Features

Dispatches from Jury Duty: Los Angeles County

GOOD — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:30:56 PST

Serving on a jury is-aside from paying taxes-the most tangible connection that our citizens have to their government. We asked people to share their experiences as temporary civil servants. This is the first.

I am listening to a 10-year-old girl list the ages of her five siblings, the names of her 4th and 5th grade teachers, and the gifts she received last Christmas. She is answering questions from a man she first met three minutes ago. Her father is also in the room. His name is Francis Dillon.

My role in this conversation has nothing to do with my occupation, and I did not volunteer to be here. The man asking the questions is a city prosecutor, and he is representing the "people" in People vs. Francis Dillon. This prosecutor alleges that Francis Dillon pushed his girlfriend to the ground and punched her three times in the face during a dispute over an alleged infidelity. I'm here because 233 years ago it was written down as law that the only people who can determine whether this prosecutor is correct are myself and 11 other citizens of this city who know nothing about Mr. Dillon's family, the law, or one another. And we all just want to back to our jobs.

Trial by jury in America predates America, originating when the early colonies were burgeoning outposts of the British crown. As tension grew between the colonies and their motherland, the British revoked trial by jury and appointed magistrates with sole authority to determine culpability. This was fresh in the minds of those who drafted our original bill of rights, and innocence until proven guilt and the right to a trial by a jury of peers became cornerstones of our grand experiment.

None of this could have been further from my mind as I trek downtown for the mandated 7:45 a.m. call time. I follow a stream of people heading for the elevator. Rarely does one enter an elevator and know that everyone else in it was brought there for the same reason. Customary elevator etiquette does not apply here. Someone with a sense of humor starts humming "America, The Beautiful." Others join in. It's like taking an elevator to Hell, but we're all intent on doing our damndest to make the best of it.

Someone starts a conversation about how they simply cannot be selected for a jury trial today because they are desperately needed at their place of employment. Everyone within earshot echoes the sentiment, and in a game of one-upsmanship, we all go around and state what we do for a living and why our respective universes are in peril if we can't return to work posthaste. The only convincing claim comes from Sharon, the lone statistical analyst on a cancer research project at USC. If she gets chosen to sit on a trial, it will literally slow down the rate at which we as a people understand cancer and its causes. None of us can top this; we all politely retract our complaints.

By this time we are on the ground floor of the courthouse, navigating the maze of tensabarriers that lead to metal detectors and X-ray machines. The jury summons had warned us that we would be subject to "airport-style" security procedures. The primary difference between courthouse security and airport security, though, is that it doesn't seem to matter if these metal detectors go off; everybody sets off these metal detectors. Metal-seeking wands are waved, but the beeps they produce don't seem a cause for concern.

The details of the trial are always the first thing people want to hear, but I will not dwell on them here. Briefly: The victim of the alleged assault-and the defendant's daughter, who witnessed it-both testify before us that no such assault occurred. The testimonies make it clear that at least half the people were lying under oath, and as a jury, we have to do our best to sort through the parts we believe to be true, and evaluate those parts with respect to the law as it has been explained to us.

After nine hours of deliberation, we find the defendant guilty of the highest offense being charged: domestic battery causing a traumatic condition.

After reentering the courtroom, the judge asks if we had reached a unanimous verdict. I tell him we have. He asks me to give the verdict forms to the bailiff. The bailiff then brings them to the judge, and the judge opens the envelope. He passes a single sheet to the clerk of the court and asks her to please read our verdict. The preamble on the form seems a lot longer than I recall. Finally, the word "guilty" is spoken.

The defendant displays no emotion, and says nothing.

After a few brief words from the judge, and with his thanks, we are dismissed.

As we exit the courtroom, a polite young woman asks if we have any feedback for the defense attorney: He passed the bar exam a few weeks ago and this was his first case to go to trial, she explains. The victim and the 10-year-old girl we'd seen on the stand are also in the hallway, seated a few feet away.

After we're done providing our feedback, the victim shouts at those of us still in the hallway. She demands to know how we could find her boyfriend guilty after she had testified that no assault had even happened. She demands to know why we would try to break up her family.

Guest blogger Chris Butterick is the director of operations at GOOD. Do you have your own story about what it was like to serve on a jury? Send your thoughts and feelings about the experience to submissions (at) goodinc (dot) com.

Image (CC) by Flickr user David Gallagher

The ABCs of Struggling Schools

Michael Salmonowicz — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 06:00:37 PST

Why literacy is at the heart of the problems that plague our lowest-performing public schools.

Imagine if you went to your doctor's office with a heavy cough, and upon examining you the doctor said, "Well, the problem seems to be that you have a cough." It's likely that you would be unsatisfied with her diagnosis. After all, you knew as much when you were at home in bed.

Unfortunately, this example of bad doctoring is exactly what happens every day in discussions about our country's struggling schools. Journalists, commentators, parents, and even educators mistake symptoms for causes, as exemplified by these common refrains: "Well, of course the kids won't learn if they don't come to school." And "If students didn't act up so much in class and paid attention more maybe they'd have better grades." And "Can you believe how many kids drop out every year in [insert school or district]?"

Attendance, behavior, and dropout rate seem to be three of the main culprits when people talk about schools or school districts where many students are not doing well on annual state tests. But these are in fact symptoms. In order to prevent students from skipping school, misbehaving, or leaving school altogether, we need to know why these problems are happening in the first place. I submit that the root cause of all three of these problems, and many others, is weak literacy. Therefore, when Arne Duncan talks about "turnaround schools," what I hear is "schools that are populated by students who struggle when it comes to reading."

As I noted in my recent article on school turnaround in the Phi Delta Kappan, our research team at the University of Virginia learned that of the problematic conditions present in 19 struggling Virginia elementary and middle schools, low reading achievement was the only one found in every school. While serving as director of the reading development team at a turnaround high school in Chicago last year, I found that 60% of students were reading on or below a sixth-grade level. Just over 20% of our students were reading on or below a fourth-grade level, and half of them were freshmen-presumably because most struggling readers in the upper grades had dropped out of school already.

When Arne Duncan talks about "turnaround schools," what I hear is "schools that are populated by students who struggle when it comes to reading."

It makes sense. If you struggled to read the books and handouts in your classes, or couldn't make heads or tails of what your teachers were talking about, why would you come to school every day and endure hours of frustration and failure? And if you were worried that your teachers or classmates might find out you struggled with reading, wouldn't acting out in class be a good way to ensure their focus was on something other than your academic skills? It is in this way that weak literacy skills are at the root of the problems that end up being so visible in our public schools.

So why isn't literacy a focal point in conversations about underperforming schools? One reason is that the effects of the problem do not reveal themselves until long after they begin. Just as it may take years of unhealthy eating and smoking before a heart attack occurs, a student who begins struggling with reading as a fourth grader may be able to get by for a few years before any serious problems emerge. (I use the example of a fourth-grade student because that is when students move from learning to read to reading to learn.) If a student sees a decline in report card grades from all Bs in grades 1-3, to Bs and Cs in grade 4, to mostly Cs in grades 5 and 6, and to all Cs and a few Ds in grades 7 and 8, it may be too gradual for anyone to become alarmed or even take notice. By the time red flags go up in November of his freshman year-when his first quarter report card comes back with Ds and Fs, accompanied by reports of his skipping school, talking back to his teachers, and getting in fights-it's too late for prevention. The heart attack has struck.

One factor that contributes to literacy problems flying under the radar is that oral language does not necessarily reflect how well one reads. Jacques Demers, a well-known coach and general manager in the National Hockey League for over 20 years, did not reveal he was illiterate until he was 60 years old. In an interview he gave after going public with the news, Demers explained, "I took to protecting myself. You put a wall around yourself. And when I was given the possibility of talking, I could speak well and I think that really saved me." Similarly, students can acquire and use the language needed to survive in school without being able to read that language in a textbook. An adult may have an interaction with a nearly illiterate child and not even know it.

Another reason literacy is not a focal point is that issues like attendance, behavior, and dropout rate fit into the average person's mental model of how the world works. Everyone understands what it means to not show up when you're supposed to, to misbehave, or to quit. Struggling with literacy, on the other hand, is much harder to understand and does not lend itself to simple explanations.

In order to talk about the problems stemming from weak literacy skills, what the general public would need to consider is what goes on in that hypothetical student's head during fourth grade, when he can't quite keep up with classmates when reading and comprehending a passage from the textbook. Does he want to ask for help? Is he embarrassed? Does he realize that he is falling behind? With what aspects of literacy is he struggling? And in sixth grade, as the problem compounds, does he not enjoy school as much? Can he comprehend the work he is expected to do in class? Does he know what kind of support it would take to get him back on track? As high school begins, does David act out in order to take attention away from academic deficits? Does he feel so far behind that he stops coming every day, biding his time until age 16 when he can drop out? Although parents, teachers, and the public may attribute his failing high school grades to poor attendance and bad behavior, in actuality his weak literacy skills were exposed. He was able to pull decent grades in elementary and middle school, but the work became progressively harder and by high school he could not keep up.

Even if dropout rates and school fights are visible and show up in the local paper or on the evening news, it is important for all of us to understand the vast difference between causes and symptoms of low-performing schools. Acknowledging, educating ourselves about, and addressing the primary cause of these problems-weak literacy skills-is essential if we hope to see our students and schools improve.

Give Us Something Other Than Suicide To Talk About

Damien Stankiewicz — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:00:47 PST

Five years ago, a friend and I watched as maintenance workers drilled eight-foot tall, half inch-thick pieces of Plexiglas into the sides of the railings at New York University's Bobst Library.

The railings, which encircle the library's central atrium, weren't high enough to prevent students from climbing over them-and where, from the library's tenth floor, they would tumble to their death.

Since 2002, there have been at least 10 suicides at NYU The most recent ended the promising career of a 37-year-old computer science professor, Sam Roweis, who jumped from his university-owned apartment on Tuesday night.

While all universities struggle with suicide, and while NYU's suicides are no more frequent than those that occur at a number of other large research universities, ours nevertheless seem to feel more public, more scrutinized.

NYU, much like the city itself, is a place where the sheer number and density of people lathers tragic events like these into a kind of anxious foam. In the days or weeks after a suicide, there is a kind of perverse, gossipy attention, as if it were all that NYU had to talk about.

There are few shared conversations, little in the way of social structure to cobble together the 16 schools and 50,000 students that make up NYU Unfortunately, the university is not a "close knit community, a large community of small communities," which President John Sexton evoked last fall in an email to the NYU student body following Andrew Williamson-Noble's suicide.

Part of the difficulty, of course, is that the university's "campus" is more or less a series of purple NYU banners used to distinguish otherwise ordinary city blocks. Absent are quads and green spaces that allow for shared social interaction. But the larger issue is simply the issue of size: NYU is huge. Its bureaucracy can be formidable, and its students, perhaps even its professors, often feel lost in the fray.

So what really connects people at NYU, then? What might bring awkward freshmen, junior faculty, and administrators into a conversation about what they share, their common interests, their similar experiences, and especially, why they are willing to subject themselves to wearing such an awful shade of bright purple?

NYU is, in fact, an extraordinary place with great potential for bringing together students from extraordinarily diverse backgrounds and walks of life; this is what I've always loved about teaching here. Many of my students have thrived in the frenetic energy of the university and its ultra-urban locale. And I've loved my doctoral program, finding ample support within my department.

But the Plexiglas barriers reveal much about the extent of its problem and the university's misguided attempts to somehow compel order.

NYU needs to respond to the issue of its largeness not by fencing in its students, or offering ad hoc solutions like extended hours at the student counseling center, but by emphasizing what makes the university great, and how its students, faculty, and administration can feel to be a cohesive unit.

We need to think about what we share, why caring for one another not only alleviates some of the anonymity that abets suicide, but creates a community held together by common beliefs and values. One thing we might celebrate is the great diversity of our backgrounds, economic and otherwise. Another might be NYU's identity as a private university whose emphasis is on social justice and public service.

And while I respect President Sexton's message to NYU last fall that "you belong in and are part of a community that cherishes your presence, you are loved," the words ring false for anyone who ever has stood in a crowded line at the Silver Center, where most of the undergraduate courses are held, waiting for an elevator-a crowd of people who seems to have more or less nothing to say to one another.

We need something to talk about other than the latest suicide or administrative attempt to stave them off. NYU needs to work on constructing a community with a deeper sense of shared purpose-well before it needs to erect more Plexiglas barriers.

Damien Stankiewicz is completing his Ph.D. in NYU's Department of Anthropology.

