Yodelling is Alive

I went to a nearby town recently, to hear a yodelling concert. New Glarus, Wisconsin is a town founded a hundred seventy years ago a Swiss emigrant community. They far more than cling to old traditions: they cultivate them, and keep them alive. Here are two members of a local choir, getting ready for a concert.

Mobile Citizenship?

A fascinating article in Eurozine on Bulgarian migrant workers examines the ways global capitalism demands a deep rethinking of the very concept of home.

Basically, a huge percentage of Bulgarians are displaced laborers across the European Union, quite often "without papers." Their fate in many respects resembles that of undocumented Mexicans in the US: forever in danger of being deported, they end up under the control of coyotes, sometimes as near-slaves.

As illegal residents, they have a relationship to the host society that is ambiguous at best, and certainly offers no chance at integration.

Here's the question that kept returning to my mind as I was reading: to what extent are American citizens, in full possession of citizenship, thrown into the exact same cultural no-man's-land? How many condos are mere bedrooms for a transient class of professionals, whose belonging to their place begins and ends with their current job?

How many of us would suffer very little loss if our entire cities were to burn to the ground, forcing us to up and relocate?

How I Long For A Paw-Paw

I'm reading a tasty book on endangered foods of North America. It's got everything from "Tennessee Fainting Goats" to all kinds of berries, beans, and corn varieties I'd never heard of.

The authors of Renewing America's Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods broke North America down into ecological "nations" sharing traditional staple foods, from "Maple Syrup Nation" in the northeast, to "Bison Nation" in the plains, to most appropriately, "Acorn Nation" (California).

For each region they highlight several perfectly good foods, that have been left along the wayside for any of several reasons. Mission grapes, for instance: A type of grape grown for wine at Spanish-Californian missions. The breed suffered two setbacks, from which it barely survived. The first, of course, was California's transfer to the United States, which hastened the end of the missions, after which many were abandoned. The second was prohibition, during which period most of the remaining vines plowed under for other crops.

When California's wine industry returned, it was designed in competition with French wine. French grapes like Merlots and Chardonnays were planted. Most growers had never heard of Mission grapes, until one grower discovered feral mission grape vines in a sage-covered hillside she had bought. Apparently left to their fate a century ago, these handful of vines survived and have now been restored as a novelty wine, produced in only a few cases a year.

Meanwhile, some fruits--like Paw-Paws--are too fragile to transport in trucks and crates. I have never had a Paw-Paw, although archeologists have found paw-paw seeds among native kitchen scraps right in my neck of the woods. It's possible to grow them here, but we stick to a half-dozen varieties of apples.

There are several stories like this, and page after page I grew more amazed at how impoverished my supermarket is. There can't be more than a few dozen fruits and vegetables in the produce section rotation; or a dozen meat animals. The authors of Renewing America's Food Traditions have opened my eyes to endless new possibilities.

Beyond the joy of variety, however, lies a deeper issue: if we're ever going to survive a national interruption to our transportation network - whether in the form of terrorism or simple unaffordability (fuel prices) - it will be because our neighborhoods and surrounding counties have figured out how to feed themselves with crops uniquely suited to their conditions.

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Photo Credit: Flickr user Blackstone Photography of WV

Hurricane Season

Badgers are Back in Town

One of the strange aspects of living across the tracks in a college town is seeing life go on, year round, with no hint that another part of the city is alternately bustling or vacant.

It is my pleasure to announce, then, that the Badgers are back in town.

This clip accurately portrays gameday atmosphere, albeit without profane chanting, drunken staggering and puking, and broken bottles on sidewalks. Badger games are fun (although I haven't attended one in three or four years).

These tribal gathering are impressive. It is to Badger home games that alumni typically refer in their fondest memories; the home games, then, are highly significant for "Badger Nation" identification, i.e. fund-raising.

It shouldn't be heroic to make room for the disabled

This is an ugly man. Or was, rather. He was an Etruscan, one of the indigenous tribes of Italy, whose civilization was wiped out by the Romans.

