Superferry damages cars

SUBHEAD: Cars are damaged aboard HSF in rough seas. Is this design ready for JHSV?

by Brad Parsons on 6 Janaury 2008 in Superferry Blogspot
http://hisuperferry.blogspot.com/2009/01/cars-damaged-onboard-in-rough-seas.html

Well, I've still got at least one more post to do on the lack of studied need being established updated page for seeing the State Supreme Court decision when it comes out is the following: http://www.state.hi.us/jud/2009jan.htm.

But, what brings me back early here from my vacation is the following report today based on yesterday's transit. I must say I have commented many times on this blog about observers wondering what happens to the cars onboard when the vessel is in turbulent water. Particularly, I have wondered what happens to animals and livestock in vehicles down below when the vessel is in turbulent water. I had assumed that they were hook-chaining the vehicles down in four places on the axels, but I guess not. I recommend reading the comments on the following article:

image above: military tractor on board Superferry vehicle deck. In future civilian vehicles may have to be tied down

"Rough seas caused car damage aboard Superferry"
Updated at 6:23 p.m., Monday, January 5, 2009
Read comments (28)
by Advertiser Staff

"Rough seas on Sunday resulted in 'minor damage' to 13 vehicles aboard Hawaii Superferry during its voyage from O'ahu to Maui. The company said the conditions caused some parked vehicles to shift during transit. 'There was no substantive damage to the ship,' said a company statement. 'Affected passengers have been contacted and we are facilitating their claims. This is the first incident in which significant vehicle shifting has occurred,' the statement said. 'Vehicles are now being tied-down in affected areas on days when conditions are unusually rough to mitigate any damage.'"

Some of the better comments on the above article that other blogs have also been referring to:

jklmc wrote:
"My family and I were on this particular voyage...rough doesn't begin to describe the ride. We've caught the Superferry 8 times so far and this was the worst we've ever felt. I can honestly say that this experience has made me decide that I never want to catch the Superferry again. I don't want to take my chances. I estimate that more than 90% of the passengers were vomiting from the moment we passed Diamond Head. There was about 1.5 hours of relative calm while we were sailing between Molokai and Lanai and then the second storm of nauseous attacks began. Our boat was suppose to land at noon, but we docked at around 12:40. I did notice that the captain did slow the boat down at times when the seas seemed insane. My wish is that the Superferry would have some decency to cancel voyages when they know that seas are bad...or at least give passengers the option of rebooking/getting a refund on those days. One thing I may add is that the staff aboard was EXCELLENT & HELPFUL... iron stomachs! 01/05/2009 10:07:24 p.m.

ffejhonolulu wrote:
This happened to a friends truck last year--you would have thought SF would have started tie-downs right after the first accident, back then. It was pretty messy upstairs too with people barfing all over the place!!!!!... 01/05/2009 9:35:24 p.m.

techsavvy wrote:
a couple of thoughts - someone mentioned the parking brakes on the cars - that would not cause this unless the transmission broke (which is possible, it is a big ocean)... - I talked to a guy who has alot of time on the water in Hawaii who rode it on a 'moderate' day - in the channel, the windows were flexing as they hit waves at 35 knots and you could hear little 'rattle ding cling' noise just like you do when you slam a boat into waves (whether it is a 15' whaler or a 54' Bertram - DUH!!!!)... 01/05/2009 7:58:33 p.m.

Kaumanua wrote:
Good luck getting their insurance carriers to cover the damage. I think there was only one carrier in Hawaii that covered loss or damage to vehicles while on ocean transport. I highly doubt that SF will pay for the damage, but you never know. . . they have been very accomodating to local passengers and often bend over backwards to ensure their customers are satisfied. Accidents happen, nature is unpredictable. 01/05/2009 5:09:01 p.m.

scat47 wrote:
And they're planning on coming across the Alenuehaha channel to Kawaihae? Don't think it's going to happen....01/05/2009 5:01:12 p.m.

Here is a KGMB-9 video report on this story.

Regarding techsavvy's above comment, here is a video under similar conditions where you can hear it and the 'deck-slamming' for yourself:

Here is another extended video of what these type of conditions would look like on the vessel from onshore:

Now, the really interesting part. We have talked about deck-slamming on this blog before, but there is more to this and it relates now to what we are seeing, so quoting from the following article, "Need for Speed" by By David Perera appearing in The Military Logistics Forum of December 2008:

"A 2007 Rand study concluded that presence of a single JHSV in a scenario of transporting Army units from a seabase would 'roughly halve the time required to transport an Army brigade ashore.' [Are we talking about a difference of 15 minutes?--Ed.] Still, one of the report’s authors remains skeptical. 'There are some significant interoperability problems with using the JHSV with seabasing,' said Robert Button, a Rand senior analyst. Design specifications call for the ship to be fully operational up to 'sea state 3,' in which the height of waves (from trough to crest) are no more than two feet and winds don’t gust above 10 knots. 'But, the vessel is not designed for interoperability above ‘sea state 3',' Button said...

Vessel proponents say that sea state hasn’t been much of an issue to date. 'We’ve sailed the boats in big seas,' said the Army’s Wichterman, citing a time when a leased catamaran transported a Stryker company from California to Washington during a gale. 'It didn’t leak, it didn’t take on water. It took a severe pounding, but again, it was successful at the end of the day.' As for JHSV’s compatibility with seabasing, it’s likely that 'every boat is going to find it difficult to work 50 miles off shore in a seaway with vessels that aren’t going to be able to anchor to transfer cargo at sea,' Wichterman added...

How robustly the JHSV will survive high sea states may come down to which design the military chooses. Incat relies on a wave-piercing design meant to prevent waves from slamming into its vessels’ underhull. Austal, instead, relies on a tall flat bow between the two hulls to neutralize waves..."
by the PUC and Act 2: 

It would appear that with this design waves are being neutralized with difficult 'seakeeping' conditions and possibly destructive underhull deck-slamming as opposed to Incat's underhull wave-piercing design. Maybe this all relates to the following consulting contract solicitation being issued by the DoD on JHSV quietly and quickly in November 2008:
JHSV Operational Assessment Subject Matter Experts Solicitation Number: N00033-09-R-3300 Nov 20, 2008 9:35 am General Information Notice Type: Combined Synopsis/Solicitation The Military Sealift Command has a requirement for specialized technical services to support an Operational Assessment (OA) for the Joint High Speed Vessel (JHSV). See Statement of Work below for details. 

Posted Date: November 20, 2008
Response Date: Nov 28, 2008 10:00 am Eastern Archiving Policy: Automatic, 15 days after response date Archive Date: December 13, 2008 Responses to this solicitation are due by 10:00 AM Eastern Time on 28 November 2008. My recommendation is that both the State and DoD should have gone with a true wave-piercing underhull design to minimize destructive deck-slamming and maximize seakeeping for passengers. It's not too late for both of them to correct this.

