From Streetcars To Spaceships

Let's look at ecoroof implementation and why it's so much less than it should be.

As some of you know, greenroof design is nothing new. When Cortez marched into Mexico City, he and his soldiers were amazed at the beauty and food-growing capacity of the rooftop gardens they found. In Scandinavia grass-covered, super-thick sod rooftops have been around as long as the ancient sagas. But somehow, we've lost most of that and, as with so many things, now we're starting over. And while from an energy-savings standpoint alone, vegetated structures should be a home run, getting used routinely on buildings from average private homes on up, instead, greenroof is still seen as a boutique sort of thing. A luxury reserved for special case use by large institutions, the wealthy, and corporations anxious to buy some good press.

Almost all of our modern "experts" in this field start by assuming that maximum possible rewards are quite small, so they start by assuming a total budget that must be even smaller. Since they are assuming a very small budget per square foot, anything that would take "real money" is, right off the bat, declared "impossible."

They don't consider significantly strengthening the rooftop. Or having a few deep wells of soil bridged with a shallower bed of growing medium. Or trellises as part of that rooftop setup. Or sacrificing any space inside the building to gain room for either better roof access or for area for those possible structural reinforcements. Nor do they consider vegetating approaches limited to areas near existing load-bearing members. Or relocating any building tenants, either permanently or just while construction is under way.

So they then pre-emptively dismiss most buildings as "unsuitable" without ever having even considered most of the possible options. They are mixing up their prejudged idea of reasonable with the vastly larger range of what is possible. And then telling others that greenroof is "impossible" for most buildings.

At Portland's recent ecoroof show I think I was finally able to put a last few crucial pieces into place in my understanding of why.

When I first starting looking into greenroofs and doing my first small experiments, long about 1991, the people I talked to about it, most notably Paul and the other folks at the Gaia Institute, justified it first and foremost as a means of superinsulating the roof. Once one of these puppies goes in the top floor tenant's in the cool shade forever. And finds it much easier to keep warm when the outside gets cold. It was also something thought of as being done on older buildings such as five to seven story rowhouses in poor neighborhoods. Some of them about a hundred years old. And it was being done largely with variations on the mix the Gaia Institute was then pioneering, made almost entirely of post-consumer materials like styrofoam and food waste.

Let's go over that again. How things were then:

• Biggest known advantage: massive reduction of energy consumption.
• Typical project: old building rehabbed on a small budget by a small team.
• Typical composition: heavy membrane covered with a growing medium made mostly of processed "waste".

Those of you who knew me in the early nineties were subjected to my endless lectures on this, as well as "guided tours" of whatever my latest planter design was turning into or whatever plants had just done whatever unexpected thing. I know that a few of you also saw the displays that the Gaia Institute had up in the Cathedral of St. John or the projects visible on nearby rooftops.

And I can tell you that in the years after that I saw greenroof stay marginal and continue to be unknown to most builders I discussed it with. Or, at best, perceived as impractical or simply impossible for their sites. Part of the reason that I spent the years that I did with This Old House Magazine, Architectural Record, Engineering New-Record, and others in the "shelter" world was to keep track of this field and get access to their experts and libraries. And I found there and elsewhere that marginal position was pretty constant, in terms of projects planned, funded, and completed, as well as in perception among engineers, architects, and even landscape designers. Even among squatters, who were sometimes more than willing to build photovoltaic systems and other ambitious "green" projects, it just wasn't taken seriously.

But as time passed I noticed a trend. The publicly cited "experts" shifted from being builders and experimenters with dirt on their hands at small, out-in-the-field, practical firms to being paper-pushers and desk jockeys at massive, glossy firms like SOM who had been designated the in-house suit for coordinating elegant, high-budget implementations on purpose-built small segments of hundred million dollar corporate complexes. Greenroof became a way that wealthy firms provided a last, small touch of class to a large, institutional project. A rooftop courtyard garden for a very rich hospital. Vegetated swaths on the one rooftop of a corporate campus most visible from other campus rooftops. I started to see a lot more CAD flythroughs and considerably fewer self-managed projects.

But I also found a non-obvious limiting factor. One trend in that period had annoyed the bejabbers out of me. With all that nineties enthusiasm for breaking free of the anonymous glass box, they started building all these things with setbacks that just begged to be done as greenroof. In fact, some of them explicitly referenced Edwardian and Deco architecture such as Rockefeller Center, that had originally been designed to be overflowing with living things. So with their wealthy corporate clients and all their desire for high valuations, why the frack weren't these "New Traditionalists" planting all these rooftop courtyards and balconies, etc.?

It wasn't until I was at a presentation by some of the senior team members of New York City's Worldwide Plaza that I got an answer. At the reception afterwards I was blunt in my enthusiasm and my frustration and was all ready to go into evangelist mode. And they cut me off and started going into rich detail about how the original plans had included intentions to vegetate every last horizontal surface larger than a stick of gum. Oh, they were quite eloquent and very well-informed. So what had stopped them?

Insurance, they said. No insurance company would provide a policy for those surfaces. How did they know tenants wouldn't go out on them and fall off the building or even just snap an ankle or drop a glass off the side? How did they know the membrane wouldn't tear and pour water and soil on the tenants below? And so on. No data, no actuarial tables. No actuarial tables, no precise, controllable calculations for risk. No risk tables, no policy.

And while in the decade and half since some data has been put together and that issue has faded, at the time it, as far as I can tell, considerably dimmed the flame and discouraged another generation of designers from building vegetated structures.

And then it all changed.

