Fall’s mold or sage’s bloom, or the Idaho forest fires’ smoke — hay fever season — has my sinuses  in a vise grip, forcing drainage to full flow.  So I wonder, as always, as every autumn it thunders into my skull on massive buffalo hooves like clockwork, like the springtime turkey buzzards’ return to Bluff — I wonder:  is it more environmentally appreciative to toss soiled tissues into the toilet, or into the trash? (Of course I know well enough not to use what we generically call Kleenex — I learned a hundred years ago, not so much because of ungreen superfluous packaging, but the equally allergenic, oily, cheesy perfume, the same that leaves your unclean seeing glasses even filmier and foggier than before.)  A conundrum, it seems, identical to the check-out lady’s old question, “Paper or plastic?”  There are arguments for, but mostly against, either.  A neither/nor proposition in the end, yet it begs a bring-your-own-washable-cotton-bag solution.  As we reach paralysis (on many levels), do we traipse backward to employ what has been derided a ‘snot rag’?  Yeck! we think.  Why so enamored of the antiseptic?  (Not just any kind of bag, mind you, but “washable” cotton for your groceries — doesn’t that sully the water, too?)  Save up for a mini weenie roast bonfire?  What are the front-end costs of compostable?  You do have to include environmental accounting — what does it do to the “good bacteria”?  Head spinning even worse I consult the title which, indeed, laughs out loud:  How Bad Are Bananas?  Its subheading: The Carbon footprint of Everything.  For instance, bananas themselves:

“are good for just about everyone — athletes, people with high blood pressure, everyday cycle commuters in search of an energy top-up, or anyone wishing to chalk up their five servings of fruit and vegetables per day…They are grown in natural sunlight — no hot-housing required.  They keep well, so although they are grown thousands of miles from the end consumer, they are transported by boats (about 1 percent as bad as flying). There is hardly any packaging, if any, because they provide their own…”

But, it continues, “Don’t let me leave you with the impression that bananas are too good to be true…Of the 300 types in existence, almost all those we eat are of the single, cloned ‘Cavendish’ variety.  The adoption of this monoculture in pursuit of maximum, cheapest yields has been criticized for degrading the land and requiring the liberal use of pesticide and fungicide.  Furthermore, although land is dramatically better used for bananas than beef in terms of nutrition per acre, there are still parts of the world in which forests are being cleared for banana plantations.”  As I intimated, it’s a jungle out here!  The truth in accounting goes on to say that the only really bad bananas are any that you let rot in your fruit bowl, joining “the scandalous 40 to 50 percent of food wasted in the U.S.”  I cringe, sheepishly run to pulse up a smoothie.  The book breaks down most other fruits, too, and vegetables, according to their “co2e” (carbon dioxide equivalent, which includes methane, nitrous oxide and refrigerant gases, all generally lumped into the warming, or weirding, culprit called “greenhouse”).  Other categories up and down the spectrum include:  A war, Driving one mile, A new car, Doing the dishes, A heart bypass operation, Christmas excess — tell me about it — and,

An email

0.3 g co2e a spam email

4 g co2e a proper email

50 g co2e an email with long and tiresome attachment that you have to read

> A typical year of incoming mail adds up to 135 kg (300 lbs.)

co2e:  over 1 percent of the 10-ton lifestyle and equivalent to driving 200 miles in an average car.

I knew there was a reason I eschew it, email, to my and everyone else’s detriment, they say.  But the actual detriment comes because I don’t really eschew it, truly.  I dabble in it, putting my own particular screw to the world.  A virtual cad who knows next to nothing about CAD, much less BIM, but an athletic supporter in a cheerleading fashion, leading people on, mysteriously vacating a questionable broadband-aided self for weeks, even months at a time.  Then coming back to turn it in a little deeper.

I do freak about a misplaced iPhone, but secretly I loathe it just the same.  Ehlias, my son, Skyped the other day (verbs these days, to Skype, to FedEx) from Aix-en-Provence, and recounted an exasperating, initiation-type gerbil wheel against which he’d been recently running madly.  He couldn’t buy a cell phone until he provided a bank account, couldn’t open a bank account until he had a semi-permanent residence, and he couldn’t find a semi-permanent residence until an agency might know him well enough to trust him, stemming from French law, skewed, not surprisingly, to the favor of lessees.  Not exactly sympathetic, as unfortunately can be my wont, I spewed a version of back in the day having to walk five miles to school through inconceivably deep (remember warming, weirding?) snow; I reminded him that for several years while he was growing up (in a Banana Republic, as it were) we didn’t have even what we now call a land line, relying instead upon the local cantina’s connection to news about four kilometers south in Matapalo, named for the ubiquitous vine (there in the un-virtual jungle) that chokes trees to death.  I suppose, however, it’s all relative.  As I said, I freak when I don’t feel the wireless umbilical buzzing my front right pocket, or when it has died and I’m lacking the hard-wire umbilical to plug into the grid!

