I don't know -- yesterday I was writing about saying goodbye -- how does that enter in to conversation -- how do you say it when you can't imagine the future -- the new life...
And then comes a breath of fresh air...
A city is being planned in Abu Dhabi which will be entirely solar powered, zero carbon emissions, 100% recycling, car free... a future with clean air and less pollution. If plans hold, it will be up and running by 2016 -- my kids won't even be in college yet!
Groundbreaking is scheduled for Saturday for Masdar City, a nearly self-contained mini-municipality designed for up to 50,000 people rising from the desert next to Abu Dhabi's international airport and intended as a hub for academic and corporate research on nonpolluting energy technologies.
The 2.3-square-mile community, set behind walls to divert hot desert winds and airport noise, will be car free, according to the design by Foster + Partners, the London firm that has become a leading practitioner of energy-saving architecture.
The community, slightly smaller than the historic district of Venice, will have similar narrow pedestrian streets, but shaded by canopies made of photovoltaic panels. It will produce all of its own energy from sunlight.
Water will flow from a solar-powered seawater-desalinization plant. Produce will come from nearby greenhouses, and all waste will be composted or otherwise recycled, said Khaled Awad, property manager for the project.
The first phase, to be completed over the next two years, will be construction of the Masdar Institute, a graduate-level academic research center associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
From an article in The International Herald Tribune by Andrew C. Revkin.
In the Times DOT Earth Blog there's an interactive promotional video about the project -- it looks like something out of the Jetson's -- but it also looks pretty... "enjoy a fresh cup of coffee on the veranda in a car free environment..."
Car free... calm... quiet... breathe...
While it is unrelated to oil, I was further lifted this morning by a new report issued by the World Health Organization proposing a global anti-smoking campaign. The report goes tracks world-wide who is smoking and where in order to combat the situation with a huge anti-smoking communications.
There is hope.
Revkin makes a really big point that none of the major movements in sustainable energy happening here in the US. Even his lead in the International Herald Tribune pits the Gulf as an unlikely spot for such strides and why not Arizona, Oregon, New Mexico... I would further complain that while this story was given prominence in the International Herald Tribune, which is the international paper of the New York Times Corp., the story is relegated to the blog (albeit the best blog in the country) in the Times itself.
The World Health Organization report was funded by mayor Bloomberg himself.
I don't know -- I think where we live is all messed up. Power and money and an inability to change the situation we are in... overwhelming.
But there are people out there doing it -- and I don't care who they are or where they live -- we are all people. We are all here together -- and while I would prefer to say that we will be part of the solution, I'm just glad someone is working on a solution this morning.
Car free... calm... quiet... breathe...
Showing posts with label DOT Earth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DOT Earth. Show all posts
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Monday, December 17, 2007
News To Me
The question of why some things make into the news and some don't has been on my mind a lot for the past few days. Maybe it's because I've been feeling the need to filter daily things out -- maybe it's the fact that I've been snowed in -- or maybe it's simply this project.
On December 9, there was a major oil spill off the coast of North Korea. 2.8 million gallons of crude oil. December 12 another off in the North Sea off Norway. 21,750 barrels. 913,500 gallons, if I'm right -- there are 42 gallons for crude oil in a barrel.
Full disclosure, I once made a reporting error to the multiple of 10 on the front page of a business journal which has lead me to dread my own publishing of numbers... At any rate, it sounds like a little less than a third of the size. The spill in North Korea also went directly to land, and the effects were extremely dramatic -- devastating.
I'm interested, though, in what gets reported and what doesn't.
The North Korean spill was covered in a big spread in the Times -- as it should have been, no question. The thing is, I can't find the Norway story farther east than the BBC. Yesterday I was trying to follow up a story from UPI and couldn't find it in the American press. Same today -- though not really today; I read about both these spills when they happened, and have been waiting to follow up, and trying to think about what I've learned from them. That's part of the thing with news -- what makes a big news day -- what gets covered may solely depend on what happened that day in history. This really is no different from any other communication -- what presses depends on what's happening. Something is always biggest.
