santa maria, ca

If you've spent time in the coves of northern California, and looked up close at the endless lines of scrubby cliffs falling into the ocean, you may have discovered a curious crustacean clinging for breath amongst the mussels, anemones and seaweed. It's name is the gooseneck barnacle, and it looks somewhere between a sharks tooth and dinosaur skin. In a way it's a little bit of both.

The gooseneck barnacle is a rare species found only in the pacific northwest and the chilly waters of Portugal and northern Spain. In the old days, Gooseneck Barnacles were a delicacy. They were harvested to near extinction and steamed, fried, battered, and boiled to the delight of their sophisticated European clientele. Like their brethren the oyster, as the allure of the gooseneck spread further and further away from its natural habitat, the gooseneck found it harder and harder to please all its hungry admirers. Unlike the oyster, the gooseneck wasn't endowed with so vast a domain. By the early 20th century, the clanking chatter of discarded gooseneck crowns was so rare that it was all but forgotten.


I discovered the gooseneck after paddling in from a big day at Graywhale, about two kilometers south of Pacifica. It was dusk and I was exhausted. Endorphins were coursing through me as I carried myself out of the water and behind a big rock outcropping with the swell wrapping around both sides. The sun was all but down and in my shady enclave I examined these strange dinosaur tooth animals with a child's curiosity and sense of wonder. I was in rapture running my hands across their pearly calcium scales.


They were beautiful, and the desire to take a couple home with me was equally as strong as the desire to leave them in their pristine state. I was reminded of a time a couple years back in Stockholm, when I ducked into a courtyard fleeing some enormous 17th century block palace, only to find a miniature bronze statue of a little boy, hands around his knees gazing up to the sky. The statue is called pojken som tittar på månen (the boy who looks at the moon) and it's beauty is due to the expansiveness of the boys universe and the vulnerable humanness of his pose.

The endless ocean beyond and the wall of rock above make a similar statement to my gooseneck.

the view from gray whale

Hengki Koentjoro

The internet is currently shut off in Egypt. Protests continue into the night on this historic day of civil unrest against the dictator (and chief American ally) Hosni Mubarak. Below are a series of pamphlets that are circulating around the streets of Cairo, with translations provided by The Atlantic.

Art by Jesse Hazelip

You gotta love the cabbage as well as the avocado, and of course the king of all fruits, the mango.  The glorious mango.  I was a little shocked to see celery scoring so poorly.  Celery looks so harmless.  Who knew it was the benedict arnold of vegetables.  So boring, so benign, when in fact, a killer.

Check out this new project that my friend Nick Bastis completed.

Much of Chicago is mired in vacant lots and foreclosures. Bastis uses a 1:1 replica of a Frank Gehry building to test the idea of destination architecture as a means of cultural and economic rejuvenation for blighted cities.

Forms of Spectacle and Solutions to Vacancy from Nick Bastis on Vimeo.

Can You Spare 16 Cents?

Last month, politicians in Virginia shot down a deal in which Invenergy would sell its wind power to a large local utility. Regulators believed that the project would unfairly raise electricity costs in lieu of cheaper alternatives like natural gas. According to the New York Times, residential electric bills would have increased by 0.2 percent. Assuming the average residential bill is $80 (which it is), this would have increased the average homeowner’s bill by a whopping 16 cents. That’s about 2 tablespoons of a Starbuck’s coffee.

Healthy and secure world for ourselves and our children? No. Grande mocha frappuccino? Yes, please.

Our electric grid is very different than most people think. People assume that electricity production is subject to a thorny thicket of environment regulations. They also think that a mix of corporate greed and environmental legislation has caused sky-rocketing electricity bills unheard of in years past.

According to Credit Suisse, however, the American electric fleet is a dirty aging behemoth. Currently 70% of the coal fleet is over 30 years old and much of the fleet is lacking meaningful environmental controls like scrubbers and SCRs. “Of the roughly 340 GW of coal capacity, a little over 140 GW lack scrubbers or SCRs, 60 GW have scrubbers but no SCRs, 60 GW have SCRs but no scrubbers, and about 85 GW have both scrubbers and SCRs.” Thus, there is a meaningful hole in environmental controls across the US power generation fleet.

Not only is our electric fleet a lot dirtier than anyone imagines, electricity is cheaper than we imagine as well. The real cost of electricity nationally has actually fallen over the past 30 years, even with the rate step-ups from the early 1980s. Furthermore, spending on electricity and natural gas as a percentage of personal disposable income is currently at 50 year lows.

If you think solar power is an evil ploy from abroad destined to take down the US economy, you may point to the fact that three of the world’s largest solar markets are Germany, Japan and Italy, aka the original axis of evil. Today 2% of Germany’s power is supplied by solar power, compared to 0.1% in America. The country is on track to provide 20% of its power from solar by 2020. This momentous transformation has created thousands of jobs while providing much needed energy security for the nation, not to mention cleaner air and water. This has cost the average German ratepayer the equivalent of $1 per month.

Americans think that they have two options when it comes to green energy: pay now or don’t pay at all. Unfortunately, if we don’t pay now we will pay later and the pay later method is a HUGE environmental and economic unknown. The coal fleet is dying and it’s being replaced by a new breed of natural gas plants that rely on a dubious and undocumented extraction method known as fracking. Right now most of the negative externalities of fracking such as waste water creation, intense water usage, pumping billions of gallons of undisclosed chemicals underground, natural resource destruction, and green house gas emissions, are not incorporated in the price of the gas. If they were, natural gas would go up at least a percentage or two, and at most a whole lot of percentages.

In Kentucky this year, the public service commission voted down a contract for a local utility, Kentucky Power, to buy electricity from renewable energy provider NextEra Energy.

Kentucky’s Attorney General Jack Conway, joined by business and industrial electricity users, opposed the deal, contending that it would have increased a typical residential customer’s rates by about 0.7 percent and was “a discretionary expense” that the utility’s customers could ill afford.

What we can ill afford is to live in fear because we are killing our planet, losing the international green energy race, and all the while delaying the inevitable and unknown payments of cleaning up a mess of our own making.

Way to go Jack.

Water