The Vigorous North

Comeuppance: the decline and fall of Ford and General Motors

2008-07-06T11:40:00.000-07:00

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” - Benito Mussolini

Since 1990, Ford and General Motors have protested new fuel-efficiency standards in Washington, because improving gas mileage might make their SUV-dependent business models less profitable. Today's NY Times business section has a great story about how we can essentially thank Ford and GM for $4/gallon gas.

These GM workers were photographed protesting fuel-efficiency standards in 2002. They wanted to continue building the company's ridiculously profitable SUVs:

(Photo by Joe Polimeni, via the AP)

I like the sign that says "America Means Choice." Because now, Americans are choosing not to buy any of their piece-of-shit vehicles.

GM is shuttering several of its truck factories. Another great story in today's NY Times talks about how much it sucks to cough up a Benjamin every time you need to fill your gas tank.

Even Starbucks is worth twice as much as GM these days. Sometimes capitalism works just the way it's supposed to.

The Militarization of Maine's Working Waterfronts

2008-06-25T22:21:00.000-07:00

Mainers take a lot of pride in the state's remaining working waterfronts, our in-town piers and wharves where marine industries haven't yet given way to upscale condos and quaint shoppes. People like me appreciate the working waterfront because it ties us culturally to a seafaring heritage and a tightly-knit relationship with the marine wilderness. The ragtag warehouses and stink of fish may not be pretty to everyone, but working waterfronts are a visible reminder that we still derive a good portion of our food and our livelihoods from the wild ocean.

But obviously, the working waterfronts are only a shadow of what they used to be. What's happened to Maine's shipbuilding industry has been particularly interesting and telling as a barometer of the rest of the state's waterfronts.

Maine's shipbuilding traditions have military roots from the Colonial era, when "king pine" trees (old-growth white pines) were marked and felled to build ship masts for the Royal Navy. Maine's Portsmouth Naval Shipyard was established in 1800 to build the new Union's naval fleet.

Nevertheless, Maine's shipbuilding industry flourished with the civilian, commercial trade in the 19th century. This 1901 article from the New York Times tells us that

"The Maine shipyards have on the stocks or under contract, including vessels launched since Jan. 1, 1901, 2 ships, 35 schooners, 8 barges, 5 steamers, and numerous small craft, and in all New England there are now under construction 131 vessels, with an aggregate tonnage of over 100,000. This does not include Government vessels... with a total displacement of over 50,000 tons.

"This is an era of mammoth fore-and-afters. In 1900 2 six-masters were built, one at Camden and one at Bath, including the Oakley C. Curtis... and the Rebecca Palmer. ... It is likely that Maine will produce a seven-master before the year is out."

At the turn of the century, then, New England shipbuilders were building lots of boats, and most of them, by tonnage and in raw numbers, were for civilian uses. The image above is the Rebecca Palmer five-masted ship mentioned in the article. The image is from the State Library of Queensland, Australia, and a Google search turns up genealogical references to service on the "Rebecca Palmer" from all over the world. It seems likely that Rebecca was a merchant ship, an industrial-era pioneer in global trade.

Today, though, Maine's shipbuilding industry is overwhelmingly reliant upon Navy contracts (and, depending on your perspective, pork-barrel spending brought home by Maine's swing-voting senators). The state's largest remaining shipyard, Bath Iron Works (pictured), built yachts, trawlers, and passenger steamships in its early days, but its last non-military contract was for two tankers in 1981. In 1995, General Dynamics bought the yard to officially claim Bath's working waterfront as a fixture in the military-industrial complex.

BIW is an impressive sight to see, and some part of me is glad that it's still there, even if it's spending my tax money for dubious reasons. Still, today's shipyards have nearly nothing to do with Maine's natural resources, unless you count the proximity of deep water. They have nothing to do with Maine's tall, straight trees, its fisheries, or its seafaring population. When these ships launch, their crews will rarely, if ever, have to worry about gales, currents, drinking water, or sustaining themselves with food from the sea. The militarization of Maine's shipyards has removed most of the shipyards' and the ships' distinctive relationships with nature.

And it's also removed the reasons why the shipyards should remain here, instead of anywhere else. BIW only remains here because of the inertia of history, the difficulty of moving huge cranes and laying off labor unions. Except for the inherent political difficulties, General Dynamics would probably just as soon move the whole operation to Mexico.

