Books in Brief: September-October 2010

Edited by Rick Docksai

Ending the MADness?
Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World by Tad Daley. Rutgers. 2010. 296 pages. $24.95.

Ridding the world of nuclear weapons is both feasible and necessary for survival, argues science journalist Tad Daley. As long as nations keep them, it is only a matter of time before they fire them at each other, he warns.

Daley examines the alternative futures that can unfold from the status quo of globally distributed nuclear arsenals. He concludes that, despite nations’ belief that they need nuclear weapons to ensure their own security, the only true security would be to not have them at all.

Daley outlines the steps that governments and social movements could take to abolish nuclear weapons by 2020 and rebuts some of the most common arguments against disarmament, such as the theory that a noncompliant nation would hold onto its nuclear stockpile and proceed to rule the world.

Skeptics may consider the goal of no nuclear weapons to be utopian, but Daley’s Apocalypse Never makes a bold and convincing case for policy makers to both believe in a nuclear-free world and to strive wholeheartedly toward it.

Grassroots World-Changing

Change the World, Change Your Life: Discover Your Life Purpose Through Service by Angela Perkey. Conari Press. 2010. 218 pages. Paperback. $15.95.

Despite the best efforts by government and nonprofit groups, many of the world’s problems seem to be getting worse. That’s why it’s up to individuals to contribute to community betterment, according to Angela Perkey, founder of the nonprofit group Students Serve. She shows examples of what regular citizens can do, such as participating in service organizations, building Web sites, or even starting service organizations of their own.

The best part, says Perkey, is that anyone can emulate these initiatives. It doesn’t matter what your education level, annual income, or background might be. If you commit your talents to an issue or cause that inspires you, you can make a difference in the world and be a much happier, more fulfilled person in the process.
Change the World, Change Your Life is a guide that philanthropists and activists across the globe may find inspirational.

Averting Planetary Meltdown

The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps by Peter Ward. Basic. 2010. 252 pages. Paperback. $25.95.

When global temperatures 125,000 years ago were just 4°F higher than they are now, Florida was submerged, according to biologist Peter Ward. A similar increase — or even more by 2100 — could happen with present-day carbon-dioxide levels, he warns. Should this warming take place, the ice sheets of Greenland, the Arctic, and Antarctica would mostly melt. The property losses, crop damage, famines, and displacements worldwide would be catastrophic.

Ward combines research on the earth’s ancient fossil record and present-day climate patterns to paint a vivid and alarming picture of how climate change would disrupt life over the long term.

Identifying Our Cultural Tribes
The Lifestyle Puzzle: Who We Are in the 21st Century by Henrik Vejlgaard. 2010. 235 pages. Prometheus. Paperback. $19.

Americans are more diverse and individualistic than ever before, observes social scientist Henrik Vejlgaard in The Lifestyle Puzzle. He cites the increasing fluidity of U.S. society: Few Americans today grow up in “traditional” two-parent households; fewer still keep the same jobs or remain in the same towns; and religious and political affiliations have grown highly interchangeable. Even age means less than it once did — senior citizens frequently adopt the clothing styles and hobbies of younger adults.

Yet certain patterns are discernible, he adds. Nonverbal symbols that carry universal meanings are ubiquitous: sports jerseys, corporate logos, national flags, etc. And the landscape teems with modern-day tribes whose members share clothing styles, recreational pursuits, and language: cowboys, hip-hoppers, and Goths, to name a few.

Tribes and cultural symbols are present in societies throughout the world. Many observers fear that globalization homogenizes cultures, but Vejlgaard concludes that the diversity of America’s cultural tribes suggests that people still find ways to be culturally unique and individually expressive.

The Lifestyle Puzzle is an analysis of contemporary culture and the forces likely to drive its evolution. Anthropologists and cultural critics will find it an especially valuable resource.

Better Brains, Better World?
The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World by Zack Lynch, with Byron Laursen. St. Martin’s Press. 2009. 245 pages. $25.99.

Although neurotechnology researchers’ primary goal is development of better-targeted medical treatments, neurotechnology applications are likely to transform many areas of human life during this century, including legal systems, health care, academia, culture, politics, and business, predicts Jack Lynch, founder of the Neurotechnology Industry Organization.

He and co-author Byron Laursen describe the explosive growth and activity that this field of research is undergoing, noting that universities invest millions of dollars in it. Private venture capital in neurotechnology start-ups has tripled in the last 10 years.

Besides describing major trends under way in neuroscience, the authors note the potential for great benefits as well as for misuses.

The Neuro Revolution is an overview of a major scientific field and its relevance to everyday life now and in the future. General audiences of all kinds will find it informative and approachable.

Alternatives to Consumption
Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet by Tim Jackson. Earthscan. 2009. 264 pages. $22.50.

Many nations experienced momentous economic growth across the globe over the last few decades, yet people’s reported levels of happiness stayed the same, according to environmental economist Tim Jackson. He adds that this is not surprising: Just because a nation’s economy is growing does not mean that its people are better off. In fact, sometimes economic growth can be detrimental to national well-being.
Jackson points out the roles that uncontrolled speculation and scarcities in land and resources played in hastening the 2008 economic crash and hampering economic recovery. Nonstop economic growth is the aim of most modern economies, but it is ecologically and socially impossible.

The great challenge of our time will be learning how to flourish within our ecological and social limits, Jackson concludes. This will require a new kind of “ecological macronomics” that will require structural reforms and societal values shifts to come into being.

Prosperity Without Growth is a futurist’s approach to global economics, its potential trajectories, and the desirable future to which the author believes societies can and should aspire. It is well-suited for economists and for general reading audiences.

Innovation to Avert Catastrophe
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley. HarperCollins. 2010. 422 pages. Paperback. $26.99.

Throughout the last two centuries, experts have repeatedly warned that civilization was headed for an imminent collapse and that society would shortly descend into anarchy, epidemics, famines, or other such catastrophes — yet the future kept turning out better than they had expected, says conservationist Matt Ridley.
The disasters never materialized, and instead living standards everywhere continuously improved. People in the twenty-first century are living longer, eating healthier, earning more, and enjoying vastly more and better amenities than they have at any time in human history.

