Salon.com > Linda Baker

Just say it’s sunny

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 10:16:00 +0000

In 1981, Steve Schneider, then a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., was faced with what he refers to as a "real job crisis." He was offered a job as weekend meteorologist at a station in New York City, a position that would have brought him the kind of fame and fortune that can otherwise elude the hardworking American scientist.

Schneider, who is now a Stanford professor in interdisciplinary environmental studies and biological sciences, and a 1992 MacArthur Foundation "genius" fellow, says he made a couple of requests during his station interview. Instead of describing the weather to viewers -- "showers, sun breaks" -- he wanted to deliver "probabilistic forecasts," which reflect the uncertainty inherent in any forecast and the odds that any given event will occur. Schneider also wanted to discuss the daily weather in the context of global climate, as well as human activity, such as pollution.

Station managers weren't impressed. "They were interested in the idea of probabilistic forecasts, but the news consultants hadn't told them that's how to make money," Schneider says. As for including climate change and human influences on weather, Schneider was told: "'Our chief meteorologist doesn't believe in that.' I said, 'He doesn't know what he's talking about.' That was the end of the interview."

Urban renewal, the wireless way

Mon, 29 Nov 2004 20:30:00 +0000

In November 2003, New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger penned a diatribe in Metropolis magazine against the isolation and dissolution of place wrought by the pervasive use of cellphones on city streets. "The mobile phone renders a public place less public," he wrote. "It turns the boulevardier into a sequestered individual, the flâneur into a figure of privacy. And suddenly the meaning of the street as a public place has been hugely diminished."

Goldberger's critique of mobile communications technology capped over a decade of analysis revolving around the ability of global communications networks -- for better and for worse -- to release people from the constraints of time and place. "The post-information age will remove the limitations of geography," wrote Nicholas Negroponte in "Being Digital." "Digital living will depend less and less on being in a specific place at a specific time." In "Pandemonium," Lars Lerup, dean of the architecture school at Rice University, proclaimed: "The bandwidth has replaced the boulevard."

Walk to school, yes, but don’t forget your lawyer

Wed, 13 Oct 2004 19:30:00 +0000

When Andy Clark, executive director of the Washington D.C.-based League for American Bicyclists, speaks to parent groups about bicycling and walking, he likes to toss out the following query: How many people walked to school when they were children? The answer, he says, is always roughly the same: about 75 percent. But when he asks the same group how many have kids who walk to school today, the figure drops to 25 percent.

In our post-bipedal world, the youngest generation is spending mornings and afternoons -- you guessed it -- in the back seat of mom or dad's car. "It has taken us 50 years to destroy our ability to walk," said Clark. "And it will take 50 years to get it back again."

Over the past two decades, transportation activists have focused efforts on redirecting state and federal transportation funds away from cars and road building toward bicycle, pedestrian and mass transit alternatives. By all accounts, their efforts are succeeding. Between 1973 and 1991, the 50 states spent a total of $40 million on bike and walk infrastructure improvements. By contrast, expenditures on bike lanes, sidewalks and pedestrian trails now total $422 million per year, an order of magnitude greater -- albeit still a paltry 1 percent of the country's total transportation budget.

Great big green monster mansions

Wed, 07 Jul 2004 19:30:00 +0000

En route to a Vancouver, B.C., conference on recycled products a couple of years ago, green-building consultant Kathleen O'Brien struck up a conversation with her Bangladeshi cab driver, who wanted to know what kind of green features to incorporate into his house. "He asked, 'Should it be wood, should it be steel?'" said O'Brien, who helped create Built Green, a landmark residential green-building program in Washington state. "I said: 'If you do one thing, build it small.'"

Green building is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the exploding market for environmentally friendly materials and technologies. According to the National Association of Homebuilders (NAHB), in 2002, programs such as Built Green certified more than 13,000 homes in the United States. Next year, the U.S. Green Building Council will pilot its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Homes program, certifying state-of-the-art green residences. States and municipalities also continue to strengthen residential codes for energy efficiency, indoor air quality and water use.

