Green Rhet

2011-09-05T19:00:00.000-07:00

What do you all think about Robot Vacuum Cleaners? Are they really Green as they claim to be?!

Just came across this:

2010-07-06T03:15:00.001-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9S3vvPe9IM&feature=channel

Enjoy!

Some Thoughts From A Former Student

2010-06-30T17:40:00.000-07:00

Nobody can truly be happy any more. Some people accumulate great wealth and do a great many good things with it, but there must be some unhappiness that drives them to do good. Maybe it is possible that there are poor, dumb people out there who have everything they need and are happy. They can only be relatively happy for there must be little annoyances, drama, and/or loneliness in every body's life. No in the postmodern world that we live in happiness is just a construct of a previous era like 'truth'. It is not something that can be truly attained. In fact there is no longer reason to believe that it is something to be obtained, or that it is even an 'it' at all. Happiness is a feeling with which we identify, but some of us have become aware that our use of grammar implies a lot about subject and object. That is to say we pose happiness as some kind of goal, at least I know I do, and we ignore the fact that we can only identify happiness as a feeling, but we cannot know when we are going to find ourselves in that state, and we certainly do not know how to put our selves permanently in a state of happiness. Still we say it is what we want. Misery can become a constant state of being in a way. Humans can suffer to the point where the slightest bit of good news can never outweigh the overwhelming problems at hand. This is the indifference of nature at times, but it is also the problem that the thinkers of the enlightenment and all of modern society set out to solve. The problem of poverty. And it has not been solved, and has only gotten worse to where we have a global 'Dickensian-ism' of sorts currently on our hands. Without poverty happiness might become something that holds weight again. It might be a reachable goal. Unfortunately there has yet to be a truly sustainable solution to poverty. Because of this impoverished mind set our whole race is rapidly becoming extinct along with millions of others. What I am saying here is that whatever it is that has made us unable to care for all of humanity has become an entity that is now destroying our planet. Obama is not facing his 'Katrina' in the gulf of Mexico, but rather his '9-11'. There is not a great evil out there that is perpetuated by some individuals, at least not in nature's view. We can sight specific incidents like the one in the gulf as the problem. But what leads to creating the system that allows such a disaster to happen. No I think we have to all take blame for what is happening to the world because this is the only productive way to move towards sustainability as a culture. Right now I pose that we work towards this goal of happiness with soft eyes and humility. This is a serious incremental approach to a problem that has never been solved and we should not expect this approach to appease nature, or be what we hope it could be, but I applaud any attempts to really work on a global community in the true sense of the words.

Amazing Spaces

2010-05-20T16:16:00.000-07:00

I came across this video randomly; a Chinese architect made a transforming house. It's pretty intriguing, especially it's claims to ecofriendliness.

http://www.megavideo.com/?v=RPYAEAI0

Okay, SURE, passive solar design is ecofriendly, but where is all the metal and glass that aids it coming from, especially because metal washes and metal production are incredibly environmentally destructive (although it's difficult to weigh the cost/benefit analysis externally; the pollution that goes into powering that many people in such a small area is a very different kind of pollution than the point source pollution of mining, etc.).

Anyway, if anyone is still around, it's a pretty amazing living space.

Carbon menu

2010-01-06T21:45:00.000-08:00

A BBC video report about Sweden's steps to inform consumers about carbon outputs for the food consumed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/world_news_america/8402877.stm

Solar Commons

2010-01-01T17:44:00.000-08:00

If you're still around, check it out.

meatarianism

2009-12-29T00:24:00.000-08:00

I just came across this site, thought I'd share:

http://www.vegetablecruelty.com/

the photo gallery is particularly interesting!

Futurism In China

2009-12-19T14:25:00.000-08:00

I was reading an article that made me think about futurism and its implications. China has become the leader in sustainable technology despite being the worlds biggest producer of green house gases. They have made bigger and cheaper wind turbines than the U.S. has, and they are the worlds largest producer and consumer of solar energy panels. Their government supports research that is usually left to the free markets here. This allows for riskier and more innovative technology research. Also the government is able to implement energy saving programs quickly among their population since they have the bureaucracy to handle such situations (because they are commies.)
This made me think that if I was Chinese, I might believe technology will solve the problems of the future. It already has created the Chinese middle class which some say have it better then our middle class in terms of quality of life. And futurology or not, it seems to me that clean energy technology is going to be central to saving the planet. This does not mean we should blindly have faith in technology without actually knowing what that technology will do. It simply means that any intelligent person has to realize in order to have a future we need to use scientific innovation (along with behavioral changes) to take the existing polluting technology we have and alter it or remove it in a way that is sustainable. Technology is the problem, but it also has to be part of the solution. Sometimes I feel we are all doomed and other times I think maybe there is hope for turning back the destructive tide of human progress. I like some of the things the Chinese are doing even if they still have a long way to go. At this point momentum is on their side and I predict that they will be tasked with creating a model for being a sustainable nation. So here is to the future, may it be better then the past. Happy New Year and holiday.
Chris W

Hope!

2009-12-19T12:16:00.000-08:00

Hello all,
I realize that most people aren't checking the blog anymore but I saw this on a friend's fb wall and I thought that only this group of people would understand how exciting it is! Jühnde is a tiny village in Germany that is living an almost completely sustainable lifestyle. It seems an Eco-village par excellence. My primary worry is the tractor... is that run on biofuel too? Most of their emissions and energy come from biofuel and woodchips... are they cutting down forests? How much do people drive in the town? Even so, it is very exciting that it exists even if it seems highly dependent upon local trust.

Car of... THE FUTURE!

2009-12-18T10:36:00.001-08:00

I feel very sad that I did not do my report on car of the future dot org. :(

EcoTechnofuturistic Webcomics...

2009-12-17T18:56:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone. I am near delirious and finals end with a bang for me tomorrow at 330. Phew.

Anyway, a couple weeks ago, I was talking to Dale about an amazing webcomic called Dresden Codak, done by the great and amazing Aaron Diaz. Anyway, check out HOB, a beautiful, futuristic piece outlining an association between computer and nature, or any of his standalones (Onald Creely is my favorite). It's weird. I love.

http://dresdencodak.com/
Direct link to the HOB plotline: http://dresdencodak.com/2007/02/08/pom/

Have a good break, all. Happy graduation to some, see the rest of you after the break.

Precis: The Decay of Lying

2009-12-16T18:19:00.000-08:00

Oscar Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying” attempts to throw preconceived notions of Art, Life, and Nature upside down. Wilde continually comes back to the idea that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. Everything in the world that we experience is linked to a previous thought or image that our minds recognize and immediately compare to. Wilde feels that our experiences are becoming dull and stagnant. Art is a medium used to inspire and create new things, and most importantly, to shape Life. Wilde calls for a return to lying because lying is pure fantasy and is crucial in the development of Art and artistic expression through Life.
Realism and Impressionism are denounced and presented as attempts to manipulate and mold by mimicking and altering what is real. The problem for Wilde is that once we accept something as being real, the formulation of that thing has already been understood as unchanging. We can only mimic things that are constant. For Wilde, the creation of the real relies completely on the inventions of Art. Art allows our imaginations to create the realities that human nature seeks to fulfill. An example is given as to how a sunset was never a sunset before it was painted. It was simply an experience that each person had, visually. After the sunset was painted, it was shown in exquisite fashion, as perfection. Our idea of what a sunset ought to be is forever engrained in our minds when we see a natural sunset. We compare the colors of the clouds and of the sky to a certain artist who employed those colors in his creation of a “sunset.”
The character of people is determined by Art as well. Writers have created characters to build their work of Art in the form of fiction. People strive to maintain their own identities by latching on to those identities created by fiction. Fiction becomes much more like fact, and writers attempting to capture fact seem only to be able to create fiction. These writers are attempting to capture what is, what happened, and what was, but only succeed in replicating those circumstances. Elements of the event are written in forms that were created by artists and in trying to describe the real, the author creates his story. What is already present in the real cannot be mimicked and considered artistic.
Nature is said to be crude, monotonous, unfinished and lacking design. What is in nature is already there and Art cannot become of nature as a result. Art is new. Wilde tells of poets who wrote about and were inspired by nature. Their poetry is not considered beautiful because it tells of natures beauty, it is beautiful because the author brought the skill of poetry to writing about nature. Wilde says “people only discover in nature what they bring to her. She has no suggestions of her own.” Nature is a creation of humans. All that exists as nature is only thought to be such because we invented it. “For what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation.”
Wilde describes nature as stagnant and boring. His description is a result of his characterization of Art and Life. Nature is boring because it simply “is.” Our conceptions of beauty in nature are creations. Nature is depicted in ways to mirror what actually exists. A painting of a mountain is designed to show what the mountain looks like, but this is not Art. A fanciful interpretation of a mountain with striking faces and glittering snow with gleaming skies and the greenest trees is a lie that attempts to show what nature should be. Our interactions with nature rely on artistic renderings of the surroundings that are supposed to be untouched. It is in this way that Nature is always boring, always falling short of artistic expectation. Nature never influences our interpretation of the world, our interpretations of the world through the experiences of Art, shape Nature.
It seems as though Nature is lie according to Wilde. But this lie does not seem to be the lie that he is striving toward in the beginning of his writing. Nature is a creation, but it is not created because of the influences of Art. The lie of Nature does not contribute to the formulation of the multiple beauties that Wilde says Art inspires to create. Instead, the lie of Nature is a result of people imitating and replicating life. This inartistic approach creates a worshiping of Nature as something other than what it really is. Nature becomes a reproduction of the visible objects found within it. Nature cannot be mimicked because life imitates Art and Nature is not Art. Nature is the imitation of Life. Still, it remains unclear when Nature is a creation of the human mind whether or not this constitutes as a lie similar to that described by Wilde? If Nature is a creation, it does not reflect the real, and is a lie. Then is the lie of Nature not preserving the artistic mode of creation Wilde is begging for? Nature cannot be mimicked because life imitates Art and Nature is not Art. Nature is the imitation of Life.

bernake man of the year!?!?!?! who would you pick?

2009-12-16T10:46:00.000-08:00

Not that I every had respect for Time Magazine but their decision to make Bernake of the year is a a cruel, sick, sad joke for all of us who can't find jobs or lost health care due to not having jobs or having to resort to dangerous black market jobs to finance their public education. And the millions and billions around the world that we know suffer because of our economic system and insatiable demand for Starbucks sugarfree nonfat decaf lattes.
Even more of joke then Obama nearly simultaneous troop deployment/acceptance of the Nobel PEACE price. There's goes my pride to brandish that blue passport. Even that men's magazine that picked the fictional character of Don Draper from Mad Men did a better job than Time.

Anyways, who would I choose for Person of the Year? Well if it was from the traditional applicant pool...what about Micheal Jackson? Or Hugo Chavez. Or the female head of Liberia Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf or that born again christian guy that controls the human genome project. Who would you all pick?

Obama gets real p2p on retrofits

2009-12-15T15:49:00.000-08:00

First off, hope you guys all got through the final. Maybe it was the hours....that i spent staring at some of more dire terms of the course but this seems reductive and vaguely mocking:

Before going off to Copenhagen this week, Obama stopped at a Home Depot in Northern Virignia to talk about home retrofits. Obama strikes a light-hearted and comedic tone in making his argument for the power of retrofits. Did he spend all his soaring rhetoric last week in Norway, or is this Obama's message for changing national behavior? He is really selling it here:

"Insulation is sexy"

"What would you do if you saw twenty dollar bills floating out your window?"

http://www.politico.com/politico44/perm/1209/obama_at_home_depot_c0b82d41-702b-429b-b1c6-79755abae52e.html

PRECIS: Minority Communities Need More Parks

2009-12-15T01:34:00.000-08:00

PRECIS: Minority Communities Need More Parks

(Reading scheduled for Thur. Oct 8)

The article “Minority Communities Need More Parks, Report Says” was written by Angela Rowen and published in The Berkeley Daily Planet. This article addresses a local issue that is particularly relevant to larger discussions of environmental justice and social ecology, as well as the idea of ecoracism. Rowen central focus is Paul Kibel’s report, “Access to Parkland: Environmental Justice at East Bay Parks,” directed at the East Bay Regional Park District. Kibel reviews published and unpublished reports to determine information about usage and access to EBRPD’s holdings and determines that a clear pattern emerges from this data.
According to Kibel, the majority of the district’s 100,000 acres is geographically situated in hillside areas which are next to wealthy, white communities. The low-income flatlands of cities like Oakland, Richmond, Berkeley, Hayward, and Fremont have a much farther proximity to parks than their hillside counterparts. These flatlands are also home to most of the district’s minority neighborhoods. Proximity to parks greatly increases park access; “Kibel argues that because people are more likely to visit parks near their own communities, the district’s historic focus on acquiring large tracts of land in the highlands has created disparities in park usage based on income and, by extension, race.” He hopes “his study will highlight the importance of the availability of open space in the fight for environmental justice, which has largely focused on toxics issues.”
This issue is one of both social justice and ecology, and thus one of environmental justice, because it is believed that parks provide the public with health benefits from recreation, therapeutic benefits from the natural setting, and “consensus for broader environmental policies.” Although I personally agree with the belief that certain park systems provide this final benefit of broadening support of environmentalism, I am skeptical as too the validity and/or directness of this causal claim for all parklands for two reasons. Firstly, there is an immense difference between the “nature” encountered in small urban parks and the “nature” encountered in the expansive, long-standing state and national parks. Secondly, an appreciation for nature’s physical beauty does not necessarily translate to awareness and understanding of global or even local environmental problems. Although I do not contest the value of urban parks, I question his implication that creating new urban parks will directly result in broadened support for environmentalism.
Subsequently, Kibel offers several solutions in his report, although his expressed intention is to “start a conversation about the issue, rather than assess blame or accuse any individuals or groups of environmental racism.” This highlights an important distinction between environmental justice and ecoracism. In addition to outlining the arguments of Kibel and supporters, Rowan provides opposing points from prominent environmentalists, like the chair of the Sierra Club’s East Bay Public Lands Committee, Norman La Force. La Force commends the collaborative efforts of the state and regional park services, adding “that some of the problem of getting more open space in Richmond lies in the political will of African-American city council members, who he says have complained that there are too many parks in their neighborhoods.” Furthermore, he says that “it would have been more useful to examine the California State Parks agency, which wants to create more urban parks but can’t get the funding to do so.”
Additionally, Nancy Skinner, a park district board member who represents Ward 1, which includes Berkeley, San Pablo and Richmond. Skinner, critiques the article, conceding the historical trajectory of existing claims but argues recent aims have been toward acquisition of shoreline. Skinner also praises EBRPD for their instrumental role in passing Measure AA (“which set aside $60 million for city parks to acquire flatland and shoreline parks and develop programs to serve urban communities”). The article closes with Skinner’s reminder that another bond measure, on the November 2008 ballot “would provide for more money to city parks for acquisition of parklands and environmental education and outreach programs that target low-income people.”
Accordingly, I looked up this November 2008 ballot measure to see what it included and whether or not it passed. The measure authorizes East Bay Regional Park District “to issue up to $500 million in general obligation bonds, provided repayment projections, verified by independent auditors, demonstrate that property tax rates will not increase beyond present rates of $10 per year, per $100,000 of assessed valuation.” Measure WW, “Extend Existing East Bay Regional Park District Bond With No Increase In Tax Rate East Bay Regional Park District”, passed 72% yes to 28% no.

by: Whitney Paalborg

Interesting e-mails regarding last Friday

2009-12-14T17:16:00.000-08:00

Hi all,
I promised a synthesis of Bob Meiser's arguments in "They pledge your tuition" but I got to busy to read through the close to 40 pages of text (total, it's broken up into 4 documents). So, if you are genuinely interested go to Save UC's "get educated" page. You will see them. It's an important issue to understand so if you've got some time over break I'd encourage you to check it out.

Also, this letter has been circling around today and I thought you all might be interested to in an analysis of the events that have occurred over the last few weeks, culminating in last Friday's violences. There is the analysis from a Prof in the Graduate School of Education (appears first), which is actually a response to an e-mail sent out by the Dean of the GSE (which is below the analysis). Just thought I'd share it.

Dear David all the GSE colleagues,

While I genuinely appreciate David's message, I feel, somewhat guiltily, a
need to respond to it.   Where I second David’s message is in the belief
that beyond any wider implications, acts of violence necessarily diminish
the university, discouraging the free exchange of ideas, which ought to be
our defining characteristic.  Nevertheless questions of proportion and
degree matter.  While all acts of violence diminish the university,
differences in how and how much they do so ought to influence our
responses. And these differences were obscured in David’s message.

With many people having little more than news reports of events at the
chancellor's residence on which to base their impressions, I realize that
my comments might seem to indicate a lack of common decency or at least an
incredibly bad sense of timing, but as I will try to explain, I believe
that the university administration not only set the stage for a violent
turn in protests by acts which have repeatedly raised tensions and
undermined belief in its good will, but actually engaged in most of the
violence that has occurred.

I write as someone who has been consistently critical of the Berkeley
administration, but also as someone who has worked for decades against
violence, and finally as perhaps the only person on this list who
witnessed any of Friday night's events.  (I was writing letters of
recommendation in my Tolman Hall office, which faces the chancellor's
residence.)

In brief, at about 11 PM a group of protesters --lit by perhaps 10
torches- marched past Tolman and up to the chancellor's residence.  They
sounded quite angry.  I heard someone call out, "That's the chancellor's
house," and I remember at that time having the impression that it was said
as if people who did not recognize the chancellor's house and were not
focused on going there.  The protesters did not, as the Chronicle reports
that police claimed, surround the residence, nor would it have been
possible for so few to do so.  I heard, but did not see what must have
been the planters and window(s?) breaking and almost immediately saw the
protesters fleeing. There may have been police chasing them; I did not see
any. I could not tell if the protesters were fleeing because they did not
wish to be caught or because they did not want to participate in what they
now realized was an escalated form of violence. None of the protesters I
saw fleeing (and I believe I saw most of them) were carrying lit torches.
I did not see anyone arrested, but trees block my view of the front of the
chancellor's house, so I do not know if the arrests occurred at the time
or later, and whether because of their individual actions or because of
the actions of the group as a whole.

What I do know is that I witnessed enough at variance with university
officials’ accounts as reported in the press to make me suspicious of the
rest of those accounts, even if I had not already been made suspicious by
distortions and inaccuracies in previous administration statements about
recent protests, which have been amply documented elsewhere.

I believe that acts were committed at the chancellor's house that were not
only counter-productive but also, more important, wrong.  And yet those
events were remarkably brief and perhaps spontaneous. Again, I do not
write this to be evasive but rather because even among what we condemn we
need to make judgments, and I believe that sustained, planned violence
demands a different response from that which did not and does not strike
me as sustained and possibly not even as planned.  Moreover, it seems to
me that violence by those whose power confers legitimacy on its exercise
requires a stronger response than that by those who lack such power.
There should be a higher standard by which to judge the actions of police
and campus officials than of protesters, many of them –whether students or
not—youthful.  (I would also characterize the actions by individual police
outside of Wheeler as brief and perhaps spontaneous.  I do not by this
mean to excuse acts of police violence. It seems to me that police have a
professional responsibility to de-escalate a situation, and moreover
spontaneity does not excuse violence.)

The one group so far whose actions –both those that have fostered violence
and those that have constituted in themselves violence-- have been neither
brief nor spontaneous is the university administration.  Against all kinds
of advice from a range of campus figures, the university administration
has consistently escalated rather than tried to reach out.  The decision
to leave it to police to deal with the Wheeler occupation on Nov. 20, to
close the building, to not meet with protesters, to block faculty from
trying to mediate an end to the protest, and to charge the first arrested
protesters with felonies (with felonies (!) for staging a sit-in in two
Wheeler classrooms), the decision to surround Wheeler Hall with riot
police, all reflected decisions made by administrators who had amply time
to do otherwise. The distorted, unsympathetic statements released by
campus leaders days after the protest again followed deliberation and
caused real trauma to many students, including GSE students who described
a seemingly unbridgeable gap coming to separate them from a university
they had loved.  And then Friday morning, directly leading up to the
incident at the chancellor’s residence, the arrest and detention of the
students in Wheeler despite what appears to be police permission to be
there and the failure to give a dispersal order, the decision to detain
students at Santa Rita jail (an act the ACLU is investigating as a
possible violation of student’s constitutional rights), was, by its own
admission, a choice the administration made not in the heat of the moment
but after careful planning. (The Friday morning arrests in Wheeler Hall
ended a week-long protest during which academic activities continued
largely uninterrupted. During the week, students had been told by police
that they would be given the opportunity to disperse before police began
making arrests.  Students came and went.  Early Friday morning police
entered Wheeler and without warning began arresting sleeping students.
The administration has explained that faculty could not be called in as
mediators because it might have undermined the secrecy of the arrest
operation.  Because students had their computers and other study materials
confiscated and then were detained for many hours far from campus, they
were put at risk of academic failure.  And so, the campus’s senior
academic leaders now appear to many students dishonest enemies of their
education.  This premeditated action by campus leaders that did students
real harm does not excuse any violence at the president’s house, but it
does suggest a need to place violence that might have occurred there in
its context.

If the university curriculum is to include contentious public matters,
peaceful protest is not antithetical to their exchange but a crucial
component of it.  And on no campus has the history of protest done more to
extend the range of ideas exchanged in classrooms than Berkeley.  It is
thus all the more discouraging that campus officials have so consistently
escalated tensions and repressed protest rather than seeking a dialogue
with protesters.  Repudiating the role of campus leaders in violence does
not absolve protesters of responsibility for their actions, but to avoid
challenging the central role of campus leaders precludes any meaningful
dialogue.

Finally, I started this note because I thought that David’s appeal to
invocations of shared campus values rings increasingly hollow.  But David,
to his credit, has at least spoken out.  It is discouraging how few
faculty have done so. If shared governance is to mean anything beyond its
formal mechanisms, faculty have an obligation to speak up about
administrative violence that inevitably bears our imprimateur.

