The Census

Well, I guess any geographer worth their salt was pretty excited yesterday to see the first of the 2010 Census numbers. As as expected, Michigan lost population. It was the only state to lose population. Thank you GM and cronies. It will also lose a congressional seat making it that much harder to renew its engines and energy.

(Sorry about the map. I don't know how to make it fit in this box. Suggestions?)

The Mango and the Snow: A Tale of Moderation

It is really cold here now, and we finally have snow. I think we haven't been out of the teens for several days now, pretty cold for December, but at least now it is wrapped in the peaceful white blanket of winter. Better than cold and just brown ground, which we had a few days ago.

I purchased a couple of hard mangoes several days ago. Each day I have been checking them to see if they are ready to eat. Today one was ready. It is not a local mango. They do not grow them here in Michigan, even in hoop houses! I guess it is a good thing that I was born after technology had gone far enough to bring mangoes to my Ypsilanti door, and any other citrusy fruit that saves us from scurvy!!! in the middle of winter.

I say this because I am, of course, known for my support of local food. And I do support the movement. I just made the first winter veggie roast the other day. It is so satisfying to have the heft of the root vegetables in a balsamic glaze when the weather is frigid. I even added some sweetness with maple syrup this time. All the veggies were local, either from the Ypsi Food Co-op or the AA farmer's market. I even make an effort to buy it from the farmer who IS growing it in hoop houses in Riga, Michigan.

But citrus, or mangoes are not on his or any other farmer's list.

So am I being bad?

I suppose to some die hards I am. That is okay. No one is perfect, and few if any are totally sustainable. I am okay with that. Here is the reason why.

Back in the day when i lived in LA I remember that everyone had their own "correct" and "healthy" diet, and few were tolerant of any one elses definition of healthy.

"What? you are serving meat?" I don't think anyone I knew when I left was still eating meat. when the average American eats nearly 200 pounds of meat annually, the vegetarian stance can be pretty radical to the rest of America.
"OMG how can you have dairy items that have rennet?"
"Tell me please that you aren't serving fruits mixed with your vegetables?"
"What no Soy milk for my coffee?"

It was getting so that I was afraid to cook anything. I was going to offend someone. Give me a break! (but of course they didn't). So I decided that this high than thou attitude had to end. I was going to serve what I was going to serve. nothing wrong with some moderation.(Can't we all get along?) If you don't like it, then don't come. Fortunately I had help.

My dissertation topic was hog CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations). Hard to be writing on that when you were a vegetarian. And the Oklahoma farmers where i was doing my research were very aware when I came to call. A woman from LA? Working on CAFOs? They (rightly) feared I was a member of PETA, and would slice through their world with a cleaver that is very specific to their milieu. But I was coming from that place I mentioned earlier in this missive. I believe in moderation in all things. i had to see the world through their eyes. their world was just a little bit different than the soy milk world of LA. And it was a good thing had had that attitude because the farmers were no fools.

The first thing they would do when we started to know one another is invite me to lunch. while I appreciated sharing the meal, what they really wanted to know was: DID I EAT MEAT?

I was newly recovered from a bout of vegetarianism. One had a hard time not being vegetarian as some point in their life while living in LA, but i was never hard core. Even in the depths of one of my bouts, if I found myself near some BBQ ribs, I was in trouble. Moderation.

So when I moved to Michigan to teach at EMU, I came as a moderate in my food concerns. I am even now pretty radical for Michigan, (the other day I was trying to find some barley to make a barley soup and the grocery clerks at the market didn't even know what barley was. "Is is a fruit?" It turned out this big box market had NO barley. What is this world coming to? I should have purchased it at the coop) but I am sure that unless LA has changed radically itself (I don't think so) I am a moderate.

Good. I should be moderate in some ways. It is not a bad thing. And it allows me to eat mangoes in the snow.

Sometimes it is okay to be a moderate.

The Sins of Omission (not doing something you should have done)

Dr. Russell Ackoff died last year at 90. He was a wise man who understood the problems as they are currently addressed (analytical) and brought a synthetic mindset to the table.

In my continued studying of sustainability and how we get there, I am getting much deeper into systems thinking. I will be attending some workshops on same over the next month. Systems thinking is a team effort. I do not have a lot of community for this effort, so I am going out there to find it and then bring it home. I do have a small still loosely connected community of faculty and students who are beginning to think sustainably, but not enough to push me into my uncomfortable zones. that is why i am going to these workshops. they are where I am weakest and I need to gain confidence and experience in those areas.

Ackoff begins the above interview with 5 types of content in the brain. Each level is built on the preceding level.

