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HFCS

This is not at all unrelated to passage of the health care reform bill, health care generally, diet or the environment. What could be so voraciously dynamic as to pertain to all of these areas at once? Oh, and fits the truest definition of ‘teh socialism’ more than anything currently on offer?

Why – it’s high-fructose corn syrup, of course:

While there has been extensive evidence thatfructose is harmful to human health and associated with metabolic diseases like diabetes and liver problems, the fact is that plain old table sugar is itself 50 percent fructose. HFCS does have a higher concentration of fructose at 55 percent but it’s close enough to table sugar that most experts continue to dismiss claims that HFCS is on its own more dangerous. And certainly the claim that the introduction of HFCS in the ’80s directly led to the current obesity epidemic continues to be a highly controversial view.

You would have to be at least quadruple major in one of our finest business schools to qualify as a proper apologist defender for HFCS by now. Nothing stands for competition like monopoly sweetener like a substance we can manufacture and put all those little sugar cane-growing country out of business, all in one fell swoop. We must protect our vulnerable little farmers from the predations of those foreign sugar conglomerates.

Rejection of something real, with an actual purpose, in favor of something manufactured, that twists that purpose into something not only grotesque but literally poisonous on several levels, fits our collective sociopathy to an uncomfortably elegant tee. Systematic rejection and defense of this rejection as patriotic and/or linked to our very destiny as a country is something else, something I am unwilling to quantify with words – or maybe just the words I know now. Maybe I should collect my books and get on back to skewl.

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The Perils of Ownership

At first [okay, maybe only right away], this article about efforts to save the Everglades benefitting U.S. Sugar appeared to be the apotheosis of green: environmentalism that made sense fiscally, actually working to save an industry whose competition – sweetener not from sugar but corn –  was wrecking the ecology, not to mention the health, of the country. Also, being so easy to find right up near the top of the page of the Times on a Monday morning, surely it might also be a positive harbinger – you see, this is what green is supposed to mean.

Boy, talk about projection.

In its current form, the deal’s only clear, immediate beneficiaries would be United States Sugar, a privately held company based in Clewiston, Fla., and its law firm, Gunster, which is expected to collect tens of millions of dollars in fees for its work on the sale, according to current and former United States Sugar executives.

The sale, scheduled to close March 31, amounts to a lifeline for the company, which entered negotiations at a time of profound weakness; it was facing a costly shareholder lawsuit, sinking profit margins and increased foreign competition. The deal would enable it to wipe nearly all the debt from its books.

United States Sugar had an unusually powerful advocate in Gunster, a West Palm Beach law firm that had represented it since 1990. Gunster’s chairman, George LeMieux, was Governor Crist’s chief of staff when the deal was first conceived. Mr. LeMieux, who began working at the law firm in 1994, returned to it in January 2008 as the deal was being renegotiated.

So, on top of the long-obstinate landowners getting to profit by allowing a lifeline to clean water for the ecosystem, their competitors, the Native American tribe that lives on the land, conservation groups and the feds were all locked out of negotiations right up until before they were announced. It’s not that this alone doomed the project, but it certainly didn’t help – mainly because the governor and U.S. Sugar created a dynamic whereby their efforts would naturally be opposed, instead of engendering a sort of automatic support – the kind I had when I first glanced at the headline.

Because (uh-oh, the Adventures of Positive Boy), as North Americans, cynicism is not our default setting. But that’s not where I was going… oh yeah. There is a disconnect, a patented (that’s a crazy, if illustrative, euphemism: only in this country – where, oddly, everyone’s gotta own everything but everything that is not privately owned has some taint and is not worth anything) separation between a ‘best of both worlds scenario’ and  the ‘worse possible combination’ that are so close to each other that they travel the same pathway. Yet we persist in believing them to be completely different. The path to health for the environment and positive economic outcomes is the same. Not to say this path is an easy one but, Occam… gesundheit.

We can have eminent domain on all kinds of levels, but we must only use it to benefit commercial interests. We can’t allow ‘the state’ to value the Everglades – the only subtropical wetlands ecosystem of its kind – in its own right; it must be attached to profit and ownership in some form.

