http://kahesofi.angelfire.com/

Green Skyscrapers

There are some sweet designs in this top-ten list of green skyscrapers. Not all of them are complete yet (most are under construction or still on the drawing board), but I think this is evidence there is some serious creative intelligence focusing on green building these days, along with some serious cash.

Plenty?

I'm currently two pages from finishing Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally. The basic premise is a couple in Vancouver, BC, who decide to spend a year eating nothing that is not produced within a 100 mile radius of their home. There are many interesting ideas contained herein, information about food miles, the failings of the industrial food system, the degradation of place that modern society engenders, and so on, but to me the overwhelming appeal of the book is not intellectual--I've heard all this stuff before--but gastronomical. I love the authors' descriptions of the various local treasures they uncover during their trial, their joy at discovering some unexpected delicacy, their despair at not being able to source a beloved food locally. There's something fundamentally invigorating about good food, and the food they find in the small farms of British Columbia and the (mostly) fished-out bays of the Salish Sea is some of the best. Truly, you can't beat local produce. It's ripened in the garden, on the vine, not in a truck, and it just tastes better. Local cheese and wine, local meat, local grains--the list goes on.

OK, so there's a little bit of food porn in here. I like to eat. I love to eat, and that's part of the reason I'm fascinated with this book. I'm also fascinated with variety in food. I'll eat and enjoy almost anything. When you go to the supermarket regularly, you soon realize that the apparent year-round plenty of the produce section is reliant on a couple dozen commercially viable species that don't even taste all that good. This throws the variety and freshness of the farmer's market and kitchen garden into sharp relief. I guess this is one of the things I like most about this book. The authors don't just get by on local food, they thrive on local food.

Sure, it's hard for them at first because they don't know where to go for what they need. The farmer's markets and local organic groceries are places to start, but they can't get everything they need there, and the prices at the organic groceries are too high for them to be a realistic everyday source of food. Not to mention a lot of that food is flown in from all around the world. So they dig in. They find farmers growing fruit, beans, wheat, making cheese, slaughtering grass-fed beef. (They start the year as vegans but with tofu out of the picture, quickly start eating dairy, eggs, seafood, and eventually even beef. But they feel good about it. It's one thing to avoid factory-farmed beef, which comes from an unhealthy animal that's practically been tortured most of its life, so poor are the conditions it is raised in, and quite another thing to eat a healthy pastured cow that has been respectfully and cleanly killed by its owner.) Above all, they discover that the local food they find is more nourishing, more varied, cheaper, and just better than the food they've given up. There are certain things they miss--avocados, beer (some of the ingredients even in the local brews are sourced from far away), and so on--but they find many more things they never even knew they loved.

There's also something about their DIY mentality that appeals to me. I love the idea of baking my own bread, fermenting my own yogurt, making my own cheese. Of course, finding the time to do it is another problem for a 9 to 5-er like myself. The authors are freelance writers and journalists and, though busy, have a more flexible schedule that can accommodate tasks like these.

So where does that leave the book? As I said, it primarily appealed to the Epicurean in me, but I did find its other points interesting and salient. Sure, it is impossible and absurd to absolutely refuse to eat ANYTHING grown or raised more than 100 miles from home. But the point being that it is equally and perhaps more absurd to eat only or mostly food grown thousands of miles from home. The transportation costs involved are reliant upon cheap oil and mask a host of externalities that are someday soon going to bite us in the ass. In fact they already are. Not to mention the farming practices in much of the industrialized world are hard on the land and unsustainable in the long run, or even the medium run. A local food system is not only tastier year-round (and not just in Vancouver, as the authors point out with a midwinter visit to a group in northern Minnesota pursuing a similar dietary regimen), it is also more stable and more sustainable in the long run. It also doesn't mean we can't eat food grown in other regions or parts of the world, but such things should be delicacies and not an everyday part of our diet.

