Living on the Edges of 2012

Plum Creek winter 2007

Living on the Edges of 2012

A cold damp wind blows across my face; it burns the eyes, as I look toward a sky empty of artificial clouds of steam and smoke that once dominated my view of the valley where I have lived for the last 13 years. Today only, a passing car breaks the silence, as the constant hum of Plum Creek one of the largest sawmills in the Northwest is quiet. The sound of nothing is deafening and suddenly frightening. The mill had operated seven days a week working three shifts, seldom was there ever a break in the clouds of smoke and steam. The economic collapse that has rocked America has arrived in Columbia Falls is a small town of around 5000 residents known as the industrial heart of Northwest Montana with a stunning blow to our small community.  Plum Creek is one of the largest timber corporations America. They are also one of the largest landowners in the country only second to the Federal Government here in Montana and they are in desperate trouble. The demand for wood products have ceased with the collapse of the housing bubble.

My mind wanders as I listen to nothing this morning. I think about Last year 2007.

It seems like it was so long ago now that my son and I took a road trip to Death Valley. It was only a little over a year ago now. Our purpose was to take photographs to document our trip. It was a photographers outing. We both just wanted to get away from the must do’s of work and life itself. But that trip turned into something far beyond what I expected as did the coming year 2008. We had two weeks to ourselves, no obligations. The impending changes of 2008 that December before were just talk. Talk about how improbable it was that Barrack Obama would even make it through the primary elections let alone become President. The economy was not really on the radar as much as climate change. We drove south from Seattle down the coast where a category 3 hurricane type storm battered the northern west coast like never before. The road, lined with trees torn out of the ground, snapped off mid trunk as if twigs were a testament of the power of that storm. Seawalls breeched by record tides flooded; devastated the small towns along the west coast that were now in a state of organized recovery. No national press about this storm dominated the news like Katrina but the damage was impressive, severe. We stopped to take pictures and walk on the beach in Oregon. You would hardly know that only a few days ago the ocean covered shoreline up to the first stories of homes and hotels along the beach except for the line of debris that had been contained along the sea walls. People were collecting wood scattered by the storm, building fires to warm themselves as they waited for the sunset. A man was moving big logs on a stairway that led up to a patio at one of the hotels, was asked him how all those logs got there. He told us about the storm and that he had never seen the water come up as far as it did water pushed by a weeks worth of hurricane force winds. He told us how the town of Oceanside had been cutoff with no escape by tidal flooding that blocked the roads. He told how the residents banned together to help each other and share food and whatever else they had.

As we journeyed on toward our destination, we talked a lot, about the effects of coastal flooding we had witnessed and changes that were occurring right now. Maybe it was just random events as weather is, or maybe not. We talked about the Mayan calendar and the Hopi prophecies http://www.geocities.com/whitecrystalmirror/prophecy.html that predict and end to this phase of modern civilization in 2012. We talked about how these prophecies might play out, how this might happen. Would natural disasters like Katrina, Oceanside or the results of climate change, play a role in the end of modern civilization? Or would our behavior today as a society be the catalyst for failure.

After a long day of driving, we approached Death Valley it was dark. Night comes early in December.

Stop here I have to take a leak. Here was nowhere in the middle of nothing, just a dark road, where no artificial light could penetrate the darkness except the headlights of the car that connected Death Valley with the rest of the world. Turning off the car and headlights, we got out of the car, lit a smoke, and proceeded to relieve ourselves when the sky lit up like a roman candle.  As monstrous greenish blue fire ball with a tail that stretched across the horizon burned right over our heads. Did you see that? “What the Fuck was that”, Jake said. “A meteor I think”, I answered. Excited by the event our consensus was, let’s go!  We jumped into the car and headed down a steep grade that seemed to go on forever to the valley floor. Every now and then as the road turned the headlights, spied large water tanks located in turnouts. The water tanks were a reminder of where we were and how fortunate it was December and not August because the modern automobile is still no match for natural heat of that desert.  As we arrived at Stovepipe Wells, we were still taking about that Meteor. That Meteor and the hundreds we saw over the next couple of days really change me, as did the scorched wasteland that is Death Valley. That was little more than a year ago December 2007 before the turmoil of 2008 had occurred. I really didn’t know then what I know now because now was the future then.