How about we engage in a little trade for a euphemism-to-be-named-later: we change the concept to manifest domain, in exchange for eminent destiny.

Can you tell who’s had a supposedly free morning? jeez.

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Getting Comfortable w/o Parking

If you needed to be shown how completely entangled this parking lot-led development paradigm/morass is, look no further:

Transit-oriented development isn’t stymied by outdated zoning, unwilling developers or a lack of space. It turns out, banks, wedded to old-fashioned lending standards that stress parking, may pose the biggest blockade by denying financing.

The reason: Lenders operate from a tried-and-true principle that maintains more parking means less risk and a higher return on their investment. But ditching cars is the whole point of urban developers looking to create 24-hour live, work and play environments that hug light-rail hubs.

You’ve been in this lending situation, and so have seen these people. They’re not computer algorithms – they’re people. But because bank executives and underwriters, lawyers and loan officers cannot grasp the concept of a walkable mix of residential, retail and office space, they glom onto surface parking as a deal breaker/maker for real estate development.

Granted this was always going to be difficult; when the new “bus technology” began replacing street cars back in the 1920’s, it was always going to be tough to go back. But the twenties will be here again soon, and we’ll be building a future that has a look and feel of the past – except we’ll call it retrofitting communities to build a living environment, or some such. Hopefully the banks will one day again be right next to the YMCA.

via.

Plus… if that weren’t enough, it’s blog action day! They should know that’s everyday around here.

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What is Design?

The dictum for which Einstein is famously quoted,”You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war,” bears a pointed similarity to the way we are presently enmeshed in a no man’s between an unknown future and well-trodden past. That is, we are generally accepting of the fact that our world has changed from its industrial-model platform; yet we continue to plan, design, build, educate and think as if it has not. The comparison to war and peace is inexact but illuminating. The idea that one will get us the other is a fantasy lived and re-lived throughout the ages. By the same token, new systems for human viability will not emerge from continued industrial machine age thinking.

There is a chasm, therefore, between the way we built our industrial age society and the manner in which we will navigate a post-industrial future. They bare so little resemblance that we have a hard time imagining that future, letting go of some of the major characteristics of the past to grab hold of… what? We’re not sure. And reaching for something we’re not sure of makes little sense to us. We have spent no small amount of energy greatly trying to eliminate uncertainty in many aspects of life. But this situation requires us to orient ourselves in this chasm of great uncertainty – a feat which points to our greatest weakness.

The even greater conundrum, it seems, is that it is up to us to change our own thinking and ways of learning about the world going forward. Instead of honing in on small problems, reductive elimination of unwanted elements and specialization, there is a need to zoom out to a point where can ask very broad questions, like, what is design?

The systems scholar Bela H. Banathy wrote extensively on this subject of societal transformation, asking some great questions and positing some rather intuitive points about changing the ways we live.. The following is from his research paper, We Enter the Twentieth Century with Schooling Designed in the Nineteenth. (Copyright 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)

The design of social systems, such as education, is a future-creating human activity. People in these systems engage in design in order to create and implement systems, based on their vision of what those systems should be. Or, they may redesign their existing system in order to realize their changing expectations and aspirations and the expectations of their environment. Competence in design enables us to create systems that enrich the quality of our lives and add value to the systems in which we live and work.

In general, people in our educational systems are not yet aware of the potential and power of systems design. Education in design and expertise in design are limited to a few technical professions. But when it comes to the design of systems in which we live and work, we are the experts. When it comes to designing educational systems, the right and responsibility to design are shared by those who serve the system, who are served by the system and who are affected by it. It is such collective involvement in design that makes a system authentic and sustainable. Furthermore, each and every community is unique. It becomes the task of each and every community to design its own unique educational system. Nobody has the right to design educational systems – or any social system – for someone else. The age of social engineering by outside experts is over. We have arrived at the age of ‘user-designers’ people designing their own systems. That is what true empowerment is about. But empowerment cannot be given; it has to be learned.

