AIFF2024: Cigarette Surfboards; Alaska Native Masks Out In the World

Two more days of festival.  Well only one more for us.  Not that long ago, the Festival website said the festival was Dec. 6-14 and we made our plane reservations for December 15.  Then the more recent edition of the website moved it to December 15.  

This festival has been filled with crazy good documentaries - Champions of the Golden Valley, Ultimate Citizens, Porcelain War, 76 Days Adrift, The Empathizer, Diving Into the Darkness - and I heard Unearth was also great.  And I thought Queen of the Ring was also quite good, but not quite at the level of those others.  

Today we saw two more:  So Surreal:  Behind the Masks and The Cigaret Surfboard.  The basic 'discovery' in Surreal, was how Yupik Alaskan Native masks along with Native Masks from British Columbia had a huge influence on the surrealist artists early in the 20th Century.  This was something I'd learned some time ago.  But the film combined a number of themes - the spiritual meaning and use of Alaska Native masks, the history of how the churches and white government banned the ceremonies in which masks were used and confiscated them, how the Surrealists discovered these masks and were inspired by them, and a detective tale of where some of the masks were today and how to get them repatriated.  The magic of the film is how seamlessly all these themes were intertwined.

Perry Eaton (center) and Drew Michael, both Alaska Native mask makers featured in the film, talk afterward about masks and the film.  

But I also was very pleasantly surprised by how good Cigarette Surfboard was.  I'm biased.  I grew up near Venice Beach, and while I was too lazy to lug a surfboard around (they were big heavy monsters back in those days, and none of my friends were surfers) I was an avid body surfer growing up.  
 

This film starts out with Taylor talking about how cigarette butts are the most numerous item when people are cleaning trash off the beach.  (I had encountered this once long ago when I helped pick up trash with a Covenant House mentee in downtown Anchorage.  So many cigarette butts.)

Not only is the tobacco full of chemicals, but the filters are not biodegradable.  So Taylor decides to make a surfboard using cigarette butts to draw attention to the pollution they cause.  The first one - in the photo - was two heavy.  But he got it down in weight and then got professional surfers to use the boards as a way to get the environmental message across.  The basic question people seemed to ask when they saw these boards was "It must take forever to collect all the butts."  They get told, "Not really, they're everywhere."

So this is an environmental movie and a surfing movie.  We see lots of people riding the waves on their cigarette surfboards.  

Taylor also visits surfers in different parts of the world.  In Ireland one former surfer decided flying around the world to go surfing, while fun, was not environmentally defensible, and he switched to sustainable farming that won't harm the ocean.  In southwest England, a group of surfers had successfully lobbied - with surfboards at Parliament - to end the practice of dumping raw sewage into the ocean.  

A fun film with a message.  

Pension Funds: One Of The Many Causes Of Housing Shortages, Homelessness

 I started a long post trying to show that homelessness isn't a local issue.  Well, sure, the impact is local, but the main causes are outside the control of local politicians.  While that post sits around (maybe forever) waiting for me to make it perfect, an article in Sunday's LA Times gives a great example of how greed and uncontrolled capitalism set up a structure that makes many ordinary folks with money in pension funds unwitting accomplices to the high cost of housing.  From the LA Times:

"At the Shady Lane Apartments in the suburbs east of San Diego, the carpet could be worn, the appliances old. But with some of the cheaper rents around, the complex was a relatively affordable home for an increasingly priced-out working class.

Then, in 2021, the nonprofit that owned the 112-unit property sold it. In less than three years, the new owners raised rent for vacant units 21 percentage points more than landlords in nearby neighborhoods, according to data from a real estate research firm. On average, available homes at the complex went from less expensive than the surrounding area to more expensive.

Existing tenants saw change too. Rubin Flournoy, a supervisor at a city water treatment plant, said he’s seen his rent climb roughly twice as much annually since the sale. What he didn’t know was that the new owners had a surprising funding source: people like himself.

The El Cajon complex had been sold, according to research firm CoStar and commercial loan reports, to a giant real estate investment fund managed by the private equity firm Blackstone. Investors in the fund include the California State Teachers’ Retirement System and other public pension funds across the country.

There's the bind.  Pension and other such funds, like the Alaska Permanent Fund, are supposed to be invested to increase the value of the fund.  For pension funds, the purpose is to be able to pay pensions once people retire.  An important goal.

But few fund managers worry too much about the social and environmental impacts of the funds they invest in.  Some have started to pay attention to these issues - generally called ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance).    Republican legislators have started introducing legislation demanding punishing companies that use ESG criteria in investing.   [This is a Forbes article and I assumed I'd be blocked.  They said it was 1 of 4 free articles.  Clear out your cache regularly]  It seems Republicans are against regulations except when they aren't.  

Now, this was a short and easy post to write (and I hope to read).  Store it in that part of your brain that monitors housing and homelessness issues.  And the negative side effects of unregulated (or loosely regulated) capitalism.  

Also check on the funds your money (personal or pension or Permanent Fund, etc.) is invested in.  

I did look at the Alaska Permanent Fund Investments and the Alaska Teachers Retirement Fund (2021), but I couldn't find Blackstone.  But such funds could be hidden somewhere I didn't know to look.  I did find that Blackstone bought the Alaska Permanent Fund's infrastructure portfolio for $1 billion.   I didn't go much beyond the headline because of a paywall. (Giving them my email address is a kind of paywall to me.)

More Waste In Packaging

 Waste in packaging is another thing that has become normalized.  Unless it's egregious, we just wade our way through it, without even thinking about it.

I felt this one qualified as egregious.

The pills came in these three plastic bottles inside the box behind.

Each plastic bottle had 14 - FOURTEEN - pills!

When I put them all into one bottle they reached up to the blue line. (That was supposed to be an arrow pointing down to the blue line.)

That's about 1/5 of the bottle.  There were three bottles, so only 1/15 of the bottles' volume was actually needed for the pills.  That's not counting the box the three bottles were packaged in.

