Back to the Roots

When I arrived to Boston 4 months ago, I stayed in a hotel in Allston, a neighbourhood South-West of Cambridge and closer to Boston University. My first morning in this city I ended up having breakfast (blueberry pancakes, of course) in an extremely nice and relaxed coffee house Allston Café, on Brighton Avenue. I was immediately impressed, it was a café that would be a perfect hang-around place for cool characters of a sitcom. Actually, the employees of the place would themselves form a nice casting with their quirky glasses and tight t-shirts covering their skinny bodies (I take this opportunity to mention that the Harvard guys are often way too pumped up, and boy, they like to show it as well!). The music varied from folk to old school rap and the customers were unpretentious punks or some sort of artists. I was almost intimidated, afraid they might recognise that I belong to the Harvard crowd, rather than to this, it seemed to me, tight-knit community of free souls.

On Thursday, I decided that before leaving Boston I still need to have those blueberry pancakes. I put on my Converse shoes (to hide my “across the river” look) and took the bus (none of my three bus tickets worked so I finally got a free ride) pass the Harvard Business School and over one highway. I suddenly realised what I had been missing in Cambridge: this kind of crowd of different, bohemian (but still not bobo as they could be in Europe), somehow rougher and more interesting people who wouldn’t compare Harvard’s professors to those in Yale or Princeton, oh, they didn’t look like they were very much interested in what was happening in the latest sociology or anthropology research. This was somehow more real, not an academic bubble, a bit like some cool café in Kreutzberg in Berlin or “darker” side of Santo Spirito in Florence. Those people with so many tattoos and hair colours that first you seem like an outlier but once you have a chance to talk with them, they turn out to be friendly and interested in you (and not in your research).

I had my wonderful blueberry pancakes with some maple syrup. In the next table, there was a group of four guys. I recognised one of them, I had seen him there drawing the first time I went to the café. This time, I ended up having a conversation with him. He was an artist, some of the painting on the walls and in the toilet were his works. He liked drawing monsters (he actually made his living drawing monsters!) and he gave me one of his drawings with recommendations of some comic books that I should try out. I told him I was going to the Museum of Fine Arts and that I was going to leave on Monday (just before some of his arts exhibitions would open in Boston). He wanted me to indulge in my creativeness and proposed me a drawing date in the café during the weekend. It was basically his second home or his office. It was a great idea but I was too sad to call him to confirm a date. Of course, I meet somebody different just before I’m returning back to Europe. I didn’t want to regret of not living in the funnier side of the river where I could have met some interesting personalities who would have been shaped by something else than Ivy League elite schools. Instead of our drawing date, I went to buy a Harvard t-shirt today.

By the way, after a 1,5 hours of walking I finally found Museum of Fine Arts, it was great! And the last sight on my to do –list for Boston, I'm ready to return to Europe.

Oil, Coal, Wind and Food

In 1969, an offshore oil drilling platform close to Santa Barbara’s white sand beaches exploded and spilled 100 000 barrels (16 million litres) of oil into the sea. This ecological catastrophe led to new environmental laws and changes in oil industry. One can wish that the similar catastrophe facing the Gulf of Mexico at the moment would produce these kinds of positive side effects as well. However, there are no signs that the American dependency on oil is decreasing; in fact, Gulf of Mexico represents an increasingly important domestic source of oil (one third of American oil production).

Boston Globe cartoonist Dan Wasserman.

Energy issues have hit the headlines often this year. In West Virginia, 29 workers died in a mining accident recently. Then came the oil spill in the coast of Louisiana. In the clean energy side, there was the approval to build the country’s first offshore wind farm in Nantucket, close to Cape Cod, the beautiful peninsula that I visited in March. There were many protests in the island of Nantucket about this development of a windpark size of Manhattan, for aesthetic reasons. The worry of destroying the views is of course understandable and often employed in the windmill debates. But pondering the issue in the actual energy context, we must set new priorities. Do we want to spoil the oceanic view from the summerhouses of privileged people (for example the late senator Ted Kennedy was opposing the windmill park as his family has a holiday house on the seaside there) or are we more concerned about the ecological system of the seas and the global warming? Boston Globe’s cartoonist Dan Wasserman got the point a few days ago:

Politics are often coming far behind the civil society in fighting against social or ecological problems. The New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, who is often pleading for clean energy policies, saw an opportunity in the current oil spill to change the American energy production patterns. While I totally agree with him, I think that for now the only hope (even if it's not very realistic either) is that people would themselves start thinking of the consequences of their car-centred life styles. If climate change hasn’t provoked any tangible phenomena in the USA (except for the droughts in California maybe) and is thus relatively easy to ignore, the oil slicks washing to your beach might cause some concrete worry and perhaps even an acknowledgement of its connection to the life you’re leading.

In her excellent and inspiring non-fictional book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” (2007) Barbara Kingsolver tells how her family decided to live a more environment-friendly and healthier life. They moved from Arizona to their summerhouse in greener Virginia to cultivate their own food. In desert-surrounded Arizona, all the food was produced far away or irrigated with the water coming through a canal connected to Colorado river that now gets drier and drier when approaching the border with Mexico (not even reaching the ocean anymore). Their idea was to avoid products that are transported from Europe or South America or even just from another state in the USA. Instead they would consume only locally produced food that is gasoline-free and also better quality – and who needs strawberries in January anyways.

The book is a wonderful melange of scientific facts, tales of family life in a farm, horrific stories how huge agri-business corporations work and how local food from small farmers is not only healthier, more ecological, tastier, but also supports life in small communities. Unfortunately, I will leave Boston before the farmers’ market season really begins, but I’ve already left bananas or other exotic fruits from faraway countries in the shop (and for health reasons I always prefer organic products here). For sure, I will write about this book again here and I truly recommend it to everybody even not living in the USA. But I also hope to find a similar book written from a European perspective, so widely it has opened my eyes about the lobbying that affects what we eat and the problems, consequences and solutions that an individual consumer should be aware of.

"Recipes for Disaster" (or Katastrofin aineksia, 2008) provides another example of civic action in order to save the planet. In the docu-film Englishman John Webster and his Finnish family in Espoo are going for an 'oil-diet' for one year, oil meaning often plastic that is in all the simple things we daily use (therefore the Websters are making their own toothpaste and shampoo for example). The film is tragi-comic but the ecological idealism wonderfully crazy.

Following Webster, Planet Green website challenges us to join the oil detox reminding that gasoline is where only half of the barrel of oil goes to! The website also tells us that "Plastic production continues to increase at a rate of nine percent per year. Scientists estimate that more plastic will be manufactured in the first ten years of this century than in all of the previous one." Below an example where all this non-degradable plastic is ending up (see more photos by clicking here).