LA Weekly

The past two days have brought some weather to Black Rock City that has definitely enriched the experience. On Thursday whiteout conditions raged for hours in the afternoon, obliterating many structures and coating everything with a generous coating of dust. I'm writing in one now, in fact, nestled in the relative comfort of the Burning Man Regional Info Center, where there's both bandwidth and friendly people. I can't see farther than four feet in front of me. But I can hear a nice house beat coming from some camp a block down the street.
One big story here, and there are many, is about the corporate influence the Burning Man organization has allowed to seep in to the event. Some people accuse Burning Man of selling out; others worry entrepreneurism will ruin the party's charm. The organization counters that without corporate involvement, Burning Man will become an isolated relic of a moribund party culture, not unlike the hippie movement of the ‘60s.
At a talk today at Otter Oasis, I understood what both sides meant.
First there was Bob Noble, an architect with the San Diego Green Building Council, who assessed the spirit of the moment and went with it: He even got a round of applause when he announced that he’d left his PowerPoints at home. Noble told about new photovoltaic technology, the “thin film” that should be on every RV in the country; he bragged about San Diego’s Solar Forest, which uses the principles of biomimicry to provide both shade and power.
Next was Matt Chiakas [not sure about that spelling, sorry], who facilitates a movement based in Santa Barbara, California to convert the country to 100 percent renewable energy by 2033, “Fossil Free in ’33.” “We’re actually trying to do it by 2030,” he admitted, “but we decided to give ourselves three extra years because it’s a tough thing to do. Plus, it rhymes.”
This is all good and fun: Fossil Free may be a story to follow in the future. But I had gone to the talk hoping to hear Mark Cheney of Renewable Energy MMA, the firm that donated the 30 kilowatt solar array that power the man (which is back up, by the way). Cheney didn't show up; in his stead was a public relations expert who explained the necessity of public relations and talked about "planting memes" to address global warming. "The only reason we haven't solved global warming is that we haven't tried," she said.
At that point, I got up and left. Not because I disagreed with her -- I did, in fact, in a big way. But the talk had started a half-hour late, the guy I'd come to see wasn't there, and I wanted to get over to see Daniel Pinchbeck speak at Entheon Village by 3:30.
"I hope this isn't a protest," the woman said abruptly as I walked away. I assured her it wasn't. "I'm just getting a little paranoid after reading the discussions on ePlaya."
The defensiveness seemed misplaced, as well as a misunderstanding of the environment. People come and go here; they drift in and out, and there's a lot to do: You could be busy every second and not see all you came to see; I always go home with a deep sense of regret over everything I missed. You get tired and overstimulated if you get too ambitious, and the Playa is not the place to sit through a talk out of obligation.
That’s what you do in a corporate environment, though, and that’s one of the hazards of corporate life: Too much has been automated, too much protocol put in place that doesn’t matter. And if that takes hold at Burning Man, it will be a relic for sure.
Whiteout still rages. It’s kind of nice, actually, like a snow day in Minnesota, where I grew up. All I can do is hang out in this shelter until it subsides and see if anyone has a beer they want to share. Or a vodka, or a glass of wine, or . . . I’m not picky.
I'll add links and pics as I can later. It's hell getting a signal.

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How did Burning Man founder and self-described "messianic personality" Larry Harvey take the "premature immolation" of the Man during the lunar eclipse early Tuesday morning? Even better the rest of us.

"First of all," he said this morning at a Playa press conference, "it teaches us a lesson. There's a process called 'reification' when you forget the meaning comes from you and not from an object. And lest peop;e thought there was ju ju inherent in the Man," this provided them with an opportunity to learn that there isn't.

It also gave them an opportunity "to see what they haven’t seen in years. People haven’t got to see the building process. It will remind tham that it’s our dedication that makes the city what it is.

"They’ll see us crane it up. They'll be reminded of the dedication that goes into this event. And it reminds us that -- this is a story about redemption, isn't it? When he gets put back on you’re going to hear a howl. It’s a good story."

