I have it on good authority that my friend Traxus was totally making fun of someone else in this post on blogging styles. That said, some unhappy Monday links.

* As you've probably already heard, Michael Jackson's death has now been ruled a homicide. Let the feeding frenzy resume.

* Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. named a veteran federal prosecutor on Monday to examine abuse of prisoners held by the Central Intelligence Agency, after the Justice Department released a long-secret report showing interrogators choked a prisoner repeatedly and threatened to kill another detainee’s children. A good day for America (and for the rule of law). Hopefully this is the beginning and not the end.

* NJ-Gov: Christie's lead has all but disappeared in the face of weeks of bad press. More from TPM.

* Elsewhere in New Jersey news UPDATE: from 1970: Foster parents denied right to adopt because the father is an atheist.

In an extraordinary decision, Judge Camarata denied the Burkes' right to the child because of their lack of belief in a Supreme Being. Despite the Burkes' "high moral and ethical standards," he said, the New Jersey state constitution declares that "no person shall be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshiping Almighty God in a manner agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience." Despite Eleanor Katherine's tender years, he continued, "the child should have the freedom to worship as she sees fit, and not be influenced by prospective parents who do not believe in a Supreme Being."

People who love to tell New Atheists to sit down and shut up, take note.

* 'How to Kill a City': from an episode of Mad Men yesterday to the pages of the New York Times today. Via @mrtalbot.

* The Coin Flip: A Fundamentally Unfair Proposition.

* 12 Greenest Colleges and Universities, at Sustainablog. Vermont once again takes high honors.

* 'Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox.' (Via Ze.) This is actually an important plot point (with some nice twists) in a novel I've touted a few times here, Accelerando.

* And Fimoculous has your Curb Your Enthusiasm preview.

Catching up from travel back to NC tonight. Here are a few random links.

* Why aren’t universities spending their endowments?

* 'Sci-Fi Writer Attributes Everything Mysterious To "Quantum Flux."'

A reading of Gabriel Fournier's The Eclipse Of Infinity reveals that the new science-fiction novel makes more than 80 separate references to "quantum flux," a vaguely defined force the author uses to advance the plot, resolve conflict as needed, and account for dozens of glaring inconsistencies.

* Ten things we don't understand about humans.

* The world's oldest map?

* Jared Diamond has lunch with the Financial Times.

With a nod to the feast before us, I say there seems little chance that Chinese or Indians will forgo the opportunity to live a western-style existence. Why should they? It is even more improbable that westerners will give up their resource-hungry lifestyles. Diamond, for example, is not a vegetarian, though he knows a vegetable diet is less hard on the planet. “I’m inconsistent,” he shrugs. But if we can’t supply more or consume less, doesn’t that mean that, like the Easter Islander who chopped down the last tree, thus condemning his civilisation to extinction, we are doomed to drain our oceans of fish and empty our soil of nutrients?

“No. It is our choice,” he replies, perhaps subconsciously answering his critics again. “If we continue to operate non-sustainably, then in 50 or 60 years, the US and Japan and Europe will be in bad shape. But my friends in the highlands of New Guinea will be fine. Some of my friends made stone tools when they were children and they could just go back to what their ancestors were doing for 46,000 years. New Guinea highlanders are not doomed,” he says, draining his pomegranate juice. “The first world lifestyle will be doomed if we don’t learn to operate sustainably.”

* And the line between fake news and real news continues to blur.

Friday night in Albuquerque.

* Today in tasers: 72-year-old grandmother Tasered for refusing to sign a speeding ticket. New York judge allows Tasering to force compliance with DNA test. The system is working as intended; obviously these are both cases where lethal force would have been necessary in the absence of a Taser. (Via MeFi.)

* The Memory Card covers iconic moments from classic video games. Also via MeFi.

* Remembering Tiananmen.

* 'Graveyard Civiizations': The idea here is that we can explain the Fermi paradox (’Where are they?’) by assuming that exponential growth is not a sustainable development pattern for intelligent civilizations.

* Blue Eyes: The Hardest Logic Puzzle in the World.

* Empire Magazine has your spot-the-reference movie poster. Via Denise.

* Conan v. Super Mario. (Last two via Neil.)

* 40 Fantastic Sand Sculptures. Via my dad.

A little busy today, but here are a few links I've saved up.

* Watchmen link of the day: The Fate of Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis. Via the comments at the Candleblog review.



* Grant Morrison on the superhero genre.