Now it seems that economic collapse is perhaps the immediate threat to the system of how we live. The cascading failures of banks and businesses that have sustained our way of life are collapsing. Perhaps the Mayans and the ancient ones of the Hopi Indians knew that history has a way of repeating itself, that human prophecies are self-fulfilling. These events of collapse and failure are the historical facts of life of written history of history no longer spoke by silent voices. A silent history recorded in the ruins of past civilizations here in the American Landscape. These Ancient ruins and ghost towns preserve the presence and failure of our ancestral people and our history.

Today the Columbia Falls Aluminum Company, CFAC is also quiet; their plotlines are cold and empty, as the demand for high-grade aluminum has vanished and the costs of energy and material have soared.  CFAC as we call them around here has announced that they can no longer operate at today’s prices in today’s metals market on Christmas Eve and they have decided to close permanently.

Semi Tools a high tech company a front-end manufacturer in the computer industry, a company that supplies the computer manufacturing industry worldwide with the machines that actually make your computers.  Announced they have to reduced production and cut their workforce by more that fifty percent. These dramatic events have occurred over the last two weeks, with CFAC announcing on Christmas Eve they will close permanently and Semi Tool and Plum Creek making their announcements this past Friday January 9 they will curtailed until further notice. This news came to workers who were on mandatory furlough for the past month as an emergency cost saving measure by all of these companies had returned to work after the first of the year. In addition, Plum Creek has told all of their contractors to stop work, stop logging operations. The news is devastating for a small town a small community and for America, that is already suffering the effects of the housing and construction market failure. In one week, more than a tenth of our small population lost theirs jobs and these were the highest paying jobs in the Flathead Valley as well as Montana.

We moved to Columbia Falls about 13 years ago where I became the Director of the local Art Museum located in downtown Kalispell Montana. This was at a time of franchise infancy in the community. Wal-Mart and Costco arrived to the Flathead valley just after the first McDonalds. Before that, the infrastructure of the Flathead Valley was local Mom and Pop un-franchised businesses. The Flathead Valley of Northwest Montana was mostly untouched by the mass distribution of corporate enterprises that dominate the larger communities of America. Its sense of place was unique; a small Home Town, a Rural Paradise that offered a haven from the large urban communities of modern America. It was a place where a kid like Jake can grab a towel and walk to the end of the street to the community swimming pool with no worries. Thirteen years after McDonalds and the explosion of Franchise Businesses I can hardly recognized the original community I moved too in 1996. The valley has taken on the same visual characteristics as the rest of America it has become part of the Homage-O-Nation! As you drive through the valley on U.S 93, the landscape reveals the same architecture, a true assimilated American Community. Wal-Mart, Boarders, Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Target, Walgreen’s and a plethora of corporate franchise restaurants to supplement a major anchor complex. You seen one you seen em all. This is how goods and services are delivered today, the Architecture is functional and predictable, a box with ornamentation stuck on it giving each box an identifiable appearance, or as I like to think of it, a CODE. One-step farther inside the box and we identify the product line. It really doesn’t matter what McDonalds you walk into anywhere on the planet, you know you can get a Big Mac and you identify the product with the architectural Code. The architecture is the reinforcement of the Code an image of the corporation, the franchise; it is part of the brand. This is where the sameness of products of the landscape, cityscape and culture started. The code or brand reinforces the product into our culture and our ideas about ourselves changed. We began to seek our comforts in unifying products. These products help us define our status or place in the social economic pecking order. These product identifications, brands, codes enhance our personal likeability our sexuality to others. Many of us now live in towns in houses and neighborhoods that all look alike. Even the color of the houses and building are regulated, all the same color scheme, no variation on the theme is tolerated.

