think Spring is about the sneak up on us and grow stuff. More transition.
Archive | March, 2011
Shazaam! Ontario, the Jolly Green Giant
17 MarWriting from Buffalo, Bill Nowak informs TPUSA that Ontario’s become the Jolly Green Giant of North American energy.
Check it out – Ontario has started taking over the North American market for renewable energy because they have followed Germany’s example and set fair, fixed prices for solar and wind through their “feed-in tariff”. The renewable revolution is now accessible to all in Ontario. Individuals, communities, co-ops, Indian tribes and businesses can all generate green energy profitably. They are setting themselves up for a secure future.
In the last year, over $9 billion in private sector investment has been committed to clean energy projects, creating an estimated 20,000 new jobs in Ontario.
In 2003, Ontario had 19 dirty, polluting coal units and just ten wind turbines. Today, the province has over 700 new wind turbines and by 2014 they plan to be finished with coal generators and the greenhouse gases they produce.
Check out the latest news from Ontario’s Ministry of Energy.
Follow the Acorns: Totoro Isn't Gojira, can you find him in YOUR back yard?
16 MarAnyone familiar with Japanese popular culture knows that it is haunted by the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ishiro Honda’s Gojira is one seminal example of that haunting. But those evil ghosts are by no means the only spirits animating the Japanese psyche and landscape. In this post I examine the life spirit Hayao Miyazaki has embodied in My Neighborhood Totoro, a story that is rich with a deep sense of locality, locality as humble as an acorn and as exhalted as a mighty camphor. Even as we meditate on Gojira as a cautionary tale about techno-hubris, let us also meditate on Totoro as an affirmation of life.
My Neighbor Totoro is set in rural Japan in the 1950s. The story centers on two young girls, Mei and Satsuki, and the Totoro. Along with their father, the girls have moved into a rural house that’s near the sanitarium where their mother is hospitalized. As the story opens the three of them are in a small moving truck traveling the final distance to their new home. They arrive, stop the truck, and start moving in.
As you know, the story is set in rural Japan in the 1950s. The story centers on two young girls, Mei and Satsuki, and the Totoro. Along with their father, the girls have moved into a rural house that’s near the sanitarium where their mother is hospitalized. As the story opens the three of them are in a small moving truck traveling the final distance to their new home. They arrive, stop the truck, and start moving in.
About six minutes in – the film is roughly 86 minutes long – Satsuki and Mei notices a huge tree towering over the forest. Their father tells them it’s a camphor tree (that’s it, at the head of the post). We’ll see this tree again; it’s a major motif in the film.
About a minute later – 6:41 – Satsuki notices an acorn on the floor in a room. And another. For the next minute or so she and Mei will chase down acorns. Father suggests they’re evidence of squirrels . . . or rats.
The girls begin to investigate the rear of the house and, upon entering, detect soot sprites, which will have their attention for the next eight minutes or so, to about 16 minutes in. Soot sprites are small fuzzy balls of soot with eyes. There are lots of them, and they seem to have something to do with the acorns. The girls report back to their father, who has been joined by Granny, the old woman who’s been taking are of the house. She’s the one who identifies the little creatures as, yes, soot sprites, and tells the family a bit about them.
We now know that there’s a bit of fantasy in this world, and its visible to children, but not adults – that’s what Granny said.
At this point we’re roughly a fifth of the way through a film named after Totoro and we haven’t seen one, nor even a hint of one. That won’t happen until roughly 29 minutes in, a bit over a third of the way through the film. But I’m getting ahead of the action.
They finish out that first day doing this and that and end up taking a bath, all three of them together – this is, after all, Japan. They laugh vigorously to drive the spirits from the house – and the last of the soot sprites scurry away. The next day they travel to the sanitarium to visit their mother (and the father his wife). On the third day, Satsuki prepares box lunches for the three of them. She heads off to school, father goes into the study, and Mei sets out to play.
By this time we’ve forgotten about the acorns and the soot sprites.
At about 28 minutes in Mei spots an old bucket with its bottom rusted out. She picks it up, looks through the hole, and what does she see? An acorn, that’s what:
One acorn leads to another and before you know she’s got a pocket full. Then she spots a pair of ears sticking up from the grass:
Perhaps they’re rabbit ears. But no, when she sees the whole creature, it’s not a rabbit, it’s not even fully solid. It’s translucent. It can’t be a “real” creature:
Over the Rainbow and Thru the Woods to Safe Nukes, NOT
15 MarOver at the NYTimes Peter Wynn Kirby has kicked off a nice discussion of nuclear disaster in Japanese pop culture, which is what put me in mind of Gojira. The staff here at TPUSA has been reading through the discussion and found one comment to be particularly potent. It’s by Bert from Philadelphia:
Nuclear power is perfectly safe if it is place in a location that we know in advance will be unmolested by earthquake, terrorism, uprising, tornado for the next half century. And that it is made of pure unobtainium* so that the parts never break or wear out unexpectedly. And the software that runs it is bug free. And the operators will never be inattentive, sick, drunk or drugged up, or having sex instead of watching the gauges.
*Jeez, I hope James “Avatar” Cameron hasn’t trade-marked that term.
Gojira 1954: No More Nukes
14 MarHere’s blast from the past, a review of Gojira, which I published in The Valve three years ago. Since this film is about nuclear anxiety it is highly relevant to the current emergency in Japan. I would also add that the Japanese original is superior to the film that appeared in America as Godzilla and scared the stuffing out of me when I was a kid. The Japanese original is richer and has a sense of grave ritual that is missing from the American hatchet job.