Anemometer going up at Portland's East End School site

2008-06-25T06:19:00.001-07:00

Via the Portland Press Herald, Portland School Department's facilities manager, Doug Sherwood, is moving forward with plans to install a test anemometer at the East End School site on Portland's Eastern Prom - the first step towards installing a utility-scale wind turbine on the site, an idea I'd written about last November. After a few months of testing the winds, school officials should have an estimate for the best size of turbine to install there. Hopefully the scale won't be limited by what the school can afford (which isn't much). I could see a private or community-owned enterprise putting up the capital cost for a turbine or turbines, then selling some of the electricity back to the school at reduced rates in exchange for the use of their site.

The test anemometer would come on loan from the Efficiency Maine program, which recently acquired several anemometers for the express purpose of loaning them out to potential wind power developers.

A few months ago I'd spoken with a local utility-scale wind power developer about building turbines here, but he basically told me that his company wasn't interested in building in an urban location, because he was so certain that the neighbors would throw fits, and because the city's zoning doesn't allow it yet. I'd like to prove him wrong on the first point; on the second, I'd like our city's planners to get with the program and establish a flexible wind power siting ordinance.

Besides the Eastern Prom site, Portland also has a number of islands that could benefit from cheaper and more reliable power delivery if they were allowed to build their own wind generators.

What does "carbon footprint" mean, exactly?

2008-06-24T05:42:00.001-07:00

NY Times editorial writer Verlyn Klinkenborg takes the term "carbon footprint" to task in today's Editorial Observer:

"What makes me uneasy is simply knowing how quickly humans adopt new phrases and how readily we confuse them with the reality - or the unreality - of our actions. The two things we seem to do most instinctively are manipulate language and create markets, and those two instincts converge when it comes to carbon footprints. Creating a market in moral carbon - offsets that counter our energy-rich lifestyle - feels a little like Rotisserie baseball, more illusion than reality...

"There is nothing trivial about grasping the idea that lies behind carbon footprints, trying to understand the scale of our consumption and its widespread environmental costs. Think about it properly, and it leads you to a profound critique of who we are and how we behave. Act on it, and you immediately see how carbonaceous our lives have become."

From Swimming Pools to Vernal Pools

2008-06-18T11:25:00.001-07:00

The Wall Street Journal last month reported a great story on new ecosystems that are emerging from California's foreclosure crisis. As families lose their suburban homes, immaculately maintained backyards are growing into wild steppes, and formerly fluorescent blue swimming pools are accumulating nutrients and turning a murky tea-green. Can you spot the foreclosures in the aerial photo below?

But as swimming pools evolve into vernal pools, health officials are sounding the alarm about resurgent mosquito populations bringing diseases like the West Nile Virus into these neighborhoods. So governments are breeding and distributing small fish that eat mosquito larvae into abandoned pools:

"The Gambusia affinis is commonly known as the "mosquito fish" because of its healthy appetite for the larvae of the irritating and disease-spreading insects. Lately, the fish is being pressed into service in California, Arizona, Florida and other areas struggling with a soaring number of foreclosures...

"The mosquito fish is well suited for a prolonged housing slump. Hardy creatures with big appetites, they can survive in oxygen-depleted swimming pools for many months, eating up to 500 larvae a day and giving birth to 60 fry a month. That can save environmental crews from having to repeatedly spray pesticides in the pools while the houses grind through the foreclosure process."

Unfortunately, not everyone is happy with this solution:

"First you have fish, then you have birds that eat them" and then bird droppings, says Arnie Shal, a retired accountant, who lives next to several foreclosed houses with pools in Clearwater, Fla. "It's not really a healthy situation."

Suburb-dwellers, so accustomed to a landscape of control, are uninterested to having wild ecosystems next door. But the reporter found a different attitude towards the fish on the Left Coast:

"This is how we are supposed to take care of things,'' says Robert Kloepping, who lives next to a vacant home with a pool containing mosquito fish in Antioch, Calif. "I think it's cool, man. It's organic."

California's Contra Costa County also maintains an indoor colony of mosquitoes and has hired a staff entomologist, Steve Schutz, for scientific research on these new ecosystems of suburban foreclosure. One of Mr. Schutz's responsibilities is to keep the research mosquitoes alive with a regular "blood meal."

"He usually reads a book or works on a puzzle while the mosquitoes bite him for about 20 minutes. 'I have been doing it so long that it doesn't even itch that much,' he says. The district used to use a bobwhite quail for the blood meal, but Mr. Schutz says it's less hassle to offer up his arm."

