Carnaval (in Small Pieces) I

Carnaval might be a lot of little pieces, vignettes and thoughts tossed together.

It’s a pile of parties, thrown anywhere and anytime, ranging from the everpresent blocos to the high end balls that I hear exist. There’s also the official samba parades in the Sambódromo, tickets to which are expensive, and which many Brazilians watch on TV.

Carnaval nominally is Saturday through Tuesday before Lent, but in practice has parties a week or two before on weekends, on the Thursday and Friday before, and cooldown events on the 4-5 days afterwards. No one here expects anything productive to happen during this week - it’s a good mentality.

Going to Zona Sul, our local supermarket, during mid-afternoon is an experience in alcohol purchasing. The checkout lines are roughly 50% anyone buying alcohol - cachaça, wine, cases upon cases of beer, 45% street vendors buying cases and cases of beer (to resell to all the celebrants in a very transparent mark-up scheme), and 5% locals or semi-locals stocking up on totally normal groceries. It’s hilarious, and only occasionally disturbing - like when you realize that the folks next to you are probably 16, buying a case of beer, and carrying a beer bong to drink it in the street. Open-container laws don’t exist here, and a minimum drinking age is a theoretical construct rather than a practical thing.

Three Different Adventures: The Saara and Churches

The other two adventures this past week were both in Centro - one, a shopping expedition, and the other, proper touristy sightseeing.

The Saara is the... ‘popular’ market area of Centro. The name translates to Sahara (an explanation has not been found), and it’s one of those areas where you hold on to your bags and watch your pockets. It’s a pile of tiny proper stores (four walls and a roof, buildings), and two sections of stalls (very dense, not particularly permanent looking). Per a suggestion from one of our portuguese teachers, we went to the Saara one day to find costume pieces (fantasias) for Carnaval. Brazil does dress-up for this rather than for any Halloween-like event (which they don’t really celebrate), and you get the same basic things - devil horns, feathers, the occasional mask. Less full costumes, but lots of headware - one of the popular things for girls are these tiny hats, about 4” across.
      At first, we wandered into the stalls, where it was immediately apparent that you could buy two things : cellphones and watches, both in the paired semi-legal categories of ‘definitely stolen’ or ‘probably stolen’. It was a ridiculous place - the sheer number of watches was absurd, as you generally couldnt see the walls, table tops, or shelves in any of the relevant stalls. No pictures, because taking your camera out there would be a bad idea for a variety of reasons.
   We then wandered down the street into the heart of the neighborhood, eventually spotting a doorway with feather boas and other festive pieces hanging outside. We proceeded up the stairs to the second floor of the building (it might have been over one of the many pet or fishing stores, I forget), and found ourselves in the Rio equivalent of a Halloween warehouse - cheap plastic items, cheap fabric hats, cheap anything you’d like, so long as you don’t mind if it comes from China and you pay in cash. We grabbed some pretty tame hats and some pretty not-tame giant glasses (black hat and gold glasses for me, blue and blue for Mike, and white and silver for Justin), and also got Justin to grab a fake mustache. We got through the ‘line’ with a minimum of fuss, with the mustache tossed in for free (the register was handwritten and it was a hectic sort of place). It’s a crazy neighborhood - somewhere I want to return to for a bloco in the next few days, this time without a backpack. It’s a nice example of the less scaled, less formalized economy, that also has more personal interaction than most US stores.

 The second piece was actually surrounding the Saara trip, and consisted of the exploration of a bunch of religious buildings. We started with the Candelaria, a giant church at the end of one of the major downtown avenues (but one which was never the cathedral, a fact I find curious). It’s almost over-the-top baroque, with not only elaborate painting and decoration everywhere in a romanesque (and thus dark) structure, it also has four columned doorways around the altar. So far as I could tell, these didn’t lead anywhere, they simply existed to add more stuff to the inside. It was an impressive place, and the ceiling paintings were lovely, but I’m unfortunately more a fan of light than of massive decoration. Church the First.

