The true cost of everything

A friend of mine recently had to take her daughter to the emergency room for stitches. After the procedure, the doctor gathered up the metal utensils she'd used and threw them in the trash. My friend, a very environmentally conscious young lady, was horrified and questioned the doctor about it. "Yeah," she shrugged, "it's cheaper for us to throw them away than it is to sterilize them." How is this possible, my friend wondered? Surely there must be someone in the world that could use this metal. "Did it get recycled? I asked. She said it went right into the garbage, medical waste. "That shit gets buried," she said. Wow.

In this month's National Geographic is an article about "The real price of gold." This metal, that has nearly no uses other than ornamentation, has been soaring in price since 9/11. As the economy of the world becomes more uncertain, people up their hoarding of gold. The article says that all of the nuggets of gold in the world have been mined or are totally inaccessible. What's left is dust. One of the largest commercials mines in the world digs for particles of dust so small that 200 would fit on a pinhead. Technology has made it possible for man to separate these tiny particles from rock but at great cost to our environment.

On one island in Indonesia, a volcano, once 1,800 feet tall, is now a gold mine a mile deep. To mine one ounce of gold (the amount used for the average gold ring), 250 tons of rock have to be relocated. To accommodate that rock, hundreds of acres of virgin forests are razed. The chemical runoff is dumped into the ocean. The company that operates this mine pays the local government to offset the environmental damage but everyone knows that in 20 years, the gold will be gone and so will the funds flowing into their homes, churches, schools and hospitals. What will be left is total environmental devastation.

That doesn't even take into account the human devastation that these industries are causing already. 25% of the world's gold is mined by enterprising individuals who camp in mountains by the thousands without any sanitation. They pour buckets of mercury-tainted water into the rivers even as the deadly element cuts their own life short. I can't help but think that the reason it's cheaper to throw metal into a landfill in America is because the true cost is being absorbed by someone less fortunate. Only when the cost of this devastation reaches our shores will it be too expensive for us to waste.

All eyes on China

I got a request to blog more frequently. It very sweet and it made me smile but in order to do it, I’ll have to post more of my silly thoughts while I chew on those that surround my days and weeks and sometimes months, like what I’m thinking right now about China.

This month’s issue of National Geographic is all about China, every page. It's excellent. I love the timing of this magazine and I think they’re right on; in the very near future, the whole world is going to be looking at China. Not just the Chinese government that suppresses rights and imprisons those that speak out against it and not just the China that’s buying the world’s debt, investing in resources in Africa and South America and not just the China that’s hosting the Olympics.

I have yet to find someone who agrees with me but I’ll even go one further. Not only will the world be all about China and the Chinese people, soon, it will no longer be all about the United States. It’s already happening in conversations with friends, relatives and my parents. I can’t get into any conversation without someone bringing up what China is doing. All of a sudden, they’re in everyone’s country and everyone’s business.

There's a great article on WorldChanging about a collaboration between photographer Paolo Woods and journalist Serge Michel at FotoGrafia, the 7th edition of international festival of photography which runs until May 25th in Rome. Their presentation follows China's industrial neo-colonialism in Africa. The photos of Chinese running factories and building local economies and Chinese being taught by Africans in their classrooms are amazing. You can see all the photos from China's Wild West under stories, on Paolo Wood's website:


China is home to one of the oldest continuous civilizations on earth. They are by far the most populous country, making up 20% of the world’s population. There are more people on the Internet in China than in any other country, including the U.S. They are expected to overtake us as the world’s largest economy in less than 10 years. Over 30% of the population call themselves religious and that number is growing. 45% of women say they don't want to give up their careers to have children.

They are the world leaders in manufacturing, and in a few short decades, they have grown a rich class and an enormous middle class with healthy appetites for domestic and foreign goods and resources. They have quickly embraced the West’s competition for success and all the stress and malaise that goes with it. They still cannot freely surf the Internet or speak their mind but those days are numbered. As they continue to embrace technology, art and imported culture, they’ll find themselves in a much more visible role in the world struggle for human rights.

Most Chinese in school are now studying English and their English speakers outnumber those in the United States. There’s a mass migration going on of people from the country to the city and with increased wealth and population density comes a frenzy of information sharing and a demand for more freedom. I predict that in the next few years China will have a cultural explosion, exporting and importing people and culture with the same voracity that they have adopted everything else.

China is dealing with the issues we’re all dealing with, except in all cases their situation is already more dire. They need to provide healthcare for the biggest baby boomer population in the world, a generation that has less children to provide for them due to the one-child policy. They have the highest statistic for air pollution related deaths, have built more mega dams than anywhere in the world, and have deforested and leveled mountains to the point of serious environmental erosion. They’re only now beginning to embrace archeological digs and animal conservation. They’re dealing with a rapidly growing disparity between rich and poor, massive urbanization, and a serious shortage of natural resources.

Natural disasters are a constant but this time the Chinese are starting to ask questions like why so many schools collapsed in the recent earthquake. We’re already seeing a comparison between how China handled their rescue efforts compared to the disasters in the rest of the world. The incredible level of humanitarian aid offered by regular citizens has put the government in an uncomfortable position. No longer a closed society, there are at least three Flickr groups with photos from the earthquake: china 512 earthquake, Sichuan Earthquake 2008 and Just The News (were you there? - if not, don't add!)

They’ve turned the spotlight on themselves by bidding to host the Olympics and I’m afraid it isn’t going off for a while. I predict that the era of all eyes on America is coming to an end. The question is, will American eyes remain closed to the outside world or will we begin to learn by observing others?

Wired sells out to Monsanto

I picked up my new Wired magazine and immediately read their cover story, an inflammatory ‘environmentalists are full of shit’ piece. It really pissed me off. They end their series of anti-arguments based on facts focused around cutting carbon dioxide, with a “take it with a grain of salt" letter from the editor of Worldchanging.com. He basically says the article is a short-lens focus that could get us into even more trouble. Isn’t the damage already done with a cover like “Keep your SUV, forget organics and screw the spotted owl?” I suppose it would be okay if they were using it to get people reading but then dole out some actual wisdom inside, but they don’t.

Here are my reactions to the articles:

1) A/C is OK. Here they say it takes more energy to heat a house in a cold climate than it does to cool a house in a hot climate. Good point, but really do we want everyone to move to the Southwest? The area is already burgeoning and just beginning a mega-drought that could last up to 150 years, where are they going to get enough water to live? What about clamping down on cheap housing construction and passing ordinances requiring better insulation. We’ll all have to pay more per square foot but maybe it will have the doubly beneficial effect of making our houses use space more efficiently.

2) Live in cities. Yes, for the most part, urbanization is cool and better for the environment but they make an argument that exurbs are the same as living in a truly rural area surrounded by trees. People don’t live in exurbs to be closer to nature, they sprouted up because people (like in Los Angeles) couldn’t afford to buy houses in the city so developers bought cheap land 50 miles out of town in the desert and built affordable housing there. The article points a finger at lawnmowers (a product of the suburb/exurb) and I totally agree that lawnmowers are a waste of energy. But why not encourage people with land to plant trees and grow a garden to feed themselves instead of trying to get them to move to a city? Not everyone wants to live in an apartment.

3) Organics are not the answer. This one really burns me up. They say we should screw organic because it takes 25 organic cows compared to 23 industrial cows for the same milk and they put out 16 percent more greenhouse emissions. Are they f’ing kidding me? We should drink hormone-laced pus-filled milk from sick suffering cows for that differential? The only smart thing they say in this article, albeit stuffed in the middle, is that if you really want to do something for the environment, stop eating meat altogether. It’s true that we can’t go organic at our current rate of consumption but we (in industrialized countries) eat and waste too much food anyway. Instead, I think we should go organic 100% and patronize restaurants that serve reasonable proportions of quality food.

4) Farm the forests. The only good thing in this section is about culling dead wood out of the forests, it does prevent fires and with the climate heating up, we can’t afford the kind of fires it’s going to bring. But the rest of it, about becoming full time forest farmers and cutting down old growth trees is total bullshit.

