theurbanpragmatist

[theurbanpragmatist]

Reading excerpts from William Godwin’s Political Justice, my notes are littered with the phrase “FUCK YEAH GODWIN”

[theurbanpragmatist]

I attended a class on California water, today, and while it didn’t go over anything super-revealing, it did create a context for me to really appreciate how fucking insane and amazing California is. This humongous economy, and the largest population in the nation, housed by two of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States, was built on aqueducts. We engineered this... to a large degree. This is bigger than most people realize. California didn’t just happen. It was fucking made. 

This state is one of the few states I’d consider living in, and it came about by deliberate planning, grand vision, and huge investments. By rerouting water all over the state, we have literally shifted the landscape. 

Without this reorganization of water resources, we would barely harbor any agriculture. Would the culture of food we have here, owed to the close proximity we have to our productive farmland, have come about? Would the wine industry even exist? 

San Francisco and Los Angeles would not have been the huge population centers they are. I wonder where people would have settled in California, then? Would the Owen’s Valley that Los Angeles took water rights from have turned into an inland metropolis? Would people have simply moved to other cities? What would the Californian coast look like? Is it even reasonable to think that we could have continued on without aqueducts eventually coming about from demand?

With all the water that we have here, would there even be any way to use these resources without this deliberate and massive infrastructure, considering we get most of our precipitation in only a few months out of the year? I’m fascinated by thinking about what the alternative to our reality would look like. I’m impressed by what Californians have accomplished. It’s worth saying that a lot of this infrastructure came about by deliberate lies and sneaky tactics, and maybe that isn’t commendable. Also, water regulation and rights in the west... I don’t understand them yet but they sound really inconsisent, and, uh, maybe non-existent. So a lot of this was possible because of weak laws, as well. Still, it’s hard to look at all this over 100 years later and not pause in astonishment at where we are because of this. 

[theurbanpragmatist]

My First Post

Okay! This is my first post on this blog. I have no idea how to organize my messy human self and all of its gradients, spills, and contradictions into neat, categorized blogging. But I do often feel the need to write, so whether I take the time to do it or not, I enjoy having a blog around. At this point, I’ve disassociated my selves into several Tumblrs.

digitalwasteland: my first tumblr account, which was a spread of interesting facts, links, memes, songs, videos, and stray thoughts. It was a record of my walks through the internet that I thought of as a digital wasteland. It’s something I haven’t used in years. It’s reflective of some personal growth in my twenties. Probably. It’s been dead for almost five years, I think.

rememberingfutures: the Tumblr I created to be less about reflecting and curating the internet, and more about writing. The one rule for this blog was that it could only include content I produced. There is personal writing. There is also very superficial attempts at creating an online self; I went through desperate times trying to seek employment, and I was under the impression that I needed to generate content to maintain certain appearances. There is a lot in between.

There is also another tumblr, which is a record of some moments when I’ve been most fragile, in the midst of trauma. But I won’t share a link to that, here.

Finally, there’s this blog. I used the name theurbanpragmatist for a while when I was a solar energy consultant. I even bought a domain. But like most things I’ve done professionally, my heart just wasn’t in it. There has always been a part of me that refuses to take anything more seriously than my education. In my heart, my goal has been to finish my degree before anything else. All other endeavors were a matter of getting a paycheck. 

Starting this fall, I’m on track to finally finishing my degree in Urban Studies and Planning, at San Francisco State University. My whole heart is in this, to an extent I’ve never felt before. When I first started my journey through higher education, I felt committed to a career in music and was majoring in Music Composition. All of my young life had revolved around the study and performance of music up to that point, and even so, I felt ambivalent and disinterested in many aspects of an education in music. This is different. I feel way more intensely engaged in the subject matter of my current courses. I mean, I’ve only been to the first class for each course, but none of it feels like a chore. I am fucking ready.

I am fucking ready, and I have feelings and thoughts and inspirations to write about that revolve around my education and the subjects it helps me ponder. For that, I have this tumblr. The Urban Pragmatist. What I most hope is that I can grow into a person that leads into solutions from practical perspectives, focusing on vision and action. It seems to me that we are a society which is ready to identify ills and discuss them, but we’re lacking a core set of values to apply to policy, and a vision of how relevant social ills can be addressed according to those values. I want to be one of the people helping with that.

And this is where you can read about it. I’ve taken the first step towards making this my career, after a long, hard break. You can follow me, here.