Death is still forever, but extinction may not be. A dead body can’t be reanimated once it begins to rot, but the essence of a species — its genome — survives rot for centuries, even thousands of years. That DNA knows how to make living animals, once we figure out how to invite it to do so. At the leading edges of synthetic biology the invitation is now being crafted. For some extinct species, regenesis is becoming plausible. “De-extinction” is the new word signaling a new capability at the intersection of molecular biology and conservation biology. For several years scientists have had the ability to reconstitute the genomes of many extinct species from their DNA in well preserved museum specimens and some fossils. Now it is gradually becoming possible to take the pure data of a reconstituted genome and convert it into viable DNA, piggy-backing on the living DNA of the closest living relative of each extinct species. The passenger pigeon (extinct 1914) might return via its relative, the band-tailed pigeon. The penguin-like great auk (extinct 1852) may swim again in the north Atlantic thanks to the closely related razorbill. Even woolly mammoths (extinct about 2000 BCE) could use living Asian elephants as DNA proxies and surrogate parents. For molecular biologists the uncertainty at this point is not whether it is possible to edit living genomes — that has already been done for small sets of genes in micro-organisms. The question now is how soon it will become practical to edit whole arrays of vertebrate genes, and to know exactly which genes are the ones to edit. Since 2005 the tools and techniques of synthetic biology have been plummeting in cost and soaring in sophistication at a rate four times faster than Moore’s Law. Complete de-extinction techniques are not here yet, but at labs like George Church’s at Harvard and the Roslin Institute in Scotland, the technology is so close and accelerating so rapidly that major steps toward reversing extinction can be expected in this decade.
Accordingly, conservation biologists are beginning intense discussions about whether they really want extinct species back, and if so, which ones? A few days ago the subject went public at a forum called “TEDxDeExtinction,” featuring 25 scientists at National Geographic’s headquarters in Washington DC. That event grew out of a prior private meeting of 35 molecular biologists and conservationists, held last October, also at National Geographic. (I was a co-organizer of both events.) Next month in Cambridge, England, the New-York-based Wildlife Conservation Society is running a three-day meeting on “Synthetic Biology and Conservation,” with de-extinction as one topic for discussion. Debate at the meetings reflects changes going on deep within the conservation movement. Kent Redford, the organizer of next month’s Cambridge meeting and long a leading theorist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, said something pivotal at the forum in Washington: “My chosen field of conservation started off with a conviction that it is a crisis discipline, and you can only get people’s attention by pointing out what is wrong and the terrible things that we’re doing to the natural world. I think that after 30 years of that, people have stopped listening to us. I think that the lesson should be that hope is the answer, and that hope will get people’s attention. That’s why I’m less concerned about the details of de-extinction than I am about the lesson of hope that it can convey.”
While most conservationists I’ve heard so far indicate they are excited by the prospect of resurrecting extinct species, all of them are also voicing concerns. Will scarce resources for the all-important task of preventing extinctions and protecting wild lands be diverted to spectacular but extremely expensive de-extinction projects? Will the harsh warning “EXTINCTION IS FOREVER” become so diluted that it no longer conveys the urgency of protecting animals on the brink of extinction? Might the new capability even be an excuse for allowing some species to become extinct because “we can always bring them back later”? And suppose a long-absent animal does make it back to the wild. Could it become a problem — an all-too-skilled invasive that disrupts everything? Or might it restore ecological functions that we would welcome back? Some arguments favor reviving extinct “keystone species” — ones that had a disproportionately large effect on their environment relative to their abundance. When the wolf, an apex predator, was returned to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, a rejuvenating “trophic cascade” was set in motion. The wolves chased elk out of the river valleys; aspens grew back along the rivers; that allowed beavers to return and build dams; and beaver ponds became hotbeds of biological diversity. Might the return of extinct great auks, passenger pigeons, or mammoths have similar effects? Penguins abound in the Antarctic, but they never lived in the Arctic. Their ecological role was filled in the northern Atlantic ocean by a similar large, flightless bird, the great auk. (The word “penguin” itself is said to be derived from an old Celtic name for the great auk.) Vulnerable on the few islands where they bred in dense colonies, great auks were hunted to extinction for their meat, fat, and down. They were such prolific fishers along all the northern coasts from Canada to Greenland to Great Britain that their disappearance must have been ecologically consequential. What would be the impact of their return? (One attraction of the great auk as a de-extinction candidate is that if its reintroduction was eventually deemed harmful, the birds would be easy to remove from their island breeding grounds a second time.)
The keystone function of passenger pigeons was as “ecological engineers” — animals that create or modify habitats for other species either structurally, as beavers do, or by moving nutrients around, as salmon do. Passenger pigeons did both. The pioneer conservation biologist Aldo Leopold described them as a “biological storm.” They were once the most abundant bird in the world, ranging America’s eastern deciduous forest from the Mississippi to the Atlantic. The dense flocks opened up square miles of forest to regrowth when the weight of their numbers broke branches, and the deluge of their droppings added nutrients to the soil. Their demise came because commercial hunters slaughtered the birds most efficiently just when deforestation of the eastern woodlands was at its maximum in the late 1800s. Since then the forest has grown back dramatically, ready perhaps for the return of the ancient ecological dance between the trees and the birds.
Woolly mammoths were one of the most effective ecological engineers of all time. They dominated the largest biome in the world — the once species-rich grasslands of the far north. It has been called the “mammoth steppe” because they were the leading mega-herbivore, trampling the moss-suffocated tundra into grass, knocking down and browsing the species-poor boreal forest into grass, and recycling nutrients with their dung. In their absence, which was largely caused by early human hunters, the tundra and forest have taken over. The northlands of America and Eurasia are not only less biodiverse as a result, they may be exacerbating climate change. Whereas grasslands fix carbon, the tundra is thought to be releasing vast quantities of greenhouse gases as it thaws. The Russian geophysicist Sergey Zimov has made a strong argument for restoring the mammoth steppe as a climate mitigation strategy. Conservation biologists, intent in recent years on restoring the health of whole ecosystems, have been focusing ever less on individual species and ever more on ecological function. In studying the prospect of reviving certain extinct species they get to do both. I predict that the outcome of their deliberations will be, “Let’s do it — carefully, incrementally, hopefully.” I predict further that after all manner of fits and starts in the science, and no end of distractions in the public discourse, the dance of the passenger pigeons with their forest and ours will at last resume, and by the end of the century woolly mammoths will again tend their young in northern snows.
Twelve birds lie belly-up in a wooden drawer at the Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Bloated with stuffing, their ruddy brown chests resemble a row of sweet potatoes. Slate-blue heads and thin white tails protrude in perfect alignment, except for one bird that cranes its neck to face its neighbor. A pea-sized bulge of white cotton sits where its eye should be. A slip of paper tied to its foot reads, “Ectopistes migratorius. Manitoba. 1884.” This is the passenger pigeon, once the most abundant bird in North America. When Europeans first landed on the continent, they encountered billions of the birds. By 1914 they were extinct. That may be about to change. Today scientists are meeting in Washington, D.C. to discuss a plan to bring the passenger pigeon back from extinction. The technical challenges are immense, and the ethical questions are slippery. But as genetic technology races ahead, a scenario that’s hard to imagine is becoming harder to dismiss out of hand. About 1,500 passenger pigeons inhabit museum collections. They are all that’s left of a species once perceived as a limitless resource. The birds were shipped in boxcars by the tons, sold as meat for 31 cents per dozen, and plucked for mattress feathers. But in a mere 25 years, the population shrank from billions to thousands as commercial hunters decimated nesting flocks. Martha, the last living bird, took her place under museum glass in 1914. Ben Novak doesn’t believe the story should end there. The 26-year-old genetics student is convinced that new technology can bring the passenger pigeon back to life. “This whole idea that extinction is forever is just nonsense,” he says. Novak spent the last five years working to decipher the bird’s genes, and now he has put his graduate studies on hold to pursue a goal he’d once described in a junior high school fair presentation: de-extinction. Novak is not alone in his mission. An organization called Revive and Restore is enlisting the support of preeminent scientists—and even the National Geographic Society, which is hosting the TEDx meeting on the topic today, to investigate putting the passenger pigeon back in the sky. The group has chosen Novak to spearhead the project.
When the bird from the Berkeley drawer flew over Manitoba in 1884, it didn’t travel alone. Passenger pigeons were named for their passage up and down eastern North America in flocks several hundred million strong. To sustain long, strenuous flights, the birds devoured forests and left destruction in their wake. Ornithologist J.M. Wheaton described one flock as a rolling cylinder filled with leaves and grass. “The noise was deafening and the sight confusing to the mind,” he wrote in 1882. It was easy to tell where the pigeons had roosted: The trees were crippled, their branches cracked off and picked clean of nuts and acorns. For miles, the ground was coated with a layer of feces more than an inch thick. But the same flocking behavior also led to the bird’s demise. Their nesting sites in the northeastern U.S. were densely packed—as many as 100 nests per tree, each containing a single egg. Pigeon hatchlings were a smorgasbord for predators. Each helpless lump of fat, as heavy as its parents but lacking their aerial skill, would wallow in the nest for a day, then flutter to the ground. Even before Europeans arrived, hunters shot nests with arrows or knocked them down with poles. But in the mid 19th century, the railroad and the telegraph turned the pigeon into a national commodity. Professional trackers followed the flocks and descended on nest sites. Their tactics were brutal and effective: Firing into the trees brought down thousands of birds in one afternoon. Setting a match to the combustible birch bark forced terrified chicks to fling themselves from their nests. By the late 1850s, flocks were shrinking. By 1889, the population was in the thousands. Novak remembers learning about the pigeon in school. “I just fell in love with the story of it,” he said. “This absolutely bigger-than-life story of the most abundant bird on the planet going extinct so quickly.” But he wasn’t convinced that animals like the passenger pigeon were gone forever. “I thought that was too absolute.” As a student at Montana State University Novak studied ecology and evolution with the hope of bringing back extinct animals, but his focus soon shifted toward more modest population studies. “You’re kind of steered away from the science fiction when you go to school,” he says. When he started graduate school at the Ancient DNA Center of McMaster University in Ontario, Novak hoped to analyze genes from the bird that had captivated him as a kid. All he needed were samples from a museum specimen.
Passenger pigeon flock being hunted, 1875
The Manitoban pigeon lying in its drawer at Berkeley holds a vast library in its feet. Every cell in its fleshy toe pads contains the 1.5 billion base pairs of DNA that spell out the bird’s identity, from the color of its eggs to the sound of its voice. But this DNA has seen better days. It has been broken apart by enzymes and oxygen, zapped with ultraviolet radiation and contaminated by other organisms. “Whenever you touch it, your DNA gets in the sample,” said evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “If it sits next to other birds, their DNA gets in the sample.” But in the last decade, a set of techniques known as next-generation sequencing has offered a better way to work with less-than-perfect DNA. New machines can analyze hundreds of thousands of short fragments at the same time, speeding up the tedious sequencing process and bringing down its cost. “In the past 10 years, sequencing has gotten approximately 500,000 times more efficient,” said biostatistician Steven Salzberg of Johns Hopkins University. “Nothing in the history of civilization or technology has ever gotten that much more efficient that fast.”
Using next-generation sequencing, scientists identified the passenger pigeon’s closest living relative:Patagioenas fasciata, the ubiquitous band-tailed pigeon of the American west. This was an important step. The short, mangled DNA fragments from the museums’ passenger pigeons don’t overlap enough for a computer to reassemble them, but the modern band-tailed pigeon genome could serve as a scaffold. Mapping passenger pigeon fragments onto the band-tailed sequence would suggest their original order. Eager to crack the pigeon’s genome, Novak sent requests to 30 different museums for a toe fragment, and was rejected by all of them. He resigned himself to a thesis focusing on the mastodon, but he continued his pigeon research on the side. In 2011, Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History offered him a sample. He sent the pigeon DNA to a Toronto lab for sequencing, using $2,500 he borrowed from a friend. Meanwhile, others were taking note of the revolution in biotechnology, including writer and activist Stewart Brand, best known for the Whole Earth Catalog, the late-1960s counter-culture guidebook. More recently Brand founded the Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to “provide a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common.” Brand saw reversing extinction as a conservation method of the future. He and his wife, Ryan Phelan, founder of the consumer genomics company DNA Direct, created a branch of the Long Now Foundation called Revive and Restore. They chose the iconic passenger pigeon as the first experiment. Revive and Restore hosted a meeting at Harvard University in February of 2012. Attendees included experts like Beth Shapiro, biologist David Blockstein with the National Council for Science and the Environment, and renowned Harvard molecular geneticist George Church. Shapiro was skeptical of the project’s goal from the start, but she decided to add her expertise—and her concerns—to the conversation. When Novak heard about the meeting, he contacted Church, Phelan and Brand to see if he could contribute. Recognizing his passion, Brand and Phelan invited Novak to help coordinate the project, and he abandoned his graduate program to begin formulating a step-by-step vision of de-extinction. His official title, according to the organization’s website, was “passenger pigeon reviver.” When Novak describes his revival scenario, his eyes shine with enthusiasm, but his tone is that of a matter-of-fact classroom lecture. With a wry smile, he presents de-extinction as if the futuristic science were already the stuff of textbooks.
museum specimens
Here is Novak’s plan in broad strokes: Sequence the band-tailed and passenger pigeon genomes and find the significant differences between them. Edit the DNA from a band-tailed pigeon germ cell – the type that develops into sperm or eggs – to match that of the passenger pigeon. Implant this cell into the egg of another pigeon, perhaps a rock pigeon, which is easy to work with in the lab. Hope that the germ cell will migrate into the gonads of the developing chick. Allow the chick to grow up, and breed two such birds to create a passenger pigeon. Sequencing the two genomes is within reach. In March 2013, Novak joined Shapiro in her lab at UC Santa Cruz; he hopes to finish both genomes in about a year. But after that, the going could get rough. Because the last common ancestor of the two species flew about 30 million years ago, their genomes will likely differ at millions of locations, Shapiro says. Scientists will have to figure out which variations correspond to meaningful physical differences. “It’s not impossible,” she said. “It’s just a long time’s worth of work.” Even in humans, mapping traits to genes is a murky discipline. According to Steven Salzberg, that’s not even the biggest barrier. Modifying the genome of one species to match another would be an unprecedented feat of engineering. The most promising method comes from Church’s lab, where scientists have developed a technology called Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering that can make fine-scale alterations to bacterial genomes. Novak hopes Church can make similar modifications at crucial points along the band-tailed pigeon chromosome. But Salzberg cautions that animal genomes are much more complicated than bacterial ones. At the same time, he’s not ready to write off this phase of the project just yet: “If I had to bet, I’d say someday we’ll figure it out.”
Getting from a strand of passenger pigeon DNA to a living bird is the last big step, Novak says. He will need specialized germ cells, which scientists know how to extract from chicken embryos, but not pigeons. He is investigating a work-around: extracting stem cells form band-tailed pigeons instead, and stimulating them to become germ cells. This feat has never been achieved in birds. However, Novak says, “Someone could make a major breakthrough in next two years.” Surmounting such technical challenges is only phase one of Revive and Restore’s plan. Novak hopes to set up a sanctuary of lab-generated pigeon chicks in the bird’s original breeding territory. He would then train homing pigeons to pass over the nest site, showing the chicks their ancestral migration route. Novak says passenger pigeons would restore balance to forest ecosystems, clearing brush and fertilizing soil. This strategy doesn’t make sense to Blockstein, who says “quote-unquote” before every mention of de-extinction. He doubts that any small population could survive long enough to reach its original numbers. If it did, he fears the bird would become a pest to farmers, consuming commercial berries and grain. Stanford University bioethicist Hank Greely shares this concern. “You’re re-introducing to the same geographic region,” he said. “But not to the same environment.” No governing body exists to make decisions about re-introducing an extinct species. Once the science is within reach, Novak says he will work with wildlife management authorities to set up a legal framework. Beyond the ecological risks, Revive and Restore has a bigger “why” question to answer. The argument that extinction is forever underlies important protections like the Endangered Species Act, Greely says. Why try to rewrite the passenger pigeon’s iconic cautionary tale?
One possible answer: to do it responsibly before someone does it recklessly. The genomic tools of de-extinction may soon be cheap enough for students and DIY types to try on their own, Brand told an audience at the 2012 Aspen Environmental Forum. “I would like to see some kind of framework of how we think about that, before it goes totally amateur.” If an organized effort like Revive and Restore tackles a high-profile and tightly controlled project, it might bring scientists and the public into an important conversation, he argued. Shapiro, who is no de-extinctionist, sees value in an ambitious goal that unifies scientific disciplines. As Novak strategizes decades into the future, Shapiro still plans to focus on the more down-to-earth population genetics work that has been the focus of her lab. Revive and Restore will pay Novak’s salary while he works with Shapiro, but the project is not supporting her research financially. “I’m thrilled to be along for the ride,” she said. “I will do what I can to bring some enthusiasm and hopefully also some sanity to the problem.” In Novak’s mind, reviving the pigeon is not just about turning back the clock, but also demonstrating the exhilarating pace of science. “It’s actually going to get people more interested in the idea of conservation, because of how cool it is,” Novak said. Greely doesn’t dismiss this argument. He believes “a sense of wonder” is one of the most compelling cases for de-extinction. If Novak can convince the public and potential funding sources of that value, the passenger pigeon might do more than ride a wave of new technology; it might propel science forward. Whether or not we ever see another living passenger pigeon, its genetic code remains alive. The birds in their dark museum drawers may be more powerful now than when they swarmed by the billions.
So maybe genetically recreating the Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) is a bad idea. Long extinct, the only chunks of DNA we are able to piece together to bring it back would have to be mixed into an Asian elephant. And over time, through a long process of trial and error, we could likely create a laboratory hybrid with the right combination of size, long hair, and cold tolerance genes expressed to at least visually recreate a Woolly Mammoth. A geneticist’s rendition of what a Woolly Mammoth should be like that in the end is a Frankenstein animal, no more realistic than the cartoons that artists render for our imaginations. And maybe the other figurehead of de-extinction, the Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius), is the wrong way to go. We have fresh specimens from the early 1900′s, and technology from the poultry industry, but would need thousands if not millions of expensively engineered individuals to ever recover the enormous flocks that once flew over the eastern seaboard.
Respected conservation biologists call de-extinction misguided, or at best a hobbyist branch of conservation biology. They loudly cry that it will take money from existing conservation efforts, create invasive species and worst of all lead to the political and public disregard for extinction. This last concern of disregarding extinction deserves more attention. As a field that is based on conserving species from extinction, de-extinction potentially pulls the foundation out from under the entire conservation biology movement in one fell swoop. If extinction is no longer forever, lobbyist and pro-development politicians should be licking their chops. Despite these objections, the consistent theme of the current National Geographic cover story and conference on de-extinction is one of hope. Hope that will distract us from the more common and depressing story conservationists have been pedaling for over 20 years – that we are ruining the planet by causing a sixth major mass extinction event at an unprecedented pace. Perhaps conservation biologists should look in the mirror and ask if what we are doing is working and if people are still listening. Jurassic Park may be science fiction, but it was correct in one thing – there is public interest that can be generated by inspiring people’s imagination and curiosity.
If this is the first you have heard of de-extinction, know that this is happening. Even if you have deep reservations about genetically recreating species, there are no longer questions regarding whether we can do it. The train is leaving the station and we as conservationists need to be in front of it or on it, not be left behind. As you read this, Australian scientists are watching the cells divide in a future, genetically re-engineered Gastric-brooding Frog (Rheobatrachus silus and/or vitellinus), bringing the extinct species back to life. Thylacines (aka Tasmanian Tiger, Thylacinus cynocephalus) and mammoths will likely follow a few years later. It is pointless to try to block this from happening, but what if we were to direct de-extinction so that it strategically focuses on the species we most carelessly let go. We could direct the de-extinction train towards charismatic and ecologically important species we extirpated through simple overharvest like the giant oceanic island tortoises or Caribbean Monk Seals (Monachus tropicalus). By bringing them back we would almost undoubtedly gain both species and ecosystem function. It may not be the same ecosystem or even the exact same species, but it is a step forward in conserving biodiversity and a new, more popular, ecosystem. Yes I said popular, because in the end, with over seven billion people and counting, conservationists needs to accept that preserving species is a popularity contest. The Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus) only wins against gas development if people like them and advocate for them. For de-extinction, we could use the same branding that makes restoration ecology so attractive to the public (by selling hope that things can be restored) for conserving existing protected areas as well as neglected, novel ecosystems. Look at the success of large herbivore and carnivore restoration in South Africa, or tourism demand to see wolves in Yellowstone. There are certainly concerns to proceeding with de-extinction, but perhaps by embracing and defining the path of de-extinction, conservation biologists will not lose the foundation of their discipline, but gain support.
The “Hard Times”, strictly speaking, referred to the “recession” of 1837-1838, when 90% of the factories and the United States closed following a banking crisis which was credited to Andrew Jackson. At the heart of this period, these large cent sized tokens became necessary substitutes for the government issued coins, which were to a large extent hoarded. This rich and varied series has achieved a substantial following, with some pieces commanding thousands of dollars. The series includes politically oriented tokens, commercial advertising tokens, and anonymous monetary tokens. Perhaps the most enduring result of this series is emergence of the donkey as the symbol of the Democratic Party.”
“The event that defines this era was the veto of the renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States by Andrew Jackson in 1832. The BUS was slated to close in 1836, but Jackson didn’t wait. He withdrew Treasury money from the BUS. (Interestingly, the Treasury had an embarrassment of riches. The US was without debt.) However, when the BUS closed, credit collapsed. ”I take the responsibilty”, says Andrew Jackson, standing in an empty treasure chest. Martin Van Buren’s ship of state has tattered sails on the obverse of a coin; the reverse shows Henry Clay’s sails billowing. “I follow in the steps of my illustrious predecessor”, says the jackass on the obverse while the reverse shows a treasure chest being borne off by a turtle. “Good for shinplasters” refers to worthless paper money used as stuffing in boots. Some, to avoid charges of counterfeiting bear the slogan “Millions for defense NOT ONE CENT for tribute.”
These tokens were about the size of a US Large Cent, just under 3 cm across, hefting over 10 grams. They were an east coast phenomenon, since metals, dies, etc., were found near industry. (Twenty five years later, Civil War tokens were issued from Michigan, Indiana, etc.) The fact that they are found today in middle grades around Fine indicates that they actually circulated in trade. America eventually recovered from the Panic of 1837. The debt rose. Finances moved from Chestnut Street in Philadelphia to Wall Street in New York. Hard times tokens retired to dressers and chests as government cents (soon smaller) circulated again.”
“One of the more interesting aspects of American numismatics is the study of those tokens which served in place of coins. The best known of these were made in the late 1830s and today are called Hard Times Tokens because of the economic problems that affected the United States during that era. Prior to 1837 tokens were little used in the American marketplace but a series of events that began in 1834 was to change everything. In that year, after many years of debate, Congress finally reformed the gold coinage by lowering the weights. During the 1820s most coined gold had left the United States, leaving only silver and bank notes to conduct commercial affairs.
The act of June 1834 was meant to bring United States gold coins into line with the international ratio between gold and silver. The law of 1792 had set the ratio at 15 to 1 (i.e. one ounce of gold was worth 15 ounces of silver) but by the 1820s the world markets used ratios closer to 16 to 1. The result of the 1834 law was that gold flowed heavily into the United States because the ratio had been set a little too high, at 16 to 1. During 1835 and 1836 Mint and Treasury officials became concerned that the influx of gold was having the unwanted effect of driving out the silver coinage of the United States; foreign silver still arrived in considerable quantities, however. To solve this latest problem, Mint Director Robert M. Patterson prepared a comprehensive coinage bill that included a provision that slightly lowered the ratio, to about 15.9 to 1. The revised law was passed in January 1837 and proved beneficial. U.S. silver stopped leaving the country while gold continued to arrive.
During early 1837 the United States was perhaps the best supplied with gold and silver coins than had ever been the case in its history up to that time. But all of this would soon end, due to a series of blunders made by the states, as well as the federal government. The early 1830s witnessed a great expansion of business and with this came a call for roads and canals so that goods could be gotten to market and raw materials brought from the interior to the coastal manufacturing plants. All of this initiated massive borrowing by the states for these internal improvements. This spending created inflation and increased issues of paper money. The expansion of the roads and canals played out against another backdrop, the attack by President Andrew Jackson on the Bank of the United States. This bank, which had been chartered in 1816 for 20 years, served the nation well in forcing private banks to honor their paper currency with specie, usually silver but after 1834 in gold if desired.
The strong position of the Bank of the United States, however, inevitably led to political involvement and the bank leadership was openly against the Jackson Administration. This President felt the same about the bank and was determined to destroy it. The early 1830s saw a bitter struggle between the bank and Jackson. The bank lost. One of the strategies used by the President to undermine the bank was the removal of federal deposits (gold and silver coin). Such funds were placed in private banks friendly to the administration, called “pet banks” by Jackson’s enemies. These banks were sometimes poorly managed and the influx of hard money led them to issue loans to politically connected individuals without the proper collateral.
Hard Times Token, 1834
The federal government had also stepped in to make matters worse, much worse. Jackson had long felt that paper money, in particular that was issued by private banks, was holding back the economic expansion of the United States; the President believed that bank notes of less than $20 in value ought not to be issued. The problem with this was that was a large number of notes of less than $5 value in daily use, an unintended result of the monies going to pet banks. The disaster waiting to happen was politely termed the Specie Circular and had been issued by Treasury Secretary Levi Woodbury on July 11, 1836. It required that land purchases on the frontier be made strictly in gold or silver coin. Some exceptions were made for the use of paper money on a temporary basis but the intent was clearly to force paper money out of daily use. At the same time, the massive influx of gold into the United States from 1834 through 1836 caused problems in Europe, especially England. The Bank of England responded to the loss of gold by raising the discount rate to 5 percent in September 1836. This caused a reverse flow of gold to Great Britain although on a limited basis at first. By the spring of 1837 gold was leaving for England at a growing rate. The cumulative effect of the Specie Circular, funds to pet banks, and the English discount rate came crashing down in May 1837. On May 10 the New York banks suspended specie payments for their notes, triggering a run on banks throughout the United States. The financial upheaval forced many businesses to fail and a large number of workmen were laid off. The Panic of 1837, as it came to be known, was a severe recession but not a depression. Gold and silver were now rarely used in commerce, their place being taken by bank notes as well as scrip for values as low as a few cents. The government had meant well but failed to foresee what would happen by acting too quickly.
As in all such situations a number of people saw the opportunity not only to make money, but score political points against their enemies at the same time. It is hard to say which aim was the most important. The token coinage which resulted succeeded very well in both aims, much to the irritation of the supporters of Andrew Jackson and his hand-picked successor, Martin Van Buren. Van Buren had taken the oath of office as President on March 4, 1837, just in time to reap the whirlwind caused by the earlier mistakes. On the eve of the token explosion in 1837 the United States Mint had no idea of what would happen. But it did have a vested interest in seeing to it that the tokens were neither issued nor used in the marketplace. The reason was purely economic in that the Mint derived a considerable profit from issuing copper coins to the public. There was, however, a difficult problem that the Mint had in dealing with the token outbreak. Copper coins were not legal tender and not convertible into gold or silver except at the so-called exchanges, where copper cents could be converted to silver for a fee of several percent. Merchants had to pay their bills in specie (until the banks suspended specie payments) so the accumulation of United States copper coins was not exactly a blessing. (Legal tender status was not given to minor coins until 1864.) Just when the first Hard Times Tokens began to be seen in the marketplace is uncertain, but distribution of these pieces was well under way by the summer of 1837, perhaps as early as mid July. They apparently first appeared in New York City but this is also not quite certain and is based on the fact that more varieties of tokens are known for this area.
Whatever the exact sequence of events, they were unknown to Mint Director Robert M. Patterson until the fall of 1837. He noticed, in a local newspaper, an advertisement offering tokens for sale at a price well under the official value of a cent. Considering that the Mint needed the profit on copper coinage to offset other expenses, he was less than pleased at what he saw. Dr. Patterson sent a Mint employee to purchase a few of the tokens that had been advertised and then visited the United States district attorney, whose name was Reed. Patterson told Mr. Reed that the tokens in question were “spurious” and that the 1825 anti-counterfeiting statute was applicable in this case. Patterson testified before a federal grand jury and that body agreed with him; federal officials now ordered the local merchant to stop selling tokens on pain of prosecution. At first the Mint director believed that the token episode was an isolated one. However, he soon learned that he had witnessed but a small part of the business and that it was widespread throughout New England and New York State. Patterson then began writing letters to friends asking them to investigate the matter and report back to him. By late November Patterson had learned how much of a nuisance the tokens had become, at least in his mind. On Dec. 2, 1837, he wrote Treasury Secretary Woodbury on what he viewed as a worsening situation as the Mint’s profits on copper coinage were being eroded. Patterson began his letter by recounting the incident with the Philadelphia merchant and the grand jury. Patterson noted that similar problems were encountered at Baltimore but that the major problem was in New York City where the tokens were not only manufactured but used widely in ordinary business transactions. One friend of the director’s in New York had picked up 10 different kinds of tokens and sent them to the Mint for examination. The Mint director found that at least three of the tokens had been made at the same private mint because the design was similar. In particular Patterson mentioned the following tokens (or “store cards” as we might term them now): New York Joint Stock Exchange Company, Robinson, Jones & Company, and Ezra Sweet. He went on to note that a newspaper, the New York Observer, was reporting numerous kinds of such pieces in daily use throughout the city. According to the newspaper account, the tokens were sold for about 62 cents per hundred pieces, a nice profit when passed on for a cent.
“In its issue of Nov. 23, 1837, the Emancipator ran an advertisement offering the Female Slave tokens at $1 per hundred. Made of good copper and with a device on reverse similar to legal U.S. cents, they sold well. The ad also said that it was proposed to issue Kneeling Male Slave tokens as well, and this accounts for the few pattern pieces of HT 82, which were never produced for circulation.” http://www.hardtimestokens.com/ht81details.html
According to Patterson, an anti-slavery newspaper, the Emancipator, reported that pieces similar to a cent of a “new emission” were being sold at the offices of the Anti-Slavery League on Nassau Street. The paper described the devices as being anti-slavery in nature. There is one anti-slavery token listed by Lyman Low (No. 54), in his study of Hard Times Tokens, which seems to fit the given conditions except that it is dated 1838. Perhaps the issuers felt that it would be coming out so late in 1837 that it ought to be given the next year’s date. The listing made by Dr. Patterson show another interesting aspect of the Hard Times Tokens in general. The date, if prior to 1837, may well mean nothing more than some important year connected with the business that issued them. The Robinson, Jones, & Company piece, for example, uses an 1833 date to show that it received a medal that year for a button display. Patterson also noted that tokens were well used in Boston though he did not give any names. The Boston tokens, as with most of the others, were lightweight compared to the genuine cent, averaging perhaps 70 percent of the weight. He thought that manufacturing costs were about 50 cents, or a bit more, for a hundred pieces which gave a decent profit when they were later sold at about 62 cents per hundred. The dies were crude and cheaply made, which helped hold costs down. Not only did the merchants get “cents” at a strong discount but most of these tokens had the added advantage of advertising their businesses. As far as they were concerned it was a win-win situation. Dr. Patterson, however, had a slightly different opinion.
