1. 17 September 2008

    In the Bubble

    John Thackara

    20 days ago

    Notes headed with the chapter they come from.

    On closer inspection however, urban sprawl is not mindless at all. There is nothing inevitable about its development. Sprawl is the result of zoning laws designed by legislators, low-density buildings designed by developers, marketing strategies designed by ad agencies, tax breaks designed by economists, credit lines designed by banks, geomatics designed by retailers, data-mining software designed by hamburger chains, and automobiles designed by car manufacturers. The interactions between all these systems and human behavior are complicated and hard to understand—but the policies themselves are not the result of chance. “Out of control” is an ideology, not a fact. 5

    Lightness

    Apart from its impact on the wider economy, information technology is heavy in itself. It’s a heavy user of matter in all the hardware needed to run it. One of the hidden costs of the misnamed silicon age is the material and energy flows involved in the manufacture and use of microchips. It takes 1.7 kilograms of materials to make a microchip with 32 megabytes of random-access memory—a total 630 times the mass of the final product. The “fab” of a basic memory chip, and running it for the typical life span of a computer, eats up eight hundred times the chip’s weight in fossil fuel. Thousands of potentially toxic chemicals are used in the manufacturing process. 10

    One of the most startling pieces of information brought to light in Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins’s Natural Capitalism is that the amount of waste matter generated in the manufacture of a single laptop computer is close to four thousand times its weight on your lap. Fifteen to nineteen tons of energy and materials are consumed in the fabrication of one desktop computer. To compound matters: As well as being resource-greedy to make, information technology devices also have notoriously short lives. The average compact disc is used precisely once in its life, and every gram of material that goes into the production and consumption of a computer ends up rather quickly as an emission or as solid waste. 11

    The pièce de résistance in the extraordinary Natural Capitalism is that the amount of matter and energy wasted, or caused to be wasted, by the average North American consumer is roughly one million pounds a year: a “million pound backpack.” 12

    ELIMA, the Environmental Life Cycle information Management and Acquisition project. 13

    A lot of potentially weight-reducing research goes unreported. Environmental design information tends to be scattered and fragmented, and many eco-design tools and data that could help us remain hidden from view and underused. Kathalys, a research group in Holland, turns ecological footprints into design action points by measuting pressure on the environment in terms of everyday activities in the home—such as taking a shower. Taking just one shower in a top-of-the-range cubicle, Kathalys has discovered, consumes as much as thirty-five kilojoule-pounds in energy and two hundred litres of water. Kathalys is testing a mist shower that, combined with water and heat recycling, reduces those numbers tendolf, to five megajoule-pounds of heat and twenty litres of water. 15

    Buckminster Fuller I think designed a super–bathroom, of which a mist shower played it’s part. I’ve wanted one ever since. It just sounds awesome, and how hard can it be? Why aren’t they sold at Home Depot?

    TNS (The Natural Step), one of many “frameworks introduced to give us a better view of the big picture.”

    • Minimize the waste of matter and energy.
    • Reduce the movement and distribution of goods.
    • Use more people and less matter. 16

    …five types of capital enable us to deliver goods and services we need to sustain and improve the quality of our lives: natural, human, social, manufactured, and financial capital. 17

    It’s the accumulation of such tiny acts that weighs heavily on the planet. A relationship, or flow, or accumulation, or change, is by its nature invisible. An important new task of design is to make these behaviors and changes within systems intelligible. We need new ways to understand the morphology of systems—their dynamics, their “intelligence”: how they work, what stimulates them, how and why they change. 22

    We’ve embarked on an operation compared by Ezio Manzini to “changing the engines of an aircraft while in flight.” “It may appear a difficult task,” understates Manzini, “but consider this: during two centuries of innovation, until now, we have reduced the role of labour in production by even larger proportaions. We have done it before.” 23

    The Hanover Principles, prepared by William McDonough’s architecture firm. 25

    Shaking off out culture’s mechanical conception of the world, the idea of controllability, and our all-round anthropocentrism will be especially difficult. Writes Theodore Roszak: “Ecology, as the study of interconnectedness, has a psychological dimension—the transition from egocentrism, to ecocentrism. Copernicus took us out of the center of the solar system; we now need to take ourselves out of the center of the biosphere.” 26

    Mentions Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for a New Millennium, which looks interesting but I can’t find a copy or much of anything but passing references. 26

    Speed

    The acceleration of the speed of human population growth means that in a single human lifetime, the Earth may lost half of its living species, species that it took tens of millions of years for evolution to create through the process of speciation. 32

    the age of acceleration

    The Greeks, Levine explains had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos means absolute time: linear, chronological, and quantifiable. Kairos, however, means qualitative time—the time of opportunity, chance, and mischance. If you go to bed because the clock says 10:30, you are adhering to a chronological time sustem. if you go to sleep beacuse you’re tired, you are following kairological or event time. 33