Data, information, knowledge, understanding, wisdom.

I buy into that and hope someday to attain the heights of that hierarchy, but for now, I want to ask, where are we in our general education today? We are BIG on data. We call ourselves the information age. Undoubtedly there are many with a lot of knowledge, but I think the drop off begins at understanding.

One of my repeatable quotes (Einstein, Ben Franklin?) is: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

I see our society as insane for these reasons. I see the education system as insane. We have to take a chance FAIL to find the right way.

The path to success is paved with failure.

We have a broken system in so many ways and yet as Ackoff says: we aren't rewarded for our failures, we are penalized. The way to success today is through NOT taking chances.

The sins of omission. Don't address the problem but sweep it under the rug. Do nothing- not do something you should have done (like a population policy?).

I find what he had to say in this interview very wise. He got to the top of the hierarchy. He took chances to do it (he was kicked out of several schools along the say), but his understanding of the problems and his willingness to address them, made him wise.

I look forward to taking the chances in the coming months. I hope to succeed, but expect to fail along the way.

A Time for Thanks and for Thinking

Sometimes the world we live in hits you on the head. Today I have been hit twice with living and understanding the environmental and economic choices we make, and it is only early afternoon.

This morning I made a trip to the market and decided to buy some of the Clementine oranges that are just arriving this season. There were two varieties, both the same price. Which should I buy? I was reading the labels when a lady approached me and asked what was the difference between the two.

"What is the difference between the two?" she asked.
"Well, one is from California and the other from Spain."

She immediately understood and picked up the box from California, as did I.
"Thank you," she gratefully said to me as we continued shopping.

I returned home and began work on the computer. The doorbell rang. As soon as I opened the door I knew I was in for it. Bible under her arm and lovely Midwestern grandmother type smiled and said what a nice home. She began her spiel. It began with "What is the world coming to?"as she opened her booklet of converting me.

She had interrupted my writing on exactly that subject.
"A agree it is a subject we are all concerned about."
"Look," she said, pointing to photos in her booklet of saving grace,"where are we going?"
"I know. I am an educator and these subjects are important in my classes."
After a short conversation about where and what I teach and that I was not really interested in what she was selling (saving me) she asked,"Can I ask you one more question?"
I nodded my head and smiled.
"Do you believe in evolution?"

We parted on good terms, but I couldn't help but think how no matter who we are, or what we believe we are all searching for answers in today's uncertain times.

Slowly but slowly

The world is changing, slowly but slowly. I certainly would like to see more of the new type of progress (sustainable) but it isn't happening nearly fast enough at my school. Sigh. Last week my own department put the kibosh on giving a proposed Environmental Science program any sustainable content. To me, all that is doing is taking the old geology program that wasn't making it, turning the same classes into the Earth Science program (also not making it), and now environmental science. All the same classes taught the same way. If you keep on doing the same thing over and over and expect different results........ but what do I know? Obviously nothing. There is still a LOT of fear and silo mentality around here.

On another front, outside of dear old Ypsilanti, the world is moving in what I consider the right direction. For example in Tuesday's NYT Science section I saw this encouraging sidebar on mimicking nature (!) from Charles M Vest, the President Emeritus of MIT:

Engineering

“We’re going to see in surprisingly short order that biological inspiration and biological processes will become central to engineering real systems. It’s going to lead to a new era in engineering.”

In the 20th century, engineers and biologists dwelt in different universes. The biologists picked apart cells and tissues to see how they worked, while the engineers designed bridges, buildings and factories based on what they understood about physics and chemistry.

In recent years, however, engineers have begun paying very close attention to life. Evolution has fine-tuned living things for billions of years, giving them many of the properties — efficiency, strength, flexibility — that engineers love. Now biologically inspired engineering is taking hold in many engineering departments. In some cases, engineers are trying to mimic nature. In other cases, they are actually incorporating living things into their designs.

Researchers at Delft University in the Netherlands, for example, are developing bacteria-laced concrete. When cracks form, the bacteria wake from dormancy and secrete limestone, in effect healing the concrete. Next year, Dr. Vest expects, more of these lifelike designs will come to light, and they will keep coming for many years.

Dr. Vest is also president emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/09/science/20111109_next_feature.html?ref=science

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id="SPELLING_ERROR_5" />André A. Fenton">

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Neuroscience

“I expect we will see the physical organization of a memory within the brain.”

André A. Fenton

For decades neuroscientists searched through the brain, in pursuit of physical markers of memories. They found evidence that memories form through the contact of neurons. They grow new branches to communicate with other neurons, and old branches become stronger or weaker. In just the past few years, Dr. Fenton and other researchers have discovered that one molecule present in those branches, known as PKMzeta, maintains memories. Block PKMzeta, and the memory vanishes.

