August 2007 archive

Greetings, literature-loving Dharmists! (do we have a group name yet?)  This is a crosspost of my dailykos series, profiling famous and not-so-famous names in literary history.  Last week we spent time in West Africa with the former president of Senegal, who also happened to be a cultural theorist and excellent poet.  Our subject this week was also involved with politics, although on a much more modest scale: he was friend and informal adviser to Czechoslovakia’s first elected president, Tomáš Masaryk. 

Since the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina two years ago this week, one of this author’s novels has become uncomfortable to read, because he had once imagined in agonizing detail the destruction of the Gulf Coast due to humanity’s meddling with nature.  Join me below for an extended discussion with a true visionary, and one of the foremost liberal humanists of the 20th century.

Man, this is hard!

I think I am putting way too much importance on it after all the legal wrangling and Troll Wars at Daily Kos. ugh

I also feel very self conscious about being , the Man…even though I am very convinced that there does need to a The Man…..so Help Me, my friends

PLEASE give me feedback! (let me know if I am being too egocentric, etc)

PLEASE let me know what I am leaving out! (It feels VERY incomplete.)

Please point out my errors in Spelling and Grammah (I suck at that shit!)

It’s not often that genuinely good news comes out of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Today, there is some. It’s small, but it’s huge.

As the Associated Press reports:

Palestinian police rescued an Israeli soldier Monday after he mistakenly drove into this West Bank town and was surrounded by a mob that later burned his car. Israel praised the rescue as a sign of the growing strength of Palestinian moderates.

In the past few days, two news stories have captured my imagination. The first story came from the Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney’s skyline turning green. The second story was in the Washington Post, Iraqi Past Ferments in An Unlikely N.Y. Winery. Both stories deal with urban agriculture – the potential for it and one man’s reality of it. From the SMH story:

Rice paddies and orchards on city rooftops could become reality with a plan to green Sydney’s roofs… “It’d mean an enormous increase in parkland in the city,” [architect Tone Wheeler] said.

The rooftop gardens could also have commercial potential. “There could be organically grown food grown on the roof and sold in the cafe below,” Mr Wheeler said…

Garden designer Jamie Durie’s company, Patio, has worked on several Sydney rooftop gardens and is working on projects in Chicago and New York, where the concept is more advanced.

“Wherever the sun falls there’s an opportunity to grow a garden,” he said.

The idea of rooftop gardens isn’t a new one, but I think it has untapped potential for growing food in the urban environment. I love the idea of inviting you to a cozy corner restaurant in a favorite part of the city. We’d sit down at a table and, perhaps, order a fresh salad made from tossed greens grown on the restaurant’s own roof garden. Throw in a few slices of cucumber and wedges of tomatoes from the garden and a dash of a light vinaigrette dressing and we’re dining in urban agricultural style.

But, there’s more… our young server suggests that we order a bottle of wine made by the neighborhood winery. She can see by our dubiously raised eyebrows that we were unaware that there was a vineyard nearby. After a couple, gentle but leading questions, she begins to tell us about Latif Jiji, a 79-year-old “engineering professor originally from Iraq, [who] has made his townhouse into a vertical winery…”

Stingray and I had been long hauling in the jungle for a solid month at this point. The mysterious bug bites and shady comidas had been worth it, we had found what we were looking for. But that is easy when you have a map, especially one from NASA. Hidden in plain view in the mountains of their forefathers, there were still Mayan temples with pre-Columbian pottery on the ground. We had not come to loot, we had only come to see, and that’s why we were welcomed. And even lead.

We had met Poncho down in the valley where I do my best work, on a barstool in a cantina. When he saw our map and gear he knew we were serious and lead us deep into vines and history, all the way to his village. All the way till we were the first gringos seen, all the way to the lands where they don’t even speak Spanish.

The funniest part of this trip, before we hunted the monster, occurred 150 feet inside a mountain miles away from anything that resembled civilization. And as usual in this part of the world, it involved gold.

read MY f’cking rant, kos

Last month the USFWS released in advance its massive obituary for one of the most-studied birds in the world: Status of the Red Knot (Calidris canutus rufa) in the Western Hemisphere

Warning! This is a 287-page pdf. That is not as offputting as it might seem, since much is supporting material, 18 pages of citations for instance, and 25 pages of habitat maps. It is also lavishly illustrated.

For the impatient reader, the actual status of the bird is baldly stated in the first paragraph of the Executive Summary:

The population of the rufa subspecies of the red knot Calidris canutus, which breeds in the central Canadian arctic and mainly winters in Tierra del Fuego, has declined dramatically over the past twenty years. Previously estimated at 100,000-150,000 . . . .

. . . . Counts show that the main Tierra del Fuego wintering population dropped from 67,546 in 1985 to 51,255 in 2000, 29,271 in 2002, 31,568 in 2004, but only 17,653 in 2005 and 17,211 in 2006.

In other words, with allowances for imperfections of methodology, in 2000 the bird’s numbers had declined to one third of historically normal levels, and by 2006 to something like one ninth of those levels. 89% wiped out. That is why most conservation groups predict it really has five years left or less. What is remarkable is that the FWs has finally recognized the severity of the situation. Not that they plan to do anything about it, mind you.