The cosmopolitan ecologist

What I will miss about Boston

Tue, 13 May 2008 09:04:22 -0500

The short answer, of course, is that I will miss all my friends here. After 4 years in New England, I’ve finally reached the point where I can walk down the street and bump into someone I know.

But after a walk today through Harvard Yard and up Tory Row, I realized how much I will miss the physical beauty of the city’s streets. We’ve been driven from Boston by foul weather and excitement of the possibility of doing some good in DC, but we leave knowing we are leaving the most beautiful and stately city in the US. In no particular order, here are some things I will miss.
1. The cold snow on the bronze statues in Harvard Yard.
2. The crazy neighbor in Porter Square who would leave her excess books on the wall outside her triple-decker. I feel like I learned the deep psychic baggage of this woman from her cast-off literature.
3. How I once found a copy of King Lear in the gutter, and decided to sit on a bench and read it.
4. The state of the tortoise actually beating the hare in a foot race, Copley Square.
5. Walking along Fort Point Channel at night, admiring the city skyline and trying to figure out why there were so many jellyfish there.
6. The crustiness of Haymarket on the weekend, with its subterranean shops.
7. Eavesdropping on Click and Clack’s conversation while at the Café Paradiso, may it rest in peace.
8. Drinking grappa at the Café Algiers, and writing for hours.
9. Walking across Longfellow Bridge, and thinking about William Faulkner.
10. The crazy polyglot mob trying to shop at Market Basket in Somerville.
11. Dim Sum at an old vaudeville theatre turned into the most garnish Chinese banquet hall imaginable.
12. Bow Street and Arrow Street. Just the fact that they exist, and cross near the lovely Café Pampalona.

The best preface I've ever read

Tue, 06 May 2008 09:16:05 -0500

Recently on a whim I picked up my copy of Edward Said’s Orientalism. For this 25th anniversary edition of the book Said wrote a new Preface, with the events of September 11th and the Iraq war in his mind. The result seems to me today to be one of the best Prefaces I’ve ever read. Two passages in the first paragraph strike me as beautiful. First, he makes a self-mocking comment about “the necessary diminutions in expectations and pedagogic zeal that usually frame the road to seniority.” Second, he writes of the will to go on in the face of adversity not as “a matter of being optimistic, but rather of continuing to have faith in the ongoing and literately unending process of emancipation and enlightenment that… frames and gives direction to the intellectual vocation.”

This is a stirring declaration of the purpose of academia and intellectual life which I can say from experience is absent from many faculty (but not all, by any means). What he essentially does in the rest of the Preface is contrast this search for truth from the stories that sheer ideology would tell. His point is that the US approached its adventure in Iraq in much the same way the French and the British mentally thought about the “Orient, … that semi-mythical construct, which … has been made and remade countless times by power acting through an expedient form of knowledge to assert that this is the Orients nature, and we must deal with it accordingly.”

In the end, Said is making a last stand for the intellectual vocation as humanism, as a search for truth. And in essence he is admitting that in the US today we are losing that battle: “Reflection, debate, rational argument, moral principle based on a secular notion that human beings must create their own history have been replaced by abstract ideas that celebrate American or Western exceptionalism, denigrate the relevance of context, and regard other cultures with derisive contempt.” What I love about the essay is that Said is simultaneously attacking American exceptionalism and postmodernism as both being incompatible with the search for truth.

Stockholm postcard: April 18

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 07:41:54 -0500

This city is, above all else, clean and orderly and beautiful in its well-designed simplicity. I’ve had almost a week in Stockholm, and I’ve fallen in love with the brightly colored medieval homes lined up against the dark Baltic Sea. But what strikes an American about Stockholm is how well-run it seems to be, even down to the way passengers get on and off the metro trains. It’s almost a ritual: at each stop those remaining seated swing their knees towards the aisle to allow those who are departing to get out, and then everyone seated switches seats towards the window seats, to allow new riders who are coming on the train easy access to a seat. Sounds simple, but it is so far from the rudeness of the Boston subway.

