Across Weirdish Wild Space

When I was at the coffeeshop over the summer in the blazing heat, some idiots drove up in their ginormous SUV and spent a half hour inside the coffeeshop with their engine running. When one of them finally came out to the truck, I asked why he had kept the engine running as it was really super bad for the environment (we are talking old boys club golfer types here and a very new, stupidly huge SUV Hummer class they obviously don’t use for anything more strenuous than driving to the golf club). The answer ? To keep the inside of the truck cool with the air conditioning. I’m pretty sure he got the hint from the way I looked at him.

The same evil part of me that wanted to open the door to their truck, put it in reverse and let it slide into the lake lurvs this same little piece of brilliant guerilla protest. Kinda like counting coup really.

Bumper sticker the morons with “I’m Changing the Climate! Ask me How!” bumper stickers. Brilliant, cheap and if they’re unobservant (as most of them seem to be), a great way to socially pillory them in the absence of public stocks.

I also like the fact that the site has Rules of Engagement that you only hit the really obscenely bad offenders and not trucks or SUVs obviously used for work purposes or in rural areas where they might really be used legitimately.

Very cool bit of harmless but very poignant environmental activism.

The only thing I worry about is the jerks who would actually wear the things as a badge of honour and pride of their excess.

(and yes, even one of my very good friends should be a victim of this tagging. And she knows who she is…)

As pointed out in the article, this is probably not legal where you are without proper permits, but let’s face it, microgeneration and conservation are probably a big part of the future and aren’t you just a little tired of the big dead dinosaur co’s and big utility inc. dragging their feet over making it easier for you ? I know in the Valley here, Fortis has yet to allow net metering which is a crime.

Anyhow, great reading to get you thinking of spring projects (pdf) on this very sunny groundhog day that are easy on the earth. Or fantasize about negative electricity bills, the power company paying you, and your power meter spinning backwards.

Of course, I could just be giddy from the sunshine this morning.

(via hack a day).

Besides the other environmental goings on at the Davos World Economic Forum (go Zeina!), where the evil and wannabe-evil overlords of the world economy have gathered in their mountain fortress of solitude to justify debate the weighty problems of globalism and world issues, there was an interesting paper (pdf) presented by the Yale Centre for Environmental Law and Policy and Columbia’s Centre for International Earth Science Information Network.

It ranks 145 nations in an environmental league table benchmarking environmental stewardship on an Environmental Sustainability Index based on 21 indicators. I’m still reading through the paper and checking out the methodology but it does seem fairly comprehensive (hey, anything presented at Davos is kind of suspect in terms of its objectivity).

Notable rankings (for people I know regularly read the blog) :
Canada is #6 (go Canada !), Finland is #1, the US is #45 and the UK is #66. France is #36, the Netherlands is #41, Morocco is #105, Mexico is #95, Spain is #76, Greece is #67, Vietnam is #127, South Korea is #122, Japan is #30, Germany is #31, Senegal is #59 and the Côte d’Ivoire is #88. I’m also personally wondering whether Iraq’s dismal #143 score is pre or post US invasion.

I’ve talked before about how GDP is a bad measure of a nation’s overall development because of the fact even horrendously negative things for people and an economy are measured positively and other truly important things are not measured because they have no “economic value.” (for instance, resources only have value when processed and not innately of themselves, making it hard to say what the value of something like a pristine forest or other natural object is and make substantive decision on whether harvesting it is a better idea than leaving it alone. In the GDP model, the answer is always to harvest more and faster.)

The ESI does not track sustainability in the overarching “triple bottom line” (economic-environmental-social) sense that is now often used. Sustainability in this broader sense is the dynamic condition of society that depends on more than the protection and management of environmental resources and stresses as measured with the ESI. It is also necessary to have economic sustainability, with wealth distributed so that extreme poverty is eliminated, capital accounts are in balance, and investments in wealth-generating assets are at least equivalent to their depreciation. In addition, no society can be considered sustainable without attention to the social dimension, including effective governance, social justice, and respect for diverse cultural, ethical, and spiritual needs. The ultimate sustainability of human society also depends on education, through which knowledge, science, culture, values and the accumulated experience that we call civilization are transmitted from one generation to the next. For a complete measure of sustainability, the ESI needs to be coupled with equivalent economic and social sustainability indices to give an integrated set of measures of the efforts of countries to move towards full sustainability. With such measures, it will be easier to explore and understand the interactions between the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of the human system.

