From the Streetfilms site – “The first time you visit Portland, Oregon, the gaggles of cyclists streaming over the Hawthorne Bridge during rush hour is a sight you will never forget. It’s something other cities need to see and be inspired by.”

USA Today reports that Germany has increased new-car registrations in Germany by more than 21% to 277,800 in February compared with the same month last year. These sales were achieved by the German goverment’s bonus to people who scrap older cars and buy new ones, an amount of $3,134 at Tuesday’s exchange rate. A buyer has to trade in a car at least 9 years old and agree to let it be scrapped. America, take note.

Some people just aren’t shopping at all and it has nothing to do with the recession. GOOD Magazine has just profiled five groups of anti-consumers that includes:

1. The Amish: With an estimated population of 232,000, they have a strong commitment to simplicity that includes traveling by horse and buggy, sewing their own clothing and cooking on wood-fired stoves.

2. No Impact Man: Blogger Colin Beavan has vowed to produce no trash whatsoever. Even more amazingly, he pulls this off in New York City with his wife and daughter in tow. A life without toilet paper sounds challenging….

3. The Church of Stop Shopping: 20,000 members strong, the church has members in every continent but Antarctica. They have vowed to do anything to stop ‘The Shopocalypse’ including marching down Disneyland’s Main Street and even releasing a documentary called What Would Jesus Buy?

4. The Compact: A group of friends from San Francisco teamed up and vowed to buy nothing new for an entire year. They allowed themselves to buy food, health and safety items (and underwear), but everything else was off-limits. Now close to 10,000 people strong, The Compact hosts monthly meetings.

5. Freegans: Most freegans are middle-class and well-educated, but choose to dumpster dive instead of contributing to an economic system that holds profits above everything else.

Read more on these groups here.

The house slide above Terwilliger

Hyper-local can be summed up easily as ‘all the news in your zip code.’ Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson captured it nicely too in a post titled The Vanishing Point Theory of News. The idea of hyper-local is further validated by the success of sites such as Yelp and Outside.in; they drill down to the zip code level to bring us all the news that’s fit to print, or not as the case may be.

I was hiking with my dog in my Hillsdale neighborhood yesterday and some thoughts percolated to top of mind – one being that hyper-local is an awesome idea yet that thought was immediately tempered by the next; hyper-localized information means having easy access to all the news in our communities, we are made aware, therefore we have to accept responsibility for what happens in our communities. There will be no excuses.

I could have stopped right there, it would have been a good Twitter-esque moment. But no. I have actually been paying attention to what goes on in my neighborhood and it’s not always pretty..

From tragedy and despair to new thinking.

No vehicles, a blessing

My regular hike leads from my home in the residential neighborhoods of Portland’s West Hills, down narrow musty lanes and streets to Terwilliger Boulevard [known to locals as the Terwilliger Highway - you may already sense where this is going...]. Where Terwilliger crosses the SW Capitol Highway the road is now closed to vehicles but not to hikers and bicyclists. A few weeks ago a house slid down the hillside that I can see ahead of me taking two others off their foundations as it cascaded toward Terwilliger. Road closed. Despair for the families involved but thankfully no injuries.

The house collapse has created a chain of events that can be seen as an opportunity.

First and foremost, as vehicles can no longer drive along the boulevard it is possible for hikers and bikers to enjoy the serenity of walking Terwilliger’s tree-lined curves without inhaling exhaust fumes or having to be constantly vigilant of motorists speeding to work. Remove the automobile from the equation and we are suddenly back on the path to nature. Of course the traffic has to go somewhere; the detour funnels it through Hillsdale along the increasingly congested Capitol Highway, up through the dangerous cross-section at Sunset Blvd and the Wilson High School entrance, and on back down to the severed umbilical that is Terwilliger where commuters, one to each car, can speed off toward OHSU.

Here’s the opportunity for Hillsdale as I see it: make things difficult for drivers.

Two fairly recent developments in Hillsdale [in the last 4 years] changed the character of the neighborhood – one positively, one negatively. The Hillsdale Library, completed in 2004, is both architecturally and holistically a perfect example of how Hillsdale should be developed. The Watershed building on the other hand is just the opposite. And yet the library, as good as it is, is not perfect.

The library is a wonderful building to look at – a mix of modern eco-friendly materials, an open inviting design that allows complete transparency throughout and although it is a thoroughly modern building it has hints of neo-classical architecture, a good mix for housing the books within. Its problem? It has added to the areas automobile congestion. Drivers attempting to park on the streets or enter the parking lot below the building create mayhem just a half block from the already overloaded intersection at Capitol Highway and Sunset Blvd. And why the library’s underground parking entrance was placed right opposite the parking lots for the Hillsdale Post Office and Liquor Store is beyond me. The pedestrian crosswalk indiscriminately dropped at the corner of the library at the junction of SW DeWitt St has to be the most risky crossing in Hillsdale for the old and young alike.

Meanwhile the Watershed building at the southern end of Hillsdale’s strip malls is an eyesore. [Calling this building the Watershed is apt. Here's one definition of the name's meaning - A critical point marking a change in course or development.] There is nothing to love about this building. Although the ground beneath it was once a brownfield it was at least an open space that afforded a view across Bertha Court to the well-designed public housing just off Bertha Boulevard. The Watershed was perceived with a noble cause – a 51-unit senior affordable housing project – and is also an environmentally-friendly building but it is architecturally dull and has a ludicrous light tower perched on its NW corner that proclaims Hillsdale – such a folly and a waste of money. A retail condominium has lain empty since the buildings’ completion and the low retaining wall that runs along Bertha Court opposite provides a perfect sanctuary for the nicotine-addicted residents to sit and smoke throughout the day. Smoking is a choice and I’m fine with that but it’s a shame that as our local children walk to school they must pass these smokers. This building does not represent the future of Hillsdale.

