AstroTurf green: nuclear power

Nuclear power's promises have history of imploding

Ducere, Usere, Cyclere

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 4/30/08

Twenty years ago environmental activists were fighting nuclear energy tooth-and-nail. Now, according to surveys by Treehugger.com, and Grist, an online environmental journal, more than half of their readers favor giving fission another chance. What was recently the bane of a clean, safe and livable environment now represents salvation from global climate change.

The argument in favor of building new nuclear power reactors is simple, arguably effective and definitely well-publicized. If we had a nearly limitless, well-developed, greenhouse-gas-emissions-free power source, why would we not use it? The pre-packaged answer is that of course we have to. Logic demands it, because if you'd rather burn coal then the evildoers have already won.

What is left out of the sales pitch is any acknowledgment that the long industrialized road from uranium ore to controlled fission is one long story: material that is deadly to human life, that neighbors to reactors, like Chernobyl, risk catastrophe from fairly minor accidents, that the life span of a reactor facility is a matter of short decades and that the "spent fuel" will be extremely dangerous for 10,000 years after it's powered our flat screen TV and, if things go right, charged our mystical electric vehicles.

Yet fickle and conflicted average people are jumping on the nuclear bandwagon, as are many self-proclaimed environmentalists. Deluded by a fast-talking "solution" to the greenhouse gas emissions problem, it is akin to signing an adjustable rate sub-prime mortgage on our sky-domed home in the hopes that we'll find a solution to the stop-gap after this crisis passes.

The problem with problematic solutions is that over time they lose their solution-like characteristics and become simply problematic. We should not be willing to accept more nuclear-powered facilities as a solution to our energy and climate crises because they represent a short-term benefit with a long-term liability. We should not hold at the core of our electrified society a power source that is deadly and dangerous.

Such residual problematic qualities were evident in a decision earlier this month by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. They ruled in favor of the plaintiff in a case that claims radiation from Hanford facilities in south-central Washington caused cancer in employees and nearby residents. Hanford produced plutonium for weapons for more than 40 years, and Washington's only commercial reactor, Columbia Generating Station, is in the same neighborhood.

Even though the nuclear industry claims that processes are better and safer, the fact remains radioactive material is extremely deadly, expensive to work with and the lifespan of the waste dwarfs the lifespan of any facility. Despite this, the federal government supports the nuclear solution and is processing applications for new reactors to add to the more than 100 nuclear reactor facilities already in the U.S. As a solution to the waste issue, there is the plan to neatly centralize "all" radioactive wastes at Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

It sounds neat on paper, but in practice it is much messier.

Oregon's ill-fated Trojan facility was killed in 1992, about twenty years before its projected life span due to the release of radioactive steam. With Trojan came a total construction-demolition cost of about $900 million. Its core was sent to Hanford, the tower imploded, yet its spent fuel rods are still on the banks of the Columbia waiting in a pool of water for what may come next, be that Yucca, erosion or nothing.

Such messiness has the likes of Warren Buffet scrapping plans to back a new facility that had been planned near the Oregon-Idaho border. However, show me someone who holds contracts to store radioactive waste and I'll show you someone who knows how to leverage long-term investment against public health and public sentiment - and who supports more nuclear power facilities.

Because Oregon has a law that the public must approve new reactors, though two research reactors still operate in the state - at Oregon State University and at Reed College - and given the regional reliance on hydropower and a sentiment toward wind and solar power, there is little likelihood that we will have a new nuclear power plant in our state.

However, Eugene does draw some power from the Columbia Generating Station, and if an expansion occurred there, we would "benefit" from that. Also, plans for a new facility outside Boise would have regional implications if it were actually built.

Given the push to expand nuclear power's role in our energy spectrum, and given its apparent "emissions-free" status and our willingness to flip on the switch no matter where the electricity comes from or what wastes are made, it is a real possibility that nuclear power will effectively take up the "environmentally friendly" banner that most rationally thinking environmental activists would reserve for solar, wind and perhaps hydro-electric power.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2008 Oregon Daily Emerald

Nuclear renaissance blows (up the spot)

Those of you who recall the 1980s will no doubt remember not just the horrible day glow fashion and hideous hair but also the international specter of radiation that overshadowed daily life. Ionizing radiation, from a theorized nuclear holocaust or nuclear power reactor accidents, was at the top of media reports and at the top of public fears.

