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US GDP contracted by just 1% in Q2 2009, less than expected and considerably better than the 6.4% fall in Q1...

though, it does mark the fourth straight quarter of decline, the longest streak for the US economy since records began in 1947...

and things have been 'worse than prior estimates'...

but it does appear the recession has, at the very least, bottomed out, which very, very good news.

China is all over the news these days, but the debate about their role in the world has been given an extra boost by their participation in a "strategic economic dialogue" in Washington this week.

One theme that keeps re-appearing is that of Chinese expansion abroad. For instance, Marc Chandler at BBH argues that China's use of its enormous foreign reserves to lock up strategic resources abroad is a 21st century version of colonialism. Moreover, the country's level of outbound foreign investment, currently tagged at $41 billion, is set to increase after August when Chinese firms will be permitted to purchase currencies to fund foreign acquisitions.

Marc worries that such activities will stagnate development in the countries that China invests in because "It prevents the economic diversification away from low value-added commodity extraction... and often doesn’t lead to employment opportunities as China often exports workers to operate projects." That may be true in some circumstances, but Adrian Wood counters that this is a one-off phenomenon. As China grows and moves up the value-added chain, it will open up a huge gap in labour-intensive manufacturing that workers in other developing countries can fill. (Of course, that's assuming they can keep growing at pace, which I'm not so sure about).

Nor are China's foreign investments simply to acquire strategic resources to fuel their rapid growth - according to an op-ed by Moldova's OECD ambassador, China has moved into Russia's sphere of influence by acting as Moldova's lender-of-last resort (and replacing the IMF to boot). Moldova isn't what you might call a reliable debtor, so there must be other considerations at play here.

Two other areas where Chinese foreign acquisitions suggest that they're not only interested in "hard power" assets or geopolitical maneuverings, but also "soft power:"

1. The Chinese government has taken a stake in distilling giant Diageo, further confirming the trend in booze sales I reported on in a tongue-in-cheek editorial back in February.



2. A Chinese firm has acquired America's finest news source, but the content looks more-or-less the same.

But fear not - should our blog also be acquired by a foreign fish-stick manufacturer, readers should expect that our quality standards for content, wittiness and snark will remain unchanged.

(Perhaps the next time the space toilet needs fixing, like what had to be done last week, astronauts may be required to take a spacewalk. Image courtesy of NASA.)

A fantasy table of contents for the fantasy first issue of BUTT, now renamed Buttology, a fantazine for the spatial study of waste.

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The Rise of Public Composting Toilet  Freshkills Park Blog
“Installation of composting toilets in public facilities is catching on. In New York City, The Bronx Zoo and Queens Botanical Garden have been operating restrooms with composting toilets, with no need for sewer lines, for the last few years. The technology in both facilities is made by Clivus Multrum and resembles a conventional toilet, except that it uses only 3-6 ounces of water, in combination with a bio-compostable foam, for flushing.”

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Montreal’s Wastewater Treatment: A History of Problems  Spacing Montreal
“While it’s an impressive system in terms of its scope and capacity, the treatment process itself leaves much to be desired. In fact, it’s actually one of the worst in Canada. A national ‘report card’ issued by the Sierra Club in 2004 gave the city’s treatment process a grade of F-. The only other city to receive a grade worse than Montreal was Victoria, a place which doesn’t even have a treatment process in place yet.”

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Nomadic Spaces: The Afghan Sewer Kids of Rome  BBC
“Italian police have found more than 100 immigrants, including 24 Afghan children, living in the sewer system beneath railway stations in Rome.”

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(Image courtesy of MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory.)

Trash Track  MIT
“Trash Track relies on the development of smart tags, which will be attached to different types of garbage in order to track in real time each piece of waste as it traverses the city's sanitation system. The goal of the project is to reveal the disposal process of our everyday objects and waste, as well as to highlight potential inefficiencies in today's recycling and sanitation systems. The project will be exhibited at the Architectural League in New York City and in Seattle starting September 2009.”

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LooWatt  Virginia Gardiner
“Today, 40% of the global population lives without toilets. In most places, scarcity of water renders sewer systems impossible, while ad hoc human waste disposal spreads waterborne illnesses that prey upon millions, and cripple developing economies. It is crucial to address the global sanitation crisis with creative solutions. While many NGOs are hard at work installing composting eco-toilets for those in need, a continual challenge is to motivate communities to look after their new toilets. By turning human waste into a high-value commodity, energy, the Gardiner CH4 offers plenty of incentive to sustain itself.”

