From Streetcars To Spaceships

So I see that Whole Foods is even more distasteful than I had thought.

The CEO has again been spewing his pseudo-libertarian trash again. This time in opposition to the Obama health plan. Guy's awfully full of opinions. Shame that his judgment matters. Seems to me that it's up to us to minimize the power of that judgment.

I have found Whole Foods viscerally distasteful from the first time I set foot in one. Even aside from their "recent" move to stock more junk food, they were always heavy on melamine fixtures when they could have used wood or otherwise hired local craftspeople, they have always have a broader selection of disposable plates and otherwise consumption society oriented self-indulgences than even stores like Food Emporium that made no such claims to social responsibility, and, as we all know, they always had a vibe of supreme entitled contempt for the barriers that their prices create. While others moved to light pipes and skylights and explored LED fixtures, they "championed" compact fluorescent, both as used in their stores and for sale, that they of all people had the resources to understand were an ecological and social disaster waiting to happen. This doesn't even begin to get into local issues like their predatory approach to our regional Pacific Northwest markets. Like Walmart and Exxon and Microsoft, they "justify" their attacks as "only fair" and "just business". Well, to hell with them.

As far as I'm concerned they've never been any more than a yuppie palace for the entitled to do no better than protect themselves from perceived risks to their personal health while turning their backs on the great majority of the population who they were quite pleased to see kept on the other side of those gleaming doors.

I'm not going to rant against Whole Foods at great length. Plenty of others have. I have avoided them this whole time and have made no secret of it. And, no doubt, at some point I will choose by circumstance to buy something there due to time pressures or avoiding arguments with others.

Or maybe not. I've never yet bought so much as a pair of socks at Walmart. I have endured considerable discomfort and cost to avoid other chains.

So yeah, in theory, the day may come that I set foot on one of their plastic simulations of a responsible store again. But not willingly.

I call anathema on them. I wish upon them bankruptcy and dissolution and humiliation.

And first, and foremost, the latest action by their senior decision maker reminds me once again that we must remember to stick to the simple things we speak of. Grow food yourself. Help others to do the same. Buy unprepared foods and prepare them yourself; then share that food with friends. Buy local. Cut your consumption. Barter. Take seriously the task of structuring your life to become one in which the temptation to do business with these creatures is minimal.

Get an energy-efficient standing freezer if you have the room and buy fresh-frozen local foods in bulk. Instead of buying prepared foods from the big chains get things like locally made prepared foods. Personally, I've had a rough few weeks and it would have been a lot harder without things like locally made frozen steam buns, pelmeni, and so on. My steamer and I are great friends. And my wallet appreciates the relationship.

Do not waste your energies in open conflict with these creatures if you can possibly avoid it. Just withdraw and help us build healthy lives in which they have no part.

In. Which. They. Have. No. Part.

Don't buy from them, recommend them, or, if you possibly can, work for them. Don't "compromise".

Just walk away.

-Rustin

Bush is out. Fascism is more of a risk than ever.

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.
- Benito Mussolini

Personally, I have found the overuse of the term "fascism" in my lifetime reprehensible. It is not "fascism" when your teacher won't let you get out early to see your friends. It isn't fascism when Walmart stops carrying some music label. Not every act of potentially capricious authority is fascism.

But some things are. And, as folks tend to forget, fascism has always been built from the ground up as partnerships between public idealogues, authoritarian movements, and corporations who have used those movements to protect and maximize their profits in return for funding and legitimizing the otherwise very unestablishment face of the movement.

In other words, whether we're talking Germany, Italy, Ethiopia, or the Klan, frankly, fascism has always had roots in the kind of people we these days call trailer trash. This has made for a very useful dynamic in the eyes of the monsters who have served as fascism's architects. The low-class, usually unemployed thugs of bottom-of-society movements have made very useful shock troops to undermine groups like farm worker unions that threaten the profits of corporations. And the quiet but increasingly public support of those corporations has provided material resources and a much-needed veneer of respectability to the otherwise socially rejected masses of those authoritarian movements. All while the least honorable among the media take their funding from the corporations while inflaming the conflict and then reaping the increased revenues from getting to feature the very violence and hatred that they helped build in the first place.