However, radiation, in and of itself, was neither a new nor unnatural phenomenon. Also, the life cycle of radioactive elements is not confined to the narrow sphere of weapons or energy and they continue to pervade our everyday lives – in manufacturing processes, in health care and even in your living room smoke detector.

In these ways, radiation is far from just an inconvenient environmental and social liability, it is part of our convenient modernity in which we seek to eradicate human suffering through a domination of nature, including the nature of the atom. Along the path from uranium ore to industrially, medically or militarily useful materials to radioactive waste, there is a dynamic mix of benefits, liabilities and economic opportunities.

The common perception is that if we avoid nuclear power facilities and research and testing sites that we’re generally safe from exposure to radiation. The reality is that we are all exposed to ration on an ongoing basis. Just by being on Earth, we come into contact with a certain level of ionizing radiation. The United States Environmental Protection Agency has even put together a system of radiation risk assessment that breaks conveniently allows people 360 millirems per year, or about one a day.

Twenty-six of those come naturally from cosmic sources and another 23 to 90, again without human cause, from the ground you walk on. You are also expected to ingest about 40 millirems of radiation from your food and water and calculated to breathe in an astounding 200 millirems from the alpha particles from radon gas. If you get medical x-rays you can expect to absorb about another 70 millirems annually. There are also a whole range of lifestyle factors that you may not expect to affect your millirem exposure, like porcelain crowns or false teeth, the mantels of gas lanterns and living in a stone, brick or concrete building.

The one that we all fear and had 80’s nightmares about – reactor meltdowns and fallout from the more than 500 above ground nuclear explosions between 1945 and 1990 – gives us only one millirem a year. That is about the same as the LCD display wrist watch that you wear.

This is not to say that certain locations and events, such as the 26 April 1986 accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine or the attacks on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on 6 and 9 August 1945 respectively, have not resulted in irrevocable and incomprehensible death, suffering and disfigurement. However, the environmental and social fallout from these events has not precluded the continuation, and even proliferation of nuclear and radiation technologies.

In many ways the first decade of this century is a renaissance for nuclear development, both as rumors of the United States’ efforts to develop small scale “bunker buster” nuclear weapons and as North Korea seems to have brushed the United States off its back with its combination of long range missiles and a demonstrated nuclear weapon test in October 2006. Also, Russia is helping Iran build a nuclear reactor as it continues with the development of its nuclear capabilities, whether those be aimed at electricity or weapons production and last August the United States signed a bilateral agreement with India regarding India’s “civilian” nuclear technology. And in the United States 17 companies are laying the groundwork to build 33 new nuclear reactors – possibly just the right solution for energy in a market in which oil will probably not see the low side of $100 a barrel ever again and biofuels continue to conflict with food markets.

If the question is “How do we ensure our military capabilities and our energy needs?” then the answer, for many, seems to be the same as last century – go nuclear.

In the shadow of this answer, we may also renew our nightmare scenarios, though they will now be lined with advanced radiation technologies like praseodymium-147 to measure the thickness of our textiles, americium-241 to detect smoke in our homes, californium-252 to measure moisture content in the fields where our food grows and iodine-131 for radiation therapy.

Further down the half life of these military, industrial, political and medical innovations, there are results both more curious and more sinister.

In Washington state, in the US, courts have ruled in favor of those exposed to radiation as a result of working at or living near the Hanford Nuclear Site, which produced plutonium for much of the US arsenal. Such a ruling opens the way for further “downwinder” cases related to nuclear weapons production and testing in the United States.

Radioactive waste dumps and tailings from uranium mining and processing are also a huge issue related to our dependence on radiation. The waste is often a fiscal liability and this translates into an environmental liability as well, as it has been dumped and abandoned around the world, from South Africa to Central Asia and the Sea of Japan.

Abandoned uranium mines, in Boulder and Basin, Montana, US and Bad Gastein Austria, have actually capitalized on the excess of radon gas and converted the liability to a part of their tourist economies as people come there for natural radiation treatments that are claimed to cure arthritis and other ailments.