Yeah, this seems a little Quixotic. I have a really hard time imagining a majority of people in this country giving up their McBurgers and midwinter spring mixes in favor of canned corn left over from last summer's harvest. But stranger things have happened. And if cheap oil peters out without a good alternative, we may not have much other choice. It also seems fitting that this dismantling of powerful but ultimately self-destructive industrial systems could begin with a return to local food. People have historically been touchy about what they eat, attaching an almost religious importance to diet (or explicitly religious; see Kosher rules or Indian vegetarians). If there is one area where people are finally beginning to see what has been lost in the switch to large-scale industrial production, it is in the food we put on our tables.

As for myself, I probably won't adopt a strict 100-mile diet anytime soon. But I do plan to eat a lot more local food this summer. I've planted a garden (not necessarily because of this book--I planted it before I read it--but it makes me more excited about my garden), and I plan to spend a lot more time at the farmer's market than the produce aisle this summer. Maybe I'll even poke around and see if I can't find some local flour, or local fish. Who know? Maybe I'll find some tasty delicacies I never even dreamed existed. The plains of Colorado seem barren compared to the Pacific Northwest, or the Illinois farm fields I grew up in, but surely they have their hidden treasures, as well. I look forward to finding them.

Spam Poetry

Why this is the thing that inspired me to my first post in almost a year, I don't know. Maybe it's the line that reads "Ghost my butt bridget." Anyway, this is nonsense, but it's somewhat inspired nonsense, at least as good as a lot of stuff I had to read in college. As long as computers stick to poetry as a way to trick us into downloading a virus, fine. But if they start giving readings in local coffeehouses, we're gonna have a problem on our hands.

Previous next print photos view.
Who know ps this. And thats klarissa both of us going?
Still hasnt figured out the camera, welcome people.
Take it anymore oh made. Klarissa both of us going pro tiffany.
Brittany ian and thats? Figured, out, the camera, welcome people! It anymore oh made that still hasnt.
Hasnt figured out the camera!
Us going pro tiffany. People who know, ps this all by myself previous.
Photos view fullsize image comments!
Who know ps, this all by, myself previous.
Oh made that still hasnt figured out the. Snow trip wedding rings! All by, myself previous next, print photos, view fullsize.
Ghost my butt bridget.
Butt bridget just cant, take. Going pro tiffany snow trip.
Ps this all by myself. Trip, wedding rings ghost my butt bridget just.
Rings, ghost my butt, bridget just, cant take it. Brittany ian, and thats.
Snow trip wedding, rings, ghost my butt.
This all by myself previous next print photos view.
Welcome people who, know, ps, this, all by myself.
Myself previous next print photos view fullsize.
Hasnt figured out the camera welcome people who know!
Klarissa both of, us going? Us going pro tiffany snow, trip wedding. Going pro tiffany snow trip wedding rings ghost? It anymore oh, made that! Who know ps this, all by.
Ghost my butt bridget. Snow trip, wedding rings ghost my butt bridget, just.
Trip wedding rings ghost my butt bridget just, cant. Welcome people who know ps this all?
Pro tiffany snow, trip wedding rings ghost my butt. Previous next print photos view. Of us going pro, tiffany snow trip wedding.
Butt bridget just cant.
Know ps this, all by myself. Know ps, this all by myself previous next print.
View fullsize, image comments add.
Take it anymore, oh?

Are You an Extreme Survivor?

Take the test and find out. I got 12 of 17. I'm alive, but badly injured and maimed for life. With a little effort, I, too, can be an extreme survivor.

Turkey - Ahead of the Curve on Human-Animal Hybrids

Instead of using genetic engineering, though, they did it the old-fashioned way: inbreeding. Yahoo News reports that researchers have discovered a family of human quadrupeds somewhere in southern Turkey. (Sadly, no pictures to accompany this post.) The five children in the family walk on all fours and are incapable of walking upright. They are also mentally retarded and have some other genetic abnormalities. Researchers think they may be expressing genetic traits our ancestors possessed before our upright stature became widespread.

No disrespect to the mother and father of this particular family, though. I'm sure they have a hard life, made harder by caring for their children, who are undoubtedly unable to function independently in the world. Inbreeding is a time-honored tradition (think European monarchs), and has given us many spectacular mutations, like the white skin and ability to digest milk proteins in adulthood that most Caucasions possess. What would we do without cheese? So I won't knock them for that. It's interesting, though, how much of our heritage remains hidden in the genome, ready to leap back into service given the right, um, pairing.