Several factors were all creeping up on us. Municipal budgets were getting stripped. City populations were growing without proportional additions to infrastructure. And laws about public exposure to toxicity were being passed and/or stiffened, sometimes with real enforcement powers. Add all of this up with global climate change and a few other factors and cities began to be in a crisis about managing stormwater peak loads.

For those of you not familiar with this issue, there are a few parts. First of all, many cities were built so that when the drains off city streets and from downspouts and so on that were meant to handle runoff during storms reached capacity, they overflowed into the sewage system. Which then sometimes itself overflowed. With a mix of stormwater and sewage. Into rivers, parks, estuaries, and so on.

Ew.

And the most commonly accepted "solution" to this was building treatment plants where that stormwater could now be routed, pretreated, tested, and released "in a controlled fashion" to some adjacent waterway.

Well, let me tell you, from a typical city hall perspective, this sucks ass. Now you need to go hundreds of millions of dollars into debt, force some neighborhood to let you build this huge muckin' grey, ugly, government facility next to them, and, now that your citizens think of it as toxic waste, they're going to fight you tooth and nail about the smell (even if you prove that there is none), how you store and ship away the resulting "collected matter", and where you release the resulting cleaner (ish) water. That they won't really believe is clean. You're looking at possibly fifteen years of expensive, unpopular and required activity and the citizens will, no matter what, blame you. After all, they were doing well enough *before* you got there, right? And why can't you just put it all somewhere else?

Other than the excuse to eventually maybe grant government consulting and construction contracts to some of your favorite campaign supporters, this is pretty much one enormous barrel of aw, sh*t. And one that, unless you find a route-around, you can expect to be drinking out of for the rest of your time in office.

Now the biggest factor in increased loads was runoff per square block. Not total city size but population density. And what increased that runoff was replacing "soft" and therefore permeable surfaces (lawns, fields, street tree planters, etc.) with "hard" and therefore impermeable surfaces (asphalt, concrete, and so forth). Even if a "soft" surface was thin, it still reduced runoff somewhat and, usually good enough, what runoff did come anyway trickled through it to drain off over the course of hours or even days, instead of what happens on a surface like an asphalt-surfaced rooftop which starts adding load to the stormwater system in as little as a minute.

Because, you see, it's all about minimizing those peak loads.

So this all changed when the city of Toronto was found to be required by law to build a stormwater treatment plant.

Well, like all cities, partially they just contested the findings. And did all the usual stuff of preparing to review plant design bids and so on. But they also did something new. Some folks up there did a very smart analysis. They said, "wait a minute, each square meter of greenroof reduces peak runoff by X and costs Y to build and operate. While a plant to treat X amount of runoff costs (greater than Y) to build and operate. So instead of building this great muckin' water treatment plant, we could save money by instead subsidizing greenroof."

*light dawns*

So governments started, one by one, encouraging greenroof. Mostly with tax write-offs and incentives that were structured in ways that appealed most to large organizations. Places where their stormwater tax bill added up to serious money. Places of the sort where adding a few dozen more pages of forms and documentation to their yearly tax filings was no big deal.

So, at long last, that become the way that greenroof starting getting more penetration. And it meant that the people inside the client's companies who were put in charge were people from the departments seeking to cut their annual taxes, from the departments seeking to avoid fines for violating environmental regulations.

In other words, the projects were being run and judged on efficacy by people like compliance officers, who saw this as just one new tool to keep government problems minimized. The cognitive framework wasn't first and foremost about positives pursued because it (greenroof) inherently appealed to them but rather about compliance with regulations and minimizing of risk. "How little expense will make them go away?" not "how much of this desirable thing can we afford?"

And the people in government in charge of encouraging this were (and are still) judged by the same kind of standard. Not "is our city now a healthier/more fuel efficient/biodiverse/whatever place?" but "how much closer have you taken us to not needing to build a goddamn hundred million dollar water treatment center?

And, as with so many other things, the relevant municipal official were given very little money or new staff to accomplish this with. Even in cities like Chicago and Toronto and Portland, those being put forward as the trailblazers, in reality funding support was really a sad few civil servants with maybe a few graduate students from a local architecture school and some projects being built as part of some new government-funded facility.

So just about every project involves six rounds of proposals. And maybe a few of bids. And a lot of the time the funding falls through. Or the project is refocused. So a new committee is formed and it all starts over again. And every time the whole shebang needs to be rejustified. Largely to people who don't see the point, are short on funds and time, and are asking (reasonably enough) for good, hard numbers on why this is even being considered.

And I can tell you that most of the time the numbers of those justifications are described the same ways over and over and over. "Our stormwater tax is X2. The Incentive funding available is Z. The cost to build is Y2."

And I'll bet that by now most of you reading this have forgotten the biggest reason that greenroof had been getting pushed in the first place.

Remember what I said in the very beginning?

Heat. A properly built greenroof cuts your heat loss to pretty much zip. And in our new world of triple-glazed windows and air walls and so on, especially for a new-ish large building, the losses from the sides of a building that takes up half a city block and is twenty feet tall just aren't that big a percentage.

So, I ask you, how big is your water bill? How big is your heating and air conditioning bill?

If shrinking your water bill is your total justification, how big a budget makes sense?

If NOT HAVING a heating or cooling bill is a possible justification, how big a budget makes sense?

But somehow, as I walked the (pretty much empty) aisles of the Ecoroof show (I would guess that there were about sixty tables and fewer than three hundred attendees) I always asked for the selling points of every (growing medium/contractor's work/tray system/etc.) and nobody even mentioned comparative insulating value. Or mentioned it as a reason to build a greenroof.