We then went to the Saara, followed by walking down towards the convent of St. Antonio, a very old building near what used to be a lake. On the way, we walked around the Teatro Municipal, which is a lovely old building (also classically inspired, but cleaner in both design and upkeep, at least on the outside). Also got some photos of strike signs from the recent police and firefighter strike (since resolved, no worries). We arrived at the convent, which is under rennovation, and is clearly an established place - they have images from when it was the only building around and far from the town center, and then the town grew around it until today, where it’s in the middle of the city’s downtown. How things grow. The convent is simple, with not a whole lot to look at (the church next door was closed on Mondays), but it does have some nice steps which were in the shade with a nice view of the nearby plaza (né lake). Mike and I were going to meet Cassie here (she was getting extra pages in her passport because she travels too much), but after 10 minutes, we realized that it would be a while, and that the city cathedral was right around the corner, and headed off in that direction.

 This was a phenomenal decision. The cathedral of St. Sebastian (patron St. of Rio) replaced the former cathedral near one of the main plazas (Praça XV, after independence day here), and is stunning. It was built in the late 1960’s, and is a 250ft high flat cone, hollow inside, with huge (180ft) stained glass windows every 90º. It’s totally open air, totally modern, and feels totally right for a strongly Catholic but non-european country. That may be a weird statement, so let me explain. Most churches that I’ve seen are in the classical tradition, built for a Christianity that grew and flourished in Europe and then moved to the New World. And Brazil has that - the Candelaria, the convent, the old cathedral are all this style, all built under a european inspired culture. Today, however, Brazil’s culture is a much different blend - between the afro-brazilian influences, the different climate, and several hundred years away from home, the church has changed along with the culture. And this building feels right for that shift - it’s built with lots of places for light to come in, built to allow air to circulate (something that wouldn’t make sense anywhere with winter), and built with a more modern feel. There’s an element of ‘dictatorship concrete construction’ as well, but it works better here than most spots around the city (i.e. UFRJ’s main building). It was a very cool experience, and a very worthwhile side trip. We ended up back at the convent, waited for a bit, and then went and got on the metro, likely about 5 minutes before Cassie arrived (we met back up at the apartment and laughed).

That was Monday, and it is now Saturday, with excitement over Carnaval building the whole week. I’ll write about that next, and eventually get back to general themes - I want to talk about transportation and urban design here. But first - to tonight’s bloco!

Three Different Adventures: Forte da Copacabana

Apparently life here *is* interesting enough to warrant blog posts (though it might just be the season). In the past week, I’ve had three different trips (one not quite independent, but worth mentioning regardless).

Saturday (last Saturday) we went to the Fort of Copacabana. This is on the spit of land between Ipanema and Copacabana known as Arpoador, right at the entrance to Guanabara Bay. Back in the late 1800s, the government built a giant gun station - in the period when big guns rather than planes and missiles were the dominant factor. We walked over there from our apartment (Mike, Cassie, Cassie’s ‘brother’, and myself), which is a pleasant walk through the neighborhood.






The fort has a great view of the whole giant length of Copacabana beach, and is very inexpensive to enter - R$4 in general, R$2 if you have a student ID. This is similar to many other museums around town - the government has put money towards making educational/historical/cultural items cheap.
 In the modern day and age, the buildings behind the fort proper (which is out on the end of the penninsula) have been turned into a gift shop, art gallery, historical museum, and two cafés with seaside tables - like everything else in Rio, it’s a pretty open design. The fort itself is a giant concrete/stone blob at the front, with walls several meters thick.

 Walking through is the standard semi-preserved old building, with the omnipresent mosaics on the floor.It was cool to be able to read all the signage in portuguese (progress!), but the inside is nothing phenomenally new. Outside, you can walk up on top of the emplacement, right around the gun barrels and across this concrete wasteland sticking out into the sea. It’s a much more interesting view in many ways, and we thought it interesting that the guns are all pointed away from the open sea. (Big guns here means barrel diameters of 19 and 30 centimeters, btw, with ranges of 18 and 23 kilometers).

As always, I’m fascinated by this sort of photo: the continuous combination of beach, high-rises, favela, grassy-hilltop. This one is Copacabana’s version (on the far side of one of the hills we see from our veranda), and it’s very nicely framed. The combination of terrain and wealth never fails to fascinate.




 On the way back, we ran into the beginnings of a bloco (the street parties that show up pretty much everywhere all the time during Carnaval), with the standard band and people selling beers. The difference here is that this was aimed at animals, so that it was the dogs (and maybe a cat or two) that were wearing costumes. A bit strange, but intriguing nonetheless.