Image of Bobst Library via David Silver's photostream at Flickr

Engineering a Better Climate

Tom McNichol — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 09:00:23 PST

Aerosol particles, seawater mist, and transparent screens in space-can these seemingly madcap geo-engineering ideas be the answer to global warming?

Everybody talks about global warming but nobody does anything about it.

Well, almost nobody.

While world leaders bicker about how to slow the pace of global climate change, some scientists are proposing audacious global engineering schemes that would actually reverse the effects of global warming. The proposals sound like chapters from a half-baked science-fiction thriller, but today's science fiction may become tomorrow's global energy policy-particularly if the earth's climate system abruptly changes for the worse.

The National Academy of Sciences and Britain's Royal Society are preparing reports on the possible benefits and dangers of global climate engineering, and the Obama administration has promised to at least consider such plans. One recent study, by researchers Dr. Eric J. Bickel and Lee Lane, contends that we could cancel out this century's global warming by spending about $9 billion on climate engineering, and that such an approach could benefit the planet as much as carbon cuts, at a fraction of the cost.

But critics say that tinkering with the earth's climate could have unforeseen and disastrous consequences, and that such would-be climate "fixes" deflect attention from harder truths: the need to make sharp cuts in carbon emissions.

Here's a look at some of the leading climate engineering proposals-and some possible of their problems:

Proposal: Release aerosol particles into the atmosphere to reflect solar radiation back into space.

How It Would Work: A concentrated stream of sulfur dioxide particles released into the troposphere and lower stratosphere would reproduce the effects of volcanic eruptions such as that of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, which was followed by a global cooling of about 1 degree Fahrenheit. The effects of an aerosol release would gradually dissipate as the particles fell back to Earth, just as the sulphate from volcanoes eventually disperse. Keeping the planet cooled with aerosol releases would cost an estimated $30 billion per year if the particles were fired from military artillery guns, or $8 billion annually if delivered by aircraft, according to a recent report by a climate engineering study group sponsored by the nonprofit Novim Group. The study's authors say the aerosol scheme could be tested on a small scale-say, an experiment to cool a small portion of the Arctic-before being implemented globally.

Possible Problems: The planet's climate system might be too complex-and the unintended consequences too dire-for the aerosol plan to be considered safe. Aerosol releases could make matters worse if the particles don't dissipate as quickly as anticipated. Even a closely monitored aerosol release would likely affect different areas of the planet in varying ways, greatly increasing international tensions between climate "winners" and "losers." An aerosol release program costing billions of dollars would be seen by some as a convenient substitute for reductions in greenhouse gas emission, undercutting efforts to deal with the root causes of the climate change problem. A small-scale experimental release of aerosols might not yield clear results, and would need to be observed for a long time in order to produce meaningful data.

Proposal: Spray seawater mist from ships into low-lying clouds to cool the Earth.

How it Would Work: This scheme, sometimes called "marine cloud whitening," would shoot an extremely fine mist of sea spray into low clouds so that the clouds become brighter and reflect more sunlight away from Earth. This cloud-brightening technology was deemed the most promising form of climate engineering in the aforementioned study by Bickel and Lane. Preliminary calculations by the researchers show that marine cloud whitening could produce enough cooling to offset a doubling of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, at a cost of no more than $9 billion. Compared to sulphur dioxide aerosol releases, marine cloud whitening is considered less risky, since it introduces natural sea spray into the air, and the particles would precipitate quickly.

Possible Problems: Besides the danger of unintended consequences inherent in any planetary-scale climate engineering plan, marine cloud whitening faces potential technical and political problems. No one has come up with a practical way to produce a seawater aerosol of the required volume and concentration, or developed a reliable device to launch the spray into low-lying clouds. A large flotilla of ships numbering in the thousands would have to be deployed across the globe to spray the sea mist, and disputes are likely among countries over the coverage area and who gets to define what the optimum climate should be.

Proposal: Install arrays of pulsed lasers at mountain altitudes that would selectively destroy chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere and reduce the greenhouse effect.

How it Would Work: A National Academy of Sciences study team looked into the laser idea in the 1990s. A large array of pulsed lasers deployed on mountain peaks would focus intense infrared beams into the troposphere. The lasers would selectively destroy chlorofluorocarbons through a process known as multiphoton dissociation, a technique that fragments gas molecules.

Possible Problems: The laser proposal hasn't advanced much beyond the idea stage. No one has come up with a workable plan to build and install a laser array, or determined how many lasers would be needed and at what cost. The National Academy of Sciences study into climate engineering technologies couldn't put a price tag on the laser plan, and warned that climate-changing technologies should not be implemented "without careful assessment of their direct and indirect consequences."

Proposal: Deploy an array of space-based sun shields that would focus small amounts of the sun's light away from Earth.

How it Would Work: The idea of using an array of screens in space has been kicking around for more than a decade. The latest proposal comes from the University of Arizona astronomer and optics expert Roger Angel, who suggests launching of a vast network of two-foot wide thin transparent disks into orbit above the earth. Each disk would act as lens, collecting a small amount of the sun's energy and focusing it away from Earth. The units would feature tilting reflecting panels and solar-powered positioning controls to help prevent collisions. Angel's proposed sun shield array-to be deployed if climate change takes a sudden turn for the worse-would cut incoming sunlight by an estimated 1.8 percent, and counteract the warming expected from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Possible Problems: Even Angel admits that his plan would require a stupendous number of sun shields-as many as 16 trillion refractors flying in formation over an area of nearly 3 million square miles. Even if such an ambitious plan was successfully deployed, it would be almost impossible to ensure that some screens wouldn't fail and fall back to Earth. Such a technically complex array of reflectors would inevitably be funded and controlled by a few major powers, but everyone would suffer the consequences.

Proposal: Capture and remove carbon dioxide already in the air through a variety of "carbon scrubbing" techniques.

How it Would Work: Carbon scrubbing is by far the most predictable form of climate engineering. It doesn't introduce foreign substances into the atmosphere, but rather aims to clean the air that's already there. One proposed carbon scrubbing technique is to build so-called "synthetic trees"-high-tech towers with specially designed resin filters that capture CO2 in the air and collect it for later processing or storage. Klaus Lackner, a geophysicist at Columbia, says that while the technology is expensive (about $30,000 per tower), the first synthetic trees could be up and running within about two years.

Possible Problems: Capturing CO2 after it has been released into the atmosphere will never be as effective as capturing it at the source or preventing it from being emitted in the first place. A Royal Society scientist estimated that millions of CO2 scrubbers would have to be deployed to make a significant dent in global warming, at a cost of about $20 trillion. The enormous amount of money needed to scrub the atmosphere of considerable amounts of CO2 would be better spent on reducing or eliminating carbon emissions in the first place.

The Blind Side's Blind Spot

Michael Salmonowicz — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 06:00:37 PST

Taking stock of what Hollywood left out of The Blind Side: That we all have the power and responsibility to help others.

Last month saw the release of The Blind Side, a movie starring Sandra Bullock that is based on real-life events involving a homeless high school student-Michael Oher-and the family that took him in. The Tuohy family helped Oher graduate from high school and get into college, where he became a star left tackle for the University of Mississippi football team before being chosen in the first round of the NFL draft in 2009. (The movie is based on Michael Lewis's book, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game; for the short version, read Lewis's 2006 New York Times Magazine story on Michael Oher.)

It's safe to say that this is an uplifting story; the review from E! Online states that "at the end of the movie…You feel good." So how could I possibly leave the theater feeling otherwise? Well, I was concerned people might walk away thinking things like, "It's so good to know that even in this rough time, there are people who do things for others that become life changing"-as one commenter did online. Notice the word choice: "There are people." This view of good works as distant events-things that other people are doing-is dispiriting and worrisome.

Many have poked fun at President Obama's oft-repeated campaign line, "We are the ones we've been waiting for," but it actually carries a positive and true message that applies here. We can't sit around and hope that a wealthy family like the Tuohys will step up and help a child in need. The rest of us can do it, too. Of course, not everyone can take a child into their home and provide food, clothing, and a private tutor. But most adults can volunteer to tutor a struggling elementary school student after school, or mentor a middle schooler as she deals with the challenges of adolescence, or help a high school junior prepare for the SAT and the college admissions process. Regularly spending time with a student, especially over an extended period of time, can make a profound impact on her or his life.

We can't sit around and hope that a wealthy family will step up and help a child in need. The rest of us can do it, too.

From a moral perspective, this is the right thing to do. When children have positive role models and experience healthy interactions with adults, they have a better chance at a happy and successful life. But from a purely economic perspective, it is the intelligent thing to do. When children do not have positive adult interactions growing up, they are more likely to drop out of school and/or end up involved with gangs, drugs, and crime. A recent story in the Chicago Tribune cited the work of researchers Jens Ludwig (University of Chicago) and Philip Cook (Duke University), who "found that each crime-related gunshot wound costs society 'on the order of $1 million.' That includes such things as the expense of building prisons, taxes spent on policing and money for private security systems installed because of fear of crime." Meanwhile, for all the talk of how expensive the proposed health care bill might cost (between $80-90 billion per year), our country seems to have resigned itself to the fact that it's necessary to spend $60 billion per year on federal, state, and local corrections.

Providing students with extra guidance can go a long way toward preventing negative behaviors and consequences in the future. Dr. David Jewison, a family medicine physician and former Chicago Public Schools teacher, explained to me a few years ago how he had come to make sense of what he saw in his classroom and his clinic. "It's all about making choices. Many kids have never had good role models who they saw making good choices-which are often more difficult initially to make and accept-and they therefore don't know how to think through tough situations and make good choices themselves."

Unfortunately, those who might understand most what kids need are doing the least volunteering. According to a September, 2008, release from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 21.4 percent of adults-and just 17.6 percent of men-ages 20-34 were involved in volunteer activities during the previous year, compared with 30.6 percent of adults ages 35-54. Surprisingly, one third of adults with a child under age 18 spent time volunteering, while less than one quarter of adults without a child under age 18 did. Finally, although people with a bachelor's degree (or beyond) were more likely to volunteer than people at other education levels, 58 percent of them did not.

Understanding that these numbers can't tell the whole story, what we see generally is that millions of people who are young, college-educated, and without parenting responsibilities are not volunteering their time and talents. Where do we go from here? First, it is important to acknowledge that people who are not volunteering probably are not reading GOOD and will not get this message unless it is delivered to them. We cannot wait for someone else to deliver the message; it is up to us. I encourage you to talk to one person in your life who currently is not spending time volunteering. Approach that person with an idea or an opportunity that fits her or his skill set and interests-perhaps at a school serving low-income students, or with Big Brothers Big Sisters or Upward Bound-and present a compelling case about how that person's talents can make a meaningful difference in a child's life. If you encounter resistance, remember, many have never thought of themselves as a mentor or teacher. They are saddled with the "there are people" mindset. It's our job to convince them that, yes, there are people…and we are those people.

Michael Salmonowicz is a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education and a contributing writer for trueslant.com. He spent three years as a high school teacher on Chicago's west and south sides and continues to mentor a number of his former students. He can be reached at michael.salmonowicz@gmail.com.

The Music Class

Justin Vogt — Mon, 7 Dec 2009 07:00:38 PST

With school funding slashed from coast to coast, a new program is aiming to do for music education what the Peace Corps did for international service. We visited New Orleans to see how the experiment is going.

Twenty third-graders file into a brightly lit classroom at Langston Hughes Academy in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans. Though it is just one of the dozens of charter schools that now enroll 60 percent of the city's students, the just-completed $27-million academy is the first new school to be built in the city since Hurricane Katrina. The gleaming glass-and-brick structure towers over the modest single-family homes that line the streets of the still-recovering area.

Wearing uniforms of grey slacks, white button-down shirts, and red cardigans, the students take their seats on the floor, their eyes lingering on the electronic keyboards lining one side of the room. Facilities and equipment like this are a far cry from what they're used to: over 90 percent of the school's students are African-Americans from households that fall below the poverty line.

At the head of the classroom stands David Pulphus, a 36-year-old New Orleans-based jazz bassist who is serving as their music teacher this year. Pulphus is teaching at Langston Hughes as part of a new national service initiative called MusicianCorps. Created by a nonprofit called Music National Service, the project is designed to be a "musical Peace Corps," offering musicians fellowships in exchange for taking year-long community service positions, mostly as music teachers in disadvantaged neighborhoods. And this fall, Pulphus and 20 other MusicianCorps fellows began working in New Orleans, Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco.