Harvey also believes that Burning Man will help resolve the old rift between the political activists and the hippie partiers. "If the 60’s had been as structured as Burning Man it might have worked out," he says. "A good party builds community."

(Please forgive technical errors in this post. I'm not high [yet] but the signal is spotty and I'm sitting behind a desk on the Esplanade and it's beautiful and people think I'm an authority figure and ask me all kinds of questions. But the weather rocks. Hot, sunny and STILL.)

(Photo of the fire fighters hosing the man by Dan Garcia.)

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Greetings from Burning Man 2007.

Here's the news.

While the full eclipsed moon still floated above the Playa like a smooth orange balloon, the man went up in flames.

In case you haven't been here, this typically happens on Saturday, at the end of the event. Not Monday Tuesday at 3:00 a.m.

First reports said the neon on the man had shorted out after they turned him off and then back on again in honor of the eclipse (I didn't notice this; I was immersed in the spetacular sky.) Most more reliable reports now say it's arson; two rangers I spoke with told me that at least one person is in custody. Several witnesses apparently saw at least one person climb the structure supporting the Man and set off fireworks. (Some people have also said he hurt himself.)

One man I talked to happened to be in the pavilion under the Man ("The Green Man" Pavilion, in keeping with this years enviro-conscious art theme) when he heard everybody shouting "get the fuck out!" There wasn't a lot of art in there yet.

More on this tomorrow. The official word out of Burning Man officials right now is that pavillion under the man is currently roped pending investigation in the morning,

Other than that, it's beautiful here. Lots of solar-powered art, but still lots of big-ass flame-throwers, too. I'm in the Red Nose District again, and it's awesome.

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That nutjob senator from Oklahoma had it wrong: It's not climate change that's the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American People.

It's bottled water. Way back at the Bioneers conference in 2005, when I traded my Nalgene bottle for a stainless steel Klean Kanteen, which I fill with filtered tap water, I had reservations about drinking bottled water that had been transported from Australia/Fiji/England/France/Venus in plastic. I was only concerned about my health back then, not so much the planet.

But after reading about plastic in the oceans, plastic in the landfills, the environmental cost of manufacturing and disposing of plastic bottles and this:

[I]n Fiji, a state-of-the-art factory spins out more than a million bottles a day of the hippest bottled water on the U.S. market today, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have safe, reliable drinking water. Which means it is easier for the typical American in Beverly Hills or Baltimore to get a drink of safe, pure, refreshing Fiji water than it is for most people in Fiji.

(From a fine bottled-water exposé on Fast Company ) I've become a tap-water fascist.

I gently lecture everybody who insists that bottled water is the only healthy way to live. I recite statistics about the relative safety and health of municipal water supplies. I remind them that, as a New York Times editorial pointed out last week, if we don't drink our tap water we won't invest in our clean water infrastructure, and we'll all be like Fiji: The only people with clean water are the ones who can pay for it. "The last thing America needs," said the NYT, "is two water streams — one for the rich and another for the rest of us."

But just as this movement was gaining steam, along comes the Metropolitan Water District, hell bent on going through with its four-year plan to fluoridate Southern California's tap water. As of October 29, the MWD will begin adding 0.8 parts per million fluoride to the water of 18 million customers in Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, and parts of San Bernardino, Riverside and Ventura counties. Whether you like it or not. (They call it "adjusting" the fluoride levels in water, because Southern California water already has naturally occurring fluoride concentrations of 0.1 to 0.4 parts per million.)

Why? Because the American Dental Association says so. Fluoride kills decay-causing microbes on contact, and the ADA believes fluoride is a public health necessity, especially for children. Does it matter if those children also get little white spots on their enamel, an undisputed side-effect of preventing tooth decay with fluoride called "enamel fluorosis"? Or if several studies have strongly suggested that fluoridated drinking water may disrupt thyroid function, lower IQs and cause an increase in a rare form of bone cancer, osteosarcoma, in children?

