— gl —

In lieu of creating any real content for now (the usual excuses apply), I'm going to try to post a "Gratuitous PDF of the Week", or GPDFOTW — a ridiculous abbreviation for a ridiculous idea.

I have an obsession with PDFs. They imply sanctity to me. They say, "we have completed this endeavor".

I wish one could collect rare PDFs, and sell them.

I save random PDFs on my hard drive, intending to read them later. I rarely do. But I like having them. Like this one: "Climate Change and the Concept of Private Property," by Paul Babie, at the University of Adelaide Law School.

From the abstract:

This essay argues that the dominant liberal conception of private property, implemented and operating in legal systems worldwide, permits power—or choice—over the use and control of goods and resources so as to prioritise self-interest over obligation towards the community, both local and global. This, in turn, is one of the components of modern social life making possible the complex processes that produce both anthropogenic climate change and its consequences for humanity.

I go out-into-the-world at regular intervals seeking encounters with the experts, the photographic faces, the crowd-leading dressers, the owners, et alia, to engage in casual banter and to watch for a cadence in their speech, a geometry in their darting eyes, a dance in their moving hands; indeed, any pattern that will help to discern how they think, how they conclude, how they identify "this is next". This observational study inevitably results in a null value.

Next, I check their words. Few.

I am resolved to believe "expertise" means little.

When I'm mulling ideas or learning new concepts (say, biophysical economics), a primary need is information arguing against what I'm thinking or reading. I need an argument to help me to know why I should not believe what I'm reading, to set my feet in the debate.

Thomas Waterman Wood (1823-1903, American). The Argument, 1874, via stjathenaeum.org

Often I'll type my keywords into Google, then type "bullshit," hoping some angry blogger will have railed against the idea, called it bullshit, and provided links supporting his argument. That has yet to work for me, but I hold on to hope.

I'm sure you, you out there, maybe at Google, could develop a search engine that finds keywords in a context of negation, and thus the critical search engine would be born. That would be nice.

Eagerly awaiting,

-gl-

I went here today: Changing Environments, Changing Societies: Community Responses to Environmental Uncertainties. (All photos come from the symposium's site.)

                   

This is what I took away:

1) You can avoid the "Did we cause global warming?" question by focusing on the fact the climate is changing with or without anthropogenic causes and give *adaptive* solutions for a changed climate, instead of mitigation solutions to a (politically charged &) changing climate. This allows the chaos of climate change to ensue, which will be more fun than stopping it.

2) Poor & rural areas of Africa and other countries are sweet. It's easier to implement an energy infrastructure for the first time with low-impact energy solutions than to *replace* original infrastructure with new clean energy infrastructure. There is no cultural paradigm shift to instigate, it's cheaper financially and socially, it provides jobs to poor people, and you can "fuck up" because no one will notice. (Maybe sad, but true. Someone said that about doing business in Maine once...) Even a small experiment that fails because it doesn't pass the scalability test may have immediate positive benefits.

3) National Parks and other protected areas can't be conceptualized as permanent lines etched on a map. Homes become dilapidated, and better prospects arise, so people move. Wildlife will do the same. If it gets too hot M. Rhino is going to say "fuck this" and take off, if he can. If your protected area is fenced in, or entirely bordered by urban development, you're going to have a rhino problem. We have to think about protected areas as shifting with climate change. If the wildlife moves out will the protected areas be meeting statutory requirements? Can you protect an abandoned ecosystem? As far as policy implementation goes, this sounds nigh impossible, and is probably why am particularly intrigued by pursuing this question. I have a pathological fear of success.

4) You can cover up rhetoric almost imperceptibly with a really sweet moustache (I am not joking, and I am envious). *Almost* imperceptibly. Nonetheless, Dr. Orbach was a great speaker with great insights and daunting questions. In particular: What do we do with our existing infrastructure on the coasts when the tides roll in? What do we leave behind? Many wastewater treatment plants will succumb to a 1 meter rise in sea levels... Shit.

