Strange (Earth) Days
April 22nd, 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. It’s also our wedding anniversary. That’s us, wearing masks. We have been honoring Los Angeles’ “Safer at Home” edict, with daily and desperately needed masked sojourns out for fresh air and sunshine.
When the parks and trails closed, we started walking new routes. One day I walked 5.7 flat miles, all along 3rd St., from Gregory’s office at MASS Architecture + Design to our West Hollywood apartment. I traveled the world reading signs: Korea, Pakistan, India, Thailand, El Salvador. Most people on 3rd St. wore masks, but remaining physically distant around crowded bus stops was tough. As incomes decrease in LA so does social distancing.
We’ve also explored the fancy low-density neighborhood in the hills north of our apartment. A few days after the mask photo was taken, (notice the owl-shaped landscaping in the background), I actually spied three live owls – a great horned owl and two fledglings – on a wide sill in the Hollywood Hills.
Wildness is resurgent in the city during these strange and destabilized times. I’ve seen as well a pair of healthy looking coyotes trotting down Outpost Drive at 6:30 p.m. on a weekday evening. There were no cars zipping by. People should have been headed home. But they were already at home, en masse. It was gloriously quiet.
The residents of Casa Zaragosa have taken to tacking poems, printed on multi-colored paper, to the wooden gates that protect their Hollywood Hills home. My favorites are Wendell Berry’s, “The Peace of Wild Things,” which sees my anxiety (When despair for the world grows in me/ and I wake in the night at the least sound…) and Pablo Neruda’s “Keeping Quiet,” which sees my frailties (If we were not so single-minded/ about keeping our lives moving/ and for once could do nothing/ perhaps a huge silence/ might interrupt this sadness/ of never understanding ourselves…).
Sometimes I stop and read the poems out loud. It makes my heart hum to do this. Sometimes masked humans stop to read their own poem near me, or listen. We greet each other, strangers making connection. There have been more than a few moments like this, as ephemeral as a wave or a nod; as generous as a ‘hello, how you doing?’ It’s fleeting, but in these instants the city feels small and intimate and neighborly.
And all the while above, the LA skies are bluer than ever.
Beauty has saved our souls and sanity, especially now, and we are reminded how essential a healthy environment is to a healthy community. We are determined to carry that ethic forward with Urban Renewable, even as circumstances threaten to arrest positive movement toward pro-planet architecture and more just and equitable public policy.
There is so much worry and suffering these days. It’s as though we are in a collective state of breath-holding – not wanting to inhale the Covid-19 coronavirus and also paralyzed by the economic horrors we fear are lurking just around the corner.
The desperate desire to “get back to normal” is understandable. More than 22 million people are suddenly unemployed. But this crisis is also a chance to rethink the world and our future in it.
Science Daily reported April 16th on a new study from Columbia’s Earth Institute that, “a megadrought worse than anything known from recorded history is very likely in progress in the western United States and northern Mexico, and warming climate is playing a key role.”
On April 20th, due in good part to the global pandemic, oil prices collapsed below zero – which makes it all the more challenging to phase out fossil fuels and usher in clean energy.
The temptation to return to old patterns of behavior, to get back to “normal,” is a really bad idea. Doing so would squander this moment, this chance to rebuild better.
As Gregory and I celebrate our fourth anniversary, we acknowledge how grateful we are to have gotten a second chance. We messed up royally the first time around, more than 30 years ago, but when we found each other again we knew painfully well how rare it is to get a do-over.
Shortly after we reconnected, in 2012, we were walking on a beach in northern California and Gregory asked me how I saw myself growing old. I told him that I’d always imagined that I’d live by myself, in a beautifully sustainable shack in Arizona’s high desert country. He didn’t mind the sustainability part but said I wouldn’t be by myself.
He suggested a larger shack, hopefully in his hometown of LA – a nurturing space open to nature. As someone who’d been writing about the environment for a long time, I added the solar panels and rain barrels to our imagined home.
We’ve kept that conversation going, reconceptualizing and expanding our horizons along the way into what is now Urban Renewable. This more inclusive blueprint illustrates an entirely new way to dwell well; build community; redress the racial wealth divide; and collaborate with rather than ignore or defy nature.
We didn’t plan to get married on Earth Day. It was the first available opening at City Hall in April, before our ceremony with friends and family in my parent’s back yard the next week. We usually celebrate the latter anniversary. But this year, this tender and terrible year, it feels right to honor the long, hard fight for a healthy planet; to celebrate second chances; and to renew our vows to rebuild better.
