Adult male Monarch butterfly (photo by Shawn Kinkade)

Some Californians seem shocked to hear the water people finally say: “Hey folks, rethink that yard! We don’t have enough water for lush lawns.” Why the surprise? California is the only state in the union where rain doesn’t typically come in summer, which (aside from the gold rush) is why they call it the Golden State. Describing the state’s crispy hillsides as “golden” is much more poetic than burned-out brown.

California’s Mediterranean climate zones are perfect places to grow many exotics—almonds, pistachios, olives, citrus fruit, figs, apricots, wine grapes, you name it. Many of these can be grown in the U.S. only here. But lawn? No. Bad idea. It’s always been a bad idea, a complete waste of the West’s precious water.

And scarce Western water is fast becoming more precious—a lesson driven home on a daily basis, with supplies dwindling faster than normal during the current drought.

Fortunately, eliminating water waste is pretty easy—especially when you start looking around outside. Just how much water the average California family consumes monthly for outdoor irrigation and other uses varies considerably, but you can figure it’s anywhere from 25 percent for mild-weather coastal cities like Santa Cruz to 80 percent or more in Palm Springs and the rest of the Coachella Valley.

Worse, when it comes to irrigation abuse, there are superstars. According to a report from Matthew Green of KQED in San Francisco, 15 percent of California households are responsible for 60 percent of landscape water overuse.

Acknowledging upfront, then, that no one is really “average,” about 53 percent of the water used by the average California household is used outdoors.

So go ahead, kill your lawns, or let the summer heat do it. Will you’re waiting for the grass to turn “golden,” start planning new, adventurous, yet highly traditional landscape habitats to take its place.

Planting the right kinds of milkweed plants “feeds” Monarch butterflies, because the caterpillar stage will eat only milkweed. (photo by vladeb)

Everyone a Native Californian

If you can’t be a native yourself, you can at least plant some. No need to paint the dead lawn stubble a deep green, or dump a load of gravel around a few desolate cacti. Native plants are a much better way to seriously save on water while creating a lovely landscape.

Monarch emerging from its milkweed chrysalis (photo by Sid Mosdell)

Drought resistant native California plants have many qualities to recommend them, starting with very low summer water requirements. It’s a natural fact that they evolved here, and are uniquely adapted to thrive under conditions that often doom other contenders. You’ll need to provide drip irrigation for the first few years, until everything is well started, but after that it will be enough to water just once a month or during extended hot spells.

In fact, once established, natives are so low maintenance you can spend weekends year-round doing something other than work in the yard. Natives also need little or no fertilizers or pesticides, lowering the environment’s toxic load.

Because they evolved together native plants support native pollinators, providing them with food and shelter, which ultimately supports both native wildlife and plants. Attracting birds, including nectar-loving hummingbirds, as well as butterflies and other pollinators is another benefit of native plants. You’ll be surprised by the number of animals that will make themselves at home in your yard, including nesting birds. Native bees, moths, and other pollinators also directly support us,boosting food production in gardens, orchards, and fields, now that domestic honeybee populations are in decline due to pesticide overuse, parasites, and disease.

Given how much California real estate we human residents have appropriated, “giving back” habitat for the wild things seems perfectly reasonable. That gift can also provide huge support to wildlife in general, with private native gardens and landscapes serving as a valuable “bridge” between barren urban and natural landscapes.

Many native gardeners, for example, now make a point of planting Asclepias speciosa, showy milkweed, and other regional milkweed species essential for the survival of migrating Monarch butterflies. The hope is that if many people create milkweed “Monarch waystations” in their gardens and on other property, together we can recreate the conditions that once supported migrations of millions and millions of Monarchs. Together we can save this imperiled species.

Circling back to the original point: In supporting nature we also save water, and otherwise support our own survival.

A Cedar Waxwing enjoys toyon berries. (photo by Kevin Cole)

First Create Community

Either way, you’ll need to commit to a period of study and research. Then you’ll need to decide on the type of plant community to create.You can be a purist by planting only natives, or allow them to mingle with established landscape trees and other plantings that are also reasonably drought tolerant. That’s up to you. Both approaches can create stunning drought-resistant landscapes.

A native plant community is a group of native plants that interact with each other and with their environment in ways not greatly altered by modern human activity, as Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources explains this basic ecology concept. Recognizable plant communities (whether all-native or not) to try to emulate in Northern California include central or northern oak woodlands in valley areas such as Bidwell Park, which range up into the foothills; yellow or Ponderosa pine mixed forests just above oak woodlands; valley grasslands, where soils are too shallow to support oaks; and dry chaparral brushland areas characterized by rocky, shallow soils.

A native carpenter bee (many people mistake them for bumblebees) feeds on Western redbud blossoms. (photo by JKehoe Photos)

Make a “planting plan” based on climate conditions where you are, soil type, and drainage. The plants you select need to “create community” together. They should have similar water needs, of course, but you’ll also want to group them in correct “micro-communities.” Shrubs that thrive in woodland or forest understories, for example, need the same filtered or shady light conditions and protection in your garden. The more successfully you imitate each plant’s ideal growing environment, the more successful your garden community will be.

A great place to start educating yourself about native plants and their garden possibilities is the nonprofit California Native Plant Society (CNPS)—support it by joining a local chapter—and its very helpful website. The CNPS native plant database is very useful. As part of its in-depth Gardening Program, the CNPS will soon certify landscapers as knowledgeable about planting and maintaining natives in the garden. The first certification classes will be held in Fall 2015.

Northern California has some excellent native plant nurseries, including Chico’s own Floral Native Nursery, a peaceful place to wander, ask questions, observe various plants at different times of the year, and also see some of them established in the landscape. There’s even a useful online price list to help with garden budgeting.