Any of this sound like what we're seeing now with the "birthers", the "teabaggers", the health insurance industry/Big Pharma, and FOX?

If you still have any doubts, I suggest that you read this piece on the recent appearance of activities in America, like the disruption of our ongoing town halls, that have always in the past been leading and reliable indicators that a country would soon be suffering a fascist regime.

I thnk that the article actually, in some ways, understates the problem. I have said from 2002 on that the TSA was designed from the get-go as a training ground and then reserve of brownshirts. Minimally-screened, recruited largely from the unemployed and underemployed, given arbitrary and intrusive powers "justified" by a fear-based logic that was made both sacrilege and dangerous to question, they have continued, with an expanding mandate, almost no supervision, and minimal training in jobs that get them used to treating the public as hostile adversaries to be controlled, questioned, and kept within ill-defined and non-negotiable limits.

Every day that somebody holds a TSA job they are further conditioned to make a trustworthy goon who will follow the unexplained and possibly counterintuitive orders of The People In Charge. They are already building adversarial dynamics with, well, real cops. The cops find them contemptable. Undertrained, puffed up, poor, and posturing. The TSA employees find the cops arrogant, uncooperative, questioning of the limits of their mandate and jurisdiction. If push comes to shove, TSA staffers will have been hardened by years of public displeasure and frustration. Trained to demand unquestioning obedience from the public, where even a joke about their techniques or concerns are considered grounds for arrest and detention.

Make no mistake. The "birthers" and their ilk are dangerous. A clear and present danger to our democracy and basic rights and principles. But if we're to look at this honestly, we need to stay vigilant about the armed, staffed, equipped army of fascism-ready bully-boys who walk our streets and control our rights of way right this very minute.

This is NOT a drill.

Urban Agriculture: what exactly ARE our options?

There has been a steady increase in buzz in recent years about urban agriculture. While cities like Havana and Manila have been seeing comprehensive implementation of this for years now and while projects like Growing Power in Milwaukee and Chicago have been pioneering techniques, here in the U.S. we really don't have even much of a sense of just how much land in a given city would actually be suited to this or even how to make that determination.

Well, here in Portland, there has been a wonderful project called Diggable Cities that has taken on just that. I was lucky enough to have dinner tonight with Kevin Balmer, one of the authors of this remarkably complex and throrough study so now I'm posting the link here.

Hopefully this will serve as a model for such projects in other cities. Maybe even interwoven with the kind of city reinvention that Flint, Michigan is now embarking on and others may take on soon.

It makes it easier to get up in the morning knowing that this kind of work is going on.

-Rustin

OK, I admit it, Burn Notice did something very cool.

A friend of mine just posted a video from San Diego ComicCon. The team that does Burn Notice did a special series of "advice from a spy" shorts on, yes, optimizing your time at ComicCon. How to deal with having two panels you want to see scheduled for the same timeslot. How to maximize your take of swag. And so on. Jeffrey Donovan did a great job at keeping a straight face while reading out of a script that was full-on comics nerd in both goals and jargon.

Sadly, I'm not posting the youTube link since those things get takedowns in hours or less.

Lots of media companies spend money on cons these days. Plenty even send their stars for panels. And with Bruce Campbell in the cast they must have had some lead on what this all is like. But even so, major points for style, guys. Money is nice. Stars are nice. But actually tying up your production staff to make something directed not at your television audience but just at our geeky hearts.

Shiny.

-Rustin

Promotion - when it goes wrong it's hard to see the point.

Over a year ago I created a group on facebook called Portland Publishing & Printing that was supposed to help people in the area connect. I meet many people in the area who say that they would love to have more local connections to find out about suppliers, to meet for drinks, to maybe do things like share orders for supplies that are only available by the caseload, and so on.

It's been, I say again, over a year. I have been talking this up to people at paper supply stores, to small presses, to not such small presses, to zinesters, to locally owned copy shops that say that they want to reach zinesters, and pretty much to anybody else who seems even vaguely relevant who is willing to stand still long enough for me to get my spiel in.

