When Katrina happened, when the earthquake hit Haiti, when the Deepwater Horizon permanently poisoned the Gulf of Mexico global media machine went into full alert. The world received daily - even hourly - updates on the futile efforts to plug the thing. It was "top killed", "bottom killed" sideways killed". The faces of the main players filled computer and TV screens, their pixelated lips forming the vocabulary of catastrophe. Corporate coffee shops percolated disgruntled outrage. People cut off their hair and sent it to bewildered clean-up crews composed of deposed fisher kings. It's the worst man-made disaster in history. And yet there is a far worse chemical crisis slowly killing the seas. A byproduct of co2 emissions in the atmosphere, ocean acidification is wreaking havoc on marine life. Anyone who has ever gone mano a mano with an oyster understands the concept of hard shell-soft body. To say that the gradually acidification of the world's oceans has gone unremarked by the electronic bullhorn is an understatement of epic scale. This slow-burner deserves our panicked attention if anything on earth does. And yet, and yet, and yet...
Then there's the Columbia River Crossing...Here we are, planning for a future plagued with the results of bad planning. This horrible idea seemed to emerge out of smoke and mirrors, as a fully fledged beast. "No city ever developed its way out of congestion," says traffic researcher Vukan Vuchic at the University of Pennsylvania. Think about it. and next think about this: There is a science to this stuff and it involves chaos theory plus some pretty fancy math. Again, in the words of fractal pioneer, Rupert Sheldrake, it all starts with "sensitive dependence on initial conditions." Very small changes at the source of a system have magnified downstream effects. Apply that to traffic congestion and you have to conclude that if we ran the numbers and tweaked key elements before running the program, we could think our way out of the mess. That plus riding a bicycle... .
- KBOO