In the meantime Treasury Secretary Woodbury had taken Patterson’s letter under consideration. On Dec. 4 he replied, noting that he had just written the federal attorneys at New York and Baltimore; he did not mention Boston but this was probably done as well. The attorneys were instructed to take such steps as to eradicate the problem. December 6 saw Patterson writing Woodbury again, this time to report that he had seen another 11 tokens, primarily from New York. His list included token issuers Henry Anderson, H. Crossman, Maycock & Company, Merchants Exchange, and Abraham Riker. These later tokens were somewhat heavier, though still light by as much as 32 grains below the legal standard of 168 grains. In an 1849 letter discussing these tokens Dr. Patterson mentioned that the legal attacks by federal attorneys had put a stop to the business. It is not clear from the letter, however, if the political tokens were interdicted by the same methods since no names appeared on these as issuers. It is believed that very few merchant tokens were struck after the spring of 1838. At the same time as the merchant pieces were issued, political opportunists saw the chance to not only attack Presidents Jackson and Van Buren but make a tidy profit in the process. Quite a few varieties of the political tokens were issued and are collected today by specialists.
It is of interest to note that the tokens of 1837-1838 are known as Hard Times Tokens, but this is a little less than accurate. The recession that started in May 1837 was essentially over within a year; New York banks resumed specie payments in May 1838. In June 1839, however, matters suddenly got worse and this time it was a full-blown depression with large numbers thrown out of work. The underlying cause of this second round of economic bad news was primarily the English discount rate, as too much gold had again left the island kingdom. This time the problem lasted until 1842, when important discoveries of gold in Russian Siberia provided massive quantities of the yellow metal for world markets. Hard Times Tokens are but a footnote in the numismatic history of the United States yet played a key role in the marketplace for a few months. They deserve to be better known.”
“Hard Times tokens represent an unusual period in the financial history of the United States. President Jackson, in his campaign of 1832, was vehemently opposed to the Second Bank of the United States. This central bank in Philadelphia was said by opponents to control the money supply in favor of the wealthy merchants. Populist Jackson vowed to abolish it. The bank issued its own currency, which quickly became the most stable paper money in the land. It exercised considerable control over credit and interest rates throughout the country. When Jackson was reelected, he tried to abolish the bank. Finally, in 1837 he succeeded in accomplishing his goal. In the meanwhile, the president of the bank, Nicholas Biddle, tightened the money supply, which then lead to a financial panic. Other banks issued paper money with little or no gold or silver backing and quickly folded. By 1837 over 100 banks had gone under. The small change necessary for commerce began to disappear. Tokens were issued to solve the needs of the public. They were frequently political or satirical in nature. The tokens of the period 1832-1844, when Van Buren became president, are classified as the Hard Time issues.”
Mint Drop Token, 1837
“”Bentonian Currency” was hard money as opposed to paper. The crash of 1837 and the Hard Times which followed were by no means solely due as the Wing leaders would have it believed–to the overthrow of their policy and the “mint drops” or hard money of Jackson and Van Buren: they were only the culmination of evils which had long been threatening disaster. The Panic of 1837 resulted in hoarding of coins in circulation. The withdrawal of public funds from the banks led to a contraction of the currency and great changes in apparent values, which were the apparent causes of “Hard Times.” To fill the need for small change in circulation, a wide variety of copper tokens appeared in 1837.”
“Because Van Buren was a supporter of Jackson — going so far as to state his intent to follow in Jackson’s footprints during his inaguration — Van Buren was a solid target for people’s resentment due to the failing economy. The Hard Times tokens were minted in cheap copper and bronze blends by private businesses and infividuals, and enthusiastically decorated with political satire of all kinds. Van Buren’s face didn’t adorn many (if any) of these tokens, although caricatures of Jackson were quite common. Mostly, Van Buren was mentioned as Bad Things To Come, represented by things such as the ship “Experiment” seen to the left, breaking up in stormy seas, representing the attempt to do without banks, despite the lack of previous evidence that it works. Van Buren’s inauguration statement, “I follow in the footsteps of my illustrious predecessor” stuck with him — but were combined with a picture of a jackass to show just what his opponents thought of him. That donkey, originally used as a visual ersatz Andrew Jackson, eventually became the way the public saw the Democrat party, and was revised to be a donkey for today’s Democrat logo. These Hard Times Tokens were some of the first lasting representations of the Democrats as a donkey.
These tokens weren’t exactly currency, although some businesses accepted them in lieu of actual monies, seeing that due to the bank’s actions and Jackson’s opposition to federal currency these Hard Times tokens had just about as much monetary value as the so-called ‘real thing’. Mostly, they were passed around like political buttons today, demonstrating political affiliation and making a statement against the government at the time.”
“I take the responsibility,” says Andrew Jackson, standing in an empty treasure chest. Martin Van Buren’s ship of state has tattered sails on the obverse of a coin; the reverse shows Henry Clay’s sails billowing. “I follow in the steps of my illustrious predecessor,” says the jackass on the obverse while the reverse shows a treasure chest being borne off by a turtle. “Good for shinplasters” refers to worthless paper money used as stuffing in boots. Many, to avoid charges of counterfeiting, bear the slogan “Millions for defense NOT ONE CENT for tribute.” In 1834, an economic downturn on the English stock market brought “hard times” to both Canada and the United States. However, the event that defines the start of this era in the USA was a clash between the Bank of the United States and President Andrew Jackson in 1832.
The BUS was a semi-private institution, the invention of Alexander Hamilton, and precursor to the Federal Reserve. It was slated for renewal in 1836, but Jackson didn’t wait. He withdrew US Treasury money from the BUS and deposited it in local banks. Interestingly, the Treasury had an embarrassment of riches, about $17 million in surplus gold and silver. Also, the US government was without debt. However, when the BUS closed, credit collapsed. Political activists and merchants created these 1-cent tokens to take up the slack. They were an East Coast phenomenon, since metals, dies, etc., required industry. (Twenty five years later, Civil War tokens were issued from Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin in the West.) The fact that most types of Hard Times Token can be found today in grades from Fine down to Good indicates that they actually circulated in trade.
The standard reference manual for this series is Hard Times Tokens 1832-1834 by Russell Rulau. His work is based on a book from the 1899 by Lyman H. Low. Rulau includes the Low numbers in his catalog. He estimates retail price. He has added many new items over the years with each new addition. The book also approximates the rarity, R1 (common) to R8 (perhaps unique). Some of these coins are objectively rare and highly valued outside the world of numismatics. “Am I not a Woman” is the motto on an Abolitionist token. “Am I not a Man” is its companion piece. Professional Afro-Americans and full- time liberals have bid these up to about $80 in better grade and perhaps over $10,000 in uncirculated. These two are difficult to find in low grade because they have been popular with collectors for over 150 years.
You can find common Hard Times Tokens in almost any dealer’s inventory. You will find them priced all over the range depending on the dealer’s willingness to own them. You will have to use basic numismatic principles to grade them. Although they rate a general entry in The Red Book, not all services will slab them. Commons in low grade are no more than a $5 item, or about $15 below uncirculated. America eventually recovered from the Panic of 1837. The Federal Debt rose. Finances moved from Chestnut Street in Philadelphia to Wall Street in New York. Hard Times Tokens retired to dressers and chests as government cents (soon smaller) circulated again. If you really love American History and really treasure the values that define our nation, you will find a wealth of pride in these artifacts.
“Pomme de Terre, Pomme en l’Air.” Coins by Matthew Hincman
I ran into artist Matthew Hincman last week, who has decided that things have gotten bad enough that it’s time to create your own money. Hincman designed the coin above and had 1,200 minted in copper, which he plans to leave on the ground at random locations for people to pick up and puzzle over. He says he modeled the coins after the Hard Times Tokens that circulated in the 1800′s, many of them satirical. Hincman has no plans to control the money supply at large. In fact, he’s trying to stay out of trouble. For one recent project, he installed an unusual version of the standard park bench — it was impounded by the authorities, though they liked it so much, it’s now back in place. Hincman figures there’s no law against leaving coins around. He says sometimes drops to one knee and pretends to be tying his shoe, then casually deposits one on the sidewalk.
Open Call for Entries: “The ‘producers’ of the International Drink Ticket herein announce a design contest for proposals to replace the current ‘Spanglish’ face of the Ticket, not pictured. The winning designer will get a small share (percentage) of any future known-universe profit. The winning design will be used to create the mold that is used to emboss one side of the IDT (the ‘Chinglish’ side will remain the same). The ‘Spanglish’ side may include a picture, as on a coin, such as Obama or a bird etc, but at minimum must include (English or Spanish) impressions that read “Int’l Drink Ticket” + “Brooklyn Mint” + the current year: “2009″.”
“The International Drink Ticket, printed in editions, is a currency alternative sincerely offered to replace the collapsed dollar (should the US dollar irrevocably fail). All over the world, even if one abstains, everyone knows someone who drinks: one International Drink Ticket is worth one drink, that is to say, one 4-count pour (using a pour spigot) of bottom shelf liquor (non-well), or a bottled beer. Everything else is negotiable. The IDT also easily gets used as barter coin. Common bartender uses are 2 cans of beer for one IDT, or sometimes two 2-count shots. One IDT currently is worth around USD$5 in NYC but this value fluctuates regionally. Design entries should be big enough to 3-D print, and fully detailed.” [Please post proposal editions below as comments.]
“A collection of 5 books Eric has deemed essential to the understanding of working with the etheric formative forces, the type of electricity that Tesla discovered being one of these lost forces. These books are volumes of lost technology. One is over 1500 pages long and combined these books are almost 400 years old. Eric told me ‘Don’t bother talking to me about this stuff until you have read these’”
“Here are some amazing experiments proving Tesla’s work we did at Borderland labs in the late 1980′s.
* The One-Wire Electrical Transmission System
* The Wireless Power Transmission System
* Transmission of Direct Current through Space
* A novel form of electric light powered by a single wire which attracts material objects but repels a human hand!
Also presented is a longitudinal ground broadcast from our lab to a nearby beach, using the Pacific Ocean as an antenna. These experiments can be reproduced by any competent researcher, there are no secrets here!”
As a fifteen year old he got his first job with Americas biggest Radio corporation RCA, as a 16 year old he graduated high-school as a full fledged engineer and began working for Bell Labs and then went on to conquer every technical challenge the US Navy threw at him. Eric Dollard is without a doubt the Greatest Hacker Alive, much as Tesla was the greatest Hacker who ever lived. Eric Dollard has dedicated his life to discovering scientific truth to better humanity. He succeeded beyond all expectations and even surpassed Nikola Tesla. His reward has been tyranny and poverty. The work of Eric Dollard was the very pinnacle of any available material. As I got closer to his work I began to wonder what he was up to. I was shocked and horrified to learn that he was now homeless. His last lab having been destroyed and all his work stolen. There are active agents of suppression working against people like Eric Dollard and Tesla before him. These agents are shadowy and have great power. They can shatter the best laid plans of the individual. My hope is that we the people working together can triumph over them. Those that don’t believe that such powers exist should look for another worthy campaign to aid. Those looking at this as an investment, look elsewhere as this is not a mere charity campaign but a bold declaration of defiance to the powers that be.
All the funds will go to Eric Dollard. If we do not meet the goal all the funds also go to Eric Dollard. The goal is just my humble estimation of how much the legal proceedings will be for a few months and hopefully to get Eric off the street. The more we get the closer we can get Eric back his lab or setup a new lab. One of the most respected venture capitlists in this field said that “Eric has done more on foodstamps than all my other investments” This is what caught my eye and it is very true. Eric can make do with very little but I estimate it will take around $200,000 to set him up with a functioning bare bones lab again.
Eric Dollard is a scientist of the type found in America around the turn of the century. He is an electrical engineer of the old school relying on experience with equipment rather than acceptance of mathematical considerations. He has studied the works of Nikola Tesla and Charles Proteus Steinmetz extensively and has applied their principles to his research. He has advanced the mathematical works of the early electrical pioneers to the stage of pragmatic industrial engineering. This was only possible by bypassing all modern relativistic theories and concepts of electrons flowing through wires, and instead maintaining the ether theories from which modern electrical equipment originally emerged. Eric’s work is a direct continuation of the works of Tesla, Steinmetz, Oliver Heaviside, Philo Farnsworth II, and other energy pioneers whose work can be reproduced and used.
Eric has written over 30 notebooks of material covering his years of research. Five of these notebooks have been published by Borderland Sciences Research Foundation: Condensed Intro To Tesla Transformers; Dielectric & Magnetic Discharges In Electrical Windings; Symbolic Representation of Alternating Electric Waves; Symbolic Representation of the Generalized Electric Wave (In Time); and The Theory of Wireless Power. These books are all practical and engineering oriented. The Alternating Electric Waves paper, presenting Eric’s Four Quadrant Theory of Electricity, was written after his discovery of how to generate excess magnetizing power in an industrial situation (using synchronous motors in a huge shipyard) and make the KVAR (Kilo Volt Amperes Reactive) meter turn backwards. Eric discovered that these industrial meters are pinned so that they will not turn backwards, but they can be stopped, creating readily realizable savings for the industrialist.
Further development of Eric’s ideas has been presented at the U.S.P.A. Conference in 1987 in his talk, Representations of Electric Induction, which also included a demonstration of the Tesla One-Wire Transmission of Electricity. The One-Wire Electric Transmission has direct commercial applications in the realm of real full spectrum incandescent lighting, which could be used in operating rooms, highway lighting, schoolrooms, offices, etc. In Eric’s talk at the 1988 International Tesla Symposium he presented the engineering mathematics to continue work on Tesla’s oscillating coils while shedding the misconceptions attached by modern physics which have brought real research into Tesla to a dead halt. The engineering mathematics developed by Eric will allow researchers to manufacture coils with practical uses rather than just making sparks.
The broadcasting of electricity, distortion free worldwide radio transmission, and single element full-spectrum incandescent lamps are just a few of the spinoffs taken from the realm of abstraction and brought to the reality of the lab bench by Eric’s work, but perhaps the most commercial of all is what Eric terms, “The Ultimate Sound System”. Eric has developed the principle and the first prototypes of distortion free audio amplification. This discovery, if properly applied, has the potential to revolutionize the entire audio industry, as well as the reality of related spinoffs into the communications and power transmission industries. In Borderland’s videotape, Transverse & Longitudinal Electric Waves, Eric presents practical uses of Tesla’s theories for power transmission, and in the process opens up, through the use of clear, reproducible experiments, aspects of electricity which have only been partially theorized in the past. Extensions of his industrial power work are presented with practical applications for increased power efficiency in industrial situations.
In brief, Eric Dollard has single-handedly carried the works of the early electrical pioneers to a stage where they can be applied to everyday uses. There is no false promise of “free energy” sometime in the future, just a better technology we can use NOW!
Eric made an excellent video about the truth of the Tesla Marconi radio station and why it was shut down. When this video was made Eric still did not know the full extent of the suppression. The books of Gerry Vassilatos, Secrets of Cold war Technology and the Vril Compendium, showed him just how far RCA and the shadowy organizations funded by the central banking cartel went to suppress Tesla’s longitudinal wave technology.
Nikola Tesla single handedly gave us the technology that has created our entire power grid and communications systems. As the pinnacle of the evolution of the Victorian scientists Tesla aspired to create a system that would light up the entire world without wires. In the end a combination of his own wreck less decisions and the agenda of the moneyed elite brought upon his downfall and banishment. Undaunted by this, Eric’s set out to recreate all of Tesla’s technology and to design a system of self powering, faster than light and lossless communication. Eric was successful in rediscovering Tesla’s core work, yet he is now living out in the desert. His laboratory and all of his possessions taken were from him. Eric’s story is the story of all those who fight for truth in defiance of power. How his story ends is up to us.
As a fifteen year old Eric was granted free access to RCA’s great Bolinas Radio Facility. RCA, America’s biggest Radio station at the time was happy to grand the young prodigy complete access to all of their facilities for his research into high frequency alternating current. Eric wasn’t on the payroll for legal reasons but those in the know were aware of how how great a competitive advantage Eric Dollard could give them. Bell Telephone quickly snatched him up right out of High School and also gave him free reign to persue his experiments, while not officially on the payroll. Eric was still only sixteen. Eric left high school with three certifications as a full fledged engineer at the age of sixteen. Bell Labs called him their “Golden boy” and “Angel of Electricity”.
To pursue true science is to pursue truth and all truth seekers are to tested. Eric learned this a hard way at an early age when his parents wrecked his garage laboratory and kicked him out of the house. This was to be the first time his laboratory and work would be deliberately destroyed. In desperation he enlisted in the US Navy. They gladly accepted the young recruit and after aptitude testing referred to him as “God’s gift to the Navy”. He solved their “impossible problems” with ease and later returned to RCA to save their network from the rapidly advancing threat of satellite communications.
Eric was happy to be back at the massive Bolinas station as he was beginning to see just how special it was among radio facilities. The great Bolinas Radio station, also called KPH was one of the oldest in the world and it held a secret that had been covered up for decades. He began to see that much was being hidden about how radio really worked. With his free time he began peering into the forbidden history of radio. Then one day he read a copy of John O’Neill’s book Prodigal Genius. The suppressed history of Nikola Tesla was laid before him. Eric began to see how the radio system as it was now was merely a shadow of what it was intended to be and once was.
Eric began reading all of Tesla’s patents and lectures. What he discovered was that after reinventing alternating current in the 1890′s Tesla then discovered an entirely new kind of electricity that was not electro magnetic in origin, hence completely different from the system we use today. This was confirmed by reading the court transcripts from the patent trial between Tesla and Marconi, where Tesla stated many times that his technology was not electro magnetic, a statement that at the time fell on deaf ears. Eric, however, heard him loud and clear. If Tesla’s discovery did not use electro magnetic waves then what kind of waves where they and how was it different? Eric did not turn to the false path of theorizing with nebulous mathematics as our modern day physics would but to experimentation, as Tesla himself always did. From his lab in California and working the salvage business Eric managed to recreate all of Tesla’s key experiments. What he discovered would come as a surprise to even the most learned Tesla fan.
Most scientists associate Tesla’s work with Frankenstein movies the same way children do. Even the most avid Tesla fans build Telsa Coils for Halloween entertainment and completely miss the point of his invention. * Tesla’s system of wireless transmission of power and communications was not through the sky, but through the earth, as in the actual ground. While it did naturally reach out into the atmosphere, the earth itself was the main conductor. * Tesla discovered a completely new kind of electrical energy, one that was faster than the speed of light and did not lose strength as it was transmitted. hence it was NOT electro magnetic. It has come to be called scalar waves by some but the proper term is longitudinal waves. Eric calls this energy in electrical form “dielectricity” * This new energy could send power through the earth and the earth amplified this energy as it traveled, meaning that one transmitting station could send one million volts through the ground and 5 receiving stations whether around the neighborhood or around the world could each receive one million volts, for a total of five million volts of power! * This energy could be used to send communications as well as power, and this was the case from 1900 to the 1919′s until RCA refitted the landmark Bolinas plant and suppressed the Tesla longitudinal technology.
Tesla’s secret project was about far more than simply transmitting electricity without wires. It was about all communications at faster than light speeds and giving energy away to all humanity for nothing. Tesla figured it all out in theory and tested it at Colorado Springs but did not complete his system at Wardenclyffee. Eric Dollard has figured out how to implement the core of these ideas into a viable system. The first major radio installation in the USA was at Bolinas California. The same station where Eric got his start as a fifteen year old engineer working for RCA. Bolinas was first built by Italian inventor Marconi in California in 1913. Marconi used 17 of Tesla’s patents to build this system and it worked. This station used massive plates in the ground, one buried in the ocean near the fault lines, to transmit radio waves that ALSO carried power, not enough to power homes but certainly enough to power radios. This is why the old crystal radio sets of the 20′s and 30′s had bright clear sound with NO BATTERY or WIRE to the WALL OUTLET! You can still make radio wave powered radios using bottles and wires that work with no batteries our wall outlet. The science is very real.
This old crystal radio set from the 20s used to work LOUD and clear using the radio signals sent in that era, no wall outlet. Those radio stations have long since been taken down…
KPH
The Bolinas Tesla/Marconi radio station is also known as KPH by those old timers who still know of it’s significance. The secret this facility holds is the key to unlocking faster than light radio, wireless power transmission and free energy synthesis. Eric has dedicated 2/3rds of his life trying to save this secret and resurrect it for the benefit of mankind. Thus we can now see that the first radio stations in the USA were leading back to Tesla’s free power transmission system that sent radio waves using Tesla’s method. Marconi did not go all the way and build it as Tesla envisioned which was to broadcast power to a network of such stations worldwide. The Tesla Marconi station sent out radio waves using Tesla’s longitudinal wave technology. These waves provided enough power to amplify the signals it sent without any external electricity, even worse the existence of such technology left the door wide open for others to naturally pursue the transmission of energy via radio. This was far too threatening for the energy industry and they had Marconi’s station shut down and replaced with an inferior system of electro magnetic waves, which is what we use today.
The Alexanderson Antennas MTA’s hold the secret to electrostatic non wave length radio technology. Faster than light, lossless and long suppressed. Ernest Alexanderson was the protege of Charles Steinmetz. His generators based on Tesla tech are extremely advanced even today.
This plant was further augmented with the technology of another brilliant radio engineer by the name of Alexandersson. It became such a prized jewel into crown of the military industrial complex that it’s secret had to be hidden away. The true value of the Bolinas Radio station can now be seen.Not only did RCA bury it;s significance but other shadowy NGO’s such as Commonwael of Bolinas, California made it there prime directive to literally bury the facility under a pile of dirt and garbage. Commonwael poses as a harmless NGO but this belies it’s true purpose as a front of the central banking cartel to suppress forbidden technologies.
the TESLA MYSTIQUE
Tesla is now wrapped within the cloak of a deep mystique as a flawless genius who invented AC current, radio, electricity and pretty much everything else. Tesla was indeed a magnificent genius but he was far from perfect. People blame J.P. Morgan for crushing his dream at Wardenclyffe but they fail to do their research, read the book Empire of Lights, and see that Tesla had received monies from Morgan to develop telegraphic radio and from Astor for the florescent light bulk yet Tesla in his own idealistic way spent the money instead to further his own theoretical research, which lead not to the promised deliverables but to a lack of confidence amongst him and his investors instead. The mystique buries Tesla under a mountain of sugar and keeps his admirers from seeing the true and revolutionary nature of his work.
Eric Dollard claims that the vast majority of Tesla societies are dis-information fronts funded and controlled by the very same interests that suppressed Tesla’s work. Eric gave several long and deep presentations on the truth of Tesla’s work at the San Francisco Tesla Society. To this day these video presentations and even a book that Eric had written are being withheld from the Public by the San Francisco Tesla Society, a now revealed to be a front for the Lawrence Livermore National Labs. Those who wish to know the truth about radio and Tesla’s real work should connect Eric Dollard with an attorney willing to sue the San Francisco Tesla Society in court to retrieve the videos and book.
POLITICS of AETHER
After Eric confirmed and double checked all these findings he was left to accept a very painful political truth. All of Tesla’s work with this new type of electricity and wave form had been actively suppressed. Despite this new type of energy wave being far more cost efficient and effective it was banned from all commercial use and banished from textbooks as well. The scientific community has disavowed any knowledge of it, why? This original form of transmission, called dielectric wave forms, if allowed to proliferate through the industry would have naturally lead to the transmission and synthesis of energy at no cost. The very intellectual admission of the existence of this type of energy was the admission that there was energy all around us. Victorian scientists up until the twentieth century called this energy field that permeated the entire universe, the aether. Tesla believed that his system of longitudinal electricity worked because of the aether. The aether was a dangerous concept to the energy barons such as Rockefeller, Morgan and the central bankers that funded them such as the Rothschilds. It was not enough to destroy Nikola Tesla, and to tear down any trace of such technology such as the Marconi radio plants built with Tesla and Alexandersson dielectric technology. The powers that be had to completely destroy the very idea of the aether and ensure that free energy would never again threaten their monopoly.
Physics was hijacked and turned into a religious cult of personality. Nebulous theories and quirky characters were constructed to misinform all generations afterwards. Eric Dollard has not been shy in his writings and named The Theory of Relativity and Einstein as the main constructs to this end. Many other scientists support him and there is a growing movement to liberate physics from pseudo psychics and the high priests of nebulous pseudoscientific banker funded dogma. Time magazine, The NY Times and many other publications have recently published articles citing the evidence that Einstein was wrong. Einstein was proven wrong the moment he introduced his theory and has been proven wrong countless times since, yet we still hail him as a saint of science. The suppression is inter generational and Einstein was only the first pillar of the deception. Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking and most recently Michio Kaku have taken up the flag of obfuscated mysticism in a desperate effort to suppress aether theory. All this at the bidding of the same central banking giants which sprang from the Rothchilds and Rockefellers. Knowing this and knowing the fate of Tesla and all those that tried after him to recreate his work was not enough to stop Mr. Dollard. Eric went about his work and peered even more deeply into the past.
BACH & ORGANIC ELECTRICITY
Science and logic alone were not enough to comprehend the aether and how energy flowed through it and from within it. Eric looked to the legendary mathematician Charles P Steinmetz and to Oliver Heaviside for answers. Their censored writings revealed that they too had taken this battle for truth upon themselves and were met with the same resistance. In their mathematics and Tesla’s experiments lie the key to unlocking the aether but there was one element missing to decipher the riddle. Johannes Sebastian Bach and his music held the answer. The multi-dimensional organ music of Bach began to reveal an organic matrix to Eric. He began to see the work of Bach as a culmination of the same thread of natural science exposed by Pythagoras of Samos. The aether and the energy it produced was not some mechanical construct and thus pure mechanics and mathematics alone could not represent it. The aether was an organic energy matrix and it was as responsible for the static electricity in the air as it was for the plants that grow from the ground and the animals that walk the earth. Eric had begun to step out of the world of pure science and into the metaphysical.
Eric noticed in his experiments that when he ran this special electricity of Tesla’s through wood or other organic matter that it would burn tree like etchings into it. They looked like the branches of trees and their dimensions reflected the golden ratio. Going a step further Eric noticed that when this energy was transmitted within vacuum bulbs that galactic formations and cosmic arrangements would form within the bulbs. It was as if he was looking through the Hubble telescope through a light bulb on his lab bench. Further experiments revealed the fractal organic nature of all matter. The aether theory became all the stronger the more one compared the cosmic and organic. Eric would progress even further into the study of the ether. The more he experimented with channeling dielectricty through various enclosed spaces the more he uncovered the truth behind the “Theory of Creation” The Big Bang was a big Hoax and Einstein, Darwin and the whole lot of them were crushed by his experiments. Eric Dollard now became a very dangerous man to the establishment as his scientifically proven and tested research could destroy the web of lies which they had carefully built for over the past three hundred years. The aether was ever present and could project it’s formative powers to any proportions. The deeper he went into true science the more that he saw that science and spirituality were one and the same. He began to see quantum physics as a misinformation campaign for true aetheric science. The mystics of the past knew more of true science than the quantum physics of today.
The shape on the left has been burned into wood by a Tesla coil. The right is the special kind of electricity Tesla discovered in its pure raw form. Notice the organic shape.
GROUND RADIO
A retired aerospace technician named Walter J De-Roche, who would die under suspicious circumstances, left Eric a facility which was once used for Ionospheric and Telluric research. This was the last research laboratory Eric had and was located at Landers California. A wealthy investor in the alternative science scene once commented that “Eric Dollard has done more with food stamps than you all have with millions” This kind of praise was not an understatement as Eric single handedly transformed the long abandoned Landers facility into a radio base to serve the country of San Bernadino and the 29 Palms Marine Corp Base as a civil defense station and earthquake warning system. On a shoestring budget Eric had taken Telluric ,relating to the study of electricity within the earth, research to new heights and his facility could even detect underground nuclear blasts from North Korea. The Landers plant could be scaled to serve the entire country with free, loss less, faster than light radio, save lives via earth quake detection and potentially far more. Upon the completion of this modern day wonder, the powers that be swooped, shut it down and destroyed it. A certain Roy McGee and Olin Bates worked together to cheat Eric out of the property and even confiscated all his notes, gear and work.
After losing this, his last laboratory and being so close to implementing a system that would revolutionize communication for the community, Navy and possibly the entire country Eric has realized that his work shall always be marked for destruction. Eric wants those that truly desire the advancement of science to step forward and support a campaign to sue the guilty parties in court and get back his life’s work. The potential for the advancement of humanity is tremendous.
Eric inherited a radio station in Landers, CA from a friend. He spent years building it up and turned it into the an advanced ground radio station that could detect earthquakes before they occur, transmit faster than light radio with no losses and potentially far more. The “far more” part sent the powers that be scrambling to destroy it and they did.
Eric, now in his sixties has had to endure more hardship than most humans and even rebel scientists can imagine. He has been assaulted many times and suffered serious injuries. He has had his home and lab’s raided repeatedly and been driven to homelessness. All of his friends have betrayed him, all of his possessions taken from him and worse still all of his notes and work burned. In this last scenario they even took his pet dog away from him. While Eric has had to face off with the men in Black many times, it was the women in white that the powers that be choose to send after him this time. An NGO posing as a charitable foundation but in actuality being a front of the energy brokers was what did him in this time. They knew he was close to releasing something monumental and they swooped in and took everything but his life.
Eric has not given up. While he has rebuilt his lab many times and rallied to the finish line alone, this time it is different. Now in his sixties, black listed and without a penny to his name we cannot ask this man to try and bless the human race with the gift of free natural energy yet again, not without our help. There are three things you can do right now to help Eric P Dollard and his mission.
1. Believe in abundance, believe that energy for all humanity at no cost is as natural as a seed in the ground producing fruit. This is the hardest thing but it only takes a second.
2. Send this article to your friends and spread the word about The Mission of Eric P Dollard.
3. Write Eric a letter! Not an email, a real paper letter, in the mail! Eric is old fashioned. analog only and homeless but he does have a PO Box. It would help his spirits immensely to know he had believers. Eric has not given up, he is still trying to pass on his knowledge so that others might recreate his work and Tesla’s work.