"Tah-tah tee-tee-tah," sings Pulphus, holding up a placard showing the phrase rendered in musical notation.

"Tah-tah TEE-TEE-TAH!" the kids roar back.

"A lot of social justice work is addressing problems associated with exclusion: poverty, injustice, racism. And music is about connecting people and bringing people together."

Pulphus tries to lead the students in basic scales and simple rhythmic phrases, clapping and singing in a call-and-response. But he spends most of his time trying to get the kids to focus on him instead of rolling around on the floor, talking to each other, or fighting. He sends a few of the more rambunctious boys out of the room, but that doesn't seem to help much.

The unruliness persists until Pulphus announces, "I'm looking for scholars to go to the keyboard." Suddenly the children sit up, ramrod-straight, and the room falls silent. Pulphus sighs and smiles. He's counting on reactions like that to get him through the rest of the year.

Music National Service was founded by Kiff Gallagher, a musician and self-described "social entrepreneur." During the Clinton administration, Gallagher worked in the White House as part of a small team of advisers tasked with crafting the legislation to create AmeriCorps, the federal community-service program. But he left his promising career in public policy to move to the West Coast and focus full-time on making soul-inflected pop music. A few years later, still feeling unfulfilled, he decided to combine his passion for music with his commitment to community service.

With his mussed hair and lopsided smile, Gallagher exudes a scruffy enthusiasm that makes him seem much younger than his 40 years. "A lot of social justice work is at its root addressing problems associated with exclusion," he says. "Poverty, injustice, racism-it's always one group separated from another. And music is about connecting people and bringing people together."

In late 2007, Gallagher began putting together Music National Service. He pitched it to funders as an opportunity to help counteract budget cuts that are weakening arts and music education all over the U.S., and pointed to recent research suggesting that such programs have a positive impact on the development of children's cognitive and analytic skills. His first big break came when the Hewlett Foundation awarded Music National Service a $550,000 grant to launch MusicianCorps.

New Orleans was an obvious candidate to host a group of MusicianCorps fellows. As the birthplace of jazz, the city's musical traditions run deep. "Music here is not separated from life-whether it's a christening, a funeral, a wedding, or whatever else might rain down from the sky," explains Bruce "Sunpie" Barnes, a harmonica player and music teacher who is widely respected in the local music scene. "Folks here need music to get through the day. So you need to keep the supply up, and make sure there are as many players as possible."

Like so much else in post-Katrina New Orleans, that supply is threatened by a lack of resources and a diminished population. "In recent decades, jazz has emerged out of the schools here, because of great school-band leaders," says Randy Fertel, a writer and philanthropist raised in New Orleans. "But the school bands and music programs are being lost."

Fertel is the president of the Ruth U. Fertel Foundation, named for his mother, who founded the original Ruth's Chris Steakhouse in New Orleans. He was impressed by Kiff Gallagher's plan. "This is a guy who knows how to get things done," he recalls thinking. His foundation provided additional funding to Music National Service, and Fertel set up a task force of two dozen civic, arts, and education leaders to help Gallagher partner with local institutions. One member was "Sunpie" Barnes, for whom the New Orleans tradition of mentorship is particularly important. "Most of the early jazz pioneers talk about the way they learned from elders," he says. "Louis Armstrong would follow King Oliver around during parades, and that's how he would learn a particular lick or tune. That's why the music sounds a certain way."

In addition to David Pulphus, three other musicians were chosen to serve in New Orleans: Rebecca Crenshaw, a viola and violin player who gained extensive post-Katrina volunteer experience through stints with AmeriCorps and City Year; a multi-instrumentalist named Nathaniel Money; and Zack Feinberg, a guitar player who leads a popular local band called the Revivalists. All told, they are currently teaching more than 800 students at five different schools across the city.

"Folks here need music to get through the day. So you need to keep the supply up, and make sure there are as many players as possible."

Meanwhile, Kiff Gallagher has been busy in Washington, D.C. Relying on his knowledge of the legislative process, he was able to persuade a number of congressmen and senators to add language to legislation that became the Serve America Act when President Obama signed it into law in April. The law authorizes federal funding for a wide array of community-service programs, and the amendment Gallagher helped fashion calls for the creation of "a musician and artist corps program that trains and deploys skilled musicians and artists to promote greater community unity through the use of music and arts education." Federal dollars have yet to be appropriated for this purpose, but Gallagher is confident that MusicianCorps is well-positioned to receive the funding once it starts to flow.

Inside David Pulphus's classroom, the high-minded rhetoric that surrounds MusicianCorps-the talk of "the reaching, teaching power of music" and its potential to teach "21^st-century skills"-seems a world away. Once the students are standing in front of keyboards with headphones on their ears, it's nearly impossible for Pulphus to get them to focus on playing the basic phrase he is trying to teach them: the first three notes of "Hot Cross Buns."

Being a disciplinarian isn't a natural role for Pulphus, whose easygoing manner has endeared him to his colleagues in the jazz world. Scolding impoverished children all day long doesn't quite compare to touring the world with major artists like Terence Blanchard, whose trio Pulphus joined when he was just 20. His upbringing, too, was quite different from that of his students, as was his musical education. His grandmother founded the Azariah Missionary Baptist Church in St. Louis, and his loving family was at the center of a tightly knit African-American community. "My brother and I would take turns playing the piano while the congregation sang hymns," he recalls during a break between classes. "That's how I learned to play by ear."

But Pulphus embraces the opportunity to provide his students with a sense of discipline that is missing from their lives outside of school. "This is probably the only time they get this much structure in their lives-or even a male figure in their lives," he says.

Deontre, a wiry boy, is often on the receiving end of Pulphus's admonishments, and today he'd almost lost his chance at the keyboards after a scuffle with another student. Once it is his turn, Deontre stands up straight at his keyboard, playing the notes and repeating the words each time Pulphus calls out, "One, two, three. Hot, cross, buns."

As Pulphus makes his way through the room to work with each student work one-on-one, Deontre plays and sings the phrase over and over, looking up after each repetition to try to catch his teacher's eye. Finally, Pulphus reaches him. Deontre pounds the keys and shouts: "Hot! Cross! Buns! Hot! Cross! Buns!" Pulphus points at the boy's hand and says, "Use all three fingers. And don't sing so loud."

Deontre tries again, this time more smoothly and without shouting. He looks up at Pulphus, who pats the boy's shoulder. "That's good," he says. "That's real good."

Photo by flickr user musicnationalservice.

Emerging City Innovation

GOOD — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:00:40 PDT

Most of the world's population now lives in cities. How can we make sure these urban centers are good homes for humanity? Cities from Bogotá and Rio de Janeiro to Seoul are leading the way, using fresh ideas to reduce pollution and waste; provide efficient, clean transportation; and support biodiversity.

Reaction Housing

GOOD — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:13:04 PDT

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it became obvious that America was frustratingly ill-prepared to house people displaced by a natural disaster. Michael McDaniel took this as a design challenge. His Exo housing system-inspired by the humble styrofoam cup-could be deployed quickly and cheaply to help us when we need it most.

Your Daily Water Use

GOOD — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:00:21 PDT

Thirsty? So is everyone else. We're headed for a water shortage. Here's how a few simple choices can reduce your daily water use by 1,213 gallons. A GOOD Transparency video.

A collaboration between GOOD and Fogelson-Lubliner.

GOOD and Whole Foods Market have teamed up to bring you a series of infographics and videos on what we eat: where it comes from, what's in it, and what choices you can make to ensure you're eating as well as possible. This is the first in a series of four videos.

The Patriots

Emily Badger — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:00:57 PDT

How do you erect an entire museum to an idea as divisive and abstract as patriotism? A trip to Atlanta's newest tourist attraction invites the question.

Bob Hope, Kenny Gamble, and Patti LaBelle smile from the back of a moving bus in Atlanta's Midtown neighborhood. Inside star-shaped cutouts, their faces beam from a billboard advertising "the only museum of its kind in America"-the National Museum of Patriotism, now open in its new home near the Georgia Aquarium. "I am an American," Gamble and LaBelle announce. Whatever that means to the drivers stuck in traffic behind them, the accompanying invitation is intriguing: "Come for a memory, leave with a mission!"

Such a museum, were it to exist anywhere, seems like it should be in Washington, D.C., off the mall between the National Portrait Gallery and the National Postal Museum. That is, more or less, where the "national" everything is located. The National Museum of Patriotism, though, is on the street level of a Hilton Garden Inn in a 15,000 square-foot exhibition space amid Atlanta's biggest tourist attractions.

The city has been steadily turning the once-derelict area into a tourist hub, and the museum fits the neighborhood theme of stuff-no-one-else-has: the World of Coke, the CNN Center, and the world's largest aquarium in a landlocked city are all nearby.

But what could be inside? How do you turn an abstract concept, and one as complex and divisive as patriotism, into a physical exhibit you can knock off between lunch and the mall? How do you illustrate that patriotism means different things to different people and that we have often clashed in its name? How do you capture the gray areas between patriotism and nationalism, dissent and disrespect?

And who-with what agenda-would create such a place?

"I do suspect that some people have a tendency to shy away from the museum because they may think we are a right-wing zealot organization," says Nicholas Snider, who founded the museum.

I admit: I thought it might be a right-wing zealot organization, but that says more about the tactics of recent elections and the tone of cable TV than the concept itself. Patriotism is, of course, not a right-wing creatio, but that meme reinforces my suspicion that the topic might be a fundamentally un-museumable one.

Museums, after all, are generally about facts, or things you can touch, or things you can look at but may not touch; disciplines of the hard sciences or fine arts, of the variety where you could expect to find a similar display in every sizable city on earth. The National Museum of Patriotism in Atlanta, on the other hand, appears to be the only such place in existence.

"I do suspect that some people have a tendency to shy away from the museum because they may think we are a right-wing zealot organization." -Nicholas Snider

Snider, a 67-year-old retired UPS executive, created the museum because he had amassed thousands of pieces of patriotic jewelry, once exchanged by soldiers and their sweethearts, and couldn't figure out how to share them. He'd called the Smithsonian. They were interested, but only in adding his collection to their 140 million items already stored in their never-to-be-seen-by-the-public warehouses.

Snider thought about creating his own place to house the trove, until it occurred to him devoting an entire museum to the world's largest privately held collection of sweetheart jewelry might seem shallow. Mulling this problem one day, he heard a radio story about a bill that would introduce a "character" curriculum in Georgia's schools-teaching things like honesty, integrity, respect, patriotism.

"When they said ‘patriotism,' the old proverbial light went off. It literally happened where I went ‘Wow, that's it,'" Snider says. "It just made so much sense to me to develop a National Museum of Patriotism."

He didn't just think the community might like such a place; he thought it needed one. In fact, now that his flagship museum-which originally opened in 2004-rolled out anew this past spring, he's been thinking about 17 or so other cities that could use a patriotism museum of their own.

He and the executive director, Pat Stansbury, recognize that framing the idea for other audiences poses a challenge of imagination; there is probably a reason no one has ever made one of these before.

"It's so abstract," Stansbury says, "when you sit down to have a serious discussion with potential donors, you will be amazed by the huge array of ideas, sometimes so many ideas that it's hard to get back to the general focus. It takes incredible focus, a laser-sharp ability to hone in on a central message."

When I ask her what the Atlanta museum's central message is, she comes back to a favorite phrase that the place offers "level ground" for people from any political leaning or background. "The most important thing about the museum," she says, "is we do not throw a flag in your face and tell you what patriotism is."

They try, instead, to evoke an emotion. Snider figures that you can't inspire with objects or images, but only with stories about other people, like that of Rick Rescorla, the head of security for Morgan Stanley in the South Tower of the World Trade Center, who ushered almost all of the company's 2,700 employees to safety before dying in the building. Patriotism is an emotion, Snider says, and citizenship is what you then do with it.

What is patriotism? muses the four-minute introductory video that opens the museum. Several images follow: George W. Bush yelling into a bullhorn at Ground Zero; that iconic statue of Saddam Hussein falling in Baghdad; Barack Obama speaking at his inauguration in January. The video never answers the question, instead inviting visitors to define their own responses inside.

Before the clip loops back on itself, several famous quotes are projected onto the screen from leaders like Bush, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. The best, however, comes from John Updike. "America," he said, "is a vast conspiracy to make you happy."

On the other side of the curtain, the exhibit hall opens into a kind of free-association on the theme: America in entertainment, America in the armed forces, America at the Olympics. This isn't supposed to be a history museum, although some of the exhibits offer history lessons. Nor is it really a military museum, even though America-at-war (at least some wars) is an obvious source of the emotion Snider wants to draw out.