Dan

Campus administrator’s harsh treatment of protesters undermines

--------

(From the Dean of the School of Education)

> GSE colleagues (students, staff, and faculty,
>
> I have been struggling to find the words to convey to our GSE community
> the range of conflicting emotions that I have felt over the past few weeks
> as events have ranged from the sublime to the outrageous. My responses
> have ranged from pride (in the way our GSE and other students acquitted
> themselves in the initial protests in November), to bewilderment (at the
> reaction of our campus leadership to the initial Wheeler occupation) to
> concern (about whether the peaceful equilibrium in the Open University
> sessions could be maintained) to helplessness (with the arrests on Friday
> morning) to outrage (at the violence that placed the Birgeneaus in harm's
> way late Friday night next door at University House).  You are all, I am
> sure, equally conflicted as the events push and pull us in different
> directions.
>
> I was searching for a way to say that we must maintain some key
> principles, such as respect for all sorts of differences (including
> intellectual and moral issues, the right and responsibility for all of us
> to express our views in dialogue or even debate, the importance of
> resisting the impulses to violence. Then Catherine Cole shared these
> principles, officially adopted by our campus, and available on our
> Berkeley website, with the Faculty Forum.  They say what I was trying to
> say, much more eloquently than I.  Let's continue to debate the issues
> vigorously, respectfully, and peacefully.
>
> Yours in defense of fairness, respect, dissent, and peace,
>
> David
>
>
> PRINCIPLES OF COMMUNITY (http://berkeley.edu/about/principles.shtm)
>
> These principles of community for the University of California, Berkeley,
> are rooted in our mission of teaching, research and public service. They
> reflect our passion for critical inquiry, debate, discovery and
> innovation, and our deep commitment to contributing to a better world.
> Every member of the UC Berkeley community has a role in sustaining a safe,
> caring and humane environment in which these values can thrive.
>
>     * We place honesty and integrity in our teaching, learning, research
> and administration at the highest level.
>     * We recognize the intrinsic relationship between diversity and
> excellence in all our endeavors.
>     * We affirm the dignity of all individuals and strive to uphold a just
> community in which discrimination and hate are not tolerated.
>     * We are committed to ensuring freedom of expression and dialogue that
> elicits the full spectrum of views held by our varied communities.
>     * We respect the differences as well as the commonalities that bring
> us together and call for civility and respect in our personal
> interactions.
>     * We believe that active participation and leadership in addressing
> the most pressing issues facing our local and global communities are
> central to our educational mission.
>     * We embrace open and equitable access to opportunities for learning
> and development as our obligation and goal.
>
> UC Berkeley's "Principles of Community" statement was developed
> collaboratively by students, faculty, staff, and alumni, and issued by the
> Chancellor. Its intent is to serve as an affirmation of the intrinsic and
> unique value of each member of the UC Berkeley community and as a guide
> for our personal and collective behavior, both on campus and as we serve
> society.
>
>
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> P. David Pearson
> Professor and Dean
> Graduate School of Education
> 1501 Tolman Hall #1670
> University of California, Berkeley
> Berkeley CA 94720-1670

Copenhagen Climate talks Suspended

2009-12-14T10:58:00.000-08:00

Hope your finals are going better then the UN international climate change conference . The Huffington Post has updates on the situation. Essentially:

" ... the G77, which represents 130 developing countries "pulled the emergency plug" suspending the talks over wealthy countries' reluctance to discuss a legally binding emissions treaty".

Carrico on Campus?

2009-12-14T08:07:00.001-08:00

Hey Dale (and class), are you going to be in Berkeley today or tomorrow to accept anything that cannot be attached via email? If not, could I possibly send you a picture and then mail the final project to you? What works for you?

Many thanks,

Jen Cowitz

General Comments

2009-12-13T16:28:00.001-08:00

The last review section really helped put things in perspective for me. I got into an argument about what people really need earlier in the blog. My point then was that needs are hard to determine. Now I am starting to think there are a lot of things that we do not need but that we still need. Its because things that may just be offered as fetishized commercial items are chained to things we really need. For instance one may not need a book, but that book might lead the reader to realize how to better manage the needs she has. A vegetarian cookbook could do this. The value of that book is not really based on how much it costs, but what comes out of it.
There are so many entries that I cannot keep up anymore, but it was a great class and I learned a lot. Often academics can be completely useless in the real world, but Dale teaches in a way that seems to give a kind of agency to his students. The concept of peer to peer information becomes very important once we no longer have access or time to access University materials.
Finally I have to say that I am a capitalist as are you. Its not something for which we really have a choice in the matter. We all need jobs to pay bills and eat and eventually to feed our families etc. I wanted to buck the system and live a bohemian life without having to be part of the machine. Though I was able to find a fringe position in which I could exist (living like an artist in San Francisco), it became apparent to me that to really reach the audience I wanted to reach I would need capital. Now I am not saying that this going to be everybodies fate, but I suggest everybody keep in mind that we cannot truly extract ourselves from the systems in which we exist. College allows us a unique opportunity to be reflective and reflexive (which is more helpful then the former in the real world.) But just beyond those diplomas is survival. And I would be lying if I said I was not in school to improve my employment options. I hope if anybody reads this they do not find it to be a downer. To put it in the mildest form or criticism I can, I am simply trying to suggest that rather than fighting the system from the outside try and see how each of you can be a part of the system and still make positive changes within it that can have the kind of lasting effects that we as environmentally concious students would like to see. Often good can come from bad. Its not always easy to see the forest through the redwoods.
The End
Chris W

Precis: Reversal of Fortune by Bill McKibben

2009-12-11T21:49:00.000-08:00

There are two things that dominate this essay: happiness and wealth. The primary argument that McKiven is making is that for the last six decades (since the post-WWII economic boom) our country (and most of the world is catching on) has been seeking happiness through increasing it’s wealth. The question he ends up posing is whether or not wealth can create happiness, and though I think we all understand the basic assumption will be that “no it does not” McKibben goes into great detail about exactly why it is that wealth past a certain mark will not create happiness. Besides proving his point, there are certain other goals I will address that McKibben is attempting to achieve by convincing the reader that wealth and happiness are not necessarily dependent, and sometimes they are mutually exclusive.

McKibben makes the rhetorical move of putting the reader into a grouping of “us” at the very beginning: “They’ve built the unprecedented prosperity and ease that distinguish the lives of most of the people reading these words. It is no wonder and no accident that Smith’s ideas still dominate our politics, our outlook, even our personalities.” These lines do two things. First, they create an “us” for the readership. If you are reading this article you are likely one of the people that Smith’s philosophies have worked for. American, middle class, educated, a person with stuff. It is imperative that the reader identifies herself in this class because McKibben is making moves for the reader to see themselves as selfish and greedy, and as one of the causes for many of the problems this world is facing. Secondly, it establishes Smith as a relevant source, because what he said worked for YOU. McKibben from this point cannot completely disagree with the cited Smith, but for his argument he must show the reader that Smith’s ideas couldn’t predict the outcomes of his philosophies followed for such an extended period of time.

McKibben’s main points are stated at the very beginning: growth makes our lives worse, it isn’t making people wealthier, it is pushing the Earth’s physical limits (climate change and peak oil are given as examples) and his most important point that “growth no longer makes us happier.” Because of his first move identifying the reader as “one of us” he can now write from an us-central voice. By succeeding in this shift, McKibben manages to get the reader on his side through an appeal to credentials, i.e. ethos. By sharing in the same fate, we want to believe the solutions he offers. McKibben attempts to create an ethos that will include the left and right by citing both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton as supporters of the viewpoint that “more is better.”

The first natural counter-argument to the argument that one could come up with is that wealth enables agency. The more money you have, the more possibility you have at choosing what type of life you will live, and therefore the more potential happiness you have. McKibben does anticipate this argument when he discusses how people have become more alienated now than ever. My favorite example is his use of the popular TV show Survivor, “No wonder the show that changed television more than any other in the past decade was Survivor, where the goal is to end up alone on the island, to manipulate and scheme until everyone is banished and leaves you by yourself with your money.” He goes on, with an even stronger argument, quoting a psychologist Barry Schwartz:

“’people who participate in religious communities are happier than those who are not.’ Which is striking, Schwartz adds, because social ties ‘actually decrease freedom of choice’—being a good friend involves sacrifice.”

And as he stated earlier in the piece “we have a surplus of individualism and a deficit of companionship, and so the second becomes more valuable.” So even if wealth does enable agency, it seems that this agency is based on individualism, which has nothing to do with happiness. The adds for a new movie have George Clooney stating “think of your happiest memories, are they ever by yourself?” So is McKibben arguing that happiness and agency are mutually exclusive? It seems that he is, but only to a certain point.

This is where the idea of a $10,000 annual income benchmark becomes very important. The number seems to come out of nowhere, but the important part of the message is that happiness requires a certain amount of wealth, but beyond that there is a property of diminishing returns (we have talked about this in class a few times). So whether or not one agrees with the actual number ($10,000 a year for me will cover rent, food and my phone…. but nothing else—including my education), there certainly is a number where money stops becoming as important as friends, family, and other non-essentials. Maslow already argued this years ago with his hierarchy of needs—where we can see that money can buy physiological needs (food, water, shelter) and most safety needs (security of health, property, employment) but definitely nothing higher than these two most base levels. As the Beatles said “money can’t buy me love.”

After reading this piece I think the final purpose is both to inform a reader, and spur her into action. It achieves this goal by creating a very strong identification bond where the reader feels like McKibben understands exactly what is going on in their world. His use of pathos ( it has forced us to become more thoroughly individualistic than we really want to be) and ethos (by creating the “us” voice used everywhere in the text) seem to be more important than his logos, but he uses logos in every argument as well, mostly by using credible sources to back up his claims and by finding examples that draw attention (the floor plans of new homes, the Survivor example). By creating an audience that should identify with him as a speaker, and it may even spur some into action. For me, it made me want to read more of his stuff, and also put off buying an iPod even longer (as I have never owned one because I know as soon as I buy one, I will have to buy a new one in a year, and then the new nano… etc etc).

In Class Report on Local Beef

2009-12-11T21:25:00.001-08:00

Here are the links to Niman Ranch and Golden Gate Meat Company - a couple places where you can still get better beef... hopefully.

www.nimanranch.com
www.goldengatemeatcompany.com

What if cheap beef were outlawed? Can we one day live in a world where cows are raised and slaughtered more humanely? What would be the costs of such a project if it were to be applied globally and who would be able to afford to stay carnivorous? How much would this reduce the world's meat consumption? ???

Precis for Californian Ideology

2009-12-11T21:23:00.000-08:00

In their essay “Californian Ideology,” Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron offer up critique after critique of California’s techno-savvy, “culturally wacky”, blinded-by-ambition entrepreneurs. The two writers coin the term and define “Californian Ideology” as “a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism.” They go on to describe it as an enticing “faith” as well as an exportable “fashion.”

“Implacable in its certainties, the Californian Ideology offers a fatalistic vision of the natural and inevitable triumph of the hi-tech free market – a vision which is blind to racism, poverty and environmental degradation and which has no time to debate alternatives.” (thesis…I think)

In a nutshell, the Californian IT masters of the universe (the “virtual class”), through a “nearly universal belief in technological determinism” believe that pure freedom could be attained online. Their original hippie ideals, however, have been forgone in favor of an elitist, imperialist attitude and the larger picture replaced by a small-minded, damaging world view. Individualistic, democratic self-expression is drained out of the equation in favor of free market greed.

“Already ‘red lined’ by profit hungry telcos, the inhabitants of poor inner city areas can be shut out of the new on-line services through lack of money. In contrast, yuppies and their children can play at being cyperpunks in a virtual world without having to meet any of their impoverished neighbors.”

Instead of realizing a collective community (like the “agora” they refer to), this “ideology” only attains a further stratification of rich and poor where the rich get to plug into a fake reality and forget the bigger problems at hand.

The essay is written as a classic exposé of the corruption and misguidance behind a shiny new product. It is academic, but also sarcastic and humorous; educated, yet colloquial. It is also scathingly critical at every step. Its primary audience is anyone who goes online and enjoys a good blog and who might be unaware of the imperialistic forces at work behind the pretty web pages. In some ways it is a call to action – a wake up call to those who have forgotten all the good things that can come from advanced information technologies because they’re too busy buying and buying in.

The authors use various techniques to critique and discredit the Californian Ideologists. Twice in the paper the Ideology’s future is likened to sci-fi novels – romantic, but unrealistic and unpractical. The founders of the Ideology are constantly referred to as “hippies,” but hippies who lost their way. “…The cultural divide between the hippie and the organization man has now become fuzzy.” They critique the Ideologists for having a “profoundly anti-statist dogma” and priding themselves on being self-made, while gladly accepting government assistance and public funds to further their projects. An interesting point in the essay comes in a section entitled “the myth of the free market.” The first half of the section describes 19th and 20th century government intervention in technological development and ends at Nazi Germany’s failure to produce the first electronic computer. The essay then seamlessly transitions forward from history to the present where the US government pours “unacknowledged and uncosted” billions into the Californian Silicon Valley. The transition is not well explained, but leaves a bad taste in the mind of the reader.

Barbrook and Cameron continue to play up the contradictions embedded in the Ideology when they contrast the “celebrated libertarian individualism of the hippies” with the too-oft-forgotten “political and social demands of the counter-culture.” This critique culminates in an examination of Thomas Jefferson.

“The life of Thomas Jefferson – one of the icons of the Californian ideologists – clearly demonstrates the double nature of liberal individualism. The man who wrote the inspiring and poetic call for democracy and liberty in the American declaration of independence was at the same time one of the largest slave-owners in the country.”

The authors often take on the voice of those they are critiquing in a “so the argument goes” type of attack – one where the argument is easily refuted because the opposition can word it in a satirical way.

The only question mark in the piece comes after the question, “whose progress?” This emphasizes the way in which the original hippies have strayed from the path of altruism and have instead discovered the path to financial enlightenment instead.

In summation of their attacks, Barbrook and Cameron warn the reader of a Brave New World future where “individual freedom is no longer to be achieved by rebelling against the system, but through submission to the natural laws of technological progress and the free market.” (There’s our favorite word again…)

Precis on the Johannesburg Declaration

2009-12-11T17:51:00.000-08:00

The Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development was drafted at the United Nations’ World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002. The declaration reaffirms previous documentation on sustainable development and promotes new ideas concerning development for both the rich and poor nations of the globe. Basically, this document argues that humanity must unite to confront the environmental problems we face. We must work together to develop sustainably so we do not harm the needs of future generations because of our current wants.
This declaration is written with the input of most nations of the world, and is addressed to the same audience. While I feel the declaration is directed towards various world governments and NGOs working in the environmental field, this document applies to all citizens of the world, myself included. It outlines the importance of sustainable developmental and the steps towards building a sustainable world. By viewing this document as applicable to all world citizens, then the ideas it promotes are scaled much smaller than otherwise intended. In this regard, nations can still promote these policies through legislative means on a grand scale, and individuals can enact change in their own lives to protect their future generations. By reading it this way, individuals will realize the interconnectedness of the globe and how our individual actions affect those around the world.
This piece heavily builds upon previously documents produced by the United Nations. It calls upon the UN previous definitions of sustainable development, and also adds to the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. While it does refer to these previous documents, the piece does not raise a defense against possible objections. The language of the declaration is vague and general, so I cannot foresee many objections that would be raised by the audience to which it appeals.
This document addresses the problems of a growing world and its impact on lesser developed countries. These countries bear the brunt of development’s environmental impacts, and only add to environmental problems when they begin to develop. With these facts, the document states its thesis through various opening points which boil down to one central argument that the global society must work together to spur development of the poor while eradicating environmental harm. The Johannesburg Declaration argues that the world must make changes now to protect future generations. The developed world must aid the developing world, so they can grow sustainably without further harm to the environment. By making such an argument, the Declaration tries to alter current opinions about sustainable development. It encourages wealthy nations to aid nations so they do not resort to cheaper, less efficient sources of development. It hopes to compromise the growth of the developing world with the environmental goals of wealthier nations.
These arguments depend on certain assumptions about the state of the world. This document requires the reader to assume that much of the world is living in poverty, and this impoverished world is in need of development. Yet, as they develop, they will add to the problem of ecological degradation. Thus it is the duty of the developed countries to aid the developing so they can both lift themselves out of poverty and not contribute to environmental problems. While I think these are all valid assumptions, I think the document must do more to strengthen these arguments. It must clearly state what is at stake for the developed countries as LDCs begin to develop, giving credence to the idea that developed countries must assist them so they can develop sustainably. Developed and developing countries may find fault with the ideas presented here. These countries will bear a great cost if the resolutions presented here are enacted. The declaration makes no mention of cost or economic effects of the plan it outlines.
The Johannesburg Declaration hopes to bring awareness to the plight of developing countries while encouraging the growth and development of these countries. It uses no metaphoric or figurative language, and instead relies on literal language so it clearly outlines its goals. This is a document that will be reproduced in various languages (or was possibly translated from another language) so any figurative language would be lost. Despite this lack of creative writing, the Johannesburg Declaration still informs the reader of the stakes of global development and promotes forms of sustainable development with particular attention to poor countries.

12 cleanest and dirties veggies

2009-12-11T14:46:00.000-08:00

I found an article that lists the 12 "dirtiest" or most chemically treated/pesticide intensive fruits and vegetables, as well as the 12 "cleanest" or ones lowest in pesticides. The article recommends buying the 12 dirtiest organic.

Dirty Dozen: Peaches, Apples, Sweet bell peppers, Celery, Nectarines, Strawberries, Cherries, Lettuce, Grapes, Pears, Spinach, and Potatoes.

Cleanest 12: Onions, Avocado, Sweet Corn, Pineapples, Mango, Sweet peas, Asparagus, Kiwi, Bananas, Cabbage, Broccoli, and Eggplant.

Wwoof experiences?

2009-12-11T12:08:00.000-08:00

Wwoof (Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms)

I'm thinking about volunteering on a farm (maybe in Hawaii) next year and was wondering if anyone has had any personal experience, or has heard about friends' experiences, with Wwoof farms? I hear generally good things about the program but would appreciate any additional info or tips. Thanks!

General Website: http://www.wwoof.org/index.asp

A Precis for Vandana Shiva

2009-12-11T02:54:00.000-08:00

Vandana Shiva's argument is a plea to her fellow Indians and legislators to insist on the revision of global intellectual property regimes that allow for the patent and exploitation of indigenous methods and technologies. Such patents allow for the piracy of indigenous knowledge for the benefit of western corporations. Her most proximate example is a recent US patent issued to a pharmaceutical research company based in New Jersey for the proprietary use of 'karela', 'jamun','brinjal' to treat diabetes. Shiva is outraged that the method, a traditional and everyday Indian practice, has been deeded to the exclusive ownership of two assignees in the United States.

Shiva substantiates her argument by tracing the destructive implications of such US patent law. The ante of outrage goes up with each argumentative turn. Starting with the LOGICAL ABSURDITY: how can you patent and own something that has been in practice for hundreds if not thousands of years. To revealing the INSTITUTIONALIZED "Piracy" of the American patent system: historically, the US has condoned the theft of foreign technologies in order to foster national comparative advantage. Here, Shiva effectively illustrates the insidiousness of such traditions by anecdotally tying the practice back to America's trade revolution against the British. Also by directly quoting the failings in US IP law to bar patents requested for "prior art" in a way that does not discriminate against indigenous methods in underdeveloped countries (proof of "prior art" can only be made in foreign or domestic trade publications). Next, and most compelling, Shiva describes the GLOBALIZATION of such a flawed intellectual property regimes: as a result American economic hegemony has imprinted these elementally flawed patent laws onto international regulatory bodies that would then have jurisdiction to prohibit developing nations from the commercialization and foreign trade of their own indigenous methods. As a quick aside, I am surprised that she doesn't play out the logical extension of her argument; that, if enforced, Indians would be forced to license for the use of their own indigenous technologies.

After reading her Op-Ed, "The US Patent System Legalizes Theft and Biopiracy, I get the distinct impression that Vandana Shiva has a deep appreciation of the 90's eco-classic "The Medicine Man". For those who don't recollect the film, don't fear, I have engaged in multiple screening. In short, a very beautiful biochemist is sent by a pharmaceutical company to the Amazonian rainforest to check on Sean Connery who, in a fit of deep research, had cut of ties with the outside world. After a lot of brooding and classic Connery unfriendliness, he finally admits having found a cure for cancer, but has failed to recreate the naturally occurring formula that was given to him by a tribal medicine man. The original effective serum is running low as a nearby logging company builds a road headed straight for the village to begin chopping. Connery refuses to ask the powerful pharmaceutical company for help in halting the logging but is paralyzed by the knowledge that hints of a cancer cure will warrant in numerous researchers whose foreign diseases would wipeout the native tribe. Ultimately, a fight ensues between Connery and a bulldozer that starts a massive forest fire just as the beautiful biochemist realizes the cancer cure was a product not of a flower, as assumed, but a species of rare indigenous ant. As so happens, the local population of ant was completely wiped out with the fiery destruction of their habitat.

At this point Shiva is on her feet, whooping very loudly. From her perspective the Western corporate interests have been doubly stymied. The logging and pharmaceutical corporations have been hindered in their exploitation of third world timber and a locally practiced cure. However Shiva fails to recognize two vital points. Firstly, the abuse of patent rights goes both ways. If Shiva is anything like the majority of her fellow Indians, she has likely watched "Medicine Man" on a pirated DVD. The circuit board in her generic DVD player, the word processing software on her computer are undoubtedly based upon a foreign model. The blackmarket pills fighting malaria in India's northern province, AIDS in Africa most often are not subject to intellectual property enforcement. Yes, unfair enforcement mechanisms discriminate against indigenous products and methods, but is Shiva willing to trade the illegal proliferation of western products to get back the indigenously derived diabetes medicine and Bazmati rice? In my opinion, I cheer the blackmarkets who allow helpful technologies to reach the largest amounts of people for the lowest costs. The indigenous products that do not qualify as "prior art" will not make India rich. She must grasp it is the Indian intellectuals, software programmers, and engineers (all of whom document their work) who will achieve this. Secondly, and more prescient to our course, I challenge the her claims of ownership over such indigenous products. Her prime example, the health benefits of certain plants, are not a product of Indian ingenuity but its environment. the cancer cure of "medicine man" was a naturally occurrence. The duration of their existence is on a time scale where "indigenous" is but a blip.