    Thoreau: “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” 33

    The Kabyle people in Algeria, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu discovered, despise any semblance of haste in their social affairs and refer to the clock as “the devil’s mill.” 35

    Beethoven: “the usage of measured tempo made no sense in music.” 49

    Mobility

    La Transhumance 51

    Throughout the world […] 244 million containers are moving around, or standing in yards, or waiting to be delivered, at any one time. If all these containers were placed end to end, the line would stretch to the moon and back eight times. Their contents account for about 90 percent of all the world’s traded cargo by value. In other words, 85 percent of all the goods and materials in the world are not in factories or shops, but moving, or waiting to move—on the road, in the air, or on the sea. 55

    “There is far too little information in the so-called information age”, “we feel compelled to reduce all human knowledge and experience to symbolic form”, “Digitization speeds the flow of data, but impoverishes our lived experience.” 63

    “[The human brain] comprises the equivalent of one hundred billion squids linked together. Overall the human brain is the most complicated thin in the known universe—known, that is, to man, to itself.” —Edward O. Wilson.

    “Nature doesn’t commute to work.” 72

    Locality

    A sustainable city, Illich foresaw, has to be a working city, a city of encounter and interaction—not a city for passive participation in entertainment. Sustainable cities will be postspectacular. 76

    “Tourism—human circulation considered as consumption—is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.” Guy Debord wrote that more than forty years ago, in The Society of the Spectacle. […] Cultural attractions are like genetically modified food: bland, tasteless, and a threat to the ecosystem. 77

    A city full of people can now be seen as a live database, full of knowledge, time, and attention—incarnated by human beings—that any of us might use. Louis Kahn talked about the city as a “place of availabilities”; with wireless networks and search technologies, the potential becomes actual. 86

    Situation

    Our very sense of being is based on an experience of process, activity, and movement. We seem to find an image of our own existence in the changing lights of the natural world. Henry Plummer, 103

    Place is not given, it is made. Malcolm McCullough, 111

    Convivality

    The mortality rate of men with cardiovascular disease is inversely related to the level of social connectedness. 114

    “When people no longer have the need or desire to resolve their problems within the network of their own relationships, medicine becomes the alibi of a pathogenic society.” Illich concluded that we have thrust the bad things of life—old age, death, pain, and handicap—onto doctors so that families and society will not have to face them. 117

    Learning

    Learning is a complex, social, and multidimensional process that does not lend itself to being sent down a pipe—for example, from a website. Knowledge, understanding, wisdom—or “content,” if you must—are qualities one develops through time. They are not a thing one is sent. 135

    We might reject the narrow focus of much corporate education, but it’s partly our own fault as a society. We have filled the world with such unstable technology and clunky systems; these need to be looked after by people with limited horizons who do what they are told and don’t ask too many questions. 137

    Over-regimented teachers are forced to cram too much predetermined content into students who spend so much time learning that they have no time to think. It’s a downward spiral. The more important learning becomes, the more demands we put on teachers and students within rigidly organized institutions. 143

    Literacy

    Design is to make information digestible, not to keep it out. 162

    The body is our general medium for having a world; sight and movement are specific ways of entering into relationships with objects. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 171

    Computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets. Ivan Illich, 180

    How much do we really know about the trash heaps, slums, and wars depicted by today’s imaging technologies? THese technologies are supposed to give us a clearer image—but by sanitizing the subject, they prevent us from knowing reality itself. 183

    Smartness

    We would not be here had not our ancestors rotted. All organisms are designed with the intention of being recycled. Learning from nature, this means we have to be careful about bond energies in materials and see that they can be broken down easily. Julian Vincent, 191

    Three thousand lines of code in an electric toothbrush? 195

    The world is already filled with hundreds of microprocessors for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Think of all those ATMs, ticket-cending machines, traffic lights, billboards, cellular phones, pagers, and cash registers. A new car from General Motors, contains $675 worth of steel and $2,500 worth of electronics. 198

    China is issuing all its citizens above the age of sixteen a smart card id? 201

    Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we are frighteningly inert. Donna Haraway (Cyborg Manifesto), 201

    Flow

    “partial solutions, continually produced” 214

    “We are all designers now” 226

  2. 19 August 2008

    Farewell, My Subaru

    49 days ago

    Journalist chronicles his transplantation into rural New Mexico with the goal of going green, almost cold–turkey. Solar electricity, water from a well, a veggie oil diesel truck conversion, goats chickens and a big garden. He even manages to find happiness and family. A good story.

