pureInteractions

Blackstone: the Path to Providence

2011-12-22T04:44:00.000-08:00

Next time I’ll take the canal I thought, as our camera bearer dried himself from a plunge sustained while navigating a particularly hairy logjam. The minor mishap was amplified by the disappearance of our disposable camera in the mail on its way to development. It may be better for the future careers of all those involved that few records exist besides this subjective account. By the time the trip was over, we had all mastered the J stroke and aerodynamic reach, and moreover, the tortuous and urban Blackstone, cradle of the industrial revolution in North America, and for our purposes, the path to Providence.

Our small band had gathered under the common impetus to travel by water, to canoe in an epic way, to soak up the last of the summer sun. I had planned the trip months before, shortly after completing the Storrs to New London canoe route with two friends of mine, both of which bailed on this trip at the last minute. For the better I supposed at the time, as it meant that we would only need two boats. I had talked Steve and Christian into the trip while I was still in central America, and Mark was a last minute addition picked up at an Outing Club meeting the Wednesday before labor day. In an overly optimistic bout, I gave us two days to make the 40 or so miles connecting the two cities, a miscalculation that was to set the pace for what seemed like eternity.

The day was balmy, a gorgeous Labor Day, Skies blue, weather, soccer tournament perfect. We didn’t even know it could be done, but the nagging feeling of passing the sign for Blackstone River National Heritage Corridor off of I-91 just south and east of Worcester too many times had culminated in this plan. Last-minute rearrangements in crew left us with 4 hardy souls, 2 boats and 3 small cars.

The Heritage Corridor is not only home to the river of its namesake, but also the Historic Blackstone Canal, which had a short functioning life between 1827 and 1848. The canal boosted the predominantly agrarian of central massachusetts society into a mercantile economy, before it was made redundant by a competing railline to Boston. Far before it had been graced with the likes of Adam Sandler’s tollbooth Willie or the Polar Soda Co, WPI, Worcester was an industrial powerhouse, linked to sea by the canal. To us, the river promised adventure, just as it had promised all those enterprising Yankees wealth, water power, and later, sewage and recreation. The question was; what had it become?

Having arranged for a 9.30 Sunday morning meeting time at the ole’ outing club shed over on Horsebarn hill, Christian, Mark, Steve and I, packed up our boats and drybags, departing in three cars towards our end point at Pierce Stadium in East Providence. About an hour later that morning’s hasty breakfast of a wild gathered mushroom and egg sandwich was unpleasantly pounding on my temples in a most immediate way. A mounting nausea and headache made me think back to the details of the consumed mushroom, and I realized that the fungus I had eaten was in fact not the famed chicken of the forest. A classic beginner’s mistake, the offending mycelium I had ingested, while bright yellowish orange with concentric rings of darkened pigment, sported gills, and not pores. Retching on a road adjoining Rt. 6 I was triply humiliated as Steve was apparently afflicted in a similar, though less severe way. Post purge, I felt marginally relieved as Steve grew more concerned.

Passing through Providence, the feeling returned, and it was with urgency that I hunted for a parking spot in the lots surrounding Pierce memorial stadium. Not being able to hold it, I pulled a rolling vomit through the open door, to the horror of a mother and her two baseball uniformed children. Christ! what a sight I thought, the outing club kayak on my roof, vomiting in the parking lot, 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning. Stay away from the strong drink wee laddies, it will make a devil and a wretch of you indeed.

Steve managed to void the contents of his stomach more discreetly than I did, and with C’s car tucked in an inconspicuous corner of the lot, we made our way North, onto State Rt. 146, following the out of sight river to Worcester. None of us were sure where the river started, Google earth’s resolution of the urbanscape was too poor to make out the size of the stream before it hit Millbury, and the dry nature of the last few weeks (even after a diluvian summer), meant that the head stream we had picked out, emerging from Coes Reservoir in Worcester was about 6 inches deep, very greenish, full of beer cans and shopping carts. Though our quest was not completely fruitless, as we had found the source of our river, we needed at least enough depth to drop in if we were to start the journey. We did our best to follow the river out of town through the urban maze, a task made difficult by the stream often being funneled underground. We ended up on the other side of the highway, having missed the other potential dropping in point of middle river park, which ended up being a good thing, as when we stopped by the Blackstone Hertigate Canal museum (a work in progress) we were greeted by a channeled mill dam with no portage rout. Thus frustrated, we headed into Millbury to look for a better launch site. At a convenience store where we stopped for supplies, I approached an older looking river rat type and asked him about launch sites. Taken aback by our plan to go to Providence, his first remark was on how many dams there were in between Millbury and Providence. He scratched his head for a while when I asked him how many total there were, and he eventually put the number at 6 or 7, but he wasn’t really sure, he’d spent his whole life fishing that river, but had never put a boat in it to go all the way down.

I got the feeling that his was a common story; that nobody since before the time of the water wheel had been able to make this paddle straight shot. In our quest for longer paddles in Southern New England, we are not alone. In his book Uncommon Carriers, John McPhee devotes 8 pages or so to retracing the canoe voyage of Thoreau and his brother documented in Five Days on the Merrimack and Concord Rivers. Ninety percent philosophical tangent and ten percent narrative, the journey in Five Days started Aug 31^st, 1839, and traversed 55 water miles from Concord MA to Hookset NH, three years before the Blackstone canal was closed, and twenty years after the Eerie canal was finished. It was a time of transition, the railroad was coming, as Thoreau occasionally lamented in Walden, but he could not have foreseen the age of the automobile. Thoreau didn’t begin writing Five Days until 1845, a possible explanation for his paucity of narrative, and we do know he took his time in traveling as well, as did McPhee, and enjoyed the river for what it was. Perhaps we should’ve followed their lead, but our desire to be responsible students wouldn’t allow it. We didn’t have the same leisure as Thoreau did, who took his water from the river and had completed his ‘education’ years before. Neither did we have portage support from a spouse in a Minivan as McPhee did, but what we lacked in time and logistical support, we made up in pure verve and enthusiasm.

Thus supplied with beer and information we made our way to the launch site just south of Millbury, below the second Millbury dam. All was well, the sun shone the river sparkled, albeit slightly sullied, and we pushed off. With us we carried two tents and stoves, sleeping kit for 4, food for one night, lunch for two days and a breakfast, a water filter and assorted personal items. The first dam of our quest was eventful, a ragged broken weir followed by an intact 6 ft damn immediately followed by crumbling 4 ft dam adjacent to a broken down mill. This hazardous obstacle, required a partial portage, and a bit of canoe gymnastics and a quick shoot through the rapids, and finally a pause to reload.

After this brief bit of excitement, we pleasantly several miles paddled among farms and a few warehouses. Before long we came into the Blackstone canal national heritage site, a lovely expanse of marsh dotted with small humps of trees. Fall raged in the yellowing grass. The sun was setting and we were eyeing small islands as camp sites as one bank darkened and the other was ablaze in the golden light. A lone kayaker paddling upstream pointed us to a small island to camp, just out of sight around the river bend. He’d never done it, but had always thought that it would be a nice spot to spend the night. Darkness, a dam and uncertainty being the only things to keep pushing towards, we set up on narrow shelf bounded by a few rocks, a point which seemed like a former bridge, and a space big enough for two tents (upon flattening some poison ivy), with a comfortable spot for a small fire and cooking place among the boulders. We ate well, drank deep and slept soundly.

The next morning broke hazy, but in the mist there was enough warmth to anticipate a brilliant blue sky. And so it was, as we packed up, our tents drying and breakfast cooking, the sky began to break above us, and as we pushed off, around 9.30, the fog lifted, the sky bright and sunny. The former holding pond for the Blackstone Canal was about a foot deep in most places, the silt sprouting water lilies, bull rushes and cattails in abundance. We passed under a bridge and slid our boats over a sloped concrete wall, adjacent to the canal, plopping semi awkwardly over the lip and back into the stream. We opted to take the river, the canal overgrown and its continuity uncertain.

