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LA Claims the Future While the Rest of Us Argue About It

June 17, 2019 By David Griesing 1 Comment

A Sidewalk in Koreatown

I’ve been re-writing quite a bit since I got back from LA, mostly stories for the book and, in particular, the heart of a central story that I‘d never managed to find before. One of the wonders of “getting away” is the space you reclaim to tackle the problems that were resisting you before you left. 
 
It’s not unlike breaking out of “group-think” by bringing in new energy and perspective to challenge the limitations that were holding you back. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
 
In thinking about this post, I remembered an observation I’d written down before I left but also didn’t know what to do with.  It was made by physicist Geoffrey West in a book he wrote a couple of years back called Scale. Among many extraordinary observations, West noted that one of the reasons cities tend to outperform companies is because cities have more weirdos in them, that is, more people who challenge the prevailing norms or group-think. 
 
Since I’m also still digesting my time in LA, I wondered whether some of the vitality in that city (and maybe in California generally) comes from the fact that there are more contrary voices–more weirdos–participating in the conversation that defines them.  After mulling this over for the past couple of days, I’ve concluded that there may be something to it.
 
A year ago, I wrote two posts: Why Voice Your Dissent? and Dissent That Elevates the Group. In the first, I summarized some of the findings in Charlan Nemeth’s book In Defense of Troublemakers by noting how hard it is to find yourself outside of the mainstream and then to persist, despite your seeming disagreement with everybody else. Summarizing Nemeth’s research, I wrote:

People automatically follow the majority as much as 70% of the time, even when the majority is wrong. People do so because the group ‘works on you’ to conform in blatant as well as subtle ways. Moreover, the remaining 30% are not unscathed by group pressure. In one study, even though the minority disagreed with the group, many reported that the majority was ‘probably correct’ because the group must know something that they didn’t know.

This pull towards conformity is powerful, but there are individual as well as group rewards when dissenters refuse to keep their contrariness to themselves. The courage to persist has three parts:

In addition to your knowledge and experience and what you believe to be true about them, the most productive dissent also contains at least a piece of the future that you are convinced everyone in the group should want.  A dissenter’s convictions engage our convictions about what we know and believe, but perhaps neither engage us as much as her hopeful vision about the future we are here to create together.

Cities more than companies listen to its dissenters more, and LA may listen harder than most. It stands on the frontlines of the future because it recognizes the outsized role that its idealists and oddballs have played in getting it there.  I also think it’s because dissenting voices are raised less loudly and vindictively on the West Coast than they are on the East. People are more relaxed, or as Emily would say (now that she’s moved there from Brooklyn) they’re way more chill dad. The tenor of LA’s conversation leaves more cooperative energy for when the debate is done. It leaves more space to imagine something better together.
 
To the hard, gritty realities Los Angelinos confront every day (their tides of homelessness, miles of aging infrastructure, the domination of their cars and roads), they seem to have made room for softness too. They seem to have smoothed the grittier edges but not forgotten them, daring to relax enough to dream with their best dreamers about how to reach a more livable future. They seem to have found ways to remain optimistic in spite of their many challenges. Really, is there any existing option that’s better for the rest of us to follow today?
 
Here are a few recent experiences in LA that may have caused this question to linger.

1.      Grand Central Market

It’s always dicey extrapolating what people are like from their built environments, but how they’ve created new homes and workplaces, shopping centers and entertainment venues (or re-inhabited abandoned ones) always provide clues.
 
When Emily was younger, we visited the zoo in every place where we traveled. It gave me a lot of anecdotal evidence about how locals thought about wildlife, nature, education, family outings and relaxation. For example, the zoos in London and Barcelona are very different, as you might imagine.
 
In these and other trips over the years, I’ve also managed to find the central food market wherever am. A benchmark for thinking about these marketplaces has been Reading Terminal Market in my hometown. It may be the most bustling and thriving institution in Philadelphia, regulating the flow of produce, seafood and meat coming in and going out while providing arrays of prepared food in an environment that balances the traditional with the up-to-the-minute. It also looks and feels both effortless and authentic given its time and place.
 
I could disparage many other cities’ tourist-oriented farmers markets, but I’d rather celebrate LA’s Grand Central Market located in a cavernous old building in the heart of its high-rise downtown. It was where I first started considering the combination of “gritty and soft” in the city.

The cavernous space was dark instead of bright from above. Its inner volumes cascaded down three or four partial levels from one elevation at the Bunker Hill entrance to the Market’s final landing on South Broadway. The building had been hollowed out, with its spine, service lines and ductwork visible, if you looked for them in the dim recesses on walls, ceilings and snaking through lower levels. Inside, it felt like what it was: the shadowy hulk of a re-purposed building. 
 