The range of reasons they *did* give has broadened and improved, partially because the greenroof work now being done has also improved. In addition to stormwater, people mentioned heat island effect. They mentioned species diversity. They mentioned improving real estate values. But nobody said any variation on "this will reduce your heating and cooling bill." They had charts and graphs with information on water held per square foot, cost per area installed, cost of maintainance, species range, animals found nesting on similar systems, and so on. But on insulating value? Nothin' and nothin'.

And after a while I started asking everybody the same question. "Have you or anybody ever collected temperature performance data on installed greenroofs?"

You know. Put one sensor each above and below a bare section. Another matching pair above and below a vegetated section. Hook them up to a computer. Log the data. Do this on a few dozen buildings. Publish the results.

I talked with everybody I could reach, including the relevant Portland city officials and several of the other speakers, considered world-class experts, including quite some time talking with the Director of the International Green Roof Association, Wolfgang Ansel, who flew in from Germany for the event.

And as far as any of them knew, nobody has ever done this simple thing. There is no real statistically usable, controlled, significant scale data of the sort that would make it possible for greenroof to get remembered to be in addition to the things it's thought of as now, a vastly more capable potential cost-reducer and resource-saver.

For the lack of what most of them readily agreed was about a $10,000 study, we are ignoring one of the fastest, cheapest ways we have to massively cut world energy consumption.

Because most of the relevant people have forgotten to even think about it and those who haven't have all decided that this job is simply somebody else's problem.

And because this factor is usually thought of as an undocumented "oh, by the way" HVAC operational cost reductions don't get included when people calculate when greenroof is appropriate. Which leads to that crippling fallacy. As I wrote at the very beginning of this essay, most of our "experts" (Paul Kephart being one glorious exception) start with the presumption that a greenroof project is being done as a bit of a cost game by a grudging organization whose total maximum return on investment will be quite small. So they START by throwing away consideration of every option that would cost "real money".

No serious bracing of the roof. Certainly no bracing that would reduce in any way the amount of space available inside the building.

No large, enjoyable staircases or new elevators up to this wonderful beautiful place.

No incorporation of new ductways or service shafts, let alone an internal "dumbwaiter" to move all that heavy water and plants and so on up and down. So the builder/contractor will be, in effect running a huge landscaping job with nothing but cranes and equipment that they will have to bring with them every time they have work to do.

No consideration of the viability of getting the building repermitted to allow residences or a restaurant or some other installation that would further turn that newly green surface into a revenue generator.

And on and on and on.

By starting with ignoring the relevance of some of the biggest relevant cost justifications, our engineers/architects/project managers are throwing away any willingness to consider most of the means they have available to make greenroofs work.

Having then started by reducing their options to almost nothing, they they sit on their high perches and dismiss most projects as "impossible". And keep in mind that I still haven't even mentioned some other key factors. For example, facilities managers all over the world are finding themselves these days needing to provide new seismic retrofits. And yet none of the contractors I spoke to mentioned those considerable projects to add beams and brace walls and otherwise do comprehensive structural revamps as chances to make a building better suited to deep bed greenroof or even for greenroof at all.

Nor have we gone into how many commercial districts are converting to mixed use, complete with children and schools and, rather frequently, in areas where all the land is already long since spoken for, new pressure to create more park space. This is frequently now addressed by spending millions of dollars and going through a vast, many year circus of public hearings and funding rounds premised on buying existing buildings, forcing out the tenants, demolishing everything, and creating parks where those buildings once stood. Mightn't it make more sense to instead build greenspace right on top of the one of the shorter buildings that are there right now? Perhaps with a nice twenty foot wide ramp up to the new public space from street level?

But that's now what we do. Instead, we have a paltry few hundred buildings in even the best cities, usually partly covered with thin, near-monoculture beds of very short plants, all installed at massive cost per square foot by people who tell us that this is the only option we've got.

Does this seem like the right approach to you?

Greg Mortenson should be no model to anybody.

Greg Mortenson and his group have built some very admirable things in the mountains of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the rest of that part of the world, material and organizational. But I am convinced that he, deep down, is a dangerous and willing tool of the authoritarian right wing and that we should all be damned careful before giving him or his group a penny of our money or a second of our support. You want to help children in that part of the world? Wonderful. Find other ways to do it.

Not only that, but any techniques his group, the Central Asia Institute, put forward as models for wider use should be strictly cost-accounted, broken down to their constituent tasks, and then reviewed with a fine-toothed comb and run past others for confirmation who have done similar work in similar parts of the world before being adopted or publicized.

I'm taking this opportunity, with the New York Times having just name-checked him yet again, to say again that I find many things about "Three Cups of Tea" and Greg Mortenson morally repellant and that I look forward with fervor to the day that people realize that it's no coincidence that Mortenson's strongest Congressional supporter featured in his books, Mary Bono, is a mainstay of the authoritarian Christian right.

I found it interesting and non-coincidental that his writing partner for his first book, David Oliver Relin, is never even mentioned in Mortenson's second book. I suspect that they are no longer even on speaking terms. I'm betting Relin's patience ran out. That the mixed feelings he alluded to in the introduction to Three Cups of Tea shifted further over to the negative as time passed and that Mortenson and his people have erected as tall a barrier as they can manage to block off any role Relin might have in speaking about what's really going on. In fact, I'd give it about one in three odds that Mr. Relin is under continuing pressure to keep his mouth shut or be faced with attack by Mortenson's allies. Allies who I would equally bet have long since threatened Mr. Relin in no uncertain terms with retaliation if he should say "the wrong things" in too loud a voice.