There are replicas, each several feet tall, of Mt. Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial and the Liberty Bell. Interactive kiosks troll through the history and traditions of each branch of the military. Under the headline "Patriotism in Entertainment," a spread of photos and album covers centers on Lee Greenwood, a man who appears repeatedly in outfits made out of American flags. (A museum employee clarifies that he is a country music singer who "has pretty much made his career off singing patriotic songs.")

This strikes me as a very Republican thing to do with yourself. But for every sign of encroaching conservatism, there is a liberal antipode. Off in one alcove is a Hall of Patriots, commemorating Americans who have variously "put service to others above service to self," including both Ronald Reagan and J.F.K. Helen Keller is there, and although this isn't mentioned on her plaque, she grew up to be something of a radical socialist. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Jackie Robinson are all included: a predictable cast of characters. Then there is one Georgia boy, named Desmond Doss, who was the first conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor (he was a medic in the Pacific during World War II).

In other exhibits, even some of the harsher moments in American history are recast with optimism. September 11 is presented as the tragic event we rose above to become "One America." Ellis Island is evoked as the gateway of hopeful immigrants, as Neil Diamond sings "They're Coming to America" from a speaker nearby.

The museum is so apolitical and feel-good, mirroring the dictionary definition of the word more than its messy application throughout history. There are no controversial Dixie Chick appearances, no scenes of civil disobedience as patriotism, no cautionary tales of past patriotic intentions gone awry. Visitors, the museum suggests, should fill in the details on their own. And then, Snider hopes, people will be moved to some kind of unspecified action.

"My one wish for everyone who comes through this museum," says a board member on the video that ends the tour, "is that you look inside yourself and examine what do you do, no matter how large or small that is, to celebrate America and make it a better place for all of us to live."

This seems like a reasonable request. But what happens outside the museum when we disagree on how a "better" America should look? I think America would be a better place to live if it had single-payer health care, but I keep thinking about that woman at one of the town hall meetings over the summer who literally sobbed at the thought of such a thing. This country is becoming "not my America," she said. "I want my America back."

The museum is so apolitical and feel-good, mirroring the dictionary definition of the word more than its messy application throughout history.

The painstaking bipartisanship in the place is intentional (Snider is registered with a party, but he wouldn't say which one), as is the "celebrate America" tone that, for the most part, stops shy of celebrating America at the expense of other countries.

In all its inoffensiveness, Stansbury says, the museum isn't trying to define patriotism to mean nothing, but to elevate it above the fray. She's deeply sincere about the topic. She even signs her emails "your partner in patriotism." It's hard to argue with how pleasant her and Snider's interpretation of the word is, but I tell her what troubles me is more patriotism in practice.

In practice, those who define it through dissent often collide with people for whom patriotism means giving government a permanent benefit of the doubt. In practice, we go through moments in history-maybe this is one of them-where our visions for a "better America" are so divergent there's nothing unifying about the quest at all.

Stansbury says her first encounter with patriotism occurred when her older brother returned from Vietnam. "He came home in a taxi cab, without his uniform, by himself. He wasn't greeted by a parade, there was no fanfare," she says. "The taxi driver spit at him, threw his money back when he tried to pay, called him a baby killer and drove off." At 7 years old, she didn't get why he was not welcomed home a hero.

Vietnam protesters may have been agitating for their vision of a better America, too, I suggest. But in the process we sometimes become each others' collateral damage. Stansbury agrees dissent is one form of patriotism (she points to the "tea party" movement as a model for peaceful protest). But in the world envisioned by her museum, we would always remain respectful where we disagree.

This is hopeful but perhaps not terribly realistic. I try to imagine a museum that would treat the topic like a wholly dispassionate observer, one that would also explore unpleasant stories like Stansbury's about her brother. But such a place probably wouldn't accomplish what Snider and his National Museum of Patriotism are going for.

"Let me ask you this," Snider says to me. "When you left the museum, did you feel better?"

Because this is what he hopes will happen.

Photo by Robert Kimberly.

We Are All Art Now

Alice Ross — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 05:00:24 PDT

A public-art experiment is taking London's art scene by storm. The project? Giving 2,400 people each an hour to do whatever they like in the city's most bustling square.

Twenty-three feet above London's Trafalgar Square, a girl with long blonde hair stands on a platform, dressed as a mermaid. It's 4:30 a.m. on a chilly Tuesday, and the square is still mostly empty aside from a few stragglers. The mermaid holds up a series of cardboard signs promoting a campaign for vegetarianism by the animal rights organization PETA.

At 5 a.m., a cherry-picker rises from the square, and she steps onto it. A lady from Yorkshire, less scantily clad, steps out with a wooden frame taller than she is. She spends the next hour gluing brightly colored bits of cellophane onto the frame to create a massive piece of art.

An hour later, her time is up, and as the first commuters start to make their way across the square, the cherry-picker makes its trip again. It's sunny now, and the cellophane artist is replaced by a man in his early thirties, who demonstrates fencing moves with a heavy-looking sword.

All day and night for 100 days this summer and through October 14, the cherry-picker makes its hourly round trip, each time placing someone new onto the platform in London's busiest square, where they are free to do almost anything they like. This experiment in public art, called One and Other, is the brainchild of sculptor Antony Gormley. Launched on July 6, the project aims to turn everyday people into art, putting them at eye-level with the long-dead generals who look sternly on from their own platforms, at Trafalgar Square's other three corners. And so far, it's a huge hit.

Over the course of the project, 2,400 randomly selected volunteers-selected from over 32,000 applicants-will scale what Gormley refers to as "the plinth." Once they're up there, they hula-hoop, play guitar, unfurl banners, release balloons, sing, paint, chat to the crowd-basically doing whatever they like. Inevitably, this means a handful of people have publicly stripped (one was politely asked to dress again by police). For others, this has meant dressing as a ninja to spend an hour knitting in the dead of night. Together, they form a sort of living portrait of a city at a time when the world could use a little more art in its life-and a little perspective.

Antony Gormley made his name with large-scale public artworks: his Angel of the North-a 66-foot steel sculpture modeled on his own body-is possibly Britain's best-known sculpture. His pieces, Another Place and Event Horizon, place eerie, multiple life-size casts of his body along stretches of windswept northern beach, and over 31 London rooftops respectively (Event Horizon was a temporary piece). In its repetition of human forms, One and Other is very much a continuation of his ideas.

Even by his standards, though, it's ambitious. Launching the project, Gormley said he was aiming to create a "portrait of the U.K. now" that offers "the chance for you and I to have a look at the world from the point of view of art." (He won't actually perform, however; he hasn't been randomly selected.)

Londoners have become addicted to the spectacle, with anywhere from two to 200 passersby gawking at any given time. The project is also streamed live and saved online, where a vocal community of plinth-watchers discuss each person on the site, on Twitter, and on Facebook, coining phrases such as "plichés" (for clichéd plinth behavior) as they go.

Part of the project's appeal is the unpredictability of what might unfold. Shortly before 11 p.m. on a Monday night, while a lady on the plinth holds up placards giving thanks for her kidney transplant, a white-haired man named Tom tells me he makes the trip to Trafalgar Square from north London a couple of times a week, just to see what's happening. "I just like it. It's something different, isn't it?"

Standing nearby, a talkative, compact man called John looks wistfully up at the plinth and relives his moment of glory to anyone who will listen: The previous Saturday afternoon, he dressed in a Union Jack and threw 200 roses to the crowd in memory of Princess Diana.

People get hooked on plinth-watching, even from further afield. Anthony, a neuropsychologist, tells me by e-mail that he hasn't visited the plinth, but, "I try to watch the 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m., and 5 a.m. slots online each night," he says, "with a particular affinity for the 5 a.m. dawn slot." He explains that he became a regular viewer after watching one lady, who hummed to the square at 3 a.m. "It was without a doubt the best piece of performance art I have ever seen… I got ‘it'-what Gormley was wanting this to be."

So what does Gromley's portrait of the U.K. show? Person by person, it picks out a picture of a nation that's by turns earnest and eccentric, attention-seeking and contemplative. Hundreds of people use their hour to raise money and awareness for good causes, while others take the chance to show the world their singing or juggling, or to spread a little sunshine with bubbles and balloons.

Perhaps inevitably, as the project has gone on, the bar has been raised as people realize that others really are watching. Plinthers from outside London have found they're the talk of their towns, appearing on local news and in the papers. Particular performances have been keenly discussed in letters pages of London papers and on Twitter, while highlights from each week make it onto a weekly TV show about the project. And over time, the banners have gotten bigger, the weird has gotten wackier, and the plinth has become a platform.

While at first many got up just to be there, now plinthers aim to be seen. These figures are nothing like Gormley's other sculptures, silent and faceless: They're noisy, whether for a cause or just for the feeling of an hour in the spotlight.

One and Other is a product of its age. It takes place both live and online; on the one hand it's intimate-living, breathing and made up of people like you and me-while on the other hand it's curiously anonymous, scrutinized and commented on through the internet, every hour recorded and watched by people from all over the world. It aims to celebrate ordinary people, but gives them an opportunity to show themselves as anything but ordinary.

As a contemporary art project, it's been fantastically successful: More than 400,000 people logged onto the site in its first three weeks, while countless more have found themselves stopping to watch as they head through the square.

In some ways, it's the perfect public monument to our short-attention–span society: if you're bored or disappointed by a particular performance, not to worry. At the end of each hour of the day and night, the cherry-picker makes its way back up from the square to the edge of the 23-foot platform, a person steps off the plinth, and another steps on, ready to begin their hour as a living work of art.

Photos by (in order) flickr users paulsimpson1976, mittfh, and pikerslanefarm. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Not Like Mike

Lysandra Ohrstrom — Mon, 7 Sep 2009 10:06:02 PDT

New York City's oddball mayoral candidate Reverend Billy is mobilizing young voters in droves in his race for City Hall. He might not be able to beat the billionaire Michael Bloomberg, but he's up for the fight.

Reverend Billy Talen bursts onstage wearing a white tuxedo and a black priest's habit, his platinum hair sprayed into an Elvis bouffant. A 35-member gospel choir breaks into a soulful hum and within seconds, the packed New York City auditorium erupts in shouts of "Amen" and "Hallelujah."

"I know some of you are shopping too much," Talen bellows to a room packed with aging hippies and twenty-something hipsters. "Consuming too much, sneaking off to the big box. You gotta push back!" And with that, his back-up singers launch into their first anti-consumerist anthem of the night. "Who are these politicos? Have you ever seen one lie?" the choir sings, as the Reverend wings his head up and down, his arms reaching to the heavens. "They gotta live uptown. Somewhere where they can hide. Who buys them all that TV time? He's the one who broke your lease. Officials slick their palms with grease."

This is tried-and-true material for "the Rev," as William Talen, 59, is known. Ever since he founded the Church of Life After Shopping, after the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, he has been spreading the gospel that Americans cannot buy their way out of their problems. In the years since, Talen has amassed hundreds of followers and become arguably the most entertaining champion of embattled mom-and-pop retailers in the city. But this year, he upped the ante.

A few months after New York City's two-term mayor Michael Bloomberg drafted a bill to extend term-limits so he could run a third time, the Rev vowed to take that oddball activism all the way to City Hall. And in late August, he became a bona fide New York City mayoral candidate on-what else?-the Green Party ticket.

Talen is obviously a fringe candidate. But as New Yorkers' frustration with the status quo grows, it's not so easy to write off Talen's candidacy as a stunt. With the presumptive Democratic opponent William C. Thompson continuing to lag in fundraising and recent polls even as the mayor's approval ratings slide, Talen has emerged as one of the loudest opposition voices in a race that many called before it even began.

"Electoral politics in New York seems to be mostly boomers and older people. We think backing Billy sends the right message to young people."

By the end of July, Talen had collected the 7,500 signatures required to be included on the September 15th primary ballot, and had doubled that number by the time the August filing deadline rolled around. Whether those numbers will mean anything at the polls is another issue altogether, but no one on Talen's team expects him to beat Bloomberg. Still, after the election on November 3, it will be clear if a serious politician lingers beneath the priest's habit, and whether his nascent constituency will stick by him without another four years of Bloomberg looming on the horizon.

"The reason we said yes to a quixotic campaign against a $100-million candidate was to introduce new ideas into a political system that's become conservative," explains Talen. "The mainstream parties here are like Coke and Pepsi; McDonald's and Burger King."

