As climate warms, species shift

Yellowstone is changing, as warmer weather encourages Canada Thistle to move in. Pocket gophers feed on the roots, and grizzlies feed on both the roots and the pocket gophers.

As climate change alters ecosystems, Dr. Crabtree said, “the winners are going to be the adaptive foragers, like grizzlies that eat everything from ants to moose, and the losers are going to be specialized species that can’t adapt.”

He said one specialized declining species was the long-tailed weasel. It feeds primarily on voles, which are also declining. The changes in the Lamar Valley might point to a new approach for invasive species, which are overwhelming many natural systems. “Invasives are the single biggest threat to biodiversity,” Dr. Crabtree said.

In another example of species shift, ecosystems are moving higher and higher up the mountains of Vermont as the climate warms:

We resurveyed forest plots established in 1964 along elevation transects in the Green Mountains (Vermont) to examine whether a shift had occurred in the location of the northern hardwood–boreal forest ecotone (NBE) from 1964 to 2004. We found a 19% increase in dominance of northern hardwoods from 70% in 1964 to 89% in 2004 in the lower half of the NBE... Our results indicate that high-elevation forests may be jeopardized by climate change sooner than anticipated.

Arctic Sea Ice - More Bad News

Although it's been a particularly cold winter (thanks to a strong La Nina system in the Pacific), arctic ice is thinner and younger than ever before (no surprise, since we had a record melt last summer).

According to Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as ice ages it continues to grow and thicken, so that older ice is generally also thicker ice. This winter the ice cover is much thinner overall and thus in a more vulnerable state heading into the summer melt season.

"It's becoming thinner and thinner and much more susceptible to melting during the summer - much more likely to melt away. It may look OK on the surface, but it's like looking at a Hollywood movie set - you see the facade of a building and it looks OK, but if you look behind it, there's no building there," said Meier.

Tilting Windmills

(Cross-posted from 3rings)

Wind power has been part of the energy landscape for thousands of years. But in the nuclear era, it was viewed as quaint - “Tilting at windmills” became a metaphor for fighting hopeless battles against the forces of change. Mind you, Helix Wind of San Diego does come off a bit quixotic in their corporate philosophy: “Freedom is at the heart of our values – energy independence and autonomy – a freedom fueled by a resource that never runs out. The wind.”

But this ain’t Cervantes’ windmill. Not only is their Savonius more efficient, simpler to set up and less expensive to buy than your average model - it’s also flipping gorgeous. When I saw this sleek, nautilus spiral at the Wired NextFest, it took my breath away.

The key to the design: vertical orientation, which eliminates a lot of traditional windmill issues. When folks apply for zoning variances to install wind power, they’re nearly always battled by neighbors who say (quite rightly) that windmills are ugly, noisy, obtrusive, and dangerous to birds and other wildlife.

All of those problems are eliminated in the Savonius. Instead of horizontal propeller-like blades with tips that spin at very high speed (noisy!), and must therefore be set very high above the ground (dangerous!), the Savonius spins vertically, with no more noise than wind blowing through the trees, on a pole (no tower) that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Oh, bird-lovers should note that at the low speeds the Savonius spins, you never have to worry about it taking on that translucent look that encourages birds to try to fly through it…

The Savonius currently comes in two configurations: 1 kw for residential applications, which stands 9’ feet tall by 4’ feet in diameter (2.74m x 1.21m). The commercial turbine, the Helix 2 kw measures 12’ feet in height by 4’ feet in diameter, (3.6m x 1.21m).

And there are rebates - if you live in California, the state will cover up to 77 percent of the cost; other states are coming on board, as well. Helix Wind even has a calculator function on the website to help you work out the financials.

But we shouldn’t worry about such Philistine considerations… what, after all, is the true price of beauty?

Paperless Gypsum Board?

(Crossposted at 3rings)

Who wants to breathe mold?

There’s been a growing awareness of indoor air quality, with the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM) estimating that 10 percent of Americans are directly allergic to mold.That’s about 30 million people who can potentially be sickened just by walking into a building. Mold is an even bigger concern for at-risk populations, like children (it’s estimated that mold exposure doubles a child’s chance of developing asthma), the elderly, or those already sick.

It turns out mold’s major foothold comes in wallboard, and in particular the organic paper cladding, which in damp environments can provide the perfect home for mold to thrive in. This is why the Oakland children’s hospital went with DensArmor Plus paperless drywall from Georgia Pacific.

Instead of paper, the panels feature a glass-mat surface on both the front and back, plus additional moisture-resistance features. DensArmor Plus® scored a 10, the highest level of performance for mold resistance, under ASTM D 3273 testing.

The panels are recommended for all interior uses, but are especially useful in environments that might be exposed to moisture, including bathrooms, kitchens, and basements, in both residential and commercial settings. And moisture can be a problem anywhere: Georgia Pacific points out that “In today’s tightly sealed structures, inner wall cavities present ideal growth opportunities for mold, simply because of the moisture concentration, the lack of air circulation and the temperature differential from one side of the wall to the other. Thus, mold’s greatest potential for growth is out of sight.”