However, the renewed proliferation of fission and fissile materials as solutions for political, energy, industrial and military predicaments will outstretch their useful lifespan. We’ll still be stuck with the deadly half-lives of these “advancements,” as more nuclear activity moves deeper into our communities, farmland, industry and foreign policy, and the only recourse will be to recalculate the recommended daily dosage of millirems: a 21^st century version of “day glow” fashion.

PETA chews the fat

PETA's meat support a hard change to swallow

Duceré Useré Clycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 4/23/08

It's official - the coldest day in hell since Charlton Heston made good on his promise to deliver a firearm in his cold dead hands: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals announced it supports "meat."

Far from just supporting meat, PETA is promoting a $1 million prize for any organization that can produce and market volumes of in vitro meat by June 2012. In vitro meat is meat tissue grown in culture in a controlled environment rather than in an animal body in a pasture, lot, sty or cage.

The echoes of Heston and "soylent green" are creepily present in the challenge to produce the nondescript tissue mass, though we are told that the cultures will be bred from stem cells of animals that we already traditionally eat, like chickens, cattle and swine.

The New York Times reported that PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk has been "hoping to get the organization involved in advancing in vitro meat technology for at least a decade." However, the announcement has shocked PETA to its core as the "meat is murder" mantra will now be complicated by the idea that meat without skeletal, circulatory and nervous systems may not exactly be in a position to be murdered.

The Times further reported that Newkirk understands the move has initiated a "civil war" within PETA, with one PETA Vice President, Lisa Lange, maintaining the philosophy that "animals are not ours to eat," while Newkirk defends the support of body-less meat tissue in terms of actions that will lead to conditions in which "fewer animals suffer."

I am at once pleased, shocked and appalled by the announcement and the implications of separating our meat production from animals' bodies. The decision of what to eat has social, economic and environmental repercussions that need to be addressed. We have to consider the question of whether or not we should support further industrialization of meat-type food products, because in the answer we will at once betray and realize a belief in either pastoral or industrial narratives of utopian ideals.

PETA's problematic move only further complicates this discussion. In order to try to make itself relevant again, PETA has imposed its argumentative claim of animal ethics and rights directly into the midst of dialogue on livestock production's role in global climate change. Earlier this month there was an inaugural in-vitro meat symposium in Norway. The press surrounding this event seems to have provided the right conditions for PETA to impose itself in such a fashion and, in effect, attempt to hijack collective concern about climate change.

This is moxie beyond what I've come to expect from PETA, as they seem to have realized there's only so far that nearly naked models and undergrads - always women by the way, but that's a question for another time - can move PETA's social message of ethics. All such discussions always have to move into the marketplace and faux-meat has a relevance to the masses and the market that faux-fur can never garner.

The sheer brilliance of re-founding PETA upon such a paradox strikes fear deep into my heart.

My first fear is that environmental reactionaries could actually think that this is a good idea and that we should further isolate human existence and sustenance within an illusion that modern industrial utopia can be achieved. There is precedence for markets, activists and consumers to all jump on alternatives with a rapacity that outpaces logical thought - biofuels is the best current example, in the context of its unintended impacts on food supplies and prices.

My second fear is exactly the same market function that I often put forth in this column as an integral element in the success of an overall sustainable market, economy, society and environment. I fear that people will buy this stuff. No doubt they will.

There is already an appetite for mechanically separated, chopped and pressed meat tissue products, and this in vitro meat tissue could easily fill that processed food market. As far as bone-in products marbled with fat like my two favorite cuts of dead cow - the New York strip and rib-eye steaks - how to produce these without the mess, disease and emissions of the rest of the cow is a challenge that attendees to the Norway symposium have been discussing how to overcome.

At this point we're back to the urban myth that there are vats of chicken breasts somewhere in the mid-west, growing without the rest of the chicken. Given that utopia, or dystopia given your ideals, it's time to pick a side and, as always, vote with your dollar. On the one hand you can throw your faith in a pastoral ideal in which local and ethically slaughtered meats can serve as an answer to problems of unsustainable environmental, social and economic practices. On the other hand, you can decide that, given Earth's human population, further industrialization of meat tissue is a logical, even desirable step.