Arthur Dahl
International Environment Forum
Geneva

Incorporating environmental sustainability information in order to get a better view of overall national economic and global health is a key development to pushing forward and measuring the true costs of business, globalism and the effects of corporations that offload true costs of production on others rather than reflecting them in their products’ pricing. And ultimately, a path to make things better for everyone around the globe.

An excellent primer on some of these sustainability issues if you want to learn more is Paul Hawkin’s seminal The Ecology of Commerce(Amazon, ORL). I’d also recommend the documentary The Corporation which you can generally get via BitTorrent now that it is no longer in theatres.

(via Nature)

playing : Sugar Cane by Space Monkeys

Can I tell you how great these are ? Six ways to “live like we mean it”.

Six comics style mini sites from Section Z presenting the big ideas making our economy safe for people and nature : clean energy, buying local, FSC Forests, salmon, and the commons.

Absolutely brilliant. Clear, concise, entertaining and gets the message across.

(via a great pdf repro of the A Tale of Two Tomatoes” site @ ChangeThis)

Much like the brilliant Ringu by Hideo Nahata’s which inspired the Hollywood bastardization of The Ring and ruined the original which is what I consider perhaps the scariest film I have ever seen, Ju On is the Japanese pre cursor to the US remake The Grudge (starring Buffy !). I wanted to see this before seeing the remake if Ringu was any indication of the quality of the film I would be missing seeing the Americanized version first.

In a sense, Ju On is an updated haunted house story. Rika, a volunteer care worker enters a house where a violent and tragic death, the murder of a mother and child be their father, has left an indelible psychic imprint on the home. She enters to find an elderly women in a catatonic state completely unresponsive and staring off into space. As she beings to take care of her and clean the disastrously messy home, she enters a room where she hears scratching and after untaping an obviously intentionally taped shut closet door, discovers a cat and then suddenly a little silent boy inside the closet.

She runs downstairs to ask the near catatonic woman about the child and calls her agency where she is then surprised by the child who speaks. Running downstairs, she witnesses a black spectral form descending on the elderly woman which terrifies her so much she passes out.

The story jumps back and forth between the stories of the people who have entered the home after the tragedy has taken place over time and disappeared and of the connection with the ghostly spectre (which is weirdly never really explained why she takes vengeance on the living). Some schoolgirls checking out the haunted house disappear, as do the policemen involved with the investigation of Rika’s complaint and the mystery deepens.

The film is vaguely reminiscint of Ringu to me, at least in the sense that there is a fatal curse that taints anyone who comes in contact with it. Japanese culture is interesting in this way, as in most American horror films, there is a “moral survival” clause in most cases where someone survives who exhibits some quality which sets them apart from the other characters in either some clichéd chastity, independence or clear headedness.

The incredible thing about both Ju On and Ringu is they do all of this work without a plethora of special effects. Freaking you out through good old fashioned story craft, inference, cinematography and plain creepiness (another interesting contrast I find in Japanese films is that supernatural influences can effect technology like TV, cameras and cell phones which is not really something you see in US films – in fact, it is usually the opposite.). The film creeps you out mostly because of the pale, virtually silent child running around and this slow, malevolent black spectre which gives the impression of stalking, methodical malevolence.

Great use of first person perspectives to emulate close up anxiety and long shots for revelation. Heightens tension incredibly. Rather than sudden musical stings to make you jump, these films use a quiet creepy low tone in the place of the silence that marks the sonic landscape. It makes it incredibly creepy. Seriously, pay attention to the use of sound in both these films if you have the chance.

This film seems to me to pull heavily off the same sense of horror filmmaking as Ringu. The similarities in story, effects, sound and visuals is obvious if you watch Ringu first as opposed to this one.

Make sure you do get the 2003 version of this film which is a remake of the guerrilla video feature releases of Ju On and Ju On 2 which were originally released by Takashi Shimizu before he had a chance to make it with a bigger budget. It should also be noted that this film has thrust Shimizu to the forefront of Japanese horror filmmaking so watch out for more excellent features from him in the future.

