A Change in the Wind

Is climate change impacting real estate in the Southwest?

In the United States today, according to the real estate site Zillow, the two cities in the most trouble are Phoenix, where a little more than half than half of all homeowners are underwater -- where debt outweighs the equity -- and Las Vegas, where an astounding 70% of homeowners are underwater. 

Is it a coincidence that these are the two biggest cities in the Southwest, where climate change is expected to hit brutally hard? Could climate change be contributing to this mega-downturn now?

Until someone goes out and starts doing some serious interviewing of folks in the real estate market, we're not going to know for sure, but we do have Tom Ashbrook's show on the subject from January, On Point: Can the Southwest Survive Climate Change? which was especially good. (To give an example of its quality, when an author of a book about the grim future of the Southwest claims he's not "in the prediction business," Ashbrook has a little fit, and forces him to answer.)

Ashbrook points out that we had record wildfires, record drought, and record temperatures in the Southwest last year He looks at two books, A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the future of the American Southwest, by William deBuys, and Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City, and talks to the authors. 

William deBuys points out that the predictions for temperature change in the Southwest have been underestimates, and that this century Phoenix will get 4-6 degrees C hotter. Andrew Ross points out that the growth in Phoenix and the Southwest has been largely driven by growth itself: People making money on construction, buying their own homes, buidling more. Growth has stopped now, and -- as Ashbrook said -- developments have been all but abandoned. Ross doubts it will return, and points out that Phoenix in our times has yet to experience a mega-drought (of sixty years or more) which are shockingly common in the long-term record. Could the suburbanization of the desert be over? 

Included in the discussion s a notable figure in Phoenix, Grady Grammage, an attorney, developer, and believer in climate change, who sees high temps as the factor most likely to bring down his business. Yet Grammage insists that Phoenix is accustomed to planning for drought, that the region could support many millions of more people, and that growth will return. 

Grammage in my personal experience is a more thoughtful and reflective figure than one usually encounters in real estate, but even so his claims that Phoenix is "fine" fails to convince. 

"We call these places deserts for a reason," as Ashbrook said, "because they are often deserted." 

From on high, NASA looked at a related issue -- the urban heat island index in Phoenix -- and by cross-referencing satellite data with sociological data found that the rich were clustering in areas of vegetation and permeable soil (green), while the poor were shunted towards downtown Phoenix, with impermeable surfaces and buildings reflecting heat (blue). 

This week it reached 108 in Phoenix -- 12 degrees above average for May. 

The sexiness of a stupid woman, according to science

In Slate, a science reporter specializing in sex, Jesse Bering, reports on a new study that finds that women who look drunk and/or stupid are especially attractive to straight men.  

The study has problems -- for one, a lack of a good control sample. For another, the hypothesis (that men find women who appear out of it more attractive because the guy thinks he's more likely to get laid, for example) surely has limits, to which the study seems blind. 

All this Bering discusses ably. He notes the flaws, but concludes: 

All else being equal, would you really have thought that the average man would subjectively perceive such women to be physically more alluring than their sober, bright-minded peers?

Actually, yes. But that's because I remember a great quote from the sexy, brainy Hedy LeMarr:

Any girl can look glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid. 

Lamarr was an extraordinary woman: a great scientist and inventor in her maturity, a movie star and sex symbol in her youth, and a woman who knew something about men. (She married six of them.)

 Here's a pic of her in her early movie star days: 

I wonder if Lamarr came to this realization because she couldn't look stupid if she tried, and maybe sometimes wished she could. 

Poetry vs Oil (and bulldozers)

Vancouver poet Stephen Collis writes about the poetic resistance to another pipeline planned to transport oil sands slurry from inside western Alberta to market in Poetry vs. Oil. 

Right now, one major pipeline carries the goop to Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet, where it is loaded onto supertankers tourists can wave at from scenic Stanley Park. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline, south, to Texas, has been (temporarily, perhaps) blocked. So now there are plans for a “Northern Gateway” pipeline to carry massive amounts of crude over 1,170 kilometers of forested and river-crisscrossed Northern BC—to the still largely undeveloped coast of the Great Bear Rainforest. Charming.