The Environmental Working Group has been arguing for months now that several studies have been released in the last four years that cast doubt on the public-health value of fluoridated drinking water. Even the American Dental Association, in its "Interim Guidance on Fluoride Intake for Infants and Young Children," recommends that infant formula should be mixed with non-fluoridated bottled water to avoid exposing babies to dangerously high levels of fluoride.

This is crazy. The more I read about it, the crazier it gets. Even if it's true that the ingestion of fluoride (as opposed to its topical application) prevents tooth decay, why do we have to have industrial-waste silicofluoride chemicals -- chemicals that have never been FDA-approved for human ingestion -- forced on us in our drinking water? Why can't we choose it in our toothpaste, for example (I, personally, don't)?

Simply because a certain percentage of lower-income families may not choose that toothpaste. "[Fluoridation] is a powerful strategy to reduce disparities in tooth decay among different populations and is more cost-effective than other forms of fluoride treatments or applications," says the ADA.

In other words, it saves money. Intriguingly, even though the URL "fluoridealert.org" belongs to the anti-fluoridation Fluoride Action Network, "fluoridealert.com" will redirect you to an ADA-controlled Web site, where you'll learn that "The average cost for a community to fluoridate its water is estimated to range from approximately $0.50 a year per person in large communities to approximately $3 a year per person in small communities. For most cities, every $1 invested in water fluoridation saves $38 in dental treatment costs."

Given that 108 million Americans have no dental insurance, that dentists often have to fill cavities below cost in rural and low-income urban communities, this represents a cost-savings bonanza for the dental profession. Better that adults should come in to have their teeth capped, bonded and whitened due to enamel fluorosis than that a dentist should have to fill another child's cavity on an Indian reservation in Alaska.

I don't buy the conspiracy theory that municipal water fluoridation is just a cheap way for industry to dump its fluoride. But I do believe the ADA, which has been known to suppress the opinions of dentists opposed to fluoridation, has something at stake in the fluoride issue. And it isn't an altrustic concern for public health.

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Our results support the hypothesis that cats are highly exposed to PBDEs; hence, pet cats may serve as sentinels to better assess human exposure and adverse health outcomes related to low-level but chronic PBDE exposure.

A new study by the Environmental Protection Agency, et al, "Elevated PBDE Levels in Pet Cats: Sentinels for Humans?" has been making the blog rounds of late, proving, perhaps, that we can muster up more outrage over the suffering of house pets than we can about a world of children. ("That's it. Now I'm really angry," writes Eric de Place on the Grist blog.)

(Flower hopes there's no PBDEs in my bike bag.)

I'm not judging this or criticizing this impulse; in fact I share it.

What do you mean my innocent cats, the ones I raised by bottle since their first day on earth, have been lounging on toxic furniture? That their very fastidiousness, their assiduous grooming, has caused them to ingest more of the flame-retardant chemicals that sully our sofas than do our dirty pet canines?

Wasting away with thyroid disease possibly brought on by exposure to polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), they can have no idea what made them sick or why, and they're powerless to stop it. It's unconscionable.

But as the journal of Environmental Science and Technology points out, we already knew that children have been taking on more PBDEs from household products than adults do in the same househould; in fact, a study published in 2006 found "children's levels 2- to 5-fold higher than those of their parents." In other words, we should have been outraged already.

Doesn't matter, though, really, does it? Whatever wakes us up. And we have no excuse. What matters now is what we do about it. And there's no greater authority on this than author, climber and biophysical chemist Arlene Blum, who in the 1970 worked to get another flame retardant chemical, Tris, banned from children's sleepwear. On the Huffington Post, she writes not only of her cat's battle with (PBDE-triggered?) hyperthyroidism, but also of the ongoing political struggle to ban disease-causing chemicals from our household products, furniture and toys. PBDEs have already been banned in California, but:

The bad news is that the very same Tris, I'd helped remove from kid's pajamas decades ago is replacing them. A handful of companies -- Albemarle, Dead Sea Bromine, and Chemtura -- supply potentially toxic fire retardant chemicals to the foam and furniture industries with assurances of safety. And these fire retardant manufacturers have already spent $1.4 million in Sacramento this year opposing reforms that would protect our health and environment.

