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Why the Expressive Arts are Essential to the Transition
16 AprThe expressive arts: music and dance, drawing and painting, calligraphy, sculpture, acting, needlecraft, architecture, and so on. Why they are essential: Because they bind us to one another and to the earth, they transform a place, a locus, into a home.
Before continuing down that path, however, let’s take a look back to the Romantics. It’s important to see how, for all their love of nature and of the expressive arts, they contributed to the ideologies that have ended up alienating us from Nature, and from the expressive arts.
It’s really quite simple. Back at the turn of the 18th into the 19th century, as the industrial revolution took hold, the Romantics venerated Nature, and opposed it to the City and to Industry. Industry was dirty, degrading, and alienating, keeping us from our True Home, nature. The trouble is, by so arguing, the Romantics placed Nature on a Pedestal, and put the Pedestal Over There Somewhere. The Romantics preserved nature by separating it from us. As more and more people moved into the cities, more and more people moved away from Nature. Nature became more and more alien, even as the Romantic Ideal became more and more alluring.
At the same time, the Romantics invested artistic expression in a class of rustics that lived Other There, in Nature, but also in an elite class of Geniuses who, while living among us, were not of us. Music and painting and poetry and dance became the provinces of those august geniuses, on the one hand, and women and children on the other. They were no longer capacities that each and everyone of us had and exercised. And those geniuses, they became the playthings of the industrial rich, perhaps railing against them, but ultimately tied to them as patrons.
My Father Cleaned Coal for a Living
1 AprA Systems Story
by Bill Benzon
My father was trained as a chemical engineer. He spent his entire career with Bethlehem Mines, the mining division of the Bethlehem Steel Company. He designed coal-cleaning plants, at least the system for actually cleaning the coal.
This is a story about the last plant that he designed, one designed to keep the air clean while at the same time reducing the cost of running and maintaining the plant. It was a beautiful and elegant solution to a nasty engineering problem. I offer it as a study in systems thinking – though my father probably never used that phrase.
Cleaning Coal
Before coal can be turned into coke (for subsequent use as a fuel in steel-making) it must be cleaned of impurities, mostly sulfur. Most cleaning techniques take advantage of the fact that the rocks containing the impurities are denser than coal. So, you crush the raw coal until all the particles are less than, say, an eighth of an inch. Then you float the crushed coal in some medium – generally, but not always, water – and take advantage of the fact that the rock sinks faster than the coal. There are several things you can do, as I recall, but whichever technique you use, you end up with wet coal when you’re done.
Wet coal is considerably heavier than dry coal. As railroads charge by the pound, it costs more to ship wet coal than dry. And, in the winter, a hopper car filled with wet coal at the mine – coal is generally cleaned at the mine, not at the steel plant – is likely to be filled with frozen coal when you get to the plant. How do you empty that mess from the cars?
So, you need to dry the coal.
The old drying techniques – drying ovens – leaves you with a lot of coal dust in the air. A lot. And coal dust is nasty stuff. You don’t want it spewing out of chimneys anywhere in your neighborhood. Or near your farm.
Manufacturing? Make It Local
28 MarWouldn’t you know it, her Grey Ladyship, The New York Times, has an opinion piece on the localization of manufacturing. Allison Arieff observes that “the monolithic industry model — steel, oil, lumber, cars — has evolved into something more nimble and diversified . . . as manufacturers see the benefits of being smaller and paying attention to how patterns of consumption, ownership and use are shifting.” Mark Dwight started SFMade in 2010 to promote local manufacturing in San Francisco: for example, here’s an upcoming workshop on setting up a manufacturing process. Kate Sofis, executive director of SFMade, observes:
“Manufacturing isn’t dead and doesn’t need to be preserved,” she says. “Let’s stop fixating on what’s lost. Let’s see what we have here, what’s doing well, and let’s help those folks do better.”
Pride of place helps in the branding and marketing of local manufactures and, of course, it plays into the sustainability pitch, which is sometimes real, and sometimes not (do I hear BP?).
There’s a similar game afoot in New York City, Made in NYC, and her Grey Ladyship has written a number of articles about local manufacturing successes: envelopes, bicycles, brushes, boilers, specialty lights, and mattresses. And, of course, readers list other examples in their comments. Arieff notes that “growing consumer demand for greener, more ethically produced products, along with skyrocketing unemployment and nervousness about globalization all work in the groups’ favor.”
And those demands are all over the place. Local’s the way to go. After all, that’s where everyone is, no? If you aren’t where you are, then where could you possibly be?
Biology humor
24 MarMy buddy John Wilkins informs us that some biologists have recently bestowed some pretty interesting names. If you want to know what Aussiedraco, Pantydraco, and Pinkfloydia are, visit Evolving Thoughts.
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.
Truth and Traditions 