“The monophasic dielectric forces developed thru the work of Nikola Tesla nullify relativistic relations. Tesla, thru a unique space-time hysteresis electrically “grounded” to a zero order Galilean coordinate system. It is also the cathode ray projector tubes utilized by Tesla in his atomic studies also nullify relativistic relations. Tesla’s remarks about “radiant matter” indicate the existence of cosmic rays of immense penetrating power moving fifty (50) times faster than the velocity of light (Le Sage particles).”
In just a few hours you can make a completely batteryless AM radio receiver with a range of around 25 miles. Built with a small assortment of components, some scrap wood, and a beverage bottle tightly wound with magnet wire, we call this project Bottle Radio. Similar to other “crystal radio” projects, the crystal in this build is contained inside a germanium diode, which rectifies incoming audio signal. The radio operates on the power from radio waves, and receives signal from a long wire antenna. When this signal enters the diode, it contains positive and negative peaks, however the diode, only allowing signal to pass in the forward direction, converts the alternating current of the signal into direct current. That current then vibrates a diaphragm inside a crystal earphone, allowing you to hear the radio without any visible power source!
If it sounds difficult, it’s not. In fact once you have your parts in hand, this project will only take a couple hours to assemble. Watch the video below to see how the entire circuit works, and we also provide some tips on the project page for extending the range of your receiver using a loop antenna and RF amplifier.
“Please consider contributing research content to the Mark Lombardi Memorial Library. You might participate by scanning & sharing one of the following historical titles in an appropriate file format, towards an online searchable database of Mark’s research. You might also participate by mirroring scans online somewhere safe (fair use, historical research) tagged #marklombardimemoriallibrary.”
from the Rockefeller / MoMA collection website (who have all those index cards locked up in the basement, available for viewing “upon request”): “These scandals, such as Whitewater or the Vatican Bank, were researched by Lombardi in an exhaustive manner, from a range of sources in the public domain, the Findings then being stored in an extensive filing card system. After establishing the key connections and relations between powerful figures, Lombardi would then schematize these by means of circles containing names of individuals and organisations, joined by connecting lines. The schema is codified by straight lines that indicate direct influence, and dotted and wavy lines that indicate financial connections and frozen assets respectively, as well as by the layering of black and red, indicating lawsuits, bankruptcy and death.
When Mark Lombardi died, at the age of 48, he left behind a controversial body of work—large-scale, maplike drawings that chart connections between the worlds of international banking, organized crime, arms dealing, terrorism, oil, and government—the result of countless hours of research distilled into spartan webs of pencil lines and text. He also left a legacy shrouded in conjecture and mystery. Did he take his own life in his Brooklyn apartment on the night of March 22, 2000, or were there more insidious forces at work? What did a woman claiming to be an FBI agent hope to find when she called the Whitney Museum of American Art, owner of one of Lombardi’s most epic drawings, soon after 9/11, asking to study the piece? A new feature-length documentary, called Mark Lombardi: Death-defying Acts of Art and Conspiracy, takes on these and other questions, and spotlights the sinister links found in Lombardi’s art.
German director and writer Mareike Wegener worked with a small crew for two and a half years to shoot the film, conducting interviews with most everyone who was in some way close to Lombardi: New York–based artists Rafael Vargas-Suarez, Greg Stone, Fred Tomaselli, and James Siena; the owners of Brooklyn’s Pierogi Gallery, Joe Amrhein and Susan Swenson; art historian Robert Hobbs; and Lombardi’s dry-eyed and stunningly honest parents and siblings, in his childhood hometown outside Syracuse, New York. “The visit to his parents was one of the most fraught times, but also turned out to be one of the most rewarding times of the film. All were really up front,” Wegener says. “They were concerned with the possibility of my scandalizing things. But if you look at Lombardi’s work,” she adds, “he’s really de-scandalizing things. He’s putting things together in a very subtle way, and that’s something I’m doing in the film, too.”
Wegener intersperses the interviews with archival news footage that illustrates events detailed in the drawings—Manuel Noriega giving a speech, Oliver North testifying before Congress at the Iran-contra hearings, executives of the First American Bank in a great hurry to leave a courthouse, black-hooded foreign soldiers toting guns—edited in such a way that the clips cycle back and repeat, echoing the formal structure of the drawings. “Mark never talked about people hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings,” says Vargas-Suarez in the film, referring to 9/11, “but he knew about the activities of how these things would be financed. . . . He had a vast knowledge of the networks that would create a scenario like this. His work was showing you the abuses of power. And some of the same people that you see on the news making trouble in different parts of the world—they’re all in the works.”
“One of the drawings called “George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens, ca 1979-90″ (1999) shows the connections of James Bath, a former CIA spook and business broker, front man for Saudi money who connected the Bush Family and Bin Laden Family (of the Osama bin Laden/ 9-11 legend) in shady deals in Texas and around the world. Other drawings document the Savings and Loan (S&L) Frauds, IraqGate Fraud (illicit sales of nuclear and biological weapons to Iraqi kingpin Saddam Hussein with a $5 billion US Government-guaranteed phony “agricultural loan” through the Banca Nazionale de Lavoro), Iran Contra Fraud, and the Clinton/ Jackson Stephens Frauds. Lombardi was an artist and an archivist, not an investigative reporter; he simply used available material from books and newspaper articles (from the public record) for the information “content” of his work. Viewing his art (mostly un-inked pencil drawings) requires the ability to 1/ see the graphics, 2/ read the names of people and corporate fronts, and then 3/ integrate this content of networks into an epiphany about How the Real World Works.
Historically, of course, the Harken Stock Fraud made George W. Bush his first serious chunk of money. It should be also noted that Bath, a former cokehead pal of George Jr., was also connected with the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) Fraud. Lombardi’s web-like drawings show the decentralized nature of the networks of crime and flows of global capital. The key is a multitude of front companies, which add layers of complexity to the conspiracies themselves. Allegedly diagnosed with bipolar disorder (manic depression), Lombardi supposedly died from suicide (or was suicided) in 1999 — after two successful solo shows and just as his career was about to go to the next level. It should also be noted that Jim Hatfield, author of “Fortunate Son,” (Soft Skull Press), a biography of George W. Bush, which alleged that George Bush Jr. was convicted in Texas on cocaine charges, until his record disappeared from the court system, was also found dead by suicide in an Oklahoma motel.
Artist Mark Lombardi (1951-2000), whose business card ironically read “Death Defying Acts of Art and Conspiracy,” was found dead in his studio, officially declared a suicide in the police report. Or as government whistleblower Al Martin, author of “The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider” (http://www.almartinraw.com) says, “The guy put together one chart too many.” Martin was retained by attorney Frank Rubino, defense counsel for Panamanian strongman Antonio Noriega, to produce a chart for the courtroom, which would explain the complex relationships between individuals and offshore companies, etc. The 5’ x 9’ chart was topped off by a color photo of former president George Herbert Walker Bush and Antonio Noriega embracing one another, both giving a victory sign to the camera. It should be noted that US troops under George Bush invaded Panama, then hijacked Noriega to Florida, where he was convicted of drug charges. Noriega is still in prison to this day. “When they set up this chart in the courtroom, the judge said, what’s that? We had Bush connected to this drug operation,” recalls Martin. Martin says that later CIA operative Frank Snepp joined the defense team (Rubino himself was a former CIA agent) and gave daily reports to George Bush Sr. on how the trial against Noriega was proceeding. Martin says he overheard him on the phone talking to Bush in Rubino’s office. “I was real naive,” says Martin about his participation in the Noriega trial. “I made the assumption that this is what they wanted” — to have a flow chart of personnel, covert operations, as well as banks and other front companies and how the schemes actually worked. Martin notes that they didn’t really expect him to use the real names of people and front companies. “Investigative reporter Dave Lyons from the Miami Herald told me this is what people can understand,” Martin continues. “Graphs and charts help the average person understand complex conspiracies Martin jokingly concludes, “Charts and graphs — bad. Shredders – good.”
In a video of the artist shown at the exhibition, Andy Mann asked Lombard in February 1997, “Do you fear for your life?” Lombardi didn’t answer the question. Instead he said, “This is a way I can map the political and social terrain in which I live.” According to his friends, Lombardi told them that he was being followed — just before his death. Lombardi also described his work as “visualized fields of information [which] started out as corporate diagrams.” In the end, Mark Lombardi’s contribution to culture is his relentless search for the truth. He was a pioneer in the cartography of realpolitik, mapping international networks of crime which include high-level government officials and shady so-called “business” men. Lombardi’s legacy is his depiction of geo-political realities, the essence of global criminal conspiracies. No theory, just conspiracy –- conspiracies that continue to haunt the planet into the 21st century.
“I really like Mark Lombardi’s artwork, but buyer beware–the dimensions of this book are a mere 11 x 9.2 x 0.4 inches. Mr. Lombardi’s work is relatively large by comparison. For this book, his pieces have been shrunk to where it is almost impossible to read what’s been written in the nodes of the networks. Each featured piece is instead explained by the authors, with the occasional enlargement of a section for clarification. This seems contrary to the spirit of Mr. Lombardi’s work. I was expecting this book to at least have fold-out pages, but no such luck. The artwork is completely subordinate to the authors’ verbose text. So if you want to READ about Mark Lombardi and his work, and get a little information design history lesson in too, then this book will do just fine. But if you want to actually LOOK at Mark Lombardi’s artwork, look elsewhere. I think I will be reselling this book.”
[ note: if the book seems to discuss art only (versus crime), perhaps skip it ]
Aarons, Mark and John Loftus.Unholy Trinity: How the Vatican’s Nazi Networks Betrayed Western Intelligence to the Soviets. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
Aburish, Saïd K. The Rise, Corruption, and Coming Fall of the House of Saud. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994, rpt. 1996.
Adams, James Ring, and Douglas Frantz. A Full Service Bank: How BCCI Stole Billions Around the World. New York, London, Toronto: Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1993.
Adams, James Ring. The Big Fix: Inside the S&L Scandal: How an Unholy Alliance of Politics and Money Destroyed America’s Banking System. New York, Chichester, Brisbane: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1990, rpt. 1991.
Adams, James. Bull’s Eye: The Assassination and Life of Supergun Inventor Gerald Bull. New York: Times Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1992.
_____. The Financing of Terror. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984.
Adbusters 4, no. 4 (Winter 1996).
Adríani, Götz, Winfried Konnertz, and Karin Thomas. Joseph Beuys: Life and Works, trans. Patricia Lech. New York: Barron’s 1979.
Agee, Philip. Inside the Company: CIA Diary. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1975.
Allport, Jeff. A Guide for the Perplexed: News Production at Dow Jones. South Brunswick, New Jersey, 1987.
Altick, Richard D. The Shows of London. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Belknap Press, 1978.
Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed.
Anderson, Jack with George Clifford. The Anderson Papers. New York: Random House, 1973.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, The World Publishing Company, 1951, 2nd ed., 1958.
Arlacchi, Piño, and Antonio Calderone. Men of Dishonor: Inside the Sicilian Mafia, trans. Marc Romano. New York: Morrow, 1993.
Arostegui, Martin C. Twilight Warriors: Inside the World’s Special Forces. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
Baker, Bobby, with Larry L. King. Wheeling and Dealing: Confessions of a Capitol Hill Operator. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1978.
Bamford, James. The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America’s Most Secret Agency. New York: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1983.
Barry, Tom and Deb Preusch. The Soft War: The Uses and Abuses of U.S. Economic Aid in Central America. New York: Grove Press: 1988.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Evil Demon of Images. Power Institute, 1987.
Beaty, Jonathan, and S.C. Gwynne. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI. New York: Random House, 1993.
Bellett, Gerald. Age of Secrets: The Conspiracy that Toppled Richard Nixon and the Hidden Death of Howard Hughes. Maitland, Ontario and Ogdensburg, New York: Voyageur North America, 1995.
Bianco, Anthony. The Reichmanns: Family, Faith, Fortune, and the Empire of Olympia & York. New York: Times Books, Random House, 1997.
Binstein, Michael, and Charles Bowden. Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions. New York: Random House, 1993.
Blackstock, Paul W. The Strategy of Subversion: Manipulation, the Politics of Other Nations. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964.
Bloch, Jonathan and Patrick Fitzgerald. British Intelligence and Covert Action: Africa, Middle East, and Europe since 1945. Dublin: Brandon Book Publishers, Ltd., 1983.
Block, Alan A. Masters of Paradise: Organized Crime and the Internal Revenue Service in the Bahamas. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1991.
Boettcher, Robert, with Gordon L. Freedman. Gifts of Deceit: Sun Myung Moon, Tongsum Park and the Korean Scandal. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1980.
Boulton, David. The Grease Machine: The Inside Story of Lockheed’s Dollar Diplomacy. New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London: Harper & Row Publishers, 1978.
Bower, Tom. Maxwell: The Outsider. New York: Viking Penguin, 1988, rpt. 1992.
Branch, Taylor and Eugene M. Propper. Labyrinth. New York, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1982.
Brewton, Pete. The Mafia, CIA & George Bush. New York: S.P.I. Books, a division of Shapolsky Publishers, Inc., 1992.
Brill, Steven. The Teamsters. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978.
Brogan, Patrick, and Albert Zarca. Deadly Business: Sam Cummings’ Interarms and the Arms Trade. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1983.
Browenstein, Ronald and Nina Easton. Reagan’s Ruling Class: Portraits of the President’s Top One Hundred Officials. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982, revised 1983.
Bruck, Connie. The Predators’ Ball: The Junk Bond Raiders and the Men who Staked Them. New York, London, Toronto: The American Lawyer and Simon & Schuster, 1988.
Buchloh, Benjamin H.D., ed. “Broodthaers: Writings Interviews, Photographs, 1924-1976.” October 42 (Fall 1987): 5-210.
Burrough, Bryan. Vendetta: American Express and the Smearing of Edmond Safra. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992.
Burton Bob. Top Secret: A Clandestine Operator’s Glossary of Terms. Boulder, Co: Paleden Press, 1986.
Cabanne, Pierre. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett. The Documents of 20th Century Art. New York: The Viking Press, 1971.
Cantor, Bert. The Bernie Cornfeld Story. New York: Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1970.
Celant, Germano. The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943-1968. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1994.
Charney, Leon H. “Spy” for Peace. New York: EMG Limited, 1993.
Choate, Pat. Agents of Influence: How Japan Manipulated America’s Political and Economic System. New York, London, Toronto: A Touchstone Book, published by Simon & Schuster, 1990.
Chomsky, Noam. Towards a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There. New York: Pantheon Books: 1973, rpt. 1982.
_____.Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace. Boston: South End Press, 1985.
_____. The Culture of Terrorism. Boston: South End Press, 1988.
Clarke, Thurston and John J. Tigue. Jr. Dirty Money: Swiss Banks, the Mafia, Money Laundering and White Collar Crime. New York; Simon & Schuster, 1975.
Clarkson, Wensley. The Valkyrie Operation. London: Blake Publishing, Ltd., 1998.
Cockburn, Andrew and Leslie. Dangerous Liason: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991.
Cohen, William S. and George J. Mitchell. Men of Zeal: A Candid Inside Story of the Iran-Contra Hearings. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.
Copeland, Milles. The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969.
Corn, David. Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA’s Crusades. New York, London, Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
Cranston, Maurice. Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rosseau 1712-1754. London: Allen Lane, 1983.
Crooker, Jr., John H., and Gibson Gayle, Jr. Fulbright & Jarowski: 75 Years (1919-1994). Houston: Fulbright & Jarowski, 1994.
Culburtson, Judi and Tom Randell. Permanent New Yorkers: A Biographical Guide to the Cemeteries of New York. Chelsea Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1987.
DeGraffenreid, Kenneth, ed. The Cox Report: The Unanimous and Bipartisan Report of the House Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military Commercial Concern with the People’s Republic of China. Washington, D.C.: Regency Publishing, Inc., 1999.
Demaris, Ovid. Boardwalk Jungle. Toronto, New York, London: Bantam Books, 1986.
_____. Dirty Business: The Corporate-Political Money-Power Game. New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, published in association with Harper & Row, 1974.
_____. The Last Mafioso: The Treacherous World of Jimmy Fratianno. New York: Times Books, a division of Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., Inc., 1981.
Di Fonzo, Luigi. St. Peter’s Banker: Michele Sindona. New York, London, Toronto: Franklin Watts, 1983.
Dorman, Michael. Vesco: The Infernal Money Making Machine. New York: Berkeley Medallion Books, published by Berkeley Publishing Company, 1975.
Draper, Theodore. A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs. New York, London, Toronto: A Touchstone Book, Published by Simon & Schuster, 1991.
Drosnin, Michael, and Howard Hughes. Citizen Hughes. Toronto, New York, London: Bantam Books, 1986.
Drunken Boat: An Anarchist Magazine of Literature and the Arts. Brooklyn, New York: Drunken Boat, 1993Ñ.
Ehrenfeld, Rachel. Evil Money: Encounters Along the Money Trail. New York, S.P.I. Books, a division of Shapolsky Publishers, Inc., 1992, rpt. 1994.
Ellison, Katherine. Imelda: The Steel Butterfly of the Phillipines. New York, St. Louis, San Francisco: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1988.
Emerson, Steve. The American House of Saud: The Secret Petrodollar Connection. New York, Toronto, London: Franklin Watts, 1985.
Faith, Nicholas. Safety in Numbers: The Mysterious World of Swiss Banking. New York: The Viking Press, 1982.
Fay, Steven. Beyond Greed. New York: Penguin Books, 1982.
Fehrenbach, T.R. The Swiss Banks. New York, London, Toronto: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966.
Fortune, eds. The Conglomerate Commotion. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1970.
Franco, Joseph, with Richard Hammer. Hoffa’s Man: The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa as Witnessed by his Strongest Arm. New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1987.
Friedman, Alan. Spider’s Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq. New York, Toronto, London: Bantam Books, 1993.
Fry, Edward F., and Hans Haacke. Werkmonographie. München: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg, 1972.
Giancana, Samuel M. and Chuck Giancana. Double Cross: The Explosive, Inside Story of the Mobster who Controlled America. New York: Warner Books, 1992.
Gould, Jennifer. Vodka, Tears, and Lenin’s Angel: A Journalist on the Road in the Former Soviet Union. Canada: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
Goulden, Joseph C., with Alexander W. Raffio. The Death Merchant: The Rise and Fall of Edwin P. Wilson. New York: Simon & Schuster: 1984.
Grant, Dale. Wilderness of Mirrors: The Life of Gerald Bull. Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice-Hall Canada, Inc., 1991.
Bertram Gross. Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America. New York: M. Evans and Company, Inc., 1980.
Haines, Joe. Maxwell. London: MacDonald, 1988.
Haley, J. Evetts. A Texan Looks at Lyndon: A Study in Illegitimate Power. Canyon, Texas: The Palo Duro Press,
Hall, Richard. My Life with Tiny: A Biography of Tiny Rowland. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987.
Halloran, Paul and Mark Hollingsworth. Thatcher’s Gold: The Life and Times of Mark Thatcher. London, Sydney, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
Halperin, Mortin H., Jerry J. Berman, Robert L. Borosage, and Christine M. Marwick. The Lawless State: The Crimes of the U.S. Intelligence Agencies. New York: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1976.
Hammer, Richard. The Vatican Connection. New York: Charter Books, by arrangement with Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1983.
Harding, Luke, David Leigh, and David Pallister. The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken. London: Penguin Books, 1997.
Hector, Gary. Breaking the Bank: The Decline of BankAmerica. Boston & Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1988.
Henderson, Paul. The Unlikely Spy: Paul Henderson: An Autobiography. London: Bloomsbury, 1993.
Hendricks, Jon. Fluxus, Etc.: The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection, Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum. September 20–November 1, 1981. Bloomfield Hills, Michigan: Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum, 1981.
Herman, Edward S. The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propoganda. Boston: South End Press, 1988.
_____ and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
Herzog, Arthur. Vesco: From Wall Street to Castro’s Cuba: The Rise, Fall, and Exile of the King of White Collar Crime. New York, Doubleday, 1987.
Hobbs, Robert Carelton, and Gail Levin. Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years. Ithica, New York: Herbert G. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1978.
Hoffman, Abbie [Free, pseud.]. Revolution for the Hell of It. New York: The Dial Press, Inc., 1968.
Hoffman, Abbie. Soon to be a Major Motion Picture. New York: A Perigree Book, published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980.
Horowitz, Leonard G. Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola: Nature, Accident, or Intentional? Rockport, MA: Tetrahedon, Inc., 1997.
Hougan, Jim. Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA. New York: Random House, 1984.
_____. Spooks: The Haunting of America–The Private Use of Secret Agents. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1978.
Howowitz, Lois. Knowing Where to Look: The Ultimate Guide to Research. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer’s Digest Books, 1984.
Hulbert, Mark. Interlock: The Untold Story of American Bank, Oil Interests, the Shah’s Money, Debts, and the Astounding Connections Between Them. New York: Richardson & Snyder, 1982.
Hutchinson, Robert A. Vesco. New York and Washington, Praeger Publishers, 1974.
Index on Censorship. London: Writers & Scholars International, 1972––.
Inouye, Daniel K. and Lee K. Hamilton. Report of the Congressional Committee Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair with the Minority View. Abridged Edition, Joel Brentily and Stephen Engelber, eds. Times Books, Random House, Inc., 1988.
Inside PR: The Magazine of Integrated Marketing. New York: Editorial Media Marketing International, Inc., 1990-4.
Jacobs, Karrie and Steven Keller. Angry Graphics: Protest Posters of the Reagan/Bush Era. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1992.
Jacoby, Neil H., Peter Nehemkis, and Richard Eells. Bribery and Extortion in World Business: A Study of Corporate Political Payments Abroad. Studies of the Modern Corporation, Graduate School of Business, Columbia University. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., and London: Collier-MacMillan Publisher, 1977.
James, Gerald. In the Public Interest: A Devastating Account of the Thatcher Government’s Involvement in the Covert Arms Trade–By the Man who Turned Astra Fireworks into a £100m Arms Manufacturer. London: Little, Brown and Company, 1995.
Jarry, Alfred. Ubu Roi, trans. Barbara Wright. New York: A New Directions Book, 1961.
Kahn, Douglas and Diane Neumaier, eds. Cultures in Contention. Seattle: The Real Comet Press, 1985.
Kaplan, David E., and Alec Dubro. Yakuza: The Explosive Account of Japan’s Criminal Underworld. New York: Collier Books, Macmillan Publishing Company, 1986.
Katz, Barry. Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation. London: Verso Editions and NLB, 1982.
Katz, Harvey. Shadow on the Alamo: New Heroes Fight Old Corruption in Texas Politics. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972.
Keen, Sam. Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination. San Francisco, Cambridge, Hagerstown, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1986.
Kellner, Douglas. Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989.
Kennedy, Colonel William V. and Dr. David Baker, Colonel Richard S. Friedman, Lieutenant-Colonel David Miller. Intelligence Warfare: Today’s Advanced Technology Conflict. New York: Crescent Books, 1983.
Kessler, Ronald. The Richest Man in the World: The Story of Adnan Khashoggi. New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1986.
Knabb, Ken, ed. and trans. Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley, California: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981, rpt. 1983.
Krosney, Herbert. Deadly Business: Legal Deals and Outlaw Weapons, The Arming of Iran and Iraq, 1975 to the present. New York and London: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993.
Kwitny, Jonathan. Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.
_____. The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA. New York and London, W.W. Norton & Company, 1987.
_____. The Mullendare Murder Case. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974.
_____. Vicious Circles: The Mafia in the Marketplace. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979.
Lacey, Robert. Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life. Boston, Toronto, London: Little, Brown, and Company, 1991.
_____. The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Sa’ud. New York: Avon Books, a division of the Hearst Corporation, 1981.
Lawther, William. Arms and the Man: Dr. Gerald Bull, Iraq, and the Supergun. Novato, California: Presidio Press, 1991.
Le Carré, John. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. New York, London, Toronto: A Bantam Book, published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1974, rpt. 1975.
_____. The Unbearable Price. Granita 35, Spring 1991.
Ledeen, Michael. Perilous Statecraft: An Insider’s Account of the Iran-Contra Affair. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988.
Lee, Marin A., and Bruce Shlain. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1985.
Leigh, David, with Richard Norton-Taylor. Betrayed: The Real Story of the Matrix Churchill Trial. London, Bloomsbury, 1993.
_____. The Wilson Plot. How the Spycatchers and their American Allies Tried to Overthrow the British Government. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
Lepera, Patsy Anthony and Walter Goodman. Memoirs of a Scam Man: The Life and Deals of Patsy Anthony Lepera. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974.
Lernoux, Penny. In Banks We Trust. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984.
Levine, Dennis B. Inside Out: An Insider’s Account of Wall Street. New york: G.P. Putnam’s Son’s, 1991.
Lies of Our Times. New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1990-1994.
Lippard, Lucy. Six Years: The Dematerialisation of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972… New York and Washington: Praeger Publishers, 1973.
Livingston, Jane. Robert Irwin–Doug Wheeler 1969. Fort Worth: Forth Worth Art Museum, 1969.
Lo Bello, Niño. The Vatican Empire. New York: Trident Press, 1968.
_____. The Vatican Papers. Seven Oaks, Kent: New English Library, 1982.
Maas, Peter. Manhunt. New York: A Jove Book, published by arrangement with Random House, Inc., 1986.
_____. Underboss: Sammy the Bull Gravano’s Story of Life in the Mafia. New York: Harperpaperbacks, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, 1997.
Mahon, Gigi. The Company that Bought the Boardwalk: A Reporter’s Story of How Resorts International Came to Atlantic City. New York: Random House, 1980.
Manser, Roger. Failed Transitions: The Eastern European Economy and Environment since the Fall of Communism. New York: The New Press, 1993.
Mantius, Peter. Shell Game: A True Story of Banking, Spies, Lies, Politics–and the Arming of Saddam Hussein. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
Marchetti, Victor, and John D. Marks. The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1974.
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, 1966, rpt of the Beacon Press Edition, 1955.
_____. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Indusrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, rpt. 1966.
Mayer, Martin. The Greatest-Ever Bank Robbery: The Collapse of the Savings and Loan Industry. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990.
McCann, Thomas P. An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit, ed. Henry Scammell. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1976.
McCarthy Cormac. Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1992.
McCollom, James P. The Continental Affair: The Rise and Fall of Continental Illinois Bank. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1987.
Messick, Hank. Syndicate in the Sun. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968.
Moldea, Dan E. Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob. New York: Penguin Books, 1987.
Mollenhoff, Clark R. Tentacles of Power: The Story of Jimmy Hoffa. Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1965.
Murray, Linda. The Late Renaissance and Mannerism. New York and Washington: Frederick D. Praeger, 1967.
Naylor, R.T. Hot Money and the Politics of Debt. Montreal, New York, London: Black Rose Books, 1994.
Noonan, Peggy. What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era. New York: Random House, 1990.
Norton-Taylor, Richard, with Mark Lloyd. Truth is a Difficult Concept. London: Fourth Estate Limited, 1995.
O’Brien, Joseph F., and Andris Kurins. Boss of Bosses: The Fall of the Godfather: The FBI and Paul Castellano. New York, London, Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 1991.
O’Shea, James. The Daisy Chain: The Tale of Don Dixon and the Looting of a Texas S&L. New York, London, Toronto: Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1991.
O’Toole, George. The Private Sector: Private Spies, Rent-a-Cops, and the Police-Industrial Complex. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1978.
Owen, John. Sleight of Hand: The $25 Million Nugan Hand Bank Scandal. Sydney, Australia: Colporteur Press, 1983.
Peck, James (ed.). The Chomsky Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987.
Persico, Joseph E. Casey: From the OSS to the CIA. New York: Viking Penguin, 1990.
Pileggi, Nicholas. Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas. New York, London, and Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
Pizzo, Stephen, Mary Fricker, and Paul Muolo. Inside Job: The Looting of America’s Savings and Loans. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.
Plate, Thomas and Andrea Darvi. Secret Police: The Inside Story of a Network of Terror. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1981.
Potts, Mark, Nicholas Kochan, and Robert Whittington. Dirty Money: BCCI, The Inside Story of the World’s Sleaziest Bank. Washington, D.C.: National Press Books, 1992.
Powers, Thomas. The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979.
Propaganda Review. San Francisco: Media Alliance, 1988-1990.
Raviv, Dan and Yossi Melman. Every Spy a Prince: The Complete History of Israel’s Intelligence Community. Boston: A Marc Joffe Book, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990.
Raw, Charles, Bruce Page, and Godfrey Hodgson. “Do You Sincerely Want to be Rich?” The Full Story of Bernie Cornfeld and IOS. New York: The Viking Press, 1971.
Read, Herbert. To Hell with Culture; and Other Essays on Art and Society. New York: Schocken Books, 1963, rpt. 1970.
Reich, Wilhelm. The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1971.
_____. The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Governing Character Structure, trans. Theodore P. Wolfe. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1945, rpt. 1969.
Reisman, W. Michael. Folded Lies: Bribery, Crusades, and Reforms. New York: The Free Press, a division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. and London: Collier MacMillan Publishers, 1979.
Reston, Jr., James. The Lone Star: The Life of John Connally. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1989.
Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1965.
Robinson, Jeffrey. The Laundrymen: Inside Money-Laundering, the World’s Third-Largest Business. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996.
Robinson, Michael A. Overdrawn: The Bailout of American Savings. New York: Plume, published by Penguin Group, 1991.
Roemer, Jr. William E. War of the Godfathers: The Bloody Confrontations between the Chicago and New York Families for Control of Las Vegas. New York: Ivy Books, published by Ballantine Books, 1990.
_____. Roemer: Man Against the Mob. New York: Ivy Books, published by Ballantine Books, 1989.
Rosenberg, Harold. Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1971, rpt. 1975.
_____. The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience. New York: Horizon Press, 1964, rpt. 1966.
_____. The Case of the Baffled Radical. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1976, rpt. 1985.
_____. The De-definition of Art. New York: Collier Books, a division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1972.
_____. The Tradition of the New. New York: Horizon Press, Inc., 1959.
Roumpates, Giannes P. Tangled Webs: The U.S. in Greece 1947-67. New York: Pella Publishing Company, Inc., 1987.
Rudolph, Robert. The Boys from New Jersey: How the Mob Beat the Feds. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1992.
Saikal, Amin. The Rise and Fall of the Shah. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Sampson, Anthony. The Arms Bazaar: From Lebanon to Lockheed. New York: The Viking Press, 1977. _____. The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies and the World They Shaped. New York: a Bantam Book, published in association with the Viking Press, 1975, rpt. 1979.
_____. The Sovereign State of ITT. New York, Stein and Day, 1973.
Seagrave, Sterling. The Marcos Dynasty. New York, Harper & Row Publishers, 1988.
Segev, Samuel. The Iranian Triangle: The Untold Story of Israel’s Role in the Iran-Contra Affair, trans. Haim Watzman. New York: The Free Press, a division of Macmillan, Inc., 1988.