Back to the problem of cars.

Another Hillsdale development with potential is the advent of the local Farmer’s Market. Along with the Food Front Cooperative taking over the old Wild Oats market, the local community now has easy access to organic foods which in many cases are locally grown. Yet once more the local “planners” failed to estimate the amount of traffic that the Farmer’s Market would create. The entrance to the market across from SW Sunset Blvd and Capitol Highway is now as congested and dangerous to pedestrians on Sundays as it is on weekdays. I don’t see this as progress; the car has dominion over the pedestrian and bicyclist in Hillsdale. Those that think this way will reduce our vibrant urban community to that of a bland, automobile-saturated sprawl reminiscent of the worst of any of Portland’s suburbs. Why doesn’t the Farmers Market and its boosters provide shuttle buses, bike racks and safe pedestrian access?

Shopping local, supporting growers and eating locally grown organic foods are all fine acts but not at the expense of clogging up the community with more cars. Talk about carbon footprint.

To add salt to the wound our hyper-local newspaper the Southwest Community Connection, the same paper that insists on calling the strip malls along Capitol Highway ‘Hillsdale Town Center,’ recently had an article titled ‘A New Look For The Heart of Hillsdale.’ This ‘new look’ according to the architecture and planning firm SERA is a way to “strengthen the qualities of what is Hillsdale” and “to over time create a more focused activity center or plaza.” Business folks in the district are all over it. As happens all too often in Hillsdale, business and automobiles trump residents and community.

The plan as presented by SERA is to create three high-density commercial and residential zones by extending roads through the middle of what is known as the “Sunset Triangle,” some green space that is bordered by Sunset Blvd, Capitol Highway and SW 18th Drive. But don’t worry, the designers “imagine the roads to be tree-lined boulevards with a European air.” If they truly imagined a “European air” they would understand that in Europe buses, light rail, pedestrians and cyclists predominate in towns and villages and many cities – not the automobile. The ‘European’ tag is just pure marketing fluff, an attempt to soften the blow that this development would create in the community.

I presume SERA has already asked the question of Hillsdale’s residents, [although I wasn't included], of what exactly are the strengths of Hillsdale that this phrase invokes – “strengthen the qualities of what is Hillsdale.” If they had asked me I would have these words for its qualities – urban, green, democratic, aesthetic, forward-thinking, family-friendly, bike and pedestrian-friendly, educated, local, supportive….. If they had asked me of my dislikes they would include the ugly buildings that dot Capitol Highway such as the abandoned gas station next to Baskins Robbins, the bizarre architecture that houses the Mexican restaurant Casa Colima, Starbucks [Baker and Spice next door is local and has better coffee,] the traffic, lack of bike lanes and most importantly the nightmare that is the junction at SW Sunset and Capitol Highway – will it take a pedestrian or bicyclist’s death to make someone pay attention?

Nature has a way of dealing. Capitol Hwy in December

Hillsdale simply does not need more businesses and homes crammed into its green spaces. It is hypocritical folly to suggest that the very same decisions that create suburban blight should be made on behalf of Hillsdale’s residents. Hillsdale also does not need to create more roads for automobiles. In fact the community should be doing the exact opposite and work on creating more bike and pedestrian-friendly streets in our neighborhoods.

Here’s a quick example – SW Sunset Blvd. The city should remove all the “traffic calming speed bumps” as they do not work. Drivers have discovered that they are low enough that by speeding up they can clear them more conveniently! The city should put in either stop signs at every junction or traffic circles to slow cars down. It could also narrow the street by putting in chicanes that slow traffic by funneling and are used very efficiently in Europe. Pedestrians and bicyclists should be considered more important than cars…

The Hillsdale District, as it stands today, is a model community. It has the potential to be as strong a destination as the Hawthorne, Clinton and Belmont Districts in SE Portland. It is an urban oasis with charm and character yet it is being blighted by the automobile and wrong-headed thinking such as the idea of under-grounding our utility cables. The money that would be spent on a pet project like that, one that benefits no one, should be put toward a holistic and sensible urban community plan. One that reduces traffic and improves the safety and quality of life for Hillsdale’s residents and those that are attracted to the district as they go about their activities that support local businesses. Filling in our green spaces with more roads and buildings, even if they were “tree-lined boulevards with a European air,” is simply wrong. Cars should come last.

Surely the community of Hillsdale understands that creating more roads and streets for vehicles that burn scarce fossil fuels is a redundant idea – an idea that is not aligned with Hillsdale today nor one that should be in its future.

[where: 6344 SW Capitol Highway, OR 97239]

Recently, the 70s underground classic novel Ecotopia has had a resurgence in popularity. The wide range of Ecotopia fans (ranging from hippies and new agers to religious conservatives) believe that it is a blueprint for the future and with its eco-concious themes, more relevant than ever.

In Ernest Callenbach’s book, residents of the Pacific Northwest recycled, took public transportation and ate local foods long before it was the norm. And perhaps the most interesting of all, the NY Times is claiming that much of the novel directly resembles current-day Portland, Oregon…coincidence?

Now here’s a very simple and concrete way to save some trees…sign up to stop the unwanted delivery of the Yellow and White pages. Here’s the link, it takes about 30 seconds..

Image: The New York Times

In this faltering economy, if you still manage to have an extra $30,000 dollars to blow, there’s a room waiting for you. On the top floor (52nd, to be exact) of the Four Seasons Hotel in midtown New York City, you can live in the lap of luxury with access to a private butler, grand piano, health spa, a remote controlled bidet, a thermostat-adjusted floor, lasers in the bathtub that turn the water different colors and even a toilet that heats your prosterior and flushes with a remote control.