As Blum notes, MomsRising.org has a letter-writing campaign going to urge the swift passage and approval of AB 706, the bill working its way through Sacramento that would "require all
seating, bedding, and furniture products to comply with certain requirements, including . . . the requirement that they not contain brominated fire retardants or chlorinated fire retardants," beginning in 2010.

Don't just do it for your cat. Do it for yourself. And your kids.

And, of course, it goes without saying: Do it for future generations of cats.

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Last night my fella was catching up on this week's episode of "Entourage," in which that one kid, Turtle, gets pulled over and searched with three girls in the car. The cop who pats him down finds a prescription bottle full of ganja on him -- a precious and nearly extinct strain, as it happens. The cop tells Turtle to get down on his knees -- on a Los Angeles street, by the way -- which Turtle does. The cop hands Turtle the bottle of weed.

To be more explicit about this: Turtle is kneeling on the street right in front of the opening under the curb into which water and dirt flow off the street. The kind of slot that Heal the Bay stencils to remind you that everything you throw down there goes into the ocean. The drain our city planners invented so our streets wouldn't flood.

Then cop tells Turtle to throw the bottle of rare marijuana down the "sewer."

Turtle hesitates.

And, really, who wouldn't? I don't even smoke the stuff and I'd be loathe to deposit that little bottle of goods down that slot. Because, after all, it isn't a "sewer," is it?

No, it isn't. It's a storm drain. And you're not supposed to throw your garbage down the storm drain.

"That's really bad public education," I shouted at the TV. "Bad, bad, bad. This is why I hate television."

"Are you going to blog about it?" asked my guy.

"I guess I am," I said.

And so I am.

All that stenciling the sidewalks with the sweet little dolphins in blue paint. All those public awareness campaigns about beach closures and storm drains. The NRDC's announcement last week that the local beaches are dirtier than ever, drought be damned. That story I wrote last year about the lost streams of Los Angeles. Ken Weiss's Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the Oceans for the Los Angeles Times. All this -- and yet some bone-headed television writer lets a police officer refer to our storm drains that water and pollute the ocean as a SEWER?!

Don't those idiots surf?"

Luckily, Turtle really wanted his dope, rare, precious strain that it is. And perhaps he even cared about the ocean enough to not throw shit down the storm drain. So he got down on his knees again and fished it out.

Whew.

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Joseph Romm on the Gristmill blog has a wonderful, long post up on the question I admit I was too intimidated a weasel to ask:

Did Climate Change Contribute to the Minneapolis Bridge Collapse?

Being on deadline, I won't elaborate. Just go read it, and all the comments, too. (And read my story on Burning Man while you're at it, where the comments aren't so bad, either). But those of you rolling your eyes and unwilling to consider the question, Romm says this:

Some may object to even asking the question, "Did climate change contribute to the Minneapolis bridge collapse?" My guess is those are the same people who deny that global warming is caused by humans or that it is a serious problem -- the same people who inevitably say "we can adapt to whatever climate change there is."

But, in my experience, those "adapters" are actually not interested in finding out what the impacts of global warming are.

In California we're used to earthquake-proofing our homes. Now do we have to climate-chaos-proof them, too?

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"We are at a crossroads, environmentally speaking, in drawing more precise connections between illness and hazardous substances. If we live in a toxic soup of goop, we also increasingly understand how to tease apart fact from fiction, how environmental factors are not going away in cancer statistics. And, how children are affected may be the most striking product of all."

That's Joy Horowitz writing in her excellent, instructive and terrifying book, Parts Per Million: The Poisoning of Beverly Hills High School, the story of a skeptical reporter making her way through a tangle of data and law to determine whether the oil operations on the campus of Bev Hills High did or did not bring about a cluster of cancers and other illnesses.