Sharaf, Myron. Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich. London, Melbourne, Sydney: Hutchinson, 1983.
Shaw, John A. and David E. Long. Saudi Arabian Modernization: The Impact of Change and Stability. The Washington Papers 89. New York: Praeger, published with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., 1982.
Shawcross, William. The Shah’s Last Ride: The Fate of an Ally. New York, London, Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 1988.
Sheehan, Neil and Nedrick Smith, E.W. Kenworthy, and Fox Butterfield. The Pentagon Papers as Published by The New York Times. Toronto, New York, London: Bantam Books, Inc., 1971.
Shields, Jerry. The Invisible Billionaire: Daniel Ludwig. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986.
Sick, Gary. October Surprise: America’s Hostages In Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan. New York: Times Books, a division of Random House, 1991, rpt. 1992.
Singer, Mark. Funny Money. New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 1985.
Smith, Joseph Burkholder. Portrait of a Cold Warrior. New York: Ballentine Books, 1976.
South: The Third World Magazine.
Stanford University, Department of Art. Edweard Muybridge: The Stanford Years, 1872-1882. Stanford, California: Stanford University Museum of Art, 1972.
Stevens, Mark, and Carol Bloom Stevens. The Big Six: The Selling Out of America’s Top Accounting Firms. New York, London, Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 1991.
Stewart, James B. Den of Thieves. New York, London, Toronto: A Touchstone Book, published by Simon & Schuster, 1991, rpt 1992.
Stewart, Justice D.G. Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Activities of the Nugan Hand Group: Final Report. Volumes One and Two. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1985.
Stockwell, John. In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story. New York and London, W.W. Norton & Company, 1978.
Sussman, Elizabeth, ed. On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1957-1972. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1989.
Tarpley, Webster Griffin and Anton Chaitkin. George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography. Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992.
The Testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North. New York: Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, 1987.
Thomas, Gordon. Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad. New York: Thomas Dunne Books; St, Martin’s Griffin, 1999.
Timmerman, Kenneth R. The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq. Boston, New York, London: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991.
Tomasinelli, Vezio. Art in Life: Project ’93-94. Torino, 1993.
Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Tosches, Nick. Power on Earth: Michele Sindona’s Explosive Story. New York: Arbor House, 1986.
Tower, John, Edmund Muskie, and Brent Scowcroft. The Tower Commission Report. New York: Bantam Books and Time Books, 1987.
Traub James. Too Good to Be True: The Outlandish Story of Wedtech. New York, London,Toronto: Doubleday, 1990.
Trento, Susan B. The Power House: Robert Keith Gray and the Selling of Access and Influence in Washington. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
Truell, Peter and Larry Gurwin. False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992.
Tuccille, Jerome. Trump. New York: Primier, Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1985, rpt. 1987.
Tuchman, Barbara W. Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1970, rpt. 1971.
Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Left Bank Books and Rebel Press, 1983.
Vicker, Ray. Those Swiss Money Men. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973.
Volkman, Ernest. Spies: The Secret Agents Who Changed the Course of History. New York, Chichester, Brisbane: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1994.
Wade, Bob “Daddy-O,” with Keith and Kent Zimmerman. Daddy-O: Iguana Heads and Texas Tales. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
Waldman, Michael, and the staff of the Public Citizen’s Congress Watch. Who Robbed America? A Citizen’s Guide to the Savings & Loan Scandal. New York: Random House, 1990.
Waller, Leslie. The Swiss Bank Connection. New York: A Signet Book from New American Library, Inc., 1972.
Walsh, Lawrence E. Iran-Contra: The Final Report. New York: Times Books, a Division of Random House,1994.
Walter, Ingo. Secret Money: The World of International Financial Secrecy. Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Books, D.C. Heath and Company, 1985.
Weiner, Tim. Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget. New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1990.
Weschberg, Joseph. The Merchant Bankers. New York: Pocket Books, a Simon & Schuster division of Gulf & Western Corporation, 1966.
West, Nigel. The Circus: MI5 Operations 1945-1972. New York: Stein and Day Publishers, 1983.
Wilmsen, Steven. Silverado: Neil Bush and the Savings and Loan Scandal. Washington, D.C., National Press Books, 1991.
Winsor, Jackie. Jackie Winsor. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1979.
Winter-Berger, Robert N. The Washington Pay-Off: An Insider’s View of Corruption in Government. Secaucus, New Jersey: Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1972.
Wise, David and Thomas B. Ross. The Espionage Establishment. New York: Random House, 1967.
_____. The Invisible Government. New York: Random House, 1964.
Robert Paul Wolff, B. Moore and Herbert Marcuse. A Critique of Pure Tolerance. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965, rpt. 1969.
Wolfe, Jane. The Murchisons: The Rise and Fall of a Texas Dynasty. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.
Woods, Gerald, Philip Thompson, and John Williams. Art Without Boundaries. New York and Washington: Praeger Publishers, 1972.
Woodward, Bob. Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987. New York, London, Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 1987.
World Who’s Who in Finance and Industry (Formerly World Who’s Who in Commerce and Industry). 16th Edition 1970-71. Chicago, Illinois. Marquis Who’s Who. 19th Edition 1975-76. 20th Edition 1977-78.
Zakanitch, Robert. Fondation du Chateau de Jun, 11 June–15 September 1983.
Zepezauer, Mark. The CIA’s Greatest Hits. Tucson: Odonian Press, 1994.
Gravity waves, mysterious waves that ripple unseen throughout the atmosphere, may be a major source of airplane turbulence, a new study suggests. The new findings, presented Tuesday (Dec. 4) here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, may help explain why planes get shaky in apparently clear skies. Forecasting those waves may allow planes to reroute around them. ”Just like waves on the ocean, as they approach a beach, they can amplify and break. Gravity waves in the atmosphere can amplify and break, and we’re finding now that’s a major contributor to turbulence in the atmosphere that affects aircrafts.”
Gravity waves form when air traveling up and down in the atmosphere meets resistance. For instance, clouds rising in the troposphere, the lower level of the atmosphere where air mixes freely, will bump up against the boundary of the much more stable stratosphere, forming ripples in the process. These waves can travel up to 180 miles (300 kilometers) before breaking, said Robert Sharman, a meteorologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), who conducted the study. ”They’re waves running around in the atmosphere all the time,” Sharman told LiveScience.
Sharman and his colleagues wanted to understand when and where these waves occur. They collected data from commercial aircraft flight recorders, which record the location, duration and intensity of turbulence. Then they recreated these turbulent events using a computer simulation that models the atmosphere. They found that gravity waves “break” on the surfaces of planes, just like ocean waves breaking on the beach, causing much of the turbulence that occurs out of the blue in clear air. In the past, pilots thought airplanes moving up and down in the jet stream caused such turbulence.
Many of the waves were formed in storm clouds that tracked the jet stream, but traveled miles away and broke in areas where airplanes were flying. Big mountains like the Colorado Rockies often form gravity waves as air flows over the mountains and then overshoots as it reaches the other side. Luckily, gravity waves don’t span a large height in the atmosphere, so it’s pretty easy for airplanes to avoid such waves, Sharman said. ”They could either climb over it or go beneath it,” he said. The team is now using their simulations to forecast gravity waves throughout the world. While the forecasts can predict the waves’ occurrence most of the time, they would need to reach about 85 percent accuracy before pilots would use such predictions to avoid choppy air, he said. ”Anytime they change course, it costs the airlines fuel. They have to be pretty certain that that forecast is right before they’ll make any deviation,” he said.
Goddard physicist Babak Saif is part of a team from Stanford University and AOSense, Inc., a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company, that has received NASA funding to use atom optics to detect theoretically predicted gravitational waves.{photo: NASA | Pat Izzo}
Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves that ripple outward from moving celestial objects such as stars or black holes — but such waves are so weak by the time they reach Earth that the planet quivers by less than an atom’s width in response. NASA wants to harness the spooky quantum behavior of atoms to help detect the gravitational waves. The U.S. space agency has funded the possible solution, called atom interferometry, so that it might someday enable a mission consisting of three identical spacecraft flying in a triangle formation between 310 miles (500 kilometers) and 3,107 miles (5,000 kilometers). If a gravitational wave swept through the area, the spacecraft interferometers would sense the tiny disturbances. ”The NASA funding is basically for a preliminary design study for what a gravitational wave detector would look like,” said Mark Kasevich, a physicist at Stanford University.
The technology would enable scientists to detect gravitational waves related to events such as a black hole or two stars merging in a distant star system. It could also lead to more sensitive sensors for steering U.S. military submarines or aircraft — Kasevich’s Stanford lab has been working on gyroscopes, gravimeters, accelerometers and gravity gradiometers for the U.S. Department of Defense. But for NASA, a gravitational wave detector is “probably a decade away,” Kasevich told TechNewsDaily. An actual space mission would probably take even longer to launch. Normal interferometry — a 200-year-old technique — gets accurate measurements by comparing light that has been split into two equal halves by a beam splitter. Scientists shine one of the beams through something they want to measure, and compare it to the other untouched beam by bouncing both off mirrors to reflect back onto a detector or camera. [Space Quantum Experiment Has First Balloon Flight]
The atomic interferometry funded by NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program takes advantage of quantum mechanics, the physics theory that describes how matter behaves at the tiniest scales. That effort is led by researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; Stanford University in California; and AOSense Inc., in Sunnyvale, Calif. Researchers would first fire a laser to slow and cool the atoms down to a frigid temperature near absolute zero (minus 273.15 degrees Celsius), so that the atoms behave like waves rather than particles. Then they would fire more laser pulses that put the atoms into a “superposition of states,” which allows them to exist in multiple states simultaneously. The superposition means a single atom can split into different states that exist independently and go flying off on different trajectories like separate particles, before they recombine at a detector. If an atom’s path is altered even a bit by a passing gravitational wave, the atom interferometer can detect the difference. NASA’s funding does not cover the full spacecraft mission just yet. First, the researchers plan to test the atomic interferometer at a 33-foot drop tower in the basement of a Stanford University physics laboratory — firing lasers at a cloud of falling rubidium atoms to cool them and then put them into their “spooky” quantum states. Successful testing could establish the foundation for making the space version of the technology.
This illustration shows the variations in the lunar gravity field as measured by the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL). Red corresponds to mass excesses and blue corresponds to mass deficiencies.
Beneath its heavily pockmarked surface, the moon’s interior bears remnants of the very early solar system. Unlike Earth, where plate tectonics has essentially erased any trace of the planet’s earliest composition, the moon’s interior has remained relatively undisturbed over billions of years, preserving a record in its rocks of processes that occurred in the solar system’s earliest days. Now scientists at MIT, NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and elsewhere have found evidence that, beneath its surface, the moon’s crust is almost completely pulverized. The finding suggests that, in its first billion years, the moon — and probably other planets like Earth — may have endured much more fracturing from massive impacts than previously thought. The startling observations come from data collected by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission. Since March, the mission’s twin spacecraft, named Ebb and Flow, have been orbiting the moon and measuring its gravitational field.
From GRAIL’s measurements, planetary scientists have now stitched together a high-resolution map of the moon’s gravity — a force created by surface structures such as mountains and craters, as well as deeper structures below the surface. The resulting map reveals an interior gravitational field consistent with an incredibly fractured lunar crust. “It was known that planets were battered by impacts, but nobody had envisioned that the [moon’s] crust was so beaten up,” says MIT’s Maria Zuber, who leads the GRAIL mission and is the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “This is a really big surprise, and is going to cause a lot of people to think about what this means for planetary evolution.” Zuber and her colleagues detail their findings from GRAIL in three papers published this week in Science. GRAIL’s lunar gravity map has also revealed numerous structures on the moon’s surface that were unresolved by previous gravity maps of any planet, including volcanic landforms, impact basin rings, and many simple, bowl-shaped craters. From GRAIL’s measurements, scientists have determined that the moon’s crust, ranging in thickness from 34 to 43 kilometers, is much thinner than planetary geologists had previously suspected. The crust beneath some major basins is nearly nonexistent, indicating that early impacts may have excavated the lunar mantle, providing a window into the interior.
Lifting a veil
To generate the gravity map, GRAIL’s two probes measure the changing distance between themselves as they orbit in tight formation around the moon. As one of the probes flies over a large mass, such as a mountain or dense, underground rock, the stronger local gravity will pull that probe ahead, widening the space between the two spacecraft. Scientists can translate this changing distance into a gravitational map, representing the gravity produced by both the surface structures and the interior. To find the gravitational field for the moon’s interior alone, Zuber’s team used topographic measurements from another of their instruments, a laser altimeter aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a separate spacecraft in orbit around the moon. The scientists calculated the gravitational field expected to be produced by the moon’s topography — its surface structures alone — then subtracted that field from the field measured by GRAIL. “It’s essentially like removing a veil to reveal the gravity due to the inside of the planet,” Zuber says. “And when we saw those maps, we were just speechless.”
Compared to the surface, the map of the interior looked extraordinarily smooth. In fact, the team found that most of the moon’s local gravity is due to surface features, such as crater rims and mountains. Except for the large impact basins, the moon’s upper crust, largely lacks dense rock structures, and is instead likely made of porous, pulverized material. The interior map did reveal long, linear structures of denser material, which Zuber and her team believe to be buried lunar dikes — formed from magma that seeped into large fractures in the crust, and then solidified into dense walls of rock. These dikes represent evidence for expansion of the moon in its earliest history. But overall, 98 percent of the lunar crust is fragmented — a clear remnant of very early, very massive impacts. “This is interesting for the moon,” Zuber says. “But what it also means is that every other planet was being bombarded like this.” The resulting fractures, she says, affect the way a planetary body loses heat and also provide a pathway for the transport of interior fluids. David Kring, a senior staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, says knowing the extent of pulverization in the moon’s crust is an essential detail needed to determine the moon’s bulk composition. Such information would go a long way toward identifying the processes the formed the moon and other planets. “The staggering quality of the data reported by Professor Zuber and her colleagues is amazing,” says Kring, who was not involved in the research. “The data are exciting because they foretell far more insights than are captured in these initial three papers.”
Perfect times two
In addition to GRAIL’s discoveries, Zuber says another major accomplishment has been the performance of the spacecraft themselves. To achieve the mission’s science goals, the two probes, which can travel more than 200 kilometers apart, needed to be able to measure changes in the distance between them to within a few tenths of a micron per second. But GRAIL actually outperformed its measurement requirements by about a factor of five, resolving changes in spacecraft distance to several hundredths of a micron per second — one twenty-thousandth the velocity that a snail travels. “On this mission, with two spacecraft, everything had to go perfectly twice,” Zuber says, adding proudly: “Imagine you’re a parent raising a twins, and your children sit down at the piano and play a duet perfectly. That’s how it feels.”
The LIGO project to detect gravitational waves has been given the green light to begin a major upgrade of its detectors. When the upgrade is completed in 2014, the project may be sensitive enough to detect gravitational waves – which have yet to be observed – as often as once a week. Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. They are triggered by the motion of massive objects. “[With the upgrade], either we’ll see a signal or Einstein’s general theory of relativity will be wrong,” says LIGO director Jay Marx of Caltech in Pasadena, US. The ability to listen to gravitational waves would also open up a completely new window for astronomers to observe the universe, allowing them to witness violent events like the collision of pairs of black holes or neutron stars, and even hear the primeval groaning of the universe as it expanded during its earliest moments. LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories) uses two gravitational wave detectors in the US – one in Livingston, Louisiana, and the other at the Hanford nuclear facility near Richland, Washington. Using lasers, the detectors look for slight changes in the length of tunnels several kilometres long that would occur with the passage of a gravitational wave.
Powerful lasers
Although LIGO is the world’s most sensitive gravitational wave project, scientists estimate that currently it has a chance of only a few percent per year of detecting a source for the waves. Scientists just have to wait and hope that a violent enough event will occur close enough to the Earth to be noticeable. To improve the situation, scientists have been planning a major upgrade called Advanced LIGO. Now, the project has been given approval to begin the upgrades, which should be finished in 2014. The US National Science Foundation’s governing board gave the go-ahead for the $205 million upgrade at a meeting on 27 March. The upgrade will involve replacing the existing 10-watt lasers with 180-watt versions, among other improvements. Put together, the improvements mean Advanced LIGO will be 10 times more sensitive in the frequency range it currently monitors. It will also be able to detect waves at much lower frequencies, down to 10 Hz, compared to its current lower limit of around 40 Hz. The improvements mean Advanced LIGO will be able to detect sources 10 times farther from Earth than it can now, increasing the volume of space it will probe by a factor of 1000. “With Advanced LIGO, we think we’ll be seeing gravitational waves from sources maybe once a week,” Marx told New Scientist. “Advanced LIGO really opens the door to a new form of astronomy.”
Suffering from its exorbitant price point and a dearth of titles, Sony’s PlayStation 3 isn’t exactly the most popular gaming platform on the block. But while the console flounders in the commercial space, the PS3 may be finding a new calling in the realm of science and research. Right now, a cluster of eight interlinked PS3s is busy solving a celestial mystery involving gravitational waves and what happens when a super-massive black hole, about a million times the mass of our own sun, swallows up a star. As the architect of this research, Dr. Gaurav Khanna is employing his so-called “gravity grid” of PS3s to help measure these theoretical gravity waves — ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light — that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity predicted would emerge when such an event takes place.
It turns out that the PS3 is ideal for doing precisely the kind of heavy computational lifting Khanna requires for his project, and the fact that it’s a relatively open platform makes programming scientific applications feasible. “The interest in the PS3 really was for two main reasons,” explains Khanna, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth who specializes in computational astrophysics. “One of those is that Sony did this remarkable thing of making the PS3 an open platform, so you can in fact run Linux on it and it doesn’t control what you do.” He also says that the console’s Cell processor, co-developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba, can deliver massive amounts of power, comparable even to that of a supercomputer — if you know how to optimize code and have a few extra consoles lying around that you can string together. “The PS3/Linux combination offers a very attractive cost-performance solution whether the PS3s are distributed (like Sony and Stanford’s Folding [at] home initiative) or clustered together (like Khanna’s), says Sony’s senior development manager of research and development, Noam Rimon.
According to Rimon, the Cell processor was designed as a parallel processing device, so he’s not all that surprised the research community has embraced it. “It has a general purpose processor, as well as eight additional processing cores, each of which has two processing pipelines and can process multiple numbers, all at the same time,” Rimon says. This is precisely what Khanna needed. Prior to obtaining his PS3s, Khanna relied on grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to use various supercomputing sites spread across the United States “Typically I’d use a couple hundred processors — going up to 500 — to do these same types of things.” However, each of those supercomputer runs cost Khanna as much as $5,000 in grant money. Eight 60 GB PS3s would cost just $3,200, by contrast, but Khanna figured he would have a hard time convincing the NSF to give him a grant to buy game consoles, even if the overall price tag was lower. So after tweaking his code this past summer so that it could take advantage of the Cell’s unique architecture, Khanna set about petitioning Sony for some help in the form of free PS3s. “Once I was able to get to the point that I had this kind of performance from a single PS3, I think that’s when Sony started paying attention,” Khanna says of his optimized code. Khanna says that his gravity grid has been up and running for a little over a month now and that, crudely speaking, his eight consoles are equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on. “Basically, it’s almost like a replacement,” he says. “I don’t have to use that supercomputer anymore, which is a good thing.”
“For the same amount of money — well, I didn’t pay for it, but even if you look into the amount of funding that would go into buying something like eight PS3s — for the same amount of money I can do these runs indefinitely.” The point of the simulations Khanna and his team at UMass are running on the cluster is to see if gravitational waves, which have been postulated for almost 100 years but have never been observed, are strong enough that we could actually observe them one day. Indeed, with NASA and other agencies building some very big gravitational wave observatories with the sensitivity to be able to detect these waves, Khanna’s sees his work as complementary to such endeavors. Khanna expects to publish the results of his research in the next few months. So while PS3 owners continue to wait for a fuller range of PS3 titles and low prices, at least they’ll have some reading material to pass the time.
“The Sony PlayStation 3 has a number of unique features that make it particularly suited for scientific computation. To start with, the PS3 is an open platform, which essentially means that one can run a different system software on it, for example, PowerPC Linux. Next, it has a revolutionary processor called the Cell processor which was developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba. This processor has a main CPU, called the PPU and several (six for the PS3) special compute engines, called SPUs available for raw computation. Moreover, each SPU performs vector operations, which implies that it can compute on multiple data, in a single step. Finally, its incredibly low cost makes it very attractive as a scientific computing node, that is part of a cluster. In fact, its highly plausible that the raw computing power per dollar that the PS3 offers, is significantly higher than anything else on the market today!
Thanks to a very generous, partial donation by Sony, we have a sixteen PS3 cluster in our department, which we call PS3 Gravity Grid. Check out some pictures of the cluster here: 1) the PS3′s arrive; 2) the rack arrives; 3) front view of the cluster; 4) side view of the cluster. We are using “stock” PS3s for this cluster, with no hardware modifications. They are networked together using an inexpensive netgear gigabit switch. For Linux installation, there are several guides available on the internet. For YDL Linux, consider using the guide by Terrasoft Solutions. For Fedora Core 5/6, I found this guide particularly useful. For deploying a parallel job on this cluster, we use a code that implements a standard domain decomposition approach, based on message-passing (MPI). There are more details available on our code below. For compiling, we use GCC and also IBM’s XL compilers for the Cell, that are available as part of IBM’s Cell SDK. These are available from IBM’s alphaworks site. The MPI distribution that we are using is the recently released, OpenMPI distribution for PowerPC Linux.
Projects
* Binary Black Hole Coalescence using Perturbation Theory (GK) This project broadly deals with estimating properties of the gravity waves produced by the merger of two black holes. Gravitational waves are “ripples” in space-time that travel at the speed of light. These were theoretically predicted by Einstein’s general relativity, but have never been directly observed. Currently, there is an extensive search being performed for these waves by the newly constructed NSF LIGO laboratory and various other such observatories in Europe and Asia. The ESA and NASA also have a mission planned in the near future, the LISA mission, that will also be attempting to detect these waves. To learn more about these waves and the recent attempts to observe them, please visit the LISA mission website. http://lisa.jpl.nasa.gov/
The evolution code for the extreme-mass-ratio limit of this problem (referred to as EMRI) is essentially like an inhomogeneous wave-equation solver which includes a very complicated source-term. The source-term describes how the smaller black hole (or star) affects the space-time of the larger one. Because of the computational complexity of the source-term, it is often the most numerically intensive part of the whole evolution. On the PS3′s Cell processor, it is precisely this part of the computation that is farmed out to six SPUs. This approach essentially eliminates the entire time spent on the source computation and yields a speed up of over a factor of five over a PPU-only computation. It should be noted that the context of this computation is double-precision floating point operations. In single-precision, the speed-up is significantly higher. Overall, a single PS3 performs better than the highest-end desktops available and compares to as many as 25 nodes of an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. And there is still tremendous scope left for extracting more performance through further optimization. Furthermore, we distribute the entire computational domain across the sixteen PS3s using MPI (message passing) parallelization. This enables the entire cluster to run together, harmoniously, working on the computation in an efficient way. Each PS3 works on its part of the domain and communicates the appropriate data to the others, as needed. http://www.open-mpi.org/
In the most precise effort yet to detect gravitational waves — the quiverings of space-time predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity — the National Science Foundation in the late 1990′s carved two large V’s, one in the barren landscape of central Washington State, the other among the pines outside Baton Rouge, La. The tunnels are part of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, known as LIGO. If something astronomically violent, like a collision of two black holes, shakes the fabric of the universe within 300 million light-years of Earth, an expanse that encompasses several thousand galaxies, LIGO should see the resulting gravitational ripples. The observatory is sensitive enough to detect a change of less than one ten-quadrillionth of an inch, or about a thousandth of the diameter of a proton, in the length of the 2.5-mile-long tunnels. After several years of testing and fine-tuning — special dampers had to be installed at the Louisiana site to counteract vibrations generated when nearby loggers cut down trees, for instance — the observatory began full operation in November. The centers cost nearly $300 million to build and $30 million a year to operate.
The data so far, reported last week at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Dallas, contain nothing of interest. In fact, scientists would not be surprised if the initial run of the experiment over the next year or so found nothing at all. “I would still sleep well about general relativity,” said Peter R. Saulson, a physics professor at Syracuse and an observatory spokesman. Jay Marx, LIGO’s executive director, estimated that the chance of success was “25 percent, if nature’s kind.” General relativity, formulated 90 years ago by Einstein to explain the properties of space and time, fits well with measurements of gravity in and around the solar system. But predictions about what happens around black holes and other places where gravity is extremely strong remain largely untested. One of the predictions is that in such conditions, sizable gravitational waves will be produced. With new research, scientists have a better idea of what LIGO should look for. Researchers led by Joan M. Centrella, chief of the Gravitational Astrophysics Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, announced last month that they had succeeded in calculating the shape of the gravitational waves that should result when two black holes, orbiting one another, merge. “This is not something made up like in a science fiction movie,” Dr. Centrella said in a news conference announcing the findings. “Rather, we have confidence that these results are the real deal, that we have the true gravitational wave fingerprint predicted by Einstein for the black hole merger.”
The equations of general relativity can be easily written down but are notoriously hard to solve. Astrophysicists were able to simulate the head-on collision of two black holes three decades ago, but computing the paths of orbiting black holes and their violent merger proved much harder. “This has been a holy grail type of quest for the last 30 years,” Dr. Centrella said. Dr. Centrella’s simulations still contain some simplifications that do not reflect attributes of actual black hole pairs: the two black holes have the same mass, and neither is spinning. The calculations predicted, for example, that 4 percent of the mass of the black holes should be converted into gravitational waves. “That’s a very important number,” Dr. Saulson said. “That tells us that these gravitational waves are going to be about as strong as we hoped they could be.” He added, “And that’s got those of us working on the detectors very excited, making it seem more likely we’ll bump into something.” Einstein’s theory of general relativity changed the idea of gravity from a simple force dragging apples from a tree to a puzzle of geometry. Imagine a rubber sheet pulled taut horizontally and then tossing a bowling ball and a tennis ball onto it. The heavier bowling ball sinks deeper, and the tennis ball will move toward the bowling ball not because of a direct attraction between the two, but because the tennis ball rolls into the depression around the bowling ball. In this two-dimensional analogy of space-time, one can also imagine a sudden collision of objects creating ripples that skitter across the sheet. Those are the gravitational waves LIGO hopes to detect.
At each site, a laser beam generated at the base of the V is split in two and shot through tunnels buried along each 2.5-mile-long arm. The light bounces back and forth in the two tunnels. When a gravitational wave speeds past, it should stretch and shrink the distance that the laser beams travel, causing the laser light to flicker into a detector at the base of the V. Because the instruments are susceptible to tiny disturbances, only signals seen by both LIGO detectors, nearly 2,000 miles apart, would likely be convincing to scientists. The skepticism about whether LIGO will actually spot gravitational waves comes not from questions about general relativity — “People would be incredibly surprised if it wasn’t right,” Dr. Marx said — but uncertainty about how often events that create gravitational waves occur in the universe. Pairs of orbiting black holes should be the end result of star systems consisting of two massive stars. Over time, the black holes would spiral inward and eventually collide. Astronomers can see plenty of pairs of massive stars twirling in the sky, but they cannot be sure that they ultimately collapse into pairs of black holes. Because astrophysicists do not fully understand how stars age, “There are multiple factors of uncertainty,” said Vassiliki Kalogera, a professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University. “We don’t know that binary black holes exist.”
At the optimistic end, her calculations suggest that LIGO could detect up to 10 black hole mergers a year. But the calculations are still uncertain by a factor of 100, which means that at the pessimistic end, the rate of detectable black hole mergers may be just one every 50 years or so. A more common event is the merger of neutron stars, the dense, burned-out cores left over by some exploding stars. The most convincing evidence so far for gravitational waves was the observation in 1974 by two Princeton physicists, Joseph H. Taylor and his student Russell A. Hulse. They saw a pair of pulsating neutron stars spiraling inward toward each other. The amount of energy lost in the decaying orbits turned out to match the amount of energy expected to be emitted in gravitational waves. However, the gravitational waves produced by orbiting neutron stars are too weak to be detected by LIGO. And even when the neutron stars slam into each other, the cataclysm is not nearly as violent as the merger of black holes, so a neutron star collision would have to occur much closer in order for LIGO to see it. Dr. Kalogera’s calculations suggest that the observatory will see a neutron star merger once every seven or eight years, at best. For LIGO to detect gravitational waves routinely, the instruments will need a proposed $200 million upgrade, which includes more powerful lasers, to increase their sensitivity by a factor of 10, Dr. Marx said.
Astronomers hope that LIGO and its successors, as well as similar detectors in Europe and Japan, will become a new type of telescope. If the detection of gravitational waves becomes common, astronomers should be able to deduce many physical properties of black holes and neutron stars. They may also find that such objects are more common in certain types of galaxies. The upgraded observatory may also be able to detect gravitational waves produced by exploding stars or even reverberations of the Big Bang 13.6 billion years ago. Sometime in the next decade, NASA and the European Space Agency hope to launch a space-based gravitational wave detector called the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA. Consisting of three satellites flying around the sun in the formation of an equilateral triangle 3.1 million miles apart, LISA would be able to detect gravitational waves with much larger wavelengths, like those produced when mega-black holes at the center of galaxies merge. For now, the scientists await their first gravitational wave. “We are all hoping we are lucky,” said Gabriela González, a physics professor at Louisiana State and a LIGO scientist. “Even if we are not, we will know more about nature.”
“The gravity waves of this story should not be confused with the gravitational waves of astrophysics. One is an ordinary wave of water or air; the other is a ripple in the fabric of spacetime itself.”
Did you know that there’s a new breakfast food that helps meteorologists predict severe storms? Down South they call it “GrITs.” GrITs stands for Gravity wave Interactions with Tornadoes. “It’s a computer model I developed to study how atmospheric gravity waves interact with severe storms,” says research meteorologist Tim Coleman of the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Alabama. According to Coleman, wave-storm interactions are very important. If a gravity wave hits a rotating thunderstorm, it can sometimes spin that storm up into a tornado. What is an atmospheric gravity wave? Coleman explains: “They are similar to waves on the surface of the ocean, but they roll through the air instead of the water. Gravity is what keeps them going. If you push water up and then it plops back down, it creates waves. It’s the same with air.” Coleman left his job as a TV weather anchor in Birmingham to work on his Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “I’m having fun,” he says, but his smile and enthusiasm already gave that away. “You can see gravity waves everywhere,” he continues. “When I drove in to work this morning, I saw some waves in the clouds. I even think about wave dynamics on the water when I go fishing now.”