Clearly, this is the hotel room of choice for wayward CEOs with a Centurion Card in hand.

James Nachtwey is preparing to reveal his photographs, which highlight a shocking and under-reported global crisis. Over the past 18 months, the TED community have been working with James to gain access to locations he wished to photograph and to prepare spectacular plans for unveiling these pictures.

“I’m working on a story that the world needs to know about. I wish for you to help me break it, in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digital age.”

He says to bloggers – “On October 3, the story breaks. You can help.” Bloggers can get links to the URL for the Oct 3rd unveiling of the photographs here.

I wrote on this blog back in March about the success of plastic and paper bag elimination in Ireland. The government there made it a priority to reduce the use of these bags and worked with business to make it happen. Here’s my blog post on the subject.

The campaign was incredibly successful even though it meant adding a tax penalty to both shoppers and grocery store owners to make it work. It has now become as socially unacceptable to be seen using plastic grocery bags in Ireland as it would be to be caught smoking in a maternity ward. It is not hard to switch peoples social behaviour when it is seen to be for a social good. It was made clear to the Irish that the amount of energy that went into manufacturing plastic bags, that were all destined to end up in landfills anyway, was not sustainable. Paper bags were not the answer either as they are just as wasteful of natural resources as their plastic counterpart. reusable shopping bags were the answer and the Irish bought that argument.

The Irish now pack reusable bags in their cars and offices and carry them with them on buses when they go shopping. It’s simple and effective and it is a small step toward energy independence. Portland can do it.

B-Day ride to Bend 08 from Steve Hoskins Jr. on Vimeo.

Two of our Nemo guys, Steve and Morgan, grab the bikes and head Southeast from Portland, climb over Mt Hood, ride through the reservation via Madras, stop off in Redmond and finally hit Bend. Amazing.

An image of the galaxy NGC 1275 and its network of filaments (in red). The center of the galaxy hosts a giant supermassive black hole.

Earlier this year, Portland enhanced its bike-friendly status by becoming the first US city to be designated a Platinum-level Bicycle Friendly Community. In 2006, then Commissioner now Mayor-elect, Sam Adams had launched a nine-part strategy to win that status and called together advocates and community leaders to work toward achieving the goal. Mission accomplished as they say.

There is a problem though. In Portland and across the nation as more people are affected by the high price of gas and switch to the bicycle for their commute tensions are rising between car drivers and cyclists. Along comes a timely new book – ‘Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do’ by Tom Vanderbilt which has been reviewed by Mary Roach, who admits to a map-reading-while -driving induced fender bender in Portland a few years ago. Reading this book may help understand the psyche of the person behind the wheel – human nature is at fault.

For anyone interested in the way traffic flows and why you find yourself sitting in many traffic jams this book seems to be a good read. What follows are bullet points that I’ve pulled from Roach’s review:

01. Traffic jams are not caused by flaws in road design but by flaws in human nature.
02. Gawkers cause a 12.7% increase in traffic slowdown after a crash and the rubberneckers themselves are so busy gawking that they often slam into the car in front of them as it brakes for the driver to get a better look.
03. Drivers will slow down to look at anything, even a couch dumped in a roadside ditch.
04. Starbucks places stores with drive-through lanes on opposite sides of the road to spare drivers the “agony of having to make a left turn during rush hour.”
05. In a 15 block area around UCLA drivers logged on an average day 3600 miles looking for a place to park.
06. Add a new highway and drivers will defect from others to clog it up.
07. Americans won’t accept congestion charging to help reduce traffic.
08. They will accept a surcharge for peak-travel time hotel rooms and airfares though.
09. We think we are good drivers and that’s a problem as we base that on the number of accidents we’ve been in instead of on the number of accidents we narrowly avoid.
10. In ancient Rome, Caesar declared a daytime ban on chariots and carts as traffic was so bad!

And how does this affect bicyclists? Well, Vanderbilt’s research has discovered that drivers pass bicyclists more closely on a road with bike lanes than on one without. And pedestrians can’t win either – more people are killed while crossing in crosswalks than while jaywalking.

The solution appears to be that we should separate cars, bicyclists and pedestrians and also implement a congestion charge on drivers to reduce the amount of cars in cities. Portland seems to be the best candidate for this experiment. Go Sam.

The engineers and technologists who designed and built the giant Airbus A380 may well be proud of their accomplishments in attempting to reduce this huge aircraft’s environmental impact. As their web site says “[they took] a fresh approach to its environmental impact, too. With a new wing design and composite materials accounting for 25% of its structural weight, the A380 is a much more efficient aircraft all round. And by producing only about 75g of CO2 per passenger kilometre, the A380 is contributing to the aviation industry’s commitment to constraining greenhouse gas emissions.”

So, a full A380 carrying 525 passengers between London and Los Angeles, a distance of 8750km, will produce 344,531,250gms of CO2. Yes that’s 344 million – I’m just saying…hat’s off to the marketers for using grams instead of pounds. They’re European, so they can.

The site also mentions that “The A380 burns fuel per passenger at a rate comparable to that of an economical family car.” All I can picture here is 525 cars driving 8750km. And what is an “economical” family car?

They go on – “There’s the extra space per passenger afforded by its twin, full-length, wide-bodied cabins. The cabin air, recycled every three minutes to keep the atmosphere fresh. The natural light provided by 220 cabin windows. And while the A380 feels more natural inside, the environment outside benefits too. From the dramatically reduced external noise levels. From the lower fuel consumption and significantly improved CO2 emissions per passenger kilometre. From the increased capacity at airports and the reduced need for expansion.”

