Archive for the ‘Green’ Category
May 27th, 2010
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Author: I’m not a design critic, but I love reading design critics. This essay by John Thackara might help explain why. Following are some excerpts, but really, read the whole thing.
The Revelation
Advice for would-be design critics
By John Thackara
What Should Design Critics Write About?
The question is easy. You should write about humanity’s new place in a catabolically challenged world and the kind of future that awaits us.By catabolically challenged, I mean the complex, connected and high-entropy world we’re in now — the one that can’t possibly be sustained into the indefinite future. Why? Because it depends on perpetually growing throughputs of energy and resources that are not going to be available.
Adbusters’ True Cost campaign calls our economy a “doomsday machine.” We strive after infinite growth in a world whose carrying capacity is finite. The better the economy performs — faster growth, higher GDP — the faster we degrade the biosphere that is the basis of life and our only home. It’s madness. And the world is waking up to the fact that it’s madness.
The trouble is that no society in history has ever been able to reduce its consumption of resources voluntarily over the long term. On the contrary, as the anthropologist Joseph Tainter has explained: when problems in a complex society such as ours emerge, tackling them requires more resources just as resources are becoming scarcer.
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My own view is that although “surviving as best we can” will be rough in many aspects, it does not need to be grim. We’re likely to experience decades of muddling through what Greer describes as “scarcity industrialism” while we liquidate what remains of the planet’s oil endowment, fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources. This scarcity-industrialism phase will morph into a “salvage society” phase, in which we’ll scavenge the ruins of abandoned manmade structures for their iron, steel and other raw materials.
Scarcity industrialism is well under way in India and Brazil, by the way.
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You’ll probably think I’m strange, if not sad, but I can no longer look at paved surfaces without thinking about breaking them open to free the soil.
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“A thief who tells a judge he is stealing less than before will receive no leniency. So why do companies get environmental awards for polluting less — even though they are still polluting?” The biomimicry entrepreneur Gunter Pauli, who I’m quoting here, is scornful of the “do less bad” school of environmentalism. Pauli demands that we commit to Net Positive Impact – that’s to say, “economic activity where the demands placed upon the environment are met without reducing the capacity of the environment to provide for future generations.” Otherwise stated: Leave the world better than you found it.
That kind of economy may sound fanciful, but it’s happening, out there, now. Between the “tech-will-fix-it” dreamers and the “head-for-the-hills” brigade, a third and much larger global movement is growing. Paul Hawken reckons it’s the single biggest movement on the planet, with a million or more active groups. But it’s been invisible in mainstream media.
This movement is evident wherever people are growing food in cities, opening seed banks or turning school backyards into edible gardens. The movement includes people who are restoring ecosystems and watersheds. Their number incorporates dam removers, wetland restorers and rainwater rescuers.
Many people in this movement are recycling buildings in downtowns and suburbs, favelas and slums. So-called slack-space activists work alongside computer recyclers, hardware bricoleurs, office-block refurbishers and trailer-park renewers.
You’ll find the movement wherever people are launching local currencies. Non-money-trading models are cropping up like crazy: nine thousand examples at last count. In their version of a green economy, 70 million Africans exchange airtime, not cash.
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Their disconnect from place and context is one of the reasons global systems have become so vulnerable. Manmade systems are attenuated, hyper-connected and interdependent, but not resilient. They depend on high throughputs of energy, and we have systematically sought to remove human agency from their day-to-day operations. Think how parlous is our food security. Think about what one volcano did to global travel.
So my suggestion about where to write would be: select a bioregion as your patch. A bioregion is defined by the interconnectedness, and the interdependence, of its natural systems. It’s an ideal context in which to explore what co-dependency with one’s place can mean for people.
Many bylines these days describe a story’s writer as “London-based,” or “Tokyo-based.” My reaction is to think: So? Imagine how different it would be to describe yourself as a “Central Valley BioRegion–based writer” if you’re from that part of California; or a Hudson River Watershed–based writer, if you’re located in that part of upstate New York.
In Norway you could be a writer based in the Caledonian Buckling. Me? I’m a writer based in the “Steppic BioRegion” (formerly known as Occitania, or southwest France).
***
Emitting messages, however clever and evocative they may be, is not the same as being with real people, in real places, who are changing their lived material reality. That’s why I have a radical proposal: Consider speaking your words in a place rather than pressing “send.” Ivan Illich believed that our culture started to go off the rails in 1120, when monks stopped reading texts aloud to each other and became solitary scholars.