All of this has added up to 25 members and one post by somebody other than me.

So a few weeks ago I figured that the Portland Zine Symposium would be a perfect place to finally get this thing up and running. Designed a little flyer that, frankly, I think was pretty cool and printed up about sixty of them in full color on heavy, funky paper stock (mostly on a cover weight parchment that I thought would suit the context), handed most of them out to tablers, left a few out on the free table, and brought a few for my PZS talk on Never Go To Kinkos Again.

Also, before the symposium started, I sent a flurry of messages by email, facebook, and phone, asking (sometimes nearly begging) people to join or at least post something on the group board. This didn't seem like much of a stretch since, on top of everything else, all of these folks have new zines or something like that that they're supposedly trying to promote right about now.

So here we are. And all of this has accomplished . . .

(wait for it)

Two new members and no posts.

I know that sometimes these things take a while to show results. I've already heard about people saying that they've learned things just from checking out the member list. But c'mon.

I'm sorry, but some days I really do wonder why i get out of bed at all.

Put half a pound of equipment in orbit for $8,000.

Seriously. The PongSat and the CubeSat have been succeeded (joined?) by the TubeSat. You can find the Slashdot thred here. What better proof do we need that the cost to orbit of all kinds of goods is going to way down? At the very least, the kind of expertise that comes from this many iterations will be wonderful and will help more people make a living and build credentials in helping get humans really living out past the earth's surface. Which, among other things, makes more obviously viable a nobody-owns-it successor to the internet, with groups of techies just shooting up an open-protocol sat or three whenever they get some cash put together. Tell that to the big telcos and government bluestockings.

Ya know, there's just no way that anybody could have anticipated a thing like this.

Oh, yeah. Right. I did. Over ten years ago.

To all of you MBA-types, techies, and cocktail party sages who took considerable and condescending glee in "explaining" to me that I "just didn't understand how the real world works", allow me to take this chance to say, once again, fuck you.

-Rustin

There used to be corporations I was proud to be connected to.

I was on the phone earlier with my friend Sara talking about all the trouble she's having finding furniture. Hitting the thrift stores or customizing something or any of the other ways that most people I know can route around typical corporate options just aren't viable for her anymore. She's got cerebral palsy, really does work absolutely as many hours as her body allows just to pay the bills, and lives in London, Ontario. So for her the internet, in reality, and a few carefully budgeted trips to stores are the ballgame.

And I was surprised at how long the list in my head was of places that, ten or fifteen years ago, I wouldn't really have had a problem suggesting. I think that maybe we've lost track of how many of the corporations we've grown used to loathing used to be, by and large, admirable. They used to be entities that most people I knew were proud to support and be connected to. Let's go over some of that list. I think that it's worth bringing back some concrete examples because I think that we've all been deafened a bit by our own drumbeat of more recent and justified conflict.

Remember the days when Banana Republic was a catalog with innovative hand-done drawings and detailed descriptions? One that sold clothing actually meant for traveling in the developing world? I do. We had gotten their catalog for years already but the one time I ordered from it was when I was preparing for a trip to Panama and Costa Rica in, iirc, '85 and my mother chose them on the advice of my father and friends of both of them who lived in places like rainforest research stations regularly and had found that this little catalog on rough-finished paper was a great source for when you needed The Good Stuff.

Remember when many Pier 1 employees could go on for half an hour without a break about the crafts coops in countries like Honduras who they partnered with to make many of the goods in their stores? I furnished my first places in Portland, back in '84 to '87 largely with items I was proud to buy from them. I bought more for my place in Astoria in the early nineties and, again, was proud to do it.

Remember when Lands' End had detailed essays on their production techniques in their catalog and had everything made in America? When the Conran's store was a reliable source of excellent design? When J.Crew founded their product line on the dual principles of classic clothes that wouldn't change season to season and of using all-natural materials in simple, timeless ways?

