Sunday, September 2, 2012
Say Hello!
[ed. Sometimes on sunny evenings I'll walk down to a nearby park and watch the boats motor around the bay. I have a favorite bench on a high outlook that I like. The other day I had been sitting there for several minutes when I noticed a small rock sitting next to me. At first I was surprised that I hadn't seen it sooner; then I wondered about it's message. Say hello to who (or is it whom)? Or maybe...say, hello!, how are you doing (and, don't I have nice handwriting)? As I pondered this mystery and wondered whether I might be experiencing some kind of LA Story type of moment, a small, slender woman with a very large dog suddenly appeared walking up the trail...]
McKinley Thumps La Salle 43-22
The McKinley Tigers put on a dazzling second-half display as they dismantled La Salle high school's vaunted defense in a pre-season football exhibition in Corvallis, Oregon last Friday. Traveling all the way from Honolulu, Hawaii the Tigers went up against Oregon's 2011 4A football champions, the La Salle Falcons, on a clear blue sunny afternoon at Crescent Valley H.S. Field. It was a pitched battle through the first half with each team trading touchdowns, and McKinley led by just a single point, 23-22, going into the break. But as the second half got underway the Tigers kicked in the afterburners following a traditional 'haka' warrior dance and the Falcons never recovered. Stand out performances were recorded by wide-receiver Tyrell Tuiasosopo and running back Mathias Tuitele-Iafeta. Asked after the game how he felt, head coach Joe Cho said he was "satisfied" but also "very tired", as the match had required over a year's planning, logistics and fund-raising to accomplish. Plus, Kahuku is now on deck for next week's game, and Farrington the week after. Still, it was worth it. This was the first McKinley H.S. football team to travel to the mainland in over 40 years, back when coach Cho was still playing for the Tigers. And, there were several other members of that long-ago team in the stands watching the game as well, which drew Tiger fans from around the Corvallis area and several other states. Go Black and Gold!
More pictures after the fold:
‘Thriller’ and the Lessons of the Mega-Super-Album
How Hall and Oates Saved Pop
Of course, in the end, “Thriller” had several money tracks. There were four solid cornerposts: a blistering rock song (“Beat It”); a sublime ballad (“Human Nature”); an R&B dance sizzler (“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ ”); and a video-friendly story song (“Thriller”). And at the center of it all, connecting the entire work and providing access routes to its outer regions, was a song whose musical basis came from the lone bastion of hope on pop radio in those dark days, Daryl Hall and John Oates. Their solid amalgams of pop, soul, rock and even light electronica had been breaking through the dross for a few years. In January, their “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” logged a week at No. 1 between Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” and “Centerfold” by the J. Geils Band. Jackson liked “I Can’t Go for That” and heard in it the basis for his own album’s elusive unifier. He lifted its bass line for a song that made him want to dance. (And no wonder; that bass line was itself an echo of ’60s soul.) He could hear it. He could see it. That track was “Billie Jean.” It was one of the last songs completed for “Thriller” — it was reportedly mixed 91 times — and even though Quincy Jones fought Jackson about its inclusion, Jackson insisted. By early November, he was finally satisfied, and the album was rush-released into stores at the end of the month.
Not My Lover
Few blockbusters are sleeper hits. They usually start strong and then keep lapping the pack — think Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” or U2’s “Joshua Tree.” But “Thriller” didn’t get out of the gate as fast as everyone expected. The first single, a pallid duet with Paul McCartney called “The Girl Is Mine,” was a hit but failed to ignite a frenzy for the album, which had only nine tracks. More than two months after its release, “Thriller” still hadn’t reached No. 1. I was a D.J. at the time at a small rock-oriented bar on Long Island, and I started playing “Beat It,” with its surprising guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen, but at that early point the song was less a phenomenon than a curiosity. It wasn’t until “Billie Jean” was released as a single in early 1983 that “Thriller” really took off. It had that long, sinuous bass-line intro, paranoiac synth warnings, a hiccupping vocal; it was the ultimate crossover dream, a song both timely and out of its time. And it had a first-rate video in which Jackson came off like a musical James Bond, sexy, sly and licensed to dance. The song climbed to No. 1, stormed the ramparts at MTV and, buoyed even further by Jackson’s dazzling performance on the “Motown 25” TV special that May, led the way for the album’s other hits and for other black artists. By the end of 1983, “Thriller” had become a nine-track stimulus package for the entire music business.
