Everybody must live in a city. At least that is the impression you get when you see how fast public services are disappearing in rural areas here in France and elsewhere in Europe, and how politicians and activists talk about the, in their eyes, horrible inefficiency of living in a place where everything is far away and you always need a car to get around. The carbon footprint! Terrible!
At the same time, ecologists (the same ecologists who are against the use of personal mobility and want everybody to live in dense cities where you can go everywhere on foot or by bicycle) want us to grow our own food in our yards, keep chickens and generally get our food from nearby farms.
See the contradiction? If you live in a densely populated city, thus in an apartment as opposed to some horrible suburban sprawl, you can maybe grow a fistful of cherry tomatoes and some seasonings on your balcony, but you won’t ever be able to grow even a week’s worth of vegetables. Let alone keep chickens for eggs, or other animals. So you will need to buy all of it, more often than not prepackaged. Bad!
And if you live somewhere with enough space to provide most of your own food, compost your organic wastes and so fourth, you are automatically bad for the planet, because you must live in a detached house or farmstead, and you must be driving a car. And you need to drive a lot, as the post office, the bank, the grocery shop and the school are all many kilometres away from your home.
My perspective on this has become that of a neo-rural dweller. We live in a freestanding house in the French countryside, five kilometers from the nearest small town with essential services. The closest city of any importance is about 40 kilometers away, most of that over winding country roads.
But our area produces some of the best beef in the country. Some farmers grow classic grain varieties, mostly organic, that are milled into flour in a local mill, and bakers in our area and that same faraway city use it to bake one of the best breads in France, officially labeled as a local product.
Herds of sturdy Charolais cattle graze the modestly sized hilly pastures, protected against the wind by hedgerows of beech, birch and oak. Bulls are part of the family herds. Meaning they are happy: they are surrounded by their harem of cows and their offspring. Calves suck the milk directly from their mothers’ teats until they can graze themselves, and stay in the family group all their short lives, typically a year, sometimes two, until they are taken to the slaughterhouse in the city. The local butcher sells meat from animals he hand-picks in the fields.
Almost no ‘power fodder’ is added to the animals’ diet. Nor are they frequently injected with hormones or antibiotics. There is no need. Many cattle farmers grow some clover and maize to supplement the winter stock of hay for their animals, and do it in sensible rotation on fields that are humid enough to avoid artificial irrigation.
People here have vegetable gardens, sometimes greenhouses as well; they compost their wastes, many hold chickens, sometimes rabbits (to eat, not for fun), they fish in the nearby river or have fish ponds. Almost every house has a woodburning stove, some as their principal heat source, some as an addition to some form of central heating. There is so much forest here that even if everybody exclusively used wood as fuel, it would hardly make a dent; in fact the greatest worry here is to combat new-growth forest that tends to intrude on fields left unattended as older farmers retire.
The landscape, painstakingly maintained by pruning the hedgerows, is a paradise for birds of all sizes and colours, particularly predatory birds that have become rare elsewhere, such as red and black kites, buzzards, hawks and eagles. Europe’s largest owl species is endemic here, and beavers build dams in the same river where humans have installed a hydro-electric power plant. That river is highly appreciated by sport anglers and canoers - not anywhere near as many as you’ll find in mass tourist areas, as there are no souvenir shops and fast-food outlets along the river banks - there are virgin forests and steep rock cliffs and that is that.
Members of Birdwatch use a dedicated observation point on a nearby hilltop to count migratory birds. The Sioule river gorge plus part of the surrounding plateaus have been designated by the EU as a Natura 2000 protected habitat.
Beautiful, right? Great for holidays, great for biodiversity, great for the production of good, healthy, non-industrial meat, for organic vegetables, goat cheese and so fourth.
Urban dwellers happily eat the food brought in from areas like ours; they revel about the quality of the organic products in the farmers’ markets, and some like to come up here, strap on their hiking boots and enjoy nature.
But this kind of area can only exist because people live here, who work the land and so maintain this varied countryside, produce the meat, milk, vegetables et cetera. Farmers and ‘paysans’. Many of whom have another day (or night) job in a factory or a shop to make ends meet, as extensive non-industrial farming is not very profitable, and never has been.