When I first read those lines of Illich, 20 years ago, I thought the guy was nuts. Later, when he told me in person, I listened harder. Embodied, situated and unmediated communication, he explained, was the norm before we invented writing, and later, mass media, and later still, social media.
Barely three generations ago, nine out of ten words that a man had heard when he reached the age of 20 were spoken to him directly — one to one, or as a member of a crowd — by somebody whom he could touch, feel and smell. By the 1970s, that proportion had been reversed: About nine out of ten words heard in a day were spoken through a loudspeaker. “Computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets,” Illich said in 1982.
How well do you know your bioregion? Take this quiz from Kevin Kelly to find out.
(h/t to Robin Sloan at Snarkmarket.)
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(Today’s story is from Pro Publica. Pro Publica is an effort to create non-profit journalism. Pro Publica reporter Sheri Fink won the Pulitzer for Investigative Reporting this year. Images are from the US Coast Guard and are in the public domain. “Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles and graphics… for free. You just have to credit us and link to us, and you can’t edit our material or sell it separately. If you’re republishing online, you have to include all links.”)
BP Had Other Problems in Years Leading to Gulf Spill
by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica – April 29, 2010 11:01 pm EDT
BP, the global oil giant responsible for the fast-spreading spill in the Gulf of Mexico that will soon make landfall, is no stranger to major accidents.
In fact, the company has found itself at the center of several of the nation’s worst oil and gas–related disasters in the last five years.
In March 2005, a massive explosion ripped through a tower at BP’s refinery in Texas City, Texas, killing 15 workers and injuring 170 others. Investigators later determined that the company had ignored its own protocols on operating the tower, which was filled with gasoline, and that a warning system had been disabled.
The company pleaded guilty to federal felony charges and was fined more than $50 million by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Almost a year after the refinery explosion, technicians discovered that some 4,800 barrels of oil had spread into the Alaskan snow through a tiny hole in the company’s pipeline in Prudhoe Bay. BP had been warned to check the pipeline in 2002, but hadn’t, according to a report in Fortune. When it did inspect it, four years later, it found that a six-mile length of pipeline was corroded. The company temporarily shut down its operations in Prudhoe Bay, causing one of the largest disruptions in U.S. oil supply in recent history.
BP faced $12 million in fines for a misdemeanor violation of the federal Water Pollution Control Act. A congressional committee determined that BP had ignored opportunities to prevent the spill and that “draconian” cost-saving measures had led to shortcuts in its operation.
Other problems followed. There were more spills in Alaska. And BP was charged with manipulating the market price of propane. In that case, it settled with the U.S. Department of Justice and agreed to pay more than $300 million in fines.
At each step along the way, the company’s executives were contrite.
“This was a preventable incident. … It should be seen as a process failure, a cultural failure and a management failure,” John Mogford, then BP’s senior group vice president for safety and operations, said in an April 2006 speech about the lessons learned in Texas City. “It’s not an easy story to tell. BP doesn’t come out of it well.”
In a 2006 interview with this reporter after the Prudhoe Bay spill, published in Fortune, BP’s chief executive of American operations, Robert Malone, said, “There is no doubt in my mind, what happened may not have broken the law, but it broke our values.”
Malone insisted at the time that there was no pattern of mismanagement that increased environmental risk.
“I cannot draw a systemic problem in BP America,” he said. “What I’ve seen is refineries and facilities and plants that are operating to the highest level of safety and integrity standards.”
Nonetheless, Malone, who spent three decades at BP and was promoted to the CEO of BP America shortly after the Texas refinery blast, promised to increase scrutiny over BP’s operations and invest in environmental and safety measures.
He told Congress that it was imperative BP management learn from its mistakes.
“The public’s faith has been tested recently,” he said. “We have fallen short of the high standards we hold for ourselves and the expectations that others have for us.”
Time will tell whether the accident that killed 11 workers and sent the Transocean Deepwater Horizon drilling rig — a $500 million platform as wide as a football field — floating to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico was simply an accident or something else.
Malone, who retired last year, declined to comment for this article. A spokesman for BP was not available for comment.
Families of workers who died in the accident have already filed lawsuits accusing BP of negligence. Congress, as well as the Minerals and Management Service, the federal agency that regulates drilling in the Gulf, were already separately investigating allegations that BP has failed to keep proper documents about how to perform an emergency shutdown of the Atlantis, another Gulf oil platform and one of the largest in the world.
There are also indications that BP and Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig that burned and sank, could have used backup safety gear — a remote acoustic switch that would stanch the flow of oil from a leaking well 5,000 feet underwater — to prevent the massive spill now floating like a slow-motion train wreck toward the Mississippi and Louisiana coastline. The switch isn’t required under U.S. law, but is well-known in the industry and mandated in other parts of the world where BP operates.
