By DANIEL GILBERT
NY Times Published May 21, 2009

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Seventy-six years ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took to the inaugural dais and reminded a nation that its recent troubles “concern, thank God, only material things.” In the midst of the Depression, he urged Americans to remember that “happiness lies not in the mere possession of money” and to recognize “the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success.”

“The only thing we have to fear,” he claimed, “is fear itself.”

As it turned out, Americans had a great deal more to fear than that, and their innocent belief that money buys happiness was entirely correct. Psychologists and economists now know that although the very rich are no happier than the merely rich, for the other 99 percent of us, happiness is greatly enhanced by a few quaint assets, like shelter, sustenance and security. Those who think the material is immaterial have probably never stood in a breadline.

Money matters and today most of us have less of it, so no one will be surprised by new survey results from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index showing that Americans are smiling less and worrying more than they were a year ago, that happiness is down and sadness is up, that we are getting less sleep and smoking more cigarettes, that depression is on the rise.

An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.
But light wallets are not the cause of our heavy hearts. After all, most of us still have more inflation-adjusted dollars than our grandparents had, and they didn’t live in an unremitting funk. Middle-class Americans still enjoy more luxury than upper-class Americans enjoyed a century earlier, and the fin de siècle was not an especially gloomy time. Clearly, people can be perfectly happy with less than we had last year and less than we have now.

So if a dearth of dollars isn’t making us miserable, then what is? No one knows. I don’t mean that no one knows the answer to this question. I mean that the answer to this question is that no one knows — and not knowing is making us sick.

Consider an experiment by researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who gave subjects a series of 20 electric shocks. Some subjects knew they would receive an intense shock on every trial. Others knew they would receive 17 mild shocks and 3 intense shocks, but they didn’t know on which of the 20 trials the intense shocks would come. The results showed that subjects who thought there was a small chance of receiving an intense shock were more afraid — they sweated more profusely, their hearts beat faster — than subjects who knew for sure that they’d receive an intense shock.

That’s because people feel worse when something bad might occur than when something bad will occur. Most of us aren’t losing sleep and sucking down Marlboros because the Dow is going to fall another thousand points, but because we don’t know whether it will fall or not — and human beings find uncertainty more painful than the things they’re uncertain about.

But why?

A colostomy reroutes the colon so that waste products leave the body through a hole in the abdomen, and it isn’t anyone’s idea of a picnic. A University of Michigan-led research team studied patients whose colostomies were permanent and patients who had a chance of someday having their colostomies reversed. Six months after their operations, patients who knew they would be permanently disabled were happier than those who thought they might someday be returned to normal.

Similarly, researchers at the University of British Columbia studied people who had undergone genetic testing to determine their risk for developing the neurodegenerative disorder known as Huntington’s disease. Those who learned that they had a very high likelihood of developing the condition were happier a year after testing than those who did not learn what their risk was.

Why would we prefer to know the worst than to suspect it? Because when we get bad news we weep for a while, and then get busy making the best of it. We change our behavior, we change our attitudes. We raise our consciousness and lower our standards. We find our bootstraps and tug. But we can’t come to terms with circumstances whose terms we don’t yet know. An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.

Our national gloom is real enough, but it isn’t a matter of insufficient funds. It’s a matter of insufficient certainty. Americans have been perfectly happy with far less wealth than most of us have now, and we could quickly become those Americans again — if only we knew we had to.

Birds of Australia 2009

Ricky Swallow
Watercolours
23 May – 20 June 2009

Darren Knight

By Timothy Egan
NY Times Published May 20, 2009

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — On a day after Californians showed they may be ready to pull the plug on the bankrupt citizen-democracy they have created, it’s worth going back a few years to a moment when this divorce could have been predicted.

The prison guard union, having swelled its well-paid ranks after voter mandates helped to produce a system where 750,000 Californians are either locked up, on parole or on probation, was upset at Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for balking at their demands.

The union trolled a billboard around town of a nearly naked and decidedly unbuff Governator in a thong. That’ll show him who’s the girly man.

With overtime, some guards now make $100,000 annually. Every year, enough people to fill three Dodger Stadiums apply for jobs in California incarceration, the fastest-growing public expense.

This spring, trying to keep the prison guards and other state workers from taking to the streets with cuts from a $21 billion deficit, the governor said voters had to pass emergency budget measures or the state would become “a poster child for dysfunction.”

It already is. Yawn. And so an extraordinarily small number of voters showed up Tuesday to add to the mess. The vote, the electoral equivalent of a “Braveheart” bum flash, gave all sides something to sneer at.

But the rejection of those ballot measures should not be read as another California death notice. Such obituaries have been around at least since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and they’ve always been wrong. Chaos from the natural world (wildfires, earthquakes, droughts) and from the political system are background noise, the camouflage of California.

The reason one in eight Americans live here — up from 1in 11 in 1960 — has nothing to do with what happens in Sacramento. The other states may hate California, and as a native Pacific Northwesterner I was raised to despise the “sunbaked barbarians,” as Seattle columnist Emmett Watson called them. But more of us continue to become one of them. Over the last half-century the share of Americans who live in California has increased by nearly 30 percent. The Golden State still grows by 420,000 people a year — to 38 million now — despite decades of Armageddon prophecies.

It’s a wonderful state, from the High Sierra to Death Valley, from the redwoods of the rain forest to the Joshua trees of the desert. And it’s stuffed with creative optimists.

California’s problem is its democracy. The legislators, term-limited yet complacent, long ago threw in the towel. Now the citizens have had enough, expressing a pox-on-both-houses rejection Tuesday of every major ballot measure except the one that limited pay raises for politicians.

Think of Italy — which reminds me of California in so many ways — and its chronic inability to form a government. That’s California, with even better food and no parliamentary system.

l can’t blame the special interests: teachers, prison guards, the asphalt lobby. They’re only doing what special interests always do.

But I do blame the voters. They’re part-time citizens, and not very good at it. They shackled the tax system back in 1978 with Proposition 13, limiting how much government could take from a homeowner. It was a reasonable middle class revolt.

But then, in succeeding years, voters passed laws that packed California’s prisons with criminals (many of them petty) but also mandated that the education system get a lion’s share of the budget. On top of that, the voters made it nearly impossible to pass a budget. Then they walked away from their car wreck.

Voters, through ballot initiatives, do not govern well. Once in a while they act as a break to some particular act of legislative lunacy. But more often they’re absentee rulers, at odds with themselves.

This year, they have no easy solutions for a broken system that gets half its revenue from a state income tax. The result is like California weather — in wet years, it’s awash in green; during droughts, the whole state is burning.

Fixing that system is something legislators should do. But voters have handcuffed the politicians, and now they’ve told them to go away — we hate you, both parties, don’t bother us any more.

Never before have polls shown the state’s elected officials held in such low regard by voters. And here in the capitol, the feeling is mutual — though no politician would dare say so.

It’s time to break up, start seeing new people — and no, they can’t be just friends.

That billboard of the governor in sagging pecs and tiny thong is a perfect symbol of what the voters created. Schwarzenegger is himself a product of a voter recall. And those prison guards would never have grown so powerful had voters not decided to swell the penal system without a way to pay for it.

It’s easy to say that California is an “ungovernable state,” as the oh-so-snidely-erudite Economist did in February. Or that its role as a harbinger of America’s future “now has an increasingly dark urgency,” as the equally erudite George Will did.

But British magazines and Beltway pundits often mistake a Pacific pulse for a flat line.

In 2007, California had more babies, 566,352, than Wyoming has people. If most of them are brown — another target of end-of-days critics — it simply shows that this state’s best renewable resource is always changing colors.

Remember that California’s motto is “Eureka” — I found it. One day that will apply to the political system.

Thanks to Basil Katz

Bronze sculpture worth £3m was melted down and sold off as scrap for just £1,500, say police

Mark Townsend and Caroline Davies
The Observer, Sunday 17 May 2009

One of the most audacious British art thefts, the disappearance of a two-tonne Henry Moore sculpture worth £3m, has been solved by police, who believe that the internationally revered Reclining Figure sculpture was melted down and sold for no more than £1,500.

The bronze sculpture was stolen from the 72-acre estate of the Henry Moore Foundation in Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, in December 2005. The theft baffled art and crime experts and sparked a global hunt for the culprits.

Police feared at first that it had been stolen to order, but investigations suggest it was taken by a group of travellers from Essex and that the metal may have ended up feeding China’s growing demand for electrical components.

Detective chief inspector Jon Humphries, of Hertfordshire police, said it is believed the figure was “irreparably damaged” shortly after being taken away on a flat-bed lorry.

Inquiries indicate that the statue was moved through a Dagenham scrap dealer in December 2005 and on to another Essex scrapyard. Shortly afterwards it was shipped abroad, possibly to Rotterdam and then further east, circumventing an order to Interpol to monitor all ports for the distinctive figure.

Humphries said estimates suggested that the sculpture, three metres long and two metres high, may have made just £1,500 as scrap metal, a value that equates to just a few hundred pounds in current market prices. The Henry Moore Foundation is believed to have offered £10,000 for its safe return.

Humphries, who led the investigation, said: “We have evidence and information suggesting it was cut up on the night, then taken to a location where it was irreparably damaged before it was shipped abroad. In my mind we’ve managed to kill off the mystery as much as is possible.”

Charles Hill, a former head of Scotland Yard’s art and antiques squad and now a private art detective, added that he had been told by the notorious art thief Jimmy Johnson, whose family carried out a string of robberies at stately homes in 2005 and 2006, that a well-known group of travellers was behind the theft. Johnson alleged that the metal had been shipped to Rotterdam, then possibly to China.

Richard Calvocoressi, director of the Henry Moore Foundation, said the theft remained a “source of great regret” and that “considerable efforts” had been made to find the sculpture. Moore, who died in 1986, was renowned for his monumental, rounded reclining figures.

“Security measures have been considerably increased since the work was taken,” added Calvocoressi.

The latest developments come amid a huge rise in thefts of public sculptures, up by more than 500 % in the past three years, according to Ian Leith, deputy chairman of the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association (PMSA). Police and art experts believe that although some are taken for scrap, others are targeted by black market collectors. Leith believes there is clearly an illegal art collector market, with thefts occurring on average once a month. “It is not purely due to the bronze,” he said.

