…and Will, your argument about ‘environmental capital’ is certainly less clear than your usual postings, and blatantly incorrect on several points (unless the entire posting is sarcastic, and I’m missing it).  Your ‘posting quality’ is slipping.  Are those rhetorical questions?  Are you asking them to stimulate thought?  Or are you defending the status-quo approach to environmental pollicy, which clearly isn’t working?

To answer one of your questions, there are several interesting cases that suggest that archaic technology does in fact lead to environmental stability (by reducing waste, increasing employment, and reducing the use of toxic materials in agricultural and manufacturing settings), but that’s a whole different posting.

So, how’s the Squamish weather?  Has anyone actually been out there in a month?  And has anyone sent my ’secret’ project by Wendy’s?

Trent.

Well, now, I have to agree with Colin.  The burning of pallets as firewood is silly and destructive from a number of points of view.  I’m assuming, however, that these pallets were not purchased for the purpose of burning, but were rather stolen from their rightful owners.

Pallets are often made from a variety of hardwoods - and one would guess that these hardwoods are a variety of rainforest species as well as low grades of ’domestic’ hardwoods such as oak and birch.  While I find the idea of harvesting rainforests for the production of pallets more than a little odious, there was still substantial effort and cost put into the harvesting of the trees, the shipping of the wood, and the production of the pallets.  They are then used to ship products all over north america and beyond - the US, Canada, Vancouver (not really part of North America, at all, if you look at a map closely), and Mars.

People justify the stealing and burning of pallets because they delude themselves into believing that they (the pallets, not the people) are disposable (a similar ethical sleight-of-hand allows otherwise perfectly law-abiding citizens to steal milk crates from behind convenience stores, although the same people would never dream of walking into Zellers and stealing the same plastic crate on sale for .99).

But of course, the pallets (like the crates) are not disposable, or free.

So, from my perspective, if you want firewood to burn when you’re camping in a old gravel pit, fill your trunk before you leave home (although border crossings might be a pain), or go to a construction site and ask them if you can raid their scrap pile.  Try to refrain from the ‘I think that’ll burn’ mentality of scavenging every unattached piece of wood for miles around, regardless of who owns it.

And I hardly think that stealing pallets is a viable way to protest against the proliferation of multi-national monstrosities like Walmart.  Instead, pick up a placard, write some emails, join a citizen group, and don’t shop there. 

It’ll give you something to do on your rest days.

Trent.

I killed and ate numberous hippies when I was in Asia.  They are clean and mostly organic food, giving a good high from residual THC, and, being not into violence, are relatively easy to hunt.  However, they make for better stewing than roasting, as there isn’t a whole lot of meat on their bones.  Their dogs, on the other hand, are often very well fed…but not by them. 

no, cause the Grateful Dead, Phish and Dave Mathews Band were as yet unknown.

Dense theory is in fact a type of critical theory that originated from the post-positivistic model of the semiotic poetics of the Prague School in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

As Judith Butler summarized in her article Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time, the move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

If you’re interested, sign up for English 466 at UBC, Dense Theory and the Twentieth Century Poetics of Post-Positivism.