This discovery opens up an exciting prospect. Scientists could train animals to perform some simple task and then compare the brains of the animals that learned with those of the ones that didn’t. There should be a unique sprinkling of PKMzeta molecules in the animals that formed the new memory. Scientists could then map all the neurons and their branches that were required for the animals to remember what they learned. For the first time in history, scientists would be able to see a memory.

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Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Biotechnology

“It seems pretty likely within this year someone will show how to go from an adult peripheral blood draw to pluripotent stem cells. It means anyone who wants to try to make stem cells will be able to give it a whirl.”

Rob Carlson

The cells in an embryo can give rise to any kind of tissue in the adult body. But once they commit to being muscle cells, neurons or some other type of cell, there’s usually no going back. A huge amount of research has gone into finding a way to induce adult cells to turn back into so-called pluripotent stem cells. Someday it might be possible to use them to grow back damaged organs from a person’s own cells.

In September, Derrick J. Rossi and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School created artificial versions of RNA molecules, the templates that cells use to build proteins. They bathed human cells in a cocktail of five kinds of RNA molecules. The cells took in the RNA and made proteins that reprogrammed them into pluripotent stem cells.

Rossi’s method has a drawback as well, however: he and his colleagues used a type of cell called a fibroblast. To gather these cells, they have to do an invasive biopsy and then culture the cells to get enough fibroblasts for their experiment.

This July, Dr. George Q. Daley of Harvard Medical School and his colleagues had success using a different route: they drew blood from healthy human donors and genetically reprogrammed the cells to become pluripotent stem cells. Next year, Dr. Carlson predicts, scientists will combine these methods: they will draw a little blood, place it in a cocktail of RNA and — voilá! — stem cells. This advance would make producing stem cells cheap, fast and relatively easy. In fact, it may even be possible for dedicated amateurs to set up stem cell labs in their own garage.

Dr. Carlson is also the author of “Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life."

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Strogatz">

Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

Mathematics

“We’re going to see scientific results that are correct, that are predictive, but are without explanation. We may be able to do science without insight, and we may have to learn to live without it. Science will still progress, but computers will tell us things that are true, and we won’t understand them.”

Steven Strogatz

Computers have been taking over more and more of the things humans used to do, including getting driving directions and operating subway trains. They’ve even started making serious inroads into the heart of science. Rather than just churning out simulations or pretty pie charts, computers can do what scientists have traditionally done: find mathematical equations that explain complicated data. Eureqa, for example, is an “automated scientist” created by a Cornell engineer, Hod Lipson, and his students. In 2009, they reported that simply by observing a pendulum, Eureqa can rediscover some of Newton’s laws of physics.

In 2011, automated scientists are poised to make major contributions to science. Dr. Lipson and his students are looking for hidden patterns in the networks of proteins that break down food in cells, for example, and they’ve set up a Web site where people can download Eureqa free of charge and discover laws of nature for themselves.

Automated scientists may speed up the pace of discovery, but in the process they may change the nature of science itself. For centuries, scientists have solved problems with flashes of insight. But while the equations that automated scientists offer are very good at making predictions, they are often inscrutable to human scientists. We may have to program computers to explain their discoveries to us. Otherwise they will become more like oracles than scientists, handing down mysterious utterances to us mere mortals.

Dr. Strogatz is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University.

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Yeah, I would love to be surrounded by such inspiration and energy. Oh well. Back to the drawing board. I have some educating work to do here.

Moving along with the Sustainable mindset

While the system shown on the left was not drawn by me, it is very reminiscent of a drawing, now lost unfortunately, of the first lecture I ever gave. Ask Rod McKenzie at USC. He will remember (and he saved me on that first outing in front of a class. Thank you again Rod!) I have always thought in the circular pattern, but didn't have a term to describe how I thought. Only slowly, after many years of study, did I finally come to the conclusion that the way I thought naturally was as a systems thinker. Knowing that now, makes a lot of the difficult past easier for me to understand. I just never got the Band Aid way that I saw the world applying "answers" to their problems. but since working on my book I have had to work out the many problems that were mine, and those that were part of the paradigm I was never able to accept. Maybe my mother will finally begin to understand why I was such a difficult adolescent (and adult).