California fuchsia is striking in the landscape, and a hummingbird favorite. (photo by JKehoe Photos)

The Las Pilitas California native plant nursery is a bit far afield for most of us to visit, but its website is a wonderful resource for “plant community planning,” wherever you are. Discussions of California plant communities include extensive, informative listings of plants typically found in each, complete with photos. You can also figure out what plant community you live in by city or zip code, though in “edge” areas, this tool may not be absolutely accurate. (For Paradise, for example, the dominant community listed is Central Oak Woodland, but even in middle Paradise the Ponderosa pines are already pretty thick, suggesting a quick transition into Yellow Pine Forest.) So at least here in Northern California, where native vegetation is still easy to find, you’ll get good guidance by going outside and looking closely at what’s growing wild.

Also immensely helpful is the Tree of Life Nursery website, which features a variety of useful planning tools, plant profiles, and a 30-plant short list of reliable “must-haves” that will succeed even for the beginning native gardener. Check out Tree of Life’s Sage Advice article series for more in-depth practical assistance, with topics such as How to Create a Pollinator Garden, Fragrant Natives, Natives for Basketry, and Native Groundcovers.

This is the first in a multi-part series that encourages Californians to replace lawns and other thirsty landscaping with drought tolerant native plants. The many benefits of this approach include re-creating natural animal and plant habitats that human population growth has overrun. 

Kim Weir is editor of Up the Road. A long-time member of the Society of American Travel Writers, she is also a former reporter for North State Public Radio. Before Weir embarked on a career in words, she sharpened her observation skills while studying botany and ecology as a biology student at Chico State.

Cell phones are the poster children for products with illogical life cycles. They lead fabulous development lives and arrive on the scene like film stars. Everyone wants to be seen with one and is happy to pay for the privilege. About 6 billion phones now ride about in humans’ pockets and carryalls (and there are 7.1 billion of us walking around). They are, after all, amazing, useful objects, lending their glamour to our humdrum selves. Sadly, though, they are vulnerable to a fatal affliction: the human attention span. They are anticipated, adored, and abandoned in an apparently endless cycle. It’s a significant quality flaw in the production process.

Since we can’t and won’t do without our phones (at least until newer versions upstage them), it follows that we’ll continue to abandon them, and they will continue to accumulate as we dig up the planet’s entire hoard of gold and other minerals needed for their manufacture. In the U.S. neck of the woods, mobile devices outnumber the population. From a recycling perspective, that represents about 72,000 tons of phones in use, of which some 20,000 tons get recycled annually.

We’re in a love affair with a potentially tragic ending, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s in our best interests to figure out and implement a saner product life cycle for these items we value so highly for such a short time. Otherwise we’re engineering our future disappointment and throwing away money and other valuable resources in the bargain.

Partly due to their small size and improvements in technology, cell phones don’t leave quite the dismaying environmental footprint as other, especially older, electronic devices. The guilty image we all harbor of children squatting in a toxic puddle, fiddling with a square of vaguely recognizable circuitry while smoke from burning plastic wafts skyward behind them, doesn’t totally apply to phones. We’re paying a bit more attention to their recycling or reuse, and although we’ve yet to hit on the ideal end-of-life process, we’ve at least recognized that it’s a kaizen event increasingly worth pursuing. The only question is how.

PLANET OF LOST PHONES

Various recycling strategies are in use globally. When the love affair sours between a cell phone and its user, it usually enters a cast-off purgatory that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) characterizes as “storage”—neither used nor recycled. Most phones wait out this period in someone’s drawer (raise your hand if this applies to you). Once they begin to move, some do so via voluntary take-back programs established by manufacturers. Eventually, phones land at recycling centers or landfills, minus the few that enjoy a brisk second life as a resale, mainly those returned on warranty.

Recycled phones are sorted and stockpiled according to potential value. Some will be sold as-is to secondhand retailers, who in turn offload them in job lots of many thousands. Some of those head to other countries to be repaired and resold.

Phones that no longer work might be sold to reclamation companies like Belgium-based Umicore or Japan’s Dowa Eco-System. These outfits are equipped with giant smelters, vats of electrocuted acid, and particulate-filtering smokestacks to extract precious metals and sell them to the jewelry industry or back into the electronics pipeline. A cell phone contains about a dollar’s worth of precious metals, mostly gold—the “green gold” of recycling parlance—but this small sum adds up. Dowa Eco-System produces an estimated $5–8 million in gold bars per month through its alchemical process.

Other DOA phones are destined for landfills; in the U.S. at least these are regulated disposal sites that theoretically prevent as much toxic waste as possible from leaching into the environment. Many phones leave our shores, heading for landfills overseas, where regulation can vary from spotty to nonexistent. The EPA declines to speculate about exact figures, but it did, in response to the National Strategy for Electronics Stewardship, fund a 2013 investigative study by MIT as part of the StEP initiative, a partnership of UN organizations, industry, government, the science sector, and others. The study estimates that 8.5 percent of all electronic waste generated in the United States is exported to other countries. Cell phones would make up a small but growing portion of that.

WEEE THE PEOPLE: LEGISLATING FOR CHANGE

Europe’s 2003 Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE) imposes on manufacturers or distributors the responsibility for properly disposing their electrical and electronic equipment, a tactic from which the United States has so far shied away. A Senate bill originally introduced in 2011, the Responsible Electronics Recycling Act, proposes regulating the shadier exports of electronic waste and creating reclamation centers here, but it was last seen in 2014, dead in committee.

WEEE has undergone several revisions to make it more effective, and some companies have responded to it in positive ways. The European Recycling Platform (ERP) was established by Braun, Electrolux, Sony, and HP to abide by the WEEE directive in the most cost-effective way possible. Organizations can become members (there are 2,500 now worldwide) and, for a per-ton fee, use one of ERP’s facilities to recycle their electronic waste in compliance with the directive. ERP currently operates in 40 countries.

So although the state of play in terms recycling efforts might seem discouraging, it could be—and has been—worse. Awareness of the problematic end game for phones is growing, but that doesn’t mean someone else will ensure our electronic BFFs are properly laid to rest.

