Entries associated with the tag "Environmentalism":

Thanks to Whet for pointing me toward Penelope Green's NY Times piece on "eco decorating." Among other extreme weirdness, she describes conceptual event planner David Stark, who was commissioned to do the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum's awards gala in October. He "directed the museum to shred its office paper for six months, producing a harvest that he augmented with 12 years of his personal tax returns and his own office’s papers. He then turned the resulting 6,000 pounds of paper strips into giant topiaries and chandeliers, floridly archaic shapes fashioned from trash. It was the language of excess -- those topiaries recalled the gardens of Versailles -- expressed in the material of frugality."

And that's as good as it gets in our "Prius culture" -- James B. Twitchell's word for the situation in which "We know things are wrong. We don’t know what we can do. We can’t know. And so we do what marketers encourage us to do to get those feelings we want to have."

Joel Makower at Two Steps Forward reports on a survey of green marketing that TerraChoice Environmental Marketing made at six big-box stores. Their research teams found 1,753 green claims made for 1,018 products. Most of them (57 percent) were misleadingly narrow, and 26 percent offered no proof either on the product or on its website. Fewer than 1 percent were actually false.

Neither Makower nor I would call this "greenwashing," as TerraChoice does. Would other claims made for products stand up even this well? I'll make a wild guess that, for the moment, green marketing is actually a bit more honest than marketing in general -- a low standard to be sure, but if the environmental movement could raise the standards of 21st-century capitalism in this area, it should count for something.  

Alex Gourevitch at n+1:

"While Democrats have become increasingly uncomfortable with the anti-democratic consequences of the hard power of the war on terror, they seem more comfortable with a 'soft power' politics of fear: environmentalism. Environmentalism is one of the few movements on the left that presents itself in the same totalizing political terms that the war on terror does on the right, and its influence only seems to grow as the war on terror’s influence declines. The New York Times’ bellwether of elite opinion, Thomas Friedman, recently swung around to the new framework...

"The global warming argument can be as morally coercive as the infamous ticking time-bomb torture scenario, even if the clock ticks slower. It’s not just that we should unite; we are, as Gore puts it, 'forced by circumstance' to act."

Trolls please note that Gourevitch is not making the discredited argument that global warming is nonexistent or harmless. He's talking about the way in which real problems -- terrorism and environmental deterioration alike -- tend to be discussed these days, as if the facts dictate one response and one only.

"In the face of real political opportunities, there is always an element of freedom. One chooses between two alternatives, picks a principle, and commits to it. Imagining ecological collapse as an overweening crisis demanding immediate action and collective sacrifice, with emergency decisions overriding citizens’ normal wants and wishes, is not really a politics at all, but the suspension of politics – there is no political choice, no constituencies to balance, nothing to deliberate. There is no free activity, just do or die. It seems we will have traded one state of emergency for another."

Chris Clarke at Pandagon (hat tip to Stentor): 

"In a paper published a couple weeks ago, Dr. Sherilyn McGregor of Keele University in Staffordshire points out that when environmentally sound living requires extra work, that work is usually 'women’s work.' ... What decisions are environmentalist citizens asked to make? Choosing the green laundry detergent and toilet paper and buying organic groceries. Carrying cloth bags to the supermarket. Using non-toxic cleansers. Adding corporate citizenship to one’s list of brand loyalty factors and schlepping the Seafood Buying Guide around. Sorting trash into the proper containers for recyclables, compost, and landfilling.

"Of course, we men carry all those containers to the curb, which perfectly balances the division of labor. But then you add Environmentalism 2.0 to the mix, and you have the Slow Food (read: hours spent in the kitchen) and Local Food (read: hours spent shopping) movements, and with that kind of scheduling pressure a woman likely wouldn’t even have enough time left in the day to type up her husband’s poetry."

That's not random snark -- Clarke is specifically referring to poet Wendell Berry's anti-computer tirade of a few years back, in which he explained that his wife types his stuff on an old Royal typewriter. It's all very well, as Keele writes in her paper, to idealize participatory citizenship as in Athens of old. But "as feminists have noted, these Athenian citizens were freed for politics by the labour of foreigners, slaves, and women who were not granted the status of citizen. Citizenship, understood as being about active participation in the public sphere, is by definition a practice that depends on 'free time'; it is thus not designed for people with multiple roles and heavy loads of responsibility for productive and reproductive work."

IOW, compartmentalized progressivism ain't progressive at all. 

Peter Montague's "Rachel's Democracy & Health News" is a good window on the left wing of the environmental movement, and that's where I picked up on historian David Noble's "The Corporate Climate Coup" and its companion piece, Denis Rancourt's "Global Warming: Truth or Dare?", both originally housed at Rancourt's blog Activist Teacher.

They're enormously long; fortunately Rancourt's a good summarizer:

"I argue: (1) that global warming (climate change, climate chaos, etc.) will not become humankind’s greatest threat until the sun has its next hiccup in a billion years or more (in the very unlikely scenario that we are still around), (2) that global warming is presently nowhere near being the planet’s most deadly environmental scourge, and (3) that government action and political will cannot measurably or significantly ameliorate global climate in the present world....

"By far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and...the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized."

Noble elaborates:

"If the corporate climate change campaign has fuelled a fevered popular preoccupation with global warming, it has also accomplished much more. Having arisen in the midst of the world-wide global justice movement, it has restored confidence in those very faiths and forces which that movement had worked so hard to expose and challenge: globe-straddling profit-maximizing corporations end their myriad agencies and agendas; the unquestioned authority of science and the corollary belief in deliverance through technology, and the beneficence of the self-regulating market."

Rancourt and Noble do draw on some right-wing denialist material, and the underlying logic is eerily similar: since the commonly proposed solutions to climate change don't involve undoing world capitalism ASAP, then the problem must not exist. (The right-wingers reach the same conclusion from the opposite worry, that the commonly proposed solutions might indeed undo world capitalism.)

