Historical Threads

You had me at "Science is a fundamentally non-dogmatic and self-correcting investigatory process"

2012-01-09T20:33:00.000-08:00

As many of you know, I've recently started a new job. I've been hired as part of a student program, which means that one of the fundamental requirements of the position is that I am a student. Fortunately, this is the case because I have begun a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) certificate program at Portland Community College.

I'm diving-in to one of the requisite courses this evening, Geology of the Pacific Northwest, and am immediately heartened by one of the introductory statements from the department and professor:

Regarding the teaching of basic geologic principles (such as geologic time and the theory of evolution), the Portland Community College Geology Department stands by the following statements about what is science.

** Science is a fundamentally non-dogmatic and self-correcting investigatory process. A scientific theory is neither a guess, dogma, nor myth. The theories developed through scientific investigation are not decided in advance, but can be and often are modified and revised through observation and experimentation.

** “Creation science,” also known as scientific creationism, is not considered a legitimate science, but a form of religious advocacy. This position is established by legal precedence (Webster v. New Lenox School District #122, 917 F.2d 1004).

** Geology instructors at Portland Community College will teach the generally accepted basic geologic principles (such as geologic time and the theory of evolution) not as absolute truth, but as the most widely accepted explanation for our observations of the world around us. Instructors will not teach that “creation science” is anything other than pseudoscience.

** Because "creation science", "scientific creationism", and "intelligent design" are essentially religious doctrines that are at odds with open scientific inquiry, the Geology/General Sciences SAC at Portland Community College stands with such organizations such as the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, the American Geophysical Union, the Geological Society of America, and the American Geological Institute in excluding these doctrines from our science curriculum.

It's so refreshing, in these times when the boorish and bigoted Rick Santorum can be considered a serious presidential candidate,* and when the center-right Mitt Romney -- who might otherwise be a quasi-decent fellow -- has to twist himself into logical pretzels so he can bend to the nonsense of the religious right, to read a statement at the beginning of the course that basically lets Christian fundamentalists know that they either need to open their minds for the class, or drop out. Very refreshing indeed!

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* And so recently after the anti-intellectual, incoherent blathering of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann were considered serious front page news.

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My view on the Occupy Movement as of right now

2011-11-24T11:18:00.000-08:00

A family member recently asked me about my view on the Occupy Movement. I thought about it for a few days and realized that I could write 20K words about it in an attempt to explain my views, but that this would take much more time than I have in the midst of a new job, the book project, the Holidays, etc. So, I will let far more knowledgeable and eloquent people speak on my behalf, and call upon one extremely flawed counter-example for contrast.

Here is my view on the Occupy Movement as of right now:

From David Weigel at Slate:

We're hearing about the arrests, and passing around meme/photos of cops shooting pepper spray at kids. Matt Taibbi does yeoman work tying these stories together.

Not to belabor the point, but the person who commits fraud to obtain food stamps goes to jail, while the banker who commits fraud for a million-dollar bonus does not. Or if you accept aid in the form of Section-8 housing, the state may insist on its right to conduct warrantless "compliance check" searches of your home at any time – but if you take billions in bailout aid, you do not even have to open your books to the taxpayer who is the de facto owner of your company.

The state wants to retain the power to make these subjective decisions, because being allowed to selectively enforce the law effectively means they have despotic power. And who wants to lose that?

The Occupy Drift: From Wall Street to Police State

Slate

From Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times:

. . . in a larger sense, the furor over the eviction of protesters in New York, Oakland, Portland and other cities is a sideshow. Occupy Wall Street isn’t about real estate, and its signal achievement was not assembling shivering sleepers in a park.

The high ground that the protesters seized is not an archipelago of parks in America, but the national agenda. The movement has planted economic inequality on the nation’s consciousness, and it will be difficult for any mayor or police force to dislodge it.

A reporter for Politico found that use of the words “income inequality” quintupled in a news database after the Occupy protests began. That’s a significant achievement, for this is an issue that goes to our country’s values and our opportunities for growth — and yet we in the news business have rarely given it the attention it deserves.

The statistic that takes my breath away is this: The top 1 percent of Americans possess a greater net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

A new study by Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University polled Americans about what wealth distribution would be optimal. People across the board thought that the richest 20 percent of Americans should control about one-third of the nation’s wealth, and the poorest 20 percent about one-tenth.

In fact, the richest 20 percent of Americans own more than 80 percent of the country’s wealth. And the poorest 20 percent own one-tenth of 1 percent.

It would be easier to accept this gulf between the haves and the have-nots if it could be spanned by intelligence and hard work. Sometimes it can. But over all, such upward mobility in the United States seems more constrained than in the supposed class societies of Europe.

Research by the Economic Mobility Project, which explores accessibility to the American dream, suggests that the United States provides less intergenerational mobility than most other industrialized nations do. That’s not only because of tax policy, which is what liberals focus on. Perhaps even more important are educational investments, like early childhood education, to try to even the playing field. We can’t solve inequality unless we give poor and working-class kids better educational opportunities.

The Occupy movement is also right that one of the drivers of inequality (among many) is the money game in politics. Michael Spence, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who shares a concern about rising inequality, told me that we’ve seen “an evolution from one propertied man, one vote; to one man, one vote; to one person, one vote; trending to one dollar, one vote.”

James M. Stone, former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said in a recent speech that many members of Congress knew that banks needed to be more tightly regulated, perhaps broken into smaller pieces.

“So why was this not done?” he asked. “One obvious piece of the answer is that both political parties rely heavily on campaign contributions from the financial sector.”

Occupy the Agenda

New York Times

David Lister, on the other hand, provides a clear example of someone who is either too ignorant or too committed to his ideological views to consider the very real substance of the Occupy Movement—or is purposely & nefariously trying to muddy the waters (I suspect the second). Lister first provides some facile comparisons between the Occupy Movement and the 1932 Bonus March which enables him to conclude that the Occupy Movement doesn't measure up to his expectations. These comparisons are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of a core part of what Occupy is all about.

For example, Lister claims that "The bonus marchers purposefully kept out anarchists and troublemakers. The Occupiers embraced them." This comparison is ridiculous for at least four reasons:

1) The Occupy Movement's core principles include an unyielding commitment to diversity and inclusion, so purposefully keeping out an entire group of people simply because they call themselves "anarchists" (or "capitalists," for that matter) would violate one of their fundamental values. Lister here commits a straw man fallacy.

2) Certainly, some anarchists are troublemakers, but "anarchist" does not equal "troublemaker," as Lister insinuates. Here Lister attempts to denigrate the Occupy Movement using guilt by association and by implying a connection between "anarchist" and "troublemaker" that doesn't necessarily follow. The fallacy in Lister's thinking here becomes apparent when one reconstructs Lister's sentence as ". . . purposefully kept out police and troublemakers." "Police" does not equal "troublemaker," in spite of what sometimes seems like an abundance of evidence to the contrary.

3) Lister's argument comes up short because it's also based on an appeal to fear: if one follows the false proposition that the Occupy Movement has no core values worthy of consideration, and the false claim that movement embraces "anarchists" who are all "troublemakers," then it would certainly follow that one need not attempt to understand the Movement or engage with the Movement's critiques because they're all just barbarians who want to tear our society down. Based on his false reading and his superficial comparison to the Bonus March of 1932, Lister implies that police are perfectly justified in using their clubs, pepper spray, and tear gas, before the unwashed heathen masses burn our crops and take our daughters away.

4) Even if one aggregated all of the "troublemakers" ("anarchist" or otherwise) within the individual Occupy Portland, Occupy Wall Street, etc., movements, one would find that this group represents an extremely small fraction of those involved. News outlets gravitate to "troublemakers" like moths to a flame, and ideologues salivate whenever they can point to the actions of "troublemakers," but the simple truth of the matter is that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of perfectly peaceful, nonviolent, protesters for every one "troublemaker." Just as the core arguments of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle have been obscured by the actions of relatively few "troublemakers," so does mainstream media and certain groups with power and privilege seek to denigrate the entire Occupy Movement by associating it with a fringe and very, very small fraction of participants. They do so because it's much easier to come to a knee-jerk, reactionary opinion about something than it is to try to understand the issues; for people and institutions fully invested in the current system of inequality and injustice, it's also beneficial to misrepresent critics so as to remain in power and privilege. Lister takes this approach in his op-ed.

Lister then concludes his piece with another example of the straw man fallacy so that he can provide we readers with what he feels to be An Important Life Lesson. Lister's concluding paragraphs illustrate how obtuse he is. His words prove how little he knows about the Occupy Movement's goals. They also prove how little he respects historical research generally. His comparison of Occupy with the Bonus March is supposed to impress readers, who might be led to conclude, "oh, Lister has called upon historical evidence, he must know what he's talking about," when, in fact, Lister merely cherry-picked a history-like meme that came across his transom because it seemed to support his preconceived ideas.

The irony of Lister's concluding paragraphs is that he identified precisely what the Occupy Movement is all about, without trying to do so or understanding what he'd done (in my bold sections below):

If you could synthesize their multiple messages into a theme, it seems they are saying, "We were promised the American dream, and we haven't received it."

The American dream is not a promise; it is an opportunity. The American dream cannot be given; it can only be achieved.

Protest without purpose: Unlike Bonus March, Occupy goals are nebulous

Oregonian

The Occupy Movement has arisen precisely because the promise of the American dream—however that may be defined—has been broken by the inadequacy of federal regulatory and enforcement structures and the sociopathic greed of key groups and institutions. The "only thing standing between any person and the attainment of the American dream" is not "that person [her or] himself," no matter how much David Lister, Charles Krauthammer, Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, and all the other blowhards of like mind claim otherwise.

I could spend much more time finding examples, but that, in a nutshell, is what I think of the Occupy Movement.

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An Entreaty for the New Year

2011-11-23T21:03:00.000-08:00

I posted this on Facebook, but not all of us are on Facebook . . .

For all of us who have ever "shared" politically-themed links, or forwarded them via email, there is this timely reminder that we might be full of shit (Plus, see the Errol Morris Op-Doc link I posted not long ago [here]). May our resolutions for the New Year include endeavoring to attempt to try to strive to be less credulous, particularly when our egos & ideologies are involved!

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Notable people remembered on a nondescript moss-covered boulder at the end of a rarely-traveled country road

2011-11-21T22:50:00.000-08:00

Izaak Walton League Memorial Plaque, Oak Island Game Management Area, Sauvie Island, Oregon, Nov. 19, 2011. Photo Seth S. Moody.

A few weeks ago, I went a-looking for a plaque in North Portland that was not to be found. A few days ago, my intrepid co-explorer Seth Moody and I braved the wilds of Sauvie Island to find another plaque. I'm proud to report that neither of us were disemboweled by the Sasquatch, and that we achieved our goal (and we have proof!).

The plaque we found was installed by the Oregon Division of the Izaak Walton League on September 14, 1957, to commemorate the life and work of Edgar F. Averill and William L. Finley. Both men were long-time members of the League, long-time active conservationists, and long-time water pollution abatement advocates.

Our trek to discover this plaque was somewhat of a pilgrimage for me. In my ongoing research on Willamette River pollution, I have discovered an extensive amount of information about the in-the-trenches work of men and women like Averill and Finley. With every discovery I am increasingly more appreciative of this work, and conscious of these people's relevance and resonance to the present day. I locate my spiritual center in nature and human consciousness, so, in my interpretation, Averill and Finley are two notable and fully human figures—among many—who illustrate the ways in which real people can take real actions in the real world to effect real and positive changes to benefit present and future generations. In my interpretation, this is precisely the realm of the highest spiritual practice.

I will explain what I mean and ground these men in the real world. Below you will find some details of the lives of Averill and Finley to help explain why their names are glued to a nondescript moss-covered boulder at the end of a rarely-traveled country road in an out-of-the-way place like Sauvie Island . . .

Izaak Walton League Memorial Plaque, Oak Island Game Management Area, Sauvie Island, Oregon, Nov. 19, 2011. Photo Seth S. Moody.

This plague honors two men who were very active in Oregon conservation efforts throughout the first half of the twentieth century. This activism also included persistent and unstinting advocacy to improve water quality throughout Oregon, particularly in the Willamette River watershed.[1]

Edgar F. Averill was born in 1881 in Chetco, Oregon, and graduated from Willamette University with a BS in 1905. He worked as reporter for the Salem Capital Journal, night city editor at the Pendleton Tribune, and city editor for the East Oregonian after graduation. In 1911, he became a District Game Warden for the Oregon State Game Commission. From 1914 to 1919, he worked for the U.S. biological survey based in Pendleton. Two years later, he entered the insurance business. He served as State Game Warden from 1925 to 1927, and left this position to open his own insurance agency in Portland’s Yeon Building (522 SW Fifth Ave.). In addition to his active involvement in the Izaak Walton League and long-time advocacy for water pollution abatement, he was an active member of the Portland City Club, the Audubon Society, Exchange Club, and the Methodist Church, and was also a trustee of Willamette University. In the 1930s, he served as President of the Oregon Wildlife Federation. Averill died at home at 6805 NE 32nd Avenue, March 19, 1955.[2]

William Lovell Finley was a nationally-renowned conservationist, writer, photographer, and conservation advocate. Because he published widely and helped propel both state-wide and national conservation efforts, Finley's accomplishments, compared to Averill's, may seem more outwardly impressive, but both men seem to have been close friends and associates and, specifically in terms of Willamette River water pollution abatement, Averill was more active and influential.[3]

Finley was born on August 9, 1876, and when he was nearly nine years old he and his parents moved from Santa Clara, California, to Portland, Oregon. His father established Portland’s Finley Mortuary in 1892. Finley and his friend Herman Bohlman helped form the North-Western Ornithological Association in December 1894; Finley was president of the twenty-two-member organization by 1896. The association briefly produced a magazine titled The Oregon Naturalist, in which they advertised the bird eggs and skins they collected.

In the late 1890s, Finley and Bohlman had moved decidedly away from collecting skins, feathers, and eggs and began photographing birds instead. The men collaborated on a number of expeditions throughout Oregon and Northern California from 1899 to 1908. Together they produced thousands of images of nearly 100 western bird species.

William Finley and Nellie Irene Barnhart married in 1906. They were both 1903 graduates of the University of California, and they settled in Portland. William and Irene often traveled on photography expeditions with their two children. Irene was active in the Oregon Audubon Society, contributed to Finley’s first book, American Birds (1907), and wrote many magazine articles.

William Finley helped form the Oregon Audubon Society in Portland in 1902, and society members elected him President in 1906. Finley helped pass the state’s Model Bird Law in 1903 and, backed by this law, helped put an end to the hunting of sea birds. After becoming Oregon Audubon President, Finley helped raise fund for a patrol boat for wardens enforcing game laws on Klamath Lake. Finley and Bohlman’s 1903 photographs of Three Arch Rocks helped convince President Roosevelt to establish there the nation’s first west coast bird refuge. Roosevelt was inspired by Finley and Bohlman’s work in the Klamath and Malheur areas to establish bird refuges at these places in 1908.

Finley worked on regional and national conservation projects through the 1910s-1930s with Ira N. Gabrielson, Jay N. “Ding” Darling, and others. Gabrielson served as the first head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1940-1946, and helped found the World Wildlife Fund; Darling was a journalist and Pulitzer-prize winning editorial cartoonist, and in the 1930s he served as Chief of the U.S. Biological Survey, administered the Federal Duck Stamp Program, and helped establish the National Wildlife Federation.

Finley helped establish the Oregon Fish and Game Commission in 1911 during the administration of Governor Oswald West, and shortly thereafter became head of the commission and State Game Warden. In this role he oversaw game and fish re-stocking, hatchery construction, hunter safety, and related projects. He also founded the Oregon Sportsmen magazine. State fish and game commissioners created a new job category for the widely-popular Finley—State Biologist—in 1917, but in 1919 abruptly fired him. The commissioners claimed the firing was because Finley’s interest in non-game species conservation and his frequent speaking tours out of state were incompatible with the commission’s work; some observers speculated that the firing was linked to Finley’s opposition to the draining of Klamath-area waters for farming purposes, a project many commissioners supported. In 1926 state officials reappointed Finley to the commission, in the role of a Commissioner, and he held this role until 1930.

Local civic leaders, conservationists, and other men formed the Portland Chapter of the Izaak Walton League on December 15, 1922. The organization’s first elected officers included President Noyes E. Tyrrell (who had been a charter member of the Multnomah Anglers’ Club, organized circa 1903), Vice President John Gill (a state senator), and Secretary A. Benz. The executive committee included naturalist William Finley, Mazamas mountaineering club president John A. Lee, and conservationist, journalist, and newspaper editor Marshall Dana. This organizational meeting came just a week after the Chicago Chapter of the IWLA honored Finley for his contributions to the causes of conservation and preservation; these same men in Chicago had, just a few months previously, founded the Izaak Walton League.

David B. Charlton, who was also a long-time member of the Portland Chapter of the Oregon Division of the Izaak Walton League and one of the central figures in Willamette River water pollution abatement from the 1930s into the 1980s, reflected on the central role that William Finley played in recruiting him into the IWLA in the early 1930s:

My becoming a Waltonian in 1934 resulted from my visit to the Portland chapter meeting when there was much uncertainty on how to get Portland to do something on its sewage disposal problem. Perhaps my greatest inspiration and awareness of wildlife and conservation problems come from contact with Bill and Irene Finley.[4]Finley died on June 29, 1953, after suffering a series of strokes since 1946 that left him physically and mentally impaired for the last seven years of his life.[5]

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[1] See, generally, James V. Hillegas, "Working for the 'Working River': Willamette River Pollution, 1926 to 1962" (MA thesis, Portland State University, 2009).

[2] For information on Averill, see: University of Oregon Libraries, “Guide to the Edgar Averill papers, 1934-1939,” http://nwda-db.wsulibs.wsu.edu/nwda-search/fstyle.aspx?doc=OrUAx_188.xml&t=k&q=edgar+averill, accessed March 19, 2011; “Fish Killed by Sewage,” Morning Oregonian, May 5, 1926, sec. 2, p. 1.; “Edgar Averill Dies at Home,“ Oregonian, March 20, 1955, p. 15; “Plaque to Fete,” Oregonian, Sep. 14, 1957, p. 9; “Finley-Averill Memorial,” Oregonian, Sep. 14, 1957, p.10; A.J. Kreft, “Finley-Averill Memorial,” Oregonian, Sep. 23, 1957, p.14.

[3] You gotta trust me on this last claim. Documentation will be forthcoming.

[4] David B. Charlton to “Dear Al,” April 9, 1975, folder Correspondence re: Water Pollution 1930-1950, box 18, Charlton Papers (Mss 1900), Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland, Ore.

[5] For information on Finley, see: Worth Mathewson, William L. Finley: Pioneer Wildlife Photographer (Corvallis, Oregon State University Press, 1986); Lawrence M. Lipin, Workers and the Wild: Conservation, Consumerism, and Labor in Oregon, 1910-30 (Urbana, Ill., University of Illinois Press, 2007), particularly 51, 54-60; “Local Anglers Elect,” Morning Oregonian, Dec. 16, 1922, p. 16; “Izaak Walton League Chapter is Formed Here,” Oregon Sunday Journal, Dec. 17, 1922, sec. 2, p. 2; “Naturalist’s Widow Dies,” Oregonian, Sep. 29, 1959, p. 15; “Plaque to Fete,” Oregonian, Sep. 14, 1957, p. 9; “Finley-Averill Memorial,” Oregonian, Sep. 14, 1957, p.10; A.J. Kreft, “Finley-Averill Memorial,” Oregonian, Sep. 23, 1957, p.14.

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Is Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy anything more than cynical and intellectually shallow misanthropy?

2011-11-14T17:07:00.000-08:00

I think I know the outlines of Ayn Rand's philosophy -- and I've even read Atlas Shrugged long ago, before I could make much sense of it -- but this morning's segment on NPR provides both a concise description of her philosophy and the very real ways in which the philosophy resonates in current politics.

Particularly after listening to the NPR segment, Objectivism seems to be a deeply cynical approach to governance that justifies the perpetuation of political and economic inequality and ignores the necessary and fundamental contributions that broader society and functioning governmental services provide to the general welfare (i.e., transportation & communications infrastructure, sanitation, public health, security, etc.). Objectivism ignores the fact that individual achievement is tied-up in complex ways with the strengths and weaknesses of broad society, and focuses instead on the fiction that fulling distinct individuals could possibly exist in a fully laissez faire system.

For these reasons, it's no surprise that the a significant slice of people with money and power (and their toadies) who are detached from daily knowledge of the complex iceberg upon which their money and power stands have the audacity and myopia necessary to advocate strongly for the dissolution of the very system that enables their success. From my vantage, Objectivism seems both intellectually and morally bankrupt, and it's rather frightening to me that so much of our current political debate is driven by advocates of this philosophy.

Or, am I missing something important about Objectivism, and my interpretation isn't correct?

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Perfectionism is just another form of procrastination

2011-11-05T20:03:00.000-07:00

Last week I locked myself away in a cabin[1] in the woods in an area rumoured to lie within the range of Sasquatch. I did not see the Sasquatch[2], but I did get a lot of work done on the book, which I plan to report on soon.

I was chatting with a friend recently about the process of deciding upon and following-through with a research project. She's working on a thesis project for her Masters in English Language Learning, and I relayed to her some kernels of wisdom I've learned from my colleagues and mentors over the years:

1) Deciding upon a research topic is a conscious focus of will. One caveat:

1a) If one writes about the topic that one's advisor has chosen, and this topic does not correlate directly with one's own interests, the will will resist.

2) Any topic can be written about in 50 words, 500 words, 5,000 words, 500,000 words, or more; the skill is to figure out how to tailor the length and detail to the needs of one's audience and the purpose of the writing.

3) Calibrate #1 and #2 with the amount of time one has to devote to the project.

4) Just git 'er done. Two corollaries:

4a) Perfectionism is just another form of procrastination.

4b) All research is preliminary to some degree. Given the nature of academic research, there will always be both new sources to be found and other researchers who come along with new information and interpretations, so all analytical writing is to one extent or another, preliminary. But, we can't let that stop us.

I didn't come up with any of the above myself, but I've found each item to be extremely helpful in my own research and writing process (such as it is). My thanks, then, to my mentors & colleagues!

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[1] As you will see in the photos I will provide, it was quite a comfortable cabin. I'm eternally grateful to Michelle & family and Mary & family!!

[2] But maybe that was part of their plan . . . ?

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Wow

2011-10-27T20:12:00.000-07:00

White Salmon Restored: A Timelapse Project

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Craft brews at WalMart (and somewhat related news)

2011-10-23T12:32:00.000-07:00

Laura Gunderson reported in the Oct. 21, 2011, Oregonian that "Former Walmart exec says the retailer plans on more craft beers."

