economy/environment

With the TRB submission deadline come and gone, I feel like I have some breathing (and blogging) room. The next task is dissertation proposing. This time it's for real, though, since I have something of a deadline associated with advancing to candidacy. The high-level theme I'm thinking about is something like complications associated with good ideas. It's a little contrived since some of the work has already been done and I need to weave a common thread. I've got work on environmental justice in AB 32, and work on the greenhouse gas emissions/land use implications of ARRA projects. Finally, I've got a funded proposal starting up in fall regarding a general disconnect between good transport policy ideas and a failure to put them into practice despite a lot of white papers, research, and talk.

What's underlying all of this is my exposure to Willem Vanderburg's preventive approaches in undergrad. Unlike most (all?) graduate students, I can still say that my graduate application's statement of purpose is highlight relevant.

My undergraduate education has left me with pressing questions related to the practice of professional engineering. If we accept that engineering activities aim to improve the quality of life, to promote environmental sustainability, and to ensure economic well-being, how is it that we find ourselves, faced with many threats to our very life support systems? Why are economic viability and environmental well-being so often viewed as fundamentally irreconcilable? How might I address these problems through my own engineering practices? In my graduate education, using the tools of rigorous engineering analysis and academic research, I plan to seek answers to these and related questions.

I'm doing okay, except what's happened is that I've drifter further and further from engineering practice to the point where I'm doing social science to get the answers that I want -- this is a little beside the point since I've got academic support for these methods.

The point is that I read a couple of things this morning that brought up a Vanderburgian idea that I touch in in the above paragraph. Vanderburg points out that we're often forced to choose between environmental and economic objectives. (I.e. we're told that if we prioritize the environment then we will surely lose jobs. Q.v. the prop 23 debate.) Jobs (and by extension, the economy) often win out.

A corollary is that economic expansion and job creation trump not only environmental objectives, but also local visions of and for the economy.

Caltrans has a proposal to widen 101 through Humboldt County in the name of economic development thereby eliminating truck restrictions -- widening would allow trucks to travel from the Port of Oakland to Eureka in ~275 miles instead of ~700.

Critical Mass by John Whitelegg talks about Cornwall (a town in Southwest England) that was being pressured to "improve" highway access in the late 90s.

In both cases it seems like pressure is being exerted mostly by political actors, while actual residents are/were opposed. In Cornwall, residents enjoyed their remoteness, in Eureka, it seems like some enjoy having difficult truck access since it appears to be keeping out the likes of Walmart).

What is the Caltrans role in all of this? What is the language being used to justify the proposal? Are they presenting themselves as objective observers, simply responding to the economic development needs of the population? How does this relate to Bruce Seely's work on the Bureau of Public Roads and their role in the development of the (pre-Interstate) US highway system?

Why are folks so afraid of envisioning alternative economies and livelihoods?

threats to academic freedom

just got this forwarded message. see other writing here: http://bang.calit2.net/2010/03/bang-lab-edt-update-call-for-accountability-and-the-criminalization-of-research/

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: ivan evans
Date: Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 9:54 AM
Subject: Emergency Faculty Meeting in Support of Academic Freedom and Tenure
To: ucsd-faculty-coalition@googlegroups.com
Cc: ivan evans

Emergency Faculty Meeting in Support of Academic Freedom and Tenure

Tuesday, April 6 5PM in SSB 101.

Our colleague and member of the UCSD Faculty Anti-Racism Coalition Professor Ricardo Dominguez (Visual Arts) is being targeted by members of the Senior Leadership Team for criminal charges and revocation of tenure.

Professor Dominguez researches and engages in various forms of technology-based art, activism and protest, including facilitating virtual sit-ins, which allow individuals to protest organizations by occupying their web sites virtually. Ample precedent has established both the legality and effectiveness of Professor Dominguez' research. Professor Dominguez' internationally acclaimed leadership in digital activism led to his hiring as an Assistant Professor at UCSD and promotion to tenure. Most recently, Professor Dominguez' b.a.n.g. lab has developed a Transborder Immigrant Tool to reduce the death toll of immigrants crossing the border by helping them navigate to water caches, and facilitated a virtual sit-in of the UCOP web site in support of students protesting budget cuts.