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The Geopolitics of Space Toilets  The Guardian
“[Veteran cosmonaut Gennady Padalka] told Novaya Gazeta newspaper that officials had rejected his request to work out on the American exercise bike during their pre-training mission. Worse than that, they had also ruled that American and Russian crew members should use their own ‘national toilets’, with Russian crew banned from using the luxurious American astro-loo.” The situation may have improved since reading this.

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Religious Freedom vs. Sanitation Rules  NYT
“For the last two and a half years, Mr. Crislip, a planning supervisor for the state’s Environmental Protection Department, and local sewage authorities have had more than 30 meetings in a futile effort to persuade members of the sect here in Cambria County, about 80 miles east of Pittsburgh, to upgrade outhouses next to a schoolhouse so they comply with state sanitation codes.”

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(Image courtesy of Bureau E.A.S.T.)

Fez River Project  Bureau E.A.S.T.
“The City of Fez Department of Water and Power (RADEEF) is currently implementing a new system which will channel the city’s water sewage towards two treatment plants. Thereby, the Fez river will soon stop receiving backwater and regain its potential as a public amenity. If rehabilitated, its impact will be inordinately salient to the unique urban context of Fez. Indeed, the medina’s intra-mural population not only lacks public open spaces, but is also experiencing a rapid deterioration of its environment due to over-densification and aging public infrastructure.”

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Soft Disaster  NYT
“The national obsession with soft paper has driven the growth of brands like Cottonelle Ultra, Quilted Northern Ultra and Charmin Ultra — which in 2008 alone increased its sales by 40 percent in some markets, according to Information Resources, Inc., a marketing research firm. But fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada. Although toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them.”

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Poo Power to the People  The Guardian
“Lünen, north of Dortmund, will use cow and horse manure as well as other organic material from local farms to provide cheap and sustainable electricity for its 90,000 residents.”

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(Community urinalysis, one of NYT Magazine's ideas of the year in 2007.)

Mapping Urban Drug Use  OSU College of Agricultural Sciences
“A team of researchers has mapped patterns of illicit drug use across the state of Oregon using a method of sampling municipal wastewater before it is treated. Their findings provide a one-day snapshot of drug excretion that can be used to better understand patterns of drug use in multiple municipalities over time. Municipal water treatment facilities across Oregon volunteered for the study to help further the development of this methodology as a proactive tool for health officials.”

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Tips for the next issue will be much appreciated. We're especially looking for built works, thesis projects, entries submitted to (ideas) competitions and proposals of a highly speculative nature.

No, not my own. The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, the nightly news program on America's public broadcasting station (PBS), has held an hour-long discussion with the Fed chairman entitled, 'Bernanke on the Record.' I highly recommend it (hopefully the link is available outside of the US, we have had the problem before of posting US-based content subject to distribution restrictions. Apologies in advance- scour YouTube).

The more Bernanke speaks in an open, frank forum (Americans might remember his much-lauded interview on '60 Minutes'), unencumbered by Fed-speak and congressional grandstanding, the more I am convinced that there is no better American to be steering the country's monetary policy/systemic reform/inflationary death spiral(?!?) than Bernanke. He's not only gotten the policies right (well mostly, minus one very very big exception), but has the unique ability to articulate the complexity of the crisis in a manner that enables lay audiencies to make sense of the madness around them. Imagine if a less imaginative or aggressive chief had been at the helm over the past two years. Where would we be?

Recently declassified images of the Chukchi Sea off Barrow, Alaska show the scale of the challenge facing the Copenhagen conference in December. If you can't read the fine print, that's from July 2006 to July 2007. One year.

Following the very public differences between the US and Indian on who should shoulder the burden of the climate change fight, the US-China talks in Washington this week are a critical test of whether a real consensus can be formed ahead of Copenhagen.

A great article in the FT Weekend highlighting rising consumer debt defaults in Europe.

With all the optimism over green shoots and stock market rallies, many remain worried that the global economy will face a second-wave assault, from credit cards or commercial mortgages or some unforeseen feedback that plunges the real economy back down, irrespective of asset prices.