There are a couple of additional benefits. Because of its low emission of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), DensArmor Plus® is the first, and so far the only, gypsum drywall to be GREENGUARD Indoor Air Quality Certified®. It also received GREENGUARD Children & Schools Certification, for a product that can help reduce exposure of schoolchildren to indoor air pollutants, which means use of DensArmor Plus® gives LEED certification points two separate ways in school construction.

Another benefit: it’s so moisture-resistant that Georgia Pacific offers a 90-day in-place warranty against exposure damage, meaning wallboard can start going up even before the building is completely closed in. Imagine how much help that can be on a tight construction schedule!

Biofuels: "Worse than we thought"

The word has been trickling out that the latest attempt by big energy to jump on the green bandwagon is, in fact, an environmental disaster.

Via Kevin Drum, biofuels guru Mike O'Hare says recent studies have shown that, once you take all the factors into account, corn-based ethanol and similar fuels actually dump much more CO2 into the environment.

There is now more than good reason to expect that no biofuel from seeds, possibly none (even cellulosic) grown on land that could grow food, will reduce global warming if substituted for petroleum products...

(There's more...)

The first piece of the puzzle is the recognition that if a piece of forest is cut down, or natural grassland plowed up, to grow biofuel, decay and/or burning of what was there before releases an enormous puff of carbon into the atmosphere that needs to be counted along with the carbon releases of the biofuel crop. Even spreading the initial release over decades of biofuel growing, it is large enough to push almost any biofuel's global warming intensity way above that of gasoline, especially because it all occurs right at the beginning of the future rather than a few years or decades down the line...

Small amounts of diesel and ethanol will probably be available from trash and agricultural waste like the tree branches and bark scraps the logging industry leaves around to decay, or cornstalks, or McDonald's used frying oil, and these are environmentally OK because they don't induce land use conversion....And many smart folks in this business expect that algae growing in tanks in the desert (for example) can eventually be taught to make a lot of diesel cheap, with no land use implications. But for now, and for a while, biofuels generally are going over a very rough patch of road, a patch that may go on for years before new technologies smooths it out again.

Sounds Strange Department

"If music be the food of love... veg on!"
Why not a vegetable orchestra?

Onigiri

More good eats from Lyra's blog. We served these up at our Oscar-nominated film marathon and potluck over the weekend.

Writers Strike: The End

It looks like the writers strike is over. Niki Fink reports (extensively!) at DeadlineHollywood:

At the WGA's news conference today, union leaders declared the new contract is "a huge victory for us". Trumpeted WGAW President Patric Verrone, "This is the first time we actually got a better deal in a new media than previously." Verrone credited News Corp. No. 2 Peter Chernin and Disney chief Bob Iger, and also CBS boss Les Moonves, with "being instrumental in making this deal happen" after the WGA spent 3 months "getting nowhere" with the AMPTP negotiators and lawyers. WGA negotiating committee chief John Bowman added that, "What happened to the Golden Globes was instrumental in getting the CEOs to this table. It was a huge symbol." Bowman said it was "imperative" that the WGA "get in on the ground floor of New Media. Henceforth, we're in from the start. It's 2% of distributor's gross. They can't have a business model without taking that into account."

(There's more...)

Verrone said, "Since we began negotiations in July, we've been saying, 'If they get paid, we get paid.' This contract makes that a reality. It's the best deal this Guild has bargained for in 30 years after the most successful strike this Guild has waged in 35 years. It was arguably the most successful strike in the American labor movement in a decade, clearly the most important of this young century. It is not all that we hoped for, and not all that we deserved. But as I told our members, this strike was about the future, and this deal assures for us and for future generations of writers a share in the future..."

Verrone said it was "heartbreaking for me personally" to drop the WGA's demands relating to reality and animation (Verrone is an animation writer) "But it was more important that we make a deal that benefitted the membership and the town as a whole and got people back to work." Verrone stated that "The legacy of the '88 strike was the ability of the companies to develop content without writers and creators. The legacy of this strike will be the ability of writers and creators to develop content without the companies. We are making deals, and we will continue to make deals, with Google, Yahoo, and others beyond just the 7 conglomerates."

People Power

More cool toys...

First, it was the flashlight you charged up by shaking it a few times. Never again to frantically search for batteries by candlelight when the power goes out...

Now, scientists at Vancouver's Simon Fraser University are developing a knee-brace that charges up electronics as you walk.

Max Donelan's team's work has spawned a startup called Bionic Power, which has received seed investment but no rounds of venture capital. Donelan told Wired.com that their initial markets were "people whose lives depend on portable power." These off-grid power users include backwoods hikers and the military, which is always looking for ways to reduce energy usage. Donelan called soldier battery use "astonishing," noting that soldiers can pack 30 pounds of batteries for a 24-hour mission. All those batteries add up to an equally astonishing $57,000 per soldier per year in battery costs.

