Modeshift

Late last summer Circle of Blue, a global multi-media journalism project based here in Traverse City, sent a reporting team to Inner Mongolia, China to cover the front lines of the freshwater crisis in Asia. The members included a writer based in South Korea, a photographer from Australia, an artist and grasslands specialist from Beijing, and Eric Daigh, a videographer and multi-media producer from Circle of Blue’s main office in northern Michigan.

Circle of Blue’s strategy is to merge great independent reporting with the new online multi-media production and dissemination tools to elevate freshwater scarcity to a global priority. The project is the inspiration of Carl and Eileen Ganter, multi-media journalists who live in Traverse City and covered the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. They returned with the idea of doing what no mainstream media organization wanted to do: invest in producing great reporting and images to galvanize public attention around an emerging global environmental, cultural, and political crisis.

Circle of Blue is finishing its “Reign of Sand” multi-media report from Inner Mongolia, which includes more video, articles, photographs, and an interactive motion graphic map. This video is a taste of the great work to come from this online journalism project.

The presidential candidates of both parties have uttered next to nothing about urban development, suburban well-being, and how to improve the quality of life in the places where 80 percent of Americans reside. But the Web sites of the candidates, particularly the Democrats, offer some clues.

A useful summary was posted earlier this month by Robert Godspeed on Planetizen.com.

My new MacBook has a video camera and communications features (okay, don’t laugh all you Apple freaks) that enables me to dial up sources on Skype and also see who I’m talking to on my screen. On Friday morning I used these tools to interview John D. Liu, an American-born videographer, soil scientist, and founder of the Environmental Education Media Project for China, a 10-year-old environmental organization based in Beijing. My questions concerned the growing frequency and strength of sand storms that start in Mongolia and Inner Mongolia and sweep across east Asia, closing airports, and filling the air of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese cities with stinging clouds of sand, and choking dust.

Inner Mongolia, the largest contiguous grasslands on earth, is rapidly turning to sand. Mr. Liu described the source of the dust storms as increasing “dessication from devegetation,” the causes of which are “water management disruptions.” In other words a steady progression of bad policy decisions, increasing industrialization, and much larger numbers of subsidence farmers and herders are changing how available moisture is absorbed, making it much harder for dry and sensitive land to generate grass.

Northern China is not only the new global Dustbowl of the 21st century, it also is an indicator of how the massive economic development that has improved the lives of 400 million Chinese is producing conditions that could lead to a biological collapse unlike anything ever seen in human history.

Mr. Liu (see pix) was born in Nashville, raised in Bloomington, Indiana, and has lived in China since 1979, when he helped to open the CBS News bureau in Beijing. He left after 10 years to turn his video skills loose to help solve some of the global problems he encountered in an international reporting career that has taken him to over 50 countries. He’s since become a doctoral candidate in soil science at the University of Reading in England, and a well-known film maker, reporting on environmental issues for a number of European television stations.

Given my own history of deploying reporting and communications skills in pursuit of public interest goals I felt an immediate kinship. On Friday morning, in a personally compelling display of applied technology, our paths intersected. Mr. Liu sat at the desk in his Beijing study near midnight. I was my Traverse City office at the start of the day. Thirteen hours lay between us, yet we were linked by video cameras, computer screens, online servers and a common interest in trying to make complex issues easier to understand. Two veteran journalists using advances in environmental science and communications know-how to do what we do: learn from each other and tell stories.

“I think the hardest thing is to deal with the depressing information,” he said. “Right now there is little to gain from pulling punches.  We need to see exactly what has happened ecologically and deal with it.  It can be done but only if we face it quickly and accurately.  Putting off rebalancing the human relationship with the earth makes everything much worse.”

Somewhere in our micro human interaction, made so easy and so inexpensive by deft use of computers and software, lies the germplasm of knowledge and sharing that can be replicated. It was a 21st century experience, one that gives me hope.

Cary Moon, the founder of the People’s Waterfront Coalition in Seattle, and one of the country’s premier advocates for alternatives to wasteful highways, wrote me this week about the progress she and her colleagues are making to replaced the elevated Alaskan Way Viaduct with a less expensive, neighborhood conserving, energy efficient alternative.

“You might find this joint press release from the governor, the county, and the city interesting,” said Ms. Moon (see pix). “Quite a big shift in the governor’s intentions, eh?”

Eh, indeed. On Tuesday, December 11, Washington’s Governor Christine Gregoire, King County Executive Ron Sims, and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, all Democrats, said they had directed their aides to toss out the super expensive “one size fits all” construction plan to replace the viaduct, and consider the “entire system of streets, transit service, and freeways from Lake Washington to Elliott Bay, and from Northeast 85th Street to South Spokane Street in evaluating solutions that keep people, goods and services moving.”

