Thursday, July 8, 2010
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Failure- Adaptation or Resistance?
Failure-
Adaptation
or
Resistance? (1)
by tyler caruso
"My awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it,
lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever
directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before
I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought
near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always
preceded by a zone of evaporation "( Proust “Swann’s Way”).
Architecture as a discipline is struggling to understand its own accountability in relation to society, and how to communicate itself beyond its immediate practical relevance. Furthermore Architecture is far from an auspicious moment, how can it proceed when the world has entered into the consciousness that the best thing we as a society can do is not build. What then is its new role or function? I believe Architecture must, without digressing into rhetoric or crouching into a defensive stance move the role of the built environment beyond the object and open up a critical dialogue of social space. A space should enable its occupants to draw connections from a matrix of ideas and structures- moving simultaneously between the lived experience of embodiment and the theoretical lens of observation. The visionaries of this new arena will not accept but embrace the state of perpetual flux. We have seen the transformation of everyday spaces in Margaret Crawford’s work and the dynamic role the public has on space but as time progresses we will experience an unstable physical form from the earth itself, as we enter into the climate crisis.
While most would agree that language is at times unwieldy- even volatile in certain situations one cannot be content to leave the nature of the built form off limits- carving words into effable stars or punctuations of our very existence. In Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy, Braidotti explains, “The body, far from being an essentialist notion, is situated at the intersection of the biological and the symbolic; as such it marks a metaphysical surface of integrated material and symbolic elements that defy separation.” If we entertain this, what then is the body of architecture? I postulate that Architecture takes this theory a step further and attempts to delineate between the self and the society. The built form must see beyond its state of conception and feature a flexibility that moves away from its material form, creating many different social realms where the individual can participate in the space- where the user has the ability to experience a unique embodiment of that space without the observer trying to define in a homogenous manner the nature of his/her experience (2). We always need to be cognoscente of the material nature of the signifier itself (the built form in this instance), for materiality and signification (the built form and society) are indissoluble (3). It is through the navigation of these realms and the attraction to certain elements and distancing from others that we begin to amass ‘self-knowledge’ and mould the concept of a persisting self – our own ontological nature, identity conditions and character. Sartre posited that,
“Man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterwards will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust towards existence. Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself” (Sartre “Existentialism and Human Emotions”).
What if there is no reasoned existence- what if a critical reading is the only truth we have- in which the reader wrestles from the text- the ever changing failure to communicate. Post Structuralist or Post- Saussurean(4) readings of text denote that “…common sense is itself ideologically and discursively constructed, rooted in a specific historical situation, and operating in conjunction with a particular social formation” (5). ‘Obvious’ and ‘natural’ are produced in a specific society by the way that very society talks about and frames the way it conceives itself.
Common sense theory is analogous to how the world has grown into a grotesques mass functioning on the assumption of infinite limitless resources. I attribute this to a failure of being able to articulate time- we have the same language for years that can be experienced within a life and those that will exceed many lifetimes- we cannot know time that extends beyond the expanse of a single life; it is intangible to us. Empiricism thereby evades confrontation with our demise and the realization of the planet’s limits. We refuse the precautionary principle because human existence has metastasized to an endless formation of wants, powered by the verb of consumerism and the myth of immortality in our language. We cannot carry ourselves as immune the very language we use. Belsey’s reveals that, “…. language is not merely the medium in which autonomous individuals transmits messages to each other about an independently constitutes world of things. On the contrary, it is language which offers the possibility of constructing a world of distinct individuals and things, and of differentiating between them”.
The failure of language to bring people together then rests a heavy burden on our spaces- Barthe relates this feeling, “Sometimes I would mention this amazement buts since no one seemed to share it, nor even understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it”(6). My own “ontological desire” is a struggle to understand the failure of language and how that helps to create or restrict social spaces. What is architecture? What are its boundaries? What if architecture is not meant to be more than anything then a “come here”, a ‘meeting’, an interruption of the ‘void’- we are choosing by building this moment- this interruption or fatality. Architecture diverges from other forms of art becomes while the roles of ‘operator’ and ‘spectator’ remain, the ‘referent’ however is transformed into not only an object but a cultural meeting point where the interaction both occurs and is instigated (7). Nicolas Borruidaud argued a similar task for art in the 90s in Relational Aesthics- however I feel that his emotional excitement about the creation of new daily social micro utopias falls sort of action into a sort of acceptance, failing to take the challenge out of the gallery space.
