NatureLand: What They Used to Call the Environment
bcohen | August 12, 2008MIT Press publishes a series called Urban and Industrial Environments. Several of the "author-meets-blogger" books were from that series. The main editor is Robert Gottlieb of Occidental College out in California. I was just made aware of a blog for his Urban & Environmental Policy Institute there, where one can find notices of new books, discussions of current issues in environmental justice, and, you guessed it, matters of urban and environmental policy more broadly speaking.
In addition to the well-stocked and premier Urban and Industrial Environments list, Gottlieb also edits a…
worldsfair | August 7, 2008See this:
This glorious piece of work is doing amazing things, amazing things!
What we have here is our small attempt at growing vegetables - actually, I should correct that and say that what we have here is my wife's, Kate, small attempt at growing vegetables - she should get all the credit, since my role has only involved the occasional plough.
It's obviously hard to tell from the picture, but we have arugula (lots of arugula: what is arugula?), green beans, carrots, lettuce, onions, cucumbers, a whole lot of tomato vines (but no tomatoes yet), and, of course, spinach.
The spinach is…
bcohen | August 6, 2008I came across this slide show by Christopher Benfey at Slate earlier this summer. It's a series of photographs by the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. Apparently Bernd passed away last year, so I don't know (and Benfey didn't know) if there will be more. All of the Becher's pictures on display at a MoMA showing are black and white photos of industrial settings. Although they are images of a worked- and lived-in nature like those of Edward Burtynsky and other industrial landscape photographers, the ones recently displayed at MoMA are of places still at the center of those…
bcohen | July 29, 2008
An advertisement from Frank Scott's company (as reprinted in Ted Steinberg's American Green). Talk about religion and nature--Scott thought it was un-christian not to keep a manicured lawn.
Our lawn finally came in this year after three years in this house. We hadn't put much of an effort into it, I'll admit, though the original builder sought to. Our dirt is awful, just god awful. Ask my dad. He, the ardent gardener, is astonished by how poor the soil is. But this year the crabgrass grew in. And it looks good, real good. Plus it's helped prevent erosion from the occasional torrential…
bcohen | June 11, 2008
Won't you read this story over at Orion? Choice, consumption, citizenship.
Then reread Charles Kettering's 1929 article, "Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied." Says Kettering:
If everyone were satisfied, no one would buy the new thing because no one would want it. The ore wouldn't be mined; timber wouldn't be cut. Almost immediately hard times would be upon us.
You must accept this reasonable dissatisfaction with what you have and buy the new thing, or accept hard times. You can have your choice.
Says Jeffrey Kaplan, in "The Gospel of Consumption," to give a sample of the link:
As far back as…
bcohen | June 4, 2008
Here's something on sustainable agriculture: Farmfoody.org seeks to connect those who eat food with farms and gardens. Do you eat food? If so, this might be of interest to you.
The site showcases a featured farm, links to an Eat Well Guide, provides a forum for local growers and buyers to interact and arrange meetings, offers recipes, and allows farmers to tag members with foods that they grow and members to tag farmers with foods that they want.
Their premise follows from these basic definitions:
Farm - a farm, vineyard, PYO, Farmer's Market, CSA, a victory garden -- a local producer.…
bcohen | May 28, 2008Scientists and engineers have helped empower the environmental justice (EJ) movement. But how has their participation changed their own scientific and engineering identities? A workshop this weekend will explore the matter.
(click on the image--a larger pdf version will open in a new window)
This website provides further information about the workshop, including a more substantive overview and a list of participants. For anyone in the Charlottesville area, note that we're hosting a public reception for the event on Friday at 5:00 pm. Stop by, have some spinach dip, talk about…
bcohen | May 27, 2008A new off-off-off Broadway production is in the works. It has: Drama! Intrigue! Denialists Exposed!
It's Bisphenol-A: The One Act Play.
Read on to find out about Endocrine Disruptors! See how the tobacco interest is related to the recent Bisphenol controversies! Hear about Nalgene and the National Toxicology Program report and industry spokespeople! Revel in the claims of lobbyists! Look in on the outcomes of an entire regime of consumer products and late-modern chemical production!
All at the Science Creative Quarterly today and, soon, in limited production at community theaters near…
bcohen | May 22, 2008Geo-engineering from the '40s.
From Military Engineer, 1944
(via C. Pursell's Technology in Postwar America, 2007)
bcohen | May 5, 2008Last year we posted a notice of the highest measurement of dioxin ever recorded by the EPA. The reading was from the Tittabawassee River in Michigan, downstream from Dow Chemical's headquarters in Midland and on its way to Lake Huron (see map below). Michigan state safe levels are set at 90 ppt. The EPA standard is 1000 ppt. A hot spot reading on the river clocked in at 1.6 million ppt. Last week, the Bush Administration forced out a senior EPA official who was pushing Dow to clean it up.