I still liked Ringu much, much better than this film. If you haven’t seen any of the ones I’ve mentioned here (Japanese or American), I have to heartily recommend you find the original Ringu and rent it before watching any other film mentioned here. It’s definitely the shining, spooky jewel in the midst of all these.

One of the scary things I find missing from people discussing the issue of our movement to new energy sources is the simple concept of the net energy argument. Simply put, this generally means that any system for generating power must yield more energy out of the generation than you put in to get it.

And while I do hold out a lot of promise for microgeneration (ie. a wind turbine or solar cell in every home), the fact is there are serious issues for large scale power generation currently.

1. Basically, you need more coming out than you put into getting it out
   (this point seems lost on a lot of alternative energy proponents at the moment
   
2. There is a very real resource cost associated with converting an economy over to the kind of energy dependence
   (ie. converting to hydrogen or wind implies massive retooling and conversion costs)
   
3. With projected demand in N. America, no current fossil fuel or alternative system has the capacity to meet our energy needs without some deep conservation measures. We are all consuming too much energy
   
4. Toxic products or greenhouse gases in creation or generation are undesirable and need to be reduced if not totally eliminated
   

One of the nice things I like about biodiesel for instance is that it addresses most of these concerns.

In terms of net energy, algae farms or rapeseed (to say nothing of seed crop which we have a plenty here in Canada) produce 3.2 units of energy per unit (soy) to each unit put in or 4.3 units of energy per unit (rapeseed).

It’s a simple, safe, virtually non-toxic process for creating the fuel. Basically, you’re just encouraging natural processes to decompose vegetable matter. The end product is non-toxic and creates much less greenhouse gases when burned than fossil fuels.

Existing factory plants can be re-fitted to create biomass fuels. Out here in the Valley for instance, Okanagan Biofuels is overhauling the abandoned whisky distillery to generate ethanol. Furthermore, common diesel engines for the most part will safely, reliably, and efficiently burn these fuels to generate electricity or drivetrains (and I have to admit I did not know this before). Several already existing models of trucks (Yukons etc) will burn up to 85% grade ethanol (and virtually all vehicles will burn up to 10% ethanol). Ethanol and other biomass fuels also apparently burn cleaner though there is some sacrifice in power compared to straight gasoline. Finally, existing distribution systems (ie. gas stations) can be used to distribute biomass fuels contrary to what would be required for say, hydrogen. Compared to H₂ generation, biogeneration results in no net CO₂ emissions.

At least for me, biomass provides a realistic and legitimate migration path for societal energy requirements while technologies such as solar, wind, microhydro and changes like microgeneration, net metering and aggressive energy efficiency move into the mainstream.

Another advantage is that a societal shift for these technologies could probably be completed in about 5-10 years, in sufficient time to lessen climate change impacts whereas a hydrogen economy is realistically more than 25 years away.

I’m finding I’m spending a lot of time on alternative energy generation the longer I spend out here in the Okanagan. As a joint 2005 project with my mechanically inclined brother I plan on getting a car running on biodiesel going and playing with the idea of lobbying the local co-op gas station to provide biodiesel fuels for diesel owners.

Of course, all this is only part of the equation I guess. Good public transport, less stupid vehicle design, more energy efficient homes and industrial processes, plus raw energy conservation all figure into the equation to meeting the energy requirements of our populations while making that consumption planet-friendly.

I’m still gathering a lot of information on this front, so anyone who can provide better pointers to the cons of using these technologies (I’ve seen way too many positive articles to make me think there is no downside). ChangeThis also has a very informative PDF on biodiesel versus hydrogen if you can get past the “terrorist regimes own oil” angle as a supporting statement.

Ran across Tangible Media Group at MIT’s Media Lab, and I have to just say what a great idea I thought it was in terms of helping people be responsible consumers. Just in speaking to people, I find most people have absolutely no conception of where their products come from and who is selling them what and would honestly change their consumer patterns given more information about their product purchases.

