Why the Great Plains Are Dying
By Steven Conn
Mr. Conn is an associate professor in the history department at Ohio State University and a writer for the History News Service.
Much of the western United States has been experiencing a severe drought for nearly a decade, and the future only looks drier. One of the conclusions of the new United Nations study on global climate change is that wet places on the planet will probably get wetter and dry places, like much of the American West, will become even more parched. John Wesley Powell is rolling over in his grave.Powell isn't a household name any more, but in the era after the Civil War he was among the most prominent American scientists and explorers. His expedition down the Colorado River became the stuff of heroic legend in the late 19th century.But Powell was not simply an adventurer. Between 1881 and 1894 Powell directed the United States Geologic Survey. Based on his research he concluded that there were really two Americas, one wet and one dry, divided almost exactly down the middle, roughly at the 100th meridian. That unalterable fact of the climate, Powell warned, would force limits on the way Americans settled the West.Americans don't like to be told that there are limits. The very idea rubs us the wrong way and it did in Powell's day as well. Yet then as now scientists were telling us that we faced real environmental constraints. Then as now the question was whether we were prepared to face those limits, restrain our use of resources, and re-imagine our national aspirations so that they were more environmentally sustainable. Powell's career serves as a reminder of what it ultimately costs if we stick our heads in the sand.In 1878 Powell wrote and submitted to Congress his Report on the Arid Lands of the United States. It was a blockbuster as scientific reports go. Powell told Congress that if the West was going to be settled at all, the region would require an extensive plan for water management and allocation.It was not what Congress wanted to hear, any more than Congress wants to hear that message today, especially not the expansion-minded politicians from the West who rashly predicted that their states would some day be home to as any as 180 million Americans. Rep. Thomas Patterson of Colorado denounced Powell as "a charlatan in science and intermeddler in affairs of which he has no proper conception." The bill to reconfigure the use of public land in the West that resulted from Powell's report died a slow procedural death.Events proved Powell right, of course, though being right has never been a path to political success in America. Americans have a long and rich tradition of shooting the messengers bearing bad news. Drought hit the arid lands in the 1880s, creating the first large-scale farm crisis in the nation's history. "In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted," so the expression went at the time.The rains stopped again in the 1930s and created the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl. Look at a map of the areas most devastated by the drought and wind of the "dirty '30s" and you'll notice they hug that 100th meridian -- exactly the region that Powell worried would be under-watered and over-farmed.After World War II, farmers on the plains dealt with the natural cycles of rain and drought by pumping water from the Ogallala aquifer, a vast underground lake, to irrigate their fields. It's the agricultural equivalent of paying your mortgage with a credit card -- the bank catches up with you eventually. In this case the water table under the Great Plains is now dropping dramatically, as much as five feet in a single year, and to what end? The plains are being depopulated; the nation's poorest county is now in Nebraska.Meanwhile, suburban regions in the west continue to sprawl without restraint. It makes even less sense to water lawns and golf courses in the Las Vegas desert than it does to farm intensively on the plains. Yet they continue to sprout up, surreal, unnatural green dots on a tan and tawny landscape.In the West, the region Powell spent a lifetime studying, no quantity of boosterism, or political grandstanding or individual will can create more water where there isn't enough. Denying a problem doesn't make it go away. Oklahoma's Sen. James Inhofe, who still insists in 2007 that climate change is a "hoax," is simply the successor to Rep. Patterson in 1878.Climate change is no more a hoax now than Powell was a charlatan. We have paid a grievous environmental price for our failure to take Powell's warnings about water seriously. Perhaps we can learn from that failure and face the challenges posed by climate change by pulling our heads out of the sand.

The Ranch House AnomalyHow America fell in and out of love with them.

By Witold Rybczynski SLATE MAGAZINE
In his new book, Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville, Witold Rybczynski follows the design, construction, and marketing of a new residential subdivision over the course of several years. In the process, he explains how modern homes and communities are built. In yesterday's excerpt, the first of three, Rybczynski examined why we live in houses. Today's excerpt explains how Americans fell in and out of love with the ranch house. Wednesday's slide show follows the evolution of New Daleville step-by-step, from cornfield to subdivision.