The list goes on and on and on. It really didn't used to be this bad. Marshall-Fields working to rebuild their flagship store and bring out respectful reissues of turn of the century fabrics and pottery. Crabtree & Evelyn working with glassmakers and woodworkers to make authentic, old-fashioned displays. Barnes & Noble being a book business institution that ran the best used textbook store in New York City. And so on.

Many of the eighties companies who developed the biggest and fastest reputations as admirable and responsible were never really all that great. Let's face it, Snapple always sold thinly disguised sugar water and Mrs. Fields was always a franchise system with a pretty face and a good marketing campaign. Jennifer Convertibles was racking up fraud complaints from the year they opened their doors. And plenty of famous corporations were founded with a fundamental structure built around, I'm sorry, I don't see a lot of ambiguity here, evil. General Motors and General Electric were built to win through undermining, bullying, and fraud. Microsoft was rotten from, at best, 1983 on.

These kinds of companies were architected in ways that, if our laws were fairly applied, would subject them to comprehensive dissolution, not just through antitrust laws but through the RICO statutes. [See my note below on RICO.] They were created as corrupt enterprises whose evil was written into their compensation structures, product lines, subcontractor relationships, and everything else. They are stained throughout with the taint of their original sin. And like the artifacts of J. Edgar Hoover's rapacity and prejudice that came up in the hearings about intelligence failures connected to 9/11, these things don't just drift away like mist when the founders are gone.

But I don't think that all of the companies we've grown used to fighting grew out of such parasitic ways. And, frankly, I was there for more of this than probably ninety-nine point nine percent of people alive, so I've got some small degree of confidence in my conclusions. And in those days, as those places were, I was, by and large, proud to be there. When my friend Eliza hooked me up with a job at Citibank, I was proud to get it, proud to be good at it, and proud that two years after I left they were still calling me asking me to come back. And that, by the standards of the time, was about as evil as a corporation could get. Just ask any government still trying to pay off their Citibank debt.

I'm not going to go down my long list of marquee corporations I was inside of but frankly, it's a damn long list and none of it was working at the margins. I met and worked with quite a few of the people who made these companies what they were and I do not believe that most of them were evil. Short-sighted? Yes. Self-interested? Certainly. Dismissive of approaches outside of their authority-approved playbooks? Undoubtedly. And, frankly, most of them were never terribly comfortable with having me there precisely because a lot of my job was to deal with the cracks and flaws their approaches created so I got to see a lot of how they solved problems and interacted with each other. After all, I was the guy who didn't need to play nice.

But my point is that they weren't all the same. It is wrong to treat all that they did and who they were and are as interchangeable. Make no mistake, I also dealt with Wall Streeters and Andersen Consulting staffers and various others who, if it were up to me, would be tied to posts to be slowly beaten to death by Louisiana housing project residents. And if you think that I'm not writing literally, you don't know me very well.

But I think that, as we think about what our society is and what we want to work to turn it into, it is dangerously misleading to consider Bernie Ebbers as the same as Bernie Madoff. It is dangerously misleading to conflate Whole Foods and ConAgra. They are not the same. And to sweep the broad brush of CORPORATE EVIL over it all and dismiss it all in one satisfying but stupid gesture is the kind of waste we simply can't afford.

We just ain't that rich.

I find most of the Obama Administration's stimulus spending decisions something between disappointing and repellent. I find his corporate bailouts, by and large, disgusting and grotesquely wasteful. By no means am I suggesting that we should forgive and forget.

But we should be ready and willing to do three things.

- Firstly, concede that not every organization big enough to have an ad campaign should be burned at the stake.

- Secondly, to look into these companies for things worth adopting. Did you know that McDonalds was heavy and early into efficiently and cleanly converting used oil into biofuels? They were and are.