Corcovado, à pé

I promised I would write about Adventures, and I need to catch up, starting with a pretty big one - going to Christ. Christo Redentor, that is - the giant statue of Jesus which overlooks Rio from one of the highest peaks, Corcovado (the Hunchback). Being the biggest tourist attraction in the city, it’s got several standard ways to arrive, with most people taking the cog train or bus up. Justin and I decided to take the hard way - on foot. Though less advertised, there is in fact a well established trail up the 710m mountain, conveniently starting from the Ipanema side. Guided by Briana’s account of the same trail and a trail map, we left the apartment at 7:10 on what promised to be a clear, hot, and humid Sunday in February.

Being carless, energetic, and ignorant of any direct bus routes, we decided to walk to the starting point in Parque Lage, a lovely tropical forest with walkways, ruins, waterfalls, and a school of visual arts. The Lagoa was lovely and calm, and we got to the entrance of the park at 7:55am, to discover that it opened at 8 - our timing was pretty much perfect, as we couldn’t have gotten any use out of being their earlier, and we were among the first people into the park.

We found the start of the trail, which has a ranger-hut-like structure at it, along with a trailhead sign (which I suspect is relatively recent). There was a policeman there, who took our first names, made sure we knew the trail, and sent us on our way.
The first chunk of the trail was a standard tropics ascent - switchbacks, dense forest, occasional peeks out into the wider world, hot and humid with the smell of smashed and possibly slightly decaying tropical fruit. It was lovely. After passing by some trickling waterfalls and making up a legend in português about the monkeys (which supposedly exist but which we didn’t see), we found the second half of the trail.

Here, things got more interesting. I’m pretty sure that the 2.2km trail does about 25% of the climbing in the first half, and the other 75% in the other half. The map uses a different color for the trail and notes it as ‘steep and slippery’, and you know exactly when you hit it because it just goes up. No compromises, no switchbacks, rare plateaus, just a steep set of roots and compacted earth for a nice thousand feet of vertical climbing. Conveniently, because it’s so steep, if you keep going, you finish it relatively quickly - we hit the train tracks at the top at 9am.

From here, we knew that heading to the statue directly would be useless, as we didn’t yet have tickets. We clambered up the steep slope beyond the tracks to the road and wandered down a kilometer or so of switchbacking road, occasionally passed by a careening 15 passenger van or an ambitious bicyclist. We also got some peeks at the back of Christo through the trees, and got to cool off a bit - we were sweating pretty hard.

We arrived at the spot where the vans depart from (the cost of transportation is an undesired addition to your ticket price, making up 40% of the total), as well as the midpoint station for the cog train. We put our shirts on, bought tickets, looked at the line of people expending far less calories, and walked up to the train station to head up the tracks. When we jumped off the end of the station, we promptly got yelled at, so we went back up the road and did what we were apparently supposed to - took the cut through to the tracks at the first close curve.

Because the tracks are so much steeper, we got back to the intersection of trail and tracks in about 10 minutes (it had taken about 30 to walk down the road), and were soon out in the open at the ‘Curva da OH’, as it’s noted on the map. This is the spot where the train gives its riders an expansive view, as well as the feeling like they’re going to careen off the cliff. For hikers, it ends up being a nice resting spot - though a bit sunny, it has plenty of room to stand on the side and a concrete equipment shed to sit on top of. 

As we got to the top of the tracks, we found a Brazilian doing the same journey, with the same map, and he figured that it was quicker just to finish the tracks out. While correct, after getting yelled at again, we came back and went through the upper cut between the road and the railway. Seems like no one cares if you walk on the tracks, so long as you don’t do it in the stations. Having finally arrived at the monumental complex (double meaning totally intended, as it’s a huge area), we entered and walked up the numerous sets of stairs past souvenir shops and cafes to reach the statue itself. At this point, we’d  taken ~3 hours to go from our apartment to one of the highest points in Rio. It was a pretty good feeling, and we spent a bit taking touristy photos, photos of tourists, and reading plaques. 

After escaping the masses of people, we stopped and had some refreshments (bananas for me, suco de abacaxi, or pineapple juice, for Justin) at the café. The whole place is a little bit ridiculous in terms of how touristy it is - plus there are helicopters buzzing by all the time, taking people on a 8-9 minute ride for only R$180 per person (three person minimum). It’s a very cool statue, but the explorer in me wishes they’d made it a little harder to get to, or something. 

