Over-eager adopters of newness and supposed goodness

23 August 2010 by pcNielsen Leave a Comment

An article I read this morning made me think of something I posted about a month ago:

It never ceases to amaze me how we’re such eager adopters of new technology ideas that we don’t stop and consider the ramifications of what we adopt — like 90% of soybean farmers planting one genetically modified soybean seed.

I eat locally when I can because, in general, the food is better and I have a better idea of where it came from. There are people who’ve made eating locally a religion, though, apparently in part because they think it a more environmentally friendly lifestyle. Writing for the New York Times, Stephen Budiansky informs us that’s bogus in a little article called Math Lessons for Locavores. “The local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas,” he claims.

Budiansky enjoys eating from his own garden nine months out of the year, but he breaks the energy consumption of foods down for us into layman’s terms. Locavorism has apparently entered pharisaical levels of legalism, resulting in “all kinds of absurdities. For instance, it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley.”

According to Budiansky’s math, driving to the grocery store and then refrigerating your loot consume most of the energy that goes into our food production, even if we can brag about our Energy Star appliances. The diesel fuel to truck or train it across the country uses little energy by comparison.

Guess we have to find another way to boost our own self-esteem.

Filed under Buy local, Consumerism, Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Live car free, Mass production, Mass transit, Modern culture, Sustainable living

On public transit and urban community

17 April 2009 by pcNielsen 1 Comment

Rebecca Tirrell Talbot wrote an article titled Of Public Transit and Human Nature for today’s issue of The Curator Magazine. Fascinated as I am by transit (and in some ways the city of Chicago) I read the whole article, not too long and not too short for an internet publication.

Talbot makes some interesting observations concerning the trains in Chicago and their riders, how different lines possess different personalities, how riders in general react (or don’t react) to certain behaviors. I’ll let you read the article (linked to in the first paragraph) for the details after saying one thing: People in the city really wear iPod earbuds like they’re implants. I noticed this on the trains in New York back in February. It’s something we — and by we I mean American culture — made fun of a few years back. Here in our tiny midwestern town you don’t see it very often, hardly at all actually.

cta_red_line_rerouted

Photo from Wikipedia by Daniel Schwen.

Filed under Living incarnationally, Mass transit

IAM Encounter: On conferences and NYC

2 March 2009 by pcNielsen 1 Comment

This will be the first in a series of entries parsing my thoughts from the International Arts Movement‘s Encounter 2009 conference.

On Conferences
I’ve attended a number of conferences and trade shows over the past six years — from two days to one week, a few hundred participants to 30,000 attendees. My wife and I agreed before I left for New York that paying for these kind of events is more or less a crapshoot. You don’t know if it will actually be of value until you get there. You pay to register, transport yourself to the venue, pay for hotel and food and hope for the best.

I’ve learned that such conferences, despite all of their planning with seminars, plenaries and exhibit halls, are best for organic networking. IAM Encounter was no different. Yes, I gleaned some good stuff from the seminars and even the plenaries — which, for the most part, exceeded my expectations — but the meat of the conference was in the people I met in the hallways and bookstore.

On New York City
I was actually a tad nervous prior to my first time in the Big Apple, for some irrational reason. The whole thing went off without a hitch, even though I ticked off the bus driver who drove me from the Newark Airport into the city. In my defense, he was in a bad mood before we left the airport.

That first experience interested me though, in that my uncle previously expressed how nice New Yorkers were in his opinion, at least compared to Chicago-ans. I was always skeptical of his assessment, mainly because people like he and I who haven’t lived in either of these cities get very limited exposure to a reasonable cross-section of the community. That said, most people in the Big Apple were personable; the exception seemed to be transit workers (even beyond the aforementioned bus driver).

The city is much dirtier than I expected. It was encased in a brownish-yellow dome of smog, so much so that I had to squint from the airplane in order to actually see the skyline as we flew into Newark. I was surprised at the volume of trash littering streets and subways, although with such a concentration of people in such a small area I shouldn’t have been.

I was In all likelihood comparing the actual city to my impressions of it in TV and film. I spent time in the Upper East Side, Midtown, Downtown, Chelsea and Tribeca, which barely scratches the surface of the metro but isn’t a cloistered experience wither. None of the neighborhoods looked like sets from Seinfeld or Friends that I could recall. Then I remembered hearing a number of years ago that a lot of movies set in New York City are actually filmed in Toronto, mainly because it’s similar in appearance and a lot cleaner.

scarf-head

Jonathan Cowans’ show “I Remember Rainbows” on Bleecker Street

Filed under Disposable culture, Mass transit, Personal reflection

Living car free

26 February 2009 by pcNielsen Leave a Comment

Assuming I’ve made it to New York for the IAM Encounter conference by now, I’ve flown, taken the bus into the city and then a train (subway) to the apartment I’m calling my temporary home. All of this after being dropped off at the airport by my wife — at an ungodly hour of the morning, sorry dear — in our car.