- And thirdly, it is past time that we started paying attention to what went wrong in a way that goes beyond "wow, they suck" or movies that tell it all like horror flicks. It is more than past time that we looked at *how* they got corrupted. We need more people to talk to the executives at places like Lands' End and articulate the mechanics of why they gave up on making anything in this country and what it would take to get them to come back. We need to be looking at employee-owned companies like Bi-Mart and WinCo and engaging them. Seeing what makes them work and how. Encouraging them to cut down on the agribusiness ties and help them figure out how to make those transitions profitably. Looking into "activist" organizations that work (like Portland's own Red & Black Cafe and Freegeek, like Milwaukee and Chicago's Growing Power) and documenting in ways that the average person can understand and will find interesting what exactly is involved in running a business that isn't exploitative, that is scalable. In particular to find ways to do this without either selling stuff that's so expensive that only rich people can buy it (Real Goods and Smith & Hawken, I'm looking at you) or are occasional luxury purchases where customers have to compromise some other part of leading healthy lives to buy their goods (Ben & Jerry's, this spot is yours). Or, for that matter, is subsidized by some kind of unending and usually downplayed stream of donations.

We also, for that matter, need a hell of a lot more readable, detailed, carefully researched work on the cultures and practical power dynamics of our business schools. We've done plenty of complaining about all the asshole MBAs and the damage they do but what exactly does that mean, and what can we do about not just countering their creations but bringing more sunlight into places like the University of Chicago and the Ivies? Who do they choose? How much debt do those graduates come out with? How does that debt get paid off? Where do they end up ten years later? Twenty? Fifty? What are their conclusions about what their impact was once they're retired and can afford to be a little more open? How does this contrast wiht the conclusions of those who work with them?

It's very easy to complain. It's very easy to bemoan how terrible all those evil corporations are and how they own everything and there's nothing to do but blow it all up and start over. But it's bullshit. Not once in all of human history has that worked. The closest we've seen to a "fresh start" was the Khmer Rouge and if you think that's a model you admire then fuck you, may you die soon and you have no place in this conversation. For the rest of us it's time to not only grow up and accept a certain degree of compromise, of responsibility for what will happen now, it's time to take fields like industrial organization, the very study of how groups work and how organizations become what they do, and make them our own.

Let's be honest here. We now have plenty of people making home-brew biodiesel setups. You REALLY want to change the world? Take a couple of YEARS (yes, I said "years") and study up on some famous organization in a field you care about. Really study up, Don't just read Fast Food Nation. Talk to employees. Read newspaper articles for their hometown in the years when they were starting up. And really think about WHY did they do the things that they did? What were they thinking? What did it cost them to not do something else? What do we know they rejected? Don't spout that wussy bullshit "Oh, they're just like that." That's for cowards and the intellectually feeble. People have real world reasons for their decisions and many of them, news flash, aren't just about short term material gain. They're about the interpersonal dynamics between the decisionmakers. They're about looking good to outsiders. They're about emotional comfort. They're about all sorts of things and until we know them well and address them effectively they won't ever really change. You think that making everything you dislike illegal will "fix things"? Then you understand neither the dynamics of law enforcement (who exactly will pay for all those cops, what will keep them from corruption, and how will they detect all these things, just for starters?) nor the basics of human nature. (Shall we discuss the effectiveness of drug laws for a start?)

And then, when you know that organization the way that Green Bay residents know the Packers, start to talk about it. Partner with good writers. Become a good writer. Put stuff on YouTube. Do zines and poems and songs and bloody frackin' puppet shows if that's what it takes to get your conclusions into the heads of people who are looking to make things better.

We don't need more whiny, "well-meaning" children wating for the New Age to dawn. We need workers willing to take on the job, to mine deep into dark, lonely, and scary tunnels, and emerge with nuggets of insight and knowledge.

If we're going to build a world in which the scammers and bullies don't keep coming out on top, then the very bones and muscles and organs of our society need to be changed. I don't know how that should be done and neither do you. We need to get serious about why things keep going the way that they do and what, in the face of real world human nature, we need to create to make organizations and laws and citizen dynamics that act not just as antibodies to such scum, but keep them from having such advantages in the first place.

I'm doing my part. Will you?