Into the fray steps a poetry anthology—The Enpipe Line (Creekstone Press 2012)—edited by a diverse collective that includes poet/activist and project founder Christine Leclerc...Originally conceived as a 1,170 kilometer long line of collaborative poetry (matching the proposed pipeline’s length), the project eventually grew to over 70,000km. The poetry in it is diverse, to say the least, and includes contributions from widely published and recognized poets to children and “professional” activists (such as Greenpeace co-founder Rex Weyler).

[snip] 

Here’s an example of the range. Eleven-year old Ta’Kaiya Blaney of Sliammon First Nation wrote the song “Shallow Waters” (the performance of which has become a popular mainstay of demonstrations in the province over the past year) when she was ten:

In shallow waters, I can’t see
Your clear waters lapping at my feet
The lifeless ocean, black not blue
I didn't help but deep down I knew

[snip]

From a purely aesthetic viewpoint, some readers might find some of the work in this anthology “lacking.” However, the precise point this anthology raises—the very fact of the concatenation of art and revolution that it works—is the disappearance and impossibility of the “purely aesthetic” in today’s world. Rex Weyler, writing in the Forward, asks—“Can poetry stop ecocide?” I would have to answer no. But I would also say—it’s not not going to stop it either. 

A similar point was made in a striking essay in Poetry a couple of years ago by John Kinsella, an Australian poet, about resisting the destruction of the natural world:

A pacifist, which is what I am, can be the strongest resister, and pacifism the most defiant form of resistance. Same with language usage: I mix the old and the new to engage with a debate about protection, preservation, conservation, and respect of the “natural” world. I am aware of the problems these words carry in terms of implying complicity, because I am a poet rather than a speech writer. For me, because of this, poems can stop bulldozers. Not because they just say “stop bulldozer,” but because the intricacies of language challenge, distract, and entangle the bulldozer. I am using a semantics not of analogy, but of opposition. My words are intended to halt the damage—to see what shouldn’t be seen, to declare and challenge it.

Resistance, in this case, is not futile -- it's a belief in life. Here's the enemy, in an astounding photo essay from, of all places, Business Insider, called The Oil Sands Mines Refused Us Access, So We Rented This Plane to See What They Were Up To: 

via Fountain, not Mountain. 

The Way: A Catholic movie for non-Catholics

My old friend and equaintance Lance Mannion wonderfully appreciates that small but touching movie, The Way, which came out last year. He captures so many aspects of the film, from Martin Sheen's ability to carry a movie with sheer grumpiness, to the underlying beauty of the story. 

The Way is a sweet, sad, funny, joyful movie that asks its audience to accept that intelligent, humane, educated, thoroughly modernized and basically liberal people can, although lapsed, still be Catholic enough to find solace in their faith or to miss it if they’ve lost it enough to walk a thousand miles to chase it down and get some of the feeling and comfort it used to give them back, if only for a few moments...

Gary Wills has written about the divide between the church of the People of God and the institutional Church.  It’s a divide I’ve always seen as being between the church of St Francis and the Church of the Pope.  In the latter, the priests stand between you and Christ.  In the former, you go out into the world like Christ in order to join him in the company of other sinners.  The one approach is institutional.  The other way is purely personal.

For some of us, faith is a journey, not a destination; a search, not a knowing. 

When 1 + 1 = 3: Ken Burns on Story

A fascinating short film (in the Burns style) on what the documentarian thinks makes a good story: 

Sez Burns:     

Abraham Lincoln wins the Civil War and then he decides he's got enough time to go to the theatre. That's a good story. When Thomas Jefferson said "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal", he owned a hundred human beings and never saw the hypocrisy, never saw the contradiction, and more importantly never saw fit in his lifetime to free any one of them. That's a good story.

