Camps: A Guide to 21st Century Space by Charlie Hailey
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009
ISBN 978-0-262-51287-9
(56) The neo-summer camp then approaches what [Hakim] Bey calls the “utopia of utopia” where work is play and threat becomes solution.
(90) Cosimo Rondo camped for most of his life as baron of the trees. Having left his parents’ table on June 15, 1767, the twelve-year-old oversaw central Europe’s green canopy wihtout ever setting foot on earth again.
NB: Italo Calvino The Baron of the Trees
(158) Leave No Trace [LNT]
IN this way, the LNT principles have their origins in the practices of camping but imply a reading far beyond the campground to frame outdoor ethics as a way of living:
1. Plan ahead and prepare
2. Travel and camp on durable surfaces
3. Dispose of waste properly
4. Leave what you find
5. Minimize campfire impacts
6. Respect wildlife
7. Be considerate of other visitors
(159) If the camping principles of LNT reflect the ethical underpinnings of governmental policy for an evolving national program to manage wilderness, then the Earth Guardians might be its localized practitioners and the Burning Man parlance of matter out of place (MOOP), its vernacular. After their certification as LNT Masters by the Bureau of Land Managemnt (BLM) in the Cabez Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, the Earth Guardians returned to the 2002 Burning Man with the objective to “green” the festival’s termporary city. The event’s theme camps can be certified as Leave No Trace sites, and in 2006 the Guardians estalished an LNT Model Camp Tour to showcase camps with LNT best practices. Solar showers, recycled materials, gray-water disposal, and other green technologies are profiled in the tour.
NB: John Todd’s ecological waste treatment
(201) The Royal Air Force occupied the now militarized holiday camp as RAF Hunmanby Moor, accomodating six thousand military personnel. Such wartime appropriation was not new - Cunningham’s Young Men’s Holiday Camp, thought to have initiated the holiday camping tradition, was transformed into an internment camp during the First World War. This ready, though uneasy, translation of holiday camp into places of detainment and military organization suggest how fluidly, and sometimes alarmingly, the spaces of camps in their perceived temporality can be transformed in kind but also by degree.
(267 -268) Planning to design playgrounds and gardens for the internees, Isamu Noguchi, the sculptor of Nisei Japanese and American descent, left his home in New York and voluntarily entered the Poston Relocation Center on May 12, 1942. When his plans for a cooperative community proved impossible, it took Noguchi seven months to be discharged from the camp, having only been able to negotiate a temporary permit for his release. But the experience of the camp followed Noguchi and his work, as the existence of the internment camps has remained in the landscapes of many of the country’s extant military camps. Immediately after his release in November 1942, Noguchi produced the Monument to Heroes and sculpted My Arizona and the cast bronze This Tortured Earth.
(325) aporia [ecological aporia] - an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory.
"the celebrated aporia whereby a Cretan declares all Cretans to be liars"
In Transitional Settlement [Transitional Settlement/Displaced Populations by Tom Cosellis and Antonella Vitale (Oxford: Oxfam, GD, 2005)], the objectives of the refugee camp work between safety and assistance, within a semipermanent zone of expected, and by some measures planned, obsolescence; “Camps are not intended to be sustainable settlements, but every effort should be made to create and support livelihood opportunities for displaced populations, to empower them by increasing their self-sufficiency, and to reduce demands upon the aid community.” Considering the scale of refugee camps, many of which exceed populations of twenty thousand, environmental impacts complicate sustainable practices: “Camps are invariably established on marginal land, with little productive potential for agriculture and livestock; if the land was not marginal, the community would probably be using it.” Caught in this ecological aporia, camps succeed environmentally only when the increasingly complex needs of the displaced population are met more effectively with fewer resources. If natural disasters alone affected two billion people in the twentieth century’s last decade, then the environmental impacts of the resulting refugee and IDP camps yield increasingly great epiphenomena. Mandate refugees soon become environmental refugees, who are then joined by economic refugees. And when one-quarter of a region’s population lives in semipermanent camps, as in the case of Tanzania’s Kasulu district, environmental and social constraints collide.
(328) castramentation - the making or laying out of a military camp
...the military camp’s systems of control and the evolution of twentieth-century housing plans primarily arising out of Western traditions.
(349) More recent research, carried out in combined civilian and military studies, has addressed language translation, open-source communications, and network infrastructure. Strong Angel’s Pony Express models a mobile vehicle used to establish a wireless cloud that services the immediate area of emergency and provides what is called a “sync groove,” linking with other sites across a hypothetical camp (see “Mock Refugee Camp” section). Coordination has also improved with the development of such projects as Global MapAid, an NGO specializing in the distribution of GIS technologies.
(390) On March 31, 1933, the U.S. Congress authorized the president to direct emergency conservation work “for the relief of unemployment through the performance of useful public work.” The purpose of the resulting Emergency Conservation Work (ECW) agency was to conserve and develop the nation’s natural resouces. As government-administered versions of the work camp model, ECW camps hosted a half million unemployed youth by the summer of 1935. ECW camps became CCC camps with new legislation in 1936, creating the Civilian Conservation Corps and limiting enrollment to three hundred thousand men - a total made up of unmarried male citizens between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three, no more than thirty thousand veterans, and a maximum of ten thousand American Indians. Enrollees were required to devote a minimum of ten hours per week to “general educational and vocational training” - concretizing the learning component of CCC’s overall mission. As the main fiscal agent, the War Department served as the primary administrator within a complicated network of governance by three other departments - Labor, Agriculture, and Interior, Throughout its nine-year history, the program administered more than four thousand CCC camps.
(396) Camp Katrina generated the organization “Burners Without Borders” (BWB). With its mission and projects coming directly out of the experiences in Pearlington and Biloxi, BWB is an “international network of volunteers dedicated creating community though social food works that reflect inclusion, self-reliance, civic responsability, gifting, and above all, the belief that doing good can be fun, and done with style.”
NB: Rainbow Family disaster and advance teams, Cajun Navy, eco-restoration villages
(397) Burners Without Borders https://www.burnerswithoutborders.org
(400) Gary Smith’s Radical Compassion about the Jesuit priest’s work with homeless communities in Portland
