A primer on the metabolic theory « Per Square Mile
Tim De Chant discusses the rise of the metabolic theory through the work of Kleiber, West, Brown, and Enquist.
Find the best food trucks in New York - Tweat.it, food truck map!
A real time map of NY food trucks.
The Future Of Europe: Not A Federation, A League
Spain’s government is considering a restriction on the free immigration of EU citizens into the country, specifically Romanians. This is just another sign that the EU’s collective solidarity is being unmade by a down economy, and pointing the way toward the future of Europe, which is to break apart into a hundred or so language-based regions, operating under a a common agreement, as a league.
It may also be the case that the boundaries of this league of autonomous regions will contract: perhaps Romania and other peripheral countries will be left out.
Perhaps other regions will find great common cause. For example, the Baltic countries — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland — may find that common cooperation in joint activities and agreements could be beneficial. That region might decide to supprt Schengen-style immigration rules, even when the EU Schengen agreement is in serious decline elsewhere. Note the recent decision by the Danish government to strengthen passport controls on its borders with Germany and Sweden.
I also anticipate that the debt burdens of some countries might accelerate their dissolution. For example, Catalonia is already a semi-autonomous region of Spain, but in the future — when the European Union falls apart — Catalonia may want even more autonomy.
Catalonia is a great example of what the future of Europe might be like. A region dominated my a large metropolitan area — Barcelona — where the great majority of commercial, governmental, and cultural innovation occurs, and around which the outlying areas provide food, materials, and resources for the growing urban population of the urban center.
A similar model is found in the UK — a country dominated by London, and where Scotland may break off independently, while Wales may find itself too closely integrated to split. Denmark and Copenhagen is another example.
The break up of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia showed that even mini-unions composed of discordant language and cultural groups had no place in the modern world. Belgium is likely to break into two regions, of French and Flemish speaking peoples. The Basque might finally get their homeland, and the breakaway interstitial country of Transnistria could get official blessing. Why aren’t Corsica and Sardina independent, again?
Yes, German reconnected East Germany after the fall of the USSR, but that stands out as an exception to the trend. And many West Germans may regret having done it, now.
The borders of European countries are largely holdovers from wars fought generations, if not centuries, ago, or the deals struck between long-dead kings. They often have no more utility than the court dress of ceremonial guards.
But for a real change of this sort to occur, the cult of the EU will have to die out. And a different set of beliefs will have to come to the fore. Or perhaps the rise of a common set of disbeliefs. Why should anyone living in Europe trust their leaders to make the right decisions, after the mess the continent’s finances are in? I bet the younger generation don’t buy into the old dreams. They aren’t haunted by WWII.
The Eurozone is failing, and debt-burdened countries will defect, opting to have their own currencies, which they can manipulate to better resolve regional financial difficulties.
We can anticipate the desire of Catalonia to create and use its own currency, once Spain falls out of the Eurozone. Catalonia will opt out of the peseta-zone.
What to expect, then, ten years or more in the future? A Europe of loosely-connected, cooperating regions, regions dominated by regional urban centers, or ‘metros’. Not a unified EU with a single unified identity, currency, and set of laws. Instead, a network of metros agreeing to cooperate in various ways, but not to cede control of local issues to the whole. Europe will be a connective, not a collective.
Connectives cooperate: members support each other because they are drifting in the same general direction, most of the time. Collectives share a single common set of goals, and operate in a lock-step fashion.
Europe today is neither: it is caught between two chairs, and has no place to sit, as a result.
[Note that I believe than the US is naturally trending toward more of a connective approach to government, where major urban centers will become even more important as we become a more urban society. But the US is a federation, already, and has been for hundreds of years. I wouldn’t imagine we will see the dissolution of the union. However, we might see a reorganization of government, so that metro NY, for example, would not be (mis)governed by four different states.]
A connected Europe of the sort I envision is messy: it has no single head, no easy handle to grab. It is a heterogeneous crowd of small metros, pursuing their own ends, and part of the time in direct competition with each other. It’s not a state, not a collective union marching in unison toward a single shared tomorrow.