As I read Three Cups of Tea and then Stones Into Schools, a lot of subtle things kept sounding somehow off to me. Credit seemed oddly disproportionate to contribution and was weighted far further to authoritarian, conservative sources than their role would seem to merit. Groups I had heard about doing related work seemed oddly absent. Major help from people here in the Pacific Northwest was glossed over, while much smaller efforts by midwesterners got paragraph after paragraph if not page after page. An especially odd thing given that his coauthor was a Portlander. Gender issues in the areas he was working in were addressed, but in an odd tone. One that would fit well in a 1980's Mormon document trying to show that, no, we're not racist at all. Never were. And some of his actions in the mountains just somehow didn't sit right with me. Didn't quite match what I had heard from mountaineers and other people who had been there about what was possible, viable, advisable.

But, well, I've never really even been out of America's big cities. Certainly never really spent time overseas. Maybe I was wrong. I'm just a techie and publishing guy. What would I know?

So I asked around a bit. And I've got to admit the details escape me at the moment. Well, other than my sources being able to rattle off half a dozen agencies getting more schools built with far less fanfare. Or the mahooah I already knew he was spouting about the availability of earthquake-resistant building techniques. Or the presumption that nobody could have been expected to notice the massive fraud his later "partner" was pulling off as his first big third round funding came in. Or the details of his "lucky" chat with Congresswoman Bono and the military connections thereof.

I've spent plenty of time in my life around the charismatic leaders of do-gooder organizations, from senior officials in the Salvation Army to managers of anarchist community centers, and they all have a certain vibe to them, to some degree or other. A certain sense they give off of how much they're sanding off the serial numbers of other people's work to build their own legend or clouding up the record to cover up the shortcuts they've taken or making their agendas seem more in line with what the general public will find palatable. And I'm telling you that based on those two books and a bit of looking around I've done, Mortenson is over on the greasy-haired preacher end of the equation.

I'm telling you, eventually the honeymoon will end and left and right people will be distancing themselves from Greg Mortenson. And, crucially, making heavy pronouncements that "there was no way we could have known".

Yeah, well. I knew. And I'm just a crippled guy with no special access reading a couple of library books and making a few phone calls in a barely heated studio in a cheap part of town in a city far away indeed from the halls of power.

But even so, I'm telling you, don't believe the hype.

Landfills are the best mines of the future.

I'm finally seeing more proper mainstream coverage of the accelerating trend of mining "waste" for minerals. This N. Y. Times article is a pretty decent introduction. Thermal depolymerization, for one, always was presumed to base their long-term profit margins on this kind of thing. "Urban mines". I like the sound of that.

Not least of the implications of this is the inevitable event of people paying to buy mining rights to collections of what has previously been thrown away.

Now it seems to me that the kind of conventional mining industry approach the Japanese are using now is far from what may eventually become the norms. Far less brute force options may lie ahead. I've been saying for years that we will eventually see wormlike robots that will spend their days lying in the sun, charging, and their nights burrowing, eating their way through landfills and either simply leaving behind a more readily processed "soil" or themselves storing up valuable minerals, which are then left in little piles to be collected somehow. Another possibility is plants optimized to concentrate selected rare materials, just as some flowers do now, changing color as the contents of the soil they sit on varies, waiting to be picked and used as feedstock for further concentrating techniques.

There are many possibilities. And what they all have in common is that we should get used to thinking of what we now call "waste" as simply "matter out of place" as Burning Man people already do.

It's not waste once you start using it again.

OLPC V3, Too Little, Too Late. At Best.

I'm delighted that the OLPC project has happened. I agree with those who say that most of what they accomplished is seen not in their own devices or projects but in the prod they gave and occasionally still give to other organizations, most famously Asus, who openly stated that the OLPC project inspired the EEE PC that massively shifted most people's perception of the possible and launched the netbook revolution. I'll even say that I think that Sugar has been unfairly maligned and may yet turn up as a valuable part of something six market segments away.

That having been said, the current agreement with Marvell to create a computer on a chip and build the new OLPC around it, well, it looks nice stated briefly on paper but I just don't believe that they'll get there. Maybe eventually. Not soon enough to matter to most of us. Especially with so many other projects moving ahead, even taking into account the new revelations that India's "$35 laptop" was largely a rebranded existing el-cheapo design. And most especially with Pixel Qi having gone independent.

This article in Forbes lays it out pretty well.

Me? I'll be dropping by Amazon and watching Liliputing, UMPCPortal, and Shanzai and the iPad jailbreak sites and choosing my next computer from what turns up there.

Sorry, Nicholas, you've cried wolf too often now. I'm done and so are most of the rest of us.

Apple: Think Diffident. Their corporate censorship, yet another reason a diverse marketplace is important.

This article goes in detail through the ways that Apple's obsessive, narrow-minded, self-justifying censorship of what can be done on or even sold for the iTouch/iPhone/iPad platform has hurt us all. Including, I think, Apple. And, even more importantly, how this dynamic hobbles many other parts of our oligopoly-dominated society.

There is a dangerous tendency on the left, not to mention among Tea Partiers, to try to explain everything corporations cause in terms of what enriches the people at the top. In other words, to presume that when some corporate-caused action hurts our society, the suits somehow gain equivalently to how we lose. If ten of us are in a boat and I pour salt on all the food, nobody gains. On the macro scale, the world is very rarely a place where each gain and loss is tidily evened out. And until people let go of that childish zero-sum game way of looking at the world, they'll never have any hope of accurately seeing what happens or why.

The truth is even worse. Much of what they do hurts even them. Sometimes choices are made out of fear or confusion or simple transitory power games that will be forgotten next week but whose consequences will live on for years or even decades.