Scenario 2020

SUBHEAD: The Future of Food in Mendocino County.
 
By Jason Bradford on 5 January 2009 in the Oil Drum
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4884#more

I was asked to give a presentation to a group called Leadership Mendocino. Every year about 30 people in our County, usually from a mix of businesses, government agencies, and non-profits, meet monthly for a full day and intensively study a particular topic. Nov. 14th 2008 was their Ag day, and my presentation followed the Ag Commissioner’s, who reviewed the County’s history and present. I didn’t want to talk about the future as if I knew what was going to happen, but I did want to highlight the vulnerabilities and tensions I saw building and suggest some alternatives to our predicament. Hence I created a storyline in which I was now the County Historian in 2020 giving a talk to the group about the past decade of change.

image above: Burned out combine in winter field from "Agricultural Law http://aglaw.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html

While the details are specific to where I live, the general lessons apply to the whole world.

For Mendocino County the key date was December 12, 2009. The trucks didn’t show up that day.

Why weren’t the trucks running? I’ll give a quick overview of what led up to the Little Death.

Let’s start with the credit market break down in 2008. What followed was a plunge in the volume and reliability of global trade. Without access to the free flow of credit, countries experienced food and fuel shortages. People began rioting.

We saw how developing countries were in profound crisis, but most of us didn’t imagine how those awful scenes would so quickly be in our own neighborhoods too.

Everyone knows the story…Pakistan devolved into anarchy and was unable to keep all of its nuclear weapons secure. Several went missing and the world didn't find out where they went until it was too late.

South-Central Asia and the Middle East were on fire.

The nuclear exchange was contained within the region, but the effects spread globally. The world’s largest oil production facilities and ports were destroyed or inaccessible. The daily flow of supertankers from the Middle East was over.

It was common knowledge at the time that crude oil was the lifeblood of our economy, but little had yet been done to reduce our dependency on oil. The modern world was suddenly without sufficient transportation fuels and totally unprepared.

The specific numbers are staggering. Only a quarter of U.S. crude oil consumption was domestically produced in 2009. The trucking system was the key part of what was called the "Just in Time" delivery system. Warehousing and stockpiling were no longer practiced significantly and so no buffer existed when the trucks stopped. Our "Just in Time" system unraveled over a period of several weeks.

"J-I-T" now stood for "Just Isn't There."

As the flow of goods and services slowed dramatically and then in some cases stopped moving altogether, we were subject to cascading, compounding failures in key sectors of the economy. Just a couple of examples…Without constant truck movement, spare parts and basic supplies ran short. Electricity production relied on coal, which relied on diesel.

Most dire of all was that within three days of the halt to trucking, the grocery stores were out of food.

Looking back at historical records it is clear that, while shocking, this was no surprise. Community-based organizations had been warning of this exact possibility for years.

Nowadays we have buffers and resiliency built into our systems, but that was not the case in 2009. Government hadn’t prepared, having placed its faith in the market to provide for basic goods such as food and energy. Global food stockpiles had been declining for over a decade, and in any case they were not under any government control.

Although some people had stockpiled food and essentials, most people hadn't because either they never thought this could happen or were simply distracted. It might be good to remind everyone what life was like in 2009. Most of us tended to spend our free time in front of the television or interacting with various media and communication devices. Gardening, food preservation, community meals and stuff like that wasn’t cool and exciting for the majority of people, although interest in food security had been increasing for a few years preceding the crisis.

After a week everybody became scared, and most started to feel hungry. This was so unthinkable that many also became profoundly disillusioned and angry. This was not supposed to be happening to “us.” The Five Stages of Grief were on full display.

Events began to run their natural course.

Scared, hungry people saw that some households still had food. This led to looting in some areas. A handful of police and sheriffs couldn’t protect private property from a desperate populace. In other areas looting was averted (barely) as neighbors and authorities agreed to pool private food holdings and distribute them evenly.

As the crisis deepened, a triage system was established. Food was preferentially given to those who could work, and the young.

All sorts of questions that had been ignored for decades became very important. “What about the local farms,” the people asked. “Can they feed us?”

“It’s the middle of winter,” the farmer’s replied. “We can plant potatoes and grains in the spring but they won’t be ready until summer.”

“And where are the seeds going to come from? We are hay farmers, cattle ranchers and grape growers. We don’t even have the right equipment for this.”

Three months passed without relief. Clearly, household preparation wasn’t enough, and now the population was starving.

Other problems arose too. Electricity was spotty. Every bit of gasoline and diesel were needed in generators to keep pumps for water and sewer systems going, to keep the hospitals powered, and to cook food in community kitchens.

But by spring these supplies, commandeered from the storage tanks of gas stations, were gone.

FEMA didn’t arrive with supplies of food, fuel and medicines in the major valleys until March 2010. These were barely enough to end starvation and give tractors some fuel.

When the railroad cars arrived in May 2010 we finally had enough of the basics again. Freeways were abandoned for hauling freight. They were in disrepair from winter storms and far too expensive to maintain for the now minimal trucking system.

In addition to supplies of grain and beans (25,000 lbs per trailer load), enough seed potatoes were brought in to plant. Potatoes became our survival food for a few years. As we all know, it is hard to eat enough of them to keep the weight on! Health care providers estimate that the average person lost twenty pounds between 2009 and 2012.

Here’s another graphic from the archives. Food security organizations in the County knew that storage foods with high caloric density were essential, and had even started to import and store them in the County. The grain and bean silos established in Willits in 2009 really helped that area weather the crisis better than elsewhere. Silos were quickly built along the railroad tracks in every town.

All of us began to learn some of the basic facts about nutrition and agriculture, such as how many calories we need per day and how to eke that out of the soil.

Even with farm supplies brought in by rail car, we lacked much of the needed energy infrastructure to irrigate crops as electricity was still unreliable. Few well pumps ran off solar panels. So in most cases, yields weren’t as large as we’d hoped. It was terribly frustrating; we could see the water 30 ft down in the well but couldn’t get it out fast enough to make a difference.

Ever since the Little Death, precious tractor fuel has been limited. Much more is now done with manual labor than in the past. This was a difficult adjustment, both physically and psychologically. Some people were excited by the challenge and adapted well. On the bright side, “unemployment” is nearly non-existent and we are a fit and industrious people.

Explicit warnings of our vulnerabilities, and an alternative vision had been given by local community groups as early 2004. In August 2010, a plan for a local food economy was adopted by local governments based on the research of community activists that preceded the crisis. The food system we have today is by and large based on those plans.

