The Constant Gardener  

Joel Makower has a report on the GreenBuild 2006 conference up at WorldChanging.

Affordable housing groups increasingly are adopting green-building techniques, constructing quality houses that are cheaper to build, cheaper to live in, with fewer environmental impacts. Moreover, given that Habitat for Humanity, to name one such group, is among the top-20 largest builders in the U.S., this will help move the needle on environmental home building overall.

McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry announced the latest batch of Cradle-to-Cradle certifications, recognizing products that achieve "environmentally-intelligent design." According to the MBDC Web site:

This means using environmentally safe and healthy materials; design for material reutilization, such as recycling or composting; the use of renewable energy and energy efficiency; efficient use of water, and maximum water quality associated with production; and instituting strategies for social responsibility.

Among this year's newest C2C awardees is Steelcase, for its Answer workstation system, along with PolyVision, a Steelcase subsidiary, for its whiteboards made of "e3 environmental ceramicsteel," which contains no heavy metals, VOCs, or other toxic materials. Another C2C recipient is Icestone, a durable surface for countertops and floors made from 100% recycled glass.

And then there's the Vinyl Institute, which made a full-court-press this year to promote the "energy-saving, environmental and health benefits" of vinyl as a building product. The vinyl folks' efforts to make vinyl "green" is one of the more contentious issues in the green-building world. Many environmental activists opposed the use of vinyl products in LEED projects, noting that the production of PVC releases dioxin, a highly toxic persistent organic pollutant. The cult documentary (and 2002 Sundance Film Festival winner) Blue Vinyl focused on vinyl's environmental evils.

A few years ago, when the U.S. Green Building Council proposed to award LEED credits for buildings that eliminate the use of vinyl altogether, the industry went on the offensive -- not merely to kill the proposal but to make the case that vinyl has strong environmental attributes. The ensuing debate nearly brought down the USGBC but, in the end, the vinyl industry prevailed. A USGBC task force found that "the available evidence does not support a conclusion that PVC is consistently worse than alternative materials on a life cycle environmental and health basis."

Hardly a ringing endorsement, of course, but that hasn't stopped the vinyl industry from claiming greatness -- or, rather, greenness. A few snippits from its recent press releases:

Heightened interest in vinyl as a preferred material for "green" buildings was one of the most significant developments at the three-day GreenBuild International Conference & Expo in Denver, according to industry officials. . . .

"We were amazed at the traffic at our booth," said Vinyl Institute president Tim Burns. "More than ever before, architects, designers and builders came by to tell us of their increased interest in vinyl as a key factor in sustainability." . . .

Architects and designers are increasingly finding that vinyl's infinite flexibility, durability, and well-established, energy-saving qualities represent one of the most effective ways of meeting the evolving standards for green buildings, noted Vinyl Institute president Tim Burns.

And so it goes. The green-building industry is coming of age. And with that maturity comes growth, profitability -- and big, well-heeled players seeking to stake their claim. In doing so, they often find that there's enormous profit potential to be had by shaping the rules in their favor, never mind that doing so all but thwarts the environmental and social benefits intended in the first place.

We've seen it in organics. We're seeing it in green buildings. We'll soon, I predict, be seeing even more of it as companies seek to claim "climate neutral" status.

There's nothing wrong with big, well-heeled players coming in to these spaces, of course. We need their market clout and political standing to help make sustainability a standard operating procedure. But we need integrity, ethics, and responsibility. We need standards of excellence. And we need vigilance.

That's the lesson I learned at this year's Greenbuild, even from more than a thousand miles away.

Ted Rose also has some comments on the conference.

The grand-poobah of green builders, William McDonough, couldn’t contain his pride, bragging twice in one keynote about how his clients’ combined revenue totaled more than one trillion dollars. “We’re mainstream,” he announced.

The conference itself seemed fat and happy. Twelve thousand attendees shuttled from ballrooms to expo hall, a number that will be dwarfed next year by the twenty-five thousand expected in Los Angeles.

The reason for all the attention was as obvious and as it was sobering: The world’s carbon footprint is deepening and our building construction continues to fuel its expansion. The people in Denver had that very special worldchanging combination of qualities: a basic awareness of our precarious environmental situation and technical skills to transform it.