Those farmers need to live on their lands, near their herds and crop fields. You can’t expect them to commute from cities. And it would be rather harsh to expect them to live in the rural countryside all by their lonesomes, without any neighbours other than a few colleagues and a handful of lumberjacks; without schools for their children; without a post office, a bank, some shops , a pub or two, a small supermarket, a doctor, a pharmacy, an auto repair shop and a gas station. Plus the specific services they need, like vets, a blacksmith to take care of horses’ hooves, a agricultural supply store. Places that are, in turn, run by people who also have families with basic needs.
This means that if our mostly urban society wants to eat good food and go play in the forests and rural countryside during the weekends and summer holidays, people (and thus politicians) must accept that the rural countryside needs populated villages, connected to the cities by effective public transport, and with a minimum level of public services like schools, post offices and medical care. And as long as those villages exist, city-dwelling ecologists should not begrudge a small number of individuals the right to live there, even if they are not farmers or have a farmer-supporting profession. Someone working from a rural home using the internet may still have a smaller carbon footprint than a suburban office worker who has to commute by car every day. And if rural areas are supposed to cater for urban tourists they also need people to run the tourist businesses, even if only part-time: small hotels, bed-and-breakfasts, camp sites, mountain guides, a kayak rental, horse and donkey handlers, even yoga teachers and balloon pilots. And the tourist offices need friendly hostesses. All these people should preferably live near or at their place of work, thus in the countryside.
Small cities and mid-sized towns (as opposed to megacities) are likely the most efficient places for people to live, as they offer a good balance between density of services and the human scale. But these towns must be surrounded by rural countryside to feed them, and that countryside needs to be populated, too.
Ignore that fact at your peril.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
iPhone back to the future
Apple has a new iPhone. The 3GS. For 'Speed'. And it offers a software update for the older model 3G.
One of the new features is that you can connect it to a laptop and use it as a modem, so you don't need to try and read web pages or send e-mails using that tiny screen and your greasy fingers, but a full-size screen and a keyboard.
Yahoo.
Somewhere in a drawer I must have an old Ericsson GSM phone lying around, that could do the same thing. It dates from the late 1990s. More than a decade ago, which is a whole other geological era in computing terms.
Sure, it worked slower than the present 3G network (which did not exist at the time), but it used the then available network to let a connected computer communicate with the web. Many present-day phones of the kind you get practically for free with a standard phone subscription can still do that - at 3G speeds if you want them to. In fact since that early Ericsson brick I have had two Sagems and now again an Ericsson that all did exactly that.
So it took Apple over a decade to 'discover' that it might be a Good Idea to let a phone act as a modem, while everybody else was doing it as a matter of fact without bragging about it.
I'm glad I'm a PC.
Now I'm off to a webstore to get me some new free software for my non-Apple phone.
One of the new features is that you can connect it to a laptop and use it as a modem, so you don't need to try and read web pages or send e-mails using that tiny screen and your greasy fingers, but a full-size screen and a keyboard.
Yahoo.
Somewhere in a drawer I must have an old Ericsson GSM phone lying around, that could do the same thing. It dates from the late 1990s. More than a decade ago, which is a whole other geological era in computing terms.
Sure, it worked slower than the present 3G network (which did not exist at the time), but it used the then available network to let a connected computer communicate with the web. Many present-day phones of the kind you get practically for free with a standard phone subscription can still do that - at 3G speeds if you want them to. In fact since that early Ericsson brick I have had two Sagems and now again an Ericsson that all did exactly that.
So it took Apple over a decade to 'discover' that it might be a Good Idea to let a phone act as a modem, while everybody else was doing it as a matter of fact without bragging about it.
I'm glad I'm a PC.