But then, that is the lay of the future world, if we are lucky. Thousands of metros, cooperating with their neighbors and others, perhaps far away, but acting in limited and local ways to make their citizens happy and healthy. And from the viewpoint of building a sustainable and resilient world, a better bet for our future on earth.
That’s why I think the groundswell in Europe is away from union, and toward a connective of hundreds of increasingly autonomous metros. There is a common disbelief in the value of being big and tight, at the expense of the autonomy from remaining small and loose. So expect a European League of metros to replace a European Union of countries.
Competition over scarce water and land, exacerbated by regional changes in climate, are already a key factor in local-level conflicts in Darfur, the Central African Republic, northern Kenya, and Chad, for example — when livelihoods are threatened by declining natural resources, people either innovate, flee or can be brought into conflict.
In total, 145 countries share one or more international river basins. Changes in water flows, amplified by climate change, could be a major source of tension between states, especially those that lack the capacity for co-management and cooperation.
Foundations for the Economy of a New Civilisation
Guillermo Sullings via
Today most of the world works under the rules of globalised capitalism, and this is set up around Darwinian social behaviour, individualism and an eagerness for consumerism. Although there are many people who are starting to have a different type of sensitivity, the mechanism continues to work, and continues to feed the materialist culture. However, this new sensitivity, which is gradually appearing in many people, though not enough to change the system yet; helps highlight the contradictions and it is there that room is made for a ray of hope.
So we could say that as an initial basis for the economy of a new civilization, there needs to be a deepening of the sensitisation in terms of the need for a deep rooted change of paradigms. And although the image of how this new economy that we are striving towards would be does need to be traced, to be as close as possible to the collective image, what is essential is that through this image new cultural values are born, in harmony with the new born sensitivity, to the point that a new social mysticism is developed.
The valuing of reciprocity as a mode of relations between people, and therefore also of economic relationships, could be encouraged as a certain attitude to life, and this would bring a transforming dynamic to relationships. Unlike simple humanitarian solidarity which not only tends to naturalize the system of relationships between the “helpers” and the “helped” but also it is unlikely to establish itself in most people outside of formal rhetoric.
A critical and self-critical attitude towards irrational consumerism should incorporate itself in this new society as a code of social worth. In the decadent culture of materialism, having and exhibiting objects are synonymous with “being a winner”; in a new culture it could start to be synonymous with “being an idiot”.
Selfishness, lack of social responsibility and animosity against taking part in all things collective, an indifference to the pain of others, and many other tendencies, which today are common currency, allow individualists to justify themselves and pass unnoticed; in future this will be recognised as more and more obviously appalling behaviour.
[…]
It will be necessary, a foundation of an economic science at the service of the human being, to modify the current conception of the economy as “an exact science, with some social interferences”, and to move onto the conception of the economy as a social science, which uses technical instruments. It would no longer be necessary to look for the balance of the market at the cost of social sacrifice but to achieve a social balance based on the principle of equal opportunities and adapting the techniques to such a principle. And it will no longer be possible to gauge growth and development with money as the unit of measure, but to weigh up the indices of human development, putting the economy at the service of such indicators.
Finally, we should say that as global problems need global solutions, and it will not necessarily be the powers which generate them which will take care of solving them, it will be fundamental to be able to count on a level of world resolution for such problems. The extreme poverty of many countries, global warming, the collapse of energy and food supply, and other world scale scourges, cannot be solved country by country, but rather as a whole. The nations which maintain and respect their cultural diversity and independence, should work as a great Universal Human Nation, to coordinate the solving of world problems.
[Sullings, an Argentinean Economist, presented his work in the Punta de Vacas Park of Study and Reflection, Mendoza, Argentina.]
There can be no solution of world problems in the small, but our actions must occupy social scale: we need to fix the cities, to make them work on new principles, but we need to fix all the cities in the world.
Sullings offers a sort of prolegomena to the economy we must build if we are not to perish.