The Development that we have come to believe we need, that we want, has created a sameness that has overtaken the cultural landscape across an America of endless McDonald’s, Strip Malls and Big Box Stores that has grown into new cities and towns, not built to live and walk in, but to drive to. Development and Sameness has changed us as a culture. Perhaps this is how it happened? Developers brought us development and products and we were all told we needed them and we believed the developers, the corporate retailers, and their advertising and we believed we needed these products. This idea is in stark contrast to having true needs and then developing products and services to fill our true desires and needs. I am sure we all really want a MacDonald’s hamburger that is smaller than the pickle slices on the bun. But “Your Love n It”.

Today’s headlines detail the failure of our way of life, a human system on the brink of Collapse. If the effects of this rapid growth this manmade disaster only impacted Columbia Falls and the Flathead Valley then perhaps emergency aid and relief could help stabilize the situation. The effects are in fact global and not centralized to us alone. The effect of our modern model and its collapse will touch all of us around the world in ways; we have yet to experience because of “How We Live” and our dependence on a global market place that apparently according to world leaders has become un-stable, unsustainable.

This is not a new story in the history of civilization. It is a story of transition from the past to the present and an uncertain future. Several years ago, I read Jared Diamond’s book Collapse. http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,0_9780670033379,00.html

He compares modern Montana with past civilizations. He writes about the people of Chaco Canyon http://eubank.home.bresnan.net/ and the failure of their system, their way of life. They exhausted the natural resources that had been the source of their success as a culture. In the end the climate, the environment changed and civilization failed. Throughout the Western United States lay the ruins of the past. The people vanished as their environment no longer sustained them, from the Wupatki http://www.nps.gov/wupa culture in northern Arizona to the Chaco http://www.nps.gov/chcu Culture in New Mexico they were gone with countless others. Today the reasons why these civilizations failed is part speculation and part science, the mystery of what, when and where they went remains un-spoken in stories of a vanished civilization. After reading Diamond’s account of the failure of the Chaco Culture, I wanted to go to New Mexico and see for myself this place of mystery of un-spoken stories. As I embarked on my expedition of discovery in November of 2006, I went as an Artist not as a Scientist. My discoveries are intuitive, based on my feeling about this place.  My intuition, my gut feeling about what happened and what remains were my source, my sense of this place. Diamond writes about an enterprising culture that had a purpose to develop beyond their limits and technology to sustain them. They were a culture that destroyed their sustainable environment for the sake of development of expansion. It is un-clear in the forgotten stories why this development was so important to the Chacoan’s.  Some archeologists believe the people used the pueblos during ceremonial seasons and that only a small population of people inhabited the area year round. As the story goes, thousands of visitors would come to Chaco during the ceremonial seasons to celebrate their stories, their beliefs. Perhaps this account is true or maybe there is a story untold. Diamond writes about how the people deforested the landscape. They cut down all of the trees of what once was a forest far beyond what the eye can see into the distance from the canyon so they could build their city. What remains is a desolate landscape void of any large trees. Ponderosa Pine covered the landscape before. Diamond estimates that the Chaco people cut down tens of thousands of trees as far away as a sixty-mile radius from the Chaco site. This was a time when horses did not roam the landscape and all of the timber moved was by the manual labor of the people. They carried or pulled the fallen trees to the city and they built great structures. In the process, they changed the flow of water, their life substance and slowly the environment turned against them. Corn, which was the food of the gods no longer, grew in this place. Slowly they vanished as a culture. There is evidence that the last Chacoan’s began recycling. They salvaged material from older buildings and reused them to continue building new ones. But this was an effort too late because the environment became the master of this land– a land unable to sustain a human presence. To be sure, descendants of the Chaco Culture still exist. Fragmented disenfranchised from one another they either sought survival on their own or assimilated into other groups. They became us a thousand years into the future or perhaps we have become them and as future inhabitants look back from a thousand years forward.