Similar to Crawford’s critique of Davis I agree with Bourriaud’s ‘symptoms’ or description of relational aesthetics but I believe without consent he has pinned the banner of ‘avante garde’ inappropriately on a artists who are not able to take up that mantle. He defined relational art as 'a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space' where art works are intended to provoke and produce inter-human relations. These ideas are rooted to the SI's constructed situations, which are a response to 60s/70s oil crisis, class discord and national terrorism.
In a critique of Bourriaud the Radical Culture Research Collective (RCRC) dissect his positioning relational art as the heir to the 20th century avant-gardes. They feel that,
“The avant-garde legacy becomes at stake with Bourriaud’s claim about the historical importance of relational art as the new cutting edge of politicized cultural practice… The old avant-gardes, Bourriaud tells us, were oriented toward conflict and social struggle; relieved of this dogmatic radical antagonism and macro-focus on the global system, relational-alleviation art “is concerned with negotiations, bonds, and co-existences.” (Bourriaud 45) The new relational avant-gardistes “are not naïve or cynical enough ‘to go about things as if’ the radical and universalist utopia were still on the agenda” (Bourriaud 70). We would put it differently. Precisely formulated, relational aesthetics represents the liberalization of the avant-garde project of radical transformation. In 1998, Bourriaud saw this as a virtue. Today, we see it as the main limitation of relational art – and one that negates any claim it makes to the legacy of the avant-gardes. While we would defend relational art from its conservative and reactionary critics, we would also insist that it not come to stand in for the radical project it falls short of – and indeed refuses”.
New architecture has the potential to be our avante garde- in its response to globalization the grandchild of post-modernism the built form needs to champion its own position- and it is one that both accepts and then moves beyond, to engage failure, in the flexible nature of the space- to create a ‘third space’ (8).
NOTES:
1- Taken from Stuart Hall
2- Jacques Rancière throughout his work he has taken issue with the way that intellectuals have theorized the proletariat. While I agree with Davis that democratic space in America is less I cannot readily sign off that we are in a time of decline from other more emollient times. Writer’s often don the romantic lens of nostalgia and take up the labored view of depicting the proliteratriate as a single mass waiting for their own liberation. In Crawford’s criticism of Mike Davis she concurs that the ‘symptoms’ are valid but she points out that, “ …the perception of loss originates in the extremely narrow definitions of both ‘public’ and ‘space that derives from the insistence on unity, desire for fixed categories of time and space, and rigidly conceived notions of private and public”. Her theoretical framework comes from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay, “Can the subaltern Speak?”, where she warns of the potential of “epistemic violence” to cause just as much harm to a subjugated class as the original colonizers did. Everyone must work to refuse the use of a collective voice that assumes a ‘homogenous’ voice can be lent to the ‘others’.
3-Understood from Judith Butler’s “Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex”.
4-Crawford is engaging in the architectural equivalent to literature’s Post- Saussurean critical theory in her breakdown of the social landscape into which, “cultures consolidate and separate” taking the time to identify the differences that exist between saying Latino and being Mexican as oppose to Cuban.
5- “Critical Practice”
6- Barthes, Roland "Camera Lucida"
7- Brthes, Roland "Camera Lucida"
8- Taken from Margaret Crawford’s adoption of Edward Soja who followed Henri Lefebvre- “a category that is neither material space that experience nor a representation of space- it becomes a space of representation, a space bearing the possibility of new meaning, a space activated through social action and the social imagination”.
Adaptation
or
Resistance? (1)
by tyler caruso
"My awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it,
lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever
directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before
I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought
near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always
preceded by a zone of evaporation "( Proust “Swann’s Way”).
Architecture as a discipline is struggling to understand its own accountability in relation to society, and how to communicate itself beyond its immediate practical relevance. Furthermore Architecture is far from an auspicious moment, how can it proceed when the world has entered into the consciousness that the best thing we as a society can do is not build. What then is its new role or function? I believe Architecture must, without digressing into rhetoric or crouching into a defensive stance move the role of the built environment beyond the object and open up a critical dialogue of social space. A space should enable its occupants to draw connections from a matrix of ideas and structures- moving simultaneously between the lived experience of embodiment and the theoretical lens of observation. The visionaries of this new arena will not accept but embrace the state of perpetual flux. We have seen the transformation of everyday spaces in Margaret Crawford’s work and the dynamic role the public has on space but as time progresses we will experience an unstable physical form from the earth itself, as we enter into the climate crisis.