The ranching community was familiar with the concept of carrying capacity, but usually called it the “stocking rate.” Good ranchers made sure not to put more cattle on a piece of land than it could handle. A local food system plan had to think about the sustainable population of humans in the County too.

Some basic facts that were used to frame the plan:1. The County’s population in 2010 was estimated at 80,000 (down from a peak of 90,000 before the crisis).2. Somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000 acres of prime ag land remained in the county (after an initial endowment of 95,000).3. To supply enough food to feed one person requires about one acre.

The plan also recognized that a local food system had to overcome serious capital deficits with respect to: renewable energy, equipment, infrastructure, education and worker skills, business to business relationships, and public law and policy.

In any environment it would be difficult to overcome these deficits, but the crisis was a mixed blessing. Everybody now recognized that a new system had to be built. Nearly all resources were allocated according to this need. Ideology was replaced by practicality. What people were “willing to do” changed overnight.

Now I will shift gears and contrast the food system of 2009 with what we have today. I’ll start with a review of the 2009 food system.

Here are a couple of graphs that summarize data at the national scale when the crisis hit. At that time, one calorie of food energy depended on several calories of fossil fuel energy. Basically, all parts of the system were highly dependent upon fossil fuels, long-distance supply chains, and complex financial markets.

Today’s food system has many features that improve our resiliency and security. Key attributes are:

Diverse. A complete and balanced diet can be had within the agricultural base of the County.

Local. Food produced here is consumed here, and the agricultural landscape is no longer dominated by grapes and cattle for export.

Renewable. Energy inputs for agriculture, transportation and processing are based on solar, wind, hydro and other non-fossil sources.

Non-toxic. Artificial pesticides and herbicides are no longer available and we use biological controls and landscape management to dampen pest cycles.

Cyclical. Soils are improved rather than depleted through conservation tillage, smart land-cover rotation patterns, and composting of all human and animal wastes.

Adaptable. As climate changes and new farmers learn what works best, systems are in place to exchange information and perform needed research.

Buffered. The future is always uncertain. Always be prepared for trouble by storing extra of what we really need.

Today’s food system is completely different. The plan recognized the web of relationships needed for a sustainable system. Fossil fuels are nearly eliminated. Transportation distances are very short. Waste becomes the new fertilizer.

While mechanized to the extent energy availability allows, the farm of 2020 uses efficient hand tools when those suffice.

Compost today is very expensive. Farmers work very hard to create the fertility they need on site as best they can. Food scraps are highly valued and used in vermiculture systems. Human wastes are professionally handled and sold to farmers certified disease free.

Imported chemical pesticides and herbicides are also very costly. More knowledge and labor is now used, including beneficial insect plants that add a lot of color and interest to farms.

Off the farm society has changed just as dramatically. People often use solar ovens to cook, and disposable packaging is rarely seen anymore.

Because a transportation fuel crisis was the proximate cause of the crisis, people were especially keen on eliminating reliance on long-distance supply chains. Households began sourcing as much food locally as they could. In 2009 a trip to the grocery store would mean a 1500 mile diet. Today that could be more like a 150 yard diet. Bikes with trailers can now handle much local transport. Streets are quieter, and the air less polluted.

Not only have on the farm practices changed, but farms are cooperating like never before. This creates synergies at the landscape level we all benefit from.

For example, this goat dairy sows a hay crop rich in wildflowers, thereby supporting a local beekeeper. The beekeeper’s hives also service orchards and row crops in the area, ensuring good pollination and food for all of us.

We have much to be proud of now. We made it through very tough times together by mostly keeping our heads on straight and making good decisions when it really counted. But we also live with the pain of loss and regret, asking ourselves over and over, “How did we let this happen?”

What does the last 10 years teach us about the importance of leadership?

I look at this issue in two ways. First, good leaders do their best to prevent crises. This requires the ability to help people accept the reality of unsustainable tensions before they go too far. Just talking to people can establish new conversations that propagate. Only when enough people are having similar conversations are social changes possible.

Of course human history is full of one account after another of societies that failed to recognize their obvious problems before it was too late. When disaster strikes, good leaders manage their shock and the loss of normalcy. They model the proper attitude, reducing panic and heightening clear thinking.

The best crisis leaders are those that combine awareness of the problem before it arrived with a sense of direction and clarity. Because they saw what was coming, they often have a plan to deal with it as soon as the population is forced by circumstances out of denial, distraction and inaction. Since what people are willing to do changes in a crisis, wise leadership can make a lot happen for the good very quickly.

Residents want beach access

SUBHEAD: Once again the residents of Kauai are bared from a Poli Hale State Park by the DLNR

Editor's Note: We have a right to access this sacred site! We wonder what happened to the military's promise to maintain the roads at Polihale when they took over control on the 6,000 acres of the Mana Plain, including the road to the State Park.

image above: Southern end of Polihale State Park looking toward the Pacific Missile Range Facility

by Nathan Eagle on 4 January 2009 in The Garden Island News

http://www.kauaiworld.com/articles/2009/01/04/news/kauai_news/doc496070b1d12f6971042339.txt

Flooding from heavy rains last month caused damages to a bridge, large holes in the access road and erosion around the water system at Polihale State Park as seen in these photos taken on a state Department of Land and Natural Resources site assessment the week of Decemeber 22md.

The closure of Polihale State Park due to damage caused by flooding has irked some Westside residents who want access to the remote beach and surf spot.

The state Department of Land and Natural Resources Division of State Parks said in a statement on Friday that it is closing Polihale State Park “indefinitely until significant repairs are made to areas of the park that were damaged by recent heavy rains.”

“We are asking for the public’s patience and cooperation during this closure,” said Laura Thielen, DLNR chair, in a release. “It is necessary for all vehicles to stay off the roadway to Polihale State Park in order to protect public safety. The park itself is closed and no camping permits are being issued due to the washed out roads.”

Kekaha resident Bruce Pleas said yesterday that there is a viable alternative.

“Instead of DLNR sending people out there to make sure you don’t use the park, the solution is to post one personnel at the gate and make sure only residents with four-wheel drive are allowed to pass,” he said.

Pleas, an avid surfer, said those familiar with such conditions should be granted access.

“Even after the flood we recently had, the road is still in far better condition than it was before the 2006 flooding,” he said. “It’s even in as good of condition as it was when the sugar cane production company was there. So, my main gripe is why can’t local residents who are familiar with these conditions and who have a specific purpose get out there?”

State Sen. Gary Hooser, D-Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau, said he plans to meet with Thielen tomorrow to learn more about the department’s budget.