Quite aside from some factual questions -- did Al Gore really just prevent a "world-wide global justice movement" from taking power? -- Rancourt and Noble have the same problem that has bedeviled the left since the collapse (first moral, then physical) of any credible alternative to capitalism. No matter how bad the current system is, what goes in its place? One of the commenters on Rancourt's article gave a revealing answer to this question:

"If I were the benevolent dictator of planet Earth, I would remove all subsidies to the polluting industries, make towns and cities responsible for their own energy and food production, take from the rich to give to the poor equalizing wealth among all peoples, make it illegal for anyone to earn 7 times the amount the most poorly paid person makes, give Aboriginal peoples ten times the land they have now and a huge apology for the injustices done to them, only allow democratic free presses to operate, implement a 1-child per couple law, ensure all farm animals are well-treated and can roam freely, reforest the planet, reuse metals instead of mining, and so on. What a beautiful world it could be!"

Uh huh. No such utopia could exist without a centralized power that would make previous totalitarianisms look wimpy. Better the capitalist devil I know, thank you.

Gristmill has a list of some two dozen green building techniques arranged in a quick-read table with approximate energy and greenhouse-gas savings and more technical references for each. It's an educational list, not a substitute for the systematic thinking that goes into standards like that of the U.S. Green Building Council, nor a for seeing a bunch of ideas together in action like the Sullivans' Rogers Park rehab.

There are not only some materials and practices listed here I've never heard of (geopolymeric cement, anyone?), but some good thoughts -- be cautious about savings on building that end up requiring more energy in operations, because building operations keep on using energy and money for a loooong time.  Top of the list: rehabbing over building new. Reminder: no significant savings to be made on items that are a small part of the structure, such as wiring.

There are also reminders that in this enterprise as in all others, not all good things go together. There are tradeoffs. From a building standpoint, for instance, skyscrapers are very energy-intensive and so need to have operational efficiencies. But from a broader point of view, the alternative to skyscrapers is acres of low-rise sprawl, which consumes energy in transit and other ways.

As the comments suggest, some of these innovations will become more palatable if energy is priced according to its true costs -- but people have to know about them first!

Meanwhile, ENN reports on the American Institute of Architects' list of the ten greenest buildings in the U.S., and the midwest was entirely shut out.

David Roberts of Gristmill picks a bone with his friends (writing at TomPaine.com):

"It's often said that conservatives seek out converts, while progressives seek out heretics. That's too often true of the green community. Everyone's supposed to pass all these tests of consistency and commitment before they're allowed to speak out. Gore's got a big house. Arnold's got Hummers. Lester Brown probably pees in the shower. We constantly worry about whether people deserve to speak out about the environment, whether impure spokespeople will tarnish the movement, whether offering people too-easy personal solutions will anesthetize or stupefy them, whether passing imperfect legislation will forever exhaust our political capital. As I've said before, these are the worries and preoccupations of people accustomed to being losers--people who don't believe their cause is broadly compelling."

I'm not sure it's a right or left thing--Illinois conservatives have been killing their own for years now. It is a problem inherent in any movement, going right back to New England Puritanism: are you pure or do you go for a majority?

Also the dynamics are tricky. The other side will use any impurity against you, if only because hypocrisy is easier to prove, and easier for the masses to understand, than substantive wrongness. Even if you disavow purity and hold your nose while embracing the freshly painted green Governator.

I wasn't too thrilled a few months back when Conscious Choice gave generous marks to the city of Chicago on sustainability ("Grade inflation in transit world"). Now in the new In These Times -- yet another can't-skip periodical on my list -- Michael Burgner reports that CC editor Charles Shaw has declined to provide the magazine's 11-point sustainability evaluation system to a senior fellow at the Army Environmental Policy Institute. Said Shaw, "Why would I want to make the army a more efficient, sustainable killing machine?....They see that green is sexy and cool and that people don’t like oil corporations right now. They think they can dress themselves up with it.”

I take his point: a torture prison with a green roof isn't something an American should be proud of. But did Shaw ever ask himself the same question about the corruption machine that is the city of Chicago under Richard M. Daley?

A few years ago Michael Jackson, now chief architect of the state Historic Preservation Agency, showed me around the Dana-Thomas House in Springfield, a Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece I nominated for "the most beautiful man-made object between Interstate 80 and the Saint Louis Arch" in a Reader story August 31, 1990.

Jackson was the restoration project manager for the place, working with Chicago's Wilbert Hasbrouck. Now Jackson is on a more abstract kick, pointing out that the powerful tool for greening architecture, the LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] rating system of the U.S. Green Building Council, may not take into proper account how environmentally constructive restoring old buildings can be.

"Preservation provides 'stealth green' practices," he tells Jonathan Moore in Focus, the monthly magazine of AIA Chicago. Over at another AIA site he opined, "The 'green design' movement has largely ignored the inherent ecological advantages of building re-use, including the primary one—embodied energy. The environmental benefits of building re-use, such as embodied energy, have to be measured against the operating energy for a true life-cycle equation. Historic buildings can be made energy efficient through the appropriate use of new technologies and 'invisible interventions.'"

IOW, don't assume that new is best. Moore again: "Jackson's hypothetical example cites a new LEED Platinum-rated [i.e., top-rated] school built on the edge of town, contrasted with saving an existing school structure in an existing urban area.  Using green building materials, LEED may award more points for the new structure, while total energy expended for new construction actually saps more resources from the environment."

LEED standards do encourage reuse of construction materials; could they do more?

I lost my copy of John Brunner's 35-year-old apocalyptic sci-fi The Sheep Look Up a few moves ago, but as I recall, in it he foresaw an activist anticar group (called Trainites after their shadowy leader Austin Train) whose members regularly marked commuters' stalled cars with their slogan, "Stop, you're killing me!"

Megan Tady's February report in the New Standard (since picked up by Alternet and by Rachel's Health & Environment newsletter) reminded me. She finds a number of environmentalists arguing that Greenpeace is way too conservative, maybe even holding back environmentalism by merely calling for "various regulations and market-based actions to reduce greenhouse-gas output by 60 to 80 percent over the next 43 years."