He added that because of the lack of an audit, local authorities and arts bodies were incapable of providing accurate information on stolen pieces. “How do we know what public art exists if we do not record what is there? There is literally a national gallery of art out there,” said Leith.

The PMSA is attempting to create an online database of pieces in public places, but is hampered by a lack of funds.

via the arm

via platforma acrquitectura

By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times Published: May 19, 2009

Dick and Rummy are at Cafe Milano in Georgetown, holding court. The maître d’ fawns. Waiters hover. Tourists snap pics on their digital cameras. Cable chatterers stop by to ingratiate themselves.

It isn’t so much that Dick and Rummy are back. It’s that they never left.

They had no intention of turning America’s national security over to the Boy Wonder. The two best infighters in Washington history weren’t yielding turf to a bunch of peach-fuzz pinkos who side with terrorists.

Let W. work out at the S.M.U. gym in Dallas, waiting for history to redeem him; Dick and Rummy are leaning forward into history, as they always do. Cheney is tawny with TV makeup; there’s no point taking it off. The gigs are nonstop, and he has a big Obama-bashing speech Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute.

“That was funny when you were on Fox and Neil Cavuto called you Obama’s ‘ball and Cheney,’ ” Rummy grins, taking a gulp of his brunello.

Dick grunts, raising a fork of his Risotto Gucci with roasted free-range quail.

“The punks thought they could roll over us,” Vice mutters. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”

Eyeing the quail, Rummy shakes his head. “Can you believe the nerve of that dadburn whippersnapper at the press dinner, saying your memoir would be called ‘How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People?’ Whatever happened to the great White House tradition of giving respect to your predecessors?”

Dick is looking over at himself on the TV behind the bar, where Fox is doing a segment about how Republicans on the Sunday talk shows praised him for his shock-and-awe campaign against Obama.

“I can’t believe how easy it was to bring Obama into line,” Rummy says, gnawing on Gorgonzola. “We wouldn’t have needed waterboarding if everybody cracked like a peanut. It was even easier than getting the bit into Junior’s mouth. Way simpler than if we’d had to contend with McCain. In the end, the right guy won.”

Dick is surprised, too, but who can tell?

“You’re running national security now and everyone knows it,” Rummy says. “You got Obama to do an about-face on the torture photos. He’s using our old line about how it would endanger the troops. He’s keeping our military tribunals. His Justice Department invoked our state secrets privilege to try to get that lawsuit on torture and rendition dismissed. He’s trying to stop any sort of truth commission, thank goodness. He’s got his own surge going in Afghanistan. He’s withdrawing from Iraq more slowly. He’s extended our secret incursions over the Afghan border into Pakistan.”

Dick smiles on one side of his face.

“Transparency bites,” he snarls.

“By golly, yes,” Rummy says. “We controlled Junior by playing on his fear of looking like a wimp just as his dad did. And now we’re controlling Boy Wonder by playing on his eagerness to show that the Democrats are tough on national security. He’s a sucker for four-star generals, can’t resist anyone in uniform. Petraeus and Odierno speak and he jumps. If we want to roll him, we just send in the military brass flashing their medals.”

Rummy knocks back some more brunello, and shoos away some Japanese tourists after confiscating their cameras.

“I hear Poppy Bush is furious at you,” he says. “He’s telling folks he put Junior in your care and you stole his presidency and destroyed the Bush name and derailed Jeb’s chances to ever be president, and P.S., you wrecked the country and the Atlantic alliance to boot. He has it in for Lynne, too. Thinks she spun you up, like she did in high school with her flaming batons. He thinks you got loopy from all the heart procedures. And Colin’s mad at you.”

“He can go to yoga with Pelosi for all I care,” Dick growls.

The two old connivers clink glasses. “So,” Rummy muses, “what do we make our new White House boy toy do next?”

“Well,” Dick says. “He’s got to keep Gitmo open. It’s rich that his own party won’t give him the money to close it. The NIMBY factor works every time — no terrorists in my backyard. He’s got to stop this pansy diplomacy with Muslim nations. He’s got to let Bibi take out those Iranian centrifuges. He’s got to stop his Kodak moments and Commie book club with Hugo Chávez. He’s got to release those C.I.A. memos proving that we were right to rip up the Constitution. And, of course, he’s got to pardon Scooter.”

“Can we get him to do all that, Dick?”

Dick twinkles. “Yes, we can.”

On the evening of November 9, 1989, I was watching TV.
The Berlin Wall was coming down, and I was flabbergasted.

From my 18-year-old perspective, the wall had always been there, and I had no reason to doubt that it would remain there forever. The news of the wall coming down was like somebody telling me that the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates had reversed course overnight, and that from now on you could stroll from Hamburg to Boston.

I saw pictures of people dancing on the wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate. Millions were out in the streets of Berlin, complete strangers were falling into one another’s arms, smiling and weeping at the same time. The images could not have been more emotional, but since I lived in southwestern Germany and we had neither friends nor close relatives on the other side of the wall in East Germany, it remained an abstract event.

During my only visit to the divided Berlin, in 1988, I had experienced the city in all its terrifying absurdity. I vividly recall the so-called ghost stations of the subway:
Some Western subway lines passed through Eastern territory, resulting in a surreal commute. Imagine getting on the uptown 6 train at Union Square, but instead of stopping at 23rd, 28th and 33rd Streets, the train just slows down, and you are peeking out at dimly lit platforms patrolled by heavily armed soldiers from an enemy army. Then you get off at Grand Central to buy the paper and a bagel as if nothing had happened.

Officially, the wall existed to protect the citizens of the East from the capitalist aggressions of West Berlin. The day after the wall went up in 1961 the East German propaganda newspaper Neues Deutschland was filled with reports of thankful East Berliners. An article compared the orderly conduct of the socialist citizens with their counterparts in the West: “There was blood and thunder at the concert of American chief decadence apostle Bill Haley at the West Berlin Sports Palace. With our protective measures for the national border, however, everything passed off peacefully.”

The real reason the wall was built was different: East Germany was simply running out of citizens. Millions had fled by crossing the open inner city border of Berlin since the end of the war.

Today my family and I live just a few hundred feet away from Bernauer Strasse, where the wall ripped most callously through the city. In the early morning of August 13, 1961, East German police brigades started to seal off the border between the Soviet and the Allied sectors, splitting the city into East and West Berlin. In other neighborhoods, the divide often ran along a natural border, or at least through open spaces. Here it followed a regular residential street. People who lived on the south side of Bernauer Strasse woke up on the very frontier — their apartments were in the East, but the sidewalk in front of their building belonged to the West.

We moved from New York to Berlin last summer. Renovations at our home weren’t finished yet. We were exhausted. On top of that, we had a cranky baby who was content only when I put him in the stroller and took him for long walks exploring our new neighborhood. Often we came by the Wall Memorial on the corner of Bernauer- and Ackerstrasse. That’s when I first saw the old photos of people jumping out of their apartment windows to escape to the West. After the lower windows had been bricked up by the police, people tried to escape from the upper floors. They left behind forever their possessions, their friends, and often their families. Ida Siekmann died right here on August 22, 1961, the day before her 59th birthday, after jumping from her third-floor apartment. She was the wall’s first official victim.

And here was I, pitying myself because I had only slept a few hours and couldn’t get my DSL connection up and running.

In the first days after it went up, the wall was a barbed wire barrier. Conrad Schumann, a 19-year-old soldier in the East German army, was standing guard on the corner of Ruppiner Strasse and Bernauer Strasse. He was taunted and insulted by passers-by from the West and, on a whim, started running and hurdled the barbed wire into the West, thus becoming the subject of one of the most dramatic photographs of the time. Only recently have I realized that I often go jogging up that very sidewalk.

Today our neighborhood is filled with bustling restaurants, shops, galleries and playgrounds, which makes it all the more jarring to find out about all the drama that unfolded here. A few feet away from where the boys and I play in a sandbox, my neighbors from 40-odd years ago had dug a tunnel through which 57 people escaped before its existence was leaked to the secret police. Another photo at the memorial shows a bride and a groom waving at their parents from the other side of the barbed wire. They had probably lived just a few blocks from each other, and now found themselves in two separate, hostile nations. I think of our parents, who can just hop a train to come to Berlin to see their grandchildren perform a song in kindergarten.

While I try to get in touch with history through museums, books and TV, 20 years ago history was actually being made, just a few blocks east in the church communities of the Prenzlauer Berg district. People risked losing their jobs, ruining their children’s prospects and even being taken to one of the notorious Stasi prisons, yet they still worked in opposition groups for years. Like similar groups in Leipzig, they began organizing open demonstrations in the fall of 1989. Within weeks, these grew from a few dozen brave men and women to hundreds of thousands across the country, ultimately leading to the collapse of the socialist regime.

Germany, with a history so full of iron-fisted terror, war and wanton violence, had finally experienced a revolution without a single bullet being fired.

For 28 years the wall in Berlin was one of the world’s most frightening and impermeable borders. Few made it to the other side; most who tried were captured and thrown into prison, and many were killed in the attempt. Today, there are only a very few places where the wall still exists. Instead, a twin row of cobblestones is laid into the streets of Berlin, indicating where the wall once stood.

Every time I ride my bike across this artificial scar, I quickly close my eyes and appreciate the small, humbling bump.

By Christoph Niemann
NY Times Published May 18, 2009

Christoph Niemann’s illustrations have appeared on the covers of The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine and American Illustration. His work has won numerous awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Art Directors Club and American Illustration. He is the author of two children’s books, “The Pet Dragon,” which teaches Chinese characters to young readers, and “The Police Cloud.” After 11 years in New York, he moved to Berlin with his wife, Lisa, and their sons, Arthur, Gustav and Fritz. His Web site is christophniemann.com.

Florian Morlat at Ben Kauffman, Berlin

via Kelly Breslin

Jonathan Richman & Modern Lovers

via Danielle Kays

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
NY Times Published: May 18, 2009

LAHORE, Pakistan — The idea was simple, but in Pakistan, a country full of talk and short on action, it smacked of rebellion.