“Apoca-holic” experts, Ridley argues, accurately described existing problems but failed to consider that future technological innovations might mitigate them. No one in the early 1800s foresaw the rise of fast transit by steam-engine trains, for example, and even the most savvy computer-industry experts in the 1960s had no idea that microchips would shrink computers to sizes that would fit inside users’ home offices.

Ridley advises having some hope in the capacity of future generations to solve problems that may seem insurmountable today. The key, he says, is making sure that our institutions and laws promote innovation rather than stifle it.

Combating Inequality
The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. Bloomsbury. 2010. 331 pages. $28.

Societies won’t make major cuts in their carbon emissions until they first reduce their socioeconomic inequalities, argue health professors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. Wide gaps between the more-affluent and less-affluent members of a society are powerful drivers of consumerism — people buy and consume far more than they need in order to appear to hold higher social statuses.

Inequality has risen in most developed countries over the last few decades, according to Pickett and Wilkinson; as inequalities rise, so do unhealthy consumer buying habits and a wide range of associated ills: debt, minimal personal savings, obesity, crime, scarce charitable giving, and mood disorders such as anxiety and depression.

The authors favor a “steady-state economy” that would ration the extraction of the earth’s resources and keep their use well below present-day levels. Technology may ameliorate the situation by reducing the environmental and production costs of most goods, thus making them more affordable to more consumers. But true social equality will take a fundamental transformation of societal values.

The Spirit Level is a philosophical and political evaluation of national economies and how they might have to adapt to be viable in the future.

Cultural Transformation for Sustainability
State of the World 2010: Transforming Cultures by the Worldwatch Institute. W.W. Norton. 2010. 244 pages. $19.95.

A worldwide binge of material consumerism has been draining the planet’s resources for the last few decades, but a new mass movement toward sustainability seems to be under way at last, according to the Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 2010.
The Institute report identifies such trends as religious leaders increasingly urging their congregations to embrace environmental conservation. Carbon fasts and “green” weddings are becoming common rites. Organic farmers, anti-consumerist social movements, and eco-villages promote the principle of living contentedly with less. Governments are passing legislation meant to encourage their citizens to live more sustainably. And businesses are increasingly assuming roles of social responsibility.

The report praises these initiatives as societal pioneering that could lead the way to a healthier and more equitable future — but only if their values become truly accepted by society at large. State of the World 2010 is a detailed road map for sustainable societal organization that readers of all professions may find insightful.

Designing Buildings for Climate Change

Scientists at the University of Exeter have created an online database called Prometheus to show how increasing temperatures will affect future weather patterns in the United Kingdom. The creators hope that their projections will help architects design structures that are better suited to the hotter climate of the 2050s and 2080s.

“Buildings are modeled using historic weather. As the climate warms, this means estimates of overheating and energy use will be wrong. As peak temperatures are predicted to change by much more than means, this error will be substantial,” Exeter physicist David Coley told THE FUTURIST in an e-mail. “We use the output of the probabilistic models to create a series of example weather files (which can be found on our Web site). These cover all common weather variables and are on a one hour time step [change]. The reason we use probabilistic data is that the climate science is not perfect. Hence the predictions cover a range.”

The United Kingdom’s Met Office Hadley Centre (cited by the researchers) reports that the 40°C (104°F) temperatures at the height of the 2003 European heat wave will be common for Europe during the summer by the year 2040. The 2003 European heat wave saw tens of thousands of deaths from heat stroke. Heat mortalities were particularly high among vulnerable communities.

“Think about the 14,000 elderly people who died in Paris in 2003. They died because of a failure of buildings to moderate the external climate. The temperatures in the heat wave are soon to become common. Is it acceptable that we are designing buildings around the world that will kill people?” asked Coley.

Among the Prometheus project’s findings is that the mean temperature in London in 2080 would be higher than that of Washington, D.C., today.

“People want to compare a typical year in 2010 with a typical year in 2050, say, to see the difference. This is the first time this has been done,” the group wrote in a press statement.

The various files are available for free on the Prometheus site and are compatible with common building-simulation software. Used correctly, they show how any given design will respond to weather variables within a wide range of scenarios. Not all building projects will be affected by climate change the same way, Coley noted. “Some companies need to be precautionary, some conservative. For example, if you were thinking of expanding your ice cream factory, you might take the 10th percentile; if [you were] designing a flood defense you might take the 90th.”

Many construction strategies actually amplify the effects of climate change. A 2°C rise in mean summertime temperature outside a house could translate to a 3°C rise in mean summertime temperature inside the house, depending on the method of construction.

The findings contradicted accepted thinking on the subject, which assumed that any relationship between external structural temperature and internal structural temperature would be difficult to obtain given the complexity of the movement of heat indoors. In one of the papers available on the site, the researchers call this link between internal and external temperature “climate change amplification co-efficiencies,” a somewhat esoteric term that may show up more frequently in tomorrow’s construction proposals. The ability to quantify these co-efficiencies could have a major influence on building design in the future.

Coley reports that the Prometheus project is already helping architects reconsider how to build in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. — Patrick Tucker

Source: David Coley (e-mail interview), University of Exeter Prometheus Program. Web site http://centres.exeter.ac.uk/cee/prometheus/.

Driving Toward a New Destination

By Patrick Tucker
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink. Riverhead. 2009. 242 pages. $26.95

Most of us believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards. Without a clear incentive, like more money, complemented by a disincentive, like poverty, people wouldn’t contribute to society. They might hunt and gather, but they wouldn’t build skyscrapers, invent new computer languages, or teach high-school algebra.

That carrot-and-stick approach worked well in the twentieth century, but as Wired magazine contributing editor Dan Pink shows in his new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, it’s the wrong way to inspire people to tackle the challenges of today. A growing body of scientific evidence — starting with the work of physiologists Harry Harlow in the 1940s and Edward Deci in the late 1960s — shows us that people are motivated by the “intrinsic value” of a good job well done far more than many managers assume. “If the science is to be believed, a new approach to encouraging people is in order,” says Pink.

He outlines three essential elements to that approach.

• Autonomy. In the words of Harlow and Deci, “autonomous motivation means acting with a full sense of validation and choice.” The autonomous performance environment, whether an office or a classroom, is one where results matter above adherence to arbitrary control rules like dress code and punctuality. Researchers at Cornell University studied 320 small businesses to see whether top-down micromanagement motivated workers better than did freedom or autonomy. Pink reports that the control-oriented firms grew at one-fourth the rate of the firms that allowed more worker freedom. The control firms also experienced three times the job turnover among employees.

