the suppression of human potential. Thiele articulates Heidegger’s disclosive freedom, writing “Freedom is not absolute liberty in the sense of an unbounded and ungrounded power to do, move, or create. Freedom is freedom to reveal what is” (Thiele 73). Rather than to master, the will is employed to maintain “resolute openness” toward the questioning of one’s Being-in-the-world. In the technological age, calculative reasoning and the drive to efficiently extract, produce, and consume characterize enframing as a form of mastery. Mastery suppresses the human potential to accept our Being-in-the-world and find respite in its questioning exploration.

With Heidegger, Cartesian dualism no longer gives rise to isolated selves, who portray the world as the other and flee into attempting its mastery. Instead of resenting human limitations, worldly realities, and the contingency of Being, they are embraced by Dasein’s care. The post-modern standpoint worked itself out in society through the demise of increasingly distant values and institutions; in some ways, postmodernism could be said to advocate a “resolute closedness” to the processes of enframing. Yet, in the ensuing introspection, there is a liberation of the self, as care is disclosed. This has implications across a range of human values, institutions, and activities. In the case of values, we discover how the basis of ethics shifts from tradition to an expanded self: “Expanding the etymology of ‘ethics’ (ethos) to include not solely a customary way of being with others but a characteristic way of being in the world, Heidegger considers his work an ‘original ethics’…Heidegger’s ontology might then be construed as a form of ethics—if ethics pertains not simply to the customs of the human collective but to the character of the human condition” (Thiele 54).[1] The character of the human condition becomes the wellspring from which all worldly relations arise, including the political. Freedom can then begin to assume a constructive role, no longer actively resisting contingent institutions, but rather actively promoting that which is found to be in line with the human condition.

Nevertheless, Heidegger largely avoided the political, privileging art as that which “yields to the holding-sway,” (Question Concerning Technology, 34). From 1985 to 1988, the river’s potential was disclosed by three residents with different interests and approaches (Gumprecht 250-256). Lewis MacAdams’ contribution is the most traditionally artistic of the three. He had recently moved to Los Angeles from the free-spirited Northern California town of Bolinas, where he had participated in water politics. He took the most decidedly artistic approach to the river, in a series of performances. He first cut the barbed wire that guards the river’s channel with three friends and walked along its dry bottom for miles, asking to speak for it in the “human realm.” He then put on a mixed-media show at a local theater, painted green and impersonating animals. It was universally panned. He formed the non-profit, Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR), and began distributing stickers.

Dick Roraback portrayed the river with a “gently mocking tone” (MacAdams’ words) in a series of newspaper articles. In reading his articles, one discovers that, “like MacAdams, Roraback was plainly appalled by what he saw, but his series was not a call to arms. He did not resolve to fight for the river’s future or to organize on its behalf…” (Gumprecht 254). Though an ironic disposition is often something of a retreat from the world, his articles focused attention on a little-considered feature of the Los Angeles landscape, disclosing what had been overlooked. He laudably increased interest in the river and happily put a FoLAR bumper sticker on his car when MacAdams offered.

Dilara El-Assaad was a student at the University of Southern California pursuing her master’s in landscape architecture. After immigrating from Lebanon, she observed a lack of open space in Los Angeles and found the river beautiful for its clean, straight lines. She did her master’s thesis on a potential revitalization, suggesting, for example, inflatable dams to maintain water flow. It was not published but nevertheless launched her into the limelight. She delivered speeches and has worked with planners on the revitalization. Her creative reimagining of the river’s role in Los Angeles life was more scholarly than artistic in a traditional sense, but its ability to convey something deeply true and disclose possibility manifests an artistic contribution.

Though Heidegger did not develop much in the way of a direct political theory, we are lucky to have his student Hannah Arendt to help us understand that politics has a role to play precisely because human conditions “are determined by the fact that not man but men live on the earth,” (Arendt 2003, 165). Arendt’s conception of politics dovetails with disclosive freedom in her observation that “freedom and sovereignty are so little identical that they cannot even exist simultaneously. Where men wish to be sovereign, as individuals or as organized groups, they must submit to the oppression of the will, be this the individual will with which I force myself, or the ‘general will’ of an organized group. If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce” (Arendt 2003, 165). Her notion of sovereignty includes any hierarchical relationship between individuals. Thus, neither a master nor slave is free. In a public sphere which is entirely characterized by political equality, freedom holds sway.  It is not necessary that there be material or even natural equality. Rather, the public sphere must be characterized by isonomia, equality under the law.

Arendt was also not particularly concerned with the public sphere’s inclusivity.  She admired the exclusive Greek polis, which maintained slavery and male superiority. Nevertheless, for a society to be truly characterized by freedom, equality must extend to all members. For politics to exist in practice, then, society must guarantee that all citizens have the opportunity to participate in the public sphere. For many impoverished community members, that potentially time-consuming opportunity is out of the question. Thus, the equality that gives rise to an authentic public realm requires more than an empty commitment to legal equality. Greek democracy, in the Age of Pericles, found it necessary to undertake “social” measures to ensure political equality, such as, “concession of salaries to public functionaries, to seek and supply work to the poor, to grant lands to dispossessed villagers, and public assistance for invalids, orphans and indigents” (“Age of Pericles”).

In the same way that disclosive freedom allows Being to come to presence, politics is miraculous in that it offers the appearance of that which is fundamentally new and unpredictable, a form of natality. That potential is unleashed by the deliberative process, where participants have relinquished mastery. As Heidegger observed, we are thrown into a populated world and human Being is characterized by Being-with-others. Society is ever more a collection of selves, but each self maintains a “resolute openness” to Being-in-the-world. The standpoint reduces the distance between an individual and their world, internalizing formerly external institutions, and thus giving rise to politics with a decidedly more “grassroots” flavor.

Widespread political involvement allows for more enlightened public policy, as well. Arendt declares that “opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate.” In the absence of such a process, “moods,” which are “fickle and unreliable,” come to dominate and opinion does not even exist (Arendt 1991, 260). Moods express narrow self-interest, while opinion is able to comprehend a broader public good.

This is a central problem of a Republican form of government, where political action is left to the centralized political elite, concerned mostly with re-election. Mere citizens have little incentive to inform themselves or engage in deep dialogue, with periodic elections serving as a superficial and circumscribed version of political freedom. Large-scale elections are also an extremely divisive element in society. The fragmentation of society into two or more opposing camps is inevitable in such a system. That divisiveness prevents the type of political space that Arendt champions. No open discussions among equals are possible or productive unless desire to collaborate and willingness to compromise are also present. Referring to the councils which have arisen organically in many post-revolutionary interim power vacuums, she wrote that “the remarkable thing about the councils was of course not only that they crossed all party lines… but that such party membership played no role whatsoever” (Arendt 1991, 255).

As individual self-consciousness has increased over time in society, politics has followed by becoming more decentralized and democratized. A virtuous cycle develops as formerly marginalized citizens are empowered. Disclosive freedom comes to presence politically through open dialogue in which all citizens are welcomed to play an active role.

We can see this evolution in the nature of politics taking place in Los Angeles, a city which has been characterized by scholars as “weak on civic organizations, and on the connective tissue that was assumed to underlie the capacity to undertake civic enterprises” (Sonenshein, xiv). Along with a disenfranchised immigrant population, the relative deficiency of political participation in Los Angeles has been attributed to its “thoroughgoing nonpartisanship” (Sonenshein 22). Its lack of political machines has often prevented widespread mobilization of voters. Traditional electoral politics has lost its centrality: “L.A.’s Mayor and city council members, as well as the city’s business leaders, are merely part of the cacophony of political voices within the larger metropolitan area” (Wolch, Pastor Jr., and Dreier 19). Dear refers to the process as the “continuing spectacle of electoral politics” (Dear 64). Los Angeles’ fragmentation can be seen as the decline of traditional, central institutions, which exist outside of the people.

Although the absence of strong central leadership has allowed economic forces to reign supreme, decentralization becomes constructive as citizens exercise their newly found political freedom. The lack of partisan gridlock has from time to time enabled political action in the broader public interest, without being circumscribed by devotion to a particular party. The political scientist Raphael Sonenshein, drawing on his experience as the Executive Director of the city’s successful Charter Reform Commission, explored the functioning of Los Angeles politics and found that “there are virtues to the less connected nonpartisan system in Los Angeles. One is that despite furious battles among political leaders, there are pathways to agreement and even consensus when the interests of the city are at stake” (Sonenshein 255).