As I write that sentence, I know it sounds clichéd, but it’s what really struck me first about Sweden. Some other observations: Sweden has the best bathrooms in the world. The custom is that instead of having little cubicles, each toilet is in a little room covered floor to ceiling with white tile. What’s even better, there’s a real door to the room that really locks, and each little room has its own small sink. Given that the rooms are so private, there’s a tendency for some places to just mark all the rooms as unisex, which makes perfect sense but it stills takes some getting used to for us Americans!

Another thing that is clear it the Swedish people’s love of the environment. Several conservations I had in cafes suggested that the average person here knows a great deal about global warming, for example, and believes the world should do a great deal to fight it. They also clearly love to get out and hike in their woods and gardens, albeit after often driving there in rather large and posh SUVs. I wonder why SUVs have grown so popular in Stockholm, while they are still exceedingly rare in Paris.

Reykjavik Airport postcard: April 13

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 01:45:45 -0500

Landing here in winter is like entering an odd no-man’s land, a netherworld of lost souls. White fog obscures the horizon in all directions. Every inch of the ground, save the runway, is covered in wet snow. One can’t glimpse any other buildings, not even a road leaving the compound. It is, in a pleasing, lonely way, like a terminal in purgatory. Inside the terminal is a modern, clean well-lighted place, with the floors occasionally made of wood, a nice touch that adds some warmth to the place. It’s funny that here they have a large, walk-in theatre, showing some truly beautiful pictures of Iceland in the summer. It’s almost as if they want to reassure us travelers that there really is a world out there, beyond the fog.

Seattle postcard: April 8

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 01:44:30 -0500

The daylight is slowly seeping through the clouds, and the waters of Puget Sound are going from jet black to a dark, threatening blue. The café I am in is empty, while the baristas slowly bitch about their paychecks, the state of the world, their boredom. Outside the traffic on Stewart Street is slowly picking up, cars whizzing by the odd neon sign advertising luggage, nude girls, or a Chinese restaurant. To a Bostonian, the attire of businesspeople seems curiously disjointed, in a pleasant way: a woman wearing a yellow rainslicker over a suit, her feet shod in sandals. It seems like a beautiful city, Seattle, with the same weather-induced gumption as Boston but without Boston’s comical sense of self-importance. I think I will go for a walk along the water’s edge, before returning to my wonderful babacool pension for breakfast. I love traveling west; my biological clock is ahead of all of Seattle’s, and so to me the city is moving in slow motion.

rational versus irrational environmental problems

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:40:34 -0500

I just finished reading Jared Diamond’s new book Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed. It’s a brilliant and well-written. In a set of case studies of collapsed civilizations, Diamond reviews the role environmental degradation played in causing the collapse. While he discussed political and cultural causes of societal failure, his emphasis is clearly on the environmental issues that he believes are often the root causes of collapse. In some of the case studies, particularly the Rwanda section, one feels that these political causes deserve more attention, and Diamond comes close to environmental determinism. In general, however, one comes away convinced that environmental degradation has played a key role in many collapses.
The section of the book that’s most interesting to me is simply entitled “Why do some societies made disastrous decisions?” The answer, of course, is “it depends on the society.” There are some cases where societies simply failed to anticipate or perceive an environmental problem, and thus failed to react appropriately. More interesting is when societies perceive an environmental problem, and yet fail to respond. As Diamond correctly points out, this may be because of a purely irrational response by the society (Diamond highlights the Greenland Norse’s stubborn refusal to eat fish even though there was plenty of it around), or because of rational processes of decision-making leading to a suboptimal outcome (the famous example of this is the “tragedy of the commons”).
It strikes me that this question, of rational (yet flawed) and irrational responses to environmental problems, is something environmental NGOs today need to think about. The mainstream
NGOs are focused on “win-win” solutions, which assumes global society has simply not responded rationally to the scientific evidence of environmental degradation. However, it may well be that for many issues like climate change, the rational response of some actors (a company that benefits from an activity that causes degradation of the environment, or a citizen of the developed world more generally that benefits from the vast environmental inequity between the developed and developing world) will be to maximize current personal welfare while damaging the overall system. If most environmental problems require “win-lose” solutions they are, I’d argue, much harder to solve. That’s not to say that “win-win” solution, so-called “no-regrets” actions, should not be taken by NGOs, as the low-hanging fruit. But my reading of Diamond’s book suggests more fundamental environmental problems are “win-lose” situations, that are fundamentally political battles, not simply a matter of ignorance of scientific facts.

