20.3.04

A Major Accomplishment

After a couple years of uninspired searching, I have finally come across another blog by a geographer -- Blue Pencil. The author (PhD student Scott Whitlock, studying urban geography) is perhaps even more of a geographer than me, since he has a link to the AAG in his sidebar.
Stentor Danielson, 20:54,

Trust And Communicative Action (An AAG Post)

I'll hopefully be doing a few posts in the coming days about thoughts I had while attending various presentations at the AAG meeting. One of the more interesting talks I saw was by Peter Walker, discussing research he'd done with Patrick Hurley on environmental politics in Nevada County, California. His talk was in a session on social capital, but he said he hadn't thought in terms of social capital while originally doing the fieldwork. So it was somewhat appropriate that, while he didn't mention Habermas or frame his analysis in a Habermasian way, my thoughts went in that direction. The Nevada County case seemed like a nice example of a failed transition to a rationalized lifeworld.

In a nutshell, what happened was that the voters of Nevada County elected, without quite realizing what they were doing, the first anti-development board of supervisors in county history. The board came out with an environmental management plan called NH2020 that would restrict the building of new stuff. Anti-NH2020 partisans sabotaged the planning effort and swept the board out of office in the next election.

At the start of the case, there was the assumption of a shared lifeworld -- Walker said that voters assumed that the board shared their values when they elected them. But through what sounds like practically a coincidence, power wound up in the hands of a group that differed from the assumed consensus on this issue. The board wanted to push its anti-development agenda. But they knew that administrative power alone isn't enough -- their plan would need the legitimacy that comes from a shared lifeworld. Since they couldn't base their plans in the no-longer-shared pro-development lifeworld, they would have to build a new consensus through communicative action. Thus, they launched a public involvement process that would allow the community to come together and build a management plan that everyone could agree was legitimate (even if they were unwilling to agree that its content was right).

However, the process was not designed to be fully communicative. The board and its supporters feared that pro-development people would be unwilling to cooperate in communicative action and would instead act strategically, doing whatever it takes to get their way. Engaging in communicative action requires a degree of trust because you're taking a risk that you may be talked into changing your mind. So the board stacked the deck, for example by not allowing pro-development interests to participate fully. They hoped to work strategically to get the outcome they wanted, while being parasitic on the legitimacy that accrues to a process percieved to be communicative.

The board was unsuccessful in its attempt to have its cake and eat it too. The pro-development interests saw the strategic element of the board's plan and brought it to the forefront of public opinion. They organized on the basis of the pro-development lifeworld that they still shared among themselves, and took strategic action to stop NH2020. The degree of strategic action they took -- such as disruptive behavior at meetings and infammatory rhetoric about "enviro Leninists" -- was probably worse than that which, as per the board's fears, they would have taken in the context of an attempt by the board at a truly communicative planning process. The end result seems to be a situation in which the county has a rift and neither side trusts the other's willingness to talk constructively. Each uses its own distrust to justify acting in a way that deserves the other side's distrust.
Stentor Danielson, 20:11,

Name Change

Sara Butler points to this article about women's decisions about post-marital last-name changes, which has also been discussed by several people at Crescat Sententia.

I don't share the hostility expressed in the article and Amanda Butler's comments toward creating a new name out of parts of the partners' old ones. Obviously it doesn't work for all combinations of last names (though it's amusing when they have strong but contrasting ethnic flavors, as Mr. and Ms. McLopez can attest). But when it produces something nice-sounding, I see no problem. And it's much better than hyphenating.

I think there's something to be said for the idea of taking a new name, either from pieces of the old ones or out of the air, when forming a new family. After all, ours is a neolocal society, so why not exchange our patrilineal naming convention for a neolineal one? Will Baude at Crescat brings out the "unwieldy fourth-generation hyphenation" argument to demonstrate that we have to either give up on retaining connections to parts of our ancestry, or give up on the idea that our last name is the place where we acknowledge our heritage. I prefer the latter -- I'm no less a descendant of Demeyer Tengstrand for having Marshall Danielson's last name.

