KULTIVATOR is an experimental cooperation of organic farming and visual art practice, situated in rural village Dyestad, on the island Öland on the southeast coast of Sweden.
By installing certain functions in abandoned farm facilities, near to the active agriculture community, Kultivator provide a meeting and working space that points out the parallels between provision production and art practice, between concrete and abstract processes for survival.
Kultivator initiates and executes meetings between idealism and realism, hoping that fruitful cooperation’s should take form.
Cycling increases profits, reduces carbon, attracts employees and cuts down sick days. PleaseCycle provides organizations with everything needed to begin or boost a workplace cycle scheme.
We specialize in using digital innovation, employee-engagement and professional services to get more staff commuting by bike. Our Cycle Hub ® system is a turnkey solution for corporate cycling, while the BikeMiles™ programme rewards cyclists for each journey – like “Nectar Points” for bikes.
We’re a group of passionate entrepreneurs and keen cyclists who simply love cycling and want to help businesses tap into the tremendous value it offers to their brand, employees, and all other stakeholders.
“I actively used the environment designing the ‘Tree Bench’ for the municipality of Amersfoort and worked with the elements that the park had to offer: trees, city walls, paths, and grass. It is no challenge to just dig a hole and a install a bench. An ideal bench need the environment and the environment needs the bench too. To achieve that goal a bench contributes to the park as a walk, sit, rest, kiss, lie, meet, watch, dog walk, day-dream, stretch, run, think, decide, smoke and lunch spot.
During my visits to the park I was inspired by the plants overgrowth and mushrooms. In the design I used the characteristics of mushroom. mushroom is suddenly there and when the weather and temperature conditions change, they disappear. Using the Tree Bench I want surprise the park visitors in the same way. The Tree Benches can easily be attached to the trees using a suspension system. The Tree Bench will not hinder the tree itself. The visitor will understand immediately that the tree bench is made to sit on.”
Jim Moran explains why saving the planet will be an uphill struggle.
The recent development of the branch of philosophy called ‘environmental philosophy’, or as it is sometimes referred to, ‘environmental ethics’, has been characterized by a variety of theoretical disputes about the best way to provide a philosophical basis for engagement with the environmental problems facing us, now and in the future. Many of the early writers hoped that a new environmental ethics would emerge, embodying a set of principles that could help us deal with our relation to animals and the natural world in a way that traditional ethical theories seemed to have overlooked.
One of the early contributors to this project was Aldo Leopold, who was not a philosopher but a professor of forestry and land management. His famous essay ‘The Land Ethic’, found in his 1949 book The Sand County Almanac, has stimulated a great deal of discussion about the kind of principles we need to guide us on environmental issues. Leopold argued for the extension of what we see as worthy of our respect from the human community to include animals and the natural world, or what he referred to as ‘the biotic community’. His famous principle, briefly expressed, was, ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise’.
Leopold carried forward a discussion by nineteenth century conservationists about whether nature should be preserved only because of its economic and practical benefits for humans or because it provides value beyond merely supplying natural resources. He mentioned the songs of birds and the beauty of flowers as being part of nature’s bounty. He also brought into focus the importance of the interconnection of things in nature, defending the kind of holistic perspective which has since played such a crucial role in scientific ecology. He insisted that environmental ethics should focus on systems and not just on individual things. Our human dependence on nature cannot be understood without a deep ecological study of the interconnectedness of life. Rachel Carson’s famous 1962 book Silent Spring, which was so important in stimulating environmental awareness, is a good example of this approach to conservation.
Capital Growth is a partnership initiative between London Food Link, the Mayor of London Boris Johnson, and the Big Lottery’s Local Food Fund. It is championed by the Chair of the London Food Board Rosie Boycott and aims to create 2012 new community food growing spaces across London by the end of 2012. Capital Growth offers practical help, grants, training and support to groups wanting to establish community food growing projects as well as advice to landowners.
Ensuring that the genetic diversity of the world’s food crops is preserved for future generations is an important contribution toward the reduction of hunger and poverty in developing countries. This is where the greatest plant diversity originates and where the need for food security and the further development of agriculture is most urgent.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is established in the permafrost in the mountains of Svalbard, is designed to store duplicates of seeds from seed collections around the globe. Many of these collections are in developing countries. If seeds are lost, e.g. as a result of natural disasters, war or simply a lack of resources, the seed collections may be reestablished using seeds from Svalbard.