    I’ve always wanted to try something like this. Particularly the computer nerd aspect of it: I’ll never pull a Thoreau so much as wait out for super–wifi that’ll let me bring an internet connection and solar powered computer paraphernalia into the sticks with me. The author has a website. Gotta figure out how to make that work. Overall a quick inspiring fun read.

  3. 07 January 2008

    The World Without Us

    Alan Weisman

    274 days ago

    A treatise on the environment, looking towards what it would become if humans suddenly vanished. With all kinds of interesting material, most of it damning our society’s penchant for unforeseen destruction, but elegies where they’re due to what good we have done, followed by how things might change with us out of the equation.

    Recorded history from civilization’s Fertile Crescent beginnings to the present day has taken barely more than 1/100th of the time that our ancestors lived in this one spot [northern africa], grubbing plants and heaving sharpened stones at animals. There must have been a lot of prey to feed a growing predator population with awakening technological skill. Olorgesailie is cluttered with femurs and tibia, many smashed for their marrow. The quentities of stone tools surrounding the impressive remains of an elephant, a hippo, and an entire flock of baboons, suggest that the entire hominid community teamed up to kill, dismember, and devour their quarry. 69

    Varosha) is a city on the island of Cyprus, uninhabited since the mid seventies. I really want to go there. It was a big tourist town until Turkey invaded Cyprus and stirred up a whole bunch of shit. It’s to be reopened for tourism by Turkey (in the view of the UN, stil illegitimate invaders) in 2010; but where’s the fun in that. I want to jump a fence and go there now. I’d probably get shot by the Turkish military, who’ve cordoned the area and seriously restricted access. 96

    In the Turkish capital of Ankara, the subway system’s central nerve core broadens into an extensive underground shipping district with mosaic walls, acoustic ceilings, electronic billboard screens, and arcades of stores – an orderly underworld compared to the cacophony of the streets above. 105

    no one knows how many underground cities lie beneath Cappadocia. Eight have been discovered, and many smaller villages, but there are doubtless more. The biggest, Derinkuyu, wasn’t discovered until 1965, when a resident cleaning a back room of his cave house broke through a wall and discovered behind it a room that he’d never seen, which led to still another, and another. Eventually spelunking archaeologists found a maze of connecting chambers that descended at least 18 stories and 280 feet beneath the surface, ample enough to hold 30,000 people — and much remains to be excavated. One tunnel, wide enough to walk three abreast, connects to another underground city six miles away. 108

    Nobody [knew how much plastic was in the ocean], because plastics haven’t been around long enough for us to know how long they’ll last or what happens to them. [Richard Thompson’s] team had identified nine different kinds in the sea so far, varieties of acrylic, nylon, polyester, polyethylene, polypropylene, and polyvinyl chloride. All he knew was that soon everything alive would be eating them. 116

    “Think of it this way. Suppose all human activity ceased tomorrow, and suddenly there’s no one to produce plastic anymore. Just from what’s already present, given how we see it fragmenting, organisms will be dealing with this stuff indefinitely. THousands of years, possibly. Or more.” 118

    So a million years from now, some organism will evolve the ability to gorge on plastic. Most of it will have settled somewhere, from tides or wind currents, so there will be large collections of the stuff. It’ll propel whatever organism to great things for a hundred or so years, until they realize that pretty soon the plastic is running out, and they start worrying and fighting each other for control of what’s left. Kind of like us with oil. Hopefully these organisms can at least break the plastic into something organic, and not leave piles of all kinds of waste shit covering the earth, swirling in the oceans, and clogging up the air.

    In this age of deepening drought and rising temperatures, ski lift operators who, the Indians claim, defile sacred ground with their clanking machines and lucre, are being sued anew. Their latest desecration is making artificial snow for their ski runs from wastewater, which the Indians liken to bathing the face of God in shit. 120

    In 1998, Moore returned with a trawling device, such as Sir Alistair Hardy had employed to sample krill, and found, incredibly, more plastic by weight than plankton on the ocean’s surface. In fact, it wasn’t even close: six times as much. 123

    By 2005, Moore was referring to the gyrating Pacific dump as 10 million square miles – nearly the size of Africa. […] Plastic debris, Moore believed, was now the most common surface feature of the world’s oceans. How long would it last? Were there any benign, less-immortal substitutes that civilization coudl convert to, lest the world be plastic-wrapped evermore? 125

    “Except for a small amount that’s been incinerated,” says Tony Andrady the oracle, “every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last 50 years or so still remains. It’s somewhere in the environment.” 126

    (Municipal sludge, since 1990 deemed too toxic to dump into the North Sea, is instead spread as fertilizer on European farmlands—except in Holland. Since the 1990s, the Netherlands has not only offered incentives that practically equate organic farming with patriotism, bit has also struggled to convince its EU partners that everything applied to the land ends up in the sea anyway.) 156

    Mount Rushmore, carved into fine-grained pre-cambrian granite, rock formed 1.5 billion years ago, is gonna be around for awhile. 7.2 million years without an asteroid hitting it or something incredibly catastrophic. 181

    The DMZ, as it is called even in Kore, is 151 miles long and 2.5 miles wide, and has been a world essentially without people since September 6, 1953. 185

    When the Korean war ended and the two countries split. Nobody lives there, or even goes there. An ecological dreamland.

