Features

A Church With a Memory

March 8, 2014 by Vanessa Hua Comments Off

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Professor Tomás Summers Sandoval Jr. peeked through the front doors of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, a gleaming white church on a steep street at the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Inside, a red light glowed over a patch of black-and-white tile, and a musty odor wafted out, the scent of decades of rites and rituals, of fading memories.

Summers Sandoval wrote extensively about the church—a vital religious, educational, political, and social center for Spanish- speaking Catholics—in his new book, Latinos at the Golden Gate, which explores the rise of the city’s Latino community.

The archdiocese never once let him inside, the professor notes, but the lack of access didn’t impede his research into the last remnant of a once lively Latino neighborhood. “Most of the time when you’re writing about history, the people are no longer there, the community is no longer there,” says Summers Sandoval, standing outside Guadalupe Church. “That’s history.”

In his book, he traces the roots from the days of the Gold Rush when migrants first arrived in search of fortune. By 1871, Latin American diplomats and business elites started raising money to build a Spanish-language Catholic church to unify a diverse population, hailing from countries that had strong rivalries. “We who belong to the Spanish in this city, will never achieve strength or respectability while we do not also have unity,” they wrote in a fundraising circular.

Founded in 1875 and rebuilt in 1912 after the city’s great quake and fire at a cost of $85,000, the Moorish Gothic style church could hold 700.

The neighborhood around the church (bounded by Columbus Avenue, Filbert, Washington and Jones streets) grew into the Latin Quarter, a residential and commercial district catering to Spanish speakers. The church fostered solidarity, holding a unified Mass commemorating the independence days of Mexico and Chile each September. Parishioners also carried on traditions, continuing the same rituals, prayers and songs on feast days of their homelands.

By 1950, though, Guadalupe Church began to decline. The Latino population—which more than doubled between 1945 and 1970—moved to more affordable neighborhoods such as the Mission District. The construction of the nearby Broadway Tunnel displaced some residents and reduced attendance, and Chinatown encroached, transforming the blocks around the church. Yet even when Latino families moved out of the neighborhood or into the suburbs, many maintained strong ties, returning to Guadalupe Church for baptisms, confirmations, first communions and first confessions.

Declining membership brought the closure of Guadalupe Church in 1991, and the building eventually housed St. Mary’s School for 15 years. The space is now vacant, and efforts by the Archdiocese to sell the historical landmark met resistance from activists who want to preserve the church for use by the Latino community.

From the front steps, there’s a view of the Bay Bridge and the tip of the Transamerica Pyramid, and the street below hums with the sound of cable cars rolling past. The bells are gone from the church’s twin towers, but a stunning mosaic of the patron saint remains on the façade above the front doors, in a red gown and blue mantle adorned with stars, streaming rays of sunshine—the same saint that generations of San Francisco Latinos venerated here.

The church, says Summers Sandoval, remains a reminder of the people’s struggles, “the result of the success of early century immigrants to create a home for themselves in the city, a place they could claim as their own.”

Digital History

March 8, 2014 by Steven Boyd Saum Comments Off

Pomona Alumnus Ashlee Vance

How to tell the story of Silicon Valley—land of entrepreneurial visionaries, booms and busts, and the quest for machines to extend the farthest reaches of the human mind? For Ashlee Vance ’00, a writer covering tech for more than a decade, a good place to start is across the street from his house in Mountain View, Calif., at the Computer History Museum. The building is part of the story; here once were headquarters for SGI, maker of hardware and graphics innovations that enabled work on the first Star Wars films and provided sought-after speed for Wall Street trading.

“Computing moves so fast that people don’t take time to stop and document it,” says Vance, author of Geek Silicon Valley and writer for Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Striving for the new new thing means that there’s a tendency to chew through the old stuff and spit it out. But the museum offers a kaleidoscope history of technology (2,000-plus years and counting) and shows how the ways we work and play have been rewritten by computing, with design aesthetics that range from a wooden abacus to steampunk to the Jetsons. There’s the big hardware from the pre-digital (and even pre-vacuum tube) age, starting with Charles Babbage’s “Difference Engine No. 2,” a massive contraption filled with metal gears designed in the 1830s. (It was only built last decade, to see if it would actually work. It does.) Another hefty device, Herman Hollerith’s desk-sized “Electric Tabulating System,” used punched cards to compile data for the 1890 U.S. Census.

Think colossal for IBM’s SAGE system, built in the 1950s (at the cost of $94 billion in today’s dollars) to provide warning against a Soviet nuclear attack. It required hundreds of operators—some who spent mind-numbing hours staring at a screen, watching, waiting. Thankfully, there was a built-in ashtray.

Think cool (including Freon) for the Cray-1, both the fastest computer on the planet after it was finished in 1976, with 60 miles of hand-threaded wire inside, and “the world’s most expensive loveseat,” thanks to a leather bench wrapping around the outside. “It has so much more character than computers today,” Vance says.

It’s the story threads that make the museum displays especially compelling, Vance says. Early work on enormous scale wouldn’t have been done without massive government funding. But standing on the shoulders of those literal giants are the smaller machines which, together with a DIY attitude and a late-’60s desire to expand the possibilities of human experience, led to the first virtual reality goggles (1969) and, through the Homebrew Computer Club, the Apple I.