The loss of biological diversity is currently one of the greatest challenges facing the environment and sustainable development. The diversity of food crops is under constant pressure. The consequence could be an irreversible loss of the opportunity to grow crops adapted to climate change, new plant diseases and the needs of an expanding population.
Moving big animals to places they don’t already live is at once appealing and disturbing, a sort of adolescent environmental fantasy come to life: African lions in Nebraska! Komodo dragons in Australia!
But at the beginning of the 21st century, with 7 billion humans competing for space and resources on a rapidly warming planet, exercising arguable control over the fate of nature, moving species around is a legitimate option.
It’s called assisted migration. Often the goal is to save endangered plants and animals, though not always. Sometimes, as with the Komodo dragon proposal, the goal is to restore ecological balance, and other proposals are motivated by an almost romantic sense of possibility: Wouldn’t it be marvelous to watch cheetahs dash across the grasslands of South Dakota?
As an idea, assisted migration has been around for decades, but since the millennium’s turn it’s moved from a mostly fringe concept to something that scientists discuss, if not argue. After all, many examples of unwittingly assisted migration show what can happen when relocation goes wrong: Cane toads swarming across Australia, brown tree snakes devouring Guam’s birds, kudzu swallowing much of the southeastern United States, and of course the voracious Burmese pythons of Florida.
On the flip side, however, are pheasants and sweet clover, brown trout and Norway maple, which despite their non-native origins are now considered a natural part of North American life. Sometimes relocation works fine, and an argument can be made that consciously acting as landscape-scale zookeepers and gardeners is a legitimate response to impending catastrophe.
Written by Brandon Keim, WIRED Science. Continue HERE
Our built environment doesn’t have to be static. With the right synthetic biology, it can respond automatically to changes in temperature or moisture level, and even react to natural disasters, hunkering down during earthquakes or removing toxins after a toxic spill.
Synthetic-biology-based approaches to design practices, which have a material engagement with design and engineering practices, propose a new set of conditions in which architectures can alter their characteristics to suit changing environmental conditions. Living materials raise the possibility that buildings can make a positive impact on their local surroundings by performing remedial functions, that the construction of architecture could actually heal a stressed environment, for example, by removing toxins or fixing greenhouse gases. These new technologies could be on building exteriors, which present a managed interface with the environment.
Responsive architectures that are sensitive to their local environment can revitalize cities and equip communities with the ability to deal with and recover from radical disturbances in their surroundings, such as a natural disaster. Indeed, all cities should be designed with environmental crises in mind, whether they have reached the proportions of a megacity or not. Densely populated areas need to be considered potential disaster zones, where living spaces are at risk from the accumulation of toxic waste and from physical damage as a consequence of our unstable Earth. Given the present environmental challenges and worldwide population growth, fundamental changes in the expectations of buildings must be considered globally. This is a more urgent and radical requirement than current notions of sustainable development that pander to industrial developers; it promotes and demands an immediate rethinking of the way that we build our homes and cities. The strategic use of these new materials, woven into the substance of the urban landscape on building surfaces and into structural fabrics, provides an opportunity for buildings to actively participate in environmental challenges.
This installation was created with protocells, DNA-less chemical systems that can be programmed to form structures. Is this what you’re going to live in in the future?
NYFA speaks with 2009 Digital/Electronic Arts Fellow: Hi Leila and Cary, please tell us a little bit about yourselves and what you’re currently working on.
We are an eco-art/theory collaborative and former New Yorkers now based in Rochester, NY. Leila’s academic training is in literature and Cary has made new media and performance-based art for over twenty years. We bring together our separate disciplines, histories, and practices through a shared interest in nature and the environment. For us, the “environment” encompasses a wide variety of networked systems, including biological habitats, global exchanges, industrial grids, digital networks, and the democratic imagination. Our works merge primitive with emergent technologies and navigate the intertwined terrain between nature, built environments, mobility, and electronic spaces. We are particularly excited right now about a residency program we are creating in the central Maine mountains where new media practitioners will be invited to make art in networked treehouses in the remote woods.
Human waste might someday turn human urine or waste into useful electricity for radios or space robots. EcoBot-III was able to both eat and crap inside its lab environment.
Today’s robots that fly, jump or roll around must refuel or recharge as does any gadget that runs out of energy. Tomorrow’s new generation of self-sustaining robots might keep going nearly forever by grazing on dead insects, rotting plant matter or even human waste.