I am interested in the negative feedback mechanisms that could undermine a return to significant growth over the coming years. The consensus is that the global economy will rebound in 2010, but to what level? And how will factors like the lack of financial aid to college students, or higher US savings rate, shape this recovery and re-order developed economies?

(Photo courtesy of Thanet Earth.)

A passing scene or two in a British police drama of the garden variety gritty kind — no need to name the show, but the scenes involved its Northern Irish anti-hero of an undercover cop discovering illegal aliens from Eastern Europe arriving by boats on the blue-toned, cinematically tempestuous North Sea and then being sent off, if not to the brothels, to work unsurprisingly at slave wages in the commercial greenhouses of a light-deprived Norfolk, where the glass-walled foliage provides as much cover from the Home Office as the urban jungle of council estates — those scenes reminded us of Thanet Earth.


(Photo courtesy of Thanet Earth.)


(Photo by Henry Browne for The Guardian.)

Thanet Earth, as described by The Guardian last year, is “Britain's biggest greenhouse development.” Located in Kent, “80 football pitches' worth of greenhouse” will accommodate “1.3 million plants, growing in seven greenhouses, each up to 140m in length and fed by its own reservoir.” The entire complex will be heated by seven power generating stations located on site, and any excess supply of electricity will be sent to nearby towns. It is estimated that when all the greenhouses are completed, the UK's crop of salad vegetables will increase by 15%.

It's huge, massive, perhaps so gargantuan that illegal migrant workers might go undetected among the wild thickets of cucumbers and peppers, lost in the din of pneumatic harvesters, sonorous simulant thunderstorms and the reverberated rustlings of tomato leaves. It's just huge, massive, gargantuan.


(Photo by Henry Browne for The Guardian.)

Or maybe Thanet Earth is so technolicious, so heavily under surveillance that no stray variable can ever escape its sensors. Speaking to Will Wiles of Icon Magazine, Steve McVickers, Thanet Earth's managing director, says, “We're measuring all the time. Temperature, humidity, the amount of water in the Rockwool; we're looking at the growth of the plants, we're looking at the ventilation, we're looking at where the sun is, we're looking whether it's raining, we're looking at the wind direction. The greenhouse is constantly adjusting itself.”


(Photo courtesy of Thanet Earth.)

Phantom EU neo-gypsies displaced by the econopocalypse, non-functioning CCTV cameras, a food crisis, humorless Dutch efficiency experts, a rogue transgeneticist, guerrilla gardeners and allotment nutters, the insufferable Jamie Oliver and the sublime Heston Blumenthal — all converging in that one giant patch of the earth excised from geography, from the cycles of time and even from itself, one day infiltrated by a Northern Irish anti-hero of an undercover (food) cop after reports that tomatoes coming out of these Crystal Palaces have suddenly and improbably started tasting better, sweeter, juicier than Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's organic heirlooms, right after the children have also started going missing. This is a story pitch to the BBC.

(Photo by Brent Humphreys.)

Popular Science paid a visit to Disaster City in College Station, Texas. It isn't a city, of course, but “a vast disaster-simulation center designed to look and feel as close to catastrophe as you ever want to be. Each hairline crack, each mangled car, all the mountains of rubble are modeled on wreckage from real disasters, like the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles that killed 72 people and injured nearly 12,000. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing inspired the collapsed parking garage, with cars dangling off the sides like spiders from a ceiling, while the 12-foot-deep rubble catacombs resemble those from Ground Zero.”

This “Jerry Bruckheimer set” is where search-and-rescue teams go to train.

(The sea, the lake, the wall, the peninsula, the future Dubai of Northeast Asia.)

Saemangeum is an estuarine tidal flat on the western coast of South Korea, just south of the port city of Gunsan. With the completion in 2006 of a 33-kilometer seawall, perhaps the world's longest, it is now essentially a 400-square-kilometer artificial lake.

It won't be a lake for long, however, because this the site of what's been dubbed as “the world's largest reclamation project.”


(Saemangeum, South Korea.)

To put its gargantuan scale into perspective, the project site is roughly two-thirds the size of Seoul, the South Korean capital.