So the contents needed about 7% of the packaging (again, not counting the box this was all in.)  So about 93% of the packaging was unnecessary.  

OK, I get that stores don't want to sell things so small that it's easy for a shopper to put something into a pocket or purse without paying.  There have to be more creative solutions to stopping shoplifting.  If humans can figure out how to get to the moon, they can figure out how to not pollute the earth with excessive packaging.  

I'd also note a story in the LA Times Sunday.  Mike Hiltzik wrote a follow up to the big story earlier this year that stores were losing $45 billion to organized crime shoplifting.  

Politicians and the media both repeated the fabricated number without question.  And law enforcement agencies love it because such stories help them get ever increasing budgets to fight crime.  But for them crime means the guy who shoplifts $30 worth of groceries, not companies that steal billions from their employees and customers.

Why do I add all these other issues to a simple story about badly packaged pills?  Cause everything has a context.  Telling stories without the larger context is just relating miscellaneous anecdotes.  There's a lot more context for this pill story, but I'm just adding a little here so that readers at least think about the larger context and maybe even add more themselves.  

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JB MacKinnon Speaks On His Book "The Day The World Stops Shopping"

Wednesday night my daughter and I went to Bainbridge High School to hear author J.B MacKinnon.  He was interviewed on stage by local Bainbridge resident Becky Rockefeller whose a founder of the Buy Nothing movement.  She was a knowledgeable and perceptive interviewer.  

The discussion was exciting.  Mackinnon's ideas about changing consumerism were realistic - "if we cut back shopping by 25% one day, the economy would collapse" - and there were lots of examples of people who have chosen non-consumer life-styles.  

A key concept for me was the idea of one-world living.  Not sure what your first thought was when you hear that term, but mine was not what he was talking about.

He was talking about how many planet earths were required to sustain a country's level of consumption.  He said the US needed about five or six planet earths to supply the resources for all that we consume of the long haul. (He said he didn't remember the exact number.)  When he was writing the book he looked for countries that were one-world or less.  The most attractive life at the level, at the time, was Ecuador.  

But he also said that 1977 in the US fit that standard too.  I was alive and aware at that time and it wasn't a burdensome life.  

I realize that one reason I'm blogging less frequently is that trying to do it right takes more time than I seem to have.  So I'm going to use a shortcut and offer this YouTube with MacKinnon so you can get a sense of his ideas yourself. 

 

Giving Things Away This Thanksgiving

We're on Bainbridge Island visiting with family for Thanksgiving.  I've been walking more than biking just because a) most roads here are either up or down or both and b) bikes get, if at all, narrow space on the side of two lane roads.  

The other day I walked past this gifting and receiving stand.  It's on a small dead end street that doesn't get much traffic, but there is a walk way that goes through to a main road.  

This one is a nice idea, but I suspect it will have little impact on recycling, but perhaps it will cause people to think about buying stuff.  

Other related efforts that seem to have a bigger impact are Freecycle and Buy Nothing.

"Freecycling is when a person passes along, for free, an unwanted item to another person who needs that item. From silverware to mobile homes, people worldwide are choosing to freecycle rather than discard. The practice frees up space in landfills and cuts down on the need to manufacture new goods. Thousands of groups dedicated to connecting people who want to give away something to people with a need are forming worldwide. Here are three steps you can take to join the freecycling movement."

And Buy Nothing.

THE BUY NOTHING PROJECT is an international network of local gift economies. Buy Nothing offers people a way to give and receive, share, lend, and express gratitude through a worldwide network of gift economies in which the true wealth is the web of connections formed between people who are real-life neighbors. We believe that communities are more resilient, sustainable, equitable, and joyful when they have functional gift economies

Both use the internet to help neighbors give away what they don't need and find things they need.

And as we celebrate Thanksgiving, with businesses salivating for Christmas sales,  it's a good time

Inflation could steal Christmas, but shoppers are finding ways around it  (Washington Post)

Jaclyn Peiser

to remember that our capitalist system is a huge Ponzi scheme which requires organizations to grow constantly and to compete for 'market share.'  People who actually have jobs that pay well mostly have way more stuff than they need.  This economic model exploits and pollutes our natural environment.  And causes the wealthy (those with 'enough' money) to often be poor in time and interpersonal relationships.

So use today to think about what you have, what you need, and what you could do without.  I think about a friend who barely earns enough to keep housed and fed, yet pays a monthly fee on a storage unit with stuff he never uses.  

Here's a post I wrote in 2007 called Not Consuming isn't just about Being Cheap. I'd note that since then I did get a cell phone.  

Who's Going To Clean Up The North Slope And The Pipeline When The Oil Companies Leave?

 

Like lots of my posts, I have one key points to make, but it seems like I need to give some background to this quote.  

Cold Mountain Path, by Tom Kizzia, is this month's book club selection.  The group also read Tom's Pilgrim's Progress  that told the story of Papa Pilgrim and his large family that turned out to be filled with nasty unpleasantness under the facade of a happy religious family. 

Both books take place largely in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.  This second book expands on unpublished notes from the first book - notes that talked about the history of McCarthy the ghost town like community in the park near the Kennecott copper mine.  

Kizzia has figured out the way to tie lots of stories about the town and people in it, into a fascinating tale.

The particular I quote I'm offering today is part of a section describing John Denver's week in McCarthy as part of his Alaska Wilderness movie tour in 1975.  He writes about how the locals reacted to Denver and vice versa.  But here he's talking about the irony of filming an environmental film in a ghost town of a huge copper mine that made a fortune for the Guggenheim Syndicate before they suddenly pulled out in 1938 just before WWII, leaving everything behind - equipment in the Copper Mill, all the houses and furnishings for the workers, clothes, food, vehicles . . .