• Mastery. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has shown that people tend to perform best on those jobs where perfection was just beyond the person’s present capabilities. “That perfect balance between person and a goal that sits just barely out of reach produced a degree of focus and satisfaction that surpassed other, more quotidian experiences,” says Pink.

• Purpose. Purpose is the personally affirming, possibly spiritual, connection between the individual and the task. Pink says that, without purpose, even autonomous employees striving for mastery will perform below their potential. Field research at the Mayo Clinic found that doctors who spent one day a week on community service projects, or talking with patients, or involved in other activities to which the doctors felt a strong personal connection brought more energy to the rest of their work. These physicians had half the resignation rate of those who did not have this connection.

This new way of organizing what we do, which Pink calls Motivation 3.0, doesn’t destroy the value of extrinsic rewards. People who participate in open-source software development still want to turn a profit in their own endeavors. Wikipedia’s many thousands of volunteer contributors still eat out at restaurants, buy gas, and lust after the same commercial goods as anyone else does. But, says Pink, we now have real evidence to show what many of us always suspected: Success in any endeavor comes from a personal connection to the task at hand.

“We are designed to be active and engaged,” he concludes. “We know that the richest experiences in our lives aren’t the moments when we’re clamoring for validation from others, but when we’re listening to our own voice — doing something that matters, doing it well, and doing it in the service of a cause larger than ourselves.”

FutureScope

HEALTH

Mental-Health Benefits of Parks

Mother Nature may be an efficient therapist: Five minutes of exercise in a park, on a trail, or even in a backyard garden has measurable benefits to mental health, especially for young people and individuals with mental illnesses, according to a study in the American Chemical Society’s journal Environmental Science & Technology.
The benefits both of physical activity and of communing with nature are well known, but the new research defines the amount of “green exercise” that may boost short-term mental health and long-term physical health.

The largest positive effects for mood and self-esteem came from a five-minute “dose,” report authors Jules Pretty and Jo Barton, and even urban parks can provide the boost.
Source: American Chemical Society, www.acs.org.

SOCIOECONOMICS

The Well-Being Gap in America

The disparities in well-being and socioeconomic development across the United States have become so wide that it would take some groups a century to catch up.

Asian Americans and whites score highest on the latest update of the Human Development Index created by the American Human Development Project. The Index measures life expectancy, income, educational attainment, and other factors to provide a more complete picture of well-being than is shown by GDP.

The latest Index shows that Asian Americans living in New Jersey are 50 years ahead of the national average in terms of development, and Native Americans living in South Dakota are 50 years behind.

“If current trends continue, it will take Native Americans in South Dakota an entire century to catch up with where New Jersey Asian Americans are now in terms of life expectancy, educational enrollment and attainment, and median earnings,” according to the report.

Source: “A Century Apart,” American Human Development Project, www.measureofamerica.org/acenturyapart.

GENDER

Rise of Rwandan Women

If there can be any “good” news from the horrors of genocide in Rwanda, it may be that it allowed women to rise to positions of leadership. Rwanda now has the most gender-equal government in the world, with women making up 56% of parliament.
This elevation of women’s political status may not be the result of improved education or other advances, as typically occurs in developed countries such as Sweden. Simply put, the 1994 genocide created a shortage of men and thus an opening for women in politics, according to researcher Christopher Kayumba, a doctoral candidate at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

Though Rwanda’s elite have attempted to defuse conflicts between the Hutus and Tutsis, focusing on the “Rwandan-ness” of all regardless of ethnicity and gender, a sustainable democracy is still a challenge, Kayumba warns.

Source: University of Gothenburg, www.gu.se. The abstract for Christopher Kayumba’s thesis may be viewed at http://hdl.handle.net/2077/22216.

FORECASTING

WORDBUZZ: Econophysics

If economists can’t predict economic crises and prevent their ensuing disruptions, maybe physicists can. In 2005, Didier Sornette—a physicist, earthquake scientist, and financial expert at the Swiss Technical Institute in Zurich—accurately predicted the bursting of the U.S. real estate bubble three years later.

The emerging field of econophysics relies on the study of complex systems, which looks at feedback loops and cascading effects. Forecasts do not rely on averages, as mainstream economists do, and take into account irrational decision making, herding behavior, and other destabilizing influences.

Econophysicists argue that markets are not stable, efficient, or self-regulating, so models that succeed in predicting upheavals will be those that understand the rich dynamics of market interactions.

The multidisciplinary approach to economic forecasting has spawned a European research initiative called FuturIcT, and is also getting support from billionaire George Soros, who has established the Institute of New Economic Thinking.
Sources: ETH Zurich, www.ethz.ch. FuturIcT, www.futurict.eu.

Learning from Informal Cities, Building for Communities

By Pavlina Ilieva and Kuo Pao Lian

What if there were a better way of living? A way that was more environmentally sound, more economical, more conducive to the building of community, and didn’t require huge monetary investments? What if this new method of existence was already visible, and people were already participating in it, in places we had never thought to look?

Today, in the world’s most underdeveloped countries, locations where the impact of formal rule or government and capital is scarce, people are creating this other way of life. You might know these places by their other names: slums, favelas, and ghettos. We believe that these settlements offer lessons on natural development patterns, on more efficient resource and commodity use, and on sustainability. There’s this book we have, Informal City: Caracas Case,* which depicts quite vividly the “informal city” phenomenon.

Environmental futurist Stewart Brand and San Diego architect Teddy Cruz have spent years trying to learn and communicate the lessons of these places. Here’s the truth about so-called slums that you probably never considered: They’re high-density and walkable, two goals most urban designers consider of utmost importance when planning multibillion-dollar neighborhoods for hip, wealthy Americans. Commerce and housing in these informal cities mingle freely to the betterment of both residents and shopkeepers. In the West, we hear a lot about the need to recycle. Slum residents have always made use of post-recycled material more effectively than anyone else, including the stuff no one else will take.

In a March 2009 Boston Globe article, writer Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow points out that some countries have begun to “mitigate the problems with slums rather than eliminate the slums themselves.”