The vision of robots capable of plugging themselves into the natural world of living organisms has begun taking shape in several labs around the world, and even NASA has shown renewed interest in powering space robots with microbes. But one British lab has already been building on the work of robotics pioneers to create small “EcoBots” that extract energy from microbial fuel cells since 2002.
“Robots that eat biological fuels could find enough fuel almost anywhere,” said John Greenman, a microbiologist at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, a joint venture between the University of the West of England and the University of Bristol. “There is organic matter anywhere on Earth — leaves and soil in the forest, or even human waste such as urine and feces.”
Written by Jeremy Hsu, Scientific American. Continue HERE
Amidst society’s hopes for a green future, the power of working with nature is still not sufficiently understood or exploited. Too many visions remain divorced from the end user. Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, the architects and co-founders of London-based ecoLogicStudio, feel that ‘using and interacting with natural elements in a symbiotic way can become a game with ecological benefits.’ Recently they have focused on the potential of algae—micro-algae are used for energy, while macro-algae—like bio-radars or generative agents—is used for filtering water and making food.
New symbiotic algae and seafood/fish farms generated in Crane Greenhouses
As global regions undergo structural and demographic shifts, agritourism and algae farms have huge potential, but models need testing and feedback from people, so that prototypes can be optimally identified as multi-use educational resources related to their living context. ‘You don’t have so many choices at the moment. There is a detachment of production from consumption, when even recycling can be fun’, say ecoLogicStudio. Their Algae Farm for the Swedish Municipality of Simrishamn demonstrates the interactive potentials for algae-related urban activities and architectural prototypes. Here on the Ostersjiön region of Sweden on the Baltic Sea a decaying fishing industry and aging local population ‘calls for the introduction of a new type of economic and urban system.’
HORTUS (Hydro Organisms Responsive To Urban Stimuli) is a new exhibition from ecoLogicStudio that engages with the notions of urban renewable energy and agriculture through a new gardening prototype. Over a four-week growing period, flows of energy (light radiation), matter (biomass, carbon dioxide) and information (images, tweets, stats) will be triggered to induce multiple mechanisms of self-regulation and evolve novel forms of self-organisation. HORTUS proposes an experimental hands-on engagement with these notions, illustrating their potential applicability to the masterplanning of large regional landscapes and the retrofitting of industrial and rural architectural types, as exemplified in the project ‘Regional Algae Farm’ developed by ecoLogicStudio for the Swedish region of Osterlen.
Architectural Association School students, staff and visitors are invited to engage daily with HORTUS to invent new protocols of urban biogardening. A virtual organism such as this offers the opportunity to capture and build up information and cultivation practices, enriching the material experience of the visitor turned urban ‘cyber-gardener’.
The Meat Licence Proposal is an organization working towards the collaborative development of a new kind of law. From the first of January 2012, The Meat Licence Proposal will begin a new strategy of developing ‘Licenced Products’ for sale within the market. The initial premise for the ‘meat licencing law’ is:
“Instead of a law which prohibits, we are interested in a law which compels engagement. Citizens will gain a ‘meat licence’ through their specific and supervised engagement in the act of killing an animal.
Understanding ‘law’ as a creative medium, and, implementing open-source development models, The Meat Licence Proposal is an attempt to build a bridge between citizen and lawmaker.
The ‘meat licencing law’ will be developed and tested in the public domain, through a combination of traditional, digital and creative strategies. To find out more, please visit our forum and blogs.”
City Grazing is a San Francisco-based goat landscaping business. An environmentally friendly solution to weed control, our business rents out goats to clear public and private land. Whether you have acres or an overgrown backyard, our goats would be eager to eat your weeds and aid in fire prevention, naturally. While they are not out on the job, our herd lives on pasture in San Francisco’s Bayview district, between the SF Bay Railroad and cement recycling plant.
Goats grazing is an ecologically sound practice that eliminates the need for toxic herbicides, chemicals, and gas-powered lawn mowers. They clear brush in areas that people or machines cannot easily reach, like steep slopes or ditches. The goats can help restore soil fertility by providing organic fertilizer.
No other form of weed control comes with such a great character! Our herd is very friendly, lively, and great with children. As we work around the city, City Grazing teaches about animal husbandry and ecological stewardship of industrial land. Our goats are available for birthday parties and educational visits at the railyard coming soon!
Why Choose Goats?
– Goats can eat weeds in terrain that is difficult or impossible to mow – steep slopes, gullies, between rocks, etc.
– Goats can eat plants that are hard to remove by hand, such as poison oak, thistles and blackberry.