Catch of the Day

2008-06-17T18:14:00.000-07:00

As seen on Treehugger:
The Surfrider Foundation packages the bounty of our beaches into seafood containers, which are then sold locally at farmers' markets. So Californians in Newport Beach can enjoy this fillet of condoms (note the safe handling instructions: "Every day, 1.3 billion gallons of partially treated sewage and trash are dumped into the ocean"), and Texans can partake of the Aerosol Valu-Pak:

Butts and Bits from Venice Beach:

The geography of "cyberspace"

2008-06-15T21:27:00.000-07:00

The first time I used the internet was during my freshman year of high school, in 1994, when I walked across the football field to use Bonny Eagle Middle School's new computer labs and "surf the web," as they called it back then. I didn't know what URLs were or how to run searches, so my browsing was limited to following chains of links on some of the first web pages: from an MIT student's page, to the Mentos home page (one of the first commercial advertisement web sites, I think), to a web site of exploding Twinkie experiments that I thought was really funny.

In hindsight, we clearly had no idea what the internet would become, or even really what it was good for. The Internet seemed so strange, in fact, that we actually assigned it a completely new geography: "cyberspace," "the information superhighway," etcetera. We made up terms that defined it as a strange sort of parallel universe, because generally speaking, the stuff on "cyberspace" had little to do with what was in real space.

Now, of course, things are completely different. Lots of people have figured out that the internet is a great way to publish and share information, or to create and manage groups of people, for practically no cost at all. I just finished reading a great book by Clay Shirky called Here Comes Everybody, which details some of the remarkable things that the internet has enabled, and that we sometimes take for granted.

For instance, we now use the web to convene clubs, to read the news, to stay in touch with old classmates. We use it to conduct commerce with each other. And we use it for political activism and to blow the whistle on regressive government bureaucracies. In other words, the internet isn't a separate geography anymore: it's strongly integrated with real life, and it's made a lot of formerly difficult things cheap and easy to do.

Shirky's book struck me with this fact several times, but I'm particularly fond of this passage about the fading geography of "cyberspace":

"The idea of cyberspace made sense when the population of the internet had a few million users; in that world social relaions online really were separate from offline ones, because the people you would meet online were different from the people you would meet offline, and these worlds would rarely overlap. But that separation was an accident of partial adoption... In the developed world [today] the experience of the average twenty-five-year-old is one of substantial overlap betrween online and offline friends and colleagues. The overlap is so great, in fact, that both the word and the concept of 'cyberspace' have fallen into disuse... our electronic networks are becoming deeply embedded in real life."

Cyberspace is disappearing: the internet, e-mail, and all the rest of the "information superhighway" are no longer a separate space, but an expansion of real space.

In fact, it may be even more than that. In the course of reading this passage, I thought to myself: "it's true, when's the last time you heard the term 'cyberspace'"? Then I thought to myself, what if there were some way to measure the frequency of the use of the word "cyberspace" through the years?

As it turns out, there is a way to measure the frequency of use for the word "cyberspace," or any other word or phrase, and it's on the internet. Google Trends charts out how often people have searched for various words or phrases on Google over time. And here is the trend graph for the word "cyberspace":

In decline, sure enough.

But what strikes me as especially eerie about this is the fact that, in a flash of what seemed like insight, I had a question - "how has the use of the word 'cyberspace' changed over time?" - and a related idea - a statistical tool to measure the use of words over time - and to my surprise, both the idea and the answer to my question already existed on the internet.

Suddenly 'cyberspace' seems again like a strange and fantastic geography - one that contains and expresses my thoughts and ideas before I have them. It reminded me of a concept from philosophical mathematics: the set of all possible thoughts and ideas.¹

Dr. Darryl Macer, a New Zealand bioethicist, has proposed that science should attempt to map this collection of possible human thoughts - a sort of "ideome" project to follow the human genome project. Such a collection is probably infinitely large and has only been talked about in theoretical terms until very recently. But as more and more people use and contribute their thoughts and ideas to the internet, it strikes me that the ideome project is already well underway.

¹Jorge Luis Borges also thought of this stuff and wrote about it in his short story "The Library of Babel," which was published in 1941. The Library of the title contains all possible books, printed with every possible combination of letters, spaces, and punctuation. Like the Internet, the Library contains mostly nonsense - but because it is complete, it must also contain the works of Shakespeare (in every language), a directory of the Library's English-language books, books written in code, and every other great work of literature from the past, present, or future.