Carbon Footprints and Immigration

2009-12-10T22:46:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to the video I showed in class sponsored by CAPS, Californians for population stabilization:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDFFbiIbm2c

And here is a link to their website:

http://www.capsweb.org/

--Karina Grifka

Report: Green Sidewalks

2009-12-10T22:10:00.000-08:00

FUF -Friends of Urban Forrestry

I personally think they have one of the better acronyms. I really wanted to talk about SLUG (San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners) but they don't seem to exist any more. But I will post if they respond to any of the phone calls or emails I sent to them.

-DJ Swire

2009-12-10T19:06:00.000-08:00

Hi Class.
This is Masih, I did my report about backpacks that charge your phones a few weeks ago. Here is the link:

http://www.v-dimension.com/en/products/view.php?prod=V-DIM-HELIUS

Masih Ebrahimi

Precis, The Shallow and the Deep

2009-12-10T18:52:00.000-08:00

"The Shallow and the Deep", a summary of Deep Ecology by Arne Naess, reveals a watershed moment for ecologists during the early 1970s. A chasm was forming in the ecological movement: On the one hand, the "shallow but presently rather powerful movement" and the other hand, "a deep, but less influential movement".
The Deep Ecology Movement is, for Naess, the only appropriate way to create ecologically-sound policies, for the shallow movement not only fails to provide effective solutions for the existing problems, but leads to the creation of more problems. Naess argues that the ecological movement should not be limited to the discussion of pollution and resource depletion. Scaring people with environmental catastrophe doesn't provide the necessary means to what Naess believes to be the end of "Deep Ecology". The Deep movement has great political potentials that go beyond the mere reduction of environmental degradation, and what Naess strives is to expand the capability of the ecology movement.
Although Naess derives his authority from the science of ecology, and the facts associate with it, the Deep Ecology movement is not derived from ecology by logic, but mainly from ecological knowledge. He takes a moment to differentiate between the ecological and philosophical elements of deep ecology, using ecosophy to describe this harmony. Naess explains the nature of the system of the argument he presents: "The basic relation is that between subsets of premises and subsets of conclusions, that is, the relation of drivability." Ecosophy will take many forms due to the variation of "facts" about ecology and value priorities. However, his seven points is an attempt to create a unified framework.
The first ecology movement, the Shallow, the author simply defines as a movement by those who struggle for protecting resources and addressing pollution in order to maintain the affluent and healthy lifestyle of people in developed countries.
Naess breaks the Deep movement into seven sections. The first point argues for a way to conceive human's place in nature. Instead of understanding human an isolated entity in an environment, Deep ecology understands humans, and other organisms to have intrinsic relations, and that our understanding of organisms is directly dependent on these relations.
The second argument addresses "biospherical egalitarianism", claiming that all organisms have the equal right to live and while opposing the notion of restricting this right to humans. Naess argues that anthropocentrism creates detrimental effects on the human living standards by saying that ignoring human's dependency on the environment, leads to "alienation of man from himself". Since Anthropocentrism is a polemical topic, the author employs idiosyncratic ecological definitions to provide a tone of scientific legitimacy when he discusses the future research variable of "level of crowding" and its behavior effects on that species.
In his third argument, Naess addresses the significance of diversity and symbiosis. He uses the concept "survival of the fittest" in its most paradoxical understanding when he argues that the survival of humans depends on their ability to maintain natural diversity through "the ability to coexist and cooperate". The traditional view of survival as competitive killing and exploitation destroys other species and communities within a species, and greatly decreases diversity and therefore survival.
In his next argument, Naess expands on the exploitation and suppression of groups within a community. Through this exploitation, a hierarchy is formed that benefits no one. This addresses the growing stratification among nations and societies.
The fifth argument refers to the most supported aspect of the ecological movement: "the fight against pollution and resources depletion". This dogmatic and unenlightened support leads to a band-aide approach that can generate more problems, instead of a holistic one. For this reason Naess argues that there is an ethical responsibility for ecologists to support the Deep movement.
Then he clarifies the distinction between complexity and complication. Ecologists acknowledge the "profound human ignorance of biosphereical relationships" and demonstrate the ecosystem’s complexity. Division of labor, not fragmentation of labor, is analogous to this ecological argument. By taking the complexity of ecosystemic into account and accounting for our ignorance, future research should produce clarifications of possibilities and less prognosis.
Lastly, Naess argues for local autonomy and decentralization. The significance of this policy is due to "the vulnerability of a form of life is roughly proportional to the weight of influences from afar". Accordingly self-governance and self-sufficiency is critical.

Clorox "Green Works"

2009-12-10T17:56:00.000-08:00

Presentation for Vanessa Lord:

I realized I'd forgotten to post on the blog about my presentation I did way back when in September. I spoke about "Greenwashing" and Clorox's relatively new cleaning solution "Greenworks."

Here is the greenworks website where you can review some of the advertising techniques that publicly "green" their company:

http://www.greenworkspresskit.com/

and another news article from which I got much of my research about the actual ingredients in greenworks:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/14/MNN7UC1IQ.DTL

The quote I ended my presentation with was from the CEO of 7th generation, Jeffery Hollender, and it summed up my feelings on the subject as well:

"'Green' is not something a company becomes because of a new product line, a marketing campaign, a decision to be carbon neutral or even the selection of an enlightened new CEO. 'Green' is about the inside, not the outside of a company. It's about its DNA, its culture, and its very reason for being."

Is Clorox Green Works really green?

p.s. I shared with the class some ideas for green cleaning solutions that you can make yourself and here is that list as well:

CITRUS FLOOR CLEANSER
1 gallon hot water
2 tablespoons liquid castile soap
15 drops sweet orange essential oil
1/ cup lemon juice
(combine in large bucket)

WINDOW CLEANSER
3 cups water
1/4 cup white vinegar
1 tbsp lemon juice
(mix and spray)

ON-THE-SPOT STAIN LIFTER
2 tablespoons cream of tartar
2 drops lemon essential oil
water
(combine to make paste, spread on stain, allow to dry before washing)

BATHROOM CLEANSER
1/2 cup baking soda
1/4 cup white vinegar
10 drops tea tree essential oil
(combine, scrub with brush, and flush)

Vanessa Lord

Precis: A Roadmap for Natural Capitalism

2009-12-10T17:54:00.000-08:00

by Vanessa Lord

In “A Road Map for Natural Capitalism,” the authors contend that altering business practices in ways that will help save the environment can ultimately improve a business’ bottom line and make it more competitive in the future economy. The article appeared in the Harvard Business Review—a journal for the current and future business leaders of America—ten years ago. The authors’ argument seeks to find an acceptable compromise between pursuit of two seemingly exclusive goals: a compromise between the protection of the earth’s natural resources and a business’ ability to make a substantial profit in a capitalist society. They say, “The reason companies (and governments) are so prodigal with ecosystem services is that the value of those services doesn’t appear on the business balance sheet. But that’s a staggering omission. The economy, after all, is embedded in the environment.” For the authors, wasteful consumption of natural resources in the modern economy is not only bad for the environment and for the future of our planet, it’s just plain bad business. From that follows the idea that if we start practicing business the way it was intended—by economizing our scarcest resources—we will save the environment in the process. Explicitly, it states its thesis as, “Business strategies built around the radically more productive use of natural resources can solve many environmental problems at a profit.” The article serves as an instructional roadmap for the future business leaders of America to follow as they make business decisions. The authors contend that there are four main stops on the “roadmap”:
1. dramatically increase the productivity of natural resources
2. shift to biologically inspired production models
3. move to a solutions based business model
4. reinvest in natural capital

The argument is particularly compelling, especially to the business set, because it is essentially comforting. The other environmentalists were too doomsday, the authors seem to say. It is not our lifestyle behavior that needs to be drastically changed in order to save the planet; business leaders just have to start practicing smarter business practices. Other texts we have analyzed in this class offered solutions that would be much more difficult to implicate—solutions that involve changing an entire way of life. This article lends hope to the idea that we aren’t doomed after all: we just have to, once again, trust in sturdy old capitalism.
The authors assume (and probably accurately so) that its readers—business leaders and future business leaders—will agree that markets can be predictable, trusted, and, when managed correctly, will result in profit for companies. The evidence in support of practicing each of the four roadmap points consists of statistics surrounding the successful bottom lines of companies who have followed these practices. It details how certain businesses have drastically minimized their use of natural resources while maximizing their profits, and it explains the way new technologies could do more of the same for more businesses in the future. It reads the same way a letter from a consultant written to the CEO of a big firm would read: namely, this is how you can cut costs and increase your bottom line.

Business jargon doesn’t seem out of place in a business journal, but the authors incorporate a discourse of nature into the text as well. In the authors’ argument, words like capital, value, and bottom line now seem to be applicable to environmental issues. The authors distinguish a drastic difference between natural resources and “ecosystem services,” (they say that is the distinction between exploitable resources, like petroleum that can be sold for profit, and the services that the earth provides for free, like maintainence of habitats and climates, etc.), and they put forth the term “natural capitalism” as their idea of what the future of capitalism will become if it follows the traditional capitalist logic of capitalizing on the scarcest resources. All of a sudden, mother nature seems to become a key player in big business. Mother nature provides ecosystem services in the sum of $33 trillion a year, they say. The article’s essential argument depends on these neologisms that work by combining environment and business, like “natural capitalism” and “ecosystem services.” These phrases are the rhetorical integration of our economical and ecological goals, and they are signifiers for the conceptual integration of those goals.

The “broken compass” serves as a recurring metaphor throughout the text. The compass stands for capitalism, essentially—for an invisible hand phenomenon. The fact that the compass is “broken” is indicative of the authors’ belief that “the instruments companies use to set their targets, measure their performance, and hand out rewards are faulty. In other words, the markets are full of distortions and perverse incentives.” The compass is still set on the premises of the world during the Industrial Revolution. If we reestabish these mechanisms, namely, fix the compass, capitalism will be successful, and as an added advantage we can do this in a way that preserves natural resources, the authors say. The compass metaphor is consistent with the use of the term “roadmap” as the title for the article. Both are interesting terms because they connote the type of tools pionneers used when first exploring nature in the sense of unknown territory. Pioneers used compasses when they explored, created maps, chartered terrain—when these pioneers, in a sense, made the natural world knowable and managable in the realm of the social construct of humankind. Similarly, with natural capitalism, ecological systems can become a part of the realm of capitalism.

Yet the authors seem to directly contradict their argument, and to finally get one thing irrefutably right, when they say: “In the industrial system, we can easily exchange machinery for labor. But no technology or amount of money can substitute for a stable climate and productive biosphere. Even proper pricing can’t replace the priceless.” But isn’t natural capitalism doing just that—putting a price on the priceless? The authors admit we cannot put a price on a stable climate and a productive biosphere, why then can we include ecosystem services as a integral aspect of the money-oriented “bottom lines” of the businesses that engage in “natural capitalism”?

Vanessa Lord

Queer Ecology-Re-articulating the Language of Oppression (a precis)

2009-12-10T17:46:00.000-08:00

In Unnatural Passions?: Notes Toward a Queer Ecology, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands draws on established disciplines of ecofeminism and environmental justice, arguing that they “open our eyes to the fact that nature organizes and is organized by complex power relations. What queer ecology adds is the fact that these power relations include sexuality.” She examines the connection between sexuality and nature, first in terms of the institutions that categorize and qualify “nature” and “sexual identity,” most notably in the pathologization of non-normative sexual desire. She then goes on to point out a relationship between sexuality and the construction of natural space, such as urban and national parks, arguing that these spaces emerge from and serve to regulate and re-inforce normative sexual desire. She ends by exploring how a “queer ecological project” might challenge these normative power relations articulated within discourses of sexuality and nature, writing “My argument is thus that we should reorient our politics and take on what I am calling a queer ecological perspective, to work toward more critical possibilities responsive to the kinds of complex relations of power that I have thus far outlined. Here, I am advocating a position not only of queering ecology, but of greening queer politics.”

The article begins by describing a metaphor that seems to be fundamentally synonymous with an understanding of queer ecology, that of Jan Zita Grover's encounter with nature, Sandilands even describes her as a source for the development of the article: “With Grover as my guide, I am arguing that there is indeed such a thing as a queer ecology.” She expresses the value of Grover's perspective: “Grover, by taking elements of queer experience to construct an alternative environmental perspective. By this label, I mean that she focuses on dimensions of her experience born in the specific history of a queer community, and uses the resulting emotional resonances and conceptual links to live in nature in a way that reflects this queer experience. Simply put: Grover sees nature through queer eyes, and what she sees is important and unique.” The passage suggests that the queer experience can be used to alter the way one understands and lives within “natural” spaces, undermining perhaps the hetero-normative power-relations of spacial construction.

What is interesting about this metaphor to me is that despite its centrality to the article and supposed embodiment of the (or a) queer perspective, the language that Grover uses seems to re-articulate the language of oppression used to pathologize and marginalize queer people and queerness. For example, Sandilands writes of her experience, "The idea that one might find natural wholeness in this hard, boreal landscape was shattered at the sight of its large, multiple clear-cuts and the thin “idiot strips” of trees along the highways that foolishly attempt to conceal the scars to the landscape caused by the softwood pulp and paper industry.” She describes the effects of industry on the woods as “scars” and “artificial” and therefore devoid of “natural wholeness.” She uses these woods as a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic, and eventually learns to love and find beauty in the scars. She writes that the woods “offered me an unanticipated challenge, a spiritual discipline: to appreciate them, I needed to learn how to see their scars, defacement, and artificiality, and then beyond those to their strengths – their historicity, the difficult beauties that underlay their deformity.” Through the filter of her queer perspective, she does not learn to see the woods as whole but to look past their “deformity” to their positive attributes. Though this metaphor preaches the rhetoric of acceptance, it seems to re-enforce a certain articulation of what is “natural” and “unnatural,” problematic in light of how that rhetoric applies to queer sexuality. Granted she is speaking of AIDS and not sexual identity, but I feel a large part of the AIDS epidemic is the marginalization of those living with HIV/AIDS and the “unnatural” acts or desires associated with it. And furthermore, in terms of how a queer perspective may revolutionize an understanding of space, Grover's conceptualization of a “whole natural forest” does not seem to stray very far from the spacial understanding of a national forest as devoid of aboriginals, even if the political implications are very different.

So Grover's “queer experience” contains its own form of normativity, but hers is only one experience of many, right? Sandilands speaks of the value of the queer perspective to re-orient ourselves toward space, but whose queer perspective is it? She acknowledges that many queer discourses re-articulate normativity and therefore need to be “greened” up, but she only offers the examples of commercialism and gay marriage, neglecting the fact that even outside these obviously normative articulations, queer experiences are normative in complex ways, in terms of gender identity and expression, in terms of race, body type, and behavior. These are not directly linked to the normative articulations that Sandliland's points to: commercialism promoting waste, etc and gay marriage mirroring the hetero-normative paradigms that construct and are constructed by “natural spaces.” Is the queer experience valuable simply because it is unique? Can a queer understanding that is valuable to the re-articulation of space be extracted from individual subjectivity, in which these queer experiences are implicated in other problematic forms of normativity that construct and are constructed by space?

-Karina Grifka

Precis on John Zerzan's "Agriculture"

2009-12-10T16:53:00.000-08:00

We’re Not Part of the Problem. We Are the Problem.

The first thing to notice about John Zerzan’s piece on Agriculture is that it is subtitled “Demon Engine of Civilization,” which immediately conjures up an image of a man-made, energy-consuming piecemeal assembly-line prototype of carbon-pumping pistons that, for all intensive purposes, endlessly generate only fractions of the energy its inception depleted. The next thing to notice about the piece is, less hopefully, that our original sin was literally “ordering the world.” For me, it doesn’t translate that naming today as “Thursday” somehow robs the day of its day-likeness or that fixing a date for a ceremony somehow makes the ceremony less purposeful. But even if our name-giving and representation-making can reasonably be considered the moment that we fell from grace, whatever we learned in falling is crucial to our understanding of Zerzan’s argument as a legible one, and ultimately as one that has literally materialized as words on a page.

There is a Key Term in Every Word And The Lesson of Each is That It Should Be Unlearned

Of course there are buzzwords (like time, language, number, art, “and all the rest of culture”) but no one in particular demands our attention. It’s not because each is unsubstantial or unsubstantiated, it is instead because our attention is due more immediately to the fact that there are words to be concerned with at all. (Really, what else could an argument be constructed with other than words?) It’s certainly true in this piece, and I think it can be said of all anti anti-civilization discourses more generally, that if THE problem originated with the emergence of agriculture, then the root of the problem was with the topical application of language. When in doubt, it’s always safe to assume that behind every problem “artificiality and work” are to blame and that we’ve already cultivated out of life all that was worth living way, way before “we necessarily domesticated [ourselves].”

We learned in Green Precursors Week that “culture” arises from “cultivation.” All of the cultural projects and constructs and institutions to which Zerzan makes recourse, then, can be reconfigured metaphorically in ways that look a lot like what we’re doing when we cultivate a field. On a figurative level, though, this actually plays out when word-pairs like “technology” and “culture” or like “agriculture” and “production” become inexhaustibly interchangeable. Words are still always just weeds, though.

Who, Me?

If “culture” so-called is the crossroads at which language and signification meet, then what Zerzan is calling for is the undoing of a culture we ourselves have signified. This claim is totally and utterly insane, but at least it is self-consistent.

Zerzan does a smart thing when he doesn’t argue for civilizations to rid themselves of calendars. Surely even he realizes that an “industrial society [would] be impossible without time schedules.” So instead of arguing for a re-configuration of society as one that’s free from “formalized temporal reference points,” he just argues for the disavowal of civilization as we know it. This kind of call-to-action is as illogical as it is genocidal, and no number of sufficiently interested subscribers can ever ethically sympathize with genocide. If the magnitude of such a regression is seriously “unimaginable…for the modern mind,” then who on Earth is he possibly talking to?

As far as anti-civilizational writers go, Dale wasn’t kidding when he said Zerzan does it to the hilt. Perhaps the reason Zerzan’s ideas don’t seem outright dismissible, though, is because his arguments always seem just about half-right. Surely agriculture is a triumph, but it’s not a triumph of “estrangement.” Nobody’s going to argue against the fact that we humans are “less connected” than we once were, but that’s not necessarily to say alienation by agriculture is the reason.

Bat-Shit Crazy As the Wave of the Future

The conclusion posits something like “our decision to embrace agriculture was a catastrophic mistake.” Be that as it may, that Zerzan argues we had a CHOICE in the matter is, again, i-n-s-a-n-e. Even if it’s only through the dissolution of agriculture—and thereby everything else—we may then find our path to liberation, it is in making this claim that Zerzan resubstantiates the very civilizational set of symptoms which he claims 1) we, exclusively, have all been sickened by and 2) that he’s already rejected as problemetizing in the first place.

As if his fetishized and delusive pre-alienated state of nature could ever exist! There can be no such thing as a pre-technological humanity because technology has and will always footnote culture. Our self-consciousness depends for its intelligibility on our having been cultured, linguistic, and historicized from the beginning of time as we know it. In the meantime, then, we must then all of us be absolutely riven by this alienation from everything that was once good. If ticking clocks really are “a function of repression,” then we’re all unconsenting umpteenth-generation slaves to ourselves in a futureless now, and we don’t care.

If there can never be any trajectory from our world to Zerzan’s, then the space out of which his argument arises is altogether as uninhabitable as the Paleolithic terrain to which he looks for redemption.

By Lauren Klein

Precis on "Why Copenhagen May Be a Disaster"

2009-12-10T14:49:00.000-08:00

Precis on "Why Copenhagen May Be a Disaster"

By Nuveen Dhingra

Bill McKibben, in “Why Copenhagen May Be a Disaster,” argues that the failure to recognize that climate change is not a normal political problem has been—and will continue to—retard our ability to adequately respond to it.

The article begins with a general statement about politics. “Most political arguments,” he writes, “don’t really have a right or wrong….[t]hey’re about human preferences….” Because most seemingly clear-cut stances on issues also have strong arguments to the contrary, politics relies upon compromise, which makes change slow. McKibben uses this characterization of the political process to explain why healthcare reform has been stunted. Perhaps a single-payer model has been thwarted this time, but at least its discussion may make people more receptive to it the next time healthcare is discussed. This is how politics-as-usual operates and may be a necessary cost of maintaining a pluralistic society.

The tools of politics-as-usual, however, are insufficient to deal with the climate change crisis. The problem in this crisis is unlike what we usually deal with: “Republicans, or socialists, or deficits, or taxes, or misogyny, or racism.” “The adversary here is physics.” While the normal adversaries are not immutable, the laws of physics do not sway. Politicians have been unwilling to react to the climate change under such terms. McKibben cites numerous instances of reluctance sacrifice prioritization of supposed national interests over honest recognition of gravity the problem.

Is Mckibben engaging in anti-democratic discourse? He advocates the suspension of normal politics in which actors attempt to reach consensus. In mobilizing the “wartime partnership” that Obama should have been seeking with China, he is figuring climate change as an emergency that must be responded to with a coordinated, authoritarian, and absolutist strategy. The crisis is upon us, and we have no time for politics. We know what must be done, and since talking about it will take too long, let us skip politics and go to war.

To be fair, this is not what McKibben is actually calling for, but perhaps only because it is not possible. Instead, he is arguing that politicians need to adopt these “wartime” discursive frames in the sphere of politics in order to accomplish what need to be done. But declaring war seems cheap. Politicians are always declaring war: on poverty, on drugs, on terror. What justifies the urgency here? Mckibben says that climate change is implacable, much like fascism was, and thus demands going “all in,” and putting all other things “on hold.” This is interesting because he earlier justifies the climate change crisis as being a different kind of problem by appealing to the laws of physics as immutable. Physics is “out there,” and marks its bottom lines independent of us. On the other hand, the human problems that he cites are yielding. But if the climate change crisis is like fascism, what can justify fascism as being “out there,” or as something that will not yield?

The distinction that Mckibben draws between fascism and climate change and “normal” political problems is unsustainable along these lines. Climate change and fascism are political problems that demand political solutions, and the same reluctance to recognize urgency can be said to pervade other political problems. Impending doom and irreversibility of harm are appropriate criteria for advocating urgency on climate change, but we must also embrace the political process if that is all we have. Should we focus on reducing carbon emissions before we tackle healthcare, entitlements, and financial regulation? I am not sure what McKibben would say, but I would rather have some healthcare reform before embarking on the trip that action on climate change will require. Perhaps organizing issues like healthcare reform and financial regulation around a green ethos could be a feasible way to get things done on all fronts.