I’m not even sure if there is a superhero genre or if the idea of the superhero is a special chilli pepper-like ingredient designed to energize other genres. The costumed superhero has survived since 1938, constantly shifting in tone from decade to decade to reflect the fears and the needs of the audience. The current mainstream popularity of the superhero has, I think, a lot to do with the fact that the Terror-stricken, environmentally-handicapped, overpopulated, paedophile-haunted world that’s being peddled by our news media is crying out for utopian role models and for any hopeful images of humankind’s future potential!

* Don't Look Back—a flash game based on the Orpheus myth.

* Top 10 myths about sustainability.

* Bad news for solipsists: the universe exists independently of our observation. Via Kottke.

* Also from Kottke: famous directors take on famous comedy bits. A little amateurish, but it made me smile.

Seven steps toward a sustainable society from Anne and Paul Ehrlich, recently submitted for President-elect Obama's consideration via change.gov, via Dot Earth.

#1: Put births on a par with deaths.
#2: Put conserving on a par with consuming.
#3: Transform the consumption of education.
#4: Judge technologies not just on what they do for people but also to people and their life-support systems.
#5: Rapidly expand our empathy.
#6: Decide what kind of world we all want.
#7: Determine the institutions and arrangements best suited to govern a planetary society with a maximum of freedom within the constraints of sustainability.

Eco-Monday.

* "It's not as safe, it's bad for our planet and it's clearly more expensive": Why can't we just stop drinking bottled water?

* Climate change 'faster and more extreme' than feared.

* A specter is haunting American environmentalism – the specter of failure. All of us who have been part of the environmental movement in the United States must now face up to a deeply troubling paradox: Our environmental organizations have grown in strength and sophistication, but the environment has continued to go downhill, to the point that the prospect of a ruined planet is now very real. How could this have happened?

* And according to Peter Salonius, a Canadian soil biologist, "humanity has probably been in overshoot of the Earth's carrying capacity since it abandoned hunter gathering in favor of crop cultivation (~ 8,000 BCE)."

* This week's icon is eco-tastic too—it's a Greenpeace poster labeled "Stop the catastrophe" I found at grinding.be. The rejoinder in the tag is borrowed from Tim Morton: The catastrophe has already happened.

The College Sustainability Report Card ranks colleges on the grounds of their environmental and sustainable practices. Duke does surprisingly well by this accounting, rating a B+, up from a B in 2007 and failing pretty much entirely on the level of endowment transparency. My other alma maters, Case Western Reserve Purple Monkey Dishwasher University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, do significantly worse, with a B- and a C respectively.

Inside Higher Ed tallies the overall numbers, noting:

Some of the notable trends among the 191 colleges measured this year and last include: The proportion of colleges committing to reductions in carbon emissions (including through formal initiatives like the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment) grew from 45 to 54 percent, and the proportion of colleges that include hybrid, electric or biodiesel vehicles in their fleets increased from 42 to 74 percent. The proportion of colleges that reported buying at least some local foods grew from 70 to 91 percent, and the proportion with full-time sustainability staff increased from 37 to 66 percent. The percentage of colleges with endowment investments in renewable energy funds increased dramatically, from 19 to 46 percent.

Even in the areas where colleges are, overall, the weakest, there were improvements. On endowment transparency, the percentage of institutions making shareholder voting records available doubled from 15 to 30 percent, and the proportion of colleges with shareholder responsibility committees grew from 13 to 18 percent.

Harvard, Stanford, Penn, and UVM were among the 15 schools with the highest awarded grade, an A-.

Quick links for Monday morning.

* Dream tenure locations Portland and San Francisco top this year's list of most sustainable cities.

* Did I just say "tenure"? Dean Dad has predictions for higher education in the current financial crisis that don't look good.

5. More of the 'replace retired full-timers with adjuncts and hope for the best' approach to hiring. In the very short term, the cost savings from adjuncting-out the classes that had been taught by a high-seniority full-timer are significant. The damage to the institution is (usually) somewhat abstract at first, and hard to quantify, but the savings are concrete and easy to quantify. When the bulkhead is broken and water is rushing in, the quick fix holds real appeal. If last week's IHE article was right, and the pace of full-timers retiring will slow as the returns on their pensions slip into negative territory, then the pressure to adjunct-out the few who actually do retire will be all the greater. Expect an already unforgiving job market in the evergreen disciplines to get that much worse, at least until the dust settles.

* Is the financial crisis more dire than the climate crisis? $700B+ if you can guess the right answer.

* Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert sneak their way around the Emmy politics ban.

* And the This Week panel hates John McCain.

The very structure of American politics imposes its own constraints. For all the clout that presidents have accrued since World War II, their prerogatives remain limited. A President McCain will almost certainly face a Congress controlled by a Democratic and therefore obstreperous majority. A President Obama, even if his own party runs the Senate and House, won't enjoy all that much more latitude, especially when it comes to three areas in which the dead hand of the past weighs most heavily: defense policy, energy policy and the Arab-Israeli peace process. The military-industrial complex will inhibit efforts to curb the Pentagon's penchant for waste. Detroit and Big Oil will conspire to prolong the age of gas guzzling. And the Israel lobby will oppose attempts to chart a new course in the Middle East. If the past provides any indication, advocates of the status quo will mount a tenacious defense.

Ret. Col. Andrew Bacevich, last seen in these parts talking with Bill Moyers about the relationship between consumerism and American imperialism, had some tough words in a Los Angeles Times op-ed two weeks ago: "The next president will disappoint you."

The pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism, has induced a condition of dependence on imported goods, on imported oil, and on credit. The chief desire of the American people is that nothing should disrupt their access to these goods, that oil, and that credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in part of through the distribution of largesse here at home, and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad.

Retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich talks to Bill Moyers about the consumerist origins of American foreign policy, what Charles Maier called the 'empire of consumption.' Of course, once again Carter comes up::

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I would be one of the first to confess that - I think that we have misunderstood and underestimated President Carter. He was the one President of our time who recognized, I think, the challenges awaiting us if we refused to get our house in order.

BILL MOYERS: You're the only author I have read, since I read Jimmy Carter, who gives so much time to the President's speech on July 15th, 1979. Why does that speech speak to you so strongly?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, this is the so-called Malaise Speech, even though he never used the word "malaise" in the text to the address. It's a very powerful speech, I think, because President Carter says in that speech, oil, our dependence on oil, poses a looming threat to the country. If we act now, we may be able to fix this problem. If we don't act now, we're headed down a path in which not only will we become increasingly dependent upon foreign oil, but we will have opted for a false model of freedom. A freedom of materialism, a freedom of self-indulgence, a freedom of collective recklessness. And what the President was saying at the time was, we need to think about what we mean by freedom. We need to choose a definition of freedom which is anchored in truth, and the way to manifest that choice, is by addressing our energy problem.

He had a profound understanding of the dilemma facing the country in the post Vietnam period. And of course, he was completely hooted, derided, disregarded.

More immediately important, though, is this about Obama, McCain, and general election 2008:

BILL MOYERS: ...Do you expect either John McCain or Barack Obama to rein in the "imperial presidency?"

ANDREW BACEVICH: No. I mean, people run for the presidency in order to become imperial presidents. The people who are advising these candidates, the people who aspire to be the next national security advisor, the next secretary of defense, these are people who yearn to exercise those kind of great powers.

They're not running to see if they can make the Pentagon smaller. They're not. So when I - as a distant observer of politics - one of the things that both puzzles me and I think troubles me is the 24/7 coverage of the campaign.

Parsing every word, every phrase, that either Senator Obama or Senator McCain utters, as if what they say is going to reveal some profound and important change that was going to come about if they happened to be elected. It's not going to happen.

BILL MOYERS: It's not going to happen because?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Not going to happen - it's not going to happen because the elements of continuity outweigh the elements of change. And it's not going to happen because, ultimately, we the American people, refuse to look in that mirror. And to see the extent to which the problems that we face really lie within.

We refuse to live within our means. We continue to think that the problems that beset the country are out there beyond our borders. And that if we deploy sufficient amount of American power we can fix those problems, and therefore things back here will continue as they have for decades.

It's a truly exceptional interview. Read the whole thing. Via MeFi.

The question is not, as Ryan Avent asks while guest-blogging for Ezra Klein, whether high-energy prices will destroy the suburbs. It seems clear that they will, at least to some extent, and more importantly it seems clear that these energy realities exist in a context with other, perhaps more immediate trends that point in the same general direction: America's cities are on the mend, and it's the suburbs that now face decline.

The important question, then, is not whether all this will happen but how suburban America will react to the fact of re-urbanification, which will have dire financial consequences for those who have concentrated the bulk of their wealth in the prices of their suburban homes. To the extent that middle- and upper-class people, especially young people, increasingly choose to live in cities, prices will rise there and fall in the suburbs, which over time will essentially wipe out those people whose suburban residence is also their primary or sole investment.

