Some found amusing the proposal by State Representative Jan Angel (R-Port Orchard) to let state and local agencies raise revenue by charging for the right to rename public buildings and infrastructure. She said the idea came to her while brainstorming how to curb tolls on the Tacoma Narrows bridge. ("Lawmakers fear names like Chuck E. Cheese Bridge")
I think we’ve already gone down that slippery slope and it’s hard to stop, especially when the old “revenue in hard times” argument is sung. We name public structures-- Key Arena, Qwest Field, Safeco Field, Hec Edmundson Pavilion, Paine Field— sometimes for money, sometimes just for the honor.
In the last naming round for the new Washington state 144-car ferries, “Ivar Haglund” was supposedly a contender but “Samish” and “Tokitae” were the names chosen. “Tokitae” is also the name given to a captive Puget Sound orca known as “Lolita” in the Miami Sequarium. We also name our Southern resident orcas — the J-pod includes Granny, Oreo, and Mike; the K-pod Cappuccino, Lobo and Kali; and the L-pod Skana, Orphelia and Ocean Sun— in addition to giving them numerical designations.
If you discover something you usually get to name it or name it in honor of someone as in the case of Halley’s comet, the Van Allen radiation belt, the Salk vaccine, Vancouver Island, Puget Sound, Mount Rainier and Baker. Salish native peoples gave their names to Tahoma and Komo Kulshan. Bert Webber succeeded in renaming Puget Sound and the Straits of Georgia, Haro, Rosario and Juan de Fuca the Salish Sea.
The right name, most people believe, is very important for success or good fortune. A lot of time and money are spent to get it right: Cars get names (Mustang, Jaguar, Eclipse) and some people even name their cars. Teams have names (Huskies, Sounders, Mariners) and our businesses (Amazon, Starbucks, Nintendo) and our clubs and organizations (Roller Betties, Seal Sitters, EarthJustice).
Our rescue dog came with the name “Joey” but I call him “Joe” because he’s just not a “Joey.” The rest of my household call him “Spike” because he’s not a “Joe’ to them. Parents name their children— and sometimes children grow up and change their names: “Timothy” worked well for parents; “Timothy” grew up and really needed to be known as “Tim.”
Naming celestial objects, bridges, whales, hurricanes, pets and children is not something to be taken lightly. There’s a slippery slope, because I’m sure someone has brainstormed a revenue source that includes selling naming rights for a zoo’s new baby gorilla or tiger. And I’m sure there are weird news accounts where a person has offered to change his or her name in consideration for money or notoriety. “Hi, I’m Papa Murphy Smith. I’d like you to meet my wife, Frito-Lay Smith, and my kids, Pepsi and Mountain Dew Smith.”
Naming is a serious business because, done right, it gives something an identity, a connection to other named things. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge tells me what the bridge spans and the Deception Pass Bridge must be pretty spectacular, even before seeing it. I once knew “Young Dick” Pickering and “Old Dick Pickering. There was no way to get them confused and calling the wrong one at Pickering’s Sand and Gravel for a truckload of cement.
I like the way Carol Kaesuk Yoon, author of Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science, drilled down on what a serious business naming is in her New York Times column, “Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World”--
“No wonder so few of us can really see what is out there. Even when scads of insistent wildlife appear with a flourish right in front of us, and there is such life always — hawks migrating over the parking lot, great colorful moths banging up against the window at night — we barely seem to notice. We are so disconnected from the living world that we can live in the midst of a mass extinction, of the rapid invasion everywhere of new and noxious species, entirely unaware that anything is happening. Happily, changing all this turns out to be easy. Just find an organism, any organism, small, large, gaudy, subtle — anywhere, and they are everywhere — and get a sense of it, its shape, color, size, feel, smell, sound. Give a nod to Professor Franclemont and meditate, luxuriate in its beetle-ness, its daffodility. Then find a name for it. Learn science’s name, one of countless folk names, or make up your own. To do so is to change everything, including yourself. Because once you start noticing organisms, once you have a name for particular beasts, birds and flowers, you can’t help seeing life and the order in it, just where it has always been, all around you.”
No “Chuck E. Cheese’s” Bridge, thank you.
--Mike Sato
Two days after last Christmas, I woke up to the world spinning to my right and wanted to throw up. I spent the morning lying very still in bed and in the afternoon, after throwing up and being examined in the doctor’s office, I was informed that I was suffering from labyrinthitis.
