New header…

…thanks to David Burdeny. Extraodinary photographs. This is from the Antarctica/Greenland 2007 series, titled Iceberg Remains. Appropriate for our warming climate…

Raphael Saadiq is cool…

Other daughter is in San Francisco at Outside Lands, and calls me from the Raphael Saadiq concert. Wish I had been there, but will settle for this…

10 things I have learned…

…from Milton Glaser.

3   SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.

(…) there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

Why pay tuition?

Since my daughter is about to experience paying private college tuition for graduate school, the idea of free classes caught my eye. The Khan Academy is a large collection of mini-lectures on Youtube, for free. Via Baseline Scenario.

Is Anybody Listening?

On the News Hour last night there was a remarkable story about a high school class that made a video “Is Anybody Listening?” about how the recession is affecting their lives.

It was a class project born out of a discussion of the American Dream. Five months later, it made it into a speech given by President Obama. “it” is an eight minute video titled, “Is Anybody Listening.” It’s the first person accounts of students struggling with foreclosures, hunger and the threat of becoming homeless.

The video feels like a twenty-first century version of a Dorothea Lange portrait. One student told us his American dream is modest – to have a refrigerator full of food. The goal of making the video was to get the attention of the nation’s leaders, specifically the President. It took a few months, but just last week, the video made it to the White House and President Obama told the students in a speech he is listening and promised to fight for their right to the American Dream. Although there is no assurance the President’s promise will change the lives of these Pomona kids, they are hopeful and for now are declaring “mission accomplished.”

It’s a heartbreaking story. Watching the sadness and anxiety of these young lives gives a new dimension to the anger over greed that led to the meltdown and the AIG bonuses. Watch the News Hour (above), then watch the original video:

Sprint to Santa Monica

We did a quick trip to Santa Monica over the weekend to go to my nephew’s volleyball game–he’s a frosh at George Mason University, and they played #3 Pepperdine Saturday night. Great chance to see fam, and a good volleyball. Pepperdine won, 3-0.

We also spent Saturday doing galleries in Santa Monica, and made a great discovery of the Bergamot Station art gallery complex, as well as cruising the galleries on Main Street. I have to say, LA has great modern culture and music (KCRW).

We also stopped at the new Getty on our way back to Sac. No special exhibits for us, but just a great building and views.

More photos in Flickr set.

Get it on…

…Marvin Gaye style.

Social collapse: best practices

The suddenly famous pessimist Dmitry Orlov spoke at the Long Now Foundation seminar last week. Here is Stewart Brand’s summary. Audio and video of the talk will be available on-line soon. See also Orlov’s site, which includes the text of the Long Now Talk, as well as a link to text and slides for Orlov’s famous 2006 “Collapse Gap” talk.

“Managing social collapse

With vintage Russian black humor, Orlov described the social collapse he witnessed in Russia in the 1990s and spelled out its practical lessons for the American social collapse he sees as inevitable. The American economy in the 1990s described itself as “Goldilocks”—just the right size—when in fact is was “Tinkerbelle,” and one day the clapping stops. As in Russia, the US made itself vulnerable to the decline of crude oil, a trade deficit, military over-reach, and financial over-reach.

Russians were able to muddle through the collapse by finding ways to manage 1) food, 2) shelter, 3) transportation, and 4) security.

Russian agriculture had long been ruined by collectivization, so people had developed personal kitchen gardens, accessible by public transit. The state felt a time-honored obligation to provide bread, and no one starved. (Orlov noted that women in Russia handled collapse pragmatically, putting on their garden gloves, whereas middle-aged men dissolved into lonely drunks.) Americans are good at gardening and could shift easily to raising their own food, perhaps adopting the Cuban practice of gardens in parking lots and on roofs and balconies.

As for shelter, Russians live in apartments from which they cannot be evicted. The buildings are heat-efficient, and the communities are close enough to protect themselves from the increase in crime. Americans, Orlov said, have yet to realize there is no lower limit to real estate value, nor that suburban homes are expensive to maintain and get to. He predicts flight, not to remote log cabins, but to dense urban living. Office buildings, he suggests, can easily be converted to apartments, and college campuses could make instant communities, with all that grass turned into pasture or gardens. There are already plenty of empty buildings in America; the cheapest way to get one is to offer to caretake it.