From Kottke.

Robert Creeley: A Prayer

A Prayer

Bless
something small
but infinite
and quiet.

There are senses
make an object
in their simple
feeling for one.

Robert Creeley
February 1966     

[Editors note: Spelling corrected, pic removed -- inappropriately pretty. Search continues]                                                                                                                         

 

The Last Myth: the problem with apocalyptic warnings

From a new book about the perils of apocalyptic thinking called The Last Myth.

To understand why fewer people believe in climate change even as evidence mounts, we must look beyond the industry-funded movement to deny the reality and effects of climate change. Perhaps equally important -- if not quite equally culpable -- has been the extent to which both the proponents and opponents of human-made climate change have led us down a cul-de-sac of conversation by exploiting the apocalyptic metaphor to make their case.

Whether by design or by accident, the initial warnings of environmentalists -- of oceans rising to engulf our most beloved metropolises, of amber waves of grain scorched into a desert landscape -- activated the apocalyptic impulse. The focus on disastrous repercussions for our behavior at some point in the future echoed the warnings of the Israelite priests to wayward Jews in Babylon or, later, to those who submitted too willingly to Alexander's process of Hellenization. It was a familiar story: change, and change radically, or face hell on earth. Perhaps there was no other way to sound the alarm about the devastating threat presented by global climate change, but that echo of apocalyptic warning was quickly seized upon by the naysayers to dismiss the evidence out of hand.

Actually, the tide of public belief has turned again in the US, towards belief. Based apparently mostly on direct observations of a hot spring in the East.   

Could one consultant mislead two SoCal water districts?

At its best, journalism is surely a joint enterprise. It's not a reporter that makes democracy workable, it's the press. Quotes from Thomas Jefferson come to mind. So it's very exciting to yours truly to see another reporter pick up and run with a crucial detail from a long story I wrote a few weeks back on an unhappy experience a big water district in Ventura County had with an underground reservoir.

This unhappy history could be repeating itself in the Mohave desert, with a notorious underground resevoir project known as Cadiz. 

Let the reporter herself, Emily Green, an expert in water issues, explain: 

When last month the Ventura County Reporter recounted that the capacity [of the Las Posas aquifer] proved to not be the much-celebrated 300,000 acre feet, but instead 50,000 acre feet, no villain was named. Who needs a villain when, as the Reporter ran a rough tally, the cost borne by a water district serving 620,000 people exceeded $53 million?

No, no hand was caught in the civic till. There were only pregnant hints as to the possible miscreant, all implying that it was a one-man job. “After 18 years as general manager for Calleguas, Don Kendall abruptly resigned in May of 2010,” went the Reporter account. “Neither he nor the Calleguas board of directors will discuss with the press the reasons why he left. Nor will any other water official speculate on the record as to why he stalked off a job that paid him a quarter-million dollars a year. Off the record, a Metropolitan insider said that Kendall’s resignation was ‘not unrelated’ to the collapse of the Las Posas ASR deal… “

As it happened, when earlier this week I decided to put up a brief  post connecting the early enticements made about Las Posas and a new generation of stunningly high estimates to do with a project best known simply as Cadiz, the fleecing of Ventura County was not on my mind. Orange County was, where a municipal water company has signed on to front the Cadiz project. San Bernardino County was, where the Cadiz target basin is located in the dry Mojave.

All it took to get me wondering aloud about the hard landing that the Ventura County rate payers covered by Calleguas suffered in the Las Posas venture was the chance observation that Las Posas shares a hydrologist with Cadiz. Cadiz has convinced the Rancho Santa Margarita Water District, an Orange County water company only a fraction the size of Calleguas, to go a-prospecting in the San Bernardino desert. Like Calleguas, Rancho Santa Margarita Water District is big enough to be credible, but small enough to be credulous. If only by coincidence, it’s been using hydrological estimates from the same man who consulted Calleguas.