The philosophy embodied in either position, unlike Newkirk's meat tissue, cannot be separated from your personal behavior and choices and, subsequently, the future that we collectively realize. Like Newkirk says, in ethics and philosophy, this is war.

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© Copyright 2008 Oregon Daily Emerald

Let's start with the lawyers

'Green' ambitions change lawyer stereotype

Duceré Useré Clycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 4/16/08

As stereotypes go, lawyers run at a deficit when it comes to empathy and morals. They're generally lampooned as being at the same level as used car salespeople - forked-tongue devils whose interest is more in winning or selling than in ethical responsibility.

However, students at the University of Oregon's School of Law are trying to level those interests as they promote the idea of making money through environmental law and sustainable business law. Last Friday the Law Students for Sustainable Business held the first Sustainable Business Symposium, focusing on renewable energy, carbon policy and sustainable development and investment.

By promoting a hybrid of environmental law and sustainable entrepreneurship, the LSSB envisions an environment in which lawyers champion sustainable policy and locally owned used car lots sell zero-emissions vehicles. This idea will be awkward for some, as we can hardly imagine a world in which the stereotypes of lawyers and salespeople that we make fun of open their mouths and start speaking of environmental and social responsibility rather than slick rhetoric and half-truth pitches.

While the LSSB's efforts are positioned to be extremely successful, as policy and investment are core driving factors to any economy, this movement will encounter resistance from within another branch of the sustainability movement, which holds fast to the mantra that lawyers and people with products to sell or money to invest cannot be trusted, or even considered by some to be the manifestation of pure evil.

What is required to overcome this combative atmosphere is a hybrid. "Green" activists need to merge with the green of capital investment. Isolationist activism in and of itself is not sustainable, as it in the end needs to have energy, products, modes of transportation and places to live like everyone else. The principle, then, must be one of growing, one of falling dominoes and world domination of sustainable economies and business practices.

Sustainability activists should actually consider this move by the LSSB, or even just the existence of the LSSB, as a huge success as social activism is helping inform business models. Sustainable ideals require a partnership with sustainable materiality, and co-opting the business world as it is already structured is much more efficient than creating a parallel economy that would seek to destroy and replace the old order. Reduce, reuse, recycle - stick to the basic principles.

In the end, or at this point anyhow, it comes down to a question of motivation. We are becoming more motivated through negative re-enforcement - that is we are told that if we do not change our lifestyle and sources of that lifestyle that we will die. However, we need to encourage good old positive re-enforcement of cash and material benefit. This is what "the masses" respond to and this is what business responds to as well. This is the hybrid motivation - good for our environment and good for the bottom line - that necessitates and implies a hybrid between ideological hippie crunchies and entrepreneurial suits.

Selling this idea itself is going to be the first step. Trust has to be realized in the no-man's land between conservationists and developers. The suits will have little trouble, once old streams dry up, adapting to new cash-flow streams and rivers of capital. A basic business principle is that one grows or dies, and if sustainable markets, manufacturing and marketing represent the new streams, capitalist boats will put afloat in them.

This may strike some idealists as shameless opportunism and trigger accusations of "greenwashing" in order to move the same old products. Those who advocate individually isolationist sustainability over mass-marketed sustainability may hold an ideal in which invasive barges of capitalist exploitation and extraction are banned from trafficking the idealistic streams of sustainability. This ideal is as unsustainable and outdated as the petrol-heavy import-export model that they are critiquing.

Not only accepting, but deliberately pirating and exploiting the willingness of capital ventures to populate new areas of the economy is the hybrid model that sustainability advocates have to embrace.

The movement of goods and services will not stop and isolationist pockets of sustainability are futile in a reality in which the action of the world's masses determines global fate. World economy and world conquest needs to be the ultimate goal for the sustainability movement, whether the agents are crunchy idealists or business suits.

