Our weekly guide to what you may have missed.  

“A science fiction fantasy from the sixties with a view to the sea.” We tend to forget about the Olympics once they’re over, but the games often leave behind quite a lot. In a series of vignettes in Granta, writers living in Beijing, Athens, and elsewhere recall the changes the Olympics brought to their communities, and what remains of the spectacle. “I happen to live in the Olympic neighborhood, built twenty years ago for the games,” says Santiago Roncagliolo, from Barcelona. “This is the point where past meets present, and you wonder which is the real one. I still have no answer.”

And check out this Sociological Images post on “the life of Olympic infrastructure once all the spectators pack up and go home,” from John Pack and Gary Hustwit’s Olympic City Project. 

One thing that’s clear about post-Olympic London, however: “the gloves come off,” says Dave Zirin in Edge of Sports (thanks, ZNet). International spectacle could hardly distract many Londoners from a crumbling economy, harsh austerity, and a blossoming national security state, and London politics are about to get messy. What will the city remember 20 years from now?

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Video: The Center for Investigative Journalism takes on industrial ag in The Hidden Cost of Hamburgers, a new animated short (reposted by Civil Eats). Bottom line: beef is a big rip-off. For every ounce of beef that’s made, a pound of greenhouse gases are also produced. And that says nothing for other externalized costs, like health risks, water pollution, and mistreatment of workers, to name a few. Oh, and we’re addicted to it.

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From Colossal: Recreating Van Gogh masterpieces with colored newsprint and pieces of wood.  

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Climate change has been the forefront of a lot of people’s minds this summer, along with a lot of very difficult questions about our role in confronting crisis and adapting to change. But for Sarah Gilman, one of the biggest questions is how to deal with a loss of this magnitude. Writing in High Country News, she wonders how we “grasp the obliteration of so much we have known and loved,” as we move very quickly from world to another entirely different one. Reflecting on creative responses like Maya Lin’s “What is missing” project, Gilman’s own answer points toward the future. “Looking forward, grieving for what has been,” she says, “we must remember that loss is not new to the world, and that loss is also possibility.”

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President Obama may have put the kibosh on Keystone XL, but that didn’t stop TransCanada from trying to make it happen in smaller pieces, especially in the southern plains. But activists in Texas have no intention of letting that happen, says Forrest Wilder in The Texas Observer. Construction on the pipeline could begin very soon, which is why Tar Sands Blockade got into gear on Thursday with “a sustained campaign of civil disobedience” to block the project in East Texas. Dozens of people have signed on, marking a new chapter in what Wilder calls “one of the biggest environmental fights of our time."  

The blockade in Texas makes a powerful statement, says Bill McKibben in Think Progress (via Grist), and invokes the civil disobedience last year that eventually spurred action from Washington. What’s more, the actions come at an appropriate time, as similar protests have erupted in places like West Virginia, Montana, and the Pacific Northwest over coal exports and mining. The fight over Keystone XL united a lot of disparate groups of people last year, says McKibben, and that can happen again.  

Image by Kiko Alario Salom, licensed under Creative Commons.  

It’s been an uplifting several days for anyone who’s opposed to the massive Keystone XL oil pipeline, which had seemed to be rapidly steamrolling toward presidential approval.

First, on Sunday, an impressively large crowd of 10,000 to 12,000 protesters showed up to encircle the White House and pressure President Obama to give the pipeline a thumbs down. On the same day, the Los Angeles Times reported that the administration may now put off the Keystone XL decision until after the election. On Monday, Think Progress reported that the State Department’s office of the Inspector General would conduct a review the pipeline approval process, which has been dogged by accusations of inadequate environmental review and potential conflicts of interest.

All in all, it’s a remarkable turnaround of Keystone XL’s prospects, offering some hope—remember that word?—to environmentally conscious Americans who might have started to think that green activism is no more effective than video-game playing in changing the world.

There may be more than a little political calculus in Obama’s move to delay a pipeline decision until after the election. Last week, Reuters foreshadowed the delay when it reported that some of the president’s advisers were uneasy about the support that a Keystone XL approval could cost the campaign—especially among young, enthusiastic, door-knocking volunteers.

The situation may be a sign that times are changing. Conventional pundit wisdom holds that the environment is a minor player at presidential election time, writes Keith Kloor at the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media, taking a back seat to “kitchen table concerns like the economy, health care, and war.” But the current political environment, with Keystone raising a ruckus and virtually all the Republican candidates rejecting climate-change concerns, writes Kloor, has

Juliet Eilperin, a Washington Post reporter, thinking that global warming may yet be a big issue in the 2012 election. Just yesterday, in a talk at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, Eilperin said:

“I actually think this is a really interesting moment. It is a moment that is challenging a position I’ve held for a long time, which is that the environment doesn’t play a role in elections.”

She added that climate change “has the potential to become a wedge issue. What is so interesting is whether it will be a wedge issue for the left or a wedge issue for the right.”

Still, for pipeline backers, hope—unlike oil—springs eternal. Reuters now reports that the State Department is considering rerouting the pipeline to avoid ecologically sensitive areas of Nebraska and improve its chances of success. This is despite the fact that “TransCanada said last month that it was too late in the federal approval process to move the proposed path for the line.”