While the prototype is a bit bulky by design (I’m assuming a production device would be tiny), the device scans barcodes of the goods you are about to buy and makes a clicking noise (think a radiation scanner) based on the environmental or ethical record of the manufacturer of the product. It correlates several online barcode databases with a pollution database and a corporate ethics data bank.

OK, admittedly with the environmental and consumption-oriented mess we’ve gotten ourselves into we’ll need to do more than just shop our way out of it, but I have to admit I think this is a fantastic idea. I’d love to get the backend stuff for this to work as a web-based database. Use your iSight as a scanner like Delicious Library. Hmmmm….

The maze of corporate ownership makes it difficult for consumers to reward good business practices or punish bad ones by changing their buying habits. The products on the shelves in a store look more or less the same whether they were manufactured using child labor, or they increase pollution, etc. These aspects of products are invisible and difficult to understand. In this sense, these aspects are like nuclear radiation (invisible, dangerous, complex), which is part of the reason I designed the Corporate Fallout Detector to look and sound like a Geiger counter.The performative aspect of the Corporate Fallout Detector is also important. For some people, the clicking sound it makes brings back ominous memories of Geiger counters sold to the public in the cold war era. The hope is that hearing this sound, combined with the sight of someone scrutinizing products in a store will cause people to think about their buying decisions in a different way.

Now if it was just a little tinier. I really do think it’s a great idea.

(via we make money not art)

It’s beyond disheartening to see that 20 years after the Bhopal disaster, Dow (after buying Union Carbide in 2001) has still done nothing but token gestures to properly compensate victims or clean up the area of what is humanity’s worst industrial disaster.

Bhopal is a clear case of industrial negligence. Lethally toxic gases leaked from understaffed and under-maintained plant killing 20,000 people, injuring over 500,000 and leaving over 100,000 people chronically ill. The safety systems designed to prevent such a disaster had been consciously shut down in order to save money. Today, the polluted site of the abandoned factory bleeds poisons into the grounds leading to high infant mortality rates and elevated levels of cancer and poisoning related illnesses in the area around Bhopal. And there is even a third generation of victims : the children of parents born after the disaster suffering from life threatening birth defects and abnormalities. Adding to the already shameful inventory of victims suffering from acute breathlessness, brain damage, immuno-deficient illnesses, cancer and TB. Groundwater in Bhopal has become heavily contaminated as well, further toxifying the environment and causing a long term problem stretching into the unforeseeable future.

In the West, we are fairly protected from events like these by the fact we have a strong whistle-blower ethic, heavily protected rights and efficient and comparatively quick courts and effective laws in protecting our safety. Firms which have been found to be putting profits ahead of consumer safety and covering things up (to say nothing of actively contributing to such a disaster) have been punished in civil court and suffered enormous loss of reputations where it’s been demonstrated that there was wilful disregard and negligence. Still though, some days it seems that the needle is tipping in favour of corporations lately with their unbelievable ability to put money and personnel behind lobbying government and law-makers to limit their liabilities and otherwise unfairly protect their interests against the public.

It has made me have radical thoughts mulling over, not just how to make amends for what happened at Bhopal, but in making sure that companies are seriously punished for cutting corners and negligently causing loss of human life.

One thing that was pointed out in the excellent documentary The Corporation was that really the only difference between a normal business and a corporation is the fact that it is basically identified as a legal individual. It has the rights of a legal person.

Yet, for some reason, a corporation is never struck with the same responsibilities we would expect of any sane and reasonable individual. In fact, even with obvious criminal intent by executives in wilfully deceiving or negligently pursuing business practices which are dangerous or even fatal, it is not only very difficult to approach them in civil courts but expensive to the point that it is only the recent advent of class action suits that has allowed them to be brought to any form of justice. And while these suits may in fact (and note that many corporations are lobbying for limitations in punitive fines in these cases) allow some people to find satisfaction at the hands of a few companies in financial means, many firms never admit culpability or negligence.

If an individual causes a criminal act though, the government charges, prosecutes and if found guilty, incarcerates, fines and in some cases even terminates the lives of persons. Why do we not have a criminal code for corporations ? If they are legal individuals, how difficult would it be to have a criminal code for the heinous acts perpetrated by companies that wilfully and criminally neglect the public good ?

