"When you expect things to happen - strangely enough - they do happen." J.P. Morgan

I was in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn today when I spotted this "Axis of Evil" mural on a plywood wall, perhaps hiding a now stalled and quiet construction project. Things sure aren't looking good for the economy, yet I'm not sure we can hang this all on Paulson, Cox and Bernanke. The World Economic Forum this week brought forth some interesting discussion. I never thought I'd hear so much talk about "nationalization" of banks in my lifetime, whether it be complete nationalization or the concept of a "bridge bank" to get us over these rough waters. I specifically remember Steve Forbes responding to a question about what he thought of the stimulus package with something to the effect of most of it being a waste of time. Closer to the street, the ideological debate seems to be between the idea that letting Lehman fail brought us to where we are or whether trying to prop up anything at all will prolong the inevitable. In New York the layoffs keep coming, thousands announced this week by the mayor newspapers are now calling "Doomsberg" and "Gloomy." I do think that if over the past decade or so the country had been run like New York City, with some element of check-book balancing, times wouldn't be so tough now. Yet on the surface, the city doesn't seem so different, there may be an increase in the number of street musicians, but the restraunts don't seem to be cutting menu prices. It was Friday evening at the Morgan Library that I remembered the response J.P. Morgan gave when asked what the markets would do. "They will fluctuate," he responded.

Eric Miller on 01.31.09 @ 01:23 PM PST [link]  

Certainly the best article of January, perhaps of the year: Prepare for the Best

Great ideas from Philadelphia--which had some pretty great ideas 250 years ago too, which led to the founding of the US.

Quote:

Philadelphia has 40,000 vacant lots. Their best use is now for growing fruits, berries and veggies. Same with many of our 700 abandoned factories: These are prime sites for vertical and roof farms, hydroponics, aquaculture, mushrooms. Plant the parks, too. Greenhouses extend seasons. Land breathes again when abandoned parking lots are depaved. Edible landscaping blooms meals. Edible community centers process neighborhood yields. Fallen leaves stay in neighborhoods to become new soil. Feeding kitchen scraps to worms (vermiculture) builds the food of food.

...ride a bike. Hop on the bus. Revive street rail with ultralight passenger cars. Restore regional freight routes. Raise transit funds with local gasoline tax. Make pathways for bicycles, rollerblades, skateboards, Segways, scooters and wheelchairs. Restore canals. Zone for mixed use, to reduce travel needs. Live near your work. Employ multitudes making mosaic sidewalks. Convert paving to playgrounds.

Mentions groups now working on the next civilization, including one of our favorites, Carfree Cities.

Richard Risemberg on 01.31.09 @ 05:11 AM PST [link]  

As a chef living and working in Portland, I find that one small and rarely mentioned component of Portland's health code really defines a new way of thinking about businesses and their role in the community. One of the largest hurdles a developing restaurateur or chef needs to overcome is the initial cash outlay for a licensed and inspected kitchen from which to produce the food one sells. You need a fire suppression system in the ventilation system and a gas shut-off valve that is connected to the whole thing. You need a certain amount of space between the stove and the wall to allow emergency escape if there is a fire. You need NSF-Certified work surfaces and either high-heat or chemical sanitation systems in your dishwasher.

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Eric Miller on 01.31.09 @ 03:51 AM PST [link]  

Frankenstein Productions announces the first release of a new documentary on food and sustainability, exploring issues raised in the far north and applying them to all our lives.

This month the new documentary Eating Alaska (www.eatingalaska.com) made its lower 48 premiere at the Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Festival in Nevada Ciity, CA. At the same time the 56 minute film screened at the Slow Food and Film Festival in Tucson, Arizona, Bob Berzok, one of the Slow Food coordinators describes the film as "Wonderfully unpredictable, adding, what a pleasure to have an hour long documentary about Alaska with no mention of Sarah Palin."

Eating Alaska is a the story of a vegetarian who moves to Alaska, marries a fisherman and hunter and begins to wonder what the "right" thing to eat is on the last frontier. What ensues is a humorous and enlightening journey as the filmmaker heads to the woods and mountains with women hunters, fishes for wild salmon, communes with the vegans in Wasilla, talks moose meat with a group of Alaska Native teens in a high school in the Arctic, and more, all in search of a meal that makes sense politically, socially, spiritually and tastefully. This wry look at what's on your plate explores ideas about eating healthy sustainable food from one's own backyard, either urban or wild, versus industrially produced food shipped thousands of miles.