What our phones have given us in convenience, speed, and innovation, we continue to throw away through negligent follow-through. We should take action at whatever place in the communication stream we find ourselves. Don’t keep last year’s model in a drawer. Pester workplaces to put recycling protocols in place. Push our leaders to lead in this and other recycling areas. And think twice before selling used phones to companies with questionable logos.

What do you think? Let us know by sending a letter (a.k.a. email). Send your comments to editor@uptheroad.org. Please include a phone number in case we need to chat.

Taran March is editorial director at Northern California’s own Quality Digest magazine. A 25-year veteran of publishing, March has written and edited for newspapers, magazines, book publishers, and universities. When not plotting the course of Quality Digest Daily with the team, she usually can be found clicking around the Internet in search of news and clues to the human condition.

You’ve gassed her up, you’re behind the wheel, with your arm around your sweetheart in your Oldsmobile . . .

—Tom Waits

If you were in the business of selling a popular dream—say, freedom, status, and mobility—and you began to notice your customers’ dreams shifting elusively, as dreams do, into something quite different from your product, what would you do? For automakers, the answer seems to be wake up, quickly, and smell the soy latte. 

Young people—I’ll pass on the stereotypical “millennials” or “generation Y,” which evidently stands for humans ages 16 to 34—aren’t as keen to own cars as their parents and grandparents were. Not too surprising, automakers are very, very interested in this trend. Cruising down the boulevard is no longer the essential rite of passage it once was. Today’s young show a marked preference for the sort of mobility smart phones can provide rather than what internal combustion engines offer.

“We have to face the growing reality that today young people don’t seem to be as interested in cars as previous generations,” said Toyota USA president Jim Lentz at the Automotive News World Congress way back in 2011. “Many young people care more about buying the latest smart phone or gaming console than getting their driver’s license.”

Here are some facts you can be sure automakers are looking at:

• In a wide-ranging survey of brand and commodity preferences for young people, not one car brand ranked in the top 10.
• 46 percent of drivers aged 18 to 24 said they would choose Internet access over owning a car.
• In the United States, available cars already outnumber licensed drivers.
• Just 31 percent of 16-year-olds had their driver’s license in 2008, down from about 42 percent in 1994.
• People in their late 20s and early 30s are less likely to have a driver’s license now than people of the same age in 1994.
• The percentage of new cars sold to 21- to 34-year-olds hit a high of nearly 38 percent in 1985 but stands at about 27 percent today.

FACING REALITY

Their preference for gadgetry aside, there’s another giant and pervasive reason behind this trend: the moribund economy. In many respects it weighs more heavily on the indebted young than on older adults, who entered the workforce at a time when the future sparkled with dollar signs. The trend then was to live outside urban centers, commuting by car to fetch essentials and get the kids to school.

Today’s newly fledged adults live in a very different world. They have come of age during a recession, and owning a car is simply not a high priority; they are expensive, and so is the gas that goes in them. New laws requiring driver training add to these costs and dampen the ardor for getting a license as soon as possible. Breaking into the workforce and paying down college loans come first.

The most reasonable way to do that without a car is to live close to where the jobs are, which pretty much means a city unless you plan to be a sailor or cowboy. The young, along with retiring Baby Boomers, are part of a general migration back into revitalized urban centers, where mass transit is affordable and easy to use, thanks in part to real-time transit data provided by phone apps. Riding a bus certainly beats paying for stashing a car in the city. Besides, you can dive into your favorite device when someone else is driving.

For those times when a set of independent wheels are needed, there’s the increasingly popular option of car clubs like the international Zipcar or local car-share schemes within cities.

Or course, outside urban centers and in the vast stretches between Nowheresvilles in the western United States, some sort of transportation is a must, whether it’s a car or a horse. In fact, Dave Cole, former chairman of the Center for Automotive Research, thinks that as young people hit their middle-age strides with families of their own, they may find cars more of a necessity than a nuisance.

A likely scenario? Yes, but when The Economist lets slip terms like “saturating trend” and “peak car,” you have to assume automakers are sitting up and paying attention. How are they responding to all this?

BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD

For the short term, there are still millions of consumers in Asia eager to get behind the wheel. In 2010, for example, car sales jumped 17 percent in Indonesia. Figures like these indicate that automakers will continue to be busy for a while. But closer to home, they have turned their attention to research and development in a trial-and-error attempt to figure out how their future consumers tick.

Toyota has focused on the Scion FR-S as its chief ambassador to the indifferent young. Happily for the top automaker, the Scion seems to have recovered from a tepid consumer response in 2011 and gone on to win Cars.com’s Best of 2013 award for its styling and affordability. The Scion emphasizes individuality with its five different body styles and personalized accessory options. There’s also the “Pure Price” sales approach, where the car’s advertised price is the one you ultimately pay. This simplifies the buying process and helps reduce the confusion and unease for first-time buyers.

And, of course, new owners can log on to the many Scion forums and social hangouts sponsored by Toyota.

GM has taken a different route. It’s trying to shift an entrenched culture from within the auto industry itself. Last year the automaker consulted with Ross Martin, executive vice president of MTV Scratch, an offshoot of Viacom that helps brands connect with consumers. During this pow-wow, everything from affordable models (Chevrolet’s Sonic, Cruze, and Spark passed muster), to the creepiness of traditional hard sales and test driving with a stranger, to dashboard technology was examined.

If pursued diligently enough—and GM has hired John McFarland, a 31-year-old marketing executive to do just that—this strategy might indeed bring about a switch in direction. But a culture doesn’t change overnight, and some of this effort will be slowed by the standard three-year lead time for car designs. It’s unlikely we’ll be seeing proposed new colors like “techno-pink” and “denim” on the roads any time soon

BOLDLY GOING

Ford seems to be splitting the difference between its chief competitors, changing both its approach and its engineering. Its Fiesta has received the most attention in terms of youth appeal, including an affordable price, decent gas mileage, and spanking new Sync technology that enables voice-activated music searches and audible text messaging.