A few families milled about, some on bicycles, eyeing us and our large kit, but no one asked us who we were or where we were going. Leaving them behind we entered the quiet winding wilds of southern Mass, the heart of the Blackstone valley. The windy stretch of wood was to be some of the last wild dominated landscape we passed through. The quiet curves and poorly marked meanders muted the sound of distant traffic, an otherwise persistent phenomena of southern New England. The river was intensely braided, and wound its way through the trunks of trees, sometimes little more than a canoe wide before meeting up with a piece of itself and broadening out. It was frequently shallow, and we thus had to walk often, if we were lucky, we let the canoe drift as we made our way over the slippery rounded rocks. A few logs crossed our path, and walking through ankle deep water made me wonder about where the canal went and what sort of shape it was in; it was madness what we were doing, walking among the slippery round rocks for a few hundred feet at a time, sitting in the canoe for a few hundred, and repeating the process. The bump and scrape as a friend calls it, the bane of any attempt at mileage. And it was only 10 in the morning.

It was with some displeasure that we left the wooded landscape and entered the realm of former mill town and suburban farm country. Out of the meanders, the river was moving pretty good, and we started to make up for lost time. We crossed the Algonquin gas pipeline (a holding of the energy giant Spectra Energy) that goes from Boston, through Storrs to New Jersey, connecting to the Texas Eastern natural gas pipeline running all the way to the Gulf, and the Northeast Maritime pipeline which supplies northern New England. As far as connections go, its unexceptional, some low key yellow markers warning of a hazard, and a 80 foot wide cleared path through the woods on either side. The river, once the central source of energy for manufacturing in the region, had ceded to the high tension lines and Texan gas.

The last town in Massachusetts, about 20 miles south by southeast of Worcester, Blackstone sprawls into Rhode Island, the river crossing the state line three times before decidedly turning south. Our first bona fide portage was at Blackstone gorge, a recently created white water park. We stopped for lunch, and watched families watching us as we rested our shoulders and dried out. The white water park was running low, but still fun to navigate through, even though a few sections required wet knee deep exits to cross rock berms. As we cleared the park, large buildings rose to our left, and the river became progressively funkier, cloudy, greenish brown with slightly scummy surface. A few mallards were about as we passed a large structure from which the other third or so of the Blackstone poured out of three eight foot high concrete pipes. Not even a mile down, we hit a low dam, about 4 ft high, and we were able to lift and slide the canoes over the few inches of water pouring over its lip, easier than carrying all our gear, but no easy feat in the rushing water. The mixed blessing of the deeps before dams, is the shallow water on the other side. A bit further on, we passed a waterside park, where there was some sort of Labor Day fest going on, partially meeting our expectations of encountering revelers along the banks. Feeling a need to push on, we didn’t stop, but enjoyed the music, allowing it to push us into Woonsocket and our first urban portage.

By this time it was more than obvious that the river was not meant for this sort of journey, there were no portage trails anywhere, barely any access to the river at all, and the dam at Woonsocket Falls was the worst example so far. We ended up hauling our gear up a rip rap embankment and over a fence. Rip rap is the perfect engineers solution to bank stabilization, but otherwise an abomination. Imagine climbing up sharp rocks, about head sized, some of them shifting while you haul a 80 lb canoe up and over a 4 ft high fence at the top of the slope. In Woonsocket, the cars outnumbered the people by about 500 to 1, though one friendly soul did wander over to talk to us as we got ready to cross Main Street, pass down a long staircase and plop back in the water. In northern Maine, portages are to get from river to river, pond to pond, or to get around rapids, here, we cross man made obstacles.

The man who wandered over turned out to be a canoe salesman, and he liked our boats. The mad river explorer 16, triple tough, weighing at 82 lbs and advertised as a multipurpose, durable and seaworthy boat, more or less perfect for our purposes. “A good boat” he says, though I get the feeling he’d never taken it on a trip like this. Some guys are renovating a restaurant across the street, and they guide us down the steps, a cook on a cigarette break tells us that he’d “shure as hell’d be rather doing that than this.” It’s still early in the day, and we agree heartily. We scoot around rocks, around a river island, skirt the historic district, and keep paddling down. Not a mile down, we hit a broken dam that we can navigate through, some swift running rapids for a change, getting the juices flowing as we get back into the flow of the river. Drinking the last of our Landsharks we happen upon a wide smooth current stretch of river where we broke into a race for fun, open water competition with no rules. Our paddling technique had advanced considerably since the outset, and we were neck and neck, the race degenerated into an endurance contest, replete with boat pulling and other foolishness, as is the case with all good contests. The sun was bright, as we passed first one waste treatment plant, and then some large dome shaped buildings each with their own suspicious effluent pipes passing some watery substance into the river.

A few miles down the water appeared clear again, the sun hot on my skin I stripped down to my skivvies, prayed to the EPA and flipped into the water. Bliss; a hot day, the golden sun, a cool river to plunge into.

Another mile down and we hit the Manville dam. And who was there to greet us on the boat launch but the men of Manville, amidst a case of empties and in the full swing of a Labor Day celebration. They couldn’t believe that we were paddling to Providence, and expressed even more incredulity that I had gone swimming in their river. As children of the 70s, they refused to eat fish from the water, convinced it would cause permanent genetic deformities in themselves and their offspring. The aged dome shaped buildings we had passed turned out to be the “poop factory.” Advising us on the location of the closest and cheapest (not the same) liquor stores, we chatted with these characters about bygone days. They were all zonked on their empties and a potent strain of new England swamp homegrown, thouroughly amused by our crazy quest to brave the Blackstone. Re-supplied a case of Pilsener Urquell (fortified water from the Czech Republic) and a few bags of chips and assorted candy bars, we dove into our portage.

The men of Manville’s advice was all car based, and sucked for foot bound paddlers. To get around Manville Dam, We ended up scaling a fence with our canoes and gear to get on the bike path, repeating the process to work our way down a rocky underpass, where we re-entered the shallow stream, avoiding scum covered rocks as much as we could. Heads abuzz, we plowed down river with the knowledge that the sun was setting and we had some 14 odd miles and 5 or 6 dams to traverse. We launched from underneath the overpass, shopping carts and graffiti our only onlookers. Dusk was just approaching, the labor day bike path travelers thinning out into Subarus headed for home, dinner, or the party. We put our backs into our living and headed into the unknown.

On the larger river, 9 hours from when we started paddling, delirium began to take us. Blackness grew as we went into the Blackstone National Forest before hitting another small dam in Albion, one I barely remember as our portages became automatic, a quick hauling out of the bags, flipping the canoe upon our shoulders, finding a way around the dam and on.

We paddled down alongside the Blackstone river bikeway, the east coast greenway, underneath the mighty pillars of I-295 and onto the Blackstone River Reservoir, around the reservoir dam and through Ashton. Here we’re surrounded more by conservation areas and forests than anything else, and we are cruising, the river completely rock free for once, and night fast approaching. Past the Maria St. conservation Area, Thibadeau Farms, Lincoln Gardens bits of dark green bank in the dusk. We push onwards. It’s starting to get really dark now, the water grays, the surrounding trees gray, the sky darkens as we hit a line of floats warning of danger. We pull ashore to investigate, a pedestriab bridge atop several colums, narrow arches between them, fronted by a broke weir. Potentially lethal. We’re sick of portaging, we decide to thread the needle. Near disaster strikes in a collision in one of the bridge columns, the current is treacherous for an un-experienced bowman, we muscle our way through nonetheless, into broad water.