Don’t miss the game room. Start with the first Pong machine—a curiosity when it was installed in a bar, “but this kicked off the videogame revolution.” That made Atari into the fastest-growing company ever. They’re not any more. But “people tend to underestimate video games,” Vance says. “They push limits of software, of graphics, of silicon.”

The seemingly limitless realm of the Cloud is a place we know well enough now—though where is it? Here’s an early server rack, the machine sagging in the middle, that belonged to a fledgling Google. “They had to use cheap hardware, and the software had to make up for when a disk drive or chip would fail.”

What would Vance imagine for the next wing of the museum? The interplay of hardware and software in what we drive—or drives itself, especially under electric power; and the coming revolution in robotics. Plus, he says, “Down the road is a company working on a flying car.”

For the Birds

March 8, 2014 by Daniel Gould Comments Off

The Farallon Islands, a windy string of rocks 30 miles off the coast from San Francisco, might seem like an odd place to call a “second home.” Boasting just a single research station, the remote islands are only accessible by infrequent and often choppy boat trips. But Associate Professor of Biology Nina Karnovsky isn’t fazed by the rugged conditions.

“It’s one of my favorite places in the world,” she says.

farralon1 Home to the largest seabird colony in the continental U.S., the Farallones are a magnet for ocean wildlife. In summer, seemingly every inch of the place is claimed by thousands of nesting birds fiercely guarding their chicks. During the winter, noisy elephant seals crowd the beaches to give birth to their pups. Meanwhile, great white sharks hunt in the waters offshore. In other months, blue and humpback whales can be spotted making their annual migrations along the coast. Karnovsky made her first trip to the islands when she was just out of college, to work on a project to record shark sightings.

She’s returned several times over the years to observe how seabirds such as auklets and gulls respond to changing conditions in the ocean. Perched at the top of the marine food web, these birds are impacted by everything from climate events like El Niño to pollution from plastics and oil spills.

“On my second trip out there, during a seabird breeding season, I realized that these birds are just such powerful indicators of what’s going on in the ocean. That really turned me on to the idea of using these indicator species in my work, and that’s exactly what I do now,” she says.

A National Wildlife Refuge since 1969, the Farallones are closed to the public, and scientists and students are only allowed for temporary visits. Still, wildlife-lovers can catch a close view of the action from birding and whale-watching boats that sail from cities in the Bay Area to circle around the islands.

“If you’re not susceptible to sea-sickness, you can go out there and see them,” Karnovsky says.

Karnovsky, who has spent over a year’s worth of time on the Farallones between her different stays, hopes to ship out again soon. In recent years she’s even been able to send some of her students to the islands to gather data for their own summer research projects and senior theses.

“Looking back, I can see it was one of the turning points in my life, where I discovered something that was really exciting. It’s nice that I’ve been able to share that with my students.”

Nature, Science and Art

March 8, 2014 by Paul Sterman '84 Comments Off

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As the 1950s came to an end, Jonas Salk was looking to open a top-flight research center. The man who developed the polio vaccine wanted a site where scientists would be inspired by their surroundings.

Today, standing at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, you can see what a perfect spot he picked.

Sitting atop a rocky cliff in La Jolla, the world-renowned facility looks out prominently on the Pacific Ocean, offering a scenic vista that’s as dazzling as any in San Diego. On this mid-January day, the sun is out, the surf is glimmering and two hikers are walking leisurely along the canyon trails below. The open, airy design of the institute accentuates the calm of the horizon.

“It’s an extraordinary place,” says Mary Walshok ’64, who knows the spot well. She works right across the street, as associate vice chancellor for public programs at UC San Diego. “This space speaks most deeply to the character of this region.”

A sociology professor and sought-after expert on San Diego’s economy, Walshok is my personal guide on a tour of Torrey Pines Mesa, a high-wattage biotech cluster that stretches about three miles along the La Jolla bluffs. She knows just about everything about the area, from the history of city land deals to where the eucalyptus trees on the hillsides come from, and her earthy enthusiasm and humor enliven the journey.

As Walshok explains in a new book she has co-authored, Invention & Reinvention: The Evolution of San Diego’s Innovation Economy, Torrey Pines Mesa has been a catalyst for the region’s prosperity in recent decades, as the city has refashioned itself from a military metropolis to a thriving hub of science and technology innovation. The mesa is home to such heavyweights as the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Qualcomm, General Atomics, the Scripps Research Institute, and the new star on the block, the J. Craig Venter Institute.

Walshok proudly notes that Pomona’s Roger Revelle ’29—a UC San Diego pioneer and onetime director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography— played a pivotal role in the emergence of Torrey Pines Mesa in the ’50s and ’60s.

The Salk Institute, founded in 1960, is largely regarded as the most iconic of the mesa’s inhabitants. It was designed by famed architect Louis Kahn, who deftly captured Salk’s vision of a transcendent place for thought and discovery. At the center of the site is a courtyard separating two uniquely shaped, symmetric structures— six-story laboratory buildings with dramatic views of the ocean. A narrow channel of water flows through the middle of the courtyard. The place gives off the vibe of a scientific sanctuary, encouraging creativity and reflection.