Etruscan art is notable for its depiction of normal people, warts and all--a stark contrast to the heroic obsessions of the Romans.

The professor who taught me these things felt it important to note that a measure of a society's cruelty or kindness is its treatment of the disabled. In the case of the Etruscans, their willingness to depict ugly people suggests a similar willingness to include them in their society.

Which brings us to Sarah Palin.

Andy Crouch notes in Culture-Making that the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate's now-famous decision to keep her Down Syndrome baby is an instance of cultural leadership. In a nation where 85% of Down Syndrome babies are quietly aborted, Palin's is an expression of inclusivity.

So far, so good. But it's a creepy thought to consider that (in the media's eyes, at least), her decision is noble. In fact, if we really believe in inclusivity, tolerance and democracy, we oughtn't bat an eye about Palin's decision. It shouldn't be heroic to make room for the disabled.

The general acclaim about Palin's heroism testifies more to the hidden shame in our society of our hidden intolerance for the weak, the ugly, the disabled and the outsiders.

PHOTO CREDIT: Flickr user diffendale.

Waste is a Spiritual Matter

A conversation about ethanol recently took a surprisingly emotional turn. My friend, from a large Asian country never far from food emergencies, told me how wrong it feels to him when Americans waste food, or play with it, or in the case at hand, drive it.

This was refreshing even as it was urgent. Because food is life. It should be felt, not just consumed. In fact, there's something deeply human about strong feelings about wasted food.

Meanwhile, the New Republic's Vine - their environmental blog - takes a look at wasted food. As it turns out, roughly 50% of the food we humans produce gets wasted. In poor countries it's market inefficiencies (food rotting in the fields etc.); in rich countries it's too much market efficiency (Food is so cheap that we buy more than we can use and throw it away.

Vicarious Vicariosity

My beloved FC Basel qualified for the UEFA Champions League this week. Today they were matched for the group phase against FC Barcelona, Sporting Lisbon, and Shakhtar Donetsk of Ukraine.

I've followed Basel since the 1980's, when I lived there. Back then, the team was in the Swiss division 2, so I can claim to have followed them since they were really bad.

Here is the Question: what does it mean to follow a team vicariously like this? I mean, I live in another country, never watch their games, and know no other fans.

Photo Credit: Flickr User keepthebyte

Manufactured Landscapes

My iPod doesn't actually come from a copper mine in Arizona. It comes from China. And when it eventually gets destroyed, a lot of it will go back to China a scrap and possibly as toxic waste.

Manufactured Landscapes is a documentary I saw recently, on DVD from the library. It's really stirring in its silent depiction of the industrial landscape of the workshop to the world, China.

Here's the trailer. I really recommend it.

Where My iPod Comes From

It is sometimes difficult, in our globalized economy, to conceptualize the connectedness of our consumer products. If, for instance, our bread contains foodstuffs from a half-dozen states and three or four countries, we can be excused ignorance of truly complicated items like computers.

It was a little sobering to recently visit an enormous copper mine in Arizona. (Copper, of course, is needed for circuitry.) It's kind of hard to represent just how enormous this production was, so here are two attempts.

First, a few pictures. The first two are satelite images, screen shots from Google; the third I took from the blue shed in the background of the tire picture above:

Now, here's a panorama with my pathetic camera:

They extract miniscule amounts of copper from all this rock a few grams to the ton, I believe. So mines have to be this big to even stay in business, even at today's sky-high prices. It's the only business model that works.

I'm trying to grow beyond knee-jerk opposition to mining. We oughtn't judge mining in the Sonoran Desert under the same criteria as mining in Armenian forests, for instance.

Reclaiming Friendship

Andy Crouch has a new essay on culture-making.com about online social networks (scroll to August 18, because I can't find a way to link to individual articles).

[Courtesy of Andy's comment: here's the link. Thanks, Andy!]