These people will have every financial incentive to fight to keep the suburban lifestyle intact, no matter what the cost in money, energy, or sprawl. And they'll vote, demanding pro-suburban incentives and policy counter to every consideration of sustainability or good sense.

This will be not only a geographic fight but a class and intergenerational one as well, and if you'll allow me to make a Big Prediction for a moment I fully expect this to be one of the more highly contested divides in American politics as we face the end of cheap energy and the accordant, dramatic weakening of our automobile-centric culture.

UPDATE: There's more of this sort of speculation at Freakonomics, Political Animal, and Matt Yglesias.

We'll eventually be doing a full writeup for our Indy article on energy issues in the Triangle and North Carolina, but for now let me say that Earthaven Ecovillage near Asheville is easily one of the more interesting and inspiring places I've visited in six years in North Carolina. Nearly fifteen years old, and one of the largest communities of its kind in America, the project serves as a model for sustainable living and alternative, off-the-grid mode(s) of life.

I'm not going to lie to you: I was thinking about Mars the whole time we were there.

I've been up since six, so that's about all the coherent thought I can manage at the moment. For a lot more useful background on Earthaven, check Think or Thwim's report from a year or so ago. (There's always the Washington Post, too.)

Lots and lots of photos—over a hundred!—at my Flickr site. Just a few favorites below...



One of the many signs greeting you as you enter the community.



A painting inside the community's Council Hall.



A characteristically Ecotopian home.



Good advice.



Also good advice.



Delicious berries.



Delicious solar-powered golf cart.



Ducks.



Sometimes this happens. That's part of it, too.



The name of the main thoroughfare in the community and a succinct expression of their mission statement—there really is one. And in fact, as our tour guide was quick to remind us, emphasizing the diversity of the community and the many approaches to sustainability to be found inside Earthaven, there's not just another way, but other ways.

Polygraph 22—Call for Papers
http://www.duke.edu/web/polygraph/cfp22.html

Special Issue: Ecology and Ideology

The contemporary moment abounds with speculation concerning our ecological future. Specialists in a variety of fields forecast immanent catastrophe, stemming from a combination of climate change, fossil-fuel depletion, and consumer waste. The recent bestowal of the Nobel Peace Prize on a group of scientists studying climate change indicates the degree to which "peace" has come to signify ecological balance; even the declaration by the Vatican of a new set of "7 Deadly Sins for the modern age" includes pollution in an attempt to grapple with the potential of individuals to inflict ecological damage on a global scale.

In the name of an impending crisis felt to be collectively shared, new political, cultural, and intellectual alignments are being forged, just as seismic shifts in the flow of global capital once again threaten to "redistribute" the world's resources and people. Ecological crisis has become a 24/7 media event, canvassing the planet in the imagery and rhetoric of disaster. From the halls of research and policy to activist documentary and apocalyptic fantasy, at the news desk, podium, pulpit, classroom, and computer monitor alike, all channels are united by a single underlying conviction: the present ecological catastrophe has humanity as its cause.

Precisely because the answer seems so obvious, we want to know: why now? Where are the points of antagonism in the midst of such apparent consensus, and what is at stake in their difference?

The Polygraph Editorial Collective invites papers concerning any aspect of ecology's relationship to ideology, both interrogating ecology as a location for critique of global capitalism and analyzing the ways in which ecology functions as an ideology in its own right.

Potential areas of interest include:

Political Ecology
Globalization and ecology
Marxism and ecology
"Environmental accounting" as a challenge to the free market
Ecology and capital / consumerism
Ecology as growth market

Eco-Disaster
Peak oil and climate change
Biofuels and the food crisis
Overpopulation and Neo-Malthusianism
Ecology as a rhetoric of control
Figurations of eco-disaster in popular culture

Religion and Ecology
Green apocalypticism and green evangelism
Ecology and world religion

Ecology and gender
Recent articulations of eco-feminism
Eco- & transnational feminisms
Women's work and the global chain of production
Agricultural work and reproduction

Ecologies against ecologies
"Light" vs. "dark green" environmentalism (i.e. deep ecology)
Primitivism and technofuturism
The status of international Green movements

Polygraph welcomes work from a variety of different disciplines, including critical geography, cultural anthropology, political economy, political theology, science studies, and systems theory. We also encourage the submission of a variety of formats and genres: i.e. field reports, surveys, interviews, photography, essays, etc.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE
December 31, 2008

ISSUE EDITORS
Gerry Canavan
Lisa Klarr
Ryan Vu

CONTACT
polygraph22cfp@gmail.com

"We badly underestimated the degree of damages and the risks of climate change...All of the links in the chain are on average worse than we thought a couple of years ago." Much more at MeFi.