5) China is the solution, not the problem. I agree! (See next post) China has become the number one producer of alternative energy solutions for export and use in their own country. Due to decades of rapid and untethered production and growth, their feet are now much closer to the proverbial fire than ours; they will likely find and implement environmental solutions quicker than us.

6) Accept genetic engineering. If I read one more thing about biofuel, I’m going to be sick. They just made the point that we should use more public transportation in the “move to the city” argument but now they’re talking about how we should embrace genetic engineering so we can grow more biofuel. They attack fertilizer and say nothing of chemical sprays, but fertilizer is necessary because of our addiction to monocrops (and profits). Thousands of years ago, farmers rotated crops and used trees and companion plants that naturally kept bugs away or attracted complimentary insect relationships (like worms) and enrich the soil to the benefit of certain crops. The author mentions Monsanto as some kind of wonder company here to save our lives. Monsanto is a chemical company that produces the world’s best-selling “herbicide,” a chemical that kills everything. They then got into the agriculture business producing 90% of the GMO crops on the planet, specifically engineered to resist their herbicide. Roundup kills everything except the crops they engineer. They are corporate bullies who use lawsuits and threats to wipe out local farmers. "Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food," said Phil Angell, Monsanto's director of corporate communications. "Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA's job." Unchecked, everything we eat will be engineered by Monsanto. If Wired really gave a shit about us and the environment, they’d do a full report on how they control our food supply.

7) Carbon Trading doesn’t work. I agree, good idea that needs improved.

8) Embrace nuclear power. There’s been a lot of talk that the only way we’ll produce enough energy for the billions of us on the planet in the future is from nuclear. They call it the cleanest of the fossil fuels because of the low emissions, uh, but what about the huge volume of nuclear waste produced? We already have tons of it buried in leaking containers under the ground in Washington and other states, we have no safe way to dispose of it and it remains toxic for thousands of years. Let’s focus on energy saving and efficiency before we make feeding our voracious appetites the top priority, eh?

9) Used cars not hybrids. Okay, I get the argument. New cars cost a lot of energy to make. If you’re driving a ten-year old fuel-efficient Toyota like my RAV, it’s better for the environment to keep driving it than to buy a new car. Except that my RAV will never end up in the landfill, there will always be someone waiting to buy it. They suggest (again, to be inflammatory) by the same logic you’re better off driving a Hummer because making a Hummer contributes less carbon to the environment (because of the nickel in Prius’ battery). They say nothing about the fact that cars in Europe are twice as fuel-efficient as ours and are the same as a Prius, which is why you don’t see hybrids there. It’s all a bunch of crap. We’re sold gas-guzzlers on purpose so the hybrids look good in comparison. While it doesn’t affect our carbon output, the quiet drive of the hybrids has many other benefits.

10) Prepare for the worst. Yes, things are going to get much hotter and much worse before they get better and we do need to accept that and prepare. They quote Stewart Brand who says, "We are as gods and might as well get good at it" and suggest that we take over completely by using our technology to fix the things we've broken like helping birds migrate, for example. We're destroying their natural habitat, building over open spaces that break up long migration journeys, disrupting communication with our noise and killing them and their food with pesticides but the scientists are going to save the birds with assisted migration? Then again, they mention that Monsanto, who brought us Agent Orange, PCBs and Bovine Growth Hormone, will save us with genetic engineering. What is this issue sponsored by Bush and the chemical industry?

I agree we better figure out ways to adapt and continue to innovate but we are consuming and disrupting the natural order of the planet at an unsustainable rate and technology alone will not save us (or the birds). We need to continue to make our small but impactful changes like eating locally produced food, driving less, taking a tote the store instead of using plastic bags, planting trees and food in our yards if we have them, installing energy efficient appliances, using less energy by unplugging what we aren’t using, and continuing to pay attention, support innovation and demand responsibility from corporations and governments.

Here's the first part of a two hour-long show about Monsanto:

The World According to Monsanto 1 of 4 27min

A post I started in December

I watched Local Hero the other night, a fantastic little Scottish comedy from 1983. It was kind of a cult-favorite of my parents and for some reason I don't remember having ever seen it. I think I refused to watch it as a teenager out of some kind of protest. If they liked a movie, the only way you could get them to stop trying to get you to see it, was to watch it (and love it). I held out for 24 years but turns out, it's a great film - simple and totally ahead of it's time. A rally cry for what makes us happy in this world; it isn't money, it isn't power, it isn't prestige. It's friends, love, nature and a sense of belonging in the world.

I've never been much of a consumer. My dad was the king of what we didn't need, he actually had his priorities straight in a lot of ways. He spent money on travel and experiences for us, but we never got the jeans we wanted, the toys we wanted and we were were the last ones on the block to get a microwave, VCR and a host of other things deemed necessary by our neighbors. That dialogue ran in my head to the extreme until the last couple of years when I've let myself buy things that make my life better. But I still question my need for everything. Even things I already own.

In 1998, I made a decision that I couldn't live my life making people buy stuff. That's when I moved to LA to be an actress. One of the pinnacles of success in that pursuit is getting a commercial agent. Imagine my surprise to realize even in this endeavor, I was hoping to make a living off of selling stuff. It's nearly impossible, working in the U.S. to NOT have a job that makes people buy stuff, because that's what we do. A friend of mine sent me a short film to watch, The Story of Stuff, that while it sounds like it's made for seventh graders (and maybe it is) makes a really good point: We made this culture and this economy and we can unmake it.

Then I heard an interview on the radio with Judith Levine, who published Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping about the year that she and her husband decided not to be consumers. It reminds me of the day in Seattle, more than ten years ago, that my boyfriend and I decided to try not eating for a day. It was a spontaneous thing, we woke and up and said, let's fast! We lasted about three hours. We wandered around town and literally couldn't think of anything to do that didn't involve eating. So we went to our favorite vegetarian cafe and had our usual lunch but it tasted better that day than it ever had. See, even going without for a short period of time raises our enjoyment level when we do consume. Clearly our national hobby of consumption has not made us the happiest nation on earth.

I don't think we need to stop purchasing altogether but I do think we can should be much more conscious of what we think we "need" and recalibrate. Even "green" has become consumerized and we're being encouraged to offset our guilt by green things that we clearly don't need. It's like they've just replaced the heroin with morphine. The catch for me is that I love marketing. I think I'm good at sharing information and changing people's perceptions and behaviors and it's easier to make a living using that skill in advertising than anything else. One of these days, though, I would like to try my hand at marketing for something good.

Addendums to earlier posts

This is possibly, fantastic news! I just read that the San Francisco Zoo, under pressure since the tiger attack in December, might become a rescue zoo. Apparently it means that the animals would likely get more space and bigger habitats more closely resembling their natural ones. I won't take credit for this development, ha ha ha, BUT I will say that I think blogging is a powerful tool. Public opinion matters and the easiest and most visible way to track public opinion these days is on the Internet. If hundreds of people blog that they're upset and hundreds of people (or dozens in my case) read that blog, it adds up. This is still one of my favorite videos (Nick Park is a genius).

I met a guy who works at Yelp this weekend. Actually, another 24-year old who wanted to "date" me. It's bizarre how young this town is. I guess it's the dot com thing, and actually, this is a cool place to be. Young people graduating from college want to live in San Francisco or New York. He said that the CEO and founder of Yelp is 28 and came to a meeting the other day in a "hoodie and sneaks." This guy, at 24, was flabbergasted that his millionaire boss is basically a slightly older version of himself. Imagine how I feel! Anyway, he told me that doctor recommendations are HUGE on Yelp and that some doctors have had to stop taking patients for six months or more because of the demand. It's very interesting, when recommendation works, it really works!

As it turns out, I wasn't the first person to think of a virtual concert (I know, amazing!) A friend of mine went to the 3D U2 show and said it was really cool. He heard a guy comment on the way out that it was better than a live concert for all the reasons that I specified. It was in a movie theater which is not conducive to the concert vibe though as people were self-conscious about singing along, shouting, etc. I maintain that this kind of thing should be shown at a dark, loud club just like a real concert, except better. Miley Cyrus' concert movie has already made ten times what it cost to make and parents don't have to let their teenagers drive into the city to see her in real life. A friend wrote me that now you can now see your opera in HD at the local movie theater. I love this idea that culture comes to you.