A group of young Pakistani friends, sick of hearing their families complain about the government, decided to spite them by taking matters into their own hands: Every Sunday they would grab shovels, go out into their city, and pick up garbage.

It was a strange thing to do, particularly for students from elite private schools, who would normally spend Sunday afternoons relaxing in air-conditioned homes. But the students were inspired by the recent success of the lawyers’ movement, which used a national protest march to press the government to reinstate the country’s chief justice, and their rush of public consciousness was irrepressible.

“Everybody keeps blaming the government, but no one actually does anything,” said said Shoaib Ahmed, 21, one of the organizers. “So we thought, why don’t we?”

So they got on Facebook and invited all their friends to a Sunday trash picking. Trash, Mr. Ahmed said, “is this most basic thing. It’s not controversial, and you can easily do it.”

Pakistan is a country plagued by problems — Islamic extremism and poverty. But these young people are another face, a curious new generation that looks skeptically on their parents’ privilege and holds mullahs and military generals in equal contempt.

“The youth of Pakistan wants to change things,” said Shahram Azhar, the lead singer for Laal, a Pakistani rock band, reflecting an attitude that is typical of this rebellious younger generation.

“The reason the Taliban is ruling Swat,” he said referring to a valley north of Islamabad, where Islamic extremists took control this year, “is because they are organized. We need to organize, too.”

“The only answer to Pakistan’s problems,” he added, “is a broad-based people’s movement.”

The trash movement, which calls itself “Responsible Citizens,” does not yet qualify as broad, but it still drew a respectable crowd on a recent Sunday, considering the heat (above 90 degrees) and the time (around 4 p.m.). Mr. Ahmed and his friends were doling out trash bags they had bought for the occasion. About 40 people had gathered. Some were wearing masks. All were carrying shovels.

They set their sights low: The area of operation, Ghalib Market, was modest, a quiet traffic circle in central Lahore encircled by shops, a cricket field and a mosque. It was not one of the dirtiest parts of the city, but the group felt attached to it, as they had cleaned it in the past, and wanted to see if their actions were having any effect.

The first time they cleaned there was like raking leaves on a windy autumn day.

“We collected, like, 30 bags, but there was no visible difference,” Mr. Ahmed said.

But they talked with local shopkeepers, in a kind of trash outreach, asking them to walk their garbage to the trash bin. Those connections, Mr. Ahmed said, were actually the point of the cleaning — setting an example for others to follow.

“The major problem people have here is that there are no bins,” said Murtaza KhwajaKhwaja, a 21-year-old medical student.

Actually, the problem was deeper. A long-term cycle of corrupt, weak governments interrupted by military coups has caused Pakistan’s political muscles to atrophy, leaving Pakistani society, particularly its poor, hopeless that they will ever receive the services — education, water, electricity, health — that they so desperately need.

“People say, ‘This is nice, but things will never change,’ ” Mr. Khwaja said, pointing to a hamburger seller who he said was particularly pessimistic. “There is a hopelessness.”

That is where the trash cleaning comes in. Locals find it perplexing and helpful in equal measures. One enthusiast who met the group on its first outing in March, Muhamed Zahid, has come to every one since. One man passing by in a rickshaw dismounted to help them shovel for a while.

The men in the mosque, on the other hand, were picky, wanting the young people to clean the mosque but not the surrounding area.

“They said, ‘We already have Christians doing that for us in the morning,’ ” Mr. Khwaja said. Christians are a minority in Pakistan, and those who have no education often work in the lowest paid jobs, such as collecting trash, sweeping streets or fixing sewers.

On Sunday, Malik Waqas, a 16-year-old who was driving by on a moped, stopped to watch a cluster of young people shoveling what looked like old food.

“It’s good,” Mr. Waqas said shyly. When asked why, he said, “Because people care.”

But that also confuses passers-by, many of whom stop to gape at the young people, who, in their jeans, T-shirts and sunglasses, look more New York than Pakistan. On Sunday, three men in flowing, traditional garb leaned on a fence staring at the students while they cleaned.

Mr. Khwaja’s mother, who had also come to clean, was commanding like an army general, trying to get them to join in.

“Most of them just mock us,” she said. “ ‘What are you women doing?’ ”

But the youngsters seemed to understand the men’s perspective.

“They’re like, ‘Why are these rich people cleaning this up? It’s probably a college project,’ ” one student said.

That brought the students to the most serious discussion of the day, one that is arguably Pakistan’s biggest problem: The gap between rich and poor. Generations of poverty and a system of substandard education that keeps people in it have created fertile ground for Islamic militancy, which now poses a serious threat to the stability of the country.

“Here, if you’re poor, you’re not even a human being,” said Pavel Qaiser. “It’s the culture we have — one landlord and the peasants working under him.”

And here was a revelation: The trash picking, which the students had intended as an example for shopkeepers and residents, was actually an exercise for themselves.

“The rich don’t care, the poor can’t do anything, so it’s up to the middle class to make the change,” Mr. Khwaja said, a group of friends standing near him and nodding in agreement. “We have to lead by example. To change it from inside.”

He continued, his voice urgent, as if he were giving a speech: “We want to tell everyone, ‘You have the right. For 60 years everyone has told you that you don’t, but you do!’ ”

Then he bemoaned the small number of friends they were able to gather for the trash cleaning. For those who didn’t come, he had a message: “You want to do something? Pick up a shovel.”

INTERVIEW BY SANTIAGO FERNANDEZ-STELLEY

Oscar Niemeyer is on the infinitesimally short list of people who have designed and built an entire city. A world capital. Sure, Haussmann made Paris into the postcard background it is today and Wren rebuilt London after the Great Fire (by not building everything out of wood—good thinking!). But it’s not like they were lacking in usable models on which to base their work, considering those cities were already functioning metropolises before they got the re-up. Niemeyer, though—he took an empty patch of Brazilian countryside and, in four years (and with the layout assistance of Lucio Costa), put a hyperfunctional capital city on the face of the earth. It’s called Brasília, and it’s shaped like an airplane or a butterfly or a woman (though Niemeyer claims it’s not a woman).

That was 50 years ago, and Niemeyer has been working nonstop ever since. He’s 101 years old and still designs buildings every day. He spent a few years as the president of the Brazilian Communist Party, recently got married at the sprightly age of 98, and got himself into trouble last year for trying to make some changes to Brasília.

Living for a century has given him a lot of perspective, as in, “architecture-can’t-give-meaning-to-your-life” perspective. And when a guy who built an entire city from scratch tells you that nobody in this life is important, you start to fear that nothing, not a single accomplishment that you rack up, will ever mean anything to anybody, ever.

Let’s start with an easy one. How did you become interested in architecture?

Oscar Niemeyer: I think that drawing drove me to it. I remember when I was ten years old and I used to like to draw with my fingers in the air. My mother would ask, “What are you doing, boy?” I would say, “I’m drawing.” I could picture the drawings in the air and correct them. Now I think differently. Architecture is in my head. I am able to do a project without the use of a pencil. I can imagine the location and I can imagine the project that I want to make. I think of all the solutions.

And how did you come to build Brasília?

President Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, who had hired me to design the Pampulha Church in Belo Horizonte, assigned me Brasília. I remember when Juscelino decided to build Brasília. He came to my office and said, “Oscar, we did Pampulha and now we will build the new capital.” That’s how Brasília’s adventure started.

An entire city was built so quickly.

I knew we only had a short time, but that didn’t influence me to design simpler architecture. When I built the Alvorada Palace, for instance, I made a curved canopy and curved columns—a type of column that had never been built before.

You’ve said your architecture has strived for new shapes or forms. What do you mean by that?

We didn’t make the architecture that Bauhaus wanted, which would be purely functional. Architecture has to be pretty. It has to amaze to be a masterpiece. I work a lot. I have lots of work over in Europe and here, but I always try to bring beauty and amazement.

And the Bauhaus philosophy was too cold for you.

Architecture can’t be like Bauhaus wanted, a “habitation machine.” Architecture has to be born from nothing, have no influences. Once a very intelligent architect told me, “There’s no modern or old architecture, there’s only good and bad architecture.”

Now, I don’t see architecture as something that will save the world, but I think the architect has to read, has to be informed. For instance, here in our office, we’ve had a class for five years where we have a teacher coming to talk about philosophy and the cosmos. How good it is to know things.

That’s a pretty unconventional way to run an architecture firm.

I’m interested in life. I think life is more important than architecture. I think what’s important is solidarity. I remember once a journalist asked me, “Oscar, what’s your favorite word?” I said, “Solidarity.”

But architecture isn’t your favorite thing to discuss?

When I talk about architecture, I feel like changing the subject. I’m interested in problems of life and the human being.

Let’s change the subject then. Let’s talk about women.

Now when you talk about women, that’s great. Woman is fundamental. Once, a journalist came here and asked me, “Oscar, what is life?” I said life is a woman on your side. And it’s true. Another great friend of mine, Darcy Ribeiro, who was a very important scholar in Brazilian society, said woman is fundamental.

I’ve always heard that the curves in architecture were based on female curves.

No. If we have a dome with empty space—generous space—then we want the best-looking shape. Sometimes it happens to coincide with a woman’s body, but that’s not our objective. We want a pure form, a different form that relates to the calculations and that will bring to the project a different sensation.

But I was imagining…

No. There’s nothing to do with woman. The form comes from nothing.

Do you still draw?

Oh yes, a lot.

What do you draw these days?

[He shows us a drawing.] Well, this, for instance, is a theater in Buenos Aires. The shape is very different. You have never seen a shape like this before. It has a lower cover that corresponds to the audience and an upper dome that corresponds to the stage. I can say modestly that you have never seen something like this before.

How do you see the cultural climate of Brazil today?

Brazil is important. Brazil is growing. We are in a moment in time where there’s hope. We are doing well—Brazil is defending itself, it’s organizing itself, the president is a friend of the people. He was a worker, he reacts to any exterior intervention, he protects our sovereignty.

What are some other projects that you have going?

Well, this is a square I want to make in Brasília, because every capital has a square that is pretty monumental. In this triangular-shaped monument, the first two floors are set for a permanent exhibition about the country’s progress. The triangle keeps going and changing until it becomes this 100-meter-high monument and then there’s this other smaller one where the square ends.