While most would agree that language is at times unwieldy- even volatile in certain situations one cannot be content to leave the nature of the built form off limits- carving words into effable stars or punctuations of our very existence. In Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy, Braidotti explains, “The body, far from being an essentialist notion, is situated at the intersection of the biological and the symbolic; as such it marks a metaphysical surface of integrated material and symbolic elements that defy separation.” If we entertain this, what then is the body of architecture? I postulate that Architecture takes this theory a step further and attempts to delineate between the self and the society. The built form must see beyond its state of conception and feature a flexibility that moves away from its material form, creating many different social realms where the individual can participate in the space- where the user has the ability to experience a unique embodiment of that space without the observer trying to define in a homogenous manner the nature of his/her experience (2). We always need to be cognoscente of the material nature of the signifier itself (the built form in this instance), for materiality and signification (the built form and society) are indissoluble (3). It is through the navigation of these realms and the attraction to certain elements and distancing from others that we begin to amass ‘self-knowledge’ and mould the concept of a persisting self – our own ontological nature, identity conditions and character. Sartre posited that,
“Man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterwards will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust towards existence. Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself” (Sartre “Existentialism and Human Emotions”).
What if there is no reasoned existence- what if a critical reading is the only truth we have- in which the reader wrestles from the text- the ever changing failure to communicate. Post Structuralist or Post- Saussurean(4) readings of text denote that “…common sense is itself ideologically and discursively constructed, rooted in a specific historical situation, and operating in conjunction with a particular social formation” (5). ‘Obvious’ and ‘natural’ are produced in a specific society by the way that very society talks about and frames the way it conceives itself.
Common sense theory is analogous to how the world has grown into a grotesques mass functioning on the assumption of infinite limitless resources. I attribute this to a failure of being able to articulate time- we have the same language for years that can be experienced within a life and those that will exceed many lifetimes- we cannot know time that extends beyond the expanse of a single life; it is intangible to us. Empiricism thereby evades confrontation with our demise and the realization of the planet’s limits. We refuse the precautionary principle because human existence has metastasized to an endless formation of wants, powered by the verb of consumerism and the myth of immortality in our language. We cannot carry ourselves as immune the very language we use. Belsey’s reveals that, “…. language is not merely the medium in which autonomous individuals transmits messages to each other about an independently constitutes world of things. On the contrary, it is language which offers the possibility of constructing a world of distinct individuals and things, and of differentiating between them”.
The failure of language to bring people together then rests a heavy burden on our spaces- Barthe relates this feeling, “Sometimes I would mention this amazement buts since no one seemed to share it, nor even understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it”(6). My own “ontological desire” is a struggle to understand the failure of language and how that helps to create or restrict social spaces. What is architecture? What are its boundaries? What if architecture is not meant to be more than anything then a “come here”, a ‘meeting’, an interruption of the ‘void’- we are choosing by building this moment- this interruption or fatality. Architecture diverges from other forms of art becomes while the roles of ‘operator’ and ‘spectator’ remain, the ‘referent’ however is transformed into not only an object but a cultural meeting point where the interaction both occurs and is instigated (7). Nicolas Borruidaud argued a similar task for art in the 90s in Relational Aesthics- however I feel that his emotional excitement about the creation of new daily social micro utopias falls sort of action into a sort of acceptance, failing to take the challenge out of the gallery space.
Similar to Crawford’s critique of Davis I agree with Bourriaud’s ‘symptoms’ or description of relational aesthetics but I believe without consent he has pinned the banner of ‘avante garde’ inappropriately on a artists who are not able to take up that mantle. He defined relational art as 'a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space' where art works are intended to provoke and produce inter-human relations. These ideas are rooted to the SI's constructed situations, which are a response to 60s/70s oil crisis, class discord and national terrorism.
In a critique of Bourriaud the Radical Culture Research Collective (RCRC) dissect his positioning relational art as the heir to the 20th century avant-gardes. They feel that,
“The avant-garde legacy becomes at stake with Bourriaud’s claim about the historical importance of relational art as the new cutting edge of politicized cultural practice… The old avant-gardes, Bourriaud tells us, were oriented toward conflict and social struggle; relieved of this dogmatic radical antagonism and macro-focus on the global system, relational-alleviation art “is concerned with negotiations, bonds, and co-existences.” (Bourriaud 45) The new relational avant-gardistes “are not naïve or cynical enough ‘to go about things as if’ the radical and universalist utopia were still on the agenda” (Bourriaud 70). We would put it differently. Precisely formulated, relational aesthetics represents the liberalization of the avant-garde project of radical transformation. In 1998, Bourriaud saw this as a virtue. Today, we see it as the main limitation of relational art – and one that negates any claim it makes to the legacy of the avant-gardes. While we would defend relational art from its conservative and reactionary critics, we would also insist that it not come to stand in for the radical project it falls short of – and indeed refuses”.
