Lambertville, NJ:
Apologies for the radio silence. Not sure that blogging is something that I can keep up with, but a few new posts in the works… one thing I had to make sure people heard was the story of the century: that we might combat the obesity epidemic and climate change by turning down our thermometer to 64degrees.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102964807
We keep our house at 58 degrees at night and 64 degrees during the day… activiting the good fat 24 x 7.
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Nairobi, Kenya:
In February 2006, when travelling with my colleague Jacqueline in South Africa, we stumbled on the Guardian’s top 100 works of fiction of all time. Being competitive sorts, we immediately ticked off the books that we had read, or could have claimed to have read, and I was shocked. I am a well-educated guy who likes to read, so going in I thought I had a chance… I was skunked! I had only read 18 of these classics of literature while Jacqueline had read 45 or so.
Since then, on my travels around the world, I have enjoyed discovering a treasure trove of ideas, insights, and compelling stories from the list of books (current count, 38). Many of the novels resonate with the work that I do, inform the complexity of the current political and economic crisis, or remind us of our common humanity. And some are just plain old good stories.
None, perhaps, more so than Independent People, the great Icelandic novel, by Haldor Laxness, the great Icelandic author and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1955. I added it to the list largely because of the wonderful 3 weeks I spent in Iceland in 1990 writing for Let’s Go Europe. Picked up for a song last fall in Portland at Powell’s (the world’s greatest bookstore), I hadn’t made much progress on the book until the long flight from London to Nairobi.
Set in early 20th century rural Iceland, it chronicles the life of a proud and stubborn freeholder Bjartur who is desperate to remain independent–of the banks, of family, of God–despite desperately harsh conditions and extreme poverty. At times hilarious, but poignant throughout, I was struck by how the economic boom and bust today is just an echo of the credit crunch that Iceland lived through following the prosperity of the Great War. (And how ironic is Iceland’s own particular financial collapse today).
Towards the end of the book, we revisit some of Bjartur’s contemporaries to see how they have fared over their lives. One, Olafur, who had lost his wife and children early in his life, continued to live in poverty in the same turf hut despite the arrival of a host of social programs and modern conveniences to his fjord. ”Human life isn’t long enough for a peasent to become a man of means” Laxness reflects.
Further, in discussing the government’s attempts to improve the conditions of the poorest of the poor, through subsidies to buy tractors or ploughs, cheap credit, “access to water on tap, linoluem and eletric light”, Laxness concludes:
“The fact is that it is utterly pointless to make anyone a generous offer unless he is a rich man; rich men are the only people who can accept a generous offer. To be poor is simply the peculiar human condition of not being able to take advantage of a generous offer. The essence of being a poor peasant is the inability to avail oneself of the gifts that politicians offer or promise and to be left at the mercy of ideals that only make the rich richer and the poor poorer.”
I am not sure that I fully agree, as there are millions of the poor around the world whose lives have been transformed within their lifetimes, but Laxness has a point. There are no quick fixes, this work can take generations, and it may not be through our generosity alone that they get out of poverty. We should pay heed to these fairly strong words of caution from nearly a century ago about how the best intentions may not, in the end, lead to real change for the poor.
Washington, DC:
What a day in Washington. The energy, optimism and hope in the millions of people was truly unbelievable. We arrived Monday night at 7pm, no traffic on 95, to stay at the home of a college friend. A great night of reminiscing about 17 years ago when we all lived in DC, and a champagne toast to the end of a forgettable era and the cusp of an unforgettable moment in history.
We started out at 8am, two kids in tow, not sure how far we would make it and what we would see when we got there. My friend set out on bikes to the House Rayburn Office Building, where he worked; we walked.
Through Adams Morgan where we lived in the early 1990′s when I worked for the Clinton Adminstration’s national service program AmeriCorps, an era of hope without virture, as we learned in retrospect…
Onto the 42 bus to Farragut Square, where we disembarked among thousands of people streaming to the Mall. Over to the Washington Monument, under the bright gray skies, with hundreds of thousands of people milling about, soaking in history, and reliving the fantastic concert on Sunday. Thousands of people of all races, but the girls were struck by how many African-Americans there were.
We decided to risk it… to Rayburn or bust. Swimming upstream was not easy. Tens of thousands of people were coming over the Virginia bridges on foot, heading to west. We were walking east, and it got harder with each block. We finally made it to within sight of Rayburn, but a flood of people made it unthinkable, especially with a six year old in hand.
Disconsolate in front of HHS we sat, a decent line of sight to the podium, not sure we would be able to hear. Should we stay? We decided to push one more time. Through a line of ticket holders a mile long, twenty abreast, we finally made it across. Into Rayburn was remarkably easy… public entrance, office B373, obstructed view to the capitol, but I grew up with Fenway and the Boston Gahden, where obstructed view was pah for the course. And with CNN in the background, it became like a political sky box.
And what an all-star performance. Aretha singing and Yo-Yo et al playing the theme from Simple Gifts, the most elegant theme of American classical music IMHO. And then Obama’s speech. After fumbling over the oath (another Supreme Court conspiracy? He never said it in order, maybe he is not president?), Obama was forceful and strong, polite but clear. There is a new sheriff in town.
He was thoughtful and dignified, so fundamentally inspiring. In the grand arc of the American narrative, Obama’s swearing in was the completion of a chapter started by Lincoln in 1863, amplified by King in 1963, and the beginning of a new chapter, where the political landscape has fundamentally shifted.
Everyone in Washington today and around the world is ready for that new chapter, eager to turn the page, and read what will be written. For now, the chapter starts with one word, “Wow.”
