You Can't Always Get What You Want . . . Luckily!

Preston Schiller contacted me a little over a year ago to incorporate some of my work on Interstate 5 construction through Bellingham, Washington, into his book-in-progress. Preston had come across my article on this topic soon after it was published. In 2004-2005 when I was living in Bellingham, he had asked me to speak to one of his classes at Western Washington University on this subject, and a few months later I accompanied another of his classes on a public transportation field trip to Vancouver, B.C.

I felt honored that Preston offered the invitation to contribute to this book, and am now pleased to announce the book's recent publication:

Preston L. Schiller, Eric C. Bruun, and Jeffrey R. Kenworthy, An Introduction to Sustainable Transportation: Policy, Planning and Implementation, London: Earthscan Ltd., 2010.

The vignette about the history of I-5 through Bellingham is on page 71. The narrative is titled "How Interstate 5 Came To Bellingham: You Can't Always Get What You Want--Luckily!" I composed the basic narrative and then Preston and I collaborated on the final draft.

The key point of the story, as I write in my article and that Preston and I sought to highlight in the vignette, is that Bellingham residents circa 2000 were fortunate that their circa 1955 predecessors did not get what they wanted when it came to the location of Interstate 5. Bellingham's current residents enjoy waterfront views and access, and are now revitalizing former waterfront industrial areas, because city leaders in the 1940s and 1950s were not able to convince state highway officials to bulldoze these areas and build the freeway.

The value of effective government regulation

Jennifer and I arrived at PDX late last night, returning from our trip to Nebraska. We stood outside the bag claim area, waiting for our ride. The vehicle traffic through the passenger pickup area was clogged, even at 10:45 p.m. We stood there with our luggage, waiting.

After a few minutes, I started to notice that there were quite a few vehicles along the curb lane, idling, their owners either sitting in the driver seat, waiting, or standing outside their vehicles at a door, waiting. More minutes passed, and most of these people continued waiting. The two pickup lanes were almost completely clogged, and vehicles were moving in the two through lanes only slowly.

Eventually, I noticed a handful vehicles along the curbside pickup lane that had not moved in at least ten minutes.

After about fifteen minutes of this, two airport security officers came outside and started directing traffic and pedestrians and ordering that the curbside idling vehicles move on. "The curbside is for active loading and unloading only," as the pre-recorded public service announcement proclaimed every few minutes. The security officers used their whistles and day-glo gloves to direct these drivers to move on. Many of the drivers moved only reluctantly.

Finally, within a few minutes, the traffic lanes began flowing relatively efficiently. The security officers had restored the flow like some moist wad of fiber through a clogged digestive system.

It struck me at this time that this is precisely why we need effective government regulation: individuals do not often regulate themselves effectively. Too many people think that they are the ones for whom the rules do not apply, they are the ones who deserve an exception, etc.

If individuals cannot regulate themselves with such a simple task as picking folks up at the airport, how can individuals and corporations possibly regulate themselves in the complex realms of industrial effluent, worker health & safety, off-shore oil drilling, international finance, etc.?

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Walter Watson, The Architectonics of Meaning

The comment thread on the post "Critiquing Sustainability" over at the Sustainability History Project involved a discussion about alternatives to Brundtlandian sustainability. One commenter, Adam Kissel, wrote

If the point is to thoughtfully consider challenges to a sustainability perspective, I think there’s a lot to think about by examining competition-based, power-based, and win-lose models, and how they either overlap with or reject various sustainability principles.

and suggested that I read Walter Watson's The Architectonics of Meaning to understand further this point.

I've recently finished this book and will begin to process it in this post, so I can respond substantively and succinctly over at the SHP.

Ignorance by any other name would still smell as foul . . .

I've recently been alerted to the escalating bigotry associated with the possibility of having a mosque constructed at/near the former site of the Twin Towers in NYC (here and here). The most shrill voices in opposition to this project include people we have already come to know as ideologically-motivated blowhards who select and manipulate data in any way that will further their political agenda: Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich.

Desiderata

This is the first installment of the ever-growing list of my favorite words. The list begins with the word desiderata, not because it's my most favorite word but because it is, simply, the first word on my list.

The noun desiderata is the plural of desideratum and means "things wanted or needed" as well as necessary things, aspects, elements, etc. The word originates from the past participle of the Latin verb dēsīderāre, "to desire, long for."

Here's an example of use from the comment thread to this EotAW post:

So while this is the biggest piece of financial reform legislation since the New Deal, it manages to reaffirm a lot of the post-Reagan conservative desiderata.

I like this word because of its alliteration, as well as the fact that it encapsulates nuance and complexity in a single little word, as so many of my favorite words seem to do!

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My book proposal

Back in Mid-may, I submitted a revised book proposal to an academic press[1] that included a sample chapter. The book is tentatively titled the same as my thesis—Working for the “Working River”: Willamette River Pollution, 1926 to 1975[2]—but I understand from the publisher that if the project does move forward the title will have to change. The publisher will send out these materials to a couple of scholars as part of a double-blind review process, who will evaluate the project; if these reviewers and the press' editorial board deem it worthy, we'll then set up a contract and schedule and move forward!

This is an exciting prospect, but I definitely don't want to count my horses before the cart has hatched, so I'm not holding my breath.

In the interest of keeping informed friends, family, and other interested folks, I thought I'd provide some excerpts from the proposal.

Just imagine what could have been: Oil-soaked Oregon beaches!

Matt Love wrote an interesting piece in the Sunday Oregonian on the topic of proposed offshore oil drilling along the Oregon coast in the late 1970s.[1]

He begins his article with reference to a 1978 pamphlet "Oregon and offshore oil," written by a body identified as the "Governor's Task Force on Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Development." The year prior, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had determined that prospects for discovering oil off the Oregon and Washington coasts was lowest in the country and, therefore, not worth the hassle.

However, Governor Bob Straub lobbied the BLM to reconsider this conclusion in the hopes that offshore drilling might, after all, be proven feasible.

Formerly a Hog, currently cluless (historically speaking)

It was one of those days weeks ago when I was putzing around on the Internet, re-living a bit of the glory days of the Washington Redskins,* when I happened upon what was news to me: One of the original Hogs, former Tight End Clint Didier (#86), was one of 15 candidates gunning for Patty Murray's senate seat in Washington State.

In response to the interview showcased at the link above, when asked why he was running for a position on the Senate, Didier replied:

When I see our kids and grand-kids' freedom being jeopardized by an over-intrusive government. They want to keep taking away our rights and individual liberties. We've gotten away from the basics...the Constitution.

"Hmmm," I thought . . .

Some things to keep in mind while using Internet sources

(X-posted at the Sustainability History Project)

Howard Rheingold provides some useful guidelines to evaluating Internet sources in his article Crap Detection 101.

Rheingold begins:

The answer to almost any question is available within seconds, courtesy of the invention that has altered how we discover knowledge - the search engine. Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part - the part a machine can do. The real difficulty kicks in when you click down into your search results. At that point, it's up to you to sort the accurate bits from the misinfo, disinfo, spam, scams, urban legends, and hoaxes. "Crap detection," as Hemingway called it half a century ago, is more important than ever before, now that the automation of crapcasting has generated its own word: "spamming."

To summarize Rheingold's points:

Not Seeing the River for the Trees

Below is the text of my presentation proposal for the American Society of Environmental History's 2011 conference in Phoenix, April 12-17:

"Not Seeing the River for the Trees: How Place Fostered and Constrained Human Actions Along Oregon’s Willamette River"