New architecture has the potential to be our avante garde- in its response to globalization the grandchild of post-modernism the built form needs to champion its own position- and it is one that both accepts and then moves beyond, to engage failure, in the flexible nature of the space- to create a ‘third space’ (8).
NOTES:
1- Taken from Stuart Hall
2- Jacques Rancière throughout his work he has taken issue with the way that intellectuals have theorized the proletariat. While I agree with Davis that democratic space in America is less I cannot readily sign off that we are in a time of decline from other more emollient times. Writer’s often don the romantic lens of nostalgia and take up the labored view of depicting the proliteratriate as a single mass waiting for their own liberation. In Crawford’s criticism of Mike Davis she concurs that the ‘symptoms’ are valid but she points out that, “ …the perception of loss originates in the extremely narrow definitions of both ‘public’ and ‘space that derives from the insistence on unity, desire for fixed categories of time and space, and rigidly conceived notions of private and public”. Her theoretical framework comes from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay, “Can the subaltern Speak?”, where she warns of the potential of “epistemic violence” to cause just as much harm to a subjugated class as the original colonizers did. Everyone must work to refuse the use of a collective voice that assumes a ‘homogenous’ voice can be lent to the ‘others’.
3-Understood from Judith Butler’s “Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex”.
4-Crawford is engaging in the architectural equivalent to literature’s Post- Saussurean critical theory in her breakdown of the social landscape into which, “cultures consolidate and separate” taking the time to identify the differences that exist between saying Latino and being Mexican as oppose to Cuban.
5- “Critical Practice”
6- Barthes, Roland "Camera Lucida"
7- Brthes, Roland "Camera Lucida"
8- Taken from Margaret Crawford’s adoption of Edward Soja who followed Henri Lefebvre- “a category that is neither material space that experience nor a representation of space- it becomes a space of representation, a space bearing the possibility of new meaning, a space activated through social action and the social imagination”.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Op-Ed Published in the RiverReporter-
See my Op-Ed about gas drilling in the River Reporter Newspaper:
http://www.riverreporter.com/issues/10-03-11/ed1-caruso.html
http://www.riverreporter.com/issues/10-03-11/ed1-caruso.html
Monday, March 1, 2010
My (belated) new years letter
So...
I know it's nearing the end of February and that I am about 1.5 months passed the acceptable 'Happy new year/best wishes' threshold for emailing- but i this weekend I watched the DVD "No Impact Man" and despite myself, the long winter, lack of sunlight, and the sight of dirty melting snow- I feel inspired.
However I would be remis if I didn't say that the current state of the world imposes a sort of emotional bi-polar state in regards to my general level of life hope- oscillating between inspired hope and a feeling of being on a sinking ship on the deck just before the panic sets in and everyone else realizes it’s sinking. Today I woke up to read more stories on the disaster in Chile, the on-going chaos in Haiti and now the Ny times article- “Rulings Restrict Clean Water Act, Foiling E.P.A.”.
Seriously?!
“As a result, some businesses are declaring that the law no longer applies to them. And pollution rates are rising…..The Clean Water Act was intended to end dangerous water pollution by regulating every major polluter. But today, regulators may be unable to prosecute as many as half of the nation’s largest known polluters because officials lack jurisdiction or because proving jurisdiction would be overwhelmingly difficult or time consuming, according to midlevel officials.”
At Pratt I have spent the last year or so, slowly and at times painfully becoming aware of how the things I do (no matter how mundane they appear) effect the world at large. However I know that by expressing that sentiment/revelation, I am simultaneously aware that regardless of my intention, I run the risk of sounding preachy (which no one likes) and also striking a nerve inducing defensiveness from most of the people in my life. This paradox has left me very self-conscious and sort of quiet (for me!)- about all the things I am learning and the way it has been reconfiguring my life. And I think to some extent it has started to make me feel further from the rest of my life- and no one likes living a duality especially one that is self-imposed.