They've got a video up explaining the core technology... worth checking out.

(Image courtesy Simon Fraser University)

No, He Can't

Parody is the sincerest form of mockery...

No more Polaroids

Technology marches on.

Polaroid instant photography was the coolest thing, back in the day... No waiting!

But now we live in an even more instant age, and I can take better pictures with my phone.

So... Polaroid has announced that it will no longer be manufacturing film. They dropped their instant camera manufacturing last year. Sensibly, they'll be focusing on digital photography.

Cupcakes Can Be Healthy, Too

More gluten-free goodness from Lyra.

Not only did she make these chocolate chip cupcakes gluten-free, but she used coconut milk instead of butter or oil. My god, they are rich and tasty....

Experience vs Inspiration

For years, the Democratic Party has nominated good, experienced candidates - who failed to inspire.

Mondale: Strong on substance, wooden in inspiration
Dukakis: Strong on substance, wooden
Clinton: Yes! Inspiration!
Gore: Incredibly strong on substance, inspirational in real life, put in a lock-box by his consultants and mocked mercilessly by the media
Kerry: You get the picture.

Reagan got people to cross over and vote for him despite their disagreeing with him on policy. He inspired.

We know that on issue after issue, from abortion to economics to Iraq to torture, the majority of Americans actually agree with us.

Wouldn't it be nice for a change to nominate someone who inspires people to vote for the candidate they actually agree with?

(There's more...)

I've been pretty much an Edwards supporter since 2004. I still think the wrong guy was at the head of the ticket that year.

With Edwards out, I've had to take a good look at the remaining choices. And it seems to come down to a choice: Experience vs Inspiration. "Ready on Day 1" vs "Yes We Can".

Now we have a choice between Clinton II, who we already know will not inspire the opposition to cross the line and vote for her.

And we have Obama.

Substance? The man is a sitting US Senator who, before being elected to public office was involved in grassroots community organizing. He's not the cypher some would like to make him out to be.

Governors have an executive advantage, of course. Bill Clinton was a governor who had put through policy initiatives in a small state. But it was not his policies and initiatives that made him Presidential timber, but his inspirational ability

Bill Richardson is out of the race, despite having a great resume, because he is not a great communicator.

You select a plumber based on "substance" because you know he's the guy with his hands on the pipes. You can choose a guy for CEO based as much on inspiration as on resume, because the CEO sets direction. For everything else, you have managers and bookkeepers.

It's the same with a President. We've seen time and again Democrats put forward proposals that are just and fair and far-reaching, only to have them shot down because we couldn't build a coalition of support behind it.

After years of nominating guys with good resumes who went down in flames in the general election, I'd like to see someone inspirational get the nomination.

"Nothing's Gonna Change My World"

What a great song. And what a wonderful idea...

NASA beams Beatles' song into space

The Beatles' song Across the Universe will be the first ever to be beamed directly into space next week, NASA said.

Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney said it was an "amazing" achievement and John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono called it the "beginning of a new age".

The transmission of the song over the space agency's Deep Space Network on Monday will mark the 40th anniversary of the day the band recorded the song.

The song will be aimed at the North Star, Polaris, 431 light years away from Earth, and it will travel across the universe at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, NASA said.

In a message to the space agency, Sir Paul said: "Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens. All the best, Paul."

Car Culture and Cul de Sacs

James Howard Kunstler has been one of America's leading curmudgeons for the past 20 years. He was in Vancouver last week, spreading his iconoclastic (or perhaps "autonoclastic") notions that we are at the end of the era he calls "Happy Motoring" and entering the twighlight struggle of "The Long Emergency".

His weekly posts at Clusterfuck Nation are must-reads for anyone who is worried about the current state of America and the world - that is, anyone who has been paying attention.

What's scary about this interview is: It's from 13 years ago. And nothing has changed - the situation has only gotten more critical.

James Howard Kunstler and
The Geography of Nowhere.
Interview with Jeremy Bloom

"Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading...."

Thus, James Howard ("Jimmy") Kunstler begins his new volume, "The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-made Landscape." A pithy, gutsy volume that pulls no punches, "Nowhere" develops the idea that the lack of community we feel in America today is, in large measure, because we have failed to build communities.

By looking at how our towns and cities grew - from Long Island to Detroit to Disneyland - Kunstler is doing more than the proverbial "talking about the weather" of our urban environment; he is attempting to do something about it. He points out what he thinks are the mistakes that were made, and also looks to the future with some hopeful changes, some of which are already in motion. It's an important issue: important enough that "The New York Times" has run reviews of "The Geography of Nowhere" in both the Book Review and the regular daily Times, as well as running an Op-ed Page piece by Kunstler.

We chatted with him on a warm summer day, sitting on the wide, carnival-painted porch of his Victorian Saratoga Springs house. Holding a glass of frosty iced tea in one hand, he contemplates the cover of "The Geography of Nowhere," with its pictured vista of Long Island's suburban sprawl.