– A managed goat grazing plan can reduce and potentially eliminate species of weeds and invasive plants from an area.
– They eat the plants that fuel wildfires, improving firefighters’ ability to manage and stop fires.
– Goats only need one tool: an appetite! There are no chemicals, mowers, chainsaws, or machines. This means no fuels are used and no emissions are generated, and you don’t have the liability of a worker injuring his or herself with dangerous equipment.
– There is no hauling or dumping of debris. They automatically recycle your plant mass into fertilizer, and work it into the soil with their hooves.
– Watching our goats work is a fun and educational experience that you’ll want to share with your friends and family. They’re the cutest weed eaters we’ve ever seen!
The whistled language of La Gomera Island in the Canaries, the Silbo Gomero, replicates the islanders habitual language (Castilian Spanish) with whistling. Handed down over centuries from master to pupil, it is the only whistled language in the world that is fully developed and practised by a large community (more than 22,000 inhabitants). The whistled language replaces each vowel or consonant with a whistling sound: two distinct whistles replace the five Spanish vowels, and there are four whistles for consonants. The whistles can be distinguished according to pitch and whether they are interrupted or continuous. With practice, whistlers can convey any message. Some local variations even point to their origin. Taught in schools since 1999, the Silbo Gomero is understood by almost all islanders and practiced by the vast majority, particularly the elderly and the young. It is also used during festivities and ceremonies, including religious occasions. To prevent it from disappearing like the other whistled languages of the Canary Islands, it is important to do more for its transmission and promote the Silbo Gomero as intangible cultural heritage cherished by the inhabitants of La Gomera and the Canary Islands as a whole.
Landscape-related professions that deal with constant loneliness, such as shepherds, hunters or fishermen, profit from this system to warn the others from dangers, emergencies, wolf attacks or enemy invasions.
There are whistled communication methods in every main family of languages: French Pyrenees, Turkey, Mexico, Greek islands, Amazon forests, North Vietnam Hmong peoples, or desert zones in West Africa. Listen HERE
Continuing from the Dawn of Social Networks: Ancestors May Have Formed Ties With Both Kin and Non-Kin Based On Shared Attributes. HERE
If you ever sit back and wonder what it might have been like to live in the late Pleistocene, you’re not alone. That’s right about when humans emerged from a severe population bottleneck and began to expand globally. But, apparently, life back then might not have been too different than how we live today (that is, without the cars, the written language, and of course, the smartphone). In this week’s Nature, a group of researchers suggest that we share many social characteristics with humans that lived in the late Pleistocene, and that these ancient humans may have paved the way for us to cooperate with each other.
Modern human social networks share several features, whether they operate within a group of schoolchildren in San Francisco or a community of millworkers in Bulgaria. The number of social ties a person has, the probability that two of a person’s friends are also friends, and the inclination for similar people to be connected are all very regular across groups of people living very different lives in far-flung places.
So, the researchers asked, are these traits universal to all groups of humans, or are they merely byproducts of our modern world? They also wanted to understand the social network traits that allowed cooperation to develop in ancient communities.
Written by By Kate Shaw, Ars Technica. Continue on Wired HERE
The Political Equator was conceptualized by Teddy Cruz in 2005. Political Equator 3 was a 2-day cross-border mobile conference held on the 3rd and 4th of June 2011. This event was co-organized by the Center for Urban Ecologies at the Visual Arts Department at UCSD, and two community-based, non-profit organizations on both sides of the border, Casa Familiar in San Ysidro, California and Alter Terra in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico.
The third program in a the series of bi-national conferences, PE3 continues to engage pressing regional socio-economic, urban and environmental conditions across the San Diego –Tijuana border. These meetings have been focusing on a critical analysis of local conflicts in order to re-evaluate the meaning of shifting global dynamics, across geo-political boundaries, natural resources and marginal communities.
The Guerrilla Grafters are a group of San Franciscans who believe urban trees are a precious thing to waste on simple flowers. Their goal is to graft- albeit illegally- fruit bearing branches onto non-fruit bearing fruit trees, in hopes that over time the cities ornamental trees can provide food for residents free of charge.
In this video, we follow Guerrilla Grafters Tara Hui and Booka Alon as they check up on their surreptitious grafts, perform a bit of pruning and search for their trees’ first fruit.