But it came obvious to me that the Denver cadre represented just one clique in a very large crowd. The number of licensed architects in the US dwarfs the number of GreenBuild attendees by a factor of eight.

EU Commissioner Jose Manuel Barroso has an article in The Guardian saying that Europe must accept the role of green pioneer in the world.

The facts are clear. We can all see the effects. Sir David Attenborough's Planet Earth television series is bringing viewers face to face with them every week. We know our planet is warming faster than ever, and that human activities are the main cause. We have experienced the 10 warmest years on record since 1995. Most of the world's glaciers are in rapid retreat.

The recent review by Sir Nicholas Stern sets out with stark clarity the price of indifference. And the impact goes beyond the economic - social and environmental costs would add to freshwater scarcity, lost food production and rising sea levels. Poor countries would suffer most, which can only mean new risks to global security.

Politicians, policymakers, businesses, families, young people - anyone with a stake in the future - knows that we need to act now to manage the problems of tomorrow. And by we, I mean the European Union, taking a lead with our system of rules-based co-operation, enabling us to tackle shared problems, seek common solutions and set world standards.

EU leaders meeting in Finland last month promised to step up the action on climate change and called on the European Commission to lead this policy process. The International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook for 2006, (published on 7 November) shows that there is a credible alternative to 'business as usual'. Germany, which takes over the presidency of the EU in January, has made it clear that it will put a high priority on this.

From the "back to the future" files, high oil prices have prompted German company Enercon to explore wind powered ships.

A German wind turbine manufacturer wants to power large freight ships with wind energy as rising oil price have caused energy firms to become interested in the cutting-edge technology.

The computer-generated image of the freight ship of the future is at first startling: Out of each of the ship deck's four corners blooms a steel cylinder, looking like chimneys from a long outdated fossil fuel era. But the cylinders rotate and they don't give off any emissions. On the contrary, they are the key elements of a new wind propulsion system for ships, with which German company Enercon wants to save emissions and fossil fuels based on a physical phenomenon known for the past 150 years.

In 1853, Gustav Magnus, a physicist from Berlin, discovered that when air flows around a rotating object, its one side with the spinning increases the velocity of the air flow, while the other side, spinning in the opposite direction, decreases the air flow. The resulting pressure differential drives the object perpendicular to the direction of the wind -- like a curve ball in baseball or a top spin in Tennis.

In the 1920s, Anton Flettner, another German scientist, used the principle of the Magnus effect to power a sailboat: With wind blowing from the side, the rotating cylinders, two of which he mounted on his boat Baden-Baden, pushed it forward.

The Baden-Baden -- after a speedy cross over the Atlantic -- was even praised by Albert Einstein as having great practical importance, but its propulsion system never became a commercial success.

Germany's largest wind turbine manufacturer Enercon believes the wind ship today has a much greater potential to succeed than in the 1920s.

The petroleum prices shipping companies currently have to pay increased three-fold in the past two years. A wind-powered freighter could save massive amounts of crude oil and drive down costs by "30 to 40 percent," Rolf Rohden, an engineer at Enercon, told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper.

"Flettner banked on the system at the wrong time, so even the brilliant technology didn't help," he said.

Enercon has more than 9,000 wind turbines installed all over the world, and is increasingly relying on exporting its large turbines and rotor blades. With the new ship, overseas deliveries could be handled "as environmentally friendly as possible," Rohden said.

R & D magazine has an article on a biomimicry based approach to solar power - "Innovative Solar Cell Mimics Photosynthesis".

A ‘leaf-inspired’ PV cell design offers the possibility of inexpensively converting solar to chemical and electrical energy.

The U.S. alone uses about 30 trillion kilowatt-hours of energy each year, and with energy usage in other regions of the world rapidly growing, it is clear that developing alternative sources is imperative. Each square meter at mid-latitude locations in the U.S. receives 4 to 5 kilowatt-hours of solar energy per day; so tapping into that energy source seems an obvious path to alleviate energy shortages. But traditional methods of capturing solar energy are expensive to generate and deploy. For 15 years now, researchers around the world have been improving the efficiency and manufacturability of a non-traditional approach: the dye-sensitized solar cell. Their efforts are beginning to pay off.