So Talen represents an alternative. "We're activists, and as activists you have to broaden your idea of success to include the fight itself," says Savitri D., Talen's wife and the director of the Church. "In a city where eight million people are rolling over for a guy who said he was going to spend one hundred million dollars of his own money on the campaign, just putting up a fight is a success in itself." (So far, Bloomberg has spent $37 million on this campaign, and $150 million combined on his previous two. Thompson has spent just $2.6 million in the same period. Savitri says Talen has raised between $60,000 and $70,000.)

Talen's platform is about supporting community-based growth after a decade of breakneck residential and commercial development. Bloomberg has rezoned 16 percent of the city since taking office, paving the way for the chain stores, high-rise condos, and gleaming office towers that line the sidewalks. Talen, meanwhile, wants to keep the city's parks and plazas public; support small businesses with commercial lease protection and retail zoning reforms; and would like to green the city from the bottom-up with neighborhood-based initiatives. (Talen argues that Bloomberg's much-heralded environmental reforms focused disproportionately on corporate incentives, rather than community programs.)

Beyond the anti-Bloomberg rhetoric, a utopian vision emerges. Talen would like to see a socio-economically and ethnically integrated city where rich and poor mingle in parks, greet their local beat-cop by name, and plant community gardens together. The vision is at times vague and unrealistic, but it's clearly tapping into something some New Yorkers have been missing. Talen has recruited more than 850 volunteers-many of them young people who typically steer clear of municipal elections.

Take David Schwab, a 23-year-old who volunteered for Talen's campaign as an online organizer while spending the summer in Oslo and St. Petersburg. Schwab also convinced his boss at the website Greenchange.org to endorse Talen's mayoral bid because, as Schwab puts it, Bloomberg's environmental record shows that he is not as Green as he claims to be. "Bloomberg disregards democracy and social justices," Schwab says, "which are important parts of being green."

Fighting is in Talen's bones. This is a guy who stormed all three Astor Place branches of Starbucks so many times that in 2000 the management circulated an internal memo to Manhattan employees titled "What Should I do if Reverend Billy is in my Store?" At that point, he had already made a name for himself around town-known for his trademark ensembles, his street-corner sermons against the sterilization of Times Square, and for heralding an impending "Shopocalypse" outside the midtown Disney Store.

Mowgli Holmes, a longtime supporter of Talen's, remembers those days well. He recounts when he first saw him out of character at the legendary St. Mark's Church in the East Village. "All I remember are his bare feet, which he kept stomping on the ground..and he did this long, totally brilliant strange monologue about walking through the streets talking to people. I can't remember exactly what he said, but I remember my jaw was just hanging open on the floor."

This sort of performance activism kept him busy for some time, but after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Talen sensed that New Yorkers' were searching for something more; a sense of spirituality, perhaps, outside of organized religion. That year, he founded the Church of Life after Shopping, and began to hold regular Sunday worship services at St. Mark's Church.

It was around that time that the self-described "theater refugee" became the Reverend Billy full-time, and his vision of the "Shopocalypse" started to materialize. The church now has about 450 members, and many of Reverend Billy's parishioners have joined him in activism as well as prayer over the years. Talen characterizes himself as a "public-space tactician" whose goal is to reclaim the dwindling commons spaces of New York City.

"You have to go on the street," he says. "You have to go to places where different kinds of people are; where there are unexpected results; where people who can't afford theater tickets might show up; where you are not operating at the whims of grant makers, government agencies, or real estate itself."

Talen's attention-grabbing antics belie a relaxed, reasonable, and reflective person. He is as comfortable sprawled out on a picnic blanket in Brooklyn as he is dressed up in his costume onstage-but does he make him ready for the Mayor's Office in the largest city by population in the country?

To his supporters, that isn't really the point. "We approached Billy because … he was able to reach out to be people that we hadn't reached out to before, especially young people," says Karen Young, a Brooklyn Green Party member. "Electoral politics in New York seems to be mostly boomers and older people. There are a lot of young people who are politically conscious and work on political issues, but they don't see electoral politics as a way to get things done. We think backing Billy sends the right message to young people. Our chances of beating [Bloomberg] aren't the greatest, but we're annoyed that people anointed Bloomberg the winner before the primaries."

It was Bloomberg's about-face on term limits that pushed many younger volunteers into Talen's camp. After vocally opposing the extension of the law limiting elected officials in New York City to two terms, Bloomberg introduced an amendment in City Council that would allow him and 35 other members of the 61-seat council to run for another four years in office. Despite two public referendums in the past 15 years in which New Yorkers overwhelmingly supported the existing two-term limit, the City Council passed the bill last November.

Not all Bloomberg's supporters remain faithful, though. After voting for Bloomberg in the 2004 election, Eric Forman, 35, plans to cast a ballot for the Rev in November. The term-limits extension is one of the reasons Forman switched camps, but not the only one.

"[Talen's] whole anti-consumerist thing, who he was pitching it at, what he was doing with it was more of an antagonistic poke to the mainstream that wasn't going to convince or do anything positive," says Forman, adding "even though it was hilarious and totally called for. Now, he's trying to do something that's more constructive and less mocking."

If that late July fundraiser was any indication, it seems to be working. There were 650 people in the audience that night, and Joan Baez headlined. But once Talen took the stage after 9 p.m., it was clear people hadn't forked over $30 a head to see the iconic 1960s folk singer.

"I had a moment in there where I was like this guy, he's a saint," Holmes said. "He's so powerful that I don't believe anymore that he couldn't get elected. I believe that if he keeps doing this, if enough people saw him in this crazy city, New Yorkers would just be like ‘Fuck it. Let's vote for this guy. He's brilliant.'"

Top photo by flickr user (cc) BraveNewFilms, lower photo by flickr user (cc) crizzirc.

An original version of this story contained a misspelling of Talen as Tallen.

Sex, Heaven, and Peaches

Adam Leith Gollner — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:46:39 PDT

What's behind our obsession with food?

A dashing gentleman in a white linen suit cracks open an egg. He deftly separates the egg white and places the golden orb of raw yolk into his mouth. Carefully, in order to not burst the fragile load, he moves toward his young lover, seeking her mouth. She parts her lips and receives the whole, unpunctured yolk. Sliding it over her taste buds, she then proceeds to kiss the ovoid joy-toy back to him. Moments later, he glides it back to her.

A few more back and forths before the inevitable climax: it pops.

Amber nectar glistens out of her moaning mouth and onto his suit. Her body goes limp with satisfaction.

This scene, in the Japanese film Tampopo, isn't merely one of the weirdest love scenes ever. As mesmerizing as it is visually, the film-ostensibly about a search for the perfect ramen recipe-is also a meditation on food obsession. Part of the reason we've become such a food-frenzied society has to do with luxury, it suggests, but behind the materialist glaze lies a puffy inner layer of primal human motivation.

Let's start with the obvious: sex.

Tampopo's yolk-kissing scene recalls a passage in Miles Davis's autobiography that describes the trumpeter's first wet dream. It felt, he wrote, like he had "rolled over an egg and burst it." Just as music fans gobble up tawdry rock bios, foodies today have limitless cravings for stories about food. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the books and films about the insatiable pursuit of food perfection have torrid, hedonistic undertones. It seems obvious that Anthony Bourdain's books would be debaucherous, but even Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichl's memoirs are full of unbridled romps, and Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi's cookbooks contain dewy confessionals of infidelity. In one instance, on a supposedly romantic getaway, Lakshmi divulges that she was caught in the pantry stalking an earthy, silent, "god-like" Mexican cook.

"Eat fruits. Too Much. Mainly Sexy Ones."

The commingling of fleshly delights goes beyond the canon of key foodie texts: In certain areas of Brazil, natives used the same word for "eating" and "copulating." This link is primordial, even prenatal. It's in the womb that we first suck our thumbs while thinking of food-around the same time male fetuses start getting erections. Tampopo taps into our food-sex beginnings by concluding with a long shot of a mother breast-feeding her child. This intertwining of basic drives is at the root of life. Single-celled organisms, such as amoebas, do only two things: They eat and replicate, feeding and then splitting in half. These twin hungers are still fueled by a genetic imperative to reproduce.

A recent book, The Sex Life of Food by Bunny Crumpacker, inventories countless literary and historical examples of people getting turned on by food. Her account is as strange as it is matter-of-fact. She quotes NPR host and author Garrison Keillor as saying, "Sex is good, but not as good as fresh sweet corn." Crumpacker, who has the best food-writer name ever, spends ample time on what is perhaps the most arousing of all foods: fruits. Bananas are phallic, she contends, cherries feminine- while kiwis are "hermaphroditic" and "bisexual." Does that make figs bi-curious?

Fruits are what happen when plants have sex, which may explain why humans can be sexually aroused by them. No book captures this attraction quite as luridly as Edward Bunyard's The Anatomy of Dessert (recently reissued with an introduction by Ruth Reichl, as well as a foreword by a more temperate food authority, Michael Pollan). Bunyard's motto might've been "Eat fruits. Too Much. Mainly Sexy Ones." He achingly described waiting in quiet carnal anticipation for certain fruits' "lustiness."

A peach picked with love, Bunyard explained, must be "stroked off." He certainly wasn't the last to note the voluptuousness and sensuality of peaches. Reading Lolita in Tehran explains that girls can be expelled from university if they eat a peach indiscreetly. In China, the juices of a peach are compared to vaginal syrups, and saying "we shared the peach" is a polite way of saying "we had anal sex."

In Chinese mythology, peaches are also a symbol for something less tangible: eternal life. Peaches tended by Hsi Wang Mu, the Queen Mother of the West, grow on the mountains at the summit of the world. Beside a lake of gems, where invisible instruments play gentle melodies, Mu's beautiful daughters serve peaches that take 3,000 years to ripen. These fruits render the eater immortal.

Fruits are what happen when plants have sex, which may explain why humans can be sexually aroused by them.

Western mystics also knew about transcendental fruits. Thoreau, for example, spent his sunset years trying to find heaven in wild berries. As he writes in a lost final manuscript reprinted recently under the title Wild Fruits, "My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in Nature-to know his lurking places." Thoreau believed God liked to lurk in fruits: "Nectar and ambrosia are only those fine flavors of every earthly fruit which our coarse palates fail to perceive-just as we occupy the heaven of the gods without knowing it."

By now, we've bitten into something meatier than flesh. Indeed, the flip-side of our ongoing obsession with food is more meta than physical. Nowhere is this notion articulated as simply yet completely as in the wonderful film Big Night, a story about two Italian brothers who've opened an Italian restaurant called Paradise in 1950s New Jersey. The message of the film? "To eat good food is to be close to God."

This idea is also explored in the Oscar winning Danish film Babette's Feast, about a group of self-denying religious ascetics who believe salvation lies in refraining from earthly happiness. They reject any thought of food and drink for fear of losing their souls. Their world is shaken when they meet a chef from France who can transform dinners into a kind of "love affair that makes no distinction between bodily appetite and spiritual appetite." Her cooking teaches them that it's no sin to enjoy this life as well as the next one. Bliss and righteousness, they learn, aren't mutually exclusive.

What all these stories have in common is the suggestion that food is a doorway into a greater field of experience. There can be something transformative about eating and drinking-and everyone mentioned in this essay would argue that a sensual experience of life fosters, rather than hinders, creative output.

There's a reason it's called soul food. A memorable meal nourishes-profoundly. The chicken noodle soups of the world allow us to get past difficult times, to make the most of our existence in the moment. The ways we eat, just as much as the stories we tell about the ways we eat, allow us to confront and sublimate reality in unexpected ways. If food can be healing, sexual and transcendental, after all, so can life.

The top 10 films and books about food obsession.

The Sex Life of Food (St. Martin's Press, 2007)
Countless crumbs of edible erotica are sprinkled throughout this study of culinary carnality by Bunny Crumpacker.

Tampopo (dir. Juzo Itami, 1985)
A quest for a perfect bowl of ramen, punctuated with surrealist food-sex vignettes.

Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet (Weinstein Books, 2008)
Soft-focus shots of Padma Lakshmi are as suggestive as personal food reminiscences. Some pretty good recipes, too.

Comfort Me With Apples (Random House, 2002)
From pre-AIDS Californian hippy sex antics to gluttonous Parisian flings, a tantalizingly honest page-turner by Ruth Reichel.

The Anatomy of Dessert (Modern Library edition, 2006)
This reissue of Edward Bunyard's 1929 masterwork is a fetishistic handbook of fruit exaltation.