The inviting look embodies the architectural character of many of the spacious centers in this biotech cluster, says Walshok. The idea is to create public spaces that are welcoming and open, integrating nature and science and art. These are not labs where researchers work in darkened isolation; rather, the science campuses are popular sites for public receptions and concerts, Walshok says.

Down the road, at the Scripps Research Institute, a courtyard features a row of bamboo trees, a large open space and a concert hall that’s one of the best in San Diego, Walshok says. Nearby, UCSD houses the acclaimed La Jolla Playhouse, and across the street from that is the new bluff-top campus of the J. Craig Venter Institute. The $37- million, 45,000-square-foot structure officially opened in November, although parts of it are still being completed. Venter is the La Jolla biologist who cracked the human genetic code, putting him on a bevy of magazine covers.

As Walshok and I walk around the place, we look out at the ocean and the eucalyptus groves in the canyon below. The Venter Institute looks clean and contemporary, evoking an elegant, techno feel; its design features an open courtyard and lots of glass, wood and concrete.

The aesthetic is very 21st century, notes Walshok. “It’s not like European-style architecture … It’s like what you would see in Hong Kong or Shanghai.”

The distinct architectural touches that flavor Torrey Pines Mesa add an interesting element to this biotech nexus along the San Diego coast. A beacon of brainpower, it is another symbol of the state’s dynamic evolution. “California continues to invent itself,” says Walshok, “and not just in Silicon Valley.”

Reading the Desert

March 8, 2014 by Laura Tiffany Comments Off

Early the weekend before Thanksgiving, two SUVs loaded with junior geology majors, one professor, camping equipment and burrito fixings hit the road. The small caravan drives about three hours southeast, traversing interstate, state, county and local roads until finally, the asphalt ends.

anza1 They head down Fish Creek Wash, a dry riverbed winding its way through dramatically deep stone canyons.

Destination? The final exam for Sedimentology. In the Split Mountain area of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park—California’s largest state park and second largest state park in the continental U.S.—students witness the geologic history of the arrival of the Colorado River and the development of the San Andreas Fault as Baja California was ripped away from the North American Plate, opening the Gulf of California, five million years ago.

“The importance of sedimentary rocks is that they are the Earth’s history,” says Associate Professor of Geology Robert Gaines. “What’s really cool about Pomona College is instead of having to look at some dusty old samples in boxes, we can go camping, and students can actually put their hands on a really complicated succession and try to figure out what was happening during the deposition of these strata, to reconstruct the ancient environments that were present by looking at signatures in the rocks.”

While the area Gaines and his students explore—which includes wind caves, slot canyons and fossil records like Ice Age mammal footprints—is only accessible to those driving high-clearance vehicles, Anza-Borrego is full of well-marked trails (including part of the Pacific Crest Trail) in its diverse 900 square miles extending from below sea level to 8,000 feet. The park is located mostly in eastern San Diego County, and first-timers can start at the Visitor Center in Borrego Springs for information on the natural history and highlights of the area. Consider visiting in February or March to experience the dramatic blooming of desert wildflowers like the chuparosa, chinchweed and dune evening primrose.

Call the Park’s wildflower hotline at (760) 767-4684,for updates on the seasonal blooms, or visit www.abdnha.org for more information.

A River Runs Through It

March 8, 2014 by Scott Martelle Comments Off

The morning sun has only begun to tint the sky when Heather Williams breaks through thin shrubs to reach the gravelly bank of the Santa Ana River, which is running cool, clear and fast. Williams has come here often over the past two years, mainly as part of her academic research, but also because she finds the site enchanting at the break of day.

williamsriver1 She also is drawn by the juxtaposition. Egrets, ducks and other birds wing above as unseen creatures rustle in the dry grass, a bucolic backdrop to the homeless people sleeping in tents deep in the brush, and the distant rush of commuters barreling down unseen roadways. The air carries a tinge of burning garbage as well, from breakfast campfires near the covered-over Tequesquite Landfill that Williams walked past to get here.

“This is here, this is accessible to us, even when we think that we are surrounded by nothing more than big box stores and concrete and freeways and noise,” says Williams, a professor of politics who teaches, among other courses, Global Politics of Food and Agriculture. “For me it’s a metaphor for our ability to access nature in unexpected places. And it presents us with a choice for the future.”

For all the natural beauty of this stretch of river, the spot Williams has picked out cuts through suburban neighborhoods three miles southwest of downtown Riverside. The Santa Ana, surprisingly, is the largest river in Southern California, traveling nearly 100 miles from its source on Mount San Gorgonio through the Inland Empire and Santa Ana Canyon—where the 91 Freeway cuts through the mountains to Orange County—and on through to the Pacific at the Newport Beach-Huntington Beach border.

This geography represents past and future, and the centrality of water to human settlement—people have lived along the waterway for 9,000 years. And it is the subject of Williams’ book-in progress, River Underground: The Secret Life of the Santa Ana, which looks at the modern evolution of the river from early flood-control efforts through its present condition, amid the region’s expanding population and conflicting demands.