Looking around from the top, you can see a lot of different neighborhoods, and the favelas near each flat area - always an interesting contrast. While I think I found a better favorite photo of this today in Copacabana, I love this shot of the Leblon (one of the richest neighborhoods) and its equestrian racetrack, and Dois Irmãos with its two giant favelas, all smashed together - rich, poor, lake, mountain, all at once within a half hour walk of each other. 

Since we wanted to end up back in Ipanema, didn’t feel like taking multiple buses to get there, and for whatever reason weren’t completely exhausted yet, we headed back down the hill. Down was mostly much easier than up, and we passed a lot of people on their way up in much hotter weather than we’d had. We reached the bottom without incident to find that our policeman had disappeared (a mystery), that the Parque was full (and a lovely place), and that we still had to walk back to our apartment. 

After getting back around the Lagoa, to Zona Sul, and finally back home, my body was in bad need of a nap, but it was, overall, an excellent hike, and an impressive example of being able to walk to places, and to escape Rio all over the place through its myriad parks and involuntary incursions of nature. I’m looking forward to going to a meeting of the Clube Expeditionista Carioca (Rio Explorer’s Club) this Thursday, hopefully meeting some folks where English won’t be the default language, and who do some hikes and, particularly, climbing on the city’s many exposed granite and gneiss faces. 

And to finish, an obligatory picture of a giant mythological figure:

Public Transportation in Pittsburgh: A Proposal

A few weeks ago, the Port Authority put out a press release highlighting necessary fare increases and service cuts that will be required to balance their budgets (which is required). You can view the press release and detailed maps here, but some highlights include:

• The loss of 40% of the network’s routes, mainly losing access to inner ring communities (outside the city core)
• The elimination of much of the 64 and 75 routes, eliminating some key cross connections between Oakland, Squirrel Hill, South Side Works, and the Waterfront. The 75 would only be cut on weekends.
• The elimination of airport service from the 28X route. 

The cuts are well thought out for what the system should be doing - if you need to cut 40% of your system, you should do it in a way that preserves the ability of the poor and carless to get to work, and maintain service to your primary users. So many routes are cut on weekends, routes to the suburbs are cut, and almost none of the routes into Oakland are outright cut. 

But, even though that preserves the core mission, you lose almost everything else: the ability to get between neighborhoods with ease, the ability for college students (who don’t have cars) to get to entertainment centers on nights and weekends, or for anyone to get back home after drinking. You lose the possibility of living in those inner ring communities and trying public transit occasionally, or learning to like it, and the possibility of building transit-oriented communities. And you lose connections between transit systems - namely, that Pittsburgh would become the only major city I can think of without a public transit connection between its airport and city center. That’s a travesty - our airport isn’t close enough for it to be easily connected, and I’m sure the extra 20 minutes per run costs a bunch of money, but it’s a public service that needs to be there if we want to tout Pittsburgh as a thriving city, let alone a ‘green’  one. 

There are a variety of systemic issues that have led to this problem - funding sources, changing priorities, the lack of tolling on I-80, etc. Personally, I think that this release was an excellent threat - a vision of ‘this is what it will look like if you go forward with current policies without changing things’. It was well timed for this, and we’ll see what happens at the state level, where they’re going through transportation funding plans now. If you ever go anywhere in Allegheny County (whether it’s by public transit or by car on roads which are less congested because of it), you should toss in a comment or go to a hearing about the issue, and tell your friends. 

However, there are places where we should push our democratic representatives, and there are places where we can do more ourselves, and the universities are an example of the latter. In 2010, Pitt and CMU students, because of our bulk deal with Port Authority, paid $.98 and $.75 per ride respectively, rather than the cash fare of $2.25 or even the overall average of $1.46. That’s after some significant increases in our fees. To my mind, this is not just a place to call for more government funding. For the value that we as a community obtain from having unlimited access around the city and county, we should pay more.

I realize that this is a tough thing to say. Tuition keeps going up (again, variety of reasons), families or students are struggling to pay, and increasing fees is never a popular option. But when we pay $180 per person per year in total security and transportation fees (which funds Pitt’s shuttles as well as our Port Authority payment), we get something worth >$1600. We could probably manage to do a better job of supporting the public infrastructure that we depend on, particularly since we don’t pay the property taxes that would normally help do so.

I don’t want this to come from the county - for something like this to happen, it has to come from those who will pay more, via a petition of graduate or undergraduate students and work by SGB and/or GPSA. It can’t come from above, and it can’t go to pay for pensions - I’m sorry, but that was a poor thing to ask students to pay for. For students to voluntarily pay more to help maintain a functioning transit system which they use frequently is a much better deal.