All of the Market’s establishments—featuring far more prepared food than take-home-and cook—were lit at ground level, glowing like so many individual oases, each inviting exploration while you digested their descending panorama. Food is prepared or assembled in front of you, with seating right there or at tables scattered both inside and out. I made for my recommended breakfast at Egg Slut, whose name and menu perfectly embodied the customer indulgence that seemed to be the goal of every purveyor. Maybe I was too hungry or jet-lagged when I reached the Market, but it seemed like islands of hospitality and surprisingly inventive fare, all of them floating in a multi-tiered, post-industrial space. More friendly and warm than street-level in Blade Runner, but also not unlike it. Gritty and soft.
 
In succeeding days, I kept detecting this balance. LA is not a beautiful city. Much of it seems yellowed by the sun and little of it has been prettied-up. But everywhere, Los Angelinos seem to have burrowed into their mid-20thcentury sprawl of storefronts and strip malls to create environments that are comfortable, nourishing and full of character. It’s a way that all of us might ride our present into our future if we chose to live within our means while being calmer and less frantic about it.

Another bright, sunny day

2.      Brunch in Silver Lake

Atmosphere like this invites perspective about what should come next as well as advice for living better right now.  

We were at a thoughtfully calibrated outdoor café in Silver Lake when a woman at the next table, who claimed to be 70 but looked 50, volunteered that Emily had beautiful skin and slender, powerful legs. (“I drink water all the time,” Emily said by way of response.) Apparently finding nothing about me to comment on directly, she spent the better part of our meal describing her odyssey as wife, mother, business owner, inventor, personal trainer, author, motivational speaker and yoga instructor and that if she hadn’t changed her life 20 years ago, she wouldn’t be here now. I must have seemed in imminent jeopardy to have aroused her like this.

She then outlined a punishing six-month program of bikram yoga and improved nutrition that made her energetic, hopeful and feeling younger than she had since she was in her twenties. I thought to ask her about her book, whether I could get a motivational tape on-line or see her TED talk but instead I asked her if that was the type of yoga where you sweat your toxins out. Of course it was and based on her apparent diagnosis, of course I said I’d look into it.

This stranger at the next table didn’t complement Emily’s skin and legs because “they looked good” but because of what both of them told her about Emily’s wellbeing. As for me, she didn’t want to sell me anything other than “a choice for me to consider” because taking it had already helped her so much.

LA has been criticized as a shallow and superficial place. I always think of stars or starlets congratulating everyone, thanking God, thanking the orphans of Mogadishu for their award when I hear that. We did see one Academy award-winning actor while we were in a sporting goods store there, but Mahershala Ali is anything but shallow and superficial and neither were most of the locals I met. Admittedly, it was a small random-sample.  But those I encountered seemed to have put their health and wellbeing in the present moment closer to the center of their lives and choices than many Americans in other parts of the country.

Being centered like this influences not only how people view the future course of their lives but also the long-term future they tend as custodians for their children and children’s children.  When you feel better, get your body and mind under control, there’s more room for optimism and broader responsibility (isn’t there?)

3.      The Getty

The Getty Museum sits on heights that overlook Santa Monica Bay and much of the rest of the sprawling city. Locals as well as out-of-towners seemed to dress up to go there. The Persian girls were flamboyant, the Japanese men causally tailored to an extent I’d never seen before and the Japanese women and girls wore complex layers that all seemed part wedding gown and spring raincoat. Everyone at the Getty seemed to understand that they were visiting someplace special to consider treasures from the past. And it was special.
 
The works of art on display were often as spectacular as the surroundings and visitors. I was particularly dazzled by the collection of marble portrait busts by the West’s greatest carvers, including Bernini and Houdon. Their arrangement was also playful, with curators positioning them so they could interact with nearby paintings or other sculptures. For example, the busts above of Belesarius (a Byzantine general by Jean Baptiste Stouf) and a Vestal virgin (by Antonio Canova) were at opposite corners of a sun-soaked gallery, the goat gazing (longingly and hilariously) into the dove’s eyes.
 
Like the La Brea Tar Pit Museum chronicled LA’s pre-history (in last week’s post), the Getty seems to serve as a temple to the more recent history of Western art and culture. 
 
It’s where LA says: this is the best of where we have been.
 
