The seven lakes in Pioneer Basin are spread across an alpine valley on the Mono Creek drainage, west of Rock Creek. Surrounding the valley are peaks named after the Big Four, pioneer California businessmen who backed the construction of the first transcontinental railroad – Stanford, Hopkins, Crocker, and Huntington. Pioneer Basin Backpacking – High Sierra TrailsHigh Sierra Trailshttps://highsierratrails.com 

Prestigious Rose Breeder Names Its New Bloom for a Black Gardener: For more than 60 years, David Austin Roses has named new varieties after historical British figures, All of them white. The Dannahue, which honors Danny Clarke, changed that. A headline in The New York Times.

Black people are better at everything. Said Rudi Spangenberg, while standing in our living room after trying to level an entrance awning.

The Huntington Museum and Library is located in San Marino, California. The first time I went there was probably in 1958 or 1959, when I was a freshman or sophomore in college. I was not impressed. San Marino, itself, was a white, upper-middle-class town, milquetoast from my angry young man’s point of view, and the Museum fit right in. The second and third times I went were probably in the early to middle 70s; I had discovered the desert and cactus and skipped the Museum and went directly to the garden, which was spectacular and still is.  

The fourth time I went to the Huntington was with Michele shortly after we first met, in the early 90s, and I wanted to show her the garden. The fifth time was last week when Michele took me down to greater LA for my birthday. We went to see the Huntington cactus and succulent garden. However, she also wanted to see a painting that the Huntington had recently acquired, and I wanted to see some prints – monotypes, I think – made from Gee’s Bend quilts.

Michele wanted to see a painting by Kehinde Wiley who is a Black artist whose career has taken off since his first show, at the Hoffman Gallery, in Chicago in 2002. Wiley’s career then went into hyperdrive after President Obama chose him – Wiley – to paint his – Obama’s – Official Presidential Portrait. A couple of days before we went to the Huntington, we saw a Wiley show in San Franciso’s de Young Museum. It was of several huge portraits of Black people, posing in traditional Old Masters style. Most of Wiley’s paintings are men and the images have a subtext that’s not natural. Are they dead? The whole show was shown in very dark galleries in which the only light was reflected off the paintings, which really showed off the paintings in an Elvis on black velvet sort of way. For me, even though the show was difficult to see because of the glare of the shiny paintings in the very dark rooms, the show was a knockout.

But those pictures were in San Francisco, and we were at the Huntington Museum, where, when we first walked into the American Art Building looking for the Kehinde Wiley painting Michele had read about, we passed a huge Sam Francis from his Grid series. Seeing a major piece of American abstract art at this staid Museum was a shock. It turns out that the Huntington Museum has transmogrified into a much more exciting place.

We had a hard time finding the Wiley, which was incongruously in the portrait gallery of the European Building. In a room full of what I would call vanity portraits of the rich, upper-class English gentry was the most famous treasure of the old Huntington, Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The Museum purchased Blue Boy a hundred years ago, and, to celebrate the purchase’s centennial, they commissioned a complementary contemporary portrait. Blue Boy which I think was originally named A Portrait of a Young Gentleman, portrays a White, wealthy, young boy who just oozes his belief in his own class superiority. This was the Museum I remembered from my prior visits, but, across the room from the Gainsborough is a new Portrait of a Young Gentleman by Kehinde Wiley. The two paintings are wildly different and strangely the same.

One is White gentry, and the other is Black street, but they are both in the same pose and they both look down at us with a look of self-satisfaction. Neither is arrogant but they are damn close; they both seem to know they belong here.

I am not a big fan of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg but, in an interview probably ten years ago,o she said something that still haunts me. When asked when she would be happy with the number of women on the Supreme Court, she answered: “When there are nine women on the Supreme Court.” The interviewer sort of guffawed and said something like, “Seriously?” and RBG said “Why not? There were only White men on the court for over two hundred years.” Think about that for a minute, for well over two hundred years, only White men decided what was legal. Those same men – or the same class of men, to be more precise – ran everything. It just seemed like the natural order of things. It isn’t the natural order, and it shouldn’t be, but it did seem like it.