Sustainability and so much of what I have written about in this blog over the years has been about bringing us along to do things tangibly sustainable. Grow good food, drive smart cars or ride your bike!, conserve energy, but in my classes things have been changing. I wasn't even aware of it until a couple of years ago when I realized that everything I saw now was through the eyes of the sustainable mindset. All my classes were geared to looking at the world with humans as part of nature (not apart as my students have now realized) and that everything is connected. certainly my students, if nothing else, get a strong dose of the interconnectivity of it all. But if that is all they learn (and I think there is much more) it is the best thing they will EVER learn.

This all brings me back to why I ended up as a geographer (even though I was explicitly told I was not one, but a philosopher - which I am guilty of, but as a geographer). I was drawn to geography because in it I saw the ability to bridge the disciplines. Art, humanities, science are all a part of what makes geography my chosen world. And a regional geographer at that, something that is certainly not popular amongst the current stream of geography, but so be it. I am just an old-fashioned geographer, with a twist. As Nevin Fenneman said long ago (1919)

...the one thing that is first, last, and always geography and nothing else, is the study of areas in their compositeness or complexity, that is regional geography.

To me the perfect life is one where I gain the knowledge, experience, and background within all the regions (or bioregions, but that is another subject) we can know. By doing that we begin to know place and that tender feeling of "sense of place." We see the complex patina formed when humans work within the ecosystems and the physical world. When that happens it gets exciting and one can begin to see the fractal relations of one region to another, they patches that don't fit, but do, and the world does become as one.

All right, calm down now Chris. That's enough to get you feeding on that high that cannot be named.

Ypsilanti Score Card

Pre-Development vegetation for Ypsilanti, Michigan. Map is by Tali Kritzer, GIS student and
part of the Sustainable Cities class.


The semester is over and the Sustainable Cities class came through with creating an excellent first pass at a score card showing sustainable indicators for the city of Ypsilanti. It was a semester long project that involved everyone in the class finding sources and people that could help them create the scorecard.

The sustainable indicators for the city of Ypsilanti can be found at: http://www.emich.edu/public/geo/Ypsilantiindicators/indicatorsindex.html

Along the way we had two excellent speakers in our class who helped explain what their experiences have been and how to come up with indicators.
Richard Murphy: formerly the planner for Ypsilanti but now going on to be with the Michigan Suburbs Alliance.

Matthew Naud: Environmental Coordinator at the city of Ann Arbor

The Future is Here (Buses!?)

So, this weekend there was a conference called the Future of Urbanism at U of M. Geesh, I learned some interesting things but not all of them were at the conference.

Finally after way too long (I depend on my bike for local transportation most of the year) I took the AATA bus. I have never liked going to Ann Arbor because the parking situation is awful and so decided to bypass that by taking the bus. It took a while to figure out the routes and the stops (the map is quite small and does not show all the stops) and I can see how this might off put some people, but ultimately I prevailed and figured out the route (Route 5) and the time. During the week buses arrive about every 15 minutes, but over the weekend they are once an hour, which proved to be a problem, but more on that later.

The bus trip provided an opportunity to think about the relationship of EMU and buses. You see at U of M and WCC (Washtenaw Community College) they have bus passes for faculty and students. No so at EMU. It cost U of M about $1.9 million a third of which U of M is able to get the federal government to pay, but everyone there has free use of the bus! This seems like a tremendous advantage. On the 4 trips I took there were certainly some students on the bus, although I hardly saw any other professionals. Most everyone who was riding the bus were students, the elderly, or poor people who could not afford cars. But unlike a memorable trip in LA when I tried the bus (there was a local crazy aboard and someone who was throwing up, AND the half hour trip by car turned into 3 hours by bus) was clean, nothing disruptive and people were just fine. There is no reason not to use the bus, especially is you are going to parking space starved areas like Ann Arbor or EMU. Plus, the buses are hybrid that save over 100,000 gallons of gas, plus less pollutants in the air.

There are other things that make the bus trip difficult though. For example, the lack of sidewalks makes people walk in the street, or in the spring time mud, and very few of the bus stops have any shelter: Not good in a wet and cold climate like we have here much of the year. Fixing both these problems (for example Washtenaw Blvd. is the main drag and it has very few sidewalks. A person would have to be nuts to walk on the street or ride a bike.) would go a long way to making our area more sustainable transit wise.

