Kit Stolz

Andrew Revkin: on climate change in a post-media world

Covered a talk by the dean of climate reporters, Andrew Revkin, last week at UCSB, for the Santa Barbara Independent. In part because he got so sick of "the yelling" around climate, a couple of years ago Revkin gave up traditional reporting to teach at Pace University, and to run the great Dot Earth blog on sustainability (and related questions, such as climate) for the New York Times.

This year, seemingly in a better mood, Revkin is promoting the concept of the Knowosphere, a portal for the exchange of ideas useful in getting us humans through "the bottleneck" that E.O. Wilson spoke of a decade ago. Revkin brought up the analogy of yeast bacteria in a sugar solution in a petri dish. They will multiply until they consume all the food, or until they foul their nest with waste, or both, and crash.

In his talk, Revkin pointed out that:

"Scientists for the last fifty years have been saying, "Hey, there's an edge to the petri dish!" Essentially the question is will we be able to find a "peak us" before nature imposes a limit on us."

Revkin had some nifty examples of how Internet ideas have proved useful in facing problems; for instanct, a site for Pennsylvania residents called Fraktrack, that puts all public documents relating to hydraulic fracking on-line in a searchable form. He also thinks education — which can teach the well-accepted fundamentals of climate science to young people — offers hope.

But when it comes to "the yelling," in an answer to my question, Revkin put it with pithy vigor:

“In a post-media world, which is what we’re entering, it’s a great opportunity for institutions, or for individuals who understand these issues, to create a new space for scientific discussion,” he explained. “I think that’s the way forward.”

On the one hand, he's absolutely right about "the yelling." My little story led to immediate attacks on Revkin, inadvertently and ironically proving his point, and making me feel guilty for causing him pain.

On the other hand, I'm troubled by his blithe reference to a "post-media world."

Really? Do we not use the media and need the media today as much as we did twenty-five years ago?

To be specific, aren't we actually more dependent on The New York Times than ever?

The culture without the media. Talk about a post-apocalyptic landscape…

Eulogy for a watershed: Tam Valley in Marin County

My good friend David Healy sends along a touching/troubling essay about the development of his Marin County town, Tam Valley, in the days of his and my youth, approximately fifty years ago.

When I was a kid in the valley, we didn't need "facilities." We had the hills to hike in and the fields to play football in. Recreation was spontaneous, creative, inventive.

I remembered again Coyote Creek made sterile, and Corte Madera Creek and Tamalpais Creek, and the creeks of Terra Linda, Lucas Valley, and Novato following suit. I thought of all the marshes long since filled, like the ones where Redwood High School and Mill Valley's new Middle School now stand, and I wondered what the students in these schools know about the heritage that could have been theirs.

Not much, I guess. They study biology in text books while the great marshes rot under them, beneath six feet of "clean fill."

I thought again about my Tam Valley childhood, and I realized that almost everything I know about the natural world I learned during those years. Most of what I studied in college text books I have forgotten, but childhood experiences have stayed with me. Those years cannot be repeated; every wild place of significance which I knew as a kid is gone, transformed, sanitized, "brought up to standard." I realized, standing in that desolate asphalt and weed covered school yard, that when I wrote LIVING WATER, a story about the Sierras and the mighty watershed of the Sacramento River, I was really writing a eulogy for the little watersheds of my childhood creeks, and that THIS LIVING EARTH, which traces the learning process my wife and I experienced in the San Geronimo Valley and West Marin, is just as much an epitaph for the house–covered Tam Valley grasslands.

Though published in l973, David Cavagnaro's writing remains as potent and as relevant as ever.What will our future look like, when kids today — in Marin County and around the world — grow up away from nature?

At least we have some idea of the past. Here's a favorite painting of Marin by William Keith, from 1869, before it was "brought up to standard."

It's called San Anselmo Valley near San Rafael.

The Sierras: A lot younger than they look

The Sierra Nevada mountains are nowhere near as old as they look; geologically, they're shockingly young. That's the news from David Perlman, a science writer for the San Francisco Chronicle.

The mountains of the Sierra Nevada are still rising, and they're a lot younger than most scientists previously thought.