The construction of a typical house requires thousands of board feet of lumber, hundreds of sheets of plywood, and many cubic yards of concrete, square feet of exterior siding and wallboard, bundles of insulation, gallons of paint, reels of wiring, and lengths of copper piping. A builder not only coordinates a dozen different trades to put all this together in a timely and efficient manner but must put it together in a way that is attractive—and affordable—to buyers. He must also judge to what extent buyers are open to innovation. Houses are the largest investments that most families will ever make, and as prudent small investors, they tend to be conservative and to avoid unnecessary risk. While architectural critics frequently disparage the uniformity of housing, that is precisely what buyers demand; they don't want to be stuck with an odd or dated house at the time of resale. Contrarians don't do well in the housing market.
But houses are not only investments, they are homes, and hence sources of personal pleasure and pride. Like clothes, they convey status and social standing; like cars, they tell people something about their owners. Thus, the decision to buy a house is emotional as well as financial. I understood this the first time my wife and I went house-hunting. There were houses that we knew, from the second we saw them, were not for us; we didn't need to go inside. Of course, one doesn't buy a house just because of its curb appeal, but the view from the curb is important. It's what we see every time we return home.
The schizophrenic house buyer is both a status seeker and an investor. In addition, he or she is a consumer. Renovating a kitchen, for example, is done with one eye on convenience and one eye on resale, as well as a glance at the attractive advertisements in the latest issue of House & Garden. The house buyer is not immune to fashion. Although the desire for novelty is generally tempered by an inclination to the safe bet, there was one period when buyers let their hair down. Buoyed by the post–World War II boom, optimistic about the future, and gripped by the idea of Progress, Americans embraced innovation as never before, in the way they traveled, the way they brought up their children, in their manners—and in their homes. The hallmark of that period was the ranch house. It is said to have been invented in 1932 by Cliff May, a self-taught San Diego architect, but it also owed a debt to Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian houses, and to Alfred Levitt's popular "Levittowner." Today the suburban ranch house is considered the epitome of conservative taste, but at the time it represented a radical departure from tradition. To begin with, all the rooms were on one floor. The layout was open and casual, with wood paneling instead of wallpaper, and room dividers instead of interior walls. The exterior was unabashedly contemporary and did away with steep roofs, dormer windows, and porches.
The casual, spread-out ranch house (it was also known as the California ranch and the rambler) had enormous appeal and by 1950 accounted for nine out of 10 new houses. In hindsight, the rancher's most striking feature was its diffidence. Low to the ground, it lacked traditional domestic status symbols, such as porticoes and tall gables. Its one extravagance was a large window facing the street—the picture window. As far as I have been able to determine, picture windows made their first appearance in Levittown, Pa. Alfred Levitt had already used floor-to-ceiling walls of Thermopane glass to open the house up to the backyard, but in the "Levittowner" he put an 8-foot-square* kitchen window facing the street. The common criticism that picture windows offer neither privacy nor a view misses the point. Picture windows are meant not for looking out but for looking in. They are displays—for Christmas ornaments, Halloween skeletons, and Thanksgiving Day wreaths. Opening the house up to the street—something that neither Wright nor modernist architects did—is a curiously disarming gesture. "Feel free to look in," the picture window announces, "we have nothing to hide."
Another design innovation of the '50s was the split-level house, which mated a ranch house with a two-story section, half a flight up and half a flight down. The split-level originated in California as a way of building on slopes, but it also provided useful solutions to two new domestic problems. One was where to put the television. The first televisions, which were designed like pieces of furniture, stood in the living room. As television watching became increasingly popular—especially among children—to preserve the living room for formal entertaining, the set was moved to its own special room: the recreation, or rec, room. The rec room was usually in the basement, but in a split level, this was only half a flight down, less drastically separated from the rest of the house. The other problem was where to put the car. Using the lower floor of a split level as a garage was an inexpensive alternative to the attached carport. By 1970 four out of five new houses were either ranchers or splits.