It’s a convoluted past for this inconsistent ribbon of water. The Santa Ana has raged in massive floods and all but disappeared in droughts. It has had its riverbed paved in sections. And it has been the focus of political battles over who gets to use its water, how it should be managed and the role it plays in regional recreation.

In fact, there are scores of free access points along the river, from the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains to Williams’ favorite spot here amid the cottonwoods to where the Santa Ana reaches Orange County’s emblematic beaches. More than 40 miles of developed hiking and biking trails along its length offer oases of nature—and a glimpse of the original landscape—amid the SoCal sprawl.

Oddly, Williams was drawn to studying the Santa Ana River through a research project she did in Peru on the political overlays to human migration and boundaries, both natural and national. But the local Peruvians wanted to discuss water quality and mechanisms to collect statistical portraits of the health of local rivers.

That started an evolution of thought that led Williams to wonder about the health and history of her local watershed, and the demands that will shape its future.

For Williams, this spot along the river represents what has become a consuming area of academic inquiry and a place to generate and share ideas, as she did last summer with a “dream team” of summer research assistants, including Tara Krishna ’14, Clare Anderson ’15 and Minerva Jimenez, Cal State Fullerton ’14. But it also has become a temporary refuge, a place where, on a spring day, “you would see the willows in all their glory. And you would hear the wind coming through the cottonwoods.”

A Rim With A View

March 8, 2014 by Mark Kendall Comments Off

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More than a decade ago, when Geology Professor Eric Grosfils first started bringing students to Amboy Crater in the Mojave Desert, he dreaded the last stretch of the long trip, each time hoping the rough dirt road and unpaved parking lot had not been washed out in a storm.

Fortunately, the path always was intact and the three-hour bus ride always worth it, Grosfils says, because the strikingly symmetrical cinder cone volcano offers such an accessible, boots-on way to teach introductory students about the basics of volcanology.

Since then, new amenities have been put in place—restrooms, a shade spot and, best of all, paved roads and parking—clearing the way for you, too, to more comfortably visit this desert wonder located right off an old section of Route 66. Reaching the cinder cone simply requires a relatively flat, mile-long hike, and a convenient breach on the west side of the crater wall makes the steep path up to the rim a bit more manageable for those who are in less than impeccable shape. “You can go into the crater and crawl around,” says Grosfils. “It’s fresh. It’s young. The lava flow looks great. The cinder cone is completely intact.”

Grosfils takes students to the crater during the first few weeks of his introductory geology class, which he teaches with a planetary emphasis. The idea is to give them access to a very obvious volcano that they can roam and get a sense of the scale of things.

In the class, a lot of numbers are thrown around, Grosfils says, and the visit helps put the figures into context. If the students are huffing and puffing while climbing up the 250-foot-high Amboy Crater, and they know the massive Olympus Mons volcano on Mars is in the ballpark of 14 miles high, “it means something.” “This is a field trip that’s really about observation,” he explains. “It’s about finding out what you can see in the field and building hypotheses from that—things that are testable. … I want the students to be asking questions about what they’re seeing. I want their observations to drive the hypotheses about the processes that go on.”

While up on the rim, he asks the students to look out at the surrounding desert plain and imagine what they would have seen if they had been standing there watching when Amboy first erupted. He has them estimate the thickness of the basaltic lava flow, and later in the term they consider what shape it would take under the conditions of another planet. On Mars, for example, with all other conditions the same, the lighter gravity would most likely lead to a much taller, though less extensive, volcanic flow.

For your trip, you can get a little more down to Earth, taking notice of the two nested areas inside the volcano, evidence of two smaller and later eruptions. You also can figure out the direction of the prevailing winds by noticing the absence of sand on one side, a wind streak (also visible to orbiting spacecraft, like similar features on Mars) that forms on the downwind side of the volcano. Amboy Crater’s relative youth—Grosfils says that recent estimates put it at anywhere from 7,000 to around 80,000 years old—makes it a great, unblemished example of a cinder cone volcano.

But even if you hear explosions and rumbling, rest assured the dormant volcano is probably not the culprit. The boom-boom-boom is likely coming from the Marine Corps bombing range to the southwest, so, along with taking the usual desert heat precautions, make sure you know where you roam.

State Secrets

March 8, 2014 by various Comments Off

1) Amboy Crater: Geology Professor Eric Grosfils likes to take students to a strikingly symetrical cinder-cone volcano in the desert.

2) The Santa Ana River: Professor Heather Williams’ research explores a surprising and important riparian ecosystem — right in our own backyard.

3) Vast and scenic Anza-Borrego State Park is the perfect place for Geology Professor Bob Gaines’ student to learn the Earth’s history.

4) In San Diego’s Torrey Pines Mesa, regional economic expert Mary Walshok ’64 touts a hub of biotech innovation, striking architecture and seaside beauty.

5) Windswept and remote, San Francisco’s Farralon Islands are a key spot for birds — and a second home for Biology Professor Nina Karnovsky.

6) At the Computer History Museum, noted tech writer Ashlee Vance ’00 plugs into the ever-changing story of innovation and Silicon Valley.

7) Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe closed years ago, but the old church remains central to Professor Tomas Summers Sandoval’s history of San Francisco’s Latino community.