Looking at Twitter in particular, he points out that there is a limit to interpersonal relationships people can handle: somewhere around 150. Beyond that, as he says, "our little brains get overloaded. But online social networks are not just relational tools; they're also tools for "broadcasting".

It may well be that many of the most powerful media of the next generation will have this hybrid quality—keeping us connected, in some thin but real sense, to our "real" friends, but also allowing us access to the thoughts of folks like Barack Obama. And the second group, the "broadcasters," will likely be the drivers of whatever business model eventually makes these networks sustainable.

True enough. But it's important to add one detail, important from the perspective of humanness: online friends are not identical to real friends. The difference lies in love.

Dr. Venn can help us here:



In this model, set A represents people to whom I am bound by love (broadly conceived); set B represents people to whom I am bound by online social networks. The intersect are those people I know online, and whom I love.

This is an idealized, of course: love resists facile quantification, so it's hard to know where real loyalties lie. One test, of course, is the sickness test: who will come for a visit weeks and months into a sickness? Survivors of such illnesses often testify of surprise about who came and who didn't.

The other source of the confusion is cultural, not technological: as a culture of individualists, we really have no handle on loyal friendship. We are lonely, we don't know how to have friends, and we don't know how to be friends.

So when Myspace et al. use the human word friend to denote a morally neutral technological relationship, our confusion only grows. Adolescents, of course, who are in the process of that most traumatic of splits--away from parents--are doubly confused here.

Then there is the cross-cultural. Americans as a rule are far more prepared to use the word friend than people of more communal cultures. I have, for instance, found old Swiss classmates of mine on Facebook, people with whom I spent years in the same room. But I wouldn't dare add them as friends, because they weren't friends, in the Swiss sense: they weren't people who'd cross the world to be by my deathbed, or visa-versa. And so they remain unconnected to my Facebook account.

But since we live in a hybrid culture, and since Facebook and Myspace remain thoroughly American, I am also friends with people I don't even know, or in the case of Johnny Cash's Myspace account, people who are dead. (I share the latter relationship with 302,000 people, around the population of Pittsburgh.)

Culture-Makers, to use Andy Crouch's term, have low-hanging fruit here: Friendship, real friendship, is a lost art, but one which has strong support in scripture and church tradition. Culture-Makers concerned about the individualism in American culture could do worse than look at Reclaiming Friendship, to steal the title of Ajith Fernando's out-of-print, pre-Myspace gem.

Sense of a Place that Never Really Was

I’m not big on graphic novels, because the stories too often play second-fiddle to less-than-compelling artwork. Sometimes I read about such and such a story being “deep” or “sweeping” and I end up feeling like I’ve eaten unseasoned soup.

This is one of the wonderful exceptions. White Rapids, by Pascal Blanchet. It's the story of a company town in remote northern Quebec, built around a hydro-electric dam. The company provided amenities resembling mid-century North American middle-class life, in exchange for the hardship of living in utter isolation [map] with a few hundred other employees and families.

It's a short book, with fanciful art deco drawings conveying a Utopian nostalgia, something I normally find quite off-putting. But the Never-Never-Land effect works here, in part because it feels like outlandish propaganda by a loaded and megalomaniac company, one willing to impose an impossible town on an unforgiving landscape, at great expense, for the even greater profits that would follow.

In light of that history, Utopianism is the only possible design choice, like Las Vegas in the desert.

Here's the artist's website.

Not all racial boorishness is racism.

Racism is alive and dangerous, from genocide on down to exclusion. It's an issue of the heart, and needs to be dealt with as such.

That's why I'm not all that upset about the Spanish basketball team's "slant-eye" photo-op. Making fun of somebody's facial features is just provincial. It's something that's funny when you're a child, and is no longer interesting when you grow up.

But when we use words like racist where stupid would suffice, we risk dilluting the importance of addressing racism.

Consider this, from Feyenoord (Rotterdam, Netherlands) fans, chanting against Ajax of Amsterdam (a team associated with Jews, albeit with no Jews on the roster:

Hamas, Hamas, the Jews into the Gas

It's around 0:25 of this clip. the Dutch is "hamas, hamas, joden aan het gas":



Comments below the clip (in Dutch) argue the finer point that they hate Ajax Jews (the largely gentile fans), not Jews in general.