I’d suggest that the proposal go something like this: Pitt students (UGrads, Grads, or both) agree to increase annual transportation fees by 25%-50%, with all of the money going to an increase in payments to Port Authority. In return, the 28X maintains service to the airport, thus providing not only Pitt students but visitors a valuable service.

Hopefully, the extra money would be more than enough - and then it could go to other routes, either as PA sees fit, or places that are in the interest of Pitt. I’m edging into a privatization argument that I don’t want to get into, so I’m going to stop here, with the final statement that public transportation is an unmerited good, that it requires both local and higher-level support, and that right now, Pitt and other universities could and should pay more for the benefits they receive, helping to make the system better for everyone. 

Onde nós moramos (Where we live)

This will not be the only post about place and urban design, I’m sure, but it’s a good starting point. The four (currently five) of us that will be in Rio the whole time are sharing a large (and expensive) apartment in Ipanema, one of the nicest areas of the city. Map here. We’re about 4 blocks from the beach (praia), 3 blocks from one of the main plazas in Ipanema (concerts and markets and the like), and 3 blocks from the Lagoa, the lake that sits in the middle of the southern zone of Rio. The best way to picture Rio (aside from, you know, a map), is to draw a large bay opening south. The east side is the city of Niteroi (the best feature of which, in some folks’ opinion, is its view of Rio). The west side is all Rio, with major neighborhoods along the cost. The poorer areas are up in the north along the bay, the richer areas are along the coast on the ocean and turn into the bay, and Centro is in between (with favelas anywhere they’ll fit). Ipanema and Leblon are the two tourist-y and upper-class areas within the city, with things getting less glitzy and less safe as you head north (day and night are different, obviously). The whole city is much like Pittsburgh (and other places?) in that it has very distinct neighborhoods, often separated by physical boundaries (like lakes and mountains). Those photos you may have seen of high end apartments next to slums are generally from India, but the same concept applies here - favelas are more permanent construction, and almost always on steep hills, but they’re right in the middle of every neighborhood regardless.

Our apartment is on the 7th floor of a building which, like most others in Ipanema, has its own doorman to open the gate and keep track of people. We have 3 main bedrooms, one of which is the master and has its own bathroom. We also have a small maid’s bedroom and bathroom off the kitchen, along with a washing machine (no maid). It has air conditioning which we haven’t used yet due to fear of the cost, but probably the best part is the view. Our veranda and windows look north towards Corcovado (home of Christo Redentor). We’re high enough to overlook most of the roofs, so we have a clear line of sight - after the tall buildings and trees at street level, it’s a different world. It makes for a very pleasant place to sit and have breakfast, lunch, or dinner, to put on sunscreen, or to just sit and watch the world.

The apartment is very well equipped in terms of services, with wireless internet, a nice TV and dvd player, and its own washer (which saves a lot of time and money). To dry clothes, we have what I’m guessing most places have here, a rack which hangs from the ceiling and which is raised or lowered as appropriate. Ours had two strings that were essentially non-functional, but we/I bought more string and fixed that (the ease of finding drying rack materials is one of the reasons I’m guessing they’re common). While we don’t have a dishwasher, the dishes are pretty easy to wash, and the counter around the sink is all one giant piece of metal, which makes cleaning easy. We didn’t initially have a water filter, but after some calculations, we bought one yesterday, figuring that it will pay back after a month, even at a cost of R$114. The water supply is theoretically safe to drink unfiltered, but most households don’t, possibly because of the high level of chlorine. We were also worried about any extra pathogens that we might not be used to - but that’s solved now.

On the other side of the water supply system, the sewers here (apparently especially between buildings and street) aren’t built to handle toilet paper, so it can clog up the system. To solve this, there’s a small [lidded] can next to each toilet for the placement of used toilet paper. This is apparently a common practice throughout S. America (for more info on any country, see here), but it’s a small reminder that Brazil is not quite at the same infrastructure level as the ‘Western World’, even in the rich areas of the main cities. On a related note, I’d like to nominate ‘effective city-wide water and sewage systems’ as the crowning achievement of civilization - the amount of effort needed to create, maintain, and operate a system that cleans, distributes, and avoids losing water, and collects and treats sewage, all at a minimum of energy and monetary costs, is amazing. (Side note: we’re failing on the maintenance piece in the U.S.).