And yet: just nine songs, four of which don’t merit any substantial discussion now. So what made “Thriller” such a big hit? Some schools of thought contend that it wasn’t even the best album of Jackson’s career. “Off the Wall” was, in many ways, more sophisticated musically, and almost all of its songs are still memorable. A conductor/arranger friend of mine, who is classically trained but appreciates a good pop tune, says he never cared much about “Thriller” but still perks up whenever he hears the upper-level harmony on “Rock With You,” the biggest hit from “Off the Wall.” I like “Off the Wall” more than “Thriller,” too, maybe because it’s a happier and a sweatier album, the last blast of the smiley-face pop-and-soul ’60s and ’70s.
And maybe “Thriller” wasn’t even the best album of 1982. A good number of critics would probably tell you that Prince’s “1999,” a double album released a few weeks before “Thriller,” was much more ambitious and that its pioneering electro-sex-funk was what kept the music business churning through the mid- and late ’80s. A similar dynamic existed between Carole King’s “Tapestry” and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” bellwethers of the singer-songwriter era that were released within a few months of each other in 1971. King’s album sold millions and is generally considered the first true blockbuster of the rock era; Mitchell’s sold about a tenth as much but has aged better critically and is regarded the more erudite and influential album (though part of that could be because rock critics still seem to relate best to lyrics, Mitchell’s greatest strength, while King’s poetry has always been in her melodies).
And yet while King/Jackson may have been relatively prosaic compared with Mitchell/Prince, you can feel in their multiplatinum opuses a conscious effort to raise craft to art, to regain the multipartisan musical platforms that had slipped away in their respective eras (for King, post-Beatles; for Jackson, post-disco), to be both smart and simple enough to reach the greatest common denominator. They were musical populists and were building from the bottom up. What you can hear in their landmark albums most of all is the need to be heard.
Which brings us to Adele.
Not My Lover
Few blockbusters are sleeper hits. They usually start strong and then keep lapping the pack — think Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” or U2’s “Joshua Tree.” But “Thriller” didn’t get out of the gate as fast as everyone expected. The first single, a pallid duet with Paul McCartney called “The Girl Is Mine,” was a hit but failed to ignite a frenzy for the album, which had only nine tracks. More than two months after its release, “Thriller” still hadn’t reached No. 1. I was a D.J. at the time at a small rock-oriented bar on Long Island, and I started playing “Beat It,” with its surprising guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen, but at that early point the song was less a phenomenon than a curiosity. It wasn’t until “Billie Jean” was released as a single in early 1983 that “Thriller” really took off. It had that long, sinuous bass-line intro, paranoiac synth warnings, a hiccupping vocal; it was the ultimate crossover dream, a song both timely and out of its time. And it had a first-rate video in which Jackson came off like a musical James Bond, sexy, sly and licensed to dance. The song climbed to No. 1, stormed the ramparts at MTV and, buoyed even further by Jackson’s dazzling performance on the “Motown 25” TV special that May, led the way for the album’s other hits and for other black artists. By the end of 1983, “Thriller” had become a nine-track stimulus package for the entire music business.
And yet: just nine songs, four of which don’t merit any substantial discussion now. So what made “Thriller” such a big hit? Some schools of thought contend that it wasn’t even the best album of Jackson’s career. “Off the Wall” was, in many ways, more sophisticated musically, and almost all of its songs are still memorable. A conductor/arranger friend of mine, who is classically trained but appreciates a good pop tune, says he never cared much about “Thriller” but still perks up whenever he hears the upper-level harmony on “Rock With You,” the biggest hit from “Off the Wall.” I like “Off the Wall” more than “Thriller,” too, maybe because it’s a happier and a sweatier album, the last blast of the smiley-face pop-and-soul ’60s and ’70s.
And maybe “Thriller” wasn’t even the best album of 1982. A good number of critics would probably tell you that Prince’s “1999,” a double album released a few weeks before “Thriller,” was much more ambitious and that its pioneering electro-sex-funk was what kept the music business churning through the mid- and late ’80s. A similar dynamic existed between Carole King’s “Tapestry” and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” bellwethers of the singer-songwriter era that were released within a few months of each other in 1971. King’s album sold millions and is generally considered the first true blockbuster of the rock era; Mitchell’s sold about a tenth as much but has aged better critically and is regarded the more erudite and influential album (though part of that could be because rock critics still seem to relate best to lyrics, Mitchell’s greatest strength, while King’s poetry has always been in her melodies).