Power of the Gulf Conference

2008-06-12T11:06:00.001-07:00

I'm blogging today for the "Power of the Gulf" conference, a project of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute and the University of Southern Maine's Center for Law and Innovation. We're learning about ocean-based wind and tidal power development, technology, economic development opportunities, and the rest.

Read all about it as it happens at powerofthegulf.blogspot.com

Biomimicry power plants

2008-06-09T17:50:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Mitch for the heads-up on this one.

According to the BBC, a Glasgow architecture firm has won the International Design Awards Land and Sea competition with its proposal to anchor large lily-pad-shaped solar arrays in the middle of Glasgow's River Clyde (pictured). The firm is trying to sign the Glasgow City Council on for a small pilot project in conjunction with the city's science museum. The discs will allegedly rotate as the sun moves across the sky in order to maximize the panels' exposure.

So they'll generate clean electricity and also attract peoples' attention and activities to the river - sounds great. But by imitating lily pads, is it possible that this proposal could have more immediate effects on the River Clyde's ecosystem?

Plenty of urban rivers are too warm or too choked with algae to sustain much life, thanks to runoff that washes phosphates and other chemicals off from hot, sun-baked pavement. By shading the water, lily pads and other floating aquatic plants are able to divert some of the sun's energy from reaching the depths of a pond, which slows down algal growth and provides better habitat for critters.

Maybe too-warm rivers aren't such a big problem in Scotland, but they certainly are in a lot of American cities - especially on the west coast, where rivers like the Klamath and Willamette are getting too urbanized and too hot to sustain their ancient salmon populations. Maybe the shade of some solar lily pads would be just the ticket.

Proposal

2008-06-05T18:39:00.000-07:00

Storm drain stencils: a neat idea to get people thinking about how city sewers and storm drains actually work. Here's one in South Portland, Maine:

But how about some alternative messages?

Or, more to the point:

[idea inspired by Pruned]

Victory gardening

2008-06-04T17:55:00.000-07:00

Every Wednesday morning before work I wake up early to help the Snell family set up for the Portland Farmers' Market in Monument Square. In return for this work, we receive plants to populate our fire escape garden (shh, don't tell the fire marshall), and produce later in the year. Besides being extra-fresh and delicious, this payment is turning out to be more lucrative than tech stock options.

According to anecdotal accounts from the market's farmers, this is turning out to be a banner year for vegetable and herb plant sales. As food prices rise, it looks as though more and more people are taking up gardening to raise their own calories this summer.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, columnist Philip S. Wenz calls for a revival of WWII-era Victory Gardens to neutralize rising food prices:

"During the Second World War, which began while America was still recovering from the Great Depression, both money and the things that money could buy were scarce. Necessities such as food and fuel for heating and transportation were rationed at home in order to supply our soldiers abroad.

The American people and their government responded to the shortages by starting the ambitious Victory Garden program, which encouraged citizens to grow vegetables. Almost overnight, millions of gardens were cultivated in private yards, schoolyards and parks across the nation...

The results were spectacular. Victory Gardens yielded as much as 40 percent of the country's nonmilitary produce."

Of course, those victory gardeners were just coming out of a decade of Depression, and they had a lot more experience in self-sufficiency than today's Americans. We may be at war today, but instead of asking us to conserve resources and grow our food, our government now asks us to go shopping, and instead of a decade's worth of experience in frugality, we're coming out of a decade of morbid obesity. In other words, it's way too soon to tell whether today's gardeners will earn the "victory" label - but at least we can enjoy some better food and more time outdoors.

Image: San Francisco victory garden, from the Chronicle's files.

Maine Granolas OK With Recycling Plastic

2008-05-28T19:02:00.000-07:00

In a post last week, I'd written about the Berkeley, California Ecology Center's critiques of recycling plastic. Those criticisms led the Ecology Center to recommend not recycling plastic at all, rather than give people false assurances that might prompt people to consume more plastic than they need to.

That post prompted some more investigation from reader and local city councilor John Anton, who also happens to be on the board of ecomaine, the uncapitalized regional waste management company here in southern Maine. He sent my post to Kevin Roche, ecomaine's general manager, to ask about where our own plastics end up. Here was Roche's response, in its entirety (emphasis and links are my own):

Hi John -

I've been selling plastic scrap since 1989 and have visited many plastic processing facilities during my time in the industry. Back in the late 80's and early 90's, it was tough to find markets for plastic and often times you wouldn't get any revenue for it. But it was still better than sending it to a landfill so we continued to market it to a variety of processors who chip it, wash it, and palletize for the use in new products and packaging. I witnessed this being done first hand so I'm confident that when you put this much effort into processing scrap, that it goes to good use.