-Rustin

A note on RICO - I'll bet that many of you read that and thought, yeah, there Rustin goes again, exaggerating just when it seemed like he was making a good point. But, you see, RICO isn't just supposed to be about locking up guys with Italian names for violent crimes. It's about the concept of a PATTERN OF BEHAVIOR, about organizations where criminal acts, including intimidation, blackmail, and sabotage, are  intrinsic to how the organization is run. After all, if you buy cement from a mafia-run cement company, they do have trucks. they do deliver cement. It's that the way they run is fundamentally interwoven with the illegal stuff that makes it actionable.

Let's think about that list again. Intimidation. Blackmail.  Sabotage. Hmm. You mean like what General Motors, Firestone, and Standard Oil did to the streetcar companies? Or what GM did to dealers who refused to use GMAC? Or the intimidation Microsoft did to Compaq when they tried to sell PCs without Windows? These are criminal enterprises. Don't let anybody tell you different.

Think I'm wrong about RICO? Go ahead, read up on it. This page isn't going anywhere. You can start here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrupt_Organizations_Act

And when you're done and have given it all some thought, look again at companies like Archer-Daniels-Midland. When they got busted for collusion, wasn't that evidence of a pattern of behavior? When Starbucks opens a location run below cost right across from a successful and loved local coffeehouse and, as soon as the local goes bankrupt, cuts back the hours or stops most of their specials or simply closes up, isn't that a pattern of behavior? Aren't those businesses whose model is now implictly built around sabotage and fraud and collusion engaging in racketeering?

'Cause it sure looks that way to me.

Yes, there is a theme here.

In case the previous few blog posts haven't made it entirely obvious, I'm on a real Kill All The Asphalt kick right now. From the weather's way of making it all even more repellant to the news about yet more assumptions that our society should allow itself to be held hostage yet again to all of the space-hogging of so many private cars, I'm just sick of it all. In the gaps between working on production issues and setting up a real marketing/sales effort, I'm finding myself with a relentless vendetta against all those endless square miles of parking lots and highways and "parks" of cement and sterile, anti-ecosystem, flat, pathologically fertilizer-dependent lawns.

If it were up to me we would have a hundred thousand well-paid workfare participants out there with drills and shovels ripping the whole damn thing up once and for all RIGHT NOW.

How cheaply and how quickly can an abandoned lot be made into a park?

I've been thinking about this for years and puttering away at it now and again in the real world. If you have access to an asphalt-covered lot, especially one that you don't actually have rights to, how much could you do and how cheaply to make it beautiful? I think that there are some non-obvious answers, especially if you have access to a vehicle and a couple of friends. Since moving next to an abandoned area of over five square blocks I've been doing some slowly more ambitious jiggerings of the dynamic and maybe one day I'll write about that here but for now let's consider one thought experiment.

Let's say you've got access to a double-sized lot that's covered with parking spaces and (pretty much) ignored by the owner. We'll assume a temperate climate for now. We'll assume that the temperature never goes below 45 degrees Farenheit in the time that you're working.

So let's say that in one day you go with friends and pick up a few hundred used bricks somewhere. Perhaps you found them on freecycle. This is your starting gun since it can take months to get that cheap load of bricks. That night or soon thereafter, you all go to Home Despot and buy 80 cinder blocks and various other supplies.

You bring them all to your chosen lot.

There you mix some concrete. While one person does that at least one other is cleaning up garbage. If you're being really slick, you can take any paper or otherwise biodegradable garbage and shred it to use as filler along with the soil in your project.

You pour a foot and a half wide line of concrete about an inch tall in a wide circle about 11 feet in diameter.

Along the inner line of this circle you put the cinder blocks so they'll be held to the asphalt by the hardened concrete. Around four inches outside that circle of cinder blocks you put a ring of bricks. Inside the ring of cinder blocks you fasten about five or six granite "Belgian blocks" with more dabs of concrete.

Five of six cinder blocks are "spot welded" to the asphalt with dabs of concrete, in other "random" locations in the lot. Each of these cinder blocks is bordered by one to three Belgian blocks placed a couple inches away but aligned with the cinder block so as to create protected nooks and crannies between the cinder block and the stone for plants to grow in.

In each corner of the lot you use the remaining cinder blocks and concrete to create one brick high boundary walls about a foot and a half from the actual lot line. Be extra sure that you clear any garbage from right around there since that low wall is going to attract trash like birds to breadcrumbs.