In Up Against the Sprawl, Sonenshein’s analysis of Los Angeles politics is corroborated by three scholars, who write, “The general fragmentation within and across cities has brought one positive trend: with other sectors weakened, community-based organizations as well as labor unions have grown in numbers and influence. These sectors create the potential for a political force that could challenge the widening economic disparities within the region” (Wolch, Pastor Jr., Dreier 19). Some residents have developed “innovative approaches to taming these economic and political forces, often through grassroots organizing” and “new social movements to improve the conditions of daily life” (Wolch, Pastor Jr., Dreier 3-4). Since the decline of “development-oriented local growth regimes” (Wolch, Pastor Jr., Dreier 19), the city has begun to see the rise of “bottom-up governance arrangements that involve complex sets of self-designated partners, creating a new type of urban regime that includes the nonprofit sector” (Pincetl 248). The vacuum of the capacity to produce collective action that followed postmodern resistance mired the metropolis. But in the lack of institutional power, more collaborative, community-based processes have demonstrated their potential to take the lead.

In The Next Los Angeles, Robert Gottlieb detailed the history of progressivism in the city and “the growing strength of its social and economic justice movements” (Gottlieb 2005, 96), concluding that, despite challenges for the progressive movement, “the opportunities seemed even greater” (Gottlieb 2005, 186) due to an “extraordinary level of activism” (Gottlieb 2005, 48). He pointed to the rebirth of the city’s union movement, largely around service-based employment, increased energy for immigration reform, and “the maturation of the environmental justice movement, which initially had formed out of neighborhood struggles” (Gottlieb 2005, 47). An important component in the environmental justice movement’s advance has been its shift in focus from primary concern with preventing noxious development to encouraging a beneficial variety, such as parkland. Even notoriously pessimistic Mike Davis conceded a “cautious note of optimism,” referring to “a new generation of activists” in a 2006 essay prefacing City of Quartz (Davis, xvii). But his own text demonstrates that activism was not the new element. Rather, it was the shift from active resistance to an active process of envisioning a better city; the shift from postmodern freedom to disclosive freedom. Heidegger’s rearticulation of active freedom as receptivity to self disclosure rather than struggle against external formation has manifested itself in the redirection of political engagement—from taxpayer revolt to progressive activism.

Since river revitalization entered the public consciousness, it has steadily gained momentum as a result of ongoing public discourse instigated by activism, media interest, support from non-profit organizations, academic attention, community events, and official political channels. The actions have realized the official creation of a Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan, released in 2007. Voters have supported referenda providing millions for river revitalization, which has already produced parks, bike trails, water management features, and pedestrian improvements.

Although politicians and eventually the municipal bureaucracy have become allies of river revitalization, the project was born and came to prominence due to dedicated and coordinated civic efforts. In the public sphere activity surrounding river revitalization, disclosive freedom becomes evident in its political manifestation. When we consider that “the political realm preserves both its own and other modes of disclosure by creating, securing, and maintaining the space wherein human thought, speech, and action may occur,” it may be fairly said that the river revitalization process approaches the ideal-type of Arendtian politics (Thiele, 159). In the democratic discourse surrounding revitalization we see the political realm operating to create such a space both symbolically—in the discourse itself—and literally—in the ecologically sensitive public space which is the object of revitalization.

The notion that positive political action has arisen out of resistance is supported by the history of media focus on the river. Referring to a plan in the late 1980s to convert the river to a “bargain freeway” as well as the US Army Corps of Engineers decision to reinforce the river’s flood protection with buttressed concretization, Gumprecht wrote, “Nothing has helped to build support for efforts to revitalize the river more than new threats to its future” (Gumprecht, 274). Resistance to those proposals by groups like MacAdams’ FoLAR spurred intensified local and national media coverage, leading to a slew of new interest in the river, such as the 1990 creation of the Los Angeles River Task Force. The shift from resisting a freeway and concrete to advocating parks and bikeways and decentralized, ecologically sensitive flood control was a major development in the movement to revitalize the Los Angeles River.

At that point, the river revitalization movement brought together varied interests toward a common political end. Lewis MacAdams commented, “It is hard to adjust to the fact that the L.A. River has become a kind of mom and apple pie issue” (Gottlieb 2000, 32). The revitalization movement is all the more authentically political for having arisen and succeeded without promulgation by institutionalized party machines. In the absence of such structures, the revitalization’s success necessitated active citizen participation and political engagement.

In this light, it is interesting to consider the emphasis on collaborative processes which has permeated the river revitalization process, reflecting the spirit of open dialogue and deliberation as central to policy development. The first guiding principle of the Los Angeles City Council Ad Hoc Committee on the LA River is to “Encourage Community participation and Consensus” (Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan), and similar priorities are a part of nearly every revitalization-related organization’s goals. Beyond such desires, community events have been an integral component of nearly every stage of revitalization, from an extensive series on revitalization possibilities[2] to park visioning workshops to an elaborate community input process in the development of the 2007 Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan (LARRMP 17). Revitalization efforts have been unwaveringly concerned with meeting community needs and gathering feedback from residents.

A broader discourse has also taken place across forms of media and involving a diverse cross-section of stakeholders. Revitalization efforts have been featured in countless newspaper articles (actually, Google News puts the figure at “about 374.”)[3], which have, in turn, “raised public consciousness about the river to a level unprecedented in its history” (Gumprecht, 284). Several blogs are devoted entirely to revitalization efforts,[4] and they have featured prominently on many more. Input on the process has been offered by engineers, scholars, activists, residents, bureaucrats, and politicians. Several referenda[5], each with their own proponents and detractors, at both the city and state level, have provided funding for revitalization-related projects. And frequent events at the river, such as tours, bike rides, and clean ups, have allowed for a range of interpersonal dialogues.

Yet, democracy by itself ensures neither disclosive freedom nor the political. Thiele observes that “the problem with democracy is the people. No institutional arrangement can ensure the depth and integrity of the encounters between and among human individuals and groups. Only the cultivation of civic and other virtues can. Ultimately, these virtues must exist in tandem with what may only be described as a philosophic consciousness, broadly understood as a questioning relation to the transcendent and an openness to human contingency that fosters a receptivity to otherness” (Thiele 166). While he goes too far in minimizing the impact that institutional structures can have on political life—Robert Gottlieb juxtaposes graphs of LA neighborhoods’ income and campaign contributions to great effect, for instance (Gottlieb 2005, 93)—Thiele makes the important observation that neither can politics be separated from the dispositions of citizens.

For the project to truly meet the demands of Arendt’s conception of politics, it would be necessary for Los Angeles’ public sphere to ensure political equality. For only out of equality does freedom arise. To that end, revitalization activists have made an effort to explore “how such issues crossed ethnic, racial, and class lines” (Gottlieb 2000, 15). Further, bond measures for urban parks in 2000 and 2002 passed overwhelmingly, with “huge majorities… particularly among Latino and African American voters” (Gottlieb 2007 168). It would seem, then, that minority voices have been well represented in the process.

However, political equality is unfortunately far from universal in contemporary Los Angeles, as attested by surveys indicating that Latinos in Los Angeles do not feel they have “a direct say in the outcome of any environmental issue or agenda,” despite “the need for open space as a core community issue” (Gottlieb 2000, 24). During the outreach process for river revitalization, the issue was highlighted again among youth in South Gate, a relatively impoverished community in Southeast Los Angeles. Despite “strong interest among the South Gate students about the history of the River as well as the possibility of developing new open space areas along the River’s edge…., none of the students expressed an interest in attending what was seen as more of an official “city” event” (Gottlieb 2000 24). The fact that revitalization is of interest to the city’s more impoverished communities demonstrates the crosscutting nature of the proposal. However, the lack of enthusiasm to become involved in the process reveals a lack of enfranchisement in Los Angeles’ broader political sphere. Involvement in the revitalization process among minority and impoverished communities has largely been the result of outside efforts to include them. Though those efforts are an important first step in establishing more widespread political participation, they fall short of an organic movement arising from within such communities, which would likely be more capable of representing their viewpoints. Clearly, there is much progress to be made in establishing an equal playing field, and with it, the possibility for authentic political freedom.

But the project is in an important way disclosive in its nature, beyond the related activism and processes of implementation. For revitalizing the river will create, in a quite literal sense, a public sphere. Land formerly dedicated to private uses will be converted to public space, open to all. As Thiele writes, “Politics refers to the ongoing founding and preserving of a public place or site, a realm characterized by the initiating and preserving powers of action and speech” (Thiele 156). While the “public place or site” he refers to is most properly understood metaphorically, as an opening for discourse, only recently has the potential existed for discourse to take place in the absence of physical proximity. Indeed, such a location is still a nearly obligatory prerequisite for political action.