For some environmentalists (she names and quotes David Morris of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Brian Tokar of the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont, and journalist Mark Hertsgaard), "making the urgent call for lifestyle changes – from something as tame as driving less to more radical changes like adopting a vegetarian, localized diet – should go hand in hand with the push for larger, system-wide greenhouse-gas reductions and energy efficiency. They say radically scaling back consumption is needed to ensure global environmental sustainability and equity." Mere technological changes, they say, won't get the job done before the planet's setting gets stuck on "deep fat fry."

Yes, these modern-day would-be Trainites are the people who cause global-warming denialists like Avery and Singer to lose key brain synapses and conclude that a problem with such a drastic solution must be one that doesn't actually exist. But I can't quite tell what the environmentalists to the left of Greenpeace are proposing. What exactly do you do the morning after you've made your "urgent call" and your neighbors drive off to work and play as usual?

Lobby to double or triple the gas tax? Is there a single member of Congress who will even talk about the possibility of such a thing? That would do more than any number of "urgent calls" to get people to cut back. Ironically, it would also spark the inventions necessary for us to continue our mobile lifestyle without exuding so much carbon. If the radicals win, they lose.

Fellow Chicago blogger and frequent commenter Paul Botts of dot-org relays GOP pollster Frank Luntz's explanation for why public support for environmentalism has translated into few victories: "Environmental non-profits behave as professional scolds, communicating a vibe that 'anyone who doesn't believe what they believe is not only wrong but evil." (Botts draws an analogy to feminism, many of whose tenets are embraced by people who shun the label.)

I discovered this in the 80s, when I wrote two stories for the downstate weekly Illinois Times about Julian Simon, a marketing prof then at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who pointed out a number of fallacies in green orthodoxy, including the notion that we're running out of raw materials. Since he'd published an article in Science magazine (June 27, 1980) and later a book, The Ultimate Resource, I figured environmentalists would take his valid criticisms to heart and pay more attention to economic ways of thinking.

Wrong. So I went back to the well in 1994 in the Reader (behind the pay wall):

"About 15 years ago I met an economist with a bald head, a crooked smile, and some of the most outrageous ideas I'd ever heard. Our air and water are cleaner than they've been for decades, he said. There's more food per capita in the world every year. Supposedly scarce energy and mineral resources have been getting cheaper over the decades, not more expensive. Population growth is good because it adds to the number of active, inquiring, innovative human minds--the ultimate resource of civilization.

"His name was Julian Simon, and he wasn't a biologist. He taught economics at the U. of I. in Champaign, and he'd just written a book on running a mail-order business. What did he know about the fate of the earth? But I was a writer and he was a story, and many of his claims were well documented. Besides, I knew that expertise is where you find it, having just written a series of articles lauding the ability of blue-collar grandmothers to learn enough about toxicology to attack landfill siting on technical grounds.

"It was Simon's most outre claim that left the longest-lasting impression on me. There's no real oil shortage, he said. When prognosticators warn that there are only 20 or 35 or 50 years' supply left, they mean at current prices, extracted with current technology. Once the price goes up significantly, it becomes worth someone's while to look for oil farther away, deeper down, or in more diluted form. If the price of oil goes high enough, it'll become worth someone's while to perfect alternatives: cars powered by electricity or hydrogen, for instance, that aren't competitive when gas is cheap. After all, he pointed out, we don't care about oil for its black shiny self. All we need are the services it provides. Over time, innovation and substitution have made them cheaper."

In his less plausible ventures, Simon also denied the significance and magnitude of species extinctions, on which I think he's been proven empirically wrong (and philosophically questionable).  He was equally skeptical of the case for climate change, which was still a defensible position given the state of climate science in the mid-90s. He tended to deemphasize the role of government regulation in creating environmental improvement -- but then environmentalists themselves talked poor until Gregg Easterbrook's 1995 A Moment on the Earth forced them to admit they'd won some big battles.

The environmentalists who took notice of Simon picked his most extreme-sounding statements and were satisfied with refuting them -- they ignored the lessons he had to offer. Most culpable were Herman Daly and John Cobb, Jr., the lauded authors of For the Common Good (1989), whose treatment of Simon's thinking was intellectually dishonest. (If you prefer more up-to-the-minute links in this vein, Tom Yulsman at Environmental Journalism Now just excoriated Ellen Goodman for comparing climate-change deniers to Holocaust deniers.)

A movement that can't learn from its critics is, by definition, a movement in trouble.

Northwestern -- C+

University of Illinois -- C

University of Chicago -- D+

Notre Dame -- D-

Those are the grades just handed out to area schools by the Sustainable Endowments Institute in its first annual College Sustainability Report Card. (SEI says it rated only the 100 schools with the biggest endowments, but can it be that Berea College in Kentucky has a bigger endowment than Loyola or DePaul?)

The overall grades are broken down into seven subjects:  administration, climate change and energy, food and recycling, green building, endowment transparency, investment priorities, and shareholder engagement.

Northwestern has committed to buy 20 percent of its electricity from wind power (climate), aims to make all new buildings LEED slver-certified (building), and has committed $2 million of its endowment to a firm that invests in alternative-energy technologies.

U. of I. has made sustainability a priority on all three campuses and will also be guided by LEED ratings when it builds or renovates anything costing more than $1 million.

Neither the University of Chicago nor Notre Dame received any grade above a C. Both institutions "prioritize investing to maximize profit," which is about what you'd expect from the U. of C., but I seem to recall vaguely that Notre Dame claims to answer to some entity higher than the dollar.

Treehugger plugs the new issue of Dwell magazine, including this line -- which ought to be branded on the forehead of every politician who thinks it's cool to put techie-looking solar collectors on standard-issue buildings: "The big deal is the section on solar power, with the proper amount of attention to the low key, less dramatic but very important passive solar design. Passive solar does not get as much press because it is not a product, but a result of careful consideration of the site and careful design of the dwelling."

