Slashdot Mirror
Using R44 And A PowerBook To Bust Illegal Seawalls
Sylvestre writes "Ken Adelman, founder of TGV and Network Alchemy, is using a digital camera, helicopter, and a Power Book to take a high resolution photograph every 500 feet down the California coast. The goal? Busting people putting up illegal sea walls. The catch so far? One golf course covered the beach with boulders. Also of note: the website has 44 gigs of photos so far, runs on solar power, and is Microsoft Free. Best use of technology I've seen all month!"
They shouldn't be developping right along the coast anyways. It would be nice to have a large buffer zone.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
It's great that the site runs on solar, but when you're flying a helicopter up and down the coast you're hardly looking to improve the environment.
"at least he's not using a 747!"
Maybe he should look into an ultralight.
Just buy all the property from those that currently own it.
"Also of note: the website has 44 gigs of photos so far, runs on solar power, and is Microsoft Free."
Err. Why does that sound like one of the Cosby kids trying to conince their dad that he should buy them a computer? I mean, who cares if it has 44 gigs of photos? None of us are going to download that many. Who cares if it runs on solar power? We're not paying for it. And who cares if it's MS free? We wouldn't know the difference if they were using MS for anything.
I wouldn't normally make a point of it, but the way they presented those last bits of detail suggests to me they were trying really really hard to make sure Slashdot posts this story.
I dunno, maybe I missed the point and each of those details was uber-important to understanding what this guy is doing. Sure.
"Derp de derp."
It is really funny, the Department of Natural Resources usually care more about how the land "used to" look versus what it "could" look like. Erosion is natural and would happen anyways. In fact, erosion helps sealife get on shore. Retaining walls are good for man, period.
It would be way cool to have a panoramic photo of the entire California coastline (or at least a significant chunk of it) from stitching all those photos together. Set it up as a movie, perhaps, offering a sort of virtual fly-by of the coastline.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
It's the coastline after all. The guy isn't breaking into buildings or anything. What he is doing is similar to a very successful group called the Riverkeepers. This group patrols the Hudson river and watches for people dumping illegally. They are the major reason that the Hudson is no longer the utter cesspool it used to be. The government has neither the resources nor the inclination to enforce its environmental laws and so it is up to citizens to do so.
Many states have banned seawalls altogether. Washington is one example. In California, seawall construction is limited by the Coastal Act (passed in 1976) but not banned, and there are major loopholes, including language to protect "existing structures" which can be creatively interpreted to include a structure that did not exist yesterday but exists today. More and more of California's coastline is being buried under seawalls, including "temporary" "emergency" piles of rock that are never removed because the Commission doesn't have a police force to patrol the beaches. What little monitoring there is, is done entirely by volunteers, and kudos to them if they've gotten access to a helicopter to keep our beaches from vanishing!
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
I can't think of bigger waste of land and resources than a golf cource. Drive through Palm Springs CA and you'll see what I mean. Imagine how much water is wasted just so people can play a GAME. Not a sport. I'm not much for development but houses would be better than empty land set aside for golfers. Anybody who stops the golfing industry is on the side of Good and Light in my book.
This guy is way out there
and I quote:
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0"> <meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
The beaches-- or to be precise, land that is submerged at high tide, belongs to the people. Not to any private entity. This legal tradition dates from the time of Justinian. If people want to congregate on beaches, ajoining private property, that's their business.
Now here's a golf course acting in a manner that happens to deny public usage of that beach.
As for "protecting the golf course from erosion", I'd say that building a golf course in that location, in such a manner that "erosion control" necessitated the ruination of a beach, was a pretty dumb business decision.
This is wrong twice over:
What gets me about this is how old (and obvious) this advice really is.
Whatever one's religious beliefs, it's generally agreed that Jesus know how to make a point. In Matthew 7:24-27, he tells a story about a foolish builder who builds his house on sand. His audience would have laughed about that.
Two thousand years later, people with degrees in architecture and engineering build houses (and even gigantic hotels) out on the beach, and then try to get the government to spend tax money on beach replenishment when the ocean comes to take away their buildings.
People who put up seawalls should have to pay to remove them, and people who build on sand shouldn't get one penny of my tax money for beach replenishment. Building on sand is so obviously stupid that anyone who does it doesn't deserve any help from anybody.
Well, that's a _good_ thing. A higher population spread will spread the pollution. In a country like Canada where about 5% of the land makes something like 95% of the pollution, this is exactly what's needed. We could be cleaner than Japan if everyone spread out.
At the cost of vast ecosystem destruction and large increases in resource consumption. Every envirogeek I know feels that if people are going to pollute, they should do it in cities, where at least the damage is contained.
And note that Japan, noted for its cleanness, is very dense. They learned how to be clean because of the density. Perhaps we could learn from that.
So, what's your solution in this case, where mass transit is a no go?
Mass transit is a no-go because people made decisions that caused it to end up that way. The question is whether to notice the problem and move to correct it or to continue to use government money to subsidize more bad decisions. There is no easy solution, but some solutions pay off in the long term as well as the short.
Personally, I make sure to live near where I work, and I moved to an urban center that invests in public transport. These days I don't even own a car; I just check them out when I need them. Compared to the typical commuter, I save a lot of time and money, and consume far less of our shared environmental resources than most.
In the long term, we need to charge people properly for the use of shared resources. Road pricing, pollution taxes, and carbon taxes would help the problem a lot. If you give people something for free, they'll just run it into the ground. Thus, your 20 minute wait in traffic and your asthma deaths. The full change we need will take decades, of course, but that's no excuse for not starting now.