Then everybody goes home and leaves the concrete to cure.

The next time you can all get together you all go back and pour about an inch of rough gravel or sand into each cinder block, into the space between the cinder blocks and bricks, and for about a foot outside the bricks and inside the cinder blocks. Then onto patches on all the cinder blocks you spray "moss smoothies".

Now pour soil over the whole shebang. Every brick and cinder block, until they're barely visible. This will settle quite a bit.

Into this loose soil you shove hundreds of various beans obtained by the simple expedient of buying bags of beans in the food section at the supermarket. Each bean should be about two inches down and you should end up with about ten various beans per square foot. Why two inches? Isn't that deeper than gardening books suggest? Yep. These plants are going to be living in a tough environment and it's better for them to have protected roots and be harder to pull out than to grow "just right" like some Martha Stewart fancy project.

Into this soil you also put hundreds of drought-resistant "plugs" of sedum, alyssum, and other very tough plants that propagate themselves and can stand up to plenty of abuse. You can get flats of these plants really cheap, especially if you're willing to take "imperfect" ones, at any nursery.

Over ALL of this, you then spread a thin layer of fine gravel. Fine enough to be the type used in fish tanks. This will allow things to "rest up a bit" and get settled and keep soil from blowing away or be forced to the side too much by things like dog pee.

Before leaving that day, water this all plenty. Just be sure not to knock the soil and such too much into chaos while you water it.

- • - 

Think of what this can all look like within a month. Elegant, welcoming, and with the beginnnings of a local ecosystem. Among other things, some kind of plants or other will "volunteer" and start growing there without your having had to put them there. All those bean vines will be encouraging the soil to stay healthy and tying it all together, literally.

And now that the basics are in place anybody can even, if the mood strikes them, drop by any random day with a bag of soil and just pour it onto the ground wherever on the lot seems cool and just keep making the whole place closer to being an urban wilderness. It's a hell of a lot easier to spend five bucks whenever you feel like it and know that you'll add stuff to a place that's already alive than to have the weight of trying to make something live in a dead space. Same thing goes for now depaving some little five foot by five foot area on the lot now that you know it'll be part of a living environment, no matter how much or how little you have time to do.

The last step, just to add the final touch to bring people in, is to occasionally scatter inexpensive pretty things around the space. On the lots near me I scatter handfuls of semi-precious stones like cornelian, hematite, and clear quartz. Bought in bulk from the right stores, they're only about eight dollars a pound. Shells work well, too. Just be sure to not put them all out on one day or in one place or somebody will go out and just take them all. But if a few are scattered here and there you'll be amazed at the sense of magic it gives somebody to find something like a tiger's eye lurking under a bean vine.

Now let's itemize out our shopping list to see just how much this would all cost. I need to get to bed so I'll come back later and fill in the prices.
80 cinder blocks ($1.40 x 80) $120
200 bricks (used)
40 Belgian blocks ($2.60 x 40) $104
6 bags of cement
6 bags of sand for concrete
3 landscaper's flats of mixed plugs (3 x $50) $150
10 bags of beans ($1.20 X 10) $12
20 bags of soil ($2.30 x 20) $46
30 bags of rough gravel or sand
5 bags of fine gravel
semi-precious stones $40
transport costs $100
random tools,etc. $60

Anybody care to tell me that this will cost more than a large party?

There are dozens of variations on this. Not to mention less permanently attached means like this. 

In parking lots, more of the right trellises might be a very good idea.

Okay, so let's see if I'm understanding this correctly.

1.) Drivers tend to park under vegetation if they're given the chance. Shade is good for both keeping the temperature of the car down and for the finish. Bird crap sucks but most folks think that it's worth the risk.

2.) Parking lots are notorious sources of stormwater runoff. Really toxic runoff, at that. They also concentrate pollution by putting all those starting, stopping, and idling vehicles in one place.

3.) All that bare space and all those vehicles make parking lots, especially big ones, prime offenders in the heat island effect.