In the year before the accident, BP once again aggressively cut costs. A reorganization stripped 5,000 jobs from its payroll, saving BP more than $4 billion in operating costs, according to a report sent to ProPublica by Fadel Gheit, an investment analyst for Oppenheimer.
On April 27, as the U.S. Coast Guard worked with BP engineers to guide remote control submarines nearly a mile underwater in a futile effort to close a shut-off valve, BP told investors that its quarterly earnings were up more than 100 percent over the last year, beating expectations by a large margin. After underperforming its competition throughout the last decade, Gheit wrote, BP was the only major oil company to perform better than the S&P 500 last year.
Write to Abrahm Lustgarten at Abrahm.Lustgarten@propublica.org.
Want to know more? Follow ProPublica on Facebook [6] and Twitter, and get ProPublica headlines delivered by e-mail every day.
***
BP was one of Mother Jones’s 10 Worst Companies of 2005.
“Nationwide, BP’s facilities have had more than 3,565 accidents since 1990, ranking first in the nation, according to a 2004 report by the Texas Public Interest Research Group (TexPIRG).”
The Supreme Court recently ruled that corporations have the rights of persons under the Constitution of the United States. Why then, do they not have the responsibilities? If BP is charged and found guilty of criminal negligence, who will serve the time? If they are sentenced to death, who will go to the electric chair? If they must be tried by a jury of their peers, who will sit in the juror box?
(Today’s story is from Pro Publica. Pro Publica is an effort to create non-profit journalism. Pro Publica reporter Sheri Fink won the Pulitzer for Investigative Reporting this year. Images are from the US Coast Guard and are in the public domain. “Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles and graphics… for free. You just have to credit us and link to us, and you can’t edit our material or sell it separately. If you’re republishing online, you have to include all links.”)
BP Had Other Problems in Years Leading to Gulf Spill
by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica – April 29, 2010 11:01 pm EDT
BP, the global oil giant responsible for the fast-spreading spill in the Gulf of Mexico that will soon make landfall, is no stranger to major accidents.
In fact, the company has found itself at the center of several of the nation’s worst oil and gas–related disasters in the last five years.
In March 2005, a massive explosion ripped through a tower at BP’s refinery in Texas City, Texas, killing 15 workers and injuring 170 others. Investigators later determined that the company had ignored its own protocols on operating the tower, which was filled with gasoline, and that a warning system had been disabled.
The company pleaded guilty to federal felony charges and was fined more than $50 million by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Almost a year after the refinery explosion, technicians discovered that some 4,800 barrels of oil had spread into the Alaskan snow through a tiny hole in the company’s pipeline in Prudhoe Bay. BP had been warned to check the pipeline in 2002, but hadn’t, according to a report in Fortune. When it did inspect it, four years later, it found that a six-mile length of pipeline was corroded. The company temporarily shut down its operations in Prudhoe Bay, causing one of the largest disruptions in U.S. oil supply in recent history.
BP faced $12 million in fines for a misdemeanor violation of the federal Water Pollution Control Act. A congressional committee determined that BP had ignored opportunities to prevent the spill and that “draconian” cost-saving measures had led to shortcuts in its operation.
Other problems followed. There were more spills in Alaska. And BP was charged with manipulating the market price of propane. In that case, it settled with the U.S. Department of Justice and agreed to pay more than $300 million in fines.
At each step along the way, the company’s executives were contrite.
“This was a preventable incident. … It should be seen as a process failure, a cultural failure and a management failure,” John Mogford, then BP’s senior group vice president for safety and operations, said in an April 2006 speech about the lessons learned in Texas City. “It’s not an easy story to tell. BP doesn’t come out of it well.”
In a 2006 interview with this reporter after the Prudhoe Bay spill, published in Fortune, BP’s chief executive of American operations, Robert Malone, said, “There is no doubt in my mind, what happened may not have broken the law, but it broke our values.”
Malone insisted at the time that there was no pattern of mismanagement that increased environmental risk.
“I cannot draw a systemic problem in BP America,” he said. “What I’ve seen is refineries and facilities and plants that are operating to the highest level of safety and integrity standards.”
Nonetheless, Malone, who spent three decades at BP and was promoted to the CEO of BP America shortly after the Texas refinery blast, promised to increase scrutiny over BP’s operations and invest in environmental and safety measures.
He told Congress that it was imperative BP management learn from its mistakes.
“The public’s faith has been tested recently,” he said. “We have fallen short of the high standards we hold for ourselves and the expectations that others have for us.”