8) History Professor Victor Silverman finds a tragic human story and a stunning natural landscape at Donner Memorial State Park.

9) In the Los Angeles Central Library, Sociology Professor Emeritus Robert Herman finds the heart of the nation’s second-largest city.

The Rise of an Evil Genius

November 6, 2013 by Robyn Norwood Comments Off

There are trophies. big, heavy, metal ones. And there are checks. Those are big, too, with lots of zeroes.

The image of videogaming as a solitary pursuit of adolescents is becoming a relic, partly because of technology that has turned gaming into a shared experience with huge audiences and partly because of — what else? — money, and the opportunity to make plenty of it.

Alexander Garfield ’07 is a key figure in the burgeoning world know as eSports, but not because he is a player. The slender, erudite 28-year-old with tattoos written in Latin and Greek is the pioneering owner of Evil Geniuses, best described as a group of professional sports teams, a media company and a marketing venture rolled all into one.

It is as if Garfield runs both the New York Yankees and Manchester United of the video gaming world.

His Evil Geniuses teams are the most famous, but in August, a Swedish team playing for him under the new name Alliance competed in The International 3, a tournament held in Seattle for DOTA 2, a multi-player online battle game. The competition was waged in the elegant Benaroya Hall, home to the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and it was a sellout.

Garfield’s team, led by 25-year-old Jonathan “Loda” Berg, finished first and took home a stunning $1.4 million in prize money, a record for a video-game competition.

“Is it weird?” Garfield asks, sitting in the company’s loft-style offices in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, surrounded by video monitors, keyboards, samples of sponsors’ products and a small studio where gamers and commentators create video content for the web. Well, yes, it is weird to many, this unfamiliar world of professionalized video gaming. But it is a scene that is growing rapidly, a fact noted by both

The New York Times and Forbes.com, which last year named Garfield to its “30 under 30” list for games and apps.

The grandest coming-of-age moment for eSports yet came in October, when the 2013 world championship of the game League of Legends sold out Staples Center, home to the Los Angeles Lakers. Fans paid $45 to $100 to watch teams compete for the $1 million prize, won by a South Korean team in a setting that looked like a mix of a concert, a sporting event and a light show. More than 10,000 watched the competition on huge video screens. More than a million more viewed it online.

To anyone who thinks it is impossible to earn a living playing a kid’s game, consider the early days of baseball, when players took jobs in the off season to make ends meet. Last year, the average Major League Baseball salary was north of $3.2 million. Some pro video gamers already earn six figures, and Berg, who took a share of the $1.4 million prize, will surpass $300,000 this year.

The logo for the largest U.S. eSports organization, Major League Gaming—with the letters MLG and a game controller in white against a blue-and-red background—looks suspiciously like the MLB logo. Could video gaming possibly have the potential of traditional pro sports?

“I always say, I’m a sociologist, not a futurologist,” says T.L. Taylor, an associate professor of comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and expert on eSports. “One thing we can see really clearly right now is the exponential growth of the audience, and the growth of this as a spectator event.

“Alex is an interesting guy because he has been in the scene quite a while. He’s been around a long time and there have been ups and downs and bubbles and bursts, but Evil Geniuses has handled it all.”

GARFIELD IS AN ACCIDENTAL ENTREPRENEUR. Growing up in suburban Philadelphia, he trained as a classical violinist and was a huge fan of traditional professional sports. Garfield’s slight build limited him to racquet sports, but a video game called Counter-Strike became his competitive outlet. He fell into the role of impresario as a student at Pomona College, when a team of five Canadian friends wanted to go to Dallas for a tournament in 2005 but didn’t have the money. Garfield borrowed $1,000 from his mother to front them, the team finished second and he was on his way. Soon, he was courting sponsors and traveling to tournaments in Italy and Singapore.

If anyone finds the idea of watching someone else play video games odd, or the concept that a keyboard and a mouse could be the tools of a pro sport, Garfield simply shrugs.

“It varies culture by culture, right? In Eastern Europe, people pack stadiums to watch chess,” he says. “I’m not really concerned about whether this is a sport or a competitive activity, personally.”

With no training in business, Garfield nonetheless built a company with annual revenues he describes as being in the range of several million. (Because it is a privately held company with Garfield the majority owner, Evil Geniuses is not required to make financial data public.)

“My business training is I read The Lean Startup. That’s it,” he says, adding that he only read it recently.

“There were moments I really wished I’d taken some sort of economics course. Because I was like the kid at Pomona who, I think when my friends would say they were going to take econ, I would say, ‘How intact is your soul?’ Which in retrospect is such a ridiculous thing to say. I could really have benefited from micro or macro econ or business management.”

Evil Geniuses now has 15 fulltime employees and about 45 players under contract, with the gamers’ base salaries ranging from about $15,000 to $150,000 year and prize money shared with the company depending on the player’s contract, Garfield says. Under the Evil Geniuses banner, his teams compete in games ranging from StarCraft 2 to World of Warcraft. Sponsors and advertising are the driving forces, and Garfield emerged as a leader in the young industry partly because he was not only able to choose and manage top players, but also able to court sponsors with a sophisticated media presence and the analytics to prove the value of investing in what to some companies was still an unfamiliar world. The Evil Geniuses offices are stocked with cans of their top sponsor’s Monster Energy drinks, their own Evil Geniuses logo merchandise and computer gear from such sponsors as Intel, one of their first. If some of this seems reminiscent of the X Games, that’s not far off base.

