In case you were wondering what to get me for the holidays:
My most recent trip to the Catskills revealed even more frenetic activity than was evident in June. This includes massive infrastructure, especially in the form of pipelines and right-of-way cuts over forested ridges for feeder branches. The new Millenium pipeline, which will run from Corning east then south and eventually to New Jersey is a mammoth 36″ natural gas replacement for a current 12″ line. That’s a 10-fold increase in capacity. Not one well has been drilled in New York State, yet the writing is on the wall.
© 2008 Russell Honicker
What does this sort of approaching resource extraction orgy have to do with the Third World? After all, as a spokesperson for the NYSDEC said, “this isn’t Wyoming; this is New York!” We are the new Third World. Having raped the rest of the world, time to start in earnest at home. Of course there’s a long history of this here: coal, railroads, oil, highways, farming etc.
The so-called economic growth we’ve been experiencing here in the North-and-West has been subsidized by resource extraction over the last 35 years in places like Ecuador, Zambia, Angola, Sudan, East Timor and the like. Murder, authoritarianism, theft, lies, and squalid urban poverty accompany each new “discovery.” Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz calls this the “Resource Curse.” John Perkins, in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man calls it unofficial U.S. Policy. There was a recent news story about Indian farmers unceremoniously removed from their lands to make way for a new 900 acre Tata plant. This is our real economic engine.
While op-eds to the NYT place the blame for poverty on proponents of biofuels and opponents to Genetically Modified (GM) foods, and praises the efforts of our good friends at the World Bank, the reality is that our wealth has been, and is being stolen from distant parts of the world. We have been exporting poverty to the Third World for decades. While death squads are palatable or at least ignorable in some of these places, somehow the idea of mercenaries in Delaware and Broome Counties seems ridiculous. Nevertheless, residents report that Haliburton and Blackwater have arrived, along with military helicopters performing alarming seismic testing. Exporting poverty is no longer limited to other countries; we’re bringing it to the Catskills and Southern Tier.
Others have made this point before, but our agriculture is now more of a mining operation than anything else. We frack for natural gas to generate nitrogen fertilizer, applied in massive doses to sterile soil as anhydrous ammonia, most of which washes off into the Mississippi and then the Gulf of Mexico, spawning a “dead zone” (one of 150 worldwide) the size of Massachusetts. Phosphate fertilizer is mined in the Caribbean and in Canada. Diesel and Gasoline comes from Canada, Venezuela, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, by way of Port Arthur and Beaumont. The irrigation water is thousands of years old, mined from the once-huge Ogalalla reservoir, which is being rapidly depleted. All that produces starchy corn and soy beans that then act as inputs to other industrial food production processes like livestock, vegetable oils, soft drinks, and yeah, biofuels. It’s hard to find any actual food in our food systems- that is food that comes from rain, soil and sunshine. Rather, it’s all predominantly the end product of “drill, baby, drill.”
Finally, let’s tie this all back to the current global financial crisis, which is immediately a crisis of real estate and foreclosures, a crisis of land. Naturally, it is a crisis of much more. Ultimately, it’s a crisis of dissociation of money power from reality. All the working business models involve slavery, theft, monopoly or addiction.
Okay, that’s pretty negative. In order to end on a positive, a huge Greenerminds Congratulations and Thank You to Maura Harrington, who stared down Royal Dutch Shell last week.
[UPDATE 15:30 EDT] The Guardian Weekly has another success story- native Peruvians protect the Amazon basin.
Several times at NEPC, reference was made to the book A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. When I got back to town I went straight to the library to get it. Sadly, it was out, but another book, The Timeless Way of Building was in, and I’m glad for this happy little accident [sic].
The Timeless Way of Building (Volume 1 in the series) lays out, methodically, the difference between a built environment that is alive and one that is dead, what makes it possible to create the living one, that is a shared pattern language, how it is possible that normal people like you and I can build these living environments, what a pattern is, how to recognize one, and how to build a shared language of patterns and combine them in specific methods of design. A Pattern Language (Volume 2 in the series) is then, one attempt to build such a language that has general applicability.
Since Permaculture is all about design and a lot about pattern, I am glad to have stumbled onto these books. Which is not to say that they weren’t explicitly recommended in my PDC, or even by Mollison in the DM- they probably were. But they are both critically important books, IMHO, for Permies everywhere.
Here’s Alexander’s definition of a pattern:
Each pattern is a three-part rule, which expresses a relation between a certain context, a problem, and a solution.
The Timeless Way of Building, p. 247
I believe this is what Dave Jacke was referring to when he said a pattern is a way in which conflicting forces get resolved. This is also another way of restating the Permaculture principle: “the problem is the solution.”
Further, Alexander shows how we can discover these patterns.
This is a very specific and detailed form of “protracted and thoughtful observation,” and is quite similar to the ways both Mollison and Toby Hemenway suggest to identify guilds. Zone and Sector analysis is very good at quickly locating components in an overall site, in a general way. Alexander’s method seems to me much more definitive when you get down to the details of where to place the actual greenhouse, swales, paths, compost bin, chicken coop and so on in relation to each other and to existing components, within or across any zone/sector analysis segment.