"In his book, Denver described Kennecott as "a wild streak of industrial violence" that "just sits there, brooding in the night."  It might seem odd that a movie about preserving Alaska's wilderness would linger amid the frontier ruins of industrial capitalism, but the allegorical setting actually suited the times.  The conservationist's fundamental truth, about the environment winning in the end, presses itself constantly upon a visitor's imagination in the Wrangell, there being no greater illustration than Kennecott itself.  Juxtaposed against the propulsive boosterism of Alaska's modern oil boom, in which Alyeska Pipeline had replaced the Guggenheim Trust, Kennecott's ruins provide an almost religious tableau, a place where spiritual reassurance might be found in the atmosphere of decline and fall, in the inning when nature bats last."

That last sentence led me to the title of this post.  Who is going to clean up the Alaska oil pipeline when the oil companies close up shop and abandon Alaska, like the Guggenheims did?  I don't ever recall hearing about a fund set aside to clean up.  But according to this 2020 LA Times piece, 

"Current bonding levels, the funds put aside by the industry to ensure adequate decommissioning of wells and other infrastructure, barely touch what’s needed for cleaning up what’s been built or drilled to date. . . Operators can hold blanket bonds for their entire operations that may not even cover a single site’s cleanup."

The article is only talking about cleaning up the oil fields and doesn't mention the pipeline. (I'm sure there are people thinking about making it the world's larges water slide.)  How much of what the state of Alaska has earned off the oil will be needed to clean up the mess the oil companies are inevitably going to leave behind.  British Petroleum has left the state after selling its stake to Hillcorp Energy,  a company that specializes in getting the last oil out of the ground on the cheap.  

"Environmental organizations and pipeline experts continue expressing concerns about a secretive Texas petroleum company with a spotty safety record that acquired the largest share of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline last year as thawing permafrost and flooding linked to climate change threatened the massive oil conduit.

The Regulatory Commission of Alaska voted 4-1 in December 2020 to allow Hilcorp Energy Co. to acquire BP’s Alaska oil and gas assets for $5.6 billion, a transaction described as the biggest Alaskan business deal in a generation. It involved one of the state’s most important pieces of economic infrastructure."(Inside Climate News)

Not the kind of company that can or would clean things up.  

Alaska Legislators - as you talk about Alaska oil revenues and taxes - please put the costs of cleaning up the oil fields at the end into any new legislation.  We need a realistic estimate of the costs and a way to get the oil companies to deposit money for the cleanup before they leave.    

Senator Sullivan, you're one of the oil companies' biggest boosters.  Show us you care about Alaska too and get an adequate fund set up to deal with cleaning the oil fields and the pipeline when the oil is gone.  Kennecott is just a blip on the map compared to what the oil companies will leave behind.

 

And for those of you who have never heard of McCarthy or Kennecott, here's a picture and link to some old posts about the area.  

 Here's part of what the old Kennecott Copper Mill looked like when we visited in 2008.  It was at the end of several hours of dirt road.  

"Don’t call them “at-risk.” They’re “at-promise" And 3 Other Articles Of Interest

Let's start off with some good news.  If you're only going to link to one of these articles, I recommend this one.   There are better ways to do things.  For one things, being smaller and close to your people helps.   I also want to disclose that the head of Fledge is a close relative.

Novel Holding Company Africa Eats Has Raised $1.8M For Its Impact Startups (Forbes)

About a year ago, Fledge, which operates about 10 impact accelerators around the world, launched Africa Eats, a holding company with 27 agriculture and food-focused Africa-based graduates of the networks’ programs. The goal: supporting entrepreneurs on-the-ground with an intimate understanding of how best to address hunger and poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since then, the company has raised close to $2 million—and, despite the pandemic, the portfolio companies are doing fine.

Another good news story, where calling attention to labels can make a difference.  Not 'at risk.'  'At promise.'  Most kids want to be good people, they just need support for those dreams.

Caring for the environment helps South King County kids recovering from trauma or hardship find a sense of purpose  (From the Seattle Times)

"This summer, Park, Amine and Tracy are among two dozen mostly South King County youth learning to be stewards of the environment. 

They clean urban lakes during kayak patrols, plant trees, learn field mapping skills and test water quality in streams and rivers on state parks and public lands. They’re on water or trails several days each month. They’re paid $15 an hour for the work — enough to keep most of them from having to take other part- or full-time jobs that would otherwise consume their days — and they’re getting leadership training so they can help lead conservation and pollution prevention efforts in the future. . .

Many of the youth involved in Unleash the Brilliance have faced early adverse experiences “on steroids,” says Dorsey. Amine was peer pressured into regularly using drugs in middle school; his grades and relationship with his parents tanked. Park’s family faced bankruptcy. Other youth bore witness to their parents’ addictions, moved around a lot or lived in extreme poverty. Some have a history of being incarcerated, skipping class or facing delays graduating from high school. 

Dorsey sees them for their potential. Don’t call them “at-risk.” They’re “at-promise,” he says."

How much do your peers impact your behavior?  This Atlantic article addresess peer pressure and vaccination.  

The Anti-vaccine Con Job Is Becoming Untenable:  Why targets of deliberate deception often hesitate to admit they’ve been deceived

"Something very strange has been happening in Missouri: A hospital in the state, Ozarks Healthcare, had to create a “private setting” for patients afraid of being seen getting vaccinated against COVID-19. In a video produced by the hospital, the physician Priscilla Frase says, “Several people come in to get vaccinated who have tried to sort of disguise their appearance and even went so far as to say, ‘Please, please, please don’t let anybody know that I got this vaccine.’” Although they want to protect themselves from the coronavirus and its variants, these patients are desperate to ensure that their vaccine-skeptical friends and family never find out what they have done. . .

Shifting from an individual to a relational perspective helps us understand why people are seeking vaccination in disguise. They want to save face within the very specific set of social ties that sociologists call “reference groups”—the neighborhoods, churches, workplaces, and friendship networks that help people obtain the income, information, companionship, mutual aid, and other resources they need to live. The price of access to those resources is conformity to group norms. That’s why nobody strives for the good opinion of everyone; most people primarily seek the approval of people in their own reference groups."

Do you know whether your insurance company is insuring coal companies?

