My introduction to Alaska was working on the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

OK. Time to do some writing. I think I've mentioned that I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer and I didn't do much to dispel that impression in class on Wednesday. Helene and I were asked several questions and I managed to not give a good answer. To the question "What was the purpose of the Panopticon piece?" I would say that it is a warning that technology has become so available that it can be misused by anyone at any time and that nothing is being done to control the misuse. My response to the second question, "Is it wrong for parents to use this technology to monitor their children?", I would say "No!" A parent (and I said I'm not one) has not just a right, but an obligation to monitor their children. Anyone fool enough to turn a child loose in a public place while they go off on other pursuits should be neutered before they can reproduce again. And in an age where both parents often have to work full time to support a family, that GPS technology allows them to monitor the child in a way my parents couldn't and didn't need to. Not that I was that reliable, but my mother didn't work outside the home until after I had a driver's license. She had the time and ability to check on me without losing her job. I don't think that Dobson's geoslavery is any more "slavery" than driving to or calling a location to check on a child.


Other thoughts that have been rattling around this skull....Molotch is wrong! even if I hadn't read The City as a Growth Machine, he'd still be wrong. Molotch is a "neo-marxist" and marxism, whether neo, retro, paleo or any other sort of marxism is a failure. I have both experience and geography on my side on this. As far as the essay, yes, "elites" decide how the city will grow. The alternative would be what, use a lottery and have a planning board comprised of a brothel owner, a religous fundamentalist, and half a dozen winos? That would be an interesting city... Or maybe a planning board of nothing but neo-marxists? You'd have a city with the charm and beauty of Stalin-era East Berlin and ringed with gulags to limit growth. Cities grow. London, Paris, San Francicso, they all started out as villages and they grew into places with museums, theaters, sporting events, bookstores and other kinds of things missing in small towns. Elites make things the way they want but they also want nice things. I'll take Washington D.C. over Leningrad anytime.


And speaking of being wrong, Collapse by Jared Diamond was a pretty good book but after reading What’s Your Consumption Factor? I kind of wonder how balanced Collapse really is. Collapse postulates that societies collapse not because the population outstrips the available resources but because the ruling classes squander the resources on themselves, like the Maya, or that the cultures refuse to adapt to changing environments like the Vikings in Greenland. My problem with Diamond is that he points to the west's unequal consumption (probably correct) but the unequal productivity of the west is almost never mentioned. A farmer in the U.S. consumes 32 times what a farmer in the developing world uses and also produces much more. At the beginning of the semester the term "measuring the immeasurable" was used. Much of what the west produces with its unequal consumption can't be measured. That productivity creates wealth which allows a scientist to spend twelve hours in a lab doing research instead of plowing a field trying to grow enough food to feed his family. When a cure for malaria is finally found, it won't come out of Darfur State or Mogadishu U, it will come from the overconsuming West.


And Nabhan... I liked the book and it's really hard to argue with fresh food. In Sitka I'd often start my morning by putting on a wetsuit and snorkeling for abalone and scallops. Fresh abalone rolled in italian bread crumbs and fried in a little olive oil is hard to beat and frozen seafood is now a disappointment. I still eat seafood, it's just not as tasty. Anyway, Nabhan briefly mentions that agriculture is work. Producing enough food to feed several people for an entire year is brutal, low paying work. It's not like growing a few squash plants in the satellite dish or a couple of tomato plants in planters on the patio. He is also convinced that a communal, agrarian society is an ideal lifestyle. About thirty years ago a guy named Pol Pot thought the same thing. The cities of Cambodia were emptied. At gunpoint by soldiers. Anyone too old or sick to perform manual labor in the fields was executed. Anyone with a education (apparently people get uppity when they've been educated) was also murdered. The low estimate is three quarters of a million Cambodians killed to create the society Nabhan advocates.

Den lille havfrau
(The Little Mermaid)
Copenhagen harbor, Denmark