The world will go "green" when the best and most affordable products and services are sustainable and activists should try on this perspective where the market drives the movement rather than the movement tries to derail the market. So co-opt the market, give it good returns, and in the spirit of this move, let's hear it for the lawyers.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2008 Oregon Daily Emerald

From crap to artifact in only 14,300 years

Fossil find reignites continuing debate over origin

Ducere Usere Cyclere

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 4/9/08

It's true. I usually write about local crap. But not like this.

Last week a team of international scientists, including UO Museum of Natural and Cultural History senior archeologist Dennis Jenkins, published findings about some crap they found in the Paisley Caves in Central Oregon. In a way this is just ordinary crap that we flush every day - some human took a dump in a cave.

Looking at it from another perspective, however, this team of academics studied the six pieces of poop - also known as coprolites - and determined that these feces-cum-artifacts are actually 14,300-year-old evidence of human inhabitance of the Americas. Radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis provides the basis for the team to make claims that this is the oldest DNA evidence found in the "New World," and that its genetic path leads back to Siberia or Asia. This in itself may be just another load of crap to some researchers.

A DNA study published in mid-March on the online journal PLoS One claims that most Native Americans can trace their ancestry to six women, and that those six "apparently did not live in Asia because the DNA signatures they left behind aren't found there." Instead the researchers claim that they probably migrated 20,000 years ago from "Beringia," which is now under the waters of the Bering Strait.

So this story of local crap found in a cave may be the evidence of what humans were eating and doing here in what we call Oregon; or it may be a story of what we as contemporary people are wondering about ourselves. The connection of our existence and our DNA to humans of one or two millennia past may belie the facts of who we are, or the ways in which we ask where we came from.

My students and I are carrying on a three-week discussion about origins in the composition class I teach at the University. On Monday I asked my students whether or not there is a direct connection between our individual bodies and the terrestrial body of Earth, in the context of whether actions we take that impact the Earth results in impacts upon ourselves.

There was a general silence.

I don't know if this was a result of the 9 a.m. class time, general disinterest, or if the question came across as rhetorical. After another prompt they voiced a concurrence on the reality of the concept that our world and existence is not a compartmentalization of human and nonhuman, unnatural and natural, but one continuous interwoven chain of reactions.

We went on to discuss, in short form, the idea that testing nuclear weapons in Utah and Nevada could result in parallel effects in both Earth's environment and Earth's self-righteous inhabitants; or if humans could cause the release of radiation yet remain insulated from atmospheric fallout and resultant cancer. If a team of scientists 14,000 years from now finds some crap from the 1950s, they will probably try to ask the same questions about origin, continuity and the relevance of what is present in the coprolite, be it digested plant matter, DNA or radiation.

In a world in which truth of human origin and existence is claimed and determined by science as a way to address our own contemporary situations, we may be overlooking more mundane universalities. Despite all the time that has passed since the theorized land mass of Beringia, we still do so many of the same things. We eat, we look for shelter, we exist between our origin and our destination and we poop.

So, if so much has stayed the same, what is the core of what has changed? The implied and touted progress of modernity has been promoting egalitarian society, humanity free from poverty and injustice of other humans, and nature at work for humans, human nature in tune with itself.

However, we seem to be stuck with the paradox that human nature is perhaps the most unnatural "thing" of all, as we consider the anonymous cave pooper of 12,292 BCE more natural than the hypothetical Utah pooper of 1950 with Uranium 238 in his crap. Both are leaving evidence of their world, evidence of themselves, and as such the pooper of 1950 leaves evidence of humankind's attempt to dominate the "nature" of the atomic structure.

In the tale of these two poops there is no physical separation between humans and "nature," because the concept of humans being apart from the rest of existence is a cognitive invention. We are evidence of our environment as much as we are evidence of our actions.

That is why the coprolite team can determine what that human ate and what grew in that environment before it became the desert it is today. And that is also why, as we examine that old crap, we should consider the questions we assume we're asking, and see if there is evidence of what we are in the fresh crap we flush every day. We will never definitively determine our origin, but in asking, we need to consider why it is more interesting - and safer perhaps - to wonder where we came from than where we are.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2008 Oregon Daily Emerald

Ousource yourself.

