Remind me again? Why do we have to build more stuff for cars?

Amen, amen, amen: Cities must focus on resiliency

Can't add anything to this:

Cities Must Become More Resilient to Survive

by Sarah Goodyear on July 14, 2009

The idea that cities are greener than suburbs has gotten a lot of attention lately. But a recently published book argues that in a future of diminishing resources, cities themselves are going to have to become much more efficient and inventive if they are to be sustainable -- indeed, if they are to survive at all.

The book is "Resilient Cities," by Peter Newman -- the man who coined the term "automobile dependence" -- Timothy Beatley and Heather Boyer. As Streetsblog Network member The Dirt (the blog of the American Society of Landscape Architects) writes, Newman and his colleagues say that some radical changes will be necessary if the world's cities are to avoid the worst-case scenarios of division or collapse:

Solar Settlement, in Freiburg, Germany. Photo via Young Germany.

"Resilient Cities"... presents a range of options to help adapt cities to lessen a dependence on petroleum, and create more resilient urban areas. The authors argue that the urban centers that may best survive a climate and energy crisis are those that engage in long-term planning and design for resiliency, and create sustainable, inter-connected modes of transportation; invest in renewable energy technology and smart grids; support walkable, high-density living; and provide for self-sufficient food production and protection of urban biodiversity... "It is clear that the changes needed for a resilient city are not just technology substitutions, they are in the business paradigms, the culture of the utilities, and the organization that can enable new ways of managing our cities; every household needs to be a part of it."

According to Newman and his co-authors, "cities throughout history have competed by examining innovations in other cities and building upon them. This [...] is the basis of wealth creation. We see the the response to climate change and peak oil as the impetus for the next burst of innovation." “Resilient Cities” also outlines a set of specific recommendations for making existing cities more adaptable to changes in climate and energy usage.

The authors write about many concrete models of cities such as Freiburg, Germany, that are implementing the types of initiatives they deem necessary. But will the world's cities be able to act decisively in time to save themselves? In the US, at least, they face some formidable obstacles. Let us know what you think in the comments.. . .

This Saturday: Passive Solar Workshop (Portland)

Half-buried ultra-efficient, low-tech passive solar home. Image by Dominic's pics via Flickr

Passive Solar Building Design - 7/18/09 - Portland - Tickets still available

Increase Energy Efficiency and Comfort in your Home

A well designed Passive Solar Home uses up to 80% less energy for heating & lighting than a conventional home! Your home's windows, walls, and floors can be designed to collect, store, and distribute solar energy in the form of heat in the winter and reject solar heat in the summer. This is called passive solar design because, unlike active solar heating systems, it doesn't involve the use of mechanical and electrical devices, such as pumps, fans, or electrical controls to move the solar heat.

To understand the techniques involved and how passive solar design works attend our upcoming workshop! >>Click Here for more details

A practical "how to" workshop for builders, designers and individuals who are planning to design or build a passive solar home.

You gain an understanding about the natural processes that underlie passive solar design and how building orientation, architecture and construction materials take advantage of these natural processes to provide a significant portion of a home's space heating, cooling and daylighting. You will also learn to calculate how much glazing and thermal storage you will need and how to meet the requirements for the $1500 Oregon State Residential Energy Tax Credit.

$10 for Solar Oregon members; $20 for Non-members

We're killing each other with cars

InvestigateWest has a concise piece that sums it up:

We’re killing our neighbors with our cars

We are literally killing people with air pollution.

It’s a simple fact that tends to get forgotten in the everyday bustle of our lives. And it’s that bustle itself – specifically, zipping to and fro courtesy the internal-combustion engine – that is proving most difficult for air-pollution regulators to fight.

Photo/Flickr and icewaterdog

These points are brought out nicely in a story by Keith Matheny that ran Sunday in The Desert Sun, the newspaper in Palm Springs, Calif. Thousands of people die from air pollution each year there in the Coachella Valley alone.