The Guerrilla Grafters graft fruit bearing branches onto non-fruit bearing, ornamental fruit trees. Over time, delicious, nutritious fruit is made available to urban residents through these grafts. Our web application helps grafters to find graftable trees, to track how grafts are doing, and helps to facilitate gleaning of fruit. It is built by a laterally organized group using all open source code. We aim to prove that a culture of care can be cultivated from the ground up. We aim to turn city streets into food forests, and unravel civilization one branch at a time.
Botanicalls Kits let plants reach out for human help! They offer a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates to your mobile phone. When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love. It comes as a kit so that you can hone your soldering skills (or teach someone else) while you build a line of communication between you and your houseplant!
This kit comes with everything you need to get your plant tweeting in no time. The ATmega328 comes pre-programmed, but you can customize it with your own messages. The only thing you need to provide is a plant, network connection (and Ethernet cable), and a power outlet.
Over the past 100 years, the practices of agriculture have been radically altered in Western societies, spurred by development and application of a host of technologies designed to automate and monitor food production. Recently, however, many have called attention to the shortcomings of mainstream massive farming endeavors: large-scale agri-business may be producing more food, but the food itself is lacking in nutrition and the environment is suffering from these very farming practices. What is needed is a return to local and small-scale agriculture for both environmental and personal health concerns.
Engineering and design played a role in advancing the culture and practices of agri-business by producing products, systems, and services to advance and support large-scale corporate farming. The question we ask is, Can design and engineering now play a role in shifting us towards more sustainable modes of agriculture? What kinds of products, services and systems would need to be designed and engineered to enable that subversion and shift? How will technologies of automation and monitoring need to be refigured for these contexts – if indeed they are still at all useful? The growBot garden project explores these questions by bringing together designers, artists, farmers and other food producers to ask: How might robotics and sensing technologies be used in support of local small-scale agriculture? The growBot garden project is structured around a series of public and participatory workshops that bring together diverse constituencies to critically think about, discuss and debate, and re-make our near-term future. The workshops draw equally from practices of participatory design, critical design, social practice art, tactical media and hacking. More than a discursive platform, the workshops are design platforms: opportunities to collectively make speculative representations and prototypes of possible futures. These representations and prototypes are documented and shared through public forums to provoke consideration of new assemblages that might emerge at the intersection of technology and agriculture.
Across disciplines academics and artists are researching and creating practices that are highly contextual (determined by the environment in which they are located), exploring ways of articulating specific environments, spaces or places. This conference examines a specific problematic that attends the dissemination of this work: how to engage with ‘being there’ when ‘there’ is not here?
We understand environment (social, built, natural, technological) as that which surrounds and informs us. Through our practice we influence our environment. What we create is shaped by our surroundings. We exist in a relation of mutual exchange; making ourselves other and incorporating that which is other in turn. This conference offers a forum for academics and creative practitioners to come together and engage with articulations of mutual formation: to discuss work as environment.
Such work often relies on direct, personal experience of a particular environment. Transfer and abstraction, necessary for the communication of this work beyond the specifics of this original environment, challenge the work. Negotiating publication or conference environment, for example, necessitates reformulation of the work, engendering changes in texture and experience, in adapting to alternative structures. What do such alterations, translations or transformations, mean for this work?
This conference aims to examine these questions on a very practical level. When it comes to considering environment, what is the relationship between the structures of dissemination and the environment our work seeks to convey? What is the relationship between our academic environment and the work we (aim to) produce? How do we utter our environment?
Poets and writers, artists, academics, social and environmental scientists, performers and musicians, among others, are invited to discuss ways of uttering environment. Organizers seek work that explores the phenomenological sense of speaking with environment. They encourage the use of a diverse range of media as part of this dialogue. Participants are invited to find new ways of expressing their research and/or artistic practice in a conference setting that reflects upon this process of adaptation as a process of practical enquiry.
Deadline for applications: 31st March
Conference: 1st-2nd September 2012
Andrea Zittel, American, b. 1965, “Indianapolis Island,” 2010. Fiberglass, foam, mixed media. Commissioned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
The Indianapolis Museum of Art is issuing a call for proposals for a summer 2012 six-week residency on Andrea Zittel’s Indianapolis Island within the IMA’s 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park. Graduate and undergraduate students and emerging professionals in the fields of art, design, architecture and performing arts are encouraged to apply to customize and reside on Indianapolis Island.
