Signs From Earth

Was Rothstein FSA picture of cow skull a fake? Errol Morris plumbs history deeply in Zoom (via @nytimes)

 
The bleached skull of a steer on the dry sun-baked earth of the South Dakota Badlands. By Arthur Rothstein, FSA.

http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/the-case-of-the-inappropriate-alarm-clock-part-1/

A deep dive discussion on the origins and political heat resulting from a picture by Arthur Rothstein of the Farm Security Administration. One tiny excerpt:

"...What makes these accusations of photo-fakery utterly perverse is the claim that they unfairly portrayed a drought. The photographs led the viewer to infer that the Dakotas were experiencing a drought. But the Dakotas were experiencing a drought. One of the worst droughts in American history. Was the real issue that the cow had died of old age rather than drought? Or that the cow skull had been moved less than 10 feet, as Rothstein later claimed? Or had been moved at all? Or that multiple photographs had been taken? Or was it merely an attempt to shift the nature of the debate from the agricultural problems facing the country to an argument about photography and propaganda?..."

Library of Congress URL of image above: http://memory.loc.gov/pnp/fsa/8b27000/8b27700/8b27761v.jpg

Bibliography info: http://rs6.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?fsaall:1:./temp/~ammem_HECK::

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Climate and Fire: The Blaze Last Time, and Next

Fires over southern California have burned before and will burn again. This wafting smoke over the Pacific Ocean came from 12 large fires burning in late October, 2007.  Photo: NASA Earth Observatory

Recent news reports about fires, whether in Greece or Los Angeles, have not explained their relationship to long-term climatic shifts underway. Why? Maybe the remaining reporters and editors aren't well-versed in the underlying science of climate change, or the science and environment writers have all been laid off to save money.

News stories reporting these disasters as isolated events, or caused by cigarette or lawnmowers, miss the point and do a disservice by failing to put them in context. Temperatures have been increasing in these regions, and rainfall has been declining long-term. Just as a lawnmower may be the flint, these underlying conditions provide the tinder, and explain the likelihood that as these fires have burned before, they will burn again.

These contextual links have been made for some time by scientists, but traditional news outlets apparently haven't been reading. When fires hit Athens a week or so ago, the only outlet that explicitly explained the link between fires and climate change was the new global trends reporting website GlobalPost. 

New Look for Environmental Journalists Website

If you are interested in the latest news about the planet, you can't do much better than to regularly visit the brand-new website for The Society of Environmental Journalists. The redesigned website offers many improvements and new features over the old model.

Filled with headlines of the latest environmental news, tools, and tips for reporting about the earth, the new SEJ website is a must-stop if you are on the planet beat. 

Better yet, if you are not a member, join the organization. 

It's a non-profit organization whose dedicated members, I am one, envision an informed society through excellence in environmental journalism.

Recycling the Suburbs

10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now: Emerging trends highlighted this week in TIME as the world economy evolves to something new. Besides suburban recycling, others include rent-a-country and ecological intelligence.

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:

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...

Old-Media Need Mental Flexibility

Virginia Heffernan, New York Times: Content and its Discontents

"Why new forms of media must evolve along with new technologies."

..."No one is reading a six-part investigative series about mayoral malfeasance on Twitter. And if it’s the afterthought message boards — the ones moderated by interns — that draw all the traffic, why are we in old media pouring so much money and time into “main event” programming that goes unread and unviewed?..."

..."We have to develop content that metamorphoses in sync with new ways of experiencing it, disseminating it and monetizing it. This argument concedes that it’s not possible to translate or extend traditional analog content like news reports and soap operas into pixels without fundamentally changing them....."

People of the Screen

You are reading these words on one. Kevin Kelly explores implications, especially the impact of screens on printed words and pictures.

NY Times Magazine: ..."We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality...."

And Seth Godin on the declining influence of the Times in the era of the screen: Watching the Times struggle (and what you can learn)