The things that have become really apparent to me- are the ways in which we all and those before us- have allowed society to develop/ grow in an unsustainable manner- we run the Earth in a way that i am sure would make a good business man cringe- everyone, even someone who is as wildly adept as myself with money knows that. We live in such a way that we trash/use up the very thing that is sustaining us- and I believe/hope if you get people in a honest moment that most would agree to some extent with what I am saying. I am also aware the minute any sort of 'environmental' 'earth' ramble is voiced it becomes immediately out of fashion and the image of me typing at a library computer terminal in a pair of flowey linen cargo pants with a t-shirt that may or may not reference the whales-while droning on and on about the polar bears jumps to mind- However, 1) I’d never don such and outfit 2) I really don’t understand the dichotomy between having a successful creative modern world and living in a way that doesn’t pollute the earth. Being fully aware of what choices we are making and what that really means for the Earth at large doesn't have to boil down to a life with individuality, character, fun, convenience or art. It just means not being afraid to be fully informed about the total life cycle of the products we use are (even down to what type of energy we use and how it is produced). As I near 30 I am realizing that 1) I am an adult and fully responsible to make my life what I want it to be and 2) everything I do will impact the next generation (the ones I/my peers would raise) and 3) how being an 'environmentalist' really to me is about health- of myself, the people I love, the next generations, and last but not least the place we all live.
When I went upstate to see the Mayor of Dish, TX talk about how natural gas drilling has just decimated his tiny town of 2 sq miles (http://baddish.blogspot.com/) - and at the end of his talk- this person who I would have wrongly judged to have nothing in common with- this straight shooter ex-military man with a crew cut- looked out into the audience and simply said- 'Now you know, and you can't not know'. Which is exactly the sentiment I am trying to express, after spending a year actively making all the pieces of my life connect to the big picture- now that I know that all our trash is either buried or burned or shipped over seas I can't not know- which makes me need to know where does it go once it leaves my street in Brooklyn. Now that i know about natural gas, coal and oil- I can't not know- how can we find renewable sources of energy. A few years ago I had NO idea why I had to shut of the lights - I thought it was just to save money; I had no idea how electricity was produced.
The thing that really gets me is that all these 'things' that at first make it hard to imagine a life without, they seem so essential but i saw this girl carrying this tote bag that said- 'less oil more courage' and it really struck me that we can do this better. We have more power and imagination and that this defeatist attitude of ‘this is how it's been and this is how it will be’- it’s holding us back and I wouldn’t accept that type of attitude in any other part of my life so why would I accept it for the entire world? I also now understand that some of the things I am afraid to lose have also contributed to making me farther from the people in my life and more separated from the community that I really desire. We can’t go backwards- even if it seems easier- we’ll pay for it later- ‘“We are, in essence, shutting down our Clean Water programs in some states,” said Douglas F. Mundrick, an E.P.A. lawyer in Atlanta. “This is a huge step backward. When companies figure out the cops can’t operate, they start remembering how much cheaper it is to just dump stuff in a nearby creek’ (NYT)”.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/us/01water.html
Wishing you well in the new year
I attached an article that I think is really amazing by Mike Davis and below are some resources I wanted to pass on.
Films:
Blue Gold: World Water Wars
Flow
No Impact Man
Food Inc
Tapped
King Corn
Books-
Gone tomorrow - http://www.gonetomorrow.org/
Hot Flat and Crowded- http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/bookshelf/hot-flat-and-crowded
Natural Capitalism- http://www.natcap.org/sitepages/pid5.php
Cradle to Cradle- http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm
Websites/Watch/Interactive
http://www.storyofstuff.com/
http://www.gasland.us/wp/
http://www.habitatmap.org
News:
http://projects.nytimes.com/toxic-waters
http://www.treehugger.com/
Organizations
http://www.rmi.org/
http://www.aldoleopold.org
http://www.ssbx.org/
Natural Gas Drilling Info:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/press_releases/09-15pr.shtml
http://www.riverkeeper.org/
http://www.damascuscitizens.org/
http://nyh2o.org/#main/home
http://www.catskillcitizens.org/
http://catskillmountainkeeper.org/
I know it's nearing the end of February and that I am about 1.5 months passed the acceptable 'Happy new year/best wishes' threshold for emailing- but i this weekend I watched the DVD "No Impact Man" and despite myself, the long winter, lack of sunlight, and the sight of dirty melting snow- I feel inspired.
However I would be remis if I didn't say that the current state of the world imposes a sort of emotional bi-polar state in regards to my general level of life hope- oscillating between inspired hope and a feeling of being on a sinking ship on the deck just before the panic sets in and everyone else realizes it’s sinking. Today I woke up to read more stories on the disaster in Chile, the on-going chaos in Haiti and now the Ny times article- “Rulings Restrict Clean Water Act, Foiling E.P.A.”.
Seriously?!