Drought - A Creeping Disaster - NYTimes.com
Alex Prud’homme starts out strong, telling the scray truth about the drought of 2011, but then he peters out into a half-hearted, techno-optimist plea for water prudence in a world of unyeilding water scarcity.
Here’s the hard truth:
Alex Prud’Homme via
Climatologists call drought a “creeping disaster” because its effects are not felt at once. Others compare drought to a python, which slowly and inexorably squeezes its prey to death.
The great aridification of 2011 began last fall; now temperatures in many states have spiked to more than 100 degrees for days at a stretch. A high pressure system has stalled over the middle of the country, blocking cool air from the north. Texas and New Mexico are drier than in any year on record.
The deadly heat led to 138 deaths last year, more than hurricanes, tornadoes or floods, and it turns brush to tinder that is vulnerable to lightning strikes and human carelessness. Already this year, some 40,000 wildfires have torched over 5.8 million acres nationwide — and the deep heat of August is likely to make conditions worse before they get better.
Climatologists disagree about what caused this remarkable dry-out. But there is little disagreement about the severity of the drought — or its long-term implications. When I asked Richard Seagar, who analyzed historical records and climate model projections for the Southwest for the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, if a perpetual drought was possible there, he replied: “You can’t really call it a drought because that implies a temporary change. The models show a progressive aridification. You don’t say, ‘The Sahara is in drought.’ It’s a desert. If the models are right, then the Southwest will face a permanent drying out.”
Richard Seagar, the climatologist, says this aridification is permanent, but Prud’homme doesn’t tell us what that means. How much water will there be in 5 years in West Texas, Northern Florida, Las Vegas, or downtown LA? The answer — not presented in the article — is: not much. Much of that region is likely to become The Great American Desert, with significantly less rainfall than ever seen previously.
This means the end of lawns and golf courses, the termination of all water use that makes the arid south end of the country feel like the temperate north. It means the eventual departure of most of the people living there, now that the great aquifers have been pumped dry, and the rains aren’t coming back.
The Colorado no longer reaches the Sea of Cortez, but comes to a dusty end in northern Mexico, all of its water diverted to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and cattle ranches.
But Prud’homme doesn’t let the other foot drop. He goes preachy, suggesting we need to install better water meters so we can become more water conscious, or figure out how to desalinate water:
Singapore provides a noteworthy model: no country uses water more sparingly. In the 1950s, it faced water rationing, but it began to build a world-class water system in the 1960s. Now 40 percent of its water comes from Malaysia, while a remarkable 25 to 30 percent is provided by desalination and the recycling of wastewater; the rest is drawn from sources that include large-scale rainwater collection. Demand is curbed by high water taxes and efficient technologies, and Singaporeans are constantly exhorted to conserve every drop. Most important, the nation’s water is managed by a sophisticated, well-financed, politically autonomous water authority. As a result, Singapore’s per-capita water use fell to 154 liters, about 41 gallons, a day in 2011, from 165 liters, about 44 gallons, in 2003.
America is a much larger and more complex nation. But Singapore’s example suggests we could do a far better job of educating our citizens about conservation. And we could take other basic steps: install smart meters to find out how much water we use, and identify leaks (which drain off more than 1 trillion gallons a year); use tiered water pricing to encourage efficiency; promote rainwater harvesting and wastewater recycling on a large scale. And like Singapore, we could streamline our Byzantine water governance system and create a new federal water office — a water czar or an interagency national water board — to manage the nation’s supply in a holistic way.
No question this will be an expensive, politically cumbersome effort. But as reports from New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Georgia and Florida make plain, business as usual is not a real option. The python of drought is already wrapped tightly around us, and in weeks — and years — to come it will squeeze us dangerously dry.
The truth is much more stark. Water is too heavy to pump any great distance, unlike oil, so desalination is only an option for regions on the ocean, like LA, not Las Vegas or Phoenix.
And the likely outcome is that great numbers of people will need to relocate, to move to where there is ample water.