Precis - Antibiotic overuse threatens modern medicine: Experts - www.reuters.com

2009-12-10T13:42:00.000-08:00

1.The article Antibiotic overuse threatens modern medicine presents the argument that unnecessary use and over prescription of antibiotics presents a problem for the future of health care. Antibiotics are a necessary element in creating successful outcomes for various serious procedures and, with overuse, the ability to be assured of those outcomes is threatened. These procedures, including hip replacements, chemotherapy and organ transplant will eventually become impossible to treat if those in the health care field continue to overuse and over-prescribe antibiotics.

2.The article is pitched to an audience that has more than a general awareness about the healthcare system and antibiotic usage. The article addresses a well-educated base of individuals and in fact, seems largely intended for medical practitioners themselves. The usage of latin terminology to describe existing strains of antibiotic resistant illnesses suggests, at minimum, a greater-than-layperson sophistication in the field of medicine.

As an individual who has a significant amount of information about antibiotic usage and abuses, I am part of the authors’ intended audience. I do not, however, appreciate the fact that they take their audience for granted in making the assumption that their audience has enough of a general breadth of knowledge to understand the argument they employ. In failing to elaborate on specific points and in failing to define specific terms they lose the audience of individuals who are not educated about antibiotic usage and abuses. Ironically, it is the lack of comprehension on the part of these same individuals that seems to be one of the fundamental problems described in the argument.

3.The article’s primary purpose is to alter both the conduct of medical practitioners as well as that of the public. It does not present counterarguments nor does it seek to offer some acceptable compromise between two countervailing views. It fails to even present any explanations for the behavior in question, and thus fails to anticipate its own criticism. For example, prescription of strong antibiotics may be occurring as a manifestation of defensive medicine; The fear of lawsuits may be a factor in some doctors’ practice of what the authors would consider bad medicine. The article suggests that the use of strong antibiotics should be reserved to vitally necessary treatments. The article suggests that there is no middle ground. It aims at challenging convictions and changing the conduct around the use of and prescription of antibiotics.

If convictions are a set of beliefs that an individual adopts and abides by then the article seeks to change the convictions of those many individuals that believe a prescription of antibiotics is the best way to handle their or their children’s ailment. Not only does the article seek to challenge those convictions, but also, as a consequence of altering those convictions, seeks to modify the behavior of those individuals seeking antibiotics unnecessarily. In addition to changing the conduct of antibiotic-seeking individuals, the article also seeks to change the conduct of doctors who prescribe the antibiotics at the persuasion of these patients. The fundamental concern of the article is to challenge the assumptions the public has about “wonder” drugs and the medical treatment we seek. In challenging those assumptions the article informs the general public that being prudent and informed about our individual health care will not only serve ourselves, but will also serve the greater public health by extending the span of usefulness of existing antibiotics for many years. Yet by speaking in terms unavailable to the general public it fails to provide a space where the general public might find more awareness about this important issue. Reuters ends up addressing those who already have a familiarity with the concerns associated with overusing antibiotics, but not necessarily one of the audiences whose behavior it is attempting to change.

What’s at stake in this article is the welfare of vast numbers of people and the healthcare system itself. If people keep demanding antibiotics for unnecessary illnesses and doctors keep prescribing them under the persuasion of their patients we will eventually be unable to render the high percentage of successful medical outcomes to which we have become accustomed. If overuse and over prescription render antibiotics ineffective it will not only contribute to a decline in our longevity but it will also stress our healthcare system to the point where the cost to treat individuals will be so high, and the need for treatment so dire, as to possibly result in an utterly failed healthcare system.

4. The thesis of the argument is that “the "whole span of modern medicine" is under threat because bugs are become resistant to antibiotics, rendering the drugs useless”(www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5A927820091110).

5.The numbers of deaths resulting in previously treatable “Staphyloccus aureus,” which, in at least one strain, is now resistant to multiple antibiotics, and causes 19,000 deaths in the US alone is the article’s primary source of evidence. The arguments also cites “Sarah Earnshaw of the ECDC's communications unit, [who] pointed to a 2002 survey that showed 60 percent of patients do not know that antibiotics do not work against viruses like flu and colds.” However, the article doesn’t address why 60 percent of patients are not aware of this fact. Nor does the article address the how to better reach this portion of the population – it only suggests that there is to be an “antibiotic awareness” campaign that will instruct doctors not to prescribe unnecessary antibiotics. This doesn’t address the 60 percent of the population that might be less likely to seek antibiotics if they knew when the use of antibiotics was appropriate and useful.

Perhaps the brevity of the article renders it unable to define its terms, address certain implications, or dive further into the discussion of antibiotic overuse and over prescription. However, without doing a more generally available analysis of the overuse of antibiotics the article fails to reach some of very people who might be able to benefit from an article of this type – the 60 percent of individuals who don’t know when it’s best to seek antibiotics, and when it’s best to refrain from using them.

7. While the language of the article is pretty straightforward, it does depend on a general awareness of the function of antibiotics. This assumed general awareness comes through in the article’s lack of description about the additional appropriate uses of antibiotics. By limiting the set of appropriate conditions to those mentioned (neo-natal care, intensive care, cancer chemotherapy, hip replacements, organ transplants where, as the article states “antibiotics are needed in all these treatments to prevent bacterial infection” (www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5A927820091110)) the article leaves the reader more confused as to the appropriate use of antibiotics. Additional appropriate uses such as in the treatment of sinus infections, strep throat, bladder infections, and so on are not mentioned or noted as cases in which antibiotics are useful. Without a clear and full set of appropriate uses, or some rule of thumb to guide them, the uninformed reader is left more confused about antibiotic usage than when they began the article.

The article also addresses “methicillin-resistant Staphyloccus aureus (MRSA)” as a superbug without defining what it is, why it’s resistant to treatment with antibiotics, or how it might be contracted. It then follows up with staggering numbers about who it kills where by saying that “such infections kill about 25,000 people a year in Europe and around 19,000 in the United States”. The article, which could be a vehicle delivering greater understanding to those who need it most, fails to inform the reader about what this infection is, who it infects, the conditions under which it is likely to infect, or how it became resistant (www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5A927820091110).

Précis: A Road Map for Natural Capitalism

2009-12-10T13:35:00.000-08:00

In light of the fact we did not really discuss Natural Capitalism in class, I thought I’d take this opportunity to discuss this “Road Map”. I am primarily concerned with the supposed incompatibility of capitalism with environmental friendliness. We’ve come across this incompatibility in class and I’m hoping this investigation will further illuminate the issue.
The primary argument of the Road Map is that it is more profitable to have environmentally friendly business practices. They argue that intact ecosystem services are vital to the continuation of profit because their absence would be a serious “limiting factor to prosperity”. Ecosystem services are cast as previously free services that must now be paid for because natural disasters are causing billions of dollars in damage. They argue that resources and ecosystem services are not the same thing and we must stop thinking in terms of commodities and more in terms of services. Their thesis is that by raising resource productivity, closing production loops, shifting toward solution based production model and adopting business practices that support and sustain ecosystem services, capitalism can successfully adapt to the environmentally precarious world.
The audience is most definitely business owners. The report is not pitched toward alternative lifestyle environmentalists. It is very much invested in maintaining a capitalist order and the success of the argument hinges on the ability to make people believe that environmental preservation is profitable. To this end they employ many examples of profitable “Whole-System Design”. They recount the long-term benefits of switching to initially more expensive technologies. A good five pages of the report are examples of technological successes, yet the argument of the piece does not end up being a doctrine for techno fixes. It merely cites the technological examples to support its goal of convincing business leaders to alter their conduct.
In altering their conduct the capitalist order would be altered as well. I initially wrote the goal was to maintain the “current capitalist order”, and then deleted “current” because the interesting maneuvers that happen around the ideas of “services” and “ownership” lead me to believe that if natural capitalism were our economic system, we would not have such a commodity fetish. The section on “Changing the Business Model” gives examples of companies that have changed to the “solution economy” which is essentially service-leasing. The two examples cited are those of an elevator and a carpet company that lease their products. By leasing “vertical transportation systems” the elevator company captures the saving from its energy efficient elevators, and by leasing carpets the carpet company can “remanufacture” its carpets and save on inputs. The companies are voluntarily taking on more responsibility. This theme about the benefits of greater responsibility emerges again in the argument that consumer are more likely to support environmentally responsible businesses. The latter however rests on the warrant that consumers know the truth about a company’s environmental record. If business engage in greenwashing, it is difficult for consumers to support truly responsible businesses. Regardless of whether this service economy could be achieved, would it be better then a commodity driven one? The report argues that it would be because people would be more interested in building relationships as opposed to selling products.
The report itself engages in potential greenwashing. In the same section where the “service-leasing” appears, they use Dow Chemical as a company as an example. The report was written in 1999 and Dow purchased Union Carbide (responsible for the Bhopal disaster) in 2001, but the legitimacy of the entrepreneurial practice of “service-leasing” is diminished if the full history of the company is exposed. The report does not claim Dow as an exemplary environmentally friendly company, but given its full story, it is repulsive to think that it would be used as an example of a company with practices that supposedly benefit the environment.
The whole point of the piece is to encourage businesses to consider and minimize the environmental impact of decisions. The figurative language of the piece is used to give weight to the environment. Embedded within the report are the metaphor of the river for a company’s production process and the trope of frontier exploration within the “journey toward natural capitalism”. These figures, evoke more of an exploration of nature. Journeys are not sustainable; you cannot always be traveling; so I question the meaning that the figures have on the future of natural capitalism. Perhaps they mean that once we think we’ve arrived something new and better will come up. Most crucially, although it cites many technological advances that are environmentally friendly, the report ultimately rejects the ability of technology to solve the problem (as evident in the use of the Biosphere II story) and calls for a fundamental shift from valuing short-term gains to long-term gains. If this shift happens I think there really is compatibility between capitalism and environmentalism. However, the bottom line of the report is a commitment to increased profits and not environmental stewardship. If it’s really all about profit, I wonder if the environmental ethic will actually become embedded in business practices, or if it will be greewashed in as the environmental figurative language is inserted into the text.

2009-12-10T12:55:00.000-08:00

Precis on Slum Ecology by Mike Davis

The basic argument is that Cities are growing very rapidly in the past few decades. He writes: "
Cities have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950, and are currently adding a million babies and migrants each week. Dhaka, Kinshasa, and Lagos today are each approximately forty times larger than they were in 1950." In this process of rampant urbanization, the planet has become marked by the runaway growth of slums, characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure. Slums begin with bad geology. They are more often than not built on unstable dolomitic soil contaminated by generations of mining or in areas of toxic waste and chronic ground collapse. Interestingly enough, he argues that all this is not necessary at all. We read half way in the article that: "Urban theorists have long recognized that the environmental efficiency and public affluence of cities require the preservation of ecosystems, open spaces, and natural services: cities need them to recycle urban waste products into usable inputs for farming, gardening, and energy production. And along with intact wetlands and agriculture, sustainable urbanism presupposes a basic level of safety—of meteorological, hydrological, and geological stability, and protection against disasters like floods or fire." Yet, none of those conditions can hold in most Third World cities.

In the Third World slums that lack potable water and latrines are unlikely to be defended by expensive public works or covered by disaster insurance. Researchers writing in the journal Cities point out that foreign debt makes such infrastructure investment ever more unlikely. “Structural adjustment”—the protocols by which indebted countries surrender their economic independence to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)—drives sinister trade-offs that favor export-oriented production, competition, and efficiency at the expense of disaster-vulnerable settlements.

The global forces pushing people from the countryside seem to sustain urbanization even when the pull of the city is drastically weakened by debt and economic depression. One by one, national governments gripped in debt lost access to agricultural subsidies and support for rural infrastructure. Latin American and African nations abandoned peasant “modernization” efforts and deregulated national markets, subjecting peasant farmers to the “sink-or-swim” economic strategy of international financial institutions. Pushed into global commodity markets, agricultural producers found it hard to compete. These anti-peasant policies had the same results throughout much of the developing world

The audience is middle or upper class Americans. People who know about feng shui and probably have the luxury to actually discriminate between living places with high or low feng shui. His humor is directly addressed to an audience who is taken to be completely ignorant of such facts. This, reminds a more knowledgeable reader how the majority of her society is like. For example when he says "earthquakes make even more precise audits of the urban housing crisis," and continues to say that this is the "devil's bargain of 'informal' housing," he is using our own terms to remind us the sort of denial that goes on among the middle class of industrialized societies. We see two more of such examples when he says they "dont lose much sleep at night worrying," the thing that we modern societies so often do. And reminds us that when hearing wild fires, instead of thinking Mediterranean brush, we have to think of slums as the "world's premier fire ecology." He follows all this harsh language with a final shock when he tells the reader that before developing a slum site, rather than bearing the expense of court procedures or enduring the wait for an official demolition order, a favorite method of Filipino landlords is to chase a “kerosene-drenched burning live rat or cat—dogs die too fast—into an annoying settlement… The unlucky animal can set plenty of shanties aflame before it dies.”

Amin Ebrahimi

Today at Cafe Milano

2009-12-10T12:27:00.000-08:00

Lots of posts to the blog today I see, so I want to reiterate for those who don't scroll down all the way to my last message on this point, that I'm camping out at Milano rather than Strada this afternoon (hoping to find a warm perch there more easily), from 2-ish up today's informal/unofficial class meeting later in Dwinelle. Again, if others get there first, try to secure a capacious conspicuous table for us to settle in.

Two Interesting Short Pieces

2009-12-10T10:54:00.000-08:00

Josh Marshall: Climate Science Denialism and the status of scientificity for the informed citizen.

Bill McKibben: The nature of politics is at the heart of the problem of our politics concerning nature.

Precis: Bruno Latour's "It's Development, Stupid!" or: How to Modernize Modernization

2009-12-10T08:42:00.000-08:00

In Bruno Latour's "It's Development, Stupid!" Or: How to Modernize Modernization, Latour argues that environmentalism is not only the a description of a state of mind that is behind the modern era, but also that it purports to engage and to disperse ideas that are oversimplified and impotent in the face of the real environmental problems we now face. He argues that modern environmentalists should call themselves, though it is not necessarily the best term, is "postenvironmentalists" as they must now identify themselves with a group in favor of real, lasting and immediate environmental benefit that results from the resituating of our own connection to nature.

In many ways, Latour's argument is a rebuke of the engaged, green masses for not having done enough; he's yelling at us for having read Mike Davis and not having signed up for the Peace Corps, for attending Power to the Peaceful and Sea World as a means of global change. In the excerpt's conclusion, Latour writes,

"Environmentalists say: 'From now on we should limit ourselves,' postenvironmentalists exclaim: 'From now on, we should stop flagellating ourselves and take up explicitly and seriously what we have been doing all along at an ever increasing scale, namely, intervening, acting, wanting, caring.'"

While Latour discusses several paradoxes of environmentalism, this is his most effective and move palpable. Environmentalism has failed (think Al Gore in the recent SNL threatening to tape guns to trees) by trusting its own slow success. Latour offers a call to arms, but not merely to act. He asks that we reidentify our own relationship between Science and Nature.

Probably the most objectionable claim in Latour's piece is that man and Nature, or Science and Nature, are becoming more and more entangled rather than separated. Many argue that mankind is the bringer of artifice and Nature is that which lacks man. However, as Latour points out,

"Nature whose laws should remain 'untouched by human values,' needs our constant care, our undivided attention, our costly instruments, our hundreds of thousands of scientists, our huge institutions, our careful funding. We had Nature, we had nurture, but we don’t know what it would mean for Nature itself to be nurtured."

There is a quality of Nature that can no longer exist in Nature. If we are to return to the earliest part of the course, we could say that Latour is essentially arguing the impossibility of a Nature 4 and for the a greater embrace of a Nature 6 that incorporates a certain innate quality of man because man is part of Nature. Nature seems here to be an entity with which we are not only entangled directly as a species, but also cannot extract ourselves from it because we have made it a tabula rasa that each culture, or generation of environmentalists, actively reengineers.

Jen Cowitz

Lackoff Precis

2009-12-09T23:35:00.000-08:00

"How We Talk About the Environment Has Everything to Do with Whether We'll Save It: By George Lackoff."

Or does it? PRECIS

Lackoff's basic argument is that one's understanding of facts and figures translates through cognitive internalization into moral significance and that the values reflected by this internalization are contingent on the deliverance of that knowledge. That is to say, the way we use language and words determines the way our brains will produce an ethical understanding of certain facts, namely the current and dire environmental situation. By using the technical term for "understanding," Lackoff mobilizes the logic of "framing" to argue the importance of language as the mechanism for which we will realize a sense of reality and in turn, enact policy change.

"Framing," according to Lackoff, frames are organized into frame systems and work in terms of circuitry. These frames are further "organized in terms of values" and through reason, we "reflect our values." Lackoff claims that there are two opposing, but deeply ingrained, "value-based systems operating in our politics," and in particular, "the conservative framing system is actually at odds with a realistic understanding of the environmental problems facing us." Thus, given the unconscious power of developed framing systems, overcoming this will be daunting and the right language mandatory.

The argument seems to suggest mostly honesty, truth, and objectivity, but that our current understanding of "facts and findings", or rather the denial thereof, is not reflecting this reality. This is due to years of media manipulation and millions of dollars, dictates Lackoff.

The warrant in this piece appears to be that its widely accepted that the public believes a lie, more or less. That is to say, that the epiphany of the truth will suddenly result in instant action and change. However, Lackoff doesn't address the notion that bad habits are hard to quit. Even a lifelong smoker who nearly lost his life and is now breathing out of his throat will be known to continue to smoke. There is no doubt that he has internalized and understood the danger of smoking, but it doesn't change his actions. Many of those practices which have brought us to our current environmental crisis are matters of comfort and convenience, not out of an intentional malice towards the ozone layer. We enjoy those luxuries of driving our own car over a crowded sweaty bus, or the tantalizing juices of a perfectly cooked steak. When we're driving to work or eating a cheeseburger we're not actively thinking, gee I'm really sticking it to those global warming fanatics. No, its years of habit and compliance. So when Lackoff claims that "the future of our earth and every living being depends on it," he's not just talking about "understanding," he's talking about actions and changing our current actions. Lackoff's argument assumes that once we "know" honestly and objectively what is best for us, we'll just do it. The truth is, we do lots of things that we know are bad for us and neglect those things which we know are good for us. The rising rate of obesity in America or headlines reading "Cancer Risks Jump 75% if Ultraviolet Radiation Device used before 30" hasn't stopped McDonalds from selling 640 million cheeseburgers a day or bronzed obsessed youth from flocking the tanning beds. The real problem Lackoff faces, is getting from understanding to caring. It's not enough to just know the truth, you have to make people really care to see change.

In-Class Report: Living Well and Living Lightly

2009-12-09T23:19:00.000-08:00

Here’s the link for your perusing pleasure: http://www.livingroutes.org/

The very-talkative founder and director is Daniel Greenberg and here’s the contact for the marketing and admissions director: Gregg@livingroutes.org

Ecovillages, with a capital “E”

Living Routes is an educational nonprofit, anchored at Amherst and extending out to upwards to 2000 so-called “Ecovillages” around the globe. There is the “top down” community, which is Western-inspired and already well-to-do, and then there is the “bottom-up” community, which is instead indigenous and already without a carbon footprint. Both communities, it seems, aim at an ecologically-acceptable middle ground ideal sustained by “high quality lifestyles” and a “low ecological impact.”

All things considered, Living Routes is relatively young: it’s been in business since 1999 and has just recently welcomed its 1000^th alumni.

Tracing the Trajectory From “Village” to “Ecovillage”

It’s curious first that these “Ecovillages” are self-identified and next that there is nothing particularly cutting-edge about them. There are more efficient wind farms and better organic agriculture elsewhere, but there is a nonetheless a really attractive pragmatism and simplicity to the actually sustainable practices there, like toilets that compost instead of flush. Of course these places aren’t going to be utopious, but I’d argue that what works is better than what’s cutting edge and from whatever is sustainable and affordable we could surely learn a thing or two.

What we can first learn is that there isn’t a threshold for identifying or disidentifying your own community as a “sustainable” one. What’s “high quality” and what’s also “low impact” for cities in Scotland and likewise for villages in South India is sure to fluctuate about some non-arbitrary continuum that's almost entirely dependent on things that actually play out in terms like freshwater withdrawal rates per capita per year.

Even without any real criteria for identification, however, the bottom line is this: however developed or developing these communities are, within them there must be “enough going on” so that even we--we students and we youth and we future movers and shakers--can come in and help but making sure that in the process we do not “disturb” what’s already there. To me, this is calling for another youth-as-leaders-of-today-for-tomorrow in much the same way that Green Eats week star Pollan called for “food eaters” to unite.

Even if the program has done the world at least some good--and it has--there's still no getting around the very palpable connection to the Bright Green “privileged-consumers-not-wanting-to-feel-like-bad-people" Principle.

It also seems way more bizarre than it does democratic that these "Ecovillages" are located in a substantial number of “developing” places. It is this fact, among others, that to me produces the loudest traffic between technology and nature. If it's developing an infrastructure without disturbing the immediately-surrounding natural habitat that these communities want, then it's the proliferation of all technologies (even if the majority actually function as things like composting toilets) that they get. For me, the claim that more technology is necessary for people to live more lightly is just as absurd as the claim that technology can ever make nature more natural in the first place.

That “A Ha!” Moment

For Living Routes founder and director Daniel Greenberg, thinking up the idea for this program was almost accidental. He was busy pursuing his degree at Cornell in Electrical Engineering and gave up technology when he realized he “liked kids” more than he liked being on the cutting-edge. So in grad school he studied child development and for his research traveled with his then-partner (now wife) to communes across the U.S. It’s not surprising that he admitted to learning more "the day he stepped foot on the soil in a community" than he had in years of surely-painstaking doctoral research.

So here you have it, folks, THE greener way to study abroad as done with Living Routes.

Precis: Decay of Lying

2009-12-09T22:51:00.002-08:00

Interestingly enough, the first text of this class was the last text of another. I am referring to, of course, Oscar Wilde's wonderful piece The Decay of Lying.