I hear the Pres. Susan Martin may be interested in pursuing passes for EMU (or at the least discounts), which would be a great thing. It could certainly help our parking situation. I heard at one time we did have some access thru the Rynearson Lot near the stadium, but that was disbanded by Kirkpatrick sometime back in 2003 or 4. But today we have no passes. though The Ride is not expensive ($1.25 for most) it is still a lot for a student, and does not encourage you to take the bus, rather than spending time seeking a parking space if you arrive after 9 AM. Of course you could park in the North Lot, but it is pretty far and if you have to carry something in or walk during a bad winter day, or at night, well, it just isn't that great. Pretty far from the rest of campus. Most people want to park much closer, like the Oakwood lots. (Area circled in red are the north lots. Lower left hand lots are the Oakwood lots)

I came back on Saturday on the most traveled route, #5, along Washtenaw, which also has several other problems, but keeping the focus...during the weekend the number 4 route runs only every hour, and if you miss it you do what during the next hour? So I looked around on the routes and saw that Route 4 runs every half hour, still a lot to wait, but if I ran.......so I did and just caught the bus. Pretty good for me since I still can't figure my way around AA, mostly because I have avoided it for so long. It is a nice town (if I could afford it) but without parking and other things that EMU faculty sometime feel about the place.......(another time another story).

So what can be done? Fortunately there are a few others on campus who are willing to work on this problem and the solution of getting bus passes for our faculty and staff. I am one of those people but now more (Marti Bombyk, Ethan Lowenstein, and Steven Moore) are thinking similarly. Maybe there is hope.

Been a long time coming

Oh no! What's this? A happy girl?

Things are slowly but slowly changing at EMU. I haven't written in quite a while, I know, but I have been busy. the sustainability fever is growing at EMU and others are getting into it.

Last fall I wrote a proposal for a grant to help form a sustainability unit here and since that time I have been working on being a part of a group, which, since I have been here has not been easy. I have not fit in well in Michigan. Once again the prophetic words of my mentor ring out clearly: You can take the girl out of California, but....

So now, 10 years later Michigan is ready to move in the direction I was headed while still in grad school all so many years ago. But come to think of it, USC was also not ready to hear the kinds of things that were going through my (and many others) heads. I will never forget a professor there who told me when I started to talk about negative feedback: Chris, you have to stop being so negative.

I was negative probably way too much because she had no idea what I was talking about, even though there were scores of articles dealing with negative and positive feedback. I was interested in living in a steady state world, rather than the one I found myself in operating from crisis to crisis. Of course, I still live in that positive feedback world, the world where one small thin amplifies beyond control. It what happens when you work in a reductionist -fragmented way, the way we have all been taught, but which for some of us stuck in our craw.

So, now at EMU things are slowly changing. I have started another sustainable class (Sustainable Cities) and we are working with setting up some indicators for the city of Ypsilanti - something to measure how we are doing in being sustainable. Ann Arbor has indicators and we are using them amongst others to set up our own. It is a good way to study where our city is in relation to others, as well as to learn what are the elements of a sustainable city.

But beyond that movement, Liz Palmer has taken over the sustainable development class, and Tom Wagner is interested in teaching the sustainable cities class, and that may allow me to begin another class: this time on consumerism. Last October I was fortunate to be able to go to Vermont to learn about what is happening there in the way of sustainable education, and there I met Stephanie Kaza and she teaches a class called "unlearning consumerism" and that is where I want to go next. I am hoping that she and I will be able to continue our conversation and I will receive more inspiration from her on that subject.

But even more! has happened. My proposal for bringing other faculty into sustainability was granted and we had our first meeting last month. I have chosen to focus on three aspects of sustainability for each of our months:
1. local. What is happening in Michigan that we should be aware of.
2. more local. What is happening at EMU that we should be aware of.
3. bringing sustainability into the whole school. Where we can go next.

I have been fortunate to have speakers for each:
1. Janet Kaufmann spoke last month on how our dairies have changed in the past 10 years, especially in the Hudson area of south central Michigan. The dangers of factory farming has taken on its own horrors in our state. She has been talking and writing about it for years now. I was fortunate to meet her when I first arrived and kept contact. She stimulated a lot of conversation.
2. Steven Moore has been in our physical plant at EMU for a few years now and has been working to find more efficient means of using energy at EMU. He will be discussing the headway he has made. That will be this Friday in the library at 2PM.
3. Terry Link will be talking about what a sustainability director does. I met him now 3 years ago when he had this job at MSU. He has since left but has kept the way of thinking and kept in contact. He will add a lot of information to what we can do and how we can grow sustainably at EMU. April 9.

The faculty group I have been working with are still people that I still do not know well, but it is obvious that they are all committed to learning more about what sustainability is and how to incorporate it into their classes, and so it has forced me to go deeper into what I have learned and how I operate. I am fortunate to have this opportunity and look forward to learning from them as I teach.

It is a good case of negative feedback to make me work without going off because it moves so slow and I want to move faster. All this forces me to fill in blanks that I may have overlooked in my path toward the sustainable. but it is also positive feedback, that initial break with the continuum that changes everything. See I can be positive!