Two state parks—Taylor Yard and the Cornfields—have already been dedicated along the river, while organizations such as North East Trees have created many small parks along its route. Among the many parks which will line the river’s banks, there is certainly the potential that some will be used for overtly political actions, such as protests and rallies. But even among those casual visitors, aiming simply to enjoy natural surroundings, there is yet a political element to public space. One advantage is the opportunity for spontaneous interaction, which has been severely circumscribed by the privatization of the landscape in Los Angeles. Commuting down a congested highway is never a social act, despite being surrounded by thousands of fellow travelers. On the other hand, biking alongside the river opens the way to many social encounters, allowing for the experience of “Being-with-others” in a less concealed state. Just as “politics lets Being be in a particular manner, primarily as Being-with” (Thiele, 161), experiencing Being-with gives rise to the political by disclosing its essential role—by revealing what Aristotle realized long ago: that “man is by nature a political animal.”

Beyond the simple opportunity for interaction, spending time in a park in Los Angeles likely results in exposure to difference, whether ethnic, cultural, or along any number of other dimensions. The convergence of diverse individuals as allowed by an attractive public amenity supports a thriving public sphere by sowing comfort in difference. Robert Gottlieb points out that “research by UCLA urban planning professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, for example, identified a range of uses for urban parks in Los Angeles among African Americans (social gathering place), Lations (active uses, especially recreation for families), Asian Americans (quiet contemplation), and Anglo (picnics, playgrounds, clean areas, and a sense of order and beauty)” (Gottlieb 2007, 79). Although such diverse uses can make planning for the river’s future difficult, they also ensure that the river’s revitalization will continue to engender awareness of cultural difference.

In turn, that awareness of difference will hopefully give rise to increasing comfort with otherness. According to Councilmember Jose Huizar, “This Plan can and will change the face of Los Angeles, not only aesthetically, but also socially by making integral connections between neighborhoods which have previously seen the River as a concrete barrier between themselves and other communities.” The twenty opportunity areas identified in the Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan offer expanded access to green space to a socioeconomically and ethnically diverse range of residents. Originally critical of revitalization efforts, novelist, city official, and Los Angeles Times opinion writer DJ Waldie was swayed by sustained activism, writing, “As we begin to encounter the river as a place, not an abstraction, we encounter each other. The riverbank is not the perfect place for this meeting, but it’s the only place we have that extends the length of metropolitan Los Angeles and along nearly all the borders of our social divides. Think of the river we’re making as the anti-freeway—not dispersing L.A. but pulling it together” (Gottlieb 2000, 32-3). His stance demonstrates how revitalization’s many benefits created a coalition broader than that of which environmental concerns alone were capable. The effort’s widespread support is largely a result of the revitalization movement’s success at “linking community and environmental objectives” (Gottlieb 2000, 31).

There is an aspect of the project which is, however, potentially problematic from the perspective of impoverished communities along the river south of Los Angeles. The tension which exists between maintaining flood control and beautifying the river is a danger, particularly due to the lesser weight afforded, in many circumstances, to economically disadvantaged voices in the city’s political sphere. Early activism was especially plagued by this dilemma, such as the resistance to the Army Corps of Engineers’ plan to erect additional concrete barriers, enhancing flood protection. Without those barriers, the river had been reevaluated as an increasingly insufficient channel to carry the region’s peak stormwater potential. The danger had arisen as increasing development further reduced natural absorption possibilities. As a result, residents within the new flood risk zone were both endangered and required to purchase federal flood insurance.

The best option for watershed management would rely on reduction in paved land area across the region and decentralized opportunities for the absorption of rainwater. However, in fighting the short-term solution offered by the Army Corps of Engineers, river activists also pit themselves against community interests. Ultimately, the heightened walls were completed in 1997, and “even Lewis MacAdams acknowledged that the walls were not so bad” (Gumprecht 283). It is important to remember, however, that without the equal representation of all interests in the grassroots arena, only a bureaucratic institution was able to forestall a potentially unjust situation. Hopefully, the expansion of the coalition for revitalization has since rendered such conflicts less likely. The master plan approved by the city involves thorough calculation of water flow and flood protection in order to determine where and to what extent improvements can be safely made. In the long term, comprehensive watershed management is a primary goal of non-profits such as The River Project (Winter). That group released the Tujunga Watershed Management Plan to provide a more holistic approach. Ultimately, the account underscores the importance of the inclusion of all interests and voices in the planning process, though flood protection has fortunately remained a central aim of revitalization.

The results of revitalization will offer a further benefit to the potential for disclosive freedom among Angelenos. At highway speeds, one barely takes note of the surrounding urban landscape; the role of the world outside of the private sphere diminishes, assuming a role no greater than signing the correct exit. But a revitalized river offers an alternative interaction with the urban environment. Through immersion in their physical surroundings, rather than a mere passing-through, pedestrians experience “Being-in-the-world” to a larger extent. When the physical environment at hand is natural, there is a possibility for the experience of the world as something more than a standing-reserve.

In an important way, the ecological sensitivity of the project represents an attitude of caretaking rather than mastery toward the world. If all of Heidegger’s language could be understand as pertaining ontically, it would be quite simple to explain his fundamental relation to ecological theory, by pointing to his “critique of anthropocentric humanism, his call for humanity to learn to ‘let things be,’ his notion that humanity is involved in a ‘play’ or ‘dance’ with earth, sky, and gods, his meditation of the possibility of an authentic mode of ‘dwelling’ on the earth, his complain that industrial technology is laying waste to the earth, his emphasis on the importance of local place and ‘homeland,’ his claim that humanity should guard and preserve things, instead of dominating them… Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein as care, and Heidegger’s definition of human being as the ‘shepherd of Being.’ However, one must be wary of straightforward translations of Heideggerian philosophy into ecological theory” (Thiele 183). There is a significant difference between Being and beings, and the former is that of which human being is the shepherd. Care is not limited to any particular ontic state; it “refers to the totality of human Being-in-the-world” (Thiele 184).

And yet a questioning relation to Being does give rise to an understanding of our fundamental worldiness. With that awareness, we can see how the greek root oikos discloses itself as giving birth no longer simply to economy, but to a second word, ecology. According to David Orr, ecology is, in a sense, more fundamental than economics. For concern with the distribution of resources necessarily relies on an understanding of their origins and upkeep. Meanwhile, economists, in calculating figures such as GDP, often add the value of goods produced without subtracting the diminished worldly capital of resources extracted, artificially inflating estimates of economic prosperity (Orr, 164). But ontologically speaking, as well, ecological concern represents a more worldly Dasein. If economics studies the aggregation of individual interests, perhaps ecology will come to represent the aggregation of individual cares.

In an article entitled, “Remaking Environmentalism on the Banks of the L.A. River,” Jenny Price posited the revitalization movement as an icon of “fourth-wave environmentalism.” After the critiques leveled at the duality between man and nature espoused by prior incarnations, fourth-wave environmentalism attempts to reconcile the interests of the two. Environmentalism that privileged nature at the expense of man grew out of resistance to a society that failed to reflect human concerns. But fourth-wave environmentalism offers the reconciliation of formerly antipodal perspectives, recognizing the importance of environmental integrity to humans as well as the importance of human Being to the very meaning of wilderness. Jenny Price wrote that “An environmentalism inspired by this river’s revitalization appreciates, and understands the tremendous ecological significance of, wilderness, but it does not embrace wilderness as a way to ignore or escape, rather than to grapple with, the use of nature to sustain our lives.” Along with the inversion of active freedom from negative resistance to positive advocacy, the extension of the environmental-justice movement into an “environmental-justice urban-parks movement” represented the growth of fourth-wave environmentalism, calling for “the renewal of urban and community life through access to parks and green space” (Gottlieb 2007, 49). But beyond urban parks, fourth-wave environmentalism is concerned with creating a sustainable and equitable society, that can exist in harmony internally and with nature.

The notion that the Los Angeles River revitalization movement represents a fourth wave of environmentalism is supported by the detractors it has found in both traditional environmentalists and developers. According to a blog entry by UCLA scholar, Stephanie Pincetl, “It is also not a restored nature, it is an invented nature.” She derided the provision of housing for coming in conflict with natural flora and fauna, as well as the “unnaturally mesic [moist] conditions” that will result from a year-round water supply for the river. Her critique demonstrates that the project does not focus on wilderness alone. Rather, the potential for natural habitat is balanced with human needs.

