L.A. underground talent

So, email is dead. We're all info whores now, with ADD. That last detail makes turning people on to good music kind of a bitch. I somehow doubt the blogosphere is a better conduit, but at least it's flashy HTML. Trust the DJ and check out this cat Intuition - for free. Heavy rotation material. Oh and he puts on a good show, too. If only he'd put out a new album...



Next blog post: Interview with Terminator X about running an ostrich farm in the dirty south. I shit you not.

It's All Hip Hop

"The best that hip hop culture has to give is going to come from overseas"

- Danny Hoch, Hip Hop Theater 101, Davis, CA, 2003

Like my boy b_cab said, "that dude hit every area in the space between wack and awesome. some of that shit was right the fuck on."

First Ass Scent

Sometimes when climbing, things go horribly, and hilariously wrong. A perfect set up for this situation is climbing offwidths for fun - which many climbers consider a sign of being touched in the head. Thankfully, Cedar was there for an assist while a film crew hovered above.

Boogie 'til You Poop from Cedar Wright on Vimeo.

The slow march towards assigning value to ecosystems

In 1991, eight scientists entered a sealed, glass-enclosed, 3.15-acre structure near Oracle, Arizona, where they remained for two years. Inside was a diversity of ecosystems, each built from scratch, including a desert, a tropical rainforest, a savanna, a wetland, a field for farming, and an ocean with a coral reef. The "bionauts" were accompanied into their habitat by insects, pollinators, fish, reptiles, and mammals that were selected to maintain ecosystem functions. They were to live entirely off the land inside the dome. All air, water, and nutrient recycling took place within the structure.
 
Biosphere 2 was the most ambitious project ever undertaken to study life within a closed system. Never before had so many living organisms been placed in a tightly sealed structure. Inside the dome, air quality steadily declined. While a rise in carbon dioxide was expected, scientists were surprised at the drop in oxygen levels. While the ecosystems maintained life and, in some cases, flourished, there were many ecological surprises. Cockroaches multiplied greatly but fortunately took on the role of de facto pollinators as many other insects died off. Of the original 25 small vertebrate species in the Biosphere 2 population, 19 became extinct. At the end of 17 months, because of the drops in oxygen levels, the humans were living in air whose composition was equivalent to a 17,500-foot altitude. The lesson for nonscientists is that it required $200 million and some of the best scientific minds in the world to construct a functioning ecosystem that had difficulty keeping eight people alive for 24 months. We are adding eight people to the planet every three seconds.

taken from Natural Capitalism by Hawken, Lovins, and Lovins (1993).

Ecology's Ongoing Identity Crisis - A Rant

What is an ecologist these days? This nebulous scientific discipline, perpetually self-conscious of its red-headed stepchild status among “hard” scientists, has spent the last three decades acting out a napoleon complex through research into the Sacred F’s: anything with Fur, Fins, Feathers or Flowers. For a discipline with a terminal identity crisis, it’s been a highly effective financial strategy that’s led to a good run. Research in “ecology” – the study of interactions – boomed in the 1970s as legal mandates pumped money into the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, and Clean Air Act. But the low hanging fruit of addressing discrete environmental flashpoints – e.g. point source pollutants like industrial discharges and indicator species like the northern spotted owl – has been picked. Here’s the catch: the future of our society resides not in warm and fuzzy critters, but rather more abstracted, non-point resources: water and carbon. Political winds are shifting, and funding is going with it. And all of a sudden, ecologists are being left without a story to tell that justifies their purpose.

The response by ecologists so far has been to morph into “ecosystem biogeochemists” or "global biologists" (titles that are simultaneously all-compassing and vaguely generic… kinda like Amway, for scientists). Yes, research ecologists are here to save us again, pretending all along that they were integrative masters of soil science, hydrology, terrestrial biology, and atmospheric science – or that all those groups somehow managed to miss seeing the forest through the trees because their models were too simplistic. Self-preservation is the most powerful motivator, and a discipline that focused laser like on the mating patterns of Sierra Club pin up creatures is now finding absurdly creative ways to tap into the new funding stream (track the rhetoric emerging under the NEON umbrella for examples).

Honestly, do we really need a newly reinvented group of egoists at the science table? You can bet the cadre of ecologists who find a seat on the water/carbon gravy train will be leading the charge towards obscurity and esoterica. At the same time, an acknowledged glut of peer reviewed papers is contributing to the marginalization of environmental sciences as tools to effectively guide policy at a critical juncture.

It’s not knowledge we lack. What we lack is the ability to simply and elegantly understand what we know and draw conclusions. Personally, my money is against born-again ecologists contributing to the formation of a useful, cohesive message. But like any good scientist, I ask only one thing: please prove me wrong.