Time will tell whether the accident that killed 11 workers and sent the Transocean Deepwater Horizon drilling rig — a $500 million platform as wide as a football field — floating to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico was simply an accident or something else.
Malone, who retired last year, declined to comment for this article. A spokesman for BP was not available for comment.
Families of workers who died in the accident have already filed lawsuits accusing BP of negligence. Congress, as well as the Minerals and Management Service, the federal agency that regulates drilling in the Gulf, were already separately investigating allegations that BP has failed to keep proper documents about how to perform an emergency shutdown of the Atlantis, another Gulf oil platform and one of the largest in the world.
There are also indications that BP and Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig that burned and sank, could have used backup safety gear — a remote acoustic switch that would stanch the flow of oil from a leaking well 5,000 feet underwater — to prevent the massive spill now floating like a slow-motion train wreck toward the Mississippi and Louisiana coastline. The switch isn’t required under U.S. law, but is well-known in the industry and mandated in other parts of the world where BP operates.
In the year before the accident, BP once again aggressively cut costs. A reorganization stripped 5,000 jobs from its payroll, saving BP more than $4 billion in operating costs, according to a report sent to ProPublica by Fadel Gheit, an investment analyst for Oppenheimer.
On April 27, as the U.S. Coast Guard worked with BP engineers to guide remote control submarines nearly a mile underwater in a futile effort to close a shut-off valve, BP told investors that its quarterly earnings were up more than 100 percent over the last year, beating expectations by a large margin. After underperforming its competition throughout the last decade, Gheit wrote, BP was the only major oil company to perform better than the S&P 500 last year.
Write to Abrahm Lustgarten at Abrahm.Lustgarten@propublica.org.
Want to know more? Follow ProPublica on Facebook [6] and Twitter, and get ProPublica headlines delivered by e-mail every day.
***
BP was one of Mother Jones’s 10 Worst Companies of 2005.
“Nationwide, BP’s facilities have had more than 3,565 accidents since 1990, ranking first in the nation, according to a 2004 report by the Texas Public Interest Research Group (TexPIRG).”
The Supreme Court recently ruled that corporations have the rights of persons under the Constitution of the United States. Why then, do they not have the responsibilities? If BP is charged and found guilty of criminal negligence, who will serve the time? If they are sentenced to death, who will go to the electric chair? If they must be tried by a jury of their peers, who will sit in the juror box?
Simple design changes can make a substantial impact on the environmental footprint. Andrew Kim makes the case for square soda bottles. A brief interview with Kim can be found here.
In early March I wrote a post about seed bombs. Seed bombs are a guerrilla gardening technique that combines soil, terracotta, and seeds into balls you can toss into neglected, or abandoned spaces. These seed balls are especially good for fenced off areas that are dying to be filled with wildflowers.
These guerrilla gardeners are distributing their seed bombs through re-purposed candy machines.
Seed bombs are so hip right now that they’re being sold at the trendy Anthropologie.
In early March I wrote a post about seed bombs. Seed bombs are a guerrilla gardening technique that combines soil, terracotta, and seeds into balls you can toss into neglected, or abandoned spaces. These seed balls are especially good for fenced off areas that are dying to be filled with wildflowers.
These guerrilla gardeners are distributing their seed bombs through re-purposed candy machines.
Seed bombs are so hip right now that they’re being sold at the trendy Anthropologie.
April 19, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DOW THROWS A DISMAL PARTY, FEW ATTEND
Underattended “Run for Water” plagued by death, zombies, and dozens of “Dow spokesmen”; truth seems to run free
Video: Yes Men video coming soon here; other video here
Stills: Yes Men pictures coming soon here; numerous others here
Contact: Whitney Black (803)466-3786; press@theyesmen.org
Brooklyn, NY — Bucolic Prospect park in Brooklyn, NY played host to a bizarre spectacle on Sunday, as a dramatically under-attended Dow-sponsored “Run for Water” was infiltrated and turned upside down by hundreds of furious activists, including a hundred dressed as Dow spokespeople.
New Yorkers who came to the park expecting a light run followed by a free concert found themselves unwitting extras in a macabre and chaotic scene as runners keeled over dead, Dow-branded grim reapers chased participants, and a hundred fake Dow representatives harangued other protesters and and handed out literature that explained Dow’s greenwashing program in frank detail.
The actions called attention to Dow’s toxic legacy in places like India (the Bhopal Catastrophe), Vietnam (Agent Orange) and Midland Michigan (Dioxin Contamination), and to the absurdity of a company with serious water issues all over the world sponsoring the Live Earth Run For Water.