The stuff we are talking about- home, urban and communitiy gardening, food, pattern, integrated landscapes, victory gardens, ecology, edge, small farming, relocalization- is suddenly mainstream. Allison Arieff blogs on these and other topics on the front page of the New York Times website.
I heard the other day that my friend Jim Mott was on the Today Show, so I tracked it down and you can see the clip here. Jim is one of the few people I know who actually makes his living solely as an artist, and has done so for the last 20 some-odd years.
Aside from being a great painter, he’s also the person that turned me onto global warming as having a real effect (swans in upstate New York) and Diet for a New America.
One Sunday morning I was in the studio working. I was about to have an opening and wanted to get in touch with Jim, but didn’t have an e-mail address and I hadn’t seen him for a while, and didn’t even know if he was in town. Just then there was a knock on the door and there he stood! He’d been teaching using the space next door.
I’m glad to see him get some recognition after many years of hard work- huzzah!
I’m reading Claude Levi-Strauss’s The View From Afar, which contains a short essay entitled Schizophrenia and Cosmopolitanism. As always, I have an interest in most things having to do with schizophrenia from an intellectual standpoint. In this essay Levi-Strauss is trying to draw some parallels between the features of schizophrenia (dualistic splits, identification with celestial bodies, sensation of internal organs re-arranging themselves, etc.) and features of a Chinook myth. The final conclusion is that the features of the myth were borrowed from other tribes with whom the Chinook had commercial relationships, and in some cases reversed or trans-figured.
This borrowing, in a cosmopolitan culture, looks alot like cut-up or collage to me. Many of the photomontages I’ve done for the last 20 years have a quasi-mythical feeling, and the essay starts to explain that. I’ve always felt this about surrealism, and there is overt exploration of the unconscious as revealed in “random” placements and re-placements.
I was wondering today if Burroughs, John Cage and Duchamp, the artists I consider the paragons of the 20th century, had ever met or been in the same place at the same time.
We’ve been watching the early episodes of 24 lately. I love intersecting story / POV plots in general. Crash and 13 Conversations About 1 Thing come to mind. They do a great job in some of the title prologues of showing the same scene from separate cameras. This is like a sort of temporal cubism, which is a kind of reversal of the collage technique (explosive vs. collective / implosive).
I’m reading Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf and I’m about two thirds of the way through. He’s just off to deal with the newly awakened dragon who is pissed because someone snagged a goblet. Beowulf has been king for 50 years after having defeated Grendel and his ma. More and more over the last several years I’ve been interested in quest stories, particularly medieval works like Parsifal and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Quest, the Hero’s Journey. In fact I’ve always been attracted to this type of work, from Star Wars to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Last Wednesday I was babysitting my two girls and two other kids. The weather looked like it was going to be crappy so I rented Eight Below. When I got home, Y cringed and said D had taken her son to see it and they were both very upset by it, that dogs died in a terrible manner and so on. So I watched it myself last weekend and despite the Frank Marshall - Disney schmaltziness moments it was pretty good. And not that different from Beowulf, actually in that it comprised two separate hero journey’s: one by the main character and one by one of the dogs.
The hero has comrades but has to leave them and wander alone for a while. Then something or someone unexpected shows up (the sword which Beowulf uses to slay Grendel’s Mother is found, the old man who tells the main character the story about his father in Eight Below) to put the hero back on the path. In the end the hero must observe correct protocol (presentation of gifts to his king in Beowulf, asking the question in Parsifal, acknowledging Coopers girlfriend in the picture in Eight Below). This last part is like a restoration of balance after the quest and critical.
Emergence looks pretty promising, despite the hokey comparison image of a cross-section of the brain and a 17th century map of Hamburg. In the first two pages Evelyn Fox Keller is introduced. I met Ms. Keller briefly at Williams 20 years ago, where she was presenting on new work in biology that was pushing the boundaries of the concept of natural selection, saying that some species seemed to evolve without natural selection. I’ve probably way over-simplified this, but that’s what I remember.
Then it mentions that she was inspired in 1968 by Turing’s 1952 paper on morphogenesis, and in particular his work on Fibonacci series numbers as expressed in natural growth patterns in daisies. So I guess I have to go back and finish Hodges biography.
No, not the Safari browser.
A safari to figure out how to edit the theme. Already you can see that I’ve changed the color of the Annoying Million Pixel Deep Gradient Header Thingy and that my copy is black, not gray.
Did that on my lunch break so it seems pretty straightforward. However, if I try to make the AMPDGHT only 72px, it slides up, and the text of my name (also annoying) stays where it is. The style.css file in the theme has about 2000 lines and a lot of duplication, commenting, etc. Guess I’ll have to become a CSS guru on top of all my other jobs.
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Got Emergence by Steven Johnson out of the library, along with an O’Reily book on PHP. So’s I can edit the theme. It’s all circular, see?
I’m pretty fed up with work so I’m looking for new. My dream job is still creating knowledge systems using rich media, especially around sustainability, systems and permaculture. Y suggested that I stay here and work toward that, start moving to something more heart-centered for me. If you want to know about my current job, see some of the movies on the list below.
Today’s question: will the electric power grid go down with the heatwave hitting the East Coast? Yesterday, when I got home it was 89° F inside my house.
So what do you need to know to cope in this new world? Well, here’s a proposed movie list:
… and books