J.H.K.: I wanted to call the book "Why America is So Fucking Ugly," but my publisher and I settled on "The Geography of Nowhere"

(There's more...)

JB: So we're nowhere, and it's ugly. How did we get here?

J.H.K.: We had an incredible imperial boom from to '50s to the '70s. The Interstate Highway System was going up, everyone was getting a new house with an FHA mortgage. People were making money off this stuff and the horizon seemed limitless. Very few people were thinking of the consequences - and particularly the unforseen repercussions, the hidden costs.

We have done incredible damage to our culture, to our spiritual life in this country, and our civic life. To any notion of the common good.

It boils down to this: we build too many places that are not worth caring about, and we've destroyed our civic life in the process. If we're going to continue to be a viable civilization, we're going to have to build places we can care about - and if we do that, we will enjoy civic life once again.

All these things may seem to be abstractions, but they are no more abstract than, for instance, the concept of justice - which is very important to Americans.

There are some ideals that we are going to have to pay attention to that are different from the ones we've been looking at over the last 20 years.

JB: But this is very abstract and complex: we're talking here of a juxtaposition of questions of natural law, aesthetics, as well as questions of efficiency and economics questions....

J.H.K.: Most people think of this problem only in terms of aesthetics. They drive down some gruesome commercial strip like Central Avenue in Albany, and they go "ewwww, yuck..."

JB: If they notice it at all.

J.H.K.: I think they notice it. And I think they are quite justified in feeling that way. But the outward appearance of our landscape is just a manifestation of deeper problems. And I wanted to find out what they are.

We once had a sense of a community as a functioning, living organism, made up of many other functioning, living things. It's places where people live, where people do business, where people enjoy public gatherings - all these places that used to comprise our civic life.

When we look at these gruesome highway strips and go "yuck" and "bleah,' and our stomachs turn, what it finally comes down to is an apprehension that we have thrown our civic life away, and that's what people feel.

JB: And do you blame the automobile for that loss?

J.H.K.: The automobile has played a very large part in that destructive process, but it's not the only thing. There have been some reviews of the book that have suggested that it is only about the effects of the automobile on the landscape, and that's not true.

(He pauses for a moment, takes a sip of ice tea, gathers his thoughts.)

The troubled townscapes and landscapes that we have created are manifestations of our economic predicament. We have come to the end of a 50-year-long, abnormal war-time boom economy. First it was the hot war economy, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, and in between it was the Cold War economy.

From 1945 until the early 70's we could sell any product that we made to any country in the world, because after WWII all the advanced nations were either bankrupt or bombed into ruins.

Japan and Germany weren't going to try selling us cars in the 1950s. But then other countries started to catch up, and in the mid-'70s the Japanese started to successfully compete against our biggest industry: the car industry. Now, the industrial jobs that gave our workers the highest standard of living in the
world are simply gone, and they're not coming back.

So the economy we face in the next 50 years is not going to be the same as it was for the past 50. It is not going to be based on people driving around to the malls buying Guns and Roses posters and plastic trolls.

JB: But how was the "destruction of our civic life," as you put it, the consequence of that boom?

J.H.K.: Unintended consequences. One of the great tragedies of our times is that the great bustling middle class - that used to be out in the public realm fomenting ideas and meeting each other and being involved in cultural life - are the ones who abandoned the cities and are locked in their suburban houses.

The analogue to that is the way we have eliminated the merchant classes from our towns. This has been a great tragedy, because the merchants in small towns and in cities were the people who supported all the civic institutions. They were the people who sat on the library boards and on the school boards, and sponsored the little league teams. We threw them into the garbage cans so we could have K-Marts, where we could buy a microwave oven for $9 less than we would have been charged in a locally-owned store.

People are paying $9 less for their microwave oven, but they're losing a lot more than $9 in public amenity in the process.

JB: How did that happen?

J.H.K.: Mass merchandising in America came about because we have cheap transportation. Truckers pay less for gas in America than they do anywhere else in the world, period. As long as that's the case, you can have huge mass-merchandising corporations that can rationalize their operation. You can't do that in Italy, where gas is $4.50 a gallon and it costs $30 in tolls to drive
100 miles. You couldn't be trucking around 5 tons of trolls every day if the government didn't subsidize the highway system.

I'm not saying this was even avoidable. But what I think is really pathetic is the way people in the towns behaved contrary to their best interests. All the little Rotary Club boosters would do everything they could to get the K-Mart to come to town, and then they would stand there scratching their heads when all their fellow small-businessmen went out of business.

We see this in Saratoga. In 1974 they had a special supplement in the Sunday newspaper that was put together by the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, promoting the hell out of the new Pyramid Mall that was about to open here, and what a wonderful thing it was going to be, and what a wonderful adjunct to downtown Saratoga it was going to be. Well, 98 percent of the stores that existed in downtown Saratoga when the mall opened are gone now.

JB: In "The Geography of Nowhere," you take an in-depth look at the destruction of mass transit in this country, and the corollary that Detroit was given a chance to build smaller and more efficient cars when the oil embargo hit in 1973 with the oil embargo, and basically...