First organic food, and now craft beer: It seems as though social pressures & gradual societal changes are incrementally influencing the ubiquitous behemoth that is WalMart.

This is good news, but does this mean that those of us who purposely avoid WalMart should start shopping there? Do these kinds of changes make-up for their lamentable relationship with organized labor?

Gunderson's article also mentions that 7-Eleven has contracted with City Brewery of La Crosse, Wisconsin, to produce a 7-Eleven house brew. I haven't had it yet, but it certainly seems an interesting idea.

On a somewhat related note, I just poked around the Internet a bit and found that the Gordon Biersch Brewing Company of Palo Alto, California, contract-brews beer for both Trader Joe's and Costco. I've tried and enjoyed the Trader Joe's-labeled beers, but haven't had the Costco beers yet.

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My friend was recently in the news -- and for all the right reasons!

2011-10-18T14:07:00.000-07:00

PSU Engineering Graduate Student Seth Moody: Not a Miscreant. Oct. 2011.

One day a few years ago, I ran an Internet search on my own name* and came across a report of a James Hillegas in Pennsylvania who had been accused of killing his parents, or was involved in a hit-and-run, or something similarly nefarious. I knew it couldn't have been me because they showed a picture of the guy, and while he was also a cracker, he was at least 15 years younger and not balding; plus, I don't recall being in Pennsylvania at the time. I concluded, therefore, that there was at least one other James Hillegas in the world, making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

This brings me to the topic of this post: OPB's Rob Manning recently featured a project in Haiti that my dear friend Seth Moody is involved with -- "Can 'Green' Construction Product Hold Up In Haiti's Humid Climate?" There certainly may be other Seth Moodys in the world, some of whom may be doing nefarious things, but my friend Seth made the news for all the right reasons, I'm happy to report.

Seth is involved in a project to help Haitians recover from the devastating earthquake of 2010. As part of this project, he and his colleagues also ran tests on a particular building material that was slated for use in Haiti. They found the material lacking in structural integrity when it got wet.

The manufacturer continues to refine the material, and hopefully they'll come up with an improved version.

I appreciate the motivation and foresight of Seth and his colleagues to help improve this product. The worse thing in this case would be to foist upon the long-suffering people of Haiti a woefully inadequate and frighteningly unsafe product.

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[*] Yeah, there's a bit of vanity involved, but, come on . . . you can't tell me you haven't done it before!

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A Graphic Post

2011-10-17T14:59:00.000-07:00

I must warn you: This is a graphic post. Below the fold you will see images of line graphs and bar charts that provide visual representations of data across time. They look something like this:

Image 1: Oregon State Biennial Appropriation to the OSSA, 1939 through 1965.

If this seems like something that might cause your stomach to turn, perhaps you dare read no further; if, on the other hand, you have courage, stamina, and are sure that the kids won't be peeking over your shoulder, please do read on, because I'm seeking your input.

I would like any and all readers to weigh-in with comments and questions about the graphs below, and the conclusions I'm drawing from them, and to let me know if both of these are clear (or not). For those readers who have specialized training or experience in history, statistics, social science, mathematics, etc., I have some specific questions below that I would like help answering.

A common refrain I come across in both primary and secondary sources discussing the efforts and results of the Oregon State Sanitary Authority (OSSA) in addressing water pollution is that the Authority was not funded adequately. Authority members and historians have concluded that this lack of funding handicapped the OSSA between the time it commenced its work in early 1939 and the time that Governor Tom McCall restructured it and the Oregon Air Pollution Authority into the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality in 1969.

Perhaps the OSSA was underfunded, but that brings up at least two important points. First, it seems that the majority of government agencies, non-profits, for-profits, and individual households would prefer more money; I know I certainly would, and I also would prefer it if all of the non-profits that I support had much more funding. Therefore, it is quite common to hear complaints about a lack of money . . . but does that make it a pointless refrain, a case of "crying wolf?"

Second, is there some kind of objective reference point that one can call upon to gauge whether or not a given entity is "underfunded," "adequately funded," or "over-funded?" Maybe there are such metrics in some instances, but what might these be? In the case of the OSSA specifically, I suppose this metric would be whether or not the Authority was achieving it's legal mandate: Was the OSSA making substantive progress in abating water pollution? If not, to what extent does lack of progress correlate with a shortage of funds?

Asking these kinds of questions is important in a democracy. It's important for taxpayers to know where their money is going, and if the agency is using the money as effectively as possible. When voters turn-out overwhelmingly in favor of the creation of a new government agency -- as was the case with the OSSA in 1938 -- it's important for citizens to know that the agency is doing the work that they authorized it to do. Of course, there is at least one important dynamic that confounds this straightforward logic: Are citizens willing to pay for achieving the purported goal of a given piece of legislation or citizen's initiative?

The pattern of my pursuit of these answers regarding the OSSA can just as easily be applied to other local, state, or federal government agencies.

The first graph I want to show you is straightforward:

Image 1: Oregon State Biennial Appropriation to the OSSA, 1939 through 1965.

As you can see, the trend of Oregon State Legislature appropriations from the general fund to the OSSA between 1939 and 1965 is steadily upward, until the 1961-1963 biennium. This graph shows gross dollar amounts, not adjusted for inflation.

One thing to note in the Image 1 data is that they do not include funds indirectly used by the OSSA. For example, a portion of the State Sanitary Engineer's salary was funded by the State Board of Health, and, particularly during the OSSA's early years, the Board of Health also provided laboratory services and some technicians. Even considering this caveat, my stance is that looking at OSSA-specific appropriations over time will provide some context to help determine the extent to which the OSSA was under-funded (or not).

One might wonder how the graph above compares to the larger pool of funds from which most OSSA money came from, the state general fund. The graph below shows state general funds compared to the OSSA portion of the general fund (plus the amount the OSSA received from the federal government, when applicable):

Image 2: Oregon State General Appropriations Compared to Biennial OSSA Funds from both the State General Fund and the Federal Government, 1939 through 1965.

The first thing that I noticed in this graph was the miniscule amount of the Oregon State general fund allocated to the OSSA. Image 1 above shows a marked increase in funds, but, compared directly to the state budget in Image 2, the OSSA's budget doesn't even register.

This may mean that during this period state leaders didn't consider the work of the OSSA important. However, I haven't done any detailed comparison of OSSA funding with other state agencies to see how the Authority compares. Maybe I would find that many agencies are given a small fraction of overall state funding? Maybe I would find that some agencies are given preference when it comes to budget allocations? I'm not sure, but if anyone out there has a thought or suggestion, feel free to provide it below.

Comparing Image 1 with Image 2, one can see that both the state general fund and the biennial OSSA appropriations increased fairly steeply until the 1961-1963 biennium. This is interesting, but it doesn't seem to tell us much. Observing these increases in gross dollar amounts brings up two questions: 1) What were the percent increases in biennial state general fund and OSSA appropriations; 2) what percentage of the state general fund was allocated to the OSSA per biennium, and how might this have changed over time?

Image 3 addresses the second question:

Image 3. OSSA Funds as Percent of Biennial State General Fund Appropriation, 1939 through 1965.

One way to look at Image 3 is that it supports what we see in Image 2: OSSA funding was a small percent of the state general fund during these years, ranging from .041% to .113%. However, Image 3 also tells us at least two noteworthy things.

One is that the most aberrant data point is during the 1941-1943 biennium. During this period, the OSSA's budget as a percent of the state general fund peaked at .113%, when the OSSA received $23,574 out of the overall $20,901,713 general fund. This was in the midst of World War II, but the Oregon Legislature had set the budget in mid-1941, before the U.S.A. became directly involved in the war. The 1941-1943 biennial state general fund appropriation of $20,901,713 was about $400,000 less than the 1939-1941 appropriation ($21,290,778), but about $3,000,000 less than the 1943-1945 biennial appropriation ($24,164,706). What this seems to mean, if I'm interpreting things correctly, is that both the OSSA appropriation for the 1941-1943 biennium and the overall state general fund appropriation for this biennium were outliers.

A second observation is that OSSA funding hovered in the .040-.050% range during most of this period. The percentage increased for the period 1957-1961, only to fall back, more or less, to the .040-.050% range by 1963-1965.

Image 4 speaks to the question: What were the percent increases in biennial state general fund and OSSA appropriations?

Image 4. Percent Biennial Changes in State General Fund Appropriations and OSSA-specific Appropriations, 1939 through 1965.

Image 4 shows that legislators modified the state's and the OSSA's biennial budgets by more-or-less equal rates between 1941 and 1957 (with 1943-1945 being a notable outlier). During the 1957-1959 biennium, legislators provided an appreciably higher percent increase in the OSSA budget than they did for the state general fund, but then followed this up four years later with an appreciable decrease relative to the general fund.

The reason I wanted to compare the two data sets in Image 4 was because I was wondering if the relative level of importance that legislators gave to the issue of water pollution might be seen. For example, if legislators increased the OSSA's budget at a higher rate than they increased the overall general fund, maybe this would indicate that they perceived the issue as becoming more important? I don't draw any such unambiguous conclusions from Image 4, however.

Maybe things would be clearer if we compared (1) the biennial amounts that the OSSA requested with (2) the amounts that Oregon governors asked legislators to provide, and both of these with (3) the amount that legislators actually appropriated?

Image 5. Biennial Budget Requests from the OSSA and Oregon Governors Compared to Legislative Appropriations, 1939 through 1965.

Image 5 shows that the OSSA did not get anything near the amount of funding that it sought during the governorships of Charles H. Martin (D, 1935-1938), Charles A. Sprague (R, 1939-1942), or Earl Snell (R, 1943-1947).[1] However, in his 1947 budget, Snell did request most of what the OSSA asked for. For the period 1939 through 1947, state legislative appropriations did not consistently track with governor requests.

Snell died in an airplane crash in October 1947, and his successor, John H. Hall (R, 1947-1949) requested the same amount that the OSSA asked for ($65,045). This initiated a period during which the OSSA's request and the budgets of governors Douglas McKay (R, 1949-1952), Paul Patterson (R, 1952-1956), and Elmo Smith (R, 1956-1957) correlated almost exactly, and state legislative appropriations tracked closely as well.

Beginning with the 1957-1959 biennium, OSSA fund requests increase sharply. Governors Robert D. Holmes (D, 1957-1959) and Mark O. Hatfield (R, 1959-1967) both agreed with OSSA funding requests. From 1957 to 1961, state legislators appropriated more money to the OSSA than either the Authority or the governor had asked for; however, from 1961 to 1965, legislators appropriated significantly less than the amounts asked for.

Here is one possible interpretation of Image 5 . . .

The first ten years or so of the OSSA can be classified as a period during which Authority members, Oregon governors, and Oregon legislators were not in agreement about the importance of water quality. The distractions of the Great Depression and World War II certainly must be factors. Also during the war, Portland city commissioners strongly resisted the efforts of the OSSA and other abatement advocates to levy the full amount of water service charges to Portland citizens so as to generate funds to build a sewage treatment facility after the war; this shows that a fourth important constituency in Oregon's water pollution abatement history also did not agree with the OSSA.

The next period begins in the late 1940s, when the priorities of the OSSA, governors, and legislators aligned -- at least in terms of legislative appropriations. There are at least three likely causes for this change. First would be the end of the distraction of World War II. Second would be the OSSA's success in forcing the City of Portland to fund (beginning in 1944) and build (beginning in 1947) the Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Facility and interceptor sewers. Third would be he passage of the 1948 Federal Water Pollution Control Act. Though it was weak in terms of enforcement, the Act was the first nationwide water quality legislation and offered federal research assistance and some funds.

The third period begins with the 1961-1963 biennial budget. The OSSA and Oregon governors (in this instance Mark Hatfield) were in agreement, but the legislature notably was not. This downturn in OSSA funding surprises me, because it occurred during a period in which one might assume the opposite would be the case.

In the early 1960s, American society was becoming more interested in environmental concerns, federal involvement in water quality issues had significantly expanded, and the OSSA had won another contentious debate with Portland city officials. Both Rachel Carson's influential book Silent Spring and Tom McCall's influential television documentary Pollution in Paradise appeared in 1962 (June/September and November, respectively). Congress had significantly strengthened the Water Pollution Control Act in 1956 and 1961, and in the late 1950s the U.S. Public Health Service had begun a twice-yearly regional conference on water quality issues. OSSA officials threatened Portland leaders with a lawsuit in 1959 if they did not provide secondary sewage treatment and expand their sewer system -- and in 1961 city officials complied rather than go to court. Also, in 1961 state legislators strengthened the 1938 law creating the OSSA and merged the OSSA with the Oregon Air Pollution Authority. In the midst of all of these developments, Oregon legislators significantly cut the OSSA's budget.

Not having data beyond 1965 frustrates my attempt to understand this decrease in funds.

I had another question about OSSA appropriations: How did the percent change in biennial appropriations compare to the rates of inflation over these years? I was thinking that if the OSSA's biennial budgets increased only incrementally, but not ahead of the rate of inflation, then the Authority's budget, in real dollars, would actually decrease. Image 6 shows us that, in spite of some significant fluctuations, the trend of the OSSA's budget was well ahead of the rate of inflation:

Image 6. Biennial Percent Changes in OSSA Funding Relative to Inflation Rates, 1939 through 1965. (Inflation rates calculated at http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm.)

A final graph I will show compares the amount of OSSA funds that the state appropriated and that the federal government provided:

Image 7. State and Federal Funds to the OSSA, 1939 through 1965.

Image 7 offers another way to look at Image 1, and also provides data to supplement Image 2.

This graph shows the fact that prior to the 1948 Federal Water Pollution Control Act (PL 845), the OSSA received zero federal funds. From the 1949-1951 biennium through the 1955-1957 biennium, the OSSA itself received relatively little federal funding; however, during these years the OSSA did serve as the administrator of hundreds of thousands of federal dollars annually, which the Authority disbursed to various Oregon communities for the construction of sewage infrastructure. The 1956 amendments to PL 845 resulted in the OSSA receiving a much larger percentage of its annual operating budget from the federal government (by way of the U.S. Public Health Service).

Where do I go from here?

In the coming weeks, I hope to locate the data that will enable me to track OSSA/DEQ funding beyond the 1963-1965 biennium to the present. I'm particularly curious to find out precisely how much these budget numbers changed during Tom McCall's tenure as governor (1967-1975), because McCall championed water and air quality and created the DEQ while in office. Will we see a distinct difference in budget amounts for the OSSA/DEQ during and beyond McCall's time as governor?

I also am trying to track-down some information about the profits of the pulp and paper industry during these decades relative to the amount that the industry spent on it's research arm, the National Council for Stream Improvement. Considering that the State of Oregon, at least from 1939 through 1965, spent somewhere in the range of .040-.050% of its budget on the administration of its water quality agency, I think it would be interesting to compare this with the amount that the industry spent on water pollution abatement research. In the 1940s and 1950s industry representatives made much (in the press and at OSSA meetings) about the money they were spending on this research, but did their spending priorities reflect substantive efforts?

I am also very open to suggestions from readers regarding different ways I might compare or represent this data to make useful patterns more apparent. Are there any other kinds of data that I should incorporate? Using the data above, are there other important questions that I can pose and answer in some way? Do my interpretations seem plausible and my uses of data seem appropriate?

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[1] Governor Martin requested zero dollars for the OSSA in his Jan. 1, 1939 - Dec. 31, 1940 biennial budget he submitted to state legislators. The OSSA had been created by the passage of a citizen's initiative in the November 1938 election, and it appears that Governor Martin had submitted his budget proposal to the legislature a few weeks earlier, before the Authority existed (See "Budgets for Biennium Filed with Director," Oregonian, Oct. 9, 1938, sec. 2, p. 3). The citizen's initiative did not include an appropriation.

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Liberty Ships, Including Festering Liberty Ship Hulls on the Columbia River

2011-10-10T22:28:00.000-07:00

Response teams try to contain fuel spilled into the Columbia River by the Davy Crockett, a derelict barge that split open in late January 2011 near Camas, Wash., after a scrap operation went awry. Bruce Ely, The Oregonian

I recently wrote an Oregon Encyclopedia entry on the Liberty Ship Star of Oregon, which was the first Liberty Ship that Henry Kaiser's Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation ("Oregon Ship") built.[1] Workers laid its keel in May 1941, launched the ship on September 27, 1941 ("Liberty Fleet Day"), and Oregon Ship delivered it to the U.S. Maritime Commission on December 31, 1941.

The Star of Oregon was the first Liberty Ship launched on the West coast, the second Liberty Ship launched nationally, and either the first or the second Liberty Ship actually delivered for service (my sources differ on this, and I'm still trying to figure it out).

I'm telling you all this because I have Liberty Ships on my mind of late, and then I read about a festering hulk of rotten metal corroding away on the Columbia River at Camas, Washington, and I thought you might like to know a bit more . . .

Back in January 2011, we learned that "The rusting, 431-foot long barge that's split open and leaking fuel into the Columbia River is the latest pile of junk parked on the Columbia to hit the radar screen." This barge was the "Davy Crockett, a converted Liberty ship from World War II, [that] has been moored between Camas and Vancouver on the north side of the Columbia for years."[2]

In late August 2011, we learned that "The derelict barge Davy Crockett is now out of the Columbia River -- seven months and $20 million after it first cracked open and sent toxic pollution downstream."[3]

Before the Davy Crockett polluted our local waters and cost taxpayers so much to clean up, it, too, was a Liberty Ship launched with fanfare as part of the U.S.A.'s involvement in World War II.

The Davy Crockett was the second Liberty Ship keel laid by Todd Houston Shipbuilding Corporation at Irish Bend Island, Houston, Texas. The Maritime Commission assigned it Hull Number 0096. Launched in June 1942, after service during World War II the ship was sold for scrap to an as-yet-unknown firm in Portland, Oregon, in March 1969. It was not scrapped, but resold to a firm in Richmond, California, that converted the ship into a pipelaying vessel. As of 1985, the ship was being used as "a general barge/dockside facility" at Crockett, San Pablo Bay, California.[4]

I don't know how the Davy Crockett arrived back in the Portland area some time between 1985 and 2011.

These kinds of things fascinate me. I see this as an example of how history is not some dead time in the past, but is still with us; how decisions decades ago still resonate in our time; and how our present-day environment can be negatively impacted by decisions made long ago.

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[1] This entry is still in the midst of the editorial process and has not yet been published.

[2] Scott Learn and Elliot Njus, "Rusting barge cracks in half, leaks oil into Columbia River; focuses attention on derelict vessels," Oregonian, Jan. 31, 2011.

[3] Scott Learn, "Cleanup of derelict barge Davy Crockett on Columbia River nearly complete -- with a $20 million tab," Oregonian, Aug. 25, 2011.

[4] Sawyer, L.A. and W.H. Mitchell. The Liberty Ships: The History of the ‘Emergency’ Type Cargo Ships Constructed in the United States During the Second World War (2nd ed.). London: Lloyd’s of London Press, Ltd., 1985, 168.

, "," Oregonian,

DIY History Detective: A Quest in the Wilds of St. Johns

2011-10-08T02:10:00.000-07:00

I recently took a fun ride into the wilds of industrial far-northwest St. Johns on a brave quest to see if I could locate a building that was part of the Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation's ("Oregon Ship") administrative headquarters during World War II, and later served as the location of Portland State University's precursor institution, Vanport Extension Center.

Why would I do such a thing?

I was curious about this building because I had read in a May 1943 Oregonian article that the Oregon Trail Centennial Commission had re-dedicated a plaque on one of these buildings to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the launch of the first ship that European Americans had built in Oregon, the schooner Star of Oregon. [1]

I was curious to know if this building still existed and, if it did, if the plaque might still be on the building.

The short answer to both of these questions is "no." The long answer, as you might guess, is a bit longer . . .

One of the buildings of Oregon Ship's 1940s-era administrative complex does still exist:

Image 1. 12005 N. Burgard St., Portland, Sep 25, 2011, office of ~~Western Machine Works~~. Northwest Pipe Company [Thanks to Tim Whitson in the comment below]. Photo James V. Hillegas

The address is 12005 N. Burgard Street. I could discern no company signage on or near the building, but when I arrived the building's janitor was outside and he told me that ~~Western Machine Works~~ Northwest Pipe Company was based out of the building.

The building is in an odd place. One would think that it has a N. Sever Road address, because it fronts N. Sever Road. "12005" is written across the top of the door, however, and county records indicate that this area has a N. Burgard Street address. It's adjacent to Port of Portland Terminal 4.

I discovered on the county's property maps that the building I was looking for is on Burgard Industrial Park plat Lot 1, Tax Lot 900. However, as the maps below show, 12005 N. Burgard Street seems only to include Burgard Industrial Park plat Lot 1, Tax Lot 800 (not Tax Lot 900).

Image 2. 12005 N. Burgard Street (Property ID R123692) boundaries within Burgard Industrial Park plat Lot 1, Tax Lot 800, Township 2 North, Range 1 West, Section 35. City of Portland image.

Image 3. Multnomah County Tax Assesor Map for 12005 N. Burgard Street, property within Burgard Industrial Park plat Lot 1, Tax Lot 800 and Tax Lot 900. (Search for "1N2W35D" at http://gis.co.multnomah.or.us/mcormap/.)

I took a few steps into the weeds in an attempt to find out if Tax Lot 900 and Tax Lot 800 had been combined in some way so that both of these properties would be considered as part of 12005 N. Burgard Street, but I didn't find this direct documentary evidence via the Internet.

Looking at Multnomah County records, I was able to find a number of businesses that have a 12005 N. Burgard Street address, including Schnitzer Steel, Advanced American Diving, Jefferson Smurfit Corporation, and Western Machine Works, among others.

OK, back to the past: Image 4 below shows the future 12005 N. Burgard Street in about 1948. It's the building in the upper left corner of the photo, with the curved entryway.

Image 4. Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation / Vanport Extension Center buildings, ca. 1948-1953. Taken, it seems, from the second floor of the main admin building. Portland State University Archives photo. (I took this photo with my digital camera from a framed photo on the third floor of Smith Memorial Student Union, Portland State University.)

The distinctive entryway is shown more clearly in Image 5:

Image 5. 12005 N. Burgard St., Portland, Sep 25, 2011. Photo James V. Hillegas

The Oregon Ship / Vanport Extension Center building I thought I was looking for was the main administrative building, shown in Image 6:

Image 6. Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation / Vanport College main administrative building, ca. 1948. Portland State University photo, http://www.pdx.edu/ourhistory/after-the-flood-moving-to-oregon-ship.

Image 7 shows a close-up of he main entrance of the building in Image 6.

Image 7. Vanport Extension Center director Stephen Epler at main entrance, Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation main administrative building, fall 1948. Portland State University photo, http://www.pdx.edu/ourhistory/after-the-flood-moving-to-oregon-ship.