http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=IESYMFtLIis

For me Jared Diamonds story of Chaco Canyon has real meaning as a modern Montanan. As the economy, stock markets and global development soared to never before seen heights, the evidence of the cost of that great expansion are present all around us. Building boomed as more people bought homes and big rides SUV’s. Corporate development seemed destined to reach every undeveloped area in the modern landscape while small and large sawmills closed by the dozens and left once thriving communities dependant on them devastated in the wake of their failure. If you look at a map of Montana where the forests cover the land every community saw, mills go out of business. They failed in the midst of one of the most prolific periods of building and development in our history. Over the last ten years, year after year dozens of wood product, timber businesses failed after decades of sustainable production. Why, the availability of harvestable timber was not, is not available, it is gone. The once abundant old growth timber stands are gone, harvested. The existing stands today are in a second harvest or re-growth period. The re-growth period of Timber in this region spans the measure of a human lifetime, about 80 to 120 years. The second growth timber now harvested, replaced the old growth stands harvested a century ago. Add to this the devastation of forests by fire and rural development the supply of harvestable trees declined disproportionately with the development of our society. Today’s demand has placed unsustainable pressure on the natural system, demand on the forests for trees. Timber a renewable resource for the wood products industry is now on the fringe of collapse with the pressure of current demand. Time is the enemy in our current business model. Demand operates on a much faster clock than natural growth.

People ask me if I am a religious man and I tell them I am a spiritual man. Religion I think is a collection of ideas that a group of people agree on, principles that the group shares and follows. A spiritual belief recognizes the ideas and principles of all religions and agrees to share with tolerance those that seek a higher truth the fundamental truth of all things.

Jake and I discovered a joy in the adventure together and found that our ideas, our hopes, our paths were spiritually connected through our individual work as Artists, Photographers, Writers and our relationship as Father and Son”. While we were sitting under a sky full of falling stars in the desolation of Death Valley, we arrived at a moment, an idea that things fall apart that all things change and are renewed. We talked at length about the environment and the impact of our modern society. We talked about how millions of modern people have never seen the real sky, unmasked of the artificial illumination of modern cities. We talked about the disconnection of modern human beings from their natural environment and we wondered how civilization could go forward with out reconnecting to the natural environment in a sustainable way. Our present time is shocking and full of fear and the unknown, of what the future may bring. But if we are still the masters of this place this land this planet then we have the power to choose our future a sustainable future.

Elders Speak

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1299816/indigenous_native_american_prophecy_elders_speak_part_1_5/

Coming Soon Energy and Metal

About The Project http://davideubank.wordpress.com/about-jacob-and-david-eubank-and-the-living-on-the-edges-of-2012-collaboration/

Sources:

Semi Tool

http://www.dailyinterlake.com/articles/2009/01/11/news/local_montana/news_8768521326_01.txt

Plum Creek

http://www.dailyinterlake.com/articles/2009/01/09/news/local_montana/news_8768521326_02.txt

CFAC

http://www.dailyinterlake.com/articles/2009/01/09/news/local_montana/news_8768521326_02.txt

CFAC and Plum Creek

http://www.hungryhorsenews.com/

Plum Creek Formaldehyde pollution

http://www.scorecard.org/env-releases/facility.tcl?tri_id=59912PLMCRPOBOX

http://www.hungryhorsenews.com/articles/2004/09/29/news/news01.txt

About Plum Creeks New Bio Filter System

http://www.timberbuysell.com/community/DisplayNews.asp?id=3681

Blog about Formaldehyde

http://www.toxictrailers.org/2008_03_01_archive.html

Toxic Emmissions

http://static.uspirg.org/reports/toxics03/toxicreleases1_03report.pdf

• Coming Soon Energy and Metal in Montana

Filed under: Art, Art News, Culture Economey, Environment, How to survive as a Working Artists, Investing, Journalism, News, On Art, Photography, Uncategorized , Columbia Falls Montana, Economic Predictions 2009, Obama Stimulas Plan, Plum Creek, Sustainablity