Gravity waves get started when an impulse disturbs the atmosphere. An impulse could be, for instance, a wind shear, a thunderstorm updraft, or a sudden change in the jet stream. Gravity waves go billowing out from these disturbances like ripples around a rock thrown in a pond. When a gravity wave bears down on a rotating thunderstorm, it compresses the storm. This, in turn, causes the storm to spin faster. To understand why, Coleman describes an ice skater spinning with her arms held straight out. “Her spin increases when she pulls her arms inward.” Ditto for spinning storms: When they are compressed by gravity waves, they spin faster to conserve angular momentum. “There is also wind shear in a gravity wave, and the storm can take that wind shear and tilt it and make even more spin. All of these factors may increase storm rotation, making it more powerful and more likely to produce a tornado.” “We’ve also seen at least one case of a tornado already on the ground (in Birmingham, Alabama, on April 8, 1998) which may have become more intense as it interacted with a gravity wave.” Coleman also points out that gravity waves sometimes come in sets, and with each passing wave, sometimes the tornado or rotating storm will grow stronger. Tim and his boss, Dr. Kevin Knupp, are beginning the process of training National Weather Service and TV meteorologists to look for gravity waves in real-time, and to use the theories behind the GrITs model to modify forecasts accordingly. Who would have thought grits could predict bad weather? “Just us meteorologists in Alabama,” laughs Coleman. Seriously, though, Gravity wave Interactions with Tornadoes could be the next big thing in severe storm forecasting.
Scientists have attempted to disprove Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity for the better part of a century. After testing and confirming Einstein’s prediction in 2002 that gravity moves at the speed of light, a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia has spent the past five years defending the result, as well as his own innovative experimental techniques for measuring the speed of propagation of the tiny ripples of space-time known as gravitational waves. Sergei Kopeikin, associate professor of physics and astronomy in the College of Arts and Science, believes that his latest article, “Gravimagnetism, causality, and aberration of gravity in the gravitational light-ray deflection experiments” published along with Edward Fomalont from the National Radio Astronomical Observatory, arrives at a consensus in the continuing debate that has divided the scientific community. An experiment conducted by Fomalont and Kopeikin five years ago found that the gravity force of Jupiter and light travel at the same speed, which validates Einstein’s suggestion that gravity and electromagnetic field properties, are governed by the same principle of special relativity with a single fundamental speed. In observing the gravitational deflection of light caused by motion of Jupiter in space, Kopeikin concluded that mass currents cause non-stationary gravimagnetic fields to form in accordance with Einstein’s point of view. The research paper that discusses the gravimagnetic field appears in the October edition of Journal of General Relativity and Gravitation. Einstein believed that in order to measure any property of gravity, one has to use test particles. “By observing the motion of the particles under influence of the gravity force, one can then extract properties of the gravitational field,” Kopeikin said. “Particles without mass – such as photons – are particularly useful because they always propagate with constant speed of light irrespectively of the reference frame used for observations.”
The property of gravity tested in the experiment with Jupiter also is called causality. Causality denotes the relationship between one event (cause) and another event (effect), which is the consequence (result) of the first. In the case of the speed of gravity experiment, the cause is the event of the gravitational perturbation of photon by Jupiter, and the effect is the event of detection of this gravitational perturbation by an observer. The two events are separated by a certain interval of time which can be measured as Jupiter moves, and compared with an independently-measured interval of time taken by photon to propagate from Jupiter to the observer. The experiment found that two intervals of time for gravity and light coincide up to 20 percent. Therefore, the gravitational field cannot act faster than light propagates.” Other physicists argue that the Fomalont-Kopeikin experiment measured nothing else but the speed of light. “This point of view stems from the belief that the time-dependent perturbation of the gravitational field of a uniformly moving Jupiter is too small to detect,” Kopeikin said. “However, our research article clearly demonstrates that this belief is based on insufficient mathematical exploration of the rich nature of the Einstein field equations and a misunderstanding of the physical laws of interaction of light and gravity in curved space-time.”
DETROIT, MI — The city is offering vacant lots at $200 a piece to neighboring home owners in the area of the proposed Hantz tree farming project on the city’s east side. In anticipation of selling up to1,956 city-owned lots to Hantz Woodlands at $300 each, Detroit’s Planning and Development Department sent letters to 108 residents who own homes adjacent to 118 of those properties, offering them first opportunity to purchase. “In many cases, people have been occupying those lots for a long time,” department Director Rob Anderson told City Council’s Planning and Economic Development Committee on Thursday. Council is being asked to authorize the sale, though the residents will have until Jan. 10 to notify the city of any interest in neighboring lots, which would be withdrawn from the Hantz deal. John Hantz, a Detroit resident who runs a Southfield-based network of financial services businesses, is behind the plan to buy the vacant land for about $600,000 and plant hardwood trees and conifers in a lumber business that supporters say would create jobs and clean up eyesores. He developed a 3-acre Hantz Farms test project that was received well among neighbors earlier this year.
Hantz Farms Tree crop urban farm
The process of buying a much larger swath of property has been slow and the proposal at times raised the ire of some residents who called the deal a “land grab.” But City Council is now officially being asked to authorize the sale. ”We have 48,000 parcels in the city — city-owned property. So to be able to transfer 1,900 of those is great,” Irvin Corley, Jr., Director of city Council’s Fiscal Analysis Division, told the committee Thursday. ”I guess my concern is, because we have such a large amount of land that we are looking to transfer to Hantz Farms, why isn’t there a development agreement that’s driving this? … But I’m happy that we have someone who’s willing to purchase up to 2,000 lots and pay taxes on them.”
Council Member Saunteel Jenkins said the city’s law department encouraged a purchase agreement rather than development agreement, and the committee postponed the matter another week in pursuit of a legal explanation for that recommendation. In addition to removing from the deal any lots that neighbors ask to buy, about 10 acres of land near Kercheval and McClellan streets once set aside for a retail development will also have to be addressed before any sale. City Planning Commission Deputy Director Rory Bolger said the retail development plan was part of a 1980s urban renewal plan, but never became reality. He recommended for legal considerations that the land be removed from the proposal until the renewal plan is repealed or revised, a process that could take months.
Detroit City Council tabled discussion over the proposed sale of an enormous plot of city-owned land to the Hantz Farms development company at a marathon pre-Thanksgiving council session Tuesday, finally allowing for a public hearing on the controversial urban agriculture deal. If approved, the purchase of roughly 140 acres of land on the city’s east side by financial services magnate John Hantz would be the largest such deal in Detroit’s history. The proposed area lies roughly between Van Dyke and St. Jean Street and Jefferson and Mack Avenue. Through a subdivision of his company called Hantz Woodlands, the businessman is seeking to transform the area into a mixed hardwoods timber farm, pending the approval of a new city urban agriculture ordinance. He has also indicated a willingness to purchase and maintain the land, simply in order to make the area more livable.
Under the proposed agreement, the city is offering to sell the land to Hantz Woodlands at slightly over 8 cents per square foot, provided they maintain the land, demolish a number of derelict buildings and plant 15,000 trees. Although councilmembers Saunteel Jenkins, Kenneth Cockrel Jr. and Gary Brown pushed for an immediate vote, the body as a whole eventually decided to postpone further discussion until a special Dec. 11 council session, allowing time for a public hearing on the matter. No regular public council meetings are scheduled from Nov. 21 to Jan. 7 due to a holiday recess. Tuesday’s meeting also included contentious debates over a $300,000 city contract with the law firm Miller Canfield and the future of the city’s water department. It attracted throngs of Detroiters interested sharing their thoughts with council. Although many were turned away at the door, a sizable crowd lingered outside council chambers over an hour after the start of the meeting, chanting to be let in. Chastised by Councilwoman Joann Watson and members of the public for not holding the meeting in the auditorium, Council President Charles Pugh said that room was booked — though he later confessed he was also concerned about avoiding interruptions.
Nearly all the citizens present were against the deal. In their comments they voiced concerns about a perceived lack of transparency around the deal and that Hantz was given preferential treatment because of his wealth. ”I’m very concerned by the precedent this sets,” said Detroiter Shane Bernardo. “Members of Hantz Woodlands have been able to circumvent the process that many others of our city have to follow. The scale of this land grab should be of some concern to everyone in this room.” At the request of council’s Planning and Economic Development Committee, which moved the measure forward last week, the deal was rewritten from a simple purchase agreement to a development agreement for Tuesday’s meeting. A reverter clause was also added allowing the city to back out if certain terms were not followed. Nevertheless, many council members had qualms about the deal and the perceived rush by the Bing administration to move ahead with approving it. When asked about the plan’s urgency, Robert Anderson, Director of the City’s Planning and Development Department, told council that developers wanted to move on the deal before the end of the year so they wouldn’t miss out on tree planting season. Councilman Kwame Kenyatta strongly opposed the measure, indicating that he felt the city would be selling itself short with the deal. ”This city is pregnant with progress. This city is pregnant with a future,” he said. “It seems like we’re the only ones who don’t see that.” Council President Charles Pugh and fellow councilman James Tate were somewhat supportive of the deal, but each expressed reservations. Pugh said he was concerned about a provision that would give Hantz Farms an opportunity to add additional properties around the development area. Tate felt there needed to be a public hearing to listen to the concerns of people in the affected area. Members of the council also raised questions about low agricultural tax rates and a two-year limit on the agreement’s reverter clause. Some also felt the vote should wait until after a Dec. 6 public hearing on an urban agriculture ordinance that might affect Hantz Woodlands ability to commercially harvest lumber.
Although Councilman Cockrel was unsuccessful in his effort to bring the agreement up for an immediate vote, he voiced concern about the impact that the debate around it might have on other potential investors. ”The one thing that been kind of frankly distressing about a lot the dialogue surrounding this [is] it almost has this class warfare aspect to it,” he said. “The reality is, if we really truly do want to redevelop this city and move it forward, don’t we want to also welcome people who have more than a few bucks in their wallet into the city?”
Environmentalists have grown used to thinking of urban agriculture as something that occurs on pinched vacant lots in former industrial towns. But as farms of 20 acres or more start appearing in more cities, their owners are reworking the definition of “urban farm,” and causing some agtivists to question whether bigger really is better. In San Diego, there’s the 140-acre Suzie’s Farm. In Albuquerque, there is 40-acre Skarsgard Farms. Not only are both located within the city limits, they both grew more than $1 million in organic produce this season. The success of such farms, combined with urban agriculture’s broad appeal, is inspiring city officials to consider dedicating large chunks of vacant land to farming. In San Francisco, redevelopment plans for the former Navy base on Treasure Island include an “urban agriculture park” of more than 20 acres, according to Michael Tymoff, the project director. In Cleveland, a 26-acre farming district has taken root where houses once stood. In Kansas City, Mo., leaders are considering turning a 420-acre former prison, or some portion thereof, into a farm. “We believe that there is room for both food system-related uses as well as more ‘traditional’ types of development” at the site, says Gerald Williams, a planner with the City of Kansas City. Depending on how much land Williams and his colleagues ultimately dedicate to agriculture, they may be building the biggest urban farm in the country.
The average American farm covers 418 acres, far more than the largest of its city counterparts. Yet the expanding footprint of farms in the urban core underscores people’s interest in the aesthetic of farming, as well as the rising market for local products and the abundance of vacant urban land. Detroit’s Hantz Farms is still a modest operation, but its outsized ambition has created a controversy of equal proportions. Businessman John Hantz originally proposed a for-profit urban farm of 10,000 acres. But local outcry about the plan — including its size and Hantz’s low-ball offer for the land — forced him to downsize to a still-expansive 200 acres, which will be planted as a tree farm. The project’s website proclaims it both “the world’s largest urban farm” and “Detroit’s saving grace.”
The Hantz controversy highlights one of the most vexing questions about urban agriculture: How much land should cities properly devote to farming? City halls nationwide find themselves emerging from the Great Recession with a lot of land to maintain. Urban farms and community gardens have become one of the most popular options. The problem is, many small urban farmers are tired of being told their work is symbolic and are eager to grow the amount of food that will bring in a profit. That’s the idea behind Cleveland’s Urban Agriculture Innovation Zone, which shelters not one large farm but many small ones: 15 half-acre incubator plots — fostering 15 new businesses — plus five “anchor” farms ranging from half an acre to four acres. “If we had another 20 spots, we could fill them,” says Marie Barni, who oversees the zone on behalf of the Ohio State University Extension. Barni and her team are reviewing applications from would-be farmers, with the hope that, after a few years in the incubator, they will grow up and move out like fledged chicks. Logically, the project is funded in part by the USDA’s Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program.
Small urban farms can quickly become enormous ones. As Monte Skarsgard says of his capacious Albuquerque range: “Besides the machinery, what we do isn’t much different than a scaled-up one-acre farm. The key is to finding the right combination of intensive crops to make the higher land costs in the city worth it.” Yet more than a few environmentalists have argued that urban farms must remain small or risk suburbanizing the city. One of the most prominent is Kaid Benfield, a smart-growth guru with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Benfield worries that urban farming, if practiced on a large scale, will dilute the walkability and density that defines cities. “I support the growing of food in cities, and have even done it myself,” Benfield cautions. “But it should be done in ways that support urbanism and not displace it. I’m not sure we’re talking about a city any more if we’re going to have fields of 20 acres and more.” By seeding large farms in the city, he says, “we risk locking in long-term environmental problems in terms of not having a healthy urban core. Central cities are starting to revive.”
One problem is that most of the best para-urban land (or land just outside cities) — which was once seen as ideal for growing food without huge transportation costs — has already been swallowed up by suburban development. Some would argue that there’s no way these large farms can last, given our nation’s history of boom and bust economic cycles. On a related note, Robin Shulman, author of Eat the City, said in a recent Grist interview, “… even in New York and San Francisco, [land availability] has crested and fallen again in direct relation to the economy. It’s a pattern that has happened repeatedly since the late 1800s. Whenever there’s an economic fall, people use the space where other buildings were to produce food to feed those who are hungry.” According to Benfield, “once urban land is made green, it’s going to become loved as green rather than loved as city.” Not that we can blame anyone for loving green space. But that’s where sticking to smaller, truly sustainably sized farms in cities — and leaving the bulk of our food production to rural areas — might make the most sense. It will also save us all the heartbreak of seeing our favorite crops plowed under too soon.
Detroit, the very symbol of American industrial might for most of the 20th century, is drawing up a radical renewal plan that calls for turning large swaths of this now-blighted, rusted-out city back into the fields and farmland that existed before the automobile. Operating on a scale never before attempted in this country, the city would demolish houses in some of the most desolate sections of Detroit and move residents into stronger neighborhoods. Roughly a quarter of the 139-square-mile city could go from urban to semi-rural.
Near downtown, fruit trees and vegetable farms would replace neighborhoods that are an eerie landscape of empty buildings and vacant lots. Suburban commuters heading into the city center might pass through what looks like the countryside to get there. Surviving neighborhoods in the birthplace of the auto industry would become pockets in expanses of green. Detroit officials first raised the idea in the 1990s, when blight was spreading. Now, with the recession plunging the city deeper into ruin, a decision on how to move forward is approaching. Mayor Dave Bing, who took office last year, is expected to unveil some details in his state-of-the-city address this month. “Things that were unthinkable are now becoming thinkable,” said James W. Hughes, dean of the School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, who is among the urban experts watching the experiment with interest. “There is now a realization that past glories are never going to be recaptured. Some people probably don’t accept that, but that is the reality.”
The meaning of what is afoot is now settling in across the city. “People are afraid,” said Deborah L. Younger, past executive director of a group called Detroit Local Initiatives Support Corporation that is working to revitalize five areas of the city. “When you read that neighborhoods may no longer exist, that sends fear.” Though the will to downsize has arrived, the way to do it is unclear and fraught with problems. Politically explosive decisions must be made about which neighborhoods should be bulldozed and which improved. Hundreds of millions of federal dollars will be needed to buy land, raze buildings and relocate residents, since this financially desperate city does not have the means to do it on its own. It isn’t known how many people in the mostly black, blue-collar city might be uprooted, but it could be thousands. Some won’t go willingly. “I like the way things are right here,” said David Hardin, 60, whose bungalow is one of three occupied homes on a block with dozens of empty lots near what is commonly known as City Airport. He has lived there since 1976, when every home on the street was occupied, and said he enjoys the peace and quiet.
For much of the 20th century, Detroit was an industrial powerhouse – the city that put the nation on wheels. Factory workers lived in neighborhoods of simple single- and two-story homes and walked to work. But then the plants began to close one by one. The riots of 1967 accelerated an exodus of whites to the suburbs, and many middle-class blacks followed. Now, a city of nearly 2 million in the 1950s has declined to less than half that number. On some blocks, only one or two occupied houses remain, surrounded by trash-strewn lots and vacant, burned-out homes. Scavengers have stripped anything of value from empty buildings. According to one recent estimate, Detroit has 33,500 empty houses and 91,000 vacant residential lots.
Several other declining industrial cities, such as Youngstown, Ohio, have also accepted downsizing. Since 2005, Youngstown has been tearing down a few hundred houses a year. But Detroit’s plans dwarf that effort. The approximately 40 square miles of vacant property in Detroit is larger than the entire city of Youngstown. Faced with a $300 million budget deficit and a dwindling tax base, Bing argues that the city can’t continue to pay for police patrols, fire protection and other services for all areas. The current plan would demolish about 10,000 houses and empty buildings in three years and pump new investment into stronger neighborhoods. In the neighborhoods that would be cleared, the city would offer to relocate residents or buy them out. The city could use tax foreclosure to claim abandoned property and invoke eminent domain for those who refuse to leave, much as cities now do for freeway projects.
The mayor has begun lobbying Washington for support, and in January Detroit was awarded $40.8 million for renewal work. The federally funded Detroit Housing Commission supports Bing’s plan. “It takes a true partnership, because we don’t want to invest in a neighborhood that the city is not going to invest in,” said Eugene E. Jones, executive director of the commission. It is not known who might get the cleared land, but with prospects for recruiting industry slim, planners are considering agricultural uses. The city might offer larger tracts for sale or lease, or turn over smaller pieces to community organizations to use.
Maggie DeSantis, a board member of Community Development Advocates of Detroit, said she worries that shutting down neighborhoods without having new uses ready is a “recipe for disaster” that will invite crime and illegal dumping. The group recently proposed such things as the creation of suburban-style neighborhoods and nature parks. Residents like Hardin want to keep their neighborhoods and eliminate the blight. “We just try to keep it up,” he said. “I’ve been doing it since I got it, so I don’t look at nobody trying to help me do anything.” For others, Bing’s plans could represent a way out. Willie Mae Pickens has lived in her near east-side home since the 1960s and has watched as friends and neighbors left. Her house is the only one standing on her side of the street. “They can buy it today. Any day,” said Pickens, 87, referring to city officials. “I’ll get whatever they’ll give me for it, because I want to leave.”
This city is shrinking, and Mayor Dave Bing can live with that. The nation’s once-a-decade census, which gets under way next month, usually prompts expensive tally-building efforts by cities eager to maximize federal funding tied to the count. Detroit, which faces a population decline of as much as 150,000, has used that tactic in the past and once fought a successful court challenge to boost its count. But this time, Mr. Bing is pushing the city to embrace the bad news. The mayor is looking to the diminished tally, down from 951,270 in 2000, as a benchmark in his bid to reshape Detroit’s government, finances and perhaps even its geography to reflect its smaller population and tax base. That means, in part, cutting city services and laying off workers.
His approach to the census is a product of not only budget constraints but also a new, more modest view of the city’s prospects. “We’ve got to pick those core communities, those core neighborhoods” to sustain and preserve, he said at a recent public appearance, adding: “That’s something that’s possible here in Detroit.” Unlike his predecessors, Mr. Bing, a Democrat first elected last year to finish the term of disgraced former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, hasn’t touted big development plans or talked of a “renaissance.” Instead, he is trying to prepare residents for a new reality: that Detroit—like the auto industry that propelled it for a century—will have to get smaller before it gets bigger again.
With no high-profile census push, the city risks an undercount that would mean forgoing millions of dollars in federal funding. Nationwide, each person counted translates into about $1,000 to $1,200 in federal funding to municipal governments. But some community leaders see the hands-off approach as a sign the city’s leadership under Mr. Bing, a 66-year-old businessman and former basketball star, is prepared to face up to the depopulation problem and rethink Detroit’s future. “This is going to be hard to wrestle to the ground,” said Rip Rapson, president of the Kresge Foundation of Troy, Mich., a national philanthropy that has invested heavily in development projects aimed at salvaging the nicest remnants of the city. “He deserves enormous credit for leading the community into this.”
Soon after being elected to a full term in November, Mr. Bing began cutting back on city services such as buses and laying off hundreds of municipal workers. The mayor is now making plans to shutter or consolidate city departments and tear down 10,000 vacant buildings. And Mr. Bing is supporting efforts to shrink the capacity of the city’s school system by half. Along with the mayor, a number of academics and philanthropic groups are sketching visions of a different Detroit. One such vision has urban farms and park spaces filling the acres of barren patches where people once lived and worked. In a city of roughly 140 square miles, vacant residential and commercial property accounts for an estimated 40 square miles, an area larger than the city of Miami. “The potential of this open space is enormous,” said Dan Pitera, an architect at the University of Detroit Mercy who has done land-use studies on the city.
Thirty years ago, Mayor Coleman Young fought the census count in federal court, setting a precedent by arguing successfully that it missed tens of thousands of residents and cost Detroit millions in federal dollars. In 2000, Mayor Dennis Archer worked with schools, health clinics, neighborhood associations, charities and the like to pump up the numbers. The city even paid for census registration to be done at special block parties it helped throw. But that last count was ultimately a blow to Detroit’s pride, pinning its population below one million for the first time since the 1920s. At its peak in the 1950s, the city had been home to nearly two million people. Some experts believe the population will eventually settle just below 700,000, about the current size of Charlotte, N.C.
Long-term declines triggered by suburban sprawl, home-loan bias and racial strife have accelerated in recent years as home foreclosures and auto-industry cutbacks tear through even more stable, wealthy neighborhoods. Meanwhile, declining home values in Detroit’s better-off suburbs have made them more accessible to the city’s poorer residents, fueling the flight. The city is counting on nonprofit partners to take the lead on the census this year, rather than funding efforts itself. But with a population that is widely dispersed and largely poor and minority—two segments traditionally disinclined to fill out government paperwork—Detroit is already difficult to count. In the last census, just 62% of Detroiters responded, compared with an average of 71% statewide. “That’s why I keep telling the city, ‘you are in trouble,’ ” said Kurt Metzger, director of Data Driven Detroit, an organization founded by large local philanthropies that want to help the city collect accurate demographic, housing, economic and other information. “Unfortunately, they don’t have the resources.” Erica Hill, the mayor’s census coordinator, says Detroit is in a bind. It knows an undercount would be costly, but it is too broke to promote the census the way it used to. “We need to make sure the city gets its due,” she said. But “we have to be creative and build a lot of partnerships to make this happen.”
John Hantz is a wealthy money manager who lives in an older enclave of Detroit where all the houses are grand and not all of them are falling apart. Once a star stockbroker at American Express, he left 13 years ago to found his own firm. Today Hantz Financial Services has 20 offices in Michigan, Ohio, and Georgia, more than 500 employees, and $1.3 billion in assets under management. Twice divorced, Hantz, 48, lives alone in clubby, paneled splendor, surrounded by early-American landscapes on the walls, an autograph collection that veers from Detroit icons such as Ty Cobb and Henry Ford to Baron von Richthofen and Mussolini, and a set of Ayn Rand first editions. With a net worth of more than $100 million, he’s one of the richest men left in Detroit — one of the very few in his demographic who stayed put when others were fleeing to Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield Hills. Not long ago, while commuting, he stumbled on a big idea that might help save his dying city.
Every weekday Hantz pulls his Volvo SUV out of the gated driveway of his compound and drives half an hour to his office in Southfield, a northern suburb on the far side of Eight Mile Road. His route takes him through a desolate, postindustrial cityscape — the kind of scene that is shockingly common in Detroit. Along the way he passes vacant buildings, abandoned homes, and a whole lot of empty land. In some stretches he sees more pheasants than people. “Every year I tell myself it’s going to get better,” says Hantz, bright-eyed, with smooth cheeks and a little boy’s carefully combed haircut, “and every year it doesn’t.” Then one day about a year and a half ago, Hantz had a revelation. “We need scarcity,” he thought to himself as he drove past block after unoccupied block. “We can’t create opportunities, but we can create scarcity.” And that, he says one afternoon in his living room between puffs on an expensive cigar, “is how I got onto this idea of the farm.”
Yes, a farm. A large-scale, for-profit agricultural enterprise, wholly contained within the city limits of Detroit. Hantz thinks farming could do his city a lot of good: restore big chunks of tax-delinquent, resource-draining urban blight to pastoral productivity; provide decent jobs with benefits; supply local markets and restaurants with fresh produce; attract tourists from all over the world; and — most important of all — stimulate development around the edges as the local land market tilts from stultifying abundance to something more like scarcity and investors move in. Hantz is willing to commit $30 million to the project. He’ll start with a pilot program this spring involving up to 50 acres on Detroit’s east side. “Out of the gates,” he says, “it’ll be the largest urban farm in the world.”
This is possibly not as crazy as it sounds. Granted, the notion of devoting valuable city land to agriculture would be unfathomable in New York, London, or Tokyo. But Detroit is a special case. The city that was once the fourth largest in the country and served as a symbol of America’s industrial might has lately assumed a new role: North American poster child for the global phenomenon of shrinking postindustrial cities. Nearly 2 million people used to live in Detroit. Fewer than 900,000 remain. Even if, unlikely as it seems, the auto industry were to rebound dramatically and the U.S. economy were to come roaring back tomorrow, no one — not even the proudest civic boosters — imagines that the worst is over. “Detroit will probably be a city of 700,000 people when it’s all said and done,” says Doug Rothwell, CEO of Business Leaders for Michigan. “The big challenge is, What do you do with a population of 700,000 in a geography that can accommodate three times that much?”
Whatever the answer is, whenever it comes, it won’t be predicated on a return to past glory. “We have to be realistic,” says George Jackson, CEO of the Detroit Economic Growth Corp. (DEGC). “This is not about trying to re-create something. We’re not a world-class city.” If not world class, then what? A regional financial center? That’s already Chicago, and to a lesser extent Minneapolis. A biotech hub? Boston and San Diego are way out in front. Some think Detroit has a future in TV and movies, but Hollywood is skeptical. (“Best incentives in the country,” one producer says. “Worst crew.”) How about high tech and green manufacturing? Possibly, given the engineering and manufacturing talent that remains. But still there’s the problem of what to do with the city’s enormous amount of abandoned land, conservatively estimated at 40 square miles in a sprawling metropolis whose 139-square-mile footprint is easily bigger than San Francisco, Boston, and Manhattan combined. If you let it revert to nature, you abandon all hope of productive use. If you turn it over to parks and recreation, you add costs to an overburdened city government that can’t afford to teach its children, police its streets, or maintain the infrastructure it already has.
Faced with those facts, a growing number of policymakers and urban planners have begun to endorse farming as a solution. Former HUD secretary Henry Cisneros, now chairman of CityView, a private equity firm that invests in urban development, is familiar with Detroit’s land problem. He says he’s in favor of “other uses that engage human beings in their maintenance, such as urban agriculture.” After studying the city’s options at the request of civic leaders, the American Institute of Architects came to this conclusion in a recent report: “Detroit is particularly well suited to become a pioneer in urban agriculture at a commercial scale.” In that sense, Detroit might actually be ahead of the curve. When Alex Krieger, chairman of the department of urban planning and design at Harvard, imagines what the settled world might look like half a century from now, he sees “a checkerboard pattern” with “more densely urbanized areas, and areas preserved for various purposes such as farming.
The notion of a walled city, a contained city — that’s an 18th-century idea.” And where will the new ideas for the 21st century emerge? From older, decaying cities, Krieger believes, such as New Orleans, St. Louis, Cleveland, Newark, and especially Detroit — cities that have become, at least in part, “kind of empty containers.” This is a lot to hang on Hantz. Most of what he knows about agriculture he’s picked up over the past 18 months from the experts he’s consulting at Michigan State and the Kellogg Foundation. Then there’s the fact that many of his fellow citizens are openly rooting against him. Since word leaked of his scheme last spring, he has been criticized by community activists, who call the plan a land grab. Opponents have also raised questions about the run-ins he’s had with regulators at Hantz Financial. But Detroit is nothing if not desperate for new ideas, and Hantz has had no trouble getting his heard. “It all sounds very exciting,” says the DEGC’s Jackson, whose agency is working on assembling a package of incentives for Hantz, including free city land. “We hope it works.”
Detroit’s civic history is notable for repeated failed attempts to revitalize its core. Over the past three decades leaders have embraced a series of downtown redevelopment plans that promised to save the city. The massive Renaissance Center office and retail complex, built in the 1970s, mostly served to suck tenants out of other downtown buildings. (Today 48 of those buildings stand empty.) Three new casinos (one already bankrupt) and two new sports arenas (one for the NFL’s dreadful Lions, the other for MLB’s Tigers) have restored, on some nights, a little spark to downtown Detroit but have inspired little in the way of peripheral development. Downtown is still eerily underpopulated, the tax base is still crumbling, and people are still leaving. The jobless rate in the city is 27%. Nothing yet tried in Detroit even begins to address the fundamental issue of emptiness — empty factories, empty office buildings, empty houses, and above all, empty lots. Rampant arson, culminating in the annual frenzy of Devil’s Night, is partly to blame. But there has also been a lot of officially sanctioned demolition in Detroit. As white residents fled to the suburbs over the decades, houses in the decaying neighborhoods they left behind were often bulldozed.
Abandonment is an infrastructure problem, when you consider the cost of maintaining far-flung roads and sewer systems; it’s a city services problem, when you think about the inefficiencies of collecting trash and fighting crime in sparsely populated neighborhoods; and it’s a real estate problem. Houses in Detroit are selling for an average of $15,000. That sounds like a buying opportunity, and in fact Detroit looks pretty good right now to a young artist or entrepreneur who can’t afford anyplace else — but not yet to an investor. The smart money sees no point in buying as long as fresh inventory keeps flooding the market. “In the target sites we have,” says Hantz, “we [reevaluate] every two weeks.”
As Hantz began thinking about ways to absorb some of that inventory, what he imagined, he says, was a glacier: one broad, continuous swath of farmland, growing acre by acre, year by year, until it had overrun enough territory to raise the scarcity alarm and impel other investors to act. Rick Foster, an executive at the Kellogg Foundation whom Hantz sought out for advice, nudged him gently in a different direction. “I think you should make pods,” Foster said, meaning not one farm but many. Hantz was taken right away with the concept of creating several pods — or lakes, as he came to think of them — each as large as 300 acres, and each surrounded by its own valuable frontage. “What if we had seven lakes in the city?” he wondered. “Would people develop around those lakes?”
