"Catch and Release" Zoos
(1960's sometime)
Instead of zoos being in reality prisons for innocent animals where they are confined to in most cases a completely alien unnatural tiny environment as well as subjected to unpleasant human behavior for all their captive lives, why not treat animals we want to see up close and personal as Guests? At least as far as we can treat wild animals as such. Instead of a life sentence behind bars, why don't we capture those wild animals we like to see in zoos for only temporary periods of captivity? Like two weeks maximum? Catch and Release philosophy extended to animals in zoos. That way no animal has to be imprisoned more than two weeks, enough time for humans to see them and for them to see humans without longterm damage resulting from years of captivity. It has a bonus side too which is allowing wild animals a "taste" of human beings without danger so that they get to know human beings better and vice-versa. Sure, it means more capturing but it might just be a way of developing a better rapport between wildlife and human communities with education working both ways.
The Solar Rail System (1976)
Imagine the highways and freeways gone. No cars, no trucks, no exhaust pollution, no noise pollution, no dead animals lying on the sides of the road. Imagine no huge Cal-Trans budget and tax burden because the roads are gone. Imagine no more CHP tickets and no more fossil fuel cars. Imagine all the money saved if California had a state-wide mass transit system that fueled itself with electricity generated by the Sun.
Imagine the thousands of acres of highway road beds turned into forests and organic farms and quiet villages where people and animals can safely cross underneath a quiet electro-magnetic monorail system where the monorail itself contains a thousands of miles long solar collecting system that catches, stores, and releases electricity from the sun supplying all the power needed to run both passenger and freight monorail trains throughout California.
This is the future. This is the promise of the Solar Rail System for the 21st Century.
Living Waters
The California Reclimax Plan
(1991)
"Reclimax": Restoration of damaged climax ecology systems
Imagine if you will the land and the life of the land of the State of California as a body alive, the skin of which is thoroughly slashed and gouged by careless human activity resulting in degradation and loss of life-supporting natural habitat and eventual species extinction. It is unknown at present how far human beings can go in destroying the natural ecology of bio-regions of the planet and still survive but there are now more than enough environmental danger signs for common sense to call for a halt to further eco-destructive human development. I am proposing here a healing vision of environmental protection and restoration that is based on similar healing processes of our bodies. Past and present unregulated timber harvesting and subdivision developments have cut our land to shreds, fouled our waterways, and destroyed vast areas of natural habitat causing topsoil disappearance, species disappearance, and disruption of delicate planetary climate systems.
When our bodies heal cuts and gouges, new tissue grows out of branch networks of living fibrils that form first across the wound. In this same manner let us begin to establish a healing network of watercourse climax corridor "fibrils" along all year-round streams and rivers throughout California beginning with the 200,000 acres of Pacific Lumber Co. land as a model for environmental responsible commercial resource management. The elements are in place for a precedent setting working relationship between Pacific Lumber, mainstream environmental organizations and the California Dept. of Fish & Game, to establish cooperative guidelines for climax corridor wildlife and stream protection zones. Pacific Lumber Co. represents the private sector and EPIC (Environmental Protection Information Center) and the Calif. Dept. of F & G, the public sector, thus uniting commercial and community needs with the biological needs of the life of the land. If such an alliance can be forged it will become the model for land use management that can be extended beyond commercial forest management into rural subdivision planning and regulation where the major environmental damage takes place. Eventually, the climax corridor system can be extended into suburbia and the cities tying in with greenbelts and parkways to form a statewide watercourse "fibril" network for the healing of California through "reclimaxification" of damaged or lost climax ecosystems.
Only climax biological communities can provide protection for many endangered species, and only climax corridors provide natural linking ecosystems within a landscape becoming increasingly man-made. For the preservation and regeneration of species, for the stabilization of the land, for the watershed alliance of conservationists and commercial timber working together to heal the environment, please consider the California Reclimax Plan as a unifying vision and vehicle for successful cooperation.
Ark Parks
What is an "Ark Park"? Ark Parks are endangered species regeneration sites of varying size and location. Some would be large areas within existing national or state parks. These would protect and regenerate large endangered species as well as small ones. Other Ark Parks would be relatively small areas that could be set up rurally, suburbanly or even in urban environments. The idea is to regenerate and restock all areas where human development has wiped out or greatly reduced indigenous species. Ark Parks would also serve for local community environmental education with trained staff giving lectures in local fauna and flora eco-systems and how to restore and maintain them. Ark Parks would be centers for the development of human community-wildlife community cooperation so that we can gradually restore all earth ecosystems to original health.
The Ark Park Land Trust and Chateau Marmoset
As part of the Bear River/PalcoESOP buyout plan for the Pacific Lumber Co. using the TCF California Green Lottery for financing the deal, the section of land west of Redway in So. Humboldt County which is currently owned by PL would be donated to a non-profit organization, the Ark Park Land Trust as a name for this entity for now, to become a local endangered plant and animal species regeneration wildlife preserve (the Ark Park).
One portion of the land encompassing a small watershed bowl near the top of the land would become the site of a small scale e-CoHousing facility, "Chateau Marmoset", a cooperative condominium "castle" to save energy and material resources.
Chateau Marmoset would be based on usage of eco-friendly technology and would continue research and development of low-cost community self-sufficiency systems that do not harm the shared environment.