A precondition of engaging in educational design is the development of competence among ‘user-designers’ that enables them to design their own system. Only the attainment of design competence makes empowerment a reality. Without it, empowerment is just an empty word, nothing more than political rhetoric. Thus we have to create opportunities and programs for design learning, for the development of design competence. People empowered by such learning will become competent individually to design their own lives and, collectively, to design the systems in which they live and work, design their communities and design their systems of living and human development.

Emphasis mine.

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The Green Mile

The distance that runs between what we need to do for the planet and keeping everything going just as it is, if not a little better. This supports another reason why the green is so compelling as a word for something we don’t understand and, simultaneously, know only too well.

An article in the New Republic spoons up the conventional wisdom on green and greening, how its fashion star has faded and what that  and ten cents will get you after polls prove how we’ll chose economic growth over the environment every time, as if that was anything more than one of the multiple answers supplied by the survey. Jeesh.

And then, almost as quickly as it had inflated, the green bubble burst. Between January 2008 and January 2009, the percentage of Americans who told the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that the environment was a “top priority” dropped from 56 percent to 41 percent. While surveys have long showed that enthusiasm for all things green is greatest among well-educated liberals, the new polling results were sobering. For the first time in a quarter century, more Americans told Gallup in March that they would prioritize economic growth “even if the environment suffers to some extent” than said they would prioritize environmental protection “even at the risk of curbing economic growth.” Soon thereafter, Shell announced it would halt its investments in solar and wind power.

Alright. But let’s not underplay this ‘green bubble’ idea as just another noctural, if speculatory, emission. It’s easy to do that, but still. Test yourself. What if the bubble is actually about the fact that the virtue of this necessity is not our requirement that it must co-exist with a romanticized view of the simple life, but that the over-leveraged, wasteful, fossil fuel-dependent life as we demand it IS the bubble?

It may be pleasant to imagine resource scarcity as a kind of hype that we can become less infatuated with and leave by the roadside, but the whole point was that we have to change the way we live not becuase it’s somehow musty or uncool but because the short-sightedness on which it is based is destroying the planet.

Separating our economic troubles from our environmental concerns should be the thing that seems passe’, no?

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The Finest Joke is Upon Us

So the slow boil indignation over the possibility of cap-and-trade legislation has moved into high dudgeon mode. Love how the CEO of Chevron threatens that C-n-T means a return to a ‘pre-industrial economy.’

The answer to environmental problems—natch, and echoing John Tierney—is more growth, which is powered by the fuels that are in the crosshairs of policymakers right now:

To the extent that oil and gas fuel economic growth, they can actually serve the great goal of getting us beyond a carbon-based energy economy.

Because the market will decide when we’ve had enough of what and when to change and how to get us over and past the E on the fossil energy gauge when… I honestly can’t follow this reasoning. Of course, it’s not meant to be followed, so that’s my mistake. Concern for the environment can’t even break into the 20 top concerns of Americans, so see? It can’t be that important, anyway! They don’t already think it is.

Ahem.

Given a choice of three options, just 24 percent of voters can correctly identify the cap-and-trade proposal as something that deals with environmental issues. A slightly higher number (29 percent) believe the proposal has something to do with regulating Wall Street while 17 percent think the term applies to health care reform. A plurality (30 percent) have no idea.

No wonder, as Weigel says, republicans are trying to define the legislation as an ‘energy tax.’

We can’t do anything about our energy consumption because we use too much? The options on change are all too expensive and too disruptive to our way of life so… thanks but no thanks. Really? Did Darwin mention hubris in his Origin? I can’t imagine a discussion over the arrogance not to change in the face of threats to one’s survival making it into anything but a comic book send-up of the reasons societies collapse. But others, fortunately, aren’t so limited.

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FlimFlam alert

This editorial from the LAt brings up an interesting situation that we’re already in, as the EPA leans toward issuing a ruling on whether greenhouses gases are a danger to public health. If they do, which they are likely to, it will lead directly to some forms of preliminary carbon dioxide regulation. It’s going to be difficult and people are going to be screaming; driving a car is going to get more expensive when everything else already is. But is it the end of the world? That’s an interesting question.

