Kev Polk

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

This line flitted through my mind fifteen years ago as I basked in a word of praise. At a conference, a professor emeritus of electrical engineering had asked if I wrote much software. I pulled out my PalmPilot, the iPad’s distant ancestor. I had written an app called 2sky: an animated star chart. I demonstrated how it worked, even let him try it out.

At last, he said: “Now there’s a thing of beauty, as lovely as any poem ever was.”

Sure, I was proud. The source code, printed out, was longer than a Harry Potter novel.  One typo would have crashed it. I had customers in 60 countries, and got fan emails every day for five years.

I’d love to be able to show it to you now. But I can’t. They don’t make Palm Pilots anymore, and my last one died years ago.

Pride notwithstanding, my app was nothing like a poem. Sonnet 18 was published four centuries ago and you’ll have no trouble reading it today. Paper can ferry thoughts safely across a thousand years. Classical poems are easy to memorize: that’s what rhyme and meter are for. Everything about poems is built to last. My software, by contrast, was written in an ephemeral medium.

So was much of my life.  In software upgrades, I lost essays, photos, drawings, stories, programs, eight years of financial records, and twenty years of email. By contrast, my collection of family letters spans five decades and I’ve never lost any of them.

Now nearly everybody has a smart phone. There has never been a more convenient medium, and it connects us to everything. But this convenience comes at a cost.

As we pour ourselves into these devices, texting everywhere, our world becomes ephemeral.  We make fewer real plans. At best, we deal ourselves into each other’s ever-shifting shuffle of priorities. Last-minute cancellations become the norm. It’s NBD (no big deal).

In Shakespeare’s time, people expected things and relationships to last more than a lifetime.  Even back then, the English had maintained some country hedges, brimming with hazelnuts and game, for 700 years.

How much can our lives mean in the end, if no trace survives a decade of computer upgrades? How does such a life equip us to deal with the physical world that sustains us, with forests that take lifetimes to mature?

Summers end much too soon if we let them. But they needn’t. Google Sonnet 18 and you’ll see what I mean.

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Poverty often goes hand in hand with degraded landscapes, so maybe it makes sense to alleviate both together.

John D. Liu’s online film, Lessons of the Loess Plateau, provides a dramatic case in point.

China’s Loess plateau is an area the size of France with mineral-rich soils up to a thousand feet thick. For most of the 1.5 million years that people have lived there, it was lush and fertile. Its rich forests and grasslands could absorb and hold rainwater for over 100 days. Many of China’s most prosperous dynasties, including the Han, flourished there.

Gradually, though, the region’s fertility waned. By 1,000 years ago, most of the wealthy had fled. To make ends meet, locals had to graze their sheep and goats ever farther from home and scale the hillsides to cut firewood. By the 1960s, the plateau was so barren that when it rained, 95% of the water ran off immediately without soaking in. Floods carved vast gullies and carried away so much silt that their outlet became known as the Yellow River. A permanent rotation of floods, droughts, and dust storms hammered the region.

In 1995, the Chinese government set out to reverse these trends. It hired ecologists, economists and hydrologists from the World Bank and other agencies to identify the land use practices that were and weren’t working in the region. After about 4 years, it had a clear strategy: reforest the hilltops, terrace the gullies, pen all grazing animals, and allow farming only on relatively flat lands.

At this point many locals weren’t happy. They stood to lose hillside farms and pastures their families had used for centuries. Never mind that these lands were now 90% bare. The project needed their cooperation to succeed and they weren’t budging.

Two things brought them around. First, the government drew up contracts so that every parcel had a family to look after it, and every family had long-term rights to use it. Second, the project hired the locals to survey and partition the land, and then to implement the project. This provided full employment while it was underway. No handouts required.

Ten years later, the region was green and lush again, and farm incomes had increased tenfold. In Liu’s film, it’s amazing to see the transformation  in the land and people.

Meanwhile, Athens County’s lush greenery is rooted in soils much thinner and poorer than the Loess Plateau. It would take far less rough treatment to ruin things here. We have a boom and bust cycle of extractive industries, and entrenched poverty and dependence. For now we have welfare, and people need it to survive. But in the long run, we might do better to follow China’s example and invest in renewable local economies.

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Greenland, 1284: The Norse scrounge wasted lands for firewood, their spindly cows overgraze, and many of their children go hungry.The tall forests and rich soils that welcomed their ancestors three centuries earlier are long gone. 

Then the Inuit appear, paddling kayaks, mushing dog sleds, and living in igloos. The Norse laugh at their wretchedly sparse existence. But Inuit children are well-fed. Within a century, the Inuit thrive amid recovering landscapes and Norse ruins.

This scenario, from Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, ran through my mind when I first learned about tiny houses.

The modern tiny house movement began in 2002 when Iowa artist Jay Shafer built Tumbleweed, a 70 square foot Cape Cod on wheels.

Tumbleweed bucked a long trend toward bigger houses. In his book Plan C, Pat Murphy observes that residential square footage per person tripled in the USA from 1950 to 2000. Moreover, he writes, half the energy we use goes to building, heating, cooling and eventually demolishing our houses. Shaffer observes that McMansions just beg to be filled with stuff, further accelerating our consumption.