Anchored in the 35-acre lake within 100 Acres, Indianapolis Island is a habitable “off-the-grid” structure accessible by rowboat. At about 20 feet in diameter, the island serves as an experimental living structure that examines the daily needs of contemporary human beings. Residents collaborate with Zittel by adapting and modifying the island’s structure according to their individual needs. The project blends elements of environmental art, sculpture, design and performance in a unique way, offering a challenging and experimental forum for exploring ideas about individualism and self-sufficiency. Visit www.imamuseum.org/islandresidency for more information, including photos and renderings of the structure, and to apply for the residency.
The 2012 residency will be the third to take place on Indianapolis Island. During the artwork’s inaugural summer in 2010, Herron School of Art and Design (Indianapolis, Ind.) students Jessica Dunn and Michael Runge activated the installation through a series of visitor interactions based on a system of exchange with their project titled Give and Take. The 2011 island resident was Katherine Ball, a student of Portland State University’s Art + Social Practice MFA program (Portland, Ore.). Over the course of her residency, titled No Swimming, Ball initiated a series of ecological interventions in the Park’s lake and engaged a local audience through a series of public programs centered on the topic of water. For more information about the past residencies, visit www.imamuseum.org/100acres/artists/andreazittel.
Proposals are due Friday, January 13, 2012, and should include a brief written statement about the planned residency with renderings. Residencies must last six weeks or longer and be conducted between May and September 2012.
About Contemporary Art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art
The IMA’s robust contemporary art program is a model for how encyclopedic museums engage the art of our time. With a renewed focus on its contemporary collection, programs, and publications, the IMA has been actively seeking out the works of emerging and mid-career international artists through both gift and acquisition, and organizing major traveling exhibitions and newly commissioned projects. In recent years, the IMA has worked with artists including Ingrid Calame, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Los Carpinteros, Amy Cutler, Tara Donovan, Tony Feher, Orly Genger, Jeppe Hein, Robert Irwin, Alfredo Jaar, Josephine Meckseper, Joshua Mosley, Ernesto Neto, Type A, and Andrea Zittel, among others.
In June 2010, the IMA launched its new 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park to wide critical acclaim, and it has been hailed across the United States as a new model for site-responsive sculpture parks in the 21st century. Among the backdrop of woodlands, wetlands, and a 35-acre lake, the park currently includes nine commissioned art installations by artists from throughout the world as well as the Ruth Lilly Visitor Pavilion designed by architect Marlon Blackwell. 100 Acres is one of only a few sculpture parks in the United States dedicated to the ongoing commission of site-responsive artwork.
Lisa Freiman, the IMA’s senior curator and chair of the Department of Contemporary Art, was appointed the 2011 U.S. Commissioner for La Biennale di Venezia, the 54th International Art Exhibition. During the Biennale, the IMA presented six new works by the collaborative Allora & Calzadilla in the U.S. Pavilion for the exhibition titled Gloria.
Indianapolis Museum of Art
www.imamuseum.org
Twitter: @imamuseum
Tiago Barros: This project envisions a distinct approach towards moving around the United States being also a revival of the act of traveling. Why traveling at high speed? Why having the final destiny always defined? And why always departing and arriving on a tight schedule? Nowadays, everything is set and everyone is always running around. It is time to reconsider the act of traveling and start enjoying it accordingly. The Passing Cloud is an innovative and environmentally friendly method of transportation that doesn’t require expensive steel tracks or concrete highways. It is made of a series of spherical balloons that form the shape of a cloud. Its inner stainless steel structure is covered with heavy weight tensile nylon fabric. During the journey, It moves according to prevailing winds speed and direction at the time of travel. Since it moves with the wind, no wind is ever felt during the trip, offering the passengers a full “floating sensation”.
It’s an unique journey. The feeling of floating in the atmosphere – on top of a cloud – with an open schedule and unknown final destiny. All National Ground would be potentially covered at virtually no cost and the help of the wind. The journey becomes your destiny.
‘Re-Thinking Progress’ explores how through a change in perspective we can re-design the way our economy works – designing products that can be ‘made to be made again’ and powering the system with renewable energy. It questions whether with creativity and innovation we can build a restorative economy.
Waterwheel investigates and celebrates this constant yet volatile global resource, fundamental element, environmental issue, political dilemma, universal theme and symbol of life. It encourages you to explore and discover, share and collaborate, contribute and participate. Waterwheel calls on everyone—performers and artists, scientists and environmentalists, students and academics, you and me, anyone and anywhere—to test the water, dive in, make a splash and start a wave. It provides a platform and forum for experience and exchange, expression and experimentation. Waterwheel draws together different people, practices, places, media and modes of expression. There are no borders or boundaries. Waterwheel flows along its natural course.