How Great Were the Maya

In a recent post, Culture Cult author Roger Sandall uses some incidental passages from Jared Diamond's latest book, Collapse (sorry, having weird cut and past issues with Firefox so I'm not including the convoluted Amazon link), as a springboard to diss classical Maya civilization and compare it rather unfavorably to classical Greece.

Mr. Sandall's main point seems to be that for all the accomplished art and architecture the Maya left behind, precious little of value emerged from their time in the sun. The Maya leadership he describes as bloodthirsty chieftains mainly interested in war, wealth, and the appeasement of their gods, and Maya intellectual achievements are dismissed as astrology and numerology.

For the record, I am unfamiliar with Mr. Sandall's work and have no idea what his knowledge of Mayan civilization amounts to. From this essay, however, he seems very familiar with Greek civilization, less so with Mayan, making it difficult to take his dismissal seriously. He seems unaware that all save three Mayan codices, representing the collective knowledge of millions of people over thousands of years, were burned by overzealous Spanish priests and conquistadores. This makes it hard to apply his Mind at Work standard to the Maya, as any record of a Mayan Socrates or Sophocles was long ago destroyed. It is true that what survived does not approach the level of thought found in classical Greece, but take any three random books from ancient Greece and you'd likely find little more.

It is also the case that Maya civilization was severely, violently repressed with the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, both by means of cultural and physical violence and also by disease. Though it is true that most major Mayan cities were in ruins when Columbus arrived, there was still a thriving population that had by no means regressed to a stone-age level and still existed in a well-connected network of smaller towns and cities. As witnessed in the archaeological record of the Middle East, not all civilizations progress linearly from stone-age huts to world dominance. There are many stops, regressions, and revivals along the way, and as Mr. Diamond details in Collapse, the geography of the Yucatan made it difficult to support large populations even with modern agricultural techniques. Though the Greeks were invaded several times by the numerically superior Persians, they suffered no technological disadvantage (and in fact had technological and strategical advantages over the invading Persians) comparable to the Maya-Spain mismatch and also did not deal with ideologically fanatical occupiers in the Romans, as the Maya did with the Spaniards.

And as for Mr. Sandall's insinuation that the Greeks were less warlike and more high-minded and peaceful because Athens developed democracy? Please. As for the first claim, the Greek city-states were constantly at war with one another, much like the Maya, or at least were mutually hostile. As for the second claim, it is true that Athens gave birth to a fairer system than other governments of the time, but how much freedom really existed in a city where only adult men had the right to vote? This was a great step forward, sure, but I refuse to wax poetic about so imperfect and institution. And Socrates and Plato, two of Athens' more famous residents, advocated enlightened despotism, not democracy, as the ideal form of government.

I will not pretend that the classic Maya offered more of intellectual value to the human race than the Greeks. It is obviously not so, and Mr. Sandall is right in making this point. However, this is due to a specific set of historical circumstances having nothing to do with the intrinsic value of Mayan civilization. Had the tables been turned and had the Greeks suffered an invasion of technologically advanced, disease-bearing Aztec religious zealots who burned most of their literature and killed most of their citizens, I do not doubt that there would one day have been some New World version of Mr. Sandall publicly discounting Greece and Rome as having never produced much of lasting value.

Advertising on the Cheap

Here's a new one: posting ads in the comments of obscure personal blogs. I thought maybe someone had actually read my blog. I'm sure some spammer thinks he's pretty hot shit because he came up with a cool bot that dumps millions of stupid ads in people's comments. Like anyone would fall for this shit.

Though I have to admit that sometimes you fall for dumb ads when you least expect it. I just took my car into Just Brakes because the brakes started making grinding noises and I freaked. I don't have a regular mechanic yet for my new (old) Saturn and so I panicked and fell back on a radio ad I'd heard from them about cheap brake deals. Ha ha ha ha ha ha!! "Cheap brakes." Yeah, it's gonna be $500. And so after I take it in I decide to do some research on them and find all these complaints about Just Brakes doing work that doesn't need to be done, gouging their customers in the process. Great. Good thing I already signed a form authorizing it. I'm considering this an expensive lesson in the value of researching car mechanics. I just pray that everything works as advertised and I don't have to deal with these jokers again.

Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong

With clarity and incisiveness, Daniel Dennet has laid out exactly what is wrong with Intelligent Design theory: there is no theory. Oh, sure, ID advocates claim that their theory is that some intelligence, which they refuse to speculate on, created life on this planet. But as Dennet points out, this is not a theory. It is merely an assertion. A scientific theory (well, a hypothesis; it has to be tested and developed before it can become a theory) has to be composed of testable assertions. ID has none. It could. As Dennet says, it would be possible to come up with testable ID assertions, like that aliens designed our 6 million years ago, and then look for evidence to prove these assertions, but this has not been done, presumably because ID advocates know they are full of hot air. Anyway, this is a brilliant piece, probably the most concise and damning takedown of ID that I've seen so far.

I realize, upon reading it, that defenders of evolution are taking the wrong approach by doing just that--defending evolution. It makes it look as though there really is some doubt, something about evolution that needs to be defended. This might work with other scientists, but not with people who are not trying to be rational. Instead, this whole debate could and should be totally reframed in terms of ID. What is ID? What isn't it? Why are ID advocates doing what they are doing? How are they doing it? Why don't they do it with other scientific theories, like quantum theory or gravity or thermodynamics, some of which are on much shakier ground than evolution is? Though this information appears in the media, there has been no concerted attack on ID. I think if there was, and it was done in a way that regular people could understand, ID would have a much harder time hanging on.

Surprise, Surprise

The Discovery Institute, the Seattle think-tank that has been ramming Intelligent Design into the national nostril this summer, likes to put on a good face. There are lots of scientists on their roster, lots of official-sounding publications on their Web page. But what do those scientists on their roster even think about them? Do they agree with the Discovery Institute? Do they even want to be listed as members? You would think so, but this article makes me skeptical. Like the cute ape pictures and DNA molecule drawings on their Web site, and like ID itself, the Discovery Institute's scientific credentials appear to be nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries)

My wife and I watched Wild Strawberries Saturday night, an old Ingmar Bergman film. What a wonderful movie. It's the tale of an old doctor driving to a ceremony with his daughter-in-law, where he will receive an honorary degree from a university. Along the way he reminisces a lot and has several disturbing dreams that hint at things he could've done differently in his life. It was a beautiful meditation on loneliness and how even late in life we can find happiness for ourselves and ease some of the pain we have caused others. It has some of Bergman's characteristic dark strangeness, particularly in the dream sequences, but what struck me most about it was how human it was. It deals with ordinary people in ordinary situations, and overall struck me as the sort of film that just isn't made in America anymore. Partially that's because filmmaking and storytelling techniques have evolved, but I think it also has something to do with the worship of celebrity that has infested all aspects of our culture. We can't tell stories about ordinary people unless something extraordinary happens to them. We've forgotten how interesting our day-to-day lives actually are. Of course, I'm sure that if I search, particularly among independent filmmakers, I could find counterexamples, but certainly very little reaches the mainstream that is on a recognizably human scale and is not about some extraordinary tragedy/event/whatever. All cultural vitriol aside, this was a very beautiful and uplifting movie, and I highly recommend it to anyone who thinks ordinary people are fascinating.

Global Warming Irregularities Exploited by Skeptics Are Fixed

This story appearing in USA Today reveals that a key fuel source for arguments by global warming skeptics has been explained. For some time now, weather balloon data on tropical temperatures has failed to show predicted temperature increases. Skeptics used this data to argue that the models showing significant global warming were flawed. However, researchers have discovered that several of these important weather balloons had drifted off course, and were reporting nighttime temperatures as daytime temperatures. When this was corrected, the reported temps conformed exactly to current climate models showing global warming. The petroleum industry has yet to comment on their smackdown. Take that, you oil-slurping vampires.