Over-consumption has led to what National Geographic calls the Sixth Extinction (the Fifth wiped out the dinosaurs). Species are going extinct at thousands of times the natural rate. As early as 1963, Ecologist H. T. Odum warned that mass die-offs happen when any one species consumes too much. By 1992, Vice President Al Gore estimated that humans had exceeded Odum’s limit by a factor of at least twenty.

Many tiny houses weigh 7,000 pounds, so they consume 20x less material to build than the average standalone house in the USA.

According to the U.S. Census, twenty million young American adults and untold millions of downsized Baby Boomers now face the dilemma of of the Norse: they simply can’t afford the average house. But for half the down-payment on a traditional home, they can own a tiny house outright. They’ll spend ten times less on energy, five times less time cleaning, and can move their home wherever career and family take them.

Tiny houses offer a convenient way to cut consumption by 95%. They have appeared on the landscape like little kayaks in ancient Greenland. Will we learn from them and change how we live? Or ignore them like the Norse?

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26 songs in the Halloween mood for my life drawing group.  Extra wild toward the end to wake everyone up during that last long pose. We’ll probably wrap up before the Slayer song, which is most definitely the scariest piece of music ever. You can listen to the full list on Google Play.

I Put a Spell On You Nina Simone

The Phantom of the Opera Andrew Lloyd Webber

Spiral Depression Forbidden

Lacrymosa Evanescence

Dead Skin Mask Midnight String Quartet

Black Magic Woman Santana

Skeleton Woman Wormz and the Decomposers

Don’t Fear the Reaper Blue Oyster Cult

Jackie Sinead O’Connor

The Great Below Nine Inch Nails

White Flag Dido

Wicked Game Chris Isaak

Heaven Sent Esthero

Dead Man’s Party Oingo Boingo

Black Milk Massive Attack

Oblivion Astor Piazzolla

Ghosts Japan

6 Underground Sneaker Pimps

The Killing Moon Echo and the Bunnymen

I Ran Flock of Seagulls

Zombie The Cranberries

Possum Kingdom The Toadies

Bloodletting (The Vampire Song) Concrete Blond

Bat Chain Puller Captain Beefheart

Halloween Siouxsie and the Banshees

Here’s the rest of the playlist from my 50th birthday dance party. Listen to the full list on Google Play.

1995: Gloria Estefan, “Turn the Beat Around” Fun for all and gets that salsa vibe going.

1996: Sneaker Pimps, “Spin Spin Sugar” Radio Edit version for this all-ages party! The slightly better album version has a sample that has been interpreted as everything from crying to orgasm to giving birth. Amazing dance tune, though.

1987: Finley Quaye, “Sunday Shining” I had trouble finding something right for 1997. Then one morning I kept humming a peculiar lyric, Googled it, and like a lost love, up came this reggae tune. I had only heard it once, on an LA commute, 18 years ago, and had long since given up looking for it in stores. Turns out the album went multi-platinum in the UK.

1998: Alanis Morissette, “Uninvited” This was a breakup year for me and I wore out the City of Angels CD in a melancholy haze. Alanis at her raw, intense best. Great for light contact improv: let your arms become snakes. Entwine at will.

1999: Buena Vista Social Club, “Chan Chan” Slowest. Salsa. Ever. Just in case anyone wants to learn the steps.

2000: Thalia, “Mujer Latina” A traditional merengue!

2001: Marc Anthony, “I've Got You” Really fun, fast salsa with throwaway lyrics in English.

2002: Piazzola, “Oblivion” My absolute favorite tango.

2003: Hooverphonic, “Eden” Heard on KTUH with the full moon shining through the sunroof. Great for tango nuevo.

2004: Evanescence, “Bring Me to Life” There’s a very dance-able Tango hiding amid this song’s symphonic metal layers.

2005: Pussycat Dolls, “Loosen Up My Buttons” The Latin invasion continues with a stately Cha Cha dressed up in Middle Eastern stylings and naughty lyrics.

2006: Shakira, “Hips Don't Lie” A great salsa with some merengue moments.

2007: Rihanna, “Umbrella” First time I heard this, I thought I was being funny when I chimed in with “...ella ella ella,” but the joke was on me when Rihanna did the same! This probably happened to a lot of people.

2008: Paramore, “Crushcrushcrush” None of the Twilight music fit the bill, but this catches some of the mood in about 3 minutes.

2009: Natasha Bedingfield, “Pocketful of Sunshine” Here’s a perfect example of how saccharine pop can still have a soul that will never be shackled.

2010: Muse, “Uprising” For the party, I made a long flag out of a shower curtain and $1 whiffle ball bat. When this song came on, I brandished it and everyone took turns dancing with it. Then it became a prop for the rest of the party. Shoulda seen that coming.

2011: Black Eyed Peas, “I Just Can't Get Enough” They had me at the “Mr. Roboto”.

2012: Green Day, “American Idiot” Yes, I know this song was released 7 years earlier. But for me the most memorable performance was at the 2012 Grammy’s. Also, since that TV edit wasn’t available, I wanted it late in the program, past bedtimes.

2013: Pentatonix, “I Need Your Love” Like an M.C. Echer or Bev Doolittle painting, a Pentatonix arrangement can re-shape your perception of the world.