Beyond questions of personal identity-formation, neolineal naming also makes sense from the perspective of the outsider. Outside of the upper-upper-upper class (the Kennedys and Rockefellers and such) and tiny communities where everyone knows everyone else, one's last name doesn't tell others anything about you and your family, beyond a general ethnic indication (and even that is limited given the increase in interracial marriage). The only potential problem is if you choose a name that already exists, people with that name might think you're trying to illegitimately join their family.
Stentor Danielson, 11:07,

19.3.04

No Firefighter Left Behind

Critics Say Bush's Wildfire-Fighting Budget Too Low Sen. Conrad Burns joined a chorus of lawmakers who have said the Bush administration's proposed budget for next year does not include enough money for preventing and fighting wildfires. ... The administration's plan calls for a 15 percent boost in wildfire suppression, from $790 million in fiscal year 2004 to $908 million in fiscal year 2005, under the administration's plan for the Interior and Agriculture departments. The departments' hazardous fuels reduction would also be increased from $442 million to $475 million. The $908 million for wildfire fighting falls short of the $1.4 billion that was spent to fight wildfires in 2002 and is slightly shy of the $1 billion that was needed in 2003. ... Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who also voted for the law, says the $475 million for hazardous fuels reduction is far short of the $760 million that was promised in legislation. ... Burns criticized the proposed budget for cutting state, local and volunteer assistance programs by 42 percent from $132 million in fiscal year 2004 to $77 million in fiscal year 2005.

Wait ... are they suggesting that Bush pushed for a program, but was unwilling to spend enough money to implement it? Nah, that can't be -- after all, after shortchanging education and homeland security, he ought to have plenty of money left over to pay for fire management. He should be particularly able to help out the state and local programs, since devolving environmental management authority to local people has been the keystone of his environmental rhetoric.
Stentor Danielson, 23:23,

16.3.04

Bonus Post #2

One of the things I learned today was that this blog is intellectually irresponsible. Frequent readers will know that from time to time I criticize the idea of preserving pristine wilderness. This is not an uncommon view among academics. But according to an interesting* presentation, the environmentalists we often criticize for promoting this pristine nature idea know full well that it's not true. But they strategically use pristine nature rhetoric to sell their ideas -- which are, when you read the fine print, unobjectionable plans for human life with, and management of, nature -- to the public. Thus, she concluded, it's intellectually irresponsible of us to undercut environmental groups' propaganda, since weakening the public commitment to pristine nature would open them up to accepting exploitative land use masquerading as "wise use."

*I mean that seriously -- her findings were interesting even if I mock her conclusion.
Stentor Danielson, 19:52,

Centralia, Ohio

Welcome to a special bonus post, brought to you by Sarah and Brian's laptop, a free AOL CD, and the hotel room's "data port" (aka extra phone jack). I don't have time to give any thrilling insight, but I thought I'd point to this story from USA Today:

Pollution Unites Town, But Solution Tears It Apart ... this is a place where things often don't work out as planned. The notorious blue plume, it turned out, was caused by attempts to clean the plant's smoke. And today, although almost everyone has moved out of Cheshire, the village is still in business, and the plant still faces complaints from people outside the village. ... Cheshire, meanwhile, is almost gone. The population, 221 in the last Census, is down to about 15 full-time residents. Of 97 houses, 78 have been torn down. Several others are stripped and waiting for the bulldozer. The Methodist Church, which had been auctioned off piece by piece, was demolished two months ago. ... The tall stack had diluted the plant's smoke over a wider area. But it also introduced it into the jet stream, where it traveled hundreds of miles east. Now [with environmentally-mandated scrubbers in place] the bad air settled closer to home. Ash and other dirt collected on cars and ruined paint jobs. The plant had to settle insurance claims and issue car wash coupons.