It came out less than 10 years after the end of WWII and about a century after Commodore Perry goaded the Japanese into investigating Western ways and refitting them into Japanese ways. Gojira has two interlinked storylines: the story about the monster from the sea and a story about love vs. arranged marriage, which grapples with tradition vs. change. The second one was dropped from the American re-edit. In this essay I suggest — but no more than that, suggest — that the two storylines are, deep down, but one storyline.
A review of Gojira, Ishiro Honda, dir. Toho Co, Ltd. 1954; reissued by Classic Media 2006.
On March 1, 1954, the United States detonated Castle Bravo at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific. Castle Bravo was a hydrogen bomb with a yield of 15 megatons, roughly two or three times what had been expected. It was the largest radiological accident ever caused by the land of the free and the home of the brave and poisoned the crew of a Japanese tuna boat, the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5), with one crew member eventually dying of leukemia. This led to a tuna scare in Japan and a petition drive to ban the bomb.
Tomoyuki Tanaka was one of many Japanese who followed the story closely. He worked as a producer for Toho Company, Ltd., one of Japan’s major film studios. When a deal fell through and created a hole in the studio’s release schedule, Tanaka decided to fill it with a new kind of film, a sci-fi horror story filmed in noir style and featuring a prehistoric beast awakened by an atomic explosion. The beast was named Gojira and the film was released in Japan on November 3, 1954.
If you look closely, you’ll see a reference to Lucky Dragon No. 5 early in Gojira. The movie opens on a freighter at sea off Odo Island, the Eiko-Maru. It’s evening and some of the sailors are gathered together while one of them plays the guitar and another the harmonica. There’s a sudden bright light and a loud noise. The sailors rush to the side of the ship to see what’s happened:
Notice the number on the life preserver, “No. 5.” The freighter sinks and all hands are lost.
Thus begins Gojira. It builds slowly. Another ship is lost, meetings are held, decisions made, and eventually a scientific team is sent Odo Island to investigate. The team is headed by Dr. Kyouhei Yamane, a noted paleontologist, who is accompanied by his daughter Emiko and Hideto Ogata, who works for the steamship company that’s lost two boats. At long last, 21 minutes into a 98 minute film, we catch our first glimpse of Gojira:
Gojira’s footprints are saturated with Strontium 90, as is the Island’s well water, evidence that Gojira as been tainted by radiation from some otherwise unidentified nuclear test. Beyond that, we know and learn little about why Gojira’s on the rampage. It’s simply an ugly fact, the monster’s been awakened and is heading toward Tokyo, what do we do?
No Nukes, because we Know Nukes
14 MarThe current nuclear emergency in Japan underlines the need to transition to local power sources that are safe and sustainable. Writing in Artvoice, Michael Niman explains:
Global warming could radically transform the planet into something much less inhabitable. Peak oil could radically change society—and the change won’t be pleasant to live through. But nuclear power—now here’s something with the potential to render the whole planet uninhabitable. Nuclear waste is deadly—extremely deadly—for hundreds of thousands of years after it’s produced. We’ve produced hundreds of tons of this crap already and still have no clue what to do with it other than assuming we’ll have the wherewithal to babysit it for the next quarter of a million years through whatever chaos comes our way.
Adaptation, Resilience and Distributed Power
12 MarIn the course of a discussion about the earthquake in Japan, Adrew Revkin and David Roberts talk about the to start adapting to coming changes and, in particular, they talk about the need for a distributed power grid and bottom-up efforts. Video at Bloggingheads.tv.
Real Returns, Sustainable Communities
11 MarIn the Spring of 2010 three executives in New York University’s CleanTech Executives Program, conducted a field survey and study on locally-driven sustainable energy initiatives: Wendy Brawer, Brett Barndt, and Lakis Polycarpou, Real Returns for Sustainable Communities: White Paper, Linking Communities and Investors for Sustainable Development (downloadable PDF of the complete study). They were particularly interested in how such projects could be financed:
Our survey found that investment professionals are interested in local sustainable development projects as a potential asset class. As one professional put it, “Local infrastructure projects like these are very suitable to our investor profiles.” Project finance professionals also said that they expected the sustainable development industry to “grow immensely,” and the key is to “build a platform” for growth.
What then is needed to increase adoption of cleantech and sustainable development projects? “We need to get beyond the bias we have toward centralized energy sources,” and develop ways to get small projects funded, said one professional.
Sustaining a Life in the Desert
10 MarThe New York Times just ran a story about John Wells, who lives off the grid on 60 acres of West Texas desert. He calls his place the “Southwest Texas Alternative Energy And Sustainable Living Field Laboratory.” As Wells hit middle age got tired of a city-based life style and mounting debt. His father died and Wells began to rethink his life. As he says at his website:
Several years ago I began experimenting with alternative energy. I feel that the technology today has advanced enough and the costs have dropped to the point where just about anyone can make the move to off the grid living. This just happened to coincide with discovering accounts of pioneer life of some of my relatives from over 100 years ago. Their lives were difficult back then, but I sensed a feeling of great joy and accomplishment in overcoming hardship – where hard work payed off and living life was a fulfilling experience. I began to envision my life as a pioneer in the 21st century, and have chosen to follow that path.
In taking inventory of my life to this point in time, I believe that over the years I have picked up just the right skills and mentality to live my dream of how I would do it if I had it to do all over again. I suddenly found myself at the perfect point in my lifetime to go for that dream.
And so he sold his house for $600K, paid off his debts, and moved from upstate New York to Texas. He lives on rainwater, solar power, composts his wastes, and is grows vegetables. He’s got a blog going back to 2008, and a bunch of photos at his Flickr site.
Wells, of course, is in a long tradition of go it aloners. One suspects he’d be doing this regardless of the society-wide need for Transition. And that’s the point, our society needs to make such a radical decision. We don’t all have to make the decision together, but by ones and twos and tens and more, we’ve got to start moving and start changing our communities.
Truth and Traditions 