I understand this project is causing some controversy.

There’s been some commotion about it, about whether it’s going to change Brasília’s landscape. But it’s nothing like that. Cities have always been changing. In France, a lot of things have changed; in Spain, the cities grew to the sea because it was the natural solution. In Brazil, if the cities were static, we would never have had the avenue that Mayor Passos created, cutting the city in half. Modifications have always happened.

But some people started to demand that the city be “protected,” which I think is stupid. The city can’t be protected. There’s always going to be a better idea that has to be incorporated. I remind them as a joke that if they thought nothing could change, they couldn’t think about the future, because the future is nature manufacturing and changing everything. When the ice from the poles starts to melt with more intensity and the sea levels start to rise, which can happen, above two meters, every city on the coast will have to rethink itself. That’s something that comes from nature and changes everything. And this is not happening in 100 years—it can happen in the next 20, 30 years. The ice caps could melt in ten years. Nature is unpredictable.

It’s a serious concern.

Today architecture and urbanism have to be aware of the problems that the evolution of the planet is creating. If the sea levels rise too much, every building and rooftop will have to become a place to grow grass and plants. Nature will change urbanism and architecture. The architect has to watch for everything that’s happening now and in the future.

But aren’t social concerns important to architecture too?

The architect must think that the world has to be a better place, that we can end poverty. Here in Brazil, there’s still this war between classes. So it is important that the architect think not only of architecture but of how architecture can solve the problems of the world. When the world is a better place, what’s going to happen? Houses will be simpler. We won’t have ghettos and palaces. Theaters, museums, and stadiums will be bigger so that all can enjoy them. Now, poor people don’t understand architecture. They see it from afar. They will at least think the architecture I do is pretty, because it’s a different type of surprise.

So architecture is political too.

The architect has to always be political. One has to help another—solidarity. The rest is nothing. If you look to the cosmos, you’re so small, you’re so unimportant. We have to be more simple and not think we’re important. Nobody is important.

Do you like soccer?

Of course. When I was ten years old, there was a player missing from the junior soccer team and they took me to play. I was ten years old on a soccer field, imagine that! My grandfather played also, for Fluminense. I used to play soccer in my street and on the beach. We used to go to the beach early in the morning. Every summer, we rented a house in Copacabana. Once we rented a house exactly where this building is now. I remember we used to go to the beach at six in the morning to see the arrival of the boats and people buying fish on the shore. The sky was still red, the boats were just showing up. Their contour…

We were born on the beach. And soccer was the joy. It still is, and we play it really well. One thing Brazilians do well is play soccer…

What is your daily routine like now?

I come here at 10 AM. Usually the press comes here, the national and the international press, and I receive them. They are people like you. I talk about whatever interests me, always repeating that architecture is not everything, that life is what matters, that we have to be decent, fraternal, all that. In the afternoon, my friends come by, we talk, chat, enjoy it. And at night, I go home. That is my personal life.

And you intend to work as long as you can, right?

As long as I can, I will do it. That’s what I do all day long. I think about architecture and politics and meet with friends who come here to discuss it all. We want to tell young people that life is more important than architecture, more important than anything. Life is to know how to behave, to take pleasure in being amiable and just. That’s it. But life is not important. I am not going to say it’s terrible, but it is what destiny gives us.

via archinect

installation images from upcoming mocad show

By CHARLES McGRATH
NY Times Published: May 15, 2009

Almost all his life Jack Kerouac had a hobby that even close friends and fellow Beats like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs never knew about. He obsessively played a fantasy baseball game of his own invention, charting the exploits of made-up players like Wino Love, Warby Pepper, Heinie Twiett, Phegus Cody and Zagg Parker, who toiled on imaginary teams named either for cars (the Pittsburgh Plymouths and New York Chevvies, for example) or for colors (the Boston Grays and Cincinnati Blacks).

He collected their stats, analyzed their performances and, as a teenager, when he played most ardently, wrote about them in homemade newsletters and broadsides. He even covered financial news and imaginary contract disputes. During those same teenage years, he also ran a fantasy horse-racing circuit, complete with illustrated tout sheets and racing reports. He created imaginary owners, imaginary jockeys, imaginary track conditions.

All these “publications,” some typed, some handwritten and often pasted into old-fashioned composition notebooks, are now part of the Jack Kerouac Archive at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. The curator, Isaac Gewirtz, has just written a 75-page book about them, “Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats,” to be published next week by the library and available, at least for now, only in its gift shop.

Mr. Gewirtz said recently that he had included much of the fantasy material in a 2007 Kerouac exhibition he mounted at the library, and had planned to add a chapter about the fantasy sports in the catalogue but ran out of space. “I’m glad I waited,” he said, “because it forced me to go into it all in much more depth.”

Among other things, Mr. Gewirtz has learned that Kerouac played an early version of the baseball game in his backyard in Lowell, Mass., hitting a marble with a nail, or possibly a toothpick, and noting where it landed. By 1946, when Kerouac was 24, he had devised a set of cards with precise verbal descriptions of various outcomes (“slow roller to ss,” for example), depending on the skill levels of the pitcher and batter. The game could be played using cards alone, but Mr. Gewirtz thinks that more often Kerouac determined the result of a pitch by tossing some sort of projectile at a diagramed chart on the wall. In 1956 he switched to a new set of cards, which used hieroglyphic symbols instead of descriptions. Carefully preserved inside plastic folders at the library, they now look as mysterious as runes.

The horse-racing game was played by rolling marbles and a silver ball bearing down a tilted Parcheesi board, using a starting gate made of toothpicks. Apparently, the ball bearing traveled faster than the marbles, some of which were intentionally nicked to indicate equine fragility and mortality. So the ball bearing became the nearly invincible horse Repulsion, “King of the Turf,” whose legendary speed and stamina are celebrated in Kerouac’s racing sheets.

A byline that frequently appears in the racing sheets and the baseball newsletters is “Jack Lewis,” an Anglicization of Kerouac’s French first name, Jean-Louis. Jack Lewis, you learn from a careful reading of the sheets, is also a “noted turf luminary,” an owner and trainer who happens to be married to a wealthy breeder and whose 15-year-old son, Tad, is “expected to become a greater jockey than his immortal dad.” In baseball, Jack Lewis is a scribe and the publisher of Jack Lewis’s Baseball Chatter, and he appears occasionally both as a player and a manager.

That Kerouac, growing up in Lowell in the 1920s and ’30s, would turn out to be sports-obsessed is not much of a surprise. His father was a serious racing fan who for a while supplemented his income by printing racing forms for local tracks. Kerouac himself was a good enough athlete to be recruited by Frank Leahy, then the football coach at Boston College. He picked Columbia instead, because he was already dreaming of becoming a writer and thought New York was the place to start.

And that Kerouac had an active fantasy life hardly distinguishes him from other teenage boys. What’s remarkable about his fantasy games, however, is their elaborateness and detail. The players all have distinct histories and personalities. A single season could last 40 or 50 games, with an All-Star game and a World Series, all painstakingly documented.

In an introduction to “Kerouac at Bat,” Mr. Gewirtz suggests that Kerouac was trying, in part, to escape the pain and confusion he suffered from the death of his older brother, Gerard, when Gerard was 9 and Kerouac just 4. But whether he knew it or not, the creation and documentation of fantasy worlds were ideal training for a would-be author.

The prose in Kerouac’s various publications mostly imitates the overheated, epithet-studded sportswriting of the day. “It was partly homage,” Mr. Gewirtz said, “and perhaps partly parody, but every now and then an original phrase leaps out.” For example, the description of a hitter who “almost drove Charley Fiskell, Boston’s hot corner man, into a shambled heap in the last game with his sizzling drives through the grass.”

Mr. Gewirtz said, “I really like that ‘shambled heap.’ ” Another description he enjoys is one of an overpowering pitcher who after defeating the opposition by a lopsided score “smiled wanly.”

Kerouac wrote his last baseball account, two mock United Press International reports, in 1958, but he continued to play the game and to tinker with its formulas, making them more realistic, until just a year or two before his death in 1969. His friend the poet Philip Whalen was probably the only one of the Beats who was familiar with this side of Kerouac.

“I don’t think the others knew,” Mr. Gewirtz said. “Or if they did, they didn’t learn it from Kerouac. I think he was worried they might think it childish.” But in Mr. Gewirtz’s view Kerouac’s interest in playing and writing about this self-contained imaginary world goes a long way toward dispelling the familiar criticism of him as less a writer than a sort of inspired typist.

“I think Kerouac had a photographic memory — a visual photographic memory,” he said. “These games were real to him: he saw them in his head, where he was able to store everything. To me it’s another indication of the kind of mind that allowed him to be the writer he was.”

By Hugh Holub
Published Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Nogales International

Recently law enforcement officials discovered the 40th drug tunnel in Nogales.

It is beginning to seem like “Drug tunnel discovered in Nogales” is one of those standard headlines repeated every few days in newspapers, along with “Bus plunge kills 32” and “Roadside bomb explodes in Iraq.”

Regrettably, Nogales is becoming famous for its industrious moles that dig beneath city streets and out from under rented buildings to facilitate the transport of drugs, weapons and illegal migrants between the United States and Mexico.

Now, let us consider that the drug-related violence in Mexico is hurting the tourist trade in Ambos Nogales. What can be done to get more tourists to visit Nogales, Ariz.?

How about capitalizing on being the drug tunnel capital of America and creating the Nogales Drug Tunnel Museum?

This museum could feature a map of the city showing where each of the 40 tunnels started from and where they went.

This museum could also exhibit photos of the tunnels.

Replicas of what has been discovered in some of the tunnels could also be displayed bundles of marijuana, packets of cocaine.

A mockup of one of the better constructed tunnels could be re-created so visitors could experience what it is like crawling through a hole two feet wide.

The robot used to peer into newly discovered drug tunnels could be on display. If memory serves me correctly, the robot is a track-mounted camera owned by the City of Nogales that is ordinarily used to inspect city sewer lines. Videos taken by the robot could be shown.

How drug tunnels are sealed could also be shown.

I think many people would love to take a tour of the Nogales Drug Tunnel Museum.