    The Passanger Pigeon, like the Chestnut tree, speaks to humanity’s tremendous power to wipe shit off the face of the earth. “It’s flocks, 300 miles long and numbering in the billions, spanned horizons fore and aft, actually darkening the sky. Hours could go by, and it was as though they hadn’t passed at all, because they kept coming. (192)”

    They only lived in north america, and they were all killed by modern americans. Gone by 1914.

    By studying its [the Bobolink’s] eyes and brains, bird physiologist RObery Beason has detected evolutionary traits that unfortunately turned lethal in the age of electronic communications. Bobolinks and other migrants carry built-in compasses – particles of magnetite in their heads, with which they orient to the Earth’s magnetic field. The mechanism to switch them on involves their optics. The short end of the spectrum – purples, blues, and greens, – apparently triggers their navigational cues. If only longer red waves are present, they grow disoriented. 194

    Which gives us millions of birds lured towards large electrical and phone towers, marked with red lights by law to keep airplanes from flying into them, and killed. In north america and europe since 1975, the numbers of some migratory bird species have fallen by 2/3. 196 This isn’t the only way birds die. Hundreds of millions die yearly.

    If everyone on earth disappeared, 441 nuclear plants, several with multiple reactors, would briefly run on autopilot until, one by one, they overheated. 213

    That is unfortunate [that the nuclear meltdown wouldn’t burn straight into the core of the earth], because deep self-internment would be a blessing to whatever life remained on the surface. Instead, what briefly was an exquisitely machined technological array would have congealed into a deadly, dull, metallic blob: a tombstone to the intellect that created it – and, for thousands of years thereafter, to innocent nonhuman victims that approach too closely. 214

    After Chernobyl, “an entire pine forest died within days of the blast, and couldn’t be burned because its smoke would have been lethal (215)”.

    …at Dos Pilas [a Mayan city], one victim was tightly rolled and bound, and then used for a game on the ceremonial ball court until his back was broken. 226

    If we all bought into the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement: “The last humans could enjoy their final sunsets peacefully, knowing they have returned the planed as close as possible to the garden of Eden (243).”

    Bronze, a metal that doesn’t decay, makes a damn good statue. There are longs of ancient bronze statues for us to look back at.

    Unfortunately, that happens, and tragically most of history’s bronze statues are also gone, melted down for waeapons. “nintey-five percent of all artwork ever made doesn’t exist anymore,” says Himmelstein, a knuckle stroking his gray goatee. 247

    Yet the biggest elephant o all is a figurative one in the planet-sized room that is ever harder to ignore, although we keep trying. Worldwide, every four days the human population rises by 1 million. Since we can’t really grasp such numbers, they’ll wax out of control until they crash, as has happened to every other species that got too big for this box. […] The intelligent solution would require the courage and the wisdom to put our knowledge to the test. It would be poignant and distressing in ways, but not fatal. It would henceforth limit every human female on eEarth capable of bearing children to one.

    If this somehow began tomorrow, our current 6.5 billion human population would drop by 1 billion by the middle of this century. (If we continue as projected, we’ll reach 9 billion.)

    By 2075 we’d be half, and by 2100 we’d be down to 1.6 billion. back to levels last seen in the 19th century, just before quantum advances in energy, medicine, and food production doubled our numbers and then doubled us again. At the time, those discoveries seemed like miracles. Today, like too much of any good thing, we indulge in more only at our peril. 272

    Just one benchmark for how drastically the world has changed in the past 100 years:

    until Marconi’s wireless and Edison’s phonograph, all the music ever heard on Earth was live. Today, a tiny fraction of 1 percent is. The rest is electronically reproduced or broadcast, along with a trillion words and images each day. 274

  4. 15 December 2007

    Documentaries

    297 days ago

    I watched two recently, both stunning and amazing and a little bit unnerving, even disturbing. Both in the same style, mostly mute but with completely stunning and sometimes frightening visuals (frighteningly beautiful as well).

    Manufactured Landscapes follows around Edward Burtynsky, photographer of massive human altered environment. From quarries to unfathomably large chinese factories to tankers washed ashore in Bangladesh being slowly disassembled by wiry barefoot peasants to large towns being wholesale destroyed because in a few months the reservoir behind the Three Gorges Dam will rend them 100 feet underwater, Burtynsky has photographed some cool stuff. The documentary puts things in scale a bit for someone who’s never know anything but a pleasant and warm home, wanton mobility, and abundant food.