As Cruz remarks in the article, these inhabitants hold to “sophisticated, participatory practices.” They have “a light way of occupying the land. Because people are trying to survive, creativity flourishes.”

These areas are the most vulnerable to floods and natural disasters, as recent events in Haiti make clear. The total absence of planning is not a goal for urban planners to strive for. But people in these areas have been surviving and developing with very little capital or government involvement, and they’re becoming increasingly good at it. If we can learn what these places have to teach us, we can find better ways to live in our own local habitats.

We call our interpretation of this idea the self-generative community, or SGC.

The Self-Generative Community

Modern life is frustrating and disappointing; we work too hard to spend too much for things we hardly want. The most obvious alternative to our feelings of technological discontent and disconnect is leaving the world behind, quitting the high-stress job, abandoning society with its regulations and failing institutions, moving somewhere temperate, and looking out for oneself. This is popularly referred to as “going off the grid,” meaning the electrical grid, but really referring to any and all sense of society or obligation.

We propose living on the grid of a new urban fabric that distributes self-generated resources—food, learning, skills, human talent, and labor—and creates natural connections among inhabitants and nature. This way of living draws from the lessons that the world’s poorest inhabitants have to give us without romanticizing the difficult and unfortunate aspects of impoverishment. The SGC is a portrait of humanity not at its poorest, but at its most resourceful, responsible, and aware of its surroundings. The objective of the SGC is to realize homegrown socioeconomic sustainability by investing in the proper handling of the natural environment and technology.

How do you create an SGC? We see three steps, which involve uncovering the natural resources of the area, tapping into the appropriate use of both natural and social capital (such as building partnerships, cooperative business enterprises, etc.) in order to further the economic development, and finally integrating a sophisticated mix of programs into a high-density model.

Step One: Restore. Reconnect the Earth and the Sky

Restore, in this context, refers to bioremediation or restoration of the natural cycles as needed. Nations in the developed world have altered the urban landscape to a point where water hardly reaches soil for filtration and drainage, and rooftops squander solar energy that nature had used productively. There are better ways to treat both those resources.

If you’re talking about building an SGC at one particular urban area, fulfilling step one can be as simple as ripping out urban pavement that isn’t actively supporting a structure and allowing rainwater to be absorbed into the ground. Communities around the world function effectively with a lot less pavement around than do people in the industrialized world. Again, the point is not to create a situation without adequate land grading, or where un-zoned structures impede the flow of rainwater, possibly causing flooding. This is an unfortunate fact of life in many of the world’s poorest communities. We propose simply the removal of unnecessary pavement in an intelligent, considered way.

Does your city not want you to rip up the sidewalk? Some local governments are giving ideas like this serious attention. Starting in June 2010, the state of Maryland will be enforcing a new law stipulating that, if you’re developing a site of a particular size, you’ll need to meet the highest water-management requirements. But for a picture of what truly effective water management looks like, go to a forest.

Step Two: Plant and Energize the Seeds

This refers to the building of new social, economic, and environmental infrastructure based on cooperative capacity, or the amount of time and talent the neighborhood is willing to invest to make their area economically self-sustainable.

Harvesting renewable energy sources locally to generate immediate revenue and help sustain development is one key to realizing step two. This could mean passive solar energy co-ops, where neighborhoods build their own photovoltaic systems on rooftops. It could mean inner-city biofuel-crop growing, perhaps in basement hydroponic gardens. It could be all of the above. The idea is to start harvesting available renewable energy and use it to power local businesses, or sell it back into the grid. Power generation becomes a community business. In this way, it’s integrated seamlessly into the area’s future development.

This is directly connected to the informal city way of life. We in the developed world commonly misperceive slums as economic dead zones, as basket cases, when in fact they’re hotbeds of self-sustaining commerce. That’s as it should be.

Informal cities are also mixed use in their layout. That means commercial, residential, and light industrial/agricultural activities take place side by side. The key here is to capitalize on cooperative relationships, seek potential partners within the community, and develop strategies for integration. Meanwhile, the SGC must also be adaptable and versatile. Communities change constantly; SGCs reflect and support that change.

Step Three: Nourish, Breathe, and Grow

The third step is to introduce a series of connected programs between local government and the community. In terms of proposing programs to fit community needs, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy. We presented a plan to the city of Baltimore a few years ago called Hidden Walls. The plan involved rehabbing blocks of abandoned row houses. This was a high-unemployment inner-city neighborhood. The community in that situation needed a means to build equity and value into their area. They also needed to shelter their kids from the notorious Baltimore drug-dealing scene. Our final proposal was a modern iteration of the Middle Ages manor village, but with high-speed Internet and without a feudal lord. The programs we proposed were geared mostly toward community education and neighborhood economic development.

We suggested different program solutions at another location in Dallas, where the community was trying to make use of abundant sunshine and open space. The key is to add new programs and transform the relationships of the actors as more people move to the location and change it. There is no formalist approach to building a self-generating community. It’s more systematic; complexity grows itself naturally in keeping with how community actually develops.

In the context of every city and in the life of every neighborhood, there is a synergy that brings up the potential to develop something unique, to rebuild the urban environment to reach its fullest potential. There is no MAKE GOOD button for creating a more equitable environment, just like there is no GO AWAY for unwanted elements and no PUT THERE for discarded resources.

To regenerate our cities and communities and restore our feeling of place, we must stop perceiving ourselves as mere consumers. If we can become inhabitants, constituents, and producers, we can achieve a different sort of habitat, one that is environmentally, sociologically, and culturally self-sustaining precisely because it honors all of these vital areas of life, equally.

About the Authors
Pavlina Ilieva and Kuo Pao Lian are the founders of the PI.KL design group. They have won numerous awards for their work on sustainable solutions in urban design, disaster relief projects post-Katrina, and ecological strategic planning. Their works have been featured in THE FUTURIST, Architectural Record, Dwell, Metropolis, and Urbanite.

* The authors are not claiming to have written the book Informal City: Caracas Case, only to have read it. Alfred Brillembourg was the editor of the anthology.

Life Dollars: Finding Currency in Community

By Douglas Rushkoff

The recent financial meltdown may not be punishment for our sins, but it is at least in part the result of our widespread obsession with financial value over values of any other sort.