I got such a delightful number of comments on my post about starting a village. I seem to have struck a nerve! I had a little bit of anxiety after that because I thought "what if someone actually expects me to do this?" My biggest concern was how I was going to find a boyfriend. All of my friends who are up for it are already married or coupled, so it's great for them I guess, but what about me? I can't date three guys in our community of 150 at the same time (awkward!) And then it wouldn't work out with any of them and they'd all have to leave. You know? But that book about my North Node said that I have an enormous amount of love to give and that the receptacle, if it's a person, isn't big enough. I'm supposed to pour that love into a philanthropic venture, something that will make life better for other people. Once I focus on that, love will come to me and it will be easier for the other person to deal with me if I'm already in love with my "work." There's a lot of buzz right now about eco-villages: building with green materials, using renewable energy and aiming to be carbon neutral. I totally support that but my village would be communal in that "it takes a village to raise a child" way; everyone could have a role but wouldn't spend their whole life working a job they hate, and we'd all have land to grow our own food! I'm starting to wonder, however, if maybe we can make that change right where we are? There's a growing movement to plant food instead of grass in lawns (here's a fun article in the NYT Magazine about it). One step at a time, we can transform our world.

I thought this op-ed in the NYTimes today was interesting. The author criticizes the abduction of Generation 9/11 by Obama's campaign, calling them "Generation Obama." He goes on to say:
The more you learn about him, the more Obama seems to be a conventionally opportunistic politician, impressively smart and disciplined, who has put together a good political career and a terrific presidential campaign. But there’s not much audacity of hope there. There’s the calculation of ambition, and the construction of artifice, mixed in with a dash of deceit — all covered over with the great conceit that this campaign, and this candidate, are different.

After watching his speech today, addressing the comments of his pastor, I have to say that he is an amazingly composed and grounded orator. He speaks plainly so the masses can understand, everything he says makes sense and as I've said before, if all he does is inspire us it's more than most have done. The accusation of a politician being a politician is pretty weak. The Republicans haven't had someone this inspirational in office in years, if ever.



It's wise to be wary, perhaps especially of politicians, but instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater we should instead remind ourselves that we have to bring our revolution to Washington as much as we expect our leaders to bring it to us. Right on, right on!

Let's start a village

I'm going to do that mashup thing again where I look at a bunch of dots and posit whether they're connected. Here's the first dot. In the 1970's James Lovelock, a chemist and inventor, then working for NASA, published a radical theory: The earth is not a magically self-regulating planet that has always been and will always be, it is a living organism of which we are all a part. It was the first time people were asked to think about our role on this planet as something other than just beneficiaries of all it has to offer. In his latest book, "Revenge of Gaia," Lovelock declares that humans are doomed, global warming is irreversible and by the end of the century, over 6 billion people will die of droughts, floods, disease and hunger.

In an article in Rolling Stone, Lovelock talks about the ones who will survive by recalling a story about a fire on a plane. Everyone stayed in their seats as they were told, frozen, while the few that survived did so by crawling over their fellow passengers and climbing out the windows. The majority of people are going to stay seated during this crisis and die in their seats. It made me think of The Terminator and how Sarah Connor, knowing what was coming, started preparing herself for the fight ahead. According to Lovelock, there are only two ways to survive this - either by going primitive or by going super high-tech. I think it may be a combination of both but the people who can live in a more primitive way, by growing their own food and creating their own energy, will be at a great advantage.

Which brings me to the second dot. An article in National Geographic was talking about the shanty towns near Bombay and then a friend recalled the same story, something he'd witnessed in Mexico City. Enormous populations of people, hundreds of thousands, have built cities from the ground up, by themselves with no developers, no infrastructure, no government support. While poor, these communities are thriving. They have power, they have water, they've built industries and services, their places are clean and nicely kept and they are carbon neutral. These are the greenest cities in the world; everything is recycled or reused and there is no excess. If there is any kind of collapse in our energy supply or our economies, these communities will be impacted the least. Apparently one in six people lives in a squatter town and that number is expected to triple by 2050.

Then I heard one of the most exciting ideas yet in a PopTech lecture by Adrian Bowyer, a challenge to the concept of money. If every home had a small robot that could manufacture any item - a comb, a bowl, a fork - from a resin made of starch grown in the backyard (i.e. corn or potatoes) and those items went right back into the earth when we were done with them, would we have the same need for factories and therefore, money? He quotes science fiction writer Iain Banks who said that "money is a sign of poverty" to illustrate that we would be richer if we didn't need money at all.

Finally, I keep having a certain conversation with my friends about how disillusioned we are with work and its role in our life. These are people scattered all over the country who don’t know each other. They’re all about 30-45, some married, some with children, some homeowners but what we all have in common is that we grew up middle-class, we went to college and we have to work for a living. A rough illustration of who these people are:

- A single guy in D.C. who likes photography, traveling and Jazz. Works in film restoration, which he likes, but there's not much work and it pays very little.
- A recently married woman in North Carolina, about to have a baby, who works as a graphic designer. Loves designing but hates working all the time.
- A new mother and writer in Santa Monica who has to hire two nannies so that she can work when she'd rather spend the time with her baby but can't afford to.
- A single guy in Los Angeles who works a web producer. He loves computers so spends his time in front of one any way but continually has jobs that require 60-hour work weeks.
- A woman in New York working as a teacher whose job is so stressful, she couldn't do it without her live-in boyfriend helping with house work and daily chores.
- A single woman in San Francisco who has spent the last ten years pursuing a career but finds herself unfulfilled by the work.
- A bi-coastal young man, recently out of college, who's already frustrated with the fact that work takes him away from the projects he feels passionate about.
- A woman with a teenage daughter in the Bay Area who finds herself more motivated than everyone she works for and can't figure out how to dumb herself down.
- A single woman in Los Angeles who wants to help people in her native Cambodia but makes ends meet by working at an interactive agency.

We don’t have enough time to do what we enjoy because we spend our lives working and yet don’t make enough money to buy more time. In the jobs, we’re frustrated with others’ lack of commitment or in the company itself and feel that we deserve better. But in the pursuit of a better job in a better company we finally come to realize that work does not fulfill us enough to justify the time spent doing it. Most of us work to create or promote the sale of goods, goods that we use the money we earn to buy. By any measure, it’s not an efficient use of our time.

My friends are ready to quit this rat race of working and buying and are ready to move somewhere quieter, live a simpler life and grow our own food. The problem, I suppose, is that we’re all cultural people who need other people and art to stimulate us and aren’t really the kind of folk you find in rural towns. Back in April of 2007, I wrote that servitude sucks and that we've been duped because more "primitive" societies enjoy abundant free time. Now, it seems, I'm hearing the same thing from everyone: How do we get to a place where LIVING is what we spend most of our time doing instead of WORKING?

And connecting all these dots, I had an idea. A communal village of like-minded people. We want to grow our own food and learn to make our own energy and live without cars. We want to raise each other's children and imagine a society of the future and sometimes watch 30 Rock. Do you think it's possible? It would have to be in Canada, somewhere north that will be less impacted by global warming. I saw a fantastic photo in National Geographic (a similar one I found on the web is here) that shows a village in Israel, built to be egalitarian in that everyone has equal access to school, church, and other community buildings, in the center of town, but everyone also owns a piece of land, on the outside of town. It's limited as to how many people can live there, about 750, and everyone is independent and yet totally connected to each other.


It looks good. It looks real good. What do you think y'all? Ready to buy some property in Alberta?

Fear of God

A couple of different articles I’ve read lately have referenced Bill Gates as a philanthropist. But even though his contributions far outweigh that of say, Mother Theresa, she is widely recognized as a saint and he is not. Public perception, the theory goes, is not determined by actual contribution, but by the nature of the giver and their giving. One is a billionaire who created a monopoly in business and donates a portion of the massive profits, the other is a nun who lived with lepers and helped anyone who needed it.