As Green points out, the Los Posas deal cost Calleguas ratepayers about $53 million. The deal also evidently cost the general manager his job, but no one before Green seems to have questioned the consultant involved. The controversial Cadiz deal is expected to cost in the range of $200 million, even though the availability of the land, the delivery of the water, and the condition of the aquifer all look far more dicey than the Ventura County/Los Posas project did in its early days. Here's muckraker Michael Hiltzik on the Cadiz issue three years ago in the LA Times:

As it was presented to the Metropolitan Water District in 2002, the idea was to pump surplus Colorado River water into the aquifer underlying the firm's desert acreage. During droughts, the stored water (along with some indigenous groundwater) would be pumped out for delivery via the aqueduct to a parched Southern California.

If you don't look too closely, the plan has a sort of shimmering authenticity, like a desert mirage. Yes, the state faces a long-term water shortage. And yes, in the midst of drought, sometimes the rain comes down in torrents.

Yet as the MWD realized, reality isn't so simple.

First, there isn't any surplus water in the Colorado. Rather, the basin is in a long-term drought. For the foreseeable future California will be lucky to get its full statutory apportionment of river water. A single extra drop? Forget it.

Second, there's considerable disagreement over how much groundwater really underlies the Cadiz parcels, not to mention how much the company is legally permitted to pump out and how much could be pumped before neighboring aquifers become contaminated with carcinogenic minerals.

Green herself does point the finger, as tough reporters sometimes must, at a consultant for the huge water engineering firm CH2M Hill, a hydrologist named Terry Foreman. She calls him a "serial exaggerator," for his work on the Los Posas and Cadiz aquifers. She also implicitly criticizes yours truly for not delving deeper into the collapse of the Los Posas deal. To this charge I plead guilty, with extenuating circumstances. (After all, that deal fell apart many years ago, and I was focused on its successor, a completely different technology, just as complex, and pricier.)

But more importantly, Green suggests -- based on a study of documents -- that the former general manager of the Ventura County project, Don Kendall, was himself misled by Foreman. Kendall's successor, Susan Mulligan, who I interviewed at length, and who was a model of responsiveness by a public official, disputes Green's charge. But given Mulligan's good government orientation,  I expect that if she were on the spot, that she would take Green's advice:

If Mr Foreman’s work is good, isn’t the best insurance against calamity with Cadiz impartial review of the hydrology as he presents it by the USGS? Only the USGS should do it because it is their model Mr Foreman purports to use on Cadiz to arrive at recharge estimates that are, according to other USGS estimates, wildly high. 

At least, I hope so. Here's a chart Green posted of the Los Posas aquifer, the one that was expected to store water in case of drought or disaster not just for Ventura County, but all of SoCal. 

Didn't work out that way -- a warning to those who would try it again. 

Tweets: bird poems, by the season, from Marie Harris

These days when we hear the word "tweets" we may not think of birds. But Marie Harris, former poet laureate for New Hampshire, reminds us of the real thing with a quartet of lovely but tough poems about birds and their lives. I'll cite just the first, and encourage readers to search out the rest:

Spring

Everything's fledging
Woodpeckers, robins ... the lot
Empty nests everywhere 

Via Poetry Daily.

John D. MacDonald: Nature's tricks of interdependence

The Florida-based mystery writer John D. MacDonald, who like his funny counterpart Carl Hiassen unabashedly displays a wide streak of caring for the land and the sea on which he lives, tells a story about the way of buzzards in The Lonely Silver Rain. This is the 21st and last of his great series of Travis McGee novels.  

His flinty anti-hero McGee has, with much work and no small share of brilliance, tracked down a wealthy client's  missing boat, which unhappily turns out to have been the scene of a triple murder. McGee is the first to have found it, except for the buzzards. 

...the closer I got to her, the more disreputable she looked -- like an elegant lady who had stepped into the wrong bar on New Year's Eve. 

