F&O’s rich selection of reports, analysis and commentary this weekend includes: new Commentary pieces by Chris Wood and Jonathan Manthorpe, and an Arts note on Norway’s choice of a design to memorialize the country’s horrific 2011 slaying. A Dispatch from ProPublica reviews research on the health impact of fracking for natural gas, while in Expert Witness a professor makes a case for thinking smarter — much smarter — about geoengineering and climate change.

Norway’s Void (Public access)

© Jonas Dahlberg Studio

A “memory wound” was chosen this month by a Norwegian panel to memorialize the 2011 massacre of 77 people, most of them teenagers, by a political extremist. The winning entry in the July 22 Memorial design competition is by Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg. Its several parts are dominated by a void – literally, a slice to be removed from the island where Anders Behring Breivik slaughtered 69 children attending a political camp.

Chris Wood’s new Natural Security column, Eight Simple Rules (Subscription)

She’s looking for love, not to get fracked. These eight simple rules — borrowed from an American sit-com — are addressed to any person (corporate or otherwise) who asks to take my planet out for a date at the mines, the oil well, or the multi-acre Walmart parking lot. By all means, have fun, kids. Come home with a tattoo and a stray dog you found in the street, if you like. Just follow these eight simple rules…

Jonathan Manthorpe: on Malaysian politics, and Chinese Imperialism (Subscription)

Manthorpe writes this week of the conviction of Malaysia’s opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, for sodomy in a clearly politically motivated trial. Will it backfire on the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition? The judicial persecution of Anwar by the government has been going on for 16 years, and yet his public support remains solid. Turning his gaze on Ukraine, Manthorpe examines Russia’s motives for interfering in the Crimea — and concludes that the serious Imperialist threat in the world comes not from Russia, but China.

Drilling for Certainty: The Latest in Fracking Health Studies (Public access)

For years environmentalists and the gas drilling industry have been in a pitched battle over the possible health implications of hydro fracking. But to a great extent, the debate has been hampered by a shortage of science. The science is far from settled — but there is a growing body of research to consider. ProPublica offers a survey of some of that work, in air quality, birth outcomes, and other health risks.

On Geoengineering: a case for sophisticated thinking. By Brad Allenby (Public access)

The failure of the Kyoto Protocol and the underlying process of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has led to substantial interest in geoengineering technologies …  The response of falling back on ideological certainties, romantic visions, and over-simplistic worldviews at some point becomes simply a form of irresponsible denial, because the complexity of the systems within which we are embedded mean that there is no home base, no golden age to return to — and our network of systems continues to evolve, and to reflect the growing dominance of human influence. And it will do so regardless of what stories we tell ourselves to try to avoid our responsibilities. What we can do is, to the best of our ability, rationally and ethically respond to the challenges we face. Geoengineering technologies are a part of the technology response that must be developed, but they are only a part, and as we explore them and their implications we need to be far more sophisticated in how we think about them as technologies, and manage them as part of an increasingly engineered planet.

FINDINGS:

Last but not least, here’s a video for a brain break.

Crows are raspers — to songbirds as Vanilla Ice is to Mozart. And yet it was a photo of crow-like birds, sitting on electric wires, that inspired Jarbas Agnelli to write a piece of music using the location of the birds as notes. He notes on the Vimeo site, below, “I was just curious to hear what melody the birds were creating.” Agnelli credits the composition of the work, Birds on the Wires, to the birds.  The video was a Vimeo staff pick four years ago. It’s worth a fresh listen.

Have a good weekend.

– Deborah Jones

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

F&O wraps up the week with an eclectic range of slow journalism from the past, present and future:

 Critical Assembly: A Drama Critic Remembers Berlin.

Two years before the wall came down, in 1987, historian and author Brian Brennan joined 139 other writers from 40 countries in Berlin, for an international conference on theatre on the 750th anniversary of Berlin’s founding. The meeting was fractious: “it seemed some of us would never agree on where to go for a good plate of liver dumplings, much less agree on how theatre could be made more relevant to our day-to-day lives,” he recalls. And yet, suddenly, theatre critics from around the world came to agreement — on a plea for world peace, “after we had visited the former concentration camp in Buchenwald where Nazis killed thousands of prisoners during the Second World War. Without world peace, we agreed, all this talk about the relevance of theatre would be just so much blather.” (Subscription)

SEAN NOBLE: Dark Money Man for the ‘Kochtopus.’

For a brief, giddy moment, Sean Noble — a little-known former aide to a congressman in Arizona, United States — became one of the most important people in American politics, Kim Barker and Theodoric Meyer write in an investigative ProPublica report this week. “Plucked from obscurity by libertarian billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, Noble was tasked with distributing a torrent of political money raised by the Koch network, a complex web of nonprofits nicknamed the Kochtopus, into conservative causes in the 2010 and 2012 U.S. elections. (Public access)

Venezuela’s slow-motion coup and a small moment in the story of China and Taiwan

International affairs columnist Jonathan Manthorpe casts his attention from Asia to South America in two new pieces this week. In Venezuela, he writes, there were hopes when President Hugo Chavez died that “the end of his strutting, belligerent and goading influence would calm the country’s violently polarised politics.” Instead, a “slow-motion coup” is apparently under way. In Asia Manthorpe examines the implications of a historic meeting between China and Taiwan – and finds its import over-rated. (Subscription)

Museums at the Crossroads: a Future for Cultural Institutions

Jack Lohman

In an essay, excerpted in F&O‘s Expert Witness section from his new book, museum director and author Jack Lohman issues a warning about the future of our cultural institutions — and why they matter to increasingly cosmopolitan and multicultural societies. He writes: “We have entered another Churchillian “period of danger,” but one of an unprecedented nature. We live in an age of profound cultural transition, a time in which the complexity of our multicultural world confronts us with challenges that have taken on an urgency and intensity quite unlike anything we have experienced in history. It is a time when hardly any of our public institutions are free from having to undergo deep soul-searching as to their meaning and their role…” (Public access)

Commander in Guatemala Massacre of 250 Sentenced to 10 Years.

One part of a complex and grueling saga came to something of an end this week, as a United States federal judge sentenced a former Guatemalan Army officer to the maximum 10 years in prison Monday — but only for immigration crimes. It took the efforts of authorities in three countries — Canada, the United States and Guatemala. As Sebastian Rotella of ProPublica reports, the judge ruled that the ex-commando obtained U.S. citizenship by concealing his role in the massacre of 250 men, women and children in a Guatemalan village in 1982. (Public access)

Have a good weekend.

– Deborah Jones

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