U.S. INSURERS FAIL ON CLIMATE ACTION:   Global insurers make coal increasingly “uninsurable”; whole industry fails to act on oil & gas  

LONDON (December 2, 2020)—U.S. insurance companies lag behind their global peers and play a key role in enabling the fossil fuel industry, the Insure Our Future campaign revealed today in its fourth annual scorecard on insurers’ climate policies. 

Insuring Our Future: The 2020 Scorecard on Insurance, Fossil Fuels and Climate Change finds that most European and Australian insurers no longer provide coverage for new coal projects, which has made it harder and costlier to secure the insurance that coal projects need to operate. Coal companies face rate increases of up to 40%. Controversial projects—like the Adani Group’s Carmichael coal mine in Australia—are finding it hard to obtain insurance at all. This demonstrates the insurance industry’s unique power to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels.  

 More useful for most folks is the scorecard here.  

Unfortunately, smaller companies like All State and State Farm aren't listed here.  They are both independent companies.  But Geico is owned by Berkshire Hathaway which is one of the worst offenders.

 

Happiness - A Novel By Aminatta Forna - "People want choices without consequences"

Aminatta Forna's novel starts with a Wolfer killing the last pair of wolves in Greenhampton, Massachusetts  in 1834.  One of the key characters, Jean, carries on that theme by studying coyotes in upstate New York in the 21st Century as well as urban foxes in London.  But this is secondary, though related to the main theme and main character Attila. 

Attila describes his job working in crisis zones around the world.

"'I specialise in trauma, among civilian populations principally,' said Attila.  'Much of my work is as you would imagine.  Teams of us go in, some to count the dead, others to trace the living and return them to where they should be or send them somewhere else.  I work with the survivors.  My job is less to fix the damage than to catalogue the extent of it."

'What happens then?'

'After us?  More reconstruction.  The aid agencies, the people who have won the contracts to fix the roads, mend the dams, repair the bridges.'

'I meant to the victims.'

'We file our reports, they can run to thousands of pages.  Sometimes a perpetrator or two is imprisoned in The Hague.  A few of the survivors will be called as witnesses and have their moment in court.  They get to see some general or president or warlord  whose name they have heard but who they've never laid eyes on put behind bars.  They go there wanting to face the person who tortured them, but that never happens, the system doesn't work like that.  The lawyers argue about chains of command, utmost responsibility.  Those words don't mean anything to the woman whose daughter was taken away or who's son's bones turned up in a ditch he had to dig himself.'  Attila shrugged.  'While all that's happening, somewhere in the world somebody else gets ready to go to war.'

'Wow!' Jean exhaled, not knowing what to say next.  (p. 118)

All that proceeds the next paragraph: 

Attila gave a small wry smile.  'I'm not being cynical, just realistic.  War is in the blood of humans.  The kind of people who torture and rape during war, they're always among us, every time you walk own a busy street you're passing killers waiting to kill.  War gives them license.  We tell ourselves people are ordinarily good, but where is the proof of that?  There are no ordinarily good people, just a lot of people who've never been offered the opportunity to be anything else.  As for the rest, the followers and foot soldiers - well you can't imprison half a nation.  For them and for everyone else life carries on, only not quite as before."(118)

I should add that Attila is a Ghanian psychiatrist who's in London to present a paper at a conference. It's there that Jean bumps into him (literally) while she's jogging over the Waterloo Bridge observing one of her foxes weaving unnoticed through the crowd.  

He goes on, and I had to think of all the white supremacists that Trump has unleashed:

"There was no big secret to war, Attila thought.  There would always be people who relished violence, all they ever needed was a leader and an opportunity.  If someone could unite the gang members of New York or Chicago or London, they could take over their respective cities if that person was the president they could take over the country.  A lot could be achieved by offering young men power and sex."

The book was published in 2018.  Usually books take years to be written, edited, and published, so the odds are good it was started before Trump was seen as a viable candidate, though passages like this could have been edited closer to the publication date.  

The chapters are titled Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc. as we follow Attila during the two weeks or so he's in London for the conference.  He and Jean run into each other a couple of times and then team up after Attila goes to see his niece and a neighbor tells him that the niece and her son were taken by immigration.  He tracks down he niece in a hospital bed who was let go because it was a mistaken identity (well, actually, an unscrupulous landlord who reported her as illegal so he could get her out of the apartment and raise the rent), but the boy, who'd been put in a foster home, had run away.  Jean, who's been mapping out sections of the neighborhoods to keep track of her foxes, offers to help find the boy.  Jean has also enlisted the help of night workers - street cleaners, doormen, restaurant workers, many of them Africans) to report fox sightings to her.  She recruits them to help look for the boy.  

After Jean gets ambushed on a talk radio show by the host who believes urban foxes should all be killed - Attila gives her this advice:

"Attila laughed. 'Do you know what a diplomat I once worked with told me?  That in government they are taught to treat the electorate like six-year-olds.  If you ask a member of the voting public a question on any subject most of us can only come up with three words we identify with that thing  The words depend on what our concerns are or what the papers tell us our concerns are. . .

As a retired public administration professor, I assure you I never taught my students to treat the public like six year olds, but then few government employees have public administration degrees.  And thinking about the three words can be useful. 

There are other events and characters in the week and a half that's covered in the book.  And some flashbacks to prior events.  How Jean's marriage fell apart in the States.  Rosie, an old lover of Attila's who's got Alzheimers and is living in a nursing home and Emmanuel, who's bonded with Rosie, through his job at the home as a caregiver.  Attila's dead wife Marysa also hovers over the interwoven plot lines.  

The flashbacks take us back to war zones - either those between humans and wolves and coyotes, or between humans and humans - to give us background on Jean and Attila.

Attila muses about war frequently.

"His mind was on the mission ahead which was not the kind for which he cared a seminar on frontline training  for the military.  Young men giving their bodies and their minds to battle sent by middle-aged men who only ever handled a gun on their weekend duck shoots and men like Attila tasked with the job of trying to keep the young men sane while what they were being asked to do was an insanity itself."