Night falls. It is sheer insanity that pushes us on now. The insanity of dams, the insanity of tomorrow’s AM classes. The moon has risen, and is showing us the rocks amidst the reflective water. It is peaceful. The trees are silent, the water murmurs underneath, insects squawk and wonder at our passing, we leave behind nothing but the eddies of our paddles, a thin trail in the water that quickly disappears among the riffles. Left right, left right, right right, left, we steer among the rocks that become fewer and farther between. The river is big now, the current smooth and strong, but we’ve still got 12 miles to go. We’re burning now, chewing willow twigs for the ache in our shoulders in backs, burning under bridges, past forests, bridges, roads, darkness, the expanse of Londsdale marsh, valley marsh, green places left green by inutility, an homage to Lao Tzu, or a different form of utility, an homage to Pinchot, pioneer statesman of the national park system, urban planning, green corridors, flood protection. We meet a large fork in the river, to the right we are beginning to see the glow of a major city, but the current seems to pull to the left. Everyone is exhausted, and a quick break seems in order as we float at the crossroads deliberating. Our map is practically useless, and so we investigate the seemingly more direct route. It quickly becomes apparent that the right fork is a big flatwater, the pond in Valley Marsh, and so we turn around and head down river again.

It is night, 10.00 pm, as we pull into Valley falls, just north of Central Falls, and get out at a private dock for river tours, the big many-seated tourist boats sleeping alongside us. We’re out and wandering the town, looking for a way around the dam, looking for food, ravenous. A pack of hoodlums eyes us warily, we look half wild, as we ask them for the whereabouts of a bar, anywhere the kitchen might be open. A Portugese man is our savior as he whips up hamburgers and we drink white Russians. It is Mark’s introduction to the underbelly of New England, as he makes friends with a drunken man a few past too many, who regales him with exploits of jail and joblessness. They tell us we’re not far but they think we’re crazy for canoeing on. The bad news, there are a few more dams to go, two or three, nobody knows for sure. We head back to the boats, tied up next to the valley falls tour boat, a large flat bottomed river cruiser that looks like it can seat 40 or 50, and maybe serve them lunch. We haul them out, cross the street and make our way through the Valley Falls Heritage riverside park where at a pebble beach we can slide back into the black river.

We are on our way again, happy at last, full bellied moving fast again, until not even a mile later we hit the Central Falls Mills historic district. We curse the dam and slog through the knee deep mud adjacent to the new condos in the refurbished mill building. A parking lot portage leads us through some recent landscaping and over a jumble of old mill race stones, big blocks of granite strewn haphazardly at the rivers edge. The water now is channeled, straight and banked on both sides by tall granite blocks, rushing by the offices of Representative Patrick Kennedy. Its semi urban all the way down, 20 ft of wall above us sometimes before the water broadens again and we have to get out at the Old Slater Mill Dam, the top dam of Pawtucket falls, a good 40 foot drop from Sam Slater’s mill to the river below.

This is the last obstacle to Providence; one of the biggest dams in southern new England, and the cradle of the Industrial Revolution in America. Built in 1793 using designs gleaned from British textile factories, Slater’s mill harnessed this same river to twist cotton thread, only to evolve into a complex that made everything from tools to cardboard and bicycles. Slater’s Mill was the seed of industrial revolution in agrarian New England, and arguably, the rest of the nation. On our own voyage to redeem a longer history, we must scramble up boulders over a fence, and through a park, carrying our canoes a little over a half mile through the heart of Pawtucket at 1 in the morning. The city is almost asleep, one or two cars pass, but nobody seems about.

It’s the end of the Blackstone, but it’s not the end of the journey. Below the falls, the river becomes the tidal Seekonk River. We’re looking for a place to put in, but its all rock walls through Pawtucket, fortunately, there’s a lone fisherman with his line over the retaining wall fishing the inky blackness below who tells us about a boat ramp farther down the road, right next to I-95, New England’s thruway.

Set up again at the boat launch, we are homefree, 5 miles of flat water on the outgoing tide to bold point in East Providence, deliverance is around the corner. Providence is a glow off to the right, marking the sky sodium yellow and white, the persistent orange sky of modern night. The river is still and smooth, just barely touched by salt, the night is warm and the water cool as we dip our paddles and push off. The end of the paddle is anticlimactic, It’s 2 am as we pull into the boat launch at Bold point, the lights of RI’s biggest city reflecting off the water, looking other-wordly in our late night delirium. We still have 45 miles to drive back up to Millbury to pick up our cars and return to the canoes to take them home, the downside of small automobiles. Steve and I are to return for the canoes, and by the time we are all set to return to Storrs, dawn is approaching. Its 4 in the morning as we head out of Providence, we stop for coffee in an early morning spot, and then again on rt. 6 in CT for a quick diner breakfast. It’ll be 7 by the time we pull into the outing club shed, 7.30 by the time Steve is off to take a shower and hit his 8 am nursing practical. My reputation as a leader of such expeditions may be dinged, by the poisonous mushroom, the midnight hysteria and the eventual discovery of Mark’s partially collapsed lung (sustained while cliff diving a week prior), but we’ve all emerged stronger paddlers, hopefully better people; more resilient and aware of ourselves and the state of our rivers. The Blackstone may never return to it’s pre-industrial form, or its pre-dam fish populations, which included the anadromous Atlantic salmon, alewives (river herring), wild trout, sturgeon and many other fish rarely seen today. We used to pull our living from the river, and it is still there, flowing with and against the forces of humanity, and it may yet regain its purity, but not without another revolution.

Some would say that this journey was atavistic in scope, a throwback to times when the peoples of this place traveled by foot or by boat. You could say that people were of limited means, or you could say that they were possessed of a less limited time. When the longest portage from the Great State of Maine to Puget sound in Washington State is 9 miles over the continental divide, its pretty amazing how much territory is open to anybody possessed of a small boat and the skill to use it. In an era when the automobile and the asphalt river of the road has replaced man power in moving us about, it is interesting how these areas fall into neglect. Moreover, what killed the Blackstone Canal was not the automobile, it was the Boston Worcester railway and regional economic politics. We’ve entered a new era now, but we have yet to regain a connection to our rivers. We are a rich people, if you measure wealth by excess, or by waste, as we seem to do in this country, then the river is a telling sign of the neglect of natural capital. These are the veins of the earth, they are our veins, the water that flows through them is the same as the water that flows through our municipal taps, through our faucets and into our bodies. Why then would we have let them run filthy?

What would we have the river be then? Could we get rid of every below spec septic system in the valley? Disconnect the storm water system from the rivers, rip up the below ground concrete maze that funnels parking lots, roofs, dumpster slop, suburban tru-green lawns, dry cleaners, soaps, laundry detergents and road slicks into the river? Replace it all with drainage swales and retaining ponds, wetlands and woodchips? Could we farm without the river taking our excess fertilizer, pesticide, fungicide, insecticide, and eroded land to the sea? Keep the winter road sand and salt from clogging up and killing our small streams and wetlands? Could we take out all the old decrepit dams, and top the larger ones dams with fish ladders and canoe slides, five, six foot wide slaloms with a steady flow letting life work its way uphill, and us down? What would it take to replace a world of tar and pavement with green roofs, backyard gardens, fruit trees, maintained timber grounds and maple stands, nuts and game aplenty? Can we reassimilate our deep New England past, of a land that flows and thrums with the seasons and the sun, the cod larger than a man, the lobster likewise, though despised as a foodstuff suitable only to make the corn grow sweet and the squash thick and strong? What will it take to merge this deep ecological past with the industrial intermediate with the informational present, the consciousness that turns sand into a microchip, a canoe journey into a window on the world?

Would I do it again? I don’t know, the Quinnebaug to the west is nicer and canoe friendly, and will be the next southern New England odyssey. The Farmington river is also more boat friendly and more exciting, and we’ve already taken the Fenton through to the Thames from Storrs to New London. For a less intense journey I would opt to take a few more days, explore along the river, get in deep, meet some locals like the kayaker we met at the head of the Blackstone canal, maybe even try more of the canal. One thing is for sure; in the course of our 40 mile trip we crossed 12 dams, each of which was a process to get over, only 1 of which had anything resembling a portage route. On a similar trip down the Fenton, Natchaug, Quinebaug, Shetucket to Thames route, we crossed 6 dams, only 1 of which didn’t have clear access to the water, and that route was much cleaner. Part sociological study, part delirium, our trip was successful in the sense that it’s hard to feel more alive than when committed to a line with no escape. For more pristine paddles, there’s always northern New England, but nowhere in the Northeast is the rise of industrialism and its environmental consequences, both physically and in attitude to the landscape, as apparent as it is in southern New England. From the industrial nightmare we may be delivered, but there may be a few stones to get around on the path to Providence.