“I know that budgets are in very bad condition, but I am hopeful and optimistic that the road will be re-opened soon,” he said yesterday. “I met with the Kaua‘i delegation — Reps. Tokioka, Sagum and Morita — and we briefly discussed the situation and we agreed to work together to support the re-construction that will be involved in the process.”

Heavy rains last month caused significant damage to the park’s main entrance road including damage to one of the bridges. Continued use of the road before it dried caused it to further deteriorate, according to the DLNR.

Additionally, the park’s new water system and restroom facilities remain inoperable due to damages sustained by the heavy rains.

“Certainly, local residents should be allowed to access their state parks and I think visitors not familiar with the roads or without the proper vehicles, it would be appropriate to discourage them from going down there,” Hooser said. “It could be just a matter of moving boulders and letting local residents through or it could require something greater. DLNR is simply concerned about people’s safety.”

With the temporary lack of infrastructure and limited emergency access, the area will remain closed until repairs are made, a DLNR news release states.

There were no estimates of when the park might reopen or how much the work might cost, but the DLNR said it will issue regular updates as repairs proceed.

“There are many issues regarding management of the state park system here and we’ll be speaking about that this Monday, all the way from Polihale to Koke‘e to the Napali Coast,” Hooser said. “Even though the budget situation is very distressing right now, we’re going to push as hard as we can to get funds that are available.”

Sitting on top of the world

SUBHEAD: Comments about our new president, on a positive note to begin the new year.

by Garrison Keillor 13 November 2008

Be happy, dear hearts, and allow yourselves a few more weeks of quiet exultation.

It isn't gloating, it's satisfaction at a job well done. He was a superb candidate, serious, professorial but with a flashing grin and a buoyancy that comes from working out in the gym every morning.

image above: Barrack Obama palms a basketball

He spoke in a genuine voice, not senatorial at all. He relished campaigning. He accepted adulation gracefully. He brandished his sword against his opponents without mocking or belittling them. He was elegant, unaffected, utterly American, and now (Wow) suddenly America is cool. Chicago is cool.

Chicago!!!

We threw the dice and we won the jackpot and elected a black guy with a Harvard degree, the middle name Hussein and a sense of humor - he said, "I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher."

The French junior minister for human rights said, "On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes." When was the last time you heard someone from France say they wanted to be American and take a bite of something of ours? Ponder that for a moment.

The world expects us to elect pompous yahoos and instead we have us a 47-year-old prince from the prairie who cheerfully ran the race, and when his opponents threw sand at him, he just smiled back.

He'll be the first president in history to look really good making a jump shot. He loves his classy wife and his sweet little daughters. He looks good in the kitchen. He can cook Indian or Chinese but for his girls he will do mac and cheese. At the same time, he knows pop music, American lit and constitutional law.

I just can't imagine anybody cooler. Look at a photo of the latest pooh-bah conference - the hausfrau Merkel, the big glum Scotsman, that goofball Berlusconi, Putin with his B-movie bad-boy scowl, and Sarkozy, who looks like a district manager for Avis - you put Barack in that bunch and he will shine.

It feels good to be cool and all of us can share in that, even sour old right-wingers and embittered blottoheads. Next time you fly to Heathrow and hand your passport to the man with the badge, he's going to see "United States of America" and look up and grin.

Even if you worship in the church of Fox, everyone you meet overseas is going to ask you about Obama and you may as well say you voted for him because, my friends, he is your line of credit over there. No need anymore to try to look Canadian.

And the coolest thing about him is the fact that back in the early Nineties, given a book contract after the hoo-ha about his becoming the First Black Editor of The Harvard Law Review, instead of writing the basic exploitation book he could've written, he put his head down and worked hard for a few years and wrote a good book, an honest one, which, since his rise in politics, has earned the Obamas enough to buy a very nice house and put money in the bank. A successful American entrepreneur.

The last American president to write a book all by his lonesome self, I believe, was Theodore Roosevelt, who, on graduation from Harvard, wrote "The Naval War of 1812," and in my humble opinion, Obama's is the better book for the general reader, but you be the judge.

Our hero who galloped to victory has inherited a gigantic mess. The country is sunk in debt. The Treasury announced it must borrow $550 billion to get the government through the fourth quarter, more than the entire deficit for 2008, so he will have to raise taxes and not only on bankers and lumber barons.

His promise never to raise the retirement age is not a good idea. Whatever he promised the Iowa farmers about subsidizing ethanol is best forgotten at this point. We may not be getting our National Health Service cards anytime soon. And so on and so on.

So enjoy the afterglow of the election awhile longer. We all walk taller this fall. People in Copenhagen and Stockholm are sending congratulatory e-mails - imagine! We are being admired by Danes and Swedes! And Chicago becomes The First City. Step aside, San Francisco. Shut up, New York. The Midwest is cool now. The mind reels. Have a good day.

Garrison Keillor is the author of a new Lake Wobegon novel, "Liberty." Distributed by Tribune Media Services.

Kauai Water and Power

SUBHEAD: The nexus of water, energy, and survival.

by David Ward on 5 January 2009 for Island Breath -

There are several plausible futures, not simply one "official future." If the future is unpredictable, we're much better off looking at a range of possible outcomes than just at a single best guess. A forecast doesn't need to be exactly right to be useful; in fact, a mix of divergent, plausible futures (sometimes referred to as scenarios) can offer insights into the strengths and weaknesses of a given system or strategy.

image above: Wailua Falls on Kauai, Hawaii, at full throttle

With foresight tools such as scenarios, we can test how well our present environment and plans would respond to complex changes; if we see that a particular aspect of how we are today tends to weaken or fail under certain (unpredictable, but reasonable) conditions, we know that it's likely that we'll need to strengthen or change that potential point of failure.

Where is the scenario planning for the disruption to our economy, if oil becomes suddenly unobtainable? For example, the collapse in the value of the dollar or the grim possibility of war in the oil-producing regions, oil tanker transport choke points, i.e. the Straits of Hormuz (40% of world’s oil exports pass through the straits).

To quote Colin Campbell (2004): The second half of the age of oil will be characterized by a decline in the supply of oil, and all that depends upon it, including eventually financial capital. That speaks of a second Great Depression and the end of economics as presently understood. It is an unprecedented discontinuity of historic proportions, as never before has a resource as critical as oil become scarce without sight of a better substitute. All countries and all communities face the consequence of this new situation.

There certainly is cause for alarm when talking about the oil crisis. However,
When it comes to WATER, there is no comparison when we consider our dependency on water. A person can live without food for over a month, but only a few days without water. We need to ask whether our access to water is both sufficient and assured. Here on Kauai the answer is NO!