However, Ford has also made the bold move of opening a research lab in the heart of Silicon Valley, where it proposes to mastermind not just new automobiles but what it’s lavishly calling “uncompromised personal mobility experiences.”

“Ford has an incredible heritage of driving innovation in the transportation and manufacturing sectors during the past 107 years,” says Paul Mascarenas, the company’s chief technical officer and vice president of its research and innovation arm. “Now it’s time to prepare for the next 100 years, ushering in a new era of collaboration and finding new partners to help us transform what it means to be an automaker.”

Ultimately, the lab will be part of an “innovation network” that stretches from Ford’s Advanced Design Studio in Irvine, California, to its Redmond, Washington, office where designers are working with Microsoft, its connectivity platform partner.

One of the automaker’s more startling—and laudable—decisions has to do with research transparency. Working with New York startup Bug Labs, Ford is launching OpenXC, a platform that will give developers access to vehicle data to help design cloud-based apps and services. The automaker is also looking at ways to use the many sensors in vehicles to improve the road for all drivers and is sharing these data channels with developers.

“Ford integrates technologies, software, and electronics at the same pace as the most innovative companies in the world—our platform just happens to be the car,” says Mascarenas.

Brave words in a brave new world for automakers.

Taran March is editorial director at Northern California’s own Quality Digest magazine, a digital business daily. A 25-year veteran of publishing, March has written and edited for newspapers, magazines, book publishers, and universities. When not plotting the course of Quality Digest Daily with the team, she usually can be found clicking around the Internet in search of news and clues to the human condition.

Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations (Nelson Parker, 2014) has the attention-grabbing subtitle, “A guide to creating organizations inspired by the next stage of human consciousness.” Luckily for me, by the time I paid sufficient attention to that, I’d already been hooked by the book’s premise. Otherwise, I’d probably have veered off along the derision path and missed the “exhilarating and deeply hopeful” reaction the book has inspired during its few months of existence.

It really is a guide, and “reinventing” is putting it mildly. A former associate partner with global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., Laloux has spent the last couple of years researching companies that have dispensed with a top-down management structure and flourished in the process. Purposely, he sought out organizations from different sectors, with disparate functions and goals. This was no mission to fit facts to theory. He’s not selling anything (I downloaded my copy from Amazon, but skeptics can buy the book on Laloux’s website and pay what they think it’s worth).

No, what we have here is the real McCoy: investigation, synthesis, and reporting. As a beautiful bonus, he writes well. This is his first book.

Laloux is good at anticipating readers’ unvoiced questions, and I certainly found myself wondering how the model could work in gritty old reality. While acknowledging that “modern organizations have brought about sensational progress for humanity,” he believes we’ve gotten the most that we can from typical pyramidal models. A big part of workplace angst comes from a restless sense that we could do so much more if we weren’t constrained by corporate structures.

“The hierarchical pyramid feels outdated, but what other structure could replace it?” he asks. “How can we make purpose central to everything we do, and avoid the cynicism that lofty-sounding mission statements often inspire?” Looking for practical answers to those questions is what prompted him to write the book.

During his investigations, Laloux visited a parts factory in France, a healthcare service provider in Germany, a global energy producer based in the United States, and a tomato processor in California, among others. Companies ranged in size from 100 employees to 40,000. All told, he reports on nine for-profit companies and three nonprofits. Each one is a successful operation without a traditional CEO at its helm, and although the solutions they devise to deal with this vary, all share three elements, around which Laloux built the book’s practicalities. These elements are:

• Self-management: No more top-down hierarchy.
• Wholeness: Bring all of yourself to work.
• Evolutionary purpose: Treat the organization as a living entity and learn to “hear” what it wants.

Regarding this third item, Laloux lays out an introductory section explaining the rudiments of developmental psychology. It’s a necessary setup for what follows, though impatient readers might be tempted to flip ahead to the case studies. Basically, he makes the reasonable assertion that organizations evolve in much the same way people do, toward maturity and wisdom through time and experience. He emphasizes that, as with human development, one organizational stage isn’t necessarily better than another. “All have their peak usefulness under certain circumstances,” he says. “All have their dark side.”

Here’s his color-coded summary:

Red organizations. Constant exercise of power by the chief to keep others in line. Fear is the glue of the organization. Highly reactive, short-term focus. Thrives in chaotic environments. Example: a wolf pack.

Amber organizations. Highly formal roles within a hierarchical pyramid. Top-down command and control (what and how). Stability valued above all through rigorous processes. Future is repetition of the past. Example: an army.

Orange organizations. Goal is to beat competition; achieve profit and growth. Innovation is the key to staying ahead. Management by objectives (command and control on what; freedom on how). Example: a multinational company.

Green organizations. Within the classic pyramid structure, focus on culture and empowerment to achieve extraordinary employee motivation. Example: a family.

Many organizations fall into the orange category, although Laloux is quick to note it’s the rare company that operates purely as a single color. Most are mixes.

So-called teal organizations are the new evolutionary breed whose methods are detailed in the book. They tackle self-management through multiple teams of a dozen or so people, a size that experimentation has proven to be the most effective. Most teams in teal organizations are responsible for all aspects of their job; Laloux cites “budgets, workload, safety, schedules, maintenance, hiring and firing, working hours, training, evaluations, compensation, capital expenditures, purchasing, quality control, long-term strategy, charitable giving, and community relations.”

Three practices are essential for companies comprised of self-managed teams. These are described in detail, using examples from teal organizations, but briefly they are:

The advice process. All members of the organization can make any decision, as long as they consult with the people affected and the people who have expertise on the matter. Nobody, not even the founder, “approves” a decision in a self-managing organization.

A conflict-resolution mechanism. Teal organizations strive to solve conflicts within the team, beginning with a one-on-one discussion. If that doesn’t work, mediation by a trusted peer is tried, followed, if necessary, with mediation by a panel.