My interpretation is this is the building where the commemorative plaque would have been placed.

I didn't get a good photo of the location of the building in Images 6 & 7, but the building is no longer there. Image 8 below shows a view looking West down Burgard Street (former N. Sever Road). The main Oregon Ship admin building would have been outside the right side of the frame.

Image 8. 12005 N. Burgard St., Portland (in center), Sep 25, 2011. Photo James V. Hillegas

As the satellite view in Image 8 below shows, where the Oregon Ship main admin building once stood, now there is a very large asphalt surface that hosts storage containers and other hunks of metal (center). North of this lot is a nondescript, very large warehouse. Center bottom is the current 12005 N. Burgard Street building.

Image 9. Satellite view of 12005 N. Burgard St., Portland. Google Maps, Oct. 7 2011.

One can compare the satellite view from Image 9 with the map in Image 10. The dark grey building labeled "Vanport Extension Center" (see in Images 6 & 7) is the building that has been replaced by shipping containers in Image 9.[2] The light grey building directly south (and a little west) of this dark grey building is the present-day 12005 N. Burgard Street.

Image 10. Map of Vanport Extension Center, ca. 1948-1953. Portland State University photo, http://www.pdx.edu/ourhistory/after-the-flood-moving-to-oregon-ship.

Image 11 provides more detail of the Oregon Ship buildings.

Image 11. Detail, map of Vanport Extension Center, ca. 1948-1953. Portland State University photo, http://www.pdx.edu/ourhistory/after-the-flood-moving-to-oregon-ship.

Realizing that the main Oregon Ship building had been razed, and that the building I found on my bike ride was part of the Oregon Ship administrative facilities but not the main building, I tried to find out what I could by way of the Internet about what might have happened to the property. I assumed that the Oregonian would have reported on the destruction of the Oregon Ship buildings and, if I was lucky, would have said something about the plaque -- for example, that it had been removed to the Oregon Historical Society, perhaps. This turns out not to be the case, as far as I can discern.

What I found was that the Vanport Extension Center moved to its current location in the South Park Blocks of Portland in time for the beginning of the Fall 1953 academic quarter. The Oregon Board of Higher Education announced that the former Vanport College buildings were up for sale in late June 1953.[3]

I searched the Oregonian to see if I could find an announcement about who might have purchased the property, or if I could find announcements of the destruction of the Oregon Ship/Vanport Extension Center buildings, but found no such information.

To summarize my findings thus far:

Star of Oregon

2) One of the original Oregon Ship admin buildings still existed, at 12005 N. Burgard Street.It was this extant building that I was looking for on my bike trip. Image 12 provided some visual clues that spurred me to track this building down:

Image 12. Street view of 12005 N. Burgard St., Portland. Google Maps, Oct. 7 2011.

I first thought that this was the original and main Oregon Ship / Vanport Extension Center building facility, but, as this post indicates, later learned otherwise.

There are a few other images and image comparisons that shed some light on this issue.

Image 13 shows Vanport Extension Center students doing some beautification of their new campus. Note that the 12005 N. Burgard Street property is directly behind the students. Also note that the sidewalk that starts in the lower left portion of the frame curves to the right, and then back to the left, to then loop and then head off again to the right.

Image 13. Vanport Extension Center students landscaping their Oregon Ship campus, ca. 1948-1953. (I took this photo with my digital camera from a framed photo on the third floor of Smith Memorial Student Union, Portland State University.)

This same sidewalk bump-out is seen in the center-left of Image 4 (reproduced below).

Image 4. Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation / Vanport Extension Center buildings, ca. 1948. Portland State University Archives photo. (I took this photo with my digital camera from a framed photo on the third floor of Smith Memorial Student Union, Portland State University.)

I located the remnants of this sidewalk feature on my bike trek, as seen in Image 14. In Image 14, note that I'm facing East when taking the picture, so the main Oregon Ship admin building would have been to the left, and 12005 N. Burgard Street is to the right.

Image 14. U-shaped sidewalk remnant from Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation admin building, across from 12005 N. Burgard St., Portland, Sep 25, 2011. Photo James V. Hillegas

Image 15 shows a portion of the building at 12005 N. Burgard Street (to the rear left):

Image 15. Vanport Extension Center students frolicking in the grass in front of the main Oregon Ship admin building, ca. 1948-1953. (I took this photo with my digital camera from a framed photo on the third floor of Smith Memorial Student Union, Portland State University.)

The buildings below, Image 16, are also on Burgard Industrial Park plat Lot 1, Tax Lot 800 -- i.e., 12005 N. Burgard Street. They are directly to the southwest of the building that I have been fixated on. It appears from Image 4 in particular that similar buildings were in this same location, but I have no idea if these buildings trace their direct lineage to the Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation.

Image 16. Northwest Pipe Company buildings at 12005 N. Burgard Street, Portland. Sep 25, 2011. Photo James V. Hillegas

Note the long, two-story building to the right (west) of the 12005 N. Burgard Street building, as seen in Image 4. This building is also no longer there.

I didn't get the best comparative photos when I was there, but Image 17 provides some indication of the absence of the building identified above. In Image 17, this building would have been to the right; if the building were still there, it would have been eminently visible.

Image 17. 12005 N. Burgard Street from the West, Sep. 25, 2011. Photo James V. Hillegas

As is the case with most of Portland's waterfront industrial properties, there is an environmental legacy that we've inherited with this property. The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality identifies 12005 N. Burgard Street as a "suspect site requiring further investigation" for a number of toxic metals, solvents, PCBs, and other soil and groundwater pollutants (source).

In summary, I got a good physical workout and had fun trying to piece this all together. If only I could get paid to do this stuff . . .

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[1] The Oregon Historical Association and Port of Portland had originally placed this plaque at the OSC’s first administration building at Swan Island Airport on May 19, 1941, at the time of the ceremony of the laying of the keel for Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation's fist Liberty Ship, the Star of Oregon. See “First of 43 Keel-Layings Spurs New Century of Shipbuilding for Portland 100 Years After First Launching,” May 13, 1941, sec. 1, p. 6, and Lawrence Barber, "'Big Time' Shipbuilding Returns to Portland," Oregonian, Oregonian, May 20, 1941, sec. 1, pp. 1, 23.

[2] The map in Image 10 also shows the former Oregon Ship buildings that became the Vanport Extension Center, as well as the nine shipways from which Oregon Ship launched hundreds of Liberty Ships, Victory Ships, and other ships during World War II. The shipways have since all been filled-in.

[3] "Legal Notices," Oregonian, June 21, 1953, sec. 2, p. 3

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Sixty years later, a prediction comes true . . . sort of.

2011-09-27T15:34:00.000-07:00

Willamette Falls, looking north. Blue Heron paper mill on right, in Oregon City, which operated as the Hawley Pulp and Paper Mill, 1908-1948, operated under the Publishers' Paper Company from 1948-1986, and under the Jefferson Smurfit Corporation 1986-2000. On the left is the West Linn Paper Company mill, which opened as Willamette Pulp & Paper in 1889, and after mergers was operated by the Crown Willamette Paper Company (1914-1928), Crown Zellerbach Paper Company (1928-1986), and the James River Corporation (1986-1997). Oregonian photo.

This is fascinating: Metro is considering bidding for the recently-closed Blue Heron paper mill site in Oregon City at the base of Willamette Falls.[1] It would be great to have public access to this part of the river.

On another note, it appears that mill officials might have been correct when they predicted in 1949 that more stringent Willamette River water quality standards would run them out of business. However, does it count that the prediction was sixty years in coming to fruition, or that more stringent water quality standards do not entirely explain the demise of the mill?

The Blue Heron Mill's former owners, the Publishers' Paper Company, threatened Oregon State Sanitary Authority (OSSA) members in November 1949 that, if pushed too hard to take steps either to treat, re-use, or store waste sulfite pulping liquors, the mill would be forced to close. In early February 1950, Publishers' Paper Company officials spoke to an Oregonian reporter to deny that they'd made these threats.

Recall that Oregon voters had created the OSSA by passing a November 1938 citizen's initiative on a two-to-one vote. This initiative established that it was the policy of the State of Oregon to ensure the quality of the state's waters for recreation, water supplies, agriculture, wildlife, and industry. Since the OSSA began its work in early 1939, the OSSA had been trying to work with the pulp & paper industry to abate its pollution, particularly of the Willamette River. Therefore, by 1949 industry officials were well aware of Oregon law, the work of the OSSA, and growing public sentiment in favor of a cleaner Willamette River.

It did take the OSSA a few more years of pressure, but by 1951 Publishers' was working with Clackamas County officials to use a limited amount of waste sulfite liquors as a binder for gravel roads. In 1953 the company began barging these untreated wastes in 120,000 gallon batches to the Columbia River for dumping.[2]

When the Blue Heron mill closed in February 2011, company officials cited "competition from China for recycled paper, which has increased the cost of materials, as a major factor in the shutdown." Greg Pallesen, vice president of the Association of Western Pulp & Paper Workers, told the Oregonian that "No matter what they pay for it, the Chinese are going to outbid them because of cheap labor and no environmental controls."[3]

I interpret Publishers' 1949 threat as an attempt to sway public opinion in their favor, using a tactic common to a number of industries: threaten citizens with job loss in the hopes of alleviating pressure to comply with environmental, labor, or other laws.

In some respects, it does seem that company officials were accurate in their prediction, just sixty years late, but this certainly isn't all of the story. This seems to be another example of the effects of globalization over the past few decades: Industries tend to relocate to places that lack stronger environmental and labor laws. When we look out today at the relatively clean Willamette River, we can see evidence of previous generations' success in abating pollution locally. What we can't see from our riverside vantage, however, are other rivers throughout the world being polluted by the pulp & paper and other industries. Certainly a conundrum.

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[1] Steve Mayes, "Metro Considers Tapping Natural-Areas Fund to Buy Industrialized Oregon City Site," Oregonian, Sep. 21, 2011.

[2] For details on the work of the OSSA, see James V. Hillegas, "Working for the 'Working River': Willamette River Pollution, 1926-1962," MA thesis, Portland State University, 2009.

[3] Steve Mayes, "Oregon City's historic Blue Heron Paper Co. to close Friday, eliminating all 175 jobs," Oregonian, Feb. 23, 2011.

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A rather rapid escalation to ad hominem attacks & similar irrationality

2011-09-26T22:13:00.000-07:00

I'm in the midst of an exchange with others on a Linkedin group that I belong to (reproduced here). This experience has motivated me to make the following reflections . . .

The most fascinating things to me are, first, how quickly the ad hominem attacks started, and, second, how quickly the thread diverged from the central point.

The central point that started the post, as you'll see in the link above, was that the government of a Virginia city decided no longer to display the Confederate battle flag on government property.

If one were to navigate through the comment thread on the post linked above, one would find that I wrote:

I understand that some people react to change with fear and sadness, and that these emotions often manifest themselves in anger and hate-filled words -- it certainly happens to me at times! Since we're all humans here, and it seems as though we're all Americans as well, I would like to invite us all to eschew language that is both inaccurate and denigrating, and attempt to communicate with and about one another with mutual respect.
This comment didn't change the minds of the ad hominem attackers, nor prompt them to reflect a bit on the fact that they're not the only people in this country and that other people have valid points of view.

This speaks to at least the following things . . .

First, our nation is populated by people who have zero interest in entertaining, even for a moment, the fact that they may be wrong, OR, at least, the fact that other people might have points that are equally as valid.

Second, our nation is populated by people whose first impulse is not only to dismiss outright entire groups of people that they don't agree with, but to characterize these groups in the most mean-spirited way possible.

Third, our nation is populated by people who have little or no interest in intellectual disciplines generally, and the historical discipline specifically. It's called a discipline because there's a method and approach to apply in the attempt to produce findings that contribute to the greater good, and, by following this method, people can evaluate, refine, critique, challenge, etc., one's findings. The opposite of this are opinions: like assholes, we all have opinions, and like rabbits, opinions multiply exponentially; it is the intellectual discipline that tempers the unfounded opinions by applying a method to help us weed-out the nonsense and get closer to functional truths.

Fourth, following the above, it is sad, indeed, to realize that our nation is populated by a great many people who prefer not to use one of the few faculties that separates us from other animals -- namely, our species' intellectual abilities -- and operate, instead, from a simplistic, reactive, place.

Fifth, there are a great many people in this country still fighting the Civil War.

I certainly know that, at the core, I am a romantic optimist . . . it's just so fascinating to me to get outside of my bubble and realize that there seem to be so many people in this country who are actively working against the greater good of the nation.

--

Native salmon threatened with extinction from a cleaner Willamette River

2011-09-08T11:23:00.000-07:00

Detroit Dam, Marion County, Oregon, July 1990. Photo Bob Heims, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Scott Learn has a very interesting article in today's Oregonian about the negative impacts that Willamette River tributary dams are having on native salmon runs ("Getting salmon past daunting Willamette Basin dams could have a big price tag -- and a big payoff"). This is a clear example of unintended consequences resulting from large-scale infrastructure projects.

When the Willamette Valley Project was first being proposed and planned in the 1930s and 1940s, advocates asserted that the dams would bring a great many benefits. Impounding tributary waters would help modulate the seasonal flow of the Willamette River which would, in turn, decrease the likelihood of downstream floods. The dams would also facilitate reclamation, irrigation, hydroelectric power production, and navigation improvements.[1] By storing water during the rainy months and metering its release during the dry months, Willamette Valley Project dams would modulate significant seasonal variations in the flow of the main stem, which would greatly help flush the river of industrial wastes and municipal sewage.[2]

Historian William G. Robbins has found that by at least the late 1930s there was significant opposition to Willamette Valley Project dams (and also dams along the Columbia, Rogue, Umpqua, and Deschutes rivers) based upon the projected negative impacts these dams would have on anadromous fish runs. These opponents included commercial and sports fishing groups, Columbia River treaty tribes, and wildlife conservationists in groups such as the Izaak Walton League, including renowned naturalist William L. Finley. Robbins quotes U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Paul Needham's reference to these dams as "large-scale experiments" that did not sufficiently take the needs of fish into account.[3] It certainly cannot be said that Willamette Valley Project planners were entirely unaware of the likelihood of harm to salmon runs.

As Scott Learn writes in his article, in terms of healthy native anadromous fish runs, the Willamette Valley Project has certainly been a failed experiment. In terms of pollution abatement and flood control, however, the experiment has been quite successful. Therein lies the conundrum: How might we achieve the goals of healthy fish runs, a cleaner river, and a low incidence of catastrophic floods? Whatever the specific answers turn out to be, my hunch is that it will take both a fundamental shift in cultural values & priorities and a significant financial investment to achieve such mutually beneficial ends.

----

[1] William G. Robbins, "The Willamette Valley Project of Oregon: A Study in the Political Economy of Water Resource Development," Pacific Historical Review 47:4 (Nov. 1978), 585-605; William G. Robbins, Landscapes of Conflict: The Oregon Story, 1940-2000 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 47-76.

[2] For more on Willamette River pollution generally, see James V. Hillegas, "Working for the 'Working River': Willamette River Pollution, 1926-1962," MA thesis, Portland State University, 2009.

[3] Robbins, Landscapes of Conflict, 48-53.

--

If truth statements fall in the wilderness, will a Southern apologist hear it?

2011-09-05T22:54:00.000-07:00

Another comment on a Linkedin group I belong to spurred me to post a reply.

Chris Rivait posted a link to his blog that quoted in full the Roanoake Times article Rebel flags barred from Lexington poles outlining the Lexington, Virginia, city council's recent decision not to raise the Confederate battle flag at city-sponsored events:

The arguments have been made thousands of times before. The Confederate flag is a symbol of history and Southern heritage. No, the flag is a symbol of hatred and racism.

In essence, the same arguments dominated a public hearing held Thursday night by the Lexington City Council . . .The first commenter in this post was a gentleman named Stephen Quick, who linked to his website on which he attempted to defend the representation of the Confederate battle flag. I will leave it up to the reader to navigate to Quick's website to read his interpretation in full.

In reply to Quick, I wrote:

Stephen, I'm going to respond to your link not because I have any faith whatsoever that you would change your interpretive stance on the issue, but because such myopic quasi-historical & ideological points of view need to be challenged.

Your argument in favor of respect for the Confederate battle flag is specious for at least four reasons.

First, the Confederate battle flag, more than any other Confederate flag, represents the fact that slavery was a primary cause of the American Civil War (http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2007/12/24/slavery-did-too-cause-the-civil-war/).

Second, it may be the case that "antipathy toward the flag is a recent phenomenon" from the 1980s. However, if it is the case, it's not because of "a liberal media irritated at the lingering conservatism in the South" and a financially strapped NAACP. It's because after the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, African Americans were finally able to voice their opposition to White supremacy in all it's various manifestations, _and_ there was a wider White constituency open to hearing and responding positively to these critiques.

Third, because slavery was a main cause of the war, and because by the 1960s the points of view of African Americans started to make their way into the mainstream of American culture & discussion, many people -- myself included -- have come to associate the Confederate battle flag with injustice. I will leave it up to the descendents of slaves to correct, modulate, or refine what I'm about to write, but, for me, a White male, the Confederate battle flag is just a notch below the Nazi Swastika, in terms of its symbolic resonance with deeply racist ideology.

Fourth, regardless of the extent to which any given Southerner understands or agrees with the interpretations sketched briefly above, to ignore that they exist, or to dismiss them off-hand, or not to engage with their very real substance, is to be intellectually dishonest.

In summary: It's certainly not "irrational flag hysteria" for people to challenge the government-sponsored presentation of the Confederate battle flag. Southerners need to face up to the facts that slavery was a main cause of the Civil War and that, for this reason at least, these days the Confederate battle flag is a symbol of intolerance to a great many Americans.
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Does history teaching matter?

2011-09-01T16:10:00.000-07:00

At the suggestion of a friend, I've recently become more involved with the social networking site Linkedin. Thus far, I certainly prefer Linkedin to Facebook because the former is focused on professional networking.

As part of this involvement, I joined a few Linkedin discussion groups, including one moderated by the American Historical Association. Mike Maxwell asked in a recent thread: "Does history teaching matter?"

"Yes," I replied, and by that I of course meant ". . . but with some caveats . . ."

a recent CNN report

This is a basic question, isn't it: Is it important for our culture to pass along historical knowledge to future generations? Surely, members of this group would answer in the affirmative, but what about the rest of the country? Evidence from multiples sources suggests the majority view is not favorable. Check the comments at the bottom of the CNN piece to see what I mean.

So, for those who care about history education, the question must be "How can we make history learning matter to America and particularly to students?" In my view, history education as now practiced is pointless...that is, it doesn't seem to have a point. Sure, it does some of this and some of that, but what is the point really? If we can't give history education a tangible and understandable purpose, we can't blame the public for dismissing it.

If you think history teaching does matter, you must believe it has a purpose. Please share your thinking: "What is the point of history education?" Seriously, I would like to know.
My reply . . .

From my biased perspective, I certainly do believe that teaching & learning history matters, if the goal is to sustain any kind of quasi-democratic society that is as free as possible from injustices. If this is not the goal, then history as an intellectual discipline need not exist.

In light of the comments above, I find myself being more interested in history as a discipline than in the content of any given historical narrative; that is, teaching the historical method is much more important than trying to get people to memorize dates and the deeds of Rich White Men. I don't consider myself quite naive enough to believe that a person will change her or his mind about something if only given "the facts" (as George Lakoff discusses in his book The Political Mind), but I do hold out the faith that society as a whole will realize increasing benefits the more that its individual members understand and apply the intellectual discipline that history offers (i.e., conduct research to address a given question; back-up one's conclusions with evidence; be open to changing or qualifying one's interpretations).

So, considering the above, I do believe that it is possible to have an international consensus about what "the historical discipline" is, but I don't hold any hope whatsoever that any given historical interpretation will garner an international consensus. The best we can hope for might be to get to a place where people stop killing and repressing one another because of differing interpretations of a given historical question.

My understanding of what the historical discipline can offer is adding nuance and complexity to one's understanding of a topic. Nuance and complexity, unfortunately, seem nearly impossible to measure in standardized tests, and are harder to teach than rote memorization and regurgitation. I just read Mike Wallace's takes (in the mid-1990s in his book Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory) on Ronald Reagan's tenure as President and the 1995 Enola Gay exhibit at the NASM, which provide very clear examples about how certain influential segments of our society react quite negatively to nuanced and complex understandings of history, to the point of repressing or ignoring truths.

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When the un-repressed play the "I'm being repressed!" card

2011-08-27T17:59:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart had a great show on a few weeks ago that provides yet another example of a group with plenty of political, economic, and social power trying to play the "I'm being repressed!" card:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

GOP - Special Victims Unit

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

It seems even in the nearly-meaningless world of sports that representatives of certain groups who most certainly are not being repressed in the U.S. -- but who seem to have a deep-seated need to try to convince people otherwise -- are playing this card.

This is ridiculous. Here's an historically accurate representation of real repressive violence inherent in the system:

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So much fun!

2011-07-28T14:34:00.000-07:00

Yaaayyy!!!

Now I have one less reason to leave the house!

EUGENE, Ore. -- On Feb. 4, 1910, the headline across the Medford Mail Tribune's front page announced "United States At Mercy of Foreigners." The story, based on the Army's General's Staff report, warned that the Japanese could land 100,000 troops on the U.S. Pacific Coast in three weeks, and the Germans "a trained army of 200,000" on the east coast.

That's just one look-back-into-time experience to be pulled from more than 180,000 pages from 18 Oregon newspapers now available online through the University of Oregon newly launched website Historic Oregon Newspapers.

http://libweb.uoregon.edu/diglib/odnp/

The site provides unprecedented access to "first-draft" historical materials originally published by Oregon journalists between 1846 and 1922, program officials said.

"These primary source materials provide a unique window into the life of Oregon communities a century or more ago,” said Jason Stone, ODNP project manager. “In their own voices, early Oregonians tell the story of the state's industrial, agricultural and social development. We can revisit the ways that people in our state viewed and responded to major national and international news events of the day. There is also a great deal of information on topics such as race relations in early Oregon, the woman's suffrage movement, the pioneer days, Native peoples, urbanization, the emergence of environmental values … the list goes on and on.”

Historic Oregon Newspapers was created using open source software developed by the Library of Congress. UO programmers helped troubleshoot the code and were the first to implement it outside of the Library of Congress. A separate blog site provides project updates and examples of studies users might do, including June 1 entry focusing on "Hawaiians in Northwest History."

Content at Historic Oregon Newspapers is drawn from widely circulated titles like the Portland Oregonian and Salem Capital Journal, short-lived regional papers like the Sumpter Miner and Jacksonville Oregon Sentinel, and community-of-interest titles such as the first African-American paper in the state, the Portland New Age, and Abigail Scott Duniway’s suffragist journal, the New Northwest.