So, I pick up the Sunday New York Times, which from distraction and personality I stretch throughout the week.  Someone I once hung out with pointed out the potential fact that relationship compatibility could possibly depend upon the order in which you read its sections, adding fuel to the argument that opposites attract.  It should shock no one that found at the bottom of my pile is the front page.  Addlepated, maybe, but I’d be dumbfounded further to learn that anyone other than a wonk reads the first things first, and even he would seek out what used to be called The Week in Review, or Op/Ed, which now have been combined.  Getting to the front page, lead article:  Power, Pollution and the Internet, Industry Wastes Vast Amounts of Electricity, Belying Image.  Seems the Times has conducted a yearlong examination.  It begins with an amusing anecdote about back in the day, Moore’s Law style, early 2006, when Facebook’s 2400 square foot bank of servers were about to melt from overheating and the engineering chief “cleaned out all of the Walgreens in the area” of their fans as solution.  Today the company requires outsize versions of that facility, spreading over hundreds of thousands of square feet, and  those are a “mere fraction of the tens of thousands of data centers” using “about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants.”  Piling on, “McKinsey & Company analyzed energy use by data centers and found that, on average, they were using only 6 percent to 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers to perform computations.”  Ten years ago the most data-intensive customer had about 50,000 gigabytes in its entire database; now roughly a million gigabytes are processed and stored in a data center during the creation of a single 3-D animated movie.  “Sending a message with photographs to a neighbor could involve a trip through hundreds or thousands of miles of Internet conduits and multiple data centers before the e-mail arrives across the street.”  Talk about perspective.  I had thought that computerizing everything was supposed to save energy and resources, you know, the old paperless promise, saving trees (should we de- or re-jungle?).  There are other ways, sure, but I feel a little bit sang and danced.  And the cloud?  The cloud, according to a source, “just changes where the applications are running.  It all goes to a data center somewhere.”  The cloud is disk drives.  What’s driving this massive growth is “the end-user expectation of anything, anytime, anywhere.”  We have seen the enemy and he is us.  Earlier:  “player statistics flowing into servers that calculate fantasy points and league rankings, snapshots from nearly forgotten vacations kept forever in storage devices.  It is only when the repetitions of those and similar transactions are added up that they start to become impressive.”  Impressive, check that:  I have seen the enemy and he is me.

I threw the tissue in the toilet, thinking that one, like I said, it wasn’t the fancy, lacy-traced, smelly stuff from out of an extra chipboard box, but toilet paper, not super squeezy, but not that cheap, loud, waxy kind you find in squat or National Forest facilities, either, more the Goldilocks type; and two, that water’s bound to be flushed sooner or later with more pressing concerns, hence, I can walk away from the two-point shot and follow through, conscience clean.  Is that any way to spin it, though?  It’s a least bad, weaselly option at best, I’m afraid.  Gunking it up down the toilet over here, Boss.  What if it were a privately-owned septic?  The utter arrogance of my action, albeit decisive, reminded me of a recent piece published in another paper, the Salt Lake Tribune — no, not about him, not necessarily — that nearly made me drop and hug that same commode.  Arguing about a move to disallow homeowners to retain ambiance by legally declaring their neighborhood an historic district in the wake of tear-downs and the ensuing erection of starter castles, Salt Lake City Council Chairman Soren Simonsen (an architect), said “that the 51 percent approval is measured only by the ballots returned to the city.  That, he maintained, makes the threshold lower and the historic district designation easier to attain because disinterested homeowners most likely won’t participate.”  Terrific.  Banking on disinterest; policy by ambivalence.  As if this current election doesn’t really matter perhaps because of the omnipresent Washington partisan gridlock, or because this state’s already been painted a deep, deep red, or because it’s only part of an election cycle.

Winter, at least, gives me temporary reprieve to at last wrest the white, or the black, or even the black and white from unending gray phlegm.