Ian Buruma attended one of these matches while writing Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerence:

"F__ing Jews!" [Feyenoord fans] went again every time an Ajax player touched the ball, even if he was a black Surinamese. "Cancer Jew!" they shouted when the blond referee from the northern province of Friesland whistled for a Feyenoord foul.

And then I heard it for the first time, a sinister hissing sound from hundreds, maybe thousands, of beer-flecked mouths. I didn't know what it meant, until [Buruma's friend] Hans explained it. The sound got louder: the sound of escaping gas.

In Budapest soccer stadiums, players of a side owned by a Jewish businessman were greeted by rival supporters shouting: "The trains to Auschwitz are ready!" In the Olympic Stadium of Amsterdam, the fans were a touch more inventive.

In light of such creepy populist passion, it seems trite to accuse the Spaniards of racism. Racism is deadly, and shouldn't by dilluted by association with stupidity.

One Week's Haul

One Week's Haul
Originally uploaded by Paul Grant

Becca and I have been members of a local CSA for several years, and this summer's been one of the best.

Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA), for newcomers, is simply pre-buying membership in a farm's produce, in exchange for weekly baskets during the growing season.

Basically, you buy into the risks and bounty of a given farmer's year, and you commit to a relationship with that producer.

CSAs put the eater and the grower in close contact. We have to speak to one another on a weekly basis, something that rarely occurs at the supermarket. The system also helps the local economy in big ways and small: together we're helping our region, our county, become a little closer to agriculturally self-sufficient.

If, as Homeland Security is always saying, our national food supply is at risk for bio-terror attack, the best solution is to diversify the supply.

Meanwhile, there's an added benefit to a CSA: the food is way fresher, and tastier. So, for example: this week we got okra, chiles, corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, apples, peppers, onions, and a melon.

The produce is seasonal, of course. Earlier it was lettuce, garlic and strawberries; later it'll be acorn squash, potatoes and the like.

This is significant. Eating is, as Wendell Berry put it, an agricultural act. It is profoundly humbling to understand just how connected we are to the work of growing food in fields.

In the abstraction of our daily lives from the real world of gaining our life from the dirt, we are impoverished where we needn't be, and in the ease with which we fill our bellies, courtesy of our convenience culture, we are robbed of the very humility that can help us retain our sense of human finiteness.

To visit, then, with Mr. Pierce, as he asks about my baby, while packing my food--this brings about way more than entertainment and tasty tomatoes. It is goodness (broadly conceived).

Segregation as euphemism

Segregation simply means keeping things apart. But a word so burdened with history means nothing simply.

Segregation (along with its South African cousin apartheid) has a long track record as a prescription (not just a de-scription) for racial life in America: black and white were to be kept apart by force of the law.

But a thought has crossed my mind in recent days: segregation is a euphemism. That is, it's a delicate way of saying something far worse.

Segregation is a euphemism for isolation. Keeping people apart was not really the goal; after all, even in Bull Connor's country black and white were in constant contact. Somebody needed to cook and do laundry and change diapers, after all.

No, it was never about keeping people separate. It was always about keeping people in their place.

And while segregationists were able to distort scripture to justify their purposes (i.e. don't marry Canaanites), isolation can't be justified with scripture.

Isolation gets uglier the more you look at it. It's dehumanizing, degrading and destructive.

That's why segregation is shameful. That's why isolationists needed to hide behind the euphemism of segregation.

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[photo credit: sxc.hu user pixelstar

I'm reading about headscarves

I'm now reading a terrific book called Why the French Don't Like Headscarves: Religion, the State, and Public Space.

This is by American anthropologist John Bowen, who was living in France for a few years while the French were debating (and passing) a law banning Muslim headscarves in the public schools.