She further criticizes revitalization as nothing more than a “redevelopment project,” but the validity of that statement is incompatible with the historical impact of revitalization activists. The LA River Center and Gardens was created in place of a planned development for the site, which included a Home Depot. The creation of both the Cornfields and Taylor Yards State Parks required hard-fought battles with entrenched interests. The owner of the Cornfields site in Chinatown, “Majestic was considered among the most connected and politically powerful developers in the region,” with the support of Mayor Riordan (Gottlieb 2007, 159). River activists and Chinatown residents were able to successfully fight their behind-the-scenes efforts. Creation of Taylor Yards required the “mobilization of Latino soccer clubs and community residents, who emphasized the lack of public space and parks available for recreation in the surrounding neighborhoods” (Gottlieb 2007, 161). In general, it is hopeless for any policy to achieve unanimous support. The fact that revitalization has been able to appeal to so many residents, while experiencing resistance from the extremes on both sides, demonstrates that it transcends the traditional divisions which have paralyzed previous progressive efforts.

For his theoretical justification of revitalization’s importance, Robert Gottlieb advocated a “right to the river.” However, that is a right that cannot be understood in the traditional sense of either negative or positive freedom. The former fails to comprehend the river as a community resource, requiring collective action to be revitalized to a desirable condition. The latter offers its own complications. First of all, society has limited resources, and thus not all potential ameliorations of living conditions can be classified as a right. Secondly, if all citizens are to be guaranteed a right to river access, there is an implication that some external guardian is to be entrusted with its provision. That perspective is more nearly matched in a top-down approach, where citizens become passive recipients.

However, the bottom-up approach that has characterized river revitalization is one of the movement’s greatest virtues. In this way, the project is able to respond more directly and individually to the needs of each impacted community. It is less likely to resemble the sort of totalizing project represented by the river’s channelization. A broader discourse ensues about options, trade-offs, and potential pitfalls. Further, the process of revitalization, itself, allows for the building of coalitions and the overcoming of barriers. Residents are able to play an active role in shaping their own destiny, in “destining.” According to Heidegger, “man becomes truly free only insofar as he belongs to the realm of destining and so becomes one who listens and hears, and not one who is simply constrained to obey” (Question Concerning Technology, 25).

The project’s ability to attract such widespread support stems from its fundamental relatedness, on several levels, to the desires of a diverse cross-section of Los Angeles residents. Those desires are deeply rooted within the human condition, characterized by Being-in-the-world and Being-with-others. But it cannot be forgotten that the revitalization movement has been able to achieve prominence in a specific historical moment. Institutionalized racial hierarchies have been increasingly challenged. Active resistance has given way to constructive activism. And an awareness of humanity’s environmental impact has been reconciled with the impact of the environment on human welfare. We can see, then, that the revitalization movement finds its motivation, not in positive or negative freedom, or even in the postmodern articulation of freedom as active resistance. Rather, the project’s style and aims are best explained by disclosive freedom.

Conclusion

The rise of fourth-wave environmentalism parallels the evolving societal philosophic consciousness. It dovetails with an increasing openness to the other and an expanded sense of self. At its best, it represents the “political sensibility we may derive from Heidegger’s philosophy,” which, according to Thiele, “might be formulated as follows: Let not a resentment at our thrown Being-in-the-world-with-others become the impetus for the pursuit of possessive mastery. Strive for a home in difference and bear witness to its freedom” (Thiele, 168).

Were the river revitalization solely an effort at extracting more human uses out of an already enframed flood control channel, it could be argued that the project is equally characterized by mastery. But the ecological sensitivity of the project offers an alternative conception. Perhaps, by recognizing the limitations to human hubris, in the form of a planet which seems not to guarantee a home for our species much longer, we can instead maintain a resolute openness. An openness to otherness and oneself, conflated by the realization that otherness is fundamental to Being-in-the-world.

Of course, if the revitalization movement indeed reveals such a direction for society, it in no way foretells an easy, inevitable, or uninterrupted amelioration of human conditions on the planet. There are still quite clearly many forces acting in opposition to disclosive freedom’s ascendancy, and many as yet undisclosed obstacles to be encountered on the way. But if the pursuit of mastery can be identified as the problem, and an open, questioning relation to Being the solution, then the path forward is already becoming illuminated.

 

Works Cited

“Age of Pericles.” Wikipedia. 10 Apr. 2009 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Pericles>.

Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Penguin Classics, 1991.

Arendt, Hannah. “What is Freedom?” The Portable Hannah Arendt. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003. 438-561.

Brochure. Los Angeles River Revitalization. City of Los Angeles. 24 Feb. 2009 <http://www.lariver.org/5.2_brochure_link.htm>.

Ceaser, James W. Reconstructing America The Symbol of America in Modern Thought. New York: Yale UP, 2000.

Davis, Mike. “How Eden Lost Its Garden.” The City Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century. New York: University of California P, 1998.

Dear, Michael, and Steven Flusty. “Postmodern Urbanism.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88 (1998): 50-72.

Deverell, William. Whitewashed Adobe The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past. New York: University of California P, 2005.

Fogelson, Robert M. Fragmented metropolis Los Angeles, 1850-1930. Berkeley: University of California P, 1993.

Gottlieb, Robert. Re-Envisioning The Los Angeles River: A Program of Community and Ecological Revitalization. Rep. Los Angeles: Occidental College, 2001.

Gottlieb, Robert, Regina Freer, Mark Vallianatos, and Peter Dreier. Next Los Angeles the struggle for a liveable city : updated with a new preface. Berkeley: University of California P, 2006.

Gottlieb, Robert. Reinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City. Cambridge: The MIT P, 2007.

Gumprecht, Blake. The Los Angeles River Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth (Creating the North American Landscape). New York: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: SUNY P, 1996.

Heidegger, Martin. “Messkirch’s Seventh Centennial.” Listening 8 (1973).

Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper, 1977.

Los Angeles. Ad Hoc Committee on the Los Angeles River. Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan. 2007.

Marks, Mara, Steven Gearin, and Carol Armstrong. “The Experimental Metropolis: Political Impediments and Opportunities for Innovation.” Up Against the Sprawl: Public Policy and the Making of Southern California. New York: University of Minnesota P, 2004. 343-71.

Mike, Davis. City Of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

Orr, David W. Earth in mind: on education, environment, and the human prospect. Washington, DC: Island P, 2004.

Pincetl, Stephanie. “The Los Angeles River: Restoration, (Re)Invention? The Politics of Nature in L.A.” Weblog post. The Urban Center for People and the Environment. 21 Jan. 2009. 20 Feb. 2009 <http://www.ioe.ucla.edu/ucpe/blog/article.asp?parentid=2150>.

Pincetl, Stephanie. “The Preservation of Nature at the Urban Fringe.” Up Against the Sprawl: Public Policy and the Making of Southern California. New York: University of Minnesota P, 2004.

Price, Jenny, Remaking American Environmentalism: On the Banks of the L.A. River. Environmental History 13.3 (2008): 59 pars. 14 Oct. 2008 <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/eh/13.3/price.html>.

 

Sides, Josh. L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (George Gund Foundation Imprint in African American Studies). New York: University of California P, 2006.

Sonenshein, Raphael J. The City at Stake: Secession, Reform, and the Battle for Los Angeles. New York: Princeton UP, 2006.

Thiele, Leslie Paul. Timely Meditations. New York: Princeton UP, 2007.

Winter, Melanie. Telephone interview. 12 Nov. 2008.

Wolch, Jennifer, Manuel Pastor Jr., and Peter Dreier. Up Against the Sprawl: Public Policy and the Making of Southern California. New York: University of Minnesota P, 2004.

Young, Iris Marion, The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference, Social Theory and Practice, 12:1 (1986: Spring) p.1

Zimmerman, Michael E. Contesting Earth’s Future Radical Ecology and Postmodernity. New York: University of California P, 1997.

 

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[1] This interestingly parallels the recent “resurgence of interest in virtue ethics,” as characterized by Russ Shafer-Landau in Ethical Theory: An Anthology. Blackwell, 2007.  P. 663, which is often dated to Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN, 1981).  Virtue ethics concerns itself with the foundation of ethics upon similar ground to that of Heidegger’s approach.

[2] Re-envisioning the Los Angeles River: A Program of Community and Ecological Revitalization was a series of 40 forums, events, activities, and projects put on by the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College from 1999-2000.

[3] Searching http://news.google.com for “‘Los Angeles River’ Revitalization” returned 374 results, from 1985 to the present, the vast majority of which focus on revitalization efforts.  03/22/09

[4] <http://lacreekfreak.wordpress.com/> and  <http://naturetrumps.wordpress.com/>, for example.