The last major land reclamation project in Asia was the construction of Chek Lap Kok, Hong Kong's island airport. At the time, 80 percent of the world's dredging equipment was involved. But at just a little over 12 square kilometers, Chek Lap Kok is a mere sandbar compared to Saemangeum.

The current record holder for land reclamation is the Palm Deira, currently under construction in Dubai. Saemangeum will be 8 times larger.

So what will all that reclaimed land be used for?


(Saemangeum vs. London. Image by Architecture Research Unit.)

The original plan was to turn 70% of the estuary into farmland with the rest set aside for industries. Because of political and economic realities, however, the ratio of agricultural use to non-agricultural use has flipped. Instead of mainly agricultural, the new plan calls for most of the reclaimed land to be developed for industrial, financial, residential and tourist facilities.

Sure to excite many and appall the rest, Saemangeum is now envisioned as the Dubai of Northeast Asia.


(The MIT masterplan for Saemangeum. Image by ORG et al.)

Last year, several teams were invited to participate in an ideas competition and submit conceptual masterplans for this Korean Dubai. Last November, three teams were chosen as co-winners.

One team comprised of designers from MIT, ORG and Office dA. In their masterplan, Saemangeum is divided into an industrial North and a more leisure-oriented South.

The North is organized into a regimented system of 330 ‘landscape chambers’ – rooms of varying sizes, bounded by trees and canals and able to host multiple kinds of development. These chambers might contain factories, a science park, a university, or even a space port. By contrast, the South has the spatial configuration of a ‘constellation.’ Similar to stars in the sky or jewels on a crown, small cities are dispersed along the landscape on a series of small hills surrounded by areas of agriculture or nature, connected by roads and pointing to each other.

One of the advantages of this scheme is that “by spreading many cities over the land, transportation is reduced as industry grows alongside residential communities, rather than commuting-distance away from it.”


(The MIT masterplan for Saemangeum. Image by ORG et al.)

Another team was led by Jeffrey Inaba. Whereas the MIT team's scheme is both orthogonal and geomorphic, the Inaba team's scheme is wholly orthogonal, organized based on symbiotic pairings.

For instance, quoting one of the presentation boards, “wetlands are coupled with industry, agriculture and buildings to filter effluents, run-off and household grey water” and “alternative energy zones are paired with agriculture and water to harness energy through biomass processing and hydro-electric production.”


(The Inaba masterplan for Saemangeum. Image by Inaba et al.)


(The Inaba masterplan for Saemangeum. Image by Inaba et al.)

A third team was led by Florian Beigel and Philip Christou from Architecture Research Unit based at the London Metropolitan University.

As described by Kieran Long in a recent article of The Architectural Review, their scheme “envisages a city of islands that combines a self-consciously artificial landscape with a logic born of land reclamation and the depth of the lagoon. Beigel's work has always pursued his concept of ‘landscape infrastructure’, where the landscape is built first and helps to define a non-programmatic urbanism born of geography and typology.”

Kieran Long, as well as Ellis Woodman in Building Design, noted the introduction existing, Western urban typologies. Implanted into the islands are Barcelona's Cerda grid, Cambridge University's quadrangles and the “kilometre style” perimeter developments of Kay Fisker’s Copenhagen, among others. This is Collage City, and this is how one might “create a sense of place out of nothing.”


(Architecture Research Unit's masterplan for Saemangeum. Image by ARU.)

These three teams will submit their finalized proposals by the end of this month. The government will then select which of the schemes to work with. It may also elect to choose more than one team or even combine aspects from two or all three masterplans in its phased development project. Or none at all.

In any case, just a couple of decades after it's finished, Saemangeum's checkered islands and constellation cities will burst out of their seawalled compound, stimulated into runaway mitotic subdivision by population growth. Like a Suprematist painting in the works, New Saemangeum will meet up with China's own territorial expansion, sustained by immigrant soil from abraded post-glacial, post-Tibetan Himalayan mountains.

Then no sooner than the two meet, climate change will come in and undertake its own reclamation project.

In the Archives:
Flemish Island Constellation

Alex Tabarrok points to yet another study suggesting that, in addition to being more successful in their careers, taller people tend to be happier. According to the abstract, the vertically-endowed

...evaluate their lives more favorably, and... are more likely to report a
range of positive emotions such as enjoyment and happiness. They are also less
likely to report a range of negative experiences, like sadness, and physical
pain, though they are more likely to experience stress and anger, and if they
are women, to worry. These findings cannot be attributed to different
demographic or ethnic characteristics of taller people, but are almost entirely
explained by the positive association between height and both income and
education, both of which are positively linked to better lives.