A photonic crystal added underneath a layer of dye-sensitized titania nanocrystals enhances the efficiency by forcing reflection back into the light-absorbing region.

There’s plenty of solar energy around, the problem is converting it to a usable form. Because of the established infrastructure developed for distributing and using electrical energy, one of the most desirable approaches is to convert solar energy to electrical energy. Photovoltaic (PV) cells do just that, by transferring energy from an incident photon to an electron. That absorption occurs when the energy of the incident photon matches the energy needed to push an electron from one energy level to a higher available energy level. The trick is harvesting the energetic electrons before other naturally occurring processes return them to their lower energy state.

Traditional PV cells, for their part, are constructed from semiconductor crystals. The band gap of the semiconductor is tuned to match the energy available in sunlight so that a decent percentage of the incident light is converted into electrical energy. But then the real battle begins. If left to itself, the energetic photon will drop back down into the vacancy it left in the lower energy band. So PV cells are engineered with an electric field across the absorption region. When electrons are promoted into the higher energy band of the semiconductor, the applied electric field rapidly draws them away, eventually to an electrode that harvests them. But any disturbance in the process as the electron travels to the electrode will tend to bring the electron back to its lower energy state, so great care must be taken to ensure the purity and order of the semiconductor.

Industrial processes for producing semiconductors with high purity and order are already well-advanced because of the maturity of the semiconductor industry; so there’s not too much of a technological problem. There is, however, an economic problem. Semiconductor manufacturing facilities are extremely expensive to build, operate, and maintain. For electronic circuits, the cost is offset as devices get smaller and smaller, offsetting the cost of production through high volume. But solar cells need to be large to collect incident sunlight. And large pieces of semiconductor are expensive.

A “new” approach

In 1991, Prof. Michael Grätzel and his colleague Brian O’Regan, at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland developed a device architecture that introduced a new conceptual approach to PV energy generation. It would be more accurate to state they refashioned an old idea—a three-billion- year-old idea. They reasoned that the light-harvesting approach used by plants for billions of years must have features that could be adapted for use in PV cells.

One of the primary features is a separation between the light absorption and electron transfer mechanisms. An energetic electron generated in chlorophyll is rapidly transferred from molecule to molecule until it reaches a chlorophyll reaction center—a chlorophyll molecule modified with a metallic atom to modify its electron energy level structure. The reaction center then transfers the electron to an energy storage molecule. But this leaves the chlorophyll “short” an electron. It grabs the electron it needs from a surrounding water molecule. Grätzel followed that same model.

The Free Internet Press has an article (along with the most annoying ad I've seen in a long time) on the boom in clean energy jobs in the US.

The top of a large steel vat gently swings open, and a slab of silicon, cut into pieces the size of large bricks, is lifted onto a conveyor belt. On a mezzanine above the warehouse-style floor of the factory in Frederick, Bill Good is monitoring the six-foot furnaces that melt the silicon that goes into bricks, which are later sliced into wafers and turned into solar panels in a building next door.

Good, 53, used to work in a landscaping business, but like many people around the country he has found work in the alternative-energy industry. After two years, he said, "I could retire here."

That's the sort of job certainty many workers would envy. Growth in the solar, wind power and biofuel sectors has been fast and promises to be enduring. Last Thursday, BP PLC's solar division announced a $70 million plan to double the capacity of the Frederick factory and hire 70 more people.

"The demand for solar energy is so strong, not only in the United States but around the world, that we have to keep up," Lee Edwards, chief executive of BP Solar, said at a ceremony attended by Maryland politicians, congressional aides, BP employees and a group of local elementary-school pupils.

Many boosters of solar, wind and biofuels have tried to sell them as pieces of a new American economy, but these nascent industries rely on many of the same skills and materials as the old American economy - and that's good for people looking for jobs.

The wind turbines installed by Madison Gas and Electric Co. in Wisconsin, for example, were placed on towers that weigh 73 1/2 tons, mostly made of steel. They were built in Shreveport, Louisiana. Wind turbines also use components common in many endangered U.S. industries, such as gearboxes, rotors, control systems, disc brakes, yaw motors and drives, and bearings.