“As a result, some businesses are declaring that the law no longer applies to them. And pollution rates are rising…..The Clean Water Act was intended to end dangerous water pollution by regulating every major polluter. But today, regulators may be unable to prosecute as many as half of the nation’s largest known polluters because officials lack jurisdiction or because proving jurisdiction would be overwhelmingly difficult or time consuming, according to midlevel officials.”
At Pratt I have spent the last year or so, slowly and at times painfully becoming aware of how the things I do (no matter how mundane they appear) effect the world at large. However I know that by expressing that sentiment/revelation, I am simultaneously aware that regardless of my intention, I run the risk of sounding preachy (which no one likes) and also striking a nerve inducing defensiveness from most of the people in my life. This paradox has left me very self-conscious and sort of quiet (for me!)- about all the things I am learning and the way it has been reconfiguring my life. And I think to some extent it has started to make me feel further from the rest of my life- and no one likes living a duality especially one that is self-imposed.
The things that have become really apparent to me- are the ways in which we all and those before us- have allowed society to develop/ grow in an unsustainable manner- we run the Earth in a way that i am sure would make a good business man cringe- everyone, even someone who is as wildly adept as myself with money knows that. We live in such a way that we trash/use up the very thing that is sustaining us- and I believe/hope if you get people in a honest moment that most would agree to some extent with what I am saying. I am also aware the minute any sort of 'environmental' 'earth' ramble is voiced it becomes immediately out of fashion and the image of me typing at a library computer terminal in a pair of flowey linen cargo pants with a t-shirt that may or may not reference the whales-while droning on and on about the polar bears jumps to mind- However, 1) I’d never don such and outfit 2) I really don’t understand the dichotomy between having a successful creative modern world and living in a way that doesn’t pollute the earth. Being fully aware of what choices we are making and what that really means for the Earth at large doesn't have to boil down to a life with individuality, character, fun, convenience or art. It just means not being afraid to be fully informed about the total life cycle of the products we use are (even down to what type of energy we use and how it is produced). As I near 30 I am realizing that 1) I am an adult and fully responsible to make my life what I want it to be and 2) everything I do will impact the next generation (the ones I/my peers would raise) and 3) how being an 'environmentalist' really to me is about health- of myself, the people I love, the next generations, and last but not least the place we all live.
When I went upstate to see the Mayor of Dish, TX talk about how natural gas drilling has just decimated his tiny town of 2 sq miles (http://baddish.blogspot.com/) - and at the end of his talk- this person who I would have wrongly judged to have nothing in common with- this straight shooter ex-military man with a crew cut- looked out into the audience and simply said- 'Now you know, and you can't not know'. Which is exactly the sentiment I am trying to express, after spending a year actively making all the pieces of my life connect to the big picture- now that I know that all our trash is either buried or burned or shipped over seas I can't not know- which makes me need to know where does it go once it leaves my street in Brooklyn. Now that i know about natural gas, coal and oil- I can't not know- how can we find renewable sources of energy. A few years ago I had NO idea why I had to shut of the lights - I thought it was just to save money; I had no idea how electricity was produced.
The thing that really gets me is that all these 'things' that at first make it hard to imagine a life without, they seem so essential but i saw this girl carrying this tote bag that said- 'less oil more courage' and it really struck me that we can do this better. We have more power and imagination and that this defeatist attitude of ‘this is how it's been and this is how it will be’- it’s holding us back and I wouldn’t accept that type of attitude in any other part of my life so why would I accept it for the entire world? I also now understand that some of the things I am afraid to lose have also contributed to making me farther from the people in my life and more separated from the community that I really desire. We can’t go backwards- even if it seems easier- we’ll pay for it later- ‘“We are, in essence, shutting down our Clean Water programs in some states,” said Douglas F. Mundrick, an E.P.A. lawyer in Atlanta. “This is a huge step backward. When companies figure out the cops can’t operate, they start remembering how much cheaper it is to just dump stuff in a nearby creek’ (NYT)”.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/us/01water.html
Wishing you well in the new year
I attached an article that I think is really amazing by Mike Davis and below are some resources I wanted to pass on.