As corporations gain ever more control over our economy, government, and culture, it is only natural for us to blame them for the helplessness we now feel over the direction of our personal and collective destinies. But it is both too easy and utterly futile to point the finger of blame at corporations or the robber barons at their helms—not even those handcuffed CEOs gracing the cover of the business section. Not even mortgage brokers, credit-card executives, or the Federal Reserve.

This state of affairs isn’t being entirely orchestrated from the top of a glass building by an élite group of bankers and businessmen, however much everyone would like to think so—themselves included. And while the growth of corporations and a preponderance of corporate activity have allowed them to permeate almost every aspect of our awareness, these entities are not solely responsible for the predicament in which we have found ourselves.

Rather, it is corporatism itself: a logic we have internalized into our very being, a lens through which we view the world around us, and an ethos with which we justify our behaviors. Making matters worse, we accept its dominance over us as preexisting—as a given circumstance of the human condition. It just is.

But it isn’t.

We need to figure out what—if anything—we are to do about it. Here are some ideas.

Like thousands of other people across the United States, I’m a member of a community-supported agriculture group, or CSA. People make a commitment to buy a season’s worth of crops from a local farm and then either pay up front or by subscription over the course of a year. Some farms require their members to work a few hours during the growing season; others let members work in lieu of payment. In 1990, there were just 50 CSAs in the United States. By 2008, there were more than a thousand.

The farmer running my CSA wanted to provide his members with an easy way to sign up for shifts and make special requests for their weekly food shares. An unemployed Web designer I knew from the neighborhood built a site for the farmer that offered all this and more. In return, he earned a year of crops.

These activities are revolutionary for the way that they cut out the middleman. People create value for one another directly, rather than paying corporations. No one is extracting value from our engagements, separating us from our competencies, or distancing us from one another.

The one exception, of course, is the money we are still using to pay one another. When we aren’t coding Web sites in return for kale, we are cutting the Federal Reserve and its network of banks in on every transaction we make. This extractive force is a drag on the system, particularly at times when speculation or banking-industry incompetence has made money too expensive to get hold of or too unstable to use as a means of exchange.

A tiny organic café in my town called Comfort decided to expand to a second, larger location. John, the chef and owner, had been renovating the new space for a year, but—thanks to the credit crisis—was unable to raise the cash required to finish and finally open. With currency unavailable from traditional, centralized money-lending banks, he turned instead to his community, to us, for support. Granted, this is a small town. Pretty much everybody goes to Comfort—the only restaurant of its kind on the small strip—and we all have a stake in its success. Any extension of Comfort would bring more activity, vitality, and commerce to a tiny downtown that was commercially devastated in the 1970s by the chain stores and malls on the auto-friendly main strip.

John’s idea was to sell VIP cards, or what I helped him rename Comfort Dollars. For every dollar spent on a card, the customer receives the equivalent of $1.20 worth of credit at either of John’s restaurants. If I buy a $1,000 card, I get $1,200 worth of food: a 20% rate of return on the investment of dollars. John gets the money he needs a lot cheaper than if he were borrowing it from the bank—he’s paying for it in food and labor that he has in ample supply. Meanwhile, customers get more food for less money.

But wait, there’s more: The entire scheme reinvests a community’s energy and cash locally. Because our money goes further at our own restaurant than at a restaurant somewhere else, we are biased toward eating locally. Since we have a stake in the success of the restaurant in whose food we have invested, we’ll also be more likely to promote it to our friends. By using its own currency, a local business can even undercut the corporate competition. It’s not complex or even communist. It’s just local business, late Middle Ages style.

Local currencies are now used by several hundred communities across the United States and Europe, giving people the chance to buy and sell goods and services from one another no matter what the greater economy might be doing. Instead of favoring large, centralized corporations, local currencies favor businesses and the community members who own them.

There are two main types of local currency employed today. The simplest, like Comfort Dollars or the BerkShares created for the entire Berkshire Hills region in Massachusetts, have exchange rates for regular dollars. The BerkShares themselves can be spent only at local businesses that accept them, which keeps the currency circulating close to home. Local currencies such as these encourage local buying, put large corporations with no real community involvement at a big disadvantage, and circulate much more widely and rapidly through a community than conventional dollars. Further, the nonprofit bank issuing BerkShares is not an extractive force; no one needs to get rich or pay anyone back. Businesses that refuse to accept the local currency do worse than just brand themselves as apathetic to local development; they cut themselves off from a potential source of revenue.

Townspeople with their own money systems still need conventional currency. The three automobile repair shops in Great Barrington that accept BerkShares must still buy auto parts from Mopar or BMW with U.S. dollars. But they are willing to break down their bills into two separate categories, selling parts at cost in U.S. dollars and markups and labor in the local currency. The object is not to replace centralized currency altogether, but to break the monopoly of centralized currency and the corporations it supports over transactions that keep money circulating locally. This is why many advocates now call local currency “complementary” currency—because it complements rather than replaces centralized money.

Larger businesses have begun to embrace alternative currency systems as well. In October 2008, as the credit crisis paralyzed business lending, companies started signing onto barter networks in droves. Utilizing more than 250 exchange services now available through the Internet, companies can barter directly with one another, or earn U.S.-dollar-equivalent credits for the merchandise they supply to others. According to BarterNews.com, business-to-business bartering already accounts for $3 billion of exchanges annually in the United States.

Life Dollars

An even more promising variety of complementary currency, like the grain receipts of ancient times, is quite literally earned into existence. “Life Dollars,” such as those used by the Fourth Corner Exchange in the Pacific Northwest, are not exchanged for traditional currency. Instead, members of the Exchange earn credits by performing services or providing goods to one another. There’s always enough money, because money is a result of work exchanged, not an existing store of coin. There can’t be too much money either, since every service provided is a service someone else was willing to be debited for.

These local or complementary currencies, and many others, are as easy to begin as visiting the Web sites for community exchange systems (CES), local economic transfer systems (LETS), or Time Dollars. According to the most recent data available from the community exchange system (communityexchange.org), more than 180 community exchanges have sprung up around the world, including 55 in Australia, 26 in South Africa, and 33 in the United States. A local currency system can be as informal as a babysitting club, where parents earn credits for babysitting one another’s children, or robust enough to serve as the primary currency for an entire region or sector.