Being at the Getty also reminded me that Philadelphia’s largest foundation (the Pew Charitable Trusts) moved to LA not long ago to support a burgeoning contemporary art scene that has seen major new museums being built (the Broad) and existing ones expanded (LACMA) to celebrate new, experimental artists. LA is championing artistic expression in ways that rival New York, Paris and London.
 
It’s another way that LA is saying: the future is being envisioned and inhabited here. This is where we are going.

+ + +

The LA I saw offers a perspective that respects the past, striving to live with our history and pre-history and to understand what it is saying to us.
 
It provides some of the optimism that enables LA to step forward and say to other capitals: we’re not caught in your group-think and grid-lock. Instead, we’re already deciding where we should be going next.
 
We’re looking back in time for its lessons and encouragements as well as ahead from a center in the present that aims for health and wellbeing.
 
We’re repurposing our aging, urban sprawl into islands of comfort and hospitality.
 
We’ve made gritty soft, maybe because we’re more aware than others of what we have left to work with and are simply making the most of it.
 
Yes, LA was an eye-opener.

This post was adapted from my June 16, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Continuous Learning, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: Claiming the future, dissent, Grand Central Market, grid-lock, group-think, LA, Los Angeles, non-confomrmists, optimism, perspective, perspective of time, The Getty, weirdos, well-being

The Perspective of Time Enables Good Work

June 10, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

A Columbian Mammoth

The future seemed closer in California than it does in Philadelphia where I’m writing this post. California also seemed to be having a more active conversation with its past, despite there being historical touchstones like the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall only a couple of miles from me. Californians seemed to have a deeper sense of where humans have been already and where we are headed in our lifetimes and beyond.
 
I’ve just gotten back from Los Angeles, so some of it may be my wandering state of mind. But the West Coast, and California in particular, was also the hoped-for destination of our landlocked frontier, where the promise of a transcontinental crossing would either be realized by generations of settlers or dashed. It’s where America faces the rising East, the part that turns its back on the confusion and stalemate of Washington and dares to propose solutions.
 
How much we let the distant past reverberate into an equally distant future—how much or how little we can escape our fixation with “the way that we feel right now”—this flow of time (or the lack of it) impacts the perspective we bring to everything we do, worry about, want to accomplish and leave behind for our kids to enjoy.
 
Despite its rep for seeking shallow gratifications in the here and now, at least some of California seemed to be looking back, almost to our beginnings, for clues on how the human race has gotten to this fragile and deeply compromised place. These time travelers seem to know that if we fail to understand our past and learn from it, we may never know that we’re repeating the same mistakes when we could be avoiding them.
 
They also see the future differently. At least some Californians seem to understand that by focusing almost exclusively on the present, we are neglecting problems whose consequences are likely to endure for decades if not centuries.  On a timescale that includes our children, our children’s children, their children and beyond, they seem to be saying: we are responsible for addressing these problems because of the roles we have played in creating them. These adults seem to understand that in order to claim the future we want for ourselves and our descendants, we need to expand our perspective on time to include humanity’s full passage on earth, from the triumphs and tragedies that have brought us to today to the long-term future that’s worth working and sacrificing for. 

And because it’s California after all, they’ve done this by creating richly entertaining destination experiences.

A saber-toothed tiger that can almost taste you

1.         The La Brea Tar Pits

More than 10,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene Age, enormous mammals (so-called megafauna) coexisted for a time with some of the earliest humans. These were mammoths, mastodons, giant bison, dire wolves, sloths with foot-long claws, six-foot tall beavers “with incisors like medieval weapons,” and saber-tooth cats. Their enormous size was a response to the cold climate. A warm climate produces smaller bodies that expel heat while glacial intervals during the Pleistocene encouraged extra layers of bone, fat and fur with a smaller ratio of surface area to volume and a greater ability to hold in body heat. The scale of this engineering feat was enormous, with the largest mammoths weighing in at around ten tons, or three tons more than the largest African elephants today.
 
These megafauna lived in the cold, grassy plains that extended below the ice shelf in North America, from coast to coast. In certain places where oil pooled at ground level producing a kind of asphalt or tar, these mammals were drawn to the thin layers of water that accumulated just above the tar when they were thirsty and wanted to drink. As they sought out the water, individual animals became trapped in the tar. Other predators, drawn by their distress, also became trapped. Before long, these tar pits become the mass graveyards of the Pleistocene age.
 
The La Brea Tar Pits are located along Wilshire Boulevard in the center of LA. Preserved in them, researchers have discovered one of the largest repositories of Pleistocene megafauna in the world. They have also found important clues about how these massive animals disappeared altogether and the Holocene—or our next geological age—began.
 