Danish Views in the Island Kingdom

2011-12-08T07:11:00.000-08:00

Jan Gehl’s lecture at RIBA on Tuesday Night laid clear some of the persistent issues with the lunacy of cycling with London. While the city certainly has progressed on many fronts, there is a noticeable paucity if cycling infrastructure when compared to Copenhangen, Amsterdam or even Boulder, Colorado. Gehl’s main message, as I could see it, was that cities should be designed for people, by people. This refreshing burst of energy comes exactly at a time when the engines of economic progress and the clamor for more cars and suburbs have slowed for a variety of reasons; namely the collapse of the housing bubble, increasing awareness of climate change, and a growing impulse of people to refuse to submit to economic objectification and the vast iniquities becoming painfully obvious. Not that the numbers don’t shake out in Gehl’s model; his data collected on the use of regenerated and properly planned urban spaces show that pedestrian density is often representative of high rates of building occupancy, employment and property values. All of this is intuitive, fill space with people, and they will be productive,, fill a city with cars, and they will be congested, polluted with a sacrificial slaughter of the public realm to the god of parking.

While Gehl’s message is more holistic than addressing issues of sustainable transit, much of the discussion afterwards focused on the relative hazards of cycling in London. And understandably so, London’s skyrocketing rates of cycling use. Between the introduction of the congestion charging zone, Boris’s implementation of Ken Livingston’s ideas, growing concern over climate change, and the sheer painfulness of commuting by car in a notoriously congested city the explosion of cycling culture has been nothing short of phenomenal. However, it has become painfully obvious that the city has failed to deliver a city wide, well planned cycling infrastructure. Combined with the anachronistic and undemocratic system of pedestrian crossings, increased cycling has resulted in increased friction between cyclists, pedestrians and automobiles. In the best of times, cycling in the city is an adventure, and a survival contest that has spawned a militant hardcore cycling culture touting expensive and aerodynamic spandex kit. To remedy this situation, there were several concrete proposals that should be rolled out at once.

1) Give cycles a six second green light ahead of car traffic. This would avoid the mad scramble inherent in busy starts, with cyclists, scooters, motorbikes and cars all vying for position, reduce the amount of exhaust that cyclists have to churn through (potentially reducing overall emissions as the startline antics of car drivers will be ameliorated), making intersections safer, and reduce friction between cyclists and pedestrians; as has been shown in a wide array of commentary sections lately, many of those who do not cycle do not realize the advantage of cyclists in running red lights.

2) Carry cycle lanes through intersections, and sidewalks through side streets and driveways as has been done to some degree on Roman Road in the East End.

3) Computerize signaling for bike and pedestrian crossings to be more user friendly, displaying the time till crossing is closed and open.

4) Broaden cycle lanes and sidewalks, and protect cycle lanes with rows of parked cars rather than vice versa.

5) Make public transit more cycle friendly to facilitate long distance cycle commuting, this includes making dedicated bike racks on the underground, overground and national rail services, as well as busses. On my way home from Gehl’s lecture the chain broke on my cycle. I was under the impression that off peak one could take their cycle on the tube, or at least bits of it. At Regent Street station the woman working at the tube told me no way, though said at Baker Street I should be able to. I was rejected there as well, even though later looking up TFL’s policy, I was fully in the right; it was the attitude of TFL employees in both cases that was most frustrating, as they were openly antipathic to my cycle.

While the Danes point of view is openly antagonistic to automobiles in the city, it may be that there are ways to balance the convenience of pedestrian, bike, car and public transport for their respective purposes. Making the city more accessible to people at these different scales will form the basis of more sustainable and enjoyable places. Now if only we can get the river’s clean enough to boat and swim in.

TFL Cycling on Public Transport Policy

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/roadusers/cycling/11701.aspx

The Prince's House at the Ideal Home Show

2011-03-12T08:28:00.000-08:00

Pure Interactions put on its Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment hat today at the annual Ideal Home Show held at the Earl's Court Expo Center in West London. The Ideal home show is in its 103 year of showcasing homes and homegoods for the discerning consumer. Amidst the tides of visitors and brand name products, the Prince's house stood flanked by the Ideal home Retrofit and a Scandinavian open plan show home by Jorntrahus.

The show homes highlight a focus on sustainability that is growing in England, never mind the rest of the world, as a response to climate change and the litany of environmental and social disorders caused by irresponsible growth. Yet the Prince's house stands out in its approach, one that could be called sustainability through simplicity, whereby good design at the home and neighborhood planning level can go a long way to make places more energy efficient, pleasant and lasting. The use of a high quality building envelope, natural and reclaimed materials and the integration into dense, mixed use, walkable, and well serviced neighborhoods, all contribute to the house's sustainability. A full list of features can be found on the Foundation Website. While sounding a bit soft in its approach, the informative displays behind the house highlight the Foundation's other projects throughout the UK and the world, make it clear that there is a growing technical rigor in our work, in providing location efficiency, measurable cost savings and real environmental, social and health benefits.

While the house is based upon the Foundation's earlier work at the Building Research Establishment site on the 'Natural House,' this particular house will be transported up to the Scottish Ideal Home show before finding a permanent home in one of the Foundation's ongoing projects.

A few nice ideas

2011-01-13T02:44:00.000-08:00

Reforesting brought to you by lockheed martin.

Tree Bombing

I hate to say it, but this top down approach may be highly effective, if only you can get the people you are bombing to cooperate. Given the U.S.'s track record in that arena, my hopes are not too high, but if only!

and a design institute that should be known by everybody in the sustainable housing field.

PassivHaus

Efficiency through simplicity. As much as I admire technological innovation, the application of a few time tested principles, across the board, could go a long way to make the planet more habitable for all, and not necessarily breaking the bank either, check it on treehugger.

Grand Isle, LA, May 25th, 2010

2010-05-27T01:27:00.001-07:00

*Wordpress wanted 60 bucks a year to post videos, screw em, this video contains footage from the central beach area, as well as the stae park at the end of the island (which is one cleanup hub on the island, there are several all along the beach), and the west end of the islad (where you see the rock berm and boom combo, behind which there is a lot of oil residue and digging activity):

After making 150 feet of homemade boom from prepackaged hair in nylon stockings that Andrea Sorrenti and her husband Hyme brought up from Naples Florida (see www.naplesorganichairstudio.com for Andrea's site, and matteroftrust.org for the greater coordinating organization for the hair and natural fiber based booms), we decide to take a ride out to Grand Isle to see some slick. Jordan Fish, whose making a documentary with VBS.tv, on the oil spill, came along for the ride, and we subsequently gathered some footage, as well as getting our feet wet in oil slick and learning how to be part of the independent media.

Grand Isle: 3.30 pm
At a public beach access point we pull off and go over the dunes. Another older local man is down the beach, but otherwise we see nobody. As we approach the water, a line of oily sludge, about six inches wide appears at the high tide line. Where the water is receding, more crude oil residue, including a sort of granular tar, is building up. Plovers, Whimbrels and Sandpipers are foraging amidst the muck, and farther out to sea, Pelicans are diving amongst the light slick. The layer of oil stretches as far as the eye can see, and appears light but uniform.

From the current NOAA observed spill data (available online at http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/oilspill/#earth), Grand Isle isn't even being hit, but it is well within the zone of uncertainty surrounding projections for the spill. The Sawdust Bend Bayou, southeast of Venice, LA, is getting absolutely hammered. The whole situation is a mess that I can't encapsulate here, but things will develop.

