Great lakes follow up

The Toronto Star writes up an argument for paying the real price of water. The idea is that water pollution is an externality to the economic pricing of goods and services. If we raise the price of using water to better reflect the cost of using it, the theory is that the quality (and quantity?) of water will improve.

The story is adapted from the soon to be published book, “Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America” by Chris Wood. I’ve not read the book yet so I can’t comment on it but when a journalist writes stuff like this, “… the greatest threat to the Lakes, however, comes from the insidious amplification of evapotranspiration (ET)” I get mildly annoyed. Evapotranspiration is one of the advanced topics of thermodynamics and part of an engineering hydrology course. It isn’t insidious in any way but fundamental to the hydrologic cycle. Without evapotranspiration, we’re screwed. So when a journalist describes fundamental science phenomena using language that inflames the reader’s unease, it isn’t serving anyone’s interest. There is a key word in there and that is amplification. Evapotranspiration is one of those things that is pretty tricky to measure accurately. It can also vary significantly within short distances and depends on a great many variables. So extrapolating from single measurements is very inexact. What we do know is that evapotranspirtation is proportional to degree days (to non corn growers out there, a degree day is a measure of heat for growing crops. Hmm wikipedia has a more general and better description than that). So as warmer temperatures are anticipated so too could evapotranspiration. However, as I said this is a not a simple process and we don’t know exactly how this will change.

Guess I’ll have to read the book to see where the argument goes.

A Brighter Shade of Green: Rebooting Environmentalism for the 21st Century

This is a longish piece by Ross Robertson that is a very interesting read. I like the idea of Bright Green vs. Dark Green.

Here is a small sample to whet your appetite.

That future will also be significantly more urban. “Manhattanites use fewer resources and less energy than anyone else in America,” writes Steffen—even people living in super-efficient green homes in the country. In fact, urban density is not only one of the best drivers of sustainable consumption but one of the best strategies for preserving wild nature as well. Rejecting the lavish inefficiency of the suburbs and learning how to integrate densely orchestrated urban communities with agricultural greenspace and healthy natural habitats will be essential to building a one-planet society. “The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities,” wrote Stewart Brand in MIT’s Technology Review:

My mind got changed on the subject a few years ago by an Indian acquaintance who told me that in Indian villages the women obeyed their husbands and family elders, pounded grain, and sang. But, the acquaintance explained, when Indian women immigrated to cities, they got jobs, started businesses, and demanded their children be educated. They became more independent, as they became less fundamentalist in their religious beliefs. Urbanization is the most massive and sudden shift of humanity in its history. Environmentalists will be rewarded if they welcome it and get out in front of it.

Everywhere that we see the rural-to-urban demographic swing around the world, Brand ex-plains—about two hundred thousand people a day leave the countryside for life in the city, and the planet just passed the fifty percent urban point this year—birthrates plummet and population growth stabilizes. That’s good news for developing nations being crushed under economic, environmental, and social pressures never before seen on Earth, because hand in hand with the challenges of urbanization comes an unprecedented explosion of opportunity.

The academic library and the future

“if libraries had shareholders, would they, like newspapers, be in the midst of a gut-wrenching, brake-screeching exercise in redefinition?”
Full story here. I like libraries but I’ve not been in an academic library in years. This info puts into question what role these libraries will serve in the community in the future.

I should draw a differentiation between the fact that I like libraries and I don’t like newspapers (should preface that by saying modern newspapers). Libraries are a collection of information that exist in a sort passive relationship with their patrons. You must search out and discover your interests in the collection. You, the reader, get primary and direct access to information and where a reference is listed, you may follow that reference further.

Newspapers, in contrast, solely exist to parse information for a readership profile. Newspapers apply a value filter that I dislike and distrust. Newspapers, in the modern age, seldom if ever connect me to direct sources and rarely pass references to follow further. Television news is by and large even worse.

This is not to say that I don’t read newspapers, occasionally I do and I do watch TV news but I pay for neither. My expectation is not that I shall be informed but that I will be entertained. With any newspaper, I always head first to the comics section and occasionally that is as far as I get.

So the quote I’ve put above is more in reference to another of society’s institutions that is being impacted by the Net than a comparison of like institutions.

Lastly, I can recall a story told by my father, who described a man that became jobless in the dirty thirties. He unlike his peers did not stand in long lines only to discover that there was no work. He went to the library day after day and read as much material as he could. He did this in the face of considerable criticism and ridicule. The result was that he was able to find work with a newspaper while his contemporaries were still seeking lines to stand in with the hope of discovering work. He went on to a distinguished career in the newspaper business. The library was the catalyst for this success. The point being that if he had read a newspaper every day instead of going to the library would the result be the same? Not likely and therein lies an important distinction.

Don’t judge each day
     by the harvest you reap,
     but by the seeds you plant. 
          Robert Louis Stevenson

Book Review: China Inc. by Ted Fishman

You’ve heard all the stats about China and this book has plenty of them. The first part of this book gives the reader some ideas about China and the trends occuring there. My take away from this portion of the book was that China faces some very challenging internal pressures. My original impression from going to China in 1999 was that government corruption was the largest single social problem the country faced but this book provides the evidence to challenge that presumption.
Read the whole review.