Films:
Blue Gold: World Water Wars
Flow
No Impact Man
Food Inc
Tapped
King Corn
Books-
Gone tomorrow - http://www.gonetomorrow.org/
Hot Flat and Crowded- http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/bookshelf/hot-flat-and-crowded
Natural Capitalism- http://www.natcap.org/sitepages/pid5.php
Cradle to Cradle- http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm
Websites/Watch/Interactive
http://www.storyofstuff.com/
http://www.gasland.us/wp/
http://www.habitatmap.org
News:
http://projects.nytimes.com/toxic-waters
http://www.treehugger.com/
Organizations
http://www.rmi.org/
http://www.aldoleopold.org
http://www.ssbx.org/
Natural Gas Drilling Info:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/press_releases/09-15pr.shtml
http://www.riverkeeper.org/
http://www.damascuscitizens.org/
http://nyh2o.org/#main/home
http://www.catskillcitizens.org/
http://catskillmountainkeeper.org/
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Sunday, February 14, 2010
My Op-Ed piece about Natural Gas drilling
Did Somebody Put Something in the Water in Albany?
By Tyler Caruso
As a Master’s student in an Environmental Policy and Sustainability program, I have worked hard to cling to a small reserve of hope for the future, even with all the mounting evidence that we have backed ourselves into somewhat of an environmental dooms day scenario. My hope was rooted in the belief that we as a country are moving (albeit slowly) towards a more sustainable future. However recent happenings in Albany have begun to erode away at that hope, as Governor Patterson continues to lend his support to Hydraulic fracturing ( natural gas drilling). The good news is that New York City at the close of 2009 officially registered its opposition to hydraulic fracturing in its watershed, which supplies drinking water to more than 9 million residents of NYC.
Currently New York City is one of only four cities in the country that the EPA allows drinking water to flow unfiltered. Hydraulic fracturing posses the threat of contaminating NYC’s water supply, which the Department of Environmental Protection has invested over $1.5 billion dollars in protecting. If drilling is permitted our water supply could be laced with a toxic brew of chemicals and once these chemicals find their way into a water supply, they are nearly impossible to filter out. Governor Patterson and the state legislation need to take pause and answer if natural gas drilling is really the way to move NYS towards its current goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050.
Natural Gas the new Clean and Clear Energy Alternative?
Natural gas companies have spread their claims far and wide that natural gas is the new “clean” and “clear” energy alternative to ‘older’ ‘dirtier’ fossil fuels like coal and oil. In a society as industrialized and developed as ours it’s easy to only think about products in their market-ready state, never weighing their extraction and production process as part of the big picture while evaluating their environmental impacts. These drilling operations are highly industrial in nature; with large numbers of diesel engines running 24/7 producing noise and large amounts of exhaust. Drilling has also been documented to have a very negative impact on air quality, with unacceptable ozone contribution, methane releases and extremely large amounts of green house gas emissions.
What exactly is HydroFracking?
Hydraulic Fracturing or Hydro-Fracking is the method of pumping large amounts of locally sourced fresh water, sand and a blend of proprietary chemicals, at high pressure into the ground vertically and horizontally. The pumping fractures the shale and releases the trapped natural gas, letting it ‘flow’ upwards through the well. The complete list of chemicals injected during hydo-fracking were not made publicly available in the draft SGEIS on the claim that such information constitutes proprietary trade secrets of the mining company.
In a paper by Lindsay Speers she reports,
In a statement from the NY Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) it is written that,
There have been many instances of drinking water contamination resulting from hydro-fracking that have been documented. A 2009 EPA study of drinking water in Pavilion, Wyoming documented contamination from hydro-fracking in at least 11 household wells. In Dimock, PA in 2008, a water well exploded from methane contamination from nearby hydro-fracking and many others have been rendered undrinkable and the list goes on and on.
The Gas Companies Promise- 100% safe
The drilling companies assure us that this process is totally safe- and they have somehow managed to convince Albany that all possibilities of human and mechanical error have been abated. We need to take a step backwards and consider the potential consequences we as New Yorker’s will bear if drilling is allowed and contamination ensues: We will have to: 1) Build a costly filtration plant, which according to the DEP would cost a minimum of $10 billion, 2) This new water treatment plant will need energy to filter our now polluted waters and we would then be in the ironic position of supplying this new plant with energy for it’s construction and maintenance (which theoretically could be supplied by the same gas we drilled for in the first place) and 3) Once all the natural gas has run out, which it will, we’ll be right back where we started and we will still have pay for the maintenance and upkeep this plant. I would like to ask the good folks up in Albany if they can really stand behind drilling, as moving the state’s energy policy in the right direction. Instead of investing further in the extraction of the remaining fossil fuels, our state, and nation should be developing energy policies which will move us to totally renewable sources, such as solar and wind and set a global example of what is possible. I urge everyone to contact Governor Patterson and demand a ban on gas drilling in NY State.