Our power and water utilities are interdependent. Water distribution is energy-hungry. The Department of Water is KIUC’s largest consumer, satisfying its energy needs almost exclusively by burning fossil fuels. Both utilities are unable to withstand interruptions to their energy source for more than a few days at the most. KIUC's Strategic Plan 2008 – 2023 calls for generating at least 50% of our electricity without burning fossil fuels within 15 years. However admirable this plan may be, it is too little too late. Long before 2023; with the economy teetering on the edge of a depression at the impending peak in the world’s production of oil; we face the possibility of KIUC being unable to remain in operation. It is imperative that the Water Department immediately begin a program to become energy independent as soon as possible.

There is a need to adjust existing policies, programs, and resources so that the water and wastewater departments could be converted from high-energy users to net renewable energy producers. We use fossil fuels simply because they currently represent the cheapest solution. Since market forces always optimize with a short time horizon of two years or less, our Water Board and business managers will invariably be tempted to embrace the scenarios that offer the best short-term perspectives, and consequently, we could be meeting our demise with our eyes wide shut.

Living on a small island, we need to stop living beyond our means and return to a sustainable life style. The water demand and income projections that have been made in the Water Departments 2020 plan cannot be relied upon because of the global instability.

We ought to behave as if fossil fuels have already become essentially unavailable. This commodity should only be used for purposes where they are absolutely essential and to help us create a sustainable energy infrastructure for the future. Sustainability is about closing the circle, replacing wasteful extractive models of resource use with recycling models that enable resource use to continue without depletion over the long term.

As water works its way from source to tap, it typically requires many infusions of energy. We need to move it from its source, treat it, pipe it into our homes, and treat it before disposal. It is only when we look at the energy consumed in the entire water cycle that we get a clear sense of how much energy is required. This kind of whole-system calculation is called energy intensity. Energy intensity is defined as the total amount of energy required to use a specific amount of water in a specific location.

Kauai relies almost exclusively on pumped water for its residents. Pumping groundwater is one of the most expensive and energy-intensive ways of delivering water to consumers. This should be reevaluated. This cannot continue to be the preferred method of water delivery. It is essential that the Department work to make the system as resilient as possible and maximize energy efficiency.

We need to start talking about occupying the landscape differently. What is called for are not "solutions" but "adaptations." One does not "solve" inevitable change, but one might adapt to it. The developable renewable energy potential owned by the water and wastewater departments is not yet known. It would be beneficial to identify, assess and prioritize these resources, and find the technical and financial assistance to help develop renewable energy. In addition to micro-hydro generation, the Department could generate electricity through dedicated photovoltaic solar cells. Most buildings and water tanks are potential sites for photovoltaic solar generation. Third-party installations may offer faster adoption and financial benefits.

Water conservation by consumers eliminates all of the “upstream” energy required to bring the water to the point of end use, as well as all of the “downstream” energy that would otherwise be spent to treat and dispose of this water.

The best way for increasing water efficiency is to reduce the use of drinkable water for non-consumption purposes. There are two ways to do this: collect rainwater and reuse indoor wash water. The rain that falls on the roof should, if used innovatively, be sufficient for the majority of home uses, including gardening. Rainwater harvesting can be supplemented by treatment of grey water (wash water from the bathroom, laundry, and kitchen) e.g., through gravel reed beds for subsequent use in the garden. Even blackwater (from the toilet) can be treated and re-used on site in some circumstances, or a waterless composting toilet can be installed to ensure water goes to more productive uses. Closing the nutrient cycle, from human waste to fertile, food-producing soil is, in the long term, one of the most critical factors in the sustainability of our population.

Our food supply is a vulnerable link between the environment and the economy. While the use of oil dominates the production end of the food system, electricity dominates the consumption end. The oil-intensive modern food system that evolved when oil was cheap will not survive as it is now structured with higher energy prices. We will not be able to continue to import 90% of our food. Most of us will have to grow at least some of our own food. Among the principal adjustments will be movement down the food chain as we react to rising food prices by buying fewer high-cost imported foods and livestock products. The economic benefits of expanding urban agriculture will become much more obvious.

The Water Department’s policy of not supporting agriculture must be changed. If we are to feed ourselves we must expand our water use with “victory gardens” in every yard, park, school, and diversified agriculture on all prime land. The irrigation systems associated with the now closed plantations are available for conversion into supplying irrigation water for diversified agriculture farming. The Water Department must take a leadership position in working with DLNR and the Department of Agriculture to insure both our water and our food.

I sincerely believe that we should be using the still affordable fossil energy that we have,to invest in infrastructure that requires very low energy to run (e.g. gravity flow). We need to rapidly reduce our dependence on off-island sources. We need to replace systems that are inherently limited by available imported energy (e.g. groundwater pumping). Aggressive restructuring of the system for resiliency and energy efficiency and purchases of renewable energy systems are powerful steps that can be taken to improve our water security while combating global warming. We could all learn from how the Hawaiians and the early plantations operated. These necessary steps to save finite fossil fuel resources and finite biosphere must be done soon.

We have no other choice.

See also:

Petrocollapse: Can you live without indoor running water?

http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14&Itemid=33

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Israel as a Failed State

SUBHEAD: It's time Barrack Obama reconsider his Middle East policy.

[Note added by author: Originally this post was titled "Israel as a Fascist State", but a comment by JF (and a another by fellow editor Jonathan Jay) made me realize how incendiary that title is - if fruitful discourse is the goal. In any case, I am damn mad about the slaughter in Gaza.]

Image above: Gaza family in shock after air attack. From (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fdfd186a-d4f0-11dd-b967-000077b07658.html).

By Juan Wilson on 4 January 2009 -


Message to Barack Obama: It would be wise for you to reevaluate your Middle East policy before you take office in a couple of weeks. Once you set the tone at your inauguration it will be hard to wash your hands of current atrocities. It is time the United States stopped pretending that the State of Israel is a friend. The Zionists' relation to their neighbors is the linchpin of all that is wrong with the "western" approach to Middle east culture. Israel has become a dictatorial, reactionary, militaristic rogue state. Unfortunately, it is our client state run amok. It controls the Palestinians in Gaza like the Germans controlled the Polish Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Even though I was the great grandson of a Baptist preacher, I was raised without religion on Long Island. My maternal grandparents might be described as atheists, or more accurately, agnostics. My immediate family never attended a church or described itself as Christian. I spent much of my youth close to American Jews in New York City and the metropolitan area. There was a secular, intellectual and artistic ambiance to their culture that attracted me.

When I was a young teenager I attended meetings of the Society for Ethical Culture. It espoused secular humanism and I liked the mostly Jewish progressive intellectual young participants.

The "Jewish Encyclopedia" says of the Society:
"Its chief supporters in New York and Philadelphia are Jews, as is its founder and leader, though the society does not in any degree bear the stamp of Judaism."