The condition is an infection of the inner ear that affects the vestibular system which determines one’s balance. Crystalline protein-calcium carbonate granules — otoliths-- which weigh down a membrane in the inner ear’s saccule and utricle somehow get loose and screw up the sensations being transmitted via the ear and the eye to the brain about the head’s position. Hence the vertigo and the vomiting— like being badly seasick or carsick.
I spent the first week on steroids and anti-nausea pills staying as still as possible, cancelling a traditional New Year’s trip to Honolulu. I tried to explain to others what was causing the problem but the idea of “crystals” floating around in my head made it a bit strange to explain.
The second week I went to physical therapy where, after a series of questions and tests, I was told that the disorder was in the horizontal vestibular canal. I was placed on my back looking up at the ceiling, told to turn my head to the left (which made me very dizzy), told to hold my head to the left until the dizziness passed (it soon did), then to return to looking up then turning on to my right side, holding that position for 30 seconds, then turning on my belly and propping myself up on my elbows with my chin down on my chest.
We did that three times after which I was exhausted and sent home with instructions to sleep in a reclining position and not to bend over. I went home and slept all afternoon. I got up feeling a lot steadier.
Stacey, the physical therapist, said that the rotation routine— which I called her Ju Ju Man routine— was meant to reposition the otoliths — my “crystals”-- which had floated loose back to where they were. In describing the routine to an acquaintance who says she and her sister both suffer from periodic vertigo, I learned that the Ju Ju Man routine can be a lot more elaborate: her sister, she said, was treated by being strapped to a table which rotated her into the requisite positions that realigned her otoliths and was given a neck brace to wear to keep her head in the proper position until she recovered.
My mother, who has suffered from bouts of vertigo nearly all her life, greeted the news of my condition with, “Oh, you have the same thing I’ve had all my life.” I replied that, yes, that may be the case but the steroids and the anti-nausea pills helped and the physical therapy seemed to help, too. At 92, she said she can’t stand the pills and she’s learned to just live with her condition.
My brother, on the other hand, greeted the news with: “What, I now have one more thing in my genes to worry about?”
Which humbles me because if I were living on the savannah and came down with this condition, I’d be saber-tooth tiger dinner after dizzily wandering around. End of that genetic line, period. What’s so intelligent about an inner ear design as complicated as this to determine your balance like the one we have? Maybe you think yours is intelligently designed but I think mine is more the product of a busybody tinkerer relying on hit-or-miss, trial-and-error strategy.
Oh, hell, I’ll live with that.
--Mike Sato
Two days after last Christmas, I woke up to the world spinning to my right and wanted to throw up. I spent the morning lying very still in bed and in the afternoon, after throwing up and being examined in the doctor’s office, I was informed that I was suffering from labyrithitis.
The condition is an infection of the inner ear that affects the vestibular system which determines one’s balance. Crystalline protein-calcium carbonate granules — otoliths-- which weigh down a membrane in the inner ear’s saccule and utricle somehow get loose and screw up the sensations being transmitted via the ear and the eye to the brain about the head’s position. Hence the vertigo and the vomiting— like being badly seasick or carsick.
I spent the first week on steroids and anti-nausea pills staying as still as possible, cancelling a traditional New Year’s trip to Honolulu. I tried to explain to others what was causing the problem but the idea of “crystals” floating around in my head made it a bit strange to explain.
The second week I went to physical therapy where, after a series of questions and tests, I was told that the disorder was in the horizontal vestibular canal. I was placed on my back looking up at the ceiling, told to turn my head to the left (which made me very dizzy), told to hold my head to the left until the dizziness passed (it soon did), then to return to looking up then turning on to my right side, holding that position for 30 seconds, then turning on my belly and propping myself up on my elbows with my chin down on my chest.
We did that three times after which I was exhausted and sent home with instructions to sleep in a reclining position and not to bend over. I went home and slept all afternoon. I got up feeling a lot steadier.
Stacey, the physical therapist, said that the rotation routine— which I called her Ju Ju Man routine— was meant to reposition the otoliths — my “crystals”-- which had floated loose back to where they were. In describing the routine to an acquaintance who says she and her sister both suffer from periodic vertigo, I learned that the Ju Ju Man routine can be a lot more elaborate: her sister, she said, was treated by being strapped to a table which rotated her into the requisite positions that realigned her otoliths and was given a neck brace to wear to keep her head in the proper position until she recovered.
