NatureLand: What They Used to Call the Environment
worldsfair | November 23, 2009I recently attended the TEDxVancouver event, which was wonderfully done and also useful for being able to network with a lot of interesting people. There was, however, one thing that irked me - nothing to do with the conference logistics but rather a statement or two issued by one of the speakers, Patrick Moore.
Just a little background on Patrick: he's one of the founders of Greenpeace, with a major role in the evolution of the organization in its earlier days. However, currently, he's a little more well known for his climate change skepticism views, and particularly his advocacy for…
worldsfair | October 30, 2009Realclimate.org has a great post today called "An Open Letter to Steven Levitt." In case, you haven't heard, this is the economist, and one of the noted authors of the Freakonomics, who recently published Superfreakonomics, a book that is fast gaining notoriety as being fraught with many errors on the issue of Global Warming.
Essentially, the post does a great job in showing how some simple arithmetic could have easily demonstrated problems in one of the claims provided in the new book (on why utilizing Solar Energy would effectively be worse for Global Warming).
It's a wonderful piece,…
worldsfair | October 20, 2009I've just had a piece published in the Walrus, and it's also available to read at their website. Basically, the piece is about how this 85ft Blue Whale skeleton was discovered and prepped for a new museum at the University of British Columbia.
It was really quite amazing to chat with Mike deRoos, the aforementioned Master Skeleton Articulator, and it's worth mentioning that he was not the one who came up with the job title. He was as humble and nice as humble and nice can be.
Anyway, whilst finding out stuff for the piece, I had a chance to take a few photos, which you can see below. It…
bcohen | October 1, 2009If you know where the Spy Museum is, I encourage you to read "Days at the Museum #4: International Week" over at McSweeney's. If you don't know where the Spy Museum is, well, help me help you find out.
Albert Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada, California,1868 (from the Smithsonian website)
Some other things you may find in this column: Italian food in Chinatown; Japanese tourists; Albert Bierstadt in Rome and California; a French fellow; green denim on Germans; the serenity of a virtuous public space; and Obama's "Hope" poster.
It's part four of Days at the Museum. Part I was noted here;…
bcohen | September 25, 2009Instead of me answering that, I wondered instead how other people have argued about the question. To be more specific, since I am interested in the role of scientific practice for defining the land, I wondered how people argued about whether or not science was better for agriculture. I wrote a book about it. It's called Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside. I commented here a few months ago that the book was finally on its way. Although Amazon sales do not begin until October 20th (here is their link), the publisher has it officially listed for…
bcohen | September 4, 2009I had the chance to interview Rebecca Solnit for The Believer. It's on shelves now, in their September issue. They've also put the full text of it on-line at their website. (Here it is.)
To quote the interview's intro, Solnit is the author of twelve books. She is a journalist, essayist, environmentalist, historian, and art critic; she is a contributing editor to Harper's, a columnist for Orion, and a regular contributor to Tomdispatch.com and The Nation; she's also written for, among other publications, the L.A. Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the London Review of Books.
She talks…
bcohen | August 26, 2009Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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Part 3 with Julie Sze, discussing her book Noxious New York, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: What place did science play in the EJ issues of the communities you've studied? We've talked about tensions between expertise, technical knowledge, and lived community experience in other conversations. It's a vast subject, in fact, and I shouldn't cast this question so tidily. But for Noxious New York, where did scientific practices fit?
JS: Science played a large part in the story I told in New York City, a story…
bcohen | August 24, 2009Part 1 (below) | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (MIT Press, 2007), with its author Julie Sze. Sze is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of California at Davis, an environmental justice scholar, and the founding director of the Environmental Justice Project at the John Muir Institute for the Environment.
Noxious New York "analyzes the culture, politics, and history of environmental justice activism in New York City within the…
bcohen | August 13, 2009Seed/Scienceblog alum Katherine Sharpe (she of austere head office fame), recently conducted a fascinating experiment in deprivation. There's Lent, of course, the standard bearer of voluntary deprivation. And there are those who give up caffeine, or television, or the internet, or long lists, or sarcasm for some time. But this is the first I've seen of someone trying to live in our culture, our 21st century hyper-consumer, radically plasticized culture, without plastics. But Katherine tried it. Plus, she began it with a nod to Chris Jordan's compelling art on our plasticized world (about…
bcohen | July 23, 2009Tim LeCain, a professor at Montana State (in Bozeman) and a talented scholar in environmental history and the history of technology ("envirotech"), has just published Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines that Wired America and Scarred the Planet. Although I've not read it yet, I'm familiar with LeCain's work in general (having read prior work that is now part of the book). He's a solid scholar and a notable writer; this is important work.
I copy here from the Rutgers Press description of the book:
The place: The steep mountains outside Salt Lake City. The time: The first decade of the…
bcohen | July 16, 2009I haven't been here much, but I did begin a new series over at McSweeney's called "Days at the Museum." It's a limited-run set of dispatches (summer-length, let's say) about research at the Smithsonian and related miscellany. Tuesday was the first one, called "Ronzoni All the Way Down."