Far more than a political story, Bowen explains the French political/social worldview, which proves incredibly useful. I've been following this story for years, and having it explained in worldview terms helps immensely.

For instance: Bowen notes that the French tend to view social freedoms as coming from, and being guaranteed by, the state. Any weakening of the state will ultimately threaten human rights.

Since Muslims believe that Islam contains ultimate truth, most believe their religion needs to be lived out in all areas of life, not just in private.

But the French tend to view publicly assertive religion in terms of their lengthy struggle with the Catholic Church. For a century after the revolution, the Church insisted on "integrism", or the Church's dominance in all of life.

The French state prevailed by the creation of laïcité, usually translated as secularism. All public life is to be secular, according to this line of thought, because only a secular public space can guarantee freedom of thought and conscience.

When a Muslim girl wears a scarf--a veil as it's called--in school, the guardians of laïcité feel this is an assertion of Islam's superiority over the secular space.

Wisconsin Citrus

Despite its harsh winters, Madison (and the surrounding Dane County) is one of the United States' food capitals. Between year-round farmers markets, seasonal ones in almost every town, dozens of community gardens, abundant Community Supported Agriculture offerings, farmer-owned cooperatives, and an environment teeming with fish, turkeys, and other cuddly edibles, this is one of the country's regions best prepared to survive a national disruption in commodity food supply.

But some foods simply can't be grown here. Like Lemons, and Coffee. It's too cool in the summer and the season is too short.

So what's a place-conscious person to do? Find stand-ins, of course. This summer I've been making "lemonade" from sumac berries—something I'd never done before, and which frankly always sounds just a little too granola for me. But it's cheap (free), and fun, so why not? And it's good. Sort of citrus-y tart, and beautifully red.

Meanwhile, the Isthmus (a local paper) is profiling a berry farmer who's experimenting with seaberries as a legit substitute for oranges.

[Farmer] Secher is thinking big. He's not looking to create niche products, but a new fruit market "we can mainstream regionally—one that's sustainable environmentally, economically and socially." He dreams of regional processing and marketing and the infrastructure to make it happen.

This isn't necessarily starry-eyed thinking. Kiwifruit, for example, was a niche crop, closely associated with New Zealand (but native to China) until the mid-twentieth century, before it gained institutional support from big bad USDA. The USDA is now looking at Lingonberries and others.

Ecologically speaking, we should put a lot more work into feeding ourselves at a local level. There are countless foods we could be eating—far more than the twenty or thirty in the supermarket rotation. Most are either too widespread to be marketable (Dandelions, for example, make great salad), or too fragile to be industrially processed or transportable on a national basis (Paw-Paws, for example).

Introducing ...

His name is Silas.

Boomers Approaching, Hat in Hand

A new study shows what any fool could have told us: the majority of the Baby Boomer generation will outlive their savings.

In other words, we their children and grandchildren will have to pay for them.

The Baby Boomers, long ago nicknamed the "Me Generation," the people who brought us Woodstock and Yuppies, are now eligible for AARP membership. Millions of them are woefully unprepared for the challenge of old age.

Somebody will have to care for them, and that somebody will be whoever's in their prime productive years. In fact, loving elderly Boomers may well be the main thing we do with our next forty years. It will be an awesome responsibility, and an opportunity, too: we have before us the chance to reshape the history of generational relationships.

Adults throughout history have taken care of their parents and children simultaneously. What sets our generation apart is that we will have more old people than children to care for. Taking care of the Baby Boomers will be the greatest moral challenge our generation faces—how we do it will be the measure of our character.

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Photo Credit: Winnebago Industries

Highways are Rivers

The current oil crisis has cities all over the country thinking about mass transit. But some of our basic transportation problems won't be solved by quick solutions. Not that streetcars are cheap, but they're a lot cheaper than solving the underlying problem: our transportation infrastructure is built around cars. And highways are rivers: they can't be crossed, except by expensive bridges.

Urban transportation projects, starting in the fifties, focused on the automobile above all other forms of transit. Specifically, on how to quickly and efficiently move cars from the suburbs into city centers.

