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From: James P. Zoeller Sent: Friday, May 4, 2007 5:40 AM To: RWHEveryone Subject: Floral time I spent my time off in the Sonoran desert in southern California. It was beautiful. The silence alone is worth a trip to the desert. And the sounds! Birdsongs so distinct and clear during the day and coyote howls throughout the night. The creosote bush is ubiquitous in the desert. It grows by sending out runners underneath the ground that send up new a new shoot which grown into a bush. Creosotes expand in circles as they age like ripples in a pond from a dropped stone. The southwestern desert came into existence in its modern form about 10 to 15 thousand years ago. There are creosote bushes as old as the desert. You can sit in the center of one of these circles and realize that where you are sitting, over ten thousand years ago, was the beginning of all those bushes surrounding you. Creosote was there when humans were first learning how to survive in the desert. The were there when the Hohokam built elaborate and extensive irrigation systems and they were there when after some hundreds of years the Hohokam civilization collapsed, probably due to over-utilization of the land. Creosote was there when the first Europeans tried to figure out how to deal with this "barren wasteland," this little piece of hell on earth. And they are still there when humans have diverted whole rivers for their use, ripped apart mountains, and built sprawling cities with millions of people. And I reckon they will still be there when the golf courses have dried up, the fountains have stopped spouting, and the skyscrapers are empty monuments to our hubris. Can we translate the creosote's longevity and intimate connection with the environment into human consciousness? Asking What would Creosote Do? JimZ