That's the conclusion of Earth scientists in Nevada who have used space-based radar and the most advanced GPS measurements to conclude that the entire range is now rising at a rate of one to two millimeters a year – less than an inch a decade – and in its modern form could be less than 3 million years old.

Perlman writes this story so well you can forget it's geological in nature. His lede touches on an underlying reality, as psychological as it is scientific: When you're in the mountains they can seem impossibly ancient.

Interestingly, their most famous fan, despite living in the 19th century with zero access to this sort of data, was forever insisting on their youth and creativity.

Whether or not we humans can see it:

"Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everyting in endless song out of one beautiful form into another."

[So wrote John Muir, in "Yosemite National Park"]

And this gives me a chance to put up the latest of Tom Killion's work from the High Sierra. His colors are characteristically wild, even as he perfectly frames a classic Sierra scene, from the deservedly popular Rae Lakes area near Kearsarge Pass; and well, I just have to post it.

How to salve the pain of long-term unemployed: Retire

Could early retirement be even better for the long-term unemployed than marriage?

A new study by a team of German economists tests a theory that suggests so. The thery posits that we all have a "identity utility," and thus the unhappiness we feel due to unemployment — which in countries like Germany and even the US probably doesn't mean hunger or great deprivation — comes from the sense that we are abnormal, that we have failed, because we aren't doing our jobs.

…unemployment makes those people who consider themselves part of a social category “able-to-work members of society”, but who are no longer able to meet one of the most important norms of that group (ie being employed), unhappy.

To confirm this interpretation and to isolate this cause for the unhappiness of the long-term unemployed from other causes, we focus on a very special event in the life of the long-term unemployed – retirement (Hetschko et al 2011). Entering retirement brings about a change in the social category, but does not change anything else in the lives of the long-term unemployed. When a long-term unemployed person retires, she is still out of work, but she no longer identifies herself with the social category of those “able to work”, but rather with that of the retired. Retirees are no longer subjected to the social norm of having to be employed, thus evoking an increase in the identity utility and the wellbeing of the long-term unemployed.

Could retirement really make that big a difference? Yes. According to this graph, life satisfaction jumps by an average of .3 on a scale of 1-10, after retirement among the long-term unemployed, and among men who have been unemployed for a long time, by .7 or even more.

That's a greater life satisfaction increase than marriage, which comes in at a mere .2. [Of course, this is in Germany, where secure retirements are the social norm.]

Via Suzy Khimm.

To see the Prez, it helps to be a whale

In Las Vegas, to be a "whale" — a high roller — you have to be ready to live large, even if it costs $500,000 an hour.

It's a little like what you have to do if you want to get into the White House and see the President. Big bucks, as this graphic shows. Perhaps coincidentally, it's known as the "Blue Whale":

Other representations of related data, with other spirit animal names, are posted on a fascinating and apparently new site devoted to representing numerical facts in graphic form, a tumblr (of all things) called ChartsnThings.

The proprietor, New York Times graphics editor named Kevin Quealy, discusses how he "cleans up" the data by putting it through programs. Correlation comes in various forms: Working in R is necessary but "unsexy," he says, for example. He briefly explains how to explicate datasets with various tools.

Could this be the fastest possible delivery of fact to mind?

How to live forever: become a pop music star

This year at Coachella, the late great Tupac Shakur performed live with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre.

You can see it for yourself:

Okay, yes, it's digital trickery, employing unimaginably vast quantities of data, but still — it's pretty awesome. I'm ready to see the Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain versions, which are promised soon.

Why not? Isn't this the underlying promise of pop music stardom — immortality?

[Ed. note: Correction! This was actually not a hologram, but an old stage trick — but a comment on the story linked above once said that the creators are working to bring back other artists.]

Rilke: gathering the sweetnessnesses of plant love

While walking the Appalachian Trail with a friend a couple of weeks ago, all through Georgia and into far western North Carolina I found myself in the company of wild violets. Brought to mind this quote from the fourth of Rilke's wide-ranging and ever-fascinating Letters to a Young Poet:

…all beauty in plants and animals is a quiet enduring form of love and longing…patiently and willingly uniting and increase and growing, not out of physical delight, not out of physical suffering, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain and more powerful than will and withstanding. O that man might take this secret, of which the world is full even to its littlest things, more humbly to himself and bear it, more seriously and feel how terribly difficult it is, instead of taking it lightly.