I found the issue of changing pollution distribution to be an interesting environmental justice dilemma -- without the scrubbers, the pollution is dispersed to harm people in far-away places that never asked for it. With them, there is less pollution but it's more concentrated, causing acute problems for the nearby people.
Stentor Danielson, 19:46,

14.3.04

Off To Philly

I'll be in Philadelphia all this week for the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting. Unless they massively expanded the number of computer kiosks, the chances of me posting anything before Saturday night are vanishingly small. But when I return, I may have all kinds of insightful geographic things to say.
Stentor Danielson, 01:34,

Too Much Wood

Alaskan Logging May Lack Market The Bush administration recently stoked their hopes [in the town of Ketchikan, Alaska], and infuriated environmentalists, by opening 330,000 acres of Tongass National Forest, old-growth rain forest and marshland the size of West Virginia, to logging roads. But few, certainly not federal or state officials, bother to say the traditional debate between jobs and the environment is almost beside the point. Global timber markets have undergone fundamental shifts, producing a glut. Logging costs in southeast Alaska historically are much higher than in other countries, making profits elusive at best. Economists and others who study the Northwest timber industry say they doubt that companies returning to the Tongass' stands of old-growth hemlock, cedar and spruce will find buyers willing to pay enough to keep local loggers in business.

This is symptomatic of the bizarre disconnect between natural resource politics and economics. The timber market is glutted, yet the federal government continues to throw more trees at it, selling logging rights in national forests for a song in order to meet timber use quotas and pushing for logging as a solution to wildfire. This perhaps makes sense from the point of view of the individual logging company -- you can't reduce how much wood the other guys are cutting, so your only strategy is to cut lots more and hope that you can make up in volume and market share what you lose by glutting the market. But it's not clear why the timber industry as a whole would be looking to expand its cutting.
Stentor Danielson, 01:31,

Environmental Justice In New York

Pollution High Where Income Is Low ... Environmental activists say New York state isn't doing enough to protect minority communities like the South End neighborhood from being disproportionately saddled with sites that potentially pollute the environment. The Citizens' Environmental Coalition released a report Thursday, finding that communities with a minority population of at least 70 percent have about 18 percent of the state's air pollution sites but only make up about .5 percent of the land area. ... By comparison, communities with a minority population of up to 10 percent have about 37 percent of both the state's air pollution sites and hazardous materials sites, but make up about 84 percent of the land area.

Distressing, but not surprising. It's odd, though, that the headline talks about poverty, but the report (pdf) doesn't analyze income directly. There may be a political element to that decision -- many environmental racism discussions get sidetracked into arguments over whether class or race is the stronger explanatory variable, so the CEC may be trying to keep the focus on race. But I do wonder about the influence of income in the context of New York state. While visual inspection of the maps* indicates that hazardous sites are predominantly concentrated in urban areas, it's not clear whether that's proportional to their population. It's also not clear how many of them are active sites versus old contamination that hasn't been cleaned up. My impression of New York hazardous materials politics suggests that due to land pressures in the city (the city being responsible for creating most of the toxins) there's a desire in many quarters to ship crap upstate, where the population is white but incredibly poor. It also makes me wonder about the differential impacts of environmental hazards on rural versus urban poor (or rural versus urban minorities, or black versus Native American communities) -- they're different forms of poverty, which would lead to different patterns of exposure and means of coping.

The report also contained this, which indicates that the "environmental justice for all" view is widespread in the Republican Party:

Governor Pataki said that his programs are ensuring that all children, regardless of where they live, can have access to clean air and water, and pristine open land. Our findings counter this statement. Clearly, people of color are more likely to bear the burden for pollution sources. The Governor did make a start by directing the Department of Environmental Conservation to develop an Environmental Justice plan to provide additional public participation and full environmental investigations in areas with high concentrations of people of color or low-income communities. But is increased public participation or are full investigations enough, if facilities continue to be sited in already overburdened areas?

*It's strangely entertaining to watch Adobe Reader slowly fill in all the symbols indicating toxic sites -- New York City has so many toxic sites that on the state-level map it seems to crawl and writhe as if it were full of beetles.
Stentor Danielson, 01:12,