Two green MacArthur recipients were named yesterday. (A MacArthur Fellowship, or “genius grant,” is $500,000 you can spend however you want, disbursed over the course of five years.) I keep wondering if there will be a news story about a MacArthur Fellow found floating in a pool in The Bellagio, but this never seems to happen, so they must have some kind of vetting process. Will Allen–a pro ball player turned urban farmer–is the obviously green one this year. But I think John Oschendorf counts too.
He has this group or program or something at MIT devoted to masonry. Old stone stuff. How to keep it around, what you can learn from it about making buildings sustainable. If you understand green architecture as building new, more sustainable dwellings, you’re missing a fundamental point: it’s generally greener to figure out how to modify and preserve old structures. Any young hotshot architect whose powers of invention are focused on making flying buttresses new again deserves as much attention from the green movement as an urban farmer, no matter how amazing Allen’s baby swiss chard may be.
Image: flickr/Phillie Casablanca
Last night The Colbert Report gave us one of those episodes that pivot in the middle from comedy to that transcendent, swooning, oh-my-god-real-life-is-more-absurd feeling. This took place when GM Chariman Bob Lutz (pictured below) informed Colbert’s fictional persona that 32,000 respected scientists shared his view that climate change is caused by “sunspot activity.”
If you’re done mourning David Foster Wallace, a literary ally of environmentalism, you might consider getting started on mourning Philip Clapp, who spent his career refuting ridiculousness of the Bob Lutz variety. The United States does not have an environmental lobby the same way it has a tobacco lobby, but Clapp’s National Environmental Trust was the closest thing. As its director, he pressured Clinton, Bush, and even Gore, to take serious action on climate change, advocating in vain for the Kyoto treaty. He later moved to the Pew Charitable Trusts, where he lampooned Bush’s weak, late, concession to some form of American involvement in an international treaty on emissions. Let’s take a moment to remember that environmentalism needs pinstriped Capitol Hill operators with integrity, as well as the rumpled journalists/artists/farmer types.
Image: flickr/Rockershirt
The first plug-in electric American car, the Chevy Volt, is going on the market in 2010. It doesn’t look like the phallus some gearheads want it to look like (they were into the old car-show model, shown here), and this is causing lamentation in the blogosphere. Pay no attention; this is very good news.
Basically, the Volt can go 40 miles without using any gasoline, and plugs into any old home socket. It takes a few hours to recharge. Only when you’re taking long trips do you need to use gas; the gas motor kicks in after 40 miles and takes you another 300. It uses less electricity a year than a fridge.
The only problem: It’s not really viable as a mass-market business proposition yet. It’ll probably cost about $40,000, and GM doesn’t expect to make a significant profit, even with that hefty price. So while in my wildest dreams it becomes illegal to make any other kind of family car in 2011, that’s not going to happen without destroying the American economy.
Image: flickr/jurvetson
I should admit here I have not been a Segway believer. Ever since I saw Will Arnett straddle one on Arrested Development I have not been able to understand any possible use of the machine other than comic prop. I realize now that this was slightly unfair.
A British MP just defied possible arrest to lead a charge of Segwayists through London, trying to get the Department of Transportation in England to clarify whether they’re legal to drive on roads or not. He points out that in a dense urban area, they go faster than the average speed cars are able to move in traffic, and emit virtually nothing.
I guess my confusion is still this: They go 12 mph. Doesn’t a bicycle go that fast? But I guess if you don’t want to get your suit sweaty… I forget that people still go to offices in suits.
Image: flickr/RobotSkirts
As much as I love Prince Charles and his slow-food inclinations, I do have to admit the opposition has some pretty persuasive arguments. David King, a huge British scientist, just made a speech saying the West’s reluctance to bring genetically modified farming and other modes of “high-intensity” agriculture contributes to the continent’s 700,000 deaths from starvation every year.
It’s not clear, though, exactly how King squares his desire to help feed Africa through high-tech, ultra-efficient farming with his advocacy for carbon emissions cuts. (King is known for saying climate change is a greater threat than terrorism). The reason to like organic farming isn’t that it fits in better with a particular lifestyle; it’s that it’s comparatively low-emissions. If catastrophic temperature increases do take place, poor countries are going to be the ones who suffer the most from famine and disease.