Poor neighborhoods tended to get in the way. David Hilfiker points out in his book Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen:

As a network of superhighways meant to link the country together was blasted through cities, poor black areas were, not surprisingly, the first choices for disruption. Either an area would be razed and its former inhabitants removed, or a highway would be placed so as to create a physical boundary between the black ghetto and other areas of the city, further isolating its inhabitants (p. 8).

If we're really going to break our addiction to oil (as President Bush calls it), we're going to need to redesign our urban infrastructure, a multi-decade project.

Sorry, Al Gore, while your plan for energy independence is grand, energy independence can only be achieved by efficient consumption (not just generation), which in turn requires a fundamental rethinking of urban planning. We're in this for the long haul, no pun intended.

Reverse White Flight?

I'm going to be chewing on this article from the Wall Street Journal for a few days. "The End of White Flight" reports on the return of middle-class whites to the urban centers of America, after a half-century of flight to the suburbs.

What interests me most, of course, were the cultural conflicts reported in the story, such as white parent demands the PTA stop selling ice cream (for diabetes). More importantly, the churches:

Old inner-city white churches are reviving after years of decline, while black churches are following their parishioners out to the burbs. One black church in Washington D.C. is looking to hire a white intern to reach the new neighbors.

Obviously this is anecdotal. But I must point out: 99% of interracial outreach by the American church is done by black churches. That's how, 11 years ago, I became a member of my (majority-black) church.

There's another element here: As African Americans flee the cities, the poorest of the poor African Americans are left behind, and what was a race matter becomes a class matter.

Elsewehere I've seen predictions of exurbs becoming the ghettos of the future, as gas prices make living way out of town decreasingly desireable.

[Photo Credit: Flickr User Boyznberry]

Who's Your (Caveman) Daddy?

Nothing quite like loving your hometown. DNA testing has connected two rural German men to a 3,000 year old caveman, whose bones were dug up on the hill outside the village.

In other words, in 3,000 years (i.e. 500 years before Buddha or Socrates), these people haven't moved beyond the village. Puts a whole new meaning to the concept of roots.

It also brings to mind the verse from ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (who, incidentally, was several centuries younger than that lineage in Germany):

Let [people] be content with their own homes, and delight in the customs that they cherish.

Although the next country is close enough that they can hear their roosters crowing and dogs barking, they are content never to visit each other all of the days of their lives.

photo credit: Flickr user Andrea Pi

Spirit Dance

Here's an album I've been listening to not quite constantly this week: Bill Miller's Spirit Dance. (iTunes has song previews)

I've been a Bill Miller fan for several years. He's a folk singer from Wisconsin (currently Nashville, of course) who has blended his Native American musical skills with the mainstream American singer-songwriter folk style.

His songs are at once heartbreakingly real and powerfully hopeful, as he manages to look hard and long at the poverty and hardships of reservation life through the lens of Christian hope at its concrete best.

More importantly, he consistently manages to create a meaningful sense of place in his music. The songs are never wishy-washy, even as they're often fictional. They're in "paper mill towns" and along "reservation roads", on "sacred ground".

Nobody's Hands Are Unbloodied

The German arts media have been in a tizzy this year (summary, in English) over European architects' "collaboration" with non-democratic regimes--especially China, and especially around next month's Olympic Games.

The main question is of the political meaning of art: does building for a totalitarian regime lend legitimacy to said regime? The jury is out on the matter, at least in part because of China's non-pariah status in the business world--and architecture belongs as much to business as to art.

A bigger problem, in my eyes, is the question of ambiguous guilt. We all sense that our hands are bloodied by virtue of being in this world, yet we can't discern why, or a way out.

The resultant Puritanism of the secular left is the main reason why America by and large hasn't joined the progressive movement: there's more guilt there than you can shake a stick at, and no hope for salvation (see obsessive carbon-counting).

Europe (European cultural leaders at least) is much more sold on ambiguous guilt, which is why Architecture finds itself in this debate.