In 1958 my first love was a Jewish Russian girl who wrote beautiful poetry and was the best mathematician in my algebra class. Wow! Over the years I came to appreciate Jewish humor and the expressiveness of Yiddish.

In 1963 I attended Boston University in their College of Fine Arts. The school had a large number of Jewish kids from Long Island. I felt at home. On the first day of Freshman orientation they had about a 1000 fine arts students in the department's auditorium. BU was a parochial school and in its wisdom would separate all students by religion. The Catholics were invited to reassemble at their church near the student union. The Protestants were directed to their facility at center focus of the campus. The Jews were asked to stay in their seats. As the middle of the campus was a trolley-car ride away, I stayed in my seat and thus became, for many present, jewish (with a small J").

Later in the 1960's my sister married a Jewish artist from Brooklyn and, with starry eyes and a baby, moved to a kibbutz near the Golan Heights border with Syria. It was what we call now an "intentional community". They operated a large apple orchard. They all shared the farming and child raising duties together. At the time I though my sister very idealistic.

It was not until 1967 that I got even a hint that the Jewish state was anything but a modern, progressive group with humanitarian interests at heart. My sister described the occasional rocket attacks coming into their kibbutz from Syria. I began to realize that the placement of the kibbutz was an irritant to those in the disputed Golan Heights. I felt my sister was in harm's way unnecessarily. Why were so many kibbutzes located in places sure to raise hackles?

Yet, I was appalled by the brazen attack on Israel in May of 1967. I rooted for Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin's efforts in the Six Day War. I was impressed with Abba Eban's smooth representation of Israel at the United Nations. The good guys had kicked some ass.

It took years for me to realize that Israel was never going to release the Palestinian land they grabbed. It took longer for me to see the cohesiveness of the "Jewish settlements" in the occupied territories. It took longer for me to separate Zionism from Judaism from Semitism from Jewish culture.

Over the years, on this issue of Israel, my heart has had to travel a great distance. Today I think that the American, Polish, Russian and other European Jews that occupy today's Israel will need to dismantle that operation. I feel all illegal settlements must be abandoned and turned over to the Palestinians.

To me there should be no Jewish state or Islamic state or Christian state. Any religious state is repellent to me. There are "converted" Jews but essentially Jews are defined by the mother's bloodline, and a religion (and thus citizenry) defined by inheritance of genes seems barbaric.

Unfortunately, Barrack Obama has already set a course that will likely lead to more conflict in the Middle East (more conflict in Afghanistan, Pakistan and perhaps Iran). His past support of Israel does not bode well for a peace process. His silence over the disproportionate atrocities being committed by Israel in Gaza is disturbing. I hope he "gets it' and changes course before his inauguration.

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Better Way to Make a Living

SUBHEAD: Going back to tribalism may be the key to survival.

by Chuck Burr on 2 January 2009 in Culture Change -
(http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=273&Itemid=1)

Image above: Photograph by Timothy Allen. From (<www.photojournal.co.uk/timothy_allen)

We are no more able to find our way forward living as Homo modern as we are living as Homo hunter-gatherer. Both ways are blocked. Living today on the infinite growth treadmill as Homo modern results in the death of our planet. Homo sapien has exploded our population to a level that we can no longer run back into the forest to make a living like the Mayan did. So what are we to do?

The questions is actually, not “what are we going to do?”, but “how are we going to make a living?” First let’s rule out the obvious: we can no longer make a living as Homo consumer. Peak oil will put an end to our happy motoring and consuming lifestyle before we get the chance to consume the world.

A new International Energy Agency (IEA) report shows the decline of global oil production has been recalculated at 9.1% per year, up from 5.8% earlier in 2008. The weakened global economy will buy us a couple more years, but after that the decline of world oil production will be far steeper than its rise. We started the last century slowly, but we are now running our fossil fuel economy full speed with the easily extracted oil gone and only the hard or impossible to extract left.

The end of plentiful cheap energy will mean a reduction in the complexity of our society so significant that few today comprehend it. I wonder if President-elect Obama has any idea what is in store for us. Watch to see if restoring “growth” is his mantra when inaugurated. This year we saw the end of investment banking and the beginning of the end of suburbia in the form of the mortgage crisis. Peak oil’s curtailment of happy motoring has not even kicked in yet.

Next, the experiment of the agricultural revolution fails, as it has created overpopulation and overshoot of carrying capacity via a "food race." The food race drives population growth with growth in food production; every increase in human population is met with an increase in food production.

The agricultural revolution made us powerful, but it has also meant the greatest mass extinction since the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Just when we need earth’s resilience in her biodiversity the most, Homo modern is destroying it by converting what is left into human biomass.

Combine agricultural-revolution population with peak oil and you get a nightmare. At the start of the last century, there were only one billion on the planet, today there are almost 6.8 billion. That means that 5.8 billion people are here one way or another because of oil, and oil is about to run out.

The obvious being eliminated, that we are not going to make a living as fossil fuel consumers nor as hunter-gatherers, how are we going to make a living in the future? What if I told you I had a way to make a living that has worked for 150,000 generations and it does not involve running into the forest?

The answer is tribalism, or, as I describe in my book Culturequake: The Fall of Modern Culture and the Rise of Earth Culture, tribal communities.

Tribalism is misunderstood by Homo modern as “living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.” Hunting and gathering is only one way of making a living; there are a million other ways to make a living. The important point is not “what” you do to make a living, but “how” you make a living. Make a living doing what ever you are best at, whether it is on a permaculture farm or fixing bicycles, it makes no difference.

Tribalism has over three million years been the evolutionarily proven form of human social organization. Bees make a living in hives, deer in herds, whales in pods, birds in flocks, and humans in tribes. There is no getting around it. If you think that civilization is the new answer, you are deeply mistaken. In the mere blink of an eye, 500 generations, civilization has brought the world the point of mass extinction. It might be working for a wealthy westerner, but it is not working for the other 95 percent of the human population nor the 30 million other species on the planet.

Tribalism has two primary components that enable the average person to make a living from generation to generation without being stressed out or exploited. First, a tribe is simply a group of people making a living together. Everyone in the tribe does not even have to have the same beliefs; they just have to want to make a living together.

Second, tribe members have a strong incentive to share what they have made or found with other tribal members. This gives everyone else a strong incentive to share as well. There is no one leader or boss as in our hierarchic agricultural revolution culture. Being the main scheduler, for example, is just another job. When food is scarce everyone goes hungry; no one keeps a surplus to him/herself.

Generally, tribes are thought to be fewer than 150 people. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized this number of people to be the limit with whom we can maintain stable social relationships in which we know each person. He suggests that numbers larger than this require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforcement. I suggest this number does not require a hierarchy; everyone can be an equal.

