At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
The weight of history is a heavy burden. Just ask the developers of nuclear power, or the manufacturers of toxic farm chemicals, or the makers of cars that aren’t competitive in fuel economy or quality. These industrial sectors, and many more, were reshaped by cultural, political, and economic trends they neither anticipated nor were able to manage. Now that weight appears to be pressing hard on the American coal industry and the utilities that buy …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
 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 …
 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 …
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 …
 Tom Kelly, who directs the Inland Seas Education Association in Suttons Bay and is among the state’s foremost authorities on the Great Lakes, showed me a number of very interesting graphs earlier this week about the falling water levels in the Great Lakes. Much of the nation’s attention this summer was directed to Lake Superior, where evaporation, much lighter winter snows and unusually dry spring and summer seasons had produced miles of shoreline nobody had ever …