Jill Rants and Raves

Albany Bulb Photos

http://jillposener.blogs.com/photos/albany_bulb/

This is an album I put together hurriedly today - it gives a small sampling of the thousands of images I have of this place. But it only represents the photos I've taken since I gave in to digital (now of course I realise I might have had a far more glittering career had digital photography been available to me 30 years ago...)

But it'll take me a lot longer to scan and upload some of the earlier photos on negative and slide film.

But I was thinking today how much of my life over the last ten years has been informed by both the mundane and the special experiences this land has brought into my life. The wild dog Willa who raced through the bushes to bite me squarely on the butt when I lifted her pups out of the immaculate den she had made for them in the deepest undergrowth on the Bulb, the hundreds of cats and dogs whom I helped re-home after the eviction on the homeless encampment in 1999 - 2000, some of whom still curl up on my bed every night, the people I met during that time - Granma Linda Dunnigan, Animal and Sarah, Jimbo the poet, Rabbit whose guided tour of the landfill is immortalised in the movie 'Bum's Paradise', ex Albany Police Chief Greg Bone who frankly didn't like the job it was incumbent on him to carry out, Osha Neumann, one of my heroes, an artist and attorney whose gifts could have tempted him towards a thriving law practice but whose philosophy brought him clients who could never pay him except in their gratitude, JP who lived and died on the landfill. Is it the art, which was deemed 'unsuitable' for a 'family park' because of it's irreverence and crude, carnal, and gory depictions in wild imaginative scenes of lust and horror, or the artists themselves who came every Saturday with their own kids and dogs and attracted an ever growing fan club. Is it the sense of discovery which hearkened back to my childhood when I wanted so badly to be an archaeologist, or the intense pleasure I get at seeing 'nature' reclaim what we have taken from her, the plant, bird and animal life overtaking the ugliness of a man made dump.

Was it that it reminded me of squatting Victorian cottages in London in the 70's while 'progressives' including the Labour Party were pushing for high density housing, and high rises over low scale communities. Is it that I was reminded of the occupied army base in Copenhagen, or of the many other moments where the unregulated and the unsanctioned momentarily held sway. Is it that in a world of hypocrisy and cant, of political machinations and ever increasing societal control, I among many others, could pretend, as we ambled along an unkempt trail a mile into the Bay, that we were still living free.

It is all of the above and much more.

the albany bulb RIP

Deb from Minnesota, who reads my blog (thank you Deb!) and often comments, noted that my description of what is happening at the Albany section of the much hyped Eastshore State Park seems so at odds with the official version. Now there's a shock. It's almost impossible to describe what the old Albany Landfill (aka The Bulb) feels like, unless you have been there - but when you have, and especially when you have allowed yourself to go there with one of the many self appointed 'tour-guides', the question you will ask is 'Why don't they just leave it alone?".

It's absolutely true that were it not for the preservationists of the 60,s, 70's and 80's - early visionaries in this area who wanted to slow or stop the rampant commercial and business park development along the Bay shoreline - this expanse of former landfill would already be lost as open space. I'm not arguing that.

The filling and polluting of the Bay is one of the terrible consequences of the rush to build postwar suburbia. And the same profiteering now fuels the development of tract housing and gated communities on what used to be farmland and open space less than a generation ago, so that even a simple task like shopping for bread and milk requires you drive your massive SUV to a store in a developed mall a few miles away.

But the good intentions of those activists have become the proscriptive doctrines of those who build and run parks. The big lie is that the park system will give greater access to more of the 'stakeholders'. These days, a Bay Area politician without a 'endorsed by the Sierra Club' stamp on their election door hanger means virtual banishment from the corridors of power. But the reality is that doctrinaire environmentalists have the politicians by the throat and support in the next election depends upon their buying into the creation of so called 'natural habitats' and 'resource protection areas' where humans are shut out and made into observers of nature instead of participants.

This is the backdrop to what has happened with the Eastshore State Park.

But it is at the Albany piece that an almost epic battle has been waged. And while I could try (and probably fail) to describe the evolution of the battle and as importantly the battleground, I'm just going to say that the place has become a jewel - simply by being ignored by the authorities. For years, it was allowed essentially to self regulate, plants grew without being tended, animals and birds arrived, reptiles and rodents emerged, rose bushes bloomed hidden between concrete slabs dumped 40 years ago, artists came and left a treasure trove of outsider art, the homeless moved in for over 10 years. It was a dump for chrissakes. Everything that grew and breathed there came because it could, because it bubbled organically into a cauldron of life and eruptions of leaves and berries and trees.

