Crisisville

Faster, puberty, swell, swell!

I have two daughters, and when I signed the daddy contract in blood six years ago, it was understood that puberty was a teenage phenomenon. It would come along at 13 with fits of giggling, a solid dedication to making my life miserable and an incurable fixation with wild horses. Also, eerily, breasts.

But, check that, I've only got two years and counting. See, eight years old used to be the medical definition for abnormally early puberty. But now, it's the new normal. Based on several studies, scientists are recommending that the age of abnormal puberty be dropped to 7 for Caucasians, 6 for African-Americans. Eight is the new normal.

In fact, puberty has been coming earlier by a month every decade for a long time. That adds up. Why? Well, for a while, it was because our lives were improving. The body was just ready earlier. But not anymore:

In short, that finely tuned biological process may have reached a tipping point. Since the 1960s, Herman-Giddens says, the decline in the age of maturity has crossed the line from positive reasons, such as better diet, to negative ones, such as eating too much, exercising too little and the vast unknowns of chemical pollution.

I had wanted to wait and talk to my daughters about the birds and bees after they could at least spell the words. Scratch that, I had wanted to bribe my wife into talking to them about it. But now,  it's going to be out of pull-ups and into tampons.

Maybe I'm exaggerating. And there is a main point here besides my daddy freakout.

See, lots of researchers have theorized about this. Maybe its hormones in milk! Maybe its just tweenie boobs from all that Mickey D fat! Or maybe its that estrogen in the water that's making the hermaphrodite fish! No, seriously.

But there's no conclusive evidence for any chemical, or for obesity or any other lifestyle cause. And it would be unethical to, you know, drug children until you found the answer.

This points to the idea of one problem, one solution. Classically, scientists are trained to hypothesize and prove a single solution for a given problem. But given the complexity of life, that may not be possible any longer.

Most resilience theories put people squarely within an intersecting set of influences: social, environmental, economic, and organizational, to name a few.

Maybe it's not a particular chemical. It could be the interaction between the environmental factors and the lifestyle choices (milk, McDonald's) that people are making. That means that the problem could hit economically vulnerable kids more strongly - because they are more dependent on unhealthy food and often live in more contaminated areas.

Actually, its depressing that I have to write that some kids live in contaminated areas. But, hell, if we're making fish hermaphrodites against their will, something scary is going on. No offense intended toward fish that freely choose a safe, hermaphroditic lifestyle.

The point is that all of these factors influence each other. If we focus on eliminating estrogen in water or obesity in kids, we win a battle but not the war. We have to start thinking of our communities as urban eco-systems where everything effects everything else. To fix the problems, we've got to heal the community as a whole. We have to connect the symptoms-even the freaky breast budding symptoms-to the whole network of influences. Or we risk tipping the balance even more when we try to help.

And, believe me, my three year old is not ready for puberty, yet.

read more | digg story

Disaster Evacuation and Smart Growth

Happy New Year!

Here is an 18-minute presentation I put together for the Florida Department of Health on the intersection of smart growth transportation policy and health issues in disaster evacuation. It features some footage from just after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, as well as a discussion of the evacuations in Katrina and Rita (including some audio commentary from Mayor Ray Nagin).

It turns out that densely populated areas can be more smoothly evacuated if they have robust public transportation infrastructures, and that even using one dedicated bus lane can cut down evacuation times by a whole bunch.

Check it out here:

http://www.myfloridaeh.com/learning/evacuation-health/index.htm

(Note that however formal this may be, it's in no way Florida policy. It's the governmental equivalent of a think piece...)

Systems Disruption and Panarchy

What do the roadside bombs have in common with cheese in Fedou?  Other than semantic associations with a certain nation state?

Well, John Robb and the Global Guerrillas set of memes (systems disruption, systempunkt, etc.) have begun a systematic look at how attacks on resource targets can lead to cascading systems failures across a range of networks.

To me, the trick now is to look at how to develop a theoretical framework for these system failure. Yes, everyone says, attack the hubs and the scale-free networks will fall. But how many interacting networks can be linked? How many hubs, and how hard do you hit them?