Peer-based evaluation and salary processes. Laloux spends some time examining these, since they can easily create unwanted hierarchies and divisiveness. On the salary issue, he discovered that teal companies “give the potential hire information about other people’s salaries and let the person peg his own number, to which the group of colleagues can then react with advice to increase or lower the number.” Similar peer-based processes are used for hiring and performance evaluations.

Thought-provoking as the theory might be, it’s the case studies that really pull. Maybe that’s because these teal companies solve the boss-less puzzle in different but successful ways, all of which are fascinating. Maybe it’s because Laloux is a skilled narrator, highlighting approaches without banging on about his own opinions.

Quotes from company members (few of these outfits call them “employees”) and the author’s obvious respect for what they’ve accomplished generate a subtle excitement that keeps you turning pages. You think, “How can this possibly work?” and then read a matter-of-fact explanation from a team leader or seasonal worker. You’re reminded, indirectly, that we humans are a pretty adaptable bunch, and that all things being equal, we like to give our best effort as often as possible. We’d prefer not to have to fight the system to do good work. This applies to everyone, of course. Even people in the C-suites.

So what happens to the bosses? They’re still around in these companies, just no longer at the top of the heap, no longer so isolated or dependent on channeled information. They’re busy helping teams achieve the company’s purpose, whether it’s making something or providing a service.

In fact, the CEO has arguably the most important role of all: championing the new model into existence. Without this person’s active participation, it’s futile to even consider moving the company out of its entrenched SOP, says Laloux. He talks about one company that changed to the self-managed model under one boss, with positive results, but retreated to an older model, and lower profits, when that boss left the company. When the CEO isn’t engaged, it would be better to apply the ideas on a smaller scale, to one department, for instance.

“You might have noticed a major paradox: CEOs are both much less and much more important in self-managing organizations compared to traditional ones,” says Laloux. “They have given up their top-down hierarchical power. The lines of the pyramid no longer converge toward them. They can no longer make or overturn any decision. And yet, in a time when people still think about organizations in Amber, Orange, and Green ways, the CEO has an absolutely critical role in creating and holding a Teal organizational space.”

In his introduction, Laloux talks about Galileo’s difficulty getting people to look through the newfangled telescope to see alternate worlds out in space. Medieval minds balked at the idea of stepping outside accepted geocentric reality. Similarly, looking through this book’s lens and seeing entirely new ways to do business might seem strange and even unnecessary. But I strongly recommend it. Get a copy, read it, then buy the copies you’re going to want to give others, and read it again.

Taran March is a former director of Up the Road. She currently serves as editorial director of Northern California’s own Quality Digest magazine. A 25-year veteran of publishing, March has written and edited for newspapers, magazines, book publishers, and universities. When not plotting the course of Quality Digest Daily with the team, she usually can be found clicking around the Internet in search of news and clues to the human condition.

This part of California is home to me.

I can’t claim generations of northern California kinship as my friend JoEllen Hall can. Jo descends from the pioneering Stover cattle ranching clan. Her family still wintered horses in upper Bidwell Park (good grazing) not all that long ago. Her mother was a talented trick rider, too, one of the first Little Nells ever chosen to reign over Chico State’s mythic Pioneer Days festivities. That was back when candidates for both Sheriff and Little Nell needed real ranching or farming skills to be taken seriously. Clearly, that was long before P Week devolved into hard partying by college kids “not from around here.” 

I always liked being from around here, though we didn’t arrive until 1955. My father was stationed at the Chico Air Base (now the beleaguered airport) for basic flight training before his stint in Italy as a B-24 pilot during World War II. The Army Air Corps wisely kept their 18-year-old fly boys away from town as much as possible. But what little he saw of Chico reminded my dad of his family’s hometown in Southern Illinois. After UCLA and dental school he happily came “home” to Chico.

My mother was not so thrilled, at least at first. She didn’t want an insular small-town life, and Chico was very small then. Her father was a tractor mechanic in Southern California who also grew oranges, and he did well enough to send his kids to college. He spruced up an old ranch truck with leftover bathroom paint and sent my mom off to UCLA and the big city. She planned to never look back. Yet marriage and three babies later, here she was, surrounded again by orchards.

Although I always liked being from around here, for years it was pretty embarrassing not to have left. Whatever was “happening” was elsewhere, and I probably should have gone after it. But I did at least look around. As a travel writer I secretly thought I might find a better place to live, someplace different that still felt like home. That just didn’t happen, though. This was where I was rooted. This was home.

I’ve thought a lot about the ecology of home. Technically, ecology as a science belongs to the world of biology. Yet it’s no accident that the meaning of the word ecology—the relationships of living things with each other and with their surroundings—can also include our human sense of home. The ancient Greek oikos gives us the prefix “eco,” which means house, household, or dwelling place. Ecology, then, is the study of home, and, at its most basic, economy is managing that home’s resources.

This region’s ecology and economy are thoroughly intertwined—and what a blessing that is. Here, home still includes the profound presence of nature.

Unlike other parts of California, the ground beneath our feet is still just as likely to be ground—soil—as concrete. And from that soil we grow a wealth of agricultural variety. Salmon still spawn in creeks and rivers here, and other wildlife still feel at home, including, in winter, visiting clouds of waterfowl. There is so much wild and scenic wealth, including mountains, craggy coastlines, forests, woodlands, grasslands, lakes—water being the magic elixir that keeps it all alive.

We who call this place home have a tendency to sort ourselves into two camps, those who put the environmental aspects of home before its economy, and those who put economic considerations first.

Somehow we all need to get on the same team, to start creating a future that honestly values both. Our natural resources are finite; there are real limits to what nature can provide. But within those limits? We do need healthy businesses and good jobs.

My hope is that we endlessly inventive northerners will soon get serious about creating, and continually re-creating, our own unique ecology of home.

Kim Weir graduated from Chico High in 1971. She also holds a degree in environmental studies and analysis and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. She has been a member of the Society of American Travel Writers since 1991.