For most of that time, the White Male Power structure wasn’t even questioned. “Of course, women shouldn’t vote. They are too emotional.” “Of course, Black men shouldn’t coach an NFL team, they aren’t smart enough. Hell, they shouldn’t even play quarterback.” White men telling themselves that they are superior is the original Affirmative Action. When that Affirmative Action is eliminated, when the applicant pool can contain anybody, when results are all that count, often a White man isn’t the best person for the job. When being White doesn’t automatically give an advantage, the result is often different.

That is sort of shocking. I understand that shock; I can feel it in my soul, and I was brought up in a liberal family. For someone brought up knowing White men are superior, for someone who can’t see their own White privilege, it must be too shocking to take in. It is easy to justify not being at the top by thinking, even saying, “They cheated, they just got the job, position, award – whatever – because they are Black, they are obviously not better or more qualified than me.”

There must be hundreds of White men who are superb artists and could do a great job at painting a contemporary Portrait of a Young Gentleman, but, looking at the Huntington Gallery, full of White, entitled, men with Gainsborough’s Wiley’s Portrait at one end and Wiley’s Portrait facing it at the other end; it seems obvious that commissioning Kehinde Wiley was the right call.

Over the years, human beings have shown that we’re very good at destroying habitats. Now we have to show that we’re smart enough and thoughtful enough and caring enough to restore what we have ruined. from Nature’s Best Hope, (Young Readers’ Edition) by Douglas W. Tallamy.

My father, Alfred J. Stern, who my sister and I always called Daddy, was a nice guy, not always a good man, but always a nice guy. He was humorous, friendly, kind, and generous. He was a Democrat, but, more importantly, he was a democrat. He died in May of 1968 at the age of 61, about a month before I turned 28.

My family was not interested in California’s wildness, not many people were in the 50s, we – the collective we – were interested in California’s wild lands as a blank canvas to be covered by man’s creations. I was going to say that my family were not outside people but that is not true, however, to us, outside meant the backyard in the San Francisco suburbs. In the summer of 1956, my mother heard about and suggested I go on a thirty-day trip led by Jules Eichorn, my former eighth-grade teacher. It was a backpack in the Sierras although nobody in my family even knew what a backpack was. As an aside and sort of as proof of our lack of wilderness knowledge, my mother bought me a pair of motorcycle boots to fill the boot requirement. End aside.

The trip was billed as a thirty-day trip from Independence – which I had heard about because it was President Harry Truman’s hometown – to Bishop which I had never heard of. I imagined a road trip. It turned out that the actual trip was a hike in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, carrying everything on our backs, from a trailhead outside of Independence, California to a trailhead outside of Bishop, California, with much of the walking done above timberline. For the first time in my life, I felt the enchantment of the Wild, in the solitude, for the first time in my life, I felt the Mystery. Those thirty days changed my life.

I think it also changed my father’s life. When Pat Brown won the governor’s race, my dad was offered one of the political appointments that are part of the perks of the winning party. Daddy chose the Chairman of the California State Park Commission which shocked almost everybody including me. He then set out to enlarge the system with a huge increase of funds from a Bond drive. He became a proponent of saving California’s little remaining wild land and its slowly vanishing history. The Park Commission had the money and they used it to buy land and build facilities.

One of my favorite memories is Daddy’s excitement when the Park Commission bought the Ed Z’berg Estate at Sugar Pine Point on Tahoe’s West Shore and he and his fellow Commissioners spent the night in the mansion. Another story Daddy loved to tell was about taking Governor Brown on a camping trip to a wilderness lake that the State Park Commission wanted to buy. It was what is called Glamping now and included an airdrop of ice for the five o’clock cocktail hour.