"What we need are policies that advance the climate for investment in these products," says Marco Trbovich, communications director for the United Steelworkers of America.

The ethanol sector has been adding jobs, too. In August, U.S. refineries produced 27 percent more ethanol than a year earlier, and 48 distilleries are under construction. Meanwhile, the solar industry has about 20,000 jobs nationwide, said Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association. That's a small number, but Resch said it is growing by 35 percent a year.

Expansions like BP's add another reason - along with environmental concerns and national security - for the boosters of solar, wind power and biofuels to use in pleading for more government support in the form of purchases, targets, import limits, subsidies and tax breaks for alternative energy. The Apollo Alliance - a group of environmentalists, alternate energy companies and unions - said in a 2004 report that a $30 billion federal program could create 3.3 million jobs over 10 years.

That sort of spending isn't likely, so the report's optimistic forecast won't be tested, but many governors and mayors are realizing that fostering renewable energy can be good for their states and cities. Under Gov. Edward G. Rendell (D), Pennsylvania has become a major purchaser of "green energy". The jobs created, while modest in number, have symbolic importance and make a difference in individual communities. In March, after receiving financing from the state and assurances from Rendell, Spanish wind power company Gamesa Energy said it would invest $34 million to manufacture towers and blades for wind turbines in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania, which was hit hard by the closing of the last U.S. Steel Corp. facilities there in 2001. Gamesa said it expected to create 530 jobs.

Many of the jobs are good ones, in contrast to the low-wage food-service jobs that have bolstered employment statistics without improving quality of life for the people who hold them. "You're producing high-quality manufacturing jobs when others are moving out of the United States," said Resch. "If you look at the next high-tech growth industry in the United States, it can and should be solar energy."

Energy Bulletin has an interesting article from the Christian Science Monitor back in 1957 on Admiral Rickover and a speech he gave on energy.

Speechmakers and speeches are a dime a dozen in this windy city, so a man has to say something particularly significant or be particularly provocative to get the attention of the press these days. One such man and one such speech are Admiral H. G. Rickover (1) and his recent remarks on “Energy Resources and Our Future.”

Admiral Rickover is the Navy’s top man in nuclear propulsion; and his speech referred to is as full of startling, provocative, and significant observations as any your correspondent can remember coming across in years. Which proves there is plenty that is of importance for officials to say--if they will only abandon the obvious, the stereotyped, and the expected. In the short space allotted this Intimate Message I will paraphrase as nearly as possible the admiral’s admirable discussion.

This is what might be called the fossil fuel age. Coal, oil, and natural gas supply 93 per cent of the world’s energy. Water power accounts for only 1 per cent. Labor of men and domestic animals accounts for 6 per cent. This is in startling contrast to a century ago when fossil fuels supplied only 5 per cent of the world’s energy, and men and animals 94 per cent. Five-sixths of all the coal, oil, and gas ever consumed by man has been burned up in the last 55 years.

The rate at which fossil fuels are being consumed is breath-taking. All coal, oil, natural gas used before 1900 would not last five years at today’s rate of consumption.

The United States with only 5 per cent of the world’s population uses one-third of the world’s total energy output. This accounts for America’s high standard of living. Man’s first step up the ladder of civilization dates from his discovery of fire and his domestication of animals. Then slave labor was used to provide more energy. A reduction in per capita energy consumption always marks a decline in civilization. The exhaustion of wood fuel is said to explain the fall of the Mayan civilization. The depletion of forests for fuel in India and China lessened their energy base and lowered their civilizations.

Another cause of declining civilization comes from the pressure of population on available land. The point comes where land cannot support both the people and their domestic animals. Horses and mules disappear first; then the water buffalo is replaced by man--who is two and a half times as efficient as an energy converter as are draft animals. While domestic animals and machines increase productivity per man, maximum productivity per acre is achieved only by intensive manual cultivation.

It may well be that it was man’s unwillingness to depend on slave labor for energy needs that turned the minds of medieval Europeans to search for alternate sources of energy, thus sparking the power revolution of the Middle Ages which paved the way for the industrial revolution of the 19th century. When slavery disappeared in the West, engineering advanced. When a low-energy society comes in contact with a high-energy society, the advantage always lies with the latter. Europe not only achieved standards of living vastly higher than those elsewhere but did so while its population was growing at rates far surpassing those of other peoples.