I love that phrase natural light provided by 220 cabin windows because every flight that I’ve been on the attendants can’t wait to tell the passengers to please lower your window shades as the “entertainment” i.e bad movie or TV, is about to begin. Whether you like it or not you are forced to sit in a dark stuffy tube while people with headphones on guffaw at lame jokes. Good use of “natural” though.

And this is a good one – “From the increased capacity at airports and the reduced need for expansion.” The boast here is that the ‘planes are so big they can deliver more folks to be packed into your airport’s long lines at immigration reducing the need for the airport authorities to expand their airports. Brilliant! What a relief for those in charge of our comfort while we struggle through their over-crowded airports, they don’t need to do anything but allow Airbus A380’s to land.

It gets better – “Some operators might, for example, choose to seat their First and Business class passengers on the upper deck –providing a corporate jet-like environment for these clients – while configuring the A380’s main deck for an all-Economy layout.”

Dear Airlines, when you configure the ‘planes for your fleet, why not put the great unwashed underneath with the freight and be done with it?

An oil rig off the coast of California

Here in Portland I am seeing signs that the price of gas is making a difference in how people get around the city. Bus ridership has spiked, there are less cars on the road during the commuting hours and bicyclists seem to be everywhere. Yesterday as I walked my dog along the banks of the Willamette River, I noticed far more sailboats than the motorized variety. Maybe the price of gas is making Americans think twice before getting into the car? Maybe.

I carpool to the Nemo warehouse and it’s still a drag to see that of those cars that are on the road I’d guess that 95% of them are occupied by only the driver. And don’t get me started on the hypocritical Prius owners who fly past at speeds that exceed the legal limits. And on Sunday’s the Hillsdale Farmer’s Market is filled with people buying fresh, locally-produced organic food while the parking lot and the surrounding streets are crammed with their cars. None of this makes sense. If you’re concerned perhaps you can leave a comment on their blog.

It seemed that once gas went through $4 a gallon and the $100 fill up entered the public’s economic equation we’d see a marked change in the way we would use our energy. Unfortunately that’s really not the case.

Portland is one of the more environmentally-friendly and green cities in North America. If we can’t break the automobiles stranglehold on our city then what hope for other cities that are less friendly toward buses and bicyclists? Portland has also shown strong support for ending the war in Iraq. If we disagree with the Iraq war, and the inevitable future Middle East wars that will be fought over oil and water resources, what will we Portlanders do at home to reduce our dependence on foreign oil?

I argue that if we are unwilling to drastically reduce our gasoline use then it is hypocritical of us to oppose off-shore drilling in California and drilling and exploration in Alaska. We simply can’t have our cake and eat it.

Today, President George W. Bush plans to lift a presidential ban on offshore drilling to combat soaring energy prices, a largely symbolic move unlikely to have any short-term impact on the high cost of gasoline.

Who will stand in his way this time?

Related Post: I’m Sick of the Co-Opting of Green

I love coincidence. Coincidence I mention because as I reach the end of John Gray’s book, Straw Dogs, for the third time in as many years, I read chapter 20, ‘The Soul In The Machine,’ an hour before leaving the cabin this weekend. On arriving home last night I caught up with Friday’s edition of the NYT and read a review of the new Pixar movie, Wall-E, by A.O. Scott. In the first paragraph of his review he tells us – “This is a world without people, you might say without animation, though it teems with evidence of past life.” He also mentions that in the first 40 minutes of the movie – “barely any dialogue is spoken.”

Another coincidence here is that it is as if the movie’s director, Andrew Stanton and his co-writer Jim Reardon, had also read the last few chapters of John Gray’s book. According to A.O. Scott the movie’s underlying theme is far from a happy one – “…… but ‘Wall-E’ surely breaks new ground. It gives us a G-rated, computer-generated cartoon vision of our own potential extinction. It’s not the only film lately to engage this somber theme. As the earth heats up, the vanishing of humanity has become something of a hot topic…”

The Earth devoid of humans, or at least where the remaining humans are reduced to living in cities “emulating the noble idleness of hunter-gatherers, their needs met by new technologies” as Gray writes, is an Earth left to conscious machines. The writers and director of Wall-E suggest that this has already occurred and conscious machines are all that remain on the planet. As he says – “Wall-E’s tender regard for the material artifacts of a lost civilization is understandable. After all, he too is a product of human ingenuity.”

“In his recent documentary Encounters at the End of the World the film director, Werner Herzog muses that “the human presence on this planet is not really sustainable,” a sentiment that is voiced, almost verbatim, in the second half of Wall-E.”

As Gray writes in his passage ‘The Soul of the Machine,’ – “Those who fear conscious machines do so because they think that consciousness is the most valuable feature of humans – and because they fear anything they cannot subject to their will. They fear the evolution of conscious machines for the same reason they seek to become masters of the Earth.”

Gray predicts – “As machines slip from human control they will do more than become conscious. They will become spiritual beings, whose inner life is no more limited by conscious thought than ours. Not only will they think and have emotions. They will develop the errors and illusions that go with self-awareness.”

That sounds like a movie called ‘Wall-E’ to me.

One other coincidence regarding the movie was that today I read a post by Seth Godin on his blog entitled “Bravery and Wall-E.” At first I thought from the title that by bravery he meant that we humans are brave to be advancing our technological know-how ever forward as we invent “living software” and biological chips, machines that Gray predicts will move us humans toward extinction. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case – Seth discussed the marketing [or lack of] and how the movie will make “plenty of money.”

The parable of ‘Wall-E’ transcends marketing and money.

The view from the cabin

It’s been a while since I’ve been completely cut off from all means of electronic communication. Two and half hours from Portland and you hit the western edge of Central Oregon, the mobile phone drops off the grid, the AT&T wireless card hunts aimlessly for a signal – nothing but digital silence.