One place where this discussion has been underway for a long time is in the study of social-ecological systems. For thirty years, C.S. Holling and his compatriots have be dissecting the links between resource-based environmental systems and their human-based governance bodies.

Their work has a lot to say about why and how linked systems fail or succeed. And--climate change or roadside bombs--I don't think we should ignore them. So let's go to the data.

Holling grabbed the phrase "Panarchy" to describe the linked non-hierarchical systems that are in play within these networks. Panarchy tries to map the transformations of the systems like this:

There's no real starting point here, but Alpha is a system organizational phase, with Omega as a Systems Collapse phase. The system grows in organization (and rigidity) from r to K, whereupond the rigidity precipitates a crisis. The resilience of the system determines whether the linked systems will maintain their integrity ("Remembering" and regrouping at point r) or initiate a full collapse of the system ("Revolting" to point Omega and neccessitating a full reorganization. The small graph is there to show that these associations are nested within other associations; crises in local systems can tricker crises in regional systems and vice versa.

Yikes. Did I lose you yet?

This matters because it give an evidence-based framework to look at what will cause a given system (or set of systems) to collapse. You know, when do those pipeline attacks become a system drain, when do they provoke a full system shutdown, and what elements let the oil system "remember" itself and hold together.

Beau-coup work to do here, but a new paper in Ecology and Society (Resilience and Regime Shifts: Assessing Cascading Effects) starts putting some of the pieces together. Ann Kinzig and the crew come up with two main features of these social-ecological systems.

First, its important to recognize that there have multiple thresholds (change states) connected to a host of variables that operate in different spaces and at different time scales. So, at any given time, there are lots of options that the system could shift to. And each option has different resilience levels. In effect, this is like the river argument: You can never step in the same river twice. And, every day it's a different pipeline system which is always looking to shift. It's always either organizing or collapsing.

Second, whether it organizes or collapses depends on the threshold changes or multiple sub-systems. As small edge-systems cross their collapse thresholds, for instance, it becomes ever more likely that the general system will collapse. These would be things like small processing areas, transportation linkages--even food service, care package delivery. Peripheral systems are all interconnected and can be used to predicate the general welfare of the larger system. This means that leaders have to be careful about looking at systems that operate in different scales of time and space (tiny systems, quick systems, slow systems), because they also effect the prioritized system's health.

In particular, the authors chart three kinds of scale (Patch, Farm, Region) and three kinds of interaction (Ecological, Economic, Social/Cultural). By looking at how the variables intersect, they can make predications about the fault lines in the system. That's all it takes, they argue, just a handful of variables. As long as you take into account the space/time scale changes in place, and the nested networks that effect the resilience of the current focuse systems.

Now, this is very much from a resource management perspective, but the deeper you get into the work, the more applicable it is for systems disruptive attacks. After all, what's more natural to us these days than fossil fuels, money trails and communications link-ups?

Community Overdrive

So everybody's talking about making new urban land use policies that use  Smart Growth to build community resilience.   I don't think you can put new wine into old  suburban policy, though, and so it becomes key to describe a new methodology for community research.

How, exactly, do we research all the ramifications of these policy changes, many of which seem eerily subjective (aesthetics, etc.)? Well, we dig into the theory of other areas that have made this jump before. We're basically going into the community unconscious here, right? We have to bring out all the identity buried with the gas mains and fill it with light.

That makes it fully appropriate to incorporate the methodology of postmodern and, to some extent, psychoanalytical observation into community-based research.

Okay, so how exactly do you delve into a sidewalk's sex drive?

Postmodern Community Theory

So, we're starting to hear a lot about community resilience in the context of global climate change. I would argue that it's not merely that we need to change policies in order to build this resilience, we need to change the policy process as well.

Postmodern urban theory is a kind of theoretical outgrowth of architectural ideas like new urbanism. It deals with fragmentary communities, the need for intensive community discourse, and the various ways outlying growth is reorganizing traditionally central spaces.

So, great, but where do I park my car and can I get fries with that?

Like a lot of postmodern ideas, the discourse opens outward into multi-valent possibilities, which for me is awesome right up until you have to write a policy that actually helps a community. I'm just an old school Jamesian pragmatist like that, boo yah.

So, here's what I wrestle with...