And yet while King/Jackson may have been relatively prosaic compared with Mitchell/Prince, you can feel in their multiplatinum opuses a conscious effort to raise craft to art, to regain the multipartisan musical platforms that had slipped away in their respective eras (for King, post-Beatles; for Jackson, post-disco), to be both smart and simple enough to reach the greatest common denominator. They were musical populists and were building from the bottom up. What you can hear in their landmark albums most of all is the need to be heard.
Which brings us to Adele.
Beyond a Joke: The Truth About Why We Laugh
Consider the bizarre events of the 1962 outbreak of contagious laughter in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). What began as an isolated fit of laughter in a group of 12-to 18-year-old schoolgirls rapidly rose to epidemic proportions. Contagious laughter propagated from one individual to the next, eventually infecting adjacent communities. Like an influenza outbreak, the laughter epidemic was so severe that it required the closing of at least 14 schools and afflicted about 1,000 people. Fluctuating in intensity, it lasted for around two and a half years. A psychogenic, hysterical origin of the epidemic was established after excluding alternatives such as toxic reaction and encephalitis.
Laughter epidemics, big and small, are universal. Contagious laughter in some Pentecostal and related charismatic Christian churches is a kind of speaking in tongues (glossolalia), a sign that worshippers have been filled with the Holy Spirit. Before looking askance at this practice, consider that it was present at the historic Cane Ridge revival of 1801, in Kentucky, and part of an exuberant religious tradition in which the Shakers actually shook and the Quakers quaked. Even John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, did some of his own quaking and shaking. Those experiencing the blessing of holy laughter spread it back to their home congregations, creating a national and international wave of contagious laughter. Contrast, now, the similarity between the propagation of such religious anointings and what was called the "laughing malady puzzle in Africa". They are strikingly similar, tap the same social trait, and are an extreme form of the commonplace, not pathology. (...)
The use of laughter to evoke laughter is familiar to viewers of television sitcoms. Laugh tracks (dubbed-in sounds of laughter) have accompanied many sitcoms since 9 September 1950. On that evening, The Hank McCune Show – a comedy about "a likable blunderer, a devilish fellow who tries to cut corners only to find himself the sucker" – first used a laugh track to compensate for the absence of a live studio audience. Although the show was short-lived, the television industry discovered the power of canned laughter to evoke audience laughter. (...)
Psychology researchers jumped on the new phenomenon of "canned" laughter, confirming that laugh tracks do indeed increase audience laughter and the audience's rating of the humorousness of the comedy material, attributing the effect to sometimes baroque mechanisms (deindividuation; release restraint mediated by imitation; social facilitation; emergence of social norms, etc). Decades later, we learned that the naked sound of laughter itself can evoke laughter – that you don't need a joke. (...)
In our politically correct, feel-good, be-happy time we are shielded from – and underestimate – the dark side of laughter that was better known to the ancients. If you think laughter is benign, be aware that laughter is present during the worst atrocities, from murder, rape and pillage in antiquity to the present. Laughter has been present at the entertainments of public executions and torture. On street corners around the world, laughing at the wrong person or at the wrong time can get you killed. The publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad by a Danish newspaper triggered calls for the death of the cartoonists and a worldwide murderous rampage that left many dead and injured. Although radical Islam is most in the news, all monotheistic religions ruthlessly suppress humorous challenges to their spiritual franchise. The killers at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, were laughing as they strolled through classrooms murdering their classmates. Laughter accompanies ethnic violence and insult, from Kosovo to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Laughing with brings the pleasure of acceptance, in-group feeling, and bonding. But laughing at is jeering and ridicule, targeting outsiders who look or act differently, pounding down the nail that sticks up, shaping them up, or driving them away. Being laughed at can be a very serious, even dangerous business.
by Robert Provine, The Guardian | Read more:
Music of the Unquiet Mind
I asked Cage, whom I first met in 1981, about this compelling musical essay in inquietude. He told me that “Four Walls” was about the disturbed mind, a subject of fascination for Cunningham and himself during the mid-1940s. Two years after the completion of “Four Walls,” Cage seriously considered giving up composing to undergo psychoanalysis; he turned instead to Asian philosophy and Zen Buddhism.
The music in “Four Walls” is of a non-narrative nature. Its many silences and static repetitions do, however, contribute to an atmosphere of growing entrapment, inviting the listener to probe the deep recesses of his psyche. Each person brings to the experience what he wishes or, rather, what he is. (...)