You can engage with Waterwheel in many different ways.
Earthsky.org: The creation of cement is an incredibly polluting process, but Stanford scientist Bret Constanz has found a way to mimic the way coral works, by creating cement from CO2 and water.
Biomineralization expert Brent Constantz of Stanford University got inspiration from the way corals build reefs to make a new type of cement for buildings. The process of making this cement actually removes carbon dioxide–a greenhouse gas, thought to cause global warming–from the air. The company Constantz founded, called Calera, has a demonstration plant on California’s Monterrey Bay that takes waste CO2 gas from a local power plant and dissolves it into seawater to form carbonate, which mixes with calcium in the seawater and creates a solid. It’s how corals form their skeletons, and how Constantz creates cement.
Brian Merchant: Now this is people power: A crematorium in the U.K. plans on capturing the heat given off from its furnaces and turning it into usable energy. Expect some controversy on this one, no matter how pragmatic the plan to install electricity-generating turbines in the Durham facility really are. After all, it’s burning corpses that will be turning the turbine blades.
PennEnergy reports:
A crematorium wants to install turbines in two of its burners to generate electricity. The burners at Durham Crematorium would use the heat generated during the cremation process to provide the same amount of electricity as would power 1,500 TVs.
A third burner is to be used to provide heating for the site’s chapel and its offices. The scheme would be the first of its kind in the UK but industry experts say that it could be followed by other similar projects. Crematoria aren’t exempt from efficiency standards that are requiring industries across the board in the U.K. to clean up their acts. As such, many institutions are replacing their furnaces anyways, to reduce mercury emissions. Perhaps the time is ripe to install turbines while they’re at it, and capitalize on the energy given off by the burning dead folks.
In all seriousness, this makes perfect sense — even if it is the equivalent of Soylent Green for energy production. I, for one, would rest a little easier if I knew that my body would whip up some clean power after I bit the dust.
Jaymi Heimbuch: The folks at Philips have come up with some unusual and futuristic designs for their Microbial Home concept. From steampunk-ish kitchens to cocoon-like urban beehives, the designs are truly unique — and that goes for the lighting too.
Here, Philips has shown off a concept for a light that runs on not grid electricity, not solar power, not even wind power. Nope, it runs on bacteria.
According to Philips, “The concept explores the use of bioluminescent bacteria, which are fed with methane and composted material (drawn from the methane digester in the Microbial Home system). Alternatively the cellular light array can be filled with fluorescent proteins that emit different frequencies of light.”
It doesn’t provide enough light to fill a room or read by, but it does provide the subtle glow just right for mood lighting. It also is a piece of furniture or art itself, with individual cells of hand-blown glass in a steel frame. But that means you need a home where something as bulky as this has room to be hung on a wall. Though, Philips notes this could be used beyond indoors, for things like night-time road markings, warning strips on stairs or curbs, exit signs, lights for sensors, and so on.
So, is it practical for the average home? Not really. But it is definitely interesting and we may just find a practical place for the technology yet.
“This represents a new genre of ‘living’ biological products. We have involved the microbial community in the home to provide the soft mood lighting typical of luminescence by using energy stored in our waste streams. Potentially biological products could be self-energizing, adaptive, responsive, self-repairing, act as biological sensors to environmental conditions, and change the way we communicate information.”
END:CIV examines our culture’s addiction to systematic violence and environmental exploitation, and probes the resulting epidemic of poisoned landscapes and shell-shocked nations. Based in part on Endgame, the best-selling book by Derrick Jensen, END:CIV asks: “If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air, and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?”
The causes underlying the collapse of civilizations are usually traced to overuse of resources. As we write this, the world is reeling from economic chaos, peak oil, climate change, environmental degradation, and political turmoil. Every day, the headlines re-hash stories of scandal and betrayal of the public trust. We don’t have to make outraged demands for the end of the current global system — it seems to be coming apart already.
But acts of courage, compassion and altruism abound, even in the most damaged places. By documenting the resilience of the people hit hardest by war and repression, and the heroism of those coming forward to confront the crisis head-on, END:CIV illuminates a way out of this all-consuming madness and into a saner future.
Backed by Jensen’s narrative, the film calls on us to act as if we truly love this land. The film trips along at a brisk pace, using music, archival footage, motion graphics, animation, slapstick and satire to deconstruct the global economic system, even as it implodes around us. END:CIV illustrates first-person stories of sacrifice and heroism with intense, emotionally-charged images that match Jensen’s poetic and intuitive approach. Scenes shot in the back country provide interludes of breathtaking natural beauty alongside clearcut evidence of horrific but commonplace destruction.