The first thing to notice is the dialogic form of the text, a form that not only brings to mind a Socratic dialogue but is also fitting for a text that laments the prevalence of saying exactly what you mean instead saying it obliquely, in a veiled code.

The central claim of the piece is that current literature suffers from the "decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure" (13). To reverse this decline, we must revitalize the "proper aim of Art," which is Lying--"the telling of beautiful untrue things" (47). Thus, what Wilde means by lying is not mere misrepresentation but a poetic inventiveness that conveys not "simple truths" but rather"complex beauty" (24).

The dialogue revolves around the important concepts of Art, Life, Nature, and Truth. I will focus in particular on the concepts of Nature and Truth since they relate most directly with the substance of this class.

Vivian, who seems to be the dramatic vehicle for stating Wilde's opinions, shows a spirited contempt for Nature. Nature is subordinate to the artificial, man-made creations of Art because it is so "imperfect" and "unfinished" (9). Nature, according to Wilde, is "a collection of phenomena external to man" and therefore "people only discover what they bring to her" (22). On this understanding, Nature is not a fixed thing from which we extract facts and literal Truths but a bundle of figures that can be re-fashioned, re-arranged, and re-configured through works of Art. As a result, a work of Art, rather than imitating Nature like a "mirror," is a "veil" that refracts our understanding of Nature in a novel way.

Thus, for Wilde, "Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style" (28). This statement, of course, is a paradox because literal Truth is not a matter of style but of fact. However, what this paradox--this "beautiful lie" so to speak--brings to our attention is a figurative understanding of Truth. Borrowing from Nietzsche, we can say that on this figurative understanding Truth is an "army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms."

Wilde's paradox, I think, gets to the heart our class. Throughout the term we have been confronted with different readings of Nature. Each author, movement, and identity has reconfigured Nature according to their particular interpretation of it. It therefore seems that much of the substance of the political debate regarding environmental issues is about the basic images and metaphors that configure our understanding of Nature and our relationship to it.

But, the problem is: how do we reconcile this figurative understanding of Nature and Truth with the literal, scientific facts about Nature? How does rhetoric in its mode of imaginative reason deal with an instrumental reason?

Indeed, I think that what the recent "Climate scandal" has demonstrated is this exact problem: if you tell the truth no one will believe you, but if you try to re-frame or re-package the truth so to speak then still no one will believe you (because they'll call you a liar). Of course, the scientists involved in the scandal were unethical and did in fact misrepresent data, but it still illustrates the tenuousness of truth when we attempt to tell a beautiful lie.

Precis on "The Idols of Environmentalism"

2009-12-09T21:38:00.001-08:00

In The Idols of Environmentalism, Curtis White launches a sweeping critique of contemporary environmental activism. White targets all contemporary environmental activists, whether it is “the 501(c)3 organizations with their memberships in the millions, the poll results, and the martyrs perched high in the branches of sequoias or shot dead in the Amazon,” presenting their efforts not only as ineffective interventions into halting environmental destruction, but also as capitulations to it.

For White, the problem with environmentalists’ approach to environmental destruction lies in the very paradigm that it operates: targeting an illusory enemy, the “Monsanto’s and Weyerhauser’s,” and confronting them with the very language and logic that legitimizes their destructive practices. Instead, White argues that environmental activism needs to recognize and confront the “deeply anti-nature as well as anti-human” character of the market system that permeates the “very fabric of our daily life,” and inhabits “nearly every working American, environmentalists included.” White attempts to explain the real predicament and position of environmentalists in his thesis:

THE LESSONS OF OUR IDOLS come to this: you cannot defeat something that you imagine to be an external threat to you when it is in fact internal to you, when its life is your life. And even if it were external to you, you cannot defeat an enemy by thinking in the terms it chooses, and by doing only those things that not only don’t harm it but with which it is perfectly comfortable.

For White, halting environmental destruction requires not only the fall of the “idols of environmentalism,” but also the transcendence of the system that has come to define “our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order.”

White examines the popular and mainstream icons of the environmental movement, Kyoto and Gore, to demonstrate their problematic approach to environmental destruction. Kyoto, of which environmentalists “speak longingly—“Oh, if only we would join it!” is portrayed as “little more than a complex scheme to create a giant international market in pollution,” one that protects “economic growth and development” rather than nature. Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, while it “may have distressing things to say about global warming,” is little more than “an extended apology for scientific rationality, the free market, and our utterly corrupted democracy.” Although White effectively depicts the limitations of such efforts, he inaccurately distills the environmental movement into an image of parading Gore and Kyoto supporters.

In doing so, White creates an image of a ‘monolithic’ environmental movement characterized by those “that ‘give back’ to nature through the bequests, the annuities, the Working Assets credit cards and long distance telephone schemes, and the socially responsible mutual funds advertised in Sierra and proliferating across the environmental movement.” White’s characterization of environmentalists ignores the sects of the environmental movement that offer and practice meaningful challenges to the market system, of which White, himself fails to provide or even recognize their existence. White’s caricature of a uniform and static environmental movement imparts a feeling of fatalism that seems to be “thinking in cartoons,” the same critique he launches against current environmentalists.

White deepens his argument by challenging the very language and logic utilized by his ‘monolithic’ environmental movement to confront environmental destruction. Throughout the piece, White parenthesizes and contextualizes commonly used terms like “economic growth and development,” “harvests,” “liquidity,” “environment,” “ecology,” “diversity,” “habitat,” and “ecosystem” in order to expose the ways in which these terms serve to embed and proliferate the practices and mindsets that protect the market economy, not nature. For White, because these terms find meaning in a scientific and rational context and, by extension, serve to support the logic of the market, it is necessary to “rediscover a common language of Care.” White deploys his idea of such a language by quoting such transcendental and religious figures as St. Thomas Aquinas, Goethe, Kant and the Buddhist scholar David Loy. Although White’s support of this type of logic and language may offer a more effective means of communicating the intrinsic value of nature, it fails to recognize that it was the same logic used to uphold such socially and environmentally destructive practices like the Crusades and slavery. White also reinforces his inaccurate depiction of the environmental movement by failing to recognize, and legitimize, the groups that have deployed such language, like the eco-feminists and the deep ecologists.

White’s creation of a ‘monolithic’ environmental movement, subsequent rejection of all non-mainstream environmental efforts, and his failure to outline or highlight alternatives amount to a fatalist’s approach to environmental destruction. For White, the impending environmental apocalypse and the comprehensive transcendence he believes is necessary to escape such a fate seems to unilaterally raze the agency of the entire environmental movement. As a result, White’s argument leaves his audience with two distinct and competing visions for the future of the environmental movement and the world. The first is a call for environmentalists to sincerely and comprehensively re-examine their efforts and actions in order to transcend the pitfalls in which White exposes in the article. The second is one that believes that the environmental apocalypse, resulting in the dissolution of both the market system and the environmental movement, is necessary because it would force the transcendence he believes is required for salvation; without which there is “no hope for discovering the real problems and the best and truest response to them.”

Precis on "Twenty-five Questions About the Murder of the Big Easy"

2009-12-09T20:12:00.000-08:00

Mike Davis’s article “Twenty-five Questions About the Murder of the Big Easy,” is a clear-cut condemnation of officials’ reactions to Hurricane Katrina, which, David implies, go beyond incompetence into what could only be a premeditated act of violence. From the beginning, Davis’s title goes beyond the usual admonition of Katrina officials to imply thee things: first, that New Orleans is dead forever; second, that the death of New Orleans was consciously planned; and third, that there are still questions left to be answered in the public trial of the as-of-yet-unpunished murderer.

While Dale’s primary purpose in pointing us to TomDispatch may have been simply to provide a free link to Davis’s article, I think that Tom Engelhardt’s introduction becomes part of the text when it serves as the prelude for the thousands of people who read the article through his website. Engelhardt’s interpretation of Davis’ article is that, “The city is now…a huge crime scene that may never be properly investigated.” Engelhardt goes on to say, “The main question Davis and Fontenot raise below -- for an investigative body that may never exist -- is just how deliberate, from top to bottom, the neglect of the obvious was in New Orleans.” It’s clear that for Davis, the answer to that question is that this neglect was as premeditated as murder.

For Engelhardt, the audience for the piece (at least for those who read it through his blog) seems to be liberal-minded people who art willing to become the “investigative body that may never exist.” When Engelhardt provides context to the article by discussing the at-that-time-current investigation of the FEMA director by “Republican wolves in the House of Representatives,” he implies that despite their attempt at justice by attacking the FEMA director, the Republicans have allowed “the two national figures most in charge of the Katrina debacle [to] remain remarkably untouched by their acts.” Engelhardt won’t let the Republicans have any credit for pouncing – rather, he portrays them as allowing far greater injustices to be done. The “Republican wolves,” Engelhardt implies, seem to be zoning in on easy bait while the big game slips away.

Davis’s thesis seems to be, “Where outsiders see simple ‘incompetence’ or ‘failure of leadership,’ locals are more inclined to discern deliberate design and planned neglect – the murder, not the accidental death, of a great city.” He goes on to say that “the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn’t the sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward, but all the unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official betrayal and hypocrisy.” For Davis, these 25 unanswered questions are what provide unquestionable proof of official betrayal and hypocrisy – crimes that, he implies, have led directly to the destruction of the city. His evocation of a “sinister gray sludge” implies that it is not the hurricane that destroyed the city but the officials’ misdeeds – so that even after the hurricane “the city remains submerged in anger and frustration.” The hurricane is not the cause of “the most toxic debris in New Orleans” – rather, it is the officials who may as well have poured the sludge all over the city themselves.

Davis writes that his 25 questions are in “almost random order,” which actually calls attention to the order of the questions. Indeed, the questions seem to loosely follow a progressive order. Davis starts with questions about particular errors that draw attention to egregious neglect – such as what he calls “the most deadly hit-and-run accident in U.S. history.” His questions then begin to suggest that these errors were part of a larger plan “to force poorer residents to leave the city” and to destroy “blue-collar areas that have long been targets of proposed gentrification” in order to ultimately move towards “the triaging of poorer Black areas and a corporate-led master plan for rebuilding the city.” In his final questions, Davis links this imagined plan to the breakdown of democracy itself in an “ethnically cleansed” New Orleans where, he says, there is no “plan for the substantive participation of the city’s ordinary citizens in their own future.” Davis invokes “the fortieth anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act” in his final question, “what has happened to democracy?” This question ultimately sets the stakes of these 25 questions; a system where these questions are left unanswered, Davis implies, represents a breakdown of both justice and, ultimately, democracy itself.

Davis’s purpose in writing the piece is to spur into action those who can begin to uncover justice in the wake of New Orleans’s murder; as Davis puts it, “Until a grand jury or congressional committee begins to uncover the answers, the moral (as opposed to simply physical) reconstruction of the New Orleans region will remain impossible.”

--Marta Belcher

Too Cold and Wet for Strada

2009-12-09T18:20:00.000-08:00

I'm going to be at Milano instead in the hope that a warm dry table is more easily obtained there. I'm shooting for getting to Milano by 2 and staying till just before 5. If anybody from our class gets there first and I'm not there yet, by all means scoop up a good table if you see one. There will be an informal and optional final meeting of our class after.

Precis on "The Decay of Lying" by Oscar Wilde...

2009-12-09T15:01:00.000-08:00

Forgive me if this is totally off base...I know how you are a huge fan of Wilde Dale...

Dale presented the article “The Decay of Lying,” by Oscar Wilde as “supplementary” reading to the course, which begs the question—Why? What about this lofty dialogue between two men smoking cigarettes and shootin the shit about art applies to our class? Well when looked at closely I believe the answer is a muddled one. The paradoxes and word play seem to work with and against the readers understanding, perhaps forcing the reader to question his or her own view of nature. Through framing the dialogue with our disillusionment with Nature Oscar Wilde, in taking up the persona of Vivian, attempts to make apparent this disillusionment in relation to recreating Art while also complicates it tremendously. Wilde states that our disillusionment is entirely due to our “national stupidity”. He states his article to be a “most salutary and valuable warning” which leans toward a “new Renaissance of Art”.

I take his audience to be other tired Hedonists like himself, readers of the Retrospective Review, people who are interested in the pursuit of pleasure and the importance of the pursuit. One of these pleasures Wilde refers to as “lying”. He plays with the term throughout the essay and we can never quite be sure whether or not he is taking up this “lost art of lying” which seems to align itself with the preconceived notion of an unreal rhetoric of the Sophists. He states "the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure". Is he just charming us?

His word play brings to mind a Platonic relationship to Language. Words can be deceptive or slippery, and it is hard to find whether or not truth resides within them, especially when Vivian is trying to bring back the lost art of “lying” or deception. The words seem to be going beyond what they are doing. His use of “lying” for imagination and perception and redefining of “nature” and “art” seem to be reaching for a far more grandiose protreptic. The irony here is that he utilizes Socratic dialogue in order to prove that the words themselves are only incidental. Something is at stake with this idea of lying— is Wilde himself lying? What does it mean when he regards Nature to be “external to man” and then later says “Nature is our creation” only to proceed to imply nature did not exist until invented by Art. His redefinition of nature is perplexing. His definition implies that Nature is solely a creation of our own perception and imagination. In regards to this class then, what implications does this redefinition provide? Nature is what we make it? And how do we resolve the idea that “Beautiful things do not concern us”? Is Nature not beautiful, and are we therefore not concerned with it?
He also goes on to say “As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art”. I believe Nature is useful and necessary to is, it affects us, it appeals to our sympathies and it is a vital part of the environment in which we live. In this case, how can nature recreate art if it is outside the proper sphere of art?

Overall this article was perfect as a supplementary reading for this course. Through use of paradox, irony, and word play it entices the reader to explore the complexities of how Nature and Life work to recreate Art while forcing the reader to question the validity of Wilde’s claims, just as we are forced to question the validity of most people’s views of nature. He forces us out of our disillusionment by forcing us to question it.

Ashley Russell

Precis on "The Coming Resource Wars"

2009-12-09T10:56:00.000-08:00

Precis on “The Coming Resource Wars”

Through the act of argumentum ad metum, Michael Klare wrote “The Coming Resource Wars” in order to bring awareness through fear. The article is a slap in the face reminder that while we are destroying our Earth, we are destroying the future of humanity. Klare discusses how the lack of resources in the future will lead to violent chaos. He uses Darfur as an example of a place in which the lack of resources is already taking place today, leading to violent wars. He uses British Defense Secretary John Reid’s address as a constant source of information. Klare reminds his audience that while developed worlds will be greatly affected by the climate change (2012??), it is the developing worlds that will have an even harder time, seeing that they are already dealing with a lack of resources. Klare indicates how the usage of military and defense will be the solution for most politicians, and that will be a mistake. It shouldn’t be surprising to believe that developed worlds will turn to their strength when in chaos for resources, it seems sadly that our motto has always been fight war with war. Klare points out that so far American and British policymakers are ignoring the fact that international conflicts may be linked with environmental issues rather than solely ideological differences. Klares argument makes complete sense when we think about the current struggle with the Middle East; in the end it did all come down to oil and weapons. As each day goes by, countries’ slowly exceed their carrying capacity and sooner or later there will be major chaos. According to John Reid, one of the biggest worries is the weak countries’ lack of ability to handle the rapid loss of resources. While we are all aware of the death that will come in toll from climate change: with droughts, famine, etc., we are forgetting about the violence that will occur between the survivors. Klare concludes that our only hope of surviving these catastrophes is by reducing out emissions of greenhouse gases and working with other worlds to slow down the process of climate change, wishful thinking.

I think Klare is pitching his article mostly to the people whose “heads are in the sand.” Numerous times in his article he is mentioning developed countries and how their governments are ignoring the current signs of climate change. It makes sense for the developing countries to have more signs of awareness, seeing that climate change is currently affecting them as we speak. Klare is trying to bring awareness in the scariest way possible. He is focusing on the people who are not completely oblivious to the situation, but who feel that they cannot do anything to prevent the process of climate change. While reading Klares article, I was already aware of the chaos that would take place due to the lack of resources, but if I told my Hummer driving neighbor, I am sure he would have no clue. Klare is focusing on his rich, oblivious audience who doesn’t find their destruction to the environment as a big deal.

It is obvious that Klares’ main objection is to bring awareness. The sudden green movement that is seen in the new movies and the new interest of actors does not play much on the idea of human wars for resources. Klare brings up what is happening with international wars, and illustrating an alternative motive for these constant struggles, lack of resources. A big chunk of this article talks about third world countries and how they will have to deal with the hardest aspects of climate change. Klare brings a little hope within his article, in that he uses Reid, a topnotch man, as a constant reminder that the big man in social status is finally becoming aware of the environmental situation. Klare comes to the conclusion that the only resolution to this situation, is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (Obama) instead of fight for oil (Iraq).

Overall, the thesis of this piece is that people need to wake up and prepare themselves because the food and water we so easily have available to us, may not be there in the near future. And the cars we are killing the atmosphere with, may end up being the cause of our destruction.

By Melly Bahai

Coco-Cola's "Bottle of the Future"

2009-12-09T09:37:00.000-08:00

The Coco-Cola Company recently released its "PlantBottle." This is a 100% recyclable PET plastic bottle produced from plant-waste material. Coco-Cola plans to launch this new bottle globally at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Coco-Cola released a statement that it plans to eventually produce all its PET plastic from plant-waste material, including woodchips.

Coco-Cola promotes the "plant-bottle' as a practical innovation because it can be recycled as a normal plastic bottle. Heres a quote from an article explaining the apparent usefulness of producing normal plastic form plant-waste:

"These bottles are PET. That means to a recycling facility, it is no different then your standard plastic bottle. In their eyes, making a bottle biodegradable, the embodied energy, that is, the usefulness of that bottle is lost when it disintegrates. With a PlantBottle, it can once again be made into another product."

Coco-Cola promotes 'Recycle' over 'Reuse' because recycling practices don't question Coco-Cola's massive production of plastic for one-time consumption. "PlantBottle" tries to legitimate plastic-consumption for the consumer because the product is 1) recyclable and 2) is produced from a 'waste' and therefore must be sustainable. However, recycling is sooo energy intensive, that promoting it over 'Reuse' practices actually does our environment a disservice.

here's a few links to some articles on the PlantBottle. Enjoy.

http://earthandindustry.com/2009/11/coca-cola-unveils-plant-based-bottle-of-the-future/

http://www.triplepundit.com/2009/06/cokes-new-plantbottle-fluff-or-real-progress/

"Selling Nature" Précis

2009-12-08T21:30:00.000-08:00

1. In “Selling Nature,” O’Connor wants to illuminate the underlying assumptions in his primary question, “What is intrinsic to capitalism that determines a particular kind of relationship between capitalism and nature?” He investigates how we’ve come to frame such thoughts, and ultimately argues that the profit motivation is intrinsic to capitalism (6). During the course of the essay, O’Connor addresses the ramifications of capitalism by referring to influential ideas during the Enlightenment. In the end, he argues that it’s unreasonable to expect capitalists to “make decisions that would privilege the environment, underdeveloped nations, or workers” (6). Given its merging foundations, capitalism incites ecologically harmful methods of production. In fact, O’Connor argues that capitalism destroys the very conditions of which it depends.

2. This essay is primarily intended for any persons who expect capitalism to privilege the environment, underdeveloped nations, or workers (as O’Connor suggests its limitations should only be expected since capitalism is inherently profit-based). Though the argument refutes any claims to surprise (e.g. “How can capitalism be so selfish?”), it also anticipates possible rejections by addressing the negative responses to capitalism as inevitable. O’Connor addresses the social and environmental concerns as legitimate by calling social movements yet another crisis of underproduction. These concerns are deemed legitimate insofar as they are upsetting to experience, rather than for being unpredictable existences. People will get mad. The contradictions of capitalism, such as overproduction, lead to a consciousness of the gap between classes which would result in worker revolution.

This essay is also intended for an audience less informed about the ramifications of the character of capitalism. For this, I am certainly a part of the intended audience. While I can recognize the social and environmental concerns triggered by capitalism, it was through my reading of this essay that I even learned about the incapacities of capitalism that O’Connor argues can’t be expected to accommodate non-profit-based concerns.

3. At the very outset of the essay, O’Connor wants to make one point immediately clear: “by its nature, capital is bad at preserving things” (1). O’Connor suggests that it’s odd to think about nature and humanity as separate entities, so he reviews how such thinking patterns came to existence. After explaining how one thought of the Enlightenment led to another, he insists that we not consider capitalism’s characteristics inherently bad. Capitalism needs to externalize costs in order to accumulate, which unfortunately destroys the foundation upon which it is based.

After addressing several concerns against capitalism in his essay, O’Connor makes various suggestions. One of the actions that he advises is that worker and environmental movements unite, making the red-green alliance. The essay goes on to say that he has a specific suggestion for this red-green alliance, but that suggestion is never revealed. Instead, the essay discusses O’Connor’s approach -- which should rather be called his “attitude” -- that capitalism be recognized as incapable of perpetual growth. According to O’Connor, there are already long-term costs in capitalism which makes it unreasonable to expect any humanitarian resolutions. For this reason, O’Connor argues that we shouldn’t be so upset with capitalism. “It simply is” (6).

Instead, O’Connor suggests that we alternate our concerns. It’s better that we understand both the power and limitations of capitalism. He calls his alternative Preservation First! (PF!), which acknowledges social-supply-side economics. “Business should be engaged in order ‘to preserve, defend, and enhance the conditions of life and life itself’” (7). This business wouldn’t have the contradictions inherent in capitalism, thereby allowing us other ways to attempt enhancing and protecting humanitarian concerns. Though O’Connor finally offers his most viable suggestion, he ends the essay abruptly, without offering much of a direction for how that kind of business can be developed and maintained.

4. Though some of capitalism’s characteristics may seem bad, it should actually be expected since it’s in its very nature to produce effects at odds with humanitarian concerns. We should instead think about capitalism’s limitations, and switch our view to a business that could invest its interests outside of the contradictions of capitalism, where social and environmental concerns can be helped.

5. “Selling Nature” calls assumptions into question at the very outset of the essay.

