planning as if climate change matters

today i attended a lecture by subhrajit guhathakirta entitled "planning as if climate change matters".  it was delivered in tempe center room 158, the central hub of the school of sustainability and, coincidentally, the former meat locker of IGA, a local supermarket.  given the amount of attention our program is receiving, i do enjoy the irony that we are headquartered out of an abandoned supermarket, dangling like an unwanted dingleberry from the butt crack of ASU.  to our west is a sandwich shop and our north, an ASU storage unit (which i wouldn't mind pilfering a few metal tanker desks out of given the chance).  jay golden, an SOS professor, is pretty confident that his office once served as the beer cooler for the bygone grocer... he can sense the spirits. ;]  i do believe the remnant alcohol molecules are penetrating his psyche as he managed to reference alcoholic beverages at least a dozen times during his lecture last semester. 

however, within a month or two we should be moving into the freshly renovated building (former home to the school of nursing) right on university dr, perhaps thanks to some hefty corporate donors.  the wrigley family, of chewing gun fame, has donated 25 million dollars to our program.  in fact, the school of sustainability frequently consults with a board of some very influential CEOs.. wal-mart, starbucks, etc.  i still have not totally resolved my feelings regarding this matter.  there is little debate that such powerful corporations can effect massive global change through their supply chains with adjustments to environmental policy standards. there is also very little debate regarding the fundamental mission of corporations to maximize profit and to never forget the bottom line.  beyond the green-washing, is corporate interest in sustainability genuinely important or even essential?  so far there is little evidence to me of any negative influence on our academic agenda, aside from the gargantuan gold and diamond encrusted bronze sculpture of the wrigley family's deceased cocker spaniel that we are required to pay homage to at the beginning of each class.  just a minor trifle.

anyway, back to where i started with subhrajit's lecture.  i am not convinced of the plausibility of successfully or efficiently planning for climate change considering that it is likely to disrupt ecosystem services in such a complex manner that we can only vaguely understand the implications.  he argues that climate change science should be incorporated into the nine guiding principles of city planning.   several questions arise. what does this mean for coastal US cities? human civilizations across the world have an amazing track record of constructing cities in the most vulnerable locations, and the US is no exception.  given the certainty of sea level rise can we justify reconstructing new orleans or maintaining a threatened metropolis like manhattan? also, why should climate change usurp the numerous other social dilemmas that plague cities?  poverty, public transportation, open spaces, connectivity, etc.  many of these problems seem interconnected, and perhaps climate change is too narrow a focus.  perhaps, city planning should be encouraged to consider a host of pressing issues not limited to climate change.  of course, then we face the possibility of complicating planning to the point of absurdity and uselessness.   hard decisions.

my new blog

i have, more or less, completely ignored the rise of blogging culture to its now ubiquitous status. i suppose this is somewhat unexpected for someone who grew up in front of a computer screen. i distinctly remember my brother and i custom building a "massive" server computer during my freshman year of high school (1999) featuring an impressive array of three internal hard drives (amounting to about 20GB) and housing the highest quality, most diverse collection of crust punk known to the net at the time. g.b.h., total chaos, i farm, the criminals... you know, only the true musical geniuses. we ran a server on a file sharing network called "hotline", a precursor to clients like napster and others of this ilk. i am actually appalled at the inability of the current p2p clients to even remotely rival the amazing atmosphere of hotline, which involved logging on to different servers (our musical boutique was found in the hotline search engine under the title PUNK PUNK PUNK... three times like that just to add some credibility and to scare away confused ska-punks). new visitors then engaged the hosts (my brother and i) to strike up a deal to gain membership to the server. this usually entailed uploading an album that we didn't already have. it was a beautiful ethic... stealing music cooperatively. we initially ran it off a 56k modem and generally were happy to download one or two albums in a 24 hour period. 

anyway, the point is that i should have been blogging years ago but somehow miraculously defied my near-certain fate (or rather deferred it for a few years).  however, i am already enjoying the benefits of being a late-comer. on a whim i decided to start this blog and had it registered within about 2 minutes (it took a little longer than expected because my first 15 options for a url were already taken). i called it panaceas. virtually all permutations of the root word, panacea, were taken so i resulted to the plural.

panacea: a solution or remedy for all difficulties or diseases

i encountered this word for the first time in a reading in one of my classes two weeks ago. the article's author, elinor ostrom, is a famed institutional theorist. she has established a framework called the IAD (institutional analysis and development) in order to better understand the way in which human interactions are structured. in my weekly rebuttal to our readings i struggled to accept a framework that attempts to compartmentalize human interactions into neat little boxes with such names as "exogenous variables", "participants", "action arena", "outcomes", etc. it seems far too rational. in a way, i suppose, this is what i want to to do with this blog: write about some of the chaos i am confronted with on a daily basis and explore the ways in which i am changed because of it. it is impossible to make sense of it all. with any luck, i plan to write about a small sliver on the stimuli i encounter that provoke my thoughts. if it entertains anyone other than myself then i suppose that is an added bonus. :]