J.H.K.: They blew it.

JB: Or didn't see the possibility that things would change. We tend to look at the life we have, the economic environment we have as being inevitable, a "natural order"....

J.H.K.: Or maybe people are like fish, they don't question the water that they swim in. Our everyday environment is the water that we swim in.

JB: But in fact there were several economic choices that were made that could have gone a different way, with different results. For example, greater reliance on alternate fuels, or electric cars....

J.H.K.: Changing the fueling of the cars isn't going to help the trouble we have with the way places and people relate; it's only going to make the problems worse.

The question really isn't whether we're going to have solar cars, electric cars, propane cars - look, we're going to continue to have cars, I've been misquoted in some newspaper reviews as having said that the automobile is going to disappear; I never said anything of the kind. I do think we're going to have less automobiles in the future, and fewer people are going to be able to own them.

But to try to solve the problem by inventing a different kind of automobile is not going to happen, and it's not going to work, so we might as well forget it. We can get a lot more value out of redesigning the human habitat to get places that are worth living in, without having to redesign the automobile. No amount of redesigning the automobile will give us our civic life back.

JB: You comment in the book about Greenfield Villlage, Henry Ford's "old time Main Street U.S.A." park, and the fact that people visiting there like it very much, but can't quite put their fingers on why it feels good. Americans seem to instinctively like the old Main Street with its shops - and no parking lots full of cars - but somehow, it's not what we ended up with.

J.H.K.: People know what they like, know how to make a good town. The problem right now is that their instincts and their longings are in direct opposition to their building practices, laws and regulations.

JB: In the book, you talk about zoning as a prime villain....

J.H.K.: We invented zoning at the turn of the century, and it was a good idea - that all these factories and their noxious pollutants should go to their own part of the city and be dirty and smelly and noisy over there where they won't harm property values.

JB: Maybe this points a finger at one of the roots of our trouble: rather than deal with a problem, we've tended to just put it somewhere else and pretend it's not there. "Out of sight, out of mind;" put all the obnoxious activities where they'll bother someone else.

J.H.K.: And after WWII we decided that shopping was also an obnoxious activity and we weren't going to let people live around shopping either.

Zoning created the strip mall - which was an obnoxious place to shop. For 5,000 years people built their towns in a different way: You had stores on the first floor, and you had other activities up above; people living, offices, other activities all mixed together. That is the basic pattern for the basic American small town, and it's not a bad pattern. The ironic thing is, people wonder why small towns don't feel like small towns anymore - it's because their laws tell them they can't build them like small towns.

If you look around America, you will notice a curious thing: Every strip mall is one story high. We have an affordable housing crisis in this country, and one of the reasons for that is that we haven't been building any cheap housing for 50 years. We haven't been building any houses over stores.

The only kind of housing we've allowed people to build, for the most part are single family dwellings.

JB: But where did that idea come from, that it's "inhumane" to let people live over stores?

J.H.K.: I don't know. I do think it's funny that we think it's inhumane to allow people to live over a plant store. We also think its inhumane to have grocery stores in housing developments. I don't think I've ever seen a housing development in America that actually has a corner store right in the
development. And most of the people would probably greet the idea with loathing at first glance.

JB: But that makes sense - as you point out, the set-back requirements and lighting requirements would drop that corner store into the middle of a sea of asphalt and all-night mercury-vapor lighting; not exactly a pleasant neighbor.

J.H.K.: But you shouldn't have to have the mercury-vapor lights; you could even live without the parking lot. We have corner stores in the old neighborhoods in Saratoga, and they don't have parking lots, and they function very well, the people who operate them seem to be able to make a decent living. So it can be done. It's a matter of changing the zoning.

JB: In the book, you mentioned one strip mall in the Massachusetts town of Mashpee that had been converted into more of a "town center" sort of place....

J.H.K.: Yes. they took this one-story strip-mall with its sea of asphalt and built apartments on the second floor, took the parking lot and turned it into a street by putting stuff on the other side of it, and infilling it.

By observing a few good rules of urbanism, they took a place that looks like nowhere and turned it into a place that looks like somewhere.

JB: What rules are those?

J.H.K.: Well, for example, in order for a place to have any civic vitality, any life, it really helps if you have people living there. You go to a strip mall at night and it's a dead place; you go to a live downtown at night, like Saratoga, and there are people around. There are shops on the ground floor, they come out to the sidewalk - the rules are really simple. The trouble is they've been zoned out of existence, except in places that are essentially antiques.

JB: Like Woodstock, Vermont.

J.H.K.: Yeah, or any of the places I've mentioned in the book. You go to Georgetown (D.C.) and Beacon Hill (Boston), and people like to be in those places. They recognize the good relationships between things, instinctively. They know that they feel a sense of community there because they can see how nice it would be to be able to walk down that flight of stairs and out onto the street and buy a newspaper, and then go back for breakfast, or go down the street to a corner tavern and have a beer, or actually know the person that you are buying your meat from.

