log : ngl

The world is going to hell in a handbasket. Polution, sprawl, political turmoil, the list goes on. Faced with such insurmountable problems, what can a single person do? Go vegetarian. Vote green. Walk to work. Volunteer. Change your lightbulbs. Surely it starts with one and eventually if everyone pitches in, all society changes for the better.

Not really.

Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Read more at Orion Magazine.

… But they don’t want to be inconvenienced by the solution.

Overwhelmingly, Americans think the nation needs a fundamental overhaul of its energy policies, and most expect alternative forms to replace oil as a major source within 25 years. Yet a majority are unwilling to pay higher gasoline prices to help develop new fuel sources.

Read the rest of the article on The New York Times website.

Click to embiggen.

When was the last time you chatted with your neighbor? Any of your neighbors, really? Do you know the name of anyone living around you? Granted, some of your neighbors might be total jerks, but they can afford to be. They don’t need to talk to you any more than you need to talk to them.

In the halcyon days of the final economic booms, everyone on your cul de sac could have died overnight from some mysterious plague, and while you might have been sad, you wouldn’t have been inconvenienced. Our economy, unlike any that came before it, is designed to work without the input of your neighbors. Borne on cheap oil, our food arrives as if by magic from a great distance (typically, two thousand miles). If you have a credit card and an Internet connection, you can order most of what you need and have it left anonymously at your door. We’ve evolved a neighborless lifestyle; on average an American eats half as many meals with family and friends as she did fifty years ago. On average, we have half as many close friends.

Continue reading at Alternet.

In a future world without aeroplanes, children would gather at the feet of old men, and hear extraordinary tales of a mythic time when vast and complicated machines the size of several houses used to take to the skies and fly high over the Himalayas and the Tasman Sea.

The wise elders would explain that inside the aircraft, passengers, who had only paid the price of a few books for the privilege, would impatiently and ungratefully shut their window blinds to the views, would sit in silence next to strangers while watching films about love and friendship – and would complain that the food in miniature plastic beakers before them was not quite as tasty as the sort they could prepare in their own kitchens.

Alain de Botton imagines a world without airplanes at the BBC.

In 1983, architect Peter Calthorpe gave up on San Francisco, where he had tried and failed to organise neighbourhood communities, and moved to a houseboat in Sausalito, a town on the San Francisco Bay. He ended up on South 40 Dock, where I also live, part of a community of 400 houseboats and a place with the densest housing in California. Without trying, it was an intense, proud community, in which no one locked their doors. Calthorpe looked for the element of design magic that made it work, and concluded it was the dock itself and the density. Everyone who lived in the houseboats on South 40 Dock passed each other on foot daily, trundling to and from the parking lot on shore. All the residents knew each other’s faces and voices and cats. It was a community, Calthorpe decided, because it was walkable.

Continue reading at Prospect Magazine.

With the continuing failure of governments to reach agreements on combating climate change, the outlook for both humans and nature remains bleak.

And nowhere is the failure more conspicuous than in the avoidance of the subject of population growth. Population is a double-barreled environmental problem — not only is population increasing; so are emissions per capita.

In 1970, when worldwide greenhouse gas emissions had just begun to transgress the sustainable capacity of the atmosphere, the world population was about 3.7 billion; today it’s about 6.9 billion — an increase of 86 percent.

Continue reading at The New York Times.

There is a snail that lives amongst the thermal vents two miles beneath the surface of the Indian ocean that has developed a unique defense adaptation. Long ago it evolved the ability to take bits of iron sulfide floating around in the water and incorporate it into its shell, which effectively became iron-plated.

Crysomallon squamiferum’s researchers write in the PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) report (PDF found here) that the shell is…

…advantageous for penetration resistance, energy dissipation, mitigation of fracture and crack arrest, reduction of back deflections, and resistance to bending and tensile loads.

Extended article and links abound at The Ecological Society of America Blog.