I am not suggesting having tours of some of the real drug tunnels. A few years back, in a tongue-in-cheek article in the Bandersnatch, I claimed that drug tunnel tours were available in Nogales. However, instead of realizing this was a joke, someone from the Discovery Channel called the local chamber of commerce asking to schedule such a tour.

However, the museum idea is serious. The Border Patrol ought to spring for the cost of setting this up.

Maybe even admission could be charged to help defray the cost of shoring up portions of the city that will eventually collapse into a giant sinkhole cause by the tunnels that have been dug beneath the town.

Meanwhile, I am wondering when the Nogales city code will be amended to make digging tunnels inside the city without a permit and make it a violation of law, subject to an enormous fine. Given the frequency of the tunneling, this could be a major new revenue source for local government.

via bldg blog

By Louis Sahagun
Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2009

Reporting from Lone Pine, Calif. — The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is quietly prospecting once again for land and water rights in the Owens Valley, sparking tense disputes among residents over the agency’s influence on their economic stability.

Unlike previous battles between Owens Valley residents and the DWP, which focused on the environmental and economic damage caused by L.A.’s pumping of local water supplies, the current campaign seeks to break the agency’s grip on land the locals say is needed for commerce, hospitals, parking and affordable housing along a 112-mile stretch of Highway 395 east of the Sierra Nevada.

“Sustainable communities — that’s what they are sucking out of this place along with our water,” said Scott Palamar, a photographer who moved to Lone Pine in July after his Malibu home was destroyed by a brush fire in 2007. “The DWP only wants just enough infrastructure to support its own operations. Beyond that, they don’t seem to care.”

The trouble started when a local real estate broker learned that the DWP, which already owns 25% of the Owens Valley floor, plans to buy 100 acres of privately held stream-side property just west of Independence, the Inyo County seat, for an estimated $4 million to $5 million.

On May 6, a group of Owens Valley residents sent a petition to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the Los Angeles City Council urging them to force the DWP to compensate for the loss of this private land by releasing an equal amount of its own holdings elsewhere.

“They are creating a net loss of private land in Inyo County and destroying our towns in the process,” said Jenifer Castaneda, a Lone Pine real estate broker and community activist who helped write the petition. “If they are going to take what little available private land there is left in the valley out of circulation, they should make an equal amount of land available in communities that are struggling to survive.”

“I understand their sentiments” and “I’m open to having conversations” about releasing property, DWP General Manger David Nahai said in an interview.

But he also pointed out that three years of drought, cutbacks in state water allocations and rationing and its $500-million dust-mitigation project at Owens Lake have left the agency trying to cope with “a seriously overburdened water supply.”

The DWP already receives water from the 100-acre parcel it is attempting to purchase. By acquiring ownership of the land and its water rights, the agency would maintain permanent, uninterrupted access to the water and prevent other parties from tapping it for development or selling it elsewhere.

In the meantime, the communities of Olancha, Lone Pine, Independence and Big Pine continue to deteriorate, with most of their developable land controlled by the DWP.

In Independence, a town of 500, the sole grocery store recently closed because its customer base had dwindled. About 15 miles south in downtown Lone Pine, the DWP last summer demolished several buildings it owned on a single block, leaving behind three gravel-covered lots locals have dubbed “the missing teeth of Main Street.”

“That lot was an auto parts store. That one nearby was a beauty shop, and that one over there used to be a Radio Shack,” Castaneda said on a recent weekday, pointing to the empty parcels. “Now, people are wondering: What is the critical mass needed to sustain this community?”

Twelve years ago, the DWP agreed to relinquish 75 acres in the Owens Valley for residential and commercial uses, and the county amended its general plan to ensure that land exchanges did not result in a net loss of tax base or revenues.

So far, however, only a handful of lots from those 75 acres have changed hands because the DWP tends to set minimum bids far above market value.

Nahai acknowledged the problem: “We are right now reappraising the 75 acres with a goal of bringing them to market soon in a successful auction.”

The Owens Valley has been a colony of sorts since the early 1900s, when L.A. began pumping so much water via the Los Angeles aqueduct system that it was all but impossible for the region’s early farmers and ranchers to make a living — a scandal dramatized in the classic 1974 film “Chinatown.”

Owens Valley residents and the DWP have been at odds ever since over the effects of L.A.’s water use on the landscape. But the dissension flared anew when Palamar and Castaneda revealed the agency’s offer on 100 acres at Oak Creek owned by Alan Bell of Woodland Hills and his brother, Robert Bell of Bishop.

The two DWP critics were publicly chastised by an Inyo County supervisor for disclosing details of the transaction.

Some of Robert Bell’s neighbors say he should subdivide the property to increase its value. Others argue the DWP is offering too little for it.

Robert Bell, who was a construction worker for the DWP until he won a $9-million lottery jackpot in 1988, declined to comment on the land or his decision to sell it, citing confidentiality agreements. “I can talk about it later,” he said. “Not right now.”

County officials and residents say the DWP also has expressed interest in acquiring an 80-acre site with water rights in Big Pine, as well as at least one parcel with water rights adjacent to the Bell brothers’ property.

The last time the DWP bought a chunk of land larger than 100 acres with water rights was in 1986, a department spokesman said.

Three weeks ago, Nahai said he visited a group of Owens Valley cattle ranchers who receive significant DWP water allotments, “to talk with them about our dire water situation.”

The last time the DWP curtailed water allotments for valley ranching and agriculture was during the drought of 1991.

Some residents view Castaneda and Palamar and dozens of others who signed their petition as heroes for daring to take their case to the Inyo County Board of Supervisors and Los Angeles City Hall.

Said Inyo County Supervisor Marty Fortney, who operates a camping and fishing resort on land leased from the DWP: “If they can get DWP off the stick to release some of its land at a reasonable price, then more power to them.”

“But forcing the DWP to do anything around here is like trying to squeeze a bull through a window — probably ain’t going to happen,” he said with a smile. “In this country, the DWP is God, and it makes the rules.”

Castaneda agreed — to a point.

“If people don’t speak up,” she said, “there won’t be any businesses or livelihoods left to fight for.”

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: May 14, 2009

TAIPEI, Taiwan

I have seen the future, and it won’t work.

These should be hopeful times for environmentalists. Junk science no longer rules in Washington. President Obama has spoken forcefully about the need to take action on climate change; the people I talk to are increasingly optimistic that Congress will soon establish a cap-and-trade system that limits emissions of greenhouse gases, with the limits growing steadily tighter over time. And once America acts, we can expect much of the world to follow our lead.

But that still leaves the problem of China, where I have been for most of the last week.

Like every visitor to China, I was awed by the scale of the country’s development. Even the annoying aspects — much of my time was spent viewing the Great Wall of Traffic — are byproducts of the nation’s economic success.

But China cannot continue along its current path because the planet can’t handle the strain.

The scientific consensus on prospects for global warming has become much more pessimistic over the last few years. Indeed, the latest projections from reputable climate scientists border on the apocalyptic. Why? Because the rate at which greenhouse gas emissions are rising is matching or exceeding the worst-case scenarios.

And the growth of emissions from China — already the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide — is one main reason for this new pessimism.

China’s emissions, which come largely from its coal-burning electricity plants, doubled between 1996 and 2006. That was a much faster pace of growth than in the previous decade. And the trend seems set to continue: In January, China announced that it plans to continue its reliance on coal as its main energy source and that to feed its economic growth it will increase coal production 30 percent by 2015. That’s a decision that, all by itself, will swamp any emission reductions elsewhere.

So what is to be done about the China problem?

Nothing, say the Chinese. Each time I raised the issue during my visit, I was met with outraged declarations that it was unfair to expect China to limit its use of fossil fuels. After all, they declared, the West faced no similar constraints during its development; while China may be the world’s largest source of carbon-dioxide emissions, its per-capita emissions are still far below American levels; and anyway, the great bulk of the global warming that has already happened is due not to China but to the past carbon emissions of today’s wealthy nations.

And they’re right. It is unfair to expect China to live within constraints that we didn’t have to face when our own economy was on its way up. But that unfairness doesn’t change the fact that letting China match the West’s past profligacy would doom the Earth as we know it.

Historical injustice aside, the Chinese also insisted that they should not be held responsible for the greenhouse gases they emit when producing goods for foreign consumers. But they refused to accept the logical implication of this view — that the burden should fall on those foreign consumers instead, that shoppers who buy Chinese products should pay a “carbon tariff” that reflects the emissions associated with those goods’ production. That, said the Chinese, would violate the principles of free trade.

Sorry, but the climate-change consequences of Chinese production have to be taken into account somewhere. And anyway, the problem with China is not so much what it produces as how it produces it. Remember, China now emits more carbon dioxide than the United States, even though its G.D.P. is only about half as large (and the United States, in turn, is an emissions hog compared with Europe or Japan).

The good news is that the very inefficiency of China’s energy use offers huge scope for improvement. Given the right policies, China could continue to grow rapidly without increasing its carbon emissions. But first it has to realize that policy changes are necessary.

There are hints, in statements emanating from China, that the country’s policy makers are starting to realize that their current position is unsustainable. But I suspect that they don’t realize how quickly the whole game is about to change.

As the United States and other advanced countries finally move to confront climate change, they will also be morally empowered to confront those nations that refuse to act. Sooner than most people think, countries that refuse to limit their greenhouse gas emissions will face sanctions, probably in the form of taxes on their exports. They will complain bitterly that this is protectionism, but so what? Globalization doesn’t do much good if the globe itself becomes unlivable.

It’s time to save the planet. And like it or not, China will have to do its part.

image from vacant lot show

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
NY Times Published: May 14, 2009

Frank Lloyd Wright died half a century ago, but people are still fighting over him.

The extraordinary scope of his genius, which touched on every aspect of American life, makes him one of the most daunting figures of the 20th century. But to many he is still the vain, megalomaniacal architect, someone who trampled over his clients’ wishes, drained their bank accounts and left them with leaky roofs.

So “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward,” which opens on Friday at the Guggenheim Museum, will be a disappointment to some. The show offers no new insight into his life’s work. Nor is there any real sense of what makes him so controversial. It’s a chaste show, as if the Guggenheim, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, was determined to make Wright fit for civilized company.