Historical forgetfulness

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 14:34:04 -0500

I just finished reading a piece in a magazine that began by quoting Nietzsche about the abyss, and the dangers of staring into it for too long. As an example of the abyss, the author cheekily mentioned Internet advertising, and then proceeded to dissect the industry.

Apart from being so absurd it made me laugh out loud, the contorted intro also got me thinking. As modern technology increases the rate that information and people and goods move around the world, we increasingly feel like our lives are speeding up. Indeed, the spatial and temporal scope of potential impacts of all of our actions is much larger than it was a century ago. As we strive to keep up with the pace of modern life, however, we seem (in America at least) to enjoy our forgetfulness. Our memory, our cultural sense of history, more and more refers to things in recent history, perhaps the last few decades at the most. Maybe this natural trend of forgetfulness has been exacerbated by modern technology but has always been there, in one form or another.

This natural tendency to forget history is both a good and a bad thing. Dark, horrendous events can happen, from the Holocaust to the terrorist attacks of September, 2001, perhaps even made more frequent and intense by humanity’s increased technological power, and yet cultures generally move on, with perhaps a few psychological scars. The abyss Nietzsche was referring to, the existential uncertainty that hides within all of our souls, we moderns mostly forget about too. Our forgetfulness, in other words, helps us deal with the increasing scope for human mistakes to cause tremendous consequences. The only problem with this salve of forgetfulness is that it makes it much more difficult to learn from history. Mark Twain once said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. I worry sometimes that our high-tech culture, obsessed with the now, is losing its ability to hear the rhymes.

Ecologists like me worry about a version of this problem often. Humanity is rapidly depleting the wealth of nature, reducing the diversity of life and the beauty of the landscape. The problem is that each generation remembers at most the nature that they saw growing up, not the original pristine version. This problem of shifting baselines, of the perpetual “new normal”, is a challenge to wise public policy making. It is arguably harder to motivate action for slow-motion failures than for dramatic crises. Jared Diamond in his book Collapse strongly makes this point: the underlying causes of long-term societal declines are almost always issues that leaders did not place high on their priority list, simply because the underlying process was so slow.

LA is not denser than New York: true density measures

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 12:05:13 -0500

There has been this persistent myth floating around the Internet that Los Angeles is denser than New York (e.g., see the argument here and here). A variation on this myth has even worked its way into the Washington Post, which talked about dense Western sprawl (here). As someone who works on urbanization and the environment, I’ve known for a while that while these factoids are technically true, they don’t mean as much as the people using them think they mean. I finally got around to getting the appropriate data from the US Census for 2000, so I can show you all what I mean.

The simplest way one can measure density is this: one can take the number of housing units (for lots of theoretical reasons it’s more useful for planners to think about housing units rather than people… average household size in the US is around 2.6) in a region, and divide by the number of hectares in that region, and get a mean density in houses/hectare. Note that you have one number summarizing a whole region, which is just the mean density. This is problematic because there is a lot of variation in density within a region, and it’s definitely not a Gaussian distribution of variation (more likely a log-normal or exponential shape), so the mean is a fairly bad summary metric. A better metric would be the median. The best thing to do is calculate the actual distribution of density within the region. The figure below is the answer to the thought experiment, if I skydived into the region and landed in a hectare at random, how many houses would be in that hectare?

http://robertmcdonald.info/blog/comparison_area.html

As you can see, 88% of the time in the LA region, you’d land in a hectare with 0 or 1 houses, whereas in New York the figure is 70%. Note, however, that there are more hectares of 1-3 houses, 3-5 houses, and 5-7 houses in New York than in LA. One important problem with measuring density this simple way (houses/area) is that it is extremely sensitive to the boundaries of the region used. Many of the articles online discussing the myth that LA is denser than New York have used political boundaries, which are often not representative of the true boundaries of the urban area. For my calculation, I used the Census Bureau’s Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical areas, so at least there is some consistency in how I define metropolitan area. I also excluded areas of water or area of completely undeveloped land (parks, etc.) from the calculation. Still, the point is that using slightly different definitions of the urban region, these density figures could change.

