open sesame

Getting back to the world domination business, I should spell out my USA conquest strategy. You might remember the “open sesame” words for Australia. Now it’s time for the US. Well, I reckon the best way to make Americans surrender is to make them believe that it’s natural. Just market forces. You can’t oppose the allmighty market, can you? Second, make them believe that everyone does it. If that doesn’t help it, tell them it’s God’s will.

touring

I’d love to write a little more about the US but am simply too busy becoming what Germans call a Dipl.-Ing. Before I left I took a rental car and traveled a little around the state where I had spent three months just working (something I was dumb enough not to do in Australia). You may be interested in some of the places I visited so I compiled a few images.

Let’s begin with San Francisco. One of the few cities in California which is not sprawling out into the surrounding land. It is confined to its peninsula in the San Francisco Bay. The positive effect is visible: Most places are in walking distance from each other and consequently the streets are populated with people. Overall, San Francisco is a lot more European than any other city I saw in California.

Market Street, one of the city’s busy arteries. A street in Chinatown with the Transamerica Building in the background. Golden Gate Park, a huge and very beautiful park in San Francisco. And last but not least a view from Alcatraz with the city in the background.

I continued my trip to the east (well, there’s only water to the west) through the Central Valley. Parts of it are pretty neat but most of it is boring, overfertilized, salinized, endless cropland. Ugly to any sane person and even more ugly to anyone with a tiny bit of ecologic knowledge. On the other hand, I did enjoy all the tasty fruit and vegetables from the Central Valley.

I spent a night in Freson which seems to be one of the most boring places in whole California. A wide, flat city with no personal character. My judgement may be biased so please correct me if I’m wrong. Much better was the (far too quick) drive through Sequoia National Park. People told me that Yosemite offers the more beautiful landscape. However, Sequoia features the trees from which its name is derived. Standing in front of a giant sequoia tree makes even me feel very, very small. Here’s a picture of the world’s largest giant sequoia. Note the people at the bottom. After all, the landscape wasn’t that bad.

The last stop on my trip was Las Vegas. I went there primarily to watch a show of George Carlin at the Orleans Casino. The show was great, though he did take some time to get to the hard-hitting political punch lines that I love so much. At the peak of the show he called the ever-recurring phrase “God bless America” a PATRIOTIC TOURETTE SYNDROME. Bam! In your face, nationalists. Interestingly the audience laughed a lot more about the simple, superficial jokes than about the ones criticizing their own beloved country. It seems that this nation needs a lesson in self-loathing (for good reasons, that is). This particular show was my last chance – he died shortly after, at age 71. I didn’t gamble a single cent in Las Vegas. Instead, I invested my money in armory. Nevada has far more permitting firearms laws than California and a number of ranges specialize in gun rental to tourists. Overall I shot two pistols, four submachine guns, two rifles and a light machine gun. For those of you who know what these letters mean: HK USP .45 ACP /w silencer, MR Desert Eagle .50 AE, IWI Uzi 9 mm Para, Thompson .45 ACP, Colt M635 9 mm Para, HK MP5 9 mm Para, HK G3 7.62 mm Nato, SIG 556 5.56 mm Nato, FN Minimi 5.56 mm Nato. It was a hell of a lot of fun (for a gun nut like me). The Hoover Dam nearby is not as spectacular as people may tell you but for a professional environmentalist with some knowledge about hydro power it was worth a visit. What puzzled me is that at no point during the tour did anyone mention the fact that hydro power produces no carbon dioxide. In Europe this would be practically all they’d tell you. The importance of (anthropogenic) climate change has not reached Nevada yet.

A big thank you to the other motorists whom I shared the highways with. I have never encountered more civilized drivers than in California (and that tiny piece of Nevada).

gorgeous gorge

Now that I’m finished and just wasting my time I can catch up with the stories I didn’t tell. I won’t cover everything but there is one issue that must not be left out – the Grand Canyon.

