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Old Times There

Is New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta a microcosm of environmental catastrophe? If you are paid per word, it may be more remunerative to try to describe why it isn’t:

NASA_neworleansExtensive studies done after Katrina verified what lifelong residents of southeastern Louisiana already knew: Unless the rapidly disappearing wetlands are made healthy again, restoring the natural defense, New Orleans will soon lay naked against the sea (see satellite image, below).

So, how does one reengineer the entire Mississippi River delta—one of the largest in the world—on which New Orleans lies?

Three international engineering and design teams have reached a startling answer: leave the mouth of the Mississippi River to die. Let the badly failing wetlands there completely wither away, becoming open water, so that the upper parts of the delta closer to the city can be saved. The teams, winners of the Changing Course Design Competition, revealed their detailed plans on August 20. Graphics from each plan are below.

Scientists worldwide agree that the delta’s wetlands disintegrated because we humans built long levees—high, continuous ridges of earth covered by grass or rocks—along the entire length of the lower Mississippi River. The leveed river rims the southern boundary of New Orleans and continues another 40 serpentine miles until it reaches the gulf. The levees, erected almost exclusively by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, prevented regular floods from harming farms, industries and towns along the river’s course. However those floods also would have supplied the brackish marshes with massive quantities of silt and freshwater, which are necessary for their survival.

Good grief. Emphasis mine because they mean that so literally, when we throw around all kind of colorful euphemisms to describe and debate I guess after a while we return to original meanings again. What the miles of levees have wrought, let now engineering decisions and new diversion structures put asunder. Or let the delta die. May 1,000 new songs be written, though immaculate recordings and an army of busking crooners still won’t dull the pain of the [algal] bloom.

Via LGM.

 

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Enhanced Logo Techniques

plantNikeThese embroidered sportswear logos are a good reminder about all the personal space we willingly hand over to corporate advertising, and that we have the ability to take some of it back. Reclaim – hey, we’re into vintage!

The willingness to advertise products and brand loyalties needs some thoughtful push back. Adbusters is still around, but less manifesto and more creativity is what’s called for, not telling people what to think or do – but to think and do. And maybe that’s a contradiction. Maybe those are one and the same. The freedom to do nothing, to not vote, not participate, remains one of our most powerful. But it is also can be powerfully turned against the interests of a free society. The ‘freedom fetish’ itself is a good example of this.

Art is still more powerful than vandalism, but just as threatening to the status quo.

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Earth Overshoot Day

Let’s keep track of these things, shall we?foot_print_hr

On this day in August 2015, humans have used an entire year’s worth of the Earth’s natural resources, according to the Global Footprint Network.

Calling it Earth Overshoot Day, the group celebrates — or, rather, notes — the day by which people have used more natural resources, such as fish stocks, timber, and even carbon emissions, than the Earth can regenerate in a single year. It’s basically a balance sheet for global accounting.

“We can overuse nature quite easily,” Mathis Wackernagel, president of the Global Footprint Network, told ThinkProgress. “When you start to spend more than you earn, it does not become immediately apparent. But, eventually, you go bankrupt.”

How many Earths would it take… it seems as though the personal responsibility zealots among us would key into this logic, except for the great climate change hoax, which of course has nothing to do whatsoever, nosiree, with our  collective and per capita energy consumption. It is an interesting proposition: Four months left to go in the year, two of them likely pretty frosty for most people, and we’re out of gas everything?

Natural racehorses, indeed.

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Two Invisible Hands Clapping

Even scienticians agree: the modest new goals of the new EPA plan for clean power are only making official what the invisible has been waving through like a naked [invisible] traffic cop:

_CLAPOur best hope for carbon reduction is steep price drops in the cost of generating electricity by wind and solar; in the cost of installing wind turbines and solar panels; and in the cost of storing energy in batteries. If those price drops are achieved, we’ll head toward vast reductions in emissions regardless of what the EPA does. No one is going to pay 12 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity (our current national average) if it can be had for 2 cents a kilowatt hour, all other things being equal.