And speaking of products, is a $140 bag with a lithium battery pack and some solar panels really a green idea, as A Fresh Squeeze: Chicago Edition seems to think? Or is it just another yup toy?

"Here in L.A.," writes former midwesterner Jenny Price, "I've taken my own informal opinion survey, which is far from scientific. I just ask colleagues, friends, and family what they think of nature writing. When the most passionate environmental activists I know say 'yeechh' and the college students say 'huh?' then I suspect we have a problem."

Nature writing, she says, needs to climb out of its mile-deep rut, wherein writers engage in "personal meditations on the soul-saving power of wildness in our modern urban lives." That kind of writing just feeds "the popular American delusion, which nature writers have encouraged, that nature is where cities are not." Instead, she says, we need to see how nature is part of the city, even when it seems most artificial, and vice versa.

Read the whole thing, "Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA," at The Believer, or the radically condensed version at Grist. By the way, Jenny Price, meet the late Jerry Sullivan (the Reader's "Field and Street" columnist for years) and William Cronon, both of whom stuck around the midwest and echoed your thoughts in different ways.

William Cronon took naive environmentalist ideas about "nature" and "wilderness" to the woodshed in his talk at the Chicago History Museum on November 28.  (More on Cronon here, from this week's Reader.)

Among other things, he said that when you do restoration work, there's no obvious answer to the obvious question: What state do you restore a given landscape to? What's "natural"? The way it was in your childhood? Before European settlement? Before Indian settlement?

A few days after the talk, I came across an article by two European researchers, "What Is Natural? The Need for a Long-Term Perspective in Biodiversity Conservation," in the November 24 issue of Science (abstract here; full text requires a paid subscription, or a visit to a decent library). K.J. Willis and H.J.B. Birks (love those initials) confirm Cronon's point that "natural" is a culturally defined goal. Take invasive species, for instance:

"Sometimes it is even unclear whether a species is alien or native. . . . There is also the question of how far back one takes 'human' activity in determining whether a species is native or alien." Humans introduced at least 157 plant species to Britain between 4,000 and 500 years ago, and in 2004 one group of researchers proposed that these should be classified in a category in between native and exotic—dissolving the once razor-sharp distinction between "natural" and "unnatural." Everything over 4,000 years old is natural, everything under 500 years old is unnatural, and everything in between is half-natural? Why not 400 years? Six hundred?

If that's not enough to make your head hurt, Cronon went deeper in the Q and A after his talk. Feminism and environmentalism sometimes seem like they're headed for a train wreck of ideas. Environmentalists, he said, tend to see "nature" (however defined) as having some moral authority. Feminists, on the other hand, tend to see "nature" as lacking moral authority—it's often a way of pretending that many culturally defined gender roles are biological. Cronon plugged Kate Soper's 11-year-old book, What Is Nature?: Culture, Politics, and the Non-human (now on my short list unless the commenters talk me out of it—it's not cheap), adding, "Very little intellectual work has been done on how you critique nature as part of history without destroying its authority."

Joel Makower blogs infrequently but well at Two Steps Forward, where recently he described the vinyl industry's attempts, so far successful, to insure that LEED green-building standards protect their private interests. He writes: 

"The green-building industry is coming of age. And with that maturity comes growth, profitability—and big, well-heeled players seeking to stake their claim. In doing so, they often find that there's enormous profit potential to be had by shaping the rules in their favor, never mind that doing so all but thwarts the environmental and social benefits intended in the first place.

"We've seen it in organics. We're seeing it in green buildings. We'll soon, I predict, be seeing even more of it as companies seek to claim 'climate neutral' status."

Tyler Cowen is one of the best economics bloggers around. He recently took on ace environmental writer Michael Pollan's new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals in Slate, and it was like watching Brian Urlacher try to take down Tom Brady, and almost as rare. Money quote:

"Pollan makes much of the energy costs incurred by the long food-supply chains of American grocery stores. It may look like we are eating Chilean grapes, he argues, but in fact, once we consider transportation costs, we are guzzling petroleum.

"Economics offers a clearer view of what is going on. We do need to save energy, but it is difficult for a central planner (or for that matter a food commentator) to identify what is waste, relative to the costs of eliminating it. We should rely on higher market prices, if need be with the assistance of taxes, to increase conservation. If fuel becomes more expensive, we'll likely adopt peak-load energy pricing, and drivers may scrap their SUVs for hybrids. But we probably won't plant grapes in our backyards. While we must conserve energy, we cut back where it makes the most sense; grape-shipping is not the place to start. Global trade does involve transportation costs, but it also puts food production where it is cheapest, again saving energy by economizing on costs of labor, irrigation, and fertilization, relative to the alternatives."(Read the whole thing.)

This isn't the last word, of course. Economists are prone to assume that the product being shipped is like a bunch of unbreakable billiard balls. Farmer/researcher Frederick Kirschenmann, writing in the Science and Environmental Health newsletter, "The Networker," suspects that long-distance food may be one of the reasons why fruits, vegetables, and wheat have declined five to thirty-five percent in nutritional value in the last fifty years: "While fruit and vegetables may be genetically altered to retain their appearance during this long trip, vitamins are lost over time and protein breaks down. So the trip not only adds a 'fuel tax' to the cost of food, it may also deliver food with reduced nutritional value."

[BTW, peak-load energy pricing is already happening in Chicago: check out the Center for Neighborhood Technology's Community Energy Cooperative, which may be taking new members next year.]

Is this bumper sticker (which apparently still has to be imported from the U.K.) sarcastic or not? Does it depend on the gross weight of the vehicle to which it's attached? (Thanks, Treehugger.)

And here's a glimpse of the world where sarcasm can go entirely undetected: "The November 15 edition of 'The Colbert Report' on Comedy Central offered more proof of comedian Stephen Colbert's ineffective charade at pretending to be a conservative." (Hat tip to Pharyngula, where commenters indulge in a discussion of whether there has been an intentionally funny conservative since Evelyn Waugh. Your thoughts?)

