Josef+Biechler

This is Josef Biechler's page: Excellent 95%

Burlington trip to meet with Steve Brower: 8/28

On Sunday, Makayla and I met with Steve Brower in Burlington to show us around where Aldo Leopold grew up. The class met with him earlier in the week, and Makayla and I wanted to meet him as well. We met up with him at the Aldo Leopold Middle School, where he showed us the prairie landscaping he is working on as an outdoor classroom. He described it as a landscape metaphor. A piece of landscaping may look natural, but because it is man made it is not. What it is, is a metaphor for a natural landscape. It is put under people’s noses in obvious places and they look at it and experience it. This in turn sparks human’s nature to question and inventory what is around them. Hopefully the end result will be that people will go out and experience the natural landscapes he alludes to. He said what causes this is a surprise in nature fosters a renewal of appreciation in nature. This was all part of Steve’s landscape psychology, a psychology that is based on physical patterns in nature and our human responses to these patterns. Patterns and response are so intimately tied to one another.

We went next to Flint creek and hiked for a bit with Steve across the creek and up into a cave that not many people have been to. We sat with him as he spoke to us about how he came to know and understand Aldo Leopold. He grew up in Burlington, exploring and following the same places that Leopold did. Also he has spent many years reading Leopold and authors like him and indexing what they say about human relation and response to nature. What he has found is that though they may be saying words like solitude or freedom, what they are subtly saying is loss. This feeling of loss is what sparks people and makes them care for nature and ultimately brings hope. According to him, it was only when Leopold gave up trying to speak to people at a utilitarian level, and romanticized his response to nature in a subtle way, that people had a new response to conservation. Steve also explained to us that his landscape metaphors are akin to a story called buried poems. In the story an archeologist in southern Utah is trying to get people in this town to take interest in conservation of their natural areas. They have no interest though. The people in this town are all of ancient pueblo descent, and he decides to use that fact and exploit that. He begins to bury poems in obvious places, so that the townspeople will find them. He writes them with a lot of vagueness and with Indian pictographs. Eventually the townsfolk come to him to have them interpreted. All of the sudden they are interested in saving the natural places because the could now respond to it and connect.

Next we went to Leopold’s childhood home. It was incredible. We toured the gardens and saw the red oak that was planted when he was born. We also met the current owners of the estate. They showed us around a bit and we saw the picnic area over the river.

The last place Steve took us was a limestone escarpment. It was down a bluff near the river just off a byway that Leopold grew up exploring. What it was, was a giant hole in the limestone floor. When we climbed down into it, it was a giant overhang of limestone and covered in moss and a little trickle of water that flowed down like a tiny waterfall. It was incredibly beautiful and peaceful, and one of Steve’s favorite places.

He was an incredible person and it was a perfect way to spend our Sunday afternoon.

Client Brief Notes: 8/27

The clients, Jim and Sarah Anderson, have many ideas and plans already for their 5-acre piece of land.

Their first priority is their home, which will be built in the North East corner of the property 50 feet from the North and East property lines. The home must be Stapatya Ved in design thereby making the main entrance to the home on the East with a vastu fence around the house. Jim and Sarah want to foster a sustainable lifestyle and therefore the home is to be an energy efficient one-story house that blends in well with the landscape. It will be a post and beam straw bale house with a brick bag floor and no basement or concrete. The walls and roof should have a minimum of an R-42 rating. The house will be off the grid in utilities, relying on solar and wind for electricity, rainwater catchment for water, and passive solar and hot water radiant floor heating. The clients were also open to gas for cooking and heating or electricity for heating. Jim and Sarah have also designed the south side of the house to have big windows and serve as a passive solar heat bank as well as a greenhouse.