My dad visited me over here and besides checking out many of the restaurants in town we also took a longer trip to Tusayan, Arizona. This is a tiny village just south of the entrance to the Grand Canyon National Park that only exists to provide services to tourists.

Getting there takes a while. In fact, it’s a 10-hour drive (given no major jams on the way). Once you leave the Los Angeles metropolitan area on the Interstate 15 you cut across the mountains into the desert towards Barstow. We came across this freight train near the Cajun junction. These trains (we saw more during the trip) are extremely long and usually pulled by three or four locomotives. Once over the mountains the road turned into what people in Europe have in mind when they think about American highways: an endless boring road that makes drivers fall asleep and crash into trucks. But even there in the desert, you will find lots of small and medium size villages and towns, scattered across the landscape, along with which come the shopping malls that enrich the dull desert backdrop with a blast of colors. Capitalism 1 – desert 0. Hurray!

Same as Germans, Americans whine about the ever-rising gas prices. The cheapest we got on this trip was 3.55 Dollars. Per gallon. That’s 3.8 liters. I’d laugh if the problem of dwindling fossil resources and carbon dioxide emissions wasn’t so serious. Now it’s around 4.80 a gallon in the coastal urban regions of California, which is still ridiculously cheap. If people in Germany don’t consider to carpool (let alone switch to – heaven forbid – cycling) at 1.50 Euros per liter, it just has to get yet more expensive. Fuck you gas-guzzlers, that’s a solid nail in your Hummer’s coffin!

After hours and hours and hours of driving we eventually arrived. On the next day we headed towards the canyon and – Bam! – it is absolutely mind-blowing. You stand on top of the rim, gazing at billions of years of rock formation and millions of years of erosion. You take photos over photos but it’s plain impossible to capture. Here’s one of the best photos that I took but it gives you just a glance of the grace of this breathtaking landscape.

If I tell you that the gorge is an average 1 mile deep this sounds impressive but you probably still have a hard time imagining a vertical distance of that dimension. In this image you can see people walking on the crest. The following image provides a wider view. That’s not even the full height – it goes on. And on. You can’t even see the Colorado River at the bottom from this point.

We even took the liberty of a helicopter flight across the canyon. The view was fascinating but I was scared out of my mind in this light and unstable helicopter on such a windy day.

But there’s more than just the gorge to gaze at. Along the rim you can find some interesting rock formations, spooky tree carcasses and cuddly squirrels. Then there’s the Imax in Tusayan. Seriously, what’s the most famous gorge in the world without a killer theater?!

On the morning of the day we were planning to leave I opened the curtains of the hotel room and – Bam again! – stared at three inches of snow. Over night. This was reason enough to take a quick look at the canyon instead of leaving immediately. Since the climate inside the canyon is very different from the one on the plateau there was no snow inside. An interesting view.

The take-home message of this entry is: If you ever get the chance to see the Grand Canyon, take it. Whether you just walk on the rim or actually hike down and back doesn’t matter, but you have to see it.

happiness is a clean graph

All right, Jan is back in action.

Eventually, my work in California is done. This is what I’ve been working on for the past three months. The graph probably leaves you puzzled. That’s fine because I never intended to reveal any results on the internet.

busy

There’s a number of stories to tell but I’m quite busy. Sorry, guys.

life

I have decided to use my dear readers as a source of inspiration. As most of you probably know, I am an environmental engineer in the making (quite close to completion, actually) and my current work is related to biodiversity. I was wondering about the understanding of this term in the general public. Also, at this point I could use some inspiration. So here’s my task for you: I would like you to complete the following questionnaire and leave the answer as a comment. Please do not conduct any research before answering the questions, just go ahead and write what you think. Ideal would be to not even read the other comments before leaving your own.

0. For the record: Describe your relation to environmental topics. Are you (a) an environmental professional, (b) a scholar of environmental science, engineering or management, (c) an interested citizen, (d) a common citizen with no special interest in the environment, or (e) an annoyed citizen who can’t stand the hype about environmental topics anymore.