The other way of living is artificial, created by accident, by zoning and government policies, and as long as it's economically feasible for people to maintain this status quo, they are going to. My point is that it isn't going to be economically feasible much longer, because of the hidden costs.

Something that no one seems to think about: Every little town and hamlet in America has to bear the expense of operating a mass transit line that runs only twice a day, and only for people under 18. It's called "a school bus fleet." The costs of these things are immense - we're talking about millions of dollars for every small town in the country. And they sit around most of the day.

The tragic thing is, there's no reason on earth that they couldn't use some of those vehicles the rest of the day for public transport, but they don't. We need to rethink some of these "settled" issues. We're going to have to unsettle them, or we're never going to have decent towns in America.

When Robert Moses built his highway out to Jones Beach in the 1920s, he made the overpasses too short for busses to get under, because he didn't want that class of people coming out to Jones Beach. He wanted only the people who could afford cars - in short, he was a snob.

We do an interesting thing in this country. We pretend that we're the most egalitarian country on Earth. And yet, no other country segregates its people and its activities by category as rigidly as we do. People who make less than $12,000 must live in this concrete can we call public housing; We can't have any shopping or any places where people work around places where they live. So everything is disconnected.

That's not the way it used to be, when poor people lived right around the corner, or right upstairs, from middle-class people, when all the children walked to school together and played together.

We pay a lot of lip service to being a democracy, but when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of it, we really don't allow democracy to exist.

We don't want to live around people who are different. Forget racism - even white people don't want to live around white people who make less money than they do.

JB: One of the standard arguments against the kind of planning that you advocate is that "Americans won't stand for that kind of government interference in business and private property". But you seem to be saying that, in fact, most of the current situation is precisely because of government interference in business decisions, from zoning restrictions to FHA- subsidizing suburban tract-housing and government-subsidizing highways.


J.H.K.: Absolutely. And a few people have benefitted from, for instance, the government giving them insurance on their beach houses.

I had an interview with a very interesting man named John DeGrove, who is a professor at Florida Atlantic University and a major player in the revolutionary new land-planning stuff that's going on down there - They now have what is called a concurrency law, which requires the developers to do all the infrastructure work before they put in the development, so they can't just plop the houses down and then say to the county, "Okay, here's 7,000 new people, build schools for them." Now the developers have to do that, put in sewer lines, and do all the other things that were bankrupting municipalities. And as a consequence you don't have the same kind of development you had before.

The government has not only subsidized a lot of bad building, it has subsidized bad ideas about building.

JB: So, as long as there is still money to be made, what's going to change that?

J.H.K.: It's changing already. The Federal government is bankrupt. The chickens are coming home to roost now. We've out $500 billion from the savings and loan debacle; we're out several billion dollars from Hurricane Andrew, and that's probably just the first of many high-price disasters we're going to suffer in the decade ahead.

In an economy with less money sloshing around, it's not going to be possible to say "Go ahead, build your development on the beach, if anything goes wrong the government will pay for it again." So far we've postponed the reckoning by rolling over the debt. But we can't keep doing it forever.

JB: And yet you are not - despite what some critics have said - a "zero-growth" advocate either.

J.H.K.: The question is not whether we're going to have development or not - we're going to have it. But the development issues of the next decade are going to be different.

What we have been doing in America has been to take the functions of town life and smearing them all over the countryside. This has two consequences: It ruins the countryside, and it impairs and damages the life of our towns.

I think of development in a different way. A town is like an organism: it grows or it dies. The question is, HOW does it grow. Where does the development belong? And we're going to have to rethink that question.

The towns that people like best are the towns that are pedestrian-oriented, but we have built an infrastructure that will only serve motorists. When we discover that our life, based on motoring, is bankrupting us, we are going to build a different kind of environment.

Yes We Can

I've come around to Obama.

In part, this video is why. The man is an inspiration. And we need that in these times.

The War Grinds On

(Originally published in the Powell River Peak)

When he graduated from Brooks Secondary School in 2003 and joined the Canadian Armed Forces, Gord Hoffman knew there was a good chance he would be deployed on a mission somewhere in the world. It's one of the things for which the Canadian military is known.

Sometime next month, Hoffman and elements of his unit, the 1 Service Battalion in Edmonton, Alberta, will be shipping out to Afghanistan as part of the national support element. Exact dates and details can't be revealed for security reasons.

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"I'll be supporting our mission," said Hoffman. "I'm a mobile support equipment operator by trade, which basically means I'm a driver for any number of vehicles that we have over there, including the 16-tonne pallet-loading system, the new armoured heavy-support vehicle system, and the tracked light-armoured vehicle."

Hoffman is one of two Powell Riverites in current deployment. Darryl Hansen, who graduated from Max Cameron Secondary School in 2000, is also going as a driver with the national support element.

"This is my first time overseas," said Hansen. "We'll be patrolling, peacekeeping. We've done a large amount of training and I think we're mentally prepared and ready to go."