Earlier this week TechCrunch posted a letter from Todd Dagres,
Founder and General Partner of Spark Capital, to the President. From the letter:

    It’s time to face the truth: The people running the US auto companies are officious bumblers, the products stink, and the unions are a parasitic drain on the business. And yet the Government seems content to throw billions of dollars at the problem.

He goes on to suggest President Obama put Steve Jobs in charge of American automakers. Makes sense to me, although it wasn’t well-received by readers who thought Dagres didn’t know the first thing about the automobile industry. True as that may be (or might not; I doubt many of the commenters really know that much about Dagres), one of the earlier comments noted that many CEOs don’t necessarily have extensive knowledge of the products or processes of their company.

Today’s Wordle is from the Carfree USA blog.

carfree-wordle

Filed under Live car free, Mass transit, Sustainable living

117,000 employees and 17,000 residents

11 December 2008 by pcNielsen 1 Comment

From an All Things Considered story on Tyson’s Corner, just outside of Washington D.C.:

    “About 17,000 live here and about 117,000 — give or take — come to work here every day,” Lecos says. “So that incredible imbalance is why you have the absolute commuter nightmare of trying to get 117,000 people in, in one period of time in the morning, and out again at 5 o’clock.”

Commuter nightmare I’d say. The interview also calls Tyson’s Corner, which offers a whopping 167,000 parking spaces, a traffic engineer’s worst nightmare. The All Things Considered story focuses on a potential remodel for the community, trying to raise it’s population to 100,000 and cut down on the number of commuters. The key to that, it appears, is building up instead of out. This is a piece of advice my grandfather has suggested for years, long before the term New Urbanism was coined.

Sounds like a plan. Illustration from the Tyson’s Tomorrow website.

Tysons corner

Filed under Community planning, Live car free, Living incarnationally, Mass transit, Modern culture, New Urbanism, Sustainable living

Sustainability and the Democratic leadership

5 December 2008 by pcNielsen 3 Comments

I’ve been mulling over the potential for an Obama presidency to render a positive result for sustainable energy in our country. Understand this is a brainstorm on my part. I’d love to possess deeper knowledge about alternative energy technologies than I do, but presently my understanding of them is fledgling.

Everybody’s favorite treehugger, Al-Gore, was interviewed by NPR yesterday afternoon. The conversation focused on coal power plants and the potential for “clean coal.” I was amazed that Gore merely went along with the conversation instead of breaking out and mentioning the fact that coal is a fossil fuel, and not sustainable in the long-term. If you’re a vision casting celebrity like Al-Gore, why not move the conversation ahead by acknowledging the reality of coal in the short-term and pressing for sustainable energy solutions as soon as possible?

Regardless of Al Gore’s celebrity stump for the environment, the Democrats are typically strong in the green category. They are more likely to create green policy, and they are also more likely to spend money on environmental incentives, programs and research.

Also on the radio yesterday were reports of the big three automakers’ return to Washington D.C., this time in hybrids, sans the corporate jets. Their change of heart, a direct result of being laughed out of the city last month, is humorous.

george

I’d personally prefer some tough years and a recession to more federal debt, be it for bailouts or alternative energy. Further, letting the automakers fail has the potential to bring about more lasting cultural change than new policies and more federal money for green research. The high gas prices of this year already did that to a degree; more people are riding bicycles and taking public transit. A few more years of this and there might be an even broader openness to New Urbanism, to well designed cities that don’t use the automobile as a crutch. I’m also generally a fan of letting the automakers reap from their own short-sighted business models. Washington bureaucrats bailing out industries is no more a sustainable model of government than coal is a sustainable means of creating electricity.

Will it be worthwhile to sink billions into alternative energy sources as the Democrats might do? Where will the money come from? When will we have a balanced budget? I was horrified to hear Obama’s upcoming economic adviser say something to the effect that “balancing the budget isn’t important” in a recent interview. It was in the context of the current financial crisis, but I don’t care. The federal government should be able to balance the budget, or that government should be replaced with leadership that can. The one exception I might allow for is a time of war (particularly something like a World War, when our own soil is threatened, as opposed to whatever it is that’s happening in Iraq right now).