Ms. Moon has been advocating just that. She is convinced that the best solution for moving people and goods north and south along Seattle’s waterfront is to replace the aging and earthquake-damaged viaduct with a waterfront park, a boulevard, and re-establishing the grid network of local streets. It’s certainly the least expensive alternative, likely to cost billions less than replacing the elevated six-lane highway with a new structure, or building an even more expensive tunnel.

When it was opened in 1953, the 2.2-mile-long viaduct (see pix above) represented the country’s economic development priorities, providing drivers efficient routes from the central city to growing suburbs. Similar shoreline freeways were built in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Portland, Cleveland and other cities.

But in the early years of the 21st century, Seattle’s old wall of concrete has come to be viewed as a barrier to the city’s quality of life. The viaduct has been accused of various civic offenses, including separating residents from easy access to natural resources, especially a spectacular shoreline.

Ms. Moon’s critique of the viaduct reflects new thinking at the grassroots about the sanest way to move people and goods. For all intents and purposes, the era of massive highway building is nearing its end in the United States as construction costs soar well beyond the ability of the federal and state governments to pay. Highways are not only seen as bad investments, they also are accused of impeding local economies and diminishing the urban experience. Why” Because they are so intrusive, ecologically damaging, energy inefficent, and generally do nothing to relieve congestion.

This is essentially the argument that Ms. Moon has been making for several years. Though Washington State’s Big Three lawmakers haven’t yet conceded she is right, the announcement this week indicates that they are moving in Ms. Moon’s direction. And why not? Seattle is setting new trends in public policy that promotes walking, biking, new transit options, mixed use development, curbing on street parking, progressive zoning that promotes a mix of housing types, and other steps that have turned it into one of the most prosperous urban landscapes in the world. An obsolete idea, like a $6 billion (or more) highway or tunnel just doesn’t fit into Seattle’s 21st century plans.

My friend Brad Johnson, a graphic designer who with his wife, Julie Beeler, manages one of the hottest interactive multi-media studios in the country, Second Story Media in Portland, Oregon, sent me a link the other day to motionographer.com. Motionographer is a portal to much of the hottest and most creative online motion graphic artistry now happening around the United States and the world.

I’m often asked where the Web is going. My response since meeting and writing a New York Times piece last year about Brad and Julie is that it’s going to look a lot more like a video game than any of us ever anticipated. The rich motion graphics accompanied by music will immerse the visitor in a story-telling experience, much like video games do now.

Here’s one very cool site: Stardust, and its montage set to the Stones.

Spend more than a few moments clicking into the links on the left side of the page. Then look through the jobs section to get an idea of who’s growing, and what kind of skills are sought after in this new online graphic world. After a few minutes you’re likely to reach the same conclusion I did. Where’s the beating spirit of American creativity? It’s on the Web. Enjoy.

Two reports from different suburbs across the country indicate new kinds of pain for homeowners and communities.

The first, from North Carolina, describes the outbreak of violence, fear, and break-ins mounting in new suburbs north of Charlotte. Home foreclosures prompted by the subprime mortgage mess prompted owners — local and out-of-state — to abandon properties in what the Charlotte Observer called “starter” subdivisions, where homes generally are priced for less than $150,000.

While downtown Charlotte neighborhoods improve, as they are in other big cities, new suburbs fade and at a speed much faster than city neighborhoods declined in the 1960s and 1970s.

The other report comes from Antioch, IL, a suburb of Chicago, where one of the region’s largest developers declared bankruptcy in early November and abandoned work at the Clublands subdivision. “Streetlights aren’t installed, roads aren’t paved and half-built homes stand as stark symbols of the builder’s financial woes,” reports the Chicago Tribune.

The subdivision was slated to contain 960 single-family homes with prices from around $240,000 to $410,000, said the newspaper. “An 8,000-square-foot clubhouse also was to be built, along with swimming pools, tennis courts and other amenities.” Only a third of Clublands’ homes have been completed.

In 2005, when Jim Kunstler published “The Long Emergency,”  an unsettling synthesis of major market trends (peak oil), environmental conditions (global warming, water scarcity, disease), and what he called the other “converging castastrophes of the 21st century,” I was among the skeptics who was convinced that Kunstler’s analysis was uncharacteristically hyperbolic. Nearly two years later the shine on my bubble of optimism has dulled a bit. 