One of the ways that Daddy and I bonded was by arguing. Not fighting arguing, more like discussion arguing. We argued over politics and the changing world of the sixties, we argued over the Vietnam War and the murders of students by the National Guard at Kent State, and, probably in 1967 or 68, we argued over a crazy idea that he loved; running a tramway from Palm Springs at to a point within San Jacinto State Park at 8,516 feet. The landing spot is about a five-and-a-half mile walk to the Peak at 10,834 feet. Daddy thought the tram would be a marvel.

Mount San Jacinto is one of three major peaks that surround the Los Angeles Basin. The other two are Mount San Antonio at 10,064 feet and San Gorgonio at 11,502 feet. Mount San Antonio has a ski area near the top but the other two peaks are Wilderness areas and are rare treasures. In early 1966, I had climbed, walked really, spending one night near the peak of San Jacinto and it was breathtaking, an exquisite alpine wilderness ten thousand feet and about a three-hour drive from 12,534,000 million people. I thought this is a sacred place and should be protected, that the solitude would be destroyed by the tram, and my dad thought people who couldn’t make the walk, or didn’t even want to – for that matter – should still have the opportunity to enjoy the mountain. Reflecting back and adding a dash of projection, I think he thought, even without the solitude, people like him could taste the miracle of the natural world.

Last weekend, Father’s Day Weekend, to find some sun, Michele and I drove to Palm Springs and took the tram up Mount San Jacinto. It was not my first trip on the tram, but it was my first time in about fifty years. It brought tears to my eyes. The tram building is what is now called Mid-Century Modern or – strange to my ear – just modern. It reminded me of my dad and so did the people milling around at the top.

I now understand that Daddy was right about the tram. I also now realize that I’ve felt this way for a long time. The solitude backpacking can provide takes a lot of space but there is still a lot of wild space left in California. The top of the tram is not that kind of space, it is obviously not wild, and the people that have made it there are not the same people as those who are backpacking into Pioneer Basin and they probably never will be. Even so, everybody I saw was enjoying themselves in the cool mountain air and some of them might even have their lives changed.

Thanks, Daddy.

We went down to LA to get some sun and heat for my Birthday. The sun and heat thing is not working out but we had a great dinner.

More later.

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 – 20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go. Robert M. Pirsig

I know Peter Sagal primarily from his Tweets although I first met him – not in real life, but in the cyberverse – listening to him moderate Wait, wait…don’t Tell Me on NPR and the Nerdette Podcasts in which he had a weekly discussion about Game of Thrones with Greta Johnsen and Tricia Bobeda. They covered each episode the day after it was broadcast with my kind of humor and wit. So, when last January, as a good way to start the year, he suggested a lecture on YouTube from Robert M. Sapolsky, I went along.

It turned out that the lecture was the first lecture of a class on Human Behavioral Biology at Stanford and it was very entertaining (really, very entertaining, watch it, you’ll see). Sometime during the lecture, Dr. Sapolsky gave his reading list and I’m repeating it here in his words: There are two books that I have assigned for the course. One is by me. And you don’t even have to read it. Just go buy a bunch of copies of and bring me the receipt, and you’ve got a great grade in here. OK, so that’s what is going to be pertinent to the second half of the course. We’re going to give you a list of the chapters that make the most sense to read.

The other book is a book by an author named James Gleick called Chaos. Chaos, year, after year, after year, in this class provokes the strongest opinions. A quarter of the people decide it is the most irritating, irrelevant thing that could possibly have been assigned in the class and hate it. About half the people never quite figure out what’s up with it. And a quarter of the people, their life is transformed. They no longer have to meditate. They no longer have to have a — they are at peace. At peace, I tell you. Because what this book does is introduce this whole radically different way of thinking about biology, taking apart a world of reductionism. For 500 years, we all have been using a very simple model for thinking about living systems. Which is, if you want to understand something that’s complicated, you break it apart into its little pieces. And once you understand the little pieces and put it back together, you will understand the complex thing.

