A Change in the Wind

Bert Collins: I paint every day

Had the pleasure this weekend of interviewing one of my favorite artists, Bert Collins, and writing about her for the Star. Here's my lead (or "lede," to use the newspaper spelling): 

Admirers of pastel artist Alberta "Bert" Collins began lining up outside her Ojai studio at 5:30 on Saturday morning, eager to buy one of the 20 or so landscapes she had on sale for the Ojai Studio Artists tour, knowing that they would be walking out with a bargain.

Collins, who has been painting and teaching art to students, mostly adults, in Ojai since l976, charges less for her elegant pastels than many of her former students charge for their work. Her prices begin at about $200, even though her art is widely admired, collected, and can be found in museums.

When asked why she sets her price so low, she responded with her usual blunt wit.

"Why not?" she said. "I do five shows a year, and I paint every day, so if I didn't sell out, I'd have a stack of paintings to deal with!"

Not likely, but nonetheless here's the artist, in Juan Carlo's appreciative framing: 

And here's an example of her irresistible work. This is what a stream around here looks like, as often as not, complete with hills and clouds...

Birds, otters and whales: a week in the SoCal Bight

Had a busy week last week covering the ocean (by chance) for the Ventura County Star, I'm happy to say.

On otters: fishermen not happy with prospect of being regulated by endangered species laws.

On whales: CA air regulations may have saved whales from collisions with ships, but that could end. 

On birds: On the Channel Islands, the National Park Service is restoring a wetland. 

Pic of island scrub jay by the talented, hard-working Juan Carlo. 

How Healthy are Our Oceans?

My cover story, this week in the VCReporter. I especially liked that both a commercial fisherman and a devout sports fisherman praised government regulators for maintaining the fisheries in SoCal: 

Both commercial fishermen and sport fishermen agree [that the fisheries are in decent shape].

“I think it’s doing pretty good,” said Pete DuPuy, who has been fishing commercially off Ventura County for nearly 20 years and currently captains a squid boat. “There seems to be plenty of fish. Especially off the West Coast, the U.S. fishery is heavily regulated, and I think California Fish and Game has done a good job taking care of it. You go to fish down off Mexico and it’s different – the resource has been hammered pretty well down there.”     

Sport fisherman Jerry Stussman, who has been chartering boats to go fishing off Ventura as much as three times a week for more than 30 years, echoes DuPuy’s comments.

“Since the beginning of the year, the water has warmed up, and I’d say the fishing is very good to excellent right now,” he commented. “A record 69-pound halibut was caught last week. We’re catching our limit sometimes in less than an hour. We fisherman argue, we scream, we moan and groan about what the environmentalists are doing, but no one can argue that the result has been positive.”

How often do you hear that sort of comment from fishermen? And I didn't solicit it at all.

In any case, as a marine biologist friend said in the story, the ocean certainly still looks great. Almost can't help it. Here's a pic, taken off the Channel Islands, courtesy of Flickr and Perpetual Sunset.

A new American class: the involuntarily retired

Our local daily newspaper has an excellent story on a new class of unhappy Americans: the involutarily retired.

Kim Lamb Gregory introduces the idea with a study, and then grounds it in Ventura County reality:

"We are witnessing the birth of a new class — the involuntarily retired," said a report called "The Shattered American Dream."

The report, released in December by the Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, was a follow-up to an August 2009 survey of those who had been unemployed in the previous year. The follow-up showed that 62 percent of those respondents 55 or older were still unemployed in November 2010, compared with 57 percent of those 35 to 54 and 47 percent of those younger than 35.

According to a report released by the Urban Institute in January, fewer than a quarter of workers 50 and older who lost their jobs between mid-2008 and 2009 found work within 12 months — much lower than the rate for younger workers.

Of course, it's not just older folks that are suffering, and what's really notable about the study is the outright despair of the unemployed. The Rutgers team reported on 1200 unemployed people:

It is hard to overstate the dire shape of the unemployed. Over the space of the 15 months we have been tracking our panel’s progress, just one-quarter have found full-time jobs. And virtually all of those jobs were for less pay or benefits, with 40% having to change fields or their career path to find employment.

One of the casualties of the Great Recession has been a core American principle since the founding of the nation — that if people work hard and play by the rules, they can get ahead. Now, the majority of the unemployed do not believe that simple hard work will guarantee success. They feel powerless, and voice little confidence in the government’s ability to help them.

They lack that confidence for good reason. Washington really doesn't care. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank recently profiled the President's chief economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, who has been counseling against any more stimulus, saying that would be "rash." Goolsbee's argument: 

The private sector has stabilized, profits have returned, productivity is high, American competitiveness has improved, and large sums of money have accumulated on corporate balance sheets.

Notice anything missing? Meanwhile, outside of D.C., even middle-of-the-road economists are troubled. 

Clive Crook warns in the Financial Times that "the recovery" looks like a chimera:  

One alarming possibility is that the traits the US has relied on to drive growth in the past – labour market flexibility, rapid productivity growth – might have become toxic. If the US is unlucky, traits seen as distinctive strengths are now weaknesses, and a “lost decade” of stagnation, like Japan’s in the 1990s, might lie ahead. 