And finally, just for fairness and balance, here's an unbelievably ignorant comment from the liberal side by David Shenk, author of The Immortal Game, published in the Toronto Star and republished at 3 Quarks Daily:

"Q. Do you ever fantasize about teaching chess to some religious fundamentalists?

"A. What a great question. I should actually try to do this some time—just spend time studying how someone who thinks in this fundamentalist way most of the time is also a chess player, because I really see it as a contradiction."

Here I wish he was being saracastic! Having played tournament chess for decades, I can assure Mr. Shenk that strong chess players can hold every imaginable kind of preposterous opinion without damaging their game at all.  George Orwell still rules—he had to make this same point about Ezra Pound, who spoke for fascism and wrote great poetry. Deal with it, folks.

Progressivism is where you find it: the antigay bigots at Operation Rescue/Operation Save America are boycotting Wal-Mart for joining the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. And Wal-Mart is starting to enforce European Union's stringent laws against toxic chemicals on its own suppliers.

I have a total crush on the Nietszche Family Circus.

From Rate Your Students: "I got a frantic e-mail this evening from a student in my mid-level undergrad course.  She just now realized -- nine weeks into the term -- that she took and completed this same course last year.  It's exactly the same course, with the same title and course number, the same textbook, and the same assignments.  She wrote that she 'didn't know' that she had taken the course before. I'm sure she didn't know, because she's been too busy playing Tetris on her cellphone."

"In Las Vegas, it’s now illegal for one person to give food to another person who’s 'indigent.' If you’re walking along with a sandwich and you don’t want any more of it, you’ll be arrested if you give the rest of it to a poor person." (Hat tip to Newsweek via Bring It On!)

WorldChanging -- the blog, Web site, and book based on the premise that "real solutions already exist for building the future we want. It's just a matter of grabbing hold and getting moving" -- will have team members flogging their book and more at the Shedd Aquarium Sunday, November 12, at 6:30 PM. The event is subtitled "a user's guide for the 21st century." (And yes, some commenters are already complaining that their chosen venue "imprisons fish.")

RSVP to worldchangingchi@gmail.com. Details here.

First post on their new Chicago blog, in which Greg Ehrendreich of the Midwest Energy Efficiency Alliance notes the recent appearance of the city's Household Chemicals & Electronics Recycling Center, is here (though it looks like there may still be some formatting issues). The possibility that they may still be looking for knowledgeable local bloggers is here.

Previous mentions on this blog here and here.

These days we find the Indiana Dunes beautiful, refreshing, and maybe even "the earthly locus of a vision incorporating peace, oneness with nature, and brotherhood," as historians J. Ronald and Joan Gibb Engel put it.  But less than a century ago many saw them as sandy wastes unfit for anything except  steel mills. Artist and conservationist Frank Dudley (1868-1957), who painted landscapes of dunes almost exclusively for four decades, is now joining the roster of those, including Jens Jensen, who changed things around.

More than 200 of Dudley's works are on display through November 30 at the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University, and the exhibition's catalog is now a lavishly illustrated large-format book, The Indiana Dunes Revealed: The Art of Frank V. Dudley. (The book includes a biography of Dudley by the Illinois Institute of Technology's James R. Dabbert; a condensed version with images appeared in the American Art Review (PDF) last summer.)

Dudley's story is replete with paradoxes. Just as the creation of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore 40 years ago was sparked by Illinois U.S. Senator Paul Douglas, this book is being published by the University of Illinois.  Dudley's conservationism is now seen as a progressive cause. But from today's standpoint he fails to be a consistently progressive prophet: he stubbornly opposed modern art and idealized generic Indians in private and public performances. The outdoor "masques" and "pageants" that inspired him now seem overdone.

Much as Abraham Lincoln was an ambitious lawyer and canny politician as well as the savior of the union, Dudley was both an ardent lover of the dunes and an artist who found them an ideal niche in which to earn a living.  Writes Chicago art historian Wendy Greenhouse:

"For artists of Dudley's generation . . . the rise of both landscape painting and Impressionism were closely tied to the emergence of familiar, Midwestern subjects," and the realization that "their own home landscape -- authentic if humble -- could be the vehicle for genuine artistic expression. . . . The same qualities, in turn, promised to appeal to local buyers. . . . As modernism made increasing inroads on the Chicago art scene in the early 1920s, Dudley found unfailing support among the aesthetically conservative, civic-minded Chicagoans represented by such groups."

Near the end of his life Dudley was an advisor to the new Save the Dunes Council, which continues to watch over the "sacred sands."

Sam Smith at Undernews asks the unaskable: why is the military sacred? He prefers the teachings of Jesus Christ and midwestern socialist Eugene Debs, who said, "I would no more teach children military training than I would teach them arson, robbery, or assassination."

George Schmidt may be a ranter, but you would be too if you knew what he knows: "Problems are festering or growing at every general high school on the west and south sides right now. And the cause of the increase in those problems, this year and for the last three school years, has been the school-closing and 'Renaissance' policies of CPS." All the details are at the District 299 Chicago Public Schools Blog.

"Give everyone a personal carbon ration. If you run out, buy it from someone else," says Treehugger, summarizing the strong global-warming medicine prescribed by George Monbiot the UK Guardian.

Alon Levy of Abstract Nonsense tees off on libertarians who cling to a 60-year-old scripture: "When Hayek said in The Road to Serfdom that the growth of government spending was a threat to freedom, he had an excuse: at that time there was no evidence to the contrary."

Dudes, I swear he means it as a compliment!  Bill McKibben on the new WorldChanging book: "Their book, a compilation of their work over the last few years, is nothing less than The Whole Earth Catalog, that hippie bible, retooled for the iPod generation."

Orac at Respectful Insolence calls the Chicago Tribune's Sunday story on alternative medicine full of a "little too much credulity." For one thing, personal testimonials, "with few exceptions, do not constitute useful data regarding the efficacy of a therapy."