Another article said that most people only contribute to very personal causes, that we are motivated by emotion rather than actual need. After 9-11, The Red Cross issued a statement that they had received more donations than they could deal with and asked the public to donate elsewhere. Still, the money poured in. But there are some people with a far more scientific approach to philanthropy. Their brains are configured slightly differently, making them more rational than emotional so that when they think of doing good, they think of how they can do the most good with the money they have. Bill Gates asked what were the biggest problems that could be solved – hunger and disease – and set to solving them.

I bring this up because in my daily observations of people, we are fickle, inconsistent and highly personal in our choices. Scientists have said that stopping global warming and other environmental disasters – like the impending shortage of potable water, melting of the polar ice caps, and the destruction of the seas and rainforests – would require a collaborative effort the scale of which has never been achieved by humans. (Ants, yes. Humans, no.) In other words, we need a lot more people with Bill Gates type brains.

On the bus home the other day, I was looking out the window at a blanket of scattered clouds engulfing the sky as the sun went down, and thought about how inspiring nature is. The primitives were right to be awestruck by its beauty and fearful of its power. Nature could squash us like a bug. Our few hundred thousand years on this planet is no assurance of our future durability. Greater beasts than us have lived ten times longer and disappeared.

What if we are, in fact, a virus on this planet like The Matrix says? Then surely nature will eventually unleash storms, floods, droughts, disease and whatever else she can muster to cleanse herself of us. And history tells us that she will succeed. To quote another trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, “Are you frightened? Not nearly enough.” If we were living in a primitive society, the pagans would know that we've angered the gods and better get busy appeasing them.

A recent piece in Wired says that we humans don’t like science because it makes us look dumb. We’re happier with our myths and primitive beliefs when science challenges us to doubt everything we believe and diminish our significance in the universe. According to the article, half of all Americans don’t believe in evolution! So doesn't it seem strange that scientists are leading the discourse on global warming and not religious leaders? Why isn’t the church calling us all gluttonous and greedy and calling for humble restraint in our decadent lifestyles, citing the rise in natural disasters as evidence? Clearly, God is not happy with us. Have you seen the air in China?

Shouldn't the church be lambasting us for our wanton disregard of nature, God’s most gracious gift to us? What use is modern religion if not to motivate masses of people to become environmental stewards? Why is it that liberal science loving types are dropping everything to change their lifestyle to reduce their impact - hybrid vehicles, cloth diapers, non-toxic chemicals, recycled goods - and the Bush loving conservative types are all calling it a bunch of phooey? Clearly, the solution to our environmental woes is to get the church on board and put the fear of God in these people! It doesn't take a scientist to figure out that the pursuit of wealth through constant rape and abuse of the planet and our fellow creatures isn't very Christian.

A new brand promise

I'm constantly amazed that world is full of hope and beauty despite overwhelming evidence that our existence on this planet – a struggle to survive despite ourselves – is about to come to an end. I know this because history has shown us that everything eventually ends although our reign here so far has been but a blip on the billion-year timeline of our incredible planet. Despite knowing this and a little else, we’re still rubbish at predicting the future. Even things that we think we know and control are beyond us. So we’re in a curious place right now, a moment in time when we’re being asked to believe two incredibly difficult things: 1) That the way we live is destroying the one place that makes life possible and 2) That we can do something about it.

An unbelievable amount of change has happened in public opinion in the last couple of years. People now accept, at least in part, that we are a complicit partner in global warning. But it is still a very ambiguous concept to most people and it is only part of the picture. The bigger picture is a shift in perception, a belief that the world gives us life and that we should be grateful for that gift. It’s gratitude not entitlement that should drive our interactions with our planet and our fellow inhabitants. I'd wish the Christian Right were half as diligent about protecting plants and animals as they are unborn children, and would like to see corporations caring at least half as much about keeping people safe as they do in raising their profits, and wish government kept half a mind on how to create a new world economy while they send people to die for the old one.

I think the big picture has not been effectively branded or marketed. The focus has been on what will happen if we don’t stop what we’re doing, the effects of what we’re doing, and how we can replace what we’re doing with something else. What I think we really need is a brilliant future to believe in. Why are we bothering to save the wretched institutions we have like cars and freeways instead of committing to high-speed rail, for example?

I swear, if I read one more article about how scientists are working around the clock to make a car that doesn’t use gas I’m going to puke. What about all the other bad things about cars: #1 cause of death for young people, huge waste of natural resources, loss of farmland to build roads and parking lots, and loud crowded cities with poor public transportation infrastructures? Even if we build a car that uses no oil, China will have to pave over their food source to drive them!

We need to think much bigger than just keeping what we’ve got because if we really can mobilize the entire planet for change, why stop at the status quo? I’d like to imagine a world where animals aren’t kept in cages for our entertainment or experimentation, where rivers are sacred and not a place to dump toxic waste, where people understood the purpose and origins of food – real food that comes out of the ground and off the trees – and grew it for themselves, where forests and oceans were considered riches as they as are and not as they can be exploited and destroyed, where people’s senses became finely tuned to the natural life buzzing around them and preferred it to loud cars, strong chemicals and a flood of artificial light.

The difficulty, I suppose, is imagining people wanting to take better care of their planet than they do themselves, or to have a more daring vision for the world than they do their life. But I think we’re a product of our environment and even though we’ve created it, it shapes us, which is why this idea is so empowering. We have the ability to re-imagine our entire universe. All we need is something we can all believe in, and just like every marketing piece supports a brand promise, every action will support our belief.

In thinking of a brand promise for this movement, I came up with this: “I believe the world is a beautiful miracle, created by God or by accident, and as long as humans are given life I believe it is our duty to care for this planet and all of its inhabitants.” Greenpeace and
the United Nations both have pretty compelling mission statements, by the way. The truth is, we probably aren’t clever enough to care for this planet but if we measure all of our actions against this promise, we can at least say that we did our best.

Letter to Radiohead

Dear Mr. Yorke,

I've been reading the articles about you and your band in Wired and am really excited about the changes in the music industry, especially as they put the music directly into the hands of the fans. I've never had such a varied music collection as I do now. At the moment, I can't stop listening to your solo album (thank you!) which I bought on an old-fashioned CD.

So I read your interview in Wired this month with great interest, especially your dilemma over making most of your money touring but not being a fan of the ecological impact. I'm a fan, a filmmaker and a marketer and I have an idea to address this issue.

First I considered why people go to a live show:
- To be close to the band
- To enjoy the music with other fans
- To be part of a once-in-lifetime event
- For an experience beyond the album
- For a great show!

But there are certain limitations to concerts:
- You're never close enough to the band
- They’re expensive, making them inaccessible to many people
- They have limited dates and times, again making them inaccessible
- Late hours and long distances keep people from going more than once
- Big venues, unruly crowds and traffic jams can make the show impersonal and unsatisfying

A couple of years ago, I saw a screening of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars at the Henry Fonda Amphitheater in Hollywood. It was part of the LA Film Festival so the price of admission was the same as a movie, about $10. It was a summer night and the amphitheater was packed with people of all ages. The film was beautifully shot and the projection and sound were amazing. People sang along, clapped and shouted as if they were at a live performance. The film brought us so close to Bowie, we were practically onstage with him. I honestly felt like it was 1973 and I was watching the one and only Ziggy Stardust. Truly a beautiful experience!

Then this New Year’s Eve, a friend of mine sent me a video of a “silent disco” she went to in London. Hundreds of people wearing headphones danced in virtual silence as they tuned their headphones to one of two DJs and listened at whatever volume they liked. They were having no less fun than if they were all listening to the same live music. The virtual experience is rapidly catching up to and in some cases surpassing the real thing.

So here’s the idea: You shoot a concert series with one or several filmmakers that screens in small venues all over the world for the price of a movie. The series runs as long as people attend, like a film, and you own the rights, you don’t have to travel, your concert is ten times more accessible and it’s available forever!

Here’s how it could work:
- A small audience of diehard fans, or a random audience via a sweepstakes on your website, is selected to be your live audience
- You shoot a number of concerts with your selected audience in beautiful, historic or otherwise significant locations, each show is a little different so people will want to experience all of them
- Because there are several different films, multiple venues in the same city can competitively screen the series at the same time
- Radiohead sells the DVD through the website
- Venues can use the headphone idea to create a more personalized experience

I see you've already booked your tour dates for 2008 but maybe you could consider this idea for the next go around. Or maybe you love the idea of making your own Pennebaker classic and will contact this eager young filmmaker for more great ideas.