There's also a fair amount of discussion about psychiatry.  Here's one example.

“In Attila’s second year of medical school the psychiatric establishment was rocked by an incendiary laid treacherously by one of their own a psychologist called David Rosenhan,  Rosenhan had attended a lecture by the Scottish psychiatrist Ronald Laing a hard-drinking radical who liked to irritate his peers by challenging psychiatric shibboleths among them the notion that psychiatric diagnoses were objective and could be compared with medical ones  Rosenhan wondered if there were any empirical way to test this assertion and decided to conduct his own experiments  He recruited a group of six volunteers including (alongside several medical professionals) a painter and a housewife and himself as the seventh  Each volunteer was detailed to ring one of several psychiatric hospitals and to request an appointment, to which they presented themselves unwashed and unshaved.  They were to describe hearing voices.  Nothing too dramatic and always the same words, ‘Empty’, ‘Hollow’, ‘Thud’.  All but one of the volunteers was admitted, after which the six, in accordance with their instructions, behaved perfectly normally and told staff the voices had gone away.  Nevertheless the participants were held for an average of nineteen days, and one poor soul was kept inside for fifty-two.  When eventually they were discharged each of the patients was described not as sane or cured but ‘in remission’.  In every case the only people who suspected the volunteers of being perfectly sane frauds were other patients.” (pp 229-230)

Rosenhan was a real person.  The experiment was real.  Though Wikipedia has the details slightly different and cites cites Susannah Cahalan who challenges that it happened.  Here's an NPR review of Cahalan's book, The Great Pretender.  

I'm close to the end of the book and finding it fascinating, in no small part because many of the characters are part of an African immigrant underclass in London, taking on low level service jobs.  It's a part of London I'm much less familiar with.  

From the author's website:

"Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and Great Britain and spent periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand and Zambia. She is the award-winning author of the novels Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and a memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water, and the forthcoming essay collection, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion."

As I near the final pages, I'd say the book is about the human need to control.  To control the world, to control nature, to control others.  This is demonstrate by how psychiatrists try to control mental illness by categorizing and then treating it. By how people try to control the uncontrollable by killing it - culling urban foxes, refusing to listen to Jean who has been studying the fox behavior and who says that just killing them won't work. 

From Ayo, one of the immigrants in Jean's team of fox watchers:

"Cannot become rich from [foxes], cannot control them, not even kill them.  That's why the foxes make some people angry.  The problem with those people is that they themselves have forgotten they are alive."

A career diplomat echoes that theme.  He's holding a snow globe given him long ago by his daughter:

"'This is how most people want to live.'  He put his hand out for the [snow] globe and Attila handed it to him.  Quell held it up to the light.  'They want to be safe, they want to be comfortable.  They want to believe that they are in control of their lives, and they want that thing we call freedom.  It all comes at a price, but don't you dare mention that.  People want choices without consequences.  And we give it to them, fools that we are.  We are the "somebody" people who have no bloody intention of doing anything themselves mean when they say somebody must do something.  I blame books, films, all that nonsense.'"

 

Video About China's Contribution To Saving Wetlands Along International Flyways Of Migratory Birds [Updated]

[UPDATE:  Here's a link to a great site about birding and other wildlife in Beijing and beyond:  https://birdingbeijing.com.]

When I taught a masters of public administration class in Beijing in 2004, I paid close attention to the birds I saw.  We had a fifth floor walk up apartment in the faculty housing on campus and so we had a treetop view from our apartment.  The most prominent bird at the time was an azure magpie.  

But I was surprised to learn that most of my students were unaware of the birds on campus.  They simply didn't see them on campus.  They were surprised that there were birds and that their American professor was interested in them.  

I searched bookstores for birding guides.  I identified birds by taking pictures and sending them to a birder friend in Anchorage who sent them to her birder friend in Japan who would identify the birds and then I could google them to confirm.  

Eventually a student took me to the biggest bookstore in Beijing - about five stories - and we found a birding book published by, I think, the World Wildlife Association.  I'd even look straight up and sometimes see flocks of birds way, way up high above Beijing.  

So when Emily retweeted this video, I was excited.  The Chinese government has stopped reclamation projects along the Yellow Sea where migratory birds stop on their migration path.  

This post is for my students in Beijing. Ben (Frank), I hope you'll pass the video along to your old classmates.  

There is a variety of people speaking here - from China, from Cornell University, from New Zealand, and from Anchorage.  

Thanks to all these folks for making this happen.  (This video is dated May 23, 2021)

Easy To Sort Out The Top Anchorage Mayoral Candidates

I'm going to make this as brief as I can and encourage others to find their way to other forums so they can judge for themselves.  April elections tend not to have that many people voting, and with so many candidates, there's a good chance that there will be a runoff in May.  Those have even fewer people voting.  So your vote counts a lot.  On the other hand, the Municipality has a vote by mail election, which tends get more participation.  

 I watched the mayoral forum hosted by about 20 non-profits that one would have to say lean toward protecting the environment, diversity, and those in need.  The zoomed through a lot of questions and it quickly separated the candidates into, what seemed to me, the well qualified and the less qualified.  

Just as any large private or non-profit business would focus on people's experience and knowledge of the organization and or similar ones, when we elect a mayor we should be hiring someone who isn't going to be learning on the job.  So the first thing that struck me about the candidates was:

Knowledge and Experience With the Municipality

Basically, there were four candidates that stood out as reasonably well versed in what's happening in Anchorage and would be reasonably well prepared to start from day one.  These are folks who, unsurprisingly, have been very involved with the operations of the Municipality:

Bill Falsey - is a former Municipal Attorney and the he was the City Manager.  The first position gives you a ring-side seat and the second actually puts you in the ring.

Forrest Dunbar - is a current Assembly member.

Bill Evans - is a former Assembly member.  