And while we can happily natter on about how corporations "should" be virtuous or how we "should" be able to regulate them into pursuing the public interest, as far as I'm concerned, that's a side discussion. The most important response to the anxious, power-grasping, meddling of corporations in how a given market works is to fight that control. The control ANY small number of buyers or sellers or distributors have over that market. To create a market with many buyers and sellers and distributors.

If one company controls a market, that market will become inefficient, even for the profit maximization of that corporation. Same thing if two or three corporations share that control between them. Any detailed review of the finances of American car companies illustrates this very, very well.

My conclusion? When I see one company dominating a market, I am opposed to it. Same thing for two orthree or four companies. I don't care if it's Google or Ben&Jerry's or Apple. Oligopoly hurts the public interest. Every time. EVERY time.

Bob's Red Mill leads the way again.

In 1970 mechancial engineer Robert Moore and his wife moved to Milwaukie, Oregon with the intent of retiring, studying the bible, and living a more spiritual life. Like many other people at the time, they explored healthier foods and Bob got interested in stone-ground grains. Interested enough that he set up his own little mill. You know, just as a hobby.

Thirty years later Bob's Red Mill is a leader in stone ground flours, cereals, and, overall, over 400 hundred products. All created and sold by a little over 200 employees and still, despite considerable setbacks, in MIlwaukie, Oregon. Estimates suggest that his little post-retirement project may now be worth something like fifty million dollars.

Well, yesterday was Bob's birthday and he made an amazing announcement. He's giving the company to his employees. He's setting up an employee stock ownership plan and everybody who has been there three years or more is fully vested as of today.

It would appear that it's not just at software companies that a normal, hardworking person can take and hold a normal, everyday job and wake up one day with stock worth more than their house.

Milwaukie City Councillor Susan Stone said, "What a wonderful 81st birthday present from Bob to his loyal employees! Bob is one of the good guys! I think it's a smashing idea!"

I couldn't agree more.

Like fellow Milwaukie company, Dark Horse Comics, Bob's Red Mill has made honest products they can be proud of, stuck to their plan, and never tried to get by with copying what the megacorps told us was what we wanted, and as a result have persisted, thrived, and made a better world for all of us.

Here's to Bob. Here's to his employees. And here's to Milwaukie, Oregon for fostering yet again a company that we can all be proud of.

The tools are in our hands to make our cities erupt with fecundity and beauty.

I want a thousand new streams running through the world's cities. Through buildings, over rooftops, and bouncing and bubbling and twisting along uncounted urban byways. Streams rich with oysters and crayfish and tilapia and a hundred varieties of watercress, cranberries, and seaweed.

I want Rocky Mountain Oysters in Denver that really are freshly obtained and local bivalves.

I want shrimp grown on neighborhood kitchen scraps.

I want mile long, six foot wide living machines that twist and turn like the Mississippi and pop up where you least expect them. It's time to take another look at aquaduct technology but this time running a hundred feet up between and through Tampa office buildings.

I want ducts connecting the fountains across blocks and blocks in areas of corporate towers so passersby look down and see fingerlings schooling in them and tiny little crabs skittering along beneath.

I want cities to compete on whose carp get bigger faster. And I want the majestic and terrifying sight of a hawk or an eagle swooping down to snatch a wriggling lunch from a swift current to be a normal part of the day of officeworkers and city cops.

And I want even more.

We have many, many square miles of "pancake" buildings all across the industrialized world. Vast corporate behemoths as much as a mile long and a quarter mile wide. Usually just three to six stories tall but endlessly, oppressively long and wide. Not to mention barren. Look at Google Earth over any part of the world high tech enough to have traffic jams and you'll see rooftops with an area that dwarfs many medieval cities. Malaysia to Norway, they're inescapable.

Do the math. Energy costs on those things are insane, much of it even now lost off the roof. Heat loss in winter. Too much heat in summer. Venting problems. Toxicity accumulations. Flashing torn loose in storms.

So let's turn them into fields. Seriously. A stream or two. Some rodents. Not just field mice. On the really big ones maybe even a family of predators or two. The sound of coyotes at night. Nine or ten trees placed over load-bearing members. A few hundred shrubs scattered about and along the edges. The smells of rosemary, sage, and mint wafting over neighborhoods of shipping firms and machine shops. Maybe some trellises covered in food-bearing plants or simply ones that feed migratory birds and butterflies. Some thought given to microorganism balances. The entire roof doesn't need to be covered in soil. In some spots you could leave no more than a few inches of lightweight medium and, done right, after a few months had passed and some groundcover had settled in, it would still have the feel, and much of the biological dynamics, of a functioning meadow. A few dozen new beams pushed up through the three or four floors of cubicle farms will handle the few new concentrated loads just fine for the cost of one year's energy costs. And don't tell me that a few thousand feet of new "penthouse" dining rooms and conference rooms built to look out over these new vistas will be anything less than magnificently profitable.

My friend Ben Self says that this kind of thing is a hundred years from being viable. He said, "…What holds us back, I think, is that technology is mostly applied to ventures with maximum profit at minimum risk and cost. Junk is the capitalist's favorite -- junk food, junk buildings, etc. …"

I hope that his obviously valid general point isn't enough to damn projects like this to Never Never Land.

My friend Angela Bocage wrote that "so much of this is so possible now: depends somewhat on which cities, where and how the beginning stages are managed. It's not just the science, as you all know, or even the funding, but the social engineering spectrum."

I couldn't agree more.