Five adults, two teenagers and two younger ones walked and biked the river trails and cooked, conversed and read books and magazines. We socialized. My iPod wired to an old boombox and my Canon G9 were the only reminders of my digital life.

The Metolius River

I read an article in Newsweek about Facebook being responsible for the drop off in college reunions [an aside: being English I never quite grasped the concept of reconnecting every 10 years with ex-college mates, I must admit.] The premise, as recounted by one youthful member of the digerati, is that Facebook now fulfills this need; everything one needs to know about your former college friends is laid out for all to see online. I’d argue that this is not true. The premise requires that everyone’s Facebook profile be a true and honest reflection of their true “selves.” Unfortunately that defies reason; people’s Facebook personas are not true reflections of their “selves,” in fact they are another “self” altogether. Photos are cropped and edited to provide satisfaction to the poster not the viewer, and details of marriages, relationships and whether the person has children or not are often left vague.

There’s a reason for this. Originally Facebook was a solution for college kids to remain firmly in touch, but as that audience has broadened far and wide demographically, it has become a safe haven for people to explore their “second lives.” The only way to discover if your ex-sweetheart, dorm mate or college team buddy has actually remained a perfect, toned 150 lbs of lean muscle with no obvious receding hairline is to go to that 10 year college reunion. This is also why marketers will have a hard time reaching social network users.

Trailerwrap

The idea of portable and semi-permanent spaces have been taking hold recently. In the 60’s, nomadic types in the USA embraced the Airstream trailer as a way of escaping the humdrum existence of everyday life and hit the road with the “silver bullet” in tow behind the station wagon. The modern version of these trailers are now being envisioned as the answer to urban over-crowding as offices/work spaces and guest houses, even escape pods for solitude.

Take Trailerwrap for instance. The idea behind Trailer Wrap is to provide simple and affordable solutions to improve the condition of the mobile home. Basically taking an abandoned trailer and updating it from the chassis up. Trailer Wrap comes in the form of a simple, affordable kit that can be assembled easily by just a few people. It is both functional and aesthetically pleasing. Visit the Trailerwrap site for all the details including photos of one being built from scratch.

For urban living, the folks behind Loftcube have come up with the idea of a living space that can be built in place on the roof of buildings. It can also be placed at ground level. The body of the Loftcube can be customized. The four outer walls consist of individual segments, which are available in transparent, translucent or closed versions. Louvre windows with horizontal wooden slats provide ventilation.

The designers pondered what a temporary, aesthetically pleasing domicile could look like. They envisioned a ’space’ where people could live for short periods of time in large cities and urban centres. They also understood that in postwar Berlin, the structures that had been built offered hundreds of flat rooftops – what they called an undiscovered treasure of sunlit property.

The debate over global warming may well continue for many years. Whatever the consequences of our spewing pollutants into the atmosphere day by day one thing seems certain – sources of fresh, potable water are becoming scarce. In the western states of the USA rivers are running dry, reservoir levels are shrinking and wildfires, sparked by heat-burdened, tinder-dry woodlands are burning by the dozen and it’s only June.

The states of the USA will have to learn to share; asking people to use less water will not work – look at the oil situation and American’s unwillingness to cut back on driving. Beyond our borders, countries that do not have a plentiful and easily accessible source of water will soon look to their neighbors or nearby countries that have a plentiful supply of what is becoming known as ‘blue gold.’ There will be envy.

T. Boone Pickens

When an oil man becomes a water baron we should all take note. In an article in Business Week Susan Berfield tells us – “If water is the new oil, T. Boone Pickens is a modern-day John D. Rockefeller. Pickens owns more water than any other individual in the U.S. and is looking to control even more. He hopes to sell the water he already has, some 65 billion gallons a year, to Dallas, transporting it over 250 miles, 11 counties, and about 650 tracts of private property.” He makes no bones about his ambition to sell water – “There are people who will buy the water when they need it. And the people who have the water want to sell it. That’s the blood, guts, and feathers of the thing,” Pickens says.

Meanwhile Americans spent nearly $11 billion on bottled water in 2006, when we could have guzzled tap water at up to about one ten-thousandth the cost. That fact comes from a book by Elizabeth Royte called Bottlemania – How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It. She also tells the tale of how the residents of Fryeburg, Me, are trying to stop Nestlé’s Poland Spring from sucking 168 million gallons of water a year from its pristine aquifer. All of which goes into plastic bottles.

Something has to change as, just like oil, there soon will not be enough to water to go around. And those eight glasses a day that some “experts” say we should drink? Not true. As more clearheaded experts point out, drink when you’re thirsty. Soon you may not have that choice.

Related Post: Fiji Water: A green product?

The Tower of Babel

Cities live and breathe. As I wrote in a post last week on Social Media, cities are no more artificial [technological] than the hives of bees. As we go about our daily lives [mostly unconsciously,] we psycho-drift from block to block through neighborhoods that we know well, in amongst communities that have been drawn together by like-minded people. Think East Village in Manhattan, Venice Beach in Los Angeles, Camden Town in London, Pigalle in Paris – and here in Portland, the Pearl District.

Where we tend to live and work is often amongst communities of like-minded people, unless, as in the USA, one lives in a far-flung exurb and commutes for hours to work. Over centuries we have moved as a species from the rural countryside into large urban centres. As we have done so the ‘idea’ of the city sprang up. Throughout different periods in history, planners and architects have had differing ideas about how to cultivate urban living arrangements. There has been some success and much failure.