February and March will include screenings at the Alaska Forum on the Environment, the Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival in Northern California and community screenings in Haines, Talkeetna, Juneau and Nome, Alaska. We're aiming to set up screenings on campuses, in schools and living rooms and by community groups focused on local foods, sustainability and conservation, As Peter Forbes, Co-founder and Executive Director, Center for Whole Communities, writes, “Eating Alaska asks all the right questions and urges us to find our own answers. A useful and heartful tool for talking about food justice and food systems and to help all of us to create a new story about food."

The film is set in Alaska, but the questions as, a University of Alaska Public Health Professor, Rhonda Johnson, writes, apply beyond state borders: "What is the role of food in our lives? What is 'good' food? When is 'fresh' not best? Should all diets be local? Who decides? Who pays for our choices? This engaging film provides plenty of 'food for thought' about some of the most important questions we can ask ourselves, both as individuals and as communities."

To host a screening, order an advanced DVD or get more information go to www.eatingalaska.com, or e-mail info@eatingalaska.com.

Richard Risemberg on 01.26.09 @ 05:32 PM PST [link]  

I was browsing LiveAuctioneers.com and noticed a government sale of some land inGolconda, Nevada. It amused me that "Golconda is a rural alternative to city life in Winnemucca." I anly know Winnemucca from the Johnny Cash song "I've Been Everywhere." For the record, according to Wikipedia, Winnemucca has a population of 7,174. Urban? The The population density is 867.5 people per square mile. Compare that to say Phoenix, which is has low desnity for a city with 2,749 people per square mile or Manhattan, which has 66,940 people per square mile. It begs the question as to why the good people of Winnemucca need a rural alternative and what that might be... Link to Golconda Land ad

Eric Miller on 01.25.09 @ 11:59 AM PST [link]  

One of the things we as a people have hoped for in voting for Obama is a return to responsibility--in government, in the corporate world (faint hope there), and among ourselves. The stewardship of the earth is no longer just a diverting meditation for hippies, as scornful conservatives used to imply; it is now not just a duty but a necessity. This morning illustrated it to me in a couple of small but touching ways.

I rode off on my bicycle this morning, as I do every Monday and Thursday, to pick up groceries for my housebound mother. It was raining, a sweet, gentle rain of the sort that does our dry California landscape the most good, by soaking in (when it can find a bit of unpaved earth) instead of running off untrammeled to the sea through our storm drain system.

It was a light enough rain that I didn't put on the rain cape I carried in my panniers, but just slipped a windbreaker over my T-shirt and rode happily over to Hollywood.

Now here are the salient points:

• I was riding a bicycle in the rain wearing only a T-shirt, a windbreaker, and shorts
• It was 7:30 in the morning
• It is January in the northern hemisphere

However pleasant this might be, it is quite horribly wrong. If May comes in January, what happens in July?

I should have been bundled up against a near-freezing torrent--but things have changed.

Mark Twain once said that "Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."

Now, to our horror, we have done something about it.

I rode past lines of cars waiting out rush hour at jammed intersections, breathing out global-warming gases by the pound, squatting on thousands of square miles of the asphalt that imprisons our once-sweet soil, a scene repeated millions of times across our continent.

And then, on a detour through a quiet residential area, I saw the another dismaying illustration: on the front lawn of a wealthy house by the country club, the sprinklers running at full force. In the rain, drowning the grass with imported water, in the rain!

Because we're too bothered to turn our sprinklers on my hand, and so leave them tied to clocks; because we're too hurried to wait five minutes for a bus, too lazy to ride a bike...we waste and foul, waste and foul, thoughtlessly, always wondering when "they" will do something about it...if we wonder at all, ensconced in our metal shell with the radio blaring.

Well, we are "they." That's what President Obama was talking about when he spoke of responsibility.

We all know what to do. We have to accept that no one else will do it for us.

At least Washington won't be standing in the way anymore. (Or so we hope).

The rest is up to us.

Read on through New Colonist now. That's what we're about.