For years, the speculation was that rapid climate change or disease led to extinction of the megafauna, and both likely contributed to it. But bands of humans shared these grassy plains with these giant mammals. Our ancestors had a competitive sense of conquest and adventure, and they needed to feed their growing families.
 
In his Atlas of a Lost World, Craig Childs describes the struggle of man versus megafauna in an arresting but ambivalent way:

This is a love story—boy meets girl, if you will. One partner is a [largely] unpeopled hemisphere, the other is our hungry, inquisitive species. Some might tell you that the encounter wasn’t love at all, but domination, overkill, an invasive species hell-bent on spreading into a land that was doing just fine as it was, without us. Some scientists have called it blitzkrieg, mammoths felled like cordwood. Ours was no docile species, and the animals were not ready for us, or our weaponry. Archeologists from Alaska to Florida have found Paleolithic spearpoints and stone blades still holding protein signatures from the meat of horse, camel, sloth, bison, bear and the proboscideans, mammoths and mastodons. Ice Age bones in the Americas have been found scribed with human butchering marks, blackened from fires. But humans didn’t always win. Many died, some were eaten.  First people, wildly outnumbered by animals, would have found themselves tossed and trampled by tusks and hooves or torn to pieces by the scissoring teeth of scimitar cats. No matter how well armed they were, even with Eurasian wolf dogs at their sides, surviving among Rancholabrean megaflora would have been challenging. Nobody said love would be easy.

These encounters were difficult, but in the end the human hunters with their always improving weapons were smarter, more tenacious and more powerful. The scientists and researchers at the La Brea Tar Pits and elsewhere have concluded that it was neither climate nor disease that led to the mass extinction of the megafauna.  Whether love story (human drive and ingenuity) or tragedy (a human “blitzkrieg”), mankind triumphed over nature by wiping these enormous animals from the face of the earth.

Parallels between the annihilation of mammoths and mastodons and of entire species today due to over-hunting, over-fishing, pollution, and loss of habitat are hardly exact. Similarly, there will always be uncertainties about what happened 10,000 years ago. But the human drives (for better and worse) that contributed to these extinctions are the same. Nature is no match for man’s desire and ability to take whatever he can from it, as quickly and efficiently as he can. 

During the Pleistocene, humans killed off the megafauna. During our Holocene, the same motivations nearly exterminated the American bison (from a herd of 60 million in 1800 to only a few hundred 90 years later).

Today, mankind is likely in a new geoglogical era called the Anthropocene. For the very first time in our checkered history, human activity is exerting the dominant influence on both climate and the environment.

Can we learn lessons from the past about how to constrain our best and worst impulses so that we neither “love” nor “dominate” our earthly home to death?

Are we able to look back—sometimes very far back—to learn as much as we can about ourselves and our impacts when once again we are pushing the world around us to the brink? 

Can our minds hold a broad enough perspective of time for that?

The biomorphic Pacific Visions building at the Aquarium of the Pacific

2.         Pacific Visions

Two weeks ago, the new Pacific Visions building opened as part of the existing aquarium complex in Long Beach, just outside LA. While its biomorphic curves “shimmer like the ocean” on the outside, it’s the future of the Earth’s oceans, its life forms and our human interactions with them that are the focus of its programming.
 
Visitors are engaged by several of our oceans’ current challenges and opportunities in the Pacific Visions theater with its surround screen and multisensory effects that include wind, fog, strobe lights, seat rumblers and blasts of ocean-related scents. There is high resolution footage of sea creatures, animations, computer graphics as well as images of what cities and other ocean-facing human landscapes look like today and might look like tomorrow. In other words, visitors can quite literally “sense” our current predicament and some of the ways that we have begun to confront it. The theater is both immersive and enabling, inspiring viewers “to think creatively about out global future” while beginning to see themselves as the oceans’ “stewards.”
 
The theater empties into the Culmination Gallery which lets visitors try their hands at ocean stewardship by making the ethical choices and trade-offs that will be required to restore specific California ecosystems many of them are familiar with already. For groups, there are interactive game tables themed around food, energy and water that invite as many as ten players to make a sequence of choices while working together to create enough of each resource to sustain California’s residents into the future.
 
There are animal exhibits, including one profiling yellowtail a fish native to California’s coastal waters. It demonstrates how the fish could be raised in offshore farms to produce as much protein as beef or pork but with far less harmful environmental impacts. Another project that promises a healthier future involves Pacific and Olympia oysters. Visitors learn how oyster farming can stabilize erosion-prone shorelines while filtering and cleaning the waters that are closest to population areas.