Events make sense only in context. Sometimes the term context is used by naturalists to mean the environment or “field” in which a creature makes its living naturally. A caged parrot is out of context, then, and unable to teach us much about being a parrot. A lion or gorilla in a zoo may exhibit some genetically encoded behavior and physiology, but mostly they teach us how caged animals interact with each other, their keepers, and the observing public. Understanding context can be challenging. 

One November day, after a rain, I biked out of my drive and saw three long-tailed birds feeding off the crushed black walnuts in the street. Two were black, white, and blue-green (magpies) and the other, entirely green. When I got closer they flew off. “Parrot,” I said to myself regarding that flash of green—the best I could do at the moment.

Later Waldo (as we named him) started hanging around my feeder and I was able to observe him more closely and check with my bird books. Only the new (1983) National Geographic guide included Waldo’s kind: rose-ringed parakeet (Psittacula krameri). The length of a magpie, the bird is green in head and body, with a plum colored beak and a black gash cutting from behind the eye, down under and across the throat–-a mature male.

“What’s the story?” we often ask when a surprise like Waldo arrives. According to my book, small, resident populations of escapees exist around Miami and Los Angeles. That makes sense to a birder; this bird probably made it here from L.A. A birders’ context can make sense of a “parrot” in the Central Valley. The story here is a naturalist’s one, about native birds, exotics, and escapees with little chance of taking over and “naturalizing.”

The spread of starlings across the U.S. would be the flip side of the amusing escaped-parrot tale. When Eugene Scheffland let loose European starlings in Central Park in 1890 and 1891, determined to introduce into North America every bird mentioned by Shakespeare, that context soon grew into a nightmarish 150 million birds.

To me feral parrots and parakeets look out-of–place, out of context. And the lone one at my feeder would strike me, when I was in the mood, as lonely, a kind of brother or ally. There we were in rainy November getting used to each other across the feeder, getting to know which moves I make that will cause alarm and which don’t mean a thing.

Waldo created his own context, for he seemed quite at home with magpies: They would feed together, fly together, and soak up the sun together high in the elm. I imagine that it’s possible for a bird to be “lonely” just as a puppy might, or a cat, but being unique in a given setting or even geographically misplaced is not the same as being alone, or a loner. My parakeet friend took himself to be part of a flock, the rest of which was magpies.

Then there is the context I helped create by opening the bag of birdseed in the first place.

Red, white, yellow millets. Grain sorghum. Sunflower seed. Wheat. Other ingredients are listed on the label for Pretty Boy Wild Bird Food, packaged appropriately enough by the Audubon Park Co. of Akron, Colorado, but I don’t need to read more.

The bird seed label takes me back 65 years to Minnesota where as a boy I raised racing pigeons and fed them a mix of peas, corn, and “Kaffir corn,” the ancestor of the domesticated sorghum in the Pretty Boy mix. The now-taboo name sounds exotic still, with its echoes of Africa, of tensions between Moslems and “unbelievers” (the Arabic kafir, “infidel,” being the present participle of kafara, “to deny, be skeptical”). Sorghum, by comparison, is as downhome as a field of cultivated grain.

What’s in the name?

Combining “Pretty Boy” and “Wild Bird” on the label is likewise jarring, invoking caged canaries on the one hand and free birds on the other. This mixed imagery seems intentional. The cartoon-style red bird on the label underlines the “pet bird” tenor of the message: feed wild birds to lure them into your yard so you can enjoy them close up.

Packed into this label, then, are two ways to care about birds—let them fly free to be pursued by us birders using binoculars or cameras, or capture them somehow and use them to decorate our lives. The invocation of artist John James Audubon on the label, the company name, throws in on the side of captive beauty and decoration; Audubon commonly shot the wild birds of America for specimens and then arranged their dead bodies in “life-like” poses to create his portraits.

This too is in part a matter of context. Do wild birds in the neighborhood tell a story of abundance, variety, and plenitude? Do they speak of God’s creation and the usefulness of birds and beasts and plants to humankind? Will there come a day when lions lie down with lambs and all of nature becomes a Peaceable Kingdom, as the Bible says in Isaiah 11:6 -9?

Or do we as naturalists imagine wild birds as actors and agents in the dynamic natural drama described by Darwin? We may feel kind to them and protective, but a law much wilder than neighborhood kinship underlies our relationship.

There is contention even among birdwatchers about context. Some birders feed back yard birds for their own listening and visual pleasure, and others oppose feeding absolutely, on sanitary and ethological grounds. They condemn those misled sentimentalists who lure wild birds into urban ghettoes to eat amid mites, germs, and scat, not to mention danger from cats.

Both feeders and non-feeders approach birds as categories and kinds, as species—white-crowns, towhees, nuthatches—rather than as individual beings. Rarely do we birders know a particular bird, such as the white-crowned sparrow at my feeder some years ago with a unique, aberrant white tail feather, or the blackbird with only one eye.

The rose-ringed parakeet who showed up one day at our feeder in Davis was surely an escaped exotic, but we named him and looked for him each day for two years until finally Waldo came no more, the victim of colder weather, we assumed.

Were it not for feeders, most birders would never get the chance for such day-by-day familiarity with individuals.

Like Waldo.

At seven in the morning hundreds of blackbirds and several dozen crows forage on the grass in the field I walk and jog around for exercise. I’ve gotten to know their ways, a bit. Glossy black male Brewer’s blackbirds hop, cock their tails up, or send them straight back. Some drop their wings as in courting displays although nesting season is well past. The brownish females, dark-eyed, fluff up as round as English robins; at other times they affect a sleeker look. Both drink from the sides of their bills from the shallow puddles on the track. 