The rule with transportation, he said, is not to strand people in nonsurvivable places. Fuel will be expensive and hoarded. He noted that the most efficient of all vehicles is an old pickup fully loaded with people, driving slowly. He suggested that freight trains be required to provide a few empty boxcars for hoboes. Donkeys, he advised, provide reliable transport, and they dine as comfortably on the Wall Street Journal as they did on Pravda.

Security has to take into account that prisons will be emptied (by stages, preferably), overseas troops will be repatriated and released, and cops will go corrupt. You will have a surplus of mentally unstable people skilled with weapons. There will be crime waves and mafias, but you can rent a policeman, hire a soldier. Security becomes a matter of local collaboration. When the formal legal structure breaks down, adaptive improvisation can be pretty efficient.

By way of readiness, Orlov urges all to prepare for life without a job, with near-zero burn rate. It takes practice to learn how to be poor well. Those who are already poor have an advantage.”

Great video from Sustainable Spaces

Matt Golden at Sustainable Spaces is full of surprises. This video tells a lot about what home performance retrofitting is, while also being a great recruiting message. (About 10 minutes).

RESNET in New Orleans

We’re in New Orleans for the RESNET conference. Over 800 people in the obviously growing residential retrofit business. Ed Mazria gave a great talk. DOE and EPA staff presented the headlines from the new programs created by the stimulus package–gazillions of dollars that they have to get out in 60 days. There will be a lot of chaos, but hopefully good programs will be funded as well.

Marilyn had amazing conversations with people who had been devastated by Katrina. While the French Quarter is clearly open for tourists, many people still don’t have homes or livelihoods. She heard a lot of very disturbing stories. But it is a city with great buildings and music, and I’m sure it will survive. We had time for a walk in the Garden District, and along Magazine Street. I found a coffee shop where I did two conference calls. I’m not a good tourist… Photos on Flickr.

Is the recession an opportunity?

I’ve been wondering if the growing downturn could be an opportunity for new technologies and viewpoints to emerge. One direct effect is that energy consumption (“oil use down 6% in 2008“) and carbon emissions will drop, along with other pollution. Alex Pang has a great post on “design and the downturn” about the other creative possibilities:

Michael Cannell’s piece “Design Loves a Depression” has some interesting suggestions about the future of design: that the flourishing of expensive, celebrity designers will come to an end, allowing the field to get serious about solving real problems and being more constructive by having to work within constraints.

[D]uring the Great Depression… an early wave of modernism flourished in the United States, partly because it efficiently addressed the middle-class need for a pared-down life without servants and other Victorian trappings.

“American designers took the Depression as a call to arms,” said Kristina Wilson, author of “Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression” and an assistant professor of art history at Clark University. “It was a chance to make good on the Modernist promise to make affordable, intelligent design for a broad audience.”…

Design tends to thrive in hard times. In the scarcity of the 1940s, Charles and Ray Eames produced furniture and other products of enduring appeal from cheap materials like plastic, resin and plywood, and Italian design flowered in the aftermath of World War II….

There is a reason she and others are optimistic: however dark the economic picture, it will most likely cause designers to shift their attention from consumer products to the more pressing needs of infrastructure, housing, city planning, transit and energy. Designers are good at coming up with new ways of looking at complex problems, and if President-elect Barack Obama delivers anything like a W.P.A, we could be “standing on the brink of one of the most productive periods of design ever,” said Reed Kroloff, director of Cranbrook Academy of Art….

One way or another, design will focus less on styling consumer objects with laser-cut patterns and colored resin and more on the intelligent reworking of current conditions. Expect to hear a lot more about open-source design, and cradle-to-cradle, a concept developed by William McDonough and Michael Braungart that calls for cars, packaging and other everyday objects to be designed specifically for recycling so that their parts and materials are used and reused without waste.

This reminds me somewhat of the argument made by Brian Arthur and others (most notably Arthur, I think) that tech bubbles don’t create what’s really valuable: they create a lot of potentially valuable wreckage and infrastructure that the next round of innovators use to do really serious stuff.

Book salon on FireDogLake

Today I hosted a book salon on FireDogLake, on David Goldstein’s book Saving Energy, Growing Jobs. It was a great experience…

Another kind of speculator…

Scifi writer Bruce Sterling does his State of the World 2009 at the WELL.

New Year’s Eve entertainment

…If you’re at your laptop, here is a great 80 minute video playlist, courtesy of FireDogLake…

Along with less stuff, less house…

Here’s compelling article about living in smaller houses. Of course we’ve always lived in a small house. It’s efficient in so many ways, and leaves more time and money for other more important things.