Today, the markets have matured substantially...

The non-colored (natural) HDPE milk jugs (marked with a number 2 on the bottom) are now commanding over $800 per ton ($18,000 per trailer load). We sell a lot of this material to a Company in York PA called Graham Packaging which makes new plastic containers for detergents and cleaners (non-food).

The Colored HDPE #2 containers are sold to various markets (including Graham Packaging) at $600 per ton. Again, they make new bottles out of scrap bottles.

The PET #1 containers are sorted automatically by our scanner and sold at $400 per ton to various markets that make carpet or stuffing for sleeping bags and jackets, etc.

The 3-7 plastic we mix and sell together because we don't get enough of any one of them to substantiate accumulating them in separate loads. These markets are in their infancy (just like the #1 & #2 markets were 18 years ago). However they're the smallest percentage of what we process... See below.

Make up of the Plastics we process:

Colored HDPE #2: 28%
Natural HDPE #2: 25%
PET #1: 25%
Plastics #3-#7: 22%

We just started selling 3-7 plastic last year and we've averaged $45 per ton. Not nearly what the other plastics bring in but at least we're getting paid for it. Because there are limited markets for this material right now, we sell it to various brokers. Because they pay us for it, they can't simply afford to landfill it. It's sold to lower end markets but our hope is the markets will improve for this material over time as it has for the other plastics.

I hope this helps. Kevin.

So in Maine, at least, plastic recycling is pretty beneficial. Still, recycling does consume a lot of energy and resources, and note that even here, plastics are "downcycled" - that is, transformed from food-grade to non-food containers, or from water bottles to jacket insulation. And recycling plastics other than HDPE #2 and PET #1 is obviously more problematic, for now. Note that Roche does not know where those plastics end up - it's entirely possible that purchasers may be scouring that 22% portion of our plastic recycling to cherry-pick what they can and landfill the rest.

It's also important to note that ecomaine is a nonprofit owned by its 21 member communities, which helps to make its management considerably more open, progressive, and innovative than most waste management companies. I mean, would Tony Soprano have bothered to write the response above? Unfortunately, most American communities shouldn't expect this level of service from their own local recycling haulers. But as Roche has proven here, it's worth asking them about it.

So using less plastic is still far better than recycling plastic, but here in southern Maine, anyhow, recycling is better than burying or incinerating it with the rest of our garbage. Just make sure your plastic doesn't blow away into the nearest river or coastline when you set it out on the curb every week.

China just might surprise the U.S. on climate change

2008-05-28T06:05:00.001-07:00

With new conservation initiatives and advances in low-cost green technology, the new global superpower is taking a leading role in addressing climate change - and rendering the old global superpower "irrelevant."

read more in the San Francisco Chronicle

Grapes of Global Wrath

2008-05-22T18:51:00.000-07:00

Four years ago, I finished a season of huts work just as a good friend of mine was finishing a year of teaching english at a Thai university. I flew out to southeast Asia to meet up with him, with the goal of taking a long hike near Siguniang Shan (pictured), at the edge of the Tibetan plateau in western Sichuan province.

We spent a week in the mountains and saw blue sky once, when the clouds cleared for about an hour one morning (but that one hour was absolutely spectacular). Another morning, a yak trampled and ripped our tent while we were out on a short walk from out campsite. After coming from Thailand, we were cold and damp and we weren't enjoying our Chinese camp food nearly as much as Thai cuisine. So we cut the hike short and spent most of our time instead in the nearby town of Rilong, a Tibetan ranching village that was transitioning its economy to serve more and more Chinese tourists, plus a few days in the city of Chengdu.

Essentially, we spent all our time in China within 50 miles of the recent earthquake's epicenter. And the four-hour bus ride between Rilong and Chengdu took us through some of the hardest-hit cities, including Dujiangyan and the town of Yingxiu.

From what I can tell, both Rilong and Chengdu - and presumably, the incredibly warm, funny, and hospitable Ma family that hosted us there - fared relatively well in this disaster. Still, it's not difficult to imagine how terrifying it might be over there.

Much has been made of how open China's press has been in this disaster, and how the country is now accessible to global media, and a greater degree of global empathy. But the mountain towns west of the epicenter are only connected to the outside world by a tenuous two-lane highway and power line that threads its way through huge mountains, and both are now buried under landslides in several places. For a while, these places will have to survive as they did for centuries - cut off from any communication or commerce save for that provided by two days of walking. For a while, all the promise of easier living with indoor plumbing and washing machines has been swept away by the old basic struggle for survival.