By Tyler Caruso
As a Master’s student in an Environmental Policy and Sustainability program, I have worked hard to cling to a small reserve of hope for the future, even with all the mounting evidence that we have backed ourselves into somewhat of an environmental dooms day scenario. My hope was rooted in the belief that we as a country are moving (albeit slowly) towards a more sustainable future. However recent happenings in Albany have begun to erode away at that hope, as Governor Patterson continues to lend his support to Hydraulic fracturing ( natural gas drilling). The good news is that New York City at the close of 2009 officially registered its opposition to hydraulic fracturing in its watershed, which supplies drinking water to more than 9 million residents of NYC.
Currently New York City is one of only four cities in the country that the EPA allows drinking water to flow unfiltered. Hydraulic fracturing posses the threat of contaminating NYC’s water supply, which the Department of Environmental Protection has invested over $1.5 billion dollars in protecting. If drilling is permitted our water supply could be laced with a toxic brew of chemicals and once these chemicals find their way into a water supply, they are nearly impossible to filter out. Governor Patterson and the state legislation need to take pause and answer if natural gas drilling is really the way to move NYS towards its current goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050.
Natural Gas the new Clean and Clear Energy Alternative?
Natural gas companies have spread their claims far and wide that natural gas is the new “clean” and “clear” energy alternative to ‘older’ ‘dirtier’ fossil fuels like coal and oil. In a society as industrialized and developed as ours it’s easy to only think about products in their market-ready state, never weighing their extraction and production process as part of the big picture while evaluating their environmental impacts. These drilling operations are highly industrial in nature; with large numbers of diesel engines running 24/7 producing noise and large amounts of exhaust. Drilling has also been documented to have a very negative impact on air quality, with unacceptable ozone contribution, methane releases and extremely large amounts of green house gas emissions.
What exactly is HydroFracking?
Hydraulic Fracturing or Hydro-Fracking is the method of pumping large amounts of locally sourced fresh water, sand and a blend of proprietary chemicals, at high pressure into the ground vertically and horizontally. The pumping fractures the shale and releases the trapped natural gas, letting it ‘flow’ upwards through the well. The complete list of chemicals injected during hydo-fracking were not made publicly available in the draft SGEIS on the claim that such information constitutes proprietary trade secrets of the mining company.
In a paper by Lindsay Speers she reports,
“The findings of scientists at ‘The Endocrine Disruption Exchange’ show that nearly all of those soluble chemicals are known skin, eye, and sensory organ irritants, and cause respiratory, gastrointestinal, and liver distress. Approximately 75% affect the brain, nervous system, and the cardiovascular system. Nearly half of them affect the kidneys, immune system, cause developmental difficulties, and have known ecological effects. And most importantly, a third of the chemicals are known carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, mutagens, and/or affect the reproductive system”.
In a statement from the NY Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) it is written that,
“…The chemicals used as part of the process are injected into the subsurface rock formations and can travel along underground fissures to ground water and ultimately streams that feed reservoirs…In addition, the resulting wastewater- potentially 1 billion gallons per year- can also contaminate water supplies. Currently there is no way to locally treat this wastewater” (DEP 12/12/09).
There have been many instances of drinking water contamination resulting from hydro-fracking that have been documented. A 2009 EPA study of drinking water in Pavilion, Wyoming documented contamination from hydro-fracking in at least 11 household wells. In Dimock, PA in 2008, a water well exploded from methane contamination from nearby hydro-fracking and many others have been rendered undrinkable and the list goes on and on.
The Gas Companies Promise- 100% safe
The drilling companies assure us that this process is totally safe- and they have somehow managed to convince Albany that all possibilities of human and mechanical error have been abated. We need to take a step backwards and consider the potential consequences we as New Yorker’s will bear if drilling is allowed and contamination ensues: We will have to: 1) Build a costly filtration plant, which according to the DEP would cost a minimum of $10 billion, 2) This new water treatment plant will need energy to filter our now polluted waters and we would then be in the ironic position of supplying this new plant with energy for it’s construction and maintenance (which theoretically could be supplied by the same gas we drilled for in the first place) and 3) Once all the natural gas has run out, which it will, we’ll be right back where we started and we will still have pay for the maintenance and upkeep this plant. I would like to ask the good folks up in Albany if they can really stand behind drilling, as moving the state’s energy policy in the right direction. Instead of investing further in the extraction of the remaining fossil fuels, our state, and nation should be developing energy policies which will move us to totally renewable sources, such as solar and wind and set a global example of what is possible. I urge everyone to contact Governor Patterson and demand a ban on gas drilling in NY State.
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