END:CIV features interviews with Paul Watson, Waziyatawin, Gord Hill, Michael Becker, Peter Gelderloos, Lierre Keith, James Howard Kunstler, Stephanie McMillan, Qwatsinas, Rod Coronado, John Zerzan and more. Text from End:Civ
Alaska Airlines. A Boeing 737 before its first flight powered by biofuel and conventional fuel.
MATTHEW L. WALD: Gasoline for cars is commonly blended with corn ethanol. In the last few weeks, airlines have started using blends, too, but their feedstocks are more varied, including chicken fat, algal oil, used fryer grease and parts of inedible plants.
Last week, Alaska Airlines, based in Seattle, began one of the most ambitious test programs to date, a series of 75 flights that will burn a total of 15,000 gallons of an 80/20 blend with ordinary jet fuel. The supplier, Dynamic Fuels of Geismar, La., says it can make the fuel from a wide range of organic substances, including used fryer oil. Tyson, the chicken company, is a partner, providing chicken fat and beef tallow. Continue HERE
Alaska is using the fuel in a daily flight of a Boeing 737 from Seattle to Reagan National Airport in Washington and three daily flights in a Q400 turboprop between Seattle and Portland, Ore. United Airlines also made a demonstration flight from Chicago to Houston for which 40 percent of the fuel was derived from algae.
The seventh black rhino population established by the WWF Black Rhino Range Expansion Project, was recently released after an epic 1500 kilometre trip across the country. 19 of the critically endangered animals were moved from the Eastern Cape to a new location in Limpopo province.
“This was possible because of the far-sightedness of the Eastern Cape Provincial government who were prepared to become partners in the project for the sake of black rhino conservation in South Africa,” said WWF’s project leader Dr Jacques Flamand. “The operation was difficult due to the number of animals and the long distances involved. But wildlife veterinarians, conservation managers and capture teams from WWF, Eastern Cape Parks and Tourism Agency, SANParks and Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife worked cooperatively to ensure the success of the translocation. We all learned from one another and were united in a common cause.”
“We are a young organisation and this is a great opportunity to be giving something back to the national conservation effort,” said Dave Balfour, conservation director of the Eastern Cape Parks and Tourism Agency. “We are excited about getting ourselves integrated into national conservation. A critical element of future conservation success will be the ability of agencies with a common interest to work together. This was a great example of that.”
A relatively new capture technique was used to airlift some of the rhinos out of difficult or inaccessible areas by helicopter. This entails suspending the sleeping rhino by the ankles for a short trip through the air to awaiting vehicles. “Previously rhinos were either transported by lorry over very difficult tracks, or airlifted in a net. This new procedure is gentler on the darted rhino because it shortens the time it has to be kept asleep with drugs, the respiration is not as compromised as it can be in a net and it avoids the need for travel in a crate over terrible tracks,” explains Dr Flamand. “Another advantage is that rhinos can be more easily removed from dangerous situations, for example if they have fallen asleep in a donga or other difficult terrain after being darted. The helicopter translocations usually take less than ten minutes, and the animals suffer no ill effect. All of the veterinarians working on the translocation agreed that this was now the method of choice for the well-being of the animals.”
Security of rhinos is a major concern given the current poaching onslaught. Project partners receiving rhinos on their land are only chosen if their security systems are of a high standard. “Translocating rhinos always involves risk, but we cannot keep all our eggs in one basket. It is essential to manage black rhino populations for maximum growth as it is still a critically endangered species and this is what the project does by creating large new populations which we hope will breed quickly,” concludes Dr Flamand.
The WWF Black Rhino Range Expansion Project aims to increase the range and numbers of black rhino in South Africa and has created seven significant black rhino populations in eight years. Close to 120 black rhino have been translocated to date.
This installation was created with protocells, DNA-less chemical systems that can be programmed to form structures. Is this what you’re going to live in in the future?
Human waste might someday turn human urine or waste into useful electricity for radios or space robots. EcoBot-III was able to both eat and crap inside its lab environment.
New symbiotic algae and seafood/fish farms generated in Crane Greenhouses
Photo by TONY FRENCH
Andrea Zittel, American, b. 1965, “Indianapolis Island,” 2010. Fiberglass, foam, mixed media. Commissioned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Alaska Airlines. A Boeing 737 before its first flight powered by biofuel and conventional fuel.
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