    Food is the second one, namely Our Daily Bread. The only dialog is that of various food workers talking to each other during their lunch breaks, none in english, and none subtitled. The idea is to take a look at where our food really comes from now that multinational agricorporations have hijacked our food supply. Giant greenhouses of veggies growing on 12’ trellises, with robot pesticide dispensers riding the long rows hissing whatever substances which, deemed by whatever governing bodies as only toxic to insects and pests – somehow not to the food itself nor the humans all to ready to eat it. Chickens in barns the size of a football field, beak to beak, being sucked up by an elaborate cross between a crane and a tractor and spit out into cartons for shipping off to the factory where some poor old lady sits in a chair under a line of upside down gliding carcasses slitting the heads off those where the machine couldn’t quite manage. It’s really brutal how all this works, but some stark beauty shines through, the grime of blood running on the floor contrasted with smooth dark chrome walls and apparatus.

    These two really show that however advanced and scientific the world gets, man, is it still fucked up. You can’t have one without the other, and you have to be impressed by both.

  5. 07 December 2007

    Gentle Architecture

    Malcolm Wells

    305 days ago

    The best-known architects of the day create stunning forms and impressive details, but there is little substance behind them. It’s not that the architects don’t know better. They do. We all do, by now. Modern architecture is empty because we still lack the courage to face its consequences. 5

    Life without the courage to face consequences is cowardice, and life teems with it today. 6

    Wells asks where the act of paving over 100 acres of prime wilderness should be put amidst this list:

    • Terrorism
    • Hostage Taking
    • Skyjacking
    • Kidnapping
    • Assault with a deadly weapon
    • etc, etc

    I do know that we’re wrecking this country with out failure to face the consequences of our acts. 7

    Pretending that there are no consequences rages through modern society. We are encouraged from all sides not to look beyond immediate gratification. And nowhere, it seems, is this attitude more common or more heavily cloaked in hypocrisy than it is in architecture. […] But we someitmes forget that each line we draw can actually destroy life. 8

    “abstraction is what dehumanizes us” Robert Finch, 10

    Take away all governments and armies, take away all businesses and industries, take away all communications; take away cars, houses, cities, hospitals, schools, and libraries; take away electricity, clothes, medicine, and police; take away everything, in fact, but the green plants, and most of us would survive. But take away the plants and we would all die. That’s how important they are. 19

    That’s why our cities and suburbs have failed. We’ve created so much convenience and ease we’ve turned ourselves into an artificial people, with artificial values, who live precariously far from the roots of life. If you don’t believe it, just listen to what most people are talking about. Look at what most of us are buying at the supermarket. 20

    “the only treasure we’ll ever have is this incredible ball beneath our feet.” 33

    It isn’t possible for us to clean up skies and rivers once they get dirty. They can do that only by themselves. Our job is to manage wastes and conserve resources. It doesn’t involve skies and rivers at all. Once we do our part we’ll find that the skies and the waters have somehow miraculously cleaned themselves. That’s when we’ll know we’ve been doing something right. 57

    Every creature except man builds unobtrusive or hidden buildings. Every creature except man has solar energy as its sole energy source. Every creature except man recycles all its wastes, not just some of them. […] Imagine having to burn electric lights in the daytime! Imagine having to air-condition! Imagine having to heat a building artificially! Imagine dropping human wastes into drinking water! 58

    But is that all we want, just to get by? Isn’t that exactly the kind of standard that’s caused so much of today’s mess? We’ve produced a whole civilization based on mediocrity, on throwaway automobiles, on honky-tonk highway business, and on nonrenewable resources. If someone doesn’t stop us, we’ll go right on producing it. 60

    As a species we have an almost criminal record of land destruction on this planet, and I feel at times as if the best solution to the environmental mess would be some kind of catastrophe great enough to eliminate all human life. But in my saner moments I know there is catastrophe enough already.

    The 26 acres of buildings and blacktop that make up that shopping center pour 600,000 gallons into the pipe every time an inch of rain falls. 67

    [Our cities] drink diluted sewage and throw away their rainwater. 68

    We look with admiration at the soaring glass walls and never smell all the sewage, never feel all the hear losses, never see all the paper being consumed behind those sheer facades. Our capacity for self-delusion seems unbounded, and the crises always catch us unawares. 87

    Emphasis mine.