This weekend an article on DOT Earth discussed a bit of why stories become big stories, and how a little of the decision making goes into coverage there. Yesterday on this log, someone commented in reference to yesterday's entry that Iran not taking our currency didn't sound like much news at all, lots of countries don't. I'm not sure that I buy that, only because it's Iran, and nothing could possibly be irrelevant there now, it seems to me -- but I 'm in really unfamiliar territory.
I actually think there should be a page on the Times -- or even a part of a page -- dedicated to oil spills -- to covering oil spills every day. The idea that familiarity breeds disinterest is very dangerous -- it allows readers to not follow things -- to not understand scope and dailiness. An article in the Times earlier this year discussed Exxon's image makeover with stockholders. The article referred to "spill reduction" as one of their achievements. Let's just repeat that for a minute -- spill reduction is an achievement.
Again -- our language gives us away. I had no idea that oil was spilling all over the earth at every moment. I'm glad to know that. It makes me feel differently about leaving the lights on in rooms I'm not in. What we want to know -- what we need to know -- what we should know... The relationship between the daily and what is news -- think new -- is really interesting. For me, I'm finding, there are enormous things that are news to me...
Reporting decisions are no different than any other human decisions -- what is remembered, passed on, focused on is all a matter of timing, significance and scale. We can't do everything at once -- it's true. But important things are getting lost.
The oil spill (marked in red) is Norway's second largest ever
On December 9, there was a major oil spill off the coast of North Korea. 2.8 million gallons of crude oil. December 12 another off in the North Sea off Norway. 21,750 barrels. 913,500 gallons, if I'm right -- there are 42 gallons for crude oil in a barrel.
Full disclosure, I once made a reporting error to the multiple of 10 on the front page of a business journal which has lead me to dread my own publishing of numbers... At any rate, it sounds like a little less than a third of the size. The spill in North Korea also went directly to land, and the effects were extremely dramatic -- devastating.
I'm interested, though, in what gets reported and what doesn't.
The North Korean spill was covered in a big spread in the Times -- as it should have been, no question. The thing is, I can't find the Norway story farther east than the BBC. Yesterday I was trying to follow up a story from UPI and couldn't find it in the American press. Same today -- though not really today; I read about both these spills when they happened, and have been waiting to follow up, and trying to think about what I've learned from them. That's part of the thing with news -- what makes a big news day -- what gets covered may solely depend on what happened that day in history. This really is no different from any other communication -- what presses depends on what's happening. Something is always biggest.
This weekend an article on DOT Earth discussed a bit of why stories become big stories, and how a little of the decision making goes into coverage there. Yesterday on this log, someone commented in reference to yesterday's entry that Iran not taking our currency didn't sound like much news at all, lots of countries don't. I'm not sure that I buy that, only because it's Iran, and nothing could possibly be irrelevant there now, it seems to me -- but I 'm in really unfamiliar territory.
I actually think there should be a page on the Times -- or even a part of a page -- dedicated to oil spills -- to covering oil spills every day. The idea that familiarity breeds disinterest is very dangerous -- it allows readers to not follow things -- to not understand scope and dailiness. An article in the Times earlier this year discussed Exxon's image makeover with stockholders. The article referred to "spill reduction" as one of their achievements. Let's just repeat that for a minute -- spill reduction is an achievement.
Again -- our language gives us away. I had no idea that oil was spilling all over the earth at every moment. I'm glad to know that. It makes me feel differently about leaving the lights on in rooms I'm not in. What we want to know -- what we need to know -- what we should know... The relationship between the daily and what is news -- think new -- is really interesting. For me, I'm finding, there are enormous things that are news to me...
Reporting decisions are no different than any other human decisions -- what is remembered, passed on, focused on is all a matter of timing, significance and scale. We can't do everything at once -- it's true. But important things are getting lost.
The oil spill (marked in red) is Norway's second largest ever
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