According to its Web site, the Society of Environmental Journalists "is not a public relations or an environmental advocacy organization," and you can't even be a member if you or your employer lobby or do PR work on environmental issues. (I was a member for a year and recall how careful they are about that.) So I was unpleasantly surprised to read Katie Coleman's gripe about some sessions of the group's last two conferences. She's at Michigan State University's Knight Center for Environmental Journalism and posted on the conference blog.

She recalled a panel held last year on climate change:

"One of the panelists was a former Bush advisor; he was obviously intelligent, articulate, and motivated by forces other than those that inspire most SEJ members. On a subject on which we all most decidedly agree, his candor in representing the 'other' viewpoint was what made the panel interesting, informative, and unique. But somewhat unfortunately, what sticks out most in my mind from this event was the embarrassing behavior of some of our fellow SEJ members and journalists.

• Shakespeare's Sister isn't buying amateur anthropologist Robert Putnam's latest alleged finding -- that diverse communities are less trusting than homogeneous ones. Her experience in Chicago's northeasternmost neighborhood was quite different: "I lived in Chicago’s most ethnically diverse neighborhood, Rogers Park, for a decade, the last two years of which were spent as part of a condo association that looked like a mini-U.N. -- whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Arabs, Jews, mixed-race individuals and couples, straight people, gay people. We were, collectively, desk jockeys, teachers, nurses, actors, writers, hairstylists. Parents and not, religious and not. And we used to regularly hang out on each other’s back decks with a couple of beers and a grill going, talking about everything under the sun. We had each other’s spare keys. We fed each other’s pets during out-of-town holidays. We accepted each other’s packages. And I would find it simply astounding if we were some sort of crazy aberration."

• Unofficial word is out that George and Susan Sullivan's Eco Smart Building -- featured in the March 18, 2005 issue of the Reader -- will receive a 2006 Conservation and Native Landscaping Award from the Environmental Protection Agency and Chicago Wilderness. Official word is to come at Chicago Wilderness, and later at the umbrella group's November 15 Congress at Northwestern University. As I wrote then, "Rather than cover the backyard with asphalt, the Sullivans decided to cover it with an attached garage. They installed a heavy-duty roof, on top of which they built their recycled plastic deck and lined it with containers growing vegetables, native flowers, water plants, prairie grasses, shrubs, and small trees, which attract birds, bees, butterflies, and moths. In effect, says Susan, 'we elevated our backyard.'"

• 24/7 North of Howard Watchers, a blog by Toni and Hugh, focuses on the ever-changing if not always pleasing kaleidoscope that is the northernmost part of Rogers Park. Part photo-intensive critique of irresponsible landlords and tenants, and part an ongoing disputation with Ald. Joe Moore, it's a must-read if you live there, and a welcome politically-incorrect city chronicle if you don't.  (Hat tip to George Sullivan.)  I've been reading about Placeblogger, supposedly soon to be "a directory and live aggregator of headlines from placeblogs across the U.S." -- these folks should be on it.

• "This is a green home." I don't think so, and neither does Russ Finley of Gristmill. Money quote, which along with the picture says it all, but there's more in the story: "When we decided to build a new house on our property in Woody Creek, a few miles but a world away from Aspen, we knew we were engaging in inherently antienvironmental behavior, so we decided to go as green as we could." Used to be called greenwashing.
  

• "Your Boyfriend Is a Good Kisser." The Washington Post tells all about teens' sleazoid T-shirt sayings, but buries the lead: "The T-shirts highlight a paradox about this generation: Even as more teenagers absorb ubiquitous sexual messages, federal data show that they report having less sex than their predecessors."  Used to be called sublimation.

• "I was there." One of several priceless student excuses from the consistently depressing and compulsively readable Rate Your Students: "Student told me that he missed class because he was sitting in an empty classroom for an entire week (he told me he thought it odd that there were no other students present) and finally went to the department office and found out we had moved across the hall." Used to be called you flunk, moron.

"We need to change the hearts, minds, values and behavior of Americans toward a culture of conservation."

That's not Al Gore or even Mayor Daley talking. It's John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Co., who added that debating the science of climate change is a "waste of time," and that it's time for action instead. "The nation needs a public policy." 

Whether Shell is putting enough money where its mouth is, I don't know. (A relevant piece of their Web site; they're in deep weeds in Nigeria.) But if Hofmeister was greenwashing, he picked a funny place to do it. He was giving a breakfast talk in Saint Louis, at

--sorry, I just fell on the floor laughing and drooling on myself--

Washington University's Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government and Public Policy.  Founded as the Center for the Study of American Business, the center features publications that study the costs of federal regulation. It's so "nonpartisan" that it never gets around to studying the benefits of federal regulation.

What funnier place to showcase the fact that corporate leaders are far ahead of conservatives and libertarians--let alone the current Keystone Kops administration--in thinking about the country's real problems?  Including, perhaps, the possibility that regulation might be part of a solution?

(Hat tip to Treehugger.) 

Is the deadliest virus of the 20th century getting set for a comeback?

"I don't know whether the future of radical politics belongs to a new generation of Marxists, unmoved by (and perhaps unaware of) the crimes and failures of their Communist predecessors," writes the estimable Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books (adding some of his own thoughts to a review of Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, formerly of the University of Chicago). "I hope not, but I wouldn't bet against it."

The problem is that Judt sees little ground between the free-market fantasy and the Marxist fantasy. "No one else seems to have anything very convincing to offer by way of a strategy for rectifying the inequities of modern capitalism." And that leaves the field open "to those with the tidiest story to tell and the angriest prescription to offer."

Read the whole thing.

P.S. Well, shiver me timbers: now I learn that the members of the American Fisheries Society are taking time off from studying the life cycle of trout and the management of sea lampreys in the Great Lakes to discuss this very issue. One section of the AFS has proposed an extensive resolution stating that economic growth must end. Money quote: "A steady state economy is ultimately required for the conservation of fish, the ecosystems they depend on, and harvestable fisheries." Get yer links at Environmental Economics. Actually this doesn't sound much like Marxism to me, so maybe Judt can report next from the AFS convention--now in progress at Lake Placid, New York!