A lot of her varnish had been sprayed lavatory green and it had begun to flake off...a sudden shift of the breeze changed the look of the vessel and the shape of the day. It brought that thick ripe sweet stink of death and decay. I killed the motor and curved the skiff away from the stink, and as I did so, I noticed three buzzards in a dead mangrove which stood taller than the rest. Black sentinels defeated by the geography of a cruiser. They were never going to flap down to the cockpit deck, waddle down the steps to the feast. You seldom see them out on the islands, except after a red tide has washed the big dead fish onto the mud beaches. I hvae a friend who disbelieved the experts who say birds have no sense of smell, and so one summer out in the ranchlands north of Sarasota, he tested them. Before danw he would put dead meat under a white wooden box, and spread several identical boxes around the area with nothing under them. The buzzards would circle above them for a time, and then would always come down to clumsy landings aorund the baited box, ignoring the others. 

And then he realized that maybe it wasn't a keen sense of smell but instead remarkable eyesight. The carrion flies always arrive first. They have a shiny metallic-looking blue-green abdomen, and maybe the buzzards can spot the glintings from a thousand feet on high. Nature has many little tricks which reinforce the interdependence of the species. 

Yes, plausible. On the story about condors I did a few weeks back, I learned that condors find their meals in part by looking down on crows and buzzards from above, and preying on their carrion finds. 

For Mother's Day, a spiked New Yorker cover

From a fun new site called Blown Covers, a New Yorker cover that could have been:

 

Mitt Romney: Worse than George W. Bush?

One of this country's lesser-known great writers, Edmund White, writes for The New Yorker about the Cranbrook School, where Romney and a gang of followers ritually humiliated a gay classmate in l965. 

White attended the school, just as Mitt Romney did, but a few years earlier, and as a gay person. He speculates about Romney's motivations for his so-called "pranks":

Romney was not a good student nor was he athletic; he was the manager of one of the school teams, a sort of default position for boys who wanted to be athletic and cool and popular—a water boy, in essence. He was considered a class clown, always up to rather cruel pranks. I can picture his situation, though it’s only speculation on my part (I’ve never known any of his friends, though one of his older brothers was a classmate). On the one hand he had an embarrassingly famous father, the governor of Michigan, whom he idolized as the youngest child. On the other he was the sole Mormon, a member of what was definitely seen as a creepy, stigmatized cult in that world of bland Episcopalian Wasps (we had Episcopalian services at chapel three mornings a week). When his father was president of American Motors, he lived at home and was a day student, an envied status. When his father was elected governor and moved to the state capital of Lansing, he became a boarder. Suddenly he was surrounded by other Cranbrook students and the strict “masters,” 24/7. He no longer had the constant support of his tight-knit family. Now he had to win approval from the other boys.

No wonder he became a daring and even violent prankster. He who worried about his own marginal status couldn’t bear the presence of an unapologetic sissy like [John] Lauber, with his long bleached hair (the Mormons, then as now, have insisted on a neat, traditional, conservative appearance, especially in their young missionary men whom they send out all over the world). In scorning and shearing a sissy student and leading a gang of five other boys in this “prank,” Romney may have felt popular and in the right for the first time. According to one of Romney’s repentant accomplices, [his gay victim] Lauber was terrified, weeping and begging for help.

Interestingly, the same year that Romney was cruelly terrifying a "sissy" classmate, George W. Bush, also a cheerleader, was protecting a "sissy" classmate being teased by his friends: 

Lanny Davis, who knew Bush at Yale, and admired him in many ways, despite being on the other side of the fence politically, recalls the incident:

[A student] we all believed to be gay walked by, although the word we used in those days was "queer." Someone, I'm sorry to say, snidely used that word as he walked by.

George heard it and, most uncharacteristically, snapped: "Shut up." Then he said, in words I can remember almost verbatim: "Why don't you try walking in his shoes for a while and see how it feels before you make a comment like that?"

Remember, this was the 1960s -- pre-Stonewall, before gay rights became a cause many of us (especially male college students) had thought much about. I remember thinking, "This guy is much deeper than I realized."