I don't have an opinion about the answer: where is the boundary between engagement with a totalitarian regime and endorsement of it? I don't know. But my sense is that the answer doesn't lie anywhere on that axis.

Photo Credit Flickr User Theo W L Jones

Window on Our Ongoing Segregation

I was at first surprised, and had to rewind. It came during a podcast I enjoy—which will remain unnamed—targeted at young leaders in the evangelical church. The moderator asked the audience to email in responses to this question:

“How many of your evangelical friends are truly considering, or have already stated, ‘I'm going to vote for [Obama]’ --versus McCain? How many of your evangelical, Christ-follower friends are saying, ‘I’m not going to vote at all’?”

The fact that this question is asked makes one thing obvious: The black church is not on the radar screen here.

Nine out of ten African Americans are planning on voting for Obama. Since far more than 10% of African Americans would consider themselves “Christ-followers”, it's safe to say that a runaway majority of the black church is voting for him.

But the question tells us that we still live in different worlds. And since a large chunk of my life straddles this divide, it makes me sad—and makes me feel a little homeless.

Please note: I’m not calling these people racist. I’m merely noting that if we—as a church—were in real communion with each other, we wouldn’t wonder if “Christ followers” were voting for Obama. We’d just understand that the church has not made up its mind about the presidential vote.

Photo Credit: Flickr User PhotoMuse!

Revolutionary Roadkill

Leave it to the counterculture to glamorize scavenging.

I've just finished a most engrossing book, The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements. It was a lot of fun, reading about unpasteurized cheese, organic farming, and the slow food movement.

Then the chapter on "Feral Foraging". Author Sandor Ellix Katz profiles some former vegans who've taken to eating roadkill--not as an act of desperation, but as counterculture. One he quotes as redefining roadkill:

"Transforming dishonored victims of the petroleum age into food which nourishes, and clothing which warms."

Victims of the petroleum age! And you thought you were a progressive. These guys are way ahead. If they don't die first.

Photo Credit: marta rattlesnacks, from Flickr

Sustainable Swiss Soccer

The world’s third-largest sports event is underway: Euro 08, Europe’s tournament of national soccer teams [cue Europop Soundtrack].

Alongside hooligan-control and Spice-Girl appearances, co-hosts Switzerland and Austria have put sustainable development at the center of their strategic outcomes—as defined on three levels: ecology, economy and society.

Basically, the hosts want to be better off for having held the tournament. This is by no means an obvious goal: Glendale, Arizona lost $2.2 million on this year’s Super Bowl. Massive sports tournaments are basically one-time events, capable of permanently reshaping entire landscapes.

The Alpine hosts’ great insight is that one-time events take place in locations with histories and futures—natural and human—and that events of this variety are only worthwhile in the short run if they’re worthwhile in the long run.

What's really needed here is a new global standard for measuring cost and benefit (like the Genuine Progress Indicator) that can help us count more than money, and the Swiss and Austrians deserve some praise for bringing us a little closer to that goal.

[photo credit: Flickr user 'Host City Salzburg']

Life Imitates Telenovelas

The more you watch Brazilian telenovelas, the fewer children you have.

This according to an amazing working paper (pdf), brought to my attention by my favorite blog, Salon's How the World Works.

The gist of it is that Brazilian soap operas, over a period of forty years, have consistently starred female characters with one or fewer children—far fewer than the Brazilian norm (see table below, taken from the paper).

Here's where it gets interesting. The researchers—Eliana La Ferrara, Alberto Chong, and Suzanne Duryea—then look at the relationship between novella-watching and child-bearing. Since Brazil in this period was wiring the hinterlands, they can map a difference between regions which received a TV signal and those which didn't.

In regions with the signal, the more someone watches those glamorous, single-child soaps, the fewer children she will have. They also can trace a huge incidence in children being named after the stars of the soaps.

No great surprise there: In the US, Aiden (Sex and the City character) has become the 27th most popular boy's name.