I read Parts Per Million before I interviewed Horowitz last month for the Central Library's ALOUD series; it now joins Island on Land and King of California on my shelf of enviro-journalist source books that are also well-told, readable stories. And I, personally, have concluded that the oil fields exposed kids and teachers to chemicals that gave them cancer. In one story, nine girls in the same class -- on the same soccer team -- were diagnosed with thyroid cancer. You only get thyroid cancer from exposure Thyroid cancer is extremely rare in children who haven't been exposed to radioactive iodine, or Iodine-131 or Iodine-133, and Iodine-133 is used in the oil operations.

To understand why you can't use that slam-dunk data in court, you have to read the book. (Or consider this: If those girls had been eating a high-iodine diet, or taking potassium iodine, their thyroid glands wouldn't have been so vulnerable to uptake of I-133. So who's to say who's responsible?)

Horowitz, a Beverly Hills High grad herself, won't go so far as to say the oil fields caused a cancer cluster. But she does demonstrate in the book just how hard it is to prove such clusters exist. And she goes far beyond Beverly Hills to examine all the ways in which public health is compromised by industry's insistence on "sound science," which really just means data that proves its side of the argument.

"It turns out," Horowitz writes, "that writing a book about toxins in the environment is really an exercise in confronting a series of obstacles, especially when a lawsuit is part of the equation." And especially when that lawsuit involves Erin Brockovich, as the plaintiff's suit against the city first did.

Horowitz is making few local appearances in conjunction with the book, but on Tuesday night, August 7th at 7:30 p.m., she'll be signing and talking at a Beverly Hills house party, open to the public.

For more information call 310-274-7562 or write teddiwinn@aol.com.

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"In 1987, the Interstate Highway bridge over Schoharie Creek in New York State collapsed during a flood. After this accident, the Federal Highway Administration required every State to identify highway bridges over water which are likely to have scour problems and to identify bridges where scour is severe. Knowledge of bridge sites where scour is a potential problem will enable the States to monitor and improve conditions at these bridges ahead of time-- before they become dangerous."

(From "Bridge Scour: What's it all about" by the U.S. Geological Survey in Massachusetts.)

I grew up in Minneapolis and spent most of my adult life there; I traveled over the 35W ("thirty-five double-yah" in my neighborhood's idiolect) bridge over the MIssissippi River twice a day on my way from my South Minneapolis apartment to the University of Minnesota where I both worked and studied. (I-35 splits in two through the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area -- there's also a 35E that goes mostly through St. Paul and its suburbs).

I listen to the news and hear my accent. I hear this family, the Engebretsens, on CNN saying "We're just trying to stay positive!" when their wife and mom is missing and think -- that's so like Minnesotans.

But I'm also obsessing a lot about what happened, structurally speaking, to that bridge.

The bridge crossed a particularly swift segment of the Mississippi, just south of the two dams and series of locks at St. Anthony Falls, where the river drops 49 feet (and just a mile-and-a-half north of the Washington Avenue Bridge, where poet John Berryman committed suicide in 1972). In some parts of the river you can swim in relative safety. Where the bridge crossed the river, you could not.

Despite what Minnesota's governor has been saying, it's not true that the bridge wasn't known to be structurally deficient. A 2005 report contained in the U.S. Department of Transportation's National Bridge Inventory database says that it was. The bridge was rated at 50 percent, meaning it was possibly in need of replacement.

And it's not the only one. In March of this year, the American Society of Civil Engineers recommended that a bridge safety program be "established, fully funded and consistently operated" to ensure "the operation of safe, reliable and efficient transportation system." The group reviews the country's infrastructure every two years and issues a "report card" for certain cities and categories. (Experts from the ASCE have been interviewed repeatedly about last month's pipeline explosion in Manhattan -- an accident that's of a piece with this one.)

In 2005, bridges got a "C." Twenty-seven percent of the nation's bridges are in the same condition.

Other states have other infrastructure woes (in California, it's the levees).

Metafilter has a great thread going on this, naturally, with some local insights. The Strib has a list of past bridge disasters, including the Schoharie Creek bridge mentioned above, where 10 people died.

But the theory I had when I began this post has been disproved. The 35W bridge over the Mississippi was not a victim of scour. As I learned from the Wikipedia page on the bridge, it "was notable for not having any piers in the water."

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