“Future City Fly-Through” uses touch screen controls on wall screens to “fly” visitors through a virtual city while they explore innovations reducing water usage in a drought-prone locales like California and using ocean water in unfamiliar ways. Opportunities for exploration include vertical farming methods and the utilization of desalination plants.
 
Admittedly, several of the experiences offered at Pacific Visions are also available in online simulations, but our hosts seemed to know that most players will choose a game like Fortnite instead of having an educational experience during their personal screentime. So Pacific Visions offers a destination-based alternative, employing technology to provide an immersive experience that enables visitors to do the serious work of designing their futures in inherently playful ways. 
 
Unless there are more “active environmentalists” among Americans than there are today, confronting the challenge of climate change will be nearly impossible.
 
With its $53 million cost and 29,000 square foot destination, Pacific Visions is aiming for every recruit it can enlist among school children, vacationers, day trippers, and those who already support sustainability with their hearts but not so much with their actions.
 
In a recent post, I argued for the strategy of relying upon respected leaders whose own minds have been changed about the significance of climate change in the light of their Republican or Libertarian values to reach out to skeptics in their own communities with the same arguments that persuaded them. Common values will give those arguments a hearing while the entreaties of “tree huggers” with different priorities continue to fall on deaf ears. Californians are being similarly strategic with their investment dollars and objectives at Pacific Visions. They are seeking recruits to help design a healthier future for our oceans by packaging their serious purpose along with the fun of a day spent at Disneyland.

The Pacific Visions theater

3.          More Hurdles Ahead

California in general and LA in particular seemed poised between the distant past and the un-designed future that extends for generations in front of us. Getting out of the present and deepening our perspective of time clarifies what is truly important while gaining the wisdom from our mistakes, even when they happened in the last geological age or will only be felt by our great, great grandchildren.
 
The practical work of designing the future causes us to confront what we don’t know, what others around us are failing to appreciate, and how to deepen the understanding that stewardship requires. In researching this post, I came upon a short list compiled by the FrameWorks Institute called “Gaps in Understanding” between what the experts know about the current threats to our oceans and what the general public knows. As Pacific Visions evolves its educational programming and other forward-thinking institutions follow its lead, here are some of the gaps in public understanding that need to be bridged if we are to find a more sustainable future for our water world:

–         most people see the oceans as vast, undifferentiated bodies of water instead of supporting vastly different ecosystems with different temperatures, currents and habitats;

–         the public doesn’t understand how global warming is disrupting currents and temperatures in both the atmosphere and the oceans and how these disruptions are contributing to the extreme weather many of them have been experiencing;

–         people believe that most ocean pollution consists of plastic waste. By failing to understand the extent of pollution caused by our much larger systems of manufacturing, consumption, transportation and energy usage, they are unable to explore the kinds of solutions that are needed to stop the continuing pollution of our oceans;

–         because the public believes that the oceans’ vast capacity effectively reduces the negative consequences of human activity, it fails to grasp either the complexity or severity of the challenges to the oceans’ diverse biosystems;

–         members of the public have some understanding of the risks to particular ocean animals (like sea turtles) but fail to appreciate how overfishing, acidification and rising water temperatures are threatening the extinction of entire species;

–         people lack a clear understanding of the role that national governments can and should play, either acting on their own or in concert with other national governments. This results in “a largely empty assignment of responsibility” for addressing the oceans’ declining prospects.

–         when the public thinks about “what can be done,” it focuses on modifying individual behavior (like more recycling) instead of implementing systematic solutions like expanding and enforcing marine protected areas, reforming the commercial fishing industry, regulating and enforcing pollution controls, enforcing carbon emission limits, and incorporating “ocean protection” into school curricula and government policymaking.

To design a sustainable future, we need to close the gaps between what the experts and the rest of us seem to know.

These gaps in basic knowledge speak to the extent of the educational and motivational hurdles that are ahead of us as we confront the onset of climate change on land as well as sea.

Escaping the gratifications and distractions of the present and gaining the perspective of time–its long-term lessons as well as its long-term consequences and possibilities—provides some of the incentive to fill in these gaps in our knowledge. 

It’s the yeoman’s task that the educators and entertainers at the La Brea Tar Pits and Pacific Visions are already taking on.

This post was adapted from my June 9, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

 

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Continuous Learning Tagged With: Antrhropocene, broad enough perspective, climate change, future, future of work, Holocene, La Brea Tar Pits, ocean health, Pacific Visions, perspective of time, Pleistocene

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