Hoffman likewise emphasized the intensity of the training he's been receiving. "We've had a lot of cultural awareness briefings, lessons learned from previous tours," he said. "They've figured out what works best and we're learning from their experience. We've got corporals from the 5 Service Battalion training us based on what they saw there. We're getting a variety of different scenarios, from practice patrols, to improvised explosive devices (IEDs), anything we might encounter in the theatre of war."

When he was in school, Hoffman worked his way up through Junior Forest Wardens and army cadets, and he said that joining Canadian forces seemed like the next logical step. He also worked for several years as a carrier for the Peak.

"I don't get back to Powell River enough," he said. "Being based in Edmonton, I miss the mountains and the ocean. There will be mountains where I'm going in Afghanistan, but not as much rain as in Powell River."

Both Hoffman and Hansen will be leaving wives behind for the six or seven months of their deployments. "It'll be tough," said Hansen. "But I think my wife and I are both mentally prepared for it. We can keep in touch by email."

Hoffman will also be separated from his one-year-old son, Alex. "It'll be hard," he said.

Jim Hoffman, Gord's father, said it took him a little while to get used to the idea of his son going to Afghanistan, both as a parent and as a patriot. Their deployment comes at a difficult time for the mission. There has been increased activity by the Taliban, and last week involved both the death of the 78th Canadian service person, and the release of a report by former federal Liberal cabinet member John Manley, calling for a re-evaluation of Canada's involvement.

"He loves the job, loves the work," Jim Hoffman said. "But I'm not really comfortable with the mission. I don't think they're really there for peacekeeping. There've been too many boys killed."

Hansen said it's all part of the job. "I'm excited to go, proud to serve my country, and I'm looking forward to it."

Totally Stokes

(Originally published in the Powell River Peak)

Composer Tobin Stokes is used to working across multiple genres.

The former Powell River resident has composed classical music, choral and scores for film and television. But the score he wrote last year for the miniseries Captain Cook, Obsession and Discovery, really pushed the envelope.

"It took everything," said Stokes. "Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii and Canada each has its own aboriginal music that had to be incorporated. And of course Cook started in England, so the producers wanted to have music by Johann Christian Bach worked in, much more formal."

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He said it's tricky balancing that many different styles and influences, but it makes for a wonderful challenge.

"The show needs to be congealing through the music," said Stokes. "So I take each of those influences and try to build it into the overall plan. What's interesting about Cook is that in the third voyage he starts to fall apart. So I took all the themes I'd developed in the first episodes and deconstructed them in strange ways. It was a lot of fun."

The miniseries has already aired on Australian Television, earning rave reviews, an audience of more than one million viewers, and several awards. In Canada, episodes one and two will air back-to-back on History Television at 8 pm and 9 pm on Tuesday, February 19, and episodes three and four will air at 8 and 9 pm on Tuesday, February 26.

Those familiar with Stokes' work will not be surprised to learn that the score involved choral music. Growing up in Powell River, Stokes was an active participant in the International Choral Kathaumixw festivals, which have been a major influence on his life and work.

And he, in turn, has been a major influence on the festival. His composition, The Spacious Firmament, is sung by a thousand-voice choir at each Kathaumixw's opening and closing ceremonies.

"Choral is my favorite form of music," he said. "I think when a person is singing, they're using their own instrument. The music goes right from brain, to voice, out into the air, and then to the ears of the audience. So, it's the purest form and it gives me so much satisfaction."

His original plan for the Captain Cook score had been to record the choral sections with the Powell River Academy Chamber Singers. "They have the facilities and a great choir that can learn stuff on the spot," he said. "They're very adaptable and eager, and wonderful to work with. Unfortunately, the scheduling didn't work out."

It's been a very busy year for Stokes. Apart from the Captain Cook project, he also scored the film http://www.mountainsidefilms.com/savingluna/, about an orphaned orca that lived in the Gold River area. The film will be shown at the Powell River Film Festival at 12:30 pm on Friday, February 8.

"My score features some of the same singers and some of the same aboriginal people as the Captain Cook series did," said Stokes.

He also had a piano concerto to compose for a world premiere with the Victoria Symphony on November 26, 2007. "With delays in the Captain Cook series, I barely managed to finish it in time," he said.

The production company liked his score for Captain Cook so much that they've brought him on board for its next project, a miniseries about another sailing scientist, Charles Darwin. Stokes is also scoring a documentary about famous Canadian photographer Ted Grant.

His next big project is an opera.

"It's about the first Europeans coming to Nootka, to Vancouver Island," he said. "I'm not sure yet, but somehow we're going to present some of it at Kathaumixw."

Battered Eagles

(Originally printed in the Powell River Peak)

After two weeks in rehabilitation at the Mountainaire Avian Rescue Society in Courtenay, a wayward bald eagle was returned to Texada Island and released.

John Whitehead found the eagle on his property in the Oasis area north of Gillies Bay. "There were a few eagles hanging around in the area before Christmas," he said. "When I got home after Christmas I found this one in the backyard, hopping around, unable to fly."