I look forward to hearing from you,
Cheers!

"Guilt-free affluence"

I was listening to one of my Pop!Tech lectures on the bus the other morning and this guy Alex Steffen was saying what I've been saying. That environmental change will require a change in perception and a change in our model of economy. The world is merely one possible perspective but our current awareness will change the way we look at things, the earth and each other. "Things" will no longer be something to own, but something to use.

None of us, he says, wants to contribute to the denigration of the earth but we do all want "guilt-free affluence." The moment in time that we're in, while a "gigantic challenge," is also an immense opportunity to make this change. All of our challenges are political. The technology to solve all of our problems exists, but will we use it? Will we be able to change the system to adopt our new needs and desires? Watch the lecture, it's fantastic!

I'd rather be a smoker than a smogger

I finally watched “Who Killed The Electric Car?” and thought it was great. I actually couldn’t watch it through in one sitting. I became so depressed at how corrupt business is in terms of putting profits ahead of innovation. We have this perception that the technology we use is the latest and greatest but it’s not uncommon for us to be sold something out of date or known to be harmful even, because of the money that’s already been invested in it. Just yesterday I was talking to a group of programmers about Microsoft’s answer to Flash, Silverlight. This group thought it was crap and shared stories about Microsoft bribing programmers to use it and hiring agencies to develop projects with it so they can sell it and compete with Adobe. Sony’s pushed their Blu-Ray technology for years, forcing companies they work with to use it, despite a lack of interest because they can’t afford to abandon it. (Oh, ha! WKTEC is distributed by Sony!)

By the same token, the auto technology available to the consumer is light years behind what is possible, and what’s already been developed. The auto companies produced an electric car because a California zero-emissions law forced them to but they simultaneously sued the state and had the law repealed. After that, they collected the cars on lease – as they’d never let anyone actually buy them – and destroyed them. They were whisper quiet, went zero to sixty in three seconds, were completely clean inside and out and required very little maintenance but they threatened an infrastructure dependent on fueling and maintaining combustion engines.

It made me wonder how much different city living would be without all the noise of the cars on the road. I remember when I was unemployed, having to turn the TV up almost twice as loud in the daytime to hear it over the din of cars and buses outside. We build huge walls along the sides of freeways to block homeowners from the roar of traffic but they are only partially effective. Have you ever had a conference call with someone in a car? They have to mute their phone so as not drown out everyone else on the line!

And then there’s the obvious benefit of the lack of pollution spewing out the back of every single one of these things on the road - nineteen pounds of CO2 for ever gallon of gas! I find it ironic that it was so easy to get public support for the smoking ban, even in places like New York and London where I never thought it would happen. True, it took a long time for the public to be convinced of the dangers of cigarette smoke but once convinced, it wasn’t difficult to make the argument that we shouldn’t all be subjected to it. We’ve known for decades that smog is a worse culprit of respiratory disease than smoke and causes a long list of ailments to humans and the environment. You can see it, you can smell it and yet we keep driving cars as if they aren’t making our children’s lungs look like they belong to a veteran smoker.

The car companies say that people want big cars and don’t care enough about the environment to drive a smaller car. My dad never misses a chance to tell me that the hybrids don’t save enough gas to pay for the extra cost of the car. But I don’t believe that people don’t care, I think they just haven’t been given the choice. I flew into New York yesterday just before sunset. The sky was beautiful but laying on the city was a thick black blanket of smog so heavy you could only make out the silhouettes of buildings, but nothing on the ground. It was sickening, worse than any smog I’ve seen in Los Angeles. I just don’t believe that I’m the only one who sees it and the only one who thinks it’s disgusting. We’re ready for the change!

Innovation starts on the inside

Wired and National Geographic’s cover stories this month are about biofuel. For every unit of energy used to produce ethanol from corn, it yields 1.3 units. Ethanol made from sugar cane in Brazil and other South American countries, by contrast, yields 8 units. We can’t grow sugar cane in the Midwest, though, we grow corn. Corn and soy (used to make biodiesel - yielding 2.5 units) are now our two biggest crops.

The downside: It’s not cost efficient, it uses oil to produce and it gets fewer miles to the gallon than gasoline. The government has to subside it and we need to get clever about how to reduce the harmful emissions producing it creates. On the up side, it’s a step towards reducing our dependence on oil, it’s a boon for farmers and an even bigger boon for big companies that have invested in this technology.

But it only makes a dent in our energy production, like every other alternative source, and it’s a food product. We won’t be feeding it to cows or using it to make human food, it’s going to run our cars. People are starting to get worried that we’ll be using all our farmland to make fuel. What happens then? What happens when China and India do the same thing? China is already planning to pave over a lot of their farmland to accommodate their growing hunger for cars.

Is it possible to be so ignorant that we could literally starve ourselves by driving our food instead of eating it? Another article in National Geographic about emissions get nitty gritty about what we need to change and how fast it needs to change. The article ends with a note of hope but the rest of it is pretty grim. It says we need to change almost everything about our lifestyle, our economy, our government, and we'll have to do it practically overnight, to survive. When in the history of humankind have we ever witnessed that much change? Never, really, and that’s the real gist of the article. It’s possible but not likely.

I suggested to some friends that in the future I could see the west going to war with the east over resources, after we've made all these changes and they haven’t (I say we because I hope – ha ha ha – that the US will adopt the changes Europe has been making). Our water, air and food will be at stake and we might have to fight for it, not that it will make a difference. They thought it was a grim idea and didn’t like me for saying it so I’ll defer to the "optimistic" end of the National Geographic article:

In the end, global warming presents the greatest test we humans have yet faced. Are we ready to change, in dramatic and prolonged ways, in order to offer a workable future to subsequent generations and diverse forms of live? If we are, new technologies and new habits offer some promise. But only if we move quickly and decisively – and with a maturity we’ve rarely shown as a society or a species. It’s our coming-of-age moment, and there are no certainties or guarantees. Only a window of possibility, closing fast but still ajar enough to let in some hope.

Wired tends to be more optimistic, believing that technology will save us! (I love the description of Wired on Treehugger). Their article pins our hope on cellulose technology that (if we can develop it) will tap our energy from the tiny little plants that started this whole wonderful world. An enormous amount of money is being spent on developing those solutions - ones that don't require that we change our lifestyle. But I think in this case, it's not technology but our ability to innovate and change ourselves, that will save us.

Getting wired on cocktails

This weekend, I went for drinks one night and dinner another night with a co-worker and some of her friends. In an unprecedented series of moments, I got to reference my beloved Wired magazine with two people, actually involved in the issues, not just watching from the sidelines like me. The first was an attractive guy who had just returned from China. I had literally just told a friend of mine that it was unlikely that I would meet the kind of guy that would interest me, in a bar. He blew that theory out of the water in the first 15 seconds. “Why were you in China?” I ask, to make the kind of small talk that I know I’m supposed to make, not thinking it would lead to actual conversation. I don’t remember exactly what he said, something about going to scope out a project he might be working on, something to do with the environment. Oh, I say excitedly, “China is building a green city, on a wetlands” and I go on to describe in as much detail as I can recall, an article in Wired that I blogged about. Yeah, he says, that’s the company I’m hoping to work for, on that project specifically. So I get to hear about it, from someone who actually knows!

The next night, we met up again and this time my co-worker had brought another couple of friends, married to each other, both doctors. They were beautiful and nice and smart - the kind of people you fall in love with immediately. He’s a neurologist, she’s a dermatologist, but not the kind that gives fat injections and acid peels, unless you’re a burn victim or someone in an equally dire situation. She works in a hospital, helping people who really need it. I get to talking with the neurologist and I get to ask about all kinds of things I’m super excited about: Jared Diamond (who teaches at UCLA where my new friend went to medical school), Oliver Sacks (he worked with him at Columbia) and of course, Wired magazine! I mentioned an article I’d read about these electrodes that are surgically implanted in the brain to stimulate tiny nerves. They’re used to treat Parkinson’s and other diseases where drugs have been ineffective. I learned much more from the doctor, however, and it was more fascinating that you can imagine. He described himself as a mechanic, if the brain was the engine of a car, and said his job was to diagnose the problem and get the thing running again or running properly. He’s a technical person, not prone to the kind of work that involves a lot of guesswork or lack of precision. When I asked him how he chose neurology, he said it was the most intellectual of the medical sciences and he’s a thinker. A thinker working on brains, how apropos! So these little nodes attach to a nerve and are triggered, electronically, to stimulate on a regular pulse. They’re powered by a battery, which is connected by a wire. The wire runs down the inside of the neck, from the brain, to a place in the chest where this small battery that lasts about 12 years in implanted. In the chest!