While microfilm continues to be the preservation and archival medium of choice for newspapers, it has long presented serious issues of access and research value for the public. Comprehensive microfilm collections are often beyond the means of local libraries. And even when a copy of the film can be located, a researcher must spend hours, days, or even weeks scanning through the filmed pages, hoping to catch a glimpse of sought-after information.

Navigating the Historic Oregon Newspapers website will be simpler and more intuitive for most computer users. All the digitized newspaper pages have undergone a process of optical character recognition, in which bit-mapped texts on scanned page images are analyzed and converted to vector-based characters.

This conversion allows other computers to read the output text, allowing for rapidly completed keyword searches.

“Having the ability to keyword search has dramatically improved the potential to use historical newspapers for research,” said Karen Estlund, ODNP director and head of Digital Library Services for UO Libraries. “The data provided are not only useful for the casual researcher but also provide extensive data-mining possibilities to analyze trends in history.”

The utility of this resource already is being appreciated. “I'm really enjoying using the site. It is a tremendous help for a heavy newspaper researcher like me,” said Kimberly Jensen, professor of history and gender studies at Western Oregon University. Cricket Soules, a volunteer researcher for the Marshfield Pioneer Cemetery, agreed. “The same information it took us three hours to find on microfilm, we found in under 30 seconds using keyword searching on the website.”

Essays with background information about each of the selected newspaper titles also available on the site, along with brief tutorials on searching and browsing, lesson planning materials for K-12 educators and answers to frequently asked questions.

Beginning in 1953, the UO Libraries started the Oregon Newspaper Program to microfilm the state's newspapers for preservation. The web-digitalization project took root in 2009 under a Library Services & Technology block grant of $79,883 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Oregon State Library in Salem. It was expanded by a $365,393 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the National Digital Newspaper Program, an additional $246,880 under the Oregon Library Services & Technology program, and by matching grants totaling $181,046 from the Oregon State Historic Preservation Office and the Oregon Heritage Commission through the Oregon Cultural Trust.
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The Life & Death of Bayocean, Oregon

2011-07-17T12:08:00.000-07:00

"Bayocean Sandspit Broken and Shore Resort Periled," Oregonian, Jan. 15, 1939, p. 12.

I came across the Oregonian article recently while researching other things. I've been out to a vacation house at Cape Meares a few times over the past couple of years, but it wasn't until the most recent visit that I realized that we drove right past the former site of Bayocean as we drove west on the aptly named Bayocean Road.

From the article:

"The tremendous seas which hammered at the Oregon coast early this month have spelled the doom of the Bayocean peninsula . . . . What remained of the Bayocean natatorium was swept away. Seas poured into the town of Bayocean, flooding homes and streets."

"Construction of the north jetty in 1914, designed to deepen the channel of Tillamook bay, is blamed for the gradual tearing away of the Bayocean peninsula. Since that time, as the jetty has changed the direction of the sea's sweep, the high sand walls of the peninsula have crumbled away."Read more about Bayocean on the Oregon Encyclopedia!

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Book Project Update: Running to Stand Still

2011-07-12T12:25:00.000-07:00

I've recently started a writing group with a few local colleagues (and Northwest History Network members). We're calling ourselves writeordiepdx. We're just starting to get rolling. In reply to one of my colleague's status reports, I wrote the following:

I am preparing to get married and have a honeymoon next week, from Tuesday through Tuesday. I thought I might have time to work on the book project a bit over this past weekend, before being consumed by wedding prep, but, alas, this was not to be! So, I won't be able to get to the book project until after July 26 -- most likely the weekend of July 30-31.

I've spent a large amount of time thus far spewing/venting words that will be the essence of my introduction, trying to write myself to clarity regarding precisely what the purpose and thesis of the book is. A couple of weeks ago I finally settled on something that feels good, but I've yet to condense it down to a clear & concise statement. So, with this work done, I need to start writing the actual chapters of the book; this I hope to do beginning the weekend of July 30-31, and then establish a pattern that will enable me to chunk away weekly at the project.

Here is a condensed version of my book proposal, to give you all an idea about what I think I'm doing:

http://wwwhistoricalthreads.blogspot.com/2010/07/my-book-proposal.html

Since I got the book contract back in December, I've been trying, with varying degrees of success, to find time to write. I've gotten lost in a few research rabbit holes using the amazing full-text searchable Oregonian database from 1861-1987; I found out a lot more about some key people & events related to the Willamette River pollution issue in the 1920s-1940s. Here's one fun example of the stuff I've found:

http://wwwhistoricalthreads.blogspot.com/2011/03/there-is-almost-criminal-negligence-of.html

My personality is such that I never feel that I've done quite enough research, so I tend to keep researching and taking copious notes but not yet really writing the book chapters. Also, the topic I'm writing about has been given cursory treatment by a number of authors (some better than others), so I don't want to create yet another standard-narrative treatment of the topic; at the same time, I don't want it to be so detail-laden that a general reader wouldn't be interested. Another factor is that I don't want the book to be either declensionist or triumphal, because the story is neither of those . . . as we historians like to stress, it's more complicated than that!

Depending on how things go, I may take a few days in August or September to shut out the rest of the world, eschew any semblance of robust personal hygiene, force myself to not distract myself, and see if I can produce more than a few words worth reading.

So, in a nutshell, after I get back from the honeymoon on the 26th, I'll check-in and commit myself to something. I'll stand in front of you all and say, with deep humility and full self-awareness, "My name is James, and I'm a researchaholic."
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Osama bin Hitler Bonaparte Boothe

2011-06-07T22:35:00.000-07:00

Uh-oh.

James Marlow, "Hitler Myth Likely Unless Body Found," Sunday Oregonian, June 10, 1945, sec. 1, p. 1.

At the end of World War II in Europe, without a bloody corpse to hang from the public square, people wondered if Adolf Hitler had really died or had escaped. As James Marlow wrote in his Associated Press article pictured above, if the Allies didn't find Hitler's body, he worried that "we'll probably have to put up with a Hitler myth for years to come." Just as after the American Civil War there were "probably a hundred myths about John Wilkes Booth, who shot Lincoln," and myths in early nineteenth century France that Napoleon -- "in spite of all the evidence that he died in exile on St. Helena" -- would return "any minute now to raise a new army."

CBS News' Brian Montopoll reported on May 2, 2011, that "Skeptics wonder: Where's proof bin Laden's dead?" Similar to what Marlow speculated in June 1945 about Hitler, Montopoll had found that just a few days after the report of Bin Laden's death, conspiracy theories already abounded.

Robert Burns and Calvin Woodward of the Associated Press also reported on May 2, 2011, that "Not everyone believes bin Laden really is dead":

In the absence of photos and with his body given up to the sea, many people don't want to believe that bin Laden — the Great Emir to some, the fabled escape artist of the Tora Bora mountains to foe and friend alike — is really dead.It seems like even the pieces of a body that many thought was Hitler's may not be, in fact, Hitler's: "Fresh doubts over Hitler's death after tests on bullet hole skull reveal it belonged to a woman" (Daily Mail UK, Sep. 28, 2009). There are a number of conspiracy theories about Hitler's supposed escape from Berlin -- see, for example, Tom Chivers, "Adolf Hitler alive: weird conspiracy theories" (The Telegraph UK, Sep. 29, 2009).

Maybe, like Hitler, bin Laden is still alive. Or, as Fox News reported in December 2001, he was already dead before President Obama claimed that we had killed him (again).

I guess we'll never know . . . unless we already do know!

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Another example of the difference between an "historian" and an Historian

2011-06-04T02:56:00.000-07:00

So, I'm in the process of writing a series of concise Oregon Encyclopedia articles on some U.S. Navy ships that had Oregon-based names. One of the entries is on the U.S.S. Oregon City (CA-122). This isn't brain surgery that I'm doing here -- writing informative and authoritative 250-500 word entries on U.S. Navy ships isn't all that complicated.[1] With this and other such entries, I have, of course, consulted the most essential sources[2], but I also wanted to include in my entries some truly Oregon-specific information.

Among other things I've done is to consult various articles in the Oregonian, as I've been able to find them. In this search for documentation to bring new and intriguing information to readers, I've experienced some frustration that speaks directly to the frustrations I've had with so-called "historians," and am now in a position to articulate the essence of this frustration.

What we have here is another example of the difference between amateur and professional -- or, the difference between someone who's not conscious of what she or his is doing and why he or she is doing it, and someone who is.

In this particular instance, it's one of those things that seems obvious in hindsight but makes all the difference in the world.

In writing my entry on the U.S.S. Oregon City, I've consulted the sources I've already referred to, but I've also run various iterations of Internet searches on this topic. I've often found that changing search terms slightly, and perusing the various pages that appear, can uncover invaluable references for further research. Such is the case with this topic.

I stumbled upon an entry on the page "U.S.S. Oregon City," and in the third paragraph read some information that was new to me. I was excited to consult the source(s) that the author(s) of this entry consulted, but was extremely frustrated to find that the author(s) did not cite any sources!

This is the difference between a professional and an amateur: The professional will provide sources for her or his information, in the interest of maintaining a dialogue with others, and in helping other people delve deeper into a given topic, while the amateur isn't thinking about anything other than him or her self. Or, the amateur is thinking that whatever he or she has written can be believed at face value, without any references, because, well, he or she has written it. Or, the amateur isn't thinking at all.

The extremely valuable -- but generally under-appreciated -- role that the responsible, conscious, and conscientious historian performs in society has at least five elements:

1) spend time and energy to consult obscure archival materials, and then

2) compare and contrast these obscure materials with what we think we already know, so as to

3) help us understand ourselves and our place in the world just a bit better (ideally), all the while

4) providing clear references to our sources so that other people and later generations can re-trace our steps to find a given set of sources so they can be free to

5) compare and contrast their own set of sources to confirm, deny, debunk, qualify, and otherwise evaluate a given interpretation of history.The vast majority of amateur "historians," in my experience, fail at step #2, and, therefore, fail at all the subsequent steps. Being aware of these steps is what differentiates a professional from an amateur.

To some readers this post may seem pedantic, but it's not. What frustrates me deeply about the dynamic I herein write about is that the damned "historian" has spent however many hours researching and writing something, but doesn't bother to document sources adequately, so all of us who read this "historian's" work are put in a position where we can't evaluate the veracity of the material in any way! It may as well been written in sand on the beach, or have been pure fiction, because there's no forthright way to correlate the material with objective reality.[3] With all due respect to novelists and poets[4], what the f$#k is the point, then?!?!?!?!

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[1] I.e., when compared to trying to write a 70,000-word book that won't bore people to death.

[2] I.e., James L. Mooney, ed. Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships [all volumes], Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office (for the U.S. Department of the Navy, Naval History Division), 1959-1991; Jane's Fighting Ships series; K. Jack Bauer and Stephen S. Roberts, Register of Ships of the U.S. Navy, 1775-1990: Major Combatants, New York: Greenwood Press, 1991; Robert L. Scheina, U.S. Coast Guard Cutters and Craft, 1946-1990. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1990.

[3] Yes, of course, I'm aware that there's no such thing as purely objective reality. I guess I haven't written a post about this yet, but for starters you can consult Peter Novick's book, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1989). What I mean here is that the work of "historians," as critiqued in this post, don't allow us a clear correspondence with tangible materials that we ourselves can obtain and evaluate, for ourselves.

[4] Truly.

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Agent Orange use in Canada, 1950s-1980s

2011-05-31T14:32:00.000-07:00

I recently wrote a post on doxin pollution in the Willamette River watershed linked to herbicide spraying in the Douglas-fir forests of Western Oregon, and to chlorinated effluents from pulp and paper mills. One of the unconscionable and shocking things I learned in this research was that the U.S. Army had stopped using Agent Orange in Vietnam in 1970 because it contained 2,4,5-T (which, in turned, contained the highly toxic dioxin 2,3,7,8-TCDD). However, the U.S. Forest Service continued to use 2,4,5-T in the Douglas-fir country of Oregon until the mid-1980s.

Oregon and Vietnam certainly weren't the only places where Agent Orange (a mixture of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T) was used, as the brief video below outlines:

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Reader Poll: Is Coal the Answer?

2011-05-26T10:10:00.000-07:00

There's a movement afoot among some residents, civic leaders, and businesspeople in Whatcom County, Washington, to mine coal in the county and ship it to China. (For an overview of this proposal and links to other information, see Preston Schiller, "How to Stop Worrying and Love Coal Trains," Whatcom Watch Online, April 2011.)

This proposal would involve the burning of fossil fuels to extract fossil fuel from the ground; burning fossil fuel to transport the fossil fuel to the shipping terminal and load the fossil fuel onto freighters; burning fossil fuel to ship the fossil fuel across the Pacific Ocean to China; transporting the fossil fuel -- using fossil-fuel-burning trains and trucks -- to power generation plants, where the fossil fuel will be burned to produce electricity. The extraction will leave polluted land and air in Whatcom County; clog the regional rail system; and, when the coal is burned in China, produce emissions containing the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane, as well as sulfur dioxide, aluminium, arsenic, chromium, cobalt, copper, iron, mercury, selenium, and uranium (See here and here, among others).

So, readers, is the above proposal:

A) Crazy

B) Ridiculous

C) Farcical

D) Nonsensical

E) Ill-informed

F) Desperate

G) Inconsiderate

H) Asinine

I) Silly

K) All of the Above
Answer below the fold . . .

Ha! This was a trick question. The answer is: L) Frightening!!!

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Reading the lines between the lines

2011-05-23T13:46:00.000-07:00

I started to reply to Anonymous' comment to my post "The white men fired back. That is the story," and then realized that I was in the process of writing another post on the topic of a recurrent theme in this blog, "what use is history?"

Anonymous' shouted comment was: "MURDER IS MURDER IS IT NOT? IF IT WAS YOUR FAMILY HISTORY WHAT WOULD YOU SAY THEN?"

My reply below . . .

Anonymous, I would suggest that you read more closely the two sources quoted in the post. My intention here was to juxtapose two interpretations of the same period of Oregon's history to show explicitly how drastically different these interpretations are.

There are also a number of things I am implying by the juxtaposition of these two interpretations. I could have spent much more time and many more words in an attempt to make more clear and direct what I was implying, but this is a blog and I didn't have the time to spend writing a more thorough analysis. Also, I wanted to point readers to Wilkinson's book, because he has taken the time to go much more into depth on this topic, and has done so far more eloquently than I could.

To bring to the foreground some of the things that the post above suggests but may not make explicit . . .

1) The Oregonian editorial of 1931 is incorrect in claiming that "The white men fired back. That is the story." As Wilkinson writes, "For their part, the tribes also had people who carried out raids, thefts, and killings," BUT "It is a mistake, however, to think of this and later stages of the Rogue River War in terms of equivalency, as a conflict between where blame should be equally allocated between the two sides."

2) Because the Oregonian editorial is wrong, it's informative to think about what interests were served by the all-white, all-male Oregonian editorial board of the early 1930s dismissing a more accurate representation of the historical record vis-a-vis the state's Indian population:

a) What role might inaccurate representations of history play in both keeping certain social groups in power and undermining the power of other groups?

Oregonian

We would be committing a significant fallacy of historical interpretation if we were to respond to the Oregonian's editorial by projecting our own values and knowledge into the past, and judging the these people on the basis of what might seem to us now to be obvious. This is called anachronism. If we were to judge the Oregonian editors as morally repugnant racists, we might feel superior to them in some sense but we wouldn't necessarily have a clearer understanding of their lives and times.

To help gain a clearer understanding of how and why the Oregonian editors could hold so strongly a view that does not comport with the historical record (as Wilkinson and others have since brought forth), it's more useful to try to understand the context in which their understanding evolved and was perpetuated. The questions outlined above provide some suggestions to gain such context.

Applying this process of historical inquiry and critical analysis to the present, we might also gain some tools to analyze news and editorial content. To over-simplify the questions above, accuracy and inclusion is often well-served both in the past and present when we "follow the money" -- when we ask who is perpetuating a given claim or interpretation and who benefits from having the claim understood in this way.

In summary, I was implying that history is much more than a bland recitation of facts, or a selected string of sources lined-up to unquestioningly support the claims of one ideology or another. One of the most important uses of history is to shed light upon those instances in which a given historical narrative eschews accuracy and ignores complexity to legitimize injustices.

Anyway, I could go on and on, but, again, I recommend you read Wilkinson's book, and then we'll talk further.

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Dioxin and Willamette River Pollution: A First Step Into the Toxic Waters

2011-05-18T19:22:00.000-07:00

This post provides some preliminary research and analysis on dioxin pollution in the Willamette Watershed connected to pulp and paper mill effluents.

I was recently at an environmental history conference and found myself in a discussion with someone doing research on dioxin pollution from pulp and paper mill effluents. As we were sharing stories, I realized that I had not seen a single reference to the word "dioxin" in any of the government reports, newspaper articles, professional journals, letters, or other primary sources from the 1900s into the 1960s that I have consulted thus far. Over the past few weeks, I've searched various primary and secondary sources, with the goal of determining just when dioxins became a known toxin, and when they were linked empirically with pulp and paper mill effluents, to determine if I had inadvertently missed something very important (and would have to re-write my thesis), or if this type of pollution hadn't been discovered until after the 1960s (and I was OK).

Here is what I have found thus far . . .

It was not until the mid-1980s that scientific evidence definitively linked dioxin contamination directly to effluents from pulp and paper mills that used chlorine in their production processes—so, I didn't miss at least this important topic in my thesis (Whewww!!!).

Before dioxins were known to be present in chlorinated pulp and paper mills wastes, specialists were aware of the human-centered acute effects of these toxins. Dioxins had been identified in the 1950s as a cause of “chloracne” that effected people who produced or worked with herbicides and certain kinds of industrial solvents.

Chloracne is a broad term for a kind of dermatitis caused by chlorinated hydrocarbons. Before chloracne was associated with dioxins in the 1950s, specialists noticed the condition at least as early as the late nineteenth century.[1] Specialists during World War II found this condition associated with the use of cutting oils and solvents; similar to chloracne was the “cable rash” or “Halowax dermatitis” found in World War II shipyard workers. Specialists also noted an increase in the occurrence of this condition in shipyard workers during World War I, and that “This type of dermatitis is seen also in those engaged in the manufacture of the chlorinated naphthalenes and diphenyls, as well as in men in other occupations in which these substances are employed.”[2]

In 1970, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) stopped using the herbicide “Agent Orange” in Vietnam. Agent Orange was a mixture of the chemicals 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, the latter of which, in particular, contained the highly toxic dioxin 2,3,7,8-TCDD. In spite of the DoD's ban, manufacturer Dow Chemical successfully lobbied against a federal ban of this herbicide in the U.S. until the 1980s.[3]

The first use of the word "dioxin" in the Oregonian was in July 1971, in connection to the DoD’s Agent Orange ban. The New York Times’ first mention of this word was during the previous year, also in this context.[4]

In spite of the DoD’s ban on Agent Orange use in Vietnam, the U.S. Forest Service used herbicides containing 2,4,5-T in the Siuslaw National Forest from the 1960s into the 1980s. In 1977, the Oregonian reported that Harvard biologists had found dioxin in the breast milk of a woman from the Five Rivers area near Waldport.[5] This discovery, and previous concerns from Oregon residents about the herbicide, led to the formation of a citizen’s group seeking the cessation of herbicide spraying in the Siuslaw National Forest. A group of university and industrial scientists also reacted to these findings by questioning the accuracy of the study at a conference in Mississippi hosted by the EPA’s Dioxin Monitoring Committee. This committee met to determine what the next phases of environmental sampling would be.[6]

The Oregonian’s first mention of dioxin found in the state as a result of environmental sampling was from February 1987. This reference is in a report that a federal magistrate in Eugene ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), within 30 days, to “release a document detailing levels of dioxin around the country—including those detected in Willamette River fish—or to state why it should legally be able to withhold release of the document." The judge rendered this decision in response to a motion that Carol Van Strum had filed. Van Strum claimed that information she received from an EPA scientist “reports that tissue samples taken from Willamette River fish show dioxin levels more than four times as high as levels detected in fish taken from the Great Lakes area."[7]

The judge in Eugene was referring to a 1985 EPA study that had found “low levels” of dioxin at three Oregon locations. The EPA asserted that this information “does not constitute an environmental emergency.” An EPA spokesperson stated that the agency “had notified Oregon that dioxin had been found in 1985 in fish from the Willamette River in Portland, soil from rural Linn County, and creek sediments from a forest east of Salem.” Dioxin found was most toxic form, 2,3,7,8-TCDD. The highest concentration of this toxin from all three sites was 4.5 parts per trillion in two fish caught near the Southern Pacific Railroad bridge in Portland Harbor, upstream from St. Johns Bridge.[8]

(It's interesting to note that this stretch of the river is within and adjacent to the current Portland Harbor Superfund site. Historically, within this stretch of the river were a number of heavy industries that processed and/or used petrochemicals. It's not unreasonable to assume that these industries are at least as likely as the pulp and paper industry to be responsible for the 2,3,7,8-TCDD contamination found in this stretch of the river in 1985.)

The Oregonian's first mention of dioxin related directly to the pulp and paper industry was from correspondent Carmel Finley in September 1987. Finley reported on EPA rule changes prompted by discovery of dioxin in fish downstream of the James River mill at Wauna, Oregon, about seventy-five miles west of Portland on the Columbia River, and at four other U.S. mills. The EPA announced it was commencing a study of ninety mills nationwide. Finely wrote that among the mills to be studied would be three Oregon mills that used the Kraft chemical bleaching process, including the Pope & Talbot mill on the Willamette River near Halsey and the Boise Cascade mill in St. Helens.[9]

The kraft process cooks wood pulp in a solution of sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfide. The kraft process is more efficient than the other widely-used method, the sulfite process—at least in terms of the way that the chemicals in the kraft process can be re-used.[10] However, bleached kraft effluents produced “’substantially higher levels’ of dioxin,” and the discovery of dioxins in these wastes “’was a new area of concern,’” as Finley quoted the chief of the EPA’s Water Quality Analysis Branch Alexander McBride.[11]

In spite of the fact that TCDD specifically, and dioxins generally, are the most carcinogenic substances that humans had yet created, Walt Sinclair, manager of the Pope & Talbot mill, downplayed the potential for contamination, stating:

”’The very minute amount they’re finding almost defies science to detect it,’ . . . Nevertheless, he added, ‘I don’t think our society will stand to have any of this stuff in its water.’”[12]
Finley’s Oregonian article also referred to Van Strum and Merrell’s report, No Margin of Safety, that Greenpeace had published just a few weeks previously. No Margin of Safety featured records that Van Strum and Merrell had received from an anonymous EPA scientist. These records suggested that the there had been a high-level agreement between EPA and pulp and paper industry executives to withhold from the public information linking dioxin contamination with the industry.[13]

The New York Times also carried its first mention of dioxins related directly to pulp and paper effluents when it reported on the EPA study in September 1987. Correspondent Philip Shabecoff wrote that the EPA had found traces of dioxin in many paper products:

“The Environmental Protection Agency disclosed today that a Congressionally mandated study of dioxin contamination across the country had found less contamination than officials expected in land and water. But data on water pollution from paper mills, gathered in the course of this broader study, led industry and Government researchers to focus on the possibility of paper contamination.”[14]
As Kathryn Harrison describes, the EPA’s “disclosure that dioxins had been detected in the effluent of pulp mills prompted governments throughout the world to revise their regulatory standards for the pulp and paper industry.”[15]

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[1] For more on this, see Carol Van Strum and Paul Merrell, No Margin of Safety: A Preliminary Report on Dioxin Pollution and the Need for Emergency Action in the Pulp and Paper Industry (Greenpeace USA, 1987), III-1-III-18, and the sources cited in this work.