In 1995, as recession rocked Japan, unemployment rose and currency became scarce. This made it particularly difficult for people to continue to take care of their elderly relatives, who often lived in distant areas. Everyone had time, but no one had money. The Sawayaka Welfare Foundation developed a complementary currency by which a young person could earn credits for taking care of an elderly person. Different tasks earned different established credit awards—bathing someone earned more than shopping, and so on. Accumulated credits—Fureai Kippu, or “elderly care units”—could then be applied to the care of one’s own relative in a distant town, saved for later, or traded to someone else. Independently of the centralized economy—which, thanks to bad speculation and mismanaged banking, was no longer supporting them—people were able to create value for themselves and one another.

Although that particular financial crisis has passed, the Fureai Kippu system has only grown in popularity. At last count, the alternative currency was accepted at 372 centers throughout Japan, and patients surveyed said they like the care they get through the Fureai Kippu system better than what they get from professional service agencies. As I originally wrote for my book Life Inc., close to a thousand alternative currencies are now in use in Japan, thanks to the success of the Fureai Kippu and other pioneering models.

Complementary currencies make it easier to record and administer value exchange in an increasingly decentralized marketplace. They initiate the process through which local regions or specific sectors learn to create value for themselves instead of having it drained unnecessarily by an artificially chartered monopoly entity. They remind us that some of the things we have in abundance are still valuable, even though markets have not yet been created for them. And they give us a way to transact business during a recession or depression, when central banks and treasuries are more concerned with their own solvency and that of the speculative economy than they are with our ability to conduct the basic transactions through which we take care of one another.

Bartering in the Big City

The most recent recession saw the closure of big Wall Street firms like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns affecting the entire New York City economy. Not surprisingly, a lot of New Yorkers turned to the popular classifieds on Craigslist to find cheap goods or to sell them. But the site also saw an increase in the number of New Yorkers willing to barter services to one another. These ranged from the exchange of IT work for dental repair to free professional portrait photographs to tanning sessions, according to a Daily News story.

Bartering systems and local currencies are just one possible step in the slow subordination of market activity to social activity, and corporate behavior to human behavior. After all, we don’t spend time volunteering in our public school because we want to earn local credits; we do it to make the place better for our kids. The psychological hurdle to cross is the inability to accept that $10,000 worth of one’s time spent making a local school better will create more value than $30,000 of one’s money spent on a private school. The money guarantees a great education for our own kid; the time improves the school for everyone’s kids. Still plagued by internalized competition and self-interest, most of us are not quite ready to choose the better path or to convince our neighbors to join us in the effort. Luckily, a desperate lack of funds and employment opportunities can help nudge us toward the more socially beneficial choice.

But the more social we get, the more one voluntary act will encourage another one, and so on. We learn that it’s more fun and less time-consuming to provide real help to our local elementary school than to take on an extra corporate job to pay for a private school. We reverse the equation through which we calculate how much money we’ll need to insulate ourselves from the pitfalls of modern life, like diminishing real-estate values, stock-market collapses, and layoffs.

Instead, we could calculate how much we can get from and give to that world with no money at all. Reciprocity is not a market phenomenon; it’s a social one. And when the market is no longer functioning properly, reciprocity is a necessary life skill.

This is where the Internet might be of some help. Networks can connect those looking to reinforce their sense of hope and connection to others. We can share new models that work, collaborate with like-minded members of other communities, and build decentralized constituencies to fight our common battles. Beneath all its flashy, advertising-based social networks, the Internet is still a communications medium. We can use it to find the people and ideas deemed unready for corporate media’s precious prime time.

Perhaps more important, by restoring our connections to real people, places, and values, we’ll be less likely to depend on the symbols and brands that have come to substitute for human relationships. As more of our daily life becomes dictated by the rules of a social ecology instead of those of a market economy, we will find it less necessary to resort to the behavior of corporations whenever things get rough. We might be more likely to know the names of our neighbors, and value them for more than the effect of their landscaping on our block’s real-estate prices.

I’ve offered a few suggestions here, but the ones you’ll find will be particular to your life, your neighborhood, and your situation. That’s the whole point. Although corporatism offers itself up as a universal answer to our needs, it really just reduces the myriad complexity of human need down to individual selfishness.

This monolithic approach to society and its recovery is antisocial in intent, dehumanizing in effect, and, dare I say it, fascist in spirit. It’s also entirely temporary. We will either arrest corporatism, or it will arrest us. The alternative—local, day-to-day, mundane pleasure—is what makes us human in the first place.

About the Author
Douglas Rushkoff is the author of such best-selling books as Media Virus and Innovation from the Inside Out. This piece adapts material from his most recent book, Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (Random House, 2009). Web site www.rushkoff.com.

Prospects for Brain–Computer Interfacing

A group of undergraduates at Northeastern University demonstrated in June that they could steer a robot via thought. The subject in the experiment watched a computer screen and selected commands using his retina, causing electrical activity in the brain’s visual cortex ranging from 4 to 100 hertz. The signals were then translated to a small robot, similar to the Roomba vacuum cleaner.

Electrical engineering professor Deniz Erdogmus, who oversaw the project at Northeastern, says that because the connection between the user and the robot is Internet-based (you can track the robot over Skype) an operator could control it from a considerable distance away.

“We could take the robot to Tahiti and the operator can take a webcam tour,” says Erdogmus. “We are looking for volunteers to take the robot to Bora Bora.”
The demonstration was the latest in a string of breakthroughs over the last decade, showing the growing viability of brain–computer interface, or BCI, technologies. Cybernetic research will advance far more rapidly in the next few years, experts contend.

The Present and Future of Brain–Computer Interface Technology

Neural interface technology goes back half a century (and the larger field of cybernetics dates back to World War II), but advancement proceeded unevenly. The primary obstacle was, and remains, system compatibility; the delicate and complicated web of nervous tissue that is the brain doesn’t communicate well with wires and electronics.

“If you put an array of sensors into a brain, there’s a tissue reaction, namely scarring. The nervous tissue can no longer send a signal when there’s scar tissue,” says Klaus-Robert Müller, director of the machine learning group at Technische Universität in Berlin.

Previous studies have shown that linking mammalian brain matter with electric circuitry has a burning or melting effect on the brain. However, in the last two decades, advances in computation have enabled researchers to bypass this problem, somewhat, and rely more on devices that don’t have to be surgically implanted to collect brain signals.