Essentially, Kunstler predicted that soaring oil prices would generate enormous economic, political, and cultural instability, including rising joblessness, homelessness, currency devaluations, and social disruption. He said that climate change would add another level of complexity and that the United States and other industrialized nations faced “a dark time.” Lastly, he said the coming cataclysm was approaching much faster than business leaders, social theorists, or elected officials either believed or acknowledged. Suburban America, said Kunstler, would be particularly hard hit. Urban America, with its transit systems, walkability, more compact development patterns would fare better. 

My reporting of new market trends, explored in this blog, reached a similar conclusion about the changes we are seeing in suburban and urban communities. Generally I’m optimistic. But as I’ve toured the country in the last couple of months, I’m continually reminded of Kunstler’s more emphatic forecasts.

High energy prices  have contributed to the weakening of the dollar overseas, and dramatically slowed suburban housing markets. Both trends are accelerating the decline of the U.S. auto industry, which continues to produce uncompetitive fuel-guzzling vehicles, and is leading the Midwest deeper into an aggravating recession. That, in turn, has contributed to the highest jobless rates in the nation, and some of the highest rates of home foreclosures and largest housing price declines. 

The strength of the national housing market kept the economy afloat after 9/11. Its slowdown here and in other regions is leading the nation into a recession that some economists say will be long and severe.

Michigan residents already are very familiar with what’s in store for the rest of the country. It’s not pretty. We already have the highest unemployment rate, the largest state budget deficits, and the largest decline since 2000 (12 percent) in median family income in the country. We also have a governor and a Legislature wholly incapable of finding a political consensus that will lead to a new development strategy, part of the grave electoral dysfunction that Kunstler predicted.

Indeed, the most visible and ominous result of this economic dysfunction is the wave of home foreclosures now inundating the nation. Foreclosures are mounting in almost every major American market. Even in San Diego, where million dollar homes burned in fierce forest fires in November and a traditional outpost of wealth and higher expectations, parts of the city are “approaching a point where nearly 10 percent of all homes are in some stage of foreclosure,” according to VoiceofSanDeigo.org.

More than one million new foreclosures are anticipated across the country in 2008. The mess is of sufficient economic concern that even President George Bush reached an agreement today with lenders to help some stressed homeowners, but left millions of others without protection.

And then comes the warming, the magnitude of which is increasing by every measure. New Orleans drowned in 2005. Atlanta, the Colorado Plateau (see Lake Powell in pix), southern California, and even the Great Lakes are drying up in 2007.

In the “Long Emergency”,  Kunstler explained that he didn’t welcome a national “crack-up,” but it was “a plausible outcome that we ought to be prepared to face.” I still think he’s wrong. But I’m also willing to briefly consider that enough unwelcome trends are falling into place that he could be just a little bit right.

How useful can imagination and multi-media imagery be in helping to explain the risks of global warming? Check out this remarkable interactive map produced by Architecture 2030, the non-profit founded by Ed Mazria, an architect based in New Mexico. Each of the red hot spots identifies a coastal community that would largely disappear in a torrent of tidal flooding caused by the melting ice caps. It’s among the most immediately visual scenarios of a potential national calamity I’ve seen. 

Achitecture 2030′s terrific work also includes examples of expert messaging that adorn almost every section of its first-rate Web site. The call to action surrounds a single essential assertion: America doesn’t need and shouldn’t even think about building one more coal-fired power plant.

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That also is a message that the world’s climate change scientists and activists need to carry to Bali, where the 11-day United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change got started today.

More quickly than many advocates of clean energy ever imagined, the idea of halting every new power plant proposal is gaining mainstream acceptance in the United States. The only comparable example in American environmentalism of citizens and scientists coalescing so quickly around a big idea to ban an industrial technology occurred in the 1950s and early 1960s with the global pact to end atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. It still took more than a decade to ratify the first nuclear test ban treaty in the early 1960s.

Who knows how long it will take to convince Americans that coal-powered plants are a fundamental hazard to themselves and their children. But the path to a national ban is now slowly being strewn with cancelled plants. Kansas halted a new plant in October. An Idaho utility in November abandoned its plan to build a plant. In 2004, citizens in Manistee, Michigan halted a proposal to build a coal-fired plant along the shore of Lake Michigan.

In each case, the idea of turning aside a bad idea began with one person deciding to make a difference. That is certainly the case with Ed Mazria, who  became interested in energy efficiency and architecture, and very quickly expanded his vision to include activism to respond to climate change. What’s so hopeful is that online technology, global dissemination tools, interactive multi-media, adept presentation skills, and some cash invested in the right places (great GIS and multi-media, and full page ads in the New York Times) made its possible for one individual to add real value to a necessary conversation.