(He also links to an article which discusses the idea of taxing tall people for this very same reason. I do not like this idea one bit.)

Note that all the measures here are relative. This does not mean that tall people are happy, just happier. Except when they are seated in small vehicles, of course.

Does this apply to societies, as well as people? Are countries full of tall people happier and more economically successful than those full of shorter people? Should the poorest countries of the world invest in growth-steroids for their children?

I'm guessing no. The effects of "tallness" are most likely dependent upon your immediate surroundings. You might be happier because you are taller than your neighbour, but how tall you are relative to someone living half-way across the world has no effect. (The same applies to income, by the way). Therefore being 5-foot-9 in Bolivia might result in higher levels of happiness than being the same height and living in the Netherlands.

Also, at what point does the curve of happiness drop off and the effect of constantly knocking one's head on doorframes result in a perma-frown?

-In competing NYT op-eds, Nouriel Roubini and Anna Schwartz lay out the arguments in favor of (Roubini) and against (Schwartz) a Bernanke re-appointment.

-Funny difference a year (see: plunging output and investment) makes: foreign oil companies are suddenly welcome again in Russia.

-Balance of payments pressures + growing investor risk appetite = emerging market debt bonanza.

-While Russia's ticking demographic timebomb made the news this past weekend, Shanghai was hard at work fighting its own.

-Zsolt Darvas makes the argument for easing euro-area entry criteria.

Acura is the performance and luxury division of Honda. The brand was created in 1986 and became the first Japanese luxury car line. Since then Nissan and Toyota have also introduced luxury car brands, Infiniti and Lexus, respectfully.

Honda revealed its new compact minivan today in Japan called the Freed. On sale today as well, the Freed can carry up to eight passengers within its diminutive dimensions thanks to a low, completely flat floor and some clever packaging. Opt for captains chairs in the second row and you can still ferry seven people between Kyoto and Tokyo in relative comfort. The Freed will also be offered in three versions that accommodate people in wheelchairs with ramps and lift-up seats. Honda’s JDM mini-minivan will be offered in front-wheel and all-wheel-drive models powered by a 1.5L VTEC four-cylinder engine mated to either a 5-speed automatic or CVT transmission. It looks like a promising vehicle that Japanese buyers will snap up like 10-cent sushi, and we bet Honda would find a market for the Freed here in the U.S. as well considering the current popularity of fuel-efficient vehicles packing tons of practicality.

(With thanks to NASA and the European Space Agency for the video, and Geoff Manaugh for the audio, Main's Haloform III. See more sunscapes.)

North Korea is a scary place. Like swine flu, North Korea is a disaster waiting to happen, but something that I choose to deal with by trying not to think about it and hoping it will go away.

But North Korea (the DPRK) is not going away. And what to do about it is a problem that has bedevilled senior statesmen, diplomats and international relations scholars ever since the miserable little regime was formed. They are possibly the most frustrating negotiation partners in international diplomacy - I've heard stories of negotiations breaking down because DPRK officials didn't like the placement of chairs in the conference room - and anything they agree to is liable to be ignored or reversed at a whim.

Over the years, various strategies of using carrots (aid, more trade, direct funding) and sticks (trade sanctions, financial sanctions) have been tried, but the impact has been limited. The most recent effort is a new set of UN sanctions imposed following North Korea's nuclear test in May of this year. The UN sanctions have more teeth than previous rounds, but will they have the intended effect of choking the DPRK into giving up its nuclear program?

Stephen Haggard and Marcus Noland argue that they probably won't. In a recent paper published by the Peterson Institute, the authors examine how multiple rounds of sanctions and economic isolation has altered North Korea's trade patterns. The effect of this shift has been to push North Korea towards engagement with countries that aren't particularly interested in enforcing UN sanctions.