Wild Fruits (W.W. Norton edition, 1999)
When Henry David Thoreau sees apples at the market, he doesn't just see fruit-he sees "Iduna's apples, the taste of which keeps the gods forever young."

Big Night (Dir. Campbell Scott, Stanley Tucci, 1996)
The final scene alone, of Primo and Secondo eating eggs in silence, is a moving testament to the power of food in storytelling.

Babette's Feast (dir. Gabriel Axel, 1987)
After eating the best meal of his life, the hero says: "There comes a time when our eyes are opened and we come to realize that mercy is infinite. We need only await it with confidence and receive it with gratitude."

Candyfreak (Algonquin Books, 2004)
Steve Almond explains how our obsessions "arise from our most sacred fears and desires and, as such, they represent the truest expression of ourselves."

What's Up Tiger Lily? (Dir. Woody Allen, 1966).
In his directorial debut, Woody "Sex Is Like Having Dinner" Allen overdubs a Japanese spy flick with racy sex gags about the world's most delicious egg salad.

A New Angle

Jude Stewart — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 05:00:46 PDT

What's the X factor that will bridge design with social change? A new website says it's journalism.

Falls Village, Connecticut, sits where the Berkshire foothills begin and radio stations end. Turning off the increasing fuzziness of Top 40, you can roll down the window and penetrate a deeper quiet. Calling this area "the country" stretches the point slightly; this area is colonized enough with vacationing New Yorkers that, when asking about sandwiches at an organic market, I got asked (with eyebrow-arching sincerity) what my "feelings" about meat were. Still, tourists aside, pockets of stillness demarcate this area as a separate, contemplative place.

Turning left up a gravel driveway, Winterhouse sits whitely on a hill amid lanky, graceful trees. Three 25-foot windows spill light into its vast interior, where graphic designers (and married couple) Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel live and work. As Helfand explains, the studio takes its name from 1930s muralist Ezra Winter, who used this then-undivided space for his enormous canvases that now hang in Radio City Music Hall and the Library of Congress.

Winterhouse Studio specializes in graphic design for nonprofits and educational institutions: the Poetry Foundation, the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, the New England Journal of Medicine. Fittingly, Drenttel and Helfand also publish their own design blog Design Observer (with Michael Bierut) and run the nonprofit Winterhouse Institute, both of which constitute the locus for their next initiative, fueled by a $1.5 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to promote design for social change. The two-year program will support specific projects by designers, a conference in Aspen later this year, project case studies with the Yale School of Management (where Drenttel teaches), and a brand-new editorial website, Change Observer, reporting exclusively on design for social change. Their goal is to ramp up the design-for-social-change movement with critical inquiry and journalistic rigor as the twin engines.

There's room for skepticism. Gorgeous lamps and Apple-era modernism might not be able to save the planet, but it's design thinking that the CO team is counting on to solve social problems-the same systems-oriented thinking that made designers the darlings of business, spawning design-and-business programs at Harvard and fundamentally reshaping business magazines like Fast Company and Business Week. According to Julie Lasky and Drenttel, design for social change suffers from well-meaning, uncoordinated one-off projects and flabby discourse.

Surprisingly, investigative journalism plays a central role in their vision of success. "Almost everything we do [at Winterhouse] is editorial design. We live in a world of journalists more than designers," Drenttel begins. Given their commitment to Design Observer and Winterhouse's extensive editorial credits-Helfand designed The New York Times' first website-this claim seems to hold water. "Change Observer came about because I believe design journalism has little critical function to it," Drenttel continues. "We need to evaluate the impacts of design projects critically and stop talking only about personalities and what's new this month."

Lasky agrees: "Our lens [on design and social change] will be one of journalistic rigor. The world of social change, like anything else, needs to be scrutinized." Lasky's former position as editor-in-chief of I.D., she says, limited her scope for such investigations; she seems to relish the prospect of defrocking greenwashers and other claimants exploiting consumers' best intentions. Change Observer aims to coordinate and extend explorations begun by design-driven projects like Design21 and the 2007 Cooper-Hewitt Museum exhibit "Design for the Other 90%," as well as increasingly design-minded "green" blogs like WorldChanging.

The time may well be right for the design-and-social-change movement to gain momentum. Climate change, peak oil, and the green movement are moving fast from the fringe to mainstream public debate; the global recession is giving rise to much soul-searching for a more humane capitalistic model. Not to mention all the freshly unemployed journalists and designers looking to fill their days with portfolio-building. "Recessions are a great time for starting new enterprises," says Drenttel. "The traditional design press is going to be decimated by this recession." On this cheerful note, Helfand interrupted to show us some baby birds, freshly hatched, on a ledge outside the kitchen. Moving through the rooms to go see them gave me a Winterhouse-tour-in-a-blur: smoke-scarred fireplace, solemn modernist furniture, enough books to crush an elephant brigade.

"We need to evaluate the impacts of design projects critically and stop talking only about personalities and what's new this month."

While many social-change projects by designers have been modest or difficult to scale, a few stand out as models for future, broader-scale efforts. As examples of the latter Drenttel and Lasky cite Ripple Effect, a clean-water program in India involving the Acumen Fund, the Gates Foundation, and design firm IDEO; and MIT's One Laptop Per Child, now responsible for distributing 1.5 million sturdy, low-cost laptops to children in developing countries worldwide. The MoneyMaker Pump, co-sponsored by IDEO and the anti-poverty non-profit KickStart, is a particular favorite of the CO team for its quantified success. According to the project website, 45,000 micro-irrigation pumps are now in use among poor farmers in Kenya, Tanzania, and Mali, contributing to a net 29,000 new jobs and $37 million in new profits and wages annually since 1996.

"We're not only talking about social movements here, but social enterprises," Drenttel adds. "Enterprises can be measured and evaluated. What's missing right now [in design and social change] are serious, in-depth case studies consistent with evaluations in science or business in a university setting." To that end, part of the Rockefeller grant money will be dedicated to creating a new case-study model with the Yale School of Management. "Rather than a 10-page written fixed narrative, sold for X dollars per student like Harvard's, ours will be interactive cases, with raw data and documents, video interviews, and other kinds of project tracking, all published under a Creative Commons license," Drenttel continues. "The cases we're developing can approach a project from many different entry points, allowing them to be taught in both business and design schools."

It's curious to realize how much the Change Observer project's engine lies with journalistic inquiry. In fact, both Drenttel and Lasky mentioned the science magazine SEED as a model for the scrupulous inquiry they'd like to promote. "Scientists really have their methodology licked," says Lasky. "They pick a tiny piece of a problem, peer-review its exploration, make sure the results of any experiments are reproducible, then that knowledge replicates throughout their community. I don't know why design has been so ineffective at that methodology."

Change Observer's hope is that journalism will bring scrutiny, discipline, and deeper involvement to the larger projects where design can enable social change. On the one hand, it seems madness to believe so hard in a hobbled discipline's power; on the other hand, though, the era of citizen journalism is undeniably a critical one. Arm this brigade with discipline and slightly deeper pockets, and you have investigative journalism 2.0, practitioners, and readers. The question, for both Change Observer and The New York Times on down, is how will effective journalism fund itself?

"Design has gotten a free ride," Lasky remarks. "Much design journalism long ago fell into the habit of simply showing a product or an environment. The fact that it was published proved it was good. At I.D. it was never enough for us to say ‘this exists'; there had to be a story."

In a proof of journalistic mettle, Drenttel eyes me squarely and adds, "A lot of journalism has a rah-rah function. GOOD is rah-rah around what they define as good works in the world. Anyone who does that with personality, style and some insight can build an audience, but that's easy love, not tough journalism." He cites Project M, an awareness initiative to underwrite water meters and city-water installations for residents of Hale County, Alabama, who often don't even realize they're drinking polluted water. GOOD profiled this project in 2007 but, Drenttel complained, failed to report how many water meters got installed. "The journalist in me wants to know that," Drenttel says.

(According to Pam Dorr, executive director of Hale Empowerment & Revital.Org. (HERO), the local organization tasked with implementation, Project M has raised $50,575 and helped 119 families get clean running water. (Read Change Observer's update on this project here.))

More details, more ambiguity, more nuance-Lasky and Drenttel want these to be the hallmarks of Change Observer's approach. They also believe this attention to complexity will help the project stay neutral politically. "Exposing complexity and ambiguity is very anti-ideological," Lasky remarks. "It's harder to play Hamlet and weigh the pros and cons; it's so refreshing just to be angry."

An example of this is an online dialogue she plans between New York City lighting designer Leni Schwendinger and the International Dark Sky Association. At first blush, these organizations are at loggerheads: Schwendinger designed the Triple Bridge Gateway illuminating the city's dingy Port Authority bus terminal and the Coney Island Parachute Jump, both of which depend on liberal lighting at night. Yet it's tough to paint Schwendinger simply as an anti-environmental artiste. Dark Sky contends that urban light pollution clouds the stars from view and disturbs certain patterns in nature. For example, sea turtles rely on moonlight to find the sea; when newly hatched turtles wander towards illuminated hotels, they can be picked off by seagulls. Schwendinger poses the question this way: "Cities are places that are distinct from agricultural and wildlife spaces, and part of the reason people love cities, the magic of cities, has to do with light and shadow. Plus people feel, and are, safer in a lit city. What do we lose in terms of design and safety and people's relationship to an urban landscape in order to see the stars?"

"Design has gotten a free ride. Much design journalism long ago fell into the habit of simply showing a product or an environment. The fact that it was published proved it was good."

What holes can be poked in the Change Observer initiative? It's decidedly un-bipartisan politically. It's unclear how it'll sustain itself financially past its initial two-year funding period. It may under-acknowledge the fact that investigative journalism suffered its decline because less-than-demanding readers didn't support it. Some designers are allergic to effective solutions that don't photograph prettily. As a project, Change Observer is vulnerable to evaporating whenever the recession's soul-searching does. Most pointedly, the project is predicated on designers' ability to speak capitalists' language, but hasn't yet tackled how suits, designers and nonprofit types can be collectively motivated to approach problems of social change.

Still, Change Observer's premise is worth watching, and the solutions it finds to these challenges could have broader implications for the disciplines it touches. Lasky's comments about design can be aptly applied to the larger project: "Design is never perfect; it's at best optimal," she says. "Not to be able to show our readership the implications, the ambiguities [of design and social change], does the world of consumers a disservice as well."

Shooting the Black Panthers

Patrick Strange — Thu, 6 Aug 2009 08:38:00 PDT

How history happens to the photographer Howard L. Bingham.

What do Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela, The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali, and George W. Bush all have in common? Each one has met-and in the particular case of Ali, made lifelong friends with-Howard L. Bingham, the affable and fun-loving photographer of the 20th century's most dynamic and seemingly unapproachable subjects. Malcolm X, Robert F. Kennedy, and César Chávez all fell under Bingham's penetrating gaze, as did countless other participants-both villains and victims-of the American Civil Rights Movement. Since first taking up the camera as a rookie photographer for the local Los Angeles black newspaper, The Sentinel, Bingham has had an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time when history was in the making.

Howard L. Bingham's Black Panthers 1968 (AMMO Books), a collection of photographs and essays chronicling Bingham's work while on assignment with the Black Panthers, is only one of the many fixtures on Bingham's historical mantle-but it's a pivotal piece of documentation. Solicited in 1968 by Life magazine to cover the infamous Black Panther party, Bingham and writer Gilbert Moore spent several months with the party's enigmatic leaders, including founders Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and David Hilliard, as well as the contentious, out-spoken minister of information Eldridge Cleaver and his wife, Kathleen. Throughout the duration, Bingham captured both the loud displays of protest and the quiet, intimate moments before and after the public battles. GOOD spoke with Howard L. Bingham about the personalities of the Black Panthers, and why it pays, literally, to have a good name.

GOOD: How did you choose which photographs to include in the book?

HOWARD L. BINGHAM: Well, we edited out thousands of them. I had a book from Life magazine with a bunch of contact sheets. We went over and picked out a lot of photos. Early on, when we were shooting the Panthers in '68, Time would always send us prints after we sent them the photos-nice prints. They don't do that anymore. That's when printing was really "printing." But in compiling the book-well, when you get other people involved, they have other ideas. They say, "Well, maybe you should have that and maybe you should have this." I'm easy sometimes, and I'm like, "Alright, alright."

G: In the book, Gilbert Moore writes that he was nervous when he began the assignment, but that you were carefree and just happy to be taking photographs for money. Is this an accurate depiction?