I have lived with obsessive compulsive disorder for as long as I can remember. When I was a child it manifested itself in a spectrum of behavioral quirks ranging from an adamant insistence that the bow in my hair be perfectly straight to a perpetual need for reassurance to allay my many fears, largely imagined but painfully real to me. A few years ago I came across the perfect depiction of O.C.D.: an image of a child trapped in a merry-go-round cage while his parents looked on helplessly.
My own parents did not know what to make of it all and did their best to cope with my idiosyncrasies. Fortunately for them I insisted on having piano lessons when I was 6, and this became a creative channel for my obsessive energies. One of the classic manifestations of O.C.D. is compulsive counting. Till this day I count the number of steps when climbing a flight of stairs or the number of times I rinse after brushing my teeth. These counting rituals permeating my daily life serve no particular purpose other than to satisfy the need to perform them. That is the nature of O.C.D. Enter music and rhythm: you can imagine how delighted I was to be actually required to count the beats in a piece of music. I could now count to my heart’s content in a totally creative fashion! (...)
Through Cage and his take on Zen philosophy, I have made a truce with my O.C.D. I recognize that it is integral to who I am and have come to accept myself, warts and all. Obsessive-compulsives are, not surprisingly, perfectionists. Yet, I have learned to relinquish the grand illusion of the goal and relish, instead, the unfolding of the process. Cage’s highly forgiving definition of error, as “simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality,” has helped temper my self-judgmental parameters of right and wrong, all or nothing.
Friday, August 31, 2012
Insane, True Energy Fact of the Day
Each one uses relatively little electricity, but they are on all the time. And we have a lot of them in our schools, factories, and office buildings. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that there are more than 100 million exit signs in use today in the U.S., consuming 30–35 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity annually.
That’s the output of five or six 1,000 MW power plants, and it costs us $2-3 billion per year. Individual buildings may have thousands of exit signs in operation.To put this into a bigger context: This is just one small part of what makes buildings, in general, incredibly energy intense. In the United States, we use more energy powering our buildings—from the lights, to the heating, to the stuff we plug into the walls—than we use to do anything else. Because of that (and because of the fact that electricity is mostly made by burning coal or natural gas) buildings produce more greenhouse gas emissions than cars.
Read more about the energy consumption of exit signs and how we can use less energy, while still getting the same services, at Green Building Advisor
Take a look at some stats on energy use in buildings at the Architecture 2030 website
by Maggie Koerth-Baker, Boing Boing | Read here:
Image: Exit Sign, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from mtellin's photostream
Thursday, August 30, 2012
What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?
The Depth of the Problem
In San Francisco, if you ever leave your bike unlocked, it will be stolen. If you use a cable lock to secure your bike, it will be stolen at some point. Unless you lock your bike with medieval-esque u-locks, your bike will be stolen from the streets of most American cities. Even if you take these strong precautions, your bike may still get stolen.
According the National Bike Registry and FBI, $350 million in bicycles are stolen in the United States each year. Beyond the financial cost of the crime, it’s heartbreaking to find out someone stole your bike; bikers love their bikes. (...)
An Economic Theory of Bike Crime
In 1968, Chicago economist Gary Becker introduced the notion that criminal behavior could be modeled using conventional economic theories. Criminals were just rational actors engaged in a careful cost-benefit analysis of whether to commit a crime. Is the potential revenue from the crime greater than the probability adjusted weight of getting caught? Or, as the antagonist in the movie The Girl Next Door puts it, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”
Criminal activity (especially crime with a clear economic incentive like theft) could therefore be modeled like any financial decision on a risk reward curve. If you are going to take big criminal risk, you need to expect a large financial reward. Crimes that generate more reward than the probability weighted cost of getting caught create expected value for the criminal. Criminals try to find “free lunches” where they can generate revenue with little risk. The government should respond by increasing the penalty for that activity so that the market equilibrates and there is an “optimal” amount of crime.
There are a few great accounts of journalists getting their bikes stolen and then going on a zealous mission to try to capture bikes thieves (see here and here). In each account, they ultimately learn from local police that the penalty for stealing a bike is generally nothing.
“We make it easy for them. The DA doesn’t do tough prosecutions. All the thieves we’ve busted have got probation. They treat it like a petty crime.”
“You can’t take six people off a murder to investigate a bike theft.”Bike thievery is essentially a risk-free crime. If you were a criminal, that might just strike your fancy. If Goldman Sachs didn’t have more profitable market inefficencies to exploit, they might be out there arbitraging stolen bikes.