In a New Republic cover story (text available here for nonsubscribers), ant expert and environmentalist Edward O. Wilson pleads with "an imagined Southern Baptist pastor" to join with him and "set aside our differences in order to save the Creation."

If you actually wanted to reach a Southern Baptist pastor, would you write a generic letter and publish it in a somewhat liberal beltway opinion magazine? Scott Carson dissects this weirdness at An Examined Life. Carson has his own dogmatic agenda, but that doesn't keep him from thinking straight on one point: Wilson is actually advising fellow secularists to start making nice with conservative religious folk, who have the numbers.

If you take the letter at face value, Wilson does seem naive, especially when he writes:

"You and I are both humanists in the broadest sense: Human welfare is at the center of our thought."

Not necessarily. Christopher Shannon laid out the orthodox religious doctrine by quoting Jacques Maritain in the far-right intellectual mag First Things back in 2004 (my emphases):

"The inviolability of the person does not make him the primary purpose or end of the social order. Maritain affirms the dignity of the person only in the context of a relation of mutual and reciprocal subordination. Though superior to mere utility, [Maritain writes] 'a human life is less precious than the moral good and the duty of assuring the salvation of the community, is less precious than the human and moral patrimony of which the community is the repository, and is less precious also than the human and moral work which the community carries on from one century to the next.' I know of no clearer statement of the Catholic understanding of the place of the human person in society."

Conservative Catholic or conservative Protestant, same difference on this point.  {Added Sept. 8:  Please check out vigorous dissent in the comments.}  Human welfare is at the center of their thought only insofar as it leads to or doesn't obstruct communal "salvation."

Of course, as Shannon laments, many, perhaps most, believers are not this orthodox. But Wilson shouldn't trivialize what their leaders think, especially when he's pretending to talk to them. We don't all agree on the important things.

(FYI:  Apparently this letter is drawn from Wilson's brand-new book,  The Creation: A Meeting of Science and Religion, which I haven't seen.)

Jacob Gordon interviews green-business guru Joel Makower at Treehugger. Asked about green startups, Makower mentions some but adds,

"I’m less interested in these pure-play green companies than in the greening of big business, helping large, industrial companies, from utilities to plastics companies find their way in the emerging green economy. It’s no pipe dream; it’s starting to ramp nicely: companies as varied as GE, DuPont, Shaw Carpets, and Sharp are creating new products and services that have the potential to be game-changers from a sustainability perspective. What gets me up in the morning is the prospect of seeing these and other companies make radical shifts in their thinking about what they do and how they do it.

"Please understand, it’s not that I don’t care about the smaller, more progressive companies. I think they are our future. But we won’t have a future if we don’t bring old-line industrial companies into the fold."

Q: If you could wave a magical eco-legislation wand and pass one law, what would it be?

"No question, it would be something that puts a fair price on carbon and other constrained resources. Note that I didn’t utter the 'T' word. I don’t believe there’s the political will for carbon or natural resource taxes, at least in the U.S., and there won’t be for some time. But there are other means of incentivizing green behavior on the part of consumers and industry, and in ways that won’t place an undue burden on the economically disadvantaged."

Read the whole thing, and learn why he drives a BMW convertible (maybe Barack Obama and Dennis Hastert could learn something from his rationale).

You may know the Cheney doctrine, as described by Ron Suskind in his book The One Percent Doctrine:

"Even if there's just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty. It's not about 'our analysis,' as Cheney said. It's about 'our response.'"

You may also know the Precautionary Principle, a guiding light for some parts of the environmental movement: 

"When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically."

But you've never seen them both in the same room at the same time, because they're the same idea: act first, ask questions later.

And, as University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein has shown here and here and elsewhere, it's a bad idea, one that seems to make sense only as long as you selectively apply it. "From the standpoint of decision theory, Vice President Cheney's remark, and the Precautionary Principle, run into a serious problem: a 1/100 chance of a bad outcome just isn't equivalent to a certainty of a bad outcome. (You wouldn't spend the same amount to avoid a 1/100 likelihood of a loss as a 100/100 likelihood of a loss.)"

Both versions are rooted in impatience and frustration.  Cheney has long hated the idea of limits on presidential action.  Environmentalists have long hated the way cost-benefit analyses get skewed to make development projects and new chemicals look benign.

But once you move beyond frustration and take either version of the principle seriously, it collapses. No environmentalist would apply the precautionary principle to the issuance of car fuel-economy regulations, even though they might threaten human health if they result in the production of non-crashworthy vehicles. And as John Allen Paulos says, hopefully no young male Cheneyite would shoot a guy in a bar for giving him a hard stare, just because there was a 1 percent chance that the other guy might shoot him later.

There's no bumper-sticker way out. In any and all cases, you have to weigh costs and benefits, the possible amount of harm, and the degree of certainty on both sides.  Why doesn't this go without saying?

Anthropologist Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii tells a good scientific tale in American Scientist. He came to Easter Island, aka Rapa Nui, believing--as we've been told for years--that it was a poster child for how overpopulation and overuse of scarce resources can lead to ecological collapse. But over several years he's found converging strands of evidence that introduced rats may have had more to do with the deforestation of Easter Island than did its Polynesian settlers. (There may have been a peak rat population of more than 3 million on the small island.)

"The human population probably reached a maximum of about 3,000, perhaps a bit higher, around 1350 AD and remained fairly stable until the arrival of Europeans," Hunt writes. "The environmental limitations of Rapa Nui would have kept the population from growing much larger [as previously thought]. By the time Roggeveen arrived in 1722, most of the island's trees were gone, but deforestation did not trigger societal collapse, as Diamond and others have argued." If Hunt's findings hold up, Easter Island isn't a microcosm of the planet, but it may still be a more prosaic warning about invasive species.

Diamond, of course, is Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, reviewed in the Reader March 4, 2005. Hunt is a credible critic, as he's a professional anthropologist who doesn't have an ax to grind.