Richard Risemberg on 01.22.09 @ 11:32 AM PST [link]  

With the inauguration of Barack Obama today comes the fruition of his emphasis on "hope" during the campaign--an emphasis we feel is (to put it paradoxically) reasonable.

This is because people are not stringently reasonable entities. The Cheney administration understood this very well, as the power-hungry always do, and governed through fear--not directly, as autocrats of the recent past have done, but largely through propaganda, innuendo, and outright prevarication.

The erratic oscillations of the stock market following the crash show this as well--the all-holy market of the right turned out to be very, very bad at establishing the value of companies, and even more so of derivatives, despite access to the massed rationalities of millions of computers and tens of thousands of experienced traders.

It turned out that faith in the market was just another religious delusion, and traders bet the economy on a belief in eternal growth, an open-ended Ponzi scheme that made them feel good but did nothing to create a sustainable economy for the global, or even for the local US, community.

The functional values of well-managed companies did not fluctuate over a range of several hundred points over the course of a week, but their stock values often did, for weeks on end, as traders (and regulators drawn from their ranks) rapidly and futilely repeated their comforting but ineffectual rituals.

Fear and faith, emotional values, have destroyed our economy and brought us uncomfortably close to fascism. Hope, another emotional value, can bring us together in calm and open-hearted community and let us, if we are lucky and diligent, find our way out of this mess, and restore the functioning of law, the constitutional rights that are really what make the US different, and an economy based not on speculation but on work and worth.

One of our favorite quotes comes from Lu Xun, who wrote, early in the last century:

Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like the roads across the earth. For actually there were no roads to begin with, but when many people pass one way a road is made.

So it will be that we in the United States now can come together to create a road to a more equitable, freer, and more sustainable world, beginning here at home.

Mr. President, welcome to the White House!

Richard Risemberg on 01.20.09 @ 06:53 AM PST [link]  

Eric Miller on 01.18.09 @ 04:41 PM PST [link]  

CBS News, in an item "All Aboard! Obama's Train Trip To D.C." posted by Robert Hendin, reported that President-elect Barack Obama and his family were riding in the train's caboose. Caboose? Is the railroad so removed from general culture that we refer to a Pullman Standard Observation car as a caboose? For the record, a caboose is not and has not been historically part of the passenger train equipment line-up, and has been all but absent from freight trains for decades. I also suspect the reported date of construction for the car, known as Georgia-300 may be wrong. It seems the Huffington Post first published it inaccurately as being constructed in 1939. The correct date may be 1930, as per this trainweb page Georgia 300

Eric Miller on 01.17.09 @ 12:35 PM PST [link]  

There is plenty to look forward to in the proposed economic stimulus bill, including a focus on renewable energy and retrofitting government buildings for our more green future. Some say investing in renewable energy sources that can't compete on a dollar-cost basis with fossil fuels. Yet, even if they don't now, they will.

What worries me is the potential for massive road-building projects that will serve to exacerbate sprawl and encourage the burning of fossil fuels. As it stands, about four times as much will be invested in roads as transit.

Every economic analysis I encounter has the price of oil heading back up--the reduced prices of recent times bring brought on by our severe economic recession. More, dense urban environments mean a person living in the same amount of space in a city uses half the energy of a similar person in the auto-oriented suburbs. The energy savings are in actuality greater because the average person in a city lives with fewer square feet that someone in the suburbs. The future may place enormous pressure on communities to increase density, limiting if not eliminating the automobile as a convenient and efficient means of transportation.

With global warming at our doorstep, does it make sense to spend all this money building roads to the past? Let's talk about alternative energy and alternative transportation and get the most out of the economic stimulus.

Eric Miller on 01.17.09 @ 05:48 AM PST [link]  

The Surface Transportation Policy Partnership announced a new coalition recently, promoting the use of rail networks for sustainable transport of passengers and goods in the US. Coalition members include the American Public Transportation Association, the American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association, Amtrak, Association of American Railroads, Building America's Future, National Association of Railroad Passengers, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Railway Supply Institute Inc, States for Passenger Rail Coalition, and the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership.

The goal is, of course, "to advance passenger and freight rail policies as a critical element of the nation’s transportation system to increase mobility, reduce emissions, and promote economic growth."