What Happens to the Stolen Bikes?
Just because the risk of a crime is zero, that doesn’t mean that a criminal will engage in that crime. If that were the case, thieves would go about stealing dandelions and day-old newspapers. There has to be customer demand and a liquid market for the product in order for the criminal to turn their contraband into revenue. So, how exactly does a criminal go about converting a stolen bicycle to cash?
We decided to survey the prior literature on where stolen bikes are sold as well as consult with bike shops and experts in San Francisco to get a better picture of who steals bikes and where the stolen bikes end up.
by Rohin Dahr, Priceonomics | Read more:
Twenty-Seven
When you turn twenty-seven you start noticing the number, everywhere. Suddenly everyone else is twenty-seven, too: Every athlete and actor, all of the dead people who ever did anything. Your age is everywhere because you, at twenty-seven, are perfect. Just there. Just where you are right now: educated, but no longer preachy; fuckable, without being whiny; mature, and not yet fat. Never change.
At least, that's what you feel like America keeps telling you.
An old Esquire article, randomly stumbled across, only confirms that you weren't imagining things. This ode to "The 27-Year-Old Woman" is a love-letter to your agesake, half lust and half lecture, written waaaaaay back in 1999: "They are all twenty-seven… They always were twenty-seven, and they always will be, at the moment they are both young enough and old enough to teach you the meaning of heartbreak…" It goes on to list all the twenty-seven-year-olds who ever charmed.
Because yes, everything America mythicizes and celebrates and destroys is twenty-seven and has always been twenty-seven: Ingrid Bergman, in Casablanca; Heather Graham, in Boogie Nights; Marilyn Monroe in Gentleman Prefer Blondes; Jemima Kirke, in "Girls"; and every other actress expected to be a sexual prize for the first 89 minutes and believably settled down in the final frame.
The twenty-seven-year-old can accomplish anything: Yuri Gagarin orbited at age 27; Flannery O'Connor published Wise Blood and Hemingway The Sun Also Rises—their debuts. Think of Ryan Lochte v. Michael Phelps just last month when both were 27, or LeBron James, 27. This is the year at which baseball players ripen, like cantaloupes, their desirability on fantasy rosters spiking (think Matt Kemp, Prince Fielder). And it's not because they're so good (Delmon Young, 27) but because next season, they
settle in; because twenty-seven's home runs and "Play-it-Again-Sams" wax into twenty-eight's solid OBPs and loveless marriages.
At least that's what Julia Roberts' character thinks in My Best Friend's Wedding, which is predicated on two friends promising that if they are not engaged to others by twenty-eight, they'll marry. I watched it while eating a pint of Ben & Jerry's (founded by two twenty-seven-year-olds) and wept: twenty-seven is the last year of romance, ego, mania. It's the last year of Bold Moves. It's the age of the real man of the hour, Christian Grey, who at twenty-seven jumps out of the playpen and into the arms of boring Anastasia. How mature.
And so of course that's why at twenty-seven our musicians sign up for the "27 Club": Winehouse, Cobain, Robert Johnson… Because if you listen to the culture, twenty-seven is where you are most beautiful and where you destroy yourself; it is for Physical Peaks and Physical Destruction, it is for Olympic Lap Lanes and Public Funerals.
by Adriane Quinlan, The Awl | Read more:
At least, that's what you feel like America keeps telling you. An old Esquire article, randomly stumbled across, only confirms that you weren't imagining things. This ode to "The 27-Year-Old Woman" is a love-letter to your agesake, half lust and half lecture, written waaaaaay back in 1999: "They are all twenty-seven… They always were twenty-seven, and they always will be, at the moment they are both young enough and old enough to teach you the meaning of heartbreak…" It goes on to list all the twenty-seven-year-olds who ever charmed.
Because yes, everything America mythicizes and celebrates and destroys is twenty-seven and has always been twenty-seven: Ingrid Bergman, in Casablanca; Heather Graham, in Boogie Nights; Marilyn Monroe in Gentleman Prefer Blondes; Jemima Kirke, in "Girls"; and every other actress expected to be a sexual prize for the first 89 minutes and believably settled down in the final frame.