I never imagined that reading Wired would make such interesting cocktail conversation. Either I’m moving in smarter circles or I’ve moved to San Francisco (or they're the same thing).

Erupting at the speed of sound

National Geographic continues to be the coolest most relevant magazine to what's actually going on in our world. I swear, news and TV shows just seem flip and meaningless compared to the soulful exploration of National Geographic. Growing up, I was fascinated by it because it took me to distance lands that I wanted to visit, to the highest peaks and the lowest depths of the ocean, places that I could never visit. Then starting in the nineties, it seemed like every article was about pollution, over-population and other plights of our time. It made me sad and I felt our beautiful world was coming to an end and realized, I had only enjoyed it on paper.

I still wish I had chosen a career that enabled or required worldwide travel as I am still fascinated by other cultures and countries. But I have been pleased to discover that National Geographic is again inspiring me although, and maybe this says more about me than the magazine, it's a more mature relationship. The articles still celebrate the human spirit and beauty of nature within the context of a modern world - but in a less abrasive way - as if we're all better suited to digest these complex issues.

Last month, I read that Hurricane Katrina was the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history and that not even a "massive and endless national commitment" to the safety of New Orleans is enough to secure it. The area has always been environmentally vulnerable, it is put under water about every eleven years. The letter from the editor suggests that it's foolish for anyone to live there, foolish for the government to spend money trying to keep people there and wouldn't we all be better off if they paid people to start anew somewhere else and let nature reclaim the wetlands?

This month, the magazine ran an awesome article about Naples and the area surrounding Mt. Vesuvius, home to about the same number of people as the New Orleans area. There have been seven eruptions over the last 25,000 years, a frequency far less than that of devastating hurricanes in New Orleans, but each blast has destroyed all life in the area for several hundred years.

Scientists say the area should expect another blast any day. There is no way to predict it before it happens. There is no way for an area of that size to be evacuated safely. There is no way to survive it. And yet a thriving population continues to live in the shadow of and on the slopes of the deadliest volcano in the world with the faith that they will survive. The article is worth reading for the description of how a blast like that will unfold, a cataclysmic event equal to a nuclear explosion. Here the government, instead of spending money to build artificial protections, pays people to leave.

The pressure building from below will blow a hole in the mountain that will hurl "100,000 tons a second of superheated rock, cinders, and ash into the stratosphere," breaking the sound barrier and causing a sonic boom. This liquid rock will shoot 22 miles in the air, far higher than cruising altitude for commercial jets, and spreading out like an umbrella before flying back to earth at 95 miles an hour.

Then an avalanche of debris will explode sideways from the volcano sending a cloud of powder and ash outward, a "hot, choking wind, advancing at about 240 miles (386 kilometers) an hour" at a temperature of 900°F (482°C). If it passes quickly, and your clothing and flesh aren't vaporized, you can survive the heat for a few seconds. But you'll certainly suffocate on the fine powder in the air which will accumulate up to "65 feet (20 meters) deep at a distance of three miles (five kilometers) from the crater to about ten inches (25 centimeters) thick at a distance of 15 miles (24 kilometers). Eight inches (20 centimeters) of ash is enough to cause modern roofs to collapse."

Anyone or anything left will be washed away by the rivers of mud created by liquid ash and thunderstorms. Volcanologists estimate that an eruption nearly four thousand years ago unleashed that cycle of destruction six times in a 24-hour period. I don't know, it kind of makes me laugh to think that we spend so much time devising ways to inflict that kind of damage on each other when nature is happy to do it for us.

Canada's golden era

There was a three-part series on NPR last week about global warming in Canada and the Arctic and all the business opportunities that are opening up because of the melting ice. It was the most bizarre thing. People are actually hitching their star to global warming and looking forward to the day when the ice melts? It's like an episode of The Twilight Zone. Are people really that short-sighted? Are they really not able to connect the dots? Or is it just massive amounts of denial that allow them to believe they'll be rich before we all burn up?

Here are some of the opportunities about to befall Canada:
1) A lot of animals are migrating further north. It's warmer now and has less development, perfect for wild animals like the cougar that are usually associated with the dry mountains of southern California. Americans could start taking safaris through the Canadian outback.

2) Apparently there are a lot of diamonds in Canada, and the potential for other valuable rocks like uranium. Mining claims are hot right now, kind of like the gold rush of the mid-1800's. Trick is, the owners of the claims won't know until the ice melts, but their ship is coming in they say in 50-100 years.

3) Speaking of ships, the ice melting is also opening up a huge opportunity for shipping to come through the Arctic circle instead of way down in Panama. A viable way to link the Atlantic to the Pacific, a least one developer is talking about building a port which will naturally lead to a bustling port town in what is now tundra.

4) I was thinking I should buy some lake front property. What is currently just a patch of snow will someday be beautiful green mountains and while everyone in Los Angeles is burning in a fiery inferno of smog, I'll be lounging by the lake in beautiful and balmy Canada!

5) Oil is already big business up north but relies on ice roads to get the heavy equipment up there. Not too long ago a truck driving valuable drilling equipment fell through a frozen lake and sunk. The clever engineers who can figure out a way to fly, drive or ship the equipment there can retire on the riches.

Evolution is more than mere persistence

Something I think about often is evolution. In the context of living creatures, evolution is a process of change, arising as a result of external conditions, that facilitates the survival of the species. Guns, Germs, and Steel (which I’m only halfway done with and I just discovered is available as a movie on DVD!) is an essay about why different peoples evolved at different rates. The impetus is to answer a question of why the haves are the haves and the have-nots are the have-nots (instead of the other way around).

The success of evolution is found in the persistence of a species or group. If the change results in a greater population (and perhaps greater welfare) of the group, the evolution was successful. Jared Diamond goes through a discussion of the evolution of disease, for example. When humans became sedentary and lived in groups large enough for disease to thrive in, we acquired sicknesses evolved from animal diseases. From animals we’d domesticated in large enough numbers to sustain disease. In the beginning, many of these killers wiped out whole populations but soon evolved not to kill, allowing people to carry the disease longer and transmit it to more people.

In answering the have/have-not question though, I think we have to take into consideration that mere persistence through population is not the only measure of success. Now, a tribe that exerts more power, consumes more resources and is more resistant to disease is more “successful” than a tribe with a much larger population that is prone to poverty and disease. (I imagine that Jared Diamond will get there, and I’ll let you know what he says about that.)

But there are other issues that may or may not perpetuate the tribe but seem to me to be part of our evolution. Issues that arise as we pursue liberty and well being, demand tolerance and acceptance and ask for compassion and humanity. They are part of our evolution because of our huge population growth, our collective affect on the environment and the rapid exchange of information around the globe. Just like the right ingredients allowed certain diseases to arise, these conditions brought about these issues.

When looking at the problems of the world, I feel like we’re seeing the old clashing with the new. In the old way of evolution, people killed, displaced and enslaved other populations to perpetuate their tribe. In the new way, we protect other populations, attempt to understand the enemy and promote everyone's participation in making the world. In the old way the earth was to be mined, rivers dammed and mountains flattened for industry, animals raised and killed and crops grown to feed and grow populations. In the new way, we develop industry that gives back what we take from the earth, minimize our exploitation of animals and treat them more humanely.