Maybe this, and the context of China's position and its ambitions, is why I was instantly reminded of Rose of Sharon in The Grapes of Wrath when I heard about this story: a young Chinese police officer who is also a recent mother has been breastfeeding numerous babies in the earthquake's shelters for children who have been orphaned or whose mothers are too exhausted to feed them.

Berkeley Granolas Just Say "No" to Recycling Plastic

2008-05-20T19:11:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is the neighborhood trash pick-up day. And like most Wednesday mornings, I will go outside and find the streets littered with milk jugs, plastic wrap, and take-out containers that have fallen out or blown away from household recycling bins. I'd venture to guess that the majority of my neighborhood's litter comes from recycling - it's not as though many people would intentionally throw their organic salad greens containers and cute-little-butter-girl boxes into the gutter. Of course, you know where all that trash is headed next.

We could do a better job of piling heavy stuff on top of our recycling bins so the lighter stuff doesn't blow away. Or better yet, if it's windy out, keeping the recycling inside until the next week.

Or better still - don't recycle plastic. That's the line of action endorsed by Berkeley, California's Ecology Center. Read their Seven Misconceptions About Recycling Plastic on their web site.

Did you know that the triangular chasing-arrows symbol is an invention of the plastics industry? The Ecology Center asserts, "The arrows are meaningless." This isn't entirely true - the numbers do differentiate different types of plastic, from #1 polyester to #5 polypropylene - but the Ecology Center is correct in the sense that the numbers are basically meaningless to recycling centers. No one actually looks at the symbols and sorts the plastics by number. In fact, plastic with a #7 symbol is categorized as "Other," meaning that it's essentially unrecyclable.

Since the plastic all gets mixed together, it can't be re-used as food containers or bottles. Instead, it's typically melted together and re-formed to produce a limited number of products that don't require high-quality materials. You may have seen parking lot bumpers or picnic tables made from a grainy plastic - these are generally made from recycled materials, but they themselves can not be recycled again.

Plus, there just isn't enough demand for cheap picnic tables to use all of the plastic that Americans put out in their recycling bins. In most West Coast cities, then, a lot of plastic recycling gets shipped to China on barges. Once it gets there, Chinese factories use some of it to produce low-grade plastic containers. But much of it just ends up going into Chinese rivers or landfills.

It's less clear what East Coast cities do with their excess plastic (we have a sort of social agreement with the waste industry where we don't want to know what happens to our garbage, and they don't tell us), but it's a safe bet that a lot of it goes to landfills. Even if that's the case, at least we're not shipping it to China first.

Please read Elizabeth Royte's Garbageland, linked at right, for a much more in-depth look at where plastic goes after we "recycle" it.

But long story short, plastics can generally be recycled only once, and a lot of it doesn't get recycled at all. The Ecology Center has actually campaigned for years to prevent recycling trucks from collecting plastic: "There is a likelihood that establishing plastics collection might increase consumption by making plastic appear more ecologically friendly both to consumers and retailers. Collecting plastics at curbside could legitimize the production and marketing of packaging made from virgin plastic." They also point out that legitimizing plastics contributes to the declining viability of glass containers - and glass, unlike plastic, is an unambiguously recyclable material.

This is essentially the source of my unease about most "green" consumption, from carbon offsets to glitzy suburban land trusts. On one hand, it's great that people want to recycle, or generate less carbon per mile, or save a forest. But if that warm and fuzzy feeling they get induces them to use more plastic, or drive more, or build a bigger McMansion, then what good does it do any of us?

So reduce the amount of plastic you acquire. Reuse the stuff you can't avoid picking up. But when you think of throwing any of it away, remember that there are good reasons to send it straight to the landfill, instead of sending it on a temporary detour through the recycling center.

The desert will bloom.

2008-05-15T18:21:00.000-07:00

The Google blog today announced a $10 million equity investment in BrightSource Energy, a solar-thermal power plant developer that's agreed to provide 900 megawatts of renewable electricity to Pacific Gas and Electric. That's about as much electricity as could be provided by a small nuclear power plant.