    A paving moratorium doesn’t sound like a bad idea… 90

    It’s hard to imagine a future society that might treat land as shabbily as we treat it. We’ve got to change in order to survive, not by setting aside areas to be spared from our shortsightedness, but by making all land destruction a crime. 95

    We feel obliged to fill time. If there is nothing at hand to fill it with, then we manufacture filler. (Just look how we spend our days.) Menwhile, the most beautiful world we’ll ever know slides deeper into trouble. Four billion of us, simply by living here, are greasing its skids — four billion of us, all serving ourselves first. Statistically there seems to be no hope at all. No government, no religion, certainly no new architecture, is going to set things right. Even a sudden switch to the most enlightened, the gentlest, of architectures would make only a small dent in the overall problem.

  6. 11 May 2007

    Timeless Beauty

    John Lane

    515 days ago

    We have come to talk of music and drama and art and architecture as if they were technical words for remote abstractions or exceptional luxuries, but what is civilization for, if it is not to produce poetry, music, beauty and courtesy? These things are nothing in themselves unless they have a use for life… William Richard Lethaby, 15

    Keats: Negative Capability 24

    Speech is not of the tongue, but of the heart. The tongue is merely the instrument with which one speaks. He who is dumb is dumb in the heart, not in his tongue… As you speak so is your heart. Paracelsus, 44

    The greatest thing that a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and to tell what it saw in a plain way. Hindreds of people can talk for one who cna thing, and thousands can think for the one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, philosophy, and religion – all in one. John Ruskin, 48

    Although human ingenuity makes various inventions, corresponding by various machines to the same end, it will never discover any inventions more beautiful, more appropriate or more direct than nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous. Leonardo Da Vinci, 55

    On the novelty of landscape, John Ruskin, 56

    For the Native Americans, art and religion, art and life, were not separate; nor were the beautiful and the functional. Art, beauty, and spirituality were so firmly intertwined that words neither existed nor were needed to separate them. This wholeness was a function of the fact that everything in their universe worked together: poetry didn’t exist apart from ritual, and ritual didn’t exist apart from vision and meditation and even healing. This philosophy of relating all life and all materials permeated even the simplest of objects, a Pawnee drum, a pair of slippers or a Crow medicine bag. 73

    The earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with god. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 102

    Fritz Lang: Metropolis 139

    We must draw our standards from the natural world. We must honor with the humility of the wise the bounds of that natural world and the mystery which lies beyond them, admitting that there is something in the order of being which evidently exceeds all our competence. Vaclav Havel, 143

    The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wander, not longer marvel, is as good as dead. Albert Einstein, 155

    Walt Whitman on religion, 158:

    Heaven was here on Earth and the physical and the spiritual could not be divided; they were, are, and always will be the same. [...] The future would see a spirituality of meditation and the contemplation of beauty.

  7. 11 February 2007

    Heat

    George Monbiot

    604 days ago

    A take on what will need to be done in the next 50 years to dissuade catastrophic change in the earth’s climate.

    Monbiot lays out how badly we1 indeed are frakking the world:

    The problem is compounded by the fact that the connection between cause and effect seems so improbable. By turning on the lights, filling the kettle, taking the children to school, driving to the shops, we are condemning other people to death. We never chose to do this. We do not see ourselves as killers. We perform these acts without passion or intent. 22

    In his book Perverse Subsidies, published in 2001, Professor Norman Meyers adds the direct payments US corporations recieve from the government to the wider costs they oblige society to carry, and arrives at an annual figure of $2.6 trillion. This is roughly five times as much as the profits they were making at the time his book was written. As well as the annual $362 billion the thirty richest governments were paying their farmers when Perverse Subsidies was published, they were spending some $71 billion on fossil fuels and nuclear power and a staggering $1.1 trillion on road transport. Worldwide, governments pay companies $25 billion a year to wreck forests. 55

    He makes the comparison between now with the problem of climate change and WW2 with the problem of brutal fascism/genocide 98. In 60 odd years will people be as quick to vilify our hedonistic, carbon-gulping, wealthy nations as we now do the Nazi party? I’m sure someone witty could clone First they came... to apply here.

    Unfortunately for us:

    Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money. Cree Indian saying, 170

    Monbiot outlines possible solutions he feels could cut back our production of greenhouse gasses significantly enough to sustain a global temperature within +2º (celsius I assume, him being a brit), a point where the oceans will not rise over-dramatically and the world shouldn’t come to an end. But at the last page doesn’t leave me with much more than slight hope. In any case, t’s looking like I’ll be lucky enough to live through some fun times.

    1 We here is used to indicate the first world nations. A very small percentage of the world population is responsible for nearly all activities forbearing our current predicament. I am part of this sliver, and the fact that you’ve the leisure time to be wasting your time reading this gains you entrance to the club.

  8. 16 January 2007

    Zodiac

    Neal Stephenson

    630 days ago

    Stephenson has his go at Captain Planet; kicks all kinds of ass.