Congress Makes Me Sick

The latest issue of Rolling Stone, of all the magazines in this country, has a brilliant and nauseating article on how, exactly, Congress works. Or doesn't work. I'd always assumed that the majority of congressmen and women were a bunch of lying, corrupt bastards, but it's gross to see how true that is and how the corruption and lying actually happens.

The article follows Rep. Sanders, an independent from Vermont and seemingly one of the few honest men in Congress, as he tries to get several measures passed in Congress. Three of the four amendments he introduced before the summer recess passed by large margins, but none of them made it into law. Wanna know how and why? Read the article. It's truly disgusting, and it makes me think there needs to be some serious housecleaning in Washington, which involves more than sweeping out the Republican leadership, though that would help a lot.

And on a final note, I also think it's very sad that this article appeared in Rolling Stone, rather than Time, or Newsweek, or the New York Times, or some other publication that should be covering stuff like this. Not that Rolling Stone can't have serious journalism in it, obviously they do, but for God's sake, they're a music magazine! Their bread and butter is writing about Britney Spears and the latest flop by Oasis! OK, they've covered political stories since Day 1, I know, but I still think this is one more instance where the major, mainstream news outlets are completely and totally failing to do their job.

Jesus Gonna Be Here... As Soon as He Evolves

I listen to Slate.com's daily podcast every morning, and today they did an interview with Jacob Weisberg, author of an article on Slate about the teaching of evolution, one of my favorite topics. Mr. Weisberg makes the claim that religious people are right to be worried about evolution; it does, he says, tend to lead people toward atheism or agnosticism. His claim is not that evolution and (monotheistic) religious belief are incompatible. After all, there are people who believe in God and evolution. However, he claims that one of effects of evolution since Darwin's seminal The Origin of Species has been to lead people away from religious belief because it provides a non-supernatural answer to one of religion's biggest questions: how did we get here? Thus he feels religious people are justified in fearing evolution.

However, I disagree with Mr. Weisberg on several points. First, I do not think evolution is a stake in the heart of religion. Rather, it is another nail on the coffin. Western society was already becoming more secular when Darwin made public his theory. The conflict between religion in science began in earnest with Galileo, and is not science's problem. It is religion's attempt to use its weight to support specific scientific theories that is the problem. In Galileo's day, it was fairly obvious to most people that the sun revolved around the earth. After all, they only had to look at its motion throughout the day. However, Copernicus, Galileo, and others discovered evidence that this was not the case. This was a scientific question, but the church decided to weigh in in favor of one hypothesis--the wrong one, as it turns out. This gives them a credibility problem, especially when they claim divine guidance.

It is the same with evolution. Until Darwin, there were few compelling reasons to disbelieve the church's claim that God created the earth in seven days, etc. But now there is good evidence to the contrary. Rather than accepting that a literal interpretation of the bible is not correct, as some denominations, including the Catholic Church, have done, many religious people choose to throw the weight of their belief behind the disproven hypothesis. This does not make it right. On the contrary, it gives them a credibility problem, forcing people who agree that evolution is a resonable theory to choose between religion and science. If religious people did not force this unreasonable distinction, evolution would not make people more atheistic.

At the heart of this issue, to me, is a retention of primitive, mythic thinking. As much as many theologians (and certain biblical authors) point out that God is a transcendent concept that is not reducible to our ideas about it/him/her/whatever, many of us persist in seeing God as the modern analog of Zeus: a big, bearded fellow who sits up in the clouds watching everything we do to make sure we aren't screwing around. In this scenario, God aka Superman basically casts magic spells to create the world, making creatures, mountains, iPods, etc pop out of thin air and start disobeying him. He does all this in the time span of the modern work week, cause he's concerned about the market, too. This is the only creation story that evolution discredits. If, on the other hand, we accept that God really is transcendent and awesome and unknowable, then we accept that the seven days account is no more than it claims to be: a myth, a way of talking about creation on human terms (i.e., the magic spell aspect) while acknowledging that the truth is bigger, greater, and more awesome than anything we can come up with. If religious opponents of evolution would remember this, they would see that there is no problem. From our perspective, maybe God's creation of the world looks a whole hell of a lot like evolution.