Firmly focused on the downside is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has long argued that a climate-change crackdown would devastate Main Street America, imposing costly permitting requirements on such facilities as schools, hospitals and office buildings. Reacting to news of the pending EPA finding, chamber officials are even claiming that it would undermine President Obama’s economic stimulus package because infrastructure projects to be built with the money would be delayed by reviews of their impact on greenhouse gases.

Not really. The EPA finding would apply only to emissions from vehicles. If the agency does find that they endanger the public, it would add urgency to a process that’s already underway to toughen fuel-efficiency standards. Eventually, it might also lead to regulation of emissions from other sources, particularly power plants. But that’s years away, and onerous rules for schools and offices are unlikely. As for the stimulus money, most or all will be spent by the time the EPA gets around to regulating new construction.

It’s already really expensive to drive a car, only we don’t count all of the negative externalities as costs. These would include, of course, tailpipe emissions but also everything from the human design fiasco that is our highway-connected suburbs to the strips of fast-food joints that line them to the talk radio poison we self-inject sitting in so much traffic everyday. This is to say nothing of the wars and armaments necessary to safeguard said sources of earlier-described dangers to public health. No hyperbole is necessary to see all the ways we could begin to change how we live just by taking their real costs into account – not to mention, as the editorial does, the costs of doing nothing.

So get ready for the rending of garments as the EPA is demonized and carbon pricing construed as the end of civilization as we know it. There’s an irony I will not explain (Mean Joe?). The EPA will be doing its job in accordance with our laws. As the editorial points out, there will be winners and losers in so doing. But, in reference to the above, why shouldn’t we see ourselves as winners in this grand scrum, focusing on the things we will decide to change as positive steps?

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Eco Hustle

New Flagpole column up in all its glory. Sometimes we lose the flavor of the hustle, wrapped up as it is with so many financial, economic, and fiscal amulets. Watching how we behave toward (against, really) the least fortunate is one of the very few, truly reliable indicators of our capacity as humans. It doesn’t matter how much you might try to wind a political hustle philosophy around ‘personal responsibility’, that indicator reveals most of what we need to know, including though hardly limited to a fundamental misunderstanding of those two words.

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Two Left Interwebbed Feet

The maelstrom and convulsion we entered some time ago, which we have been so slow to notice even as the  passing scenery has begun to repeat like the same bunch of clouds and mountains, documented in the incredibly shrinking newspaper sense, here. Maybe cartoon language is one of the few we still understand. It’s got to have something to do with that ‘all I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten’ sort of thing. If that’s true, good for you. Anyway, that’s an excellent piece above, so thanks, Andy.

You might wonder, and I can only hope you do, why the clockwise newspaper drain swirl, financial melt and eco/energy colossus are all coming of age at the same time. It could make you curious about what we’ve been feeding them. Born mostly at about the same time – say at or near about the time governments began insuring East India companies in their forays into the New World – all of our societal sub-structures are breaking up into mini ice floes, drifting out to Dieu knows where, as we struggle with how to tie them together again. As much as that might be an unfortunate metaphor, it can’t help but seem – even to a kindergartener – like practice for something.

To that end, and pardon the pun, it’s always better take in a geographer-anthropologist matinee:

PAUL SOLMAN: Of all the cultures you’ve studied that have tried to deal with severe economic dislocations, what’s the marker of resiliency?

JARED DIAMOND: It seems to me that one of the predictors of a happy versus an unhappy outcome has to do with the role of the elite or the decision-makers or the politicians or the rich people within the society.

If the society is structured so that the decision-makers themselves suffer from the consequences of their decisions, then they’re motivated to make decisions that are good for the whole society, whereas if the decision-makers can make decisions that insulate themselves from the rest of society, then they’re likely to make decisions that are bad for the rest of society.

That last bit via the Poorman.

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Tralalitions

When is a metaphor not just a metaphor?

The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is causing more environmental devastation than the country’s love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions, according to green campaigners. At fault, they say, is the US public’s insistence on extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply products when they use the bathroom.

As only in the person of Hugh Person, the metaphysics of the situation keep churning in on themselves. Everything stands for something else until we have to begin literally tagging basic elements again into intelligible units of meaning.

Thanks, JL.