Out at sea, I count more than 30 offshore rigs within a mile of the beach. This is oil country. Boats move amongst them, apparently the ocean isn't closed.

State Park: 4.00 pm
The woman working at the gate named Linda was initially very nervous when we said we were doing a documentary on the spill and its effects. She calmed down when we started asking about what the park had to offer, as well as the bird list for the park, and she happily showed us pictures of birds she had seen, as well as the encroaching oil slick. Linda's maiden name is Boudreau, and her family's been in the Bayou for generations, live oaks on Grand Isle saved her great grandparents from being washed out to sea during the hurricane of 1893. Those live oaks are absent in the stick village of modern Grand Isle, where the houses seem to be getting higher and higher, and the trees, fewer and farther between.

The state park does have a nice observation tower, from where you can get a good look up and down the beach, as well as out to sea, into Barataria Bay and across the inlet, where the Grand Ecaille side of land is just visible through a heavy haze to the Northeast.

On this friday, the 28th, the Grand Isle Beach will have been closed for two weeks, making it 13 days that oil slick has been washing up on shore, some days more and some days less, but there, nevertheless.

Grand Isle residents seem to be sleeping, and largely absent as their beach is closed. Shrimp boats idly dance across the sea, passing back and forth, some are returning, boom hanging from their trawling arms. High powered golf carts make their rounds over the beach, patrolling for people and oil.

Outside the main staging area in town, we ask two men where the state park is, they say they don't know, they're not from around there. I ask if they're involved in the cleanup effort, they reply "yeah, something like that." They tell us to ask some folk down the way, and we drive past the main compound, where men are coming in off of boats, and where a bit further on, there's a van marked Jefferson Parish Temporary Command Center.

At the state park, men in white suits with neon green hats are unloading plastic bags loaded with what looks like sandy debris and oil into large dumpsters.
Four of them sitting underneath a shade canopy. They count them off as they toss them in the dumpster, about six of them working at a time. There's two dumpsters there, one may be full, the one being loaded is about half full. When they are done they cover them up and cinch them down. The dumpsters have an EPA permit on them as Non RCRA regulated watt for oil spill cleanup licensed to BP Exploration and PRoduction, 299 Westlake Blvd. Houston TX, 77079.

From the observation tower we can see thick inflatable boom covering the mouth of the lagoon that goes into the state park, where a lone great white egret stalks its prey. Other scraps of boom are arranged at the end of the beach, in a fishhook shape that may be there to capture oil, the efficacy of which is unknown.

The general impression I'm getting is that they are trying to minimize visibility of the slick on the beach.

There a culture of stifling the independent media, where only "legitimate" news organizations receive authorization to get on the beach, conduct interviews and have access to information. When we asked the folks loading the dumpsters, some of them completely ignored us, while their crew boss started to answer questions in a friendly way, but quickly clammed up when we became even more inquisitive. Part of his terseness could be his 12 hour workday, but there seemed to be officialdom at work when he said he'd really like to answer questions, but he's got orders not to.
the beach on may 22nd:

the beach on may 25th:

We did manage to meet some folks working for the blog firedoglake.com, as well as some other indie media people, Nathan and Lindsey, who make up 18thstreetmedia.com, also working on documenting the spill. Disasters like these are a form of shock treatment social networking, with exchanges of contacts, business cards and other information is rampant. Its an exciting time to be alive, but just on the media side of things, its frustrating to watch this disaster unfold and just be able to document document document.

american dream, american nightmare

2010-04-07T13:43:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting here in the aquatic plant biology laboratory filing away teaching specimens, and it just so happens that I stumble across an editorial from February of 1991 in the Daily Campus, written by Colman McCarthy, on the words of Colin Powell and Barbara Bush influencing the nightmares of small children.

McCarthy's theme stemmed from Powell's statements that we needed to isolate Iraq's army and kill it" a concept that was "very, very simple". McCarthy went on to reflect upon Washington D.C.'s ranking in homicides per capita, which at them time was highest in the world for "industrialized nations."

Additionally, McCarthy skewered Barbara Bush on her statements regarding parents needing to make sure that children understood the content of the news, in order to avoid having nightmares.

As a person whose own nightmares usually revolve around war and concentration camp like settings, I could wholeheartedly agree with McCarthy's statements that it was precisely because children could subconsciously understand the content of the news that they would have nightmares: our world has yet to eliminate the brutality and misguided logic of violence that perpetuates wars among individuals and nations alike.

And then I pinch myself, Wait! What the f**!! It's 2009, McCarthy's writing about operation desert storm, 18 years have gone by! and what's changed? Not much except for a shifted focus towards a shadowy Al Qaeda and "insurgents" who are rationally responding (according to the same misguided logic of violence) to a foreign enemy has been militarily involved in their country for 18 years (directly), and to a cultural force insensitive to its own traditions (since the creation of the Iraqi state in 1920).

Automaton's Sleeping

2009-07-06T14:47:00.000-07:00

July 6, 2009 Ciudad de Panama

The city is noisy as most cities are, morning brings a steady flow of traffic past the window and the sun just keeps getting hotter, we are practically equatorial. Panama, Polonia, Estadas Unidos, we live in a car driven world.

There's a certain hum to the passing of automobiles that seems to imply money: the passage of cars is money. Being spent, being made, the earth being transformed, the entire industrial military complex is audible in that seemingly simple flow of money; traffic.

Mix automotives with construction and you have civilization. Construction with computers and air conditioning and you have the 21st century. Add a little business suave, space exploration , information technology and a planet with 2/3 of the populace living at or below the base of the capitalist economy and our world starts to take shape. The truth is though, the capitalist system is not based upon people as much as we would like to think it is. There exists no grand conspiracy to capture all of humanity in a giant pyramid scheme (at least not one all encompassing scheme). Our mode of life depends mostly on the abundant riches of the planet itself. We are the planet's children and we have hacked our life out of the flesh and pulled our wealth from metal ore, the river's clay and the ocean's bounty.

a few more days in Bocas

2009-07-02T13:06:00.001-07:00

After a 15 minute experiment with my underwater camera, it appears I will be out of camera posts for a while, pending its return to functionality.... A friend told me to try some rice, so i guess Ill give it a shot...

otherwise,,, Things on the project are moving forwards, we are in the process of getting some aerial photos with which we (at this point I) will be creating maps of the community in which we are working (the community centered around Dos Bocas) in Bocas del Torro, Panama. The project is currently a preliminary study of the willingness of people living in the Comarca Ngobe to participate in a Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degredation (REDD) project. Wee are traipsing across the extant beaureaucratic framework, tenous as it is, in Bocas del Torro, getting information, maps and coordinating activities across different government departments. The process is resulting in getting a fairly clear image of the social forces active in the area, as well as complementary and competing economic interests that manifest in different attitudes and relationships with the environment. For instance, the main economic drivers in the area are agriculture (welcome to the home of Bocas Fruit Company, a major piece of Chiquita Banana), tourism, and a large marine fishery. Tourism and the marine fishery depend on the conservation of marine resources, whereas the fruit companies, think at least, that they need to fertilize, and apply aerial pesticides to their banana plantations to maintain a high profit margin. Should those practices change, i.e. responsible and ecological methods of agriculture being practiced, everybody stands to benefit... the trick of course being, a willingness of the agrigiants to change their practices. As is the story the world over, the paradigm of higher yield reigns supreme, though the alternatives, of ecological land management, have yet to be practiced on an appreciable scale (although they are being tested in some places). Thus we are faced with a choice resulting in definite environmental benefits and uncertain economic ones, can we really afford to not make that choice?