George Martinez - has a lot of government experience in New York and has been involved with community organization in Anchorage since at least 2008.  He worked as a special assistant to Mayor Berkowitz so he has a handle on a number of municipal issues.  He's currently head of Leadership Anchorage at the Alaska Humanities Forum

All four were familiar with the various programs and issues that were raised in the forum and were able to speak to the questions with obvious detailed knowledge of the issues.  

In my mind, these are the people qualified to step into the job and be able to do the do real work from Day One.  The others are going to have to learn on the job.  That's not really what we need.

Articulate and Able to Represent the Municipality Well

The four above were all good spokespersons.  I found George Martinez to be the best speaker - very fluent, clearly had his thoughts well organized and articulated, and conveyed a sense of caring.  Dunbar and Evans were next.  I found Falsey about wonky.  He knew the technical details and was able to say a lot, quickly, but I didn't feel a lot warmth.  High on rationality, not so high on charisma.  

I took a lot of notes, but what I've written above is probably more important than the details of the answers which were focused a lot on parks, diversity, outdoors, indigenous issues, and a little on downtown.  

The other candidates really were far behind in both factors above.  They were not people who had any real experience with Municipal government that was greater than any one off the street.  Mike Robbins said he was in the raise in response to how the Municipality handled the pandemic response.  Businesses were badly hurt.  I don't disagree with that, but I lean more to the side that believes they would have been hurt a lot more if the Muni hadn't take the strong action it took.  

Heather Herndon spoke about being fourth generation Alaskan, she said growing up in Alaska she was never aware of people being treated differently because of the race or ethnicity.  She made some cryptic references to indigenous people saying there were some in her family.  

Several candidates seemed to cast themselves as 'normal people':  Anna Anthony is a mother and a little one made noise in the background a couple of times.  Jeff Brown said he represented the 80% of Anchorage residents that agreed on most things.

Another factor might be generational - who best represents the future and will be best able to take us there?   Of the four most qualified, Dunbar and Falsey are the youngest.  At this point in the pandemic, those who kept forgetting to unmute are automatically disqualified.  It's ok for ordinary folks, but not for someone about to lead one of the biggest organizations in Alaska.  They just don't have what it takes to learn quickly to adapt to change.  T

Gender and ethnic diversity will be a consideration for others.  

Click to enlarge

Jeff Brown and Joe Westfall came in late, after I took the screen shot. Julie was the moderator.  Wikipedia lists five additional candidates who did not show up: 

Dave Bronson

Darin Colbry

Reza Momin[10]

Albert Swank Jr.

Jacob Seth Kern

Random Thoughts On COVID-19 Impacts Now And Later

 Impact On Kids 

There's lots of talk about the debilitating impacts on the mental health and development of kids with schools out of session.  But I haven't seen anything (I did look, though not exhaustively) on all those kids for whom school is torture because they are shunned, picked on, bullied, beat up, or otherwise made to feel miserable at school.  For them, distance learning is probably an improvement.  

Medical Waste

I've been appalled for a long time about medical waste.  I think it started when I accompanied someone to the ER for a twisted ankle that was swelling.  It was winter here in Anchorage with lots of snow.  We got into the ER and they pulled out some sort of chemical ice pack, they twisted it and put it on her ankle.  I don't recall the price of the item - over $50 at least.  All the free snow and ice you could want, perfect for molding in a plastic bag on an ankle, was just outside the door.  

When you get a shot, the syringe and needle is tossed.  My mom was a lab technician and I remember the autoclave (there's a word that's been sitting idle in my brain for decades just waiting for this post, I even forgot it was there) where they sterilized the glass syringes and the needles.  Now things get tossed. 

When my mom caught MRSA in the hospital - new doctors kept coming in and each put on a whole set of protective clothing before entering.  (They all wanted to do new tests which required drawing more blood from my poor mom.)  They saw her for less than five minutes, then tossed all the protective gear when they left.  

While I don't know how much this kind of waste adds to the total medical costs, I do know it contributes to the landfill problems, including plastics and ocean plastic gyres.  

But when PPP were in short supply at the beginning of the pandemic, medical personnel began wearing masks all day instead of throwing them away after each patient.  Hospitals found ways to sterilize PPP. 

I hope there are people rethinking our throwaway hospital practices.  How can they reduce what they add to landfills, reduce the use of the raw materials, reduce costs?  All the medical supply companies will be fighting them all the way.  It would be interesting to see the role of medical supply company lobbyists play in the developing the rules hospitals must follow in these practices. 

Food

The whole way my household gets food has changed radically.  We use an app and then go pick it up 'curbside' in the parking lot.  (There really isn't a curb involved.)  I'm getting better finding what I'm looking for with the app.  I buy less spur of the moment things because I don't see them.  And I realize that we have at least one new staple in our fridge - cottage cheese.  It's an easy to 'prepare' snack that's probably healthier - and less expensive - than the Talenti gelatos in the freezer.  Also, without going out to eat, our food bill has gone way down.  

Will we go back to in-store grocery shopping when this is over?  I  suspect so, but I don't know, but when we're pressed for time I'm sure we'll use the apps.  And I know there will be a huge demand for restaurants.  And there will be plenty of people ready to open restaurants to meet that demand.  

Laws of Nature versus The Rules of Men*

The notion of social construction - things that are created by humans - is becoming clearer during the pandemic.  Often these are institutions that people just assume are 'natural', fixed, the way things are.  Like slavery once.  Like women not voting.  Like until death do us part heterosexual marriages.  (And the * in the heading is to emphasize that until very recently in the US, nearly all laws were made by men.) 

We're seeing now how the economy can collapse.  How school can be cancelled.  How our customary forms of greetings can be put aside.  How covered faces can be seen as the fashion of bandits, the assumed oppression of some Muslim women, to now a badge of political political persuasion or concern for health.  

But while we keep being enlightened about the 'made up' quality of the rules of people, the laws of nature keep steady - the sun comes up each morning, the weather does its thing, viruses do theirs.  

Science is the study of the laws of nature.  Science doesn't always correctly describe how nature works, but it's surely proving that science does a lot better than religion or politicians who want to ignore it for their own personal gain.  