The twenty-seven-year-old can accomplish anything: Yuri Gagarin orbited at age 27; Flannery O'Connor published Wise Blood and Hemingway The Sun Also Rises—their debuts. Think of Ryan Lochte v. Michael Phelps just last month when both were 27, or LeBron James, 27. This is the year at which baseball players ripen, like cantaloupes, their desirability on fantasy rosters spiking (think Matt Kemp, Prince Fielder). And it's not because they're so good (Delmon Young, 27) but because next season, they
settle in; because twenty-seven's home runs and "Play-it-Again-Sams" wax into twenty-eight's solid OBPs and loveless marriages.
At least that's what Julia Roberts' character thinks in My Best Friend's Wedding, which is predicated on two friends promising that if they are not engaged to others by twenty-eight, they'll marry. I watched it while eating a pint of Ben & Jerry's (founded by two twenty-seven-year-olds) and wept: twenty-seven is the last year of romance, ego, mania. It's the last year of Bold Moves. It's the age of the real man of the hour, Christian Grey, who at twenty-seven jumps out of the playpen and into the arms of boring Anastasia. How mature.
And so of course that's why at twenty-seven our musicians sign up for the "27 Club": Winehouse, Cobain, Robert Johnson… Because if you listen to the culture, twenty-seven is where you are most beautiful and where you destroy yourself; it is for Physical Peaks and Physical Destruction, it is for Olympic Lap Lanes and Public Funerals.
by Adriane Quinlan, The Awl | Read more:
How to Make Your Lost Phone Findable
Several readers wrote to ask how to set up their own phones to be findable. As you’d guess, given last week’s experience, I have some strong feelings about the importance of setting up Find My iPhone or the equivalent on Android phones.
First, though, some caveats.
These phone-tracking systems work only if your lost phone is turned on and online; if its battery is dead or it’s powered off, it can’t see the Internet and can’t show you its location.
Furthermore, professionals know about Find my iPhone. As soon as they steal a phone, they connect it to a computer running the iTunes program and wipe it, so that Find My iPhone won’t work anymore.
All right — duly warned? Here’s how you set things up. iPhone first.
by David Pogue, NY Times | Read more:
Image via: Wikipedia
Defining Nature: How to Annoy E.O. Wilson
My friend Emma Marris wrestles with giant Burmese pythons. Well, OK, not literally. But in her book Rambunctious Garden (which you should all read this very minute), she takes on the long-held idea of nature as a pristine, unspoiled, and distant place.
She asks if we can learn to see nature almost everywhere — in highway medians, “trash forests,” even an Everglades infested with exotic, predatory snakes. She argues that while we can and should continue to push for the protection of large, relatively unaltered landscapes, we shouldn’t necessarily try to restore them to pre-Columbian conditions — and we definitely shouldn’t allow the fight for big parks and wildernesses to limit our notion of nature. For if we see nature only as a place apart from us, she says, we’ve already lost it to climate change and any number of other forces. And who wants to join a lost cause?
This summer, Emma had another public wrestling match, not with a Burmese python but with the preeminent biologist and conservationist E.O. Wilson.
During a panel at the Aspen Environment Forum in Colorado, as she describes here, Emma piqued Wilson with her talk of making more nature — of expanding our definition of the natural world to include places humans have invaded, altered, and restored. Spending billions trying to return coastal areas like the Everglades to pre-Columbian “purity,” she added, is a lost cause. Better to invest in upslope reserves, and perhaps even learn to admire the tenacity of invasive species.
“Where do you plant the white flag that you’re carrying?” Wilson asked irritably.
Emma, who got the last word, quoted Joseph Mascaro, an ecologist she interviewed for her book. Mascaro studies the ecological attributes of “novel” ecosystems heavily influenced by human activities. “When people accuse him of admitting defeat,” said Emma, “he says, ‘I never took up arms. I’m playing a different game here.’” His message, she says, is “I’m here for nature, not for 1491.”
Me, I had the luxury of watching from the audience. At times, Emma and Wilson seemed to be arguing over a false dichotomy. After all, both spoke passionately about the importance of all types of nature, from macro to micro to humble to grand, and they agreed that all deserve appreciation. What’s so wrong with defending a few pythons, then, especially if it means bringing nature a little closer to our everyday experience?
But from Wilson’s perspective, Emma’s view is heretical. By arguing that the project of conservation should extend from the peaks of national parks into the sloughs of Seattle, protecting different places in different ways for different reasons, Emma risks diluting its urgency. If nature really is found almost everywhere, one might well wonder why we need to work so damn hard to save the best bits.
by Michelle Nijhuis, The Last Word On Nothing | Read more:
Photo: Urban Nature
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
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