Back in Madison, and things are getting busy already. The course that I started on Monday is going to be a fair bit of work, since it’s most of a semester’s material compressed into 3 weeks.

The basic question: is democracy equipped to manage an environment in conditions of relative scarcity, as opposed to abundance — or does democracy, as some have suggested, in fact depend on the existence of sufficient surplus to ensure a content and relatively “equal” middle class of voters? Does democracy produce technically good decisions, or have our failures simply been masked by abundance, and now increasinly exposed as we reach, or exceed, the limits of our resources?

heh. In other news, it looks like I’m going to be doing a bit of pro-bono work (read: internship) with Mid-America Planning Services, a local planning firm. It should be interesting to see what happens…

PS: Believe it or not, the Buzzcocks are playing here tonight!

…just got back from two weeks in San Francisco, getting ready now to start a course that I’ll be taking this summer entitled Environmental Management and American Democracy: Friends or Foes?… I spent the first week with my friends Rich and Pam Ault, and their new daughter Abby. Rich and Pam are super cool and their daughter is healthy and happy, although she sure does poop alot. Speaking of new kids, Brett Gardner and his wife Lindsay Stevens just had a son, Owen August Gardner — I’ll have to get out to Milwaukee to see them soon. Kids kids kids…

San Francisco… Zeitgeist, the Palace Steakhouse, Golden Boy Pizza, Ocean Beach, hiking on Mt Tam, the bay in the moonlight, climbing at Mission Cliffs, the Peaks, driving across the Golden Gate bridge in the fog, skateboarding… I do miss it, and I expect that once I’m done with school here in Madison, I’ll be back there as soon as possible.

That said, I returned Saturday to sunny skies, 75 degrees, and lots of green here in the Midwest, and spent all day Sunday sailing on the lake. Not bad, not bad at all.