Amalgams of belated thought, the work progresses, the world waits

2009-06-18T21:43:00.000-07:00

Some said it could not be done, really, most said it could not be done. The park ranger scoffed, and gave some bogus account and psuedo terrifying story of rain, darkness, hunger and jaguars. Our host, the caretaker of the secret garden (Jardin Secreto), was also incredulous. Needless to say, after much encouragement from our friend (Kristin Fischer, aka KFi), as well as some tasty tidbits of knowledge from a Texas native english teacher, Jennifer (who told us that the annual race up and down Chirripo had a record time of 3 hrs and 20 minutes, much encouragement), we decided, that a one day peak and return was in fact, a good idea.

A late start (getting on the road, 2.5 k from the trailhead at around 6.20) was prompted by our burial in the valley, the sun had just broken the crest of the ridge as we shouldered our minimal gear (some water, some clothes, some tortillas, a tin of cherry wood smoked oyster, and a packet of walnuts) and proceeded on a brisk pace, summit bound. While I´ll leave the full accounting of the trek for a later date, let us suffice to say that at around 6.30 in the pm, a succesful summit attempt behind us (albeit in about 20 ft of visibility due to thorough ensconscement in water vapour), the light quickly fading we were still 10.5 k from home (a good 8 k from the trailhead). In our defense (maybe) we did have on lost (and found) backpack adventure about 2 k from the summit (during which I took a good 45 minute nap, waking up with a serious headache and feeling cold), and our headlamp had, sadly, been left at home. A stumbling kilometer from (7k to 6k) led us through near blackness to the realization that my camera´s LED light (for illuminating macro pictures) may have enough zing to light the way. A handheld bubble of light led us the rest of the way down to about half a klick from the trailhead, where our valiant source of illumination was finally exhausted. A stump and scuttlebut later (with no serious injuries), we limped into town to be greated by a local named Casper, who spoke a decent street english, fed us shots of Kosako vodka and arranged for his friend Luis, the owner of the Rockadura restaurant and hostel, to sell us a few beers "for the road." A bowl of granola and a hot shower later, we passed into darkness to awake at the crack of dawn to pack our limited luggage and catch the bus to San Isidro. While a full accounting of the vagaries of the Tiko travel system is beyond the scope of this narrative (at this time), it will suffice to say that Dave made his 2.30 flight back to Atlanta, and I am safe and sound in San Jose, at a friend named Marcos´ house, learning about freebording (check it out) and plotting good plans for the future.

buscaros los veinto frescos

2009-06-02T17:29:00.000-07:00

The Quest For Fresh Air
Chapter 1, Leaving Hobbiton

The day is early and the sky is dark. A whole world is left behind when one embarks to Central America, and a new one is discovered. Good and bad, ill and healthy, hale, whole and disconnected. Get on a plane, allow yourself to be swindled and utterly dismember your sense of self, self confidence etcetera, go to a place where you don´t speak the language and allow yourself to be opened, literally opened to a new way of life and a new way of thinking.

In short, discover the scrub forest, the heat, the rain, the bugs and the humanity behind our existence on this planet. The ludicrity, the hilarity, insanity and the niceties of being a human being, a transformer of our habitat, and one with enormous potential to effect positive change. Cast aside the idiocy of self limitation, of socially constructed metaphors for existence and allow yourself to see things as they are. Pierce the disgust and disconnectedness of our sheltered little existence and ramble on through, and if, you are lucky, or if your quest is true, you might just find what you are looking for.

working in the working world

2009-03-31T05:56:00.000-07:00

It's tuesday in the a.m. and the empty regurgitation of yesterday's thoughts and feelings are all too prone to catch you when least expected. In short, a world that is empty of true feeling and understanding will bear the consequences of its lack of connection to things that are Real. Hence, the advent of cubicle life... on to the next...

Belated Tuckerman's Post

2009-03-29T17:13:00.000-07:00

Amidst the hustle and bustle of life and family disentegration we managed to get a reasonably well put together trip up to Tuckerman's Ravine, the week of March 8th. Conditions were a bit dicey at times, though one day of fairly decent skiing was had, after the morning's rain on tuesday. The trip got off to a rocky start and we left significantly later than our 5 am ETD (see below, Lena serenely threatening to chop Nick's head off should he be unable to fix the ski rack), though we managed to get on the road once we had resolved our organizational and technical difficulties.
Driving at a steady 75 miles an hour, encumbered by the Thule and ski rack (and not our normal ~95), we managed to get up to N. Conway and get through EMS with even more winter gear, most notably the ice axes, which came in handy later.

Having made it, at night to Hermit lake shelters uneventfully (besides Vlad dumping his skis and boots trailside about halfway due to encumbrance) we settled in for some well deserved rest.
to make a long story short, we had one day of decent conditions (Wednesday), with high avalanche danger which kept us on the little headwall and the sherby. Air however, was fresh (not like PNW, but some of the best in NE), spirits were high and the food was incredible. Thursday found us with awaking from subzero sleeping conditions to a 0 degree day and absolutley 0 avalanche danger, as everything had turned to solid ice from Wednesday's rain. Such is fate. We skiid the lower snowfields anyways, as well as an insane variation of The Sluice, unfortunatley, without crampons, reaching the lip of the ravine was next to impossible, as it was, we were chopping out footholds on the way up. As it was, we survived to tell the tale, and I made my flight to Poland the next day. We plan or returning early april to revisit in friendlier conditions.

you don't get lichens like this in CT: nor mountains like these (the view from my perch
newly dubbed, hootenanny's hotspot, before our
descent of the solid ice of Tuck's, march 12, 0 F):

Real Food, Real Snow, Real Love

2009-02-23T18:10:00.000-08:00

After a successful real food summit workshop we decided to set up a sort of question/answer network for people working for 'real' food at their college campuses, high schools and communities, we may need to get in touch with the real food organizers, but I was thinking we could start small and see where this takes us: basically we need a google group that can post questions and answers, issues and thoughts on the subject of increasing food quality, food justice and environmental justice at all levels of human existence: Megh and I are in the process of putting that together, so y'all have something to look forward to.

Some general thoughts about people's experiences were that we all seem to be following a fairly similar course of action: from food production to food consumption... while this may seem like a closed loop, we forget how many other inputs typically go into the agricultural systems we participate in, never you mind our dollars and sense, but time, transportation and most importantly (in my mind) land use: I think one of the stronger arguments for changing our food system, besides those of concerns of immediate human health and well being are those of a more fundamental nature: we cannot afford to destroy any more arable land on this planet, and by destroy I mean desertify (undergo the process of desertification, and not the sweet one either), salinize (I may have made this word up, but I think you get the drift), render toxic, nutrient imbalanced or depleted. In addition, our agricultural systems are tightly linked with our overall environmental health both in the bio-geo-chemical sense: as they leach tremendous amounts of nutrients and pesticides into surrounding bodies of water, effects that cascade and aggregate into toxic algal blooms and anoxic zones in such places as the Chesapeake bay, Gulf of Mexico and many others (check out this link to a Nasa site), as well as contaminating ground water, eutrophying local water systems (and contributing to species invasions and the collapse of local fisheries), but organismal/ecological as well: our agricultural systems should be repositiories of biodiversity and aggregate human knowledge (seeds have been passed down for millenia, and were priorly selected upon in a myriad number of ways), as well as partnerships with plants and animals that naturally control "pests," increase their resilience (the agricultural system's), and provide medicine as well as food, and finally economic: fertilizer runoff, excess -cide usage and soil erosion all directly translate to the wastage of millions of dollars per annum (sorry about the long sentence, special apologies to the text/instant mssg generation). However, all is not lost! There exist a large number of solutions to our general method of agriculture, available to anybody with an internet connection (there are too many links to list here, check google on your own (though the Land Institute, and some of Vandana Shiva's work are good places to start, as is "The One Straw Revolution" by Masonobu Fukuoka), from no/conservation/reduced tillage, poly/permi-culture, ecological and organic farming practices to IPM (even the EPA is clued into this), and the use of vegetative buffers to protect waterways. The overall point is to increase the total health of the ecosystem in a manner that allows us to practice sustainable methods of agriculture (which, when you really think about it, is in Everybody's best interest, in the long term).