“If you look at some of the industries that have gone from underground to mainstream in recent years, you think of action sports, you think of the DJ culture, you think of poker,” Garfield says. “Major media companies and major consumer brands have played a huge role. For the most part, it’s very similar.”

Garfield and Taylor, the MIT professor, note that the other development that has fueled the growth of eSports is streaming video, which not only allows people to watch live tournaments online or a favorite player’s practice sessions, but it also provides the marketing data.

Take a look at the web site Twitch.TV, a Bay Area startup drawing 45 million unique visitors a month that recently received $20 million in venture capital, and you might see more than 100,000 people viewing League of Legends content, another 90,000 watching DOTA 2, and more than 15,000 each looking at World of Warcraft and StarCraft II, all on a weekday afternoon. Garfield points to a practice session being streamed by Conan Liu, an Evil Geniuses player and pre-med student at UC Berkeley who goes by the alias “Suppy.” Liu plans to take a year off from his studies to pursue gaming, and the screen shows 500 people watching him practice.

“My job would be much more difficult today if there weren’t technology platforms that allow my players to create content and have very trackable analytics, like, ‘This is my fan base and I can prove it,’” Garfield says.

Players also prove their marketability on such sites as Facebook and Twitter. Stephen Ellis, a 22-year-old Scottish League of Legends player for Evil Geniuses who is also known as “Snoopeh,” has more than 147,000 “Likes” on Facebook and more than 119,000 followers on Twitter. On a recent U.S. trip to provide commentary on the League of Legends championships and record content at the Evil Geniuses studio, he had a “fan meet” at USC, and some 100 students appeared to greet him.

To support some of his players in the Bay Area, Garfield established a “team house” in Alameda, across the San Francisco Bay from the company offices. There, a group of young men live and practice together, with housekeeping help. “The notion that some players live an unhealthy lifestyle is still there, that guys don’t take care of themselves or drop out of high school,” Garfield says. “But there is generally, with our players, a very balanced approach. They play games eight to 10 hours a day, but they go to the gym together, they go to bars together, they hang out with girls together.” Garfield is willing to crack down when he has to. When one of his players used a racial epithet online last year, Garfield dismissed him, and wrote a lengthy blog post explaining the move.

“Alex is one of the team owners who has taken a pretty firm stand on trying to regulate bad player behavior,” says Taylor, the MIT professor and author of the book Raising the Stakes: E-sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming.

Crude language and sexism also are sometimes issues in an arena populated largely by 18-to-30-year-old males.

“Evil Geniuses has released people from contracts for bad behavior, and that’s a brave thing to do,” Taylor says.

FOR ALL THIS, THE COMPANY VISIONARY is a bit removed. “I haven’t played games for a very long time, actually,” Garfield says. “There are tons of people, including me, who haven’t played StarCraft in, like, two years, but still really enjoy watching it.”

Garfield watches his own players, certainly. But for him, gaming became a business venture, and one that the former sociology major with minors in Africana studies and classics says he feels conflicted about at times. He is interested in music, writing songs and creating a few tracks in a genre he describes as “electroacoustic to strictly acoustic.” And concerns about the issues of race and privilege he learned about in college still tug at him. Garfield enjoys a few accoutrements of his success, but notes “I’m not a zillionaire.”

“My apartment is cool. My job is cool,” he says, dressed in jeans, a black T-shirt and high-top sneakers, his usual work attire. “Don’t get me wrong, getting a cut of the prize money for winning a tournament for $1.4 million is nice. But I think eventually I will be involved in this less, just because for me, even though this is a really interesting experience, as recently as two years ago, I was very frustrated.”

Instead of working to promote causes he cared about or making music, he was becoming well-known in a world he never meant to join. Then he had an epiphany.

“It was only at a certain point that I realized the skill set that I was developing by basically running a startup with no money in an industry that has no boundaries, no foundation and no rulebook,” Garfield says. “Then I was like, OK, this makes sense now, because I have all these skills I can use in my music career, that I could use for private projects in social justice later in life.”

In the meantime, he wrestles with how to portray himself. Gamer dude? Tech entrepreneur? Musician? Aspiring activist?

“I’ve just come to lying to people about what I do on airplanes,” he says. “I say, ‘Well, I do x, y and z.’ So the next question is, ‘Oh, you make the games?’ I say no. ‘So, OK, you test the games?’ I just end up saying ‘yeah.’ But actually it’s really simple. It’s a sports team.”

Back to the Farm

November 6, 2013 by Adam Conner-Simons '08 Comments Off

Severine von Tscharner Fleming ’04 is in the middle of another one of her jam-packed days, and this time it’s literal: stooped over the kitchen sink in Essex, N.Y., she grins and holds out two big buckets of rose hips that she’s about to clean, cube and slow-cook into a marmalade-like jam.