HLB: Sure, pretty much. Gilbert didn't know what to make of it at first. When I'm on a story, I don't know much of the history about what's going on. I just like to go take photos. I leave the history and the information to you writers. I'm the easy guy. I'm nonchalant. I just have fun taking pictures. I'm one of those people who likes to have fun.

Black Panthers addressing the crowd at a "Free Huey" Rally at DeFremery Park, Oakland, California

G: How were you chosen for the assignment?

HLB: Time magazine wanted to do an article on the Panthers. They had gone to Eldridge [Cleaver] to find out if they could do it and Eldridge said, "The only way I'll let you do this story is if Howard Bingham does the photos." And you see, at the time, I did not know Eldridge; Eldridge knew me. He had heard about me from Muhammad Ali and some other people and organizations-like the Muslims-because I was active in the Civil Rights Movement in the early '60s. So, everybody knew me and knew what kind of guy I was. I had a good name-and some say I still do.

G: Initially, were the Panthers suspicious about what you guys were doing?

HLB: Well, once we got the OK, [Gilbert Moore] came out to meet me and we went and talked about it. Afterward, we went up to Oakland to meet Eldridge and [Kathleen Cleaver] and the Panthers. A couple of days later, Eldridge called me over and said, "Hey man, I know you, but this motherfucker over here-I think he's a pig, an informant for the cops." I said, "Nah, man. He's cool. He's just never been around people like you." Anyway, I said he was a cool cat. But this story turned Gilbert all around. He learned a lot. And at the end, when we went back to write the story ... Life wanted him to write it one way, and he wanted to write it his way. And his way wasn't the right way. He said, "I want to write it the way I want." They never published his story, but later on, he wrote a book called A Special Rage in '71 that was all about his time with the Panthers.

G: Before the Panthers assignment, Life had hired you for other stories as well.

HLB: In march '66 there was a mini-riot in L.A. after the Watts riots. So, I called Life magazine and they told me to start taking pictures. Soon after that call, Life magazine sent all of their photographers who were in L.A.-all the big guys: Bill Ray, Ralph Crane, and others. The next week, when the issue came out, I had two full pages in there, and all those Life guys didn't have anything. And that made me feel good. I wasn't used to shooting for Life, and that was right before the Long Hot Summer of 1967, so they put me on "Riot Retainer." So, wherever riots were, Bingham went. That was my intro to Life magazine-I went to riots in Bakersfield; I went to riots in San Francisco; I went to riots in Detroit.

Police officers in front of Alameda County Courthouse, Oakland, California

G: Were you ever fearful of government surveillance or being held for questioning while in such close proximity to the Panthers?

HLB: Why would I be scared? I had been around Ali all these years and around all their government informants before. What did I have to worry about? I didn't do anything wrong. Nah... never.

G: What was Eldridge Cleaver like? In your photos, he seems to have such a strong, brooding, calculating exterior

HLB: Eldridge was cool. He always had a big crowd everywhere he went-thousands of people. He was one hell of a speaker. People loved to listen to him. He was very interesting. And I liked him as a man. I mean, I had no dislikes for him. I wasn't one of his followers-I don't follow anyone. I follow Bingham. I was just there to do the job. And Kathleen was a beautiful lady. She was incredible and the crowds loved her too.

G: What's your approach to shooting journalistic photographs?

HLB: I don't know-I am without any formal training in photography and even failed photography in community college. I mean, I don't just shoot to shoot. I just wait for something that makes sense and try not to waste any film.

G: Are any of these photos in the book particularly special to you?

HLB: They all are-I took them.

Two girls on tricycles in front of Panther Headquarters, Oakland, California

All images (c) 2009 Howard L. Bingham - Courtesy of ammobooks.com

Good Guide to Reducing Your Water Use, Part 1: Bathroom

Siobhan O'Connor — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 05:59:24 PDT

1A: A (Clean) Toilet Hack

Potential water savings: Up to 18 gallons per day, per person.

How to easily reduce the water wasted by every flush.

Toilets waste tons of water every year. When you flush, that's about five or six gallons right there if you have a conventional toilet, and on average we each flush six times a day. Thankfully, there are now all sorts of products to lessen gallons per flush. There are low-cost add-ons like the Toilet Tummy or the British-made Hippo the Water Saver. You can also purchase a dual-flush toilet, which can save up to five gallons per flush by offering one kind of flush for each bodily function. But the lower-tech and less-well-heeled among us might want to try this easy and free hack.

Get Started

1. Remove the lid from your toilet.

2. Observe the black floating ball. This thing determines the water level in your toilet.

3. Reach into the toilet tank and grab the thin metal rod attached to the black floating ball.

4. Bend the rod downward just a little. It won't break easily, but be ginger, yeah?

5. Be an optimist. Your tank is now half full.

Idiot-proof Version

Put a brick or two-or other heavy, noncorrosive objects-in the tank. That will let the toilet think it has more water in it than it does, and reduce the water used per flush.

1B: A (Dirty) Toilet Hack

Potential water savings: Up to 36 gallons per day, per person.

How to forgo water altogether, without a flush.

Most of the readers of the Urban Homestead blog, a guide to self-reliant city living, buy in to the lifestyle strategies of authors Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen. Except one: composting your own feces. "It horrifies most people," Knutzen admits. For Knutzen, an adherent of "humanure" guru Joseph Jenkins, the practice makes perfect sense. "Nitrogen makes plants grow," he says. "You flush it down the toilet and create pollution in our riverways. So you are taking two valuable things and making trash." Instead, Knutzen suggests following these five steps to composting your own solids.

Get Started

1. Get a five-gallon bucket and line the bottom with sawdust. Attach a lidded toilet seat.

2. Do your business and cover it with sawdust. Repeat. Empty once or twice a week into a 55-gallon composter out back.

3. After each waste dump, add leaf litter, coconut husks, or finely shredded newspaper over the waste into the container. "You're basically making crap lasagna," says Knutzen.

4. Keep it as moist as a wrung-out mop. You want it to get hot-120 degrees Fahrenheit is ideal, monitored with a long thermometer. Adding earth worms are good, too.

5. Let it age for a year. Fertilize plants.

1C: How To Bathe

Potential water savings: up to 134 gallons per day, per household

Settling the shower versus bath debate.

You've probably heard that showers use less water than baths. This is true-or can be-but it depends on a few things. Most conventional bathtubs hold 60 gallons of water. The average shower head spews between 2.5 and 4 gallons per minute, depending on whether it was made before or after 1992. Even if you have a higher-flow shower head, you have to shower for 15 minutes before you're at bath levels-24 minutes if your head is newer. The average American shower length is under eight minutes. Of course, if you fill your tub halfway and shave in there without water running, you could theoretically be using less water than showering, so it's not cut and dried, but the evidence seems to heavily favor showering. Also, for $40, you can get a one-gallon-per-minute shower head by Bricor, and for $10 you can get a 1.2-gallons-per minute Real Goods shower head-with a pause button to use while lathering. At those rates, you might feel justified in taking the occasional half-hour shower.

Other DIY Bathroom Options

Let It Mellow

Everyone's been to someone's hippie parents' country house where you're instructed to let it mellow if it's yellow. It's an unpleasant concept, but by now you know that unless you have a fancy new low-flow or dual-flush toilet, the toilet is your home's biggest water suck-it accounts for almost 30 percent of your daily water use. Since the average person urinates six times a day, may we suggest you flush every other time?

Savings Upwards of 18 gallons a day

Keep a Bucket Handy

You can lose about four gallons per minute when you run the bath, so consider the loss that happens as you run the water to get it to the right temperature. Keep a bucket handy in the bathroom and collect the water as it falls for plant watering and an additional flush. When enough volume is poured into the toilet, it essentially flushes itself, as the water level in a toilet remains constant (in other words, a flush is just water being poured into the toilet from the tank; you'd be doing it with a bucket instead).

Savings Up to 10 gallons a day

Navy Showers

As with most things imported from the military, it's simple: Get wet, turn the water off, soap up, rinse off. You're done in as little as three minutes, and you've only used a few gallons of water. Conserving water isn't always comfortable, but it's something you can get used to, like anything else. Think of our men in uniform.

Savings Up to 50 gallons over a regular 10-minute shower

Reuse Your Bathwater

Nearly 60 percent of Japanese people reuse their bath water. Some filter it and use it for other purposes that require clean water (washing dishes, etc.), others use it to water their plants. You know by now you shouldn't be taking baths (from a water-economy perspective, we mean), but if you do, make use of that water and don't take a shower after. If you do, you're using more than half a day's worth of total water for one bath.

Savings Up to 50 gallons per bath

Pee in the Shower

You can save one flush a day by urinating in the shower-two if you shower more than once a day. Sure it's gross, but unless you have an infection, your urine is sterile and nontoxic, and it washes down with your shampoo and soap anyway. An unscientific poll by Glamour magazine recently found that 75 percent of respondents do pee in the shower.

Savings Up to 6 gallons of water a day

The GOOD Guide to Reducing Your Water Use

Intro: This Is A Turn Off

Part 1, Bathroom

Part 2, Outdoors

Part 3, Kitchen

The Kashmir Question

William Wheeler — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 07:14:31 PDT

In our Water issue, William Wheeler wrote about the potential water conflict brewing between India and Pakistan. Here, in another dispatch, he looks at the question of Kashmir in growing tensions over a limited resource.

Victory in Afghanistan, the Obama administration has decided, will require stability in Pakistan. Seeking help in the fight against militants along the Afghanistan border, Washington has sought to de-escalate the simmering tensions between India and Pakistan so Islamabad can redeploy troops from its eastern border to the lawless mountain regions in the west. But putting an end to 60 years of mistrust is a tall order, as Obama's "Af-Pak" envoy Richard C. Holbrooke was reminded again last week during his fourth visit to the troubled region. And now, an emerging environmental threat is complicating the political dialogue: water.

Just last week, Pakistani intelligence officials complained that India has blocked off the rivers flowing into the country through Kashmir-an allegation, reports The Washington Post, that will make it harder to draw down troops from the Indian border even as the Pakistani army prepares for a major offensive against a powerful Taliban leader entrenched in its western westernmost region. Control of the rivers that run through the region has always been a potential source of conflict between the countries and, while the Indus Waters Treaty has long prompted both fears of a much-hyped nuclear water war, as well as optimism about the potential to solve such disputes through negotiations, water remains a strategic hurdle and potential spoiler to any peace process.

For many, resolving the decades-old Kashmir dispute is critical to stabilizing relations between the nuclear rivals, an acknowledgment President Obama made during his campaign for the presidency. "The most important thing we're going to have to do with respect to Afghanistan, is actually deal with Pakistan," Obama told MSNBC in an interview last October. "We should probably try to facilitate a better understanding between Pakistan and India and try to resolve the Kashmir crisis so that they can stay focused not on India, but on the situation with those militants."

The idea didn't seem so far fetched a few years ago when then-president General Pervez Musharraf was involved, as Steve Coll recently reported in The New Yorker, in back-channel negotiations for a settlement of the Kashmir dispute.

Tariq Hassan, a Harvard-educated Pakistani lawyer I spoke to in May, was involved in the movement to restore the country's Supreme Court chief justice-whose firing precipitated Musharraf's own ouster last year-and met with India's ambassador and other officials who, he says, were surprisingly affectionate toward the Pakistani general. "They were all singing praises for Musharraf," Hassan recalled. For Hassan, it was an indication that Musharraf had indeed been committed to resolving the Kashmir dispute.

In years past, says Hassan, American presidents have avoided getting involved in the thorny politics of the Kashmir issue. Encouraged by Obama's initial willingness to engage leaders on the issue, Hassan was disappointed by his subsequent decision to stay clear. "To be able to resolve issues between Pakistan and India, Kashmir is the central issue," Hassan maintains. "That's the crux of the problem with India-we don't have any problems with them anymore. But the issue that won't go away there is water."

Politicians from both sides, and many in the international community, have tried for decades to depoliticize the significance of water in the Kashmir dispute in hopes of finding common ground to share the critical resource. But, as Pakistani analyst Khalid Rahman told me, "in Pakistan, there is an informed perception that the Kashmir issue is a water issue and that India has been successful at separating it from the water issue and Pakistan should not have agreed to it."

Water is a soapbox issue for politicians in both countries and, according to B.G. Verghese, a former adviser to the Indian prime minister, one that Pakistani politicians have adeptly exploited in the international arena as a pretext for their claims to Kashmir. Ongoing negotiations over the Indus Waters Treaty, he says, are often gummed up by Pakistani objections. "Pakistan has no obligation (under the treaty) except to cry foul at every stage," he says, "which sadly is something that it has done."