Now what of the future of fossil fuels? It is an unpleasant fact that according to our best estimates total fossil fuel reserves (recoverable at not over twice today’s unit cost) are likely to run out at some time between 2000 and 2050 A.D. Oil and natural gas will disappear first; coal last. Nuclear fuels would seem to be the answer. But they have their drawbacks. They can't be used in small machines, such as cars, trucks, buses, tractors. We must remember that the oil we use in the United States in one year took nature 14,000,000 years to create.

Barring atomic war or unexpected changes in the population curve we can count on an increase in world population from 2,500,000,000 today to 4,000,000,000 by the year 2000 (2). It is an awesome thing to contemplate a graph of world population from prehistoric times to the year 2000 A.D., for 99 per cent of that time it stretches almost level. In the 8,000 years from the beginning of history to 2000 A.D. world population will have grown from 10,000,000 to 4,000,00,000, with 90 per cent of the growth taking place during the last 5 per cent of that period--or 400 years.

It took the first 3,000 years of recorded history to double the population of the world; 100 years for the last doubling; but the next doubling will be in 50 years. Calculations give us the astonishing estimate that the people living in this one year equal one-twentieth of the total number of human beings ever born into the world.

Bart from Energy Bulletin notes the Admiral's influence on Jimmy Carter:

Admiral Rickover was an amazing figure. Note that President Jimmy Carter - the only U.S. president to level with the public about energy - was a subordinate of Rickover's in the Navy. Carter said that next to his parents, Rickover has had the greatest influence on him.

Coal mining is probably the single most damaging activity anyone can perform - and its not only dangerous to the climate and the environment - its also dangerous for the miners, an endless stream of whom are sacrificed on the altar of King Coal.

Gas explosions in two regions of China have killed more than 50 coalminers, the latest fatalities to hit the world's deadliest mining industry.

An explosion in a privately owned mine in Fuyuan, in the south-western province of Yunnan, killed 32 men and injured 28 people on Saturday, the Xinhua news agency reported on Sunday.

At least 21 died in an earlier blast at the Yuanhua mine in Jixi, in the north-eastern province of Heilongjiang. Four miners managed to escape and rescuers were searching for six who were still missing, the reports said.

The Yuanhua mine is privately owned with an annual production capacity of 30,000 tonnes, Xinhua said. The causes of the explosions were being investigated.

A total of 3,726 miners died in more than 2,300 floods, blasts and other accidents in China's coalmines in the first 10 months of 2006.

The cold statistics highlight China's struggle to clean up the industry while trying to meet booming demand and high prices for coal, which fuels about 70 per cent of its energy consumption.

Perth's water desalination plant is now online but that hasn't stopped a few people pointing out that water recycling is a lot cheaper (and doesn't have any side effects).

AS THE anthem tells us, Australia is a nation "girt by sea".

Perhaps a modern-day verse would add that, dotted around the nation's edges, its people and industries are teetering on the brink of a barely quenchable thirst. And desalination is the latest high-tech solution to hit our salty shores.

This week, Perth Water Corporation chief executive Jim Gill filled a drinking glass and gulped down his first taste of the mighty Indian Ocean. "It tastes terrific," he said. As Victorian politicians toyed with the idea of introducing the technology, Australia's first desalination plant — the third largest in the world — opened last Sunday at Kwinana, south of Perth.

A few years ago, the idea of converting sea water to tap water was pie-in-the sky, Mr Gill admitted. "We had always thought it was off the planet economically," he said.

But the $387 million plant is now pumping its first water into WA's supplies. It will cost $20 million a year to run and will produce 45 gigalitres a year, or enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool in 25 minutes.

The idea for a desalination plant to help solve Perth's water crisis first took shape in 2001. But the corporation has had to weather criticism from environmentalists who argued the discharge could damage marine life and the ecosystem.

Cost to consumers was another issue. The Perth plant will add $43 a year to a household bill but the Government will introduce the increase gradually. Another concern was the huge amount of energy required to power the plant. But WA Premier Alan Carpenter deflected that by opening a wind farm to offset the energy used at Kwinana.