My mother, who has suffered from bouts of vertigo nearly all her life, greeted the news of my condition with, “Oh, you have the same thing I’ve had all my life.” I replied that, yes, that may be the case but the steroids and the anti-nausea pills helped and the physical therapy seemed to help, too. At 92, she said she can’t stand the pills and she’s learned to just live with her condition.
My brother, on the other hand, greeted the news with: “What, I now have one more thing in my genes to worry about?”
Which humbles me because if I were living on the savannah and came down with this condition, I’d be saber-tooth tiger dinner after dizzily wandering around. End of that genetic line, period. What’s so intelligent about an inner ear design as complicated as this to determine your balance like the one we have? Maybe you think yours is intelligently designed but I think mine is more the product of a busybody tinkerer relying on hit-or-miss, trial-and-error strategy.
Oh, hell, I’ll live with that.
--Mike Sato
Two weeks ago in Salish Sea News and Weather, I encouraged folks to read Paul Kingsnorth’s essay in Orion Magazine, “Dark Ecology: Searching for Truth in a post-green world.” It’s long but pretty provocative; it merits some discussion.
Like Bill McKibbon in The End of Nature, Kingsnorth laments our taming of Nature, the defanging of the self-willed Other that conservationist once sought to live in balance with, and replacing this Other with a utility system providing us with goods and services. The first 20 years of the modern environmental movement-- from the first Earth Day to the first Rio Summit in 1992-- were glory days, according to Kingsnorth. The next 20 years, exemplified at the second Rio Conference by non-governmental groups struggling and failing to find a common direction when facing major habitat losses, climate change and world economic downturns, Kingsnorth judges as steps toward the end of our natural world, thanks to our industrial-technological society.
“Progress” is an illusion; the new environmental technocrats, those he calls neo-environmentalists, will not save nature through technological solutions.
Kingsnorth: “If you think you can magic us out of the progress trap with new ideas or new technologies, you are wasting your time. If you think that the usual “campaigning” behavior is going to work today where it didn’t work yesterday, you will be wasting your time. If you think the machine can be reformed, tamed, or defanged, you will be wasting your time. If you draw up a great big plan for a better world based on science and rational argument, you will be wasting your time. If you try to live in the past, you will be wasting your time. If you romanticize hunting and gathering or send bombs to computer store owners, you will be wasting your time....”
Kingsnorth puts forth five things he can think he could do honestly in the post-green world he sees. Briefly: 1. Withdraw from the world; 2. Preserve non-human life; 3. Get your hands dirty; 4. Insist that nature has a value beyond utility; 5. Build refuges
Kingsnorth: “These are the things that make sense to me right now when I think about what is coming and what I can do, still, with some joy and determination. If you don’t feel despair, in times like these, you are not fully alive. But there has to be something beyond despair too; or rather, something that accompanies it, like a companion on the road. This is my approach, right now. It is, I suppose, the development of a personal philosophy for a dark time: a dark ecology. None of it is going to save the world—but then there is no saving the world, and the ones who say there is are the ones you need to save it from....”
In discussing this “dark ecology,” one reader wrote to me: “I taught an 8-week course on climate change a couple of years ago for the local Catholic Church, through their social justice program. The Catholic Archdiocese developed the curriculum, amazingly (those Jesuits are awesome). That course taught me just as much as the students who took it. I came away angry, depressed and then finally resigned to what I believe to be our fate - that the human race is going to become extinct in the next few hundred years, and we will take out most of the rest of the world's biodiversity along with us. Already, according to EO Wilson, we've eradicated almost 50% of the world's flora and fauna. That doesn't stop me from doing my best to make it be different, but I see all around me the unsustainability of this human-dominated world now. It just changed the way I see things utterly. There's no way this kind of life can continue. No way. First it pissed me off totally, but now, most of the time, I am set free. I think Gloria Steinem said that, actually: "The truth shall set you free, but first you're gonna be really pissed off."
I guess I, too, am pissed off if I’m honest about the arc of the last 40 years. I didn’t focus on the environment until the mid-80s having started out in activism against the war machine and organizing around land use and energy politics. What do we have to show for much of the time and effort spent trying to build a constituency that balances humans and wilderness in land use, energy and environment? Too often it is the sad shrug of, “It would have been worse if nothing had been done.” True, but that’s not going to bring back untamed wilderness, Nature as the self-willed Other, I’ve seen lost over and over the last 40 years. The only times when we notice Nature as the self-willed Other is when the earth quakes, the rivers flood and the seas rise over the shores. And we talk then of engineering and technological measures to keep Nature in her place. Sure, there’s a resilience in Nature because Nature is blindly fecund and will fill every niche when diversity declines. But damn it, I like whales and rockfish and auklets more than cockroaches and jellyfish— and I know what’s called “nature” will be different for my grandkids. It already is from what it was 40 years ago.