5) Old Orchard Beach is fucked because they couldn't figure out how to write and read their maps right. OK, that's not a fair statement, but it's mostly true. The majority of The Strip that previously wasn't in SLZ has to be rezoned simply because the reference maps were wrong. Oh, and because the sea level is rising. Anyway, c'est la vie, eh Frenchies? Anyway, JT Lockman's presentation was good, especially when he started dorking out about how much he loves land use planning. My girlfriend would have looked at me, rubbed my receding hairline, and nudged me in the ribs.

A top-notch round of international speakers, plus free lunch.

Thanks team!

     

I love this advertisement I found in Monday's (12 October) Wall Street Journal. I had to post it on the fridge. I was recently watching some of Ken Burns's "National Parks" on PBS, so the Hetch Hetchy battle came immediately to mind. As well as the antiquated notion of "improvement."

The copy at the bottom of the ad is presumably from the same Energo-Pro CEO who is shouting from the mountaintop in his red jacket at the center of the ad. It reads thus:

"Georgia is home to the biggest mountains in Europe. Of course their energy potential is huge and we're doing our bit to unleash it. We run ten hydroelectric stations — a major undertaking, but in a country where getting a construction license takes just three months, a very straightforward one. Georgians, you see, like to make things happen. No wonder they're already net exporters of electricity, selling power to all of their neighbours — and that's with just 20% of their hydroelectric potential. The Georgian attitude is that anything is possible. And with a future of secure, green and endlessly renewable energy, I think they're right."

Mr. Radoslav Dudolenski (Google him; I'm not sure he exists) should have gone on to clarify that what he was really saying is: Don't waste your time and money being bogged down in American bureaucracy while trying to push through a renewable energy project.

This is no doubt an accurate observation, but I am not convinced that the white splotch in the center of that mountain range would be best filled with a power station. They should just Photoshop the deleted landscape back in.

Especially if the sum of all environmental considerations takes just three months to compute. (I wish I could say, in support of this, that the time it takes to grant a construction permit in the U.S. is due to officials being efficient and diligent, but that is unlikely to be true).

Anyways, the best part is that the ad isn't about sustainable energy. The ad, paid for by the Georgian government, is intended to lure investors out of the American market and into Georgia. Part of the Georgian "Renewable Energy 2008" state program, but nothing much to do with energy at all.

See:

Nina Möntmann: (Under)Privileged Spaces: On Martha Rosler’s “If You Lived Here...” @ e-flux.com

I tend to like the e-flux journal. There is a wide breadth of articles, and the articles are usually the result of some good critical thinking.

Unfortunately, none of these thinkers can think well enough to write us a good story.

Take this article. Before it begins, we are given an epigraph with the tell-tale signs that its writing will fit to a style at the cost of good writing. In this case, our style is academia, which ironically proves itself, through its lack of precise language, as a profession wrought with unproven sentiments.

In this epigram, Lefèbvre is unable to decide if acting with another could also be against, and must use that coyish "and/or." He fails to decide if these acts are interactions, or perhaps strategies... Or perhaps successes? And if one mentions "successes" in a sentence, surely one must follow it explicitly with the word "defeats." A string of descriptors with no meaning. I need not approach his use of ""properties"."

Likewise, our article author picks up the style in her first sentence (we'll allow her title poetic license): "distinctions and disintegration."

As if using "disintegration" as the negation of the race policy term "integration" will have graver import as sounds of disintegrating mortar come crashing down around our heads from our 200-year-old broken buildings housing broken institutions.

No, instead, the astute reader sees immediately that the author attempts to rally the reader around a vague notion of activism implicit in mentioning social ills. Nevermind that the class distinctions are a much deeper issue than can be summed up in this two-toned rhetorical amplification.

We are lost as to whether we can trust the writer, because before she has reached a thesis she has broken the faithful bonds of our trust with fiery rhetoric.

I will begin this humbly, until I build the momentum to allow myself less humility. My last blog, mostly about journalism, was short-lived; I tried to do too much, too much. And I am no longer a journalist (thank heavens!).