    I had to ride slow because I was taking my guerilla route, the one I follow when I assume that everyonein a car is out to get me. My nighttime attitude is, anyone can run you down and get away with it. Why give some drunk the chance to plaster me against a car? That’s why I don’t even own a bike light, or one of those godawful reflective suits. Because if you’ve put yourself into a situation where someone has to see you in order to be safe – to see you, and give a fuck – you’ve already blown it. 45

    The big lie of American capitalism is that corporations work in their own best interests. In fact they’re constantly doing things that will eventually bring them to their knees. Most of these blunders involve toxic chemicals that any competent chemist should know to be dangerous. They pump these things into the environment and don’t even try to protect themselves. The evidence is right there in public, almost as if they’d printed up signed confessions and sprinkled them out of airplanes. Sooner or later, someone shows up in a Zodiac and points to that evidence, and the result is devastation far worse than what a terrorist, a Boone, could manage with bombs and guns. 57

    I knew this, but never fully realized what it meant:

    “Look, I’m no expert here,” Boone said, “but every environmentalist knows that a lot of water doesn’t have any air dissolved in it. Right? Polluted water, anything that’s got undecayed garbage or shit in it, doesn’t have air.”

    “Right,” Kelvin said, “because the organisms that break those things down use up all the air in the process. The more sewage there is in the water – that is the higher the Biochemical Oxygen Demand – the less oxygen is present. 250

  9. 03 February 2006

    977 days ago

    Winter weather

    As a minnesotan, I’ve been plenty disappointed with winter so far. It’s been dramatically warm all over the US. (+18 degrees out in western MN).

    via Kjell Olsen977 days ago

  10. 29 January 2006

    982 days ago

    Global warming

    Look at the graphs about 3/4 of the way down.

    via Kjell Olsen982 days ago

  11. 04 January 2006

    1007 days ago

    Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler : Oh Six

    We’re fucked. And yet could Kunstler be any less optimistic?

    via Kjell Olsen1007 days ago

  12. 21 December 2005

    Mark Dayton and Norm Coleman, hear me out

    1021 days ago

    A few hours after having written this: Looks like the drilling bit didn’t pass.

    I just wanted to let you know that I think it’s despicable that your fellow senator, Ted Stevens, has shown the disdain for congressional procedure and our troops fighting valiantly (in a pointless and unlawful war none the less) halfway across the world to hijack a defense appropriations bill with a provision to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The scumbags in congress today disgust me. Is it not completely inappropriate to force your personal agenda (as he has done) upon an entire nation while there are phenomenally more important issues at hand?

    First thing, ANWR will provide a windfall for the multinational oil corporations, but tear up a national treasure (the eighth wonder of the world?). I don’t care how small a percentage of the full reserve will be opened to actual surface penetration by drilling apparatus, the entire area will have forever lost it’s pure, unique air.

    Second, the actual volume of oil cached within ANWR is pitifully insufficient for it to be at all worth it. I’ll admit I’m on the environmental side of the issue, but at peak production (20 years from now), the subsidy provided to the american people by the surplus oil will be just 1 penny per gallon, and that’s the most it will ever do [1]. One penny per gallon. People will be saving 10 cents per tank, and who knows if they will even need or want it? You cannot tell me it’s worth such an enormous sacrifice (once it’s opened, cut through with highways to transport oil and pumps to extract it and all the necessary infrastructure, ANWR would hardly pass muster as a national park, and will never return to it’s former state) for such a trivial [2] benefit to America and it’s people.

    I’m a freshman in college at the University of Minnesota, Morris. My family was never rich, but well off. We had three cars at times during my life. That does not mean we struggled with gas costs. There are smarter and better ways to get around. For two years, fall/winter/spring, I biked the Midtown greenway to school every day. I attended 4 years at South High. 5 miles each way, I was fitter then ever and loved it. If it was too cold I could hop on the bryant avenue bus to lake street and be at school in no time, and I’ll admit to driving myself or catching rides occasionally. The metro transit system could use improvements, but it’s just as good as driving. Also cheaper, more social, and less stressful. Biking triply so.

    Please don’t cave into Bush and (Ted) Stevens hollow agenda to repay the multinational and ethically challenged corporations that financed their election campaigns. After the death of Paul Wellstone, who was the only elected official I’ve ever genuinely trusted and looked up to, I don’t see much good at all coming from any avenue of government. That isn’t how it’s supposed to work.

    Now with talks of Bush finally being held accountable for the crimes he’s committed since becoming president [3], I’m just starting to regain the naive confidence I held in government as a kid. Please don’t let me down: do what you know is right for your constituents (not big oil, but minnesotans) and shoot down this corrupt and anti-american drilling provision. If you’re not quite sure how to do it without holding up the Defense Appropriations bill (which, as much as I’m against the Iraq war, still must go through), see the third paragraph in the blog post at the bottom of my letter [4].

