Such as it is.
See you there.
See you there.
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Continue the Adventure
Well folks, it's time to move on. After three or so years of off-and-on posting, it's time to pack up and head over to a new space of the internet: draytonhiers.com, where I will continue to regale you with the odds and ends that make up my artistic career.
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Traffic Jams
A video explaining mysterious traffic jams. I could write a whole thing about human behavior, but I'm tired and cranky today. So enjoy:
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Brooke Singer posted this article by Michael Specter in the New Yorker on the Eyebeam Reblog. It's an article that I've been waiting to read for a number of years now, a look at how we can understand the carbon costs related to the production and shipment of our food.
In some ways, this issue seems obvious: eat local, avoid air shipments, and call it a day. After all, as the article points out:
"Agricultural researchers at the University of Iowa have reported that the food miles attached to items that one buys in a grocery store are twenty-seven times higher than those for goods bought from local sources. American produce travels an average of nearly fifteen hundred miles before we eat it. Roughly forty per cent of our fruit comes from overseas and, even though broccoli is a vigorous plant grown throughout the country, the broccoli we buy in a supermarket is likely to have been shipped eighteen hundred miles in a refrigerated truck. Although there are vast herds of cattle in the U.S., we import ten per cent of our red meat, often from as far away as Australia or New Zealand."
And yet, the issue, as with most things in life, is not cut and dried. Specter goes on to clarify:
"Yet the relationship between food miles and their carbon footprint is not nearly as clear as it might seem. That is often true even when the environmental impact of shipping goods by air is taken into consideration. “People should stop talking about food miles,” Adrian Williams told me. “It’s a foolish concept: provincial, damaging, and simplistic.” Williams is an agricultural researcher in the Natural Resources Department of Cranfield University, in England. He has been commissioned by the British government to analyze the relative environmental impacts of a number of foods. “The idea that a product travels a certain distance and is therefore worse than one you raised nearby—well, it’s just idiotic,” he said. “It doesn’t take into consideration the land use, the type of transportation, the weather, or even the season. Potatoes you buy in winter, of course, have a far higher environmental ticket than if you were to buy them in August.” Williams pointed out that when people talk about global warming they usually speak only about carbon dioxide. Making milk or meat contributes less CO2 to the atmosphere than building a house or making a washing machine. But the animals produce methane and nitrous oxide, and those are greenhouse gases, too. “This is not an equation like the number of calories or even the cost of a product,’’ he said. “There is no one number that works.” "
Even local may not be such a clear choice, at least in areas where "local" really boils down to "closer". New York, for example, is not in or near to a good wine growing region, so all our wines come from somewhere else. So we find ourselves in store aisles, debating the relative merits of California versus Chile versus Italy. The geography would seem to favor the West Coast over the Southern Hemisphere, but, again, the answer really isn't so clear:
"Last year, a study of the carbon cost of the global wine trade found that it is actually more “green” for New Yorkers to drink wine from Bordeaux, which is shipped by sea, than wine from California, sent by truck. That is largely because shipping wine is mostly shipping glass. The study found that “the efficiencies of shipping drive a ‘green line’ all the way to Columbus, Ohio, the point where a wine from Bordeaux and Napa has the same carbon intensity.” "
But let's call wine a luxury, and one that gets into splitting hairs - France and Sonoma are equally far away once you get past the popular "100 miles" local region. So, then, let's think about apples, something that grow in abundance in upstate New York and are easily found at any of the city's farmers markets. Surely an apple grow in the Adirondacks is a better choice than one grown in South Pacific. And yet:
"The environmental burden imposed by importing apples from New Zealand to Northern Europe or New York can be lower than if the apples were raised fifty miles away. “In New Zealand, they have more sunshine than in the U.K., which helps productivity,” Williams explained. That means the yield of New Zealand apples far exceeds the yield of those grown in northern climates, so the energy required for farmers to grow the crop is correspondingly lower. It also helps that the electricity in New Zealand is mostly generated by renewable sources, none of which emit large amounts of CO2. Researchers at Lincoln University, in Christchurch, found that lamb raised in New Zealand and shipped eleven thousand miles by boat to England produced six hundred and eighty-eight kilograms of carbon-dioxide emissions per ton, about a fourth the amount produced by British lamb. In part, that is because pastures in New Zealand need far less fertilizer than most grazing land in Britain (or in many parts of the United States). Similarly, importing beans from Uganda or Kenya—where the farms are small, tractor use is limited, and the fertilizer is almost always manure—tends to be more efficient than growing beans in Europe, with its reliance on energy-dependent irrigation systems."