[5] Proposition A in 1992, Proposition K in 1996, Propositions 12 and 13 in 2000,  Propositions 40 and 50 in 2002, and Proposition O in 2004 among them.

 

On eruption

It’s been a little while since I last posted; in the meantime, I’ve taken a trip to London, Turkey, and Greece, hiked within 5 feet of a lava river, bathed in natural hot springs at the top of a mountain, interviewed local experts in urban development, and experienced Reykjavik’s well-developed culture, from choir performances to poetry readings.

First things first, I’m not dying of volcanic ash inhalation. In fact, there is no volcanic ash to be found anywhere in the Reykjavik area. Iceland’s giant volcanic eruption conveniently spewed its toxic gases in the opposite direction, toward England and continental Europe. Keflavik is one of the few European airports that was able to stay open throughout the eruption thus far. In fact, while Eyjafjallajokull’s eruption is ostensibly the result of natural forces below the Earth’s surface, out of human control, Icelanders, in general, couldn’t be more pleased about the havoc their island was able to wreak on Europe’s economy. It’s not the first time they’ve done so in the past couple years.

Recently, Icelanders have been up in arms about their government’s proposal to pay back British and Dutch depositors who lost money in the collapse of Iceland’s banking system. At the behest of grassroots opposition, the President vetoed the legislation, leading to a referendum in which citizens overwhelmingly rejected the terms of repayment that had been negotiated. In the midst of anger over debts accrued and international pressure seen as unfair, the volcano’s impacts perfectly embodied the Icelandic consciousness in international relations.

England asked for cash, but, as there is no “C” in the Icelandic language, what they got instead was ash, or so the joke has been formulated here.

Apparently, the Icelandic economy requested, in its will, for its ashes to be spread across Europe.

In the end, Iceland’s politics are struggling to find a forward-looking approach to building a foundation for continued prosperity. The socialist Government voted into office after the crash has served as a scapegoat for its efforts to pick up the pieces, currently a focus of public anger just as much as, if not more than, the bankers and conservative Government that created the conditions that led to collapse in the first place. This is despite the fact that a recent independent investigation into the crisis described political and business leaders as grossly negligent in their inadequate regulatory approaches and irresponsible investment strategies.

Just as a volcanic eruption devastated Iceland’s self-sufficiency a century ago, contributing to a wave of emigration, the current volcano punctuates a period of high and growing emigration rates and desires to simply leave the troubled nation behind.

Despite widespread feelings of hopelessness, there is undeniable silver lining in the prospects for Icelandic recovery. Any country with abundant renewable energy and other resources, a highly-educated population, and a growing tourism sector cannot be said to be a lost cause, and it probably won’t be too long until Icelandic optimism shines through.

That being said, crisis has the potential to lead to drastic and sometimes little considered approaches to institutions and political response. I’ve heard Icelanders call for the reinstatement of David Oddson (the former prime minister who undertook much of the financial deregulation measures which led to collapse) to see the country through crisis.

The anarchist movement has also grown significantly here, adding a newspaper and many young citizens to its ranks. While hosting a “world cafe” event on biodiversity, I had the pleasure of speaking with a couple anarchists who joined our discussion. The subject definitely strayed from the intended topic to some degree, though I found the results edifying. As jointly articulated in my presence, the Icelandic anarchist movement advocates the elimination of hierarchy and institutionalized inequality, to paraphrase, in contrast to my understanding of anarchism as the elimination of government. As I tried to elicit a constructive articulation of the anarchist vision, my own ideas may have interceded, but a more democratic process was envisioned.

However, the focus is more negative, for example in one member’s self-declared lack of hope for society. It was seen as necessary to throw a wrench in modern, industrial society, whereas I posited that it may be more effective to begin to construct the foundation for an improved society in its place.

While the US tea party movement seems more concerned with bringing a halt to Government proceedings than unjust societal processes and institutions, they share a common desire to resist. They also feel alienated by the path of society, and may also be fearful of economic and political changes.

But tea partiers may be less sophisticated in their understandings than Icelandic anarchists, and therefore more difficult to collaborate with. From the New York Times:

But in follow-up interviews, Tea Party supporters said they did not want to cut Medicare or Social Security — the biggest domestic programs, suggesting instead a focus on “waste.”

Some defended being on Social Security while fighting big government by saying that since they had paid into the system, they deserved the benefits.

Others could not explain the contradiction.

“That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” asked Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif. “I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.” She added, “I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.”

Nevertheless, fear of change mixed with anger is nothing to laugh about. Bill Clinton said it best in comparing the current movement with the one that the Oklahoma City Bombing grew out of:

Fifteen years ago, the line was crossed in Oklahoma City. In the current climate, with so many threats against the president, members of Congress and other public servants, we owe it to the victims of Oklahoma City, and those who survived and responded so bravely, not to cross it again.

Haven’t we had enough eruptions?

NOT Eyjafjallajokull; the smaller one pictured here erupted a couple weeks before.

Much closer than prudence would dictate... especially considering the volcanic ash raining down from above.

A view of the infamous Eyjafjallajokull (pronounced aye-yah-fyah-tla-yo-kutl... if that helps) from Selfoss, forty minutes outside Reykjavik.

Burdened Generation

I wrote an editorial to a couple newspapers after receiving an e-mail prompt from some progressive organization imploring me to address health care. I thought I would share it here with my readers, as well:

Let’s be clear about something. Americans have been living beyond their means, consuming to the exclusion of investment in the future. It can be seen in our decaying infrastructure, continuing oil dependence, and a health care system that compares unfavorably with the rest of the developed world.

As a young American, I won’t be afraid to stand up and speak my mind. The war in Iraq, continued tax cuts, and the financial crisis left our country saddled with debt. Debt that my generation will be left to pay.

But cutting social services is not a smart or responsible way to reduce the deficit, not if we want to look beyond the next year and care about continued prosperity. Guess who loses big if health care reform stalls? The youth in America, who have a hard time finding steady insurance through employers.

You may resent hearing it, but the responsible thing to do is to raise taxes – and at the very least don’t obstruct progress! Investments in education, health care, infrastructure, renewable energy will pay off. They’ll also ensure my generation of Americans enjoy free and prosperous lives.

Ring Road on a Whim

There I was, the last bus stop out of town, armed with a towel and the naive determination to make it to the other side of a subarctic island in January. No idea what to expect, Sarah (new to Iceland, fresh out of Arkansas) and I had arranged a couple couchsurfing hosts a few days before and decided to give hitch-hiking a try.

Word to the wise: Thumbs much more effective than a towel

It rained and poured...

But we pressed on!

On the drive, we rode with urban vacationers, a horse rancher, and a few others before a couple on their way to Höbn for a funeral drove us the rest of the way. We passed several glaciers, including Vatnajokull, Europe’s largest. Unfortunately, we missed some breathtaking landscape due to nightfall.

Finally, we made it to Höfn, a town in the Southeast and our first destination– in the sign above, you’ll notice that in certain cases the town is spelled as Hafnar: this is called a declension, but I think it’s sheer insanity. We had arranged to stay with a teacher named Björg, but here phone was turned off when we arrived. We grabbed dinner at a place recommended by the gas station attendant:

Tried Björg again; no response. In a town of 1500, she can’t be that hard to find, right? We checked out a phone book, but Höfn has 4 Björgs. Back to the gas station, where the attendant said she was a student of our host, whose first name, it turns out, isn’t even officially Björg after all. She told us roughly where she lived, so we snooped around an apartment block for a while to no avail. We decided to go to a campsite, but, first, one more call. And she answered! (This pattern was typical of our trip. After a lot of hardship, something would finally go right, but we looked on the bright side and chalked the whole thing up to luck.)

She gave us directions to her place (nowhere near where we’d been snooping) and we enjoyed conversation over a glass of wine with Björg and her nine-year old son. She was pretty lonely, having just moved out to the town from Reykjavik to teach. She sort of forced us to stay for coffee and tea before we could get on the road the next day, after taking us to the municipal pool (very popular throughout Iceland).

On the road again, our next stop was a town in the Eastfjords called Stöðvarfjörður. We hitched a ride with a fishing boat owner (pretty much the pinnacle of Iceland’s socioeconomic hierarchy, now that the financial titans have fallen) who gave us a ride the whole way. Our host in Stöðvarfjörður had told us we could stay at his place even though he would be in Reykjavik that weekend. As we arrived, he told us on the phone that his house would be easy to find: just look for house with a limo, boat, and 4wheeler in front.