The advantage of this low-key approach is that it puts the emphasis back where it belongs: on the work. There are more than 200 drawings, many never exhibited publicly before. More than a dozen scale models, some commissioned for the show, give a strong sense of the lucidity of his designs and the intimate relationship between building and landscape that was such a central theme of his art.

Taken as a whole, the exhibition conveys not only the remarkable scope of his interests, which ranged from affordable housing to reimagining the American city, but also the astonishing cohesiveness of that vision

— an achievement that has been matched by only one or two other architects in the 20th century.

One way to experience the show is as a straightforward tour of Wright’s masterpieces. Organized by Thomas Krens and David van der Leer, it is arranged in roughly chronological order, so that you can spiral up through the highlights of his career: the reinvention of the suburban home and the office block, the obsession with car culture, the increasingly outlandish urban projects.

There is a stunning plaster model of the vaultlike interior of Unity Temple, built in Oak Park between 1905 and 1908. Just a bit farther up the ramp, another model painstakingly recreates the Great Workroom of the Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine, Wis., with its delicate grid of mushroom columns and milky glass ceiling.

Such tightly composed, inward-looking structures contrast with the free-flowing spaces that we tend to associate with Wright’s fantasy of a democratic, agrarian society.

But as always with Wright, the complexity of his approach reveals itself only after you begin to fit the pieces together. For Wright, the singular masterpiece was never enough. His aim was to create a framework for an entire new way of life, one that completely redefined the relationships between individual, family and community. And he pursued it with missionary zeal.

Wright went to extreme lengths to sell his dream of affordable housing for the masses, tirelessly promoting it in magazines.

The second-floor annex shows a small sampling of its various incarnations, including an elaborate model of the Jacobs House (1936-37), its walls and floors pulled apart and suspended from the ceiling on a system of wires and lead weights. One of Wright’s earliest Usonian houses, the one-story Jacobs structure in Madison, Wis., was made of modest wood and brick and organized around a central hearth. Its L-shape layout framed a rectangular lawn, locking it into the landscape, so that the homeowner remained in close touch with the earth.

The ideas Wright explored in such projects were eventually woven into grander urban fantasies, first proposed in Broadacre City and later in The Living City project. In both, Usonian communities were dispersed over an endless matrix of highways and farmland, punctuated by the occasional residential tower.

The subtext of these plans, of course, was Wright’s war with the city. To Wright, the congested neighborhoods of the traditional city were anathema to the spirit of unbridled individual freedom. His alternative, shaped by the car, represented a landscape of endless horizons. Sadly, it was also a model for suburban sprawl.

Wright continued to explore these themes until the end of his life, even as his formal language evolved. A model of the Gordon Strong Automobile Objective and Planetarium captures his growing obsession with the ziggurat and the spiral. A tourist destination that was planned for Sugarloaf Mountain, Md., but never built, the massive concrete structure coiled around a vast planetarium. The project combines his love of cars and his fascination with primitive forms, as if he were striving to weave together the whole continuum of human history.

In his 1957 Plan for Greater Baghdad, Wright went a step further, adapting his ideas to the heart of the ancient city. The plan is centered on a spectacular opera house enclosed beneath a spiraling dome and crowned by a statue of Alladin. Set on an island in the Tigris, the opera house was to be surrounded by tiers of parking and public gardens. A network of roadways extends like tendrils from this base, weaving along the edge of the river and tying the complex to the old city.

Just across the river, another ring of parking, almost a mile in diameter, encloses a new campus for Baghdad University.

Wright’s fanciful design was never built, but it demonstrates the degree to which he remained distrustful of urban centers. Stubborn to the end, he saw the car as the city’s salvation rather than its ruin. The cosmopolitan ideal is supplanted by a sprawling suburbia shaded by palms and date trees.

And what of the Guggenheim? Some will continue to see it as an example of Wright’s brazen indifference to the city’s history. With its aloof attitude toward the Manhattan street grid, the building still pushes buttons.

For his part, Wright saw the spiral as a symbol of life and rebirth. The reflecting pool at the bottom of his rotunda represented a seed, part of his vision of an organic architecture that sprouts directly from the earth.

Yet Wright also needed the city to make his vision work. The force of the spiral’s upward thrust gains immeasurably from the grid that presses in on all sides. The ramps, too, can be read as an extension of the street life outside. Coiled tightly around the audience, they replicate the atmosphere of urban intensity that Wright supposedly so abhorred.

Or maybe not. In preparing for the show, the Guggenheim’s curators decided to remove the frosting from a window at the lobby’s southwest corner. The window frames a vista over a low retaining wall toward the corner of 88th Street and Fifth Avenue, where you can see people milling around the exterior of the building. It is the only real view out of the lobby, and it visually locks the building into the streetscape, making the city part of the composition.

I choose to see it as a gesture of love, of a sort, between Wright and the city he claimed to hate.

Los Angeles Times
May 13, 2009

The Sleepers —Curtis, Deborah and their children, Kian, Perry and baby Theodore Wesley — live in a cave, a 17,000-square-foot gouge in the earth left by a 1930s sandstone mine. It’s Tom Sawyer country here in Festus, Mo., just a few miles from the Mississippi River, and the Sleepers showed their adventurous side by making their home 45 feet under a forest (and a neighbor’s home).

Sleeper said they chose to build in the cave because of the serenity and privacy he and his wife felt on the first day they visited the site. The front of the three-bedroom home is constructed from glass doors and used materials bought from a local store. Insulation sealant keeps the interiors 65 to 70 degrees year-round, Curtis said.

The couple keep a dehumidifier running, and at times the home can feel like a greenhouse, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Falling sand is an inconvenience, but it’s held at bay by a ceiling and an umbrella over the living, eating and sleeping areas.

The cave is divided into three chambers: the family’s main quarters in the front, with 2,000 square feet of living space; an 90-by-80-foot middle chamber with a 25-foot ceiling, a room used as storage space, laundry room, playroom; and the innermost chamber, formerly a 1950s roller skating rink. Perry and Kian use the room to ride their bikes and skateboards.

During the first five years of construction, the family lived in tents. Now the home really is a home, a place where Deborah gave birth to their third child in February. “It makes me feel protected, peaceful and strong,” Curtis said of his cave house. “It’s nothing scientific, but we’ve been healthier here than anywhere else in we’ve ever lived.”

Excerpts taken from LA Times slideshow

By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times Published: May 12, 2009

When Bush 41 was ramping up to the Gulf War, assembling a coalition to fight Saddam, Jimmy Carter sent a letter to members of the U.N. Security Council urging them not to rush into conflict without further exploring a negotiated solution.

The first President Bush and other Republicans in Washington considered this treasonous, a former president trying to thwart a sitting one, lobbying foreign diplomats to oppose his own country on a war resolution. In 2002, when Bush Junior was ramping up to his war against Saddam, Al Gore made a speech trying to slow down that war resolution, pointing out that pivoting from Osama to Saddam for no reason, initiating “pre-emptive” war, and blowing off our allies would undermine the war on terror.

Charles Krauthammer called Gore’s speech “a disgrace.” Michael Kelly, his fellow Washington Post columnist, called it “vile” and “contemptible.” Newt Gingrich said that the former vice president asserting that W. was making America less safe was “well outside the mark of an appropriate debate.”

“I think the president should be doing what he thinks is best as commander in chief,” Gingrich said flatly. Now, however, Gingrich backs Dick Cheney when he asserts that President Obama has made America less safe.

Asked by Bob Schieffer on Sunday how America could torture when it made a mockery of our ideals, Cheney blithely gave an answer that surely would have been labeled treasonous by Rush Limbaugh, if a Democratic ex-vice president had said it about a Republican president.

“Well, then you’d have to say that, in effect, we’re prepared to sacrifice American lives rather than run an intelligent interrogation program that would provide us the information we need to protect America,” Doomsday Dick said.

Cheney has replaced Sarah Palin as Rogue Diva. Just as Jeb Bush and other Republicans are trying to get kinder and gentler, Cheney has popped out of his dungeon, scary organ music blaring, to carry on his nasty campaign of fear and loathing.

The man who never talked is now the man who won’t shut up. The man who wouldn’t list his office in the federal jobs directory, who had the vice president’s residence blocked on Google Earth, who went to the Supreme Court to keep from revealing which energy executives helped him write the nation’s energy policy, is now endlessly yelping about how President Obama is holding back documents that should be made public.

Cheney, who had five deferments himself to get out of going to Vietnam, would rather follow a blowhard entertainer who has had three divorces and a drug problem (who also avoided Vietnam) than a four-star general who spent his life serving his country.

“Bush 41 cares about decorum and protocol,” said an official in Bush I. “I’m sure he doesn’t appreciate Cheney acting out. He is giving the whole party a black eye just as Jeb is out there trying to renew the party.”

Cheney unleashed, egged on by the combative Lynne and Liz, is pretty much the same as Cheney underground: He’s batty, and he thinks he was the president.

W. admired Cheney’s brass (he used another word) but grew increasingly skeptical of him, the more he learned about foreign policy himself, and the more he got pulled into a diplomatic mode by Condi in the second term. There were even reports of W. doing a funny Cheney imitation and that it dawned on him that Cheney and Rummy represented a scofflaw, paranoid Nixon cell within his White House.

“Toward the end, 43 was just as confused as anybody about what makes Cheney tick,” said a Bush family loyalist.

Cheney’s numskull ideas — he still loves torture (dubbed “13th-century” stuff by Bob Woodward), Gitmo and scaring the bejesus out of Americans — are not only fixed, they’re jejune.

He has no coherent foreign policy viewpoint. He still doesn’t fathom that his brutish invasion of Iraq unbalanced that part of the world, empowered Iran and was a force multiplier for Muslims who hate America. He left our ports unsecured, our food supply unsafe, the Taliban rising and Osama on the loose. No matter if or when terrorists attack here — and they’re on their own timetable, not a partisan red/blue state timetable — Cheney will be deemed the primary one who made America more vulnerable.

W.’s dark surrogate father is trying to pull the G.O.P. into a black hole of zealotry, just as the sensible brother who lost his future to the scamp brother is trying to get his career back on track.