In short, the US and its partners risk losing their leverage over North Korea. Here's a brief rundown of their findings:

• Despite the internal backlash against reform movements, the DPRK has actually become more economically open.
• Agricultural reforms are unlikely to play a role in North Korea's development, as it did in China and Vietnam; their agricultural sector is too small and fragile.
• North Korea's dependence on China and South Korea has grown dramatically; in addition, trade with partners in the middle east (Iran, Syria and potentially Egypt) has also increased.
• Meanwhile, trade with Japan, the US and Europe has either been reduced to a trickle, or has ceased entirely
• Uncertainty about the succession of North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-Il, is a further incentive for the ruling elite to circle the wagons and resist foreign influence.
• North Korea has re-arranged its external economic relations in order to reduce the impact that traditional sanctions could have.

All of this to say that China has become even more crucial to the unfolding North Korea saga. They are far and away the regime's biggest trading partner and likely the only source of significant external political pressure. By approving the UN sanctions, China is indicating its strong displeasure at North Korea's nuclear antics, but how far they are willing to push the fragile regime remains to be seen.

The US, meanwhile, is left with fewer options. Targeting financial institutions that deal with the DPRK is likely the only remaining tool that the US can use effectively. Using them will be risky, however, because once they're implemented North Korea may simply re-adjust to find new ways of doing business and leave Uncle Sam waving his stick into thin air. In the end, the threat of financial sanctions will likely prove to be more effective than actually using them.

The other option is to simply ignore them and talk about something else, as I do. Incidentally, that is Dan Drezner's half-serious advice to the Obama administration in his sobering summary of the situation.

But wait! you say. If everyone ignores North Korea, Kim Jong Il will be so ronery...

(Treating sewage from a crude oil storage terminal. Photo courtesy of Ayala Water And Ecology.)

Israel is in the midst of a water crisis. Climate change, a rapidly growing population, extensive agriculture and a very developed industry are all putting pressure on the few and extremely contested sources of freshwater.

Desalination creates more problems than it solves, because the process is energy intensive, expensive, and besides freshwater, ironically produces highly toxic byproducts as well. Though not as egregiously unsustainable, wastewater treatment plants function under a similar ecological imbalance. More efficient and creative ways to offset water demand are therefore needed.

This is where Ayala Water and Ecology comes in.


(Before and after water treatment at a gas station. Photo courtesy of Ayala Water And Ecology.)

Ayala is an Israeli company which specializes in designing and building artificial wetlands to treat contaminated water from agriculture, industries and urban areas. The treated water will definitely not be potable, but at least it could still be re-entered into the system and be used in some way again, thus reducing the need to extract more from already dwindling supplies. And if it isn't reused and instead gets dumped immediately, at least the effluent will not pollute these precious supplies much.


(Greywater treatment at a business center in Tel Aviv. Photo courtesy of Ayala Water And Ecology.)

We have described the principle of these eco-machines before in numerous posts, but to repeat, they take advantage of the ability of certain water plants not only to extract pollutants from the soil and water but also to render them inert. With the help of microorganisms, such as microbes, bacteria and fungi, they can take in toxins, heavy metals, greasy substances and pathogen agents. They can even phytoaccumulate and phytoremediate, to use the technical terms, substances that more technologically advanced systems cannot.

Of course, no single species can neutralize all contaminants. There isn't even a master matrix of plants and microorganism that works in every scenario. The trick is in finding the right combination that, in a sustainable manner, most efficiently removes the target pollutant and yields the purity level one is aiming for.


(Treating leachate from a landfilled. Photo courtesy of Ayala Water And Ecology.)

Ayala has been doing just that for nearly two decades and has deployed their wetlands machines all over Israel and in other places further afield. You can find them in domestic settings treating household sewage so that the reclaimed water can be used for irrigating the garden. Higher up on the urban scale, they can be found treating municipal wastewater and also the stronger stuff, the poisonous waste, from industrial sites. The company has also been involved in projects to treat landfill leachates and to rehabilitate degraded rivers.


(Treating effluent from an oil tankers station. Photo courtesy of Ayala Water And Ecology.)


(Treating effluent from an industrial plant. Photo courtesy of Ayala Water And Ecology.)


(Schematic for treating wastewater from a residential neighborhood. Image courtesy of Ayala Water And Ecology.)

Of course, Ayala isn't the only company applying ecological solutions to wastewater treatment. There's John Todd Ecological Design, possibly the most popular of them all, or at least the one with the most media coverage; Natural Systems International, who co-designed Sidwell's educational wetland; and Worrell Water Technologies, who holds, to our surprise when we first learned of it, the registered trademark for Living Machine®. It's a crowded field, thankfully.