Here we are!

In retrospect, things were already a bit fishy at this point, even before we a dog inside barked intensely for fifteen minutes straight.

Scary guard dog

Messiest house I've ever seen

Our host’s friends stopped by after a bit, before heading out to a bar a few towns over for the night. We watched a movie and went to bed, only to be woken at 4 AM by those guys, seriously intoxicated, and not very pleasant. Finally got them to leave us alone by promising to drink with them the next day– but instead got out in a hurry the next morning.

Click for full glory!

After exploring the town and getting a private exhibition showing by a gallery owner we met, we hiked up to a waterfall he recommended.

Putting my time at the climbing gym to use

Now, after getting halfway around the island, we thought to ourselves, “Why turn back, as originally planned?” Instead, we pressed onward, lining up a few more couchsurfing hosts and hitting the road. What had begun as a weekend on a whim had shifted to a worthy week.

Killing time before the next ride

Next we stayed in Egilsstaðir with Bjork (regional development director, not famous popstar). We watched Madagascar with her littlest one and played video games with a middle schooler. She also cooked us a delicious Icelandic dinner and served us cereal the next morning. What a way to travel!

Our next host was in Akureyri, Iceland’s second biggest town, but we had a hankering for the Northern Lights, and heard Lake Myvatn (halfway between Egilsstaðir and Akureyri) would likely provide.

The road to Myvatn was long– not in miles but in scarcity of cars. A couple of middle-of-nowhere stops ended not a moment too soon.

Shacks break the wind

We somehow missed seeing any Reindeer as we traveled through their Icelandic territory, but all that was forgotten when we arrived at the natural hot springs outside Myvatn, where our driver was kind enough to drop us off. With a sizeable facility to ourselves, we killed the rest of the evening there. On to the small town nearby, where we were the only guests at the only open hostel in town. We didn’t see the Northern Lights that night, but had plenty of adventures the next day to make Myvatn a worthwhile stop.

All the typical tourist activities were closed for January, so we had to make our own adventure.

We saw a rowboat by the side of the lake...

... and borrowed it for a while.

Stumbed upon a hole in the ground which revealed an expansive cave.

Akureyri, our next destination, surprisingly proved the hardest to get to. We accidentally took the wrong road around the lake and walked for miles (some of us even getting a little grumpy) before getting a ride back to where we started. Luckily, we quickly caught a semi-truck from there and avoided the dreaded small tent/thin sleeping bags combo.

Our hosts in Akureyri consisted of a couple, Elissa from Iceland and Ryan from Virginia. We had a nice evening exchanging photos. The next day, we explored Akureyri (including its heart-shaped stoplights) before heading back with Ryan to Reykjavik in the evening (about a 5-hour drive.) Along the way, we stopped to watch some brilliant green bands in the sky. Our luck had not run out!

By then, we were ready for home. All told, we were stayed with 4 hosts and got 20 different rides while hitchhiking. I felt that I encountered a broad cross-section of Icelandic society, from a pickup truck driver decrying Reykjavik’s “bloody leftists” to a semi-truck driver who’d always wanted to be a pilot, instead rarely able to see his wife and son between deliveries.

After this experience, my impressions of Iceland have evolved beyond doe-eyed idealism and disappointed cynicism, in a way that only personal encounters can accomplish.

I also found a statue of the Greek Goddess from which my Alma Mater takes its name.

Pomona and Me

Fortuitous Encounters

Last December, I traveled with to Oslo, Norway and Copenhagen, Denmark with two friends I met in Iceland, Jenna and Jillz, from New Jersey and New Zealand respectively.

My first experience in Oslo was an $8 orange juice at the airport, before I learned the exchange rate. Unfortunately, the price was merely a sign of things to come. We spent our next few days trying to get by without breaking the bank. Free accommodations, through Couchsurfing, certainly helped. We stayed with two Norwegians, Rosy and Eirik, who had squatted (lived in without owning) a house. True to Scandinavian welfare state form, the city gave them low rent and sent an electrician to do some basic wiring and a carpenter to help train them in refurbishing the dilapidated place. It was called an “urban ecology” project, and our hosts held down their end through a productive organic garden, fastidious attention to reuse, and had even planned an upcoming trip to Peru to learn clay wall construction techniques.

The girls sleeping in

We thought the idea was cool, but so was our living arrangement in the absence of heating. No matter, Rosy was nice enough to provide blankets and even a sleeping bag for my unprepared self.

The location was beautiful, at the beginning of the islands that extent out from Oslo’s fjord-side locale.

We were met at the train station by Maarten, another Couchsurfer, from Austria, who had moved in to the house—it was quite large, housing multiple families on separate floors. Maarten took us, for our first meal, to a youth hotspot in the city. It was exactly what you’d envision an anarchist place to be, somewhat dirty with graffiti and strange food options. I opted for an open-faced sandwich of hummus and a slide of bell pepper. But it was cheap, so we were happy.

Something about the uniform society in Norway seems to promote radicalism among youth. For example, Norway’s biggest musical exports fall into the genre labeled Death Punk. Our guide told us he had come to Oslo because of the band, TurboNegro, who apparently pay an ironic (?) homage to the Hitler Youth through their extensive fanclub network. He was shocked that we hadn’t heard of the group.

Luckily for our wallets, there were plenty of free activities to occupy us as we wandered around the city. We stopped in to several free museums, and enjoyed some ice skating at a rink in the central square.

No skates? No Problem!

We explored an astoundingly large sculpture garden created by one man over the course of his lifetime. We also checked out Oslo’s iconic opera house, designed so as to allow pedestrian access up large ramps on the building’s sides and up to the roof. Cool from an architectural perspective, the building was nevertheless poorly integrated to the rest of the urban fabric.

Fortuitously, we realized after our arrival in Oslo that we had booked our trip to coincide with Obama’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize. From our hosts, we heard that the traditional balcony appearance of the award’s recipient would be heavily protested. We stumbled on the police staging grounds for the event as we were climbing a fortress earlier in the day.

The top offered an impressive view of Oslo’s waterfront.

Returning to the city, we stood in a crowd of Norwegians awaiting Obama’s appearance. It was a comforting experience, as an American nervous about the status of our reputation abroad, to hear chants of “Yes, we can” break out among the crowd as he and Michelle waved charismatically for a few minutes.

Apparently, they didn’t get the memo that the Republicans’ resolute determination not to allow any progress is actually Obama’s fault, and that he’s thus been a complete failure.

Then we checked out the protests, mostly about the network of U.S. military bases abroad, which were pretty large though just a taste of what was to come in Copenhagen. Our host, Rosy, had been planning to make smoke bombs for the protest, but couldn’t find a babysitter for her two year old daughter.

We got to Copenhagen on a high-speed train through Sweden, taking us right into the heart of the city. From there, we planned to meet up with Ryan and Kian who we knew through Kadri, an Estonian friend from Iceland who had previously lived in Copenhagen for a year. Before Ryan got off work, we popped into a local bar near his place full of smoke, cheap beer (which was a pleasant change from Oslo), and old men. One of them took a liking to us, bought us a round, and repeatedly told us not to ruin his city, where he actually had to live after the climate protests were over.

In addition to accidentally seeing Obama in Oslo, we had unintentionally arrived in Copenhagen for a much-anticipated UN Climate Conference, tasked with negotiating a treaty to limit Carbon Dioxide emissions.

I fell in love with Copenhagen’s livable density and use of bicycles as a legitimate form of transportation—55% in central Copenhagen and 37% in Greater Copenhagen bike daily. The subway system was clean and efficient, and the city’s streetscape and public realm were dynamic .

Combined with all the energy about solutions to climate change, in the form of museum exhibits, public art, and peaceful demonstrations, I was just about in my personal paradise. Not to mention that pretty much every Danish girl could be a supermodel.

Sarina, Kian’s sister, showed us around town with a friend the next day, taking us first to Christiania. Christiania is a sort of breakaway neighborhood, taken over by students in 1971. It’s not really subject to the same laws or taxes as the rest of Copenhagen. It’s known especially for the availability of marijuana and political autonomy. A sign on the way out reads “You are now entering the EU.” Very controversial within Denmark, authorities have been threatening more and more to reclaim the area. Our guides explained that efforts by the city to clamp down on the cannabis trade simply spread the activity throughout the city. Other Danes argued that Christiania is no longer the hippie commune it once was, now largely controlled by mob-types. I think the situation illustrates the Scandinavian propensity for homogeneity and strong norms to breed radicalism, similar to the anarchist death-punks in Norway. Sarina and her friend had moved from Jutland in the West of Denmark partially to escape rigid expectations that made long hair on guys, for instance, pretty unacceptable. I see this phenomenon as partially responsible for Denmark’s increasing tensions with its Muslim community, as well as the ongoing decay of the welfare state, which nevertheless still provides too much security and prosperity to compare to anything existing or proposed in the U.S.