There is another way to define density, more meaningful for people thinking about mass transit and walkable neighborhoods. What if you were to look up a random address in the phone book (assume it’s a complete phone book, listing all addresses) and go to that address? How many housing units are in the same hectare as that address?

http://robertmcdonald.info/blog/comparison_houses.html

As you can see, the picture is very different. The “average” house in LA is in a neighborhood of 10-15 homes/ha; 20% of houses fall in this category. The “average” housing unit in NY is in a neighborhood with more than 80 homes/ha; 27% of homes fall in this category. This kind of statistic becomes extremely important when considering the feasibility of mass transit, which (for light rail) works well above 40 homes/ha. Only 8% of houses are in such a neighborhood in LA, versus 32.6% of houses for NY. Even better, this way of measuring density is relatively insensitive to changes in the boundaries of the urban region.

To return to the “myth” of LA being denser than NY, there is some truth to it. The newer (far) suburbs of New York are indeed less dense than those in LA. LA has fewer really low density suburbs, and fewer high density neighborhoods. NY has some really low density suburbs, and some really high density neighborhoods.

Edwards' gift to the campaign

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:43:53 -0500

Yesterday, John Edwards ended his campaign as he began it, in New Orleans talking about poverty and injustice. It was a sad day for me personally, to see a candidate I volunteered for lose. It was still a useful few months for me, to believe and then to lose that belief. I saw something of the American political process while volunteering. It is an odd beat whose teeny base of retail politicking (rallies, speeches, etc.) supports the giant head of the media freak show. Positive feedback loops rule the media freak show: the media declares a candidate is viable because s/he has some support, and that declaration makes the candidate more viable. Money and fame and power beget more of the same. I don’t mean to be cynical: ideas do matter, in the sense that candidates with compelling themes and rhetoric do better than other candidates without these. But policy differences, the differences in the actions candidates would take when in office, matter relatively little.

Most of the media commentary following Edwards’ withdrawal focused on why he lost the race. Sometimes commentators divined what his departure would do Obama and Clinton’s poll numbers. Missing was a thoughtful reflection on how Edwards presence in the race affected the policy positions of the other two major Democratic candidates. Edwards pushed early for universal health care coverage, and Clinton followed his lead. Edwards’ environmental plan called for drastic government action to ease American dependence on foreign oil was incorporated into Obama and Clinton’s plans. Most important, Edwards discussion of poverty made the others start to address that issue as well. Edwards’ presence took two moderate candidates and made them pledge to support some progressive ideals. It remains to be seen whether they would stick to those pledges if elected, but at least we can hold them to their word. This influence on actual policy issues was Edwards’ real gift to the campaign.

Stock market crash proves US power?

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 15:40:19 -0500

One of the oddest things to have occurred after the dramatic market crash of the last few days is the spectacle of plenty of news commentators claiming it shows the importance of the US economy. The idea is that since the collapse of the US housing bubble and our stock market affected other economies, we therefore must matter to them.

Apart from seeming rather juvenile (a point which Jon Stewart scathingly satired), this argument displays an ignorance of history. Of course, it is clear that as the largest economy in the world we can influence other countries. But there are plenty examples of the converse: smaller countries collapse, affecting us. The collapse of the Asian Tigers in the late 90s affected many US stocks (albeit far from all of them). And once those economies collapsed many US and other foreign firms moved in to find bargain deal in the damaged economy. At no time did American commentators proudly proclaim that this showed that Asia was important to the US. The main discussion was about the nature of the globalized economy and the flaws in the Asian economies (whether real or perceived).