[2] See, for example, Samuel M. Peck, “Dermatitis from Cutting Oils, Solvents, and Dialectrics, Including Chloracne,” Journal of the American Medical Association 125:3 (1944), 190-196; George E. Morris and Irving R. Tabershaw, “'Cable Rash'—A Note on a New Cleansing Mixture,” Journal of the American Medical Association 121:3 (1943), 192-193; and Alice Hamilton, “The Toxicity of the Chlorinated Hydrocarbons,” Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 15:6 (July 1943). 787-801.

[3] For more on this, see Carol Van Strum and Paul Merrell, No Margin of Safety: A Preliminary Report on Dioxin Pollution and the Need for Emergency Action in the Pulp and Paper Industry (Greenpeace USA, 1987), III-1-III-18.

[4] Victor Cohn, “Federal Report Blasted: Use of Herbicide Called Threat,” Oregonian, July 16, 1971, p. 5; Jerry M. Flint, “Dow Aides Deny Herbicides Risk,” New York Times, Mar. 18, 1970, p. 96; Les Ledbetter, “Science: A Weed Killer Banned in U.S. and Vietnam,” New York Times, April 19, 1970, p. 176.

[5] “Nursing Mother’s Milk Found to Contain Dioxin,” Oregonian, Feb. 18, 1977, p. D16.

[6] “Scientists Score Testing for Dioxin,” Oregonian, March 6, 1977, p. B8. This and related discoveries centered on the human health impacts of herbicide spraying, and is covered more fully in Carol Van Strum, A Bitter Fog: Herbicides and Human Rights (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1983), and in William G. Robbins, Landscapes of Conflict: The Oregon Story, 1940-2000 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), pp. 194-205.

[7] Dana Tims, “EPA Reply Ordered on Study of Dioxin,” Oregonian, Feb. 4, 1987 p. B3.

[8] Victor Cohn, “Federal Report Blasted: Use of Herbicide Called Threat,” Oregonian, July 16, 1971, p. 5.

[9] Carmel Finley, “Dioxin in Mill Emissions Will Prompt New EPA Rules,” Oregonian, Sep. 6, 1987, p. B6.

[10] "The Basics," http://www.rfu.org/cacw/basic.html, Reach for Unbleached Foundation, n.d., accessed May 18, 2011.

[11] Finley, “Dioxin in Mill Emissions."

[12] Finley, “Dioxin in Mill Emissions."

[13] Carol Van Strum and Paul Merrell, No Margin of Safety: A Preliminary Report on Dioxin Pollution and the Need for Emergency Action in the Pulp and Paper Industry (Greenpeace USA, 1987).

[14] Philip Shabecoff, “Traces of Dioxin Found in Range of Paper Goods,” New York Times, Sep. 24, 1987, pp. A1, A22.

[15] Kathryn Harrison, “The Regulator’s Dilemma: Regulation of Pulp Mill Effluents in the Canadian Federal State.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 29:3 (Sep. 1996), 469-496.

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Another May 18th

2011-05-18T13:05:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite DJs, John Richards, on my favorite radio station, KEXP, dedicated his show this morning to the memory of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of one of my favorite bands of all time, Joy Division. Ian took his own life on this day in 1980, at age 23.

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"The white men fired back. That is the story."

2011-05-10T11:12:00.000-07:00

I was doing some research in the Oregonian the other day and came across a 1931 interpretation of Euro-American settlement of Oregon that will likely strike some modern readers as quite dated:

"But They Fought Back," Morning Oregonian, June 20, 1931, p6.

In case you're not able to read the text, the pertinent and eyebrow-raising sections are as follows:

Oregon pioneers are justified in rising up against the modern tendency to consider them the aggressors in the Indian wars. There is no way of making them out the aggressors, unless mere entrance into the Oregon country is to be considered an act of aggression. The arrival of the Americans, with their eyes on the farm land, inflamed the natives, who shined up the rifles they had bought with furs and began shooting. The white men fired back. That is the story.

. . . we quote from the introduction to Bancroft's "History of Oregon," . . .:

Aside from the somewhat antiquated sentiments of eternal justice and the rights of man as apart from man's power to enforce his rights, the quick extermination of the aborigines may be regarded as a blessing both to the red race and to the white. The two seldom profitably intermix . . . However merciless the conquerors, Spain's government, aided by the church, was ever tender of her native American subjects, and we see the result in Mexico and Central America. The British fur traders would not permit the killing of their hunters, and we see the result in British Columbia.

While subscribing in no degree to Bancroft's assertion that the principles of eternal justice are antiquated, and in no degree to his crass approval of the extermination of a race -- which approval, by the way, was much more common in his day than ours -- nevertheless it is true that the American handling of the Indian problem has proved superior in the long run.[1]Wow.

The above is the editorial voice of one of the state's leading newspapers of the time. I'm not sure precisely what sources or advocates the editor refers to when he writes about "the modern tendency" to discuss Euro American aggression toward Indians in the nineteenth century. Perhaps there was some recent historical scholarship on the topic that challenged earlier interpretations, or maybe some tribal members' stories were finally beginning to be heard by a larger audience?

In any event, it's interesting to contrast the Oregonian's perspective in 1931 with a section from historian Charles Wilkinson's 2010 book on the history of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, The People Are Dancing Again:

In that frontier society [early 1850s Rogue Valley, Oregon], the miners, sometimes supported by the settlers, took the law into their own hands. They organized as "volunteers" . . . In Southern Oregon, however, many of these groups acted independently of official military leadership and paid no heed to the promises of "peace and friendship" in the [1851] treaty that Governor Gaines had negotiated . . . These vigilantes, who would make life miserable for the tribes and interfere with federal officials for the next three years, committed many slaughters and atrocities, including lynchings.

For their part, the tribes also had people who carried out raids, thefts, and killings. Some villagers believed they were not governed by the treaties . . .

It is a mistake, however, to think of this and later stages of the Rogue River War in terms of equivalency, as a conflict between where blame should be equally allocated between the two sides. By 1850, the tribes had reached an accommodation with the settlers; the implicit live-and-let-live understanding was an uneasy, delicate one to be sure, but it had promise. The Gold Rush changed everything, as the miners and their vigilante groups threw southwestern Oregon into turmoil. Joel Palmer, superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Oregon Territory from 1853 to 1857 and the senior federal Indian official in the region, wrote these sentiments in 1856 . . .:

The cause of the present difficulty in southern Oregon is wholly to be attributed to the acts of our own people. . . . The Indians in that district have been driven to desperation by acts of cruelty . . . that would disgrace the most barbarous nations of the earth. . . .[3]

This interpretation is a far cry from that of the Oregonian in 1931.[2] Comparing the two interpretations, the Oregonian's comes across as quite defensive and reactionary, while Wilkinson's is much more nuanced and direct.

Also interesting to me is that the Oregonian editors draw a quote from Bancroft that lauds the extermination of Native Americans, and then off-handedly disavow sharing the sentiment; I, for one, am left wondering why this quote was chosen if not to imply support for Bancroft's position? The editors claim that they don't support this position, yet they conclude that "the American handling of the Indian problem has proved superior in the long run," and "the American handling of the Indian problem" was, in many ways, an attempt at extermination.

A moral of this story is: One can't always believe what one reads in the newspaper.[4]

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[1] "But They Fought Back," Morning Oregonian, June 20, 1931, p6.

[2] Or that of Son of the South, ca. 2000, for that matter.

[3] Wilkinson, The People Are Dancing Again, 83.

[4] I know this will come as a shock to most people. [insert smiley face here]

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Global mega corporations = fascism?

2011-05-09T15:30:00.000-07:00

In a recent opinion piece on Aljazeera online, William I. Robinson (Prof. of Sociology, U.C. Santa Barbara) claims that "The global economic crisis and the attack on immigrant rights are bound together" in a potentially catastrophic dynamic.

Robert Reich had a thought-provoking take on something similar the other day. Reich observed on American Public Media's "Marketplace" program that "Corporate profits don't translate." He asked, "How can big American corporations be doing so well and the economy so badly?" His conclusion was, "Because their sales are booming -- abroad. And they're adding new jobs where their sales are."

My interpretation of Reich's point was that the current growth of corporate profits in spite of little to no job creation here in the U.S. shows how detached so-called American corporations are becoming from democratic oversight and input. In fact, this shows how detached they're becoming from any real interest in the well-being of their host countries. If it is true that General Motors President Erwin Wilson stated in 1953 that "what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa," the dynamic that Reich discusses seems to represent a different era. Erwin was equating corporate and national interests, a claim that many of us can argue with. However, Reich is describing an era in which the big global corporations don't even pretend to care whether or not corporate practices are "good" for the U.S., and vice-versa.[1]

Robinson incorporates Reich's observation as a central strand in a "web of 21st century fascism."

I'm struck by Robinson's use of the word "fascism." Even though Robinson himself states "I don't use the term fascism lightly," is it appropriate to use the term at all? Doesn't using this term frame the discussion rather rigidly? I'm reminded here of Godwin's Law that states, in part, that whomever first brings up Hitler or the Nazis in an argument automatically loses.[2]

Robinson qualifies his use of the word somewhat when he writes that "The United States cannot be characterised at this time as fascist. Nonetheless, all of the conditions and the processes are present and percolating, and the social and political forces behind such a project are mobilising rapidly."

The key elements of Robinson's proto-neo-fascism include:

1. "The fusion of transnational capital with reactionary political power . . . [including] such neo-fascist movements as the Tea Party [and] neo-fascist legislation such as Arizona's anti-immigrant law, SB1070, [that] have been broadly financed by corporate capital . . ."

2. "Militarisation and extreme masculinisation" such as "the top military brass . . . becom[ing] increasingly politicised and involved in policy making."

3. "A scapegoat which serves to displace and redirect social tensions and contradictions," in this case "immigrants and Muslims in particular."

4. "A mass social base" such as "among sectors of the white working class . . . that have been experiencing displacement and . . . rapid downward mobility."

5. "A fanatical millennial ideology involving race/culture supremacy embracing an idealised and mythical past, and a racist mobilisation against scapegoats."

6. "A charismatic leadership," which "has so far been largely missing in the United States, although figures such as Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck appear as archetypes."I might quibble with Robinson and make a few qualifying observations, such as the fact that "Militarisation and extreme masculinisation" has been a recurring theme in American history since at least the Mexican-American War; that as much as I dislike what the Tea Party stands for I'm not convinced that they're "neo-fascist" so much as scared and reactionary (mostly-) white people[3]; and that the "mass social base . . . among sectors of the white working class" isn't as monolithic as he claims. However, the trends Robinson outlines do cause me some concern. I'm extremely concerned about the corporate behavior that Robert Reich, Michael Moore, and many, many others observe, but I'm not convinced that using the word "fascism" helps clear anything up. On the contrary: I find that it muddies things considerably, in at least three ways:

First, it automatically turns-off a certain segment of readers who think, "oh, here we go again, another example of Godwin's Law."

Second, the word "fascism" has a very real, historically grounded meaning in Italian, German, and Spanish politics of the 1920s-1940s (and, to some degrees, beyond). Fascist governance was quite unpleasant to a great many people, and these direct memories are still part of the lived experiences of people around the world.

Third, the word "fascism" also has a complicated history of uses and meanings that have accumulated since the 1920s (and particularly since 1945), including being tossed about willy-nilly by people seeking only to denigrate their opponents as succinctly as possible, whether or not these opponents had any real or ideological connection to fascism.

Because "fascism" is such a loaded word, people must use it with full awareness and ample caution -- sort of like cayenne in a recipe: sure, a little cayenne is great, but too much cayenne is not great at all.

To use "fascism" to characterize a system of corporate-led quasi-governance in the early twenty-first century, one must be sure that the definition fits. After reading Robinson's article, I'm not convinced that he uses the term with full awareness and caution, and I'm not sure that it fits. I came away from my reading with the impression that Robinson's use falls under the third point I outlined above.

Maybe part of what's going on here is that corporate power is becoming monumental and all-encompassing, and threatens to become supra-national. This is unlike anything that's happened in human history heretofore, and it's rather scary. Rather than recycle over-used, heavily-weighted concepts such as "fascism," I think we'd all be better served to use more accurate conceptions and terms. I'm not going to take the time to identify alternatives, but I'm confident that they're already being used. If we're more careful in our use of language and concepts, we might be able both to describe the phenomenon more accurately (and address it more directly) and avoid alienating potential allies at the outset.

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[1] Of course, I do know that this is the premise of Michael Moore's 1989 film, Roger & Me.

[2] I write this in full awareness of how cavalierly I spewed this word when George W. Bush was president. It felt so true back then! Little did I know at that time that I had lost the argument.

[3] The categories "fascist" and "scared and reactionary white people" can, but do not necessarily, overlap.

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It Seems So Long Ago . . .

2011-05-09T09:46:00.000-07:00

. . . because it was!

Cave bear skull placed atop stone in Chauvet cave, ca. 25,000 years ago.

Some time about 20,000-40,000 years ago, people created the amazing art inside the cave at Chauvet Pont d'Arc. About 20,000 years ago, the entrance to the cave was sealed, and it was not discovered until 1994.

The people who created the cave art were part of what we now refer to as the Aurignacian culture, a

toolmaking industry and artistic tradition of Upper Paleolithic Europe . . . marked by a great diversification and specialization of tools . . . The art of the Aurignacian culture represents the first complete tradition in the history of art, moving from awkward attempts to a well-developed, mature style."
Werner Herzog has made a 3-D film of the inside of this cave, "Cave of Forgotten Dreams." Read a review from Slate.com here, and listen to Terry Gross' interview of Herzog here. See images at the official Chauvet Cave website here.

Watch the trailer below . . .

It also seems so long ago since I made a pilgrimage in October 1996 to another paleolithic art cave in France, La grotte de Font-de-Gaume near the village of les Eyzies-de-Tayac in the Dordogne region. When planning a six-week trip to Holland, France, and Spain for late 1996, I remember doing research to see if I could find an actual paleolithic art cave that I could visit, rather than the re-created cave at Lascaux.

This entire trip to Europe was a pilgrimage of sorts, and also included visits to Chartres Cathedral (Chartres, France), Santo Domingo de Silos monastery (near Burgos, Spain), Toledo Cathedral (Toledo, Spain), Seville Cathedral (Seville, Spain), and other places.

At this time in my life I had been out of the Navy only for about two years, was reading a lot of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, and had recently taken some anthropology and archaeology classes at university. I had a few years' previously rejected the Church of Christ Christianity I had been raised with and was casting about for a more open-minded, inclusive, and creative set of explanations for the mysteries of the universe. I was looking for what Joseph Campbell called a "functional mythology": a way of conceiving of the great mysteries of life that was rooted in our species' connection with the rest of the earth, rather than detached and alienating, as I had found the Church of Christ (and monotheism more generally).

Visits to the above-names sites served this purpose for me: I found direct aesthetic, spiritual, and mythological connections between the amazingly beautiful and well-designed cathedrals and monasteries of Europe, the towering forests of the Pacific Northwest, and the astounding environment inside the cave at Font-de-Gaume.

My own photos of the Font-de-Gaume cave are not in digital format so I can't show them, but below are some photos I found on the Internet:

Short trail to Font de Gaume cave entrance.

Font de Gaume cave entrance.

Some images of the interior here.

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Another of capitalism's many benefits

2011-05-05T11:42:00.000-07:00

My sister sent me a hard-copy version of Ed Dante's article about ghost writing for college and university students, "The Shadow Scholar" (Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 12, 2010).

This article points to yet another of capitalism's many benefits: enabling humans to gain financially from cheating while concurrently convincing themselves that they are not complicit in undermining social structures more important than capitalism.

Dante's article reminds me a bit about my two-year stint with a leading career services company, producing resumes, cover letters, biographies, and related materials for international clients. This work was a kind of ghost writing: people came to us, paid their money, and within a few days we delivered their requested materials.

However, there are significant differences between the work that Dante writes about and the work that I did for the career services firm. The most glaring difference is that the work that Dante did helps perpetuate the fiction of student competence, which can then be compounded by student admission to and completion of graduate and doctoral programs. People are able to build a career from a foundation of cheating. Since admission to educational programs is based upon a finite number of annual slots, more deserving students are left out.

In the work I did, the materials were designed to showcase a client's actual background and credentials in a way that increased the likelihood that the client would land an interview. What then happened in the interview was up to the client. If the client provided false information to us, and we used this to craft the resume, then it seems quite likely that these lies would be exposed during the interview, reference checks, etc.

As someone who worked very hard to write an original master's thesis, I find reprehensible the work that Dante has done for his clients. Dante admits that he lives well enough on his ghost writing, the market for which is spurred by "the desperation, misery, and incompetence that your educational system has created." There's no doubt that a system that in many ways stresses grades above education has pushed students to take desperate measures to achieve the desired grade, rather than struggle with actually trying to learn the material. However, in my view, one is not released from what I consider to be a moral obligation not to pass-off someone else's work for one's own just because the magical invisible hand of our current global capitalist system gilds this kind of fabrication with the shiny veneer of financial reward.

As someone who is currently a university instructor, I'm fairly confident that I haven't seen from my students the kind of plagiarism that Dante describes in his article. My confidence has at least two broad foundations.

The first is in response to Dante's question for those of us who may have had students in our classes for whom academically-articulate English is not a first language: "Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you?" My answer is that the written work I receive from my students has not discernibly differed from their verbal contributions in class.

Also supporting my confidence here is that I stress the importance of learning the material through in-class discussion and student-directed research to achieve a plausible answer supported by sources. Even though I am required to give final letter grades, I work with students to achieve their goals, the university's goals, and my course goals concurrently. Substantive student progress toward all three results in higher grades. (As an aside, I do realize that my small class sizes and the structure of the course facilitate this kind of an approach, which is much less likely the approach of someone teaching 200 students in an introductory course.)

In closing, Dante's article is thought-provoking, as is the very long comment thread. He and the commenters raise some important issues about our current system of higher education. I see no easy solution to the system's shortcomings -- in fact, with the teaching-to-the-test focus at the K-12 levels that the No Child Left Behind program fosters, I suspect that things are only going to get worse in higher education, as more students internalize the false impression that grades matter more than knowledge, and that short-term memorization is more important than dynamic, deep understanding.

These dynamics, of course, exist within an economic system that encourages us to reify "the market" and internalize the fiction that this system is the best of all possible worlds.

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On "The Tragedy of the Commons" (again)

2011-04-25T21:13:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I made the claim that I was done thinking about Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" metaphor.

Apparently I was wrong.

I attended the 2011 ASEH conference in Phoenix a few days ago and had two important and distinct opportunities to learn more about the weaknesses of Hardin's commons metaphor. In spite of my claim that I was done thinking about this, I came away from the conference with new information that should serve as my final, final statement on the topic.

The first experience occurred during an interdisciplinary round table discussion about sustainability (Panel 4-B on Thursday, for those of you keeping score), titled "Sustainability and its Discontents." I learned two things in this session. The first was a great rule-of-thumb that political science professor Thomas Princen articulated: When he hears people discuss sustainability, he asks, "sustaining what, for how long, and for whom?"

In this same panel I also learned another important thing, from Richard Hoffman, professor of Medieval history. Hoffman writes on Medieval European environmental issues, including the actual commons, and dismissed Hardin's metaphor out of hand.

My second opportunity to learn more about how other scholars view Hardin's commons metaphor was in a discussion of Arthur McEvoy's book, The Fisherman's Problem (1986) (Panel 7-H on Saturday). McEvoy addresses the commons metaphor explicitly in this book, and even more directly in his 1987 Environmental Review article, "Toward an Interactive Theory of Nature and Culture: Ecology, Production, and Cognition in the California Fishing Industry."

In his ER article, McEvoy provides a clear and concise critique of Hardin's commons metaphor that, for me, offers a clear, concise, and definitive rebuttal.[1] McEvoy writes:

As Hardin saw it, when competing users shared resources in common, the inevitable fate was annihilation. . . . So powerful a model was the commons tragedy that through the 1960s and 1970s it supplied the framework in which most economists, lawyers, scientists, and environmentalists understood natural resource issues.McEvoy provides a brief bit of context for theoretical models generally, within which to understand Hardin's model:

A key source of a model's authority -- its power to organize our view of the world -- is its (usually implicit) claim to universality and ahistoricity. In that sense, neither eighteenth-century social contract theory, nor social Darwinism, nor Euclidean geometry purported to describe the world only as it existed under particular conditions. Rather, each of those theories ostensibly explained the way things are in the world, independent of time, place, and circumstance.That is, people tend to offer theoretical models as totalizing views of the world. The models claim to explain everything.

McEvoy continues:

Hardin's article, "The Tragedy of the Commons," was a synthesis and popularization of a body of scholarship that originated in the early 1950s as a critique of the Progressive distinction between economic behavior and legal organization. The new reformers argued that fishery depletion and other such problems had their origins in the common-property legal regimes in which such industries operated. Placing the resources under the management of a single owner, whether private or public, would allow that owner to internalize the social cost of over-harvesting . . .

In a privatized fishery, therefore, market incentives would automatically lead harvesters to behave in an ecologically prudent fashion, in a way that competitors for shared resources -- each scrambling over the other to take as much as they could before all the wealth disappeared -- could not. That is the lesson implicit in the tragic myth of the commons; it underlies much of the modern literature on environmental problems. Developments in environmental law since 1970, however, suggest that a new understanding is taking shape.McEvoy calls Hardin's metaphor "myopic," and outlines three reasons why this is the case:

To begin with, the profit of the harvesters is the only measure of value . . . As in the Progressive Era sustained-yield model, the only meaningful variable is economic effort and the only meaningful output is cash or its equivalent. Yet at the core of most environmental problems is the fact that the price measure does not account for many important values that are too long term, too diffuse, or too uncertain to register in the calculations of market bargainers. Some values, indeed, are sacral in nature and thus not open to market bidding at any price.