Environmental groups in Victoria are lukewarm about desalination, arguing as much water could be saved if 25 per cent of Victorian households recycled grey water for the toilet, laundry and garden.

At least one expert agrees. The head of civil and environmental engineering at the University of NSW, Nick Ashbolt, said desalination was an option, but home recycling of grey water was better. "We know we can desalinate water and it is as clean and safe to drink as anything else," Professor Ashbolt said. "But … it is the most expensive way to treat water and release carbon emissions."

Jason Antenucci, from the University of WA's Centre for Water Research, said he did not oppose desalination, but recycling waste water produced the same quality and was cheaper. "But there is general public opposition to drinking waste recycled water. Desalination is the path of least political resistance. I have no doubt we will see more (desalination plants) in Australia," he said.

The cost of the "War on Terror" to Australia so far - $20 billion (not including the cost due to higher oil prices). Imagine if we'd spent this on public transport, wind farms and solar panels instead of pissing it away in the desert.

FIGHTING the war on terror has cost Australian taxpayers more than $20 billion since September 2001.

The Federal Government alone has spent or committed more than $11.5 billion on domestic and international counter-terrorism measures, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The rest of the figure covers spending by states, territories and the private sector. The money is being spent on everything from training special forces to deal with weapons of mass destruction to a $74 million system enabling police and ASIO to tap phone calls.

The Age has pieced together the cost of the anti-terror campaign useing calculations from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which has examined federal government spending, the Homeland Security Research Centre and annual reports.

The figure comes as the city of Baghdad was yesterday in lockdown, after the worst day of violence there since 2003. Authorities placed an indefinite curfew on the Iraqi capital and closed the airport, following a wave of car bombs in the district of Sadr City that killed 160 people and injured a further 275. Ports and the airport in the southern oil city of Basra were also closed as the nation moved closer towards sectarian civil war.

In a similar vein, here's a quote via Free Energy News:

"Presently, only 1% of the U.S. energy supply comes from renewable sources, including Solar, Wind and Hydro. If we applied the $400 billion dollars that has been spent in the Iraq war toward installing Wind Turbines on non-farmable lands in North and South Dakota, we could power the US, and become independent of imported oil." -- Jim Dunn, Center for Technology Commercialization, Nov. 19, 2006

While I don't think this is a problem, there are more signs of peak gold appearing.

Australia's gold output dipped slightly in the third quarter from the same period last year, despite new gold operations coming into production, a new report shows. Surbiton Associates said in its latest quarterly report on the Australian gold mining industry that production in the three months to September was 62 tonnes.

The result is a one tonne rise from the previous quarter but a two tonne drop from the same period of 2005."One of the outcomes of the higher Australian dollar gold price is that existing gold producers are taking the opportunity to treat lower grade ore," the consultancy's managing director Dr Sandra Close said.

"Gold grades have declined progressively over the last nine months so that now, the average recovered grade is just under two grams per tonne."

There are reports from Russia that Gazprom is looking at obtaining its own nuclear arsenal - in the form of floating nuclear power plants.

Russia's Rosenergoatom has said it will build eight floating nuclear power plants by 2015.

"In April 2007, the Sevmash shipyard will launch the construction of the first floating thermal power unit with the KLT40C reactor. It is planned to complete the deliveries of all the assembly parts by the end of 2008, and complete the pilot project in 2010," Sergei Krysov, deputy director general of the company, told an international conference.

The comments were reported by the Itar-Tass news agency. The news agency said the floating reactor will have five radiation protection barriers, and can withstand a 6-magnitude earthquake and a plane crash.

Rosenergoatom said one floating plant saves about 150 million cubic meters of gas a year. "Gazprom displayed considerable interests in floating nuclear power plants, as it needs at least five floating power units to develop new deposits in Yamal and the Kola peninsula," Krysov said, Itar-Tass reported.

If you're of a survivalist mindset and would like to continue practicing metal work after the oil crash, Kevin Kelly has the book for you - "The Complete Metalsmith".