Much the same is happening now, just on a bigger scale. Systematic problems in the US economy have caused some foreign investors to pull out, triggering a fall in the stock market. Later, once the dust has cleared, I’m sure some savvy firms (both foreign and domestic) will move in looking for some bargains. For those particular firms, it may be an opportunity to make money. However, why in the world would anyone regard this collapse as a good thing for the average American citizen?

What Washington, DC, means today

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:07:48 -0500

I recently got to spend almost a week in Washington, DC. I’ve been thinking ever since about what Washington symbolizes, both to those who work there and to the rest of America.

To the rest of America, Washington has become synonymous with corruption in government. For a politician, to have spent too long “inside the Beltway” is a political liability, a sign of being out of touch with reality. Yet the architecture of DC still plays this symbolic role, reporters always standing in front of the Capitol while talking generally about American democracy. Americans love what these monuments to the Constitution symbolize, they are just deeply distressed about how low the art of governing has descended in recent decades.

To those who I’ve talked to who actually live in DC, the experience is considerably more multifaceted. First of all, there is the mass of citizens who have little to do with how the Federal Government operates. They watch the shenanigans of the government on TV with the rest of us, feeling vaguely embarrassed. For those in the government, at least the majority who are career civil servants (not to mention those idealistic folks in different NGOs), they feel rather hurt by the low public opinion of Washington. The work done by these civil servants is mostly non-political, the dull but extremely important task of administering a large country. Waves of political appointees come and go (most of them never really seeing Washington as anything other than a symbol), but beneath them the civil servants continue. This is both a very positive thing (a government needs continuity) and a sometime negative thing (the ship of state turns very slowly indeed).

I thought about all this as I wandered about the Mall and L’Enfants Washington. For me, it was personal, for I am seriously thinking about leaving Harvard’s ivory towers and going to work in DC at an environmental NGO. I feel at peace with this decision professionally, for it’s where I think I can do the most good for the environment. Yet it is indeed a weird time to move to DC, morally. The government, particularly the military-industrial complex (Eisenhower’s phrase, not mine), is arguably more powerful and more corrupt than ever before. I wonder sometimes what Cicero felt working in Rome (before his exile, at least). I suspect he felt similar to how all those career civil servants feel today: proud of their own work, still optimistic about their country’s potential, yet vaguely worried that more powerful tides are slowly pulling the ship of state toward dangerous shoals.

Coffee in airports and other travesties

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 19:57:57 -0500

Europe’s cafes usually serve great espresso, although they call it different names. The French just call an espresso a “café”, and then when they add milk either call it “café au lait” or “crème” (slightly different in flavor). The Spanish seem to call an espresso a “café solo”, and add milk by asking for a “café con leche” (which tastes nothing like a French café au lait). Regardless, the coffee is of high quality. The average corner café of Paris for exceeds the quality of Starbucks, and sees no need to dilute its product with flavored liquors or spices.

How odd then that the coffee at the airports we’ve visited during this trip has generally sucked. In Charles de Gaulle, Beauvais, and Amsterdam Schiphol all the shops have this horrible machine that gives (crappy tasting) lattes at the push of a button. The exception was Girona airport, where there was a real live person who pulled a very good espresso.

As a carnival, you can’t beat Schiphol. A casino lies next to the meditation room. A wonderful children’s playground lies next to a store selling adult DVDs, their pornographic cover photos not even hidden. Down the hall somebody is selling tulip bulbs, and upstairs there is a museum that shows paintings from the 16th and 17th century. One could also rent a hotel room, or just take a shower. The only downside of Schiphol is their odd policy of interrogating each passenger individually, which makes boarding a plane incredibly slow.

Cultural independence and the EU

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 19:44:44 -0500

I’ve been traveling over the holidays, first to Brittany and now to Catalonia. It strikes me that despite the many differences- in language and cuisine and temperament- between them, the two regions have something in common.