The strong state model can be illustrated in part by the response to climate protests while we were there. Before the conference began, the legislature granted the police the power to arrest demonstrators without probable cause as well as to hold them in cages for 72 hours without charge. On our first day in Denmark, 900 peaceful protestors were arrested.

We cautiously approached the Bella Center, where the summit was being held, to check out the action there, although we seemed to have (perhaps luckily) missed any specific demonstration. Amidst shouts of “Shame on the UN,” I snuck in a quick exhortation: “No More Raisins!”

We also witnessed a peaceful march through the streets of the island surrounding Christiania.

And then we witnessed the police reprisal that night. My last night in town, we were wandering when we heard that there was something going on in that renegade community. We hopped on the subway and climbed to street level only to find all the streets into the town blocked off. We tried to pretend that we lived in the apartment buildings beyond the barricade, but they were under strict orders not to let anyone in.

The officer we spoke with speculated that the sound of teargas firings and the helicopters overhead signaled a raid. We proceeded to walk along laterally, looking for some opening to get a better pulse on the action, which we found in the form of a back alley a few streets down. We timidly advanced, stopping to chat with two journalists, armed with badges, fleeing the scene. They told us to turn back, that a French colleague who had approached with badge in hand, announcing his credentials, was taken down and beaten by police. Well, naturally, we decided to press on. We came to an intersection where two plain clothed guards were warning off a much larger crowd. It was sure to be an interesting confrontation, but a column of riot police running toward us from behind prompted me to run like hell with hands in the air. Luckily, they let us pass.

I followed some of the developments on twitter, and it sounds like it was a bad night to be a resident of Christiania. Ostensibly, the police were trying to preempt the area’s function as a staging ground for other protests, and, presumably, demonstrating their force in an effort to ward off other protests.

The visit ended on a magical note, however, at Tivoli, an amusement park in the center of town—in the vein of Disneyland, but more tasteful. A lovely end to my trip.

Of Feasts and Feats

I’ll have to cover a fair amount of ground in this post, as it’s been a couple months since the last. I’ll start by mentioning a very successful Thanksgiving celebration in Iceland.

With some fellow Americans at the dorm, we organized a full-fledged Thanksgiving meal and invited friends who had, tragically, never experienced the wonderful tradition. Guests’ were in attendance from a multitude of countries, including Iceland, China, New Zealand, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Germany—to name a few.

We served two turkeys (which cost roughly 70 dollars each for a medium sized bird), pumpkin pie (with some substitution of squash as the local pumpkin supplies were quite limited), mashed potatoes, and many other traditional dishes. My contribution was pumpkin bread, roasted red cabbage, strawberry pie, and gravy.

All in all, the meal was a success. I only hope that American Thanksgiving can come to colonize the world just as American Halloween already apparently has.

Nearing the end of fall semester, I managed to squeeze in a weekend trip to Heimaey, an island off Iceland’s southern coast, with a population of around 3,000 and a self-sufficient economy based on abundant fish resources.  The town boasts Keiko the whale, who you may remember as the protagonist of Free Willy, as one of its own. Having barely escaped disaster in a 1968 volcanic eruption, the island’s residents live in one of the world’s most active volcanic zones. The town makes up for its dangerous location with the striking beauty of its landscape.

For an island which takes little over an hour to entirely cover by foot, there are several volcanoes and a surprising diversity of terrain. The natural beauty is a bit marred by the presence of an airport, which occupies about half the island, and an inexplicable number of roads. I suppose they’ve been built to serve the island’s residents, who all seem to prefer to drive everywhere rather than walk the eight minutes from one end of town to the other. In any case, the award for coolest aspect of the island goes to the ground at the top of Eldfell (which translates as “fire mountain”), which, merely one meter deep, can light paper on fire. One of my travel companions, Tor, brilliantly confirmed the fact with his return ticket for the ferry.

That was the last trip I was able to take before finals set in. Nothing too distressing there… I’ve found the academic rigor at the University of Iceland to be rather relaxed. Whether that’s related to my only taking classes taught in English, I cannot say. In any case, I’ll share a few pictures of the design proposal I created for the class, Town and Country Planning. The final project for that course overlapped with the project I had proposed for my Fulbright Scholarship. My group proposed the revitalization of an underutilized coastal-adjacent industrial area at the center of Reykjavik Capital Region. We attempted an “Urban Integration of Nature and Community,” interweaving ecologically-sensitive development with natural preservation in order to reframe the Reykjavik Metropolitan Area as a transit-oriented, walkable community. I took it upon myself to envision a 3D rendering of a public square that would characterize the new development’s core.

We presented the projects to a panel including a former Mayor of Reykjavik and the Vice Chair of Iceland’s Social Democratic Alliance, currently in power. Our proposal won first prize.

Coming next: my travels through Scandinavia where I saw Obama in Oslo and the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen. Also, New Years Eve in Reykjavik!

Goodbye McDonald’s, preconceptions

All the McDonald’s are gone. Hooray! If you’d told me a few months ago that McDonald’s would come to exist in Iceland no longer, I would’ve guessed that this enlightened, healthy democracy had decided to evict the much-berated establishment.

In fact, McDonald’s chose to leave, after the economic crash, rather than charging the highest prices of any McDonald’s in the world (that honour now belongs to Norway). With the diminished purchasing power of the Icelandic Kronur, and Icelanders in general, it simply didn’t make economic sense for the chain to operate here. Not that any Icelanders I’ve spoken with are too broken up about it. Perhaps their cheery reaction is a thinly veiled attempt to hide their resulting feelings of inferiority. After all, can you really call yourself a developed nation without a single McDonald’s restaurant?

But I prefer to think of the turn of events as following a familiar pattern, which characterizes much of Iceland’s contemporary situation: their unique position often facilitates accidental achievements, which are all too eagerly touted as a result of the nation’s strength of character (and sometimes even the pure Icelandic heritage).

Some examples:

As much as Icelanders like to gloat about their ecological harmony (and I’ll admit I was initially taken in), the fact is that they tend not to care much about the environment. Icelanders drive big cars–maybe not as big as in the US, but that’s a pretty tough standard to beat–and Reykjavik’s public buses are mostly scoffed at by locals. Reykjavik itself is sprawly, with only 200,000 residents occupying an area roughly the size of Paris. That being said, the nation has one of the smallest carbon footprints per capita of any developed nation, thanks mostly to their abundant geothermal energy. Even then, much of it (along with the island’s abundant hydro power capacity) is tapped for massive aluminum production. I went to the city, Stykkisholmur, which apparently has the best recycling program (according to the City of Reykjavik) in Iceland–Reykjavik’s program is pretty poor.

In a city of 1000, this is what I found. Not too shabby. The town itself is pretty beautiful:

Except, of course, for the large trash dump we happened upon just outside of the city, literally spilling over a cliff face and into the sea below.

In terms of the strength of Iceland’s democratic institutions, it could be related to the fact that just about every Icelander at the very least knows someone in common with some important government official. Not that it’s always a good thing: the close-knit relationship between the government and certain business interests certainly played a role in the country’s economic woes. A documentary, Decoding Iceland, even dug up a primary school picture of the former Prime Minister acting in a play about corruption and greed with the CEO of Decode Genetics, which was given an exclusive government contract to the genetics of Iceland’s citizens.

And it will certainly be interesting to see how the relationship evolves between Icelanders and the foreign laborers they recruited when times were good. Many Icelanders seem concerned, to say the least, about the impact of immigration on Icelandic culture and society.

Not to mention the country’s economic “success.” The banking industry, what little remains, has revealed itself to have been built on shaky ground. Besides that, Iceland’s largest industries are fishing, aluminum production (enabled by cheap power), and tourism.