So what should you do? The universal advice I got from older people when I was growing up was “do what you love to do and you will be good at it.” You will make the biggest impact with your life that way. Find like-minded people and find a way to make livings together that you all enjoy.

Based on my experience as an entrepreneur I would also say follow the path of least resistance and watch for serendipity. Try multiple things and see which one gets the most traction. Also, walk before you run. Try your ideas on a hobby, part-time, or club scale to get started. You could start with your neighbors and each could plant a different fruit or nut tree and you could exchange harvests in the fall. Create a micro-neighborhood edible perennial nursery business. The possibilities are endless. Have fun with it.

One idea I am considering is to start by creating a virtual tribal community. We cannot all move in next door to each other overnight, but like-minded people could put their properties into a land trust for the benefit of the community. This would create a patchwork to start with within the existing suburban culture. You could coalesce closer together over time as the opportunities arise.

In regards to finding like-minded people, try hosting a potluck to discuss how things might change toward neighborhood sustainability; see who shows up. Also I cannot emphasis enough about learning about permaculture and even taking a two week intensive permaculture design course (PDC). You will meet your tribe of like-minded people there. See the permaculture resources below.

Have no hierarchy; work from a group consensus. Produce no surplus; make just what you need locally and your population will be stable and will not be in overshoot.

Do this and you give your children a bright future. The one great benefit of a tribal community is cradle-to-grave security. In our Homo modern culture, we “make things to get things.” In a tribal or Leaver culture, you “give support to get support.” It is a completely different story or cultural meme. Memes are to cultures what genes are to people.

Also, by living a better story, we create a new cultural meme that is more likely to be replicated than our current modern cultural story or meme that, “civilization must continue,” and “the world was made for man.” I mean really, how poor a story are these?

A far better story is that our children and we can make a living without destroying most of the other life on earth. The real exciting part is that not only can we survive, but we can thrive! We can thrive amid a riot of cultural diversity among different tribes all making a living differently. We will also be living within the natural carrying capacity of our surroundings; a far greater result than what we have today.

So this is our resolution for the new year: To find “our people” and to make a living together. Maybe being laid off from building pyramids for someone else could be a blessing in disguise as an opportunity to walk away from modern consumer culture.

Postscript: Use this winter as a time to catch up on your reading. Besides reading Culturequake.org, I recommend:

1. Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, by Toby Hemenway
2. Permaculture for Beginners DVD, coming soon from Geoff Lawton at Permaculture Research Institute of Australia
3. Beyond Civilization, by Daniel Quinn
4. Dunbar’s Number:en.wikipedia.org
5. The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore
6. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, by William Catton
7. Culturequake: The Fall of Modern Culture and the Rise of Earth Culture, by Chuck Burr
8. Permaculture Activist magazine, edited by Peter Bane
 Visit Culturequake.org to learn more about the Culturequake book and the online Magazine. Chuck Burr LLC
9. "A Return to Tribes" by Jan Lundberg, Culture Change Letter #114:cuturechange.org

The Last Road Trip

SUBHEAD: Freakishly cheap gas? Nation broke? Just hit the road!

By Mark Morford on 31 December 2008 in SF Gate -
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/12/31/notes123108.DTL

Something is deeply wrong. Something is bizarre and upside-down and perverse and it's not just fish pedicures or Rod Blagojevich's hair or the fact that people still care in the slightest about the sad and toothless chyme that is Britney Spears' White Trash Lite™ career.

It's gas. The price of oil. Or I should say, the stunning, creepy, impossibly low price of Satan's lubricant, Bush's blood, our own personal Jesus. Have you noticed? How could you not?

image above: Those who bet on cheap oil are once again being rewarded... but for how long?

It's one of the more disturbing indicators in recent memory, easily the most ironically depressing sign of doom and downturn you get to see every single day as you careen around the city streets and look at the signs and blink a few times and go, wait wait wait, what year is it again? Are you kidding me? A buck seventy five? For premium? WTF?

It is the frightening rule du jour: the cheaper gas gets right now, the more completely screwed you know we are. At the same time, a cheap tank of gas is one of the few strokes of fiscal relief we have right now, a tiny reprieve from the brutal economic turmoil. What a thing.

But on the whole, it is not good news. Normally, the price of a barrel of crude drops a couple hundred percent in less than a year and we'd be out celebrating, joyous in the knowledge that ExxonMobileShellScrewYou must've just shoved an enormous drill bit the size of Sarah Palin's vacuity deep into Russia or Venezuela or a precious Alaskan wildlife preserve and come up with enough pure, sweet crude to last us until you're very, very dead and your grandkids are using the burned-out hull of your Chevy Tahoe XLT as a bomb shelter against the global warming food riots.

Not this time, baby. No one, not even the most right-wing, SUV-loving Peak Oil denier, is claiming the crash in oil prices is actually a righteous and positive sign overall, despite how some economists say it's the one thing that's kept us from complete fiscal Armageddon, at least for now.

This is what it really means: massive production slowdown, worldwide. It means: Auto industry collapse. It means: demand is so freakishly low that even coddled Saudi sheiks are parking their chrome Mercedes McLaren SLRs at the guest mansion and driving the lowly Cayenne Turbo to their gilded office towers made of diamonds and virgins and cheap immigrant labor. See? Bleak all around.

But like any bizarre, inverse hunk of temporary reality that shouldn't really exist right now, if you close your eyes just right and spin yourself around and pretend the world is made of honeysuckle and pie and dreamy roadside cafes, you can make yourself see the tiny, tasty upside. Shall we?

You have but to ask yourself: What can I do in the midst of one of the most savage economic recessions since the Depression, when Americans can't afford a good latte anymore and retail's in a tailspin and no one's buying anything over ten bucks?

Is the answer not obvious? Did you not read the headline to this column?

That's right: Road trip. A big one. Cross-country, all over the map (maybe wait until Spring for the northern regions), see the sights, burn off any number of tanks of cheap petrol for the last time ever and get the Saturn/Chevy/Chrysler serviced one more time before all dealerships close and your creaky American car is suddenly worth less than a used skateboard. Doesn't it sound about right?

Really, the signs all seem to be aligned. Gas back to pennies per gallon for perhaps the last time in your lifetime, trips abroad still impossibly expensive, America on the verge of her next big leap forward, roads less congested (due to everyone being laid off), lots of free parking at the roughly 10,000 strip mall Targets and Wal-Marts and that still plague the land like a big-box cancer, a thousand small businesses scattered across a hundred small towns that could sure as hell use your patronage. What's not to like?