For what it's worth, Earnest Callenbach was writing about streams run through city streets and related concepts in the mid-seventies back when the world mostly knew him as a Bay Area music critic. (Mostly of jazz, if I remember correctly.) And while Ecotopia and his other books are now bestsellers, this kind of urban wilderness is still taken as not really viable. And maybe on a citywide scale, for now, that's simply the sad truth.

But when it comes to the pancake building scenario, I would say give it about ten years and plenty of people will be talking about it, maybe even a few projects seeking funding. And since it only takes one company deciding to pursue it, as Ford decided not too many years back to cover their iconic River Rouge plant in greenroof, and then did it, the whole thing starts to look a lot more doable. Now.

Here in Portland, as it happens, we have any number of buildings that would make superb candidates, some in places where many people would see them and, in fact, have their real estate values boosted by such things. And with our stormwater treatment concerns, there is certainly a municipal motivation to encourage this kind of thing. And from Chicago on down, plenty of other cities are saying the same.

If you think the engineering can't work, then fine. Let's sit down over dinner and we'll see how your numbers look when you've got all the pieces in front of you.

Then prepare to go home and dream about it.

No, Joss does NOT "need" for the network execs to give him another show.

So I see that there is yet another round of hubbub because Joss Whedon is being considered again to helm a television series. Part of me hopes that he gets it but part of me feels that J.W. just isn't up to the job of working within a network. We should know this by now. It seems to me that it's long past time that he lined up his own financing and became in charge of his own production or partnered with some kind of longer-term thinking person.

The man doesn't "need" network execs to wake up one morning and become different kinds of people with different pressures upon them or a different culture to be working within. He might as well be said to "need" to be ten years younger or six inches taller. Network television is what it is and it's time that we stopped being surprised every time it keeps not working out.

What's the classic definition of insanity? Doing the same thing and expecting *what* again?

Maybe he needs to turn to Felicia Day as a mentor instead of thinking that it's the other way around. Maybe he needs to put more oomf behind the production mechanism that made Dr. Horrible possible.

But one way or another, what he really "needs" is his own Desilu. His own United Artists. Capital, an executive team, and operational support that isn't under the control of Fox or Sony or any of the vast media conglomerates. They are what they are and no number of fan petitions and, let's face it, no amount of series profit will change that. Frankly, by the standards of those kinds of public companies, he's little people and they will never truly change to suit him.

Time for him to grow up and buy his own house. He needs to accept that he has less in common with J.J. Abrams than he does with Woody Allen for, for that matter. Shakespeare. So he needs to get busy building his Globe Theater.

Sooner he does, the better for all of us.

The best way to biofuels is gerrrrrms.

Over at the University of Texas, they're breeding bugs. Buuuugs.

Well, actually cyanobacteria, but "bugs" sounds better.

Anyway, what they're breeding for is bacteria that excrete sugars and easily processed forms of cellulose. Ones that can be readily converted to fuels.

What this means is more fuel created per acre, fuel created without using either land or fresh water that would otherwise be used for growing crops, and, let's not forget, a fuel creation means that can be done, at least on a small scale, in any frackin' wet place that can take the load and gets any sun. Not a lot of sun. Any sun. After all, Fresnel lenses and mirrors really are pretty cheap. So concentrating a whole bunch of sun on, say, squares of a Louisiana parking lot that is kept flooded with brackish water should work just fine. And, in some cases, it may even make sense to provide artificial or piped in supplementary light to areas that get lots of waste heat and will "feed" the microorganisms partially on that. Say, the area on top of a bakery.

It will take some expertise and effort and there will be lots of trial and error involved, but you get the idea.

We should note, however, that like most biofuels production means, this is fundamentally conversion of sunlight to high stored-energy organic compounds. In other words, the more sun per area, the more fuel produced. Seems to me that we're probably heading towards a time when biofuels are largely a thing produced in sunny places with long days, available "scrub" land, and plenty of water. Ideally water that's too salty or otherwise "low value" to be good for watering conventional crops. So my beloved Oregon will never be a good contender, east or west. Malaysia, otoh, may do very well, indeed, especially since they're already investing in biofuels infrastructure.

Another factor is that this looks like it will create yet another round of plantation agriculture. Look to see horrific worker abuses in the future from massive, corporate owned pond farms and tank complexes destroying human lives to cut that last tenth of a penny off their production costs.

I've written about related research before, most notably my note about gliocladium roseum. Now that microbiologists understand what to look for and breed I suspect that we'll be seeing hundreds of species of microorganism being put forward, which is wonderful.

In fact, I wonder if the best solution for most people will turn out to be some "cocktail" of several microorganisms so as to keep the tanks more resistant to changing conditions and better able to fight off unwanted "intruder" microorganisms coming in and bullying out the desired ones. After all, we're seeing folks breed bugs for maximum energy retention, which, by definition means that that they're, shall we say, kinda fat, and therefore, not up to fighting off less aggressive energy burners.

A tank of the organisms we want are kinda like a village full of couchpotatoes who just sit around and eat steak and cheesecake all day. Steak and cheesecake that we provide. People chosen precisely because they were the ones who moved around least and got the fattest. So what happens when a bunch of Mike Tyson and Bad Xena bugs decide that they want some of that steak and cheesecake?

So I'm guessing that corporations will go for their usual monoculture bullshit, complete with expensive and resource hungry "narrow range" control while homebrewers will discover a community of various bugs that may not yield as high (in theory) as the "pure" cultures of the corporate tanks but will be a lot more tolerant of the occasional intrusion of uncleaned air, water, and food.