If we are sensible we would be anticipating this now, and making sensible policy decisions to incent people to do so. We might soon be dismantling the sprawl of the southwest, taking the glass and iron from the buildings, and trucking it north to New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky and Michigan, places where projections show sufficient water and warmer temperatures in the coming decades, and rebuilding the hollowed urban centers there with scrap hauled back from the Southwest.
But the natural tendency is to think that things will blow over, next year’s weather will be like last years.
But we are on the other side of a turning point, and the Earth we have now, as Bill McKibben has said, is not the Earth we had 20 years ago. And that Earth isn’t going to return, even if we do install better water meters, or recycle the dish water into the toilets. We are over the threshold into a whole new climate, like it or not, and we better start acting like it.
Just Your Average Mass Extinction, Nothing To be Alarmed About
- NY Times Editorial Board, A Look Into the Ocean’s Future
A new report by an international coalition of marine scientists makes for grim reading. It concludes that the oceans are approaching irreversible, potentially catastrophic change.
The experts, convened by the International Program on the State of the Ocean and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, found that marine “degradation is now happening at a faster rate than predicted.” The oceans have warmed and become more acidic as they absorbed human-generated carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They are also more oxygen-deprived, because of agricultural runoff and other anthropogenic causes. This deadly trio of conditions was present in previous mass extinctions, according to the report.
There are naysayers, right now, arguing that these factors are not anthropogenic because mass extinctions have happened before, prior to people appearing on the Earth.
So, here we are, watching a government that has tied its own shoelaces together, spending 99.96% of its available time arguing about who tied the knot, and 0.04% of the time actually doing anything. And no one has time to read this report, let alone do anything about it, because the US is house divided, and a house divided cannot long stand.
A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are being. “Has the G.O.P. gone insane?” they ask.
Why, yes, it has. But this isn’t something that just happened, it’s the culmination of a process that has been going on for decades. Anyone surprised by the extremism and irresponsibility now on display either hasn’t been paying attention, or has been deliberately turning a blind eye.
And may I say to those suddenly agonizing over the mental health of one of our two major parties: People like you bear some responsibility for that party’s current state.
[…]
Which brings me to the culpability of those who are only now facing up to the G.O.P.’s craziness.
Here’s the point: those within the G.O.P. who had misgivings about the embrace of tax-cut fanaticism might have made a stronger stand if there had been any indication that such fanaticism came with a price, if outsiders had been willing to condemn those who took irresponsible positions.
But there has been no such price. Mr. Bush squandered the surplus of the late Clinton years, yet prominent pundits pretend that the two parties share equal blame for our debt problems. Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, proposed a supposed deficit-reduction plan that included huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, then received an award for fiscal responsibility.
So there has been no pressure on the G.O.P. to show any kind of responsibility, or even rationality — and sure enough, it has gone off the deep end. If you’re surprised, that means that you were part of the problem.
The Geography of How We Get to Work - Richard Florida
America overwhelmingly remains a nation of drivers. Across the board, nearly nine in 10 (86 percent) of Americans commute to work by car and more than three-quarters (76.1 percent) drive to work alone, according to the most recent estimates from the American Community Survey. Only five percent use public transit to get to work.
But does where we live make a difference in how we commute?
- It’s no surprise that 82 percent of Manhattan workers get to their places of employment via public transit, bicycle, or on foot. But more than four in ten (43 percent) of all commuters in the Greater New York metro don’t use cars either. Neither do 25 to 30 percent of workers in San Francisco, Boston, and Greater Washington, DC.
- Less than three percent (2.9) of Americans walk to work, but more than five percent of New Yorkers do. And in the college town of Ithaca, New York, 14 percent do.
- Only a little more than half of one percent (0.6) of Americans ride their bikes to work. But more than five percent do in Eugene, Oregon and Fort Collins, Colorado. In the Portland, Oregon metro, more than two percent of commuters cycle to work, and in San Francisco and San Jose (Silicon Valley) roughly 1.5 percent do.
- Walking and biking to work are especially prevalent in compact college towns, including Boulder, Colorado; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Madison, Wisconsin; Iowa City, Iowa; Corvallis, Oregon; Gainesville, Florida; Burlington, Vermont; State College, Pennsylvania; and Lafayette, Indiana, among others.