I won’t withdraw. I still get too much of an adrenal charge organizing around an issue and mobilizing people for socially redeeming causes. The days when it’s hard to get going are days when it’s clear we too often win a campaign but fail to sustain a culture of change. That’s a hard truth to face: that we need to build the kinds of communities that sustain the broad range of changes that we work towards in health, in food, in energy, in land use, in conservation, in art, in matters of the spirit.
That takes time and effort and that may well be as Kingsnorth concludes a waste of time. I don’t think so, at least I hope not. I think it’s a matter of survival, not saving the world. I’d add “compassion” to Kingsnorth’s “things to do” list: I will preserve human and non-human life. I will get my hands dirty. I will insist that nature has a value beyond utility. And I will build, if I can, or at least protect, a refuge, a wild place for the self-willed Other.
I’ve had a say here. I invite you to read Kingsnorth’s piece and share what you think.
--Mike Sato
Molly is, of course, my Molly Stevens, author of All About Roasting and All About Braising. And David is David Chang, wunderkind chef/founder of the Momofuku Food Group and co-author with Peter Meehan of the Momofuku Cookbook.
They met, figuratively, last weekend when I prepared a slow-cooked pork butt, the Momofuku Bo Ssam recipe’s piece de resistance, using Molly Stevens’ method for Faux Pork Barbecue (slow-roasted picnic shoulder) instead of the slow-roast method called for in the Chang/Meehan cookbook.
(I’d tried the Momofuku method in a test a couple of weekends earlier and couldn’t get the pork to “collapse” as described in the recipe so decided to use Molly’s method for the eight-pound bone-in shoulder, which had worked well on past occasions.)
Instead of salting and peppering the meat as Molly calls for, I prepped it the Momofuku way with a generous layer of sugar and salt and let it sit overnight in the refrigerator. Next morning, after an hour out of the refrigerator, the meat— per Molly— went in the oven at 450-degrees for 30 minutes, then slow-cooked at 250-degrees for about seven hours until the meat pulled apart easily and the meat pulled away from the bone.
From there it was all Momofuku: an hour’s rest for the meat while the appetizer of steamed butter clams was prepared and served and the Bo Ssam condiments were readied: butter lettuce leaves for wrapping, white steamed rice, kimchi (salted napa cabbage), a ssam sauce of ssamjang (fermented bean/chili paste) and kochujang chili paste with oil and vinegar, and a chopped scallion/fresh ginger sauce with oil and soy sauce and vinegar. I also got a few small oysters for the intrepid to wrap up in lettuce with their pork.
Just in case the idea or the execution of eating the pork, rice, kimchi and condiments wrapped in lettuce proved too challenging, my son David grilled some marinated and skewered chicken tenders on the frozen deck and brought them in to be served with some homemade satay sauce.
The last step was to layer brown sugar over the cooked pork and blast the pork in a 500-degree oven for about 10 minutes until the sugar caramelized and formed a burnt crust. (Molly would have loved that final act of ‘blasting.’)
Once done, it was a simple matter of shredding the pork and serving it up as the centerpiece of the table, surrounded by the lettuce, rice and condiments and the side dish of skewered chicken tenders with satay sauce.
I gave a quick demonstration of wrapping up the goodies in the lettuce leaf and we had a good time at the table passing things back and forth and finding how delicately balanced the sauces were with the sweet and salty pork and the blandness of the rice and the refreshing freshness of the lettuce. I think everyone passed on the raw oysters— but the oysters were enjoyed the next night in a Hangtown Fry.
Bon appetit, Molly and David!
--Mike Sato
 |
| Col. Tony Wright |
Puget Sound Partnership Executive Director Tony Wright took the helm of the agency charged with restoring the Sound to health late last July and yesterday sent a letter to us announcing his return to the private sector.
Wright wrote: “With the new year and a new governor come other changes here at the Puget Sound Partnership. Last summer when I took a leave of absence from my company, Normandeau Associates, to lead the Partnership into a season of action, I made a commitment that I would return. That time is near....During my time here, I have pushed to reorganize the Partnership for action and implementation with the goal of tangible progress for Puget Sound recovery.”