This investment is part of Google's effort to develop renewable energy technology that's cheaper than coal: to do so, BrightSource will build huge fields of mirrors (as in the picture above) that will concentrate extreme heat on a central water tower, which will then generate steam to spin huge turbines. Unlike wind turbines, which only deliver juice when the wind blows, these power plants can be relied on to deliver their full capability of electricity in the middle of hot summer days, when SoCal's air conditioning units are working their hardest.

Let's wait to see if any of it really comes to pass. The Mojave is a recalcitrant frontier and the graveyard of so many destinies that once seemed manifest. There are abandoned farms, ghost towns, and failed real estate schemes. Check out this ambitious subdivision near California City:

View Larger Map

If you zoom in on the map above, you'll notice that someone, at some point, actually went to the trouble of naming all of those abandoned cul-de-sacs in the middle of nowhere. Incredible.

But with Google's faith and another $115 million in venture capital in its pocket, it looks likely that these solar plants will be built in the next few years. And, since California generates most of its electricity with expensive natural gas, utilizing free sunlight for energy seems like a safe investment.

What if California decides to decommission its natural gas plants entirely and replace them with thousands of acres of mirrors covering the dry lakebeds of the Mojave? That could be a significant step towards saving the global climate.

But it's possible that these huge fields of mirrors would also begin to cool the local climate. If these mirrors begin reflecting the Mojave's sunlight back up into the sky, instead of letting it bake the hot desert soil, it seems likely that these arrays will also be oases of cool air. Maybe they'll begin attracting an understory of desert scrub plants to cool the local microclimate further.

As time goes on, the growing island of shaded ground and cooler air squeezes out any moisture that incoming desert breezes might contain, like a stationary cold front. The ground beneath the mirrors will grow increasingly verdant. The power plants won't work as well as they used to before the clouds arrived, but a new generation of frontiersmen will till the fertile soil in the shade of California's solar farms. The century-old promise will be fulfilled: the desert will bloom.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

2008-05-14T16:18:00.000-07:00

Left: a "trash boom" in the Los Angeles River collects floating waste that had washed away from city streets after a storm. This photo by Rick Loomis was part of a Pulitzer-winning report on plastics in the world's oceans from the Los Angeles Times.

There's a lot of plastic on the loose - and not just in treetops. As alluded to in the previous post, a lot of it ends up washing away: down the nearest storm drain, into a river, and out into the ocean, where plastics make a languorous journey along the ocean's currents until they arrive in a stagnant patch of dead water in the middle of the Pacific known as the North Pacific Gyre - or more recently known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Charles Moore, an oceanographer studying the Patch, estimates that this patch of ocean, twice the size of Texas, might contain about 100 million tons of floating plastic confetti (source).

But you probably already know about this, as it's been well-documented on the Internet and in excellent documentaries like this amazing series from Vice magazine.

I'm more interested in the recent Crusade against Plastic Bags. Have you noticed how this has become an environmental flash point? Across the nation, yuppie grocery stores and yuppie cities are banning plastic bags outright.

Even though it shouldn't be lost on anyone that floating plastic, in and of itself, is a relatively minor environmental problem in the grand scheme of things, and even though I suspect that the yuppies are using their plastic bag bans as a way to forgive themselves for the massive volumes of other petroleum products that they habitually use, burn, or throw away, I'm generally encouraged by this new cultural suspicion of plastic.

But it's also strange. I mean, we've been seeing plastic trash tangled in trees and washed up at the high tide line for decades now. We made that Indian cry 30 years ago. What's different now?

I think that the Garbage Patch story might be a big part of it. The Gyre is one of the most isolated patches of ocean on Earth - and yet, humans have managed to unwittingly send millions of tons of garbage there. A newly-discovered floating continent of plastic makes for a pretty compelling story. It might even be better than drowning polar bears.

But I think that the more critical force behind this phenomenon is the general surge in concern about environmental issues - especially global warming. Ostensibly, plastic garbage has very little to do with the climate crisis. But if you're worried about the climate, you're also extremely frustrated at the lack of political leadership on the issue, and at the lack of opportunities - beyond switching lightbulbs - that individuals have to do anything about it.

In this context of general frustration, though, we've found something we can seize on: plastic bags. Here's something that individuals can claim for themselves as a small but meaningful gesture.

Compared to climate change, plastic garbage is a small problem. But this new prejudice against plastic bags shouldn't be looked at as a rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic: it's a small but significant rejection of the American disposable culture. The oil and energy we save from producing a few less plastic bags isn't nearly as significant or meaningful as the idea that we should reuse things instead of throwing them away.

