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Traffic disaster towers over L.A.
Steve Lopez, LA Times
“I no longer go to Dodger games, or the L.A. Philharmonic…. I only go out to dinner at restaurants within two miles of my house.”
That was Michael Gale, who lives in Pacific Palisades.
“I’d rather stick hot pokers in my eyes than drive downtown from Santa Monica on a weeknight. Saturday nights are almost as bad. Therefore, I go to Disney Hall only on Sunday.”
That was Kim Nicholas of Santa Monica.
“We learned fast how hard it is to go east in the evening. The first few times we tried it, we assumed there was a big rig overturned somewhere …. We were then, and remain still, incredulous that an entire major American city has allowed itself to become paralyzed every evening.”
That was Maryland transplant and Santa Monica resident Laurie Brenner, who has given up on downtown L.A. cultural attractions and scratched Skirball events because of northbound evening traffic on the 405.
This is but a tiny sampling from the traffic jam of angst that clogged my mailbag after last Sunday’s column.
…”I really think you have to be fair here, that there is a property owner who has owned the property for, I think, decades, and there are certain legal rights,” [City Councilman] Weiss said.
Yeah, and if you’re a councilman, you have certain obligations – namely to make sure a developer helps solve any problems he creates.
“What my vision is, is a subway stop in Century City, and then to connect that subway stop with the Exposition line stop just south of Century City,” said Weiss. Only problem with that is, last time I checked there was no subway on the drawing boards.
Here’s a different vision worth considering: BUILD THE BLASTED TRANSIT OPTIONS BEFORE YOU APPROVE THE DEVELOPMENT!
(14 Jan 2007)
Texas view on environment is 18 lanes wide-critics
Anna Driver, Reuters
As President Bush readies a new plan on global warming, environmentalists say an 18-lane highway going up in Houston speaks volumes about how people in his home state of Texas view the planet.
Between 2003 and 2009, $2.7 billion of state and federal money will have been plowed into expanding 23 miles of Interstate-10 in west Houston to as wide as 18 lanes in some stretches of the city’s main east-west road.
“It is a concrete monstrosity,” said Jim Blackburn, an environmental lawyer in the Texas city who fought the expansion of “I-10” and lost. “It probably shows as much as anything the philosophy of development here.”
(19 Jan 2007)
Framing Global Capitalism (photo essay)
Christopher Grabowski, The Tyee
Edward Burtynsky’s visions of a hyper-industrialized world. A Tyee interview and photo gallery.
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Renowned Toronto photographer Edward Burtynsky … who has powerfully documented humanity’s relationship to consumerist capitalism around the globe over the past 25 years, considers himself no shooter for hire, but an artist relentlessly “building a body of work with an underlying philosophy that is expressed through my personal visual narratives.”
…On why the news media isn’t really getting the big story:
[Burtynsky] “Mainstream news media has a problem with it because they are searching for the breaking story that would sell papers. They’re always on the search of headline grabbing material. At the same time, the news media are very top down hierarchal organizations that are not very good at allowing creativity. They are not very good at allowing the people who are on the ground, seeing things first hand, to become a feedback system to back up the organization’s pyramid.”
(19 Jan 2007)
Several photos are viewable at the original article.
Burtynsky has recently “set out to document the idea of peak oil and its impact on society.” (Searching for the Future). -BA
The End of the World As They Know It
Kurt Andersen, New York Magazine
What do Christian millenarians, jihadists, Ivy League professors, and baby-boomers have in common? They’re all hot for the apocalypse.
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…Five years after Islamic apocalyptists turned the World Trade Center to fire and dust, we chatter more than ever about the clash of civilizations, fight a war prompted by our panic over (nonexistent) nuclear and biological weapons, hear it coolly asserted this past summer that World War III has begun, and wonder if an avian-flu pandemic poses more of a personal risk than climate change. In other words, apocalypse is on our minds. Apocalypse is … hot.
…When apocalypse preoccupations leach into less-fantastical thought and conversation, it becomes still more disconcerting. Even among people sincerely fearful of climate change or a nuclearized Iran enacting a “second Holocaust” by attacking Israel, one sometimes detects a frisson of smug or hysterical pleasure.
…I worry that such fast-and-loose talk, so ubiquitous and in so many flavors, might in the aggregate be greasing the skids, making the unthinkable too thinkable, turning us all a little Dr. Strangelovian, actually increasing the chance-by a little? A lot? Lord knows-that doomsday prophecies will become self-fulfilling. It’s giving me the heebie-jeebies.
Declinism is the least-troubling species of end-days forecast, but still, it’s apocalypse lite. These forecasts are grandly gloomy, commonly depicted as a replay of the disintegration of Rome that ushered in the Dark Ages
Not so long ago, it was only right-wingers and old crackpots making decline-and-fall-of-Rome claims about America. But Niall Ferguson is a young superstar Harvard professor, and he argues that we-undisciplined, overstretched, unable to pay our bills or enforce our imperial claims, giving ourselves over to decadent spectacle (NASCAR, pornography), and overwhelmed by immigrants-do indeed look very ancient Roman. He suggests, in fact, that Gibbon’s definitive vision-the “most awful scene in the history of mankind”-is about to be topped.
Jared Diamond made his name back in the fat and happy nineties with Guns, Germs, and Steel, explaining why the West ruled. His second best seller was last year’s Collapse, about how irrational religion and environmental recklessness destroyed previous societies and how America looks to be on the same suicidal path. Meanwhile, the unambiguous trend lines of everyday economic life-China’s rise, the dying-off of Detroit and old media-become the reinforcing background beat that makes the new declinism feel instinctively plausible.
…Let’s not freak out just yet. Apocalypticism has ebbed and flowed for thousands of years, and the present uptick is the third during my lifetime. Among my most vivid childhood memories are LBJ’s mushroom-cloud campaign ad, a post-nuclear Twilight Zone episode, and my mother’s (scary) paperback copy of On the Beach.
The next brief spike in apocalyptic shivers and dystopian fevers came twenty years later, coinciding with our last right-wing president: the nuclear-freeze movement, The Day After on TV, the post-apocalypse novel Riddley Walker (written in a prescient text-message-ese), Blade Runner, Mad Max .
And now, another twenty years later, here we are again-but this time, it seems, more widespread and cross-cultural, both more reasonable (climate change, nuclear proliferation) and more insane (religious prophecy), more unnerving.
(2 Oct 2006)
No mention of peak oil.
