While urban rambling downtown in Munich’s postmodern concrete canyons, I remember 1971 when my partner and I first arrived here tramping our way through Europe with our backpacks and no return tickets back to Santa Barbara.
Desperately broke, we literally had to find work, and although I had a freshly minted master’s degree, teaching jobs were hard to find for someone with limited German. We landed part-time jobs at the Berlitz School located in a high-rise structure arcing above the Marienplatz, where other five- and six-story businesses lined the historic city center. In order to make 14 marks an hour, I had to chop off my extremely long hair, and am now reminded of some mournful lines by American songwriter John Hartford, who sang this in 1971:
They’ll sell me a suit then cut off my hair
Then send me to work in tall buildings …
However absurd this emotion feels 51 years later, at the time those lines resonated strongly just as Neil Young’s and so much more did at the time since we were both 24 at the time, too.
Over the many decades bouncing between Santa Barbara and Munich, it feels like the Bavarian capital should be our sister city (nothing against Puerto Vallarta!). Both cities sprawl close to vibrant expanses of nature, serve as major tourist sites, possess dynamic multiethnic populations, have mountainous skylines in one direction, and feature lively arts scenes.
Sure, just like Puerto Vallarta, Munich also displays major differences with Santa Barbara: Munich is four times as large in population and has the mighty Isar River streaming through it. This so-called Big City with Heart also features a strongly socialistic local government (public transportation is awesome and cheap, see 4.1.1.) and has a huge war occurring 1,000 miles to the east in Ukraine.
Nonetheless, similarities also abound, and Munich could become a model for Santa Barbara in its efficient array of wide and intelligently designed bicycle paths — genuine commuter arteries swarmed by an outdoor-loving population, including older folks on wheels, too. They even have debates analogous to ours over proper bike lane usage, with some German cyclists complaining about the new wave of electric scooters/cargo bikes/e-bikes pushing out the original biking crowd. Electric bikes and scooters go too fast and often they’re guided by unruly adolescents or speeding drunks roaring about who cause most of the accidents.
Munich has such humane and pro-People architecture, and we could learn much from their urban designs. Because the World War II Allies led by revenge-minded British Air Force General “Bomber Brown” rained terrific destruction on the hapless city in 1944-45, the German genius for city planning had the opportunity to redesign a more people-friendly town on the smoking ruins. Bike paths, for example, are usually located on both sides of larger streets, and each side is specifically one way for the cyclists; there are also red/green bicycle stop-and-go lights making all the traffic easier, faster and safer.
American nature writer and political philosopher Jed Purdy suggests we should utilize the neologism natureculture as a single word to recognize the false dichotomy between human cities rudely separated from purportedly “raw” nature. I’ve often fallen into this clumsy distinction and must admit that even my beloved San Rafael Wilderness suffers from atmospheric pollution and climate changes.
Furthermore, we’ve murdered all the grizzly bears and only through heroic artifice managed to “save” a trophy species like the California condor. In our onrushing Anthropocene Age, the similarities between human cultures and debased “raw” nature are more obvious than the differences.
We like to stroke our human egos by bragging about our sentient scientific achievements and marvelous tools and inventions, yet it’s very clear that “sentience” is not limited to our own self-important species. Perhaps lizards can also display compassion. Famed nature writer Barry Lopez contended back in 2000 that:
In order to serve Progress, it’s been necessary for us actively to
refute the assertion of Indigenous North American cultures that
the land is sentient.
I’ve asserted this idea in some of my earlier columns for On The Trail, even identifying specific boulder fields that Indigenous Chumash groups held and hold as both sentient and sacred. Wisdom sits in places and not only in mammalian brains.
While the idea of nonhuman sentience has been bruited about in Western literature for a long time, it almost always appears as a fantasy, or mythology, or part of magic realism. Homer and the Greeks believed the priest Kalchas could prophesy the future by interpreting the fascinating flight patterns of bird flocks (“Iliad, Book I”). German-British novelist W.G. Sebald waxes eloquent on the conscious awareness of plants as well as animals, writing without irony that:
… there is really no reason to suppose that lesser beings are devoid
of sentient life … the smaller mammals such as mice and moles also
live in a world that exists only in their minds whilst they are asleep …
perhaps a lettuce in the garden dreams as it looks p at the moon by night. — Austerlitz, pp. 133-134
There are so many forms of life with self-conscious awareness (sentience) swarming through Santa Barbara and our local backcountry, and these instances aren’t confined to well-known examples of crows, foxes and bobcats. We observe this in creatures in Munich and the nearby Alpine regions, and the prevalence of sentient beings, even in stone, is amplified in the term natureculture.
Whether hiking through the 900-acre green forests of Munich’s glorious English Garden or roaming the tall concrete corridors along the Marienplatz and the Isar Tor, I no longer resonate with Hartford’s sad ending:
So it’s goodbye to the sun’s hours
Goodbye to the flowers
After hitchhiking from Munich to Athens through then-Yugoslavia, we noticed how, even in 1972, European cities like Sarajevo and Llubjana sponsored extensive public greenery and child-friendly mini-parks everywhere. Munich today sparkles with hundreds of green parklets for children beside their high-rise apartment buildings. Tall buildings and a city of 1.4 million do not have to mean a goodbye to the flowers.
4.1.1.
» John Hartford, “Between Tall Buildings” (1971); Neil Young, “Old Man” (from his “Harvest: album); Bavaria gave full access to all public transport for everyone during June, July and August, costing just nine euros per month (= $9) at enormous public expense; Jedediah Purdy, “After Nature” (2015); Barry Lopez, “Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World” (2022); W.G. Sebald, “Austerlitz” (2001), tr. Anthea Bell.
— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity and has written extensively about the local backcountry. His latest book, Autobiography in the Anthropocene, is available at Lulu.com. He serves as an archaeological site steward for the U.S. Forest Service in Los Padres National Forest. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