I've spied this book in the cluttered workshops of many amateur craftsmen, and it is frequently nominated as the best all-around introduction to light metal work. If you take an entry class in jewelry, this is often the manual. (Complete in this case does not include welding or blacksmithing; this guide is best for metal projects smaller than a bowl.). The reason I like this manual is that it is quick, succinct, clear, and dense -- sort of like metal itself. The author assumes you wield a certain level of handiness, and that you can kind of figure out things yourself if you get a general sketch of what needs to be done. It shows you with simple drawings (no fancy photos here) things you might want to do with small bits of metal -- different methods of shaping it, different textures or patinas to coat it with, ways to cast it in molds, how to set stones in it, what metals to even use. In other words, it's a quick tour of metal work possibilities. It also lays flat on the table with its thoughtful metal spiral binding. Be sure to get the revised edition.

I see the guys doing the "V For Vendetta" act in Washington are still at it - the latest stunt was a 100 man protest.

We are making good use of the powerful concept of en masse activist resistance used in the movie, “V for Vendetta.”

“V” is helping us as we build support for the unalienable Right to a Response from Government to our Petitions for Redress of Grievances regarding the Government’s violation of the war powers, tax, privacy and money clauses of the Constitution.

“V” is helping us as we educate the public about the First Amendment’s guarantee of our Right to Petition Government for Redress of Grievances.

On November 6, 2006, a lone man in a “V” mask and clothing visited security checkpoints at the White House, the main Treasury Building, the Department of Justice and the Capitol, to deliver a letter and the Petitions for Redress. A short videotape of the encounters has made its way around the Internet, including links from sites such as MySpace.com.

The letter informed the leaders of the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government that up to 100 people in “V” masks and clothing would gather in silent vigil at those locations on November 14th to await a response to the Petitions for Redress.

True to his word, at 11:00 A.M. on Tuesday, November 14, 2006, nearly 100 men and women in “V” masks and clothing could be seen walking along different streets in downtown Washington, DC, all heading to Lafayette Park across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.

Crooked Timber recently had a post on "authors you've given up on". Obviously this is a fairly subjective question, but I found the 3 entries below interesting.

I didn't read "A Constant Gardener" but I thought the movie was top class - can anyone explain what the perceived problem with Le Carre is ? While I love Kim Stanley Robinson's books, I tend to agree that he's hard going lately and still haven't got around to buying "50 Degrees Below". As for Orson Scott Card, "Ender's Game" was one of my favourite books as a teenager, and I like the justification below for someone still liking it, but Card himself is pretty much a fascist nutjob and best avoided.

56. #44, I second Le Carre. The Constant Gardener was just ridiculous.

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59. I want to like Kim Stanley Robinson’s new stuff, but just can’t read through the preaching.

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60. Ender was the target of institutional childhood violence. He was very good at turning it around. That makes him the hero of every kid that was bullied.

I always thought that Ender’s real strength was to recognize that in a world consciously designed for the success of self-absorbed monsters, the most self-absorbed monster wins. He cannot even spare time for gloating or sadism - those are luxuries a true monster cannot afford.

Time for some tinfoil - my 2 favourite commenters popped up in the RI post on the Bobby Kennedy and Alexander Litvinenko assassinations.

First starroute:

There is definitely something central and essential about the idea of cultivating one's own garden (as Voltaire put it) -- and something false and self-limiting about setting out to save the world without having learned to save oneself.

Heroes and leaders just don't cut it. They are all flawed in one way or another -- either in their personal behavior, or in their policies and effects upon the world, or in both. There is something about the attempt to exert leadership -- the desire to *change* the world through the remote application of power -- that is naturally self-corrupting.

On the other hand, merely disengaging from the world -- "dropping out" in the 60's sense -- and having as little as possible to do with the things of this world also limits your effectiveness. (If a hermit lives a life of virtue out in the forest and no one witnesses it, is he really virtuous?)

I think this must be why the Sufis talk about being in the world but not of it. By being not of the world, you are free to attune your life to a higher imperative. But by remaining in the world, you force the world to take account of you -- you become a boulder in the middle of the river that parts the flow of the waters and directs them into new channels.

And you do that not by attempting to act upon the world -- which is the way of the man of power, and which leads to corruption by the ways of the world -- but by causing the world to attempt to act upon you.

