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Monday, November 25, 2002
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In 1981, R. Buckminster Fuller writing about his design for a single dwelling to house all of the citizens of an inner city ghetto: Old Man River's City, undertaken for East St. Louis, Illinois, takes its name from the song first sung by Paul Robeson fifty years ago, which dramatized the life of Afro-American blacks who lived along the south-of-St. Louis banks of the Mississippi River in the days of heavy north-south river traffic in cotton. Cessation of the traffic occurred when the east-west railway network outperformed the north-south Mississippi, Mexican Gulf, and Atlantic water routes, which left many of its riverbank communities, such as East St. Louis, marooned in economic dead spots. East St. Louis is an American city overwhelmed by poverty. Its population of 70,000 is 70 percent black. ... At the outset meeting of our OMR's City's development, I told the East St. Louisans that I would develop the design and models at my own expense and do so without fee. I said that what I would design must be so "right" that the entire community would fall in love with it ... or it would be dropped. I said that if they did fall in love with it, I would carry on with all the development expense and that they must not allow the project to become a political football. It was fortunate that the East St. Louis community did fall spontaneously in love with the design. This held the project together through many critical moments of preliminary challenges of its validity and practicability. There were many critical meetings wherein skeptics, some of them powerful political activists, declared that this design, with its domedover interior community and exterior private-dwelling terraces, might be part of its social enemy's conspiracy to entrap them. Fortunately the design gradually explained itself, until all the leaders of the community's diverse factions-political, ethnic, and economic, as well as the city's engineer-all agreed on its desirability. (11/25/02) | |
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Donivan Bessinger, MD writes: Can there be any coherence to the collective experience of humankind? Surely the violence and turbulence of its history, the historic isolation of peoples, and the widely varying languages and cultural practices would all argue that it is not so. Indeed, to suggest that there is, in the history of mankind and in its present, any sort of system operating as a collective psyche is to court banishment to those precincts in which individual psyches are meant to be mended. (11/25/02) | |
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New York Times -- "If Darwin were alive today, he might be studying Staten Island instead of the Galapagos," said Mr. Handel, who is, in fact, working to re-introduce native North American species to a portion of what was, until recently, North America's largest garbage dump, the Fresh Kills waste site. That ecologists have gone from studying Darwin's finches to counting papayas and mangos at the Hunt's Point market in the Bronx, as well as the nearly indestructible flora and fauna that survive inside the vacant lots and abandoned industrial sites of the world's cities, is part of a much broader maturation of the field, several environmental scientists say. "The original idea that ecology involved trips to faraway places that people would consider to be pristine reflected a very deep-seated belief that people and nature are separate, which has been dominant in ecology," said Steward Pickett, a senior scientist at the Institute of Ecosystems Studies in Millbrook, N.Y., who is conducting a major long-term study of the environment of Baltimore. The foundations of ecological thinking, he said, were shaken by studies in the last 25 years that showed that virtually all "pristine" environments bore clear signs of human intervention: fires, the hunting of animals, the harvesting of plants, herbs, nuts or fruits. "There is no area left in the world that has not undergone serious human impact, and this makes the whole planet a man-made planet, and cities are only the extreme example of that," said Christine Alfsen-Norodom, the coordinator of Columbia University and Unesco's joint program on the biosphere and society. The shift to urban ecology is also linked to a series of changes in the environment itself: increased urbanization, metastasizing sprawl and global warming. "The choice is no longer between cities and wildness," Ms. Alfsen-Norodom said. "It is, in the face of increasing population, between density and sprawl." (11/25/02) | |