Several of the blackbirds and one crow stand out as individuals, but only because of their deformities. One black bird has no left foot; another, a foot turned under, as does the crow. They excite my compassion, but then I wonder: Is my pity proportionate or symmetrical to their experience of their deformity? None show any awareness of their “handicap.” They hop just the same, balanced on one leg, as they forage with the others. No mobbing or harassing of them by the “normal” birds occurs.

Walt Whitman writes: “I think I could turn and live with animals . . . They do not sweat and whine about their condition, . . . Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth” (“Song of Myself,” Section 32). He has mammals in mind more than birds, here, but my blackbirds do not seem unhappy, either. If “compassion“ means to “share the suffering of another,” as my dictionary has it, what’s to share if the birds seem not to suffer? And yet, they evoke feelings of compassion in me.

This disjunction between my feelings and the apparent lack of suffering in these birds, the subjects of my observation, raises a larger problem, both philosophical and ethical. How can we know what another feels? Must we infer from objective evidence only? Or may we draw on our intuition of likeness in another? Many do, including vegetarians, pet owners, dog trainers, cat keepers, naturalists. Interestingly, however, so do many hunters and fishers. Ethologists like Tinbergen seemed to share understandings with herring gulls, even wasps; von Frisch, with bees; Lorenz, with geese and jackdaws.

I spent my undergraduate years at the University of Minnesota amid logical positivists, students of language and symbols who left no room in the world for such “sentimental” or anthropomorphic projecting of our human subjectivity, either “down” into animals or “up” into gods. And literature’s “new critics” taught me to beware of any hint of what they termed “pathetic fallacy” in verse or prose, that is, the imputing of human emotions to animals, landscapes, weather.

It now seems sad to me that anyone would feel disallowed from sympathy across chasms between one and another, themselves and creatures, themselves and forests, themselves and creation. To throw out the human richness of sympathy with others, of compassion for others, just because of some of the sappier excesses of certain romantic and Victorian painters or poets is to “throw out the baby with the bath water,” as a slice of folk wisdom warns.

Metaphor is our deepest human way of thinking and knowing, as Gregory Bateson was fond of saying. Birds are us, Mutatis mutandis, “with those things having been changed which need to be changed.” We allow for obvious differences while we also live and breathe metaphor. We are as grass (Psalms 103:15). Or like wolves (Lois Crisler), or Coyote (Ursula Le Guin), or Balinese chickens (Alice Walker). Or the Great Salt Lake (Terry Tempest Williams) or ocean (Rachel Carson). We are human beings.

Ming-Yi Wu’s novel, The Man with the Compound Eyes (translated by Darryl Sterk), changed this perspective for me. Set mainly in Taiwan, Wu’s story features a mix of cultures, including Han Chinese, European, indigenous Taiwanese and Pacific Islander. Ming drew my attention to the continuity of island cultures around the Pacific, and demolished my preconceptions of Taiwan.

Silly idea on my part—Taiwan looks flat on a political map. I hadn’t realized it is mountainous. Taipei is a bustling center of commerce. I hadn’t realized there are people in Taiwan concerned about environmental issues. The Republic of China was created to oppose the People’s Republic of China on the Asian mainland. I hadn’t realized there were marginalized indigenous populations on Taiwan who maintain cultural traditions that are distinct from the majority Han society.

Wu’s novel asks questions I hadn’t realized were in play by Asians. For example, is it really good to blast enormous tunnels through the mountains of Taiwan in order to facilitate road travel? Is the dominant capitalistic culture the only way to live on the island? What about the ancient values of reverence for the earth and the plant and animal ecologies of the island?

The questioning of the dominant capitalistic values focuses on a trash vortex which is driven by a typhoon from the outer Pacific to the coast of Taiwan. Wu conceives the vortex as a moving island, which serves to connect Atile’i, a teenage boy from Wu’s mythical Polynesian land of Wayo Wayo, with Alice, a spiritually exhausted Han Chinese woman who is trying to make sense of huge losses in her life.

Atile’i floating over the Pacific on a patch of trash is a perfect image of humanity confronted by the unexpected consequences of its own actions. Atile’s knows nothing of modern society. The objects in the trash vortex confuse and tantalize him. He senses that they represent danger, but he must cling to them and travel with them, because his own boat, made from the natural materials found on Wayo Wayo, has been claimed by the sea.

In real life, the majority of the plastic in the ocean consists of particles less than 5 mm. in diameter. There is no island of trash that can easily be spotted by seafarers or a satellite camera. Instead, the ocean plastic is a trash soup. We can’t say for sure how the ecology of the open ocean is changing as the result of the huge amounts of these particles that float at or near the surface, but chances are we won’t be happy with the long-term changes.

Wu’s creation of Atile’i and the “primitive” culture of Wayo Wayo are, to me, the best parts of his novel, because of their magical charm and their contrast with modern Asian capitalistic society. Wu suggests a web of connections between the ancient ways of the peoples who migrated eastward across the Pacific island chains and the marginalized indigenous peoples of modern Taiwan. He also probes for submerged spiritual experiences in the Han Chinese and European characters. Can the modern mind find a link back to prehistoric human relations with nature?

Reading Wu’s novel helped me look west across the Pacific for connections which I, as a European American, am not used to making. Today’s reality is that North and South America, the Pacific Rim nations in Asia, and the Pacific Island peoples all share the Pacific Ocean’s natural resources and can learn from the cultural heritage of the prehistoric seafaring peoples who settled the archipelagos dotted over this ocean. We ignore our connections at our peril.

Photo by Scott O’ Donnell/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

During the Depression, when casinos were legal in Mexico, my grandfather worked as a bookkeeper and cashier at a club in Mexicali. My grandparents lived across the border in Calexico. They were embarrassed that Grandpa was working at a casino, but it was a job. Although recreation was limited in Calexico, they found a surprising amount of entertainment in wandering the desert and examining mineral specimens. It was a hobby that required nothing more than a guidebook.