And now, pictures:

The room that Mike and I are currently sharing.

Living room with shades mostly drawn

Dining area (the art came with the place)

View out the back (it’s a hazy day, its often much clearer).

The Third Important Question

So I do want to write blog entries about life in Rio (likely with some applicability to Brasil in general), but my day to day life is not that interesting - currently it mostly consists of português class in the morning, followed by lunch in Centro (downtown Rio), followed by a combination of sitting around the apartment, working, and running shopping errands until four or five when we go to the beach until roughly sunset. This is followed by more sitting around, eating dinner, and possibly playing cards. I think it will be more interesting (except for days where there are Adventures) to write about topics, with commentary. And since the thing that we deal with the most is food (possibly more than all other things combined), let’s start with that. And since there is far too much to say, let’s start with lunch.

Brazilians eat lunch as their primary large meal - medium sized breakfast, large lunch, small dinner (possibly with drinks). So lunch is Important, and most restaurants target the lunch crowd for food, and then switch into more of a bar mode for suppertime. The most common restaurant type by far is the per-kilo places that are all over the city. These, as you might guess, give you a plate, let you fill it up from a buffet, and then charge you a pre-set price per kilogram, with things like drinks and sometimes desserts costing extra. The buffets are pretty standard (having been to at least 8 of these restaurants now), with a variety of basic salad fixings and cold salads, casseroles (often with chicken or cream), meat dishes (they do a chicken-cordon-bleu dish which varies a bit but is always pretty great, as well as steak), seafoods, and ’things breaded and fried’, which range from bananas to cheese or meat dumplings to cod balls (better than they sound). The ’things breaded and fried’ are often ball shaped, are frequently poorly labeled, and are almost always worth getting since they vary a lot. Nicer per-kilos will also have a barbecue area (churrasco) where you can get freshly cooked meat as long as you know how to ask for it. Occasionally your price/kilo goes up a bit because you got this, but normally the price is all inclusive.

Prices range from R$22 to R$50+, primarily based on location - as you go south, things are more expensive. with Ipanema and Leblon being the most expensive neighborhoods in the city, and things being much cheaper (barato) in Centro. We eat lunch in Centro because our class gets out at 12:30 and we’re already there (and usually hungry). While there are some standard dishes (rice and beans), there’s a daily variation so even going to the same place several days in a row you don’t tend to find the same things.

The pay-per-weight is interesting, because it changes your priorities a little bit - you probably don’t get quite as much food as you would at an all-inclusive buffet (I eat about .4 kg normally), and I’ve started prioritizing foods with less water weight, as water adds mass and cost but not calories. Salads and meat are good, casseroles less so (is my thinking). It makes for an interesting game to see whose ticket is the most expensive/cheapest and why.

On weekends (and for dinner, and whenever else), we tend to have sandwiches, either nutella (no peanut butter found yet) and such, or ham and cheese (now that we can order from the deli). Either way, we’ve got the basic food pieces figured out, we try not to eat out at dinner (because the Brasileiros look at you weird and it’s much more expensive since we’re in Ipanema), and we’re all getting a pretty balanced diet - when you can get all the food groups you need/want at lunch from a per-kilo, you can fix imbalances in other areas.

More to come on the food question, but I think I’ll try to post some photos and write about where we’re living in the next post. On a related note, Christo Redentor (the 120ft statue of Jesus that overlooks the whole city) is currently on a rotating set of colored lights, possibly for Carnaval. It’s a little trippy, but also continues to help make our backyard view pretty awesome.

Pre-Departure

We’re supposed to blog about Brazil (or rather, about our thoughts and experiences connected to it), for later programatic analysis by industrial engineers. I’m going to do that here, I’m not going to start a new blog, and this can serve as a good marker for the first Brazilian post.

(Thought I’m not yet in Brazil. Reports of my departure have been greatly exaggerated).

It’s getting to that point close enough to departure where I actually have to actively consider what to pack. And more, to the point where I wake up at 6:30am and am unable to get back to sleep because my brain has gone into On mode and isn’t in the mood to switch off again. The português helps with that.

I feel a bit like a [Dragonlance] wizard, thinking and mumbling phrases as if in an effort to prepare them for future use. I remain... anxious about my eventual ability to have a decent conversation with someone about something.