I hope that the United States will achieve energy independence in the near future. Our country should be self-sustaining. Trade is all well and good, but the strings that come with things like oil dependence are anything but good. See the current Iraq conflict. I would rather see our nation’s role in the oil-rich Middle East as peacemaker.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

A multitude of energy options already exist. Coal, natural gas, oil, hydro, wind, nuclear and solar for starters. There is no energy production that is completely free of environmental impact; sorry, Al-Gore. In a conversation with a friend a few years ago he pointed out that wind turbines desertify surrounding land. Solar involves development of panels and batteries that wear out. Fossil fuels bother the global warming crowd, and besides that they just aren’t going to last indefinitely. Development always bears a certain impact that can be viewed as negative, but that’s part of humanity subduing the earth as God intended. We just have to do it in the best way possible. We cut down trees, we plant more. We create a hydroelectric dam, we do it in the most enduring and least invasive way possible.

Simply put, we act as good stewards of all of our resources, as a country, as states and as individuals.

Image from PostSecret.

Filed under Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Live car free, Mass transit, New Urbanism, Sustainable living

Advice to Car Companies: Stop making cars

1 December 2008 by pcNielsen Leave a Comment

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has an interesting angle on the whole automobile manufacturing fiasco. His message to the Big Three in Detroit: Stop making cars.

The fact that the car companies of today not only do the R&D for their industry but also run the factories that put the cars together and manage huge networks of dealerships put them at an economic disadvantage. He compares this to Apple, who does all of the R&D in house but outsources all of the manufacturing.

Where’s the iPhone of the car world, Arrington asks?

Filed under Community planning, Environmental stewardship, Live car free, Mass transit, Sustainable living

Continued observations on petrol pains

3 June 2008 by pcNielsen 4 Comments

The price of gas seems to have become reasonable filler for news reports. The following are a few observations from these reports.

    * Ridership on public transit is going up, up, up.
    * Sales of scooters are on the rise.
    * A California man decided to bike 42 miles one way to work for a month — partly because he’d always wanted to, but in the process he’s saving about $400.
    * One investigative story found that the price of fuel is artificially high. Yes, there is more demand than ever worldwide, but what Americans are paying now is more a function of other bureaucratic and speculative nuances than simple supply and demand.
    * GM is closing four manufacturing facilities, all ones that produce large vehicles. And, heaven forbid, they may also discontinue the conspicuous Hummer.

In April I asked “Will the financial strain actually change the way we live?” So it seems the painful price of petrol is forcing people to make adjustments, positive adjustments. My next question is, then, will this change be long-lasting? If the price of gas returns to the low *cough* neighborhood of $2.00/gallon, will Americans stick with the changes they made when costs were high? Will those who moved closer to work move back to the burbs? Will trains and buses have empty seats again? Will General Motors bring back the big cars?

The prices don’t effect my wife and I quite as much as some. I already bike to work whenever I can — because I like to — and the drive from home to office is barely a mile as it is. This whole ordeal interests me, instead, because of its relationship to how we live and design/build our communities in the United States. I would love to see a cultural shift take place. If the cost of gas is the impetus for this change, great. I’m convinced that a pedestrian/transit oriented culture is better for community and also better for the visual environment. I don’t expect cars to go away; they are a useful technology. But they are also overused in our culture, so much so that they have, in essence, taken over.

A few past posts on petrol pain from The Aesthetic Elevator:

Will costs really force a change?
Gas prices cause Dallasite to move
Ethanol a Symptom: Get to the root cause

Filed under Community planning, Live car free, Mass transit, Modern culture, New Urbanism, Sustainable living

Will costs really force a change?

21 April 2008 by pcNielsen 3 Comments

The price of gas is higher than it’s ever been.

The cost of rice went up 141% last year.

The cost of wheat went up 77% last year.

The ABC World News spot that prompted this post, not the first of its kind on this blog, played interview footage of a Texas man who is now using the bus. He used to put gas in his automobile seven or eight times a month — which is unimaginable for myself — and is now down to three fill-ups. I try and bike to the office as much as I can, although I’m not forced into this mode of transportation as much as I have been in the past. In truth I prefer to bike; the car is just too convenient.