Now, it’s true that Palm Springs is cursed with unfortunate geography of being just over a low pass from Los Angeles, and located in a bowl of a valley. So the gunk in the air from LA and western Riverside County becomes a problem for Palm Springs.

But it’s also true that you could find many places in this country where air pollution peaks to levels considered too high for breathing. Matheny explains:

It’s the mobile pollution sources — diesel trucks, construction equipment, cars, trains and planes — that pose the biggest air quality challenges.

He goes on to point out, though, that the California Air Resources Board has just 50 inspectors to target a state’s worth of vehicles. . . .

Another reminder that we've got to get Oregon-ized to put the needs of people ahead of cars. It's a matter of life and death.

McNary Field: Home of the Salem Cargo Cult

a working aircraft at McNary Field -- the kind that could continue with the field under private ownership (Image via Wikipedia)

If Salem needs cash so desperately, the place to find it is the airport, as in selling it to private investors for them to operate or put to other use, as conditions dicate.

The airport is currently a tax drain on the city and occupies good, centrally located and well drained land that gets plenty of sun (and, yes, rain) -- perfect for a group of investors to take over, continue to run as an private, civil aviation airport if desired and, more importantly, to start using all that safety-buffer space as farmland as well.

Because the airline industry is cratering. The sooner Salem admits that there will never be scheduled commercial service to Salem again, the sooner the airport can be privatized and put on the tax rolls to become a tax generator instead of a tax drain.

Between the price of jet fuel (kerosene, from oil) and the onset of prices on carbon emissions, the bottom line is that that air travel --- one of the most energy intensive human activities --- is going to be less and less a part of our lives in the years to come and it will certainly never be a mass activity for the middle class, as it was for a while.

Salem's leadership seems to be either unaware or in denial about all of this, but the physical facts on the ground will trump any amount of psychological denial. The only question is how many planes will we attempt to build out of cedar planks before we give up our denial and admit that those years are over:

The most widely known period of cargo cult activity, however, was in the years during and after World War II. First, the Japanese arrived with a great deal of unknown equipment, and later, Allied forces also used the islands in the same way. The vast amounts of war materiel that were airdropped onto these islands during the Pacific campaign between the Allies and the Empire of Japan necessarily meant drastic changes to the lifestyle of the islanders, many of whom had never seen Westerners or Easterners before. Manufactured clothing, medicine, canned food, tents, weapons, and other useful goods arrived in vast quantities to equip soldiers. Some of it was shared with the islanders who were their guides and hosts. With the end of the war, the airbases were abandoned, and cargo was no longer dropped.

In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors, and airmen use. They carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses. The cult members thought that the foreigners had some special connection to the deities and ancestors of the natives, who were the only beings powerful enough to produce such riches.

In a form of sympathetic magic, many built life-size replicas of airplanes out of straw and created new military-style landing strips, hoping to attract more airplanes. Ultimately, although these practices did not bring about the return of the airplanes that brought such marvelous cargo during the war, they did have the effect of eradicating most of the religious practices that had existed prior to the war.

Best editorial in a long while: Paul VanDeVelder

Image via Wikipedia

Saving the Columbia and Snake river salmon

If ever there were a story that foreshadowed the political and legal Waterloos that loom in seeking solutions to climate change, surely that cautionary tale is the one about the Columbia and Snake rivers' salmon and their imminent extinction. And like most stories about endangered species or environmental threats, this one is not only about fish and rivers -- it's about us.

The policy deadlock that has resulted from the debate among stakeholders along the Columbia and the Snake -- aluminum smelters, the Bonneville Power Administration, politicians, Indian tribes, states, conservation groups, fishermen, barge operators, agribusiness and wheat farmers -- has flushed billions of taxpayer dollars out to sea over the last 15 years while doing very little to prevent 13 endangered salmon stocks from going extinct. . . .

Throughout this stalemate, fish counts have continued to fall, and the underlying science is clear: In river after river where dams have been removed, native fish populations have rebounded and thrived. As the government's former chief aquatic biologist, Don Chapman, concluded, dam removal is the most effective strategy for saving endangered native fish stocks from extinction.