Why don’t we do it in the road?

Thu, 20 May 2004 19:30:00 +0000

It's rush hour, and I am standing at the corner of Zhuhui and Renmin Road, a four-lane intersection in Suzhou, China. Ignoring the red light, a couple of taxis and a dozen bicycles are headed straight for a huge mass of cyclists, cars, pedicabs and mopeds that are turning left in front of me. Cringing, I anticipate a collision. Like a flock of migrating birds, however, the mass changes formation. A space opens up, the taxis and bicycles move in, and hundreds of commuters continue down the street, unperturbed and fatality free.

In Suzhou, the traffic rules are simple. "There are no rules," as one local told me. A city of 2.2 million people, Suzhou has 500,000 cars and 900,000 bicycles, not to mention hundreds of pedicabs, mopeds and assorted, quainter forms of transportation. Drivers of all modes pay little attention to the few traffic signals and weave wildly from one side of the street to another. Defying survival instincts, pedestrians have to barge between oncoming cars to cross the roads.

Made in the U.S. of A.?

Wed, 11 Feb 2004 20:30:00 +0000

The revolution, says Dov Charney, the manic 35-year-old founder and CEO of American Apparel, will be standardized. A purveyor of "sweatshop free" T-shirts and casual wear, American Apparel is the exception to the rule in today's fashion and textile industry. The company doesn't outsource its production, and it confines all aspects of manufacturing and management to a single building in downtown Los Angeles. Everything from knitting the cloth to designing the garments takes place in a seven-story pink warehouse with the huge banner "American Apparel Is an Industrial Revolution," unfurled outside the top floor. (Or, as Charney puts it, "a FUCKING industrial revolution.")

In 2003, American Apparel grossed $80 million, double its sales figures for 2002. Those numbers are expected to double again in 2004. Last November, the company opened its first three retail stores, two in New York City and one in Los Angeles; by the end of the year, there will be outposts in London, Frankfurt and Berlin. The globetrotting Charney is scouting retail and manufacturing locations in Thailand, Mexico and China, where, he says, American Apparel is committed to paying store and factory workers U.S.-dollar minimum wage.

Suzhou: City of canals, semiconductors and hidden radios

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 20:30:00 +0000

I am running along the remains of the 2,500-year-old wall surrounding the Chinese city of Suzhou, and the beep is getting louder. "Find where the volume is lowest," says 17-year-old Shen Wenjie, a junior at Suzhou Middle School and, as it happens, an amateur radio direction finding (ARDF) player since he was in the third grade.

The radio signal appears to be quieter on the left, so we scramble down the slope to a newly landscaped path alongside one of the city's myriad canals. Freshly planted grass and camphor trees border a classical garden-style walkway made of inlaid stones and pavers.

Until last year, residents planted vegetables on the area where we are now standing, Shen tells me. Some of the farmers dug up the grass this year to grow their usual watermelon crop: quite the headache for local government authorities, apparently. The radio signal is so low now I can hardly hear it through my headphones. We are very close to achieving our goal: finding the radio receiver concealed somewhere in the greenspace. I look around, only to be admonished by Shen. "No, don't use your eyes," he says. "Listen and think."

It's my first time ever playing ARDF, and already I'm cheating.

Are you ready for some “unswooshing”?

Wed, 08 Oct 2003 19:30:00 +0000

Kalle Lasn isn't scared of the U.S. PATRIOT Act. "America has become a bit of a monster," says the punchy, 60-something founder of Adbusters, the anti-consumption magazine based in Vancouver, B.C. "Some of the things the U.S. is doing, in Israel, in Cancún with the WTO, I just can't take it any longer. It's gotten to the point where I almost think I've become a terrorist."