A second shortcoming of the commons tragedy thesis is its implicit view of the way that government makes decisions. Hardin's solution to the commons problems . . . "mutual coercion mutually agreed upon" . . . implied an independent observer of nature and a neutral rule maker somehow external to and immune from the interests being disciplined. The commons myth thus shares with Progressive conservation an assumed dichotomy between market struggle and lawmaking.

A third shortcoming of the tragic myth of the commons is its strangely unidimensional picture of human nature. The farmers on Hardin's pasture do not seem to talk to one another. As individuals, they are alienated, rational, utility-maximizing automatons and little else. The sum total of their social life is the grim, Hobbesian struggle of each against all and all together against the pasture in which they are trapped.

The commons myth, therefore, misrepresents the way common lands were used in the archetypical case (i.e. England before the privatization of landed property). English farmers met twice a year at manor court to plan production for the coming months. On those occasions they certainly would have exchanged information about the state of their lands and sanctioned those who took more than their fair share from the common pool.McEvoy concludes with a clear articulation of an alternate -- and dynamic -- model of understanding environmental issues:

Any explanation of environmental change should account for the mutually constitutive natureof ecology, production, and cognition, the latter at the level of individuals, which we call ideology, or at the societal level, which in the modern world we call law. First, people adapt to the world around them, one that consists of a non-human environment -- evolving in part on its own and in response to what people do to it -- and of other people as well. Second, what distinguishes humanity as a species is its capacity to produce, to alter its environment more or less deliberately to ensure its survival and propagation. Finally, people organize their behavior according to particular world views, whether expressed or implicit. As people act on the basis of their understanding of how the world works, what they do inevitably changes their social and natural environment, to which they then must adapt anew.

All three elements -- ecology, production, and cognition -- evolve in tandem, each according to its own particular logic and in response to changes in the other two. To externalize any of the three elements, to place it in the set of given "environmental" conditions within which one explains an ecological change, is to miss the crucial fact that human life and thought are embedded in each other and together in the non-human world. Insofar as the tragic myth of the commons does this, it may serve less as a heuristic device for understanding environmental problems than as a recipe for exacerbating them.[2]----
[1] This is not to say that it would not be fruitful to study the impact of Hardin's commons metaphor in framing and influencing discussion of environmental politics and management since the late 1960s, but this is a completely different conversation.

[2] Quoted text from Arthur F. McEvoy, "Toward an Interactive Theory of Nature and Culture: Ecology, Production, and Cognition in the California Fishing Industry," Environmental Review 11:4 (Winter 1987), 290-291, 297-301.

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This video clearly wasn't meant for my viewing

2011-04-25T18:43:00.000-07:00

This video clearly wasn't made for my benefit, but a loved one forwarded it to me and we got a good chuckle out of it. What entertained us the most was the opening narration--and by "entertained" I mean I found it cringe-worthy to the extent that I just had to laugh before I pulled the rest of my hair out.

Bald Me.

The video illustrates some classic examples of specious arguments and logical fallacies, and because the narration includes the word "history" I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to respond to my loyal reader.[1]

Read my analysis of the narration below the fold, and let me know what you think, but be forewarned: it's about religion . . .

We have often asserted, and we affirm it yet again, that no fact in history is better attested than the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. It must not be denied by any who are willing to pay the slightest respect to the testimony of their fellow men that Jesus, who died upon the cross, and was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea did, literally, rise again from the dead.Here's what makes me cringe about this, admittedly run-of-the-mill, Christian statement:

We have often asserted, and we affirm it yet again

Argumentum ad nauseam (argument from repetition)

no fact in history is better attested

attest

attest

claim

2) Let's take the narrator's side for a second and approach the Jesus Christ resurrection story as if it literally happened. From this point of view, does the narrator mean that no other event in history had been witnessed by more people? If so, then the narrator is clearly wrong, as more people witnessed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and more people witnessed Super Bowl XLV than lived in all of Judea at the time.[2]

appeal to authority

argumentum ad populum

It must not be denied

appeal to fear

by any who are willing to pay the slightest respect to the testimony of their fellow men

appeal to emotion

appeal to the majority

Jesus . . . did, literally, rise again from the dead

fallacy of incomplete evidence

Begging the question (or petitio principii)

I could go on.

As I wrote above, this video certainly wasn't for me. Contrary to how it might seem, I do, more often than not, ignore these kinds of contentious specious & fallacious statements, but every now and then I appreciate the opportunity to expose their constituent errors and omissions, if only for my own sake.

In the end, my contention is that using our evolved pre-frontal cortices to their fullest can be a rewarding and positive thing. After all, this part of our brains is one of the few things that separates us from the other animals!

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[1] By "reader" I mean me.

[2] Demographers: Correct me if I'm wrong.

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My take on Budweiser vs. real pilsner

2011-04-02T21:53:00.000-07:00

Budweiser is by far the worst beer I've ever had, for at least two reasons. First, it tastes bland and uninspired. Second, Anheuser-Busch, the company that makes this beer, has the audacity to use the advertising campaign that characterizes this beverage as the "King of Beer." (Using this campaign, they're banking on the fact that a significant amount of the beer-drinking population is daft enough to fall for it and, unfortunately, they've been right about this for many years.)

We recently held a pilsner-style beer tasting at our house, and I recently posted the results of this tasting. At this tasting on January 22, 2011, I didn't have time to taste these beers myself in any systematic fashion, but over the past week or so I was finally able to do so. This post presents the results of my own pilsner beer tasting . . .

My tastings differed from the group in that I was not blind to the beers I was trying; in every other way, I tried to replicate the group process.

However, having experienced and reflected upon the group process, I did learn some things that I implemented with my tasting. The most important thing I implemented in my own tasting was that I approached my tastings with the goal of evaluating these ten pilsners on their own terms. I generally prefer ales, and I generally prefer highly-hopped beers (in this way I am a product of the Pacific Northwest), but I wanted to rate these pilsners on a 1-10 scale based solely on the style. If I were to rate the pilsner style on a 1-10 scale with the styles I prefer, the scaling would be different in that it would be skewed positively in favor of high-gravity, hoppy and/or malty beers such as IPAs, barley wines, imperial stouts, Belgian Tripels, doppel bocks, etc.

Overall Themes & Comparisons

Taking the time to study these beers carefully, and in spite of the fact that my palate is attuned to strongly hoppy and strongly malty beers, I was able to discern some noteworthy differences in the ten pilsners I tried.

The first difference I noted was that "old world" pilsners (Urquell, Czechvar, and to some degree Karlovacko) possessed a malt-based body and nuanced sweetness that none of the other beers had; the North American macro pilsners uniformly lacked a balanced malt-based sweetness to complement the hops, and the micro pilsners (Oskar Blues, Heater Allen, and Victory) were somewhat in the middle, though generally on the macro brew side of the spectrum. The one "old world" pilsner that defied the trend was Bitburger -- it had much more of the North American macro character than the other three old world brews.

The second difference I noted, related to the first, was that the old world brews -- with the exception of Bitburger -- had an appreciably more dynamic character than the North American macros; the micros fell somewhere in-between (again, Bitburger tended to be more like the North American macros than the old world brews.) By this I mean that Urquell, Czechvar, and Karlovacko (in that order) had a flavor profile that had more nuance from start to fade than the other beers. These beers offered an appealing spectrum of full malt sweetness, balanced by a floral hop hint, with a silky-sweet mouthfeel, followed by a nice fade of bitterness. The North American macros, on the other hand, were uniformly watery, with a monochromatic hop character that centered on bitterness at the expense of flavor and aroma, and that faded quickly to a bland watery-bitterness. The Budweiser was even worse: rather than provide the kind of bland, sorta sweet bittery water that Pabst and LaBatt offered, Budweiser had a shallow, corny/ricey type of surface sweetness that predominated over the very mild hop bitterness, and left me with an aftertaste of some sort of highly processed, sugary emptiness.

How I Ranked the Pilsners

I rated these beers a scale of 1 being the lowest grade and 10 being the highest:

1-2: Blah

3-4: Ho-hum

5-6: Good

7-8: Superior

9-10: Excellent
Based on this scale, here is how I ranked these pilsners:

1) Pilsner Urquell (8/10)

2) Oskar Blues Mama's Little Yella Pils (8/10)

3) Victory Brewing Prima Pils (7.5/10)

4) Czechvar Pilsner (6.5/10)

5) Kalovacko Pilsner (6/10)

6) Heater Allen Pils (6/10)

7) Bitburger Pils (3.5/10)

8) Pabst Blue Ribbon Pilsner (2/10)

9) LaBatt Blue Canadian Pilsner (2/10)

10) Budweiser American Lager (1/10)

My Tasting Notes

Below are my tasting notes and ratings compared to those of the group at the January 22, 2011, tasting. The pilsners are listed in the order of my ranking, with the January 22 ranking in parentheses.

"SRM Color" denotes my color determination based on the Standard Reference Method scale.

The diagrams are flavor wheels from the 33 Beers tasting journal. I'm not sure what kind of useful information these flavor wheels can impart, if any, but I did fill one of these wheels out for each beer.

__________________________

1 (4). Urquell Pilsner, Plzeň, Czech

My Rating: 8/10

Jan. 22 Group Rating: 1.116 (4.83/10)

Served from 12-ounce green glass bottles

SRM Color: 5

ABV: 4.4

My Comments:

__________________________

2 (2). Oskar Blues Mama's Little Yella Pils, Longmont, Colorado

My Rating: 8/10

Jan. 22 Group Rating: 1.343 (5.62/10)

Served from 12-ounce lined aluminum cans

SRM Color: 3

ABV: 5.3

My Comments:

__________________________

3 (3). Victory Brewing Prima Pils, Downingtown, Pennsylvania

My Rating: 7.5/10

Jan. 22 Group Rating: 1.290 (5.46/10)

Served from 12-ounce brown glass bottles

SRM Color: 3

ABV: 5.3

My Comments:

__________________________

4 (5). Czechvar Pilsner, Plzeň, Czech

My Rating: 6.5/10

Jan. 22 Group Rating: 1.039 (4.25/10)

Served from 12-ounce green glass bottles

SRM Color: 4

ABV: 5.0

My Comments:

__________________________

5. (1) Karlovacko Pilsner, Karlovac, Croatia

My Rating: 6/10

Jan. 22 Group Rating: 1.564 (6.46/10)

Served from green 22oz bottles

SRM Color: 4

ABV: 5.0

My Comments:

__________________________

6 (7). Heater Allen Pils, McMinnville, Oregon

My Rating: 6/10

Jan. 22 Group Rating: .858 (3.63/10)

Served from 22-ounce brown glass bottles

SRM Color: 4

ABV: 5.0

My Comments:

__________________________

7 (9). Bitburger Pils, Bitburg, Germany

My Rating: 3.5/10

Jan. 22 Group Rating: .572 (2.50/10)

Served from 16-ounce lined aluminum cans

SRM Color: 3

ABV: 5.0

My Comments:

__________________________

8 (8). Pabst Blue Ribbon, Woodridge, Illinois

My Rating: 2/10

Jan. 22 Group Rating: .733 (3.13/10)

Served from 12-ounce brown glass bottles

SRM Color: 3

ABV: 5.0

My Comments:

__________________________

9 (6). LaBatt Blue, Toronto, Ontario

My Rating: 2/10

Jan. 22 Group Rating: .927 (4.04/10)

Served from 12-ounce brown glass bottles

SRM Color: 3

ABV: 5.0

My Comments:

__________________________

10 (10). Budweiser American Lager, St. Louis, Missouri

My Rating: 1/10

Jan. 22 Group Rating: .571 (2.54/10)

Served from 12-ounce brown glass bottles

SRM Color: 2

ABV: 5.0

My Comments:

Raw excrement vs. medieval combat

2011-03-21T22:49:00.000-07:00

From late November 2010 into January 2011 I was quite fixated on playing the game Mount & Blade: Warband. I had been waiting for this game for about twenty years. Though set in the fictional realm of "Calradia," the game strives to emulate Medieval Europe & European kingdoms, sultinates, fiefdoms, etc. At the strategic level of the game, one engages in negotiations and trade and agrees to complete tasks for village elders, town leaders, and various political factions. On the tactical level, one wields a weapon of choice to hack away at and sling arrows at enemy foot soldiers and horsemen. The goal, of course, is to conquer, vanquish, overwhelm, and otherwise find a way to found a kingdom of one's own.

Absent at every level of this game is magic, fantasy, dragons, potions, dwarves, and all of that nonsense.

Very exciting & fun stuff!!!

I will leave it up to readers to evaluate the extent to which my interest in this game provides evidence of patriarchy, warmongering, meaningless game-playing, escapism, moral turpitude, existential shallowness, Generation-X Peter Panism, etc., etc.

What is fascinating to me is that for the past few weeks, I've been as fixated on my book project as I earlier was on the meaningless game -- and the game has faded into the background. Where in December I would get my work done as quickly as possible so that I could play an hour or so of Mount & Blade, now I flail to find time to devote to water pollution.

Many years ago, in a previous relationship far, far, away, my partner at the time called me an "into-ist." I interpreted this as meaning that I periodically focus intensively on something, and then move on to another thing some time later. Maybe she's right -- maybe I am am an "into-ist." At the time, whether she intended it or not, I took this as a critique. Perhaps it's some kind of strength?

Back in December 2010, at the peak of my fixation on Mount & Blade, I thought my fixation might be indicative of a deep-seated character flaw. I consider myself above the meaningless distractions of a Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga or Top Model, and I hold these kinds of corporate-generated outlets in utter contempt.[1] However, what if I'm as distracted by meaninglessness as those Americans whom I disparage? What if my distractions are no more meaningful than those who are distracted by corporate-generated distractions -- "manufactured consent," as Noam Chomsky describes -- but my own personal distraction takes the form of first-person real-world combat games instead of pop culture icons?

I've been working on my book intensively for a few weeks now. In the course of my writing I've started to feel confident that the contribution I'm making to the world will be of merit -- merit, at least, to people within the state, but I also believe it will be of merit to anyone interested in water pollution, mid-twentieth century environmental issues, urban infrastructure, citizen advocacy, and the evolution of science, technology, and public policy related to these issues. It may very well be that only tens or a few hundreds of people find my book of merit in these ways, but I am highly confident in the merit of my book, at any scale of "popularity."

Spending so much time on my book recently, and working extra-hard in my other jobs so that I can devote dedicated chunks of time to my book, I've begun to realize that I needed that ~eight-week period of Medieval combat distraction to help put the book project in perspective. I needed to put sewage and pulp & paper wastes on the back burner for a bit and don virtual mail armor, a trusty saber, and a really intimidating-looking helmet to come back to the project with positive energy.

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[1] Every few years these names change, but the meaninglessness persists. Earlier it was Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, Brittany Spears, Justin Timberlake, earlier still it was Back Street Boys, MTV Real World, Celine Dion . . . the corporate entertainment system wants you to convince yourself that there's any substantive difference in these entertainments.

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My final thought about "the commons" . . .

2011-03-21T16:21:00.000-07:00

(. . . at least in terms of applicability of the metaphor to my book project.)

As part of the process of trying to clarify the topic for my own benefit, I've written three posts analyzing Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" metaphor (here, here, and here). I've finally read & digested John A. Baden and Douglas S. Noonan, eds., Managing the Commons (2nd ed., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998) and now know how I'm going to address this metaphor in my book.

Some writers apply the metaphor of “the commons” to environmental resources broadly. I find myself uncomfortable with this metaphor generally, and I am not alone among historians in this. Joseph Taylor and Richard White both directly address the shortcomings of the commons metaphor.

Taylor finds that the commons metaphor “ignores a central reality of the fishery’s spatial and racial politics.” The point that Taylor makes that is as applicable in the case of Willamette River pollution as it is in the case of Pacific Northwest salmon management is that “the relative economic and political capital that each group possessed was crucial when interests collided in environmental management.”[1]

White finds that economist Garrett Hardin’s “model of the commons is an invention. No such simple commons has ever operated.” Instead, “users of common resources set up rules and limits; they created customs.”[2] The story of Willamette River pollution abatement supports White’s interpretation of Hardin’s idea: A complex narrative of society’s changing demands upon the river and the impacts of these demands upon present and potential uses of the river, which, in turn, helped spur changes in city, state, and federal rules, limits, and customs.

Other scholars have also found Hardin’s metaphor overly simplistic. David Feeny, et al., observe that "Surprisingly little careful empirical work on common property followed Hardin's seminal publication." These authors note that Hardin's idea lacks empirical support in present-day contexts; as White and Taylor observe, the idea also lacks historical context. As a result, Feeny et al. conclude that "as with many seminal but simple models, Hardin's analysis has been shown by subsequent studies to be overly simplified and deterministic."[3]

The book Managing the Commons contains seventeen chapters from various authors discussing this idea, and there is much to commend. However, one particularly glaring shortcoming in this book is that many authors approach the topic from the realm of economic theory. A problem with economic theory, in my view, is that some people take it too seriously -- they reify a theory, either unwittingly or otherwise, and then come to believe that their theory is actually real.[4]

The clearest example of how theory can serve as an unfortunate roadblock to understanding more completely the complexities of social & environmental systems and interrelated changes over time among these systems is in economist Robert L. Bish's chapter.[5]

Bish writes that "a good example of [the effects of] privatization of a publicly owned natural resource was the enclosure movement in Medieval England." He then goes on for two paragraphs to characterize the enclosure movement. He does not cite a single source to support his data or his interpretation.

I find it hard to believe that not a single expert in the history of the enclosure movement in Medieval England has not published a single source on this topic. Bish was either being lazy or being purposeful in not citing any of these sources to help support his contentions. If the former, well, we've all made mistakes. If the latter -- and I suspect it is the latter, because these paragraphs are central to his chapter -- then he's calling upon an historical example to support his argument without bothering to apply even halfheartedly the historical method. This suggests to me that he's more interested in propping-up his theory than he is in actually trying to unwind complex events and shed light on the topic at hand.

My primary disappointment with Bish's chapter, and with the idea of "the commons" in general, is that at first glance it appears to be a substantive model that might help illuminate things, but when one looks beyond the tidy façade one finds little of historical substance. Perhaps "the tragedy of the commons" has a place in economics theory, but, until I see explicit evidence that it has solid historical grounding and relates directly to nineteenth and twentieth century environmental history in North America, I'm afraid it has no use in my book.

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[1] Joseph E. Taylor III, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 10-11.

[2] Richard White, Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York, Hill and Wang, 1995), 39-43.

[3] David Feeny, Fikret Berkes, Bonnie J. McCay, and James M. Acheson, “The Tragedy of the Commons: Twenty-Two Years Later,” in John A. Baden and Douglas S. Noonan, eds., Managing the Commons (2nd ed.) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 76-94.

[4] I'm using the word theory here not in the sense of a scientific theory. The theory I'm discussing here is "contemplation or speculation" that pertains to "a body of principles, theorems, or the like, belonging to one subject." Scientific theory -- "a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena" -- is different. The main difference specifically comparing the fields of economics and the physical sciences is that the former is a set of ideological and moral beliefs informing a definitive statement that purports to predict complex social phenomena; the latter is a working conclusion based on verifiable experimentation and open to refinement that helps explain complexities of the physical world.

[5] Robert L. Bish, "Environmental Resources Management: Public or Private?" in John A. Baden and Douglas S. Noonan, eds., Managing the Commons (2nd ed.) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 65-74.

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"There is almost criminal negligence of city officials to permit this"

2011-03-19T13:01:00.000-07:00

“River Looks Bad to Two Parties,” Morning Oregonian, Aug. 5, 1936, p. 3.

In August 1936, the Willamette River through Portland's harbor looked and smelled bad. For decades, Oregonians had come to expect that during the low-flow months of July through October, the lower Willamette River would become a tepid, chunky, and foaming soup thickened with raw human excrement, filamentous cannery wastes, harsh sulfite pulp and paper liquors, and other discharges.

What to do about all of this filth?

Polluting a river is quite easy. Simply route an effluent pipe into the stream, push the refuse over the banks, or allow pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals to drain into the water, and one is well on the way to polluting the river. Abating pollution, however, is difficult.

Abating water pollution requires many complementary and concurrent steps. One must, first, prove that a given pollutant is deleterious to the river's health, and/or the public's health. Along with this, one must prove that the harmful effects come from specific sources. Next, one must uncover or suggest technical, administrative, and procedural solutions. It's easy to critique actions, but does the critic have anything productive to offer in the way of possible solutions?

Solutions cost money, so once it has been determined that pollution exists and that there are possible solutions, one must convince people to pay for abatement options. Payment comes either from private or public sources. In the American system of democracy, neither private nor public sources can be tapped without passing laws. These laws will generally provide for some form of proactive or punitive money generation. Proactive generation includes increasing taxes and fees, authorizing the sale of bonds, securing loans, etc. Punitive generation includes assessing fines for people or companies that do not follow abatement regulations.

What does all this have to do with a guy in a gas mask?

Citizen groups, members of the state's fish and game commissions, and some Portland city officials had been working together since the mid-1920s to develop solutions to remedy extreme pollution in Oregon's Willamette River. These advocates pushed for both a state-wide solution and solutions applicable to Portland and other Willamette Valley cities.

At the state level, abatement advocates sought to concentrate responsibility for water quality in a single state agency. It was not until the first decade of the twentieth century that Oregon legislators delegated to state officials any responsibility for water quality, but they spread this responsibility among at least three separate agencies: the Board of Health was concerned with public health and municipal water supplies, the Fish Commission was tasked with water quality related to commercial fisheries, and the Game Commission oversaw sports fishing concerns. Various agency reorganizations from the 1900s into the 1920s modified these areas of responsibilities somewhat, but oversight remained separated among distinct state agencies.

Advocates attempted in 1927 to pass a state law to provide for a single agency to ensure water quality. Their proposal did not make it out of committee. Portland's mayor and representatives from industry were members of the citizens' group organized to generate a solution to Willamette River pollution. This group -- the Anti-Stream Pollution League -- also included representatives from the state board of health, fish, and game commissions as well as members of the Izaak Walton League, other sporting groups, and women's organizations.

A sub-committee of the League drafted legislation that drew the ire of both of the two primary polluters in the valley. Portland Mayor George Baker complained that forcing his city to build a comprehensive sewer interceptor and treatment system would be too expensive, and it wouldn't be fair for the state to force the city to spend so much money on the project. Pulp and paper industry officials asserted both that effective sulfite waste treatment technology did not yet exist and, even if it did, it wouldn't be fair to ask industry to abate its pollution when the city of Portland was still dumping raw sewage into the river.