I'm hoping that when this is over, a lot of the rules of men that oppress other people, that keep people poor, that destroy the natural world, that allocate wealth, will be seen as just made up rules that can be changed to create a more equitable and positive place for people to live.  

Video Conferencing

As I'm writing this post in Anchorage, I'm also on jitsi watching my grandkids in San Francisco playing with various Lego and other building materials.  We're just hanging out together doing our own things, but we can look and see each other as we do it.  It's VERY cool that we can be together like this.  I think back to my childhood when even a call to outside the local area in Los Angeles cost so many cents per minute, and international calls were dollars per minute.  This video conferencing is as amazing a change as anything I can think of.  (As I was proofing this my granddaughter pulled  apart her big brother's lego creation and he got so mad he hit her.  And she cried and told him to go away.  And now they've made up with the guidance of their dad.  

Everyone enjoy your weekend.  Time for me to get away from this screen.  

Climate Change Giant Paul Hawken In Anchorage Thursday Free At UAA

Feeling overwhelmed by Climate Change and other issues.  Learn how the top ways the world can slow down climate change.  Some are surprising - like educating girls.

The author of Drawdown - an incredible book that looks at 50 ways to slow down climate change is speaking at Wendy Williamson Auditorium at UAA tonight (Thursday) at 7pm - FREE!!!

I've posted about Hawken's book before.

Port Of Oakland and Chappell Roland Hayes

After dropping the kids off yesterday morning we took BART out to Oakland to visit long time friends.  And they took us to Middle Harbor Shoreline Park.

From The Port Of Oakland website:

"Middle Harbor Shoreline Park is built on the site of the former Oakland Naval Supply Depot, an important supply center for the Navy's Pacific Fleet from World War II until 1998, when the depot was closed and transferred to the Port of Oakland. This 541-acre facility was equipped with dozens of warehouses with a combined floor area of over 7 million square feet. The Naval Supply Depot that stood on this land played an important role in the World War II war effort--civilian and military workers processed and shipped a wide variety of cargo, including aviation material, electronics, weapons, clothing, food, fuel, lumber, and medicine and medical equipment."

The park looks out over San Francisco Bay and the Bay Bridge into downtown San Francisco.

This is a naked eye view from a tower in the park.

This is with a little zooming with the camera.

And this is with help from the telescope on the tower.

The cranes are part of the Oakland docks.  A dockworker was eating lunch on the tower.  He said he eats there every day and it's always as deserted as it was yesterday.  Except when there's a concert.  As an Alaskan I forget that deserted isn't normal.

He also said that ll shipping to and from China has been halted.  Shipowners here, he said, are afraid their ships will be quarantined.



I also learned about Chappell Roland Hayes.

I found more about him here (where you can read it all)

"Visionary Hayes Honored by PortSunday, January 25, 2004
by Paul T. Rosynsky, Staff Writer
Oakland ~ During his brief 45 years of life, Chappell Hayes inspired hundreds and changed the lives of thousands with his stoic leadership of West Oakland's never-ending fight for environmental justice.
As an outspoken critic of governmental policies that favored industrial development over community cohesiveness, Hayes stood as a beacon of hope for thousands of disenfranchised residents who neither had the means nor the knowledge to fight against the destruction of their neighborhood.
So it was fitting Saturday, exactly 10 years after Hayes' death, that his nemesis, the Port of Oakland, dedicated its prized environmental achievement to the man who made it happen.
In an emotionally stirring ceremony, more than 100 family members and friends, including his wife, City Council member Nancy Nadel, and daughter, Sele Nadel-Hayes, helped the port turn a new observation tower at Middle Harbor Shoreline Park into a monument celebrating Hayes' life and achievements.
"The naming of the observation tower is very fitting for Chappell," Nadel said, wrapping up a two-hour dedication ceremony. "With his feet on earth and head in the clouds, he served as an inspiration to me and Sele. Now, he has the ability to inspire us all to infinity."
Hayes, who died of cancer in 1994, is credited for helping West Oakland begin its long and continuing battle against polluting industries and the governments that support them. . ."

It was, as you can see, a beautiful day.  Got into the low 70s in Oakland.

Thoughts On Pebble Mine After 6 Classes

I've been to six of the planned eight OLÉ classes on Pebble Mine. Here's my sense of this mega project to extract copper, gold, molybdenum, and other metals in a remote area adjacent to the world's largest salmon fishery.


1.  Obsession:   Anyone who wants to undertake a project of this scope in the United States has to be an obsessive gambler. The amount of time and effort it takes to get all the permits, to get to the site, to put in infrastructure, to put in all the safety procedures, to woo the local communities, and to so raw mining and then to clean up everything is enormous.   I suspect that for some people this is a challenge, like climbing the peaks of the world's highest mountains.  I imagine for all who undertake such projects, the promise of great riches is a key factor.  And apparently, getting a project along a certain part of the way, means the project can then be sold to someone else.  And I'm not exactly sure who's money is at risk and what sort of tax benefits some may get out of losses in a project like this.
For example here are some of the Pebble Mine presentation slides that show a sense of the enormous scope of the project without getting into minutiae:

They have to process such enormous amounts of ore because the amount of valuable minerals is a tiny fraction.

This is just the site for the current 20 year planned mine.  There's a much richer ore deposit to the east of this, but it's buried under bedrock and harder to get at.  No one seems to believe that this project is going to end after 20 years.  That's just the point where they will begin this process over again to then go after the rest of the ore.

2. Complexity.  There is no one person who has the knowledge and experience to be able to assimilate all the data in order to make a yes or no decision on a project like this.  There's way too much technical data from too many different areas.  We've been told about tests of chemical reactions, groundwater studies, surface water studies, acidity, toxicity, bulk tailings and pyritic tailings,  porphyry intrusions, how copper affects salmon's ability to smell, the many federal and state regulations, and  growing demand for copper in green economy,

Here's an overview of the Baseline Study - an attempt to document the existing conditions.  Who is really going to read 30,000 pages?