Electroencephalography (EEG), which the Northeastern University team used, is among the favored of these techniques. EEG uses a sensor array afixed to a subject’s head externally, like a swimming cap. Because the signal from an EEG is weaker than the signal from a surgically implanted sensor, more guesswork is required to deduce what the brain is trying to communicate; that guesswork is aided through algorithmic math. Noninvasive BCI relies much more on algorithms and mathematic problem solving.

Erdogmus says that more funding agencies are seeing the potential of BCI, and this is having a positive effect across the field. “Technological and algorithmic advances allowed more groups to work on this problem for [less] equipment-wise.”

Müller agrees that shifting more of the burden to number crunchers (helped by the increase in computing power in recent years) has made a big difference. “We have put all the learning on the machine side. The computer learns to interpret your brain waves,” he says. A few years ago, subjects would need to train for 300 hours to control their brain signals before those waves could be usable in BCI. Now, says Müller, you can achieve the same effect after about five minutes of training.

Brain-based control of conventional keyboards, allowing individuals to type without physically touching the keys, has been demonstrated at the universities of Wisconsin and Michigan. In the near future, brain e-mailing and tweeting will become far more common, say experts (though these interfaces remain extremely slow). BCI will also show up in some surprising places.

Other Applications for Brain–Computer Interfaces

Also in the near term, video-game makers could use BCI to develop gaming systems capable of reading and responding to a player’s emotional state. Similar research could lead to new therapies for various neurotic disorders, enabling sufferers to see and potentially moderate their own brain patterns to reduce stress. Müller reports that a company called Pico has designed an iPhone application that allows users to see their own thought patterns on the iPhone. (He says the app is not yet commercially available, as it requires a surgical implant to operate.) Automobile manufacturers might use BCI to improve navigation systems.

“Say you’re a carmaker; you are designing a new driver-assistance system,” says Müller. “Normally if you were testing this system, you would have people come in, try the car, and you would survey them on their experience. But what if you wanted a highly accurate qualitative measure to see if cognitive workload was lower using one gadget over another? Or you wanted to see how people reacted emotionally to different designs? These things can be measured non-intrusively and quantitatively.”

Erdogmus sees brain-controlled prosthesis and robots going mainstream within a few decades. There have been a number of startling demonstrations on this front in addition to the work at Northeastern. In 2008, a University of Pittsburgh team led by Andrew Schwartz taught a monkey to feed itself using a robot arm that the monkey controlled via implant.

(A link to the video is available here.)

Researchers caution that they need much more information about the brain, particularly its feedback mechanisms and how it transitions between different states, before science can fulfill the more ambitious cybernetic visions of science fiction. Acquiring this information will be the most important application of BCI in the years ahead. — Patrick Tucker

Sources: Personal Interviews, Deniz Erdogmus (e-mail) Northeastern University, www.northeastern.edu. Klaus-Robert Müller, Technische Universität. Suggested further reading: Toward Brain Computer Interfacing edited by Guido Dornhege et al. MIT Press, 2007.

September-October 2010, Tomorrow in Brief

3-D Posters

Coming soon to billboards near you: posters you can see in 3-D without special glasses.

Based on the same principle as the old grooved “3-D” postcards of years past, the new displays consist of 250,000 individual lenses with a diameter of 2 millimeters each, aligned on sheets with computer precision to eliminate distortion.
The resulting 3-D images can be up to five meters in size. The technology was achieved by researchers from Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques, RealEyes Company, and the University of Kiel.
Source: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, www.fraunhofer.de.

Musical Clothing

Fabrics with sensors could give musicians a simple way to carry their instruments with them: in their clothes.

An outfit that produces sounds when the user touches it has been created by Swedish School of Textiles fashion student Jeannine Han and technician Dan Riley.

The prototype garments yield a harp-like sound. The goal is to improve the use of technology to produce future clothing, and also to create clothing with a larger and easily controlled musical palette. Han and Riley plan to form a band that will wear the outfits and “play themselves.”

Source: University of Borås, Expertanswer, www.expertsvar.se/english.

Bridging the Mentor Age Gap

If you’re choosing a mentor, it may be better to choose one who is still relatively early in his or her career. Doing so increases the likelihood that you, too, will become a productive mentor in the future.

In a study of mathematicians, Northwestern University researcher R. Dean Malmgren and colleagues found that older, late-career mentors were too far removed from the experiences of young protégés to train them effectively, and those protégés subsequently mentored fewer protégés of their own.

“It’s a phenomenon in our culture that as you gain more importance and success you are expected to oversee more and more people, which means that face time with your protégés goes down,” says Malmgren. “This tradeoff has negative consequences.”
Source: Northwestern University, www.northwestern.edu.

Crowd-Sourcing the Crowd

A new social-search engine promises to identify popular places in the same way that Twitter identifies popular, or “trending,” topics.

With a program developed by the Sency search-engine company in Santa Monica, California, users can find where the action is by simply selecting a city name; the search results show the locations of the most-active chatter, along with addresses and street maps.

Among the searchable places now available are London, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

Be warned, however: Party goers may have to do some extra trending-topic searching, lest they inadvertently join a protest movement or street riot.
Source: Sency, www.sency.com.

Arctic Warming, Mid-Latitude Freezing

Loss of sea ice in the Arctic region is likely to yield colder and snowier winters in other parts of the world, according to new research presented by James Overland of the NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.

Arctic warming, which is occurring twice as fast as in the rest of the planet, is due to a combination of factors, including loss of sea ice reflectivity, ocean heat storage, changing wind patterns, and natural variability.

“The exceptional cold and snowy winter of 2009–2010 in Europe, eastern Asia, and eastern North America is connected to unique physical processes in the Arctic,” Overland reported to the recent International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference.
Source: International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference, Research Council of Norway, www.ipy-osc.no.

The Postemployment Economy

By Patrick Tucker
The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future by Martin Ford. Acculant Publishing. 2009. 253 pages. $15.95. Paperback.