To increase the odds that they will, Hantz plans on making his farms both visually stunning and technologically cutting edge. Where there are row crops, Hantz says, they’ll be neatly organized, planted in “dead-straight lines — they may even be in a design.” But the plan isn’t to make Detroit look like Iowa. “Don’t think a farm with tractors,” says Hantz. “That’s old.” In fact, Hantz’s operation will bear little resemblance to a traditional farm. Mike Score, who recently left Michigan State’s agricultural extension program to join Hantz Farms as president, has written a business plan that calls for the deployment of the latest in farm technology, from compost-heated greenhouses to hydroponic (water only, no soil) and aeroponic (air only) growing systems designed to maximize productivity in cramped settings.
He’s really excited about apples. Hantz Farms will use a trellised system that’s compact, highly efficient, and tourist-friendly. It won’t be like apple picking in Massachusetts, and that’s the point. Score wants visitors to Hantz Farms to see that agriculture is not just something that takes place in the countryside. They will be able to “walk down the row pushing a baby stroller,” he promises. Crop selection will depend on the soil conditions of the plots that Hantz acquires. Experts insist that most of the land is not irretrievably toxic. The majority of the lots now vacant in Detroit were residential, not industrial; the biggest problem is how compacted the soil is. For the most part the farms will focus on high-margin edibles: peaches, berries, plums, nectarines, and exotic greens. Score says that the first crops are likely to be lettuce and heirloom tomatoes.
Hantz says he’s willing to put up the entire $30 million investment himself — all cash, no debt — and immediately begin hiring locally for full-time positions. But he wants two things first from Jackson at the DEGC: free tax-delinquent land, which he’ll combine with his own purchases, he says (he’s aiming for an average cost of $3,000 per acre, in line with rural farmland in southern Michigan), and a zoning adjustment that would create a new, lower tax rate for agriculture. There’s no deal yet, but neither request strikes Jackson as unattainable. “If we have reasonable due diligence,” he says, “I think we’ll give it a shot.”
Detroit mayor Dave Bing is watching closely. The Pistons Hall of Fame guard turned entrepreneur has had what his spokesman describes as “productive discussions” with Hantz. In a statement to Fortune, Bing says he’s “encouraged by the proposals to bring commercial farming back to Detroit. As we look to diversify our economy, commercial farming has some real potential for job growth and rebuilding our tax base.” Hantz, for his part, says he’s got three or four locations all picked out (“one of them will pop”) and is confident he’ll have seeds in the ground “in some sort of demonstration capacity” this spring. “Some things you’ve got to see in order to believe,” he says, waving his cigar. “This is a thing you’ve got to believe in order to see.”
Many have a hard time making that leap. When news of Hantz’s ambitious plan broke in the Detroit papers last spring, few people even knew who he was. A little digging turned up a less-than-spotless record at Hantz Financial Services. The firm has paid fines totaling more than $1 million in the past five years, including $675,000 in 2005, without admitting or denying guilt, “for fraud and misrepresentations relating to undisclosed revenue-sharing arrangements, as well as other violations,” according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. (Hantz responds, “If we find something that isn’t in compliance, we take immediate steps to correct the problem.”)
Hantz Farms’ first hire, VP Matt Allen, did have an established reputation in Detroit, but it wasn’t a good one. Two years ago, while he was press secretary for former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, Allen pleaded guilty to domestic violence and obstructing police after his wife called 911. He was sentenced to a year’s probation. Hantz says he has known Allen for many years and values his deep knowledge of the city. “He has earned a second chance, and I’m willing to give it to him,” he says. Some of Hantz’s biggest skeptics, ironically, are the same people who’ve been working to transform Detroit into a laboratory for urban farming for years, albeit on a much smaller scale. The nonprofit Detroit Agriculture Network counts nearly 900 urban gardens within the city limits. That’s a twofold increase in two years, and it places Detroit at the forefront of a vibrant national movement to grow more food locally and lessen the nation’s dependence on Big Ag.
None of those gardens is very big (average size: 0.25 acre), and they don’t generate a lot of cash (most don’t even try), but otherwise they’re great: as antidotes to urban blight; sources of healthy, affordable food in a city that, incredibly, has no chain supermarkets; providers of meaningful, if generally unpaid, work to the chronically unemployed; and beacons around which disintegrating communities can begin to regather themselves. That actually sounds a lot like what Hantz envisions his farms to be in the for-profit arena. But he doesn’t have many fans among the community gardeners, who feel that Hantz is using his money and connections to capitalize on their pioneering work. “I’m concerned about the corporate takeover of the urban agriculture movement in Detroit,” says Malik Yakini, a charter school principal and founder of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which operates D-Town Farm on Detroit’s west side. “At this point the key players with him seem to be all white men in a city that’s at least 82% black.”
Hantz, meanwhile, has no patience for what he calls “fear-based” criticism. He has a hard time concealing his contempt for the nonprofit sector generally. (“Someone must pay taxes,” he sniffs.) He also flatly rejects the idea that he’s orchestrating some kind of underhanded land grab. In fact, Hantz says that he welcomes others who might want to start their own farms in the city. “Viability and sustainability to me are all that matters,” he says. And yet Hantz is fully aware of the potentially historic scope of what he is proposing. After all, he’s talking about accumulating hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of acres inside a major American city. And it’s clear that he views Hantz Farms as his legacy. Already he’s told his 21-year-old daughter, Lauren, his only heir, that if she wants to own the land one day, she has to promise him she’ll never sell it. “This is like buying a penthouse in New York in 1940,” Hantz says. “No one should be able to afford to do this ever again.” That might seem like an overly optimistic view of Detroit’s future. But allow Hantz to dream a little. Twenty years from now, when people come to the city and have a drink at the bar at the top of the Renaissance Center, what will they see? Maybe that’s not the right vantage point. Maybe they’ll actually be on the farm, picking apples, looking up at the RenCen. “That’s the beauty of being down and out,” says Hantz. “You can actually open your mind to ideas that you would never otherwise embrace.” At this point, Detroit doesn’t have much left to lose.
Between 1950 and 1980, Detroit lost 500,000 trees to Dutch elm disease, urban expansion and attrition, according to Paul Bairley, director of Urban Forestry for The Greening of Detroit. Among the city’s various environmental initiatives, it’s looking to slash residential land use by 30 percent, letting areas grow into natural greenways. There are green job initiatives, and for the homeless, a community center provides training for eco-conscious work and just opened a human-generated workout room. With green gyms popping up in Seattle and Hong Kong, why aren’t we tapping into sweat equity everywhere?
Gives new meaning to upcyling
Converting otherwise wasted energy, from the kinetic motion of treadmills, elliptical machines, and stationary bikes, into renewable energy is cost-effective and energy-efficient. That’s what a community organization in Detroit did this week with its new green gym, for people living in its transitional housing and other shelter programs, staff and volunteers. “Not only is this gym a good idea for the environment, but it will help build the general health of our clients who often struggle with diabetes or heart disease,” states Rev. Faith Fowler, the executive director.
The Cass Green Gym’s facility offers weight machines, boxing bags, a treadmill, and stationary bikes featuring Green Revolution technology that generates electricity. Cass Community Social Services (CCSS), located on Detroit’s Cass Avenue, projects that full classes with ten people, is enough power to light three homes for an entire year. It will redirect it back to the building’s electrical grid, reducing operating costs.
The company, Green Revolution, taps into pedal power, providing exercise machines and consulting to facilities, harnessing the energy of gym rats into green power. Its technology can be installed on most brands of indoor cycling equipment. At its retrofit gym in Ridgefield, Connecticut, a typical cycling class with 20 bikes has the potential to produce up to 3.6 Megawatts (3,600,000 watts) of renewable energy a year. This is equivalent to lighting 72 homes for a month, and reduces carbon emissions by over 5,000 pounds.
CCSS also links job training and permanent employment with ways to reduce the footprint. One venture, modeled after a Native American enterprise in Oklahoma, recycles old illegally dumped tires from vacant lots and converts them into mud mats. So far, formerly homeless men have collected more than 5,000 tires and sold over 2,000 mats. Another of its programs involves x-ray recycling, removing patient information from films and packaging the remains for recycling. And its document shredding effort will reuse the paper for insulation in seniors and low-income homes. As a native Detroiter, who worked a block from this center, renewal efforts are personally meaningful to me — and it should be for all of us. It was heartening to read a Time article on addressing urban post-industrial problems: “we could regenerate not just a city but our sense of who we are.”
This past winter, the snow stayed so long we almost forgot what the ground looked like. In Detroit, there is little money for plowing; after a big storm, the streets and sidewalks disappear for days. Soon new pathways emerge, side streets get dug out one car-width wide. Bootprints through parks veer far from the buried sidewalks. Without the city to tell him where to walk, the pilgrim who first sets out in fresh snowfall creates his own path. Others will likely follow, or forge their own paths as needed. In the heart of summer, too, it becomes clear that the grid laid down by the ancient planners is now irrelevant. In vacant lots between neighborhoods and the attractions of thoroughfares, bus stops and liquor stores, well-worn paths stretch across hundreds of vacant lots. Gaston Bachelard called these les chemins du désir: pathways of desire. Paths that weren’t designed but eroded casually away by individuals finding the shortest distance between where they are coming from and where they intend to go.
photo by James Griffioen
It is an urban legend on many college campuses that many sidewalks and pathways were not planned at all, but paved by the university after students created their own paths from building to building, straying from those originally prescribed. The Motor City, like a college campus, has a large population that cannot afford cars, relying instead on bikes and feet to meet its needs. With enormous swaths of the city returning to prairie, where sidewalks are irrelevant and sometimes even dangerous, desire lines have become an integral yet entirely unintended part of the city’s infrastructure. There are hundreds of these prescriptive easements across neglected lots throughout the city. Desire lines are considered by many landscape architects to be proof of a flaw in the design of a physical space, or more gently, a sign that concrete cannot always impose its will on the human mind. But what about a physical space that no longer resembles its intended design, a city where tens of thousands of homes have been abandoned, burned, and buried in their own basements? While actual roads and sidewalks crumble with each season of freezing and thawing, Detroiters have taken it upon themselves to create new paths, in their own small way working to create a city that better suits their needs.
photo by James Griffioen
Academics around the world argue about whether the first paths were created by hunters following game trails. There are scientists who study ants to better understand highways. They have created mathematical models for trail formation. When the great cities were built, sometimes roads were built along ancient paths. The Romans imposed grids on every city but their own. In Detroit many of the streets are named for the Frenchmen whose ribbon farms stretching north from the river were covered in asphalt: Beaubien, Dequindre, Campau, Livernois, Chene. In many cities, there are streets named for dead men once revered throughout the land but now mostly forgotten (Fulton, Lafayette, Irving) and others named for men no one remembers. In Detroit, there are streets no one has named. And they belong to anyone.
When the film- maker Roger Graef approached me last year to make a film about the rise and fall of Detroit I had very few preconceptions about the place. Like everyone else, I knew it as the Motor City, one of the great epicentres of 20th-century music, and home of the American automobile. Only when I arrived in the city itself did the full-frontal cultural car crash that is 21st-century Detroit became blindingly apparent. Leaving behind the gift shops of the “Big Three” car manufacturers, the Motown merchandise and the bizarre ejaculating fountains of the now-notorious international airport, things become stranger and stranger. The drive along eerily empty ghost freeways into the ruins of inner-city Detroit is an Alice-like journey into a severely dystopian future. Passing the giant rubber tyre that dwarfs the nonexistent traffic in ironic testament to the busted hubris of Motown’s auto-makers, the city’s ripped backside begins to glide past outside the windows.
Like The Passenger, it’s hard to believe what we’re seeing. The vast, rusting hulks of abandoned car plants, (some of the largest structures ever built and far too expensive to pull down), beached amid a shining sea of grass. The blackened corpses of hundreds of burned-out houses, pulled back to earth by the green tentacles of nature. Only the drunken rows of telegraph poles marching away across acres of wildflowers and prairie give any clue as to where teeming city streets might once have been. Approaching the derelict shell of downtown Detroit, we see full-grown trees sprouting from the tops of deserted skyscrapers. In their shadows, the glazed eyes of the street zombies slide into view, stumbling in front of the car. Our excitement at driving into what feels like a man-made hurricane Katrina is matched only by sheer disbelief that what was once the fourth-largest city in the US could actually be in the process of disappearing from the face of the earth. The statistics are staggering – 40sq miles of the 139sq mile inner city have already been reclaimed by nature.
One in five houses now stand empty. Property prices have fallen 80% or more in Detroit over the last three years. A three-bedroom house on Albany Street is still on the market for $1. Unemployment has reached 30%; 33.8% of Detroit’s population and 48.5% of its children live below the poverty line. Forty-seven per cent of adults in Detroit are functionally illiterate; 29 Detroit schools closed in 2009 alone. But statistics tell only one part of the story. The reality of Detroit is far more visceral. My producer, George Hencken, and I drove around recce-ing our film, getting out of the car and photographing extraordinary places to film with mad-dog enthusiasm – everywhere demands to be filmed – but were greeted with appalled concern by Bradley, our friendly manager, on our return to the hotel. “Never get out of the car in that area – people have been car-jacked and shot.”
Law and order has completely broken down in the inner city, drugs and prostitution are rampant and unless you actually murder someone the police will leave you alone. This makes it great for filming – park where you like, film what you like – but not so good if you actually live there. The abandoned houses make great crack dens and provide cover for appalling sex crimes and child abduction. The only growth industry is the gangs of armed scrappers, who plunder copper and steel from the ruins. Rabid dogs patrol the streets. All the national supermarket chains have pulled out of the inner city. People have virtually nowhere to buy fresh produce. Starbucks? Forget it. What makes all this so hard to understand is that Detroit was the frontier city of the American Dream – not just the automobile, but pretty much everything we associate with 20th-century western civilisation came from there. Mass production; assembly lines; stop lights; freeways; shopping malls; suburbs and an emerging middle-class workforce: all these things were pioneered in Detroit.
But the seeds of the Motor City’s downfall were sown a long time ago. The blind belief of the Big Three in the automobile as an inexhaustible golden goose, guaranteeing endless streams of cash, resulted in the city becoming reliant on a single industry. Its destiny fatally entwined with that of the car. The greed-fuelled willingness of the auto barons to siphon up black workers from the American south to man their Metropolis-like assembly lines and then treat them as subhuman citizens, running the city along virtually apartheid lines, created a racial tinderbox. The black riots of 1943 and 1967 gave Detroit the dubious distinction of being the only American city to twice call in the might of the US army to suppress insurrection on its own streets and led directly to the disastrous so-called white flight of the 50s, 60s and 70s.
The population of Detroit is now 81.6% African-American and almost two-thirds down on its overall peak in the early 50s. The city has lost its tax base and cannot afford to cut the grass or light its streets, let alone educate or feed its citizens. The rest of the US is in denial about the economic catastrophe that has engulfed Detroit, terrified that this man-made contagion may yet spread to other US cities. But somehow one cannot imagine the same fate befalling a city with a predominantly white population. On many levels Detroit seems to be an insoluble disaster with urgent warnings for the rest of the industrialised world. But as George and I made our film we discovered, to our surprise, an irrepressible positivity in the city. Unable to buy fresh food for their children, people are now growing their own, turning the demolished neighbourhood blocks into urban farms and kick-starting what is now the fastest-growing movement across the US. Although the city is still haemorrhaging population, young people from all over the country are also flooding into Detroit – artists, musicians and social pioneers, all keen to make use of the abandoned urban spaces and create new ways of living together.
With the breakdown of 20th-century civilisation, many Detroiters have discovered an exhilarating sense of starting over, building together a new cross-racial community sense of doing things, discarding the bankrupt rules of the past and taking direct control of their own lives. Still at the forefront of the American Dream, Detroit is fast becoming the first “post-American” city. And amid the ruins of the Motor City it is possible to find a first pioneer’s map to the post-industrial future that awaits us all. So perhaps Detroit can avoid the fate of the lost cities of the Maya and rise again like the phoenix that sits, appropriately, on its municipal crest. That is why George and I decided to call our film Requiem for Detroit? – with a big question mark at the end.
MEANWHILE
ICE HOUSE DETROIT http://www.flickr.com/groups/icehousedetroit/ http://icehousedetroit.blogspot.com/
“It should be noted that The Michigan State land bank’s executive director Carrie Lewand-Monroe, And Development Specialist Khalilah Burt both extended themselves for a community based project in a manner that is not so commonly seen in other States. It is because of their continued interest in community stabilization, and their goal of fostering the development of the blighted, tax reverted properties that they got behind our project from the very beginning. Michigan State Land Bank- thank you for keeping Michigan a productive State.”
Some might say Jon Brumit overpaid when he stumped up $100 (£65) for a whole house. Drive through Detroit neighbourhoods once clogged with the cars that made the city the envy of America and there are homes to be had for a single dollar. You find these houses among boarded-up, burnt-out and rotting buildings lining deserted streets, places where the population is shrinking so fast entire blocks are being demolished to make way for urban farms. “I was living in Chicago and a friend told me that houses in Detroit could be had for $500,” said Brumit, a financially strapped artist who thought he had little prospect of owning his own property. “I said if you hear of anything just a little cheaper let me know. Within a week he emails me a photo of a house for $100. I thought that’s just crazy. Why not? It’s a way to cut our expenses way down and kind of open up a lot of time for creative projects because we’re not working to pay the rent.”
Houses on sale for a few dollars are something of an urban legend in the US on the back of the mortgage crisis that drove millions of people from their homes. But in Detroit it is no myth. One in five houses now stand empty in the city that launched the automobile age, forged America’s middle-class and blessed the world with Motown. Detroit has been in decline for decades; its falling population is now well below a million – half of its 1950 peak. But the recent mortgage crisis and the fall of the big car makers into bankruptcy has pushed the town into a realm unique among big cities in America.
A third of the population are unemployed. Property prices have fallen 80% or more in large parts of Detroit over the last three years. The average price of a home sold in the city last year has been put at $7,500 (£4,900). The recent financial crash forced wholesale foreclosures among people unable to pay their mortgages or who walked away from houses that fell to a fraction of the value of the loans they had taken out on them. Banks are selling off properties in the worst neighbourhoods, which are usually surrounded by empty and wrecked housing, for a few dollars each. But even better houses can be had at a fraction of their former value.
Technically, Brumit paid $95 for the land and $5 for the house on Lawley Street – which fitted what estate agents euphemistically call an opportunity. Brumit said: “It had a big hole in the roof from the fire department putting out the last of two arson attempts. Both previous owners tried to set it on fire to get out of the mortgages. So there’s a big hole about 24ft long and the plumbing had almost entirely been ripped out and most of the electrics too. It was basically a smoke damaged, structurally intact shell with a snowdrift in the attic.” Setting fire to houses to claim the insurance and kill off the mortgage is not uncommon in Detroit; a blackened, wooden corpse of a house sits at the bottom of Brumit’s street. But it is more common for owners to just walk away from their homes and mortgages.
On the opposite side of Lawley Street Jim Feltner and his workers were clearing out a property seized by a bank. “I used to be a building contractor. I was buying up places and doing them up. Now I empty out foreclosures. I do one or two of these a day all over the city,” he said. “I’ve been in Detroit 40 years and I’ve watched the peak up to $100,000 for houses that right now aren’t worth more than $20,000 tops. I own a bunch of properties. I have 10 rentals and I can’t get nothing for them, and they’re beautiful homes.”
Feltner’s workers are dragging clothes, boots and furniture out of the bedrooms and living room, and dumping them in the front yard until a skip arrives. Kicked to one side is a box of 1970s Motown records. A teddy bear lies spreadeagled on the floor. “You could get about five grand for this place,” said Feltner. “Nice house once you clean it out. All the plumbing and electricals are in it. Roof don’t leak.” Brumit said a man called Jesse lived there. “Jesse had mentioned that he was probably going to get out of there because he knew he could buy a place for so much less than he owed. That’s a drag. You don’t want to see people leaving,” he said.
The house next door is abandoned. On the next street, one third of the properties are boarded up. It’s a story replicated across Detroit. Joan Wilson, an estate agent in the north-west of the city, whose firm is offering a three-bedroom house on Albany street for $1, says that more than half of the houses she sells are foreclosures in the tens of thousands of dollars. “The vast majority of people that call to enquire, almost the first thing out of their mouth is that they want to buy a foreclosure. I have had telephone calls from people looking online that live, for example, in England or California, who’ve never set foot in the area. They’re calling about one specific house they see online. I tell them they need to look at the neighbourhood. Is it the only house standing within a mile?”
But what is blight to some is proving an opportunity to remake parts of the city for others living there. The Old Redford part of Detroit has suffered its share of desolation. The police station, high school and community centre are closed. Yet the area is being revitalised, led by John George, a resident who began by boarding up an abandoned house used by drug dealers 21 years ago and who now heads the community group Blight Busters. They are pulling down housing that cannot be saved and creating community gardens with fresh vegetables free for anyone to pick. “There’s longstanding nuisance houses, been around seven, eight, nine years. We will go in without a permit and demolish them without permission,” said George. “If you, as an owner, are going to leave something like that to fester in my neighbourhood, obviously you either don’t care or aren’t in a position to take responsibility for your property, so we’re going to take care of it for you.” Blight Busters has torn down more than 200 houses, including recently an entire block of abandoned housing in Old Redford. “We need to right-size this community, which means removing whole blocks, and building farms, larger gardens, putting in windmills. We want to downsize – right-size – Detroit,” George said.
Houses that can be rescued are done up with grants from foundations. “Detroit has some of the nicest housing stock in the country. Brick, marble, hardwood floors, leaded glass. These houses were built for kings,” George added. “We gave a $90,000 house to a lady who was living in a car. She had four children. It didn’t cost her a dime. We had over a thousand people apply for it. It’s probably worth $35,000 now.” Old Redford is seeing piecemeal renewal. One abandoned block of shops has been converted to an arts centre and music venue with cafes. One of the few remaining cinemas in Detroit – and one that’s among the last in the US with an original pipe organ – has been revived and is showing Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Brumit calculates that he has spent $1,500 to buy and do up his house, principally by scavenging demolition sites. He will move in with his wife and four-month-old child once it is complete, probably in the summer. He said: “The Americans we know got ripped off by the American dream. But [the renovation] is the most like moving out of the country that we can actually do. We’re the minority in terms of ethnicity and this is a rich environment … there’s 30% open space in the city and that doesn’t include the buildings that should be torn down. You’re in a city riding your bike around and you hear birds and stuff. It’s incredible.”
In the “D”, “D” doesn’t really stand for “Detroit”, but “Demolition.” Take a look around and you’ll notice a great number of buildings marked on the front with a circled “D” in faint chalk. Off to the side, many of these same buildings will also have a noticeable dot, courtesy of our own native son, Tyree Guyton. These dotted buildings have stood for so long that they have become, arguably, the most memorable landmarks of our fair city. In addition to Tyree Guyton, Detroit has had more than its fair share of artists who have taken notice of this situation and done something about it. Recently, however, we have taken up a particular project that has actually netted results – faster than anyone, especially us, could have anticipated.
The artistic move is simple, cover the front in Tiggeriffic Orange – a color from the Mickey Mouse series, easily purchased from Home Depot. Every board, every door, every window, is caked in Tiggeriffic Orange. We paint the facades of abandoned houses whose most striking feature are their derelict appearance. A simple drive would show you some of our most visible targets. Just off I-75, around the Caniff/ Holbrook exit, on the west side, towers a three story house, saturated so deeply in orange that it reflects color onto the highway with the morning sun. Also, on the east side of the highway by the McNichols exit, is another house screaming orange. In that same area, where the Davison Highway and John C Lodge M-10 Highway intersect, sit a series of two houses painted orange, most visible from the Lodge side. In our only location not visible from the highway, on the Warren detour between 94 and 96 on Hancock Street, sat a house so perfectly set in its color that it garnered approval from the Detroit Police Department.
Two of four locations have already been demolished. Of the four, the building on Dequindre, by the Caniff/ Holbrook exit, remains, as does the site that intersects the Lodge and Davison. There was no “D” on any of the façades, only burnt boards, broken glass, and peeling paint. Rallying around these elements of decay, we seek to accentuate something that has wrongfully become part of the everyday landscape. So the destruction of two of these four houses raises a number of interesting points. From one perspective, our actions have created a direct cause and effect relationship with the city. As in, if we paint a house orange, the city will demolish it. In this relationship, where do the city’s motivations lie? Do they want to stop drawing attention to these houses? Are the workers simply confused and think this is the city’s new mark for demolition? Or is this a genuine response to beautify the city?
From another perspective, we have coincidently chosen buildings that were set to be demolished within the month. However, with so many circled “D”s on buildings, it seems near impossible that chance would strike twice. In any case, what will be the social ramifications of these actions? Each of these houses serves within the greater visual and social landscape of the city. If the city doesn’t rebuild, will it be better to have nothing there rather than an abandoned house? In addition, each of these houses served as a shelter for the homeless at some point in time. Now there are, at least, two less houses for them. Why didn’t the city simply choose to renovate? Everything affects not only our experience now, but also that of the next generation. So before they are all gone, look for these houses. Look at ALL the houses in Detroit. If you stumble upon one of these houses colored with Tiggeriffic Orange, stop and really look. In addition to being highlights within a context of depression, every detail is accentuated through the unification of color. Broken windows become jagged lines. Peeling paint becomes texture. These are artworks in themselves.
If you see a house that you would like to see painted orange, paint it. Afterwards, email the good people at thedetroiter.com at ws [at] thedetroiter [dot] com. These buildings aren’t scenery. Don’t look through or around them. Take action. Pick up a roller. Pick up a brush. Apply orange.
The dialogue is going. Our goal is to make everyone look at not only these houses, but all the buildings rooted in decay and corrosion. If we can get people to look for our orange while driving through the city, then they will at the same time, be looking at all the decaying buildings they come across. This brings awareness. And as we have already seen, awareness brings action.
For $1, you can own a piece of Detroit. It will be a small piece: 1 square inch, to be exact. But your deed to that microplot of land will also buy you passage into an online community that could yield big ideas for the city. Jerry Paffendorf is not your typical real estate developer. But then, the people lining up to buy into his project are not your typical investors. He calls them “inchvestors.” Paffendorf’s project is called Loveland. And it’s a hybrid: part virtual and part physical. “What we want to do is we want to build this wild social network of people that’s literally built out of the dirt and the ground,” Paffendorf says. The physical part is a vacant lot on Vernor Highway in east Detroit. Paffendorf bought the property at auction for $500. Then he put 10,000 square inches up for sale, and people from all over the planet began snapping them up. They’ve now all been sold to nearly 600 people. The “deeds” Paffendorf mails out are not legally valid, so the people who buy inches won’t get to vote in Detroit, or have to pay taxes.
A Real-Life SimCity
Some inchvestors have sentimental ties to the city, and they just liked the idea of having a physical stake in the place where they — or their parents or grandparents — grew up. But a lot of them are attracted by the project’s virtual possibilities and say Loveland is sort of like the SimCity computer game, but with real land. Rita King is the biggest “landholder” in Loveland, with 1,000 square inches. She works for IBM, and she’s an entrepreneur with a firm that helps companies use social media and virtual worlds. King is excited about the project’s potential to help the real city in which Loveland sits. “Because Loveland is physically located in Detroit, it takes those 500 inchvestors, and it ties us to Detroit, which means that the development of Detroit is now of critical importance to hundreds of people who don’t live or work in Detroit,” King says. “And now I, for one, am starting to look very closely at Detroit, and how can I help Detroit level up along with Loveland in our small way.” “Leveling up” is a phrase from the world of video games. It’s what happens when the character you’re playing makes it to the next level in the game. And for many, it’s an apt description of what Detroit needs to do. King says she expects the online component of Loveland to include interactive maps and stories. And proceeds from the project’s next phase are expected to be used to fund grants for nonprofit groups around Detroit.
Feedback From Locals Not Always Positive
But for all the excitement about the possibilities Loveland holds among high-minded techno-futurists, the project is also fodder for derision and mockery in some quarters. Here’s a sampling of some of the comments posted to an online discussion board called Detroit YES: “Sounds like a pyramid scheme … without the pyramid.” – “A virtual art project? That sounds to me like a project that’s almost an art project.” – “This guy’s laughing all the way to the bank.” Bill Johnson, who goes by the pseudonym “Gnome” on Detroit YES, thinks the project is just exploitation. “You know in places outside Detroit, we’ve got a bad reputation as sort of a pitiful, worthless place,” Johnson says. “And this guy’s preying on that. That’s what he’s really peddling.”
An Optimism
Paffendorf says Detroit is a place of opportunity and creativity. He shares an optimism about the city and his project with Ricki Collins. She’s 9 years old and lives next door to the empty lot Paffendorf bought. Hers is the only house left on the block. “I want people to remember this place. Remember it. And I want people to come over so we can get to know each other, learn new things about each other,” Ricki says. It’s not clear how many of the people who have bought into the project will actually visit their square-inch plots in person. But King says she intends to make the trek from New York City. She also plans to install a mailbox so people can send things to and from the site.
Recently, at a dinner party, a friend mentioned that he’d never seen so many outsiders moving into town. This struck me as a highly suspect statement. After all, we were talking about Detroit, home of corrupt former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, beleaguered General Motors and the 0-16 Lions. Compared with other cities’ buzzing, glittering skylines, ours sits largely abandoned, like some hulking beehive devastated by colony collapse. Who on earth would move here? Then again, I myself had moved to Detroit, from Brooklyn. For $100,000, I bought a town house that sits downtown in the largest and arguably the most beautiful Mies van der Rohe development ever built, an island of perfect modernism forgotten by the rest of the world. Two other guests that night, a couple in from Chicago, had also just invested in some Detroit real estate. That weekend Jon and Sara Brumit bought a house for $100.
Ah, the mythical $100 home. We hear about these low-priced “opportunities” in down-on-their-luck cities like Detroit, Baltimore and Cleveland, but we never meet anyone who has taken the plunge. Understandable really, for if they were actually worth anything then they would cost real money, right? Who would do such a preposterous thing? A local couple, Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert, started the ball rolling. An artist and an architect, they recently became the proud owners of a one-bedroom house in East Detroit for just $1,900. Buying it wasn’t the craziest idea. The neighborhood is almost, sort of, half-decent. Yes, the occasional crack addict still commutes in from the suburbs but a large, stable Bangladeshi community has also been moving in.
So what did $1,900 buy? The run-down bungalow had already been stripped of its appliances and wiring by the city’s voracious scrappers. But for Mitch that only added to its appeal, because he now had the opportunity to renovate it with solar heating, solar electricity and low-cost, high-efficiency appliances. Buying that first house had a snowball effect. Almost immediately, Mitch and Gina bought two adjacent lots for even less and, with the help of friends and local youngsters, dug in a garden. Then they bought the house next door for $500, reselling it to a pair of local artists for a $50 profit. When they heard about the $100 place down the street, they called their friends Jon and Sarah. Admittedly, the $100 home needed some work, a hole patched, some windows replaced. But Mitch plans to connect their home to his mini-green grid and a neighborhood is slowly coming together.