Cities Are Good for the Environment

This shouldn't come as a surprise, but cities are efficient. That's why we built cities in the first place, thousands of years ago. Cities require far fewer resources per person.

Still, much of the environmental movement remains fixated on "nature," and for a variety of reasons—Jeffersonian individualism, puritan suspicion of urban decadence, etc.

It's been a matter of some joy for me to see the American evangelical church discover the environment. These are, in many respects, my people, and it's good to see needed change.

Still, my people, by and large, have bought into the contempt for urban life so characteristic of the American soul. The trouble is, almost no American lives a truly rural life: even those of us who live in small towns or exurbs drive long distances, for the purpose of accessing urban amenities. (Like stores, workplaces, entertainment etc.) Basically, we're long-distance city-dwellers.

What we need is a change in expectations. We need to learn to love cities.

Al Jazeera talks to Farmer Jim

You know biofuels are a force to be reckoned with when the world’s media start turning up in the rural Midwest. Record-breaking global corn prices are responsible for the attention, and this mostly because rich countries have taken to driving our food in the form of ethanol.

Al Jazeera talks to Illinois farmer Jim Robbins, and connects the dots to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where global commodity prices are set:



Not to be outdone, France 24 talks to farmers in Indiana. This segment is worth watching, if for no other reason than the sneering reporter’s accent:



Both segments highlight short-term market fluctuations driven by long-term changes in the world. Farmer Jim says:

“We’re going to need these high prices to continue, because our input costs … are going to go up, and that’s going to catch up with us.”

In other words, this is an economic bubble—froth on the sides of our transition away from fossil fuels. As France 24 points out,

“Ethanol … may only be a transitional fuel; even if the whole of the US were covered with corn fields, it would not produce enough ethanol to replace oil.”

Jeremiah and Me

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright and I have a lot in common.

We’re both by nature eggheads and idealists, who’d rather talk ecclesiology than politics, and who’d rather take action than work the machines of law.

But here’s one difference: when duty called, he joined the marines, and served his country with distinction.

I, on the other hand, didn’t lift a finger. Still, his patriotism is questioned, mine is not.

Courtesy of Wikipedia, here is Wright, tending to his president:

Where My Computer Comes From

I just got back from a week in Arizona with my Dad. Along the highway to Tucson, we drove past this copper mine:

It's a simple reminder that technology is not as clean as it feels. But our demand for copper (to run our computers, phones and laptops) makes it profitable to tear up land at this scale.

Obama used to party here

Barack in Madison, Wisconsin
Originally uploaded by Barack Obama

I was not part of this 20,000. No, I was part of the overflow crowd stuck in the adjacent practice facility.

We stood in line for an hour and a half -- it was in the single digits, with the wind whipping snow into our faces, before being told that homeland security wouldn't be letting us in to the main arena. Alas.

On the plus side, Obama poked his head into the overflow room before his speech, and was a little more personal:

"I love Madison. Back when I was a community organizer in Chicago, before I went to law school, I used to come up here for some R & R. I can't tell you what we did, but I love Madison."

Coming to Madison

College Park Rally
Originally uploaded by Barack Obama

The fever is certainly catching in Madison, with a rally for tonight at the Kohl Center. I am planning on going, although I've heard people are standing in line all day to get in. Not today, for me, at least.

This guy is the real deal, though. I've followed his work on the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee.

Still, I'm a little unhappy at how little the environment features in this campaign so far. And nobody seems to be talking about the dollar policy.

Nine Springs Creek after a big storm

We got more than a foot of snow yesterday. I went snowshoeing this morning.

A great winter so far

A Great Day for Snowshoeing
Originally uploaded by Paul Grant

This is the first solid winter we've had in several years. So on a beautiful January day, we went snowshoeing in Governor Dodge State Park.

Felt a little wierd about driving 40 miles to enjoy nature. That's a new sensation, but we've really cut back, what with $3 a gallon.

I guess we're getting 8 inches tonight, so I might be able to do this in the UW Arboretum, which is about 400 yards from our house.