Also in environmental linkage: Jeffrey Sachs has economics for a crowded planet at NPR, while Paul Greenberg unexpectedly beats me to the punch with a post on James Howard Kunstler and Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, which I read on the plane to San Francisco and which figures importantly into a paper I sometimes imagine I'm working on on environmental Marxism and sustainability.

I should have a longish post on that topic at culturemonkey sometime in the next few weeks—definitely before June. I have two other papers to write first, which is exactly why I'm on the Internet at two in the morning doing none of them.

Ian Roberts and Fiona Godlee published an editorial in the British Medical Journal on the "carbon footprint of medical conferences." They determined that flights destined for the annual conferences of the European Respiratory Society and the American Thoracic Society put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than do 110,000 Chadians or 11,000 Indians in an entire year. The problem does not end with medical researchers. Scholars of all stripes travel to meet, greet, and, in one of our more ironic roles, preach the gospel of sustainability.

I missed this Jared Diamond op-ed in the New York Times earlier in the month about how consumption, not population, is the crucial factor when thinking about resource depletion. He gets it all more or less exactly right, especially when he explains how the last few years have finally put to bed the central lie of globalization, that the "rising tide" can or will lift all boats:

Per capita consumption rates in China are still about 11 times below ours, but let’s suppose they rise to our level. Let’s also make things easy by imagining that nothing else happens to increase world consumption — that is, no other country increases its consumption, all national populations (including China’s) remain unchanged and immigration ceases. China’s catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. Oil consumption would increase by 106 percent, for instance, and world metal consumption by 94 percent.

If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates).

Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven’t met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies — for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy — they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people.

Diamond also has good things to say about the ways in which reducing consumption in the West need not be understood as an apocalyptic disaster, but as an opportunity for efficiency, simplicity, and even a better life:

Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Ask yourself whether Americans’ wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures.

More on this in the coming week, I'm sure...

On this Christmas Eve, Americans are having trouble paying off their credit cards, with 30-day-late accounts rising 26% to $17.3 billion and defaults rising 18% to nearly a billion. There's a reason for all this, and you can find it in Bill Moyer's PBS interview with Benjamin Barber (via MeFi), a Galbraithian analysis of capitalism's production not of products but of needs themselves:

As a society becomes increasingly affluent, wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied.... Wants thus come to depend on output. In technical terms, it can no longer be assumed that welfare is greater at an all-round higher level of production than at a lower one. It may be the same. The higher level of production has, merely, a higher level of want creation necessitating a higher level of want satisfaction.

The orgy of Christmas shopping that continues unabated today—to be followed by deep-discount post-Christmas sales on Wednesday, and on and on—is only the clearest proof that this is what capitalism has become in the post-industrial West and, increasingly, elsewhere as well. Barber thinks the productive energies of capitalism might somehow be harnassed, through willpower and ethical living, for better ends, but I'm much more skeptical that capitalism can ever really move in a direction other than the one it has. What we need is a new logic, a new organizing principle. Call it sustainability or call it permaculture, call it environmental Marxism or environmental capitalism if you want, it's all the same to me—what's important is that the world figure out some way to stop doing the things capitalism demands it must. We have to stop consuming everything, resources, the future, ourselves.

BILL MOYERS: When politics permeates everything we call it totalitarianism. When religion permeates everything we call it theocracy.

BENJAMIN BARBER: Right.

BILL MOYERS: But when commerce pervades everything, we call it liberty.

Merry Christmas.

(cross-posted to culturemonkey, which returns Jan. 2 with an all-new blogger and an all-new organizing principle of its own)

Michael Pollan has an article in The New York Times today about sustainability, especially when it comes to agriculture and food production:

To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.

The article goes on to focus on two stories in the news this year that suggest a sustainability tipping point could be upon us, antibiotic-resistant staph infection and Colony Collapse Disorder. Via Pandagon, which gets this right, I think:

Pollan argues that the word “sustainability” is losing its meaning, and it’s clear why—it’s incompatible with capitalism, and openly arguing for economic systems to replace capitalism is simply verboten in our society. Taboo, unacceptable, off the table. And it will be until it’s too late to reverse the damage done by the need for unchecked growth for profit.