In The Lights in the Tunnel, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Martin Ford argues that technologies such as software automation algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics will result in dramatically increasing unemployment, stagnant or falling consumer demand, and a financial crisis surpassing the Great Depression.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics foresees automation and AI-assisted outsourcing restraining job growth, particularly in the field of office and administrative support. But the Bureau still anticipates growth in this sector of roughly 7.3 million job openings from 2008 to 2018, as well as growth in most others.

These forecasts are woefully optimistic, in Ford’s view. He says that mainstream economists do not consider the possibility of radical breakthroughs of automation technology when making their projections. In a worst-case scenario, every job that can conceivably be automated will be turned over to the robots. The unemployment rate under such a scenario defies easy calculation, but the current rate of 9% would look idyllic in retrospect.

Other potential effects of superautomation according to Ford include:
The high-profit, small-staff business model will rule. An example is the Web-based movie-rental company Netflix, which has effectively driven rival Blockbuster to bankruptcy. Consumer demand for goods will plummet as unemployment rises. Defaults on mortgages and consumer debt will reach unprecedented levels, and plunging values for housing and other assets will result in cascading financial crises. College enrollment will fall as potential students shy away from “knowledge worker” jobs that are susceptible to automation and off-shoring. Young people will instead compete for trade jobs in the occupations that can’t be automated. (Hypothetical examples here might include nursing or even specific types of high-tech machine repair.) Governments will face rising pressure to restrict technological progress. Organized labor may realize a last-ditch resurgence. High unemployment in developed countries will dramatically reduce demand for foreign-manufactured goods. The result may be social unrest and political instability in places like China as export trade crumbles. The U.S. government’s already dire projections for pensions and government entitlements will become even more dismal as wide unemployment among young people decimates payroll tax revenues. Sovereign debt crises—of the type playing out in Greece at the time of this writing — will spread as demand for government services outstrips revenue. Political battles will become even more heated, partisan, and irrational.

Ford’s solution to this calamity is at once obvious and politically unspeakable: Governments must devise a system to pay their unemployed populations to consume. Only in this way can the demand for goods stay bouyant and depression be avoided. Human labor may be largely superfluous in the automated economy of the twenty-first century, but broad-based consumption will remain essential.

The idea of consumption without labor is truly radical. In the developed world — and in the United States especially — work is tied directly to our individual sense of self worth and identity. Almost half of the unemployed people in the United States suffer from depression or anxiety; unemployed Americans are four times more likely than those with jobs to report symptoms of major depression, according to the American Psychological Association. Absent career ambition, how will capable, intelligent people discover and create meaning in their lives?

The answer, says Ford, is to distribute income on the basis of performance. Civic involvement, educational, research, or humanitarian accomplishments should be better compensated than indolence, allowing for competition. Effort and intelligence, well intended and skillfully applied, would still meet with reward. But the actions of these workers would not “necessarily result in ‘work’ in the traditional sense.”

From a reader’s perspective Lights in the Tunnel is an interesting referendum on King Camp Gillette’s 1894 socialist utopian treatise, The Human Drift. Gillette, inventor of the disposable razorblade of the same name, saw the Industrial Revolution leading inexorably to a future where a single robotic corporation created and distributed goods with perfect efficiency, a tomorrow of evermore capable machines freeing people from the chores and burdens of work in order that they might pursue intellectual passions.

Ford sees a similar future but calls “freedom” by another name: mass unemployment. The results of humankind’s liberation from labor would be unrest, high crime, loss of prosperity, and eventual societal collapse. This darker modern iteration of the Utopian ideal illustrates how easily the hopes of the past can become the horrors of tomorrow.

About the Reviewer
Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine.

Tomorrow In Brief

3-D Posters

Coming soon to billboards near you: posters you can see in 3-D without special glasses.

Based on the same principle as the old grooved “3-D” postcards of years past, the new displays consist of 250,000 individual lenses with a diameter of 2 millimeters each, aligned on sheets with computer precision to eliminate distortion.

The resulting 3-D images can be up to five meters in size. The technology was achieved by researchers from Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques, RealEyes Company, and the University of Kiel.

Source: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, www.fraunhofer.de.

Musical Clothing

Fabrics with sensors could give musicians a simple way to carry their instruments with them: in their clothes.

An outfit that produces sounds when the user touches it has been created by Swedish School of Textiles fashion student Jeannine Han and technician Dan Riley.

The prototype garments yield a harp-like sound. The goal is to improve the use of technology to produce future clothing, and also to create clothing with a larger and easily controlled musical palette. Han and Riley plan to form a band that will wear the outfits and “play themselves.”

Source: University of Borås, Expertanswer, www.expertsvar.se/english.

Bridging the Mentor Age Gap

If you’re choosing a mentor, it may be better to choose one who is still relatively early in his or her career. Doing so increases the likelihood that you, too, will become a productive mentor in the future.

In a study of mathematicians, Northwestern University researcher R. Dean Malmgren and colleagues found that older, late-career mentors were too far removed from the experiences of young protégés to train them effectively, and those protégés subsequently mentored fewer protégés of their own.

“It’s a phenomenon in our culture that as you gain more importance and success you are expected to oversee more and more people, which means that face time with your protégés goes down,” says Malmgren. “This tradeoff has negative consequences.”

Source: Northwestern University, www.northwestern.edu.

Crowd-Sourcing the Crowd

A new social-search engine promises to identify popular places in the same way that Twitter identifies popular, or “trending,” topics.

With a program developed by the Sency search-engine company in Santa Monica, California, users can find where the action is by simply selecting a city name; the search results show the locations of the most-active chatter, along with addresses and street maps.

Among the searchable places now available are London, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

Be warned, however: Party goers may have to do some extra trending-topic searching, lest they inadvertently join a protest movement or street riot.

Source: Sency, www.sency.com.

Arctic Warming, Mid-Latitude Freezing

Loss of sea ice in the Arctic region is likely to yield colder and snowier winters in other parts of the world, according to new research presented by James Overland of the NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.

Arctic warming, which is occurring twice as fast as in the rest of the planet, is due to a combination of factors, including loss of sea ice reflectivity, ocean heat storage, changing wind patterns, and natural variability.

“The exceptional cold and snowy winter of 2009–2010 in Europe, eastern Asia, and eastern North America is connected to unique physical processes in the Arctic,” Overland reported to the recent International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference.

Source: International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference, Research Council of Norway, www.ipy-osc.no.