I know that I will get to Rio and it will be great, and though I will miss my wife and miss the projects and groups back here in Pgh, it will be, all in all, a pretty great time. I am sufficiently possessed of the necessary attitudes towards travel for this to be true. At the moment, and for the last month, I’ve more often wanted to stay than go. It’s a combination of an expensive apartment and being away from projects just as an excellent semester is starting up. And knowing that even if I’m extremely proactive, I likely won’t have the connections to really shift anything down there (or even really educate folks, I would guess).

Also, you know, my wife is here.

It’ll be good - it always is, and there’s enough time on this trip (and some events I already know are happening) to engage a bit more. It’s just pre-departure recognition of strong connections to Here. And the AM blogging doesn’t help that (but it means that you, dear reader, get to read more angst :-P).

Why I Believe in Transition [PGH]

There are a lot of frameworks for improving things out there - organizations, frameworks, networks. I’ve looked at a lot of them over the years (many are mentioned in this post), but I am increasingly convinced that the one I stand behind the most is Transition. We have an instance of it in Pgh, nominally a hub to help initiate, nurture, and connect more neighborhood-scale instances of Transition. That instance, TransitionPGH, was started about two years ago, and has drifted in and out, growing very slowly and collecting people rather than building its own community (IMHO). With the plethora of other environmental groups both on Pitt’s campus and in the city, several folks have asked my why I’m still dedicated to T.PGH (and I am) when it seems so weak. This is why:

Transition is based on concrete, real issues and finding concrete, real solutions at an applicable scale
I will be the first to admit that I am not much motivated by spiritual concerns. I like the Derrick Jensen quote (Premise 16 from Endgame) that

The material world is primary. This does not mean that the spirit does not exist, nor that the material world is all there is. It means that spirit mixes with flesh. It means also that real world actions have real world consequences. It means we cannot rely on Jesus, Santa Claus, the Great Mother, or even the Easter Bunny to get us out of this mess. It means this mess really is a mess, and not just the movement of God’s eyebrows. It means we have to face this mess ourselves.

Transition is based on a simple motivating factors: local resilience in the face of climate change and peak oil. Both problems have a bundle of science behind them, both are large, serious, complex, and physical problems whose solutions will need to be systemic, complex, and physical as well. And though these problems are global, what a post-peak oil or low-carbon world looks like is much more place-dependent than what we have now. Combined with the fact that change happens in communities and not because of national regulation (as if we could get that passed), and if we’re going to have an approach to dealing with climate change and peak oil - and we should - it needs to be at the community or urban level. Transition does that. A few others encourage study and education around the issues - ASPO, NCSE - and others encourage a general transition to a sustainable world - including the Natural Step, whose definition of sustainability I like best. And there are organizations looking at mitigating climate change, such as 350.org, but most of the ones I’ve seen have global issues as their motivation. Transition has ‘local’ at its heart, even with these global issues, and it believes in concrete approaches to concrete problems within the larger scope of sustainability.

Transition believes in planning as a core piece of moving forwardI like planning. I generally feel like the world is going too fast, and that we could all benefit from taking a week off to talk and think and plan out where we want to go as people, communities, and even larger. I also often feel like many sustainability efforts get started based on the phrase ‘this action will move us towards a greener world,’ without really knowing what the goal or vision is for that world. While Transition is certainly happy to have people doing things (and believes in celebrating them), at its core is the idea of looking at where we are, what’s around us, and where we want to go in the face of declining resources and energy - and then figuring out how to get there, in a physical and local manner (I’ll stop with the repeated adjectives for a bit). I think that those methods/frameworks/organizations that are based around planning sustainable visions - and the Natural Step qualifies here again - have much better capacity for leadership, even if they are currently latent.