As James Kunstler writes in his book, The City in Mind, – “[the] nation’s massive suburban build-out was an orgy of misspent energy and material resources that squandered our national wealth and left us with an infrastructure of daily life that, left as is, has poor prospects in the new century.” Kunstler points out that as global warming, oil depletion and other epochal disorders are upon us, we must reconsider what is a ‘city.’

He argues that one of the chief side effects of the move to suburbanism is “the cultural destruction…especially the loss of knowledge, tradition, skill, custom and vernacular wisdom in the art of city-making that was thrown in the dumpster of history….”

A city is not just a series of streets and avenues with buildings on either side, a city is people, culture, society and the networks that form to bind those societies together into communities. The suburbs were literally a dream, an idea that General Motors had of a drive-in utopia in its plan for a World of Tomorrow. Kunstler goes on to point out the folly of the “Edge City,” a term coined by the writer Joel Garreau. Kunstler says “I essay to show how Atlanta took the urban model of car-crazy Los Angeles to its most ludicrous, and in my view, terminal stage. With Atlanta, you can forego agonizing over the future, because the present doesn’t even work there.” As he points out “our human ecologies – namely our towns and cities – remain devalued, depopulated and decivilized.”

In America we prefer landscape over urbanism. What then now as our dependence upon oil, refined as gasoline for cars that transport one person at a time from these suburbs to the cities, proves the folly of these far-flung suburbs? Will we see a move toward urban vitality? A migration back to the city?

Government spending at any level, state or local, does little to help. We need to “nurture the unplanned civic engagements that make mixed-use city life so appealing” – writes Douglas Rae, the Richard Ely Professor of Management and Professor of Political Science at Yale University, in his book, City; Urbanism and Its End. “Small scale retailing, neighborhood clubs, informal enforcement of sidewalk civility and new urbanist design may be the keys to the future.”

I agree with Rae on the idea of “nurturing unplanned civic engagements” as he puts it but that’s as far as I would go. The rest of his thought sounds like the issue of we humans being in control of our destinies again, trying to have the answer that is beyond nature, beyond what we actually do when we congregate in cities. Our desire for urban centres always seem to be about ‘order’ or ‘cleanliness’ and ‘organization.’ So on one hand we have the thinkers – the planners and the architects, and on the other – the citizens who actually inhabit the space that we call city. What we might call the ‘Few and the Many.’

Alongside a piece by the New York Times film critic, A.O.Scott, called Metropolis Now, where he writes about the idea of how yesterday’s film sets became today’s cities, there is a sidebar that takes some lines from Fritz Lang’s 1927 film “Metropolis” – “The minds that had conceived the Tower of Babel could not build it. So they hired hands for wages. But the hands that built the Tower of Babel knew nothing of the dream of the brain that had conceived it. One man’s hymns of praise became other men’s curses.” There’s that word again, dream.

We humans dream. We dream of controlling nature, we dream of saving the earth, we dream of organizing our cities. Those dreaming deny the fact that cities live and breathe. Not the concrete architecture, not the buildings – the people that inhabit them. When someone talks of Rome having a ’soul, a feeling’ they are misinterpreting the difference between the city and its cultural makeup; people can be said to have souls and feelings, we ‘know’ this – buildings don’t have soul and feelings.

As Fernando Pessoa writes – “Only if you don’t know what flowers, stones and rivers are can you talk about their feelings. To talk about the soul of flowers, stones and rivers, is to talk about yourself, about your delusions. Thank God stones are just stones, and rivers just rivers, and flowers just flowers.” We dream and we delude ourselves.

Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class dreams of organizing urban centres [which he correctly identifies as 'place'] around the idea of a mythical “creative class” who are bound by the idea of the “three T’s,” Technology, Talent and Tolerance. This dream involves cities having a strong technology base, a “creative” class as he calls it, and a strong gay community. And of course the idea he spins is that to grow a city’s economic base it should invest in nurturing the “three T’s.” Once again – The Few and the Many. Planners and architects can no more decide what a city’s culture will be than we know that a stone has feeling.

The fabric of a city is its population. Like a bee hive [architecture] or an ant colony [social network], natural rules of engagement spring up through the daily interaction of those who inhabit a city. They commune. They gather in tribes in their ‘places.’ They share information, ideas, things they like. They become less ’selfish.’ They are city.

As John Gray writes in Straw Dogs – “Anyone who wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to the desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will do better to seek the company of other animals. A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery.”

Most large cities have a zoo.

Listen to and download Psycho Drift. Shriekback – Psycho Drift

For references –
References:

James Howard Kunstler – The City in Mind. Published 2001 by The Free Press.
Joel Garreau – Edge City
Douglas W. Rae – City; Urbanism and Its End. Published 2003 by Yale University Press.
Richard Florida – The Rise of the Creative Class. Published 2002 by Basic Books.
A.O.Scott – Metropolis Now. Published in the New York Times magazine June 6th 2008.
Fritz Lang – Metropolis
Enrique Peñalosa – Man With a Plan. Published in the New York Times magazine June 6th 2008.
Fernando Pessoa
John Gray – Straw Dogs. Published 2002 by Granta Books.
Solipsism
Shriekback – Sacred City [Compact Disc]. Released by World Domination Records 1992.
Barry Andrews – Lyrics to Psycho Drift.
Peter Carey – 30 Days in Sydney.

While many companies are simply paying lip service to environmentalism and the green movement, Patagonia has been a pioneer in green methods for years. Now they have delivered the world’s first recyclable nylon jacket, the Shelter Stone, which can be processed through their Common Threads Recycling Program.

Read more about the jacket and the technology behind it at Cool Hunting.

Sign Language, 2007 by Amy Yoes. A sculpture for “L.I.C., NYC.” Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY.