But Lasn is no Osama bin Laden. The author of "Culture Jam: How to Reverse America's Suicidal Binge," Lasn is one of the leading figures in the "culture jamming" movement, an international grassroots effort that uses the logic of commercial images to critique corporate hegemony and rampant consumerism. Under his leadership, Adbusters' preferred method of culture jamming has been to publish ad parodies, such as "Absolute Impotence," a photo of the familiar bottle drifting in spilled vodka, or a Nike satire that morphs Tiger Woods' smile into a Swoosh.

Last month, Adbusters announced a new phase in state-of-the-art meme warfare. ("Memes" refer to the core images, slogans or ideas that culture jammers manipulate: e.g., a swoosh, or "Just Do It.") Although the campaign's targets, Nike and CEO Phil Knight, appear frequently in the magazine's culture jams, the latest strategy moves Adbusters out of the realm of parody and into the competitive world of global marketing and production.

Adventures in smog trading

Wed, 04 Jun 2003 19:30:00 +0000

Fifteen years ago, Mark Trexler developed the world's first agroforestry project aimed at offsetting the environmental impact of industrially produced carbon dioxide emissions.

The awkwardly titled AES/CARE Guatemala Agroforestry and Carbon Sequestration Project was based on a straightforward premise: Scientists believe carbon dioxide is a major contributor to the greenhouse effect. Trees remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow. A large-scale reforestation project in Guatemala, therefore, would help cancel out, or "offset," the carbon dioxide emitted in North America by AES Corp., an American electricity company. The project would also displace emissions-producing activities such as logging and slash-and-burn farming.

Today, Trexler is the president of Trexler and Associates, a pioneering climate-change mitigation services firm in Portland, Ore. He travels the globe locating and developing carbon-offset projects for the private sector. These range from rural solar-electrification projects in India to methane gas recovery efforts in Ohio.

How mushrooms will save the world

Mon, 25 Nov 2002 18:30:00 +0000

Once you've heard "renaissance mycologist" Paul Stamets talk about mushrooms, you'll never look at the world -- not to mention your backyard -- in the same way again. The author of two seminal textbooks, "The Mushroom Cultivator" and "Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms," Stamets runs Fungi Perfecti, a family-owned gourmet and medicinal mushroom business in Shelton, Wash. His convictions about the expanding role that mushrooms will play in the development of earth-friendly technologies and medicines have led him to collect and clone more than 250 strains of wild mushrooms -- which he stores in several on- and off-site gene libraries.

Until recently, claims Stamets, mushrooms were largely ignored by the mainstream medical and environmental establishment. Or, as he puts it, "they suffered from biological racism." But Stamets is about to thrust these higher fungi into the 21st century. In collaboration with several public and private agencies, he is pioneering the use of "mycoremediation" and "mycofiltration" technologies. These involve the cultivation of mushrooms to clean up toxic waste sites, improve ecological and human health, and in a particularly timely bit of experimentation, break down chemical warfare agents possessed by Saddam Hussein.

The not-so-sweet success of organic farming

Mon, 29 Jul 2002 19:30:00 +0000

Over the past two months, David Gould has inspected pumpkin farms and fertilizer companies in China, consulted for the world's only organic producer of Noni juice in Tahiti, and followed the trail of non-genetically modified livestock feed -- from farmers' auctions to port machinery -- in India.

Gould is a Portland, Ore.-based inspector and certifier of organic foods. For an eco-minded scientist-activist, Gould appears to have an ideal job: he gets to travel to far-flung places, work outside and help Third World countries implement environmentally friendly development strategies. Theoretically, he's a standard bearer for a new, more sustainable form of global food production, in which local communities produce food that is consumed locally, without the input of expensive and possibly unhealthy pesticides or genetically modified organisms.

But organic farming in the 21st century is turning out to be a little more complicated than its advocates originally expected. For example, there was the time a few years ago that Gould was sent by Eco-Cert, a German certification agency, to oversee the company's first certification project in Japan.