Al Bergstein in his Olympic Peninsula Environmental News blog yesterday wrote: “This is quite shocking news. Mr. Wright only took the helm of the Partnership last summer, after the resignation of Gerry O”Keefe, who himself had not been in the ED role for very long. In meeting with members of the Marine Resource Committee members at their annual conference last winter, Mr. Wright was all a bundle of fire, an excellent motivational speaker. He left the distinct taste that this was a man who was going to get things done. About the only thing he appears to have done, is reorganized the Partnership."
Wright is a retired Army Corps of Engineers colonel who took the directorship with the understanding that he’d be at Partnership for the duration of Governor Christine Gregoire’s term in office. But he was a good, top-level choice to lead the often foundering agency.
“He has a reputation as a straight shooter who's not out to please everybody. Before he got this job, he told the Partnership it needed more courage if it wants to save Puget Sound. He says he's not afraid to ‘embrace the porcupine,’" reported KUOW’s John Ryan in late July. Said Wright: "My previous job, I frequently tried to make everyone kind of equally unhappy. You can't solve difficult problems from a distance. You have to get in there, become part of the solution and sometimes you get stuck with quills in the process."
Martha Kongsgaard, chair of the Puget Sound Partnership Leadership Council, told Craig Welch of The Seattle Times when Wright took on leading the Partnership that the governor hired Wright because she wanted the agency to have a much-higher profile.
"I think the governor wanted to energize us," Kongsgaard said. "She wanted to put some new focus and oomph in the partnership and have it be a little, maybe, nosier, so that her legacy has a better chance of surviving through many governors.
"Tony's a well-known guy who has come in his fatigues and said some pretty strong things about what it's going to take to recover the Sound," she said.
"He's got the street cred of being a serious Army Corps fellow who stuck his neck out a lot in this region and was listened to. He can go toe to toe with anyone. He's a doer."
Today, Martha Kongsgaard wrote:
“We are all very sorry that Col. Wright isn't able to remain in the crucial position of Executive Director of the Puget Sound Partnership because, as was said, his tenure brought heft and passion and vision to this enormous effort. What was not said and may not be widely known is that he came out of the private sector at the request of Governor Gregoire whom he greatly admires and promised to stay with her through her term.
“On the other end of that pledge, he promised his business partner, a war comrade, that he would be back at his firm by winter, and here we are. He has helped reenergize the effort with great skill and vitality. Puget Sound recovery has long been his passion. What he perhaps did not count on is that the job of ED would become a formidable vehicle for the pursuit of same. And so here we are in an imperfect place - he is very torn, but he has an obligation, is loyal, and will be true to his word. It is his intent to remain into Gov. Inslee's term long enough to enable a smooth transition, especially during the legislative session.
“The job of ED at the Partnership is an enormously important one and of course the churn of ED traffic is at best distracting to the public and the remarkable staff. But make no mistake, there is more to the PSP than the Director. The 40+ staff members continue to carry out the serious central core work of our mission with great technical savvy and passionate inspiration and will continue to do so regardless of Gubernatorial transitions or appointments. And as we all recognize, this work does not have an end date - it will require all of us, out generations, with many more ED's, to work vigilantly together.”
OK, maybe this is just part of the process but there’s too much at stake without the kind of leadership Tony Wright was capable of providing. Martha asks that we all help Governor Inslee fill this important position. There’s also the position of director of the state Department of Ecology that Governor Inslee needs to fill.
Where ARE we heading and who is going to lead us there? As Craig Welch notes in his July article on Tony Wright, the leadership of Puget Sound Partnership is especially critical at this time: “The agency's two biggest champions, Gov. Chris Gregoire and U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Bremerton — who as former chair of the House Appropriations Committee steered millions of dollars toward Puget Sound work — are both leaving office this year. Details about the agency's work often appear complicated and murky to the public.”
Who leads the Partnership and Ecology becomes even more critical given the GOP-control of the state Senate this session. I’m sure there are good staff at the Partnership although I can’t tell how well they have been reorganized by Tony Wright “for action and implementation with the goal of tangible progress for Puget Sound recovery” by looking at the staff roster.
Somebody with “street cred” willing to “embrace the porcupine” and can “go toe to toe with anyone” needs to lead and take action to restore the Sound. Without that, we lose Puget Sound.