When I was growing up in Canada, my friends and I lived in new, ranch-type houses. Ours was not large. It contained a living room, an eat-in kitchen, three bedrooms, and a bathroom, all in less than 800 square feet. This would have been a tight fit for the four of us, except that we also had a large basement, which accommodated my train set, my parents' collection of National Geographics, and a laundry area. There was also a rec room—my first design project. I nailed sheets of textured plywood to the walls, laid vinyl tile on the floor, and stapled perforated acoustical tile to the ceiling. I built a small bar in the corner and a Mondrian-esque room divider. I was 18, and I thought it the height of chic.
Housing has always been governed by a simple rule: As people become richer, they spend more money on their homes. Historically, this has meant using more expensive materials—varnished mahogany instead of painted pine, marble instead of brick—updating the décor, or adding technological refinements, such as gas lighting, indoor plumbing, or central heating. In addition, spending more money has usually meant making the home bigger. This happened in Renaissance Italy, 17th-century Holland, and 19th-century England. It also happened in the prosperous second half of the 20th century in the United States. Some statistics: In 1950 the median size of a new house was 800 square feet; by 1970 this had increased to 1,300; 20 years later it had grown to 1,900; and in 2003 it stood at 2,100. More than one-third of new houses built today exceed 2,400 square feet.
My childhood bedroom was about 8 feet by 10 feet, just big enough for a bed, a desk, and a chest of drawers. My younger brother's room was smaller. The most generous space in our home was the garden, where my father grew gooseberries and crab apples. Our 60-feet-by-100-foot lot was small for the time. My best friend, whose father was a local grandee—the manager of Woolworth's—lived nearby in a larger ranch house, which occupied a much bigger lot. That's the thing with ranchers; as they get larger, they stretch out and need more space. A 2,000-square-foot ranch house with a two-car garage, for example, needs a lot at least 120 feet wide.
By the 1980s, buyers wanted larger houses, but California's widely copied Proposition 13, which required developers to pay for their own infrastructure, had made land much more expensive. The builders' solution was to return to two-story houses, which don't need such large lots, and which are up to 30 percent cheaper to build because of smaller foundations and roofs. Today, more than half of all new houses have two stories. But that is only one change. No one builds ranch houses or split-levels anymore. Picture windows and carports are gone, and so are breezeways. Home buyers' affair with modernistic design is over. When I leaf through a directory of one big home builder's current models, I notice that all the houses have similar architectural features: pitched roofs, gables, dormers, bay windows, keystones, shutters, porches, and paneled doors. Americans' fondness for such conventional imagery is characterized by some critics as nostalgic and retrograde. In fact, it represents a long domestic tradition that extends to colonial New England and Virginia. In that history, the brief fling with the rancher was an anomaly.

Wireless power pulls plug on cables
Mark Henderson, Science Editor The Australian
June 08, 2007
POWER cables and plugs may soon become obsolete because scientists have developed a way to wirelessly charge electrical devices from a distance.
