Like most of us, pandemic times presented me with an opportunity to do some existential reevaluating. What am I doing here? What’s to be done in the limited days, months, years left – how limited we’ll never really know. Until we do. I didn’t want to wait to find out. I couldn’t wait. So, I decided to act as if I already knew.

I had retired from social media even before then, but during the pandemic, I also stopped watching and reading most of the news. I became acutely conscious of commerce’s thirsty stalking for my attention. And at just this moment Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy floated into my life. Like the Anna’s hummingbird that drops by my open fourth-floor apartment window just holding there and looking at me, this book seems to have just arrived in my hands. I enjoyed its discussion of the attention economy in the context of historical droppings out, the cosmic humor of Chuang Tzu, and the way making and encountering art can change how we attend to the world. But I was most moved by the fact that she was not just advocating quitting Facebook, she wasn’t just advocating turning our attention away from those forces attempting to strip mine our personalities, relationships, and attention, but she thought we might consider consciously turning our attention toward something. For Odell, this was nature around her in Oakland and the broader Bay Area.

This resonated so profoundly with me that I was sent into a nostalgic reverie as I thought of growing up in the woods in New Hampshire. The way some kids grow up playing all day with the neighborhood kids, I grew up playing all day with my neighborhood trees. When I was 15 my family moved to Santa Barbara. I remembered how at first the transition to California was difficult. “How can this be a national forest if there are no trees?” But it didn’t take too long. It was my encounters with the local ecology that taught me how to love and be loved by Southern California.

Because I had grown up in the woods and was yet to find my crew, I adjusted to this radically different new home by continually going back into nature, hiking in the front country and the backcountry of the Santa Ynez Mountains searching for some kind of solace. And I really feel it’s as if by continually turning my attention to (i.e. being present with) the natural world around me I was rewarded. Over time the most wondrous, and magical things were revealed to me. I remember watching the fiery trails of the Perseid meteor showers on rocks that were still warm from the day’s sun high above the city on Gibraltar Rock while warm Santa Ana winds carrying the composite scent of sages, decomposing bay leaves, and the finest sediments kept the marine layer out at sea. I remember the bioluminescence of phytoplankton that traced my every movement with a blue-green white light on a midnight swim like fairy dust and the most impossible magics. I remember the beaching of 10,000 grunions on their run to lay eggs when they thought no one was looking. These are just a handful of stills from the epic movie of my falling in love with California. And it makes sense to use that metaphor of love because it’s in the being present with – the attending to – that we give our love. Well, I fell head over heels for California in 1993. I’m still tumbling.

Having been brought to wallow in these recollections of my past upon reading Jenny Odell, I knew that whatever I was going to do next would involve making the wonder of nature once again part of my life. This led first to discovering the University of California Certified California Naturalist Program. This program trains citizen scientists in ecology and climate science to become stewards of the natural bounty that is California. Living in Los Angeles I was able to fulfill the course requirements with a Field Biology class at Pasadena City College. For 16 weeks we hiked around the San Bernadino Mountains, took part in biodiversity blitzes, and began getting to know the diversity of species that make up the most common communities in Southern California. This led me to put into practice what I had learned – how to turn my attention to nature like a naturalist – in my local urban wilderness, Griffith Park.

The more I learned the more filled with wonder and delight I was. I knew I wanted to share that experience of wonder with anyone with a craving for it. And coming out of the pandemic I had a feeling that many of us also have a craving to be reminded that we are bodies in a world of bodies, to engage our senses, to see, smell, touch, taste, and know the world around us – and to do so with others in a community, to do so at home and when we travel. I asked myself, “What if travel became synonymous with learning about other ecologies the way it’s now synonymous with learning about other languages, customs, and currencies? And what if by becoming a resource for my community to become better acquainted with our local ecology and sharing my wonder and delight I could offer an alternative use of one’s attention? Not to advocate a position, but just to say “Whoa! Look at this! Isn’t this cool? Did you know ants ‘herd’ aphids the way we raise livestock?![1]” Maybe if we had more opportunities for wonder and delight in nature we would all find ourselves seeking out more and more of them. Maybe sparking curiosity, wonder, and delight in another person can begin its own set of chain reactions within that person leading them to make whatever decisions they were going to make in terms of how they relate to the living systems in their lives out of that experience of wonder and delight.

I have long been a student of cityscapes and flânerie and reading a city through the individual buildings and neighborhoods that pass by on an afternoon stroll. In the same way, you can see someone has lived in the lines in their face, you can see how a city has lived in the generations of buildings and street names that change and write over themselves over time. And so much of what we call cultural history traces our relationships with the living systems all around us. So, it made perfect sense to me to combine local ecology with the history of a city like Los Angeles. So many historical eras, so many waves of migration, woven together in the face of today’s Super City of the Future: Los Angeles. I love that epithet. I picked it up from the English architectural critic Reyner Banham who famously included in his book about Los Angeles, The Four Ecologies, freeways as a unique local ecology. When I was choosing a name I started there – “Super City Wonder Tours: Los Angeles” has something - a little too much and still somehow awe-inspiring – what could be more Los Angeles?

On June 21st, 2023, the summer solstice, a little over 2 weeks ago as I write this today, I incorporated Earth City Wonderas a Benefit Corporation. A B-Corp is a for-profit entity that is protected to include social and environmental considerations in addition to profit considerations in its operations. I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t know if anyone will show up. But that’s what a life of adventure is all about – and isn’t adventure what we’re here for? Let’s see what happens. I can’t wait.

[1] Yup. I know it’s freaking crazy. Come take a hike, I’ll tell you more.