My wife tagged along to Wal-Mart with me last night and couldn’t believe the tiny amount of food we got for $70. I usually do the shopping in our household. Most all of what we bought fit in the child seat of the cart. $20 of the bill went towards meat and cheese from the deli, and I don’t buy the most inexpensive of the turkey. Further, local sales tax — yes, we pay sales tax on food — is quite high. Our checkbook is feeling the pain.

Will the financial strain actually change the way we live? Will we be, if I can put it this way, a more reasonable culture? Will we forgo the debt and consumerism that enslave so many of us? Will we adopt a more sustainable way of life all around?

Adding: A couple snippets from a book review by David Taylor:

    The enemy to this vision is Suburban Sprawl. Call it the Anti-Urban Experience. Bess reckons it a manifestation of fallen modernity: a functionally secular, therapeutic, individualist, technologically enamored vision driven by an oppressive demand for novelty and the “bottom line.”

    Suburban sprawl, Bess contends, dissociates daily communal life from physical place. It is environmentally unsustainable and unjust; it makes people slaves to their cars. Usually it is also ugly; useful and mostly durable, yes, but architecturally unbearably dull.

I might contest the “usually durable” comment, but that depends on the exact part of automobile-slash-suburban culture we’re talking about.

Filed under Community planning, Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Live car free, Mass transit, Modern culture, New Urbanism, Sustainable living

The architecture of airports

18 April 2008 by pcNielsen 1 Comment

I’ve been fascinated with various forms of large-scale transportation since I was very young. I grew up in a non-descript western Nebraska community that boasts the worlds largest rail classification yards. And after my first time flying — first time old enough to remember, anyway — I became infatuated with commercial aviation. Any time an airplane, small props such as the Beechcraft 1900 in the case of the North Platte airport, flew within hearing I would look up. Thankfully this wasn’t very often in the small town, or I might have acquired a permanent crick in my neck. More reflection on my interest in aviation is in this post from June of last year.

I don’t fly all that much, but in the last five weeks I set foot in airports for two separate trips. My layover was in Memphis in both cases. The Memphis airport is a dreary place to be (the one point of promise was the real-live art hanging on the walls). In the concourses ceilings are low, corridors are narrow and the tiled walls are a drab brown-gray. It may be the ugliest airport I’ve been in.

But a lot of airports look like this, bland and uninviting. Situation Terminal, from The New Yorker’s website, tackles the question “Can anyone design a nice aiport?” The story lays out a bit of airport design history, suggesting the logistical nightmare that is a large airport and tight finances fostered a more or less pragmatic approach to terminal and concourse design in the last thirty to forty years. Attempts at reinventing the airport were, while perhaps visually interesting, failures in function. The New Yorker cites Eero Saarinen’s efforts at JFK and Dulles in this regard.

“Since then,” the story says, “airport authorities have been wary of letting any architect have a say on what should go where. Now most architects don’t get to do much more than give the main concourse a big, swooping space with natural light — like the one in the new American Airlines terminal at Kennedy airport — which acts as little more than a distraction from the banality of the rest of the terminal.”

There are, however, two shining examples of a better way to design airports according to columnist Paul Goldberger. Norman Foster’s Beijing Capital International Airport’s Terminal 3 is the airport rethought, successfully according to Goldberger. Apparently the space is intuitive and logistically more sound than the comfortable — even if archaic — model airports presently defer to.

I’m not so keen on the aesthetics from what I can tell in the architects renderings, though, or the 500+ photos uploaded to Flickr. It looks like a very large commercial building, like so many other airports, from what I can tell. Sure, it appears as though the architect specified some attempts to cover up the generally cold underlying structure, but based on the images I’m finding online the attempt was futile. The one exception is the Ground Transportation Centre. This space actually looks pleasant to be in.

The second example of a new airport architecture Goldberger’s piece cites is Terminal 4 in Madrid. The column doesn’t say much about function in Richard Roger’s Barajas Airport project, but the images lend me to believe this is, overall, a much more inviting environment than Terminal 3 in Beijing.

My own experience lies more with smaller venues, such as the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport (XNA) or Lincoln [Nebraska] Airport (LNK). In many ways these smaller airports are much nicer to fly in and out of, even if there aren’t as many restaurants to choose from. I often wonder if the hub and spoke system major airlines use to get people from place to place is less than optimal. I suppose — that is, I hope — the airlines have seriously considered alternatives to this model at some point in their history. With all of the financial trouble most of them are in right now, one would think this might be a good time to revisit a variety of innovative options in order to say afloat and gain and edge on the competition.

Filed under Aesthetics, Architecture, Basis for designing well, Mass transit, Northwest Arkansas

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