1. List the first two or three keywords that come to your mind when thinking about “biodiversity”.

2. What is biodiversity for you?

3. What aspect of biodiversity do you consider most precious?

4. What aspect of biodiversity do you consider most crucial to human survival?

5. What aspect of biodiversity do you consider most threatened?

6. What aspect of biodiversity do you consider expendable?

7. How much does the biodiversity in a region that is not your own matter to you?

8. How much are you aware of your own impact on biodiversity?

9. What would nature look like if biodiversity was in a state that you consider its optimum?

10. How important is biodiversity compared to other environmental issues to you?

11. How important is biodiversity compared to other political/social issues to you?

12. What is the best way to preserve biodiversity, if it needs preservation at all?

I appreciate your individual answers. Thank you.

noise, eventually

Eventually I found some decent noise in this seemingly metal-free place. There was a concert in Isla Vista, the part of Goleta where most of the undergraduate students from UCSB live. On the weekend, Isla Vista turns into one big party. Saturday night I had the pleasure to watch the punk band Screwdrive Suicide, the death metal band Mouth of the Serpent and the power metal band Nekrogoblikon perform in the backyard of a house beautifully situated on the cliff above the Pacific Ocean. There was no club, no bar, no nothing. They had simply set up their equipment in the open. I’ve never seen a gig more underground than this before.

Check out the bands’ MySpace profiles. I particularly liked Mouth of the Serpent but that’s just me with my death metal addiction. It was a pity that I had kissed the asphalt the other day and didn’t want to risk moving too much.

bad luck #2

Advice to cyclists: Never hit anything harder than your body.

But good luck for you, my dear readers. I have uploaded the video from the whale watching tour on YouTube. Cliquez içi.

Green Image Day

April 22 (which is tomorrow for me and today for some of you) is Earth Day. Not just in Santa Barbara, but globally. On Sunday, the city celebrated Earth Day with a fair of eco-friendly companies and citizen groups around the old courthouse. The place is wonderfully picturesque and a fine location for revoking some long-lost hippie spirit (pay attention to the kids in tie-dye wear and the woman with the hula hoop to the left).

It was a little disappointing though, for the professional environmentalist that I am. I’m suspicious of single days dedicated to tasks that require continuous attention (mother’s day is a prime example). The day probably helped the promotion of eco-friendly ideas and gave companies with green solution to common problems an opportunity to present themselves to potential customers. For example, I think there’s a number of house owners with cash to spend on things like efficient heating and cooling, water reuse technology and the like.

Unfortunately the exhibitors seemed too carelessly selected. What’s a henna tattooing business doing at the Earth Day fair? How about a group that advocates immigration control in order to reduce environmental problems in California due to overpopulation? It gets better: Right next to them was the booth of the Volunteer Ministers, some Red Cross lookalike turned Scientology.

Apart from these obscure groups there was some shiny technology on display, e.g. hybrid cars. One exhibitor claimed to achieve a mileage of more than 100 MPG (miles per gallon, that’s how they measure vehicle efficiency over here). Having taken a look at their homepage I have to say that this is close to a fraud. Yes, it can run many times as far as a common car on each gallon of gasoline, but the energy gap is filled with electricity from the grid – wow.

Sorry guys, I liked the event for the nice atmosphere and there certainly were some interesting booths, but I think you can do better than this contentwise. I might be a little too cynical about the topic, though. Comments and descriptions of your local Earth Day celebrations are welcome.

raise the dead (guns)

The arms manufacturer Vltor of Tucson, Arizona recently announced that they are recreating the famous Bren Ten pistol (which had a rather short appearance on the stage of firearms history) under the name of Fortis. I’m not going to bother you with details about this gun but I need to tell you that it’s comforting to know that for the blog they started to announce news about the development of the Fortis pistol they chose the same color scheme.