When Cheney was in the first Bush administration, he was odd man out. Poppy, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell corralled Cheney’s “Genghis Khan” side, as it was known, and his “rough streak.” Cheney didn’t care for Powell even then.

But with W., “Back Seat” — Cheney’s Secret Service name in the Ford administration — clambered up front. Then he totaled the car. And no amount of yapping on TV is going to change that when history is written.

Spoils & Relics

30th April – 14th June 2009

The Approach E2 London

By DAVID BROOKS
NY Times Published: May 11, 2009

In the late 1930s, a group of 268 promising young men, including John F. Kennedy and Ben Bradlee, entered Harvard College. By any normal measure, they had it made. They tended to be bright, polished, affluent and ambitious. They had the benefit of the world’s most prestigious university. They had been selected even from among Harvard students as the most well adjusted.

And yet the categories of journalism and the stereotypes of normal conversation are paltry when it comes to predicting a life course. Their lives played out in ways that would defy any imagination save Dostoyevsky’s. A third of the men would suffer at least one bout of mental illness. Alcoholism would be a running plague. The most mundane personalities often produced the most solid success. One man couldn’t admit to himself that he was gay until he was in his late 70s.

The men were the subject of one of the century’s most fascinating longitudinal studies. They were selected when they were sophomores, and they have been probed, poked and measured ever since. Researchers visited their homes and investigated everything from early bed-wetting episodes to their body dimensions.

The results from the study, known as the Grant Study, have surfaced periodically in the years since. But they’ve never been so brilliantly captured as they are in an essay called “What Makes Us Happy?” by Joshua Wolf Shenk in the forthcoming issue of The Atlantic. (The essay is available online today.) Link to Article

The life stories are more vivid than any theory one could concoct to explain them. One man seemed particularly gifted. He grew up in a large brownstone, the son of a rich doctor and an artistic mother. “Perhaps more than any other boy who has been in the Grant Study,” a researcher wrote while he was in college, “the following participant exemplifies the qualities of a superior personality: stability, intelligence, good judgment, health, high purpose, and ideals.”

By 31, he had developed hostile feelings toward his parents and the world. By his mid-30s, he had dropped off the study’s radar. Interviews with his friends after his early death revealed a life spent wandering, dating a potentially psychotic girlfriend, smoking a lot of dope and telling hilarious stories.

Another man was the jester of the group, possessing in college a “bubbling, effervescent personality.” He got married, did odd jobs, then went into public relations and had three kids.

He got divorced, married again, ran off with a mistress who then left him. He drank more and more heavily. He grew depressed but then came out of the closet and became a major figure in the gay rights movement. He continued drinking, though, convinced he was squeezing the most out of life. He died at age 64 when he fell down the stairs in his apartment building while drunk.

The study had produced a stream of suggestive correlations. The men were able to cope with problems better as they aged. The ones who suffered from depression by 50 were much more likely to die by 63. The men with close relationships with their siblings were much healthier in old age than those without them.

But it’s the baffling variety of their lives that strikes one the most. It is as if we all contain a multitude of characters and patterns of behavior, and these characters and patterns are bidden by cues we don’t even hear. They take center stage in consciousness and decision-making in ways we can’t even fathom. The man who is careful and meticulous in one stage of life is unrecognizable in another context.

Shenk’s treatment is superb because he weaves in the life of George Vaillant, the man who for 42 years has overseen this work. Vaillant’s overall conclusion is familiar and profound. Relationships are the key to happiness. “Happiness is love. Full Stop,” he says in a video.

In his professional life, he has lived out that creed. He has been an admired and beloved colleague and mentor. But the story is more problematic at home. When he was 10, his father, an apparently happy and accomplished man, went out by the pool of the Main Line home and shot himself. His mother shrouded the episode. They never attended a memorial service nor saw the house again.

He has been through three marriages and returned to his second wife. His children tell Shenk of a “civil war” at home and describe long periods when they wouldn’t speak to him. His oldest friend says he has a problem with intimacy.

Even when we know something, it is hard to make it so. Reading this essay, I had the same sense I had while reading Christopher Buckley’s description of his parents in The Times Magazine not long ago. There is a complexity to human affairs before which science and analysis simply stands mute.

By JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN
NY Times Published: May 11, 2009

AS many Americans know, last week Gov. John Baldacci of Maine signed a law that made this state the fifth in the nation to legalize gay marriage. It’s worth pointing out, however, that there were some legal same-sex marriages in Maine already, just as there probably are in all 50 states. These are marriages in which at least one member of the couple has changed genders since the wedding.

I’m in such a marriage myself and, quite frankly, my spouse and I forget most of the time that there is anything particularly unique about our family, even if we are — what is the phrase? — “differently married.”

Deirdre Finney and I were wed in 1988 at the National Cathedral in Washington. In 2000, I started the long and complex process of changing from male to female. Deedie stood by me, deciding that her life was better with me than without me. Maybe she was crazy for doing so; lots of people have generously offered her this unsolicited opinion over the years. But what she would tell you, were you to ask, is that the things that she loved in me have mostly remained the same, and that our marriage, in the end, is about a lot more than what genders we are, or were.

Deirdre is far from the only spouse to find herself in this situation; each week we hear from wives and husbands going through similar experiences together. Reliable statistics on transgendered people always prove elusive, but just judging from my e-mail, it seems as if there are a whole lot more transsexuals — and people who love them — in New England than say, Republicans. Or Yankees fans.

I’ve been legally female since 2002, although the definition of what makes someone “legally” male or female is part of what makes this issue so unwieldy. How do we define legal gender? By chromosomes? By genitalia? By spirit? By whether one asks directions when lost?

We accept as a basic truth the idea that everyone has the right to marry somebody. Just as fundamental is the belief that no couple should be divorced against their will.

For our part, Deirdre and I remain legally married, even though we’re both legally female. If we had divorced last month, before Governor Baldacci’s signature, I would have been allowed on the following day to marry a man only. There are states, however, that do not recognize sex changes. If I were to attempt to remarry in Ohio, for instance, I would be allowed to wed a woman only.

Gender involves a lot of gray area. And efforts to legislate a binary truth upon the wide spectrum of gender have proven only how elusive sexual identity can be. The case of J’noel Gardiner, in Kansas, provides a telling example. Ms. Gardiner, a postoperative transsexual woman, married her husband, Marshall Gardiner, in 1998. When he died in 1999, she was denied her half of his $2.5 million estate by the Kansas Supreme Court on the ground that her marriage was invalid. Thus in Kansas, any transgendered person who is anatomically female is now allowed to marry only another woman.

Similar rulings have left couples in similar situations in Florida, Ohio and Texas. A 1999 ruling in San Antonio, in Littleton v. Prange, determined that marriage could be only between people with different chromosomes. The result, of course, was that lesbian couples in that jurisdiction were then allowed to wed as long as one member of the couple had a Y chromosome, which is the case with both transgendered male-to-females and people born with conditions like androgen insensitivity syndrome. This ruling made Texas, paradoxically, one of the first states in which gay marriage was legal.

A lawyer for the transgendered plaintiff in the Littleton case noted the absurdity of the country’s gender laws as they pertain to marriage: “Taking this situation to its logical conclusion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Tex., is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Tex., and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.”

Legal scholars can (and have) devoted themselves to the ultimately frustrating task of defining “male” and “female” as entities fixed and unmoving. A better use of their time, however, might be to focus on accepting the elusiveness of gender — and to celebrate it. Whether a marriage like mine is a same-sex marriage or some other kind is hardly the point. What matters is that my spouse and I love each other, and that our legal union has been a good thing — for us, for our children and for our community.

It’s my hope that people who are reluctant to embrace same-sex marriage will see that it has been with us, albeit in this one unusual circumstance, for years. Can we have a future in which we are more concerned with the love a family has than with the sometimes unanswerable questions of gender and identity? As of last week, it no longer seems so unthinkable. As we say in Maine, you can get there from here.

Jennifer Finney Boylan is a professor of English at Colby College and the author of the memoir “I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted.”

Biking and walking are the principal means of transport within the community. A tram that runs down the spine of the district connects Vauban to the train station and downtown Freiburg.

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
NY Times Published: May 11, 2009

VAUBAN, Germany — Residents of this upscale community are suburban pioneers, going where few soccer moms or commuting executives have ever gone before: they have given up their cars.

Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the Swiss border. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community. Car ownership is allowed, but there are only two places to park — large garages at the edge of the development, where a car-owner buys a space, for $40,000, along with a home.

As a result, 70 percent of Vauban’s families do not own cars, and 57 percent sold a car to move here. “When I had a car I was always tense. I’m much happier this way,” said Heidrun Walter, a media trainer and mother of two, as she walked verdant streets where the swish of bicycles and the chatter of wandering children drown out the occasional distant motor.

Vauban, completed in 2006, is an example of a growing trend in Europe, the United States and elsewhere to separate suburban life from auto use, as a component of a movement called “smart planning.”

Automobiles are the linchpin of suburbs, where middle-class families from Chicago to Shanghai tend to make their homes. And that, experts say, is a huge impediment to current efforts to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes, and thus to reduce global warming. Passenger cars are responsible for 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe — a proportion that is growing, according to the European Environment Agency — and up to 50 percent in some car-intensive areas in the United States.

While there have been efforts in the past two decades to make cities denser, and better for walking, planners are now taking the concept to the suburbs and focusing specifically on environmental benefits like reducing emissions. Vauban, home to 5,500 residents within a rectangular square mile, may be the most advanced experiment in low-car suburban life. But its basic precepts are being adopted around the world in attempts to make suburbs more compact and more accessible to public transportation, with less space for parking. In this new approach, stores are placed a walk away, on a main street, rather than in malls along some distant highway.

“All of our development since World War II has been centered on the car, and that will have to change,” said David Goldberg, an official of Transportation for America, a fast-growing coalition of hundreds of groups in the United States — including environmental groups, mayors’ offices and the American Association of Retired People — who are promoting new communities that are less dependent on cars. Mr. Goldberg added: “How much you drive is as important as whether you have a hybrid.”