Both are jealously guarding their cultural and linguistic heritage, and attempting to regain a sense of cultural independence from their nation.
Brittany has celtic roots, including a celtic language Breton, which have persisted despite Gallic dominion for centuries. They maintained this independence mostly intact (it seems like every Breton village has a pub named Duchess Anne) until the French revolution centralized power and crushed the last vestiges of independence. In recent decades there’s been a resurgence of interest in Breton culture, with signs everywhere listing place names in Breton, although it’s still rare to hear somebody actually speaking Breton. In one store I even saw a T-shirt that redrew the iconic photo of Che Guevara to make him look like a Breton farmer. This was at least more politically accurate than the last French reinterpretation of Che Guevara I saw, a diamond-encrusted sweater for sale on the rue St.-Germain.

Catalonia has followed much the same trajectory. A great deal of cultural independence, the last traces of which were crushed by Franco, followed in recent decade by a resurgence of regional pride. Catalan is commonly spoken, giving it a life Breton lacks.

There’s something paradoxical about this regional resurgence of cultural independence at a time when the EU is attempting greater integration. Perhaps it’s because the EU reforms are at an economic and political level, whereas the “cultural independence” of Brittany (at least) is at a more symbolic level. When nation-states felt weak they wanted to erase regional differences, whereas now in the EU regional differences become a valuable tourist and marketing attraction.

Blessed Unrest: a review

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 14:19:13 -0500

Paul Hawken’s new book, entitled Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, makes a simple argument in a straightforward fashion. This makes the book infinitely more readable than another book that makes a similar argument in incomprehensible poetic prose, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt . The only problem with the clarity of Hawken’s argument is that it brings into full relief its deficiencies.

The book begins by chronicling the rapid rise of the NGO, both in sheer numbers and in political power. Somehow, this multitude of NGOs is part of “The Movement”, heading toward a consistent vision of a better world. Hawken makes an analogy to an immune system, where thousands of different cells each do one tiny thing and together the whole system creates a collective property called “immunity.” Another analogy (which Hawken doesn’t make) would be the similarity to free market economies, where thousands of firms each independently just try to make money but overall the system achieves “efficiency”. The clear message of the book is that even if only a small percentage of NGOs achieve their goals, they will help further “The Movement”.

In a sense, this kind of argument is motivated by the desire of progressives to believe we can win in the absence of a single unifying ideology. The principle problem with the argument is the fuzzy concept of a “Movement”. The diversity of NGOs is staggering, and I don’t see any real coherent goal that they all share. In fact, many more conservative NGOs (which presumably express at least somewhat real desires by real people) are working at cross-purposes with more liberal NGOs.

It’s much better to think of this explosion of NGOs as simply the birth of a global civil society. Just as we don’t expect consensus in a republic among all the elected representative, since their constituents are too diverse, neither should we expect consensus among NGOs. There’s a word for this explosion of NGOs, and it’s not “Movement”, it’s “Democracy”.

The myth of Obama's transcendence

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 21:15:31 -0500

One of the sillier cover stories I’ve ever seen just came out in The Atlantic, entitled “Why Obama Matters” by Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan’s message has been effectively echoed around the blogosphere for several weeks now. His article starts when he admits that Obama’s policy proposals- what he would actually do if president- are none too special. Sullivan claims, however, that Obama is the only candidate who can play a “transformational” role. Sullivan gives a long litany of rhetorical excesses from the left and right- Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh, that kind of thing- and then boldly claims they are all due to some mysterious Baby Boomer malady. As Obama is not a Boomer by virtue of being 8 years younger than John Edwards, these cultural divisions will magically go away.

As a rule of thumb, whenever a writer argues that somebody can transcend a problem, it usually means the author has no clear idea how to solve the problem. Sullivan lists a few transcendent factors unique to Obama, his race foremost among them. But ultimately, the argument seems to be: “elect Obama and a miracle will happen and the cultural wars will end.” It simply doesn’t seem like a credible scenario to me. No matter how high-minded Obama’s rhetoric, it will not by itself resolve deep cultural divisions in the United States.

I’ve been frustrated my whole life by Baby Boomer’s sense of nostalgia, and their even odder notion that by dint of an accident of fate they happened to have been born within some 6000 days of each other they cosmically share an identity. In a way, Sullivan’s article just does it again, placing the Boomer’s once more in the path of History. Obama is a fine candidate, and should be judged on his merits. Judge him by his credentials and his policy proposals not some mythical transcendence.