My grandparents never lost their interest in rocks and minerals. When they were prosperous, they invested in rock-cutting equipment and slabs of mineral specimens.  They learned how to cut stones and make simple jewelry. They visited mineral shows and bought more specimens. They kept picking up rocks as they walked. On beach walks, they showed me how to identify feldspar by washing a rock in the surf, and then tilting it to look for a shiny glint. Beach rocks accumulated in a pile next to their patio.

Eventually, they weren’t able to walk on the beach or work with their rock-cutting equipment. They couldn’t bear disposing of the equipment and the mineral specimens that had cost them something in both money and thought. Their garage was full of rocks and their last car sat outside on the driveway. Grandma went first, and a few years later, Grandpa died in the armchair next to his view window.

“Many possessions hold an emotional charge.” Photo by Scott O’Donnell/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

My parents spent a month clearing out their home. They diligently found recipients for clothes, house wares, Grandpa’s record collection, the last car, and the organ wedged into the living room along with the grand piano. I can’t remember what my parents did with the minerals. They sold the house to a professor at San Diego State who completely redesigned it, taking advantage of the multi-level site to create a uniquely beautiful home.

Once they got over the shock, my grandparents would have liked this. They would have regarded the new owner as a kindred spirit, dedicated to making his home a place with a special feel. In its heyday, their more modest home was artistically arranged, and their home décor had a numinous quality. I have a few of their knick knacks, but the magic is gone from them. They are pretty, but they mean less now.

“The sense of emotional loss when we dispose of possessions isn’t trivial.” Photo by Scott O’Donnell/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

When I stop to examine a rock, I remember the connection to my grandparents, and of course rocks are abundant and free. I don’t collect them, but they give me a particular pleasure.

Like most Americans, I have many possessions that hold an emotional charge. Recently, I hesitated before tossing an old plastic beverage container into the recycling bin. Why? The beverage container was a reminder of the days when my children were small, and we often played and picnicked in parks. I feared I would lose those memories if I no longer owned that container.

“Things may be all we have to remind us of family, where we were raised, what we hold dear, and when we were happiest.” Photo by Scott O’Donnell/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

The sense of emotional loss when we dispose of possessions isn’t trivial. Things may be all we have to remind us of family, where we were raised, what we hold dear, and when we were happiest.

We obtain things almost without thought. Managing the flow in and out of a household takes constant effort, and when emotional logjams are in place, we have overflowing cupboards, bulging garages and self-storage unit bills.

Dave Bruno’s One Hundred Thing Challenge may seem contrived, but I think the book is worthwhile because it’s easy to read and presents Bruno’s internal struggles with his materialism simply and clearly.

Bruno decided he was “stuck in stuff” and challenged himself to limit his personal possessions to 100 items. Perhaps he cheated by counting his sock supply as one item, but I think that is being picky. As he describes letting go of hobby items and sports gear, he gets at the heart of the matter: decoupling the meaning of his life from his things. Once he realizes that his high quality, but rarely-used woodworking tools aren’t bringing him fulfillment, he can let them go.

Bruno lives in San Diego, a setting he labels as “paradise.” A short distance away in Mexico, living standards are lower.  Benjamin Barber addresses this global justice issue in Consumed. According to Barber, the developed world is choking on an excess of consumer products produced by the capitalist economy. Somehow, the system can’t be adjusted so that people in Africa, for example, have jobs and can afford the goods and community services, like clean water, that would life them out of poverty. Ironically, Dave Bruno designs the 100 thing challenge in San Diego while a family in Tijuana can’t afford to send their children to school. Barber’s point is that consumer capitalism infantilizes people as they mindlessly gratify themselves with shopping and lose the perspective necessary to make them responsible citizens, locally and globally.

The exact mechanism of getting people to buy more than they should is examined in Juliet Schor’s The Overspent American. Although this book was published in 1998, Schor’s description of how people aspire to mass media ideals of consumption continues to be relevant. Schor shows how people compare themselves less with their neighbors and more with media images of extreme affluence, propelling them into debt-based living.

The Overspent American and Consumed will be appreciated by sociology majors. Spent, by Avis Cardella, speaks powerfully to anyone who enjoys shopping. It’s easy to stereotype shopping addicts as fashion victims, but Cardella’s intelligent, restrained description of her self-destructive behavior shows how hard it was to resist. Particularly disturbing is her detailed recall of specific purchases, mostly made against her better judgment, over a period of two decades. Cardella’s life was defined by the contents of her closet.

Living Large, by Sarah Wexler, is entertaining journalism about big stuff: McMansions, enormous engagement rings, surgically enhanced breasts, Hummers, and giant landfills. She raises serious questions without scolding Americans for loving bigness. The chapter on landfills made me uncomfortable about being part of the problem. According to Wexler, an island of plastic refuse has gradually accumulated in the Pacific, an ominous monument to consumerism.

Sadly, dumpsters overflow with stuff tossed by “Boomer” children of parents who learned frugality in the Depression. People who kept canning jars and brown paper grocery bags were overwhelmed by the explosion of plastic in the years following World War II. Julie Hall, the “estate lady” says she has thrown out countless Cool Whip containers. Hall, the author of The Boomer Burden and several other books on disposing of a deceased family member’s estate, has practical suggestions on splitting valuables among family members, selling valuable and not-so-valuable heirlooms, and coping with the emotional overload of sorting through a loved one’s home.

After reading The Boomer Burden I managed to discard some things, the low-hanging fruit, so to speak. My home looks as cluttered as ever. I have a long ways to go, but I find I enjoy getting rid of things that were subconsciously worrying me simply by being in the house. Knowing that I have drawers and shelves of inactive stuff, I worry. What is it? What is it for? How will I use it? When it’s gone, I don’t have to think about it anymore, except to regret that some of it may last a thousand years in the local landfill.

Sustainability note:  I obtained all the books referenced above through my local library. Used copies are available through Amazon.

Linda Worden is a Chico native now living with her husband and children in Boise, Idaho. In addition to discarding objects Linda also loves to read. Look for more of her book reviews in coming issues of Up the Road.