[…]
my colleague Todd Gabe, an economics professor at the University of Maine and an MPI Affiliate, ran a series of statistical analyses to gauge the determinants of public transportation use and walking and biking in US metropolitan areas. He looked at factors like population density, rainfall, temperature levels, housing development, and the kinds of work people do. The upshot is this:
- Population density increases public transportation usage, but has no effect on walking and biking.
- Weather and climate do play a role, but not necessarily what you’d think. People are more likely to drive to work where the weather is warm and/or wet. Public transit use as well as walking and biking are more common in drier climes but also in places with colder January temperatures.
- The longer the commute (based on the average commute time), the more likely people are to use public transit, but—not surprisingly—the less likely they are to bike or walk.
- The type of housing development matters. The share of housing units built between 2000 and 2006 is negatively associated with the percentage of people who bike, walk or take public transit to work. Rapidly growing cities of sprawl - those which built the most houses during the height of the bubble - remain much more car-dependent than other places.
- Finally, and perhaps most interesting, the way we get to work is associated with the kinds of work we do. The share of workers in the creative class—scientists, engineers, techies, innovators, and researchers, as well as artists, designers, writers, musicians and professionals in healthcare, business and finance, the legal sector, and education—is positively associated with the percentages of people who take public transit or walk or bike to work. In fact this creative class variable was the largest of all.
Greater New York is the region where Americans use cars the least, it turns out.
I am hoping to use some stats from this piece to try out Visual.ly, but that new infographics service seems to be done.
The rational mind is a construct of our emotions.
Israel Bans Boycotts Against the State - NYTimes.com
The Israeli government is leading the country toward undemocratic controls, undermining ligitimacy, and increasing the likelihood that the UN will force an independent Palestinian solution on the increasingly intransigent Israeli state:
or its West Bank settlements, making such action a punishable offense.
Critics and civil rights groups denounced the new law as antidemocratic and a flagrant assault on the freedom of expression and protest. The law’s defenders said it was a necessary tool in Israel’s fight against what they called its global delegitimization.
Passage of the law followed a string of efforts in the rightist-dominated Parliament to promote legislation that is seen by the more liberal Israelis as an erosion of democratic values.
So, leading Israeli intellectuals and liberals should force the hand of the government by immediately calling on a boycott of West Bank settlements.
The Drought Of 2011 just keeps getting worse:
Kim Severson and Kirk Johnson via
The pain has spread across 14 states, from Florida, where severe water restrictions are in place, to Arizona, where ranchers could be forced to sell off entire herds of cattle because they simply cannot feed them.
In Texas, where the drought is the worst, virtually no part of the state has been untouched. City dwellers and ranchers have been tormented by excessive heat and high winds. In the Southwest, wildfires are chewing through millions of acres.
Last month, the United States Department of Agriculture designated all 254 counties in Texas natural disaster areas, qualifying them for varying levels of federal relief. More than 30 percent of the state’s wheat fields might be lost, adding pressure to a crop in short supply globally.
Even if weather patterns shift and relief-giving rain comes, losses will surely head past $3 billion in Texas alone, state agricultural officials said.
Most troubling is that the drought, which could go down as one of the nation’s worst, has come on extra hot and extra early. It has its roots in 2010 and continued through the winter. The five months from this February to June, for example, were so dry that they shattered a Texas record set in 1917, said Don Conlee, the acting state climatologist.
Oklahoma has had only 28 percent of its normal summer rainfall, and the heat has blasted past 90 degrees for a month.
“We’ve had a two- or three-week start on what is likely to be a disastrous summer,” said Kevin Kloesel, director of the Oklahoma Climatological Survey.
The question, of course, becomes why. In a spring and summer in which weather news has been dominated by epic floods and tornadoes, it is hard to imagine that more than a quarter of the country is facing an equally daunting but very different kind of natural disaster.
And no end in sight.
Each and every one of us has a vital part to play in building a world in which government and technology serve the world’s people and not the other way around.