All The Way From NYC!
Amy Yoes Will Lecture About Her Work!
The Public is Invited (it’s free, tell your friends)
Monday June 2nd, 7:30pm Sharp!
PSU 5th Avenue Cinema Room 92
510 SW Hall St. at SW 5th Ave

Amy Yoes has been interested in ornament and architectural space for many years. Her recent projects have become more three dimensional and have involved animation and light. Her work has been exhibited in L.I.C., NYC, Socrates Sculpture Park; 50,000 Beds, a project by Chris Doyle on view at Artspace, New Haven, CT; the Islip Museum’s Carriage House, Islip, NY; and Michael Steinberg Gallery, New York, NY.

She created a wall drawing, Sightseers Folklore, for Wave Hill’s exhibition Out of Bounds in 2005. Her work has been exhibited at Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfiled Hills, MI; Hollins University, Roanoke, VA; and The Peppermil Fireside Lounge, Las Vegas, NV. She has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

ABOUT PMMNLS
PMMNLS visiting artists are interviewed each Monday on Art Talk AM on the Radio: 12-1 PM. Find it at 98.3 FM on the PSU campus, streaming at KPSU.org and available at arttalkam.blogspot.com.

Portland State University’s Art Department offers free public lectures every Monday night of the school year. This is the twenty-sixth lecture in the PMMNLS for this season. The PSU MFA Monday Night Lecture Series is supported in part by PICA, Reed College, PNCA, Lewis and Clark College, and PSU’s Department of International Studies and Ben Rosenberg Studio. If you or your organization are interested in becoming a supporter of the lecture series please let us know.

What do you say, Portlanders? We’ve got some fancy new containers but what are we going to do with all those leftover yellow plastic bins? One container can be used for glass, as everything else gets tossed into the new blue thingy with the wheels, but what about the rest of the yellow containers? Where do THEY go? Being that we are one of the leading green cities of the world, surely we should be able to think of something more creative to do with them then simply tie them together like plastic sausage links and float them across the river to our brothers and sisters in Vancouver, Washington.

So what do YOU think we should do with all the extra yellow bins? Whoever comes up with the best idea should win some sort of new Pampelmoose prize that we invent just for you. Hm. We need a good prize. I don’t know…perhaps…the 563 promo cd’s settling on Dave’s desk right now? Yes…you could recycle them for him! I mean, how long could it possibly take to shred 563 cd’s?

As for me, I vote for building a big yellow Qbert environment in the middle of Pioneer Courthouse Square. Yes…that would be awesome. Now gimme my 563 cd’s!

Posted by Jon Ragel

Juxtaposing nature with man-made objects, Pennsylvania-based artist Lee Stoetzel uses woods chosen for their natural flaws to make large-scale sculptures…like VW buses…

It appears that just as the price of food has risen and more people around the globe are struggling to find food to eat, or just simply afford to buy it, we are wasting an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption according to a government study. Americans waste an astounding amount of food and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American. In England, a recent study revealed that Britons toss away a third of the food they purchase, including more than four million whole apples, 1.2 million sausages and 2.8 million tomatoes. In Sweden, families with small children threw out about a quarter of the food they bought, a recent study there found. The full story is here. You can also read the Wasted Food blog for more info.

Being green isn’t easy. Wired magazine appeared in my mailbox again this month with some bold headlines on the cover – ‘Keep your SUV’ ‘Forget Organics’ ‘Go Nuclear’ and ‘Screw the Spotted Owl.’ Sure, they have to sell magazines and controversy sells magazines but those statements seemed a bit heavy-handed. [As for selling magazines, you will easily recall for example the Vanity Fair/Miley Cyrus debacle right?]

The story behind the eye-catching headlines brings us some fun-filled facts about our carbon footprints as we go about our daily lives… e.g. Live in Cities – the suburbs have created edge-cities which in turn create super-commuters who spend more than 3 hours a day in transit. Also those lawns need mowing out there – 40 million lawn mowers each spew 11 cars worth of pollutants every hour. A/C is OK – it’s cheaper to cool a house than it is to heat it so living in Arizona is better than living in the Pacific Northwest as less energy is used in AZ and there are less pollutants created by cooling. Carbon Trading doesn’t work – where’s the guarantee that the tree planted in Bolivia to offset $10 worth of air travel, won’t be chopped down before it absorbs the requisite carbon? [Sorry, you'll have to sell that Range Rover now.]

But, what grabbed my attention immediately is the Hummer vs Prius match-up – pound for pound, making a Prius contributes more carbon into the atmosphere than making a Hummer. The Prius is actually not a good investment if you are thinking about buying one to save money according to the Hybrid Cars web site:

“Don’t buy a hybrid because you want to make back an investment. That will take between five and twenty years, depending on gas prices, the amount you drive, and how good of a deal you got on the car. Buy a hybrid because it’s the most fuel-efficient car on the road, because the tailpipe emissions are very low, because it uses great technology, or because it’s fun to drive. If gas prices keep going up, then you might get your return on investment. For now, it’s not a good enough reason alone to choose a hybrid version over exactly the same size and kind of conventional car.”

And Omninerd lays out the cost vs value proposition of owning a Prius over a regular used Toyota Corolla. Also let’s not forget that running the Hummer is a different story re its emissions than the amount of energy required to build it.

Final fun fact: All the so-called clean development mechanisms authorized by the Kyoto Protocol, designed to keep 175 million tons of CO 2 out of the atmosphere by 2012, will slow the rise of carbon emissions by…. 6.5 days.

We need a different strategy. Buying a Prius might make us feel good but selling our cars and hopping on the bus will actually make a difference.