But who besides Ayala is also working on contested terrain? Who could also say that their artificial wetlands have a geopolitical dimension to them? We're not saying that Ayala's eco-machines are co-conspirators, but who else could possibly say that theirs might be helping to entrench settlement of lands with varying narratives of provenance, with conflicting claims of true ownership? Who else is potentially employing Nature, albeit a Frankenstein version of it, as an instrument of occupation and hegemony, of erasure and amnesia? Who else could be, just maybe, quite possibly, after the deepest parts of our spatialist hearts?

Where's Rory?

-Dave Hart, 'A Call for Reader Feedback'

Hi friends. I have indeed been deficient in upholding my duty to provide the yearning masses with the kind of sophisticated insights and mind-blowing revelations they've come to expect from IPE Journal. I have quite a viable excuse (cue Dave's inner monologue), but for the sake of argument lets pretend I have been locked in my basement toiling over a masterful blog-post, tentatively called "The normative implications of Pinochet's pension reforms: deconstructing the post-war regulatory state." Ok, not really.

Anyway, my lack of consistency is nothing new; its something I have lacked since we began this little project. As Dave noted in his previous post, we've had periods of boom and bust since last August, but to Dave's enormous credit his busts have been more like blips. Nobody is more impressed by his commitment than I am.

My problem has been a fundamental one: a lack of incentives. Don't get me wrong: we started this site with nothing more in mind than providing a minor, thoughtful contribution to the debate on where our global economy is headed, and I think we have largely achieved that. Sometimes we get sidetracked by booze or expenses, though in our defense a) booze is the prism through which many of us deconstruct the world around us, and b) when such a scandal occurs in Africa it is called 'corruption', but when it occurs on the bank of the Thames it is a 'betrayal of trust.'

But without a more tangible incentive, even the noblest of pursuits can falter under the weight of competing alternatives, and I have found it difficult to sustain my contribution to the blog in a year defined by a gruelling job search and nomadic-like existence. It is not that I have lacked the time, I've had quiet a bit of that over the past 12 months. Rather, I have gone through periods of profound intellectual disillusionment, the circumstances of which I'll spare. That has been deeply disappointing and my sporadic work here has been but one consequence.

But that has turned over the past month or so, and I expect my consistency here to do so as well. Shorter, more frequent posts may be one result, but that probably serves our readers better anyway. And it helps when your partner is a rock star at this. Dave carries the torch well.

Catharsis complete, thanks for sticking with us this past year. You should see our childlike joy at getting an email from a reader. That's what this is all about.

As we approach this blog's 1-year anniversary, it's time to take a few steps back from our little project to take stock. Like any relationship, this one has had its ups and downs. Long time readers will have noticed that posting has slowed down in the last couple of months, partly due to the summer weather and the various distractions that come with it. That is temporary, as I've become too attached to this thing to stop writing, regardless of whether anyone is reading or not. But now is your chance to provide feedback and guide us towards material that you think would be interesting to see tackled.

So have at it, folks: what would you like to see discussed on this blog?

To get your thinking-juices flowing, here are some suggestions:

• US debt and the future of the dollar
• The impact of the financial crisis on sport
• More posts on the political economy of alcohol (a personal favourite)
• The future of the Bretton Woods system
• Posts about a particular country/region
• The British MP expenses scandal (just kidding!)

You may also be asking yourself: what happened to including nifty pictures in your posts? or why did you pick such a boring name for your blog? or where's Rory? These are all reasonable questions. Some even have reasonable answers. I'm open to all questions.

So this is your opportunity to influence the content of the blog - don't miss out! Feel free to use the comments or contact us using the blog email address (to your right -->).

This morning's readables, to be enjoyed with coffee (or your stimulant of choice):

• Fred Bergsten urges Obama to be bold on trade in an op-ed for the FT.
• What went wrong with economics? With reponses being posted here, here annnnd here.
• Not-so-well-endowed: Harvard is facing financial troubles. Is Larry Summers partly to blame?
• Rumours that two of the most awful places on the planet are teaming up.
• Dan Drezner discusses Iran, rap music and international relations theory

GORGEOUS WEAPON