I’m not saying that every single sin of a corporation needs to be addressed, but it’s clear that in some heinous cases like major fraud, negligent environmental devastation, loss of human life and other situations, corporations need to be held accountable wherever they are operating. Now, we are getting into the situation where corporations simply export labour and questionable practices to countries where they cannot be prosecuted for what would be crimes in their originating nations.

If people are going to re-establish some sort of equilibrium over what has become the dominant institution on the planet and re-assert some form of democratic ownership over their fates it’s clear that something needs to be done to reward corporations which act within the bounds of the public good to make profit and serve the public over those that put short term gain ahead of the safety, welfare and lives of people.

On this anniversary of such a terrible travesty of justice that still remains unaddressed by those responsible, please support the work of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal and others that are supporting relief, justice and compensation for the continuing victims of the tragedy. Keep in mind, Dow is shirking both its moral responsibilities and its legal ones in these cases, tying up compensation claims found against it and continuing to avoid costs surrounding cleaning and fixing problems. Dow continues to lie and spin its way around this problem and managed to avoid responsibilities in India without ever being held accountable to the victims of Bhopal or their representatives.

Every living system on the Earth is in a state of decline.

We know this and yet continue to ignore the facts thinking some sort of technological magic bullet or heroic effort will evenutally save us and ignoring the gross inequities it causes in the world around us (The West consumes 80% of the world’s resources. The US is responsible for 1/4 of all CO₂ emissions). Satisfying the demands of the West in their current state is stripping the planet of its biotic capacity to sustain and create life.

I am always skeptical when business people write environmental books but I have to say that I am phenomenally impressed with Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce. His vision of a restorative economy, starting from the position that mere sustainability is insufficient with the current rate of degradation, is a refreshing admission from someone in business rather than a died-in-the-wool environmentalist. It also seems intuitively correct. In order to not only maintain the level of our own standard of living at an acceptable level, but also raise that of other less fortunate countries we have to change the way we not only consume but manufacture.

Hawken feels that the corporation, as the dominant institution on the planet, must be where the solution rests and making them accountable both in terms of government action and taxes and policies that encourage market mechanisms to correct activities that do not internalize costs that are forced on the public and planet as externalities. He says that companies, because of the profit motive are essentially proscribed from becoming ecologically sound. Commerce and sustainability are antithetical by design, not by intention. It is fundamentally a design flaw.

A scary statistic he quotes is that even if every company on the planet were to adopt the best practices of places like the Body Shop, Patagonia and REI, the planet would still be in decline. Subtle course corrections are not going to save us.

Hawken advocates that we must design a system where each and every act of consumption and production accumulate as net benefits. I think the thing that is most interesting is that Hawken has a clear set of objectives that he believes, given the right changes in policy and incentives is eminently attainable. Also, he can express them succinctly.

For example :

1. Reduce absolute consumption of energy and natural resources in the North by 80 percent within the next half century
   
2. Provide secure, stable, and meaningful employment for people everywhere
   
3. Be self actuating as opposed to regulated or morally mandated
   
4. Honour market principles
   
5. Be more rewarding than our present life
   
6. Exceed sustainability be restoring degraded habitats and ecosystems to their fullest biological capacity
   
7. Rely on current income
   
8. Be fun and engaging, and strive for aesthetic outcome
   

In a sense, Hawken is simply advocating living from the “interest” from our “natural capital” in order to make sure we can live within the carrying capacity of the planet. He also makes a call for a deeper more meaningful capitalism that goes beyond simply making money or trying to greenwash environmental problems. He is really pointing, much like other authors, to the end of the industrial era. And he calls for a fundamental rearranging of commerce from the perspective of what it takes, makes and wastes.

Markets needs to be re-thought. Locally sustainable should not cost more. The fundamental problem is that while markets are amazing at setting prices, they are terrible at recognizing the true cost of producing goods. And there is an incentive to not accept those costs and offload them as much possible. Andf to borrow more intensely from the future with the ability to extract resources faster and a globalized ability to pull from the expanded world environment.

Sustainable businesses :

1. Replace nationally and internationally produced items with products created locally and regionally
   
2. Take responsibility for the effects they have on the natural world
   
3. Do not require exotic sources of capital in order to develop and grow.
   
4. Engage in production processes that are human, worthy, dignified and intrinsically satisfying
   
5. Create objects of durability and long-term utility who ultimate use or disposition will not be harmful to future generations.
   