WiTricity can already power a lightbulb over a distance of 2m, and its inventors believe that within three to five years the system would be able to charge mobile phones, laptops, MP3 players and other electronic devices. The appliances would only need to be within range of a WiTricity transmitter to work. Professor Marin Soljacic, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that wireless electricity could eventually replace most power cables, in the same way that mobile and cordless phones had supplanted landlines. “Once, when my son was about three years old, we visited his grandparents’ house,” said Professor Soljacic, whose results are published in the journal Science. “They had a 20-year-old phone and my son picked up the handset, asking, ‘Dad, why is this phone attached with a cord to the wall?’ “That is the mindset of a child growing up in a wireless world. My best response was, ‘It is strange and awkward, isn’t it?’ Hopefully, we will be getting rid of some more wires, and also batteries, soon.” Professor Soljacic’s inspiration for WiTricity grew out of his frustration at having to find a plug to charge his mobile phone. “It was probably the sixth time that month that I was awakened by my cell phone beeping to let me know that I had forgotten to charge it. It occurred to me that it would be so great if the thing took care of its own charging.” While there are already wireless devices that can charge batteries by electromagnetic induction – as used in most electric toothbrushes and pads on which mobile phones can be placed – these work over only very short distances. Standard electromagnetic fields, which are used in wi-fi networks to send data, could feasibly transmit power too, but they spread radiation in all directions so most of the energy would be wasted. Lasers can be used to focus energy in one direction, but an uninterrupted line of sight is needed. For WiTricity, Professor Soljacic turned to the concept of resonance, which allows the efficient transmission of energy between objects that resonate at the same frequency. The principle is the same when a soprano sings a loud single note – the note can make wine glasses vibrate and even break, so long as they are filled to a level that makes them resonate at the same frequency. The WiTricity system consists of two copper coils, one sending power, the other receiving it. The receiver is designed to resonate at the same frequency as the magnetic field generated by the transmitter. Professor Peter Fisher, a colleague of Professor Soljacic, said that the system worked efficiently and automatically, and did not require a clear line of sight between the transmitter and the electronic appliance. “As long as the laptop is in a room equipped with a source of wireless power, it would charge automatically, without having to be plugged in,” he said. “It would not even need a battery to operate inside such a room.” At present, the system uses fairly large coils, which are unsuitable for mobile devices, but Professor Soljecic said that it should be possible to miniaturise the system for commercial use within three to five years. “One would like the distance between the source and the device to be a bit larger – four to five metres – the sizes of the coils to be somewhat smaller, to fit into a laptop, and the efficiency to be a bit higher. We have promising ideas as to how to achieve this so now is a good time to start seriously thinking about commercialisation.”

Britain's gay Prime Minister It was only forty years ago
Has Britain already had a gay Prime Minister - only a few decades ago? The answer now seems to be yes. Brian Coleman, a Tory member of the London Assembly, finally pushed the rumours into the public domain last month when he said it was "common knowledge" in Tory circles that Edward Heath, Conservative resident of Number Ten Downing Street from 1970 to 1974, was gay. Coleman claims Heath had to be warned warned by police to stop cottaging in 1955, when he ascended to the Cabinet. There were splutters of denial from some of the old Tory establishment to the allegations. Heath's successor as Tory MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup, Derek Conway, snapped: "Ted was absolutely wedded to politics. He didn't have a great deal of personal companionship in his life but there are people who are capable of getting on without companionship."But people who knew him well said Coleman was broadly right. Matthew Parris, a gay Tory MP-turned-columnist who knew Heath, thinks he "probably was" gay. He explains: "Ever since, as a young MP, I escorted his car into my constituency, leather-jacketed on my motorbike, I used to notice the twinkle in Ted's eye... Ted simply loved male company. He like to be teased, even twitted, by younger men. Women at his table - and there were few - tended to be ignored unless they stood up for themselves."Yet gay people have been strangely reluctant to embrace the news that Heath was (to borrow a phrase from his arch-enemy, Margaret Thatcher) One of Us. Julian Clary asked: "Must we? Aren't there some grounds on which he can be disqualified? I do hope I didn't inadvertently pleasure Ted Heath all those years ago. Please God, I feel nauseous just thinking about it."So who was this lost gay Prime Minister? Edward Heath was the first Tory leader in modern times from a poor background. His mother had been a maid in Broadstairs, Kent, and he climbed from grammar school to Oxford into the Tory ranks. He seems to have sublimated his sexuality into obsessive ambition, becoming a champion sailor, a concert-level conductor, and the leader of the country. At the time, the rival Labour politician Barbra Castle looked at these achievements and said: "We do not know if Mr Heath is a repressed homosexual or a repressed heterosexual. All we can say