Written by Joshua Grenzsund

Economy says: “Outlook not so good, seek something overseas.” Thursday, 03 April 2008

It’s a wide world of work out there. In an employment environment where people are lamenting the loss of jobs outsourced overseas, the best move may be to get ahead of the curve and outsource yourself. If you’re planning on graduating from college — which, chances are, if you’re in school that is part of your plan — then you’ll have to face the eventual question of what you’ll do next. Despite repeated reassurances that our country is not heading into a recession — or even worse, a depression-scale economic meltdown — even President Bush has admitted that our “economy obviously is going through a tough time." And Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson had to commit about $30 billion to “maintain the stability of our financial system” through this “tough time.” In light of this situation, you may be experiencing a sinking sensation, in which case you should seriously consider folding your degree into a life raft and making for elsewhere. This can be done in two main fashions. Either you can keep close ties with Uncle Sam and work for the US Government in some other country, or you can choose to cut the cord with the Uncle and become a bonafide free-market ex-patriot. For those of you who can’t make up your mind, there’s always the Peace Corps, which gives you the feel-good satisfaction of living at the host country’s poverty level and feeling completely detached from the US while also providing you with the opportunity to partake in the bureaucratic circus and possibly take advantage of government-provided mental health care at the end of your service. The Peace Corps is actually celebrating its 47th year, after more than 190,000 volunteers have answered John F. Kennedy’s 1960 call to University of Michigan students to “make the greatest possible difference” in the world. Though the origin and mystique of the organization may sound like the epitome of strange bed fellows — humanitarian endeavor and aggressive patriotism — many returning volunteers actually report that it has a lot more to do with sex, drinking, drugs and crapping in your pants than with lofty ideals and accomplishments. A Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras summed up this universal Peace Corps experience in a message posted on the Peace Corps’ forum. He writes, “Well, I am officially a Peace Corps volunteer as I swore in on August 25 (and officially shit my pants on September 13).” And he doesn’t mean that he was metaphorically scared or surprised about something. He pooped in his pants. Ask a returned volunteer about his or her official moment. Of course, a lot of you will want to work overseas in a situation in which you are not likely to have semi-chunky diarrhea inconveniently running out of your ass. Cross the Peace Corps off your list, bone up on your language skills, and try to avoid working for the government all together. Teaching English and nursing are two hot areas to get you abroad. In the case of teaching, you will need to plan to get certified to teach English as a foreign language (TEFL) and in many cases also get ready to live where two-ply toilet paper may be in short supply, though it is possible to land a gig in France and other countries that may seem closer to home. For you nursing students who want to change the world, you’re in luck. Pretty much anywhere you can speak a local language and stab someone with a needle, you can get yourself a position. And you business and information technology folks may want to forget global investment firms like Bear Stearns join the rest of us who want to get out in the world in a first rate manner with salary and full benefits. To do this, just follow the money — $340 million a day doesn’t just disappear into our war efforts, it shows up in the pockets of workers who have followed the trend overseas. There’s an opportunity for just about anyone. If you can dream up a skill set or a job description, Halliburton is waiting for your resume, with 277 job openings in over 50 countries. And if contractor’s pay is what you want, there’s well over 200 organizations that have federal contracts to do everything from delivering jet fuel to managing computer networks to shooting at security threats, all overseas. For some of you, however, the only worthwhile place to combine your patriotism, salary requirements and appetite for adventure is literally on the front lines — accepting the paradox that there is little that resembles a front line of conflict any more — and again the US Government has no shortage of opportunities for you to turn your degree into an overseas career. You could enlist in the Army or Marines and spend the rest of your life overseas, working up from where your BA would start you at $21,006 a year. Or if you would rather develop your diplomatic skills more than your trigger finger, the State Department could have you participating in foreign affairs for around $40,000 a year to start. On the other hand, if you would like to put your communication and persuasion skills to use in a field that actually requires you to carry a handgun and will politely allow you to interview people with a bucket of water and the back of your hand, the CIA is always taking applications, bonus if you already speak a foreign language and know how to manipulate ambiguous situations. Pack extra briefs, though, because I also hear you’re not a real intelligence officer until you crap your pants in a third world country. So there’s something for everyone out there — though most of it involves compromised hygiene — and if things ever look up back here, you can paddle on home and find work at a Starbucks.