6. Change consumers to customers through education
   

Part of the problem stems from what we ascribe value to and thus how we measure growth. It is not necessarily flipping and consuming burgers, chopping forests, or extracting resources. Value is what we ascribe value to. Some things are bad for the economy, even if they do create industrial activity. Economists must learn to subtract from GDP. Part of this, Hawken advocates, is the introduction of Pigovian taxes which would force companies to internalize the costs of externalities and therefore have incentives to become more ecologically sound producers. He advocates scrapping the GATT and NAFTA as not having been able to evince the gains it promised. Free trade is really managed trade and merely acts as a way for companies to externalize costs to other countries rather than internalizing them. However, if we started a concept of rewarding nations with tariff benefits for sustainable and non-exploitive economies, we could bring other nations in line with more environmentally sound and sustainable practices.

Hawken’s book is a bold statement, vivid plan based on sound principles and tremendous food for thought. It also seems eminently practical if only politicos would have the will and bravery to advocate such long ranging changes to the tradition of commerce. The facts are, we derive a great deal of wealth from natural resources, we have not found an effective way to re-invest or preserve that wealth. Commerce needs to exist to serve and nurture humanity’s aspirations as well as seek to reconstruct and revive the world we’ve stripped. This book is a great roadmap to beginning to think about ideas to be able to do that.

playing : Cowards In A Brave New World by Kim Richey

While Hawken thinks these things must inherently start with corporations, the fact is people, by their individual and multiplied actions, are an incredibly vital backbone to creating these changes too.

Enter the freecycle movement. The idea is simple : All sorts of people throw away things every day. The vast majority of these things have value to someone else in their community. Why not tell people you’re giving it away and then let self-interested parties grab it ? Conversely, if you want something, why not first ask if someone else has it and is willing to give it away ?

The movement is usually run through a simple mailing list off Yahoo groups. As of today there are 1,567 cities with active freecycle lists and 567,849 people using them. To join you simply subscribe to the mailing list. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Environmentally, it’s fantastic. It is a sad fact that North Americans waste more stuff every year than a vast majority of countries consume. Reduce, reuse, recycle. If you do have stuff to throw out, log on and offer the stuff before throwing it out or hauling it to the dump. You’d be amazed at what people can use. And if you’re looking for something, you can also leave a message seeing if anyone has stuff. The mechanics and rules are simple. You merely put WANTED or OFFERED in the subject line of the emails and the relevant item (and a TAKEN when someone finally grabs it).

Quite a few people have the stuff lying around in their basement it seems but never think to get rid of it until someone asks. And, it is kind of fascinating to see what people are asking for and giving away just anthropologically. It’s been amazing to see everything from bedroom sets and baby carriages to appliances, cars and raw materials being offered and accepted.

Just this morning, I managed to get a family friend a free office photocopier ! I’ve been amazed at the activity in the last 3 months as I did not believe a small community of this size could sustain a freecycle community. The amount of activity and trades seems to be quite brisk though.

It’s not a solution, but it is definitely a start. Look for one in your community.
Here’s the one for Kelowna. OH, and if there isn’t one in your area, why not be the first person to start one ?

playing : Starlight by The Supermen Lovers

OK, everyone knows I’m a big believer in Linux. Even though I use an iBook, I use Linux for everything. All my servers run it as well as backup machines in the house and around the world.

Part of the problem with figuring out where Linux actually is in relation to other operating systems is simply that no one really knows. It’s not centralized, there are many different flavours and no one can really practically track it. You can measure downloads of the operating system and sold box sets but really, since people can just pass the free and open code around and duplicate it as many times as they want with no control over it, it is impossible to track the real numbers.

So, it is easy for guys like Microsoft to spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) about the number of users and it being a fringe operating system. “Use Linux and be relegated to mediocrity.”, amongst other myths they’ve managed to perpetrate by paying research-results-for-cash consulting companies to do “fair comparisons” on things like total cost of ownership for Linux versus Windows. Most have had holes shot through them in terms of methodology by various Linux proponents but, still. Disinformation works. Look at Iraq.

