Man Against the Earth


Jill Lepore’s New Yorker article on the great Rachel Carson is amazing, inspiring, and confirms the three intellectual giants of the twentieth century:

Shawn called her at home to tell her that he’d finishing reading and that the book was “a brilliant achievement.” He said, “You have made it literature, full of beauty and loveliness and depth of feeling.” Carson, who had been quite unsure she’d survive to finish writing the book, was sure, for the first time, that the book was going to do in the world what she’d wanted it to do. She hung up the phone, put Roger to bed, picked up her cat, and burst into tears, collapsing with relief.

“Silent Spring” appeared in The New Yorker, in three parts, in June, 1962, and as a book, published by Houghton Mifflin, in September. Everything is connected to everything else, she showed. “We poison the caddis flies in a stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die,” Carson wrote:

We poison the gnats in a lake and the poison travels from link to link of the food chain and soon the birds of the lake margins become its victims. We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elm-leaf-earthworm cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life—or death—that scientists know as ecology.

Its force was felt immediately. Readers wrote to share their own stories. “I can go into the feed stores here and buy, without giving any reason, enough poison to do away with all the people in Oregon,” one gardener wrote. They began calling members of Congress. E. B. White wrote to Carson, declaring the pieces to be “the most valuable articles the magazine had ever published.” At a press conference at the White House on August 29th, a reporter asked President Kennedy whether his Administration intended to investigate the long-range side effects of DDT and other pesticides. “Yes,” he answered. “I know that they already are, I think particularly, of course, since Miss Carson’s book.”

Which itself brings to mind (my recollection of) Abraham Lincoln’s words when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”

But back to the 20th century giants, Jane Jacobs:

So perhaps now, on the 100th anniversary of her birth [2016], we should all be asking: what is it that Jane Jacobs made us want to see in the city?

Thinking about this question leads me to focus on the conditions that make a metropolis – the enormous diversity of workers, their living and work spaces, the multiple sub-economies involved. Many of these are now seen as irrelevant to the global city, or belonging to another era. But a close look, as encouraged by Jacobs, shows us this is wrong.

She would ask us to look at the consequences of these sub-economies for the city – for its people, its neighbourhoods, and the visual orders involved. She would ask us to consider all the other economies and spaces impacted by the massive gentrifications of the modern city – not least, the resultant displacements of modest households and profit-making, neighbourhood firms.

How do we see those aspects that are typically rendered invisible by modern narratives of development and urban competitiveness? In the early 1900s, the city was a lens for understanding larger processes – but half a century later, it had lost that role. It was Jane Jacobs who taught us again to view the city in a deeper, more complex way.

She helped us re-emphasise dimensions that were usually excluded – no, expelled – from general analyses of the urban economy. Indeed, I can imagine she would have affirmed without a quiver of doubt that, no matter how electronic and global the city might one day become, it still has to be “made” – and therein lies the importance of place.

And of course, Hannah Arendt

There is almost no politics in “Origins” beyond the decisions and processes that eventuated in total domination. It is a dark book, written in a dark time and reflecting on the darkest moment of modern European (and arguably world) history. But it is not without hope. In her preface, Arendt envisions a new form of transnational governance, insisting that “human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its powerful must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly established territorial entities.” And in her conclusion she insists that there is always the possibility of renewal: “But there remains also the truth that every end in history also contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only ‘message’ which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom . . . This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.”

In her subsequent work, Arendt reflected at length about the revival of a politics of human dignity, autonomy and active citizenship. While she was highly critical of the depoliticizing tendencies of modern liberal individualism, she was a strong believer in the rule of law and in the importance of constitutional and extraconstitutional restraints on political power. This is most clear in her 1972 “Crises of Republic,” collecting four essays written in the midst of the legitimacy crises associated with the Vietnam War, the rise of the New Left and Black Power movements, and the deceit and authoritarianism of the Nixon administration.

What other major figures might outflank them in impact and vital importance to the world as it was then, and as it is now? Russell? Derrida? Keynes? Orwell? It’s not even close. To be continued, hopefully.

Green car Go

green-car

Via IC, notoriously unreliable fuel source causing chaos in California. If California is the future and $5 gas prices are the present, are you still following me and I don’t mean on the twitter machine?

Unless he’s been reading the news, my neighbor probably has no idea that California is enduring a sudden, surprising and, for other people, very painful spike in gasoline prices, which in some parts of the Southland have crossed the $5-a-gallon mark. This is creating a serious economic hardship for many. After all, not everybody can afford a $35,000 electric car to replace their gas-guzzler, and $90 or more to fill the tank of an SUV is real money. That got me wondering: When you consider all the costs of owning and operating a new car in this environment of soaring gas prices, is my neighbor a genius or a chump?

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center has an interesting tool on its website for comparing the costs of fuel and ownership of nearly every motor vehicle sold in the U.S. I compared my neighbor’s Leaf to seven other popular 2012 gas-powered models, including the hybrid Toyota Prius, given current local electricity prices and figuring the average current price of gas at $4.75 a gallon. Here’s what I came up with:

Fuel costs for the Leaf come to 22 cents per mile, far lower than any other car on my list (the other models I picked, besides the Prius, were the BMW 328i luxury sedan, Ford Focus compact, Honda Civic compact, Honda CR-V crossover, Mini Cooper subcompact and Toyota Camry sedan). The popular Prius hybrid, no surprise, was the next cheapest to fuel, at 29 cents per mile. Closest behind were the Focus at 33 cents per mile and the Mini at 34 cents. Turning to annual operating cost, the Leaf is again a big winner at $2,629, followed by the Prius at $3,407, the Focus at $3,985 and the Mini at $4,031. The most expensive vehicle on my list to operate was the 328i at $4,998, but I doubt many Beemer owners care.

I don’t wish it on you but gas prices are going to climb, just we were saying four years ago – check the archives there to your right. All of that still holds. Live where you can ride a bike, train or walk. Restart your conversations. With people.

Image: Green car from here.

Interested Parties

It’s a big news day, many things with which to keep up, what with all the Oscar speeches and all.

But some events are not so fantastically immediate – or their impacts and causes are more indirect, slow moving and perhaps irreversible within the time frames we now perceive everything.

Take, for example, this green versus green pseudo argument, which is no doubt real, though perhaps over-articulated:

The legal tussle over putting large solar power plants in often-fragile desert landscapes underscores the difficulty of pushing forward projects crucial to fighting climate change and meeting California’s ambitious renewable energy mandates.

The five lawsuits currently pending against five solar thermal projects licensed by the state and approved for construction on federal land represent a multiplicity of interests.

Now, I might ask whether any landscape could be less often-fragile than a desert, but the fact is that big solar projects are dropping like final-consonant g’s in a Republican prime time Deebate. The same massive solar projects that desperately need to break ground because they take years to build instead spend their first couple of years of existence as a case in a court docket, doing no one any good except for those who don’t want solar projects or much of anything else to change and I’ll stop right there. Any aspersions cast are your own.
In other, perhaps related news, Juan Cole has the latest updates on the rapidly churning oilpacoplypse.