Jim and Sarah plan on doing the construction primarily themselves, thus limiting the size of their home. The home will be 32’x32’ with 900 square feet of interior living space. Surrounding the house will be a porch, bringing the outside measurements of the house to 42’x42’. With the fence surrounding the house the total foot print of the house will be 60’x60’. Inside this fence there needs to be a minimum of 10 feet of garden between the house and fence on all sides, making a total of at least 2,000 square feet of garden around the house.

To access the house the clients will use the preexisting lane that the neighbors to the north built. This lane sits on the northern property line and is shared equally by the northern neighbors, and Jim and Sarah. As this lane does not go far enough East on the property, they will continue the lane across their middle drainage area with a 14 foot culvert to the West side of their house. Built there will be a 10’x30’ shed that will serve as a carport and a garden/storage shed. It will be detached from the home.

To the North, Jim and Sarah have agreed on a lifetime lease on a right of way with the neighbors. This will give them the ability to build a pathway down to the pond and build a gazebo by the pond, even though it is on the neighbor’s land. This will give them access to the pond.

To the South of the house outside the vastu fence Jim and Sarah plan to have a garden. It will be small in size with enough space to grow most of their food need s in the summer and possible a little bit for farmer’s markets.

The rest of the land Jim and Sarah plan on using as pasture ground for a single milk cow. There will be a milking stanchion in the 10’x30’ shed for the cow as well.

In designing this home there are several things to consider. First Jim and Sarah travel frequently for work. They may not be home much to take care of the gardens, or cow. Things on the acreage may need to be pretty self-sufficient and perennial. The second thing is that Jim and Sarah have a tight budget of 120 thousand dollars to do this project; they will do meaning most of the work. The third is time. Jim and Sarah are middle aged and want to be able to get this project done so they can eventually retire to this property.

Favorite Place: 8/24 Very beautiful. Congratulations! JC

My favorite place in nature happens to be right on my farm, north of Ames, Iowa. It is a large prairie pothole that I restored. It was in a corn field on my farm before we owned it, and every year it was tilled up and planted. Luckily it sits so low and a hill surrounds it on all sides, it was never tiled out. A prairie pothole is a rare feature to the prairie. It is formed when a glacier stopped moving and melted, leaving a giant depression in the ground with higher ground on all sides, kind of like the top of a volcano. When my family bought the farm we took out all row crops and planted the area to native tall grass prairie. As soon as we did this native mature wetland species began to flourish once again. Now the pothole holds water year round and is home to geese, ducks, cranes, herons, egrets, frogs, and songbirds. It is a place I feel responsible for and grateful that it gave the space to help brig about its restoration.



Reading main points from Monday, August 22:

Sustainability and consciousness: Grade - Very good - So interesting the different angles people get from think like a mountain. But 2 days late. 85% JC

Aldo Leopold-Marsh Elegy

Man judges quality in nature by beauty. How can man judge something so perfectly created though that words cannot describe it. According to Leopold our appreciation grows as our awareness opens to natures beauty and complexity. It is a primal knowing.

With this awareness of nature, as man pushed west into Wisconsin marsh land they turned the land around the marshes into agricultural land. Corn, Grains, and Hay were planted. Humans and the cranes and marsh wild life tolerated each other as they lived mutually benefitting the other.

Man soon lost knowledge of the importance of the marsh and tried to use it to grow corn and other crops. They set fire to it and the peat burned back and the bogs were drained. Yields were low and the Crane numbers dwindled. Still these fields were more useful than a water filled bog. Humans had lost their awareness of the importance of these natural areas. Only when the need for jobs and loss of money in poor fields came about in the great depression, did people desire these natural places again. Perhaps it is because in this tough time the craved, from that primal space, to see nature in full harmony.

Thinking Like a mountain-

A Mountain has stood for many millennia. It stands the test of time. It can objectively hear the call of a wolf and fear no pain, hurt, or advantages. It looks upon this seen and the emotions that all creatures have and know that this is a fleeting moment in time. In thinking like a mountain we one does not worry about what a certain omen means because it all is just a moment in time.