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New York Times -- SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 23 — High above the streets on rooftops flat and wide, nearly a dozen sun-gazing contraptions are shedding new light on this city's foggy reputation. Resembling lunar probes on spindly legs, the machines are equipped with sensors that measure solar energy. Readings are transmitted by radio to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, where engineers plot them on a computerized "fog map" of the city. The Monitoring Network, as the rooftop system is known, is the backbone of an unusual effort to transform San Francisco into the country's largest municipal generator of solar power and other renewable energy. Using the information the monitors gather on where the sun shines and how long, the utility plans to position solar panels around the city that it says will add 10 megawatts of solar power to the electricity grid over the next five years. That is about as much solar power as is now generated in Sacramento, the municipal leader nationwide. On average, 1 megawatt is enough electricity for 1,000 homes. The long-term hope in San Francisco is to increase solar generation an additional 40 megawatts — enough to meet about 5 percent of the city's peak electricity needs — by installing photovoltaic panels on dozens of publicly owned structures, including schools, parking garages, covered reservoirs and even the municipal sewage plant. (11/25/02) | |
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New York Times -- The new Environmental Protection Agency regulation will do the following: Set higher limits for the amount of pollution that can be released by calculating emissions plantwide rather than for individual pieces of equipment. Rely on the highest historical pollution levels during the last decade when figuring whether a facility's overall increase in pollution requires new controls. Give plants that have installed state-of-the-art pollution control equipment a 10-year exemption from having to make further pollution improvements. The agency also proposed changing the definition of what constitutes "routine maintenance, repair and replacement" — the language that helps determine when the regulations should kick in and that is particularly important for aging coal-fired power plants. It plans to grant power plants, factories and refineries an annual "allowance" for maintenance. Only when expenditures rise above that level would an owner or operator have to install new pollution control equipment. Replacement of existing equipment would be considered maintenance. (11/25/02) | |
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New York Times -- The seals were the first to sense something wrong, abandoning their contaminated seawater pool for dry land. Now the people who run La Coruña's enchanting aquarium dread the coming of a noxious black tide that has devastated marine life along more than 250 miles of Spain's Atlantic coast. The aquarium, one of only three in Europe that fill their tanks with seawater, sits where a tanker named the Aegean Sea carrying 80,000 tons of fuel ran aground and caught fire 10 years ago, causing what was until now Galicia's worst environmental disaster. "We built it here as a homage to the sea in a place where we hurt it the most," said Ramón Núñez, the aquarium's director. "The idea was to make an environmental center where people would fall in love with the sea and never dare to damage it again." Now fuel oil shed by the elderly tanker Prestige along the coast of Galicia for six days before it sank on Tuesday still carrying more than 55,000 tons of oil threatens the city of La Coruña and its aquarium. ... The aquarium could survive for three days without pumping in any seawater; after that, it would have to rely on the seawater ferried from saltwater swimming pools, a very temporary solution. If any of several slicks threatening La Coruña hit the coast here, Mr. Núñez will have to evacuate his charges. Many of the 35,000 fish might survive a transfer, but not the 62 species of invertebrates. (11/25/02) | |
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New York Times -- EPA spokeswoman, Ms. Whitman said, "The current rules have deterred companies from implementing projects that would increase energy efficiency and decrease air pollution." The Environmental Protection Agency said the changes, to what is called the New Source Review program, would eliminate "perverse" effects that kept antiquated plants from being modernized. Therefore, the Bush administration today announced the most sweeping move in a decade to loosen industrial air pollution rules. The administration said the changes would encourage plant improvements that would clean the air. But critics denounced the changes as a retreat from tougher rules now in place that require factories to make costly investments in pollution control equipment when they modernize. The announcement of the new rules triggered a storm of criticism from environmentalists, Democrats and some Republicans including Gov. George E. Pataki of New York. In addition, the attorneys general of the six New England states, New York, New Jersey and Maryland announced they would sue. They are all Democrats. Richard Blumenthal, the attorney general of Connecticut, said at a news conference here that the administration was saying "the Northeast can drop dead, and the rest of the country can go with it." (11/25/02) | |
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6:04:19 AM 
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© TrustMark
2002
Timothy Wilken.
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12/3/2002; 8:09:20 AM.
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