I realize this raises problems of theodicy (survival of the fittest, etc) and knocks down man a little in the cosmic scheme of things because we weren't created "special." (Though if man is created in God's image, what about apes and chimps? I'm sorry, but they look pretty damn similar to us, even with the hair.) But theodicy is still a problem even if God did create the world with magic spells in seven days because there is still suffering. In fact, I'd say it's even more of a problem in this system because suffering is an anomaly rather than an integral part of the system of creation. If we accept evolution, we actually have a rationale for suffering and can begin to look at its transformative aspects. And as for man being special, well, we're still the only creature we know of who has language, and who has developed the ability for abstract symbol manipulation, and advanced tool-making, etc. And maybe we aren't special anyway. Why is a man more special than a turtle? Maybe if we stepped down from our pedestals for a moment and actually began helping one another, as Jesus suggests, rather than believing our own press, we really would be a special species that could be worthy of God's praise.

Can Christians Come to Christ?

The 8/05 issue of Harper's magazine has a wonderful essay by Bill McKibben titled "The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong." Unfortunately you can read the article in its entirety only in the print version at the moment, but there are some excerpts on the Harper's Web site.

McKibben's basic point is that despite 85% of Americans identifying themselves as Christians, as a nation we fail to behave in a Christian manner. Jesus told his followers to turn the other cheek, sell all our belongings and follow him, help the poor, sick, weak, and so on, and yet by any metric we are failing to do these things, even when one factors in the donations to and actions of private and religious charities. Compared to all other wealthy, industrialized nations (including Japan, a non-Christian nation, and many European nations where Christianity has become so anemic that they can be considered secular cultures), we have higher murder rates, higher poverty, less health care, worse school systems, and on and on.


This point has been made before (by me, among other people), but McKibben makes it eloquently. He also very interestingly traces the roots of this phenomenon to a series of theological makeovers Christianity has received in this country. The two major thrusts of this makeover are, on the one hand, the millenarians, who obsessively search for signs of the coming apocalypse in the bar codes at Wal-Mart and in some cases hope to hasten the End Times by advocating, say, war in the Middle East, and the corporates, neo-New Agers who basically promote a feel-good Christian pop-psychology in suburban megachurches that says little about Jesus and lots about you, the worshipper, and how you can feel good about yourself.

Of course there are many variations on (and marriages between) these strands of pseudo-Christianity, but they are what they are because that's how people like to think. We (the people) are obsessed with disaster scenarios (witness the popularity of movies like Independence Day or the truckloads of other science fiction books, movies, video games, and so on that touch on post-apocalyptic themes), and we are fascinated by destruction. I am sure that as the Spaniards watched Tenochtitlan burn, some of them were excited about destroying an entire culture and one of the most amazing cities in the entire world. There is a little bit of Shiva in all of us, so it's no wonder that people find this kind of thing compelling--especially if they think religion will give them the knowledge to predict and to a certain extent influence the outcome of the apocalypse. As for the corporates, they wanna hear about how Jesus is going to make them more content at work and deal with their kids better and how they deserve to keep all the money they make and God helps those who help themselves so you don't have to do it and you're a Christian so you're saved, what's to worry about? No matter that Jesus basically contradicted all that stuff.

As I said in my previous post on this, Jesus had a radical message, and that message was love. He wanted, as McKibben says, to radically reorient human relationships around the principle of love. But as Foucault scholars will be quick to point out, human relations, in large swaths of the American Christian community, are based instead on power, often economic power.

Do I follow Jesus' message? No, I don't. Maybe somewhat, but not to the extend that I wish I did. So I'm a hypocrite, but I'm honest about it. The problem with these modern-day moneylenders in the temple like the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family is that they're not. They say in very loud voices that they represent Christian values when what they really represent is a narrow conservative political view that in a lot of ways is anti-Christian. (Millenarians, get out your pens and start connecting the Antichrist dots.) But they say it so loudly that our culture, as a whole, fails to question them, and a true and vital interpretation of Christianity is pushed to the sidelines. Like McKibben, I hope that one day we will have a truly moral majority, but until that day, all we can do is quietly labor on the sidelines.