Let’s give Radiohead credit for trying. As they point out on their blog, for a modern rock band touring is highly inefficient – 125,000lb / 55,000kg of Sound, Lighting, Video, Band Gear, Office and Catering equipment needs to be moved between every show. They have looked into alternative methods of transportation such as rail but that didn’t work out. They have managed to find a way for their truck drivers to cool their cabs while they sleep without running their diesel engines all night which helps. What they seem to have overlooked is the geographical position of where their shows are taking place.

An article in Billboard points this out – Adding fuel to the fire is Radiohead’s self-stated intention of making its summer tour as environmentally friendly as possible. According to one fan post, “One-third of the concert-goers that night were driving around in circles, burning fossil fuels all the while. This is your save the Earth tour … and yet you play in the middle of nowhere with no public transportation leading there. You owe us!”

And from another, “If you gave even one tiny llama turd about environmental impact, you would never have scheduled a show at a venue 40 miles away from downtown D.C., nowhere near public transportation of any kind.”

Here in the Northwest the band is skipping Portland and Seattle to play the White River Amphitheatre which is located in Auburn, Washington, on the Muckleshoot Indian Reservation 15 miles northeast of Tacoma and 35 miles southeast of Seattle. So for Portlanders or folks from say Idaho, Montana and even Washington, it means jumping in the car and driving for hours not to mention that gas is now $4 a gallon….time for a rethink I reckon.

A sad day for the folks at Nau. A message on their website today says that they have run out of capitalization and under the current credit climate can not raise any more investment.

Portland, Oregon’s Sameunderneath clothing company appears to fit the bill for a company that markets itself as sustainable and environmentally-friendly. In their own words from the ‘about’ section of their website:

Sameunderneath + Cashmere
Sameunderneath is proud to present its new line of cashmere garments. This luxurious, natural fiber is noted as providing light weight insulation without bulk. Appropriate for all climates, a high moisture climate allows insulation properties to change with the relative humidity in the air. The finest fibers are gathered from the underbelly, shoulder or neck of the Cashmere goat. Our cashmere is sourced from China where the hair is removed by hand with a comb. This aids in the goat’s natural shedding process.

Sameunderneath + Bamboo
Sameunderneath’s collection is produced with one of nature’s most sustainable resources, BAMBOO. This 100% biodegradable plant has the capacity to acclimate to the environment and continue to grow at a rate of 2 inches every hour! Bamboo’s innate antibacterial functions naturally wick moisture and prevent odor. Unlike other antibacterial additives, bamboo is also hypoallergenic. In addition to being plentiful, finished bamboo fabric is extremely soft so using bamboo fiber in all of our garments gives our clothing a comfortable, luxurious feel. This type of versatility cannot be found with cotton, making bamboo considerably more resourceful. Bamboo fiber is mankind’s contribution to the protection of natural resources, rare minerals and the consideration of global balance.

If you are firmly committed to using only truly green products and if you care deeply about a company’s carbon footprint it would be hard to have much sympathy for Fiji Water. Without digging too deep online I found many articles that have assessed the cost and energy that is required to bottle Fiji Water and transport it to the USA. For instance, Ask Pablo at the Triple Pundit website calculated that “a bottle that holds 1 liter (of Fiji Water) requires 5 liters of water in its manufacturing process (this includes power plant cooling water).” And to deliver one bottle of Fiji Water to the USA consumes “81g of fossil fuels, 720g of water, and 153g of GHGs per bottle delivered to the US from Fiji.” Clearly this is not good news for a product that promotes distance and exoticism as its marketing advantages.

To counter this criticism the company has embraced openness and has a blog, the Fiji Green Blog. While this is a welcome move it also puts the company in to an awkward position. Their willingness to accept open comments on their site is commendable – check out the critical comments posted on the blog by the public. I have to take issue with the blog’s title though – Fiji Green. The company’s main web site is also titled Fiji Green. The use of the word ‘green’ suggests the influence of a marketer here and there is a danger in labeling a product ‘green’ when it is clearly not – the public is suspicous.

Media Post reports “According to an Ipsos Reid study conducted this spring on behalf of Icynene, seven in ten Americans either ‘strongly’ or ‘somewhat’ agree that when companies call a product “green” (meaning better for the environment), it is usually just a “marketing tactic”. Consumers appear to be wary of companies who label their products as being green, or environmentally friendly, acknowledges the report. In the US, 75% of the men believe that labeling a product green is just a marketing tactic, compared to 65% of the women.” And AdAge.com reports that although consumers “have better-than-average recall when it comes to remembering green advertising. The bad news: They aren’t buying into the claims.”

Fuji Water then is between a rock and a hard place – it needs to rethink how it markets its product to green consumers. The only bottled water that’s truly ‘green’ is the water you pour into a recycled container at home yourself from the kitchen sink. That action doesn’t conjure up visions of tropical jungles and faraway destinations but it will help reduce the environmental impact of shipping bottled water halfway around the earth.

Back in 1992 the US Government released a pdf of how to discern if a product that is marketed as ‘green’ is truly ‘green’ and made from recyclable material. And Earth Day is April 22nd.

Update April 18th 08: Bottle Maker to Stop Using Plastic Linked to Health Concerns, Canada Likely to Label Plastic Ingredient ‘Toxic’

Lately there has been a few of the country’s mayors calling for an end to the ubiquitous plastic shopping bag. In San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom made the call as did Commissioner Sam Adams here in Portland. Nothing much happened once everyone realized that it would take a tax on the bags to bring an end to their use. Business pushed back. But in Ireland the answer was to bring in a tax and have a forceful environment minister give reluctant shopkeepers little wiggle room, making it illegal for them to pay for the bags on behalf of customers. The NYT ran the story -”In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts – within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.”And don’t think that paper bags are the answer, yes they may degrade in landfills but more greenhouse gases are released in their manufacture and transportation than in the production of plastic bags.