So, yes, if the problem is that we’re not bringing genetically-modified crops to hungry Africa because they give us the heebie-jeebies, that is nigh-homicidally crazy. But if we’re trying not to industrialize their farming too rapidly in order to save them from pestilence and heat down the road, that’s more like a tough call.
Image: flickr/DavidDennis
There is much speculation about how Obama should go after Sarah Palin. If he goes after her resume—she was mayor of a town of 7,000, then the governor of a state of 680,000—that leaves him open to the absurd but potentially effective argument that these credentials are superior to those of a senator. If he goes after her evident backwardness or unusually conservative religious beliefs, the gun/bikini photo, the never traveled anywhere thing—well, we know how the clinging to guns and religion thing went over.
It seems to me you say, she thinks the melting of arctic ice isn’t caused by humans. She thinks polar bears aren’t endangered. She doesn’t think Exxon should have to pay up. All those non-radical conservatives in Colorado, Ohio, and Nevada care about this. (See this recap of her record so far). It’s not a personal attack, and it’s not just a reiteration of the tired McCain administration = Bush administration charge.
It’s just a way of making the effects of her ignorance concrete. She’s not just a smiling hick in a bathing suit holding a gun by a pool. She’s a smiling hick in a bathing suit standing on a melting iceberg.
Image: flickr/Chesi – Fotos CC
My favorite quote from the Slow Food Nation conference this weekend came from Wendall Berry (poet, essayist, farmer, panelist).
He held up a copy of a San Francisco Chronicle piece that said the best advertisement for the Slow Food movement was the pleasure of carefully preparing and lingering over a meal, and then described what the article got wrong. The following account of what he said is from the Journal:
[Berry] said the reporter described pleasure, as it relates to the Slow Food movement, in a limited view — that the description treated pleasure as a specialty, “a form of idleness,” which leaves out the possibility that good work could also be pleasurable… By limiting the ideas behind Slow Food to just “tasteful consumption,” Mr. Berry argued, the movement is limited in its growth.
If the Slow Food movement is going to catch on outside the upper-middle class, it’s going to be a movement about making people want to farm and distribute food locally. Not making them want to drive to consulting gigs in the city, come home, put on Graceland, and cook said locally farmed and distributed food and sit around talking/blogging/referencing David Sedaris. We need more farmers, working less efficiently, in the sense of using less fossil-fuel burning, soil-eroding methods. (See my lionization of Prince Charles, who is admirably blighted with nostalgia for agrarian England.)
Image: Slowfoodnation.org
PBS has an interesting story online about how evangelical Christians are starting to behave as if they’d be up for an alliance with greens.
Their national assocation has been asking churches to get their energy consumption down, quoting scripture about how you shouldn’t let anything go to waste. Since evangelicals are about a quarter of the electorate this is good news. The only reason not to get too excited is that there is one marginally green party in the US right now, and it’s the Dems. Will climate change override school prayer and gun control and gay marriage and all the other “values” issues that tend to keep evangelicals in the GOP?
The alternative, I guess, would be to hope evangelicals will help to forge a greener Republican party. But as long as said party’s funding comes from the energy industry… Well, may the Lord be with them. But, as my own, more cynical, American subculture would say, like, good luck with that.
Image: flickr/gruntzooki
Two smaller stories combined to make this weekend interesting.
Saturday, Nancy Pelosi presented her compromise version of an energy bill permitting offshore drilling. Even Obama has been publically supporting offshore drilling these days, and the general consensus is the GOP’s been gaining some fans by saying, we drill offshore, your gas prices go down.
Tellingly, the part of the compromise bill the GOP got huffy about was the repeal of tex credits for oil companies. They hold it down for their friends, consistently.
The bright spot is more and more info circulated about the new animated comedy series about environmentalists by Mike Judge (the man who brought us Office Space). It’s called The Goode Family. It’s airing in November, and apparently the dog kept on a vegan diet attempts to eat other pets. Judge has hired the two King of the Hill writers who wrote Blades of Glory, a decision I support; a script that drops a reference to the Detroit underground figure-skating scene reflects the correct sensibility for lampooning my demographic.
Image: flickr/fluzo
Detroit’s condition is not the kind of thing you want to rub your hands in bloggy schadenfreude over. Blue-collar layoffs have started turning into white-collar layoffs. And when they sell cars that do horrible things to the planet they’re just trying to give the American public what it wants.
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