Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Direct Action and Fields of Care
J. Douglas Porteous
Educated at Oxford, Hull, Harvard and MIT, Porteous has taught for 35 years at British Columbia’s University of Victoria. His twelve books span urban history, urban and regional planning, the development of Easter Island, environmental psychology, aesthetics, literary criticism and poetry. He writes: “A recent issue of EAP—especially your exemplary theme, ‘the practice of a lived environmental ethic’—prompted me to write this short essay. Keep up the excellent work.” Geography Department, University of Victoria, PO Box 3050, Victoria, BC V8W 3P5; 250-721-7327. © 2003 J. Douglas Porteous.
In a dying civilization, we have three choices. Many of us will accept common rapacity: the “culture of more” expressed in monster houses and SUV battlewagons. Others may retreat into physical isolation or quietist obsessions with art, literature or popular culture. The third option is to contest the culture of more. Although such a route is perhaps a losing proposition, it remains necessary; and going against the grain can provide an interesting, if not always comfortable, way of life.
Three major modes of contestation are: (1) to create or disseminate ideas that oppose the primitive tropes of business culture and open new vistas of a saner world; (2) to work politically to ameliorate or overturn the structures of the corporate state; and (3) to involve oneself in direct action.
In the last two decades, I’ve written two pairs of books that take the first course. Planned to Death (1989) and Domicide: the Global Destruction of Home (2001) illuminate the negative effects of the corporate and militarist state on our dwelling places and propose remedies both mainstream and extreme. Landscapes of the Mind (1990) and Environmental Aesthetics:Ideas, Politics and Planning (1996) demonstrate the satisfactions gained from the light-footprint environmental intangibles: attachment, aesthetics, ethics, and spirituality.
As I don’t have the personality for political work, I go straight from conceptual theory to direct action. Apart from the personal direct action of changing one’s life to create a lighter footprint, public direct action is a coin with two sides. The invaluable underside is monkey wrenching, as advocated by Edward Abbey and practised by Earth First! The other side of the coin involves choosing and embracing fields of care, taking responsibility for tracts of land and cherishing them.
Home is where one starts from. All my fields of care are close to home. At its simplest, care involves the maintenance of an existing landscape. Here I have joined others in the care of an ancient churchyard (containing graves of my extended family) in the East Riding of Yorkshire; an inner city backyard in Victoria B.C.; and the destoning and dethistling (by scythe) of a horse and sheep pasture on British Columbia’s Saturna Island. The last evoked the following verse:
DRAGONS’ TEETH
I lust to handle that sharp shiny snake
quivering in my gripswathe after swathe.
As thistles fall, boulders appear,
then rocks, then pebbles.Hoist them away! Build walls,
cairns, rock piles, terraces!
Unscale the land!
Find soil!
But earth births fragments faster far
than families can fling.
More challenging is the creation of a new landscape. The development of a one-acre forest glade within a conifer wood took me about five years, mostly using hand tools ( a good machete can bring down big softwood saplings). Once created, the meadow is not mine (I don’t own it). Rather, it and its inhabitants (deer, otter, racoon, frogs, salamanders and others) have claims on me. To paraphrase the Little Prince, one is responsible, forever, for what one has changed.
But restoring native landscapes is better still. The three sites I have attempted are all on sea cliffs. First, I de-gardened my own small plot on Saturna Island, discouraging exotics and encouraging natives such as spotted coral root orchid, flowering currant, ocean spray, salal and arbutus, which form under stories to the massive Douglas fir and western red cedar.
Once satisfied with my procedures, I moved on to the de-brooming of parts of two public parks. Scotch broom—an invasive species brought to distant Vancouver Island by sentimental Scots—easily reaches ten feet in height in this mild climate, enveloping and destroying native plants.
The first park area is a well-visited couple of acres of headland, backed by forest, with a continuous fringe of broom. By de-brooming the headland, FLOS (Flower Liberators of Saturna) has promoted the spread of sea-cliff turflands, in which grow previously suppressed native species such as fawn lilies, chocolate lilies, Indian paint brush, and the calypso orchid. A rough ugly “Scotland” has been turned into something that satisfies both those who wish the restoration of native ecosystems and those who relish Mansfield Park.
My main work, however, has been on a secluded couple of acres in a seaside park in Victoria. This glaciated cliff, the south-facing shatter side of a monadnock, was smothered in high broom when I began. Dwarf oaks and arbutus struggled to survive below the broom canopy. Five years later much of the broom is gone (although I’m aware that broom seeds can survive 30 years before germination), and the Garry oak ecosystem is recovering, with its dwarf trees, grassy minimeadows, Nootka roses, animals and birds, including Anna, Canada’s resident hummingbird species.
No new morals can be derived from this story. We knew it all in kindergarten. Possessions possess; better to be possessed by the claims of landscapes. Stewardship is pleasure. It’s good to be grounded. Known places, imbrued with one’s sweat, become homes. Individual plants and birds are recognized, like family, year after year. Perhaps better than writing exhortatory books, there’s the joy of balancing the books of nature. Complementary to foreign travel is the urge to travel within these books of nature, slowly and close to the ground.
Best of all, the caring responsibility is endless, in the sense of all-continuing. I know I’ll be looking after these landscapes as long as I’m able. And I find that a few people, intrigued by this private work in public places, come to help. Meanwhile, there’s the process: travelling and, hopefully, never arriving.
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