Now I'm off to a webstore to get me some new free software for my non-Apple phone.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Man vs nature, Air France flight 447 crash
Man vs nature - guess who loses
If there is anything the crash of flight AF447 in the Atlantic proves, it is that even man’s most advanced technology can be overwhelmed by the forces of nature. The Airbus A330 involved was one of the most modern and advanced airliners ever built, with an exemplary safety record. But even that plane was not able to climb high enough into the stratosphere to stay above the thunderstorms of the tropical ‘Black Hole’ where airflows from the northern and southern hemispheres encounter each other. It now seems likely that it could not handle the combination of heavy icing, hail, excessively powerful turbulence and possibly lightning strikes, in whatever order or simultaneously.
This accident also demonstrates the arrogance of man, and what happens if economic considerations and the ‘need’ for speed outweigh safety concerns.
The shortest route between Paris (Europe, basically) and Rio passes right through the ‘Black Hole’, where planes frequently encounter severe thunderstorms. Using their weather radar, the pilots can anticipate those encounters and change course to avoid the most powerful cumulonimbus ‘towers’, where turbulence may be powerful enough to literally rip even a large airliner apart, and where hailstones the size of eggs smash into the cockpit windscreen. But as most people involved in aeronautical weather forecasting know, thunderstorms can rapidly grow ‘children’, and once a plane finds itself surrounded by fast-growing CB towers, it may be trapped. The thunderstorm area encountered by AF447 was particularly large, and the question rises whether its existence, or development, was not known by the time of take-off about six hours earlier, and if it would not have been possible to divert the flight either to the US or along a trajectory south of the storm area, crossing the ocean straight eastward to Africa. In both cases, very likely an intermediate landing would have been needed, or a lot more fuel carried. Of course, the company could even have decided to cancel the flight, or to wait for better weather - which apparently is almost impossible on that route, as the weather is always bad.
So the question rises: do airlines deliberately send planes into known areas with frequent severe weather for economic reasons? Because it shortens the trip and thus saves fuel? Because it enables them to offer a faster direct flight to faraway destinations, and thus to sell more tickets compared to companies who only offer indirect connections?
The answer is probably ‘yes, they do’.
In this particular case there is another disconcerting possibility: that the pilots were forced to cut it a bit too close. Air France/KLM at the time was suffering from extremely high fuel costs compared to other companies - the result of a long-time fuel contract they had signed with their suppliers in late 2008. They thought that fixing the price for kerosene at 80 dollars per barrel was advantageous at the time, but the oil prices kept on collapsing and other companies managed to sign contracts for prices between 60 end 70 dollars per barrel... Did this perhaps cause the company to prohibit the crews from taking on ‘too much’ spare fuel, thus making it impossible for them to take a long trajectory around the thunderstorm area - instead forcing them to cross through the area and zig-zag between the worst cumulonimbus cells? Did they finally get trapped as a result of that?
The long-haul flight Paris-Rio is about 9200 kilometres in a straight line (‘great circle’ distance). The A330-203, the type used for flight AF447, has a maximum range of 12.500 kilometres (likely less with headwind, more with tailwind). Thus with a full fuel load, it could have flown at least 2000 kms around the storms and still kept a 1000-km safety margin. So why did it not take that long way around? Why did it not traverse the Atlantic a safe 500 kilometers or so southward, towards Africa, and then skirted the African coastline towards Europe? It had the range to do that, if it was fully fueled up. Sure, it would have landed one or two hours later, but those 226 people on board would still have been alive.
Being a pilot myself - of hot-air balloons, but still - I can certainly imagine that no captain, no pilot of even the strongest, most powerful plane ever built is happy to fly through a severe-weather area like the ‘black hole’. Given the choice, they would likely prefer to take the long way around. But it seems they are not given that choice by their employers.
And this time, Nature did not play along with the bean counters.
Soft landings.
If there is anything the crash of flight AF447 in the Atlantic proves, it is that even man’s most advanced technology can be overwhelmed by the forces of nature. The Airbus A330 involved was one of the most modern and advanced airliners ever built, with an exemplary safety record. But even that plane was not able to climb high enough into the stratosphere to stay above the thunderstorms of the tropical ‘Black Hole’ where airflows from the northern and southern hemispheres encounter each other. It now seems likely that it could not handle the combination of heavy icing, hail, excessively powerful turbulence and possibly lightning strikes, in whatever order or simultaneously.