But it's also a dwindling resource that will be harder to share as the populations in both countries grow while the per-capita water supply plummets. Some growth models predict that by 2025, India's population will grow to triple what it was-and Pakistan's population to six times what it was-when the Indus treaty was signed in 1960.

And even the status quo breeds problems. The terms of the treaty cuts Kashmiris out of the deal, placing strict limits on Kashmir's ability to build its own hydropower plants and siphoning off much the power produced along its rivers at cheap rates to provide for Indians and Pakistanis. A recent report from the U.S. Department of Defense found that the region's economic development has been stifled under these terms and the deal may even contribute to the militant recruitment of young Kashmiris. As it stands, the control of the areas that form the river basins is central to ensuring water supply from the rivers-a central hurdle to the negotiation of any final agreement. "Even if we give them the land, they've got a resource that because of the Indus water treaty itself has increased the stakes for Pakistan," says Hassan. "It's a security concern."

"Politicians from [India and Pakistan] have tried for decades to depoliticize the significance of water in the Kashmir dispute in hopes of finding common ground to share the critical resource."

According to The Final Settlement, a 2005 book by the Indian think tank Strategic Foresight Group, which outlined the issues that such a deal would have to include, a main obstacle will be how to divide the Indus waters equitably. Every one of Pakistan's diplomatic overtures in recent years, the book said, referred to water as a core concern. Because the region is uniquely susceptible to changes in its water supply-and because its booming populations, already facing food and power shortages, are heavily dependent on agriculture-violent conflict over water is "inevitable" as its water situation worsens, the report says.

It also raised the prediction that upstream diversions of water to benefit Pakistani elites in Punjab will provoke a sectarian civil war with the downstream province of Sindh.

For Verghese, Pakistan's problems are the result of an identity crisis. "What is Pakistan," he asks. "This is the question they have to come to grips with. Unless they do this, the only cementing bond is anti-India." With a nationalist movement being waged in Baluchistan, and an anti-Taliban offensive raging in the country's northwestern mountains that has spurred reprisal attacks in major cities, the fissures in Pakistani society are indeed startlingly apparent.

For his part, Hassan agrees that water will be potentially volatile element in a complicated national equation. "God forbid there's another interprovincial issue," he says. "But that could be tomorrow. "We do know it's a depleting resource. But how long do we have? We don't know."

Anna-Katarina Gravgaard and William Wheeler are reporting from India and Pakistan thanks in part to support from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. For more information about their project, click here.

A Better Kind of Offset

Bonnie Tsui — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 08:00:40 PDT

The emerging market for biodiversity offsets aims to curb-and reverse-our impact on the planet.

Offsetting your carbon footprint has never been easier. Drive a car 300 miles on a business trip, or hop on a flight to Hawaii for your honeymoon, and you can pay someone to reduce carbon emissions on your behalf. The idea behind offsets is simple: A ton of carbon is a ton of carbon, so you can balance out your own emissions by stopping the carbon from being released elsewhere. But how do you swap llamas for snow leopards? Can a similar economic model apply to balance something that isn't so easily measured-say, the amount of biological diversity in an area that is disturbed by a coal mine?

These days, somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of all mammal, bird, and amphibian species are threatened with extinction. A major cause of this unprecedented loss is the destruction of natural habitat by what we now think of as basic human activities: planting a farm, cutting down trees, digging a mine, making a road, building a city, drilling for oil or gas-the same industries that provide crucial jobs and economic growth for people around the world.

But the importance of biodiversity-that is, the variety of life on earth-is manifold. Genetic diversity prevents extinction; more plant species means a greater variety of everything from food crops to medicine; diverse ecosystems are more resilient in recovering from disasters like fire, flood, and drought. Protecting biodiversity, then, is vital to the existence of life as we know it. But how do we factor it into the business of life as we know it?

An international consortium called the Business and Biodiversity Offsets Program has been working on the answer. For the past four years, BBOP, managed jointly by Forest Trends, Conservation International, and the Wildlife Conservation Society, has been quietly building a partnership of major companies, leading scientists, conservation experts, governments, and financial institutions to determine what to consider when designing and implementing biodiversity offsets. Using the carbon-credit market-worth $126 billion in 2008-as a model, BBOP is creating a portfolio of projects in a range of industries to show that biodiversity offsets can achieve better and more cost-effective conservation results.

But unlike the carbon offset market, BBOP's aim is not just to right a wrong on the back end, but to first prevent harm as much as possible on the front end. So far, participants include Rio Tinto, Shell International, Goldman Sachs, the United Nations Development Program, and the World Wildlife Fund.

The idea of biodiversity offsets is controversial to some in the conservation community; the fear is that that the use of offsets could encourage regulators to allow certain large-impact projects to go on as long as they offered offsets afterward to compensate. BBOP says that following a "mitigation hierarchy" (see below) is one of the main ways to ensure offsets are used correctly, so that businesses aren't given a license to trash.

"You must avoid harming [biodiversity] to begin with. Far better to do that than try to fix it afterward, or to try to fix it by protecting something somewhere else."

BBOP aims to ensure "no net loss" of biodiversity in development projects through conservation activities that will protect threatened habitat, support a country's existing biodiversity strategies, and address the needs of local communities. In late May, the group had a global coming-out party with the release of handbooks describing what it has learned from six different pilot programs around the world, including sites in South Africa, Ghana, New Zealand, and the U.S.; projects in the first phase focused on extractive industries like oil, gas, and mining. The reports are helping to determine a standard methodology for measuring biodiversity; they also aim to show that "no net loss" can actually help companies manage their costs and liabilities in the long run.

Typically, a developer is required to do environmental-impact studies on a site before it begins work. BBOP stresses what it calls a "mitigation hierarchy": The first priority is to avoid and minimize the impacts of a project on biodiversity; second is restoration. A biodiversity offset is the final option in this hierarchy; it is used only to tackle the remaining impact. In other words, an offset should only come into consideration after all other prevention and mitigation measures have already been taken-it doesn't wipe the slate clean if you've torn down a rainforest in one place and helped preserve one in another.

"If you have something very important on your site, you must avoid harming it to begin with," explains Kerry ten Kate, director of BBOP, Forest Trends, and a leading expert on biodiversity offsets. "Far better to do that than try to fix it afterward, or to try to fix it by protecting something somewhere else. Biodiversity is not the same in one place as it is in another."

This logically begs the question: How can the amount of biodiversity be measured? One scientific method offered by BBOP is adapted from the "habitat hectare" approach developed in Victoria, Australia: Surveyors assign scores to a site based on the quality and quantity of native plants and animals, as well as landscape features and ecological function. A hectare is weighted according to its biological health: for example, the actual area might be one hectare, but weed invasion or the lack of large trees makes it worth less than one from a healthy habitat standpoint.

Local experts first choose a "benchmark" site-an independent area that is as pristine as possible-and select roughly 20 top attributes that best characterize ecosystem health. These might include four tree species and one kind of bush that indicate thriving native vegetation, plus an iconic bird species and an insect that indicates the richness of soil. The assessment might include the size of a patch of wilderness-is it connected to others, or is it isolated by development? Once this benchmark description is ready, it is used as the comparison for the pre-project condition of a site and the predicted condition after development. The difference is the amount of biodiversity that will be lost.

Similarly, once a potential offset site has been identified, the "gain" in biodiversity is calculated by estimating how activities like replanting native trees and removing invasive species will raise the score of a habitat. The purpose is to show a balance between a project's impacts on the original biodiversity of a site and the benefits achieved through an offset.

Since biodiversity is so tough to measure relative to carbon, ten Kate admits to having a bit of "carbon envy." The wisdom lies in selecting a critical mass of things that indicate the overall health of that ecosystem, but at the same time are easy to measure in a short period. "We can't possibly count every soil microbe or nematode, so we adapted established methods that give a good estimate of the quantity and quality of biodiversity overall," she says. "This is where local experts are indispensable."

"Businesses have a strong economic incentive to do well with biodiversity and local communities, since it relies on good performance to get a license to operate."

So what's in it for a business to achieve "no net loss"? Contrary to what we might think, a business has a strong economic incentive to do well with biodiversity and local communities, since it relies on good performance to get a license to operate. "For a company to get permission to undertake a mine or a road or a house, it needs to satisfy a regulator and get the support of local communities. It can take many years, and it can be hugely expensive," ten Kate explains. If a project contaminates a local water supply or harms the forest upon which a community depends, it is a disaster that can cost a company dearly. "Companies have told us that if you come in with a good track record, it saves a lot of time and money. So it's very much a financially material issue."

BBOP doesn't yet have published figures on the costs of each offset; so far, indications are that the offsets are minor relative to the cost of the entire project. On the regulatory side, biodiversity offsets are becoming a part of responsible lending practices for major international banks and government agencies.

One of BBOP's pilot case studies involved an offset for a coal mining facility near Greymouth, on the South Island of New Zealand. This was a retrospective study: the mine is closed and its operator, Solid Energy New Zealand, had already undertaken restoration activities, but it voluntarily looked to quantify its residual impacts on biodiversity in order to accomplish the goal of no net loss.

On a global scale, New Zealand's biodiversity is relatively modest, but it's significant because most native plant and animal species here are found nowhere else. To supplement information on the mine site that had been gathered before mining began, Solid Energy conducted further surveys on similar habitat nearby that resembled pre-mining conditions; key species found there, like the great spotted kiwi, were identified. Exotic plant and animal invasion was considered in the calculation; other disturbances observed in the mine's footprint included roads built specifically to access coal reserves, lower bird species diversity and population, erosion, and blackened tree canopies.

The survey of the New Zealand mine's impact on biodiversity loss was completed in the last year; the offset is now being designed. The shortlist of offset activities includes a project focusing on the great spotted kiwi, improving the species' forest habitat through weed removal and the controlling of introduced pests and predators.

Closer to home is a BBOP pilot that concerns a 12-home real estate development project on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle. The City of Bainbridge Island partnered with a private landowner to design an offset for impacts resulting from building the homes and the relocation of a shoreline road further inland. Two types of offsets were considered. An "in-kind" offset compensates for something in the same general habitat where the impact takes place-in this case, it's forest habitat where the homes and the new road would be situated; planting of native conifers, removal of invasive species, and establishing protection of undeveloped land with local land trusts have already begun. In-kind offsets are fundamental best practice, says Patrick Maguire, program officer for Forest Trends. "But there's also the possibility of conserving instead a habitat that is a higher priority. This project explored whether or not it's feasible to compensate a different habitat."

The "out of kind" offset considered was the restoration of crucial marine habitat in Puget Sound, since salmon habitat is threatened on the island and its restoration is a high regional priority. This additional offset would contribute to the "net gain" that is preferred by BBOP-that the nature, scope, and scale of the offset does more than replace the amount and condition of biodiversity lost through the project.

The Bainbridge Island project is the first to use BBOP's handbook to design a biodiversity offset for U.S. residential and infrastructure construction. It's particularly significant since it has already begun to show how biodiversity offsets might be incorporated as standard practice for future sustainable building design here. Marja Preston, who wrote the report on the Bainbridge pilot, says that the focus was on methodology development and how it could apply to the ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest and to smaller-scale projects. "We found that we could in fact create a very efficient methodology that would work very well and not be prohibitively expensive," she said. Local interest has led the city government to create an incentive system for biodiversity offsets to motivate developers in residential and commercial construction. Preston says the policy will likely be adopted this summer.

Perhaps BBOP's most important achievement to date is the issuing of 10 basic principles agreed on by all its partners, from multinational companies to governments, conservation groups, indigenous peoples, and banks. It's a one-page statement of commitment that emphasizes the big picture when it comes to best practices. One principle in particular stresses the "landscape scale" approach.

To that end, BBOP's second phase, which begins this year and ends in 2011, will focus on expanding pilot programs and working at the national level with various governments. BBOP leaders hope that with more experience and field data, they can create internationally agreed standards within six years and explore "conservation banking" to plan biodiversity offsets that complement each other and scale up conservation efforts at the best locations in the landscape.

Ten Kate says that's one of the best outcomes she can imagine going ahead: "Not just to look at a tiny footprint, or to fixate on individual projects, but to think of one's cumulative impacts on a larger, regional scale." The organization's ultimate goal? To change the status quo-making biodiversity offsets a standard part of business practice and taking a giant step toward no net loss.