But what's the bottom line? In about five years we can expect to see significant fuel production coming from tailored microorganisms. In about another three it should be enough to have a significant economic and international policy impact. In fifteen (if we all survive that long as a society), we should see petrochemical producers getting caught moving beyond disinformation (like the recent Exxon takeover of a biofuels study group such that it then announced that biofuels just weren't practical) to flat out sabotage.

Because by then they should be running scared.

-Rustin

Grow up. Now. The world needs adults. Not crybabies.

The next time you find yourself looking at the all too many crises out there, then, in addition to corporate fraud and all the usual suspects, you should add another thought to your reflexive response.

When hundreds of millions of adults try to live by a toddler's rules this is what you get.

We've become a nation infested with permanent children who model their behavior on what makes sense to a typical three year old. I've been saying it for years and I plan to go on saying it.

If we intend to get serious about what has caused and is causing global climate change, the rise of the Right Wing, the advancing power of monopolistic corporations, shifts to anti-reason evangelical churches, and a host of other crippling problems, then we need to get serious about this. If we don't successfully address the fundamental flaws in how people think then no number of arguments from reason add up to much more than self-congratulatory mental masturbation.

As far as I can see, ever since the 30's more and more parents have been raising their children to never grow beyond the worldview that is appropriate for a toddler and more and more of society has been adapting to validate that idiocy. Corporations, not surprisingly, love this sh*t and encourage it whenever they can. So do all too many political and religious groups. Dr. Spock played his role. So did the proud spoiling of children that so frequently is done by the first generation of a family to reach prosperity. So has the shifting nature of our schools and other educational institutions.

"We're all special in our own way"? Bugger off.

But the truth is, how it happened matters far less than what it is causing now and what it will take to reverse the trend.

To these "believers" the world is broken up into the world of We Children, which includes them, their friends, and their activities and The Grownups, which includes most property, the government, and all the Big Things done by magical Others whom one addresses with begging, Being Good, tantrums, and the like. Rarely, mind you with actions meant to substantively shift the factors that caused a thing to happen in the first place.

One is then either granted beneficences/gets one's way or is "punished" based on how effectively one has convinced The Grownups to do what one wants. Their lives are lived around the parallel goals of performatively being a Good Child ("but I tried hard!") and getting things with tantrums ("we'll make them do what we want!) And when their typical sloth and ineffectual behavior doesn't work out, they hold up the child's logic of But Don't You Love Me Anyway? and It's Not My Fault!!

To them everything in the world has agency. Somebody caused it. Intentionally. Nothing ever just happens or is an unintended consequence of some entirely differently motivated activity, let alone something caused by, you know, physics. And, as any preliterate child can tell you, if it affects them it was addressed primarily to them. If you are housemates with such a person and your moving to a new city means that they need to find a new housemate, then you are moving, first and foremost, to hurt them. They are far less interested in finding and addressing the true causes of a problem than in assigning blame. After all, if they can pull off the claim that it's somebody else's fault, then they should have a "right" to be kept immune to the consequences.

These people can be identified, as much as anything else, by the speed with which they will respond to a difficulty, or especially the prospect of work, with what other people "should" be doing instead. By which they mean what they think would be right. With little or no knowledge or interest in why the existing situation is as it is or in how or why the people responsible make the choices they do. After all, the usally rather shallowly hidden subtext is that since that other person "didn't do it right" why should the speaker have to do work to address it? After all, that would be "unfair". I never cease to be amazed at how much these idiots think that they have usefully contributed, in fact, "done their share" of solving the problem by describing, in a callow, off the cuff sentence or two, something like "well, they shouldn't be storing things there anyway."

I always tell assistants of mine that I don't want to here the word "should" coming out of their mouth in a use like that. Each and every moment spent in that kind of thing is obstructive distraction from actually addressing the problem.

On a related front, they will find just about anything acceptable (that doesn't cost them too much) if they've been told a good story about why and how it got that way. Again, I tell my assistants, just because somebody "has a reason" doesn't make it okay. Charles Manson has reasons. Sarah Palin has reasons.

These people, in terms of the issues they're even willing to face, find bare facts to be alien, incomprehensible gibberish. Even, as I said above, hostile things "meant" to hurt them to be fought back into the shadows where they won't have to risk seeing them. But, oh, they sure do love their stories. Or, as we've all grown to call it, a persuasive narrative.

As for the Bigger World out there, that's Parentland, where things are done by a magic and fundamentally unknowable web of processes.

The idea that assets and institutional frameworks are things run by people much like them that can be shifted or even acquired with things like well thought-out work is not only alien, it's anathema since such thinking is a threat to that We Little Kids worldview. Wow, will they get angry fast if they figure out that something you say weakens their structure of rationalizations and appeasements.

In my experience both certain types of Good Little Corporate Citizens and many doctrinaire Marxists tend to remarkably blatant forms of this. "All property is theft" comes naturally to people who believe that all things of value were preexisting, and that therefore anything but an "even" distribution of all material goods, with each person "getting" exactly the same as each other person is "unfair".

It frequently strikes me how blatantly such people will use the language of young children to describe policy issues. Something that is "unfair" obviously should be responded to with a tantrum, oh, I'm sorry, a "protest", to convince the Magic Adult People in government to Fix It and give everybody their Fair Share.

You know. Just like in kindergarden.

Things don't happen for reasons; they Just Are.

And, notably, they're usually real fuzzy on the details of how this collection and redistribution is supposed to take place. After all, that's the territory of Magic Adult People.

As far as I can see, the very core of most Marxist thought fits very well indeed into the Permanent Toddler way of seeing things.