Unfortunately there are plenty of ax-grinders out there, such as "slithering reptile" at Not PC, who are happy to use Hunt's findings just as Diamond used the reports he drew on: as confirmation of stuff they already believed.

The research on Easter Island has made it out of the academic anthropology journals because it's ammo for these two sides. For want of better labels, they are:

• "Environmentalists" who think we're in a world of trouble, and the way to deal with it is to conserve and cut back on our use of natural resources, and
  

• "Antienvironmentalists" who think we're in very little trouble, and if we are the way to deal with it is to put a price tag on everything and let the capitalists sort it out.

I have one foot firmly in each camp--I've criticized Diamond for selecting just-so stories from the historical record and disregarding the parts that don't fit his thesis. So my strongest sympathies lie with neither. We need more people like Terry Hunt.  I don't just mean scientists; I mean people who can take seriously evidence that doesn't fit their pre-ordained worldviews.  Hunt's conclusion: 

"I believe that the world faces today an unprecedented global environmental crisis, and I see the usefulness of historical examples of the pitfalls of environmental destruction. So it was with some unease that I concluded that Rapa Nui does not provide such a model. But as a scientist I cannot ignore the problems with the accepted narrative of the island's prehistory. Mistakes or exaggerations in arguments for protecting the environment only lead to oversimplified answers and hurt the cause of environmentalism. We will end up wondering why our simple answers were not enough to make a difference in confronting today's problems.

"Ecosystems are complex, and there is an urgent need to understand them better. Certainly the role of rats on Rapa Nui shows the potentially devastating, and often unexpected, impact of invasive species. I hope that we will continue to explore what happened on Rapa Nui, and to learn whatever other lessons this remote outpost has to teach us."

Will Jared Diamond acknowledge new evidence and be part of this solution?  His friend Paul Ehrlich never did.

• WorldChanging, the book: The best environmental blog will soon give birth to a book, A User's Guide for the 21st Century, complete with an intro by former president-elect Al Gore and sections on everything from biomimicry to women's rights to green space exploration. The book's not available 'til November 1, so you'll have to content yourselves with the blog for now. (Hat tip to Kiki for pointing me to the blog in the first place.)

• A long review of works related to Timothy Leary and Philip K. Dick at 3 Quarks Daily is worth a look even if you don't care much for--or have never heard of--either one. Dick, it seems, "recently served as a model for a highly-detailed robotic head, a showcase for the work of Hanson Robotics Inc, complete with an 'artificial-intelligence-driven personality'. The construct was designed to simulate a conversation with the dead author, but alas, David Hanson, the builder, misplaced the head on an airplane in December of last year and it has yet to reappear." A few months ago I came across some TSA-confiscated nail files on sale in a little store downstate; which small town do you suppose is now being enlivened by Philip K. Dick's robotic head?

• I don't know whose blooper this was, but it's a doozy over at Buzz Girl: Due out from Viking in September is Faith and Politics: How the 'Moral Values' Debate Divides America and How to Move Forward Together by John Danforth. "The former Republican senator from Missouri--and ordained Episcopal priest--examines the intersection of faith and politics in America today and offers ideas for a more sectarian Republican party." Sorry, folks--either it's "together" or "sectarian." You don't get both. (Danforth has a moderate rep, but it's largely his fault that Clarence Thomas is a Supreme, so your guess is as good as mine.

• No morning would be complete without the Beachwood Reporter, and Steve Rhodes' amazing ability to find the good parts of the morning papers so we don't have to. His latest LOL moment is buried at the bottom of BR's political odds column: "Over/Under on the number of times Paul Green defends patronage and corruption between now and the next mayoral election: 50. Combined print and broadcast remarks." Start counting now!

• Chicago's downtown is bigger than midtown Manhattan, better-educated than downtown Boston, has more homeowners than any other, and grew faster than downtown Atlanta between 1990 and 2000. More from Penn planning prof Eugenie Birch at the Brookings Institution and at her home school.

• Louis Sullivan's 150th birthday is September 3, and the Chicago Historical Museum knows all about the festivities. (Hat tip to Lynn Becker.)

• I know they play a lot more games, but I'm still astonished to learn from Crain's that the Kane County Cougars (the what who?) put more bodies in the seats than the Bears did last year. Final: Cougars 518,394, Bears 496,965.

• Have you been to the world's largest and greenest laundromat?  Me neither. Would you believe it's in Berwyn? (Hat tip to Sustainablog.)

• The astute Salim Muwakkil writes in In These Times that the arrest of "terrorism" suspects in Miami is "a case of governmental entrapment even more threatening than the NSA spying program." It looks to him like "a reprise of the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO program that ran from 1956 to 1971 and was designed to 'neutralize' black nationalists and other domestic dissidents."

• Are conservatives and libertarians no longer BFF? And why did anyone ever think they could be?
  

Over at Gristmill, Jason Scorse--an environmentalist who believes in market principles, and an economist teaching at the Monterey Institute of International Studies--posted his four favorite policies for cleaning up the world:

"Eliminate all natural-resource subsidies.  Subsidies to timber companies, fishermen, farmers, and the oil and gas industry are by far the most damaging environmental policies engaged in by governments around the world." These subsidies both encourage environmental degradation and make natural resources seem cheaper than they are, making it hard for alternatives to compete.

"Expand property rights in areas where they are weak or non-existent.  The areas in the world where we witness the greatest levels of environmental degradation (the oceans, many large tropical forests, and the atmosphere) are those where property rights are absent, unclear, or poorly enforced." Whether held by individuals, groups, or governments, make those rights clear.

"Empower society with information.  Basic environmental science is something that will be underfunded in a pure 'free market,' because it is rarely profitable; therefore, governments should do more to support scientific research."

"Enlarge green markets through government purchases.  Since governments are some of the largest buyers of natural resources in the world (e.g. paper, power, food), their purchases have a huge impact on markets and the environment."

There are some interesting comments b