4.) A lot of species, most notably small animals like squirrels and some birds, will cross a small gap just fine. Put ten feet of asphalt between two vegetated areas and everything from racoons to frogs will make the leap. But put a large parking lot in place, a vast, unbroken vista of bare space several hundred feet across, and many species won't cross. General rule - the larger the unbroken area without living things, the more you isolate the species on both sides. Possibly with an impact reaching for miles, especially at breeding times.

5.) Vegetation acts as a windbreak.

6.) People just plain old like vegetation. It's purty and makes people feel good.

So, all of these would tend to take us somewhere that's pretty much a no-brainer. It takes no great insight to conclude that planted areas are healthier than bare cement, asphalt, or even pavers. The interesting question becomes, how can we add vegetation without significantly reducing available space for vehicles and at a low cost?

Seems to me that one good answer would be to mount raised vertical trellises between parking spots, trellises that start about eight feet above the ground (so as to not impede visibility) and, possibly, with some arched over occasional spots, creating a "skin" of vegetation that is low cost to install and low-maintenence once it's up and running.

A few decisions would be key to pulling this off effectively. Most of these will be familiar to folks who know about projects that I've done and related deocuments I've created.

Instead of starting out with transplanting relatively mature plants, accept the uncomfortable approach of using multiple small starts and allowing them a few years to establish. To buy time in terms of preventing a bare appearance in early years and display the utility of the system, also place quick-growing, low maintenence annuals like morning glories in useful spots. And then (I suspect that a lot of you will hate this) leave the dead, brown remnants of the ivy behind at the end of every growing season to help build the mass of vegetation and speed the creation of a suspended ecosystem up there.

Plants are started in small (about 5 inches across) containers, possibly blow-molded plastic, into which are put starts that have been grown in plain old jumbo styrofoam cups chosen to just fit in the planters. These are dropped in just as is, turning the styrofoam into permanent thermal insulation and a bit of a way to stretch the room for roots at nominal weight and cost. If funding allows, eventually these plants can be transplanted into larger containers but even then the styrofoam can be left pretty much as is, since roots will tend to go right through it anyway.

These containers are mounted about ten feet up.

Trellises are built of gridwall that has been heavily painted with waterproof paint like Rustoleum (as in four or five coats on top of two or three coats of primer) and ideally purchased at surplus. Frames are made of plumbing pipe, in some places bent with a standard pipe bender into arches and into goose necks for light fixtures and then, again, painted heavily with waterproof paint. These pipes are placed into holes that are about five inches in diameter larger than the pipe and about four feet deep in the asphalt and whatever subsurface is below it. Concrete is then poured into each hole and the pipe is just dropped in and supported with a temporary frame until the concrete dries.  We're going for low-cost, low-skill, low complexity. Not to mention that since most of this is plain old steel and concrete, it's comparatively non-toxic and recyclable/reusable if need be.

Ideally this time is also taken to reduce the number of those awful sodium lights that so ugly up our commercial spaces, replacing them with smaller, evenly distributed LED fixtures mounted to the same frames as the trellises and powered by photovoltaics, small wind turbines, or other power generated right there at that facility.

I know that none of this exactly sounds like rocket science but I've never seen it done yet and it seems to me like a viable, low-cost, low-risk way to ameliorate a lot of what is worst about those commercial parking lots that so demoralize so many of us. There are hundreds of possible variations on this. In a perfect world, I would love to team up a few classes of industrial design students with a few classes of landscape architecture students and advised by physical plant managers of a few local malls, hospitals, etc.

But for now, I ask that you just take a few minutes and visualize this as described here. Just a typical commercial parking lot with one of these trellises for every twenty parking spaces, ideally staggered a bit as seen from above. Could the cost be gotten down to two hundred bucks per trellis, installed? I suspect that it could. Could the marginal cost to site maintenance be gotten down to fifteen minutes per month per trellis? I suspect so and that lot of it would come down to providing the crew with the right rolling ladders and the right battery-powered tools. Is there, perhaps a better idea that you would prefer to see done?

Think about it.

Thanks,

-Rustin