is that he is a repressed something." He seemed so sexually unusual that his biographer John Campbell records a rumour that swept across London during his Premiership. Every Friday night, it was said, a black limo was pull up outside Number Ten and he would be whisked to Regent's Park. The gates to London Zoo would silently swing open and Heath would be led to the panda den - into which he would descend for a long fuck-session with the Chinese bears.This ridiculous fantasy nonetheless captures something. Heath seemed to the outside world to be a notoriously cold, odd man. His Prime Ministership is usually considered to be a disaster, since he was forced to turn out the lights in Britain and reduce the country to a three-day working week in the face of industrial action. But he had one towering passion and achievement: he brought Britain into the European Union, the cause to which he dedicated his life. As a young man, he cycled across Europe, even feeling Hitler brush past him at a Nazi rally where he gaped at in horror. After serving as a soldier in the war, he became determined that the only way to prevent Europe from consuming itself once more in fire and blood was to build a united continent.This was only one of the issues on which Heath became bitterly divided from the woman who came to dominate the last years of his life: Margaret Thatcher. As PM, Heath was reluctant to promote Thatcher to the Cabinet because he presciently guessed that "if we do, we'll never bloody get rid of her." But he did - and Thatcher knifed him, siezing the Tory leadership from him in 1976. For the rest of his life, Heath famously sunk into "the longest sulk in history", refusing to accept he had been deposed and damning Thatcher (usually for good reasons) at every opportunity. When she finally fell from power in 1991, he said just one word: "Rejoice."Although he kept it secret, at no point was Heath a hypocrite about his sexuality. He supported liberalizing the country's anti-gay laws. It's true that, as Chief Whip in 1958, he had to sack the Foreign Office minister Ian Harvey in 1958 after he was caught sucking off a 19 year-old Guardsman in Hyde Park - but that was for stupid indiscretion, not his sexuality. If Harvey had been caught performing cunnilingus on a 19 year old girl in a park, he would have suffered the same fate.But should we care? Does this submerged history matter? Peter Tatchell thinks it does. He says that the gay rights movement has been "fighting a great liberation struggle handicapped by an almost total lack of knowledge of our own past. Our minds are colonised by a straight version of history, where we gay people are invisible. Our existence has been erased from the historical record. Apart from Oscar Wilde, the only gay people who come to attention in the history books are mass murderers, spies, child abusers and men entrapped by the police in public toilets."Heath probably was not our first gay Prime Minister either. Pitt the Younger was famously attached to a young male friend, Tom Steele, who he would take to Brighton (then, as now, a gay haunt) on long holidays and write fawning letters to him. At the time, people compared Steele to the gay men who had influenced kings. Pitt would go with straight friends into brothels, but never touched a woman. His biographer William Hague - who faced gay rumours himself until he married - says "we have no sure evidence that Pitt was homosexual" but the most likely answer is that "Pitt had homosexual leanings but supressed any urge to act on them for the sake of his ambitions."Showing that there were gay people in every crevice of history - even at the apex of power - shows how normal and ordinary and ineradicable homosexuality is, and always will be. It's not about "role models". It about our sheer, unexciting ordinariness.And it's revealing that the people most keen to scorn these revelations about the gay Prime Ministers in our past are the people who would be most hostile to gay Prime Ministers in our future. Andrew Roberts, a far right historian, sniped in the Daily Express that discussing the sexuality of dead figures is "a baleful phenomenon" which "adds to a new terror to death - that someone can be accused of performing then-criminal acts such as cottaging." He insisted Heath was suffering from "a rare for of thyroid complaint" that made him "asexual".A gaggle of ugly right-wing commentators has declared that Britain will never again tolerate a gay leader. Simon Heffer of the Daily Telegraph says it is "undesirable" that "political parties or governments should have an unrepresentative number of homosexuals in their upper ranks. As the present Labour administration has demonstrated, it is difficult for ministers to grasp problems affecting the family if you don't have one." Glossing over the bizarre idea that gay people don't have families - does he think we hatch from an egg? - he continued, "The obsessive nature of politics that so absorbs homosexuals may also deny them a sense of perspective, and deny them a hinterland in which to retreat."Similarly, Bruce Anderson - a colleague of mine at the Independent, who once charmingly called me "an uppity little queer" during a drunken rant - says, "A homosexual who seemed to be a contender for the premiership might be subjected to the most intense scutiny. Though homosexuals may be the beneficiaries of increasing tolerance, this would not extend to an attempt to adopt children. 'Jonny lives with Bob and Jerry' - possibly, but not in Downing Street."If we want to prove these bigots wrong, we have to show that gay people have always been around power (and everywhere else too) - and we always will be. The only difference is that now we are no longer going to supress our sexuality, as poor sad Ted Heath did, to appease their rancid bigotry.