On a lighter note, I skipped school on Monday (stayed Sunday night in a wood heated cabin with no electricity) and went skiing for most of the daylight hours, I had to quit around 2. 'Twas an absolutley phenomenal day at Mt. Snow USA. From being waist deep in the drifts on Ripcord and the Plunge, to a constant snowgasm on practically any trail I went down, I felt that I am exploring my true love for spaces relatively unspoiled by the works of man (for some info on why you should use non-toxic ski wax check out enviro-mountain sports). 1 late day 5 later, I feel ready to get serious into the reportage on the Quest For Fresh Air (more on this later), but alas, for now, the requirements of the academe curtail my ability to spread my enjoyment of the deep snow and clean sky. Let it suffice to say, for now, that our internal motivations should always outweigh our external motivations, if we are to find the peace that makes life on this planet worth living. Then again, if we did so, the entire contemporary system of human relations (en masse) may just collapse, but if you are at all like me and have spent the last two days either listening to Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth," skiing, eating local foods, drinking local brews, taking snow baths or sleeping, it might not seem to bad after all...

Obama on mercury and hot spots

2009-02-13T17:02:00.000-08:00

In the windy city and I get an email from friend Christian asking me what I think about Obama's recent decision to enforce tighter controls on mercury emissions to avoid hotspots that may occur under a cap and trade system: here's what came to mind:

I honestly don't like cap and trade for that very reason: there is no guarantee that capping and trading leads to real emissions reductions: and no guarantee that the price per unit C is reflected in the damages that it causes: i.e. the price is arbitrarily decided by the market: i think a national policy that sets a national cap on CO2 however may be somewhat effective:

I also think that mercury and CO2 are somewhat different, b.c mercury contributes to fairly serious health disorders: however, the linkage between the two should not be overlooked: I think it would be more appropriate to revamp the clean air act with legislation that addresses CO2 emissions as a pollutant, Past a certain level: fundamentally a carbon tax would have to tax people on certain levels of emission, or else all mammals and other aerobic respirators would be taxed (or tazered)...

what the Europeans seem to be doing is regulating pollutants and CO2 separately, but i also think this is because they have had a tighter control on pollutants (though Scandinavian countries still have a pretty serious issue with heavy metal contamination of the atmosphere, as does much of the old eastern bloc, and pollution persists in all major industrialized areas)...

where I'm really going with all of this is towards a systematic shift in addressing ecosystem services: of which Climate regulation is a subset: if we want to have earth's ecosystems regulate our climate we will have to acknowledge the holistic ways in which they do so: i.e. regulating weather patterns, water movement, Nitrogen and Carbon cycling, etc...

a policy that treats technology as separate and distinct from ecosystem services is sort of doomed from the get go: as it is drawing an artificial boundary between industrial and ecosystem processes: Now: to incorporate this into some sort of public policy is tricky, and not even being thought about (to the best of my knowledge)... we should really be taxing people on polluting the air period: and the overall tax a function of the types of different pollutants being emitted (i.e. there are different costs to emitting clean CO2, and emitting high particulate, NOx, SOx, Hg, etc....) then, there has been quite a bit of scientific study on the movement/cycling of these pollutants in the environment: and using this information it would be possible to set prices based upon the real consequences of emitting each type of pollutant: That would be science and policy, hard to hammer out a consensus on: but once agreed upon, it would be fairly robust, and technically heavy (i.e. harder to legally wrangle out of)...

the idea of trading emissions seems to me a way of people who are in the C intensive industries to capitalize on their activities: the requirement of additionality basically translates to "if you can make money on the carbon market by undertaking this procedure (as versus making money on the manufacturing, or direct operational side of things) then this project is additional" i.e. emit a little less than you were before, and now get paid to emit.... which is a strange way of looking at it I admit, but then again, I'm not running a cement plant...

However, the payment system makes sense from a psychological point of view: as you are rewarding people who emit less than they formerly did, i.e. there is reward associated with a directional activity: reducing one's GHG emissions. And we come full circle to price: a cap and trade system will only be effective if two criteria are met: a) caps are set at meaningful levels and increase periodically to meet a well defined long term goal, and b) the price per unit is regulated and agreed upon by environmentalists, economists and industry, all having an equal say.

Ideally this would work out through some fantastically complex model that takes into account the environmental costs associated with certain rates of emission and sets prices accordingly: i.e. should emissions continue at this rate the risk of property loss, damage to human health, etc.. is in this range: and therefore prices should be set in this range: however this concept would need to be developed.

I see at present at least one way in which the energy market in the States

The current energy grid operates off of the principle of economic dispatch, in that baseline load (of the grid) is met by the most efficient plants that can afford to run at the lowest price per unit of energy. As demand increases, other plants come on line that can only afford to operate at higher per unit prices, the final plants coming on line being those that operate at the least cost efficiency. Now, there is no strict correlate between price and GHG emissions in that scenario: but that would change if prices reflected GHG emissions either via cap and trade or a carbon tax.

older thoughts looking for extension into global mind space...

2009-01-26T17:09:00.000-08:00

in the effect of: you can't just sit and think, if you're going to sit on what you think, here are some recent thoughts on Carbon sequestration methods:

Again, political realization of local desires is what leads to sustainability: due to an alleviation of tension between global market forces and on the ground land use changes: fundamental to this goal is understanding the socio-economic and cultural characteristics of the target population (CCB, 2008), however, understanding a people’s need for self-legitimization as well as the socio-economic concerns currently operating on the region are a key aspect of sustainable development that is often overlooked. The central question here is what exactly is development? Who decides who needs to be developed? What about quality of life questioning, rather than just economic metrics to define development: I really think we need to address this question qualitatively if we are to not devise the same set of “development” standards to which American and European societies have conformed. A rise in purchasing power, per capita income and technological sophistication are not defacto measurements of social and environmental development. To get a true measure of in which way people wish to develop I think the solution is relatively simple: we need to ask them. Fortunately, we have a basic framework that is somewhat adapted to local conditions, the World Health Organization Quality of Life evaluation (WHOQOL), which is accepted by the United Nations: and should be involved in any so called social development projects accepted by the CDM.

A more radical but also more practical and locally sensitive solution is to determine the current structure of landholding, identify capital and service flows into and out of the area, and make sure that they reach a truly equitable level: i.e. there is an equitable amount of capital flow in to service flow out: and there is an equitable amount of capital remaining in the area: i.e just compensation.

Presently, many problems still stem from a fundamental iniquity in the distribution of capital around the planet: We tend to have high amounts of financial and institutional capital in areas that have had depleted natural capital (i.e. one has been transferred to the other) and hence a subsequent cycle of the depletion of natural capital in other regions of the globe in order to continue an unsustainable method of development: unsustainable being the inability to balance energetic and material budgets within the zone of influence.

Extension of information networks will contribute to project success:

However, the real goal of disseminating information is to spread the necessary skills, tools and knowledge for individuals interested in developing such projects for themselves. This may be the role of an NGO or developmental entity/entrepreneur, but the end goal would be to disseminate a) knowledge of the possibility of true clean development projects, b) the necessary steps to implement such a project, and c) a realized connection to the global community which allows for further dissemination of methodology as well as registry (input from global capital flows) , and representation in the globa l decision making body.

