Shooting stars, one of my favorite wildflowers, are one of the first to flower here in mid-February. I have begun walking to the slopes where they live, hoping this walk will be the one where I am once again visually shocked by the intensity of the first flower’s flaming magenta. So shooting stars are on my mind this time of year. (It is now two weeks later and the shooting stars are in bloom.)
Last night, Alysia and I went to a movie at the local cineplex. I looked out over vast parking lots surrounding Costco, Winco, Home Base, Barnes and Nobles, Home Depot, Circuit City, In and Out Burger, Cinemark, Blockbuster Video, Walmart, Office Depot. I suddenly remembered that 10 or 11 years ago, this was where Gary had sent us to rescue shooting stars. He had told me there was a place in the blue oak woodland thick with shooting stars that was slated for development. He, a lover/bard of native plants, was rescuing as many as possible. So I had come out and dug up 20 or 30 bulbs and over the next week, I tried to replant them where I thought shooting stars would want to be. One or two bloomed the next year but all the transplants have since faded away.
Back then this area had been small country lanes and unofficial dirt tracks. Now it is 4 lane roads with left turn lanes at each signal. Probably most people in Redding do most of their spending in this area. Ten years ago it was oaks and shooting stars out past the mall on the edge of town. Back then I could not comprehend the scale and speed of the “development” that would happen to this area.
This led to a reverie on what I will call economic landscape ecology. Naturalists are familiar with how certain patterns shape natural landscapes. Drainage patterns shape the relief of the land. Aspect (what direction a slope faces) and gradients of elevation-caused temperatures strongly shape the vegetation that covers that topography. If you do not recognize these patterns, then they are like disruptive coloration, breaking the landscape into visually awkward pieces that don’t fit together. But if you do recognize and understand these patterns, then they connect the land into a vast, multi-hued story.
Around our towns, the graders, underground culverts and pavement have just about flattened all these patterns from the land and replaced them with patterns that are most understandable through economics rather than ecology. The landscape is still a network of interconnecting patterns but the patterns are almost all of human creation. A familiar example is how gas stations and fast food places cluster at interstate exits. Rather than a nested hierarchy of drainages with patterns and gradients of stream order, we surround ourselves with a nested hierarchy of streets (street order). Rather than riparian vegetation bordering a drainage, changing as one moves downslope along increasing volumes of water, we have a gradient of economic activity. The headwaters of the smallest streets are lined by houses. These streets converge upon larger streets where the cars, just like water, flow faster. Like an occasional willow, one encounters occasional small, local businesses. Homes start giving way (in some economic ecosystems) to apartments. As cars converge into higher street orders, one passes gas stations and grocery stores (or combinations – the convenience store). Further down the economic drainage, one encounters strip malls and the beginning of national franchise business. Just before the streets flow into the freeways, one might come to a large, fully grown mall.
A gradient of signage governing the convergences has evolved with the street drainages. Unposted rules of right of way in the headwaters gradually give way to stop signs which give way to stop lights which eventually develop into stop lights with left turn lanes until the largest streets converge with the freeways as underpasses, overpasses and on and off ramps.
The evolution of street drainages and economic activities are ancient. Through much of history, they have fit into the landscape because the drainage pattern of water has shaped the human flow of commerce. So the patterns fit together, adding a human dimension to the natural landscape. Only recently with earthmovers have humans leveled and paved the land and imposed purely economic landscapes upon the Earth.
Another ancient example of “economic landscapes” is how homes grow larger as one moves up a hill. We humans love views enough to pay extra for them so that people with more money tend to be found higher on the hill and so tend to build larger houses (partly because a large house high on the hill proclaims wealth doubly).
Anyway, what caught my mind as I walked across the cineplex parking lot was the parking lots. Probably at least 80% of this former oak woodland is now parking lots surrounding stores, many of whose names I had never heard of 10 years ago. How did this happen? Parking lots are probably the key. Fifty years ago, towns had a downtown, where most of the town’s businesses lined the streets. People either walked or had a single car. People did not go shopping every day. The volume of the goods was carryable. When one shopped, one would drive downtown, find a parking place, and then walk from store to store.
As cars become more common and people developed a rhythm of daily shopping, street parking couldn’t handle the demand. The downtowns grew congested. Parking meters evolved. From this developed the malls where more space for free parking was built into the new landscape. This invited greater dependence on the car (buy more cars) and more daily shopping. But something new happened 10 – 20 years ago. Most of the big parking lots that replaced the shooting stars are attached to stores where the typical shopper comes out with a load that can’t be carried around in a shopping bag. (Hard to carry around a TV or 20 bricks or a shopping cart of groceries.) So rather than a mall where parking surrounds a cluster of many small stores, most of which sell “shopping bag” stuff (You don’t see people pushing shopping carts down the promenades of a shopping mall; it’s uncouth.), we move to a single store connected by shopping carts to a large surrounding parking lot. The parking lot is a big, up-front expense. If you are going to buy ten acres for a parking lot and if people are going to wheel their loot to the car in a shopping cart, then it doesn’t cost much more to add a quarter acre of space within the store and expand your offerings into related stuff. A superstore develops. Rather than shopping at ten smaller stores, a person parks in three different stores’ parking lots.
But looking around, much of each parking lot is empty. The cineplex parking lot is designed to accommodate the Christmas or the Friday, Saturday date night traffic on opening day of a blockbuster movie. The rest of the week the parking lot is far less than half full. The parking lots of most of the stores are designed for the Christmas shopping crowd. The rest of the year they are less than half full.
The speed with which the shooting stars gave way to empty parking lots makes me suspect that all these big stores probably participate in development consortiums. Freeways interchanges, stop lights, new road systems – they must all go in together. It can’t really be done a block at a time. I’m not sure what all this means; I am just growing more aware of these landscape-shaping patterns.
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