LAND Are the Rockies Too Big to Worry About? Peter Berg & Linn West, editors, Seven Piece Portfolio, $3.00 from: Planet Drum Foundation Box 31251 San Francisco, CA 94131 Planet Drur:n's new "bundle" 6f materials is a wholistic exercise in bior·egional consciousness, focused on the backbone of North America, the Rockies. Its foldouts, maps and flyers will expand your perspectives on their geological time, a hydrologic system that affects an entire continent and every ocean surrounding it, the seasons that can be measured in the cycles of wild animals and wild flowers, mountain poetry and interspecies regard. Here are new glimpses of a bioregion almost too great to comprehend. You can threaten it with the destruction of unplanned and irresponsible demands, or you can seek to live here rooted in the soils and in touch with its integrity and power. Knowing the whole helps you make the right choice. -SA A Research Report on Developing a Community Level Natural Resource Inventory System, Deborah Barlow, George Burrill, J~m~s Nolfi, 1978, 49 pp., $3.00 from: Center for Studies in Food SelfSufficiency Vermont Inst. of Community Involvement 90 Main St. Burlington, VT 05401 Observing that most methodologies used for comprehensive rural planning efforts are misplaced urban planning techniques, the Center for Studies in Food SelfSufficiency in Vermont set out.to de- · velop a planning tool designed specifically for rural areas. What they came up with was a computer-based resource inventory system which overlaps and stores mapped information, prints maps of any individual category or combination, and determines total acreage of any category or combination. Named SEURAT, after French Pointillist Georges Seurat, their system has be·en . used in pilot studies 'in both Brattleboro and Middlebury to assess planning questions concerning available agricultural land and waste disposal alternatives as February-March 1979 RAIN Page 7 II MEDICINE WI--IEE.L" - H;</h., ,·,, .,. ~ ,1\1Jn f 1lll!') f) N ,,,.,,,Q .... ",ci• • IJ-70 • \ ) 8700 fed, ..JUSt abnve t,mberline. on a. fla.t -lopped 5houlder of Medicine Mounfo.,n, o.. 74- Ro fee.t d,amde.r c,·rcle oF while or c.re,o.t11-colore.d 111,iestone slabs. , from Are the Rockies Too Big a factor in land development. Their Research Report is an overview of this process. We'll be.eager to learn how the~e efforts affect their long-range goal of developing a.self-sufficient, diversified-agritultural economy in Vermont. -SA BALANCE OF THE GARDEN, RHYTHM OF THE LAND The Ocean·in the Sand, Japan: From Landscape to Garden, Mark Holborn, 1978, 104 pp., $6.95 softcover from: Such intuitive knowledge of nature seems to stand in stark contrast to the devastated, polluted landscape of much of modern Japan. Yet Japan, says Holbrook, like its gardens, contains a world within a world. And within, there remains Shambhala Publications, Inc. 1123 Spruce St. Boulder, CO 80302 While the formal gardens of the West reflect a linear worldview that seeks to impose order on nature: the gardens of Japan reflect its historical identity with the flow of nature, and the inherent harmony of natural form. The Ocean in the Sand, Mark Holbrook's deft exploration of the relationship b.etween culture,and nature, traces the traditions which have infused Japanese gardens with a natural mythology that persists today, despite the country's transfiguration into an industrial superpower. Shinto, Geomancy (the sacred science of land surveyance), and especially Zen have all contributed to the garden's heritage as a vehicle of balance in a land of contradictions. Perhaps most artful has been the Japanese mastety for creating illusions of space in small garden enclosures, and to use that space to produce either a sense of transience-or a sense of focus. The z'en-influenced Garden of Stones at the Temple of Ryoanji outside Kyoto gives us more insight into that mastery. • Here, five groups of iarge, moss-ringed stones are arranged . simply in a bed of coarse s'and. "Within the space of the garden, framed by the wall, images are compressed that extend from a view of the !andscape that is cosmic, to a pinpoint focus on matter which is IT?-icrosrnpic. You can refer immediately -to·the native landscape that is reflected-the rocks stand like rugged islands in the waves of an ocean, an image so - familiar after the native coastline; or they rise with the thrusting volcanic rhythm of the mountains, the sand swirling around their base like a cloud lingering on the lower ·slopes ... " a spirit close to the pulse of nature. The garden is a key to that source. -SA from The Ocean in the Sand
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