And what Chaos as an entire field is about — and this was pretty much the first book that was meant for the lay public about it — what Chaos shows is that’s how you fix clocks. That’s not how you fix behaviors. That’s not how you understand behaviors. Behavior is not like a clock. Behavior is like a cloud. And you don’t understand rainfall by breaking a cloud down into its component pieces and gluing them back together. So read through that book. A lot of it is from physical sciences rather than biological, so we’ll just be suggesting the chapters you should read. I will tell you it is the first book since Baby Beluga where I’ve gotten to the last page and immediately started reading it over again from the front. Because along with Baby Beluga, it’s had the greatest influence on my life. I found this to be the most influential book in my thinking about science since college. So that is a sign.

Obviously, I bought the book. But, as I started to read it, I began to worry that I was in the group that would never quite figure it out. I’m dyslexic and got confused and bogged down by the details of the various experiments. I understood the words and the description of the basic theory, but I needed help to really internalize it or grok it. I’ve had the same problem with many things like the Theory of Relativity, Morphic Fields, or Basketball. When I first started watching the Warriors, I knew how the game worked but it was mostly just a bunch of guys running around and I didn’t really understand why. . . until I did, then there were patterns everywhere.

Chaos – and, for that matter, chaos – is like that.

The book starts with Edward Lorenz trying to predict the weather. The basis of the Scientific Method – the basis of most science, really – is repeatability. I’m not sure if Chemistry is still taught in High Schoo but it was when I went to High School. The teacher would explain a principal and we would pair up and duplicate an experiment that illustrated that principal. Everybody got the same answer. That was point, if somebody got a different result, they had obviously made a mistake. But, it turns out, this is not how life actually works. To quote near the opening of the book:

Yet, Lorenz created a toy weather in 1960 that succeeded in mesmerizing his colleagues. Every minute, the machine marked the passing of a day by printing a row of numbers across a page. If you knew how to read the printouts, you would see a prevailing westerly wind swing now to the north, now to the south, now back to the north. Digitized cyclones spun slowly around an idealized glob. As word spread through the department, the other meteorologists would gather around with the graduate students, making bets on what Lorenz’s weather would do next. Somehow, nothing every happened the same way twice.

Michele talks about only really understanding calculus once she had to use it in a physics class. I had a similar experience reading this book; I began to understand Chaos Theory when it started to talk about biology and Evolution. One of my biggest beefs with classical – read that as Darwinian – evolution is that it is based on completely random mutations but the fossil record seems to say that evolution only goes one way, towards complexity, from atoms to molecules, to cells, to sentient beings. That is against the Second Law of Thermodynamics and so is chaos.

Chaos by James Gleick is not an easy read; it wasn’t for me, at least, but it is a book that I’ll recommend to anyone interested in how the world works. I want to end this with a very short quote by Joseph Ford, the past Regents’ Professor of Physics at Georgia Institute of Technology, and a lovely, long quote by the playwriter, Tom Stoppard.

Evolution is chaos with feedback.

The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about – clouds -daffodils – waterfalls- and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in – these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks…The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew was wrong.

The BLM will invest $161 million in restoring the resilience of 21 landscapes across the West, where we can make the most difference for communities and resources. The future of multiple use and sustained yield is #RestorationLandscapes. A Tweet from the Bureau of Land Management – National@BLMNational·May 31Learn more http://ow.ly/kra250OvWvZ.

I don’t think that the Bureau of Land Management even exists east of the Mississippi, but, in the West, the BLM – as it’s affectionately called – is everywhere. For much of it’s history the BLM, under the guise of multiple use, has considered its mission to be be kind to the extraction industry. I think that is starting to change.

Increasingly, often for political reasons, the BLM is managing recreation areas and Conservation Corridors (including building bridges for animals over highways). They have also become much more open to feedback from the General Public. One of the Lobbying Groups that I support is SUWA, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, which has a handy form to give the BLM your two cents worth. Please use it.