Two conflicting problems: 1 is the constant involvement of the CDM executive board; which can not hope to thoroughly evaluate all possible projects: the second is a lack of trust or real independent verification process; as both validator, verifier and project developer have a vested interest in the voluntary market (TNI). The second becomes an issue when you cannot trust ‘lower level’ validation or verification procedures: if there were smaller more efficient teams that adhered to CDM standards (which themselves are evolving) they could validate and verify projects with the implicit trust that they adhered to the overall executive procedure: if they did not, there should be an efficient system for registering complaints (from any stakeholder) all the way to the executive board. In this sense, the executive board would serve more in an oversight capacity than in an actual executive capacity, greatly alleviating the bureaucratic burden and time lag of project approval. However, a large caveat comes with such a proposed process; it will simply not work unless there is a complete disambiguation of financial interest between the validation and verification entities, and the project implementers. Again though, this necessary elimination of shared financial interest does not mean there is no vested interest in for the project implementer, verification/validation entity, national government and the CDM Exec. Board; quite the contrary: it is in all parties best interest to generate projects that meet social, environmental and economic goals. The only reason to disambiguate financial interest is to prevent corruption from significantly altering the project process. In order to achieve the financial separation of operational entity and project implementer; there should be a set rate for validation and verification process which is funded by either a national carbon tax that goes into a pool specific to energy efficieny/environmental and social development projects: or a set percentage of profits from the sale of all carbon credits within the specified registry; this model may actually be a better idea because it cuts out funneling money through unstable and potentially corrupt institutions, and it makes the registry an entity with integrity (though this may be a naïve hope)…

reasoning behind skiing cont...

2009-01-23T15:16:00.001-08:00

Oddly enough, it seems like in a few days you can sample a wide variety of the twists and turns the ski world has to offer, a hike up an unnamed abandoned resort in affords all the early season powder you can stomach in southern Vt, take it as a precursor, or trial of the true backcountry. or as a way of attaining true peace and quiet...

To get almost the exact opposite effect, get up really early to drive even farther north to make it to the races by 7.30, so that night your friends can pour cheap canadian whiskey from the balcony of a house down your throat (while you wear ski goggles), or shotgun beers out of an old ski boot (pics edited out,,,) so the next morning, 8.00 am in Ascutney Ville you will find yourself:

Music roaring, the vacuum cleaner sucking up the detritus of early early morning fun, the peace and quiet must out there somewhere; gazes shell shocked from the night before sit in deliberation, coffee brewing, a strong stomach wrenching pot takes the place of breakfast; Not a race day for the URI ski team due to an insurance mix up provides Max and I with free tickets on 6 to 8 inches of freshies... It could be an opportunity for all to get back in the roots, but new jersey, new york and rhode island beckon on a long humming ride home... Spirits are high on one end of things, and very low on the other. We get ready to depart the nightmare of a Taoist sage ("in the time of ruin the lord's children shall drink and make merriment long into the night while the lands are ravaged, the granaries full and the people hungry...")

snow the night before, around 2 am:

The deep spruce woods on the peak of Ascutney mountain are far from ravaged, and the land flush with prime real estate, cold and lovely. Last night served up a particularily lovely dinner from the Seedhouse cafe (http://www.bennetts1815.com/), is still going strong in this boy's belly. The food was delicious to the point of absurdity, served by a man named Peter who sported full chef atire and a Harvard Class ring (reason's for going North included straight economics, as well as a need to get out of the partially megalomaniacal metropolis of Boston/Cambridge). Twould be hard to find a more well traveled and rounded restauranteur, or one willing to cater in such a fine manner to two very grungy looking ski bum types... He did however seem grateful for our company, on a cold and rather empty Saturday night, but then again, everything about the place spoke low key: I feel this is somehow integral to the driving vision; i.e. people willing to go to great lengths to obtain a particular quality of life, or a quality of experience...

The Reasoning Behind (or in front of) Skiing

2009-01-14T11:06:00.000-08:00

Just sitting down after a few weeks in serious flux, in between CT and VT, the computer a slightly foreign creature tugging at my attention like a tenous internet connection, it occurs to me that I would still rather be skiing.

As fascinating as the world's problems may be, and as attention consuming the solutions likewise are; it does not fail to amaze me the number of solutions and efforts appearing on the global and local scene like mushrooms after a rain. I only hope that the same ethic that drives me into the snow covered forest can find footing in a tumultous global situation that somehow manages to stave off global chaos with well thought out changes in human lifestyle and ambition. Rather than the ceaseless quest for more we shall engage in a fruitful quest for quality of life which acknowledges the value inherent in a) not creating larger amounts of suffering in the world to satisfy material needs and wants but also b) to engage with the world in a way that increases the positive, even evolutionary, impacts of our daily decisions.

Alas the sun is shining and the shiny box has held me answering emails for too long on such a day and I must away, though I shall return to finish an essay detailing the original subject of this post...

PV market saturation and manufacturer ownership

2008-12-01T18:32:00.000-08:00

two things:

1) if a PV manufacturer is concerned with product quality rather than maximizing market share (remember that markets are psuedo spatially defined, i.e. a market could be in a town, state, nation, region, global etc...) why wouldn't they focus on maxizing their product output to a given region: the benefits would be twofold: first Energy shares would be increased as a fraction of a regional energy grid: i.e the PV manufacturer would approach market saturation within their zone of influence: i.e. the range of their distribution network:

and 2) by decreasing the size of the distribution network the producere minimizes time to delivery and allows manufacturers to reclaim products at reduced cost: as well as facilitating regional loyalty to their product AND optimizing their product (PV and supporting network/local infrastructure) for the regional conditions...

there is a caveat to the above two propositions:
PV manufacturers would have to transfer their business philosophy to service provision rather than product sales: i.e. the PV manufacturer would sell the energy of their panels to the consumer (at comparable current market rates) rather than the panel itself (i.e. manufacturer maintains ownership of the panel creating incentive to make the panel durable (without legal fees and other troubles of warranty creation and enforcement) and to constantly improve the product (i.e the company Directly reaps increased profit from an increased Quality product)... similar to the ideas laid out in Lovin's Natural Capitalism...

at pure Interactions we could do a similar deal with solar thermal set ups: the problem to solve would be attaining infrastructure to own/recycle and improve solar thermal technology...rather than just fulfilling traditional roles of contracting: however, perhaps the panel/heat tube manufacturers would be willing to retain ownership while we provide the service of optimized site design and contracted installation; as well as verification of installation quality; a pure interactions certification if you will....

In the name of the game

2008-11-24T09:08:00.000-08:00

while global carbon markets slowly self organize along lines of maximizing profit, it is important to realize that as human beings we have no need to be driven, as automatons, by the blind laws of economics. Whoever decided that profit maximization was a legitimate human and institutional goal?

Why wouldn't we, as a species decide that ensuring human health and well being, along with the well being of the planet, are in fact socio-economic priorities? It seems there needs to be more involvement in the creation of standards, even regulations, that put people and the planet first, especially in the framework of environmental policy and economics (i.e. ecosystem service oriented projects, such as carbon sequestration). Rather than follow the blind path to further exploitation of people and our natural capital, I see this as an opportunity for pure interaction; pure in the sense that we have our motives straight, and interaction in the sense that we know the consequences of our actions.

a slight historical moment

2008-10-25T18:32:00.000-07:00

this being our first post, i have taken the liberty of going ahead and setting this thing up, regardless of us (as pureInteractions) choosing to continue this blog through an alternate venue at a later point. Several things have precipitated this event: one a need and frustration to get out into the world and start doing/exchanging ideas with others who are interested, rather than just my friends who seem to be getting slightly sick of the crusade to save everything...

so lets get that straight, I wouldnt say that we are out to save the world: this is not another crusade; this is an honest attempt by reasonably intelligent people to create a tool, a method, and most importantly a mode of thought that can be applied to some of the more pressing problems posed by current human and environmental relations.

we will be part software, part implementation, part network, part thought and hopefully, part culture: our aim (as I see it) is to address the current disconnectednness of human beings and their environment: via waste, inefficiency, callous destruction of each other, self and other life, and most importantly, to do so through a framework that PROVIDES forward thinking solutions, rather than just another voice complaining about the eternally unsatisfactory state of affairs.

Im in cambridge trying to finish 16 things at once, so ill leave it at that for now, vague as usual: but still intent on applying ecological knowledge and systems principles to the design of human systems and modes of existence (commercial, industrial, residential, life, work, creation, and of course, food)...

cheers!