This is the central image of the story, a fairly well-known portrait by the French Barbizon artist Jean-Francois Millet from 1857 called "The Gleaners":
And what is the story? I'll repost it in full below the fold. I'd bet it's fair to say it has the character of one of Lawrence Weschler's Convergences…
bcohen | July 14, 2009Alas, I have a book cover to share for Notes from the Ground! I'm pleased with it. I was even brought to use an exclamation point just there.
It happens, I know it, it happens, people judge these things by their covers. I don't say so to be cutesy or play the cliche. I'm just acknowledging it happens. I've done it. Not infrequently, in fact. The one for this book is a plate from the 1697 John Dryden translation of Virgil's The Georgics, one of his epics and the one that threads through the book underneath the cover. I'm excited to see it. Make posters, put it on your walls, behold,…
bcohen | June 25, 2009The photographer Jade Doskow is capturing and creating images of the once-grand spectacles called World's Fairs. Her photographs do triple duty: they track down those old sites, in cities across the world (from Brussels to Seville, from New York to Spokane, from Paris to Philadelphia); they call back to the technological grandeur such exhibitions sought to promote; and they put those now-decaying sites into a contemporary landscape, setting up questions about past and present and hoped-for futures and the role of technological throughout.
Caption from TMN: "'The Columbian Exposition,'…
bcohen | June 10, 2009A slow June at the Fair (see here for an explanation), but I'm popping in to share what constitutes a different sort of landscape image(s) below. Here's the first:
The Citarum River in Indonesia.
Here we have landscapes of garbage, scenes of environments overwhelmed with waste, with excess, with disposed and disposable items. The images are jarring to me, especially when defined as landscapes -- that these are visions of the terrain in which we live. Nobody would confuse these for wilderness pictures. In this case, the human contrivance is too obvious to warrant comment, though In prior…
bcohen | April 20, 2009Or so I was told.
Speaking of ill-conceived arguments, we've been blessed at The World's Fair to host a lively conversation about NASCAR over the past two years. After one provocative query -- isn't burning a lot of fossil fuel bad for the environment?; can you believe they just banned lead in racing fuel after all these decades? -- we found some support from the NASCAR fan community itself.
After you get a chance to read up on the prior NASCAR post, for context to this post, come on back. I think there are a few lessons to be had. One is that we still lack a facetious sans serif font for…
bcohen | April 9, 2009USA Today's Traci Watson includes a nice graphic showing reductions in CO2 emissions during the economic downturn. It's in this story, "Bad economy helps cut CO2 emissions". This trend follows and fits in line with a post a few weeks ago about landfills receiving less trash during the recession. I'll forgo duplicating my commentary here and say only to read the one at the landfill link.
But here are three stats Watson offers:
Carbon dioxide from U.S. power plants fell roughly 3% from 2007 to 2008, according to preliminary data from the Environmental Protection Agency analyzed by the…
bcohen | March 16, 2009
Landfills are leading consumption indicators. Their use is declining in the recession. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the Loudon County landfill (that's in Northern Virginia) has seen a decrease of 30% in the past year; nearby Prince William's County has seen a 20% decrease. Loudon County's landfill was slated to close in 2012, filled to capacity by that time. Because of the decrease in consumption--fewer Circuit City boxes to throw away, fewer packages and old appliances, more saving and reuse--it will be open for an additional year and half.
In an extravagantly…
bcohen | February 26, 2009"The [Environmental Justice (EJ)] movement," writes Gwen Ottinger, "was galvanized in the early 1980s by the observation that toxic chemicals and other environmental hazards are concentrated in communities of color. EJ activists, many of them veterans of the civil rights movement, began to argue that social equality demanded an end to this 'environmental racism.' Currently, however, it is not equality but health that dominates grassroots activists' campaigns against chemical contamination."
Ottinger is a fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation's (CHF) Center for Contemporary History and…
bcohen | February 23, 2009The industrialization of agriculture, egg version.
An egg factory in China. Click on image for link to original site, credited to AP Photo/Andy Wong as posted at the Globe by Alan Taylor.
The Boston Globe has an elegant photo series called The Big Picture at its website. I don't know why this isn't more publicized. Maybe it is; maybe I've been distracted. I got lost for a half hour surfing around past entries. Above is one of the images from a series, "At Work," and below are selections from that set. I put these into the series on Landscapes and Modernity here at the blog. (Try trees;…
bcohen | February 13, 2009I had the chance to see a talk by William Cronon last week here at U.Va. He's a professor at the University of Wisconsin and a recognized world leader in environmental history and environmental studies. His work, while helping define the field of environmental history as it became one in recent decades, also transcends it; there's this too, his skill at public speaking is top shelf. He is and has been for some time working on a book called, simply, The Portage. The talk last week was from that book. Taking one location in Wisconsin--Portage--only miles from which John Muir lived when his…