Paul Krugman, quoted admiringly in Crook's piece, has a devastating graph to illustrate what a "lost decade" he's been warning us about for over two years now might look like. 

Today Felix Salmon points out that unemployment is much worse in the U.S. than in comparable nations: 

He adds:

It’s entirely intuitive to believe that structural unemployment rose significantly over the course of the recession, and that it’s now painfully high. And that the Obama Administration is, to a first approximation, doing absolutely nothing to address this crisis head-on.

In other words, the doubt and despair of the unemployed is totally justified. 

La Niña dry winter prediction fails in 2010, experts agree

This fall experts, including the Forest Service, were predicting a strong La Niña condition likely to produce a dry winter, with heat and Santa Ana winds.

The oceanic pattern developed, but the prediction? 

Bzzzttt! Wrong. Here in Ventura County, we're at roughtly 150% of normal, and got pounded by about six inches of rain over the weekend, stranding literally dozens of hikers, including both a Sierra Club outing and a Boy Scouts outing, in the backcountry, requiring rescue. More rain is expected this week.

Leader of the forecasting pack Bill Patzert admits: the predictions were a bust. 

I have a rain gauge, but my old wheelbarrow makes the point more impressively...

Why the Bering Sea is chilling as the world warms

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO, a vast pool of cold water sloshing around the northern Pacific ocean, was first discovered just fourteen years ago. It's existence has yet to make an imprint in public consciousness, in part because its effects are so varied. But Wendee Holtcamp, an excellent freelance science reporter, helps us understand the climatic ironies, such as a chilling Bering Sea in the midst of a warming planet, in a story for Climate Central. 

Scientists do not yet have any reliable way of predicting how the PDO will change in the future, as they do with the better-studied El Niño. In the meantime, year-round ice cover in the Arctic continues to decline every year, and global average land and sea surface temperatures continue to rise.

And even as some folks get lost amidst these erratic global climate and weather patterns, the reality is that the interaction between manmade climate change and natural cycles like the PDO is complex. “I think a lot of people are confused by it. They think, ‘how can you have these fierce winters in the Eastern U.S. or Western Europe if we’re facing global warming?’” poses [Nathan] Mantua, [a climate scientist]. “The simple answer is that there’s a lot of regional variation that may be completely independent of global warming.”

Holtcamp has a knack for simplifying the complex, something I'm trying to learn from her in her courses for free-lance journalists. 

Here's the PDO on a global scale, color-coded by temp so you can see the shifts over time: 

We're now in a negative phase, meaning cool temps along the Pacific coast. 

How to understand the unemployment numbers

A slight fall in the number of new jobless claims has thrilled Wall Street. This is great news, and as I wrote in a long economic story a couple of weeks ago, there is reason to think a recovery is on the way. 

But for perspective, lets look at the unemployment numbers geographically, courtesy of Derek Thompson at The Atlantic: 

-- Payrolls have shed the equivalent of Virginia since the recession started in December 2007.
-- The entire populations of Virginia, Colorado, and Rhode Island are unemployed.
-- The entire metro areas of Chicago and Los Angeles have been unemployed for six months or more.
-- The entire metro area of New York City is working part time for economic reasons.
-- The whole of Kentucky has left the labor force since the start of the recession.
-- The workweek population of Washington, D.C., has given up looking for work.

Or, for the stats-impaired, a visual representation: 

Or, to put it in Dilbert's charmingly despairing way:

The Millenials: An abused generation?

So argued economist Ed Leamer in a piece I wrote that the Reporter ran last week: 

“I see a lot of kids who are really struggling, and it’s very troubling to me,” he said. “I think we’re looking at an abused generation. A lot of kids are graduating from college with a huge amount of debt. They’re going into a poorly functioning economy, and as a group, they’re taking on huge levels of public debt with pensions and other obligations."

This recession has a lot of strange ironies that have not been well-discussed. Much of the public anger (about debt and such) is found at the older end of the age spectrum, but our seniors have suffered much less from this recession than have the younger generation, according to a plethora of stats. Curious. 

Why a farmer's market is better for you than a Trader's Joe

A couple of years back I did a story on a new local farmer's market, and, in interviewing the founder, learned something. To his way of thinking, a Trader Joe's -- despite its cool reputation among the hipster clan -- was as much of a rival as a Safeway. 

Turns out that for a local community, his antipathy is based in fact. A Trader Joe's, which, despite its folksy, Hawaiian shirt look, is a part of a multinational conglomerate, is no better for the local economy than an other big corporation, whereas a small local store is demonstrably better. To wit: 

Still, I shop there sometimes. Where else can a guy find whole wheat couscous? 

h/p: Andrew Sullivan

How to muck up a great view

A million examples could be cited, no doubt, but here's one in my little town of Upper Ojai.   

Bring in a ginormous bulldozer. Scrape flat a pad. Add one ginormous RV. 

Drive away. 

Easy!  

From Drop Box

But, to be fair, the same owners installed a lovely bench, for sunset viewings...

From 6-21-2010