waste, space, haste.

a few weeks ago, during irvine's unusual september heatwave of mid-ninety degree temperatures, gordon and i head to the district for on of our study-at-peet's afternoons. driving along harvard, we pass by the rancho san joaquin golf course - rolling hills of green, studded with bushes ad palm trees. men in the white and plaid outfits stroll the lawn, line up their drives, or putt around in little white electric carts. despite sitting in the cool cab of the car, blasted by air conditioning, i feel hot just looking at them. in the distance a thick tower of smoke billows towards the heavens. los angeles' station fire rages on, having already consumed tens of thousands of acres at less than ten percent containment, and firefighters work their hardest to battle the flames in the summer heat. i feel hot just thinking about it. the two scenes juxtaposed before me, one of smoke and fire, the other of undulating hills of green, are tragically ironic, or more precisely, tragically tragic. here, planning and land development, combined with our human propensity for manipulating the natural environment around us, has resulted in the two fantastically curious scenes before me.

somehow, we as southern californians, have managed to develop land in ways we wee never meant to. we build multi-million dollar homes on mountainsides, surrounded by dense forest or flammable brush, while never allowing that brush to undergo its natural cycle of burn and regrowth. we have also managed to cultivate the tropics in desert-land, using copious amounts of one of our most precious resources - water - in the upkeep of one of our most useless resources - turf grass - for the sole use and consumption by some type of country-club social elite. along the roadside curb, water accumulates into a murky leaf-laden pool, mere feet from a storm drain it can't reach. most likely the result of lawn-sprinkler runoff or irvine's unusual habit of watering the pavement, since it hasn't rained here in months, the pool sits stagnant, slowly evaporating in the blazing sun. i hear we are in a drought.

americans have a habit of disregarding natural processes and wasting natural resources. there is a shared pride in the ability to defend oneself from the eeevil forces of such things as fires, earthquakes, tornados, and hurricanes, or in the ability to quickly recover from such disaster aftermaths. somewhere along the way, we have lost common sense, and we are now exporting this mentality elsewhere, imposing it upon other cultures. our spread is wide and entrenchment deep. there are no "america-towns" or "little los angeleses;" it is too late for that.

america is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
: wilde