To wit:

-all property is prexisting

-all labor is of equal value, to be measured solely on the basis of exertion and time used. Moving the same rock back and forth all day in a dark room for a year is of exactly the same value as the same time and degree of exertion used to build a set of chairs or succesfully raise a crop.

-therefore, all members of the manager class (i.e. "bad parents") are useless since no literal sweat raises on their brow. And, of course, management accomplishes nothing since all that they do is shift the choices of what labor is done, which we already "know" adds nothing since all labor is equal, and move capital, which we "know" should in a "fair" world just be evenly and randomly distributed anyway.

Note, by the way, that authoritarians like Rudolf Guiliani use different parts of the same logic. To idiots like that, all that it takes to be a good manager is to order people to do something and you've now "fixed" the problem. Organizational actions aren't caused by responses to scarce or ample resources. They're not caused by compensation structures or training or culture. Actions just HAPPEN. So if you want different actions to happen, you just say that you'll beat them up or give them candy based on whether they do what you want or not. Simple, right?

Bullshit. Dangerous bullshit.

Randites, whatever their problems, are generally utterly and entirely free of this kind of thing. In fact, Ayn Rand's books give all too painfully eloquent portrayals of quite a few aspects of what happens when fools like this get their way. Her endless pages of people competing for who can seem the most pathetic and helpless before various Committees of Distribution only seem exaggerated to those of you who have never dealt with any number of "consensus-based" organizations.

In 2006 I wrote a bit of a note on one aspect of this that got reproduced here.
(My letter starts right below the first image.)

This article in the Atlantic (once you get past the title) does a pretty decent job of covering a major example of how it can utterly permeate a subculture. And has. And then damage all of us through the consequences of their ill-considered actions.

And please don't say, "oh, that's magical thinking" and then dismiss it on the logically fallacious ground that by having described it (poorly, by the way), you've now put it entirely under a Somebody Else's Problem field. To describe a thing is not to "reduce it to a problem already solved". If you really think that, then say it to my face, go out there, cure a few dozen people of these behaviors, and come back to me with proof. Unless and until you can do that, pay attention. This applies to you. We are all subject to the damage this causes.

People like this, in my experience, are also real fast to judge their own work and that of their friends by the standard of "it's good enough" while judging things like products in the supermarket by a standard where any perceived inadequacy is the same as complete failure. And why bother to write in complete sentences or spell correctly? "You know what I meant!" and intent is all, you see. But a product on a store shelf that isn't perfectly vegan, and organic, and entirely free of all chemicals, GMO organisms, and on and on and on, is just the same as a factory farmed beef patty from Walmart. Unless it was made by somebody they know, a punk band, or some other variation on Little Kids Like Us, in which case all sorts of things are forgivable.

And stealing isn't bad if it's done from a large institution. Or, in fact, doing anything you want to such an institution is morally fine. After all, they're just Magic Adult People and hence have infinite resources and can't be hurt by the actions of Little Kids Like Us. Which is, of course, logically inconsistent with the stated reasons that many will give for actions like ecosabotage ("we'll hurt them so bad that they'll give up and leave!") but entirely consistent, as I've written above, with protests that are, ideally, as loud and obstructive as possible and for which coherent messages about why and what are trivial or even counterproductive. It's a logic for tantrums that any two year old would respect and agree with.

I think that we all know some of the more obvious other symptoms of this way of seeing and interacting with the world. Emo, anybody? People who have children of their own walking the streets in fuzzy pajama pants in patterns a ten year old should be ashamed to be seen in?

I have trouble even trying to explain to people under the age of thirty that the idea of walking around in costumes in the ways that so many now do (ooh, look at my authentic military camoflage shirt! Ohh! I'm wearing a jersey just like Michael Jordan's!") was, from ancient times until the 1980's, the kind of thing that people were expected to outgrow about the time they gave up bedwetting. In fact, when a show from the seventies or earlier wanted to make entirely clear that a particular child was Just A Little Boy or Little Girl, (say, as the innocent potential victim in a bank robbery) one of the classic quick signifiers was to have the child "still" wearing a cowboy hat or a pretend army jacket. After all, what surer proof could one need that this kid is barely more than a toddler?

Oh, we certainly do have our carefully worked out rationalizations these days (I'm supporting the team!) but funny how those rationalizations always neatly correlate with opportunities to Play Pretend. And, when folks are drunk or tired or simply don't expect to be judged, they sure come out with plenty of admissions of "this makes me feel like I'm a pilot in the Top Gun program" or whatever.

Personally, I wanted a leather jacket for years. For somebody who lives the life I do, they've ungawdly practical. But I did without for years because I had no willingness whatsoever to buy one with patches from some unit I've never been in, let alone a fake map as a liner meant to help the owner fantasize about being a daring pilot over WWII China.

Oh, and fwiw, I fucking well did contract work for Avirex.The co-inventors of the "bomber jacket". They offered me access to their company store and insider discount. But I had no willingness to do that sort of thing.

It's fantasy, folks. And unless you're in the business you should be ashamed of yourself.

And no, you're not a goddamn pirate. Or a ninja. Or a pro sports celebrity.

I'll come back to this subject again. As I keep saying, I'm convinced that this pattern of behavior is central to why so many people keep making such terrible decisions. I'll probably come back at some point and expand this piece. But for now I need to go out and get back to work.

Because if you're not creating useful results, you're just wanking.

Happy holidays.

-Rustin

 

Much later addendum: I just love this video. It does a wonderful job of showing that "I must be profound because I throw tantrums all the time" ethos of much of the supposedly "radical anarchist" crowd.

I also think that this article about Black Bloc does a very good job of laying out some of how these dynamics play out in practice within the Occupy movement.