To read more, go to the STPP website and read about the OneRail Coalition.

Richard Risemberg on 01.17.09 @ 05:36 AM PST [link]  

In a scene in the 1949 movie adaptation of the famous architecture novel The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, a tall, sleek modern high-rise is “adapted” by adding a Greek-column portico at the base. Not many architects would attempt to argue the merits of such a design.

Yet, the present day wouldn’t find many designing in either of the opposing styles individually.

The modern architect, if successful, will make his buildings into a signature of sorts as easily recognizable as a painting by Andy Warhol or a song by Cher. Yet that recognizable appeal will be the facilitator of buildings that almost without fail will come to, if only temporarily, lose their appeal as times, styles and tastes change. They could age to gain the status of Wright’s Guggenheim, or more likely meet the wrecking ball after the passage of a few short decades.

It’s hard to recognize greatness when we are so close to it. Yet we readily accept the timeless qualities of certain styles of the past, yet rarely build in those styles. We look for signatures of our own time and space instead of seeking out the timeless qualities that connect us as well as define us.

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Eric Miller on 01.14.09 @ 03:10 PM PST [link]  

So, Joe the Plumber goes to Israel to report on the war and then says the media shouldn't report the war? Saving face in light of unpleasant circumstances? Sweep it under the rug? Would anyone mind if he didn't come back?

Eric Miller on 01.11.09 @ 02:54 PM PST [link]  

In a recent address by an economist, it was mentioned that despite the current economic doldrums in New York, the long-term outlook is bright. Why? Because people living in dense transit-oriented environments use half the energy as those in auto-oriented environments (see this related article from the New Yorker). As energy costs rise, as we mount the fight against global warming, as it becomes more apparent that we don't have to spend as much time in the gym if we just live where we can walk, there will be increasing demand for urban, walkable environments. New York is of course the grandaddy of them all.
I'd also like to briefly mention an extensive section on the damage being done to our oceans in the January 3, 2009 Economist. If I read it right, there are two masses of plastic, each the size of the United States, swirling in the Pacific Ocean. Please, if you don't have some, pick up a re-usable grocery bag asap. We even have one with a New Colonist logo available, but they're less expensive at most retail stores.

Eric Miller on 01.10.09 @ 02:31 PM PST [link]  

In 1815, most Americans were the subject of “a tyranny of distance,” as writer Daniel Walker Howe put it at an event this weekend sponsored by Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Howe is author of “What Hath God Wrought,” a book that chronicles the changes between 1815 and 1845. Many of the men who brought those changes into being are buried in Green-Wood.

Howe said that in 1815, the state of things in the United States were such that if it existed today, it could be called a “third-world country.” One of the current residents of the cemetery, Samuel Morse, set change into motion when the words “What Hath God Wrought” were transmitted by telegraph. The invention, which can be compared to the impact of the internet in our own time, facilitated the growth of newspapers and large political parties.

In fact, had the invention existed before 1812, the war named for the year would probably not have occurred.

When the gold was discovered in California in 1848, the message traveled to China and Latin America before it reached New York and Europe, because telegraph cables hadn’t yet reached California. The first message in “Morse Code” went across the Atlantic to England in 1858.

The lecture was preceded with a trolley-bus tour of the cemetery, guided by Green-Wood historian Jeffrey Richman, author of the also excellent book “Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, New York’s Buried Treasure.

You can hear an audio clip from the lecture at Urbanartantiques.com

Eric Miller on 01.04.09 @ 03:23 PM PST [link]  

Change.org, the Obama-Biden transition team's website, offers something rare in politics: a chance for regular folks actually to talk back directly to the political apparatus. We just received an announcement that they've started seven new blogs on their site, both to inform US residents of what's up with the prez-elect, and to solicit comments and suggestions.

One that particularly caught our eye was the Sustainable Food blog, since the provenance and transport of food has a huge effect on cities and the Earth. It's very new, but there are several good posts and lots of reader comments on it already. Our favorite comment so far (speaking of industrial scale meat production):

Corporations whose officers insist that they have rights of personhood should be held to the minimum standards of personal accountability that are asked of actual persons.

Read it for yourself at Sustainable Food--then comment and let them know what you think.

Richard Risemberg on 01.03.09 @ 09:22 AM PST [link]