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He said he called the Powell River conservation officer service, but was told there were no officers available in the area, and he should try the Powell River SPCA. He contacted volunteer branch manager Audrey Hill, who quickly arranged for local volunteers to get there with a transport cage.

"I was right on the scene," said volunteer Micheline Macauley. "I live right next door."

Joined by volunteers Cheryl Nyl and Elaine Purgavie, Macauley and Whitehead set about the daunting task of capturing a bald eagle.

"It wasn't easy," said Whitehead. "We got a blanket over him, and got a hold of his talons. But even though he was wrapped in the blanket his head was still out, and I didn't know if I was going to get an eye pecked out. I got my coat off and over his head, and we got him into the kennel. He wasn't happy, but he didn't get overly excited."

After a preliminary examination by local veterinarian Dr. Brian Barnes, of Westview Veterinary Hospital, BC Ferries gave the eagle a free ride to the Mountainaire Avian Rescue Society.

Mary Jane Birch, wildlife rehabilitator and manager of the society, said fortunately, there were only minor injuries. "There were no broken bones or major lacerations," she said. "But he was thin and wet and cold, and was found down on the ground, so that's never a good sign."

She said it was possible that the eagle may have fought with another eagle, as winter is hard on all wildlife, with strong winds, harsh weather and disrupted food supply. "There's competition over food, over territory and mates," she said. "We gave him lots of food, vitamins, and some rest and relaxation. That seems to have done it."

After two more free ferry rides on Tuesday, January 22, the bird was returned to Whitehead's property and released.

"He hopped right out," Macauley said. "He looked around, flew up into a low tree and rested for a bit. Then he just took off. It was beautiful to see."

Hill said this is the fourth eagle the SPCA has assisted this winter, which is unusual. "We've had about nine eagles in the 14 years I've been here." she said. "We captured one on Savary Island two weeks ago, but he was too badly injured, probably by the storm, and didn't make it."

Fries With That

(Originally published in the Powell River Peak)

When inventor Rudolf Diesel demonstrated his distinctive engine in the early years of the 20th century, it ran on peanut oil, not petroleum.

It took nearly 100 years, but local resident Kevin Egan said he is part of a worldwide movement to return to the original plan for the diesel engine, and switch over from fossil fuels to sustainable fuels.

He pointed out that local restaurants treat used vegetable oil as a messy waste product. "The restaurants are paying people to get rid of it, and the resources to haul it away are wasted," he said. "Instead, we could be using it as fuel."

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Egan, whose background is in organic chemistry and petroleum technology, worked for years for Shaw Cable. But a year ago he had neck surgery to fuse three vertebrae and he's been out on disability leave.

He has taken his free time to help others by assisting them in converting their vehicles. "It's not that difficult to switch a standard diesel vehicle over to run on pure veggie oil," he said. "You can hire somebody to do it for you, and that will cost around $3,000. Or you can do it yourself for less than $1,000, with all the little extras and bits. And if you're prepared, you can do the whole thing in one day."

Egan cautioned against confusing vegetable oil and biodiesel, which are two different things. "Biodiesel is oil that has been transesterified," he said. "That requires a lot of work and some messy chemicals, and it's too much for an individual to handle in most cases. With veggie oil, you can run it straight out of the fryer. You just have to filter out food particles and remove any water that got in from cooking."

He noted that it takes about 15 minutes to filter a 55-gallon drum. "That's about 250 litres," he said. "I've been getting it for free from local restaurants, since they'd have to pay to have it disposed of. What would that much diesel fuel cost at current prices?"

He sets up the vehicles with two tanks, one for diesel and one for vegetable oil. He said that cars cold-start better on standard diesel, and it's also good to have an auxiliary system if people using the system are on the road and vegetable oil is not available. "We have two full-size, four-wheel-drive Mitsubishi Delicas that we imported from Japan, and our family goes through more milk in a week than diesel," he said. "I'd say that's pretty good."

Egan said that diesel cars have not been offered for sale in the United States and Canada because of emissions concerns, although diesel pickups are available. Mercedes and Volkswagen produce diesel models, and various Japanese companies make diesel cars for their own domestic market, like the Delicas he imported. Egan estimates that about one in 20 vehicles in Powell River run on diesel. "And we have enough veggie oils being wasted here, now, to power those vehicles," he said.

Another advantage, he added, is that vegetable oils are much more stable than petroleum fuels. "You can take a big drum and carry it in the back of your van," he said. "It doesn't smell bad, and it can't blow up."

Via word of mouth and computer bulletin boards, Egan has helped people with conversions in other parts of BC, from Campbell River to Kelowna. "I'd like to do some in Powell River," he said. "I'm talking with a couple of people, and I may be helping the automotive class at Brooks Secondary School convert a Mercedes diesel over to veggie. This is the best form of community-oriented recycling, reusing things locally, saving resources and money."

Anyone interested in having Egan convert a vehicle can email him at veggievan (at) shaw (dot)ca.