Coal-use as the source of electricity has been trending downward for a while, for many reasons, and as long a modest rule-making [see Cole’s discussion above] keeps sending signals to the invisible hand, it will continue to do so. But, crappy analogy aside, the bigger news in the in the new rules is the commitments to clean energy R & D. That, coupled with reductions for carbon emissions from power plants will leverage even more research and new businesses to sprout. Even silicon itself will be replaced with cheaper alternatives that bring the price down for solar panels. I remarked to my passengers on a recent road trip down a super bright hot interstate highway that I couldn’t believe we weren’t using all of that glarea [get it?] to generate electricity and connect every city along the way with the power it soaks up on a daily basis. The same goes for the waves that pushed us around along the shore over a clear, windy weekend. Whatever the technological difficulties in doing either of these, let you remind me that we just saw pictures from a space probe we sent to Pluto ten years ago.

That was a year before the first iPhone.

Teaser image: The Beach, Sunset, Gustave Courbet, 1867

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64 Frames Per Second

Horse_gifThat’s a random choice, actually. Because anywhere between the 48 and 120 frames per second at which digital cameras can record looks so real that it… looks fake:

“Hobbiton and Middle Earth didn’t feel like a different universe, it felt like a special effect, a film set with actors in costumes.” His view was widely shared. Alexander D’Aloia wrote, “What 48fps has done is make a prop look like a prop. For example, Gandalf’s staff resembles a hunk of brown plastic, and not a length of wood (see from 1:06).” At 120Hz, your high-definition TV is repeating each frame of Fury Road five times every 24th of a second; as if that weren’t enough, the new 4K television standard puts over eight million pixels on the screen, four times that of HDTV.

Okay. So let me speak for everyone when I say: Enough is enough. This is what we get when we basically allow IT experts to become decision-makers about aesthetics. And this is not to castigate the IT people, per se; it’s only that, they see the world through the lens of technical constraints, and either work to make everything conform to these constraints (classical IT) or work to supersede them, (Digitechnorati) over and over again. They don’t stop to ask whether they should. That’s a question for another department, one that actually doesn’t get to weigh in on this point – the one that, by (high) definition, doesn’t have to ask this question. See? it’s a maddeningly vicious cycle.

And there’s nothing Luddite or purist about this. If you think this is only about art film, look at what TV commercials are doing to our fcking sense of dancing carrots:

We have to be persuaded—of what, exactly, it’s hard to say. But the illusion of dancing vegetables will never work if they are even slightly wilted or misshapen. They must be casually believable, instinctively credible carrots, like those familiar to us from “real life” at 24 frames per second, but also gorgeous, perfect carrots, or their performance will just seem … wrong.

Anyway, good story. Property masters, indeed.

Image: 12 frame long animation made in Flash 8 by rotoscoping horse gallop from Edweard Muybridge “Horses and Other Animals in Motion”, via wikimedia commons.

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Greece vs. History

o-GREECE-FLAGMy affection for Greeks and Greece knows no bounds, but even setting that aside, via Digby, here is Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, bringing some historical perspective in an interview with DIE ZEIT on the subject of Greek debt:

ZEIT: But shouldn’t they repay their debts?

Piketty: My book recounts the history of income and wealth, including that of nations. What struck me while I was writing is that Germany is really the single best example of a country that, throughout its history, has never repaid its external debt. Neither after the First nor the Second World War. However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them. The French state suffered for decades under this debt. The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.

ZEIT: But surely we can’t draw the conclusion that we can do no better today?

Piketty: When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: what a huge joke! Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations.

The internets are continuously aflutter with ‘who has the facts,’ and ‘who has them right.’ But the easy moral indignation available about the Greek debt crisis for any and all is actually… too easy. One needs to look deeper and as usual, history is instructive. Not saying the Germans or any nation is wrong, but as Krugman points out, the ‘No’ vote was actually a victory for democracy in the face of demands from the banksters. It’s more complicated than just ‘the Greeks need to pay up.’ It takes a bit to suss all this out and gain anything like an informed opinion. But we owe (get it?) it to ourselves to do so.

Parakalo.

 

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Arguments That Needed To Be Lost

argument5It’s been a strange week, in a very good way.

Another interview I’m working on reminded me of a point to share: when parking lots are made into parks or public spaces, parking companies lose X number of spaces. If there spaces aren’t there, people are usually just okay with it. But the imposition itself is often the hard part. But that is an argument the parking advocates need to lose.

The same can be said for arguments in favor of flying the Confederate flag, against the availability of affordable healthcare and against the right to love how and whom you wish. These arguments exist, and they all deserve to be lost. Beaten, actually, by better, more decent, more just arguments.