3.  Many Decisions.   There isn't just one decision.  There are many permits and approvals to get - some of which can stop the project.

On the left are the US Army Corps of Engineers authorities.  On the right are other federal laws. (clicking on any of the images will enlarge and focus them)

And there are approvals and permits needed from Alaska.

And here are all the groups involved in the Army Corps of Engineers Environmental Impact.

Although we got charts showing the decision making process, no one ever said who exactly makes the final decision.  Is it just one person?  Or several people?  We still have two more sessions so I can ask next week.  (I'll miss the last session, unfortunately.)

4. Risk.   In fact, this is NOT a technical decision. Ultimately it's a decision about risk.  How much risk is there and is that risk worth the possible consequences?  It's about the level of comfort with risk the decision maker has.  There isn't just one risk, but many.  At the extreme is the potentially catastrophic consequence of destroying the salmon in Bristol Bay.  McNeil River bears are also nearby.  Then there are the possibilities of lesser impacts on the salmon and other parts of the environment around the mine site.  On the other side are the benefits, which the Pebble folks identified as employment for local people and the importance of copper in the new green environment.  And, of course, the hundreds of millions of potential profit.

Here are some slides from the presentation of Bristol Bay Native Corporation which opposes the mine:

And this slide from the Pebble Mine folks:

5.  Ultimately It's A Values Based Decision.  Aside from the decision maker(s) comfort with and exposure to risk in this situation, this all boils down to two opposing world views:

1. The United States is based on individual freedom and capitalism which allow, even encourage, individuals and corporations to go out and exploit the world's God given natural resources to become rich and make the general economy better
2. Human beings are part of nature, not APART from nature.  Humans have been exploiting the planet and now it has reached the point that human caused climate change will make life and survival for humans and most other species of life much harder.

6.  The Decision.   The decision on Pebble will probably be determined not so much by all the technical details that are being presented, but by where on the spectrum between World Views #1 and #2  the decision maker(s) sit.


7.  Money.  As I review all this, I realize that one important aspect* of the Pebble Mine project has not been discussed in the class - how the project is being financed.  I made the assumption in #1 above that this was a gamble.  But bits of conversation after class with presenters makes me question that.  At one point I made a comment about Northern Dynasty (the company that has been at the lead in this project) and someone said, they won't be the ones who actually carry all this out.  They will be sold out.  So I have questions about how a deal like this is put together.    Who actually has money at risk?  Who is investing in this?  What are their motives?  How much of the expenses of doing all the preparation costs are only paper losses?

These all boil down to who is actually risking how much money and what do they stand to gain?  To what extent do tax payers end up underwriting this because of tax deductions for business expenses or tax offsets for losses?

*Of course there are other important aspects that haven't been discussed that I haven't yet thought of, I'm sure.

On The Edge Of Snow - And OLÉ Classes Continue

It was in the mid 30s when I went to Pecha Kucha class yesterday, but the streets were good, so I biked.  My presentation was ok, people said nice things afterward.  Here's the first of the 20 slides.

and I tried to make the case for how learning another languages let's you escape the confines of English (or whatever your first language is) as you learn that the words and grammar of one language reflect the world differently from other languages.  This shows most concretely in the fact that words of one language don't translate exactly into the words of the other language.  Even concrete objects might not translate right.  Banana would seem an easy translation, but in Thailand there are about 20 kinds of bananas that regularly show up in the market and many people there pick bananas off trees in their garden.   And that, say, a black cat, has meanings in one culture that it might not have in another.  And words that describe relationships get even trickier.

The Thai words closest to brother and sister really focus on the older/younger relationship more than the gender relationship, or even the blood relationship

People without any blood connection use the terms for older and younger about each other all the time. (And it's different from the more recent US use of 'Bro'.)  At one point I asked somebody, after he'd introduced me to his sixth or seventh 'brother', how many brothers did he have.  Oh, they aren't that kind of brother, he said.

The class liked the blue and red circles I used to show how much the English and German or Thai words overlapped.  I didn't think of that until I was finishing the last slide, the night before the presentation.  Then I went back and put in circles for the different slides that compared English and German or English and Thai words.  Good thing I did.  I argued that when the words don't overlap completely (usually the case) is when you learn what your own language doesn't capture about the world.  And the less the words overlap, the more you learn about yourself and the world.

It was just starting to rain when I returned yesterday.  It was more a light drizzle, and the drops were tiny specks of hail.  Much better than raindrops, not as good as snow.  I could feel them on my face.  But I got home fine, but I was expecting snow on the ground this morning.

There wasn't any and the street in front of our house was wet, but not icy.  And large chunks of sky were blue.   So I biked.  For the most part it was ok but then I saw a police car's lights flashing ahead and this car on the side of the road.

The culprit seems to have been a piece of light brick colored cement at the intersection.  While all the other surfaces were fine, that piece of cement was really slick.  Was there a second car involved?  I don't know.  A stop sign had been flattened.  (I thought I took a picture, but it's not on my phone.)  I walked the bike around the debris and down the hill.  Back on the flat I rode carefully to the church where today's OLÉ classes were held.

By 2:30 when I came back, the sun was out and any ice or frost that had been there was either a puddle or dry pavement.  But I did have two voices in my head this morning.  One said:  "Don't be such a wimp.  You can't let a little weather threat keep you off the bike."  The other said, "A broken arm would really be a pain.  Don't be stupid."  Stupid beat wimp today, but I know I should be more careful.

The classes today were good.  The Innocence Project class was a continuation of last week's list of reasons innocent people are convicted.  I'll put that into another post.  It's interesting.  And this class is a great one after seeing "When They See Us" the Netflix series on the Central Park Five case.  Everything they talk about in the class happens in the series.

The afternoon class was on Pebble Mine.   We've had a representative from Pebble. A person from the Army Corps of Engineers, whose in charge of the Environmental Impact Statement, and today, was someone from Bristol Bay Native Corporation who are strongly opposed to the mine.