Energy Economies

The August '05 issue of National Geographic has a wonderful article on the future of energy generation. Fossil fuels are still (relatively) plentiful and (relatively) cheap, but frankly they don't have much life left in them. Whether oil becomes too scarce to be the viable base of our economy in five years or fifty, it's inevitably going to happen, and it'll probably happen during our lifetimes. That's not the end of the show, though it will mean a lot of changes in the way we get power and the way our economy works.

This article provides a great rundown on the various technologies currently in the works to step in as a replacement for cheap oil. As the author says, this is more likely to be a congress than a president: there is no one technology or energy source that will fill oil's shoes. Oil is like heroin--the concentrated energy of billions of years of sunshine. Nothing we can do can top that. But many technologies--solar, wind, biofuels, even nuclear--working together can still probably provide all our foreseeable energy needs.

For what it's worth, my money is on solar. Sure, it works better in sunny climes than others, but what I like about it is how modular it is. Solar panels can be popped onto buildings, homes, even cars and backpacks. Solar creates a distributed network of power generation that can be increased gradually and locally depending on need and conditions. It could also create a national or global marketplace where people with extra power can sell their surplus to those in need. (A sunny day in Chicago can cancel out a rainy day in Albany.) And with improvements in battery technology, days or even weeks of power could be stored against a rainy day. Of course, any renewable system, even with battery backups and a power marketplace, is not foolproof, and some combination of solar, wind, hydro, tidal, and maybe even a few relic coal or nuclear plants, just in case, will be necessary. But solar has the potential to be the real democratic future power technology, and I think people will respond to that.

But ultimately, what will be truly interesting is to see what shape the stormclouds take when they arrive, and how easily and peacefully we weather the transition from an oil-and-gas economy to the renewable, self-sustaining energy future.

VapOr?

I gestured back at the skimmer, seeming to float in the tall, waving grass.

"No room!" I tried to enunciate clearly, speak loudly, even though I knew it wouldn't do any good. "We come back!"

The man looked at me in confusion, then suddenly took several broad steps forward. I involuntarily stepped back, one hand on my pistol. I glanced nervously at Shaun, but he wasn't even looking. Instead his attention was on the woman, the shrouded figure, who seemed to be struggling in her veil.

"Unnnnn...." A low moan rose from the sheets that enwrapped her, something hideous and otherworldly. I felt a chill run down my spine.

I looked back at the big fellow, their leader, and could see the worry and confusion written across his face. I put out my hand and started to step around him, toward the woman. He almost reflexively grimaced and moved to block me.

"No!" I said hastily, stepping back. "I help!" I looked helplessly at Shaun.

But Shaun still wasn't listening. He was sitting down in the tall grass, a slack expression on his long face. The locals standing near him were starting to back away.

I quickly walked over to his side.

"Shaun!" I said loudly. "Are you alright? What are you doing?"

"Mmmn.." he mumbled. "Tired, doc. Can't seem to..."

I started to reach out to shake his shoulder when a rough, strong hand grabbed my wrist, holding me back. I looked up angrily and not a little bit fearfully to see the burly leader fellow, his eyes wide with fear.

"What in the devil..." I began when he yanked me away from Shaun and began jabbering at me again. Of course I couldn't understand what he was saying, but I wasn't really listening. I was watching the now-unconscious form of my assistant as it began to, I'm not sure how to put this, mutate rather rapidly into some kind of cyborg, sprouting antennas and sleek metal nodules and appendages quite rapidly. I looked up at the leader fearfully and could sense his relief now that I was aware of the danger.

Rogue tech. And something strong enough to quickly overwhelm Shaun's defenses.

I wondered how on earth these people weren't dead. Or, for that matter, why I wasn't.

Vapor Cont. 3

The wind smacked me in the face as the glass on our skimmer rose, smelling of rain and distant buffalo. The folk around us had halted when I raised the cockpit, but now one took a cautious step forward. A tall, imposing fellow whose huge frame belied his gauntness, he wore his brown beard long and hair longer. He was dressed in a simple, dirty jumpsuit, something he'd probably gotten from the generators in U Town or New Omaha. He gave me a fierce look, his gaze narrow as he raised one huge hand in a formal greeting.