“I love the little pricklies,” she gushes, as she cradles the harsh fuzz of the fruit with her fingertips. She recalls how as a kid she spent summers at her grandmother’s farm in Switzerland, where she climbed trees, milked cows and first fell in love with farm life. Now planted in the rural northern reaches of New York State, she still seems to be in the honeymoon phase when it comes to agriculture, although she has farmed for eight seasons now.

Fleming is drawn to farming’s “alluring mix of sensuality and politics,” which is partly why she’s so concerned about its future. In the last century, the proportion of farmers in the U.S. workforce shrunk from nearly half to less than 2 percent, and the rise of Big Agriculture has come at a cost. “Industrialization, specialization and concentration,” says Fleming, “have created a system which is brittle, highly energy-addicted and whose practices erode the future carrying capacity of the soil.”

Discomforting trends like these have inspired Fleming and others to try to spark a revolution in a farming industry that’s fraying and graying. Through her leadership in groups such as Farm Hack, Agrarian Trust and the National Young Farmers’ Coalition, she has become in many ways the face of a movement of young people who are ready to get their hands dirty. The idea, simply put, is to create a national patchwork of upstart farmers who will grow food to be sold close to market and serve as stewards of the dwindling supply of irrigable farmland.

“We have to catalyze, crystallize and publicize to get folks involved,” Fleming says. “The odds are stacked against us, but at the same time, there’s progress,” says Fleming. “People are stepping up and showing up.”

It’s not just a smattering of urban gardeners and hippies who are concerned. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack set a goal of creating 100,000 new farmers in the next few years. Congress launched the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to speed up the pace of scientific discovery in the field. And authors like Michael Pollan have advocated expanding training programs for U.S. farmers—“not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past,” as he wrote in a 2008 New York Times op-ed, “but as a matter of national security.”

Hope may lie with Fleming’s fellow Millennials—though your typical farmer these days skews more AARP than Generation Y. According to the USDA’s 2007 agricultural census, since 1978 the average age in the profession has increased seven years, from 50 to 57. Farmers who are 65 and older outnumber those 35 and younger by a factor of six to one.

The aging in agriculture wasn’t entirely unexpected. A whole generation essentially opted out of the industry as a result of the ’80s farm crisis, when the U.S. lost approximately 300,000 farms due to high interest rates and an unfavorable economic climate. “Those kids [growing up then] looked at their parents’ lives and the stress of expensive land and mountains of debt,” Fleming says, “and they simply weren’t inspired to jump in … for good reason.”

She is cautiously optimistic that the tide may be turning, expecting that the number of young farmers will be on the rise when new figures are released next year. Fleming says that her generation is unlike any before them—an army of entrepreneurial-minded, educated, first-time farmers with a passion for local food and an eagerness to employ sustainable methods.

Rather than cultivating large acreage of a single crop in a monoculture and selling it to middlemen in the commodity market, this niche of farmers sells a wide variety of goods, often directly to the public through markets and community-supported agriculture programs. Capturing the retail price is a critical element for their success, Fleming says. In the last 15 years, revenue from this farm-to-table model has more than doubled in the U.S., and it’s what helps folks like Fleming stand out and survive in a David-and-Goliath marketplace.

“Out of both preference and necessity, we aren’t doing things like they’ve been done,” Fleming says. “We don’t buy into the idea that we have to be part of this larger machine.”

EVEN AS SHE LEADS the movement, Fleming is not really a “farmer” in the traditional sense. She is actively engaged in the production of food, running a pickle company in the Grange Hall of her town, and making a small line of dried herbs, jellies and wildcrafted teas. But mostly she sits at the computer and talks on the phone, coordinating her grassroots media network.

She hosts a weekly podcast, manages several blogs, and lives in a house bordering Lake Champlain with a vegetable garden and lightning-fast Wi-Fi.

In the last six years, the self-described “punky grassroots farming ninja” has visited 44 states, organizing film screenings, moderating panels and speaking at conferences.

“My mix of farming and activism has been an ever-shifting vinaigrette, and right now I think the best use of my time is being an advocate for the larger cause,” she says. “I don’t mean to shoot holes in your American Gothic storyline, but I don’t live on a farm with pigs and a pitchfork.”

Although, she adds, “last year’s pigs are here, on the porch in the freezer.”

A lanky, frizzy-haired ball of energy who laughs easily, smiles widely and favors flannel, Fleming is constantly in motion and talking effusively about her latest projects, whether that’s a Kickstarter-funded sail freight project that ships pickled goods to yuppies in New York City or an agrarian-themed singles’ mixer dubbed “Weed Dating.”

These days, most of her attention is devoted to the Greenhorns, a 13,000-strong organization she founded that’s aimed at recruiting, promoting and supporting young farmers. The mixers, bonfires and festivals Fleming helps coordinate bring together what she calls the “young farmer tribe.” Add to that almost 30 events for Farm Hack, an initiative that connects engineers and farmers to design open-source farm technologies.

Among her latest Greenhorns activities, she recently finished editing The New Farmers’ Almanac, a sprawling compendium of essays, illustrations and advice from more than 120 contributors. And in January she launched Agrarian Trust, an advocacy project hosted by the Schumacher Center for New Economics, focused on the issue of land access, providing farmers with legal templates and case models.