    Sincerely,
    Kjell Olsen

    1. http://www.alaskaaction.org/the-penny/
    2. http://www.answers.com/trivial
    3. his impeachment, his discredit, his dishonor and shame
    3. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/flavia-colgan/arctic-refuge-in-the-bala_b_12673.html

  13. 13 December 2005

    1029 days ago

    The advantages of being in the weeds (kottke.org)

    Kottke nails what I don’t like about my job.

    via Kjell Olsen1029 days ago

  14. 05 December 2005

    1037 days ago

    The Struggle Against Ourselves

    The structure, the complexity, the diversity of our lives, everything we know, everything that we have taken for granted, that looked solid and non-negotiable, suddenly looks contingent. All this is a great tottering pile balanced on a ball, a ball that is about to start rolling downhill.

    And we find ourselves in an extraordinary position. This is the first mass political movement to demand less, not more. The first to take to the streets in pursuit of austerity. The first to demand that our luxuries, even our comforts, are curtailed.

    Kjell Olsen1037 days ago

  15. 02 November 2005

    1070 days ago

    Confronting The American Lifestyle

    Americans basically want peace and prosperity. But right now, our economy is driving the opposite. In order to secure the oil we need, we’re trapped in a major war in Iraq. The commuting, shopping and activities that comprise our day-to-day lives are draining our pocketbooks and keeping families apart. Again, it’s not Jane Q. Public’s fault, it’s not the market’s fault. It’s the government’s fault for laying out the rules so poorly.

    via Kjell Olsen1070 days ago

  16. 09 October 2005

    1094 days ago

    Pombo Bill to Gut Endangered Species Act Clears First Hurdle

    Dick Pombo (R, CA) says the existing [endangered species] law is too cumbersome in the courts and too costly for landowners and developers. His new bill contains provisions calling for the onus of species protection to fall to voluntary efforts by property owners and local authorities around the country, purportedly freeing up the federal government from oversight and the courts from red tape.

    via Kjell Olsen1094 days ago

  17. 07 October 2005

    1096 days ago

    AlterNet: EnviroHealth: Making a Mockery of Conservation

    The real target of the refinery bill is the Clean Air Act’s New Source Review (NSR). The NSR program requires owners of aging power plants and industrial facilities to modernize pollution controls whenever they expand their facilities and increase emissions. But the refinery bill doesn’t just exempt refineries from New Source Review requirements. It exempts ALL energy industry facilities—approximately 20,000 large industrial facilities and power plants across the country—not just on the Gulf Coast.

    And next up: drilling ANWR. Fuck.

    Kjell Olsen1096 days ago

  18. 07 April 2005

    Cradle to Cradle

    William McDonough, Michael Braungart

    1279 days ago

    Excellent book detailing how exactly we can begin to stop incessantly raping the earth. Improving the way we build and manufacture things: build things to be recovered and reused, not recycled, but upcycled – made into more valuable or at least equally valuable things after being consumed instead of lesser.

  19. 1279 days ago

    RollingStone.com:The Long Emergency: Politics

    The United States passed its own oil peak—about 11 million barrels a day—in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004 it ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from natural-gas condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now. That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will continue to worsen.

    Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.
    It will change everything about how we live.

    No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements.

    We’re screwed, doomsday is coming, and this is an entirely plausible – if pessimistic – account.

    bq The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world’s richest energy regions has already led to war and promises more international military conflict. Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world’s remaining oil supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just to secure Iraq’s oil but to modify and influence the behavior of neighboring states around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia. The results have been far from entirely positive, and our future prospects in that part of the world are not something we can feel altogether confident about.

    So with china and india exploding in both population and consumerism/consumption, how do we expect to ration the worlds quickly evaporating pool of oil?

    We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this predicament. [...] In March, the Department of Energy released a report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real and states plainly that “the world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary.”

    Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.

    The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

    The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. [...] These masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical security. But their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land.

    The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than the public realizes. If the “level of service” (as traffic engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart.

    We shouldn’t fuck the nat’l rail systems:

    Railroads are far more energy efficient than cars, trucks or airplanes, and they can be run on anything from wood to electricity. The rail-bed infrastructure is also far more economical to maintain than our highway network.

    Kjell Olsen1279 days ago

  20. 09 March 2005

    A Pattern Language

    Christopher Alexander

    1308 days ago

    A great book detailing some widely applicable ways to design building, and why. Taken from studies conducted by Alexander and his architectural students and colleagues from The Center for Environmental Studies at the University of California, Berkely.

  21. Also somewhat recently

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