This accident also demonstrates the arrogance of man, and what happens if economic considerations and the ‘need’ for speed outweigh safety concerns.
The shortest route between Paris (Europe, basically) and Rio passes right through the ‘Black Hole’, where planes frequently encounter severe thunderstorms. Using their weather radar, the pilots can anticipate those encounters and change course to avoid the most powerful cumulonimbus ‘towers’, where turbulence may be powerful enough to literally rip even a large airliner apart, and where hailstones the size of eggs smash into the cockpit windscreen. But as most people involved in aeronautical weather forecasting know, thunderstorms can rapidly grow ‘children’, and once a plane finds itself surrounded by fast-growing CB towers, it may be trapped. The thunderstorm area encountered by AF447 was particularly large, and the question rises whether its existence, or development, was not known by the time of take-off about six hours earlier, and if it would not have been possible to divert the flight either to the US or along a trajectory south of the storm area, crossing the ocean straight eastward to Africa. In both cases, very likely an intermediate landing would have been needed, or a lot more fuel carried. Of course, the company could even have decided to cancel the flight, or to wait for better weather - which apparently is almost impossible on that route, as the weather is always bad.
So the question rises: do airlines deliberately send planes into known areas with frequent severe weather for economic reasons? Because it shortens the trip and thus saves fuel? Because it enables them to offer a faster direct flight to faraway destinations, and thus to sell more tickets compared to companies who only offer indirect connections?
The answer is probably ‘yes, they do’.
In this particular case there is another disconcerting possibility: that the pilots were forced to cut it a bit too close. Air France/KLM at the time was suffering from extremely high fuel costs compared to other companies - the result of a long-time fuel contract they had signed with their suppliers in late 2008. They thought that fixing the price for kerosene at 80 dollars per barrel was advantageous at the time, but the oil prices kept on collapsing and other companies managed to sign contracts for prices between 60 end 70 dollars per barrel... Did this perhaps cause the company to prohibit the crews from taking on ‘too much’ spare fuel, thus making it impossible for them to take a long trajectory around the thunderstorm area - instead forcing them to cross through the area and zig-zag between the worst cumulonimbus cells? Did they finally get trapped as a result of that?
The long-haul flight Paris-Rio is about 9200 kilometres in a straight line (‘great circle’ distance). The A330-203, the type used for flight AF447, has a maximum range of 12.500 kilometres (likely less with headwind, more with tailwind). Thus with a full fuel load, it could have flown at least 2000 kms around the storms and still kept a 1000-km safety margin. So why did it not take that long way around? Why did it not traverse the Atlantic a safe 500 kilometers or so southward, towards Africa, and then skirted the African coastline towards Europe? It had the range to do that, if it was fully fueled up. Sure, it would have landed one or two hours later, but those 226 people on board would still have been alive.
Being a pilot myself - of hot-air balloons, but still - I can certainly imagine that no captain, no pilot of even the strongest, most powerful plane ever built is happy to fly through a severe-weather area like the ‘black hole’. Given the choice, they would likely prefer to take the long way around. But it seems they are not given that choice by their employers.
And this time, Nature did not play along with the bean counters.
Soft landings.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
I blog, therefore I am. Right?
Being a freelance copywriter who has been making a living from writing and editing for a lot longer than the World Wide Web has been in use, there is no escape for me: I will need to blog to keep up with the rest of the world. With the people who live in urban environments and who are connected to the internet, that is. Thus, with you.
The problem for me is that for most of my admittedly very modest career as a writer and editor, I have worked, either as an employee or freelance, for large corporations or ad agencies who paid healthily for specific projects. “Write an article on an ISO 9000 quality project”, “Please make a brochure on this natural gas field exploration project because we can’t explain it to people otherwise - oh, and money is no object.” “Can you write a book on the 100-year history of a major theatre, including most of the research, in three months?”
Things like that. My texts were sold before they had even been written. At least someone wanted to read them - or offer them to other people to read.
Nowadays, everybody and his dog blogs and twitters. Some people apparently can’t turn a street corner without feeling a desperate need to shout about it on the internet. Two years ago almost nobody ever felt that need, but now we must.