The remnants of the dumped concrete and rebar plunges from the earth in sculpture of its' own making. As my friend Osha Neumann (one of the artists and one of the few civil rights attorneys to represent the homeless when they tried to resist eviction) says, "It is a place of wild imagination".

And now, they have started the process of destroying that imagination, to replace it with something that can be controlled, contained and coerced into compliance with a 'park plan'.

It is breaking my heart. As much as any love affair gone wrong. And in a few years all that will left of this imagination will be a few 'interpretive' signs. I will not soon get over this heartache. I once said to a good friend that when the Landfill is taken by the forces of conformity, I would leave this area. Native plants (what exactly is native to a landfill) are meant to replace the palms, the roses, the vines, the fruit trees and the lone eucalypt on the Bulb, the art has long been deemed 'unsuitable for a family park' and the dogs - like the art - will be leashed, forever.

This photo taken today:

All photos by Jill Posener © All Rights Reserved

f'OWL play

Look , I don't hate burrowing owls. I like 'em. I love birds of all kinds, and owls have a special place in my heart because as a small child I found a young owl inside a paper bag stashed into a garbage can in Kuala Lumpur. Does that sound like a far fetched story? Like so many in my strange and wonderful life, it is 100% true. My brother and I carried the owl home and my Mum drove us to a wildlife centre where they were enthralled at our find. I was pretty in love with the owl till I saw them feed live mice to it. When I met, much later, an animal rescuer called Ronnie who had liberated hundreds of mice from a vile research lab in England, I wondered whether he had released them in fields (where presumably they became prey for, among other things, owls) before he was arrested. I didn't ask. Ronnie served 7 years in jail for the act of placing animal life above the corporate greed and scientific stupidity of human beings.

So, don't accuse me of not caring about the wild, of not being sensitive enough to 'habitat preservation', or 'resource protection' or whatever fancy phrase some khaki pants and button down shirt 'park planner' wants to come up with.

The story involves the worst kind of political back room wrangling, park planning decisions, state parks vs local people, soccer mom playing field advocates, corporate boardrooms and environmentalist dealmakers and a population who seems to have come to believe that if the Sierra Club says 'jump' all we do is say 'which cliff shall we go off?'

The end result is that as part of the 'creation' of the Eastshore State Park, which made a homogenised whole of a set of unique and unusual ecological, cultural and functional open spaces, the meadow at the old Albany Landfill was designated as a burrowing owl habitat. Not that there ever was a burrowing owl there; not that the owl which supposedly lived where now the water guzzling, electricity hungry, environmentally wasteful Tom Bates Regional Sports Complex sits was ever actually seen; not that there has ever been (according to a naturalist employed by the parks system) a successful burrowing owl transplant in this area - but never mind reality and truth in political machinations - the fencing and the earth moving machines tell the story.

"You stupid people of this area" (the khaki 'Dockers' might say) "who thought that the vibrant plant and animal life, co-existing as it did with human and canine activity, must have been nuts to think that we could just let this organic urban wildness continue. Where would we put all of our chain link fence if not around your park? What would we do with all of the money we seem to have burning holes in our pockets? Why would we do a better job of maintaining our current parks if we can 'build' a new one, especially if it brings us Sierra Club support next time we want to fleece the voters for new bond money? Why let it just be when we can screw it up?"

The Albany Landfill - it's hard to explain what it's like. I have been walking there with my dogs and on my own for almost ten years and almost every day of those years photographing every nook, every cranny. Every day, I discover something new. Maybe one day I'll discover a burrowing owl. Chances are he'll be outside the fence, and if I ask him 'dude, whatcha doing outside the habitat area? Are you crazy?', he'll probably answer 'hey, all the mice left when we moved in and I'm tired of waiting for some animal liberationist to bring food'.

Or he might respond 'The really tasty gophers moved once there were no dogs to tease'.

Or 'hey Jill, you have to do what the environmentalists tell you to do. We don't'. Whoo hoo.

But he'd probably say 'hey I burrowed, Ok? I burrowed, and all I found was some garbage left here by humans in the 50's. You think I wanna live like that? Do you? Would you? Would you?'