"Sor buenoman ke es de skie, esa buenwoma taka muh infima, sor. Vasos tenar te pillen e U Town. Kin puin me aida?

His voice was rough and his accent thick, and though he spoke deliberately, I could understand little of what he said. The locals hereabouts spoke a difficult tongue for me, a much-mutated hybrid of Classical English and Spanish. I had been making attempts at the language since I arrived at U Town, but so far had had little time to devote to it. Like most native-born Martians, I spoke Classical English and Mandarin, but I found I had little facility with the native tongue.

I shrugged in exagerrated confusion to let him know I hadn't understood, and turned to Shaun. He spoke Classical Spanish, having spent some time in the Iberian Hills as a child. I was hoping he had a better idea of what this fellow was about. He nodded and leaned over to whisper in my ear.

"I think they're saying they have a sick woman. They were trying to take her to U Town to get medicine, and they want us to help them."

I nodded at Shaun and looked back at the leader of this little group. I didn't know exactly how we were going to fit this woman into the skimmer, what with our nearly full cargo of bears.

Vapor, Cont. 2

I took my hands off the stick and looked back at Shaun in surprise, barely noticing the small jolt as the autopilot took over and slowed the skimmer into a lazy circle. He returned my gaze in kind, confusion written over his narrow, bony face.

"Maybe it's a funeral procession?" I suggested, loudly. Shaun shook his head.

"No, I think the locals cremate their dead. They wouldn't come out to the plains for that."

We both looked back down at the ragged band below. Their gestures seemed urgent, almost frantic, pointing up at us and back at the body, its white shroud whipping around in our exhaust and the rapidly rising winds. I considered leaving for a split second, taking our cargo back up to U-Town, but in the same instant I found my hands on the throttle and we began to descend.

The folks below us scattered back to their buggies as we came down, save for two men who carried the shrouded figure back to the edge of the circle, where they crouched among the furiously beating waves of grass. We settled down into the middle of the circle and I cut the fans. For a moment there was a cavernous silence, filled only by the shriek of the wind as it washed over the cockpit.

I glanced back at Shaun, who had slung his Syst8 over his shoulder and unholstered his pistol. I could see the confusion in his eyes, but he said nothing. Outside, I could see several of the locals cautiously moving toward us. Reaching down to feel the reassuring weight of my own pistol, I popped the canopy.

Vapor, Cont. 1

"Say! Doc!" Shaun yelled right into my ear. I reached around and pushed his head back, scowling.

"What?"

"Some locals at 10 o'clock. Looks like they'd heading for the hills."

And so they were, though they'd never get there in time. I could see a plume of dust rising behind them as they kicked over the bumpy terrain in homebrew buggies, angling toward what was left of the old highway into Longmont.

"I wonder what they're in such a damn hurry for," I yelled back at him. "No way they're gonna beat the rain. What in the heck do you think they're even doing out here?"

The kid called out some sort of reply, but it was all chopped up by the fans. I wasn't really listening anyway. Those buggies had me intrigued. I hadn't seen the locals sporting tech like that before.

I started to bring the skimmer around toward the fleeing locals, thought of the hybrid bears we were carrying and started to pull out, then went ahead, against my better judgment.

In a few moments we were swooping in right over them. I could see six or seven buggies, rather pathetic things made out of old aluminum and carbon-composite car frames, but sporting enormous rubber tires, which really surprised me, and an invisible source of power. I eased back on the throttle and circled around the locals as they drew up into a sort of defensive circle and stopped. They all rushed out into the middle of the circle and started waving their arms around threateningly.

"What do you think they're about?" I shouted at Shaun. "They can't think we're gonna hurt them?"

"I don't think they're threatening us, Doc," he yelled back. "I think they're trying to get our attention."

I looked again, and this time the waving arms didn't seem so menacing, just urgent. In fact, the locals seemed to be lifting something up to show us, something rather long and wrapped in white cloth: a body.