Pave the Town 'Green'

University's push for 'green' Trials just a facade

In my opinion | Duceré Useré Clycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 4/2/08

The road to sustainability is paved with green intentions. In the case of the upcoming Olympic Track Trials, known as "Eugene 08," that road has been paved over with good old-fashioned black tar.

The conflicting goals and ideals embodied by the track trials, in the end, will not produce a "zero waste" or fully sustainable event because in the flurry of activity surrounding the event, short term profit is placed before the long term philosophical and social goals of sustainability.

This does not mean that there are no sustainable efforts, or that the efforts of those involved in those efforts are meaningless; however, those efforts are overshadowed by the unrelenting and all-invasive need for profit in a capitalist system.

The excitement about the "green" and "sustainable" aspects of Eugene 08 have given way to more practical concerns about making money. The peak of green energy seems to have waned near the end of last year. In November 2007 KLCC broadcast a report about sustainable efforts that are part of the Olympic event.

A critical fact given in the report is that the Sustainability Committee does not have a dedicated budget and must rely upon volunteer efforts. In other words, a failure to dedicate funds to a sustainability effort is a conscious decision to give lip service to a lot of the sustainable catchphrases, hoping that people's passion will be cheap investment capitol where cash can be spent elsewhere.

One place the University put some resources to support Eugene 08 was directly into the sustainable image-building that many have become familiar with over the last several months. Last year the University's Event Management Research Team, on behalf of the 2008 Olympic Track & Field Sustainability Committee, conducted research to find out what logos would best represent "the sustainability aspects of community events," specifically Eugene 08, and how it may be portrayed to relate to sustainable policies in "transportation, energy, water, waste management, social justice, labor, purchasing and community legacy."

In the story reported by KLCC, Sustainability Chair Alex Cuyler explained how many of the sustainable aspects, those that focus on environmental, social and economic sustainability, are engineered deep into the planning, along with how fans and athletes will arrive to Hayward Field by shuttle or bike, eat organic food with compostable utensils, presort their recyclables and trash, refill their water bottles, and drop off their old shoes to be turned into track surfaces.

Of all these "sustainable" aspects, the conflicted ideology is most apparent in the last - that being the idea that fans should fly or drive old shoes to Eugene and leave them to be transported to another location and reused as track surfacing. It seems the idea is that this feel-good publicity event will help "save our planet." The reality is more along the lines that fans are expected to go to the local Nike store and buy a new pair of made-in-Taiwan shoes. This feel-good ideology further breaks down when you realize that Nike is moving its store from Eugene's ailing downtown to Oakway Center, which relies more on vehicle traffic than pedestrian or bike-riding shoppers.

A truly laudable effort, however, are those made in remodeling Hayward Field using recycled materials and economic design, especially in regards to the new lighting systems. Eugene 08 is also attempting to use only "green power" for the three-by-one block area of the event.

In spite of all the "green" energy behind Eugene 08, the ideological conflicts can be crystallized in the Sustainability Committee's efforts to have fans buy carbon offset credits to make up for the "carbon footprint" of their flights to Eugene. This desperate attempt to "greenify" everything with a sort of Green Giant Midas Touch is more embarrassing and painful than laughable. While "greenies" attack air traffic as a cause of global climate change, local investors understand it is this same air traffic that is key to local economic and social sustainability.

On March 30, the Register-Guard published a small piece on new air services to Eugene - United 737 flights. The story reports that, according to airport manager Tim Doll, the renewed service "will be a boon for the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials this summer." This may be an indicator that Eugene is on the path to revitalizing its local economy by luring in investors, visitors and new residents who can help reverse the sort of decay that is epitomized by the gaping holes in Eugene's downtown area.

It also demonstrates the hyper-ambivalence of our catchphrase and logo-heavy sustainability movement. So in the midst of this rush to cash in on the trials, and the conflicts between environmental, social and economic sustainability, we may all be telling the environment "Just Screw It," while we wear our sustainable logo T-shirts, sport our new imported Nike shoes, and get ready to fly back home and tell everyone how they should catch a comfortable 737 flight to Eugene and make some carbon footprints in America's number one Green City.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2008 Oregon Daily Emerald