“She has an infectious enthusiasm and an uncompromising vision where she’ll just move forward on all these projects and expect you to keep up,” says Dorn Cox, board president of Farm Hack. “As long as I’ve known her, she’s always juggled many things at once and done whatever it takes—delegates, cajoles, prods —to make them happen.”

FLEMING AND I ARE standing in a field in Keeseville, N.Y, surrounded by more than 600 revelers that span farmgirls in overalls, hippies with tie-dyed shirts and hipsters without any shirts at all. We are at the fourth-annual Crowfest, a celebration of local agriculture that this year also marks the unofficial debut of her other other venture, Grange Copackers Co-Op, which produces non-perishables ranging from hot sauce to sauerkraut.

Stationed at her stand with a blue sign hand-painted by her brother, Reynolds “Charlie” Fleming PI ’13, Severine is passing out samples of pickled veggies, making small talk and refusing payment: thanks to the tightly-regulated bureaucracy of New York agricultural law, her new business is currently prohibited from accepting money for goods. “Today’s just about meeting strangers and getting our name out,” she says.

Nearby Lucas Christenson, owner of the Fledging Crow Farm that hosts this festival, soaks in the scene and marvels at the fact that only five years ago he was living here in a tent without power or running water.

“There’s definitely a tight-knit community of us,” he says, before motioning over to a group of young farmers congregated around a fire-pit cooking a portly grass-fed pig. “We’re all friends, and we want to do more to cooperate and collaborate.”

Given their busy schedules, that’s not always an easy task, but Fleming views these events as essential for establishing a support system for young farmers.

“The first few years can be so challenging. Many of us feel socially isolated and are struggling to make ends meet,” she says. “It’s important to provide a space where people can go and see that there are others ‘like me’ and support one another.”

FLEMING EMBARKED on one of her earliest community-building initiatives her first year at Pomona, when she led a team of guerrilla gardeners to start the Organic Farm—a project initially marked by wrangling with college officials, but which is now formally included in Pomona’s curriculum. A third-generation Sagehen, Severine is the daughter of noted urban planner and preservation advocate Ronald Lee Fleming ’63.

After two years in Claremont, she took a leave of absence and bought a round-the-world plane ticket to apprentice on farms across the globe, from Australia to South Africa to Scotland. Those experiences made her increasingly aware of—and outraged by—the practices of Big Agriculture, inspiring her to transfer to UC Berkeley, where she graduated with a B.S. in conservation and agro-ecology.

Her real education, however, came from organizing outside the classroom: lectures, workshops and film festivals, which left her struck by “all the dismal horror movies about hunger and soil erosion.” That’s when she decided to focus on solutions.

After graduation, she spent nearly three years traveling the States interviewing young farmers for a more “glass half-full” documentary that became Greenhorns, which has been screened at more than 1,300 schools, conferences and colleges worldwide.

The film was the catalyst that spurred Fleming’s earliest forays in activism, including stints working with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition to lobby for young farmerfriendly legislation in Washington, D.C. She soon realized through Greenhorns —and the organization of the same name that it spawned—that she could create change by telling stories and connecting people, rather than by having to “put on nice clothes and fly down to the Capitol all the time.”

FAR FROM D.C., as we speed through the winding country roads of rural New York on the way to Crowfest, Fleming points out several abandoned properties along the route, including a dramatically dilapidated barn with a roof that’s completely caved in. “This is what happens when people give up on farming,” she says.

She got her first reality check of this sort right after Berkeley, when she would cruise around Hudson Valley searching for affordable farmland and see unused spaces like these in every town.

“There are very few policy structures to support these places being properly farmed,” she says, “and that needs to change.”A report Fleming co-led through the National Young Farmers Coalition found that the biggest obstacles for aspiring farmers are a lack of access to land, capital and credit. One reason for this is corporate consolidation, spurred by 20th-century technology that has allowed farm operators to harvest more crops on larger amounts of land using fewer people. The growth of these “McFarms” has made it harder than ever for younger farmers to purchase land.

At the same time, farm values have doubled since 2000—good news for existing landowners who need to cash out their land in order to retire, but not for those just starting out. It’s telling that Fleming, a major land access advocate who has farmed for nearly a decade, doesn’t even own her own property in Essex.

“Farmland is becoming an investment asset, where it’s more expensive than is justified by what it can produce,” she says, her voice rising. “It’s no longer about managing a diverse set of crops to support your family.”

Fleming’s anger is understandable, and she notes that her critique is shared by many. Partisan bickering in Congress has repeatedly resulted in watered-down farm bills, and it can be easy to lose hope when so many other issues seem to be capturing the country’s attention (and tax dollars).

But ultimately, she’s hopeful. Initiatives like the USDA’s Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program have established government loans to help new farmers buy land. And, in a larger sense, these organizations’ success with community-building has affirmed Fleming’s belief in the importance of cultivating the “culture” part of “agriculture.”

“In the next 20 years, the amount of land predicted to change hands is 400 million acres, which is roughly the size of the Louisiana Purchase,” she says. “We have an exciting opportunity to change how that land will be managed, but we don’t have much time to do it. We’ve got to get people on board.”

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