This was the conclusion reached by the Idaho Statesman newspaper back in 1997 after it conducted a yearlong study of the Snake River dams. The paper reported that the economic benefits of a healthy fishery -- and the resultant tens of thousands of jobs -- would swamp the benefits of leaving the dams in place. . . .

If the law and science are unable to trump politics to save this fishery -- a fishery that was the most productive in the world just two generations ago -- how will we ever meet the towering challenges posed by global climate change?

Food, Inc. --- a good meal, not a great one

We ventured out from LOVESalem HQ last night to catch Food, Inc. at Salem's gem of an indie movie theater, the Salem Cinema.

The more I think about the movie, the fewer stars I would give it, although it's a very watchable and engrossing film, and I wish every American would see it (particularly those still eating industrial meats -- that is, meat purchased from anyone other than the local farmer).

The bottom line issue that's nagging at me is that the film kept attempting to assert that consumers have sovereign power in our system and that the corporations will gladly do whatever it is we demand, if we only demand it insistently enough. (The illustration used to bolster the argument was that Wal-Mart has decided, after many years of hard work by others, to stop offering milk from cows hopped up on gene-tampered synthetic growth hormone, rBST, a/k/a rBGH.)

But the film really showed, in heartbreaking detail, that consumers are not all-powerful and can only be said to get what they want from the corporate-dominated phood system if what they want is tremendously profitable to provide.

That is, a woman who lost her young son to E. Coli strain 0157:H7 was featured in the film. Her son was killed by eating a fast-food burger. Her story is powerful, compelling, almost enough to make you weep. And yet, precisely nothing has been done to prevent recurrence. She works tirelessly to attempt to get "Kevin's Law" past the corporate owners of Congress but they shut her down, year after year after year. Even after killing people in agonizing ways year after year after year, the industrial phood system, controlled by a handful of surpassingly evil companies like Monsanto refuses to change. If consumers were actually sovereign, as Food, Inc. tries to argue, then we would see companies lining up to make their meat safer and safer, because people do not want food that will kill them. (The movie's brief reference to "The Jungle" and the efforts by people like Teddy Roosevelt to tackle the Beef Trust hints at the reality -- it isn't consumers that are sovereign, it used to be that government was. In the century since, corporations have worked tirelessly to preserve the shell of democracy but to replace its internal workings with one much more to their liking --- one that won't make them get the shit out of the meat if it threatens to reduce profits by so much as a penny.)

But the rBST case undermines the movie's happy talk about consumer sovereignty even more, because Posilac (TM) --- the synthesized recombinant bovine growth hormone --- was the product that no consumer ever asked for. Moreover, when they learned about it, consumers wanted nothing to do with it, and asked repeatedly for milk from treated cows to be labeled, so they could avoid it. Naturally, this upset Monsanto, who set to work all over the country, having their hired hands in legislatures all over America and (ultimately) the FDA FORBID dairies who refused to use their infernal product from labeling their goods as rBST-free or rBGH free.

In other words, the consumer is only sovereign if we can control what the consumer is allowed to know about their food. We know that they want real milk, cream, butter, ice cream, and cheese from real cows that aren't treated like a 100w bulb being burned at 150w (which is what Monsanto's hormones do to cows). Thus, we have to forbid anyone from knowing the difference. It's been nearly two decades and we've finally reached a stage of such consumer disgust about this whole thing that dairies who don't use milk from treated cows are allowed to note that fact --- provided that they also note that the FDA says that there's no difference between milk from cows hopped up on Posilac and real cows that produce as they evolved to do.

This mandatory statement -- which is actually nothing more than a self-imposed indictment of the FDA as a servile puppy licking the hands of its corporate masters like Monsanto -- is like a North Korean news report, which is fitting, given that the control that Monsanto and its ilk exerts over the so-called "regulatory agencies" is nothing if not totalitarian in scope and effect.