Sources: Inside Climate, Los Angeles Times, Think Progress, Reuters, Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media  

Image by Emma Cassidy and tarsandsaction , licensed under Creative Commons .  

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch . 

Bill McKibben was named a 2010 Utne Reader Visionary.

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I didn’t think it was possible, but my admiration for Martin Luther King, Jr., grew even stronger these past days.

As I headed to jail as part of the first wave of what is turning into the biggest civil disobedience action in the environmental movement for many years, I had the vague idea that I would write something. Not an epic like King's “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” but at least, you know, a blog post. Or a tweet.

But frankly, I wasn’t up to it. The police, surprised by how many people turned out on the first day of two weeks of protests at the White House, decided to teach us a lesson. As they told our legal team, they wanted to deter anyone else from coming -- and so with our first crew they were… kind of harsh.

We spent three days in D.C.’s Central Cell Block, which is exactly as much fun as it sounds like it might be. You lie on a metal rack with no mattress or bedding and sweat in the high heat; the din is incessant; there’s one baloney sandwich with a cup of water every 12 hours.

I didn’t have a pencil -- they wouldn’t even let me keep my wedding ring -- but more important, I didn’t have the peace of mind to write something. It’s only now, out 12 hours and with a good night’s sleep under my belt, that I’m able to think straight. And so, as I said, I’ll go to this weekend’s big celebrations for the opening of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial on the Washington Mall with even more respect for his calm power.

Preacher, speaker, writer under fire, but also tactician. He really understood the power of nonviolence, a power we’ve experienced in the last few days. When the police cracked down on us, the publicity it produced cemented two of the main purposes of our protest:

First, it made Keystone XL -- the new, 1,700-mile-long pipeline we’re trying to block that will vastly increase the flow of “dirty” tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico -- into a national issue. A few months ago, it was mainly people along the route of the prospective pipeline who were organizing against it. (And with good reason: tar sands mining has already wrecked huge swaths of native land in Alberta, and endangers farms, wild areas, and aquifers all along its prospective route.)

Image: Bill McKibben being arrested on August 20, 2011, for protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. 

Now, however, people are coming to understand -- as we hoped our demonstrations would highlight -- that it poses a danger to the whole planet as well.  After all, it’s the Earth’s second largest pool of carbon, and hence the second-largest potential source of global warming gases after the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. We’ve already plumbed those Saudi deserts.  Now the question is: Will we do the same to the boreal forests of Canada. As NASA climatologist James Hansen has made all too clear, if we do so it’s “essentially game over for the climate.” That message is getting through.  Witness the incredibly strong New York Times editorial opposing the building of the pipeline that I was handed on our release from jail.

Second, being arrested in front of the White House helped make it clearer that President Obama should be the focus of anti-pipeline activism. For once Congress isn’t in the picture.  The situation couldn’t be simpler: the president, and the president alone, has the power either to sign the permit that would take the pipeline through the Midwest and down to Texas (with the usual set of disastrous oil spills to come) or block it.

Barack Obama has the power to stop it and no one in Congress or elsewhere can prevent him from doing so.  That means -- and again, it couldn’t be simpler -- that the Keystone XL decision is the biggest environmental test for him between now and the next election. If he decides to stand up to the power of big oil, it will send a jolt through his political base, reminding the presently discouraged exactly why they were so enthused in 2008.

That’s why many of us were wearing our old campaign buttons when we went into the paddy wagon.  We’d like to remember -- and like the White House to remember, too -- just why we knocked on all those doors.

But as Dr. King might have predicted, the message went deeper. As people gather in Washington for this weekend’s dedication of his monument, most will be talking about him as a great orator, a great moral leader. And of course he was that, but it’s easily forgotten what a great strategist he was as well, because he understood just how powerful a weapon nonviolence can be.

The police, who trust the logic of force, never quite seem to get this. When they arrested our group of 70 or so on the first day of our demonstrations, they decided to teach us a lesson by keeping us locked up extra long -- strong treatment for a group of people peacefully standing on a sidewalk.

No surprise, it didn’t work.  The next day an even bigger crowd showed up -- and now, there are throngs of people who have signed up to be arrested every day until the protests end on September 3rd.  Not only that, a judge threw out the charges against our first group, and so the police have backed off.  For the moment, anyway, they’re not actually sending more protesters to jail, just booking and fining them.

And so the busload of ranchers coming from Nebraska, and the bio-fueled RV with the giant logo heading in from East Texas, and the flight of grandmothers arriving from Montana, and the tribal chiefs, and union leaders, and everyone else will keep pouring into D.C. We’ll all, I imagine, stop and pay tribute to Dr. King before or after we get arrested; it’s his lead, after all, that we’re following.

Our part in the weekend’s celebration is to act as a kind of living tribute. While people are up on the mall at the monument, we’ll be in the front of the White House, wearing handcuffs, making clear that civil disobedience is not just history in America.

We may not be facing the same dangers Dr. King did, but we’re getting some small sense of the kind of courage he and the rest of the civil rights movement had to display in their day -- the courage to put your body where your beliefs are. It feels good.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of  350.org , and a  TomDispatch regular . His most recent book, just out in paperback, is  Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

Copyright 2011 Bill McKibben 

Source: TomDispatch 

Illustration at top by Gluekit based on McKibben photo by Nancie Battaglia.

Image of protest by tarsandsaction, licensed under Creative Commons.