In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling [the mind] with sublimity and exaltation. And those who come together in the night and are entwined in rocking delight do an earnest work and gather sweetnessnessses, gather depth and strength for the some of some coming poet, who will arise to speak of ecstasies beyond telling.

“I will not walk away from the promise of green energy”: Obama

This year, despite the failure of the solar firm Solyndra, to which a half-billion dollars of Federal aid was guaranteed, President Obama reaffirmed his support of green energy. He said so in January, when the right was stirring on pot of this issue, reminding one and all of a lost $535 million. The Prez confronted the issue directly and appears to have put it to rest with his declaration that I will not walk away from the promise of green energy. (It doesn't hurt that green energy consistently polls well, from North Carolina to California and all across the country, by huge margins)

Brings to mind this instant classic from Joel Pett.

If only we had such problems!

Winner of Ventura county climate action award: 2012

Yours truly doesn't often win awards — it's been since college, actually — so when I won an award for my climate reporting (cited was Drought-Proofing Ventura County) it's news worth posting here.

I was up against fellow reporter and friend Zeke Barlow, who unfortunately for the county has taken a job in Virginia, and an professor. Here's a link to a picture (bottom right) of the winners: I'm standing (for the curious) on the lower far right, between two men, two supervisors, in dark suits.

Here's the plaque.

In sustainable bamboo. Yes, I'm happy to be called a hero for once.

The feminism of The Hunger Games: Katha Pollitt

It's cultural news when an esteemed writer/critic/poet goes head over hells for the latest in pop culture. Expresses his or her love for a work's artistry, even if a million other people love it too, even if it's making a gazillion dollars. To a believer in democracy, this ardency speaks for itself.

Philosophers such as Plato and Kant say that's wrong, but I say the human response to an artistic offering deserves to be a part of the weighing of its worthiness, if not the only part.

So let me turn this space over to Katha Pollitt, who in The Nation marvelously explores The Hunger Games. After gushing for a moment about the book and the movie, she turns to well-accepted interpretations of the story:

There are many ways to analyze The Hunger Games. You can see it as a savage satire of late capitalism: in a dystopian future version of North America called Panem, the 1 percent rule through brute force, starvation, technological wizardry and constant surveillance. The Games exemplify these methods: as punishment for a past rebellion, each of the twelve districts of Panem must sacrifice two teenagers, a boy and a girl, to come to the Capitol (sic) and compete in a televised ritual of murder and survivalism until only one is left. Tea Partiers can imagine an allegory of oppressive Washington, and traditionalists can revel in the ancient trope of the moral superiority of the countryside: the district people are poor and downtrodden and wear Depression-style clothes but they live in families, sing folk songs and have a strong sense of community. In the Capitol, which has the dated-futuristic look of a fascist Oz, the lifestyle is somewhere between the late Roman Empire, the court of Louis XVI and the Cirque du Soleil. You can also read the book as an indictment of reality television, in which a bored and cynical audience amuses itself watching desperate people destroy themselves, and the movie plays this angle for all it’s worth.

Much to unpack here, but note how she catches the movie's ability to avoid taking sides politically. To reach young and old, leftists and Tea Partiers. And that's not even mentioning its feminism:

The element that is the most striking to me, though, is Katniss, portrayed in the film by the splendid Jennifer Lawrence. Katniss has qualities usually given to boys: a hunter who’s kept her mother and sister from starving since she was 11, she’s intrepid and tough, better at killing rabbits than expressing her feelings, a skilled bargainer in the black market for meat. No teenage vegetarian she! At the same time, she’s feminine: never aggressive or swaggering, tenderhearted and protective of the defenseless—when her little sister Prim’s name is chosen for the Games, Katniss volunteers to take her place; during the games she risks death to protect the lovable girlchild Rue (Amandla Stenberg). Not to get too literary about this most popular of popular fiction, you can see Katniss as a version of the goddess Artemis, protectress of the young and huntress with a silver bow and arrows like the ones Katniss carries in the Games.