The rate of change has recently accelerated because we’ve discovered that we can’t afford not to. The old way will destroy us. So how do we appeal to those populations (and leaders) still trying to perpetuate their tribe the old way? In Sudan, Israel, Afghanistan and Iraq, tribes are still killing and displacing. In China, Peru, and the United States, tribes are still raping the land. The new way doesn’t justify killing and displacing. It encourages participation and understanding, asks that we act as a single tribe to find solutions to common problems and use mercy on those who seek to destroy us. That’s our evolution.

Pavement, it's what's for dinner

The three biggest issues of the next 50 years, as I see it, are clean drinking water, renewable resources and transportation. Although the rate of population growth has been on the decline since the late sixties (perhaps due to the women’s right to choose movement) the population is still increasing exponentially and is estimated to reach 10 billion worldwide by 2050, up from 6.6 million today.

The production for passenger vehicles is rapidly growing as well. Already half of the vehicles in the U.S. are SUVs and light trucks and, at this rate, it will be true worldwide by 2030. Increasing an estimated 9 million per year from 41 million in 2003, auto production is giving population growth a run for its money with the most demand coming from China.

While over half of the 539 million vehicles worldwide are registered in the U.S. (where there are 1.2 more cars than licensed drivers), China and other developing nations are anxious to catch up. Let’s do the math.

China has 1.3 billion people compared to 300 million in the U.S. and are projected to grow by 500 million people in the next 50 years. Their car ownership could easily triple that of the U.S. but unlike the U.S., China’s people and cropland share the same one third of the country’s land mass. Roads and freeways are typically built on farmland putting countries like China at risk of paving over their food supply. And pavement is permanent. As environmentalist Rupert Cutler once noted, “Asphalt is the land’s last crop.”

So why are our brightest minds working on transportation to space and stealth bombers that cost two billion dollars each? Why not spend that money building ways to move goods and people in a way that’s more attractive, efficient, enjoyable and better for the environment? I, for one, am tired of determining my social schedule by time spent in the car, sitting in traffic, looking at ugly pavement and wondering why most humans think they are capable of driving.

With the second highest population in America, The Greater Los Angeles Area has 18 million people over 500 square miles (compared to 18.8 million in the 330 square miles of The New York Metropolitan area). A patchwork of cities as dense as San Francisco and Paris, the majority of the population, jobs and businesses are clustered along the major corridors making the entire area (excluding the San Fernando Valley) dense enough for light rail.

Freeway expansion projects go on for years only to yield one or two more lanes and a UC Berkeley study showed 90 percent of new highway capacity fills up within five years of being built! Another new study showed that the only thing that keeps people off the roads is congestion. It seems like there’s never enough road, never enough parking, and never enough pavement. If our pavement were its own state, it would be the 24th largest at 61,000 square miles, beating out Georgia.

In the past 20 years the population of California’s metro areas increased 20 percent but the amount of driving increased 59 percent. We’re driving more because of the way we build our communities with affordable housing in one direction and jobs in another. In the years between 1950 and 1990, the population of urban areas grew by 92% but the land area used grew by 245%. Increased suburbanization has meant bigger houses, farther apart, taking up more farmland, requiring more roads and greater energy consumption. Suburbanites drive bigger cars and rack up many more miles.

Clearly, we have to think of something else. The solution, at least in Los Angeles, seems to be easy. The city was built around the streetcar. In the twenties, we had the largest electric trolley system in the country with 6,000 trains running on 144 routes in four counties. (If you want to know what happened to them, rent Who Framed Roger Rabbit?)

Los Angeles has actually been piecing together a public transportation system over the last twenty years and our mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, is committed to joining existing rail and subway lines and building new ones. Even though only 6.6% of Angelenos take public transportation to work, it’s higher than the national average of 4.7%. Nationwide, 9 out of 10 people drive to work, 77% by themselves. For many, it’s still the easiest way to travel but it isn’t cheapest. Not for the driver, not for the city.

One study put the annual cost of owning and operating a vehicle at $7,000 - $10,000 per year. That doesn't take into account the subsidized costs: highway patrol, traffic management, police work on auto accidents and theft, street maintenance, parking enforcement, and "free" parking paid by higher rents, property taxes and lower wages. We’re starting to pay for the invisible costs as well: air pollution, loss of open space and habitat, global warming, war in the Middle East. Conservative estimates put the cost of those subsidies at 22 cents a mile. If we had to pay for them, we’d pay a gas tax of $6.60 per gallon!

Over the last decade, the fastest-growing cities are suburbs while industrial cities, once the biggest in the country, are shrinking. Detroit, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis, Philadelphia and Buffalo have steadily declining populations. New York and California are the only two major cities still growing, which is why a lot of cities are looking to Los Angeles for leadership on the mass transit issue.

But we’re still a long way off from a future where the majority of people use public transportation. As it is now, the buses use the same roads, take twice as long and are noisy as hell. We built a subway, but the most traveled east/west corridor has never been tunneled. If we’re really want to encourage drivers to use public transit, why are we digging under ground? Why not build light electric rail on the existing roads and highways, surrounded by trees and beautiful platforms for catching the train? Hey and while we’re at it, let’s build bike lanes along the same routes!

I got a request to send email to the governor about maintaining the budget for planning the high-speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles (an overwhelmingly obvious choice). Of course I sent it but then I wondered, why have we been PLANNING it for ten years? What's it going to take to get us into the future? Seriously, in every futuristic movie you've ever seen, were people taking mass transit or driving cars? Think about it.

Why women should rule the world

Sometimes these blog posts come together through a seemingly endless trickle of related thoughts and topics. I line up ideas and draw correlations as if when I stand back, I'll see the secret to the universe. In order to not get overwhelmed, I'll occasionally table a draft until I figure out what it's about.

One of those posts was Why Women Should Rule the World. I chose that title because it's provocative. When I mentioned it to a friend, she was horrified. "Are you REALLY suggesting that only women should be in charge?" It kind of tickled me, provocation successful. I suppose the title should be: Competition, Make Way For Cooperation. It started out like this:

As our world becomes increasingly interdependent, wealthier countries will have to spend more resources helping less fortunate nations. Their problems are our problems and we can no longer shut them out. We may find ourselves depending more on cooperation, not competition,to get us what we want. To bring about this change, we might consider more women in politics and positions of power.

Only 16% of our federally elected representatives are women. Nancy Pelosi, during her trip to Syria, asked for cooperation from the Middle East. Men compete, women cooperate, it's how we're made. Without women, without a balance in government, we just may destroy our world and ourselves.

A while back, Matthew Dowd, the strategist that helped get President Bush elected, defected from the Bush camp after six years in part because of his opposition to the war. In an interview with the New York Times, a deeply disillusioned Dowd called for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

Not knowing what he'll do next, Dowd said “I wouldn’t be surprised if I wasn’t walking around in Africa or South America doing something that was like mission work.” He added, “I do feel a calling of trying to re-establish a level of gentleness in the world.” I thought this was pretty powerful, a (male) political strategist calling for gentleness in the world and wondering why aren't taking care of each other. Especially since it's been proven that altruism makes us happier than selfishness!

The problem with my argument is that it makes the presumption that women would behave like women in politics and business. And obviously there are also men who can bring this kind of balance to our leadership. What I was fingering my way towards was the idea that we have been living in a masculine society for a long time now: a society based on domination, crushing the competition, winning at the expense of another's loss, taking what we want because we can. This is the economic model that I keep referring to, that has to change.

It used to be that competition drove innovation but in the last several decades, competition has suppressed innovation of a certain sort. We have the ability to reduce our dependence on oil, but we don't. We have the ability to insulate our houses with natural materials to reduce our dependence on natural gas for heat and electricity for cooling, but, for the most part, we don't. Why? Because it's not in the best interests of the companies selling those products. Why, people always ask, isn't there a high-speed commuter train between LA and San Francisco, a very well-traveled corridor? Because the airlines are making a bundle ferrying people back and forth even though the flights dump tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.

The earth is like the bank account of a very rich uncle that died and bequeathed everything to us. We don't know why we're so lucky but we never really stopped to wonder. We just got to spending! Everything we "make" is made of the earth. Humans don't MAKE anything (except babies), who are we kidding? We just TAKE and then sometimes do some stuff to what we've taken and say we made it.