I'd noticed the story last year of the EPA measurements in a news link on-line. It spurred this…
bcohen | February 21, 2008This post was written by guest blogger Jody Roberts.*
19 February 2008 was an historic day. For the first time in history, the price of oil at the close of the U.S. markets sat above $100. Ok, it was by only a penny, but that penny was probably the most significant penny anyone's see in years. And when you consider that in 2006 the U.S. consumed just over 20 million barrels of oil everyday, those pennies start to add up pretty quickly. The other major news event of the day was of course the announcement by Fidel Castro that he will step down from his top position in Cuba after nearly 50…
bcohen | February 15, 2008Daniel Nocera, Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and international spokesman on sustainable energy, is giving a talk here at U.Va. today. I thought I'd share some of the stats that he's pulled together in prior publications. Readers of this blog will already know that I question a commonly taken-for-granted assumption in energy predictions -- which is the steady and predictable rise in consumption patterns, a rise that is purported to be intractable and inevitable -- but nevertheless, those predictions are offered below the fold and summarized here: "Within our lifetimes, energy…
bcohen | February 12, 2008As a follow-up to Dave's prior post, I add here reference to a discussion about the same topic in response to an Orion article last Fall. The essay by Janisse Ray, "Altar Call for True Believers: Are we being change, or are we just talking about change?," was followed by over 200 comments. It offers a good canvas of the matter of green academics and the meaning of a greened academia.
She confronts the same moral issue raised in the story Dave cites, along the way posing this scenario:
A global-warming speaker is invited to a village ten miles from Brattleboro to speak. She accepts. There…
bcohen | February 4, 2008
One from the vault, this is by Jim Borgman, at the Cincinnati Enquirer (1990). Click on the image for a slightly larger version. All editorial comments on this editorial comment are welcome below.
bcohen | January 18, 2008"On this broad but synthetic continent of plastics, the countries march right out of the natural world - that wild area of firs and rubber plantations, upper left - into the illimitable world of the molecule. It's a world boxed only by the cardinal points of the chemical compass - carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen."
This is from Fortune, 1940 (I found it here and here.) Click on the map for a larger view to find that Rayon "is a plastic island off the Cellulose coast, with a glittering night life."
No doubt. Better snatch up a beachside condo before the mortgage rates get even worse.
(…
bcohen | January 11, 2008The 10,000 member Ecological Society of America released a position statement "that offers the ecological principles necessary for biofuels to help decrease dependence on fossil fuels and reduce carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global climate change."
Supplying the emerging biofuels industry with enough biomass to meet the U.S. biofuel energy target - replacing 30 percent of the current U.S. petroleum consumption with biofuels by 2030 - will have a major impact on the management and sustainability of many U.S. ecosystems. Biofuels have great potential, but the ecological impacts of…
bcohen | December 19, 2007I had the fortune to be a bit experimental in the classroom this semester. Curricular innovation, they call it. More precisely, in one of my courses (called "STS 200: Technology, Nature, and Sustainable Communities"), the students wrote an entire book. These are engineering students. All engineers. They wrote a book. A book about relationships between technology and nature as exemplified in a local UVA sustainable housing project called ecoMOD. A full, cohesive, compelling, well-argued, well-researched book. We were glad to see a nice write-up of the project linked from the university…
bcohen | December 10, 2007"Never has so little been asked of so many at such a critical moment."
Michael Maniates, a professor of environmental science and political science at Alleghany College, contributed a compelling op-ed to the Washington Post recently, "Going Green? Easy Doesn't Do it." Maniates basic point is captured both in the title of his essay and the quote I excerpted above. As related to the old industry-sponsored ad campaign, he's saying that Iron Eyes Cody isn't asking much of us.
He writes, ostensibly, to call attention to some recent books appealing to maintaining the status quo by suggesting we…
worldsfair | November 19, 2007
A few weeks ago, the New Yorker ran an excellent piece called "Unconventional Crude" which focused on Canada's tar sands. It was written by Elizabeth Kolbert, who got a lot of attention a year or so ago with a three part New Yorker piece called "The Climate of Man." (which was a summarized form of her book "Field Notes of a Catastrophe," and also something I found a pdf copy of on the web)
Anyway, I can't find the entire piece on line, but the New Yorker does offer up a good abstract with many of the relevant facts. Worth checking out, especially if you consider yourself the sort who "…
worldsfair | October 17, 2007
O.K. so our Canadian government (Conservatives, they be) gave their Throne speech yesterday, and basically didn't have an awful lot new to say about things of a climate change nature. This equates to, I guess, the continued stance of not even trying to abide by the Kyoto Protocol, but rather rely on a more tempered response which aims for a significant reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Through it all, I have a feeling most Canadians are not quite on the up and up on the details of the Conservatives climate change platform, which largely revolves around their Canada Clean Air…