After race cancellations in London, Milan, Berlin, and Sweden, on-site Dow brand managers were in damage-control mode. But their job was made harder by the hundred fake “Dow” spokespeople who loudly but clumsily proclaimed Dow’s position (“Our race! Our earth!” and “Run for water! Run for your life!”), spoke with many runners, screamed at the other protesters, passed out beautifully-produced literature, and all in all looked a whole lot better than the real Dow reps, who seemed eager to make themselves scarce.
“I don’t know what’s going on here,” said Tracey Von Sloop, a Queens woman who attended the race. “All I know is these people are both crazy, and Dow is f*ing sick. I’m outta here.”
The event was the latest blow to Dow’s greenwashing efforts, the most visible element of which is the “Human Element” multi-media advertising campaign, one of the most expensive, and successful, marketing efforts in recent history. It even won an “Effie Award” for the most effective corporate advertising campaign in North America.
“Effective,” perhaps — but also completely misleading. To name just a few examples of Dow’s water-related issues: Dow refuses to clean up the groundwater in Bhopal, India, site of the largest industrial disaster in human history, committed by Dow’s fully-owned subsidiary, Union Carbide. As a result, children continue to be born there with debilitating birth defects. Dow has also dumped hundreds of millions of pounds of toxic chemical byproducts into wetlands of Louisiana, and has even poisoned its own backyard, leaving record levels of dioxins downriver from its global headquarters in Midland, Michigan.
“We thought it must be a joke when we first heard that Dow Chemical Company was sponsoring a run for clean water,” said Yes Woman Whitney Black. “Sadly, it was not. One of the world’s worst polluters trying to greenwash its image instead of taking responsibility for drinking water and ecosystems it has poisoned around the world? What an awfully unfunny way to start off Earth Week. We decided the event needed a little comic relief.”
Irony was piled on irony throughout the race, which Dow absurdly claimed was going to be “the largest solutions-based initiative aimed at solving the global water crisis in history. At one point, organizers were caught on tape dramatically throwing out excess water left over because of an embarrassingly low turnout.
Groups organizing the action included the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, New York Whale and Dolphin Action League, the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign, the Wetlands Activism Collective, Global Justice for Animals and the Environment, Kids For A Better Future, The Yes Men, and hundreds of assorted volunteers, activists and mischief makers.
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I learned a new term today – LOHAS – Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability.
“Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) is a demographic defining a particular market segment related to sustainable living, “green” ecological initiatives, and generally composed of a relatively upscale and well-educated population segment.”
The marketplace includes goods and services such as:
* Organic and locally grown food
* Organic and natural personal care products
* Hybrid and electric cars
* Green and sustainable building
* Energy efficient electronics/appliances
* Socially responsible investing
* Natural household products (paper goods and cleaning products)
* Complementary, alternative and preventive medicine (Naturopathy, Chinese medicine, etc.)
* Fair trade products
* Literature in the Mind/Body/Soul, Holistic Health, and New Age genres
Hmmm, except for the “alternative” medicine and the literature part, this nicely sums up many of my interests.
Perfect. It’s Earth Day and we’re thrilled that in the last 40 years we’ve managed to stop the rivers from burning. (Yes, kids, pollution used to be so bad in this country that rivers caught fire.)
“Cleveland’s main river used to periodically catch fire. On June 22, 1969, trash and an oil slick ignited. The river burned for half an hour, drawing national attention to water pollution nationwide.
“People didn’t swim in the river at the time, and anyone who fell in needed to be checked by a doctor.”
However, since we don’t learn from history, we have many, many people (including the “liberal” president of the United States) who think it’s a good idea to increase oil drilling off the Florida coast. The more you drill the better chance you have for something like this -
It doesn’t take much for drill, baby, drill to become burn, baby, burn.
(h/t Sinfonian)
Perfect. It’s Earth Day and we’re thrilled that in the last 40 years we’ve managed to stop the rivers from burning. (Yes, kids, pollution used to be so bad in this country that rivers caught fire.)
“Cleveland’s main river used to periodically catch fire. On June 22, 1969, trash and an oil slick ignited. The river burned for half an hour, drawing national attention to water pollution nationwide.
“People didn’t swim in the river at the time, and anyone who fell in needed to be checked by a doctor.”
However, since we don’t learn from history, we have many, many people (including the “liberal” president of the United States) who think it’s a good idea to increase oil drilling off the Florida coast. The more you drill the better chance you have for something like this -
It doesn’t take much for drill, baby, drill to become burn, baby, burn.
(h/t Sinfonian)