The main source of income for this community would derive from grants, donations, and sales of eco-community educational programs developed by the people living and working in Chateau Marmoset and the Ark Park Land Trust.
This land outside of Redway also contains a special top ridge site where a small redwood grove still barely survives. This site could become a "high place" of worship, a spiritual power spot like other recognized by earth and spiritual religious practitioners. It could become a Sacred Site.
The Peaceable Kingdom
Will the lion lie down with the lamb? Well, if it has had a good meal already, maybe..actually, if lions were to become vegetarians they would eventually stop looking like lions as a predator's appearance and predatory equipment evolves in harmony with the characteristics of its prey. Changing the eating rules would eventually change the characteristics of the species themselves. I once read of a study done in Czechoslovakia I think years ago where an animal research center conducted a long term study of the effects of human selection and the domestication of wild canine species that became our dogs. In the study foxes were raised, selected and bred following a simple plan: only those foxes which got along with human beings easily were selected to breed. After many generations (a 20 year study I think it was) a surprising thing emerged. The latter generations of such selected foxes started losing their fox characteristics and starting looking and acting more like dogs. Longer legs, barking, etc, and none of these characteristics were bred for, only friendliness towards humans.
Cooperation with Animals
Another avenue of research for developing the Peaceable Kingdom is seeing how far animals can go in making cooperative arrangements with human beings that allow them to exist in human dominated environments. I have done some experiments myself along these lines and found that one can make "deals" with many wild species, even insect species, so that the two of you can co-exist without fear or vast inconvenience. In my limited experiments I've successfully made deals with ants, spiders, (including black widows), and raccoons.
Once, long ago in communal days, members of our commune, which was situated on an old mining site where there were overgrown mining "tailings", piles of stones that made excellent rattlesnake dens, made a "deal" with the rattlesnakes. There were literally too many of them to get rid of and so we simply told them that we wouldn't bother them if they didn't bother us, which they seemed to have agreed to as they stopped coming near our communal mainhouse which before the pact they often went near scaring us often as well. No one ever got bit by rattlesnakes there and there are few places in California were there are higher concentrations of rattlesnakes than on this particular farm in the foothills of the Sierras..
A muddauber wasp was the creature that actually taught me how to strike deals with animals. The wasp taught me to open our cabin door for it to go out using common wasp language: it would buzz close to my head to get my attention, buzz around until I was up and moving trying to get away from it as it circled me until I neared the cabin door and opened it up for it to zoom out. It came back through some unseen passage in the walls but always wanted me to open the door for it to go out. Same routine of buzzing me until I opened the door for it.
One Fall season my kitchen was invaded by ants who made an ant city in a large Coleus plant pot I had on the kitchen counter near the sink. I noticed that the Coleus plant had greatly grown in size after the ants moved in and discovered that they were fertilizing the potting soil as well as breaking it it up into smaller and more nutrient-available form for the Coleus plant. Obviously, the plant and ants had a cooperative symbiotic relationship going on. Why not with human too? So, the deal I made with them was simple: When they were out on the kitchen counter in their thousands eating up tiny pieces of food they found there and I wanted to use the counter, I told them I would knock three times on the counter which would be their signal to go back into the pot. They picked up on it right away and within 2 or 3 minutes all the ants on the counter would disappear after I knocked three times.
Another deal I made was with raccoons. I was living in a tiny rural trailer park I guess you could call it. I had a small kitten and raccoons came around regularly at night to check out the garbage cans. I knew that raccoons sometimes killed cats and because I had a kitty-door that was easily accessible to the raccoons as well as my cat I decided to make a deal with them. I told them one night that I would feed them my table scraps if they would not come into my trailer and steal food or hurt my kitten. I started feeding them at night with scraps on a plate that I would reach up and put on top of the trailer roof so the neighbor dogs wouldn't eat it. The raccoons would waddle up the nearby tree and jump to the roof and eat. They never came into my trailer and never bothered my cat. My next door neighbor who hadn't made any such deal was frightened several times by these same raccoons when she tried to shoo them away from her garbage cans. I never had any conflicts with the raccoons who honored our agreement.
In the future I can imagine there will be people who are good at communicating with animals who will have jobs arranging cooperative coexistence systems between people and animals. I found that one doesn't have to have any magic animal language to talk to animals; just talking plain English to them seems to work fine, explaining what I want about two or three times when they are within listening distance and paying attention. I can see new symbiotic relationships forming between humans and animals, i.e., with animals doing clean-up work in exchange for food as my ants performed. Species forms may change with human community interaction, e.g. the foxes into dogs example. But we human beings must develop ways that allow our wild friends to continue to co-evolve with us as we progress further with human society. In the Climax Civilization pages you will find that our universal social aim is to develop a universal human society that can coexist with the natural communities of life and that is also the aim of developing the Peaceable Kingdom.
Greening Cities
Restructure of city residential blocks by creating a section of blocks closed off to outside traffic except at four points (east, west, south, north).
Take out most streets with street areas made into gardens and community recreational areas.
Take out houses to leave fewer in place but more space between them.
Put in trails instead of paved roads inside these "green sections".
Connect green sections to green belts and, Violá, you've made city life habitable for more than just human beings.*
* I've read recently of Asian experiments with balcony and roof gardens planned into their apartment complexes. It will happen. Greening offsets city heat and carbon dioxide production too.
Desalinization Plant Ocean Intake Valve Habitat
Rare photo of Mother Nature