Spring foliage

2008-05-12T18:59:00.000-07:00

Ah, spring! The buds are budding! The birds are singing! Everywhere, everything is enjoying the new freedom of wandering outdoors, free from snow and ice!

And few things are enjoying this newfound freedom more than the city's plastic shopping bags, which had spent a miserable winter buried in snowbanks, burdened with a cargo of slush. But no more! The plastic is taking to the skies! To the treetops! Beyond!

And even more are taking to the ocean, to float in long meandering migrations toward those lazy latitudes where winter never comes.

The city is organic.

2008-05-07T18:06:00.000-07:00

According to the New Scientist News Service:

"French and US physicists have shown that the road networks in cities evolve driven by a simple universal mechanism despite significant cultural and historical differences. Marc Barthélemy of the French Atomic Energy Commission in Bruyères-le-Châtel and Alessandro Flammini of Indiana University, US, analysed street pattern data from roughly 300 cities, including Brasilia, Cairo, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Venice."

Old world, new world, grid city or not, the researchers found that all of these cities have road networks that are mathematically similar. According to the article's abstract,

"We propose a simple model based on a local optimization process combined with ideas previously proposed in studies of leaf pattern formation. The statistical properties of this model are in good agreement with the observed empirical patterns."

The mathematical model assumed that road networks based on immediate needs to connect destinations - a downtown area to a new factory, for example, or a neighborhood to a train station. As more houses and businesses get built, they connect to existing roads. Which is exactly how capillary networks grow as new cells develop in living organisms.

This organic development of roads holds true even in cities, like Los Angeles, that ostensibly follow a north-south, east-west grid layout. LA's grid streets are only a small part of a larger, more chaotic network of big freeways (like major arteries) and tiny cul-de-sacs (like capillaries):

View Larger Map

And so, just as two genetic clones will develop different patterns of veins, capillaries, and arteries depending on chaotic environmental factors during cell growth, so a city's infrastructure develops randomly regardless of its social or governmental DNA. Whether it's a built-from-scratch city like Brasilia or an ancient city like Paris or a master-planned, for-profit city like Texas's The Woodlands, the city grows organically.

The Anthropocene Era

2008-05-05T17:06:00.000-07:00

Millions of years from now, geologists of some different species may find a thin stratum of plastic in the sedimentary rock of ancient seabeds and speculate that maybe it was a strange sort of petrochemical asteroid that caused the giant mass extinction at the end of the holocene epoch.

A growing number of present-day geologists are now arguing that the holocene epoch is effectively over, and that it's time to call our times by a new name: the anthropocene epoch, named for the dominant geological force of the period. Let's look at our credentials: we've relocated billions of tons of carboniferous-era rocks out of the ground and into the atmosphere; we've accelerated erosion in rivers worldwide, we're melting away ice caps that are hundreds of thousands of years old, and we've precipitated one of the largest mass extinctions in the history of life on Earth.

The Holocene Epoch began about 10,000 years ago. It is, by two orders of magnitude, the shortest geological epoch, and we may have just ended it. Whatever - it's an arbitrary division of time, a scientific invention. But what impresses me most about this is the fact that the geological record is almost four billion years old - and in a few thousand years, humans have already managed to leave a permanent mark.

Some geologists even say that the entire quaternary period, a scant 1.8 million years young, may be extinct. The quaternary period is defined geologically by periodic ice ages, which seem increasingly unlikely, but it's still entirely within the realm of possibility that something like The Day After Tomorrow might happen someday. Or, as the geologists put it, "Given the large uncertainties in the future trajectory of climate and biodiversity, and the large and currently unpredictable action of feedbacks in the earth system, we prefer to remain conservative. Thus, while there is strong evidence to suggest that we are no longer living in the Holocene (as regards the processes affecting the production and character of contemporary strata), it is too early to state whether or not the Quaternary has come to an end" (source: GSA Today, February 2008).

On the one hand, I'm encouraged by the fact that geologists are heeding the fact that humans are a part and a force of nature. Kind of puts the environmental movement in perspective: Ted Turner and the Nature Conservancy can buy as many Montanan ranches as they want, but they won't be doing squat in the grand scheme of geological time.

Raise cain about greenhouse gases and move our society towards leaving carbon in the ground, though, and that's an accomplishment that will be scribed in the rocks for billions of years to come.

"The American people are called upon to not sacrifice."

2008-04-30T07:28:00.000-07:00

With ethanol, "we can break our addiction to fossil fuels without sacrificing our dependence on fossil fuels."