Child killer's parole urged
Boston Globe
NATICK -- A Northeastern University criminologist endorsed releasing Rod Matthews from state prison yesterday, saying the former Canton man has a different brain today than he did in 1986, when he slaughtered a high school classmate with a baseball bat.
John R. Ellement
May 16, 2007
Child killer's parole urged
Criminologist sees a new Matthews
By John R. Ellement, Globe Staff May 16, 2007
NATICK -- A Northeastern University criminologist endorsed releasing Rod Matthews from state prison yesterday, saying the former Canton man has a different brain today than he did in 1986, when he slaughtered a high school classmate with a baseball bat.
James Alan Fox testified before the Massachusetts Parole Board that recent studies about teenage cognitive development have convinced him that the public need not fear the 34-year-old Matthews, who was 14 when he murdered Shaun Ouillette in Canton.
"I don't see it happening again," Fox said. "The Rod Matthews who was able to plan a cold- blooded murder . . . that's not him today."
Fox, whose testimony on behalf of Matthews was described by Ouillette's mother as betrayal, also said that Matthews has matured emotionally during his 20 years in prison and has been in prison longer than adults convicted of second-degree murder, as he was. He was tried as an adult, convicted of second-degree murder, and sentenced to a life term, but was eligible for parole after 15 years.
Speaking on his own behalf, Matthews said that after years of individual and group counseling, he now has a better understanding of why he plotted the death of Ouillette and then carried it out with ruthless precision after coaxing the victim into a wooded area under the guise of building a fort. After the killing, he said, he went home and did his homework.
He said he was angry at the breakup of his parents' marriage, but had no one in his family he could turn to for comfort. "I was angry, and I wanted to take it out on him," he said of Ouillette. "I did not know how to deal with it."
In addition to being a "troubled kid," Matthews said he recent ly remembered that he was sexually abused by a man who kidnapped him from a bowling alley where he had been with his mother when he was about 10. He said he escaped by kicking the man in the shin.
Parole Board chairwoman Maureen Walsh pressed Matthews. She pointed out that during his 1988 trial, he argued that he had been mentally ill and that later he blamed use of the drug Ritalin for treatment of attention deficit disorder. And in 2001, when he first appeared before the board, Walsh reminded him, he testified that he was not sure why he killed Ouillette and also said that he could not guarantee he would not harm anyone again.
Matthews, whose voice occasionally broke with emotion, said therapy has led him to abandon all prior explanations. He was not mentally ill nor driven to kill by Ritalin, he said.
"I truly believe that what I went through in my life, all those little things, added up," he said.
Fox has followed the case throughout, attended Matthews's trial and developed a friendship with Ouillette's family, especially the slain teenager's mother, Jeanne Quinn. He said that Matthews contacted him last year and that he met with him for a total of about 15 hours. It was from those meetings he formed his conclusions, Fox said.
Along with Norfolk District Attorney William R. Keating, five of Ouillette's relatives urged the board to keep Matthews jailed. Ouillette's grandmother, Carol Oteri Puffin, pointed at Matthews and in a strong voice reminded the board that Matthews was once diagnosed as a psychopath.
"There is something wrong, mentally wrong with this boy," she said. "He is still a problem . . . Help us."
Quinn, Ouillette's mother, said she was not asking for Matthews's continued imprisonment to avenge the loss of her only son. "I am not here for vengeance," she said. "I am here to keep us all safe."
A decision by the board is not expected for at least a month.