Linspire (formerly Lindows before they were sued by Microsoft to change the name) has come up with a pretty cool way of figuring out how many people are using it. Whenever a copy of Linspire first connects to the internet, it pings a special address and adds its geographic location to and is then added to a map.

I think the thing that totally blew me away… and I mean really blew me away, is the obviously huge numbers this map seems to represent (on the site you can zoom in for details which is quite cool). In fact, I don’t even think Linspire is a particularly popular flavour of desktop Linux compared to Mandrake, debian, Red Hat, Lycoris or SuSe so just extrapolating from this data, desktop Linux is much, much more popular than a lot of people are realizing. And only growing in popularity.

All bow to the penguin !

(Via Yahoo News)

playing : Tribute by Tenacious D

After Amnesty International, one of the human rights groups I most respect is Human Rights Watch.

They’ve just released an incredibly critical paper, even though they are a US organization, incredibly critical of the US illegally detaining, torturing and mistreating prisoners as well as charging the CIA is “disappearing” captives worldwide.

Sobering reading to go along with the Project for the New American Century.

playing : Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers

More house design research. It was something in the foreword to The Beauty of Straw Bale Homes that got me to read it besides the pictures I’ve seen of straw bale homes in Shelter and Home Work.

Most modern houses are not much more than commodities that tell of our increasing dependence on specialists and our loss of ability to craft our own lives.

I’ve never really thought of straw as a building material, probably something inculcated in me since imagining the fate of the 1st little pig who built his home of straw and what the huffing, puffing wolf did to it. Yet, some of the homes featured in the book have survived even earthquakes and are still standing from 1914 in all sorts of climes (I noticed the book was silent on the topic of calamities inflicted by fairy tale wolves, however).

This book is a followup to the Steen’s How To book on straw home construction called The Straw Bale House. Really, this is a showcase book, with some amazing examples of people using straw as both a fill load bearing construction material as well as infill in North America, Europe and Mexico. The places are amazing, some of them are so gorgeous it is not even funny (in fact, the pictures in Home Work of how amazing straw bale construction looked is a lot of what led me to look at it a bit more in depth).

Perhaps the difference is simply people taking pride in constructing their own homes, but there is something about the clean, smooth stuccoed walls using interesting colours derived from kaolin and clay pigments that you simply do not see from industrial paints.

The book also covers interesting details liks how to mix your own casein and clay paints (alis) as well as internal vermiculite plasters. Cob construction (like in Devon, a mix of clay, soil and sand mixed with water and straw – had to look it up myself) is also covered though lacks the aesthetic sense for me you seem to get from the straw bale homes with their smooth walls. Still, some interesting additions in this book as an entry to the idea of building that house of straw.

The book is quite outspoken about the benefits of straw bale homes. They enumerate the vastly lower cost, natural insulation from cold and heat (R values of 30 -50) which lead to greater energy efficiency, and the acoustic insulation you also gain. These are all in addition to the benefits of your own craftmanship and skill and fashioning something with your own hands.

I think it is the entrepreneurial spirit of many of these books hat is drawing me to them. The idea of building your own shelter rather than merely buying something that someone else conceived and constructed. I guess at root it is more a question of philosophy and choice in how you choose your shelter.

Keep it small
Keep it simple
Build it yourself
Stay out of debt
Use local materials
Be energy-conscious
Make yourself a home, don’t just build a house

I was also impressed with the truism that rather than building or buying a huge McMansion like I see many of my freinds doing, a empty, beautiful modern altar to excess that the book concetrates on a much more organic sense of what is required in a living space.

People need to realize that it’s not what you can afford, it’s what you can inhabit. The rest becomes a burden.

playing : Steam (Quiet Mix) by Peter Gabriel

There is something immensely satisfying about working with my hands. Something incredibly fortifying about the smell of the earth. I don’t get to do it a lot so it’s kind of nice to get to work on house projects.

Today we laid the sod for the lawn at my brother’s house. Went much more quickly that I had imagined. Many hands make light work and all that. Took only about a half day to put down 2 pallets of sod and create a real live lawn. Always amazing what you can do when you get enough people together.