Levittown and Scarsdale, New York suburbs with spread-out homes and private garages, were the dream towns of the 1950s and still exert a strong appeal. But some new suburbs may well look more Vauban-like, not only in developed countries but also in the developing world, where emissions from an increasing number of private cars owned by the burgeoning middle class are choking cities.

In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency is promoting “car reduced” communities, and legislators are starting to act, if cautiously. Many experts expect public transport serving suburbs to play a much larger role in a new six-year federal transportation bill to be approved this year, Mr. Goldberg said. In previous bills, 80 percent of appropriations have by law gone to highways and only 20 percent to other transport.

In California, the Hayward Area Planning Association is developing a Vauban-like community called Quarry Village on the outskirts of Oakland, accessible without a car to the Bay Area Rapid Transit system and to the California State University’s campus in Hayward.

Sherman Lewis, a professor emeritus at Cal State and a leader of the association, says he “can’t wait to move in” and hopes that Quarry Village will allow his family to reduce its car ownership from two to one, and potentially to zero. But the current system is still stacked against the project, he said, noting that mortgage lenders worry about resale value of half-million-dollar homes that have no place for cars, and most zoning laws in the United States still require two parking spaces per residential unit. Quarry Village has obtained an exception from Hayward.

Besides, convincing people to give up their cars is often an uphill run. “People in the U.S. are incredibly suspicious of any idea where people are not going to own cars, or are going to own fewer,” said David Ceaser, co-founder of CarFree City USA, who said no car-free suburban project the size of Vauban had been successful in the United States.

In Europe, some governments are thinking on a national scale. In 2000, Great Britain began a comprehensive effort to reform planning, to discourage car use by requiring that new development be accessible by public transit.

“Development comprising jobs, shopping, leisure and services should not be designed and located on the assumption that the car will represent the only realistic means of access for the vast majority of people,” said PPG 13, the British government’s revolutionary 2001 planning document. Dozens of shopping malls, fast-food restaurants and housing compounds have been refused planning permits based on the new British regulations.

In Germany, a country that is home to Mercedes-Benz and the autobahn, life in a car-reduced place like Vauban has its own unusual gestalt. It is long and relatively narrow, so that the tram into Freiburg is an easy walk from every home. Stores, restaurants, banks and schools are more interspersed among homes than they are in a typical suburb. Most residents, like Ms. Walter, have carts that they haul behind bicycles for shopping trips or children’s play dates.

For trips to stores like IKEA or the ski slopes, families buy cars together or use communal cars rented out by Vauban’s car-sharing club. Ms. Walter had previously lived — with a private car — in Freiburg as well as the United States.

“If you have one, you tend to use it,” she said. “Some people move in here and move out rather quickly — they miss the car next door.”

Vauban, the site of a former Nazi army base, was occupied by the French Army from the end of World War II until the reunification of Germany two decades ago. Because it was planned as a base, the grid was never meant to accommodate private car use: the “roads” were narrow passageways between barracks.

The original buildings have long since been torn down. The stylish row houses that replaced them are buildings of four or five stories, designed to reduce heat loss and maximize energy efficiency, and trimmed with exotic woods and elaborate balconies; free-standing homes are forbidden.

By nature, people who buy homes in Vauban are inclined to be green guinea pigs — indeed, more than half vote for the German Green Party. Still, many say it is the quality of life that keeps them here.

Henk Schulz, a scientist who on one afternoon last month was watching his three young children wander around Vauban, remembers his excitement at buying his first car. Now, he said, he is glad to be raising his children away from cars; he does not worry much about their safety in the street.

In the past few years, Vauban has become a well-known niche community, even if it has spawned few imitators in Germany. But whether the concept will work in California is an open question.

More than 100 would-be owners have signed up to buy in the Bay Area’s “car-reduced” Quarry Village, and Mr. Lewis is still looking for about $2 million in seed financing to get the project off the ground.

But if it doesn’t work, his backup proposal is to build a development on the same plot that permits unfettered car use. It would be called Village d’Italia.

David Batker with his son Rafael de la Torre Batker, 9, who worried it might hurt the environment if he bought a new set of Legos. But then Rafael said, “It’s O.K. if I have Legos because I’m going to keep them for a very long time.”

By LESLIE KAUFMAN
NY Times Published: May 10, 2009

The thick-lined drawings of the Earth, a factory and a house, meant to convey the cycle of human consumption, are straightforward and child-friendly. So are the pictures of dark puffs of factory smoke and an outlined skull and crossbones, representing polluting chemicals floating in the air.

Which is one reason “The Story of Stuff,” a 20-minute video about the effects of human consumption, has become a sleeper hit in classrooms across the nation.

The video is a cheerful but brutal assessment of how much Americans waste, and it has its detractors. But it has been embraced by teachers eager to supplement textbooks that lag behind scientific findings on climate change and pollution. And many children who watch it take it to heart: riding in the car one day with his parents in Tacoma, Wash., Rafael de la Torre Batker, 9, was worried about whether it would be bad for the planet if he got a new set of Legos.

“When driving by a big-box store, you could see he was struggling with it,” his father, David Batker, said. But then Rafael said, “It’s O.K. if I have Legos because I’m going to keep them for a very long time,” Mr. Batker recalled.

The video was created by Annie Leonard, a former Greenpeace employee and an independent lecturer who paints a picture of how American habits result in forests being felled, mountaintops being destroyed, water being polluted and people and animals being poisoned. Ms. Leonard, who describes herself as an “unapologetic activist,” is also critical of corporations and the federal government, which she says spends too much on the military.

Ms. Leonard put the video on the Internet in December 2007. Word quickly spread among teachers, who recommended it to one another as a brief, provocative way of drawing students into a dialogue about how buying a cellphone or jeans could contribute to environmental devastation.

So far, six million people have viewed the film at its site, storyofstuff.com, and millions more have seen it on YouTube. More than 7,000 schools, churches and others have ordered a DVD version, and hundreds of teachers have written Ms. Leonard to say they have assigned students to view it on the Web.

It has also won support from independent groups that advise teachers on curriculum choices. Facing the Future, a curriculum developer for schools in all 50 states, is drafting lesson plans based on the video. And Ms. Leonard has a contract with Simon & Schuster to write a book based on the video.

The enthusiasm is not universal. In January, a school board in Missoula County, Mont., decided that screening the video treaded on academic freedom after a parent complained that its message was anticapitalist.

But many educators say the video is a boon to teachers as they struggle to address the gap in what textbooks say about the environment and what science has revealed in recent years.

“Frankly, a lot of the textbooks are awful on the subject of the environment,” said Bill Bigelow, the curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools, a quarterly magazine that has promoted “The Story of Stuff” to its subscribers and on its Web site, which reaches about 600,000 educators a month. “The one used out here in Oregon for global studies — it’s required — has only three paragraphs on climate change. So, yes, teachers are looking for alternative resources.”

Environmental education is still a young and variable field, according to Frank Niepold, the climate education coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There are few state or local school mandates on how to teach the subject.

The agency is seeking to change that, but in the interim many teachers are developing their own lesson plans on climate change, taking some elements from established sources like the National Wildlife Federation and others from less conventional ones like “The Story of Stuff.”

Ms. Leonard is self-educated on where waste goes and worked for Greenpeace to prevent richer nations from dumping their trash in poorer ones. She produced the video, with the Free Range Studios company, and with money from numerous nonprofit groups; the largest single giver was the Tides Foundation. She did so, she said, after tiring of traveling often to present her views at philanthropic and environmental conferences. She attributes the response to the video’s simplicity.

“A lot of what’s in the film was already out there,” Ms. Leonard said, “but the style of the animation makes it easy to watch. It is a nice counterbalance to the starkness of the facts.”

The video certainly makes the facts stark and at times very political: “We’ll start with extraction, which is a fancy word for natural resource exploitation, which is a fancy word for trashing the planet,” she says at one point. “What this looks like is we chop down the trees, we blow up mountains to get the metals inside, we use up all the water and we wipe out the animals.”

Mark Lukach, who teaches global studies at Woodside Priory, a Catholic college-preparatory school in Portola Valley, Calif., acknowledged that the film is edgy, but said the 20-minute length gives students time to challenge it in class after viewing it.

“Compared to ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ ” he said, referring to Al Gore’s one-and-a-half-hour documentary on climate change, “it is much shorter and easier to compact into a class segment. You can watch it and then segue into a discussion.”

Mr. Lukach’s students made a response video and posted it on YouTube, asking Ms. Leonard to scare them less and give them ideas on how to make things better. That in turn inspired high school students in Mendocino, Calif., to post an answer to Woodside, with suggested activities.

Dawn Zweig, who teaches environmental studies at the Putney School, a private academy in Vermont, said that the very reason the video appealed to teachers — it shows students how their own behavior is linked to what is happening across the globe — could also raise sensitive issues. She said students, particularly affluent ones, might take the critique personally. “If you offend a student, they turn off the learning button and then you won’t get anywhere,” Ms. Zweig said.

Sometimes teachers observe the opposite: children who become environmental advocates at home after seeing the video. After Jasmine Madavi, 18, saw it last year in Mr. Lukach’s class at Woodside Priory, she began nagging her parents to stop buying bottled water. Her mother resisted, saying that filtered tap water, Jasmine’s suggested alternative, would not taste as good. But Jasmine bought the filter on her own, and the household is now converted.

“You just have to be persistent,” said Ms. Madavi, who is now a community college student. “When you use a water bottle, it just doesn’t disappear. That’s Annie’s message.”

Most parents take such needling with humor. But Mark Zuber, a parent of a child at Big Sky High School in Missoula, had a stronger reaction when a teacher showed the video to his daughter last year. “There was not one positive thing about capitalism in the whole thing,” Mr. Zuber said.

Corporations, for example, are portrayed as a bloated person sporting a top hat and with a dollar sign etched on its front.

He described the video as one-sided. “It was very well done, very effective advocacy, but it was just that,” he said.

Mr. Zuber argued before the Missoula County School Board that the way in which “The Story of Stuff” was presented, without an alternative point of view, violated its standards on bias, and the board agreed in a 4-to-3 vote.

Still, Ms. Leonard is hoping the video will circle the globe. “I’ve heard from teachers in Palestine and Papua New Guinea,” she said. “It is just spreading and spreading.”