The movie was finished too late to note that one of the key Monsanto fixers who revolves in and out of government as needed to keep the system greased properly for The Firm has recently been appointed to -- you guessed it! -- a key role in the Obama Administration . . . as a top adviser on Food Safety no less!

If satire hadn't already been killed when Henry Kissinger was given a Nobel Peace Prize, this surely would have done it. (This should also prove fatal to any foolish notions about the "liberal" Obama and his willingness to fight for everyday people's interests.)

In the last few years, we've seen some stellar movies about some powerful threats and problems: There's the iconic "An Inconvenient Truth" (climate change); "Sicko" (the medical-industrial complex); "The End of Suburbia" (peak oil); and now there's "Food, Inc." about, well, phood.

What is the one thing that unites all these topics? That, until we start talking about the real sovereigns running the show -- the corporations who profit by destroying our climate, treating health care like a luxury to be granted only to the rich, promoting energy consumption and turning food into a weapon of mass destruction -- we'll get nowhere close to a solution to any of these issues.

The one documentary film that actually puts a name to the Beast and points to the underlying solution to all of our dilemmas is one that came and went without a trace, totally ignored by "responsible" media channels (responsible = responsible to corporate owners): The Corporation. That's the real meal deal for what ails us not just in the food aisle, but everywhere.

(For a powerful double feature, watch "HOME" and then "The Corporation." The first makes the problems indelibly clear; the second takes the mask off the source of those problems.)

Costco Members: An unusual offer you'd probably overlook

Image by tattoodjj- Away for a few days via Flickr

Costco.com is offering Costco members a free "Depend" adult diaper sample. I know, "Whoop Tee Doo" and Bob Dole jokes are what you're probably thinking.

BUT, there are plenty of people in Salem who need personal care/hygiene items like this and who are so hard up for money that buying them means less to eat. So your church assistance pantry would probably welcome these; the Union Gospel Mission, the YWCA Shelter (which is always looking for donations of personal care & hygiene items, the Willamette Humane Society Thrift Store, the Friends of Felines Thrift Store --- all of these places would probably gladly accept them from you and either give them to needy folks or sell them cheap.

So if you're a Costco member, consider going here and requesting the free sample for someone like yourself and give it to one of those agencies -- if we all request the sex/size pairing we would ourselves use, then we'll have a nice mix for the people who need them.

Magical thinking: Wind turbines without power transmission lines

One of the hardest things for a nation raised on a steady diet of television and politician's promises (nonsense, in other words) is to realize that there really are no free lunches, and that everything we do is connected to everything else: that the big-screen TVs are destabilizing the climate, that energy-hog appliances mean more mountaintop-removal coal mining and coal-sludge disposal nightmares, and that providing energy to lots of people living in the Willamette Valley means putting giant energy facilities elsewhere, which means that you need miles and miles of giant, ugly transmission lines across Oregon.

Notice anything NOT shown in the heroic illustration above? That's right --- in addition to showing a string of wind turbines smack in the middle of a gorgeous vista, there's a remarkable magical quality to this because it shows no transmission lines blocking the view either.

Apparently the power produced by these turbines just magically arrives at the outlets serving the heated towel bars in the gigantic McMansions (whose owners would fight tooth and nail against any power lines blocking their views or coming within miles of their homes).

The SJ and LOVESalem agree on something! (La Margarita Express)

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

One of the nicer places to eat around here is a locally owned place that quietly serves up good food at good prices from a nondescript storefront location that, while very convenient, really doesn't do it justice. La Margarita Express sits between a beauty shop and one that sells clothes and what-not to hipster kids and across from the misbegotten disaster that is the Court St. Transit Center (with its abundant complement of tattooed ne're-do-wells, tragically young mothers, and feral youth posturing for each other). None of which really detracts from the meal, but probably helps explain why so many Salem folks haven't tried it.

Check it out -- it's great to enjoy a place where the owners bring you not only the usual and salsa as an appetizer but also a nice bowl of warmed refried beans with a sprinkle of cheese --- yum. It's hard to go away hungry.