We've been taking for a long time now, withdrawing large sums from the bank account, but we haven't put anything back (and what we do put back makes us poorer). Given the laws of economics, what are the chances that the bank account is unlimited? The environmentalists are saying the account isn't dry, but it's getting there. How about curbing our spending now? In fact, with so little dough left, we have to get pretty innovative to make it last or INVEST IT WISELY so that it can grow to make us rich again.

A while back I was puttering around on the web looking for the digital version of a National Geographic article about the Jamestown settlers who intentionally and inadvertently changed the landscape of the future United States dramatically. They esentially created a new ecosystem in a few decades. I was going to use it to illustrate the point that the reason we're in such hot water is because we can change our environment so easily and rapidly, which means we can also change it for the better in the same way.

But I found that it had already been described in a thought-provoking theology blog and I discovered something. There's a term for and a whole study of what I was trying to describe! It's called eco-feminism. It basically describes a "feminine" way of relating to the environment. If we think about little girls and boys, it's easy to see what this means. Boys want to smash hills and break branches and destroy things to make other things. Girls want to smell flowers and make pretty things from twigs already on the ground and relish in the beauty of nature. One looks at something and sees what they can do with it, another looks to admire and is inspired to preserve. (The Wikipedia description is really quite fascinating - and much better than mine - you should read it.)

I guess the reason it took me so long to publish this is that I couldn't figure out exactly what my point was. I think it's this. When I was in college, majoring in Women's Studies, it was pretty radical to say that sexism was the same as racism, or any kind of discrimination, marginalization or subordination based on a person's race, gender, socioeconomic status, etc. And now I find my world rocked by the idea that it's even bigger and broader that that. The subordination of nature - plants, animals, mountains, oceans, air - also stems from the same need for domination.

While we've seen huge shifts in our attitudes towards people of color and women in this country in the last century, but we've also seen how quickly our "enemy" can change from fascist to communist to terrorist. Why, we haven't been concerned about human rights violations in China for a long time now. Not since we became their biggest client. Last I time I checked, they were still communist. And a recent eye-opening article written by an female reporter working in Saudi Arabia illustrates that while we may claim to fight oppression in one area of the world, we're quite comfortable allowing it to continue in another as long as it serves our needs. Women not only are covered from head to toe in public, they must also be kept out of sight of men at all times because even completely covered, they are a distraction and a source of unmitigated agitation and temptation.

Obviously, turning the world away from a model of domination is a big move. A change that will not tolerate such inconsistency and hypocracy. In order to truly view mother nature as something to love, protect and live in harmony with, we will have to also do that for our fellow creatures - animals and humans alike.

Science, meet nature

I blogged a while back about an article in Wired detailing the new HD camera techniques used to capture the extraordinary footage in BBC's Planet Earth (watch clips here). I then noticed a curious trend. In every issue of Wired, there's an article on the same subject in the corresponding month's National Geographic.

In April, Wired published a column on disappearing fish reporting that 96% of all wild fish considered edible, are endangered. The amount of marine fish captured has remained virtually the same since 1995 despite increasingly aggressive tactics. To make up for the difference, and equal amount of fish is being raised on farms. The biggest change for the consumer is the kind of fish we're eating. Fish that are easier to grow like carp and tilapia (which can literally be raised in a bucket of water) are more prevalent. (Mmmm, me like bucket fish.)

That same month, National Geographic published a special report on the vanishing ocean dwellers. Sixty-six pages of photos and articles detailing the state of our oceans in an explosive mix of cruelty, hope and despair. 40 million sharks per year are killed, definned alive and then left to die to support the taste for sharkfin soup in Asia. Recently banned in some countries, heavy iron doors scrape the sea bed for trawling nets where 50-80% of the haul is discarded as "bycatch." Urchins, fish, rays, suffocate aboard the vessel before being thrown overboard. Longline fishing unintentionally traps loggerhead turtles, marine mammals and albatross which make up a 30% bycatch. Shrimp, cod and sole, the intended targets, are becoming harder and harder to find sending fishing boats further offshore for longer periods of time.

The majestic giant bluefin tuna, a fish that can live for 30 years, grow up to 12 feet in length and weigh 1,500 pounds, can dive a half mile to swim at a speed of 25 miles per hour. This large swimmer is easily tracked by sonar and helicopter. Spotters in the air call to boats to tell them where the tuna is traveling, they are captured and kept in offshore cages to be fattened for sushi markets before being shot and slaughtered. Five-million dollar boats are equipped with nets that can encircle 3,000 adult tuna. Caught while they are spawning, or before they can, the species is on the brink of collapse. International laws are weak and easily flouted, more than twice the legal limit of fish is being extracted from the sea.


While nearly two-thirds of the earth is ocean, only .01 percent is protected to 12% of the world's land and despite protection, recovery is slow if not impossible. A hundred years after a ban on hunting bowhead whales, among the largest and longest lived animals on earth, they are still endangered. Entire communities have been devastated by the sudden depletion of fish and in Africa fisherman sell what they catch to Europeans leaving locals to starve or purchase the remaining carcasses for food. Ironically, it was this article, rather than Wired's that illustrated how technology has almost single-handedly led to the ocean's exhaustion.

The next month, I read in National Geographic about factory cities in China that sprout up in a matter of months drawing thousands of workers from rural areas looking for work. Traveling performers come through town to entertain the amassing population and the government shows free outdoor movies in the streets. Within a year, middle-income families have moved into high-rise housing in the area built by razing hundreds of hilltops.

Yet it was Wired that reported on the world's first "green city" being built in China as an experimental response to the environmental devastation sustained by the country for the last sixty years. In a 1940 speech, Mao Tse-tung urged China to conquer nature in order to reach its industrial future. Since then 90% of the trees in some provinces have been razed. For decades, Chinese families smelted steel in their backyards until the untreated waste turned their rivers black. It wasn't until last year that the government calculated what the environmental damage was costing the country: 10% of their GDP or $200 billion a year. Unsafe drinking water, air pollution and vast deserts that have caused flooding and other damage, are the result.

The thrilling challenge of building the world's first eco-city belongs to the international engineering firm, Arup, and their newly recruited star designer who believes the proposed metropolis, Dongtan, "was a rare chance to demonstrate that growth could happen a different way." Elaborate calculations determine how high to build, how dense to populate and ultimately, how much land is green.

A rough outline of the city, a real eco-city, began to take shape: a reasonably dense urban middle, with smart breaks for green space, all surrounded by farms, parks, and unspoiled wetland. Instead of sprawling out, the city would grow in a line along a public transit corridor.

Next, the city needed green power. But the planning process grew complicated. A city is a huge mess of dependent variables. The right recycling facility can turn trash into kilowatts. The right power plant can convert waste energy into heat. The right city map will encourage people to walk to the store instead of drive. "These are things people don't normally plan together," Gutierrez says.

This month, both magazines feature articles on the Noah's Ark of seeds, the Svalbard seed vault. National Geographic reports that The Global Crop Diversity Trust is spearheading a project with funding from Norway to preserve up to three million different seeds from key plants. The mostly food seeds are being kept in an arctic vault for the day when humanity has wiped out the majority of life on this planet - a day fast approaching. While seed vaults already exist, they are incomplete, vulnerable to damage or mismanaged.

Wired details the technology used in this massive undertaking by laying them out like something from Ocean's 11. The vault is guarded by bight lights, motion sensors, cameras and guards in a control tower. At the end of a tunnel that bores 400 feet into a mountain, are two airlocked chambers and protected against fragmenting rock by a steel sheath. The shelves inside the vault are a third of a mile long and hold envelopes with unique serial numbers each containing 500 seeds protected by a five-layer composite material, housed in plastic boxes and chilled to 0 degrees Farenheit, preserving them for centuries. The "living institution" is meant to preserve the means to grow food. One study showed that of 8,000 crop varieties grown in the US in 1903 had dwindled to only 600 in 1983.

The collective consciousness has become so saturated in environmental issues that you can't do, think or say anything without wondering about its impact on the world. I was recently working on a little video timeline of the century for a friend and it occurred to me that things change very quickly. We can change them for the better but the concern is that without conscious effort to do so, we can also very quickly change them for the worse. In the words of Ferris Bueller: "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it."