As one example of what I mean, Rosa Parks did just that by the simple act of *not standing.* An act deeply rooted in her own sense of her unique value as a human being. An act with a zen-like foundation in non-action rather than in action. She did nothing -- and empires crumbled.

To state it another way, there are holes in our reality. This is true on every level. Jeff focuses on holes in consensual physical reality -- but there are also holes in everyday social and political reality.

From the point of view of those who are wedded to existing reality, those holes are yawning maws of chaos, out of which horror and destruction may come rampaging if they are not kept closed and papered over.

From the point of view of those who despair of present realities, those holes are gates of promise, leading to Eden or utopia.

But the point of view which transcends both hope and fear is that of the person who themself identifies with the holes -- who seeks to *become* a hole in reality, an opening from what-is into what-might-be, a glimpse of unrealized possibility.

And that, I think, has to be the real meaning of cultivating your garden.

And the Iridescent Cuttlefish (I think first complaining about people viewing something as a communist conspiracy and then linking to a Trotskyite web site might be pushing it a little but he gets points for invoking the name of Yossarian):

Seems to me that while the emotional inspiration of the Kennedys still lives, the idea that politics has anything to do with how the world is run is just absurd. Corporations control the political process, the scientific establishment, and the media. And yet, this control cannot be addressed by politicians, scientists, or journalists because they are controlled by corporations.

Fixing the world's problems would require reforming the three areas I mention, but that can't be done because of the real centers of power. So deeply ingrained in the American psyche is the 1950s slogan, "What's good for GM is good for America," that any attempt to dismantle the corporate state would not only be attacked by the three very public arenas of its control, but also by the well trained consumer-citizens who would view it as some sort of communist attack on their "freedoms".

The internet has great potential, but at this point not enough people have had their worldview affected by it. Viable alternatives to the way we live do exist--spreading the awareness of their existence is still the problem. The only practical means of influencing the collective consciousness is through the diffusion of memes, which are extremely powerful, ideogrammic, and self-replicating. Unfortunately, the best media for the transmission of memes are images, songs, and books...and the media which transmit these are controlled by the corporations which schedule the assassinations and the fake news and degradation of humanity and its habitat.

What did Yossarian do, anyway?

I'll close with Rob from Transition Culture with a post called "A Walk in the Woods # Exercise 4. ‘Kick the Can’".

Getting young people, boys in particular, to be quiet and focused in a woodland is quite a task. Getting them to become aware of their surroundings, to experience the sounds, smells and feelings of being in a wood can be hard work. It would be great, therefore, to have an exercise which brought boys into a sense of complete awareness yet of which they were unaware. This exercise is called ‘Kick the Can’ and is a years old game but one which I have also found to be very powerful with adults. It places you in a woodland with all your senses heightened, rooted to one place, intensely aware of your surroundings.

You will need;

A woodland, with dense enough undergrowth and enough trees to hide behind that people can ‘disappear’ into it.
A metal bucket or large can.
A stout stick.
2 lengths of brightly coloured rope.
Anything between 5 and 30 people.

How to Play.

Mark out, by tying rope around the trees, 2 areas. One is the Prison, and needs to be large enough to fit all the people playing. The second, which is immediately adjacent to the Prison, is the Troll’s area, which is about the same size, and needs to contain, in the middle, the metal bucket hanging from a tree. One person is the Troll. Another player takes the stout stick and hurls it as far as they can. In the time it takes for the troll to retrieve it and place it in the metal bucket, all the other players have to run and hide.

The Troll’s objective is to catch all the people, and he can only do this by seeing someone and calling their name. If you are seen and called, you have to go into the prison. The people in the prison can only be released if someone manages to sneak up and hit the bucket with the stick, at which point everyone is jail is freed. That’s it basically. What happens when you play the game is that when you are in your hiding place you have no option than to sit still and quiet, yet all your senses are heightened and you are acutely aware of the sounds and movement in the wood. I have played this game with boys who just want to play it all day. I have found it a fun but powerful way of really ‘being’ in a wood. It’s good fun too! Being tall, I never actually managed to hit the can, I was always spotted!