Professor Dominguez' recent activities have resulted in numerous violent threats by local racists. Instead of committing university resources for securing Professor Dominguez' safety, members of the Senior Leadership Team have:

-harassed Professor Dominguez' B.A.N.G. Lab with a time-consuming audit
-initiated the process of revoking Professor Dominguez' tenure
-sent UCSD detectives to threaten Professor Dominguez with criminal charges of city, county, state and federal statutes.

Not only do these actions undercut Professor Dominguez' physical safety, they also threaten the academic freedom and tenure of all faculty, especially those who have been working to address and improve the toxic climate at UCSD.

The Senior Leadership Team's brazen misuse of the audit, criminal and tenure systems to go after a faculty member of color working to better our campus climate and the border region in which we live demands an immediate and forceful response by the faculty. Note that no-one at the Koala has been charged with anything to date. The student who hung the noose in the library will almost certainly not be charged too. Exploring criminal charges against Professor Dominquez is yet another insult that we refuse to accept. It is a rapid reversion to the racial insensitivity that is the norm for this campus.

The Faculty Anti-Racism Coalition has called an emergency meeting for Tuesday, April 6 at 5PM in SSB 10 to organize such a response. Please sprtead this email to as many colleagues, students and staff as you are can.

In Solidarity,
UCSD Faculty Anti-Racism Coalition
"Another University is Possible"

century freeway

Completed in 1993 at a total cost of $2.2 billion dollars over a 30 year period, the Century Freeway in Los Angeles is a material manifestation of that region’s commitment to the road and the car. At the time it was touted as the "nation's most expensive freeway."

What does this project tell us about contemporary efforts to shift away from a legacy of auto-centric transportation planning towards a more sustainable system incorporating a variety of transportation modes while simultaneously remaking the cities in which we live?

Here are a couple of great sites that take a photographic/literary approach to explaining the freeway's construction and impacts:
http://inourpath.com/intro.html
http://www.art-poetry.info/id16.html

dfw on infinite jest

"It's a weird book. It doesn't move the way normal books do. It's got a whole bunch of characters. I think it makes at least an in-good-faith attempt to be fun and riveting enough on a page-by-page level so I don't feel like I'm hitting the reader with a mallet, you know, 'Hey, here's this really hard impossibly smart thing. Fuck you. See if you can read it.' I know books like that and they piss me off."

hilarious.

http://www.salon.com/09/features/wallace2.html

the economics of climate change

i'm reading through the "yale symposium on the stern review."

it's funny that climate economics always highlights the high costs of mitigation, but then when it comes to pricing out the technology, nothing is off the table.

e.g., scott barrett (beginning p. 104) suggests that international cooperation is needed on technology. the example he gives is the ITER, "the next step in nuclear fusion research" (p. 108).

really, scott?

how expensive is this undertaking? how expensive would it be to deploy fusion reactors? is it less or more expensive than reducing end-user inefficiency?

sustainable development

i think this is why this phrase kind of fell out of favor (for me at least):

In short, [sustainable development] is a "metafix" that will unite everybody from the profit-minded industrialist and risk-minimizing subsistence farmer to the equity-seeking social worker, the pollution-concerned or wildlifeloving First Worlder, the growth-maximizing policy maker, the goal-oriented bureaucrat, and therefore, the vote-counting politician.

if you try to please everyone, you please no one.

here's an image from the article depicting the complex relationships between consumption and environmental harm considering explicit north-south disparities:

Lele, Shanarchchandra M. 1991. ”Sustainable Development: A Critical Review.” World Development 19(6):607-21.

ah!!

already had an article in the format for one journal. last minute change to submit to a different journal! pain! anguish! so many ridiculous differences! argh. standards??