George Bush, thoughtful and sensitive, putting Mitt Romney to shame. Who would've thunk? 

Andrew Revkin: on climate change in a post-media world

Covered a talk by the dean of climate reporters, Andrew Revkin, last week at UCSB, for the Santa Barbara Independent. In part because he got so sick of "the yelling" around climate, a couple of years ago Revkin gave up traditional reporting to teach at Pace University, and to run the great Dot Earth blog on sustainability (and related questions, such as climate) for the New York Times.

This year, seemingly in a better mood, Revkin is promoting the concept of the Knowosphere, a portal for the exchange of ideas useful in getting us humans through "the bottleneck" that E.O. Wilson spoke of a decade ago. Revkin brought up the analogy of yeast bacteria in a sugar solution in a petri dish. They will multiply until they consume all the food, or until they foul their nest with waste, or both, and crash.

In his talk, Revkin pointed out that:

"Scientists for the last fifty years have been saying, "Hey, there's an edge to the petri dish!" Essentially the question is will we be able to find a "peak us" before nature imposes a limit on us." 

Revkin had some nifty examples of how Internet ideas have proved useful in facing problems; for instanct, a site for Pennsylvania residents called Fraktrack, that puts all public documents relating to hydraulic fracking on-line in a searchable form. He also thinks education -- which can teach the well-accepted fundamentals of climate science to young people -- offers hope.

But when it comes to "the yelling," in an answer to my question, Revkin put it with pithy vigor:

“In a post-media world, which is what we’re entering, it’s a great opportunity for institutions, or for individuals who understand these issues, to create a new space for scientific discussion,” he explained. “I think that’s the way forward.”

On the one hand, he's absolutely right about "the yelling." My little story led to immediate attacks on Revkin, inadvertently and ironically proving his point, and making me feel guilty for causing him pain.

On the other hand, I'm troubled by his blithe reference to a "post-media world."

Really? Do we not use the media and need the media today as much as we did twenty-five years ago?

To be specific, aren't we actually more dependent on The New York Times than ever?

The culture without the media. Talk about a post-apocalyptic landscape...

Eulogy for a watershed: Tam Valley in Marin County

My good friend David Healy sends along a touching/troubling essay about the development of his Marin County town, Tam Valley, in the days of his and my youth, approximately fifty years ago. 

When I was a kid in the valley, we didn't need "facilities." We had the hills to hike in and the fields to play football in. Recreation was spontaneous, creative, inventive.

I remembered again Coyote Creek made sterile, and Corte Madera Creek and Tamalpais Creek, and the creeks of Terra Linda, Lucas Valley, and Novato following suit. I thought of all the marshes long since filled, like the ones where Redwood High School and Mill Valley's new Middle School now stand, and I wondered what the students in these schools know about the heritage that could have been theirs.

Not much, I guess. They study biology in text books while the great marshes rot under them, beneath six feet of "clean fill."

I thought again about my Tam Valley childhood, and I realized that almost everything I know about the natural world I learned during those years. Most of what I studied in college text books I have forgotten, but childhood experiences have stayed with me. Those years cannot be repeated; every wild place of significance which I knew as a kid is gone, transformed, sanitized, "brought up to standard." I realized, standing in that desolate asphalt and weed covered school yard, that when I wrote LIVING WATER, a story about the Sierras and the mighty watershed of the Sacramento River, I was really writing a eulogy for the little watersheds of my childhood creeks, and that THIS LIVING EARTH, which traces the learning process my wife and I experienced in the San Geronimo Valley and West Marin, is just as much an epitaph for the house--covered Tam Valley grasslands.

Though published in l973, David Cavagnaro's writing remains as potent and as relevant as ever.What will our future look like, when kids today -- in Marin County and around the world -- grow up away from nature? 

At least we have some idea of the past. Here's a favorite painting of Marin by William Keith, from 1869, before it was "brought up to standard." 

It's called San Anselmo Valley near San Rafael.