Really, we're seeing this come down to larger issues of sustainability: how do we grow, what are we growing, what are the costs of the systems we've created, how far can we push things and still keep our heads above water? Specter can't really offer better answers than anyone else, but he puts together a comprehensive place from which to start a discussion.
In some ways, this issue seems obvious: eat local, avoid air shipments, and call it a day. After all, as the article points out:
"Agricultural researchers at the University of Iowa have reported that the food miles attached to items that one buys in a grocery store are twenty-seven times higher than those for goods bought from local sources. American produce travels an average of nearly fifteen hundred miles before we eat it. Roughly forty per cent of our fruit comes from overseas and, even though broccoli is a vigorous plant grown throughout the country, the broccoli we buy in a supermarket is likely to have been shipped eighteen hundred miles in a refrigerated truck. Although there are vast herds of cattle in the U.S., we import ten per cent of our red meat, often from as far away as Australia or New Zealand."
And yet, the issue, as with most things in life, is not cut and dried. Specter goes on to clarify:
"Yet the relationship between food miles and their carbon footprint is not nearly as clear as it might seem. That is often true even when the environmental impact of shipping goods by air is taken into consideration. “People should stop talking about food miles,” Adrian Williams told me. “It’s a foolish concept: provincial, damaging, and simplistic.” Williams is an agricultural researcher in the Natural Resources Department of Cranfield University, in England. He has been commissioned by the British government to analyze the relative environmental impacts of a number of foods. “The idea that a product travels a certain distance and is therefore worse than one you raised nearby—well, it’s just idiotic,” he said. “It doesn’t take into consideration the land use, the type of transportation, the weather, or even the season. Potatoes you buy in winter, of course, have a far higher environmental ticket than if you were to buy them in August.” Williams pointed out that when people talk about global warming they usually speak only about carbon dioxide. Making milk or meat contributes less CO2 to the atmosphere than building a house or making a washing machine. But the animals produce methane and nitrous oxide, and those are greenhouse gases, too. “This is not an equation like the number of calories or even the cost of a product,’’ he said. “There is no one number that works.” "
Even local may not be such a clear choice, at least in areas where "local" really boils down to "closer". New York, for example, is not in or near to a good wine growing region, so all our wines come from somewhere else. So we find ourselves in store aisles, debating the relative merits of California versus Chile versus Italy. The geography would seem to favor the West Coast over the Southern Hemisphere, but, again, the answer really isn't so clear:
"Last year, a study of the carbon cost of the global wine trade found that it is actually more “green” for New Yorkers to drink wine from Bordeaux, which is shipped by sea, than wine from California, sent by truck. That is largely because shipping wine is mostly shipping glass. The study found that “the efficiencies of shipping drive a ‘green line’ all the way to Columbus, Ohio, the point where a wine from Bordeaux and Napa has the same carbon intensity.” "
But let's call wine a luxury, and one that gets into splitting hairs - France and Sonoma are equally far away once you get past the popular "100 miles" local region. So, then, let's think about apples, something that grow in abundance in upstate New York and are easily found at any of the city's farmers markets. Surely an apple grow in the Adirondacks is a better choice than one grown in South Pacific. And yet:
"The environmental burden imposed by importing apples from New Zealand to Northern Europe or New York can be lower than if the apples were raised fifty miles away. “In New Zealand, they have more sunshine than in the U.K., which helps productivity,” Williams explained. That means the yield of New Zealand apples far exceeds the yield of those grown in northern climates, so the energy required for farmers to grow the crop is correspondingly lower. It also helps that the electricity in New Zealand is mostly generated by renewable sources, none of which emit large amounts of CO2. Researchers at Lincoln University, in Christchurch, found that lamb raised in New Zealand and shipped eleven thousand miles by boat to England produced six hundred and eighty-eight kilograms of carbon-dioxide emissions per ton, about a fourth the amount produced by British lamb. In part, that is because pastures in New Zealand need far less fertilizer than most grazing land in Britain (or in many parts of the United States). Similarly, importing beans from Uganda or Kenya—where the farms are small, tractor use is limited, and the fertilizer is almost always manure—tends to be more efficient than growing beans in Europe, with its reliance on energy-dependent irrigation systems."
Really, we're seeing this come down to larger issues of sustainability: how do we grow, what are we growing, what are the costs of the systems we've created, how far can we push things and still keep our heads above water? Specter can't really offer better answers than anyone else, but he puts together a comprehensive place from which to start a discussion.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
For Those of You Who Might Have Missed This...
Stephanie Rothernberg and Jeff Crouse, from over at Eyebeam are about to open the very first sweatshop in Second Life. They're selling clothes in the virtual world, and then producing them in real life. I had the chance to try out on the early prototypes. Click above to find out more.
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