For example, O’Connor points out that to ask what is your relationship to something is to assume that you are separate from that thing. In this way, asking a question such as, “What is humanity’s relationship to nature?” assumes that nature exists outside of humanity. O’Connor surveys how such an assumption is even made, and refers to thoughts stemming out of the Enlightenment to begin.

One of the thinkers he refers to is René Descartes, whose philosophy led to the idea of dualism. For O’Connor, to be able to conceive of the body as separate from the mind helped to confirm the separation of humans from nature. He goes on to inform us that that wasn’t always the case, as exemplified by the attitude of the Apache people.

O’Connor also includes another string of evidence that marks our significant attitude towards nature. According to O’Connor, Nicolaus Copernicus added fuel to the fire by arguing that the sun is the center of the universe, giving us the idea that “the universe runs like a clock according to laws that are independent of human beings” (2). This, also according to O’Connor, made nature seem a collection of resources to be used for the sake of humanity.

As evidentiary as O’Connor’s points seem, his last point about Copernicus’ finding doesn’t constitute a reason for humanity to treat nature as “a collection of lifeless things to be controlled and used for the sake of humanity” (2). In fact, because the universe runs independently of human beings, operating on its own accord and decentering the earth, it rather seems that we should have realized nature as sure, separate, but also as operating regardless of our interests. In other words, it seems more plausible to regard nature as separately working for its own interests, and not as some collection of resources existing to merely serve our personal interests.

Of course, I don’t recognize nature as separate from humanity, but if we were to assign some causal behavior from Copernicus’ discovery, O’Connor leads to a less plausible conclusion. O’Connor uses Copernicus’ discovery to further illuminate the sense that humanity is separate from their universe, which, in a way, at least allows us to conceive of the earth as applicable to our lives, though we should feel selfish while so vehemently doing so.

6. It is especially at the moment in which he introduces Copernicus that O’Connor binds the analogy between capitalism and nature, where decentering humanity from the purpose of the universe meant that we could think of the universe as a supply of raw resources to be used for humanity alone. It is thus similar to capitalism, which “is based on private ownership and commodification (2).

In fact, Copernicus’ discovery is the point at which capitalism and nature merge for O’Connor. Seeing a divide between nature and humanity led to an objectification of nature, which allows capitalists to see natural resources as mere commodities.

O’Connor paints arrows of causality from the conceptualization of nature as separate from humanity. Specifically, he maps a line of causality out of the two contradictions of capitalism. Overproduction leads to economic crises, which lead to labor movements, while underproduction leads to ecological crises, which lead to environmental movements. This explanation frames capitalism as having a domino effect, so that it’s difficult, and in fact impossible, to think of capitalism as a simple point A to point B model. O’Connor urges us to think of capitalism as the complex chain of reactions it is. Without accounting for other complicating and indirect influences, though, this essay still rectifies itself as just a preliminary discussion about the monster, capitalism, and its relationship to nature.

7. It’s strange the way O’Connor begins to forgive capitalism for its “inherent characteristics,” because it is bound to cause unfavorable circumstances. He excuses capitalism’s bad nature as a way of asking, “What do you expect?” In a way, O’Connor seems to suggest that we should be angry with the effects of capitalism, and not capitalism itself. In that case, he creates his own dualism by treating capitalism and its effects as separate entities.

Extra Class

2009-12-08T17:34:00.000-08:00

The extra class/review to go over more of the Green Ethos texts is Thursday, right? There are office hours before at Strada, right?

Thanks,

Kelsey

CNN Opinion: Glaciers and Global Warming

2009-12-08T14:39:00.001-08:00

Balog offers “one bit of science” before getting to his photographs.

Another project, another chart: The Paleomap Project
under Dr. Christopher R. Scotese

Democracy Now Covering Copenhagen

2009-12-07T15:15:00.001-08:00

Democracy Now! will be in Copenhagen for the duration of the conference. Today's piece is a good introduction to how Global Warming is affecting the developing world and the Global South.

The NY Times also had a wonderful outline of the various factions and coalitions negotiating at the conference. See Who's at the Climate Talks, and What Do They Seek?

What is Danish for "Going to Hell in a hand basket"?

2009-12-07T15:05:00.000-08:00

Exciting things are happening as the Copenhagen Climate Conference is underway. Leading up to the conference there was much talk on saving the planet (which is what needs to happen). The topics that keep some of us awake at nights are on the news and radio as more people are exposed to the information. I fear that this is the turning point where we, the US, either commit to substantive change or we, the people who care, are shown the door as the governments care us to Hell in a hand basket. A few more days and we will see.

http://www.erantis.com/events/denmark/copenhagen/climate-conference-2009/index.htm

"The Consumer's Guide to the Green Revolution"

2009-12-07T10:57:00.000-08:00

Presentation follow-up at:

thedailygreen.com

Destroying science to undermine climate change?

2009-12-07T10:45:00.000-08:00

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748704107104574572091993737848-lMyQjAxMDA5MDAwNzEwNDcyWj.html

Natural Capitalism Précis

2009-12-06T13:54:00.000-08:00

Natural Capitalism Précis

“Natural Capitalism” by Paul Hawken argues that environmental and social problems are linked and that both can be solved by moving from a capitalist system that does not value natural capital to one that values natural capital. Natural capital includes both the renewable and non-renewable goods and services provided by nature. The value of the goods provided by nature have been considered in business such as the value of wood, coal, fish, and oil, but the value of the services provided by nature have not been considered. The services provided by nature include clean air, water, soil, and a stable climate. The contribution nature makes in sustaining these natural systems has not been considered in accounting in capitalist systems. If the services nature provided were considered on the balance sheet it would be make more economic sense to conserve rather than promoting being wasteful as our current economic system does. The shift from capitalism to natural capitalism is not only as presented as a solution to environmental problems, but social problems as well.

Hawken believes that social problems are due to mass unemployment and underemployment of “nearly one-third of the world’s workers” created by the current economic system. According to Hawken “sense that they have no value in the present economic system” and then “act out society’s verdict in shocking ways”. Natural capitalism argues that by increasing employment people can be steered toward acting in a way acceptable to the text’s intended audience. Hawken figures poor people as needing to be given a sense of value he believes they are missing by tying them closer to the capitalist system. By altering the tax system to favor the use of human resource use rather than the use of physical resources Hawken believes businesses will move to increase employment.

Natural capitalism expects businesses to respond to tax and policy changes through both new technologies to increase sustainability and a shift from providing goods to providing services. Hawken decries the idea that technology can solve all of the environmental problems, but then idolizes the power of potential new technologies stating new technologies, “are lining up like salmon to swim upstream toward greater resource productivity”. The piece then goes on to critique government subsidies of technologies that turned out to be failures, failing to recognize the fact that scientific research cannot have explicitly predicted ends. He does not understand the fact that when one sets out to research something they do not know what the results of the research will be. It is unclear how the government should decide what research to fund and what not to fund without the explicit ends of the research, which they do not have when deciding what to fund. Natural capitalism argues for funding some research, but ridicules when such funding results in what Hawken refers to as duds. Hawken also supports government intervention to change businesses from providing goods to services. By concentrating ownership among a few and having a myriad of leasers, rather than selling goods to create mainly owners natural capitalism believes waste can be cut.

Natural capitalism cites science for the legitimacy of the argument. Hawken believes that capitalism is already a system based on natural principles stating, “at the heart of capitalism, the idea that markets have a power that mimics life and evolution” and that by incorporating quantizing nature one can create a system that models nature. Hawken uses ties to scientificity to legitimize his argument, but he does not appear to understand basic biology and ecology. Natural capitalism according to Hawken, is a system “where the quality of consumer services continues to improve… a society where we have useful and worthy work available than people to do it.” The idea of a carrying capacity does not stop Hawken’s belief in the potential for continual growth in an economic system that he says models natural systems. Furthermore by suggesting the quantization of nature Hawken indicates that he does not understand the idea of continuity in nature and co-dependence of organisms on one another. Rather, Hawken sees nature as a set of independent dividable entities.

Natural capitalism is aimed at members of society benefiting from the current economic system who acknowledge that the current economic system is negatively impacting the environment. I think that I would be part of the intended audience. Reading this piece as part of the intended audience has made inaccuracies in the text, especially in the claims to scientificity seem extremely prominent and insulting to me as the reader. The text works to assure the reader that changes to improve the environment will not come at the cost of their lifestyle by continually citing how life will continue to improve. The argument works to find a compromise between maintaining the current wasteful economic system and the massive changes necessary to avoid and mitigate environmental damage. By being so overly confident about the ability of simple changes to solve the environmental crisis natural capitalism reassures readers that they will not have to compromise their lifestyles. The piece does seek to encourage a change to the government’s tax system and business practices to incorporate natural capital onto their balance sheets. Natural capitalism seeks to maintain the current economic stratification, while solving the environmental crisis and ending problems caused by the economically disadvantaged to the intended audience of the piece.

- Kelsey A. Mulherin

Drinking coffee and reading a book about the enviroment may be a bad idea

2009-12-06T12:09:00.000-08:00

I was looking for info about this upcoming storm and saw that CNN is covering Indonesia's illegal but commonplace practice of massive rain forest burning, which makes them the third largest producer of green house gasses in the world. Especially on the island of Sumatra. The CNN article didn't mention coffee (but how many times have you seen a Sumatra blend coffee) but mentioned how paper and pulp/palm oil companies are really screwing up the local order of things in order to rape and pillage the land and promising to build public facilities like mosques. Its really sad...think grapes of wrath and steel mill workers in company owned housing but worse since I doubt the locals/owners of land will have any more stake in aspect of life in their villages once the
"plantations" come in.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/12/06/indonesia.burning.rainforest/

Jared Diamond, UCLA geography professor and author of "Guns, Germs and Steal," A Natural Capitalist?

2009-12-06T10:12:00.001-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06diamond.html?pagewanted=1&em

If you have a few minutes to spare or are looking for a study break, read this article- its only 3 pages.

Jared Diamond, UCLA geography professor and author of "Guns, Germs and Steal," mobilizes many natural capitalist arguments in this piece. He even praises three corporations--Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and Chevron-- for their "embrace of environmental concerns," so tread cautiously when reading.... My favorite part of the article concerns the section on Chevron, when he asks Chevron employees and executives how a "publicly traded company could justify to its shareholders its expenditures on the environment" (2). The Chevron employees and executives supply five reasons, most of which derive from a cost-benefit analysis:

"First, oil spills can be horribly expensive: it is far cheaper to prevent them than to clean them up. Second, clean practices reduce the risk that New Guinean landowners become angry, sue for damages [expensive] and close the fields. (The company has been sued for problems in Ecuador that Chevron inherited when it merged with Texaco in 2001.) Next, environmental standards are becoming stricter around the world, so building clean facilities now minimizes having to do expensive retrofitting later. Also, clean operations in one country give a company an advantage in bidding on leases in other countries. Finally, environmental practices of which employees are proud improve morale, help with recruitment and increase the length of time employees are likely to remain at the company" (2).

I love how most of the arguments they mobilize concern the economic benefit of adopting sustainable practices and none of the arguments include respect and protection for all forms of life, like the marine life which they decimate with devastating oil spills. Anyway, check this piece out, if not for the content then for its role as a strategic move in helping to garner support for addressing the issue of climate change, which will be the focus of the Copenhagen climate conference tomorrow.

MAD Architecture: Green Futurism in China

2009-12-05T16:55:00.000-08:00

I recently came across MAD ltd., an innovative, Beijing based "design office." From their "About" page:

MAD is a Beijing based design-office dedicated to innovation in architectural practice, landscape design, and urban planning. MAD develops its unique concept of futurism through a persistent investigation of the symbiotic potentials amid nature and technology. MAD inspires to design in close harmony in nature, offering people the freedom to develop urban experiences.

As always: good in principle, but questionable in practice. While the aesthetics of their projects do seem to harmonize with nature, the actual ecological impacts of their construction probably do not.

Some of their proposals are indeed mad. Not as mad as this however (no offense to Taitlin). Take for instance, their vision for Beijing 2050. One project, the "floating islands" above Beijing, seems impractical and fantastical. I like their explanation however. Justifying the concept, they argue:

The Central Business District in Beijing was built according to the Western vision of modernization created in the last century. Yet, as China begins to leapfrog the West in terms of development, this vision is increasingly irrelevant. Instead of simply imitating Western downtowns, we need to create a city centre for a new post-western, post-industrial society...The floating islands emphasize the economic trends of tomorrow: connectivity and interdependence.

Also, I especially like their proposal to transform the concrete slab of Tiananmen Square into a "People's Park". They explain:

We propose to turn the empty space into a forest. Trees and lush grass would grow out of the square. Cultural facilities would be placed underground to connect to a transportation network. Even the national theater would be hidden inside a soft landscape mountain. The political heart of the city would become the green heart, a vast forest for residents and tourists alike to enjoy. In 2050, Tiananmen Square would be the biggest green area in the center of Beijing.

Under the new design, the figurative relationship between Nature and Culture is seemingly inverted. Whereas we normally understand culture as a human artifice built on top of a Nature (the ground, the Earth), the new design of Tiananmen literally and figuratively places Nature above Culture. Culture is hidden away, allowing Nature to flourish on top of it.

Other notable projects and proposals are the Fake Hills, the Rebuilt World Trade Center (in NYC), and Chongqing mega-building.

I'm ambivalent about this design firm. On on hand, I agree with their vision and admire the boldness of their projects. On the other hand, many of their buildings--behind the Green label--are just mega-projects that are questionable in their ecological impact. To take a cynical position, perhaps because of China's addiction to mega-projects, it would be better if they pursued these mega-projects instead, which root their design principles in "harmony" with nature.

Random Eco Invention DIY Trash Chair

2009-12-05T01:36:00.000-08:00

http://freshome.com/2008/05/20/the-most-stupid-piece-of-eco-friendly-furniture/

I know we're all busy and such, I just found this and thought it was pretty interesting. I could see this pretty quickly becoming a horrible smelly mold farm, but it also might not be so bad.... right?

REI's eco-sensitive products, and related

2009-12-04T13:29:00.000-08:00

Some links for you to enjoy:

ecoSensitive™ Materials in REI Gear & Apparel

Outdoor Industry Association Eco Working Group

Zero Waste Alliance

Arnold on California Climate Change

2009-12-04T00:56:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9VUZS8AqYY&feature=player_embedded

As promised...

2009-12-03T18:25:00.000-08:00

Embedded, please find the link to the green automotive site I presented on today in class. Enjoy!

http://green.autoblog.com/

List of Vegetarian and Vegan Beer, Wine, Liquor

2009-12-03T17:58:00.000-08:00

Speaking of Guinness having beef "solids" in it, here is a list of which beer, wine and liquor is vegetarian or vegan friendly.

http://www.barnivore.com/

PETA will also mail you a list of safe breweries upon request, all you need do is email them... but fuck PETA.

my report

2009-12-03T17:15:00.000-08:00

Here is the link to the website I did my report on...
http://www.workingforgreen.net/
Enjoy!

http://www.realgoods.com/category/camping-gifts-apparel.do

2009-12-03T15:57:00.000-08:00

I love camping but it's sometimes hard to be entirely environmentally friendly because most of the times campfires are needed to cook food. This website has some interesting solar powered gadgets for outdoor activities such as solar powered ovens. They also sell organic clothing and handmade gifts.

Lakoff Précis

2009-12-03T14:04:00.000-08:00

Précis on George Lakoff’s: How We Talk About the Environment Has Everything to Do with Whether We’ll Save It

In this article, Berkeley’s resident cognitive scientist George Lakoff clarifies the language of framing, indentified within but not understood by a New York Times article. The Times article was a belittlement of a forth coming report commissioned and publicly presented by Bob Perkowitz of EcoAmerica. The argument of the Times article was that the report, “use(s) advertising techniques to manipulate public opinion.”

Lakoff injects with his piece a laymen’s 2-page crash course in framing. He points out the merits of the article, exposes what is missing, and then provides a 8 point course of action. The overall pitch of the article is a very diluted version of the cognitive term of framing explained in his book Moral Politics, in which he takes 413 pages to explain these concepts and its effects. Even his shortened version, Don’t think of an Elephant boast 144 pages.

The pitch of the article infers that this article was made for the general public, as it is an easy read, with an ubiquitous language making it palatable for all. Writing a Thesis on the concept of framing in application to the rhetoric of Barrack Obama’s speeches, I felt very vetted in the terms that are almost ineffectively diluted (but still maintains to provide a universal understanding of the powers in play) for the mass consumption of the public. Having a critical eye for this concept makes it easier to identify the big picture that Lakoff is painting in his article.

The point of the article is to fill in the gaps of what is brought to the national attention of the public in the Times article, and to give it a name: Framing. It is then explained that this is something that has been utilized for generations by the conservatives in the misrepresentation of facts to the public. The point is made that it has been done successfully for so long that the frames are unconsciously in placed in our mind, strengthened by the repetition in which we hear them, and either understood or misunderstood contingent upon the current frames already present in our minds. Lakoff defines frames as, “terms of systems of structures…organized in terms of values…how we reason reflect or values…values determine our sense of identity.”

Lakoff argues that the conservatives frame environmental and ecological changes as something that is ‘beyond immediately causation’, also speaking of the prevention and restoration of the environment in monetarily terms as if the two were associated. In doing so, He provides basic but effectively clear deconstruction of the misrepresented ideas being presented.

The stakes presents in doing so are: 1) an attempt to awaken the collective public mindset from its unconscious dogmatic misconceptions 2) Through this collectively raised awareness produce activism in a complacent, ‘its too sublime’ thinking society 3) To be conscious of the misinforming discourse being subconsciously spread.

It is identified that the public speaks in terms of value, themes that are consistent to their everyday life. The framing of discourse by the conservative detractors takes these values and twists them. Here’s and example: what does the term ‘Clear Skies initiative’ mean to you?

A Triple Bottom Line Underwear Company

2009-12-03T12:19:00.000-08:00

I found this organic cotton underwear company a while ago that I fits with the triple bottom ideas we talked about in the Natural Capitalism week. Here is the link: http://www.wearpact.com/. Under the ingredients section they have a section on their philosophy that is pretty interesting.

NYT on the 25th Anniversary of Bhopal.

2009-12-03T10:33:00.000-08:00

The New York Times is running this article for the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, which is today. Glad to see it didn't pass by unmentioned.

From the article:

The families of the dead got an average of $2,200; the wounded got $550; a Dow spokeswoman explained, that amount “is plenty good for an Indian.”

Warren Anderson, the Union Carbide chief executive at the time of the gas leak, lives in luxurious exile in the Hamptons, even though there’s an international arrest warrant out for him for culpable homicide. The Indian government has yet to pursue an extradition request.

My (Old) Presentation

2009-12-02T05:51:00.001-08:00

Hey, it's Jen, sorry this is so late.

So on Green Eats Picnic Day, 11/12 I reported on two San Francisco current events:

1) http://www.greenfestivals.org/san-francisco/

GreenFest is and event put on by Global Exchange and Green America. It calls itself a "global movement" (read:traveling US fair) that took place on Nov. 13-15 at the San Francisco Concourse. It was all about "injecting hope" back into Green politics with food, wine, clothing, etc. While I'm being snarky about it now, it's actually a pretty cool thing; since it's all about the venders, it focuses on local, practical and incredibly diverse solution to the global crises we now face, even if it's a bit smug.

2) http://newsblaze.com/story/2009110907370300002.pr/topstory.html

San Francisco has authorized an alternative energy provider to PG&E called RFP/Local Power that aims to provide 51% renewable energy by 2017. Potentially really great.

Link to my presentation

2009-12-01T17:55:00.001-08:00

Sorry I posted this so late, but here is my friends company website, focusing on hydroponic and aeroponic systems.

http://verticalharvest.net/

-Melica (Melly) Bahai

Report: 1 Block off the Grid

2009-12-01T17:54:00.000-08:00

1 Bog is a solar retailer that uses group discounts to help neighborhoods buy solar energy

http://1bog.org/

In-class report: Viv

2009-12-01T17:21:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone,

I wanted to post about the report I gave on October 22nd on Viv.

Viv is a San Francisco-based non-profit exploring expansion into Berkeley. They give consumers a sticker for their credit cards; participating businesses scan the stickers, and each scan counts as a vote. Businesses have a “green action schedule” with deadlines being a certain number of vivs – so they become “greener” with more and more viv purchases.

I discussed some of the concerns I have with the organization in class, but I'll let you guys come up with your own position. The website is www.doyouviv.com.

--Marta Belcher

The EnviroMedia Greenwashing Index Précis

2009-12-01T15:00:00.001-08:00

A Glance Back at Natural Capitalism and Greenwashing Week

Site Goal #1:
Help consumers be more savvy about evaluating environmental marketing claims of advertisers.

Site Goal #2:
Hold businesses accountable to their environmental marketing claims.

Site Goal #3:
Stimulate the market and demand for sustainable business practices that truly reduce the impact on the environment.

The argument being made on this site is towards responsibility on the parts of both consumers and advertisers or businesses that sport the green banner. It is an attempt to discourage greenwashing: “when a company or organization spends more time and money claiming to be “green” through advertising and marketing than actually implementing business practices that minimize environmental impact.” The site promotes a kind of knowledge-generating interaction between consumers by means of The Index that aids in the spread of awareness, regarding certain businesses and their marketing ethics. Consumers view the eco-advertisements that herald the environmentally friendly quality of certain products or businesses and post the advertisement to the site. Then using The Index, consumers can rate the business or product for the benefit of other viewers and consumers:

THE INDEX
An automated tool that scores your response to five statements about the relevance of marketing claims in an ad.

The Index provides the means for a kind of checks-and-balances system between the businesses and the consumers. The consumers do their part by basically grading the advertisements they see and are exposed to based on the set of criteria provided by The Index, spreading awareness to other members of their immediate community and on to the greater general public. This vigilance encourages businesses to stay true to the environmental claims they make in their advertisements, addressing the concerns and issues of their consumer-audience that are posted on the site. The goal, then, goes beyond simply holding everyone accountable and responsible for the environmental impacts of their actions towards actual, sustainable results and feasible improvements to the environmental situation. As the bar is raised by each post of the “Voted World Offenders” in regards to the environmental address of certain advertisements, the logic follows that businesses would work twice as hard to achieve and maintain environmentally healthy standards that are deemed acceptable by the consumers, creating a perpetual chain of progress towards environmental sustainability. The site even offers businesses the chance to view advertisements that have received better ratings – “Voted Most Authentic” advertisements – so that they might discover what exactly is at stake, what their audience is most concerned about, what actions they can and should take to help improve the environment. Unfortunately, a potential backfire of this process might be that businesses would only focus on being more persuasive to audiences rather than actually addressing environmental issues.