Transition is all encompassingTransition is one of two organizations that I know of that wants everyone involved in making a better place, regardless of primary interest. Want to do urban gardens? Great. Want to look at transportation systems? Awesome. Available housing? Monetary systems? Energy production? Spiritual satisfaction? Come on in. Most organizations have focused on single areas - whether that’s one leg of the sustainability stool - Main Street is economics, PennFuture is environmental, community centers are social - or single issues - Allegheny CleanWays, Grow PGH, and Nine Mile Run all spring to mind. Those organizations are great, but a successful approach to CC and PO will be far more likely (again, IMHO, but see the Cheerful Disclaimer), if there is some connecting and unifying force, since all these individual issues are connected. I find that other candidates for community leader, including Three Rivers Bioneers and one or two others, don’t have that combination of real, physical solutions with serious planning at their core. The city might, but it has, for the moment, some other limitations - and other things to worry about. In addition, Transition talks to neighborhoods and organizations, but also talks to local government - someone that needs to be involved in long-term policy. I don’t see others doing that as much - GLUE does, but it’s weaker than Transition, and again has less concrete goals. Transition is the only thing I’ve seen that is able, at its replicating base rather than through any local additions, to reach out to all the actors, interested in bringing all types of people (heart, hands, and heads, to use some undefined terminology), and focus on concrete local solutions to complex global problems. Without actively focusing on it, it encompasses all three pieces of sustainability through local resilience as a goal - that’s an impressive feat which also makes me think it’s built properly. Sustainability is the result rather than the goal.

Transition believes in humor
The concept is excellent, but I could not stomach any movement that couldn’t joke. In the face of giant problems, the only feasible two options that I (and others, I think) have found is to become very depressed, all the time, or to laugh a lot as you make the best of it. I’ll be frank - it bothers me when people get so caught up in how important these problems are, or how flawed modern society is, that they can’t joke about it. It shows a loss of perspective which I think is vital to success in solving connected problems. And hey, the world can be a terribly depressing place, but it can also be really amusing.

So, if I’m looking for an organization/framework to back that is founded on concrete motivations and local, solid approaches, believes in planning, has a broad enough approach and mission to act as a community leader, and can take a joke (and I really don’t think that’s an unreasonable set of parameters), what I end up with, time and time again, is Transition. And I know that if I went somewhere else, how the Transition process would work out would be different - that’s ok. I believe in the method, not the specific instance. I believe in the method enough that I think it’s what should win, and I’m willing to put a lot of time in (when I get back from Brazil) to help make that happen. Because these problems, as I’ve stated over and over, are real, and fiendishly complex and systemic. Dealing with them will not be easy - but we do not get a choice. We need an approach - and Transition is the best I’ve found. Thoughts?

The [False] Keystone XL Political Dilemma

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a proposal to build an international pipeline to bring petroleum from Alberta’s bituminous oil deposits to Oklahoma, where it can go on to refineries in Texas. And the media, of late, has been harping on what everyone seems to see as a giant dilemma for Obama, who is required (at least superficially, and by his own action actively) to approve the proposal because the pipeline crosses an international border.

The perceived horns: On the one side, the oil companies (boo hiss) and union labor that would build it (yay?) who argue that the jobs are important to America, and are also playing the energy security card - not getting petroleum from countries that don’t like us.

On the other, environmentalists who would like to avoid the climatic and ecosystem impacts associated with burning all of that oil and deforesting the land (and are scientifically right, though it might get burned regardless of this pipeline). Also folks in Nebraska and Montana who would rather not have a pipeline over their shallow aquifer.

The dilemma, then, is that Obama has to choose one side to annoy - either the republicans who will smear him with it if he rejects it, or the environmentalists who will lose enthusiasm and not help out his grassroots campaign (which has significant value). What I don’t get is:

Why not make both sides happy?

Sideline punditry and policy suggestion alert: It’s easier to make decisions theoretically, and they’re worth a lot less.

But why doesn’t he come out, reject the pipeline on the basis of it being a scientific Bad Idea, and form an American goal of reducing our oil imports by the same volume that the pipeline would transport, in the process explaining where the jobs to make that happen would come from? Net gains: Jobs, energy security, emissions avoidance (or at least responsibility avoidance for the US).

There is, and will always be, issues if anything suggested costs money - and appropriate policies probably should, and probably wouldn’t get through Congress. But Obama, in the spirit of the TIME article looking at lessons from JFK (paywall, sorry), show me a vision that solves both of these problems and makes your base excited - particularly since the opposition is going to [irrationally] hate you regardless of how many jobs you create. You’re a phenomenal orator when you want to be, and you’ve hinted at pieces of this in the past - find some solid policies that could be implemented, or get the EPA to enforce a bunch of new [science-based] rules that will create construction jobs to meet. Ask for more money to pay for high-speed rail, or move highway funding to rail construction. You’ve got smart people - use them.

Don’t allow the Keystone XL pipeline, but there’s no reason not to step forward and deal with energy security and jobs at the same time. It would be bold, smart, and Hard - but if we’re going to fix our problems, Hard can never be a reason not to do things.