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Trenton, NJ:
The 7:10am express train from Trenton to New York is delayed. Again. As I begin to triage my Thursday morning appointments, my blackberry starts to vibrate. “Due to Amtrak overhead wire problem, inbound trains subject to 10-15 minute delays”. Thanks for sharing. If I am not mistaken, this is the third time this week that the commute has been delayed. Monday it was some disabled Amtrak equipment and Wednesday it was an Amtrak train that conked out around Metropark.
As gas prices flirted with $4 per gallon last summer, many commuters discovered one of the state’s hidden secrets: the pleasure of a commute on New Jersey Transit. Over 110,000 passengers ride NJ Transit trains each day (each way), up 6% from last year. That’s 50 railcars of new passengers added to the system in just one year. The trains are clean and heated (or air conditioned), the conductors are friendly, and the passengers courteous (most of the time). Seriously, it’s a great way to start and end the day reading, reflecting or doing e-mail. That is, when the trains run on time.
And the trains seem to be running late more and more often. I used to plan on one 15-minute delay per week and one hour-long delay per month. And once a year there is always some act of God (or trespasser on the tracks) that throws everything up for grabs and shuts the entire system down for the morning or evening. In the last six months, however, the frequency of delays seems to have doubled. In just two months of 2008, there were 25 separate incidents sent out by NJ Transit and their handy “transit alert” system announcing delays of 10 minutes to an hour.
What’s most frustrating is that the cause of the delays is frequently not NJ Transit, but Amtrak. Of the 25 incidents, 10 were, by my count, the result of Amtrak, 12 were NJ Transit failures and two were “acts of God” (including one ominous sounding “police activity”). The raw numbers of failures, however, need to be put in the context of NJT and Amtrak’s proportional use of the system. There are roughly 500 NJ Transit trains that run on all or part of the Northeast Corridor from Trenton to New York per day, compared with 104 Amtrak trains. In that two month period, Amtrak caused four times as many delays per train than NJ transit did.
The problem stems from the fact that while NJ Transit operates the trains, Amtrak maintains the tracks, switches and signals that keep the whole system functioning. And from one rider’s perspective, Amtrak seems to be doing a poor job. Amtrak wouldn’t respond to my requests for information about their maintenance plans. After years of budget cuts, Congress has finally passed a budget that restores funding to Amtrak, but even with better levels of funding there is no guarantee that Amtrak will focus on resolving the infrastructure issues in the Northeast Corridor.
By my rough math, using the same approach that the Texas Transportation Institute uses to calculate the cost of traffic congestion in major US cities, the current delays are costing commuters roughly $250 million a year in lost productivity. If NJ Transit were to take over maintaining the tracks that run through the state, I estimate that delays could be reduced 25%, translating into roughly $60 million of gains for commuters.
I don’t know how much it would cost to fix those overhead wires in Elizabeth or the signals near Secaucus, but even in a tight fiscal environment, I can’t think of a bigger bang for the buck for NJ’s taxpayers. I know that Congress just approved a new tunnel under the Hudson River that will be dedicated to NJ Transit trains. This should help relieve congestion in the long term, but in the short term, I’d love to get some of NJ’s finest from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers to spend time riding (and fixing) the rails.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Amtrak trains. Riding to Washington, DC or Boston on Amtrak beats flying hands down, and family trips on the Zephyr from Oregon to California are some of my favorite memories as a child. And to be fair NJ Transit is not perfect either. But it’s a professionally run system, the fourth largest in the nation, and one of NJ’s real assets. Let the professionals in New Jersey take care of the system that most affects the people of NJ, and not allow hundreds of thousands of commuters be held up on a weekly basis by benign neglect from Washington. And let’s add a serious investment in Amtrak to the stimulus package.
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January 2008 was warmer than average in Lambertville, NJ: only 961 heating degree days compared to the 30-year average of 1074. This is a bad thing if, like me, you think that global climate change is already underway and that we may be too late to stop it. This is a good thing, however, if you paid $3.50 a gallon for heating oil and are still trying to find ways to weatherize your new (old) house. Who knows what January 2009 will bring? Thankfully the price of heating oil is coming down ($2.00 anyone?), we repointed the foundation in August, and are in the process of adding weather stripping to every door and window in the house. Lots of work…
I haven’t thought about heating degree days since 1990, when as a senior in college, I helped Harvard University create an inter-dorm energy efficiency competition that pitted one residential house against the other residential houses. We called it the “Ecolympics” until the US Olympic Committee told us it violated their intellectual property for the use of the word “Olympic”, and so we changed the name to the Green Cup (it is still active, go check it out). Some houses used gas, some used oil, for heat and it required some complicated calculations to figure out who would win an energy conservation competition. I recalled that the heating degree days (which is calculated as the difference between the day’s average temperature and 65 degrees Fahrenheit) got us to a place were all of the information could be reduced to a single number, and a monthly “gold, silver, and bronze” winner could be announced.
My experience at age 20 with the Ecolympics–er, Green Cup–launched my career of thinking about social innovation, environmental protection, and communicating complicated ideas in a simple way. This blog will attempt to muse on a range of these issues. My 2009 New Year’s Resolution is to take the time to reflect and engage more on the inter-connection between my avocations (innovations in philanthropy and environmental problem-solving) and my vocation (at Acumen Fund) and to share some of my thinking real time. I’ll look forward to seeing if this experiment bears any fruit. Perhaps I’ll joined the ranks of the many well intentioned, but rarely updated blogs… the tippy, tip of the long-tail in the blogosphere. But who knows?
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