--Mike Sato
Update: The State of Washington Joint Legislative Audit & Review Committee (JLARC) briefing report on PSP’S (the Puget Sound Partnership) 2012 Action Agenda Update finds that “Revised Approach Continues to Lack Key Accountability Tools Envisioned in Statute” January 23, 2013
Specifically in three areas:
- The Action Agenda Does Not Link Actions to the Amount of Progress They Will Make Towards the Long-Term Restoration Goals Established by the Legislature
- Actions are Not Prioritized to Meet Long-Term Restoration Goals
- Monitoring Data Is Not Available to Facilitate Adaptive Management
I’m heartened that President Obama has maintained the urgency of dealing with the public health issue of gun violence by taking the executive actions within his presidential powers and by proposing that Congress pass legislation and fund closing background check loopholes, banning military-style assault weapons and sales of magazines of more than 10 rounds, increasing police protection at our schools and on our streets, and increasing access to mental health services. These measures don’t infringe on rights afforded law-abiding gun owners; these measures balance those Second Amendment rights with our rights to life, liberty and happiness. I’m going to ask Washington senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell and my Second Congressional District representative Rick Larsen to support the President on this public health and safety issue. Here’s what I’m writing to them (individually) today:
Dear Senator Patty Murray, Senator Maria Cantwell , Representative Rick Larsen :
Gun violence is a public health and safety concern that touches all our lives as community members, parents and grandparents. I support President Obama’s proposals for reducing gun violence by closing background check loopholes, banning military-style assault weapons and sales of magazines of more than 10 rounds, increasing police protection at our schools and on our streets, and increasing access to mental health services. These measures don’t infringe on rights afforded law-abiding gun owners; these measures balance those Second Amendment rights with our rights to life, liberty and happiness.
As a Washington state citizen and voter in the Second Congressional District, I ask that you give your full support and do all you can to assure House and Senate passage of the President’s proposals. Thank you. Mike Sato
There. Now, how about you writing?
--Mike Sato
It’s been a bit of a strange few days since the end of the old year and the beginning of the new-- being homebound because of an illness, watching our government turn itself inside out over a fiscal crisis, considering the usual constellation of resolutions to make myself a better person in the year to come. A reflective period, as it were.
I read Eric Klineberg’s article, “Adaptation,” in this week’s issue of The New Yorker, subtitled “How can cities be ‘climate-proofed’?” In addition to the engineering and technological ‘fixes’ he reviews in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Klineberg describes the mortality rate among different neighborhoods in the 1995 summer heat wave that savaged Chicago and killed 739 people.
Subsequent studies showed that mortality was consistent with Chicago’s demographics of segregation and inequality: eight of 10 areas with the highest death rates were African-American, characterized by concentrated poverty and violent crime. But: three of the 10 neighborhoods with the lowest heat-wave death rates were also poor, violent and predominantly African-American. The difference, in part, was people living more as a community in one, looking out for each other.
Building community ties so that residents know which of their neighbors are vulnerable and how to assist them can become a low-cost tactic applicable to natural disaster and climate-change survival strategies.
In the ‘70s, I lived on an island where we did know, for better or worse, a lot more about each other’s lives. We sat around in the long, dark winter nights fantasizing about how we would survive if the military-industrial society on the mainland were to collapse. It didn't and we tended to bicker a lot-- but we were pretty good about thinking about ourselves as a community and responded well when the occasion arose.
I'm now a townie and, more recently, I’d spent some time thinking about where my communities were heading after Robert Putnam wrote his book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Writing at the turn of this century, Putnam found civic participation in organizations in decline. Using the example of bowling, Putnam describes how the number of people bowling has increased but the number of people bowling in leagues has decreased. Community, if it continues, will be bound together in a different way than by engagement in civil organizations.
Rather abstract for the first week of the new year— but here’s the test I put to myself about me in my neighborhood: If a major natural disaster were to occur, who would need help? What skills and resources do I have that would be of value to our neighborhood? What are the skills and resources— and needs— of this neighborhood? I know Nick and Leta, Jackie, Jason and Whitney, Phil and Cynthia, Steve, Brook, and Laura— but who are all those other people?
What would make us a community rather than a neighborhood? I don’t think I will volunteer to keep the survival rations for everyone in my garage but it would at least help, as a first step, to know who folks are— and for them to know who I am.
A good resolution for the new year. I may be bowling alone but I don’t want to die alone.
--Mike Sato