The Anti-Stream Pollution League's proposed legislation thus died in January 1927, and with it, for a decade at least, a state-wide solution would not be proposed. (State Senator Byron Carney would sponsor similar legislation ten years later.)

In the meanwhile, however, the city of Portland continued to expel raw sewage: forty-eight separate outfalls emptied into Portland Harbor, and eleven emptied into Columbia Slough.

During 1933 and 1934, the city applied twice to the Federal Emergency Public Works Administration (PWA) for a $6M loan and $2M grant to build a sewer interceptor and activated sludge treatment plant. However, in August 1933 the PWA rejected the first application immediately because the plans were inadequate. The PWA accepted the second application in February 1934 but was not able to allocate funds because the state had already been provided its full allotment.

In combination with these applications for federal funds under New Deal programs, Portland's city leaders put to the vote of city residents a number of measures to fund sewer construction. To support the city's August 1933 PWA application, city commissioners brought a $6 million bond issue to the voters at a July 21, 1933, special election. Reacting to what Commissioner Ormond Bean characterized as “the emergency character of the times, as well as the intense campaign” in support of the measure, voters approved a sewer funding plan by a wide margin, 47,029 to 23,395. This plan was to be "self-liquidating" because it would be based on the sale of interest-bearing bonds.

By July 1934, Portland city commissioners had secured approval of voters to finance sewer construction, but they had failed in two attempts to get New Deal funding. That month, the PWA offered city leaders a $2.24M grant contingent upon sale of $6M in bonds. City leaders, however, could not find buyers.

Potential buyers did not consider Portland's bonds attractive because the plans that the bonds would have supported were still inadequate. These plans had been drafted by an unlicensed engineer, Walter Baer, in early 1933. Though Portland Commissioner Bean and three local consulting engineers had subsequently enhanced the plans, Boston-based bond attorneys still found them to be "very indefinite . . . and so general that they meant practically nothing." Therefore, without a solid basis upon which to base a bond sale, Portland officials could not find buyers and could not collect the PWA's grant money.

In light of these repeated failures, the Portland City Council submitted to voters in November 1934 a charter amendment that would authorize $6M in self-liquidating bonds. If buyers could not be found, the city would support the project out of general tax funds. Residents defeated this idea.

Into early 1936, Portland city officials attempted to find ways to issue the sewer funding bonds legally, in spite of the November 1934 vote. The State Supreme Court halted these attempts, however, in their March 31, 1936, opinion holding the city to the original, incomplete, set of plans submitted in June 1933, the funding of which Portland's voters had approved that August. To resolve legal and financial complications, the city council planned to offer voters in the November 1936 election the opportunity to establish a new pay-as-you-go sewer funding solution.

As part of the process to prepare the November 1936 measure, Commissioner Ormond Bean convened a Sewage Disposal Committee. This committee included former state game commissioner and President of the Oregon Wildlife Federation Edgar F. Averill, Portland attorney David Robinson, former state legislator and prominent businessman William F. Woodward, and sanitary engineer Fred Merryfield, among others. Committee members went on a cruise of Portland Harbor on August 4, 1936, to experience conditions first-hand.

After this cruise, Commissioner Bean commented to the Oregonian reporter that the river "certainly is black. I didn't realize how dirty it is." Edgar Averill replied, "Yes, and it keeps getting worse for the next couple of months." The Oregonian reporter continued:

Leaving from the foot of Stark Street, the boat nosed upstream on the west bank and passed three partially exposed sewers, all emptying into log booms, between the Morrison and Ross Island bridges.

William F. Woodward said conditions were "inexcusable" in places on the east side, but mostly because of debris along the banks.

"There is almost criminal negligence of city officials to permit this," he said.

The pollution situation would be "largely remedied" if the sewers emptied below the water level and into the main current of the river, he said, adding he saw no condition of the river which would be a "menace."

"His distinction of a 'menace' is different from that of many others," remarked Commissioner Bean.Bean's committee continued to work diligently on the issue, and they were able to prepare a measure for the November 1936 election. Portland voters, however, did not approve of this measure, either, but that's part of other chapters of this tale.

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Sources Cited:

James V. Hillegas, "Working for the 'Working River': Willamette River Pollution, 1926-1962," (MA thesis, Portland State University, 2009).

Ormond R. Bean, “Notes on the Portland Sewage Disposal Project, May 1933-June 26, 1936,” undated typewritten manuscript [ca. June 1936], folder Willamette and Columbia River Pollution 1933-1934, box 2 Early Sewage Disposal System Data Sewage Systems (1922-1961), group Department of Public Works Bureau of Refuse Disposal (8890-02), City of Portland Archives and Records Center, Portland, Oreg.

Board of Review (Abel Wolman, R. H. Corey, Wellington Donaldson, and Carl E. Green), “Report on the Collection and Disposal of Sewage,” Portland, Oreg., Aug. 19, 1939, in folder 8402-01 Sewage Disposal Project-Sewage Collection and Disposal Report 1939, box 1, Public Works Administration-City Engineer's Historical/Subject Records, City of Portland Archives and Records Center, Portland, Oreg.

“River Looks Bad to Two Parties,” Morning Oregonian, Aug. 5, 1936, p. 3.

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The difference between amateur and professional

2011-03-15T19:28:00.000-07:00

As the photo above indicates, sure, I can build something out of wood that's more-or-less functional and, if given a sufficient amount of paint, I can even succeed in hiding some of the more egregious blemishes on what I build.[1]

Contrast this with what a professional custom cabinet and furniture maker can do:

The difference between the furniture that I have made and my friend Tom's artwork is vast. It's the difference between night and day; it's the difference between an amateur and a professional.

In the field of history, like the field of fine furniture design & building, there's a difference between amateurs and professionals.[2]

The Oregonian's D.K. Rowe recently wrote an article about the financial situation of the Oregon Historical Society in the aftermath of the November 2010 passage of a special Multnomah County levy.[3] In reply to this article, Dana Carlile writes:

The Oregon Historical Society promoters' inability to learn from history (and arithmetic) might seem ironic if it were not so common among history promoters. People aren't interested in learning from history. If they were, the world would be a very different place. Just witness the past decade. Besides being exceedingly complex and uncertain, real history is frequently disturbing, subversive and humbling. Even sanitized and politically correct "history" peddled at exhibits and on TV cannot conceal that history is about people that are dead and eventually forgotten -- a fate most people don't wish to be reminded of.

The OHS has two assets: an extensive collection of materials and some real estate. What it does not have is popular appeal or benefit. Let the state universities have the OHS collection to manage for serious researchers and develop the real estate to fund an endowment for such. Dana Carlile is a"self-described amateur history buff."

In response to Carlile, Multnomah County Archivist Terry Baxter wrote a letter that (I'm led to believe) will be in the Letters section of an upcoming Oregonian:

In a recent letter to the editor (March 14) titled “Selling History,” Dana Carlile bats .250 in his analysis of history and the Oregon Historical Society. Now that is above the Mendoza Line, but barely.

He gets a hit with the comment that “real history is frequently disturbing, subversive, and humbling.” I’d agree and would add that it is diverse, multi-voiced, and always open to revision.

He misses on the following three observations, though.

History is not about “people who are dead and eventually forgotten.” History is about you and me. We use records and artifacts from the past as a mirror to see who we are and how we got here. History is the story that describes that interaction and we use it to understand ourselves, not the past.

Nor is history only for “serious researchers.” History is for all of us. There is an explosion in both the sources available to study history and in the types of stories told by an increasingly diverse pool of researchers. There are a lot of strands in the rope called history – and they don’t all come from academic historians.

And finally, the Oregon Historical Society has been a key source for that diverse research for over 100 years. Its appeal is clear. County voters paid to keep it in operation so we could use its collections to meet our various historical needs. We all have a voice and we all have stories to tell and OHS and history let us do it together.Thanks, Terry!

----
[1] This is my home office laptop stand, by the way. I'm taking orders . . .

[2] This isn't a statement that Glenn Beck would agree with.

[3] D.K. Rowe, "Oregon Historical Society could end up no better off despite millions from taxpayers," Oregonian, March 8, 2011. See also here and elsewhere.

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"Society becomes how you behave"

2011-03-15T12:28:00.000-07:00

This quote came from Eric Liu during his interview with KUOW's Steve Scher this morning, "What Makes a Great Citizen?"

Eric Liu

Guiding Lights Weekend

Seattle Voices

Imagination First: Unlocking the Power of Possibility

I appreciated what Liu said in his interview. He discussed a dynamic that I've been grappling with for many years: how can people with such fundamental differences in political philosophy learn to put aside their disagreements for the greater good? One of the resonant points he made at the end of his interview was that "society becomes how you behave" -- a variant upon Ghandi's adage "be the change that you want to see in the world," yet no less profound in spite of its near-cliche status.

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Meaningless SpamPuffery

2011-03-14T23:04:00.000-07:00

I opted to check out the quarantined spam messages on my Sustainability History Project website and found a funny pattern that I have not experienced with my email spam.

My email spam is predominately about porn, V!agra, a panoply of other pharmaceuticals, and those ridiculous 419 scams. All of these kinds of spam and scams have existed for so long that I'm surprised that they're still around -- surprised, that is, that there are still enough people among us who are so dense as to fall for these kinds of scams to keep the scammers in business.

One of these days I may write a rant about this ridiculous dynamic, but this post is not going to be such a rant. This post is about the funny theme I noticed in the quarantined spam messages on the Sustainability History Project website . . .

The refreshingly perspicacious Bullett wrote to me that

A lot of the things you claim happens to be astonishingly legitimate and that makes me wonder the reason why I had not looked at this with this light before. This piece truly did turn the light on for me personally as far as this issue goes. Nevertheless at this time there is actually 1 issue I am not really too comfortable with and whilst I make an effort to reconcile that with the actual core idea of your issue, permit me observe just what all the rest of the subscribers have to point out. Well done.Wow, Bullett -- Sarah Palin herself could not have said it more clearly. Thanks.

Mugica wanted to let me know that, well,

Wow! This could be one particular of the most beneficial blogs We have ever arrive across on this subject. Basically Magnificent. I’m also a specialist in this topic therefore I can understand your effort.Coming from a specialist on the topic, Mugica's eloquence and erudition is quite profound, and her/his contribution to the discussion is certainly of inestimable value. Bravo!

maxig19 wrote something that is undoubtedly also profound, as it was written in Dostoevsky's mother tongue, but I wish that maxig19 had picked up on the fact that the entire SHP website is written in English for people who can speak some modicum of English. I don't wish to come across as chauvinist, but, in the interest of communication and the advancement of intellectual pursuits broadly, I would have appreciated at least some attempt to communicate to us in this language. I'm willing to meet non-native speakers 3/4 of the way, but I do need some help -- I am an inadequately-educated American, after all!

основной вид деятельности компании с 1999 года. Сегодня мы имеем разветвленную сеть филиалов по всей России, распологаем высококвалифицированным опытным персоналом и необходимымWTF?

Gracious dave, whose email for some reason starts with "Mukai9759," says some things that absolutely warm the cockles of my heart:

Nice post. The info presented here was the greatest I could find all day long, and I have been searching tough on the Internet. I believe you should put this up on a large social bookmarking website, you will discover that it spreads like wildfire – Cheers – davedave, as long as you're not planning to spread herpes or spam to this website like wildfire, I'm all for it!

Halterman1321 also has some kind words to send our way:

I truly like the fresh perpective you did on the issue. Truly was not expecting that when I started off studying. Your concepts had been easy to comprehend that I wondered why I never looked at it prior to. Glad to know that there’s an individual out there that certainly understands what he’s discussing. Great jobOh, dearest Halterman1321, you're too kind. I'm glad to know that even though I strive to complete my sentences, spell my words correctly, and understand myself what I'm trying to write before I write it, that what I write can can be sufficiently intelligible to people who are not so motivated. You prove to me that the Internet can be a tool that brings us together . . . just like love.

earth145 writes:

thanks !! very helpful post!Thanks, earth145, very helpful post yourself! You've truly contributed to the broader understanding of the complex issues we're grappling with, and articulated a profound range of ideas from which we shall all surely benefit! Kudos to you!! You should definitely come by for tea some time.

Vaeth468 comes to us with a job opportunity:

Awe inspiring post, do you have contact details? I need a writer for my websiteExcellent! I thought I had a great chance to sit at home in my skivvies and earn $20K per month! That's what Vaeth468 promised me. The weird thing is, shortly after I gave Vaeth468 my SSN and bank account info, all of my computer passwords were stolen and my bank accounts were zeroed-out. What does this mean? When is the first paycheck coming my way? Why is the IRS hounding me????

Leza3042 writes:

Keep ‘em coming… you all do such a great job at such Concepts… can’t tell you how much I, for one appreciate all you do!Wait a minute . . . !!

I think I'm starting to detect patterns here: generic praise not related in any way to the content of a particular post; Cyrillic-language comments; invitations to navigate to a webpage and leave my personal information . . .

I think they're trying to play me for a sucker, just like they did when they got me to order v|agra and offered me #1 Millions U.S.A. Dolars to send my bank account info to the Honorable Dr. Motumbo Zayibi from Nigeria.

Bollocks to them. They won't get me a third time!!!

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It couldn't possibly get any more exciting than this!

2011-03-13T18:48:00.000-07:00

Of late I've been extremely focused on my book project. Today I've been immersed in archival sources relating to the City of Portland's attempts to design, fund, and build a comprehensive sewer interceptor and primary treatment system in the 1920s and 1930s. The story is fantastically complex and I've been piecing together the chronology, learning about the motivations and personalities of the key players, trying to condense the key events at the local, state, and national levels in a way that will convey the complexity in an intelligible way.

One of the key elements my book will stress is that while the Willamette River pollution abatement movement was centered in this region and abatement advocates worked within a specific set of technological, political, economic, and ecological systems, the movement at every stage relied upon public and private input. For example, in the 1930s Portland city officials benefited from the expertise of two of the foremost professionals in their field, Harrison P. Eddy of Boston, and Abel Wolman of Baltimore. In 1943, Portland city leaders benefited from the clout of renowned New York City planner Robert Moses to jump-start the sewage system plans that Eddy and Wolman had proposed.

Oregon's abatement advocates also relied upon funds and research assistance from such federal agencies as the National Resources Planning Board and the Public Works Administration, and regional organizations such as the Pacific Northwest Regional Planning Commission.

As part of my research process, I've also discovered an interesting Internet resource:

** sewerhistory.org

It's hard to have more fun with one's clothes on, let me tell you!

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Is not being stupid not enough?

2011-03-08T13:59:00.000-08:00

There is a fascinating discussion over at Intellectual History "How Should Intellectual Historians Deal with Erroneous, Foolish, or Vicious Thought?" As Ben writes in the post, historians generally don't have a problem taking seriously egregiously wrong[1] ideas from the past and applying a more detached and objective approach to these ideas in order to establish their context, learn more about their adherents, and investigate their causes and effects.

However, what is the historian's role in shedding light on egregiously wrong ideas in the present?

In his brief post, Ben provides three things to think about as historians work to identify or otherwise confront wrong ideas in the present:

1) "People do express opinions about the past that are simply wrong. And as historians, we have a responsibility, perhaps even a duty, to point out when people use bad history to bolster their arguments in public debate."

2) "significant ideas that we happen to believe are wrong, inane, or even deeply evil should still be taken seriously."

3) "Of course how we do this . . . is a more complicated question."I certainly struggle with this stuff. In some of my own posts, I've grappled with similar issues: trying to understand the relationship of deistic beliefs to historical inquiry and the scientific process and recoiling at the kind of asinine ideas that historical ignorance can foster, among others.

I also have a long list of posts-in-process that I may never finish but that share the theme of "what the f#*k?!?!?! Do (Glenn Beck/Sarah Palin/Newt Gingrich/insert your favorite blowhard here) actually believe what they're spewing, or are they blatantly & cynically manipulating the historical record on purpose?"

I like what Tim Lacy has to say in response to Ben's post, as it's relevant to the question I continue to reflect upon -- namely "what is history?":

Our job is to help tease through the hierarchy of causes and sort out the probability of relevance. We're experts on the probability of relevance.----
[1] By "wrong" Ben seems to be suggesting both ideas that are "deeply incorrect" in an objective sense (an example from my own area of study would be the miasmatic theory of disease etiology) and ideas that are wrong in a moral sense (i.e., slavery).

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A reflection on the historical method

2011-03-07T22:30:00.000-08:00

I recently received a comment in this post that included the following thought-provoking points:

do you think that historians provide “pure” interpretations of history, and if so, what is meant by a “pure” interpretation?? Here’s my take on history: the event happens, multiple people try to “interpret” it and write it down, then more people (historians) “interpret” the interpretations until we are left with something that may not resemble the original at all . . . I’m not suggesting that historians commit malfeasance on purpose; I’m only saying that each of them (including you) interprets history through [a] unique lens. Who is to say, after all, that even at the moment of action the historical event can be reported purely? This is what makes history (and communication) rich! The fact that there can be, and are, multiple interpretations based on who is receiving the information.

I do enjoy opportunities to speak about the philosophy of history!

"What is History?"

This is the title of a classic work on the philosophy of history from 1961 by Edward Hallett Carr. This book and others, and my training in graduate school and beyond, have contributed to this definition of history that I provide my Sustainability History Project (SHP) students. Teaching senior undergraduates from a variety of disciplines -- most of whom have no background in history and many of whom don't "like" history -- has forced me to come up with a definition that is as clear and concise and non-specialized as possible.

The definition linked to above that I provide my students offers a succinct (as possible) and general answer to the questions that motivated this post. Based upon this definition, I will make some explicit connections.

The way that I approach the field of history, there is no such thing as a "pure" interpretation of history. What I mean by "pure" in this instance is something completely objective. One thing that the SHP link above doesn't address directly but that I do spend much time on in class is the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity.

The former, in my understanding, is impossible to achieve absolutely and definitively, but is the carrot that many historians (including me) hold in front of us and strive toward. As the link above indicates, striving toward objectivity means, fundamentally, to be as aware as possible of one's own biases and the biases of the sources one is consulting; endeavoring to understand historical people and groups as possessing full agency [def. #3]; being open to changing one's interpretation based on evidence; and producing historical narratives for the broader community to receive feedback, critiques, etc.

Subjectivity, then, is something that always infuses "objective" information and approaches. For the historian, however, absolute and unexamined subjectivity is to be avoided -- in fact, the historical method has been developed precisely as a way to learn how to be more self-aware so as to avoid unexamined subjectivity.

Subjectivity, since it's not possible to eradicate, is best made explicit. To do this the historian has a number of tools, including:

1) the preface of a book or introduction to an article, in which the historian states explicitly the purpose and purview of the work

2) the thesis of a work, where the historian states clearly the point s/he is trying to make

3) the way the historian engages directly with other works to qualify, support, or contradict these works

4) the footnotes, in which the historian cites sources and may provide some succinct discursive analysis relative to the sources

5) the cumulative body of an historian's work that will invariably tell a tale about the topics that historian finds important

6) extra-curricular writings and involvement, such as blog posts, op-eds, membership to certain civic groups, direct involvement in politics, etc.The most pernicious kind of subjectivity, in my opinion, comes from people who are deluded into thinking that their viewpoints correlate 1:1 with objective reality, rather than realizing that their views are overly saturated in subjectivity. Religious fundamentalists fall into this category, as do Glenn Beck, Ayn Rand, Anne Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh (to name a few).

Finally (for this post at least), the idea that "there can be, and are, multiple interpretations" of the meanings of historical or contemporary events is an important point. I provide a full lecture on this topic in my SHP classes. One of the important dynamics that I point out is that the historical profession -- and, by extension, historical interpretation -- was much less inclusive and democratic before the 1960s. In this decade the culture in this country began to benefit from the impacts of people (even if they were, at first, mostly male, mostly white, largely middle and working class) who had been able to take advantage of the post-WWII GI Bill of Rights.

Beginning in the mid-to-late 1940s, colleges and universities throughout the nation received an influx of people that they had not seen before in such great numbers, and these people brought with them new questions and new passions. The result was that beginning in the 1960s many of the groups that had long been marginalized in traditional American culture were more likely to be represented at institutions of higher education, and these people brought with them interests that had theretofore received little, if any, attention in academia.

With these interests came new fields of study and new approaches to traditional fields of study. During the 1960s and 1970s this more representative version of American academia produced the foundation of what I most value today (and people like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the National Association of Scholars rail against): environmental history, LGBT history, Chicano/a studies, Black Studies, critical theory, social history, public history, etc. etc. Essentially, what happened is that academia broadened beyond the interest of the ruling classes and became much more representative of the broader American culture.[1]

The notion that there is an historical method -- similar to the notion that there is a scientific method -- implies that there is an approach to historical interpretation that is more likely to be more objective than other approaches.[2] This is precisely what I try to address in the last few paragraphs of this post.

In conclusion, my fundamental points regarding the questions that spurred this post are:

1) complex historical topics are not done justice with simple explanations

2) historical topics explained by simplistic interpretations tend to be based on ideology and subjectivity at the expense of furthering deeper understanding

discipline

4) the most honest historians don't assert "purity" or "Truth," but provide plausible, thought-provoking, and well-researched contributions to help the rest of us understand the complex world in which we live

5) historical interpretations themselves change over time, as new evidence becomes available, as more -- and more diverse -- people contribute to the field, and as new issues require historical context----
[1] Where I have a bias that I'm both not afraid to admit and not open to changing is that I firmly believe that increased representation of traditionally marginalized groups cannot be but a net positive, as difficult as the growing pains may be and as much as we have to drag along with us, kicking and screaming, the unwilling.

[2] Examples abound of people and institutions that don't have a clear understanding of the scientific method.

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"Ugh! Harumph!!"

2011-03-01T13:15:00.000-08:00

I've recently had some experiences that, to me, illustrate a fascinating discrepancy between what people express and how other people perceive these expressions. These experiences have got me reflecting on how amazing it is that humans can even communicate on anything more than the most basic levels (i.e., "need food now," "want sex now," "you go away now," "you come here now," "no," "yes," etc., like some stereotyped cave-dwelling hominid).

The first example is based on the experiences I've had just about every quarter of the course I teach. I start every quarter by reading academic articles on the topic of sustainability, and I explain to my students that, yes, these articles approach their topics from a relatively abstract, philosophical perspective, but I start the quarter this way--in the clouds, so to speak--because over the course of the quarter we're gradually going to ground these abstractions in the specific lived experiences of specific community members. The theory and philosophy we learn at the beginning of the quarter will help inform the practical knowledge that we'll be gaining, and the practical knowledge will also be seen to exist within a broader context of history, culture, theory, etc. My personal view here is that both the theoretical and the practical are incomplete without one another.