Thankfully, this week, they have. And this isn’t triumphalism, though it might feel really good.

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Pope Francis and the Golden Calf

golden_calfNow listen to a story ’bout a man named Jeb! No, that’s not right. Exodus 32? Closer. He wanted to be a knight, and was a great lover of France. When the Jesuit who became Pope took his name, he also knew battle was the best place to win glory and also to protect all of God’s creation:

Pope Francis has clearly embraced what he calls a “very solid scientific consensus” that humans are causing cataclysmic climate change that is endangering the planet. The pope has also lambasted global political leaders for their “weak responses” and lack of will over decades to address the issue.

In what has already been the most debated papal encyclical letter in recent memory, Francis urgently calls on the entire world’s population to act, lest we leave to coming generations a planet of “debris, desolation and filth.”

“An outsider looking at our world would be amazed at [our] behavior, which at times appears self-destructive,” the pope writes at one point in the letter, titled: “Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home.”

Addressing world leaders directly, Francis asks: “What would induce anyone, at this stage, to hold on to power only to be remembered for their inability to take action when it was urgent and necessary to do so?”

We’ll see how they respond.

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Eco Hustle – poverty

Again, I hoist one of these columns from the Flagpole archives and I’m aghast at how little nothing has changed:

let-us-now-praise-famous-menLike corporate green advertising, our policies against the poor get lost in a shuffle of righteous sounding reforms, intended to move people from “welfare to work” in order to usher in a new era of “personal responsibility.” The two strategies have much in common as we whitewash our consciences with high morals and the appearance of genuine, public-spirited problem solving. But there’s a dark side to this shell game every bit as dastardly as Exxon-Mobile working to build your energy future: Where do the poor go once they leave a statistical column?

In the land of perverse incentives, Georgia happens to be the shining city on a hill. A nice, depending on your orientation, compendium of our state of affairs appeared in the January/February 2009 issue of Mother Jones magazine. The experience of several young mothers on welfare is profiled for all and sundry and it’s not a pretty sight. What we do to ourselves in regard to getting people off of welfare rolls is nothing less than a full abrogation of human, economic and civil rights. We lie, mislead and otherwise confuse those among us who need help the most. The connections to other, similar atrocities to which we subject ourselves and our environment bear no further case to be made; if we can do this to the so-called least of our brethren here, there are no limits to what we might do to people, earth and sky we nominally care about and depend upon.

The whole thing, plus a few more columns. 2009, people.

Image: by Walker Evans, from Let us Now Praise fampus men, by James Agee and Walker Evans

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4th Quarter Taco Bell Salute to the Troops

Colorado Soldiers Return HomeThe disconnect between American military and civilian life are only growing, and with it, an expanding impatience for the use of patriotism as a feel-good marketing tool. This earlier Atlantic piece by James Fallows about how we treat members of the armed forces set the stage; now comes Pierce with a specific bone to pick with our beloved NFL:

Propaganda is a messy business. We like to think of ourselves as the shrewdest of consumers, but we can be the biggest rubes who ever sat around the cracker barrel. We like to think we can tell truth from fiction, but we are still the country of the patent medicine salesman, the loaded dice, the Ponzi scheme, and the rigged wheel. It is in this country that Mark Twain placed Hadleyburg and reported about amazing jumping frogs. We are not now, nor have we ever been, the hardest mark in the room. The world can see us coming a mile off.

At the same time, our hackles go to DEFCON 1 whenever anyone intimates that we might sell our birthright for a bag of magic beans. This is particularly true when it comes to the government and our sports-entertainment-industrial complex. We demand the right to choose the people we allow to swindle us, and our politicians and our athletes are not on the list. We look on every government initiative as though it were aimed directly at our wallets. We look on our spectacle sports as the outward manifestations of dark, witchy forces that arrange strange outcomes and rig lotteries. These are the two most target-rich environments for conspiracy theories for a reason.

If there’s one thing we don’t like, it’s being called out. If there’s one thing we shouldn’t stand for, it is the military being used for anything beyond the purpose for which it exists. And before it happens (right), eliding this as any kind of ‘attack on our people in uniform’ is just the worst the kind of skullduggery, and/or roofing material upon the last refuge of scoundrels. And probably both. Just stop it.