It seems that any consumer, self-identified or otherwise, who is environmentally-conscious or concerned about the planet’s eco-condition can participate or get involved in this process of greenwash indexing. Anyone can register or sign-up for the mailing list “to stay up-to-date with the Greenwashing Index” – although it is to be expected that the certain types of consumers, who are more likely to be drawn to The Index site, would be self-identified environmentalists or people very much involved and knowledgeable of this greenwashing problem. This acceptance and welcoming of all consumers (with internet access) still goes to show the site’s dedication to the free movement of information towards promoting consumer awareness. Any and all consumers are welcome to contribute to the project in the view that all consumers have valid points to make regarding business marketing schemes and claims for the environment. At the same time, however, this very openness could be cause for doubt as to the reliability of the given business ratings – the case for all such instances that involve ratings given by the general public. Consumers are entitled to their opinions based on the advertisements they rate, but figuring out which person to trust or believe can be quite difficult. Fortunately, this reality can be taken as more of a motivator rather than a confusing set-back. The very nature of this site’s opinion-based rating system, The Index, can encourage consumers to conduct their own research either to verify the comments that are being raised on the site or to supplement their own capabilities in interpreting the various advertisements posted. It is difficult to accept many of the comments at face-value, but hopefully this would act not as a deterrent but as a form of encouragement for other consumers to do research in an attempt to either verify or render false the claims made by other consumers.

EnviroMedia certainly finds it necessary to put up a Greenwashing Index online in the public domain for the use of all consumers, assuming that the tool would greatly benefit a society that might not be as eco-conscious or simply aware of certain marketing tactics as should be the case. It assumes that people are not in conversation with each other about the claims that businesses make, that people cannot simply be left to rate businesses amongst themselves, that people need something to help them remain organized, to facilitate communication and an easy flow of information. The Index is provided as a resource to those, who would otherwise be at the mercy of any business’s exaggerated claims and misleading content. The hope is that, with the help of The Index, consumers would have the opportunity to enter into a conversation with both the businesses and other consumers and engage in a process of improving the environment by addressing man’s impacts. One possible thesis for the argument presented on this site might read: a system of cooperation and healthy conversation between consumer and big business is necessary in clearing the path towards environmental sustainability. Another might read: the greenwashing distraction can only be avoided by maintaining a healthy relationship between consumer and big business. In a section called “Purpose of the Greenwashing Index,” the dangers of such a distraction are taken into account and hopes for true environmental improvements are clearly expressed:

And the challenges of climate change are too important for us to be distracted. This site is here to make sure that doesn’t happen. Our goal is to educate consumers about how to “read” an ad and encourage them to decide for themselves if what they’re seeing is greenwashing. Our hope is that with a better-informed public, businesses will start to:
Have a sustainable business before they advertise they’re a sustainable business
Be accountable for the sustainable practices they claim to have
That way we can put an end to the greenwashing and get busy with real environmental change.

The problem of greenwashing is discussed in the section entitled “About Greenwashing: Why is Greenwashing a Problem?” – “…greenwashing is bad for the environment…The last thing you want to do is spend money on a product or service you believe is doing right by the environment, but in reality is not…greenwashing backfires, hurting the company’s reputation and ultimately, their sales….” But the real evidence to the problem is in the sheer volume of problematic advertisements or “World Offenders” posted and rated. Consumers are responding to the greenwash of various businesses and spreading the news. Evidence of a global spread of awareness can be seen in some of the dialogue that occurs in the “Comments” section of The Index. The following comments respond to the Easyjet CO2 claim posted on November 24, 2008 and given a 4.6 Average Rating (a 5 rating is considered “bogus”):

Spargo’s of Netherlands gave this ad a
I do think Easyjet has good initiatives to reduce CO2 emission from their planes However this advertisement claims that flying is environmentally more friendly than driving a Prius. Apart from the fact that emissions on a higher altitude are more harmful, they seem to have used a comparison that is very positive for Easyjet…

Green-Rising-Marketing of Salt Lake City gave this ad a
December 17, 2008
Comments:
I agree, and rated it 5 on everything, b/c it fits so solidly in with what is being rated. It IS vague…it makes a comparison but does not substantiate it (an obviously outlandish claim that most would like to see backed up), and the comparison is very hard to believe. Perhaps they are comparing emissions during travel, and are negating emissions during take off and landing which are the highest and use the most gas…I think propelling a multi-ton vehicle and all its cargo into the air, would not compare well with a prius. I initially wanted to say good for them for raising people’s awareness about carbon emissions when flying, but the claims they make just seem preposterous. Holly Caughron Green Rising Marketing www.greenrisingmarketing.com

The Index site has enabled consumers around the world to enter into a conversation with others about the hazards of greenwash, whether or not it was actually intended by the business. The comments reveal how The Index can be used as an effective tool in warning others and raising awareness of the kinds of greenwashing that circulate in the media – “[the] more consumers see through greenwashing, the more it will fail.” This is the purpose of The Index. A potential harm, though, arises in this hopeful system in that consumers might be more eager to agree with the general mood or train of thought offered by previous posts. In this sense, The Index system would not encourage individual thought processes but consensus formation. Consumers might be more willing to conform to the popular rating rather than actually analyzing the claims of the advertisement.

What is left to witness are the actual environmental improvements promised and evidence of gradual greenwash reduction in the media. The site offers a generous glance of the side for consumers but the big businesses, whose advertisements are being rated, are not offered a space on this site for open communication with the consumers. Of course, the representatives of said businesses are welcome to register and dialogue with others in the “Comments” section about how improvements can be made, but this does not seem to be occurring. It is left hanging, whether or not businesses are actually taking into account the conversations that consumers are having about the greenwashing issue. Such evidence would prove invaluable to an understanding of The Index’s true effects – its success or failure to curb and ultimately eliminate greenwashing for the sake of real change, but it is reasonable to assume that evidence of these proportions would be rather difficult to acquire. We can only hope for the success of The Index, a positive response from various big businesses, and a brighter future for our environment.

Presentation: Edible Walls

2009-12-01T13:21:00.001-08:00

Hey folks,

Today I will give a presentation about edible walls. For more information, check out this article from the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/business/energy-environment/19WALLS.html?_r=1&sq=edible%20walls&st=cse&adxnnl=1&scp=1&adxnnlx=1259702119-jylZzN32QajmXd/d5H2mRw

And this is the website of Green Living Technologies which sells these walls for use in homes, apartments and office buildings:
http://www.agreenroof.com/

These installations allow people with little space for gardening to grow their own vegetables while simultaneously insulating their dwellings.

Peace!

Precis: "Death of Environmentalism" as a Rhetorical Intervention

2009-12-01T09:06:00.000-08:00

In their highly controversial text "Death of Environmentalism--" which criticizes the environmental movement for its failure to make much progress on its agenda over the previous decade and challenges them to conjure up a transformative, creative vision equipped with proposals that will reshape the global energy economy-- Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus engage in a rhetorical critique of the modern environmental movement. Their text is a rhetorical intervention, as the authors engage in a host of maneuvers that are familiar to rhetoricians: they explicitly state the thesis, scrutinize "assumptions" of the modern environmental community, and discuss the concept of "framing." Along with tracing the text's significant rhetorical movements, I will also examine the text's resonances with other texts, such Arne Naess's Deep Ecology Platform, Aristotle's Analytic Posteriora, and Al Gore's Introduction to Silent Springs. By mapping out their rhetorical intervention and the text's resonances with other texts, I hope to flesh out some of the salient features of Shellenberger and Nordhaus's argument.

Throughout "Death of Environmentalism," Shellenberger and Nordhaus make several rhetorical moves, the first in which they explicitly spell out their thesis. On page 2 of the Introduction, Shellengerger and Nordhaus delineate their thesis: "Our thesis is this: the environmental community's narrow definition of its self-interest leads to a kind of policy literalism that undermines its power." In explicitly highlighting their thesis, the authors clearly establish their argument and orient the audience (the intended audience is the environmental community) as to the direction the text intends to march. They make it clear that they intend to discuss the environmental movement's failure over the previous decade to reshape the global energy economy, specifically attributing the root of this failure to their political agenda based on self-interest. In addition to clearly mapping out the direction of their argument, they also engage in a rhetorical maneuver by highlighting the "unexamined assumptions" of modern environmentalists.

In spotlighting the "unexamined assumptions" of the modern environmentalists, Shellenberger and Nordhaus attempt to flesh out the logic behind the assumptions in order to show the limitations, fallaciousness, or inconsistency of their logic. Throughout the twenty-eight page text, they explicitly discuss "assumptions" at least eleven times (7)(8)(10)(12))(13)(18)(19)(20)(26)(28)(29)** (see below for all references). For example, on page 12, they discuss how the modern environmentalist community suffers from "a bad case of group think, starting with shared assumptions about what we mean by "the environment"-- a category that reinforces the notions that 1) the environment is a separate thing and b) human beings are separate from and superior to the natural world." In an effort to debunk the assumptions of these environmentalist's-- who see themselves as representing a thing called Nature or the Environment, separate from us humans-- Nordhaus and Shellenberger cite the worldview of Sierra Club founder John Muir, who said that "when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe" (9). Though they do not explicitly refer to Deep Ecology, Nordhaus and Shellenberger mobilize arguments about "the web of relations" that echo Arne Naess's arguments in his Deep Ecology Platform in order to undermine these "assumptions" about nature. In his work, Arne Naess discusses the "interconnectedness" of everything in nature: "organisms are knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations." Arne Naess suggests it is ignorant of humans to view the "environment" as a simple thing, as "organisms, ways of life, and interactions in the biosphere in general, exhibit complexity of such an astoundingly high level". In addition to echoing Deep Ecology principles when stating that environmentalists should not see "environment" as a separate thing, Nordhaus and Shellenberger mobilize more arguments that resonate with Deep Ecologists when they examine the modern environmentalists assumption that "human beings are separate from and superior to the natural world". This assumption that the authors highlight can be traced back to Arne Naess's rejection of the "man-in-environment image" and advocacy for ecological egalitarianism. In principle 1 of the Deep Ecology platform, Naess argues that the "well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves"-- in other words, everything has inherent value in itself. Because everything is equal and has inherent value, we humans have no right to establish master-slave relations, as it "has only contributed to the alienation of man from himself." While Shellenberger and Nordhaus do not explicitly allude to Arne Naess and Deep Ecologists, they employ arguments that resonate with the values of Deep Ecologists in order to debunk assumptions that modern environmentalists hold. In order to successfully address environmental issues, Shellenberger and Nordhaus argue that we need to see that that the environment is not "out there": "The problem is not external to us; its us. It's a human problem having to do with how we organize our socity" (12). In order to correct our cognitive dissonance and gain momentum and ground in the environmental movement, we must first debunk the assumption that there is a distinction between the environment and humans and start viewing the problem as "interconnected." Modern environmentalists, who do not assimilate the American auto industry or the union movement under the category of "environment," would be much more successful if they expanded their view to see the "interconnectedness"-- or the overlap of interests and common values-- with allies in labor, business, and community. Shellenberger and Nordhaus argue that redefining the notion of environment to include non-traditional environmental alliances is necessary if the movement hopes to win action on global warming.

Along with providing an explicit thesis and dissecting "assumptions," Shellenberger and Nordhaus also draw attention to a concept familiar to rhetoricians: framing. In the footnotes, they define "framing" as using "different words to describe the same old problem and solutions" (34). Similar to the examination of "assumption," they mention the concept of framing at least a dozen times. Shellenberger and Nordhaus understand that the environmental problem is contingent-- that is, it can be framed in one way or another. Shellenberger and Nordhaus's major criticism of the modern environmentalists is that they have myopic vision, framing the environmental problem by focusing on environmentalism as a "thing"-- the environment. The authors say the "root of the environmental community's failure can be found in the way it designates certain problems as environmental and others as not" (20). In other words, their failure can be attributed to their shallow dichotomization of problems as "environmental" or "non environmental." Furthermore, ever since 30 years ago, the community's political strategy became defined around "using science to define the problem as "environmental" and crafting technical political proposals as solutions" (7). Because they frame the problem from a limited perspective, employ analytic (scientific) logic as a way of legitimating their argument, and mobilize technical political proposals, they have come up with narrow solutions. In contrast to the narrow, short-sited, special interest, technical framing that environmentalists employ now, Nordhaus and Shellenberger call for a reframing of the problem in a creative, transformative vision. After explaining the need for a compelling, inspiring vision, they introduce the "New Apollo Project," a proposal which they put together in 2003 with Carol/Trevelyan Strategy Group, the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, the Common Assets Defense Fund, and the Institute of America's Future (though they do not explicitly state the Apollo Project is the manifestation of that vision, they include a quote from Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope who states that he sees "the Apollo Project as a way of reframing the issue" (27). In the text, they discuss how the "New Apollo Project" proposes a vision to "free the US from oil and create millions of good new jobs over 10 years" by building a coalition of environmental, labor, business, and community allies. Instead of assuming a special interest agenda, in which they craft technical proposals, Apollo suggests a new vision where allies recognize their common cause or their interconnectedness and frame "proposals around core American values and start seeing our own values as central to what motivates and guides our politics" (33).

Related to the issue of framing, Nordhaus and Shellenberger's discussion of the environmental movement's use of reductive logic is reminiscent of Aristotle's discussion of the three various modes of inquiry-- analytic, dialectic, and rhetorical. In Analytic Posteriora, Aristotle discusses how there are three modes of inquiry that yield epistema, or knowledge. Aristotle's analytic mode of inquiry most closely aligns with "reductive logic." The analytic mode is a process of inquiry that engages one person (it does not engage two people like dialectic); it is a methodology concerned with questions as to the fixed essence of something; and it involves demonstration, or the logical structure of inference that is centered around sound syntactical and grammatical relationships. It is this mode of inquiry that Nordhaus and Shellenberger say modern environmentalists have taken up: "the environmental movement acts as though proposals based on "sound science" will be sufficient to overcome ideological and industry opposition." However, it is this analytic or reductive mode that has contributed to the environmental movement's failure. Rather than privileging analytic logic, the authors suggest a new mode of inquiry: a rhetorical mode of inquiry. Using a rhetorical mode of inquiry, they suggest reframing the problem to create a compelling, transformative vision. As discussed in the above paragraph, this vision would focus on the alliance between environmentalists, labor, business, and community. In addition to framing proposals around core American values, like right-wing think tanks have been doing, Shellenberger and Nordhaus also suggest making investments in cleaner coal: "Investments in cleaner coal should be framed as part of an overall vision for creating jobs in the energy industries of the future, not simply as a technical fix" (23). They encourage the environmental movement to rethink its strategy: "the way to win is not to defend-- it's to attack (30). Rather than assuming the defensive and arguing on the right wing's terms, the modern environmentalists should try a new approach-- talking about the millions of jobs that will be created by accelerating the transition from a clean energy economy. Essentially, Shellenberger and Nordhas encourage the environmental community to exercise their collective creativity and imagine a more creative plan of attack that breaks out of their "airtight containers" or "conceptual boxes" (21).

In addition to Arne Naess's Deep Ecology and Aristotle's Analytic Posteriora, "Death of Environmentalism" also reminded me of Al Gore's Introduction to Silent Springs (along with Howard Kunstler's and Peter Sloterdikj's historical narratives), in that all plot a historical trajectory of environmentalism. Like the Silent Spring's Introduction, in which Gore cites Carson's publication in 1962 as the defining moment marking the transition from conservation to the modern environmental movement, Nordhaus and Shellenberger also discuss Van Jones's tale of the three waves of environmentalism: "the first wave of environmentalism was framed around conservation and the second around regulation. We believe the third wave will be framed around investment" (28). In quoting Van Jones, they are creating a narrative of environmentalism, one which pave the way for and then buttress their suggestion in the New Apollo Project: "Apollo stresses the need for great public-private investments to establish American leadership in the clean energy revolution-- investments like those America made in railraods, the highways, the electronics industry and the Internet" (28). Like Gore, Shellenberger and Nordhaus paint a history of the environmental movement to help contextualize the situation for readers, providing more information for them and helping them understand what is necessary so that they can support investments in clean energy. In discussing Van Jones's historical account of the environmental movement, Shellenberger and Nordhaus are making an argument, which mobilizes an authority appeal, to hopefully persuade readers to support the next wave of environmentalism.

By plotting Shellenberger and Nordhaus's rhetorical intervention, as well as the text's resonances with other texts, I have articulated my own idiosyncratic relation to "Death of Environmentalism." In threading together my own idiosyncratic relation to "Death of Environmentalism," I hope to have highlighted the salient features of the text, as well as its rhetorical workings, Deep Ecology resonances, rejection of the analytic (scientific) mode and call for a rhetorical inquiry, and historical tale of environmentalism.

**Different sites of use of "assumption": "By failing to question their most basic assumptions about the problem and the solution, environmental leaders are like generals fighting the last war" (7); "most of the movement's leading thinker's do not question their most basic assumptions about who we are, what we stand for, and what it is that we should be doing" (8); "we have become convinced that modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live" (10); "But as a community, environmentalists suffer from a bad case of group think, starting with shared assumptions about what we mean by "the environment"-- a category that reinforces the notions that 1) the environment is a separate things and b) human beings are separate from and superior to the natural world" (12); "Literal sclerosis can be seen in the assumption that to win action on global warming on must talk about global warming instead of, say, the economy, industrial policy, or health care" (13); "In light of this string of legislative disasters on might expect environmental leaders to reevaluate their assumptions and craft a new proposal" (18); "the conventional wisdom today is that the auto industry and the UAW "won" the CAFE fight. This logic implies that industry executives represent what's best for shareholders, that union executives represent what's best for workers, and that environmentalists represent what's best for the environment. All of these assumptions merit questioning" (19); "Environmentalists as well as industry and labor leaders have yet to rethink their assumptions about the future of American auto industry in ways that might reframe their proposal" (20); "Whether or not you believe that the New Apollo Project is on the mark, it is at the very least a sincere attempt to undermine the assumptions beneath special interest environmentalism" (26); "the assumption here is that the American electorate consists of 100 million policy wonks eager to digest bleak news we have to deliver" (28); "the unspoken assumptions here are a) the problem, or the "root cause" is "greenhouse gases" b) labor must accept the environmental movement's framing of the problem as greenhouse gases and c) its the responsibility of labor to get with the program on global warming" (29).

Moving Windmills

2009-12-01T09:04:00.000-08:00

I found this charitable organization Moving Windmills started by William Kamkwamba that helps rural economic and educational development in Malawi. Kamkwamba built his own windmill in Malawi after reading about windmills from a textbook from a local library. William Kamkwamba is from a small rural village in Malawi and was forced to drop out from school at fourteen because of financial difficulties. After building the initial windmill he has gone on to build several other windmills for his village as well as installing solar panels, building a solar powered well, and numerous other projects. The charity works towards local sustainable development, increasing educational opportunities for local youth through both increasing the size of the local library and by providing scholarships for secondary school, malaria prevention through bed net distribution, increased access to water through building wells and installing free running water taps, and agricultural projects such as installing a drip irrigation system. The only project that I felt did not fit as green was the distribution of fertilizer and urea, which the website states increased crop yield threefold, while ignoring the actual cost of the fertilizer and the fact that using fertilizer bought with charitable funds creates a dependent relationship with the people donating to the charitable organization and degrades the soil over time. This project does not seem to fit with the rest of the projects which are concerned with creating an independent sustainable livelihood for the people. Here is the website: http://movingwindmills.org/. In addition to information on the charitable organization there is also information on a book about William Kamkwamba called The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind and a documentary called Moving Windmills: The William Kamkwamba Story.

Digression from Lakoff Article.

2009-11-30T21:44:00.000-08:00

I grew up in a Republican family in the Conservative-farmtown Fresno: the "bread-basket" of America. How Conservative/ Republican? : My high school Civics teacher lectured with a photo of BUSH pastered on the wall behind him EVERYDAY). The Lakoff article struck me with considerable force because I am constantly framing the GREEN paradigms we explore in modes that can be understood by my conservative family and hometown friends. Often this means discussing specific issues (ie: harmful nature of monocultre) and avoiding reference to greater environmental movents: (Try mentioning ECOSOCIALISM in Fresno and they'll think you're on a comedy tour) This has been the most rewarding experience outside of the rhet 181 coursework. Forgive me for my poor rhetorical skills, mainly unsubstantiated claims and sweeping generalizations; here's a little stream of consciousness inspired by Lakoff's article.

Cheers,

Although environmentalist movements have garnered widespread support in recent years, there is still work to be done. Right wing America still associates environmental campaigns terms such as 'sustainability,' 'environmental justice,' and 'Green' with bleeding-heart socialist liberals. In fact, the very mention of the 'environment' in a political discussion is enough for some conservatives to conjure up vivid images of hippie rebels burning down buildings to protest deforestation. Growing up in the Conservative, Bush-supporting, industrial farming, and official "bread-basket" of America, I now present a image that represents my hometown's (Fresno) greatest fear:

...and in spirit of my hometown- this would be the quote attached to it......

"The World's a sanctuary, man. We have to love the world like it loves us. Treat the earth with love, care, and compassion, man. Rebel against those that TELL YOU what to do, brother. you are your own spirit, inseparable from Terra Mater (mother Earth)." "Socialism is the answer, man. Anarchy. Big Government. Rah!"

I would love to say people don't actually formulate this image when environmental issues enter into political discussions, but I'm afraid this is almost verbatim out of the mouth of a family-friend in response to my reference to 'environmental justice.'

The conjuration of such a image immediately disables any productive discussion. This where the importance of framing comes in. According to the author George Lakoff, "framing is understanding."

In my opinion, along with Lakoff, in order to successfully convey any environmentalist message, one MUST explain a simple presupposition: We ARE part of nature; nature is not separate from us. Thoreau and Emerson both speak to this exact point.