None of this is to say that Iceland has no reason to be proud of it’s achievements! The nation has a rich history, including the Icelandic Sagas, which are some of the greatest literary feats of the era (roughly the 1100′s) and still quite enjoyable to read. They can boast the first modern democracy (although we wouldn’t approve of many of its practices). And they produce enormous cultural output to this day, especially for such a small population, from world-renowned musical artists to Nobel Prize winning writers to impressive sculptors (whose works populate every corner of the country):

And the island’s natural beauty is nothing to scoff at. Snaefellsjokull is a glacier only a couple hours from Reykjavik, visible from the city on clear days:

And at least this will never happen in Iceland:

A Visitor in a Strange Land

Yesterday, I visited the Blue Lagoon, perhaps Iceland’s most famous tourist attraction and certainly the most frequented. They ingeniously coordinate flight schedules and a tourist bus to encourage people flying through to at least spend a little money in the country–and it’s no bargain to swim in the runoff from a geothermal power plant. But it is pretty beautiful:

I went there to enjoy my last day of Caitlin’s visit (in fact, the photo is hers). She stayed with me for two and a half weeks, and it was convenient to stop by the Blue Lagoon on the way to the airport. It was a sad goodbye as we boarded our separate buses, mine back to Reykjavik, and hers on to Keflavik, and from there, Boston.

The first weekend of her stay, we visited the Westfjords in the Northwest of Iceland. They extrude like a separate island from Iceland’s perimeter, and the landscapes are equally distinct. The towering mountains and deep fjords are otherworldly, a feeling magnified by the shimmering green bands lighting up the northern night sky.

There I am touching the Arctic Ocean. And some more from the trip:

We stayed at a town called Bolungarvik, which is a few kilometers North of Isafjordur, the biggest town in the Westfjords. Isafjordur is described by all the guidebooks as cosmopolitan despite its mere 3400 residents.

Bolungarvik was even more isolated and starkly beautiful. The second day there, the rest of the crew decided to drive around more of the Westfjords, but Caitlin and I decided to hang back and do some hiking with another girl on the trip. Here’s a view from up in a mountain pass:

Caitlin and Kristine are both big plant people, so of course we spent some time examining the flora, including these delicious blueberries. I accidentally ate a different kind of berry, but Kristine assured me it wasn’t poisonous.

And all of us on the trip, minus Caitlin who took the picture:

After that expedition, we spent the rest of the time back here in Reykjavik, where it was all rainbows:

(If you look closely, you can see that there are actually two rainbows in the picture.)

Blessed with good weather for the past couple weeks, we went to the Iceland Airwaves music festival, in which the entire city erupts in a frenzy of live music at every bar, club, and cafe. We went to a handful of free museums and sculpture gardens. Caitlin rented a bike and we took a tour of Reykjavik’s harbour and an observatory, Perlan, on a hill a little ways out that offers the best view of the city. Pretty much everything here is within biking distance, although biking is not a very common form of transportation for Icelanders. I’m guessing it has to do with the forbidding winter I’m about to experience.

We were also treated to an incredibly gourmet dinner by Fulbright at one of the nicest restaurants in town. I made (another) exception to my practice of generally eating vegetarian. I had a reindeer carpaccio appetizer, exquisite goose entree, and a chocolate assortment for desert with a Grand Marnier to top it all off. I met some very interesting co-Fulbright grantees, although not everyone has yet arrived. Hopefully, the inspiration of their ambition will encourage me to validate my receipt of the scholarship.

Now that she’s left, I’m settling back into my routine, which includes class, urban design modeling on Google Sketchup, and far too much Civilization with my friend Christian.

Road Trip

I’ts been a while since I posted last, due mostly to my laziness, but a lot has happened here in the meantime. I’ll offer some of the highlights of my last couple weeks.

First of all, I saw Sigur Ros (a soaring Icelandic band) playing at a Reimer concert, which is a form of traditional Icelandic poetry set to music. I didn’t know quite what to expect. As it turned out, the members of Sigur Ros were on the Glockenspiel, while poetry was recited in a language I didn’t understand. It was still pretty cool, as you can see:

On my way back, I went to a store renting VHS videos! Here’s the proof:

About a week and a half ago, my mom visited. I had a great time showing her around the city and enjoying some upscale, cosmopolitan dining that I could never afford on my own. The film festival that I mentioned earlier was still going on, so we saw a couple movies together. One film, Dogtooth, was a remarkably disturbing (fictional) portrayal of three children raised by their parents utterly isolated from the outside world–I recommend it.

We also spent a few days driving around the country. We made it up to Akureyri (Iceland’s second biggest town), a bit further on to Lake Myvatn and Europe’s most powerful waterfall, Dettifoss, before returning. I’ve included some pictures from the trip below. Along the way, we bathed in a natural hot spring, Grettislaug, saw breathtaking views of snowcapped mountains, hiked through lava formations and pseudo-craters, visited a grouping of turfhouses converted into a museum on historical Icelandic living conditions, conquered a Viking fortress, saw some seals (or sheep?) out on a rocky island outcropping, and paid homage to a troll turned rock formation, caught by the rising sun.

A couple experiences stand out from the rest. First of all,  we encountered some resistance in the form of horse round-ups while attempting to drive down a narrow, dirt road. Let’s just say that horses aren’t the most conscientious road users. It took us a fair while to pass them, and their human herders seemed to sympathize.

On our way to Dettifoss, we accidentally turned off on a road before the one we had intended, upon seeing a sign labeling the way. We didn’t realize at the time that it was a four-wheel drive vehicle only route. Had we known, we might not have proceeded in our tiny, rented Euro-car. Nevertheless, I made pretty quick time, if I may say so myself, even passing an SUV on the return trip (which may have taken even longer than the horses. My theory is that the driver was embarrassed to be passed by a car half the size of his or hers). Of course, once we came to within three kilometers of the waterfall, we finally confronted a puddle that seemed to formidable to risk fording. At that point, we decided to hike the rest of the way, which turned out to be quite an adventure, traversing ridge after ridge of barren Icelandic tundra. The waterfall was, in the end, spectacular and worth the hardship. I included a picture below of the view of our car on the hike back. It’s the tiny gray speck in the distance…

Back in Reykjavik, my mom came out with us on a Friday night to see some live music (there was a music festival going on at the time, which at this point is barely worth commenting on, giving the regularity of such events). She stayed out until about 2 and even shared a tequila shot with us! A very good night and a very good visit. Any of you considering a trip out to Iceland would do well to think about all the fun that awaits.

Welfare and Bureaucracy

So I’m on welfare now. I guess that makes me the scum of the earth?

My rent already came to under $300 US. Now it’ll be closer to $200 thanks to the generosity of the Icelandic Government. That’s in addition to the fact that university tuition is free here. No wonder Iceland has a 100% literacy rate and is one of the most prosperous societies in the world. Let’s not forget that they’re offering me that subsidy in the midst of a recession that has impacted their economy far more than it has the US. (What do people mean when they say “we can’t afford healthcare,” by the way. Do they mean that the rich can’t afford to give up their second home in order to pay a little more taxes? Or that we all can’t chip in a little in taxes to save even more in health care costs? Or that we can’t work together to improve the lot of those born into great hardship, ultimately benefiting from their productivity rather than suffering from the crime and alienation that cyclical inequality produces?)

So what’s the downside to all this? I have to admit I’ve had to navigate some pretty silly bureaucracy. Today, for example, I went to a ministry to get my welfare before being told I had to get my housing contract stamped across the city. I biked over there and the lady behind the counter literally stamped my form without looking at it. Not to mention it was already stamped and signed by the University… I did get some exercise out of the experience, but I can’t see why it was necessary. (I also found out what Icelanders mean when they say, “Don’t like the weather? Wait 5 minutes; it’ll probably get worse.”)

As a further example, I’ll try to sum up some of what I had to do in my first week here. To get my residence permit, I had to go to the Directorate of Immigration and the National Registry, where I had to convince the lady behind the counter to accept my application without proof of attending the University: I hadn’t been officially admitted yet. On that note, the bureaucracy is somewhat informal in the sense that it’s never that difficult to navigate the system with sympathy resulting from explaining one’s situation. To register at the university, for example, I was aided by an administrator in the engineering department, with whom I’d corresponded by e-mail. Of course, before I could do that, I had to get my Kennitala (national ID), for which I theoretically should have had to be registered at the university… go figure.

Anyway, to get internet I had to register my computer’s MAC address, for which I had to sign a housing contract and register at the university. To get my scholarship money, I had to sign up for a bank account, for which I had to have a Kennitala. Long story short, there was a lot of running around the city… Now that I have my bank account set up, however, I realize how convenient (and secure) their system is. I get a sweet passcode generator which creates a unique key to use to log on to internet banking every time. Awesomely, bills show up automatically on my online bank page, where I can pay them by clicking “Pay.” Not too shabby…

Secure to the max!

In the end, however, I think all the bureaucracy is a small price to pay for equal opportunity and a harmonious society.