Now, three homes and a garden may not sound like much, but others have been quick to see the potential. A group of architects and city planners in Amsterdam started a project called the “Detroit Unreal Estate Agency” and, with Mitch’s help, found a property around the corner. The director of a Dutch museum, Van Abbemuseum, has called it “a new way of shaping the urban environment.” He’s particularly intrigued by the luxury of artists having little to no housing costs. Like the unemployed Chinese factory workers flowing en masse back to their villages, artists in today’s economy need somewhere to flee. But the city offers a much greater attraction for artists than $100 houses. Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished. From Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project (think of a neighborhood covered in shoes and stuffed animals and you’re close) to Matthew Barney’s “Ancient Evenings” project (think Egyptian gods reincarnated as Ford Mustangs and you’re kind of close), local and international artists are already leveraging Detroit’s complex textures and landscapes to their own surreal ends. In a way, a strange, new American dream can be found here, amid the crumbling, semi-majestic ruins of a half-century’s industrial decline. The good news is that, almost magically, dreamers are already showing up. Mitch and Gina have already been approached by some Germans who want to build a giant two-story-tall beehive. Mitch thinks he knows just the spot for it.
“Recruiters toured the South convincing whites and blacks to head north with promises of high wages in the new war factories. They arrived in such numbers that it was impossible to house them all. Blacks who believed they were heading to a promised land found a northern bigotry every bit as pervasive and virulent as what they thought they had left behind in the deep south. And southern whites brought their own traditional prejudices with them as both races migrated northward. The influx of newcomers strained not only housing, but transportation, education and recreational facilities as well. Wartime residents of Detroit endured long lines everywhere, at bus stops, grocery stores, and even at newsstands where they hoped for the chance to be first answering classified ads offering rooms for rent. Even though the city enjoyed full employment, it suffered the many discomforts of wartime rationing. Child-care programs were nonexistent, with grandma the only hope — provided she wasn’t already working at a defense plant. Times were tough for all, but for the Negro community, times were even tougher. Blacks were excluded from all public housing except the Brewster projects. Many lived in homes without indoor plumbing, yet they paid rent two to three times higher than families in white districts. Blacks were also confronted with a segregated military, discrimination in public accommodations, and unfair treatment by police.
Woodward was the dividing line between the roving black and white gangs. Whites took over Woodward up to Vernor and overturned and burned 20 cars belonging to blacks, looting stores as they went. The virtual guerrilla warfare overwhelmed the 2,000 city police officers and 150 state police troopers. A crowd of 100,000 spectators gathered near Grand Circus Park looking for something to watch. Despite Detroit’s history of problems, the Seal of the City of Detroit offers hopeful and timeless mottoes: “Speramus meliora” (We hope for better things) and “Resurget Cineribus” (It will rise from the ashes.)”
“Affordable housing, or the lack thereof, was a fundamental concern for black Detroiters. When polled by the Detroit Free Press regarding the problems that contributed most to the rioting in the previous year, respondents listed “poor housing” as one of the most important issues, second only to police brutality. (Detroit Free Press 1968, Thomas 1997:130-131). In Detroit, the shortage of housing available to black residents was further exacerbated by “urban renewal” projects. In Detroit, entire neighborhoods were bulldozed to make way for freeways that linked city and suburbs. Neighborhoods that met their fate in such manner were predominantly black in their composition. To build Interstate 75, Paradise Valley or “Black Bottom”, the neighborhood that black migrants and white ethnics had struggled over during the 1940s, was buried beneath several layers of concrete. As the oldest established black enclave in Detroit, “Black Bottom” was not merely a point on the map, but the heart of Detroit’s black community, commercially and culturally. The loss for many black residents of Detroit was devastating, and the anger burned for years thereafter.”
The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature. Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area. The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint. Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country. Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes. Most are former industrial cities in the “rust belt” of America’s Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.
In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside. “The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we’re all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way,” said Mr Kildee. “Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity.” Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective programme at the University of California, Berkeley, said there was “both a cultural and political taboo” about admitting decline in America. “Places like Flint have hit rock bottom. They’re at the point where it’s better to start knocking a lot of buildings down,” she said.
Flint, sixty miles north of Detroit, was the original home of General Motors. The car giant once employed 79,000 local people but that figure has shrunk to around 8,000. Unemployment is now approaching 20 per cent and the total population has almost halved to 110,000. The exodus – particularly of young people – coupled with the consequent collapse in property prices, has left street after street in sections of the city almost entirely abandoned. In the city centre, the once grand Durant Hotel – named after William Durant, GM’s founder – is a symbol of the city’s decline, said Mr Kildee. The large building has been empty since 1973, roughly when Flint’s decline began.
Regarded as a model city in the motor industry’s boom years, Flint may once again be emulated, though for very different reasons.
But Mr Kildee, who has lived there nearly all his life, said he had first to overcome a deeply ingrained American cultural mindset that “big is good” and that cities should sprawl – Flint covers 34 square miles. He said: “The obsession with growth is sadly a very American thing. Across the US, there’s an assumption that all development is good, that if communities are growing they are successful. If they’re shrinking, they’re failing.”
photo by James Griffioen
But some Flint dustcarts are collecting just one rubbish bag a week, roads are decaying, police are very understaffed and there were simply too few people to pay for services, he said. If the city didn’t downsize it will eventually go bankrupt, he added. Flint’s recovery efforts have been helped by a new state law passed a few years ago which allowed local governments to buy up empty properties very cheaply. They could then knock them down or sell them on to owners who will occupy them. The city wants to specialise in health and education services, both areas which cannot easily be relocated abroad.
The local authority has restored the city’s attractive but formerly deserted centre but has pulled down 1,100 abandoned homes in outlying areas. Mr Kildee estimated another 3,000 needed to be demolished, although the city boundaries will remain the same. Already, some streets peter out into woods or meadows, no trace remaining of the homes that once stood there. Choosing which areas to knock down will be delicate but many of them were already obvious, he said. The city is buying up houses in more affluent areas to offer people in neighbourhoods it wants to demolish. Nobody will be forced to move, said Mr Kildee. “Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow,” he said. Mr Kildee acknowledged that some fellow Americans considered his solution “defeatist” but he insisted it was “no more defeatist than pruning an overgrown tree so it can bear fruit again”.
Detroit, the country’s most depressed metropolis, has zero produce-carrying grocery chains. It also has open land, fertile soil, ample water, and the ingredients to reinvent itself from Motor City to urban farm. Were I an aspiring farmer in search of fertile land to buy and plow, I would seriously consider moving to Detroit. There is open land, fertile soil, ample water, willing labor, and a desperate demand for decent food. And there is plenty of community will behind the idea of turning the capital of American industry into an agrarian paradise. In fact, of all the cities in the world, Detroit may be best positioned to become the world’s first one hundred percent food self-sufficient city.
Right now, Detroit is as close as any city in America to becoming a food desert, not just another metropolis like Chicago, Philadelphia, or Cleveland with a bunch of small- and medium-sized food deserts scattered about, but nearly a full-scale, citywide food desert. (A food desert is defined by those who study them as a locality from which healthy food is more than twice as far away as unhealthy food, or where the distance to a bag of potato chips is half the distance to a head of lettuce.) About 80 percent of the residents of Detroit buy their food at the one thousand convenience stores, party stores, liquor stores, and gas stations in the city. There is such a dire shortage of protein in the city that Glemie Dean Beasley, a seventy-year-old retired truck driver, is able to augment his Social Security by selling raccoon carcasses (twelve dollars a piece, serves a family of four) from animals he has treed and shot at undisclosed hunting grounds around the city. Pelts are ten dollars each. Pheasants are also abundant in the city and are occasionally harvested for dinner.
Detroiters who live close enough to suburban borders to find nearby groceries carrying fresh fruit, meat, and vegetables are a small minority of the population. The health consequences of food deserts are obvious and dire. Diabetes, heart failure, hypertension, and obesity are chronic in Detroit, and life expectancy is measurably lower than in any American city.
photo by James Griffioen
Not so long ago, there were five produce-carrying grocery chains—Kroger, A&P, Farmer Jack, Wrigley, and Meijer—competing vigorously for the Detroit food market. Today there are none. Nor is there a single WalMart or Costco in the city. Specialty grocer Trader Joe’s just turned down an attractive offer to open an outlet in relatively safe and prosperous midtown Detroit; a rapidly declining population of chronically poor consumers is not what any retailer is after. High employee turnover, loss from theft, and cost of security are also cited by chains as reasons to leave or avoid Detroit. So it is unlikely grocers will ever return, despite the tireless flirtations of City Hall, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Michigan Food and Beverage Association. There is a fabulous once-a-week market, the largest of its kind in the country, on the east side that offers a wide array of fresh meat, eggs, fruit, and vegetables. But most people I saw there on an early April Saturday arrived in well polished SUVs from the suburbs. So despite the Eastern Market, in-city Detroiters are still left with the challenge of finding new ways to feed themselves a healthy meal.
One obvious solution is to grow their own, and the urban backyard garden boom that is sweeping the nation has caught hold in Detroit, particularly in neighborhoods recently settled by immigrants from agrarian cultures of Laos and Bangladesh, who are almost certain to become major players in an agrarian Detroit. Add to that the five hundred or so twenty-by-twenty-foot community plots and a handful of three- to ten-acre farms cultured by church and non-profit groups, and during its four-month growing season, Detroit is producing somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of its food supply inside city limits—more than most American cities, but nowhere near enough to allay the food desert problem. About 3 percent of the groceries sold at the Eastern Market are homegrown; the rest are brought into Detroit by a handful of peri-urban farmers and about one hundred and fifty freelance food dealers who buy their produce from Michigan farms between thirty and one hundred miles from the city and truck it into the market.
photo by James Griffioen
There are more visionaries in Detroit than in most Rust-Belt cities, and thus more visions of a community rising from the ashes of a moribund industry to become, if not an urban paradise, something close to it. The most intriguing visionaries in Detroit, at least the ones who drew me to the city, were those who imagine growing food among the ruins—chard and tomatoes on vacant lots (there are over 103,000 in the city, sixty thousand owned by the city), orchards on former school grounds, mushrooms in open basements, fish in abandoned factories, hydroponics in bankrupt department stores, livestock grazing on former golf courses, high-rise farms in old hotels, vermiculture, permaculture, hydroponics, aquaponics, waving wheat where cars were once test-driven, and winter greens sprouting inside the frames of single-story bungalows stripped of their skin and re-sided with Plexiglas—a homemade greenhouse. Those are just a few of the agricultural technologies envisioned for the urban prairie Detroit has become.
There are also proposals on the mayor’s desk to rezone vast sections A-something (“A” for agriculture), and a proposed master plan that would move the few people residing in lonely, besotted neighborhoods into Detroit’s nine loosely defined villages and turn the rest of the city into open farmland. An American Institute of Architects panel concludes that all Detroit’s residents could fit comfortably in fifty square miles of land. Much of the remaining ninety square miles could be farmed. Were that to happen, and a substantial investment was made in greenhouses, vertical farms, and aquaponic systems, Detroit could be producing protein and fibre 365 days a year and soon become the first and only city in the world to produce close to 100 percent of its food supply within its city limits. No semis hauling groceries, no out-of-town truck farmers, no food dealers. And no chain stores need move back. Everything eaten in the city could be grown in the city and distributed to locally owned and operated stores and co-ops. I met no one in Detroit who believed that was impossible, but only a few who believed it would happen. It could, but not without a lot of political and community will.
There are a few cities in the world that grow and provide about half their total food supply within their urban and peri-urban regions—Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Havana, Cuba; Hanoi, Vietnam; Dakar, Senegal; Rosario, Argentina; Cagayan de Oro in the Philippines; and, my personal favorite, Cuenca, Equador—all of which have much longer growing seasons than Detroit. However, those cities evolved that way, almost unintentionally. They are, in fact, about where Detroit was agriculturally around one hundred and fifty years ago. Half of them will almost surely drop under 50 percent sufficiency within the next two decades as industry subsumes cultivated land to build factories (à la China). Because of its unique situation, Detroit could come close to being 100 percent self-sufficient.
First, the city lies on one hundred and forty square miles of former farmland. Manhattan, Boston, and San Francisco could be placed inside the borders of Detroit with room to spare, and the population is about the same as the smallest of those cities, San Francisco: eight hundred thousand. And that number is still declining from a high of two million in the mid-nineteen fifties. Demographers expect Detroit’s population to level off somewhere between five hundred thousand and six hundred thousand by 2025. Right now there is about forty square miles of unoccupied open land in the city, the area of San Francisco, and that landmass could be doubled by moving a few thousand people out of hazardous firetraps into affordable housing in the eight villages. As I drove around the city, I saw many full-sized blocks with one, two, or three houses on them, many already burned out and abandoned. The ones that weren’t would make splendid farmhouses.
photo by James Griffioen
As Detroit was built on rich agricultural land, the soil beneath the city is fertile and arable. Certainly some of it is contaminated with the wastes of heavy industry, but not so badly that it’s beyond remediation. In fact, phyto-remediation, using certain plants to remove toxic chemicals permanently from the soil, is already practiced in parts of the city. And some of the plants used for remediation can be readily converted to biofuels. Others can be safely fed to livestock.
Leading the way in Detroit’s soil remediation is Malik Yakini, owner of the Black Star Community Book Store and founder of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. Yakini and his colleagues begin the remediation process by removing abandoned house foundations and toxic debris from vacated industrial sites. Often that is all that need be done to begin farming. Throw a little compost on the ground, turn it in, sow some seeds, and water it. Water in Detroit is remarkably clean and plentiful.
Although Detroiters have been growing produce in the city since its days as an eighteenth-century French trading outpost, urban farming was given a major boost in the nineteen eighties by a network of African-American elders calling themselves the “Gardening Angels.” As migrants from the rural South, where many had worked as small farmers and field hands, they brought agrarian skills to vacant lots and abandoned industrial sites of the city, and set out to reconnect their descendants, children of asphalt, to the Earth, and teach them that useful work doesn’t necessarily mean getting a job in a factory.
Thirty years later, Detroit has an eclectic mix of agricultural systems, ranging from three-foot window boxes growing a few heads of lettuce to a large-scale farm run by The Catherine Ferguson Academy, a home and school for pregnant girls that not only produces a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, but also raises chickens, geese, ducks, bees, rabbits, and milk goats.
Across town, Capuchin Brother Rick Samyn manages a garden that not only provides fresh fruits and vegetables to city soup kitchens, but also education to neighborhood children. There are about eighty smaller community gardens scattered about the city, more and more of them raising farm animals alongside the veggies. At the moment, domestic livestock is forbidden in the city, as are beehives. But the ordinance against them is generally ignored and the mayor’s office assures me that repeal of the bans are imminent.
About five hundred small plots have been created by an international organization called Urban Farming, founded by acclaimed songwriter Taja Sevelle. Realizing that Detroit was the most agriculturally promising of the fourteen cities in five countries where Urban Farming now exists, Sevelle moved herself and her organization’s headquarters there last year. Her goal is to triple the amount of land under cultivation in Detroit every year. All food grown by Urban Farming is given free to the poor. According to Urban Farming’s Detroit manager, Michael Travis, that won’t change.
Larger scale, for-profit farming is also on the drawing board. Financial services entrepreneur John Hantz has asked the city to let him farm a seventy-acre parcel he owns close to the Eastern Market. If that is approved and succeeds in producing food for the market, and profit for Hantz Farms, Hantz hopes to create more large-scale commercial farms around the city. Not everyone in Detroit’s agricultural community is happy with the scale or intentions of Hantz’s vision, but it seems certain to become part of the mix. And unemployed people will be put to work.
Any agro-economist will tell you that urban farming creates jobs. Even without local production, the food industry creates three dollars of job growth for every dollar spent on food—a larger multiplier effect than almost any other product or industry. Farm a city, and that figure jumps over five dollars. To a community with persistent two-digit unemployment, that number is manna. But that’s only one economic advantage of farming a city.
The average food product purchased in a U.S. chain store has traveled thirteen hundred miles, and about half of it has spoiled en route, despite the fact that it was bioengineered to withstand transport. The total mileage in a three-course American meal approaches twenty-five thousand. The food seems fresh because it has been refrigerated in transit, adding great expense and a huge carbon footprint to each item, and subtracting most of the minerals and vitamins that would still be there were the food grown close by.
photo by James Griffioen
I drove around the city one day with Dwight Vaughter and Gary Wozniak. A soft-spoken African American, Vaughter is CEO of SHAR, a self-help drug rehab program with about two hundred residents recovering from various addictions in an abandoned hospital. Wozniak, a bright, gregarious Polish American, who, unlike most of his fellow Poles, has stayed in Detroit, is the program’s financial director. Vaughter and Wozniak are trying to create a labor-intensive economic base for their program, with the conviction that farming and gardening are therapeutic. They have their eyes on two thousand acres in one of the worst sections of the city, not far from the Eastern Market. They estimate that there are about four thousand people still living in the area, most of them in houses that should have been condemned and razed years ago. There are also six churches in the section, offering some of the best ecclesiastical architecture in the city.
I tried to imagine what this weedy, decrepit, trash-ridden urban dead zone would look like under cultivation. First, I removed the overhead utilities and opened the sky a little. Then I tore up the useless grid of potholed streets and sidewalks and replaced them with a long winding road that would take vegetables to market and bring parishioners to church. I wrecked and removed most of the houses I saw, leaving a few that somehow held some charm and utility. Of course, I left the churches standing, as I did a solid red brick school, boarded up a decade ago when the student body dropped to a dozen or so bored and unstimulated deadbeats. It could be reopened as an urban ag-school, or SHAR’s residents could live there. I plowed and planted rows of every imaginable vegetable, created orchards and raised beds, set up beehives and built chicken coops, rabbit warrens, barns, and corrals for sheep, goats, and horses. And of course, I built sturdy hoop houses, rows of them, heated by burning methane from composting manure and ag-waste to keep frost from winter crops. The harvest was tended by former drug addicts who like so many before them found salvation in growing things that keep their brethren alive.
That afternoon I visited Grace Lee Boggs, a ninety-three-year-old Chinese-American widow who has been envisioning farms in Detroit for decades. Widow of legendary civil rights activist Jimmy Boggs, Grace preserves his legacy with the energy of ten activists. The main question on my mind as I climbed the steps to her modest east side home, now a center for community organizers, was whether or not Detroit possesses the community and political will to scale its agriculture up to 100 percent food self-sufficiency. Yes, Grace said to the former, and no to the latter. But she really didn’t believe that political will was that essential. “The food riots erupting around the world challenge us to rethink our whole approach to food,” she said, but as communities, not as bodies politic. “Today’s hunger crisis is rooted in the industrialized food system which destroys local food production and forces nations like Kenya, which only twenty-five years ago was food self-sufficient, to import 80 percent of its food because its productive land is being used by global corporations to grow flowers and luxury foods for export.” The same thing happened to Detroit, she says, which was once before a food self-sufficient community. I asked her whether the city government would support large-scale urban agriculture. “City government is irrelevant,” she answered. “Positive change, leaps forward in the evolution of humankind do not start with governments. They start right here in our living rooms and kitchens. We are the leaders we are looking for.”
All the decaying Rust-Belt cities in the American heartland have at one time or another imagined themselves transformed into some sort of exciting new post-industrial urban model. And some have begun the process of transformation. Now it’s Detroit’s turn, Boggs believes. It could follow the examples of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo, and become a slightly recovered metropolis, another pathetic industrial has-been still addicted to federal stimulus, marginal jobs, and the corporate food system. Or it could make a complete break and become, if not a paradise, well, at least a pretty good place to live.
Not everyone in Detroit is enthusiastic about farming. Many urbanites believe that structures of some sort or another belong on urban land. And a lot of those people just elected David Bing mayor of the city. Bing’s opponent, acting mayor Ken Cockrel, was committed to expanding urban agriculture in Detroit. Bing has not said he’s opposed to it, but his background as a successful automotive parts manufacturer will likely have him favoring a future that maintains the city’s primary nickname: Motor City.
And there remains a lasting sense of urbanity in Detroit. “This is a city, not a farm,” remarked one skeptic of urban farming. She’s right, of course. A city is more than a farm. But that’s what makes Detroit’s rural future exciting. Where else in the world can one find a one-hundred-and-forty-square-mile agricultural community with four major league sports teams, two good universities, the fifth largest art museum in the country, a world-class hospital, and headquarters of a now-global industry, that while faltering, stands ready to green their products and keep three million people in the rest of the country employed?
Despite big auto’s crash, “Detroit” is still synonymous with the industry. When people ask, “What will become of Detroit?” most of them still mean, “What will become of GM, Ford, and Chrysler?” If Detroit the city is to survive in any form, it should probably get past that question and begin searching for ways to put its most promising assets, land and people, to productive use again by becoming America’s first modern agrarian metropolis.
Contemporary Detroit gave new meaning to the word “wasteland.” It still stands as a monument to a form of land abuse that became endemic to industrial America—once-productive farmland, teaming with wildlife, was paved and poisoned for corporate imperatives. Now the city offers itself as an opportunity to restore some of its agrarian tradition, not fifty miles from downtown in the countryside where most of us believe that tradition was originally established, but a short bicycle ride away. American cities once grew much of their food within walking distance of most of their residents. In fact, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most early American cities, Detroit included, looked more like the English countryside, with a cluster of small villages interspersed with green open space. Eventually, farmers of the open space sold their land to developers and either retired or moved their farms out of cities, which were cut into grids and plastered with factories, shopping malls, and identical row houses.
Detroit now offers America a perfect place to redefine urban economics, moving away from the totally paved, heavy-industrial factory-town model to a resilient, holistic, economically diverse, self-sufficient, intensely green, rural/urban community—and in doing so become the first modern American city where agriculture, while perhaps not the largest, is the most vital industry.
Until recently there was a frieze around the lobby of the Hotel Pontchartrain in downtown Detroit, a naively charming painting of a forested lakefront landscape with Indians peeping out from behind the trees. The hotel was built on the site of Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit, the old French garrison that three hundred years ago held a hundred or so pioneer families inside its walls while several thousand Ottawas and Hurons and Potawatomis went about their business outside, but the frieze evoked an era before even that rude structure was built in the lush woodlands of the place that was not yet Michigan or the United States. Scraped clear by glaciers during the last ice age, the landscape the French invaded was young, soggy, and densely forested. The river frontage that would become Detroit was probably mostly sugar maple and beech forest, with black ash or mixed hardwood swamps, a few patches of conifers, and the occasional expanse of what naturalists like to call wet prairie—grasslands you might not want to walk on. The Indians killed the trees by girdling them and planted corn in the clearings, but the wild rice they gathered and the fish and game they hunted were also important parts of their diet. One pioneer counted badger, bear, fisher, fox, mink, muskrat, porcupine, rabbit, raccoon, weasel, wildcat, wolf, and woodchuck among the local species, and cougar and deer could have been added to the list. The French would later recruit the Indians to trap beaver, which were plentiful in those once-riverine territories—détroit means “strait” or “narrows,” but in its thirty-two-mile journey from Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie, the Detroit River also had several tributaries, including Parent’s Creek, which was later named Bloody Run after some newly arrived English soldiers managed to lose a fight they picked with the local Ottawas.
Fort Pontchartrain was never meant to be the center of a broad European settlement. It was a trading post, a garrison, and a strategic site in the scramble between the British and the French to dominate the North American interior. Cadillac, the ambitious Frenchman who established the fort in 1701, invited members of several Indian nations to surround the fort in order to facilitate more frequent trading, but this led to clashes not just between nations but between races. Unknown Indians set fire to Fort Pontchartrain in 1703, and the Fox skirmished there in 1712. After the English took over in 1760, deteriorating relations with the local tribes culminated in the three-year-long, nearly successful Ottawa uprising known as Pontiac’s Rebellion.
This is all ancient history, but it does foreshadow the racial conflicts that never went away in Detroit, though now white people constitute the majority who surround and resent the 83 percent black city. It’s as if the fort had been turned inside out—and, in fact, in the 1940s a six-foot-tall concrete wall was built along Eight Mile Road, which traces Detroit’s northern limits, to contain the growing African-American population. And this inversion exposes another paradox. North of Eight Mile, the mostly white suburbs seem conventional, and they may face the same doom as much of conventional suburban America if sprawl and auto-based civilization die off with oil shortages and economic decline. South of Eight Mile, though, Detroit is racing to a far less predictable future.
It is a remarkable city now, one in which the clock seems to be running backward as its buildings disappear and its population and economy decline. The second time I visited Detroit I tried to stay at the Pontchartrain, but the lobby was bisected by drywall, the mural seemed doomed, and the whole place was under some form of remodeling that resembled ruin, with puddles in the lobby and holes in the walls, few staff people, fewer guests, and strange grinding noises at odd hours. I checked out after one night because of the cold water coming out of the hot-water tap and the generally spooky feeling generated by trying to sleep in a 413-room high-rise hotel with almost no other guests. I was sad to see the frieze on its way out, but—still—as I have explored this city over the last few years, I have seen an oddly heartening new version of the landscape it portrays, a landscape that is not quite post-apocalyptic but that is strangely—and sometime even beautifully—post-American.
This continent has not seen a transformation like Detroit’s since the last days of the Maya. The city, once the fourth largest in the country, is now so depopulated that some stretches resemble the outlying farmland and others are altogether wild. Downtown still looks like a downtown, and all of those high-rise buildings still make an impressive skyline, but when you look closely at some of them, you can see trees growing out of the ledges and crevices, an invasive species from China known variously as the ghetto palm and the tree of heaven. Local wisdom has it that whenever a new building goes up, an older one will simply be abandoned, and the same rule applies to the blocks of new condos that have been dropped here and there among the ruins: why they were built in the first place in a city full of handsome old houses going to ruin has everything to do with the momentary whims of the real estate trade and nothing to do with the long-term survival of cities.
The transformation of the residential neighborhoods is more dramatic. On so many streets in so many neighborhoods, you see a house, a little shabby but well built and beautiful. Then another house. Then a few houses are missing, so thoroughly missing that no trace of foundation remains. Grass grows lushly, as though nothing had ever disturbed the pastoral verdure. Then there’s a house that’s charred and shattered, then a beautiful house, with gables and dormers and a porch, the kind of house a lot of Americans fantasize about owning. Then more green. This irregular pattern occurs mile after mile, through much of Detroit. You could be traveling down Wa bash Street on the west side of town or Pennsylvania or Fairview on the east side of town or around just about any part of the State Fair neighborhood on the city’s northern border. Between the half-erased neighborhoods are ruined factories, boarded-up warehouses, rows of storefronts bearing the traces of failed enterprise, and occasional solid blocks of new town houses that look as though they had been dropped in by helicopter. In the bereft zones, solitary figures wander slowly, as though in no hurry to get from one abandoned zone to the next. Some areas have been stripped entirely, and a weedy version of nature is returning. Just about a third of Detroit, some forty square miles, has evolved past decrepitude into vacancy and prairie—an urban void nearly the size of San Francisco.
It was tales of these ruins that originally drew me to the city a few years ago. My first visit began somberly enough, as I contemplated the great neoclassical edifice of the train station, designed by the same architects and completed the same year as Grand Central station in Manhattan. Grand Central thrives; this broken building stands alone just beyond the grim silence of Michigan Avenue and only half a mile from the abandoned Tiger Stadium. Rings of cyclone fence forbid exploration. The last train left on January 5, 1988— the day before Epiphany. The building has been so thoroughly gutted that on sunny days the light seems to come through the upper stories as though through a cheese grater; there is little left but concrete and stone. All the windows are smashed out. The copper pipes and wires, I was told, were torn out by the scavengers who harvest material from abandoned buildings around the city and hasten their decay.
On another visit, I took a long walk down a sunken railroad spur that, in more prosperous times, had been used to move goods from one factory to another. A lot of effort had gone into making the long channel of brick and concrete about twenty feet below the gently undulating surface of Detroit, and it had been abandoned a long time. Lush greenery grew along the tracks and up the walls, which were like a museum of spray-can art from the 1980s and 1990s. The weeds and beer cans and strangely apposite graffiti decrying the 1993 passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement seemed to go on forever.
I took many pictures on my visits to Detroit, but back home they just looked like snapshots of abandoned Nebraska farmhouses or small towns farther west on the Great Plains. Sometimes a burned-out house would stand next to a carefully tended twin, a monument to random fate; sometimes the rectilinear nature of city planning was barely perceptible, just the slightest traces of a grid fading into grassy fields accented with the occasional fire hydrant. One day after a brief thunderstorm, when the rain had cleared away and chunky white clouds dotted the sky, I wandered into a neighborhood, or rather a former neighborhood, of at least a dozen square blocks where trees of heaven waved their branches in the balmy air. Approximately one tattered charred house still stood per block. I could hear the buzzing of crickets or cicadas, and I felt as if I had traveled a thousand years into the future.
photo by James Griffioen
To say that much of Detroit is ruins is, of course, to say that some of it isn’t. There are stretches of Detroit that look like anywhere in the U.S.A.—blocks of town houses and new condos, a flush of gentility spreading around the Detroit Institute of Arts, a few older neighborhoods where everything is fine. If Detroit has become a fortress of urban poverty surrounded by suburban affluence, the city’s waterfront downtown has become something of a fortress within a fortress, with a convention center, a new ballpark, a new headquarters for General Motors, and a handful of casinos that were supposed to be the city’s economic salvation when they were built a decade ago. But that garrison will likely fend off time no better than Fort Detroit or the Hotel Pontchartrain.
Detroit is wildly outdated, but it is not very old. It was a medium-size city that boomed in the first quarter of the twentieth century, became the “arsenal of democracy” in the second, spent the third in increasingly less gentle decline, and by the last quarter was a byword for urban decay, having made a complete arc in a single century. In 1900, Detroit had a quarter of a million people. By midcentury the population had reached nearly 2 million. In recent years, though, it has fallen below 900,000. Detroit is a cautionary tale about one-industry towns: it shrank the way the old boomtowns of the gold and silver rushes did, as though it had been mining automobiles and the veins ran dry, but most of those mining towns were meant to be ephemeral. People thought Detroit would go on forever.
Coleman Young, Detroit’s first African-American mayor, reigned from 1974 to 1993, the years that the change became irreversible and impossible to ignore, and in his autobiography he sounds like he is still in shock: “It’s mind-boggling to think that at mid-century Detroit was a city of close to two million and nearly everything beyond was covered with corn and cow patties. Forty years later, damn near every last white person in the city had moved to the old fields and pastures—1.4 frigging million of them. Think about that. There were 1,600,000 whites in Detroit after the war, and 1,400,000 of them left. By 1990, the city was just over a million, nearly eighty percent of it was black, and the suburbs had surpassed Detroit not only in population but in wealth, in commerce—even in basketball, for God’s sake.”