I really don’t think it will help us to become more open towards people. I fear that many city dwellers will turn their street corners looking down on their phone screens, thumb-messaging their way to carpal tunnel syndrome, while completely ignoring all sorts of interesting things happening in the real world around them.
Still, it’s the world we live in, so I will leave some musings here from time to time. I have even opened a Twitter account (protected for the moment). Weird.
The only thing I may offer is a slightly different viewpoint on things compared to that of the twittering European or American city-dweller. For two reasons: first, I live in a rural setting where even ordinary mobile phone networks offer no perfect coverage, 3G is all but non-existent, where the density of wifi hotspots is something like one per 100 square kilometres and the fastest ADSL broadband we can get is 2 megabits per second (and up to a year ago, we had no ADSL at all), the nearest fiberoptic node is probably about 50 kms away and any twittering going on is that of the birds. My life does not exist of running through a city looking for the nearest Starbucks where a geotagged friend is just having a Frappucino - a lot of it, when not writing or trying to keep up with the world through the web, is filled with things like shoveling donkey manure, mowing grass, making slow progress in finishing our home, watching real birds nesting around the house...
Secondly, I take to the skies in a hot-air balloon a few dozen times each summer. And even though that balloon now carries a GPS receiver to keep track of where it is and where it is going, and we communicate by radio or mobile phone with out retrieve vehicle, it remains a very oldfashioned way of traveling through the skies: you move with the winds, with very little influence on your track and no way to know where you will end up. It’s the ultimate opposite of the twitter-blogging urban rat race.
Anyway, we live in the era of ‘I blog, therefore I am’, so I’ll blog. A bit. Sometimes.
The problem for me is that for most of my admittedly very modest career as a writer and editor, I have worked, either as an employee or freelance, for large corporations or ad agencies who paid healthily for specific projects. “Write an article on an ISO 9000 quality project”, “Please make a brochure on this natural gas field exploration project because we can’t explain it to people otherwise - oh, and money is no object.” “Can you write a book on the 100-year history of a major theatre, including most of the research, in three months?”
Things like that. My texts were sold before they had even been written. At least someone wanted to read them - or offer them to other people to read.
Nowadays, everybody and his dog blogs and twitters. Some people apparently can’t turn a street corner without feeling a desperate need to shout about it on the internet. Two years ago almost nobody ever felt that need, but now we must.
I really don’t think it will help us to become more open towards people. I fear that many city dwellers will turn their street corners looking down on their phone screens, thumb-messaging their way to carpal tunnel syndrome, while completely ignoring all sorts of interesting things happening in the real world around them.
Still, it’s the world we live in, so I will leave some musings here from time to time. I have even opened a Twitter account (protected for the moment). Weird.
The only thing I may offer is a slightly different viewpoint on things compared to that of the twittering European or American city-dweller. For two reasons: first, I live in a rural setting where even ordinary mobile phone networks offer no perfect coverage, 3G is all but non-existent, where the density of wifi hotspots is something like one per 100 square kilometres and the fastest ADSL broadband we can get is 2 megabits per second (and up to a year ago, we had no ADSL at all), the nearest fiberoptic node is probably about 50 kms away and any twittering going on is that of the birds. My life does not exist of running through a city looking for the nearest Starbucks where a geotagged friend is just having a Frappucino - a lot of it, when not writing or trying to keep up with the world through the web, is filled with things like shoveling donkey manure, mowing grass, making slow progress in finishing our home, watching real birds nesting around the house...
Secondly, I take to the skies in a hot-air balloon a few dozen times each summer. And even though that balloon now carries a GPS receiver to keep track of where it is and where it is going, and we communicate by radio or mobile phone with out retrieve vehicle, it remains a very oldfashioned way of traveling through the skies: you move with the winds, with very little influence on your track and no way to know where you will end up. It’s the ultimate opposite of the twitter-blogging urban rat race.
Anyway, we live in the era of ‘I blog, therefore I am’, so I’ll blog. A bit. Sometimes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