Pretty much every quarter, at least a few students in the class critique these articles because they don't identify practical examples of sustainability-in-action.

The dynamic in my courses, then, is that in spite of the fact that I tell students that what they're about to read will be heavy on theory and light on practice, and that we'll be working our way, very purposefully, toward practice, some students still feel the need to critique the articles along these lines. Student critiques also arise in spite of the fact that the authors have stated clearly in their articles their thesis, purpose, and approach.

Such critiques are, to me, like critiquing a history of the American Civil War because it doesn't go into detail about the Crusades, or like critiquing an apple because it doesn't taste like an orange.

I realize that many senior undergraduates are still in the process of learning how to really read and understand academic articles (I speak from direct personal experience here), and I'm not writing this post to lament higher education. However, I am fascinated that in spite of my own and the authors' clear and repeated expressions that these articles won't be providing practical examples, many students still expend (waste?) their time formulating such critiques.

Another example stems from a conversation I recently had with a good friend on the topic of this post of mine. We weren't discussing the content of this post per se, but, rather, the definition of atheism itself.

In the post, I very purposely, very deliberately, and, I thought, very clearly defined what I meant by the word "atheism." Atheism is a loaded word in our culture, so I wanted to make it explicitly clear how I defined it so that the contentious discussion that followed wouldn't become mired in meaningless posturing among discussants who did not define their terms clearly. That is, if someone wanted to engage me in that discussion and used the definition of atheism that I offered, we could have a meaningful discussion; if someone wanted to critique my definition of atheism, we could also have a meaningful discussion; however, if someone came to the conversation with an implicit definition of "atheism" and failed to express this definition explicitly, then the discussion would be meaningless because I would be saying "apple apple apple" and he or she would be hearing "orange orange orange," and vice-versa.

So, the discussion with my friend progressed along the apples vs. oranges track for quite a few minutes until I realized that my friend was talking about a completely different definition of atheism. My friend's definition was that atheism itself was a religion and by self-identifying (even in the qualified way that I did) as an atheist I was being as hard-headed as other religious fundamentalists.

However, I did not define atheism in the way that my friend was defining it. My definition was: "disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings."

That's it -- that's where I began my discussion: From a clear, concise position. I then built a more nuanced argument that qualified my "belief" in atheism with my "belief" in agnosticism, in which I also defined agnosticism very clearly.

I may be running the risk, dear reader, of distracting you from the purpose of this post, so before you find yourself wanting to berate me for spiritual beliefs that you disagree with or lambasting me for teaching a class that focuses on the New World Order notion of "sustainability," I'll bring the discussion back to a clear focus:

Regardless of how clear and concise some people try to be in their expressions, some people are likely to read-in to these expressions, and often this reading-in will take these other people very far afield from the purpose, scope, and intent of the original words.

This is why I'm so fascinated at times that humans can even communicate at more than the most basic, animal, levels.

I'm not saying here that I'm immune to this dynamic; I could provide examples of where I've done the distracting reading-in to someone else's words. However, such a dynamic as I identify above seems to me like a waste of all of our time (at least at times).

Relating this to the field of history, if I were to read-in to my sources whatever I thought or wanted to see there, I wouldn't be an historian at all, I would be a polemicist, or a propagandist, or an ideologue, or something like that. The discipline of history involves learning the fundamental research and analysis tools to interpret historical sources, for sure, and to try to understand the lives and times of other groups of people, but not to read-in to my sources whatever I want to so as to confirm whatever point I already had in mind. If this were the case then one wouldn't need to go to school to learn the discipline of history, one could just sit at home on the Internet and make stuff up about alien visitation, lizard people, Atlantis, moon landing cover-ups, etc.[1]

The moral of my tale is this:

True communication comes from actually listening to what other people have to say, not projecting our own versions of reality onto others, so we'll all be better off the more that we can take a step back from a given statement or piece of writing and give other people the respect of actually hearing and trying to understand what they're actually expressing.

(In reviewing what I just wrote, I realized that I've just spent a lot of extra words re-stating the Golden Rule. Go figure.)

----
[1] Oh, wait -- there are people doing this already (but I'm not going to link to any of this nonsense from here).

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A cloud's-eye view

2011-02-22T11:07:00.000-08:00

Here is a really neat relief image* of the Portland/Vancouver basin:

(North is at the top; the lower Willamette River through Portland flows from the lower center to the left center of the image, where it drains into the lower Columbia River, flowing east to west (right to left).)

This image shows well the results of the deep geologic history of this area, including the Missoula Floods.

This deep geologic history has played an important role in Willamette River pollution and pollution abatement efforts. My book on the topic will articulate this dynamic in more detail.

----
* Many thanks to Sharon Wood Wortman for sending me this image via email a few days ago.

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My book project

2011-02-22T11:02:00.000-08:00

I neglected to inform the blog universe* back in December that the Oregon State University Press has decided to offer me a preliminary contract for my book on Willamette River pollution. This contract hinges upon completion of my manuscript on or before Oct. 1, 2011, and positive scholarly review of the manuscript.

Yaaaaayyyyy!!!!

In climbing the figurative mountain, I've reached a plateau. When I look behind me, back down the trail I've been walking, I can see the previous plateau down below where I completed my MA thesis on this topic; at slightly higher elevation is the completion of my book proposal. Looking ahead of me, I see a steep climb and the mountain peek obscured by clouds. I know the peak is up there, and I see the trail in front of me, so I have full confidence in myself and this journey. However, it will require a lot of time, effort, and energy to get to that mountain peak!

Three external reviewers evaluated my proposal. All of the reviewers provided some great feedback that I'm in the process of incorporating into the full manuscript. One reviewer, however, recommended I focus more on the period of the 1920s, while another author suggested that I not end my analysis at the end of Tom McCall's second term as governor (1975), but continue it into the early 2000s. The former reviewer made his/her suggestion because of the relative paucity of scholarly work on this era of conservation/environmental history, while the second reviewer made his/her suggestion in light of my professed goal of providing some insights that current policy makers might be able to use. These are important considerations to remember, and I'm as yet not sure which path I will take.

Also, neither my contact at the OSU Press nor the reviewers liked my working title, Working for the "Working River": Willamette River Pollution, 1926-1975. I'm going to have to change this.

OK mountaintop of Willamette River pollution: Here I come!

----
* If a blog post falls in the forest and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?

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Atheism or Agnosticism? That is the question

2011-02-14T13:02:00.000-08:00

Uh-oh, time to get deep and contentious!

Don't read this post if you're not ready to think about that sticky R-word, religion. If you're easily offended or firmly ensconced in a fundamentalism, this is not the post for you; go read something light, fluffy, and meaningless like this.

Still with me? Ok, you've been warned . . .

One of the comments in this post questioned my self-identification as a secular humanist/atheist. "As a trained historian," the commenter suggested, "you know better than to lock yourself into absolutes."

I appreciate opportunities like this to clarify my philosophical positions. One of the reasons I have this little blog -- besides the high levels of publicity, fame, and fortune I receive -- is so that I have a forum in which to work through historical and philosophical questions and, ideally, get constructive input and feedback from friends, family, and random trolls.

When I first read that comment, my thought was "oh, right, do I really mean to call myself an atheist, someone who definitively asserts the non-existence of supreme beings?" Maybe I meant to classify myself as an agnostic, someone who withholds a definitive pronouncement on the existence or non-existence of supreme beings? Was it my intention to be so assertive, or should I hew to a middle-ground?

I have thought about this question for weeks now, in response to that comment. In the broader narrative of my life, I've actually thought about this question since at least my mid-teens. Though I was baptized in the Siletz Church of Christ in the seventh grade, by the time I was a freshman in high school I no longer attended the church. In my junior year I began actively to ponder the Big Questions of life. For example, I always thought it was sad that, according to the Church of Christ, all Native Americans who died before the year 1492 were, by definition, going straight to hell because they had not been able to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior.

Also, according to the Church of Christ, Jews, Catholics, and all other Protestants were also going straight to hell. That's a lot of people to condemn outright.

Another idea that got my mind racing was reading the book The Secret Life of Plants. What struck me the most about this book at the time was the idea that plants weren't inert agglomerations of matter, but possessed some kind of life force. Maybe this life force was some kind of consciousness, but even if this was not the case, plants possessed energy and properties that were essential to us humans, and, in fact, life on this planet. Why else would we eat plants and use plants for medicines, poisons, and recreation?

Thoughts such as these got me wondering if there wasn't more to life than the Church of Christ was trying to sell me, wasn't more than my beloved friends and family in the Siletz area represented, wasn't more than I thought I already knew about the world? (From such small germs do spring bounteous forests of thought, some of the fruits of which are here in this post.)

It's essential to provide clear operational definitions for the terms we use when discussing such loaded and longstanding philosophical issues as the existence or non-existence of God.

I'll first specify what I mean by "atheism" and "agnosticism." The way I used these terms a few paragraphs above constitutes a general, lay, understanding of the terms: an atheist is "someone who definitively asserts the non-existence of supreme beings," and an "agnostic" is "someone who withholds a definitive pronouncement on the existence or non-existence of supreme beings." In this post, I'll be using these terms slightly differently.

Agnosticism means "an intellectual doctrine or attitude affirming the uncertainty of all claims to ultimate knowledge." Its root is in the Greek gnōstikós, meaning "pertaining to knowledge" (á, "not, without," + gnōst, "known").

Atheism means "disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings." Its root is in the Greek áthe, meaning "godless" (á, "not, without," + theos, "god").

I will use the word "God" as a general term that includes all monotheistic deities (i.e., Allah, Jehovah, etc.) as well all of the deities of the world's various pantheons (i.e., Shiva, Thor, Isis, Enki, etc. etc.). For ease of understanding, I will also refer to this notion of God using the male pronoun "he" rather than the more representative but awkward bi-gendered "s/he." You will find that I also approach this topic from a Christian perspective--particularly Protestantism--because my lived experience and educational background are much more centered in this tradition than any other.

There are two primary ways to conceive of God:

actual

Nicene Creed

the masks of God

Using the above two broad definitions of God, am I an atheist or an agnostic?

In terms of God definition 1, I am an atheist. In terms of God definition 2, I am an agnostic. I do not believe that God exists as an actual being or beings, but I do believe that there continue to be mysteries, "unknown unknowns," and the like in our own psyches, on this planet, and in the universe.

In my interpretation, God definition 1 has through time been consistently reduced in applicability as human knowledge, science, and measuring methods have evolved. God definition 2 can still be a useful way for some people to understand the universe, because there are, as yet, so many mysteries to life -- and, in spite of physicists' long search for one mathematical equation to explain everything, with every new quantum or astronomical discovery, there seems to arise only more and deeper questions.

Christians who approach their religion using God definition 1 generally use circular logic that boils down to two key points. The first is that God wrote the bible, so they hold their beliefs because God said so in the Bible, and the Bible is the Word of God. The second is that they have faith in the Word of God because being a true Christian means having faith in the World of God, which God has provided in the Bible that he wrote. In my experience, the vast majority of arguments from Christians using God definition 1 can be reduced to these circular constructions, and such Christians are not generally amenable to stepping outside of this well-worn path, even for the sake of an intellectual exercise.

Many people who do not hold to the basic tenets of the above arguments fall into the category of defining God according to definition 2. For example, many self-professed Christians that I've known and heard about do not necessarily believe that God is an actual being, or that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, or that Christianity is the only true religion. Instead, they perceive of their religion as something that provides guidance, comfort, and community, just as Islam, Judaism, and other religions can.

Christopher Hitchens is an essayist and social commentator who expresses well some of the core elements of my own philosophy. Some of his opinions and interpretations I do not agree with (for starters, his approval of G.W. Bush's invasion of Iraq), and one of these days I will write a post that will enable me to go into more detail on some of this. However, when it comes to his stance on the world's organized religions, I share many of his core interpretations.

For example, I agree with Hitchens when he states that the burden of proof is upon those who assert the existence of God, not on those of us who do not.

Why do I hold such a thought? Well, for starters, how could an impartial observer evaluate among the claims of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and the ancient Vikings (for example) when each of these groups asserts that God(s) intervened in a certain situation, or created things in such a way, or commanded us to act in one way or another? From the position of someone trying to evaluate as objectively as possible such claims, it is impossible to come to any definitive determination, because empirical evidence for all of these claims is lacking. As one commenter on this Slate.com article writes, this dynamic illustrates the "inherent unprovability of a hypothesis of an unprovable being."

The conclusion that the impartial observer would likely come to is that none of these claims from various religious perspectives are true in an empirical, physical, objective sense. In spite of the circular logic of one group or another that begins and ends with the group's "holy book(s)," for anyone not committed from the beginning to that particular religion's version of God definition 1, then all of these assertions seem equally nonsensical. Unless . . .

What if we evaluate these religious claims in terms of God definition 2? What if, rather than expressing physical and temporal realities, religious claims speak to deeper mysteries of psychology, history, astronomy, physics, etc.? In this case, perhaps there are truths to be gained in religious expressions and ideas, but these truths are not TRUTHS, or even Truths, but nuggets and snippets and glimpses of universal mysteries that perhaps may one day no longer be mysteries, or quite as mysterious, or they may be mysteries for as long as homo sapiens and our descendants yet live?

(This interpretation is not something I thought of on my own; I'm indebted to Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, in particular.)

The distinctions above exemplify the essence of my self-identification as an atheist in terms of God definition 1, and an agnostic in terms of God definition 2.

I trust that the analysis above conveys how I -- as an historian -- approach the question of God's existence, but I'll provide a final note to further specify my perspective.

I adhere broadly to the tenets of Secular Humanism. This means that I do not take things simply on faith (this post goes into more detail), and that I have a "commitment to the use of critical reason, factual evidence, and scientific methods of inquiry, rather than faith and mysticism, in seeking solutions to human problems and answers to important human questions." When I'm trying to interpret historical evidence and write narratives, I could not fathom coming to a place in my research where I would just throw up my hands and exclaim, "Well, I guess I just found an example of God's intervention, so I can stop this line of inquiry . . ." This seems to exact opposite of what a good historian should do.

On the contrary, whenever I get to a place where I find myself thinking in terms of some grand narrative that explains all things, I do one of two things.

One option is that I'm making a conscious choice to express things in a general way because to go into much detail will take me far afield from the focus of my narrative. For example, I may opt to explain in only two paragraphs the complexities of nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization throughout North America, because the purpose of my writing is to explain the situation in Oregon's Willamette Valley from the 1920s forward, and I want to do so in 70,000 words, not 700,000. I gotta draw the line somewhere, so I condense this part and provide in my footnotes references to the three or four essential books that go into great detail on this process.

The other option is that I've just discovered a facet of my own understanding that hasn't been sufficiently un-packed and examined. For example, if I find myself trying to characterize the most important motivations of key people involved in Willamette River water pollution abatement efforts in the mid-twentieth century, I could just say that they were all self-interested sportsmen who wanted to maintain stocks of salmon for recreational fishing, but how does that account for the involvement of the League of Women Voters, or members of the Chamber of Commerce, or good government advocates at the city and state level, or federal government officials engaged in regional resource planning, . . .? Put simply, it does not.

Regarding conceptions of God, on the other hand, if I go into my research not seeking to uncover some tattered shred of evidence that, looked at through fogged lenses with one eye closed, might be construed as evidence of God's actual existence, BUT, instead, think of "God" as an idea, a shorthand, a concept that changes throughout space and time according to cultural needs, then I'm getting much closer to the secular humanist goal of approaching the world from as objective a point as possible. (For more about how I define history, and the dynamic between subjectivity and objectivity, see this discussion that I wrote for the Sustainability History Project.)

-

Budweiser vs. real pilsner

2011-02-13T00:39:00.000-08:00

Budweiser sucks.

Or, at least, this was my hypothesis when I brought together thirteen friends and family members for a blind pilsner taste test on January 22, 2011.

The Vibe.

I had been thinking about hosting such an event for a few years now, but kept finding opportunities for postponement.

I discovered in 1991 that beer meant more than BudCoorsHammOly when I first tasted Paulaner Hefeweizen while stationed in Gaeta, Italy, with the U.S. Navy. My friend PJ and I used to frequent a small pub in Gaeta [~~PJ: help me recall the name!~~ Update Feb. 13 2011: Bar/Cafe Uno, V. Europa. 20, Gaeta]. The proprietor, Mario, was from Bavaria originally but married an Italian woman and was then living in Gaeta. I distinctly remember one day Mario serving up a tall glass of Paulaner with a lemon slice. I took one sip and was thrust instantly into an entirely new world.

Until that moment in Mario's pub, I equated beer with the highly-carbonated, straw-colored, slightly-bitter soda water that I had been drinking legally (in Europe) for about a year and had drunk other-than-legally in high school. The Heineken, Bira Moretti, and similar styles in Turkey, Morocco, Greece, and the other countries I visited weren't appreciably different than the Hamms, Coors, and Olympia that I ~sampled~ in high school.

After Paulaner had changed my worldview forevermore, I had the good fortune of going home to Oregon, where the microbrewery movement was really starting to pick up speed. After serving my country honorably from the age of 17 to 21, in 1994 I finally received my discharge at an age that I could drink legally in my own country. I had volunteered to die for my country and had been drinking legally in other countries, but once I had turned 21 I was finally able to drink legally at home [one of these days, in another post, I'll rant in excruciating detail about this silly dynamic].

For nearly two decades now, I've been an unrepentant Beer Snob, evolving beer connoisseur, and fledgling beer geek. I regularly snub my nose at American Style Pilsners. I consider Budweiser and Bud Light so bad that I won't even drink them if they're free [Seth can attest to this], and I'd gladly go without beer in any form than drink Pabst Blue Ribbon on a consistent basis (in spite of the ridiculous ongoing PBR billboard campaign here in Portland and elsewhere. Note to Pabst: this campaign is LAME).

However, I do possess just enough self-reflective ability to wonder if I'm full of sh*t. Is Budweiser really the worst beer in the known universe? Continue below the fold to find out . . .

The narrative that you've willingly clicked yourself into unfolds as follows:

1) Hypothesis

2) Method

3) Data

4) Conclusions

5) Lessons Learned

6) What Next?

7) Sources & Raw Data1) Hypothesis

My hypothesis was that Budweiser is a vapid, bland, beer that does injustice to the venerable "pilsner" appellation; I also extended this judgment to all North American macro-brewed pilsner-style lagers and their imitators throughout the world. Michael Jackson (R.I.P.) shared this opinion as well, and wrote that

this style has also become the basis for a blandified, cheapened adaptation, the standard golden lager of no particular character that is an international form of beer, sometimes further degraded by being made "light" or "dry." Whether or not they say Pilsner on their labels, and some have the impertinence to do so, that is the remote inspiration of these products (from p. 210 of Jackson's book credited in full below).With this hypothesis, I wondered if non-beer-experts (like myself) would evaluate Budweiser negatively if this beer was to be compared blindly with a number of other beers in the same basic style. I reasoned that it is one thing to disparage a product if one knows the producer, but if this bias is removed, how might one evaluate the product?

I do understand that the American Brewer's Association considers German, Bohemian, and American Style Pilsner Lagers to be distinct styles. I am also aware that some consider "Pilsner" to be an official appellation, and, therefore, only applicable to the Urquell and Gambrinus breweries. For the purposes of our experiment I did not consider either of these nuances.

2) Method

I led off the evening with an overview of the history of the pilsner style, based on Michael Jackson's Beer Companion (2nd ed.; Philadelphia: Running Press, 1997, pp. 210-216) and Ray Daniels' Designing Great Beers (Boulder, Colo.: Brewers Publications, 1996).

None of the participants were expert beer judges. Some of them -- like me -- enjoy beer immensely and have, for themselves, sampled various beers at various times with the intention of learning more about specific styles and style characteristics. The rest of the participants may not have ever taken the time to compile their own notes about specific beers they've had in the past, but they all do enjoy beer. None of the participants, however, indicated that the pilsner style was among their favorites.

Wish You Were Here

All participants were blind to the ten beers I had chosen, but I did tell them that they would be sampling three old-world pilsners, three macro-brewed pilsners, three micro-brewed pilsners, and one "wild card," which would be an additional selection from the previous three categories. I poured the samples in another room and brought the tray of samples to the participants.

I provided small (~6-oz) glasses for each participant, and had participants write their names on tape that I had affixed to the outside of each glass. I asked that participants rinse their glasses with water when they had finished the sample, and place their glasses back on the tray. I then brought the tray into a separate room where I poured ~1-2 ounces of beer into each glass. I kept the beers on ice in a cooler, so that they would be at more-or-less the proper lager serving temperature (low 30s F).

Me, servin' it up!

I provided each participant with a 33 Beers tasting journal so that people could get as in-depth as they wanted to in describing and tracking for themselves each beer. Regardless of what they chose to record in their personal journals, I asked that each participant rate the beer from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest positive and 1 being the lowest negative. I also asked for a few words, positive or negative, to characterize each beer. Participants recorded this information on a sheet from one of those large 20"x 23" easel pads on which I had created the appropriate rows and columns.

The Scoring Chart.

Also, I asked people to bring food that was broadly in the Central and Eastern European theme. This included cured meats, fermented cabbage, cheeses, breads, etc.

Food.

I did not rate the beers myself during this event. I had originally thought that I would be able to take my own notes for each beer, but I realized early on that the process of providing the samples took all of my time. I did taste ~2 ounces of each beer as I served the participants, and developed my own general impressions, but I was not able to take my own notes. I will do so at a later time and produce a post about this experience (stay tuned!).

Authentic action photo.

A special thank-you to Belmont Station, particularly Brendan. Except for the three six-packs of macro-brew swill that I purchased from another retailer, I bought all of these beers at Portland's own amazing beer store, Belmont Station. Brendan at Belmont was extremely helpful to me in identifying three quality microbrew pilsners for us to sample. My children will thank Belmont Station for helping make me a better & more knowledgeable person, but they may curse me for spending some part of their college tuition at the store.

3) Data

How did the participants rate the beers?!?!?!

Here is the scoring board with each beer lined-up in order served, l to r.

In descending order of preference, our 13 participants rated the 10 beers as listed below. A beers' rating in this list reflects the normalized scale, while the number in parenthesis represents the raw scale. Directly below each listing is a brief note about why I chose the beer, and below this is a selection of terms that participants used to describe the beer.

You can find the full data set and complete list of descriptive terms in the Sources section below.

A special thank-you to Chad for running the calculations to normalize the scores. As he describes below, most of the rankings do not change based upon this normalization, but at least we're able to factor-in some of the subjectivity of people's relative scoring to provide numbers that may be a bit more informative.

1 (1). Karlovacko Pilsner, Karlovac, Croatia

Rating: 1.564 (6.46/10)

Served from 22oz bottles