Signs From Earth

Map: McDonald's Golden Glow in the United States

Stephen Von Worley has produced a golden glowing map (no arches visible) of McDonald's restaurants in the lower 48 United States. He has called this "The Contiguous United States, Visualized by Distance to the Nearest McDonald's," and writes about his inspiration at his blog Weather Sealed, under the heading "Where the Buffalo Roamed." 

"To gauge the creep of cookie-cutter commercialism, there’s no better barometer than McDonald’s – ubiquitous fast food chain and inaugural megacorporate colonizer of small towns nationwide," he writes.

Based on numbers from aggdata, Von Worley says more than 13,000 McDonald's are spread across the land, and 107 miles is the greatest distance or "McFarthest Spot" to a McD's. (I guess that means somewhere in the west a pair of McDonald's is 214 miles apart?) If you live in central Nevada, southeast Oregon, Idaho's Salmon River Wilderness, or northwestern South Dakota it will be a long ride for that burger fix.

For a reality check, see the film Food, Inc. If it hasn't played your town yet, already has, or (likely) never will, this important film will be out on DVD Nov. 3. See it to understand how the American food and farm landscape has been transformed by more than the ubiquitous presence of hamburger shops. Show Food Inc. to your friends. You may want to find that spot 107 miles away and stay there.

2009 Global Temperature Trends: January – August

 

The National Climatic Data Center has (finally) released global temperature trends data for the first eight months of 2009, and the red dots on the map show that most of the world keeps running a fever. According to records of combined land and sea temperature observations the period from January through August 2009 is the fifth warmest on record.

Specifically for August, NCDC reports that ocean temperatures worldwide for August are the warmest ever measured since record keeping began.

Those in the middle of the blue dot area on the map in North America or in the far southern ocean near Antarctica might be forgiven if they thought their local world was cooling, but one must keep the long term trend in mind and remember that the map clearly shows a lot more big red dots than big blue dots. 

That means the world was warmer than average, and in some places by quite a bit when you look at the many fat red dots over Mexico, Africa, China, India, Australia, and California. It should be noted that several of these regions have also been suffering droughts, and research shows that these continuing warming trends will most likely drive long-term water shortages.

This warming trend is useful to examine in connection with the chart below showing how 2009 compares to earlier years. All years since 1980 have been above the norm (red)  and the last time a year was below the norm (blue) was 1976. It is also useful to keep in mind that we have been seeing significant loss of Arctic sea ice, as the Arctic Ocean loss of ice in 2009 was the third most significant on record behind 2007 and 2008 according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. 

The Whole Earth is Now Online

The Whole Earth Catalog and its spawn CoEvolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review were among my favorite reads and inspirations in the decades when they were in print.

Long gone from the dead tree publishing landscape, my fading collection of several Catalogs and an almost complete set of Co-Evolution Quarterly/Whole Earth Review still graces my shelves.

The Whole Earth Catalog is now online. 

Transformed from paper to electrons, this wonderous archive marks a period in our recent history when the contemporary environmental movement was beginning to take shape.

Carrying motto "Access to Tools," Whole Earth was handbook and manual for those seeking instructions and tools to create a better world and self-sufficient life with their own initative, passion, and energy.

Edited by Stewart Brand and a host of smart people like Kevin Kelly, Whole Earth is where I first saw the work of agrarian poet and essayist Wendell Berry and ecological agriculturalist Wes Jackson, who started The Land Institute in Kansas.

Whole Earth led me to Berry's influential book The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, and to Jackson's New Roots for Agriculture.

I discovered the work of Donella Meadows here, a MacArthur Fellow and one of the authors of the 1970's book The Limits to Growth.

Meadows' essay Places to Intervene in a System is significant, along with her sequel essay Dancing With Systems.

"Places" is mandatory guide to understanding any type of system: an organization, economy, living body, ecosystem, or a city, and explains why a small shift in one thing can create a big shift in most everything. She explains why most change is misguided, misapplied, and mistimed because of a failure to recognize "leverage points."

The Catalog's influence was documented in a 2007 book by Andrew Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism.

The Whole Earth family of publications was the internet before there was an internet, blogs before blogs. The arrival of a new edition or issue was an event, everything else was set aside until a full perusal of the copy that had just shown up in the mailbox.

--DD

Links:

Mapping Energy Shortages

Want to see where the energy shortages are today? 

Energy Shortage: Worldwide Energy Shortages

Lists and mapping of energy deficits, whether from earlier price spikes, current lack of financing, or customers unable to pay. 

Instead of "rolling blackout" or "brownout," an alternative term emerges: load shedding.

In other words, we'll turn off the power for several hours a day, shed the load. 

Example: Nepal - Ten hours a day of load shedding from today

"In what is certain to cripple normal life and industrial activities, the Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) has announced a fresh calendar of load shedding deciding to cut power by ten hours everyday. From the 45 hours a week load shedding, there will be 63 hours of load shedding every week – ten hours a day for six days and three hours a day for one day in a week..."

Charting U.S Immigration Trends

FlowingData ran a contest last week to produce an improved chart showing immigration trends to the United States. 

(The prizes were some Edward Tufte books.) 

Worth a look...

Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis

From FlowingData:

"If you're like most people, you don't really know what's going on with the economy. You know there's something to do with loans and payments and what not, but not much else.

Mint (the financial management app) and Wallstats (the guy who does the Death and Taxes poster) put together a

"visual guide to the financial crisis"

- or a flow chart, rather - to clear up some of those cloudy details.

It goes back to 2003 after the dot-com crash up to the recent government bailout.

Cotton Picking Correlates to President Picking

From FlowingData Which originated at Strange Maps

See how voters for Obama came from the same areas in the U.S south where cotton picking was done in 1860.

As has been pointed out correlation is not causation.

Klinkenborg's Map View

NYT November 12, 2008

EDITORIAL OBSERVER
Map Upon Map: New Dimensions in What Maps Can Do

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

I was struck, several months ago, by a piece in The Times about the effort to create a new interactive map of the New York City sewer system. For nearly a decade, the Bureau of Water and Sewer Operations — a branch of the Department of Environmental Protection — has been scanning its archive of old engineering maps onto what will soon be a digital map of the system.