You take a big roll of grass, earth side out, carry it over and roll it down like carpet. Wash, rinse, repeat. Save the worms and make sure they’re tucked under the grass.

And where once there was desert, now there is green.

playing : Capoeira na lua by Mestre Burguês

Just some rainy day food for thought…

During recent years a theory has developed that there shall be no criticism of the foreign policy of the administration, that any such criticism is an attack on the unity of the Nation, that it gives aid and comfort to the enemy, and that it sabotages any idea of a bipartisan foreign policy for the national benefit. I venture to state that this proposition is a fallacy, and a very dangerous fallacy threatening the very existence of the Nation.

In very recent days we have heard appeals for unity from the administration and from its supporters. I suggest that these appeals are an attempt to cover up the past faults and failures of the administration and enable it to maintain the secrecy which has largely enveloped our foreign policy since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was a distinguished Democrat, President Woodrow Wilson, who denounced secret diplomacy and demanded open covenants openly arrived at. The administrations of President Roosevelt and Presidential Truman have repudiated that wise democratic doctrine and assumed complete authority to make in secret the most vital decisions and commit this country to the most important and dangerous obligations. As I see it, Members of Congress, and particularly Members of the Senate, have a constitutional obligation to reexamine constantly and discuss the foreign policy of the United States. If we permit appeals to unity to bring an end to that criticism, we endanger not only the constitutional liberties of the country, but even its future existence.

Senator Robert A. Taft
United States Congressional Record (1951)

(Via The Mediaburn Radio Weblog.)

playing : What’s the Frequency Kenneth? by R.E.M.

Wangari Maathai was named the 2004 laureate. She is the 1977 founder and force behind the grassroots Green Belt Movement in Kenya which planted literally 10s of millions of trees reversing a trend in Africa where 9 trees were being replanted for every 100 cut down leading to intense soil erosion, deforestation, decreased food yields and conflict. Mostly village women did the replanting who while being paid for their labour protected the environment and with the employment were better able to care for their children, families and the future. Maathai also used the tree planting as an entry point for civic education and democratically empowering villagers.

Also notable for her women’s rights and democracy work she is the first African woman to win the peace prize. As well as the first Kenyan woman to be awarded a PhD holding a doctorate in veterinary medicine. She beat out 193 other nominees to be named. During the regime of Daniel arap Moi she was beaten and jailed numerous times for opposing the government.

When our resources become scarce, we fight over them. In managing our resources and in sustainable development, we plant the seeds of peace.

This is the first time the Nobel committee has extended the traditional definition of the peace prize to include environmental and sustainability aspects in defining peace as more than the mere absence or amelioration of war.

Personally, I think it was a phenomenal choice by the committee and echoes similar honours conferred on her by Right Livelihood (1984), Goldman (1991), Edingburg (1993), Petra Kelly (2004) and Sophie (2004).

playing : Don’t Fence Me In by David Byrne

Followup on Powered by sunshine and water

Further debates in the energy discussions. There is an excellent article in Science from a British economist (we’re all joykillers, really) on the potential difficulties of powering cars via large scale hydrogen conversion in the US (ie. H₂, rather than the car conversion idea).

I think this is largely true actually. It would take enormous amounts of power to not only generate H₂ but move the entire petroleum infrastructure over to it and, as pointed out, impact greehouse gas emissions. Interesting stat I was unaware of (though not topical to my points) :

The duo considered the United Kingdom and the United States. Transport accounts for about one third of each country’s energy consumption.

Still, the assumption here is that we would be using commercial large scale generation as the main source of fulfilling demand.

Personally, I’m beginning to wonder whether micro-generation, where say each car or house uses their own power generation (as alluded to in the car article above), rather than a centralized grid being a superior approach to this problem. For instance, if you had an efficient enough setup at your home or with your car, while it is parked unused during the day, or while you’re at work, your home or car could actually feed generating capacity (electrical, once its H₂ needs are taken care of back to the local grid. So, creating a system of micro-generation which involves positive net generation.

Kinda like open source or grassroots power generation. Hmmm… Just pondering but it’s an interesting idea I’ve been toying with since we started working on the next house design, though not sure if the BC grid is required to buy excess power from our next house if we can create it.

Anyone kno