Once this premise is adopted, environmental movements come into a more understandable light. Environmental discussions are no longer polarized with productivist society pitted against environmental justice. In other words, people would see helping the environment as crucial to bettering their own lives, not as something they should do ontop of their daily routine. What is harmful to society is also harmful to the environment. What benfits the environment also benefits society, and vice versa. The environment provides the livelihood of society, so hurting it destroys society.

Once Conservatives realize that protecting the environment actually serves their own self-interest, environmental movements will become much more useful in policy making decisions.

This is main premise to work from when questioning unsustainable industrial agriculture. Conservatives, often hell-bent on acting on individual self-interest, might then realize that
breaking environmentally harmful practices/ systems/ processes will actually provide enormous ecological and economic security (Polyculture allows more self-sufficiency while mono-culture forces reliance on pesticdes, fertilizers, seeds, etc)

Student Technology Council.

2009-11-30T19:56:00.000-08:00

For my presentation tomorrow I give you the UC Berkeley Student Technology Council (STC).

The Student Technology Council (STC) was chartered in 2009 by Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Technology (AVC-IT) and Chief Information Officer (CIO) Shel Waggener as the student technology governance structure. The STC identifies and prioritizes students' information technology needs and opportunities, in support of UC Berkeley's mission. The STC's mission is to connect, innovate, and sustain in order to meet student technology needs.

In specific relation to our class, 2 of the STC's 5 guiding principles are:

Evaluates existing campus technological resources to promote educational and organizational efficiency and effectiveness.
Advances new, green, and scalable IT solutions.

Technology is the most significant source of environmental impact, and soon students will have an official channel to change their university in this regard. I look forward to talking to you all about it tomorrow.

Oh, and, our Poll is now on the front of page your bSpace, please take a minute and take it. It's only one question -- and you can vote for Green Technology on campus.

Tomorrow --

2009-11-30T18:49:00.000-08:00

Those who have not yet presented their reports need to be ready to go tomorrow, even if that means something of a marathon. Those who have not posted their precis: tick tock, time's a wasting, people. We've a lot of business stuff to get through tomorrow in addition to discussing the "Death of Environmentalism" piece, and I'm hoping we have a high turnout -- please, do try not to miss tomorrow of all days. Also, don't worry if I arrive somewhat close to the wire tomorrow -- I've a meeting before class (believe me, I would far rather be gabbing with the pre-class cohort on the stone bench). See you all soon, d

Protest at Bank of America today

2009-11-30T18:37:00.000-08:00

The Mobilization for Climate Justice held protests across the U.S.--in San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, DC and Greensville, SC (no word on whether or not pun was intended)--today to combat the "global climate crisis, based on equitable, democratic and science-based solutions."

In San Francisco, 200 preotesters blocked the entrance to the Bank of America skyscraper, some going as far as to lock themselves inside the building's revolving doors. 23 were arrested.

According to Bloomberg Financial, Bank of America is "the third largest financier of oil, gas, and coal in the world, and is heavily involved in financing mountaintop removal coal mining" the group said. Activists also targeted "carbon traders, and five of the largest contributors to climate pollution: JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Chevron, BP, and American Electric Power."

photos via SFist...

Job Opportunity - Climate Action Facilitator

2009-11-29T17:56:00.000-08:00

The Ecology Center is currently looking for students to be Climate Action Facilitators. You can find the specifics here (they are hoping to hire by December 15).

Not only is this a great opportunity to develop your public speaking skills but it is also a great way to gain experience educating and organizing the community around environmental issues (and perhaps, since you all have taken this Green Rhetoric class, you might want to link these environmental issues to the broader issues of racism, sexism, poverty, etc.).

Vandana Shiva. " The US Patent System Legalizes Theft and Biopiracy" Precis.

2009-11-29T14:22:00.000-08:00

Activist Vandana Shiva works in the fields of bio-piracy, eco-feminism, and intellectual property rights. In “The US Patent System Legalizes Theft and Biopiracy” she explains how Western IPR systems, specifically US Patent laws, legitimize the piracy of indigenous knowledge and biodiversity. This article, along with her interview with A. Rishi titled, “Nature- Earth Crusader,” explain how Vandana Shiva challenges environmental problems with intellectual research and grassroots activism.

Western style IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) systems provide the legal basis for bio-piracy. "Prior Art" is the legal term used by IP laws to describe unpatentable material. This term is used to describe any thing/process/ technology that has previously existed and therefore cannot count as a patentable invention. Article 102 states that all 'Prior Art' must be substantiated through documented proof (ie: description in a publication) or through another patent. However, since indigenous knowledge is not often officially documented, Article 102 allows almost anything undocumented in the US to be treated as a patentable invention. As Vandana Shiva explains, this is the basis of biopiracy, “Since patents are granted for new inventions, denial or non- recognition of `prior art' elsewhere allows patents to be granted for existing knowledge and use in other countries. This is the basis of biopiracy or knowledge of Indian knowledge systems.” The WTO globalized US Patent policy with TRIPS (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) in 1994. Vandana calls this a “double theft,” because it 1) allows theft of creativity/ innovation and 2) destroys “economic options of everyday survival on the basis of our indigenous biodiversity and indigenous knowledge.”

This article was first published in the bilingual, English/ Indian daily paper, “The Hindu,” in 1999. Published before much of the international activism concerning bio-piracy, this article was intended to be a wake up call. This article is filled with some hefty claims, many of which accuse US corporations as thieves and profiteers. Claims such as : “The promotion of piracy is not an aberration in the U.S. patent law. It is intrinsic to it,” and “The U.S. style patent laws can only pirate indigenous knowledge. They cannot recognise or protect it, ” voice Vandana's strong opposition to US Patent Laws, and would undoubtedly grab the attention of the unfamiliar reader. However, Vandana is careful to support these hefty claims with empirical evidence. She begins the article with a reference to a recently granted patent that allows the private ownership of the anti-diabetic properties of traditional indigenous medicines. She later quotes verbatim the Article 102 of the US patent law, explicitly linking the text to the basis of bio piracy. This empirical evidence substantiates her hefty accusations.

After Vandana Shiva presents Artice 102 as the explicit foundation of all bio-piracy, she shifts gears to the necessity of change, and the mobilization of the masses. For Vandana Shiva, biopiracy can stop only through a overhaul of US Patent Laws and IPR systems. She claims, “Article 102 must be redrafted to recognise prior art of other countries.” She frames the Western IPR systems as a vicious “regime which denies the knowledge and innovations of the Third World” and also a regime that, “legalizes monopolistic exclusive rights.” She then presents her call to action, claiming that India must lead a campaign to the WTO to challenge this dominant paradigm based on stealing. Her last few paragraphs focus on the coercive nature of Western IPR systems, and how these systems MUST be challenged immediately. She advocates diverse IPR systems for diverse world knowledge systems. For Vandana, this will hep protect systems of common property and indigenous knowledge systems. Her call to action reaches an apex in her last sentence, where she links the very survival of India to challenging Western IPR systems, “India should lose no time in starting the movement for amendment of TRIPs and U.S. patent laws. Our survival itself is at stake.” This is perhaps her most substantial claim.

Vandana Shiva’s work with grassroots activism provides the practical force that formulates the movement against Western IPR systems. The article above functions to raise awareness in people stand outside of the direct impact of bio-piracy. It hopes to garner support from a community unaware of bio piracy. Unlike the Indians who might read Vandana Shiva’s article in the HINDU on the way to work, Grassroots activism can be seen as a direct engagement and mobilization of those directly affected by bio piracy. Grassroots activism gives a voice to the indigenous people most affected by biopiracy.

The Wikipedia article on Biopiracy (which has been neutralized under the title “Commericalization of traditional medicines") clearly shows how grassroots activism gives indigenous people agency.

This is a quote from the website:

“ In response to bio piracy threats such as this, India has been translating and publishing ancient manuscripts containing old remedies in electronic form. The texts are being recorded from Sanskrit, Urdu, Persian and Arabic; they will be made available to patent offices in English, German, French, Japanese and Spanish in 2006. The aim is to protect India's heritage from being exploited by foreign companies.”

These “ancient manuscripts” are often held by old rural communities, and sometimes exist only in oral form. The transcription/ translation/ dissemination of local indigenous knowledge to the global community provide security to local communities from multi-national corporations engaging in bio-piracy. In the Western IPR system explain above, this process makes the existence of indigenous knowledge known to the world, thus allowing it to fall under the "Prior Art" category of unpatentable knowledge.

I recently read Vandana Shiva’s Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. This book as a nice extension of her work on bio-piracy. I recommend it to anyone looking to understand how Vandana Shiva positions bio-piracy within her movement toward creating “living economies, cultures, and democracies.”

Miles Hischier

Bruno Latour announces a new site to help navigate scienitifc controversy.

2009-11-29T12:00:00.000-08:00

Bruno Latour has announced a new website to help navigate opinions and data of scientific controversy.

From the site: "MACOSPOL is a joint research enterprise that gathers scholars in science, technology and society across Europe. Its goal is to devise a collaborative platform to help students, professionals and citizens in mapping out scientific and technical controversies".

This is a 17 minute video presentation on it by Latour, and this is the website itself.

Something like this seems to me in grave demand. Consider the recent "ClimateGate" crisis for example, and its easy to see that a neutral authority to guide public understanding would be beneficial, as opposed to the always overly bias political interests that often inform the public of scientific issues from, in many cases, unscientific vantages.

Naomi Klein on Climate Debt

2009-11-29T10:52:00.000-08:00

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/23/naomi_klein_on_climate_debt_why

"Freegan" = Free + Vegan

2009-11-29T03:13:00.000-08:00

Here are a few links related to my presentation on living Freegan.

Very informative site by a guy in Brooklyn that includes definitions, dumpster diving tips, media archives, etc:
http://www.freegan.info

(from the front page of freegan.info)
"Freegans are people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed."

Freegans fight consumerism by recognizing the huge amount of food and material waste that is created by first time users. Other "freegan" practices not directly linked to food are swap meets, "squatting" in homes/apartments, and wearing used clothes.

I think that Food Not Bombs is an organization that embodies many principles of Freeganism and exists in most major cities.
(from the East Bay FnB website) "Food Not Bombs recovers healthy, nutritious, vegetarian food that would have been otherwise discarded and cooks and serves it to people in immediate need. The problem isn't too little production, it's poor and inequitable distribution. Food Not Bombs is an alternative food distribution organization, intent on building sustainable community food sharing programs."

FnB East Bay (http://www.ebfnb.org) and San Francisco (http://www.sffnb.org) both give out free meals almost every day and are looking for volunteers to help pick up ingredients, cook meals, and serve!

Christina Samons

Ethos

2009-11-28T20:28:00.001-08:00

Last additions to our syllabus are up. Hard to believe, but our final week together, at least as a community, officially speaking, is, like, you know, nigh.

Dubai's Bankrupt.

2009-11-27T21:59:00.000-08:00

Perhaps many of you already know, but Dale's favorite whipping boy/girl, Dubai, is already running out of steam.

Johann Hari writes: "Dubai is finally financially bankrupt – but it has been morally bankrupt all along. The idea that Dubai is an oasis of freedom on the Arabian peninsular is one of the great lies of our time. Yes, it has Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts and the Gucci styles, but beneath these accoutrements, there is a dictatorship built by slaves".

Click here for the link.

Dubai World is almost $60bn in debt and has asked to put off repayment until May next year.

Food Stamps and Farmers Markets

2009-11-27T18:03:00.000-08:00

This year, about one in eight Americans will rely on food stamps. This may be great news for green eats, here's why:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/food-stamp-sales-double-at-citys-greenmarkets/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/us/20market.html

http://www.grist.org/article/more-nyc-farmers-markets-accept-food-stamps-and-sales-soar/

Keywords Final

2009-11-26T11:11:00.000-08:00

There are well over a hundred keywords listed below from among the many more terms we have taken up and deployed over the course of our readings and conversations this term.

For your Final you are to create three categories (conceptual, practical, figurative, whatever) entirely of your own choosing and design, and then subsume under each of these categories a number of keywords from the list below which seem to you to be related to one another in a significant or useful way through each of your chosen categories and in respect to your sense of the overall subject of our course together. "Green" is not a Keyword in the list -- but your own idiosyncratic inhabitation of Greenness, your own sense of what Greenness most importantly consists will likely emerge in the Final taken as a whole.

For each keyword you choose, provide a clear and concise definition of the term (nothing more than a sentence, at most two) in your own words, and then follow that definition with a quotation from one of the assigned texts from our syllabus. The quotation should be one that is especially illuminating for the definition you have made in some way: the quotation can be a definition that yours is a variation of, the quotation can be an example or illustration that supports your definition, the quotation can provide an analogy or figure or frame that inspired your definition, the quotation can even be something that seemed so wrongheaded to you that it provoked your definition as a kind of protest or intervention.

Your final must provide definitions and quotations for at least thirty-six keywords but no more than forty. None of your categories can contain fewer than seven keywords and none can contain more than sixteen keywords.

Each of your categories should have a title and a general explanatory paragraph (and I do mean a paragraph, not an essay) indicating what you take the category to delineate.

You can hand the final in to me personally at any time from now to the end of term, but I ask that you send it to me as a Word-readable attachment in an e-mail if you cannot place a hard copy directly into my hands. The last possible deadline for submitting the final is via e-mail, noon, Tuesday, December 15, 2009. Think about when your other finals are scheduled and when your other papers are due and fit this final Keyword Project into your schedule in a way that best suits your own situation. If you have time to get this done early rather than last minute, by all means do so. You should give yourself a good few days to do this work, since scouting through passages and notes across the whole term often yields unexpected syntheses that lead to revisions of your initial categorizations and keyword groupings. I hope this exercise is an enlightening and enjoyable one for you all rather than a drudgery. Be experimental, exploratory, earnest about it and you are almost sure to get incomparably more benefit from it.

If you have questions, always feel free to post them in Comments, e-mail them to me, raise them in class, or talk with me about them in office hours.

Here are the Keywords I'm having you choose from:

Access-to-Knowledge (a2k)
Agriculture
Agroforestry
Alienation
Anthropocene
Appropriate Technology
Atmosphere
Biodegradable
Biodiversity
Biomimicry
Biopiracy
Biosphere
Biosphere II
Cap and Trade
Climate Change
Climate Refugees
Climax Ecosystem
Co-evolution
Commons
Common Sense
Commonwealth
Consensus Science
Consent
Conservation
Consumer
Cradle-to-Cradle
Creative Commons
Custom
Deep Ecology
Democracy
Denial
Depletion
Design
Development
Downcycling
Ecology
Ecofeminism
Ecosocialism
Ecosystem
Ecosystemic Services
Eco-Village
Edible Landscaping
Enclosure
Endangered Species
Energy Descent
Environmental Justice Movement
Environmental Racism
Exoticism
Externality
Farmers Market
Feral
Finitude
Footprint
Futurism
Gaia
Genome
Geoengineering
Globalization
Greenwashing
Hierarchy
Immateralism
Indigeneity
Industrial Agriculture
Industrialism
Input Intensive
Instrumental Rationality
Integrated Pest Management
Intentional Community
Intellectual Property
Investment
Irrigation
Leapfrogging
Limit
Local
Localvore
Luddism
Militarism
Monoculture
Native
Nature
Natural Capital
Need
Niche
One Size Fits All
Organic
Pandemic
Parks
Patriarchy
Peak Oil
Peer-to-Peer (p2p)
Permaculture
Planetary
Poison
Political Ecology
Pollution
Polyculture
Post-Scarcity
Precautionary Principle
Predator
Primitivism
Public Good
Recycling
Renewable
Resilience
Resource Descent
Salination
Scientificity
Seed Saving
Seed Sharing
Slow Food
Slum
Small Is Beautiful
Smart Grid
Social Ecology
Sublimity
Sustainability
Symbiosis
Technical Metabolism
Technofix,
Toxicity
Triple Bottom Line
Urban Agriculture
Vegetarianism
Viridian
Wilderness

A Thanksgiving Prayer by William Burroughs

2009-11-26T09:47:00.000-08:00

William Burroughs gives thanks. Director Gus Van Sant helps out.

W. S. Burroughs - thanksgiving prayer -
Uploaded by Maetthew. - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.

For John Dillinger
In hope he is still alive
Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1986

Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts

thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison —

thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger —

thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot —

thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes —

thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through —

thanks for the KKK, for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches, for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces —

thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers —

thanks for laboratory AIDS —

thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs —

thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business —

thanks for a nation of finks — yes, thanks for all the memories... all right, let's see your arms... you always were a headache and you always were a bore —

thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.

report stuff

2009-11-25T15:25:00.000-08:00

I am also planning on doing my report this week and here is the link in advance:

http://ableandbakerstudio.com/splash.html

and

http://www.bardessono.com/

Redwood Regional Park

2009-11-25T11:30:00.000-08:00

I am posting in advance the web site connected with the report I plan on giving eventually. If I can figure out how I will add some pictures I took of my dog and I at the park.
http://www.ebparks.org/parks/redwood
Chris Wood

Funny and provoking article/website re: bedbugs, pyschics

2009-11-25T10:39:00.000-08:00

http://www.awitness.org/column/bedbug_misinformation.html

Hi, I found this website and thought it is one of the most interesting sites I have ever ever seen; the way this guy talks about kamikaze attacking bed bugs and their genetic lineages, it reminds me of science fiction. It only got more interesting when I went to the site index and saw all these letters to the pope, ayatollah khomeni...It is interesting because there is some affinity between documenting apocalyptic eco events (this guy writes about a massive die off of coral reefs, ), "conspiracy" (this guy has letters about how bush documents every phone call), religion (he thinks Mary and preits are opressors of the human race), politics, extensive personal details on bedbugs. The series on the second american revolution is interesting, a lot of the stuff parallels legitmate discourse we have to read.

There are some good quotes like "Because you cannot have Capitalism without having lots of wickedness at the same time, it becomes obvious that Capitalism was a system which was designed by deviant wicked pricks who were very clever."

Here is an interesting Lakoff article that speaks to our work in Green Rhetoric

2009-11-24T15:20:00.000-08:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/why-environmental-underst_b_205477.html

Précis: Gore goes Eco-feminist in his Introduction to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”

2009-11-23T00:51:00.000-08:00

With his introduction to Rachel Caron’s Silent Spring, Al Gore efforts to convey the enormous role the book had in spawning the modern environmental movement. While doing so, he strikes a tone with strong eco-feminist resonance, positing industrial patriarchy as the biggest threat to the environment and anyone who seeks to protect it.
The fact that he is writing a preface for a book that already amassed a broad-readership and sealed its place in history meant that Gore had a good idea of the audience to whom he was writing. It did not include, “those who were profiting from pollution,” “the major chemical companies that he says tried to suppress Silent Spring”, and “those whose financial well-being depends on maintaining the environmental status quo.” Calling them out, but not by name, Gore positions the faceless corporate chemical monolith as the enemy, making it easy for the reader to feel included and comfortable uniting with him against it (which might not be possible if he referenced by name Dow Chemical, the maker of DDT, for example, since the reader could be a stockholder, or an employee or relative, friend, acquaintance of an employee). He also strikes a populist chord by emphasizing that the companies that attacked Carson were solely concerned with money, employing a well-worn trope: the conscienceless corporation’s exploiting the common man solely to increase its profit margins. He tacks an ethical appeal to the end of this paragraph in a parenthetical aside, “(Having been labeled 'Ozone Man' during the 1992 campaign, a name that was probably not intended as a compliment but that I wore as a badge of honor, I am aware that raising these issues invariably inspires a fierce -- and sometimes foolish -- reaction.)” This digression functions to remind the reader, “Hey! It’s me! Former Vice President Al Gore!” in addition to remind him or her that Gore has some environmental street-cred, having campaigned for climate change action and awareness in the past.
Secondly, it seems clear that Gore is speaking to a largely female, or at the very least, politically correct, gender-conscious audience. He makes a point of emphasizing the fact that many of the attacks against Carson attempted to undermine her on the basis of her gender. Gore writes, “because Carson was a woman, much of the criticism directed at her played on stereotypes of her sex. Calling her "hysterical" fit the bill exactly. Time magazine added the charge that she had used ‘emotion-fanning words.’” Highlighting these attacks in particular, before the ones that attacked Carson on the scientific efficacy of her research, he sets the accusations up as baseless, biased, and bigoted.
He drives the point home by writing that Carson died of breast cancer, in the pathos-rich fourth paragraph: “And her courage, which matched her vision, went far beyond her willingness to disturb an entrenched and profitable industry. While writing Silent Spring, she endured a radical mastectomy and then radiation treatment. Two years after the book's publication, she died, of breast cancer.” In referencing Carson’s mastectomy Gore appeals to the reader’s emotional response. He then cites research that links breast cancer with “exposure toxic chemicals,” a claim that casts Carson as a martyr, dying for the environmentalist cause. It is a tenuous claim—the American Cancer Society writes unequivocally on its website: “we do not yet know exactly what causes breast cancer” and lists as possible risk factors as “smoking, drinking, and diet…age, race, and family history” but not exposure to toxic chemicals—but by mentioning the two together, Gore suggests a link that provokes a strong emotional reaction, without being specific enough to risk being wrong.
It is in the fifth paragraph that Gore goes all-out eco-feminist, writing, “[Carson] was also writing against the grain of an orthodoxy rooted in the earliest days of the scientific revolution: that man (and of course this meant the male of our species) was properly the center and the master of all things, and that scientific history was primarily the story of his domination -- ultimately, it was hoped, to a nearly absolute state.” Gore chooses a quote by Robert White Stevens to exemplify the corporate, male point of view, “Miss Carson maintains that the balance of nature is a major force in the survival of man, whereas the modern chemist, the modern biologist and scientist, believes that man is steadily controlling nature." Compare that with Maguire and Maguire’s characterization of that man in eco-feminist manifesto, “Playing god, [egotistical men] manipulate life by splicing genes in a frenzy of womb envy. As profit-driven warmongers, they traffic in death. Defiling our habitat, the patriarchs seem to be recklessly inventing new ways to junk Earth like some inner city ghetto and venture off in sterile techno-womb machines for ever more vainglorious conquests on the cosmic plane.” Gore also the mentions the American Medical Association weighing in “on the chemical companies' side” which, to me, suggested a reference to the AMA’s historic role suppressing women’s rights with their campaign to criminalize abortion.