Hank’s Diary: Spring 2012

A few years ago I received a note from the founder of the Sun, a terrific magazine of interviews, literature and readers’ writings about topics which are planned and deadlines published a year or so in advance. The magazine was on the ropes, and the founder/publisher/editor had decided that things needed to change, economically, in order for it to sustain itself. Like those great television advertisements that you can’t ever recall exactly what it is they were hawking (Jobs and Chiat-Day’s famous 1984 commercial for a Super Bowl long before the roman numeral L loomed, for instance), I don’t remember exactly the strategy offered by this brilliant man of the Sun – it might have been just a hike in the price of subscriptions in order to keep the slim magazine advertiser-free, a huge basis for editorial freedom, for sticking to convictions, virtues, rubbing away the silvery goo on a lottery ticket called Truth – but apparently it worked. Just the other day, at the end page of the Utne Reader, Eric Utne himself wrote that the magazine he’d founded was now moving to Topeka, classically not Minneapolis, after having been bought out a few years prior. He wasn’t melancholy. Hardly, far from it, more of a cheerleader – it was his baby, after all. You let your children grow up and go off to college and all you can do is encourage and advise either quietly or boisterously from the sidelines. Mr. Utne had a couple of suggestions about departments to keep, and the culture they would, he hoped, maintain, but otherwise fanned the new group to go wild, combust, experiment with new ideas. When Tina Brown, editor of Vanity Fair, moved to the New Yorker it seemed as if everyone collectively shuddered; the stakes for the magazine for literature (along with the Paris Review) with its venerable Baffert-esque stable of whinnying and brushed down writers here and then who made their names household, big screen, along with the tugging and leading and perhaps even love from two longtime editors who stood not in the shadows, but basking in the glow of the talent who actually admitted their genius in mentorship. It was all going to come crashing down – there again was that ubiquitous Chicken Little. What did Ms Brown do? To the world as well as to writing, she brought color. The covers of the Atlantic Monthly and Harpers change just about mid-generation, it seems, or each time a newly hired editor hires his colleague, the new art director.

It’s the institution, stupid.

The headmaster – in fact, John McPhee wrote a book about him, called The Headmaster, who we not altogether affectionately called the Quid, and it took me a long time to understand why we did so (it was slang for a wad of chewing tobacco, he being the player/coach of the baseball team, whose field was the only sport featured on the upper quad) – the headmaster at the school where I began my secondary school years had been in that capacity for more than 60 years. The second ever in history joined us during my senior year and suspended me (and a few other friends) for a few weeks at the end of the year. We were the first ever to be suspended, or so it is remembered, the Quid never admitting that he couldn’t turn a kid around single-handedly to be an esteemed citizen for the present and future. Anyway, we were misjudged in the grand scheme of things, 90 percent innocent – there were girls and drink – but wholly innocent of the charges, which were trashing, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, a mogul’s penthouse who knows where in New York City (I’d come from Phoenix). He – the mogul – had showed up the weekend after us, visiting his perch for the first time in an untold number of years. He had something like 12 sons, one of whom was our buddy who’d backed out of joining us at the eleventh hour, another who was in his mid-40s or maybe older, from like five or so wives ago, and many of them had been taking advantage of the place week in and out for years. We’d noticed champagne and other stains all over the place when we’d visited. The Quid would have been angry, for sure, but he might have been more lenient, understanding things about the mogul, who’d sent every one of his kids to the school. But we were a convenient example. I never minded, truthfully. I never minded. My parents had known all about it, and my penance was to go to the library at Arizona State University with coeds for three weeks in order to write a thesis-like paper. Today the school keeps pumping out world-renown statesmen, CEOs and artists alike.

I’m not physically nor emotionally running this gig for 60 or more years. I’m probably not physically running it at all any more, really, although I wish I were able. I like spending time with these students, kids younger than my oldest sons. I like getting to know them, maybe even helping them get to know just who they themselves are, or, more importantly, who they can be. I have no design on it, no real pedagogical sense, really; it drives all of the academics crazy. I can try to be apologetic for it, knowing how serious they all seem to be about their meetings and things. I’m a fan of Mockbee, Socrates, and even Rem Koolhaus, I’d guess, who refuses to teach anything he thinks he knows anything about, or so we’re told. I’m on record just about everywhere with an advocacy of Paulo Lugari’s advice to the apprehensive engineer/school head who he’d appointed to take the reins of his “village to reinvent the world”, Gaviotas, an experimentally sustainable community built from scrub by all kinds of engineers, brave and strong-willed, in the savannah of Colombia, “You only have to be right 51% of the time!” The stiff-collared of the bureaucracies of the Academy don’t seem to get that for a second.

We at DesignBuildBLUFF work with the clients in order to achieve a home that will bring souls to tears of outright joy all around. It just happened with the home we’re calling Little Water, which we constructed for a pair of invalided Navajos, parents of a friend of ours, Gary, who has helped us with plumbing for the past couple of years (I would never deny the fact that we, like everyone else, don’t give me any shit, are a political organization, just like the behemoths that we work for and with). Tears were flowing from all sets of eyes as they so graciously and ceremonially professed their gratefulness for the home, not for themselves, but for a home that will stand and protect their grandchildren, and perhaps even their great grandchildren, allowing all of them to stand just that slight bit more erect.

Recently we made a mistake by choosing the wrong client to receive one of the smallish – 1,000 square feet or fewer – pieces of architecture we design and build for them, free of charge. In the case of a person who I thought might be good for the Reservation as a whole, an educator in the midst of his PhD studies at the University of Utah, his wife a respected school teacher in the Salt Lake Valley, anxiously awaiting a return to teach the children of her own culture. He whined because we couldn’t provide him surround sound, nor a hot tub. He’s just a tiny smear, like most of us; he just wants to be bigger.

It’s the institution, stupid. It’s the students. They’ll keep scraping away at that silvery goo on a lottery ticket called Truth.