Imagine the sights: All those bizarre new ghost towns, huge, tract-home megadevelopments with no one around to mow the perfect 13-foot squares of sod; tumbleweeds rolling like lost macho dreams across all those shuttered Hummer dealerships; bigwig bankers out in the street, begging for alms, $4,000 Armani suit in tatters. Or at least, a bit smudged. Honey, get the camera.

Plus, you can wave a final farewell to George Bush's America, the sour megachurches and the gun shops and the liquor barns (usually all in the same mini mall), the giant industrial feedlots and the creationist museums and the prisons overflowing with white collar criminals and hey! Isn't that Scooter Libby, hitchhiking down the highway toward Sodom? Can we take a quick detour up to the Minneapolis airport so I can take one last snapshot of Sen. Larry Craig's favorite "I am not gay" totally gay restroom before it vanishes from the tourist map forevermore? Cool.

More seriously: A shift is nigh. It feels like it just might be the end of that classic, nostalgic America of yore, the last gasp of that sweet, impossible snapshot you might have of the classic road trip, all charming roadside attractions and funky cafes and strange, tiny towns dotting the byways like weird hallucinations. Plus, filling the tank for 25 bucks? That's just ridiculous.

After all, America is changing, and not a moment too soon. Our once noble but greedy land of cheap gas and giant cars and hot concrete ribbons stretching to the horizon is finally be shifting to something slightly more... I'm not quite sure what. Responsible? Mindful? Shrewd? Less oily? We can only hope.

What we know for sure: Principal Obama is about to step in and take away much of our unchecked gluttony, the belt tightening will go all the way to the spine, cheap, plentiful oil is going the way of the rain forest, giant, lumbering cars are more irresponsible than letting your kids watch Fox News and even Wall Street kingpins are being slapped down a few dozen rungs on the ladder of respect and admiration. End of an era? Sort of. More like: End of an identity.

Does it not seems like the road is beckoning, one last time? Hell, right now a good road trip is cheaper than a plane ticket. You need no new clothes. You need no real agenda. Stock up the cooler with a giant bag of trail mix and a case of cheap Sauvignon Blanc from Trader Joe's, map out a loose route on the iPhone, fill your tank, take aim, see the nation one more time before the economy recovers and gas leaps back up to eight bucks a gallon and we all come to our senses and start driving Smart cars to the corner market to pick up our monthly allotment of basic decency and newfound global humility. Fun!

Mars Rover's fifth anniversary

SUBHEAD: It’s the fifth anniversary the Mars mission of “Spirit” and “Opportunity”

by Juan Wilson on 3 January 2009 for Island Breath -

(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2009/01/mars-rovers-fifth-anniversary.html)

Image above: Computer generated image by NASA of Mars Rover exploring

One of the first articles on IslandBreath.org was one noting the landing on Mars of the two Rover mission solar powered robots. There was worry at the time that NASA had lost contact with the rover "Spirit".

That was five years ago, and my wonder, like that of so many others, is that these two representatives of planet Earth are still roving the red planet, just a little dustier for all the time spent exploring. This is the best kind of work we can do in space... explore the near solar system and determine how life may come from, and go to a planet.

Many might feel, reading this website, that I am a Luddite and do not support or respect technology of the space program. Actually, I was an enthusiastic supported of NASA's space program and eye-witnessed the Apollo 11 takeoff that landed the first men on the moon. At that time, 1969, the plan was to land men on Mars by 1990.

But people quickly tired of the bleak, gray, dead, landscape of the Moon and lost the their stomach for space exploration. President Richard Nixon helped convince the American people that what they needed was not another spaceship, but the Shuttle program. The Shuttle was billed as a re-usable ship that would build the space platform to reach Mars.

In my opinion the Shuttle program has been a dangerous and pathetic failure. The manned space program is history. The Untied States could not build another spaceship to reach the moon if it wanted to. The engineers, plants, jigs and dies needed to put together a Saturn Five rocket capable of reaching our nearest neighbor don't exist.

We are left with a sub-orbital rocket plane so dangerous we dare not risk sending any beloved citizen aloft in it.

In 1998 the always foolish Jerry Bruckheimer produced a movie titled "Armageddon" that starred Bruce Willis as a Shuttle jockey on a mission into deep space to save the Earth from an approaching asteroid. This required shooting off into deep space, landing the Shuttle on the approaching asteroid. Drilling several deep holes into its surface, inserting timed nuclear devices, rocketing away from the asteroid before the detonations engulfs the ship and and returning to earth. Wow!

This in reality would be an impossible task for the Shuttle so in the movie it was "modified as required". It is amazing how little idea most Americans about what their technology can and cannot do.

image above: Poster promoting Jerry Bruckheimer movie "Armageddon" featuring NASA Shuttle in deep space.

That is all the more reason to be impressed when something like the Mars Rovers work so well, for so long with so little investment.

As Joyce Gramza noted in an article titled "Tenacious Twins" on www.ScienceCentral.com

"As the twin rovers emerge intact from yet another Martian winter, lead scientist Steve Squyres reflects on the incredible milestone, and the future.

The twin Mars Exploration Rovers “Spirit” and “Opportunity” landed in January 2004 with the mission of exploring Mars for three months. As the years passed we may have begun to take them for granted, but they’ve never ceased to amaze lead scientist Steve Squyres.

“The previous landings on Mars– there had been three: two Vikings and Pathfinder — all involved stationary landers, they couldn’t go anywhere,” Squyres recalled. “And what we wanted to do was to explore in the truest sense of that word.” That meant giving the robots wheels to travel, camera eyes to see and computer brains to record and communicate – as well as some toolsgeologists would want along.

After the landings, the biggest challenge continues to be the threat ofMartian dust coating their solar power supplies.

The Rovers weathered severe dust storms in July, and are now poised to weather yet another Martian winter. The rover operations teams have driven both rovers to northward-facing slopes to maximize the winter sunlight falling on their solar panels.

Both rovers accomplished the mission of finding evidence of water on Mars within their allotted 90 days, then soldiered on to make more surprising discoveries. Recently, Spirit even capitalized on its dragging right wheelby analyzing the soil it turned up, providing new evidence that Mars may have once harbored life.

While relying on smart maneuvering, conservation and a certain amount of good luck, Squyres learned to accept the missions’ successes while anticipating their eventual end.

“There’s always going to be some tantalizing thing just beyond our reach that we didn’t quite get to,” he said. “And that’s, I guess, the nature of exploration and so we just live with it.”

NASA has extended the rovers’ missions five times, most recently in October, 2007.

“We’re going to keep operating these vehicles until they drop dead,” said Squyres. “And that could be days, weeks, years, I have no idea.”

Video above: Interview with Steve Squyres, NASA. Produced by Joyce Gramza — Edited by James Eagan.

see also:
Island Breath: Mars Rover Lands 1/9/04