The Detroit Pistons are now based in Auburn Hills. According to the 2000 census, another 112,357 whites left the city in the 1990s, and 10,000 more people a year continue to leave. Even three hundred bodies a year are exhumed from the cemeteries and moved because some of the people who were once Detroiters or the children of Detroiters don’t think the city is good enough for their dead. Ford and General Motors, or what remains of them—most of the jobs were dispatched to other towns and nations long agoin trouble, too. Interestingly, in this city whose name is synonymous with the auto industry, more than a fifth of households have no cars.
“Detroit’s Future Is Looking Brighter,” said a headline in the Detroit Free Press, not long after another article outlined the catastrophes afflicting the whole state. In recent years, Michigan’s household income has dropped more than that of any other state, and more and more of its citizens are slipping below the poverty line. David Littmann, a senior economist for the Michigan think tank the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, told the paper, “As the economy slows nationally, we’re going to sink much farther relative to the other states. We’ve only just begun. We’re going to see Michigan sink to levels that no one has ever seen.”
In another sense, the worst is over in Detroit. In the 1980s and 1990s, the city was falling apart, spectacularly and violently. Back then the annual pre-Halloween arson festival known as Devil’s Night finished off a lot of the abandoned buildings; it peaked in 1984 with 810 fires in the last three days of October. Some of the arson, a daughter of Detroit’s black bourgeoisie told me, was constructive—crackhouses being burned down by the neighbors; her own respectable aunt had torched one. Between 1978 and 1998, the city issued 9,000 building permits for new homes and 108,000 demolition permits, and quite a lot of structures were annihilated without official sanction.
Even Ford’s old Highland Park headquarters, where the Model T was born, is now just a shuttered series of dusty warehouses with tape on the windows and cyclone fences around the cracked pavement. Once upon a time, the plant was one of the wonders of the world—on a single day in 1925 it cranked out 9,000 cars, according to a sign I saw under a tree next to the empty buildings. Detroit once made most of the cars on earth; now the entire United States makes not even one in ten. The new Model T Ford Plaza next door struck my traveling companion—who, like so many white people born in Detroit after the war, had mostly been raised elsewhere—as auspicious. But the mall was fronted by a mostly empty parking lot and anchored by a Payless ShoeSource, which to my mind did not portend an especially bright future.
When I came back, a year after my first tour, I stopped at the Detroit Institute of Arts to see the Diego Rivera mural commissioned in 1932 by Henry Ford’s son, Edsel. The museum is a vast Beaux-Arts warehouse—“the fifth-largest fine arts museum in the United States,” according to its promotional literature—and the fresco covered all four walls of the museum’s central courtyard. Rivera is said to have considered it his finest work.
It’s an odd masterpiece, a celebration of the River Rouge auto plant, which had succeeded the Highland Park factory as Ford’s industrial headquarters, painted by a Communist for the son of one of the richest capitalists in the world. The north and south walls are devoted to nearly life-size scenes in which the plant’s gray gears, belts, racks, and workbenches surge and swarm like some vast intestinal apparatus. The workers within might be subsidiary organs or might be lunch, as the whole churns to excrete a stream of black Fords.
Rivera created this vision when the city was reveling in the newfound supremacy of its megafactories, but Detroit had already reached its apex. Indeed, the River Rouge plant—then the largest factory complex in the world, employing more than 100,000 workers on a site two and a half times the size of New York City’s Central Park—was itself built in suburban Dearborn. In 1932, though, capitalists and Communists alike shared a belief that the most desirable form of human organization—indeed, the inevitable form—was not just industrial but this kind of industrial: a Fordist system of “rational” labor, of centralized production in blue-collar cities, of eternal prosperity in a stern gray land. Even the young Soviet Union looked up to Henry Ford.
But Detroit was building the machine that would help destroy not just this city but urban industrialism across the continent. Rivera painted, in a subsidiary all-gray panel in the lower right corner of the south wall, a line of slumped working men and women exiting the factory into what appears to be an endless parking lot full of Ford cars. It may not have looked that way in 1932, but a lot of the gray workers were going to buy those gray cars and drive right out of the gray city. The city-hating Ford said that he wanted every family in the world to have a Ford, and he priced them so that more and more families could. He also fantasized about a post-urban world in which workers would also farm, seasonally or part-time, but he did less to realize that vision. Private automobile ownership was a double blow against the density that is crucial to cities and urbanism and against the Fordist model of concentrated large-scale manufacture. Ford was sabotaging Detroit and then Fordism almost from the beginning; the city had blown up rapidly and would spend the next several decades simply disintegrating.
Detroit was always a rough town. When Rivera painted his fresco, the Depression had hit Detroit as hard as or harder than anywhere, and the unemployed were famished and desperate, desperate enough to march on the Ford Motor Company in the spring of 1932. It’s hard to say whether ferocity or desperation made the marchers fight their way through police with tear-gas guns and firemen with hoses going full bore the last stretch of the way to the River Rouge plant. Harry Bennett, the thug who ran Ford more or less the way Stalin was running the Soviet Union, arrived, and though he was immediately knocked out by a flying rock, the police began firing on the crowd, injuring dozens and killing five. The battle of the Hunger March or the huge public funeral afterward would’ve made a good mural.
No, it wasn’t cars alone that ruined Detroit. It was the whole improbable equation of the city in the first place, the “inherent contradictions.” The city was done in by deindustrialization, decentralization, the post–World War II spread of highways and freeways, government incentives to homeowners, and disinvestment in cities that aided and abetted large-scale white flight into the burgeoning suburbs of those years. Chunks of downtown Detroit were sacrificed early, in the postwar years, so that broad arterial freeways—the Edsel Freeway, the Chrysler Freeway—could bring commuters in from beyond city limits.
All of this was happening everywhere else too, of course. The manufacturing belt became the rust belt. Cleveland, Toledo, Buffalo, and other cities clustered around the Great Lakes were hit hard, and the shrinking stretched down to St. Louis and across to Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Newark. Now that it has entered a second gilded age, no one seems to remember that New York was a snowballing disaster forty or fifty years ago. The old textile district south of Houston Street had emptied out so completely that in 1962 the City Club of New York published a report on it and other former commercial areas titled “The Wastelands of New York City.” San Francisco went the same way. It was a blue-collar port city until the waterfront dried up and the longshoremen faded away.
Then came the renaissance, but only for those cities reborn into more dematerialized economies. Vacant lots were filled in, old warehouses were turned into lofts or offices or replaced, downtowns became upscale chain outlets, janitors and cops became people who commuted in from downscale suburbs, and the children of that white flight came back to cities that were not exactly cities in the old sense. The new American cities trade in information, entertainment, tourism, software, finance. They are abstract. Even the souvenirs in these new economies often come from a sweatshop in China. The United States can be mapped as two zones now, a high-pressure zone of economic boom times and escalating real estate prices, and a low- pressure zone, where housing might be the only thing that’s easy to come by.
This pattern will change, though. The forces that produced Detroit—the combination of bitter racism and single-industry failure—are anomalous, but the general recipe of deindustrialization, depopulation, and resource depletion will likely touch almost all the regions of the global north in the next century or two. Dresden was rebuilt, and so was Hiroshima, and so were the cities destroyed by natural forces—San Francisco and Mexico City and Tangshan—but Detroit will never be rebuilt as it was. It will be the first of many cities forced to become altogether something else.
The Detroit Institute of Arts is in one of those flourishing parts of Detroit; it is expanding its 1927 building, and when I said goodbye to the Rivera mural and stepped outside into the autumn sunshine, workmen were installing slabs of marble on the building’s new facade. I noticed an apparently homeless dog sleeping below the scaffolding, and as I walked past, three plump white women teetered up to me hastily, all attention focused on the dog. “Do you have a cell phone?” the one topped by a froth of yellow hair shrilled. “Call the Humane Society!” I suggested that the dog was breathing fine and therefore was probably okay, and she looked at me as though I were a total idiot. “This is downtown Detroit,” she said, in a tone that made it clear the dog was in imminent peril from unspeakable forces, and that perhaps she was, I was, we all were.
I had been exploring an architectural-salvage shop near Rosa Parks Boulevard earlier that day, and when I asked the potbellied and weathered white man working there for his thoughts on the city, the tirade that followed was similarly vehement: Detroit, he insisted, had been wonderful—people used to dress up to go downtown, it had been the Paris of the Midwest!—and then it all went to hell. Those people destroyed it. My traveling companion suggested that maybe larger forces of deindustrialization might have had something to do with what happened to the city, but the man blankly rejected this analysis and continued on a tirade about “them” that wasn’t very careful about not being racist.
On the Web you can find a site, Stormfront White Nationalist Community, that is even more comfortable with this version of what happened to the city, and even less interested in macroeconomic forces like deindustrialization and globalization: “A huge non-White population, combined with annual arson attacks, bankruptcy, crime, and decay, have combined to make Detroit—once the USA’s leading automotive industrial center— into a ruin comparable with those of the ancient civilizations—with the cause being identical: the replacement of the White population who built the city, with a new non-White population.” It could have been different. “In more civilized environs, these facilities might have easily been transformed into a manufacturing and assembly center for any number of industrial enterprises,” writes the anonymous author.
A few months before the diatribe in the salvage yard, I’d met a long-haired counterculture guy who also told me he was from Detroit, by which he, like so many others I’ve met, meant the suburbs of Detroit. When I asked him about the actual city, though, his face clenched like a fist. He recited the terrible things they would do to you if you ventured into the city, that they would tear you apart on the streets. He spoke not with the voice of a witness but with the authority of tradition handed down from an unknown and irrefutable source. The city was the infernal realm, the burning lands, the dragon’s lair at the center of a vast and protective suburban sprawl.
The most prominent piece of public art in Detroit is the giant blackened bronze arm and fist that serve as a monument to heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, who grew up there. If it were vertical it would look like a Black Power fist, but it’s slung from cables like some medieval battering ram waiting to be dragged up to the city walls.
Deindustrialization dealt Detroit a sucker punch, but the knockout may have been white flight—at least economically. Socially, it was a little more complex. One African-American woman who grew up there told me that white people seemed to think they were a great loss to the city they abandoned, “but we were glad to see them go and waved bye-bye.” She lived in Ann Arbor—the departure of the black middle class being yet another wrinkle in the racial narrative—but she was thinking of moving back, she said. If she had kids, raising them in a city where they wouldn’t be a minority had real appeal.
The fall of the paradise that was Detroit is often pinned on the riots of July 1967, what some there still refer to as the Detroit Uprising. But Detroit had a long history of race riots—there were vicious white-on-black riots in 1833, 1863, 1925, and 1943. And the idyll itself was unraveling long before 1967. Local 600 of the United Auto Workers broke with the union mainstream in 1951, sixteen years before the riots, to sue Ford over decentralization efforts already under way. They realized that their jobs were literally going south, to states and nations where labor wasn’t so organized and wages weren’t so high, back in the prehistoric era of “globalization.”
The popular story wasn’t about the caprices of capital, though; it was about the barbarism of blacks. In 1900, Detroit had an African-American population of 4,111. Then came the great migration, when masses of southern blacks traded Jim Crow for the industrialized promised land of the North. Conditions might have been better here than in the South, but Detroit was still a segregated city with a violently racist police department and a lot of white people ready to work hard to keep black people out of their neighborhoods. They failed in this attempt at segregation, and then they left. This is what created the blackest city in the United States, and figures from Joe Louis and Malcolm X to Rosa Parks and the bold left-wing Congressman John Conyers—who has represented much of the city since 1964—have made Detroit a center of activism and independent leadership for African Americans. It’s a black city, but it’s surrounded.
Surrounded, but inside that stockade of racial divide and urban decay are visionaries, and their visions are tender, hopeful, and green. Grace Lee Boggs, at ninety-one, has been politically active in the city for more than half a century. Born in Providence to Chinese immigrant parents, she got a Ph.D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr in 1940 and was a classical Marxist when she married the labor organizer Jimmy Boggs, in 1953. That an Asian woman married to a black man could become a powerful force was just another wrinkle in the racial politics of Detroit. (They were together until Jimmy’s death, in 1993.) Indeed, her thinking evolved along with the radical politics of the city itself. During the 1960s, the Boggses were dismissive of Martin Luther King Jr. and ardent about Black Power, but as Grace acknowledged when we sat down together in her big shady house in the central city, “The Black Power movement, which was very powerful here, concentrated only on power and had no concept of the challenges that would face a black-powered administration.” When Coleman Young took over city hall, she said, he could start fixing racism in the police department and the fire department, “but when it came time to do something about Henry Ford and General Motors, he was helpless. We thought that all we had to do was transform the system, that all the problems were on the other side.”
As the years went by, the Boggses began to focus less on putting new people into existing power structures and more on redefining or dismantling the structures altogether. When she and Jimmy crusaded against Young’s plans to rebuild the city around casinos, they realized they had to come up with real alternatives, and they began to think about what a local, sustainable economy would look like. They had already begun to realize that Detroit’s lack of participation in the mainstream offered an opportunity to do everything differently—that instead of retreating back to a better relationship to capitalism, to industry, to the mainstream, the city could move forward, turn its liabilities into assets, and create an economy entirely apart from the transnational webs of corporations and petroleum. Jimmy Boggs described his alternative vision in a 1988 speech at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church of Detroit. “We have to get rid of the myth that there is something sacred about large-scale production for the national and international market,” he said. “We have to begin thinking of creating small enterprises which produce food, goods, and services for the local market, that is, for our communities and for our city. . . . In order to create these new enterprises, we need a view of our city which takes into consideration both the natural resources of our area and the existing and potential skills and talents of Detroiters.”
That was the vision, and it is only just starting to become a reality. “Now a lot of what you see is vacant lots,” Grace told me. “Most people see only disaster and the end of the world. On the other hand, artists in particular see the potential, the possibility of bringing the country back into the city, which is what we really need.” After all, the city is rich in open space and—with an official unemployment rate in the mid-teens—people with time on their hands. The land is fertile, too, and the visionaries are there.
photo by James Griffioen
In traversing Detroit, I saw a lot of signs that a greening was well under way, a sort of urban husbandry of the city’s already occurring return to nature. I heard the story of one old woman who had been the first African-American person on her block and is now, with her grandson, very nearly the last person of any race on that block. Having a city grow up around you is not an uncommon American experience, but having the countryside return is an eerier one. She made the best of it, though. The city sold her the surrounding lots for next to nothing, and she now raises much of her own food on them.
I also saw the lush three-acre Earth Works Garden, launched by Capuchin monks in 1999 and now growing organic produce for a local soup kitchen. I saw a 4-H garden in a fairly ravaged east-side neighborhood, and amid the utter abandonment of the west side, I saw the handsome tiled buildings of the Catherine Ferguson Academy for Young Women, a school for teenage mothers that opens on to a working farm, complete with apple orchard, horses, ducks, long rows of cauliflower and broccoli, and a red barn the girls built themselves. I met Ashley Atkinson, the young project manager for The Greening of Detroit, and heard about the hundred community gardens they support, and the thousands more food gardens that are not part of any network. The food they produce, Atkinson told me, provides food security for many Detroiters. “Urban farming, dollar for dollar, is the most effective change agent you can ever have in a community,” she said. Everywhere I went, I saw the rich soil of Detroit and the hard work of the gardeners bringing forth an abundant harvest any organic farmer would envy.
Everyone talks about green cities now, but the concrete results in affluent cities mostly involve curbside composting and tacking solar panels onto rooftops while residents continue to drive, to shop, to eat organic pears flown in from Argentina, to be part of the big machine of consumption and climate change. The free-range chickens and Priuses are great, but they alone aren’t adequate tools for creating a truly different society and ecology. The future, at least the sustainable one, the one in which we will survive, isn’t going to be invented by people who are happily surrendering selective bits and pieces of environmentally unsound privilege. It’s going to be made by those who had all that taken away from them or never had it in the first place.
After the Panic of 1893, Detroit’s left-wing Republican mayor encouraged his hungry citizens to plant vegetables in the city’s vacant lots and went down in history as Potato Patch Pingree. Something similar happened in Cuba when the Soviet Union collapsed and the island lost its subsidized oil and thereby its mechanized agriculture; through garden-scale semi-organic agriculture, Cubans clawed their way back to food security and got better food in the bargain. Nobody wants to live through a depression, and it is unfair, or at least deeply ironic, that black people in Detroit are being forced to undertake an experiment in utopian post-urbanism that appears to be uncomfortably similar to the sharecropping past their parents and grandparents sought to escape. There is no moral reason why they should do and be better than the rest of us—but there is a practical one. They have to. Detroit is where change is most urgent and therefore most viable. The rest of us will get there later, when necessity drives us too, and by that time Detroit may be the shining example we can look to, the post-industrial green city that was once the steel-gray capital of Fordist manufacturing.
Detroit is still beautiful, both in its stately decay and in its growing natural abundance. Indeed, one of the finest sights I saw on my walks around the city combined the two. It was a sudden flash on an already bright autumn day—a pair of wild pheasants, bursting from a lush row of vegetables and flying over a cyclone fence toward a burned-out building across the street. It was an improbable flight in many ways. Those pheasants, after all, were no more native to Detroit than are the trees of heaven growing in the skyscrapers downtown. And yet it is here, where European settlement began in the region, that we may be seeing the first signs of an unsettling of the very premises of colonial expansion, an unsettling that may bring a complex new human and natural ecology into being.
This is the most extreme and long-term hope Detroit offers us: the hope that we can reclaim what we paved over and poisoned, that nature will not punish us, that it will welcome us home—not with the landscape that was here when we arrived, perhaps, but with land that is alive, lush, and varied all the same. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” was Shelley’s pivotal command in his portrait of magnificent ruins, but Detroit is far from a “shattered visage.” It is a harsh place of poverty, deprivation, and a fair amount of crime, but it is also a stronghold of possibility.
That Rivera mural, for instance. In 1932 the soil, the country, the wilderness, and agriculture represented the past; they should have appeared, if at all, below or behind the symbols of industry and urbanism, a prehistory from which the gleaming machine future emerged. But the big panels of workers inside the gray chasms of the River Rouge plant have above them huge nude figures—black, white, red, yellow, lounging on the bare earth. Rivera meant these figures to be emblematic of the North American races and meant their fistfuls of coal, sand, iron ore, and limestone to be the raw stuff of industrialism. To my eye, though, they look like deities waiting to reclaim the world, insistent on sensual contact with the land and confident of their triumph over and after the factory that lies below them like an inferno.
Shortly after Superstorm Sandy smashed in to the East Coast, Chris Mejia of Consolidated Solar decided to do something about it. Chris’s company is a distributor for portable solar generators out of Harrisburg, PA.. He leases trailers with a solar unit/battery combination made by DC Solar Solutions in California. On a normal day, he leases the units for somewhere around $500 to folks who need power someplace where it’s hard to get. He does pretty well with construction sites, where it’s a lot cheaper to lease a solar generator than string lines to a site. Construction workers only need limited juice for charging power tools and perhaps a cellphone power, pretty much the same thing disaster survivors require immediately after impact.
So as soon as the storm hit, Chris was on the phone trying to help. He called the emergency management agencies including the state units and FEMA. They were too busy to call back. He tried City Hall and the mayors of small towns. For a while, it looked like he would be teaming up with a cell phone company, but they finally said no thanks. He recalled thinking to himself “You need power. I have power. Why is this so tough?” Finally he Googled “Sandy Relief” and identified the relief agencies working in the region. But they all wanted Chris to donate the unit outright, which he couldn’t do since he was just starting his business and leasing the units from DC Solar Solutions. Finally, he chanced on the organization Solar One, NY city’s “first green energy, arts, and education center.” They were developing a solar-based emergency response as well, The Solar Sandy Project. They turned him onto SolarCity, who volunteered to pick up the leasing costs for his units.
Since then, Chris said, he’s moved three 10 kW units to the area, driving the trailers to where they are needed. At the moment, all three are in the Rockaways, which the Long Island Power Authority still has not brought on line, with two more to be located there shortly. Chris notes they are extremely simple to set up. “You fold the panels out so they are pointed at the sun, press a few buttons on the inverter, and that’s it. It’s on.” With the battery back-up, they provide an independent source of power to 6 three-prong outlets, with up to 50 amps. “The moment we set up the first one, a guy ran over to it in order to recharge his flashlight. Word was spreading quickly as we drove off to set up the other unit.”
As the Sandy post-mortem analysis turns to talk of resiliency and hardening the electric grid, resources that do not depend on fuel at all deserve a place in the conversation. Solar/battery combinations are likely to play a critical part in a community’s effort to survive the immediate and perilous aftermath. These units may not provide all of the benefits of the more extensive and powerful micro-grid (micro-grids are isolated mini systems that can be disconnected from a dead power grid), but they are mobile, independent, quick to set up, can be daisy-chained to increase power output, and don’t require a huge infrastructural commitment. And they are relatively cheap. For communities that may not be able to commit resources to a full micro-grid, or may take years to set one up, this type of resource is worth considering. As Chris Collins, Executive Director of Solar One stated “Solar generators should be in the emergency preparedness plan of every community. After a storm, people need safe places to go.” In fact, he commented that after the flooding, his own building on the East River “lost everything. But we set up our solar panels the day after Sandy and we had lights and power.”
Micro-grids are an important solution: a combination of a generator and hardened distribution system can supply reliable and larger quantities of electricity to a small circuit of users including emergency services, shelters, gas stations and grocery stores. But once you build a micro-grid, you are committed to what you have built. Mobile solar generators – though not nearly as powerful – can be reconfigured according to need, and can be daisy chained together to provide sufficient power to do more than charge cell phones and batteries.
This concept of solar power in disaster relief is not new. In the aftermath of 1989’s Hurricane Hugo, a portable solar generator supplied as community center for six weeks after the storm. After Hurricane Andrew in 1992, PV systems were brought in to provide power to shelters and streetlights. In the California Northridge earthquake in 1994, PV kept some communications links open. More recently California-based Mobile Solar freighted 6 units to Japan immediately after the Fukushima disaster, providing communications and battery charges to workers struggling to rebuild. And a project is underway today to create a solar-powered water purification system to supply the needs of 750-1500 people per day.
In the aftermath of Sandy, it is clear that we have much work to do to plan for prevention, resiliency, and recovery. Micro-grids will be a critical piece of this puzzle. But solar generators can play a key and reliable role in disaster recovery and getting communities back on their feet. They are doing so today in some of the hardest hit areas of the East Coast, and they merit serious consideration.
A week after sub tropical storm Sandy made landfall in New York, thousands are still without power in their Rockaway Beach neighborhood homes. Greenpeace has been doing what it can to help and rolled into the neighborhood Oct. 31 with its Rolling Sunlight solar truck. The truck’s 256 square feet of solar panels produce 50 kilowatt hours of electricity a day, enough to power a typical household, said Jesse Coleman, a Greenpeace researcher who is manning the truck. Parked at a storefront at the corner of Rockaway Beach Boulevard and 113th Street, the solar truck is the only spot with electricity for several blocks. “It’s become a major hub,” Coleman said. “The entire area is without power and probably will be for a couple weeks.”
Many residents in the neighborhood have lost everything, Coleman said. Their homes are filled with mud and they have to clean them out with nothing more than light from the sun and flashlights. “It’s a major problem,” he said. “People’s whole lives were destroyed.” While the Rolling Sunlight truck can’t fix all of that, it does give some of the New York residents a place to charge their cell phones so they can call each other, communicate and ask their neighbors for help. It’s also created a warm, lighted gathering place for the community. “People who are now, literally homeless, are out there cooking food for the community and giving it out,” Coleman said.
Greenpeace has set up seven locations throughout the city to help residents, though the Rolling Sunshine truck is the only solar power the organization brought with it. Greenpeace is helping to coordinate donation efforts and process items in a nearby gymnasium. Coleman said they received some box generators that they’re giving out to people who need them. This is not the solar truck’s first appearance. It’s more than 10 years old, Coleman said. And it has brought portable power to people in Mexico, powered the Seattle Space Needle and electronics at events like Occupy New York and Occupy Washington, D.C. Coleman said he plans to stay until the weekend and will likely spend this week on helping residents transition.
There is a lot of misinformation circulating on social networks regarding the response and recovery effort for Hurricane Sandy. Rumors spread fast: please tell a friend, share this page and help us provide accurate information about the types of assistance available. Check here often for an on-going list of rumors and their true or false status.
Calling 1-800-621-FEMA
Due to the large volume of calls, individuals trying to register with FEMA may experience long wait times. We ask for your patience as FEMA is increasing its capacity at call centers to address long wait times. For individuals with internet access, you can register with FEMA for disaster assistance by visiting www.disasterassistance.gov orhttp://m.fema.gov on your mobile phone. The websites and 1-800-621-FEMA request identical information.
EXAMPLE RUMOR: Cash Cards / Food Stamps
There are message boards and traffic on social media sites related to FEMA and/or the American Red Cross distributing cash cards to individuals affected by Hurricane Sandy. This is FALSE.
Occupy Sandy isn’t getting married. But it would like a gift all the same. The volunteer group – an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, focused on helping victims of the storm — is using an especially clever hack of an existing system: Amazon’s gift registry service. Those displaced by the storm, the group realized, need blankets. They need flashlights. They need hygiene products. They need a bunch of things that are orderable — with that famous one-click efficiency — through Amazon. Now, anyone who uses Amazon can buy them those things, and have them shipped to the area hardest hit by the storm. Victims need stuff; people want to give them stuff; Occupy Sandy, via Amazon, is bringing them together. The registry started, coordinator John Heggestuen told me, with a particularly frustrating phenomenon: a thwarted attempt at volunteering. Heggestuen and two of his friends — Alex Nordenson and Katherine Dolan — went to a shelter on Friday in an attempt to volunteer there. “They didn’t have anything for us to do,” Heggestuen said in an email, “so we went to the Occupy Sandy location at 520 Clinton Ave (Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew).” And “there was a tremendous effort there.”
As the friends were walking to a store to buy some food that they could donate, Heggestuen says, they talked about how they might improve the donation system. “My friend Alex said something to the effect of, ‘we need something like a wedding registry.’ I thought it was a great idea and my gears started turning. When we got to the store, I was so excited that I gave my friends my money for groceries and ran back to the church to start to set this up.” Heggestuen asked Sam Corbin, who was was helping to oversee the effort at the church, if the location could serve as a shipping address for out-state-donations. And “she said it was a great idea.” With that in place, the friends worked on setting up the registry over the weekend — an effort helped along by the fact that both Nordenson and Dolan work in social media. “Right now,” Heggestuen says, “we are setting up an inventory management team at the church to keep track of the donations when they arrive.”
As for the people who have decided to use the registry to assist Sandy’s victims? “We are still trying to get clear numbers,” Heggestuen says. “We know it’s a lot from emails we have received, but Amazon’s registry is not updating quickly enough to accurately reflect what has been bought. We need some help getting their attention and we are asking twitter users to tweet @amazon for free shipping and tech support for the Sandy Wedding Registry.” Despite the lag time, though, gifts are being bought. Thanks to the effort, Sandy victims will have blankets — and flashlights, and toothbrushes — that they didn’t before. “It is really inspiring how much support has poured out for Sandy victims,” Heggestuen says. “I have never seen a volunteer effort like Occupy Sandy, everyone is so motivated to help. I’m humbled.”
Even two weeks later, the air quality in the hardest hit areas of New York City is still extremely poor. There is an enormous amount of dust, human waste, and previously buried pollution in the air. The stench of gasoline is also pervasive. Since the storm hit, you can smell gas all over parts of Rockaway and Staten Island, as people line up in cars or on foot waiting for to get what little gas is being rationed each day. It’s ironic that gas is so scarce yet, due to all the emergency gas generators and stoves, our lungs are filled with the stuff.
In the hardest hit places like Rockaway and Gerritsen Beach, people have two choices each day: (1) go get some food for the day, maybe find someone to fill a prescription, or inquire about FEMA assistance; or (2) do none of those things, and wait in a four-hour gas line so they can have some heat that night.
It is in this bleak context that the Solar Sandy Project was conceived. First, our company SolarCity partnered with Consolidated Solar to deploy five solar generating units (equipped with battery storage) as quickly as possible. To date these generators have served four areas in Rockaway, with one more scheduled this week. We partnered with NYC-based solar advocacy group Solar One to help spread the word, do community outreach, and host a match making website for areas of further need. These solar generators can provide power for warmth, cooking, electronics charging, and whatever else people need. And they do all this without burning gas that (a) might be better put to use in cars right now, and (b) would preferably not be burned anyway.
Solar One, SolarCity, Consolidated Solar and NYSERDA are partnering to connect communities rebuilding from Sandy to mobile solar generators so that they can get much-needed temporary electricity. So far, we have installed five 10kw solar generators deployed in the Rockaways. We will be installing units in other parts of the city in the coming days. These units are installed in community gathering places where folks are already getting warm clothes, a bite to eat, and some basic medical services.
With solar generators, we can provide clean, quiet power hubs that don’t need refueling. People can charge phones, power tools, and laptops; heat food; and run other critical equipment. Not an installer? Donate to the project!
WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR
From Installers/Equipment Providers
Plug and play mobile generators that can easily be setup for these communities.
Individuals with the right skill set (solar installers, electricians, etc) who can help with deployment, installation, and maintenance of the systems
If you have off-grid solar experience with battery storage, this can be particularly useful.
If you can assist in any way, fill out the Installer/Equipment Sign-Up below.
From Community Organizations:
We are trying to figure out the best places to deploy these generators. Ideally they would be in already existing community gathering spots that have cropped up since the storm.
If you would like to be considered, please fill out the Deployment Area Sign-Up below.
Voltaic systems have personalized, mobile emergency solar charging kits. They are pledging that for every one that is purchased they will donate one.
Donate directly to Power Rockaways Resillience who are working in the field to set up solar charging and communications centers in the Rockaways.
We encourage the solar community to donate other needed items such as blankets, flashlights, AAA batteries, mops, masks, gloves, duct and scotch tape, hydrogen peroxide and personal hygiene and baby supplies. Occupy Sandy is doing a great job of organizing these kinds of donations, and is posting updates on which items are most needed.
CONTACT
Want to sign up to get more info, help out in another way, or donate? Email volunteer[at]solar1[dot]org using the subject line Solar Sandy.
PRESS INQUIRIES
Check out our Press Release and contact the person listed.
WHERE SOLAR HAS BEEN DEPLOYED SO FAR
Here’s a map of where the current solar installations can be found in Staten Island and the Rockaways(use the arrows to scroll left and right to see where the installations are):
KEY: The systems that we have deployed by the Solar Sandy Project are in Blue. Systems that have been deployed by friends and affiliates are in Purple.
