Climate science has a long view. The measuring of rainfall, temperature and pressure with instruments made from glass, mercury and copper wire. Scientists have been collecting data for centuries, first in hand-written notebooks, later in vast computer databases. Edmund Halley mapped the trade winds in 1686 and Benjamin Franklin traced the Gulf Stream in the eighteenth century, the first hints of truly global systems. Helmut Landsberg added statistical analysis in the twentieth century, which revealed fluctuation in what until then had felt eternally recurring to the individual. Eventually, models of Earthʼs climate emerged from the data, an attempt to grasp the forces that drive the reality of our immediate environment, our world.
But science itself is careful. Its method progresses cautiously through hypotheses and experiments, always inviting their falsification. Yet, there are moments when it gets propelled to the forefront of human affairs, such as it happened to theoretical physics when it enabled the construction of nuclear devices. Over the last fifty years, climate science has been making visible that human activity has had a significant and increasing influence on the Earthʼs atmosphere. Now it has been given the place in the spotlight, and it feels quite uncomfortable there.
Excerpt of a text written by Sascha Pohflepp. Read it HERE
The equivalent of two Earths will be required to support the world’s population by 2030. That is the stark warning made by the WWF’s Living Planet Report 2012, which was put together in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the Global Footprint Network. It warns that the size of the planet’s population and the resulting consumption of environmental resources, such as food and fuel, is unsustainable at current rates. “If we keep on taking more renewable resources than can be replenished, then eventually they will become depleted,” the report stated. “This has already happened locally in some places, for example the collapse of cod stocks in Newfoundland in the 1980s.
Excerpt of an article written by Nicholas Edmondson, IBT. Continue HERE
A detailed description of development of the first practical artificial leaf — a milestone in the drive for sustainable energy that mimics the process, photosynthesis, that green plants use to convert water and sunlight into energy — appears in the ACS journal Accounts of Chemical Research. The article notes that unlike earlier devices, which used costly ingredients, the new device is made from inexpensive materials and employs low-cost engineering and manufacturing processes.
Excerpt of an article via Science Daily. Continue HERE
GLOBE / HEDRON is a bamboo greenhouse designed to organically grow fish and vegetables on top of generic flat roofs. The design is optimized for aquaponic farming techniques: the fish’s water nourishes the plants and plants clean the water for the fish.
Using this farming technique, GLOBE / HEDRON is optimized to feed four families of four all year round.
GLOBE / HEDRON is designed to be manufactured and retailed at a low cost. Easy-to-set-up units can be combined to scale up food production capacity.
Using a geodesic dome, the load of the fish tank rests on the frame of the greenhouse and is redistributed to a larger surface. Because of this design, the aquaponic farm can be housed on more roofs without any structural building adaptation. The dome structure is designed to be built with bamboo, so that it is biodegradable and organically farmed.
GLOBE / HEDRON is designed by Antonio Scarponi / Conceptual Devices in collaboration with UrbanFarmers. They are fundraising the first prototype with indiegogo: help them build it.
If you ever were told by someone not to cry or that crying is useless, that person was far away from the truth. Besides being perfectly natural, therapeutic, and necessary, crying produces nutritious food for moths, bees, and probably many other herbivores. This is definitely one of my favorites examples of mutualism out there. However, these “lachryphages” are picky when choosing their ocular bars and sweet pools.
If this awakens your hidden entomologist or simply your hidden fetishes, here I have a group of articles deepening on this curious fact:
“Roots To Resistance is an Art and Activism Project in which I am painting twelve Women Activists on a large scale, doing groundbreaking, risky and extremely important work here on the planet. In addition to the portraits, the Roots Project has created a Global Postering and Postcard Campaign that displays each of the Women Activists and the issues they fight for and against, and sends them across the world via global partnerships with organizations and individuals. These Campaigns seek to build social engagement and support systems through international and local partnerships, working together to empower people and communities. People are Postering and passing out Postcards in Kenya, Russia, Guatemala, Australia, South Africa, Afghanistan, New Zealand and across Europe and the United States. A School in Portland Oregon is using the Postcards and posters as part of its curriculum and Prison Book Projects across the U.S. are partnering with the Roots Project to bring the postcards to folks living inside of the prison system. It is so deeply inspiring to see that people out there in our communities care about these issues, and so powerful to raise our voices together in support of these women and in support of each other as we engage in such profoundly important resistance work on the planet!
I am remembering that while we are helping to share the histories of these women, the present times we are living in like many times past, will be the histories of the future. As we watch entire countries and communities around the globe risking so much to rise against oppression, I am reminded that in these times we are writing our histories and the histories of others with what we do and say and with our actions vs. inactions. I give profound thanks for the work that these 12 women are engaged in, under tremendous pressures and at great risk to themselves, and I encourage everyone to consider the histories we are each writing here today. With our support of and partnership with each other, we will help to lift up the voices of many as they continue to lift us up. Thank you!”
According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world.
From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, even economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly original development unforeseen by either classical Marxism or neoliberal theory.
Are the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, volcanoes waiting to erupt? Davis provides the first global overview of the diverse religious, ethnic, and political movements competing for the souls of the new urban poor. He surveys Hindu fundamentalism in Bombay, the Islamist resistance in Casablanca and Cairo, street gangs in Cape Town and San Salvador, Pentecostalism in Kinshasa and Rio de Janeiro, and revolutionary populism in Caracas and La Paz. Planet of Slums ends with a provocative meditation on the “war on terrorism” as an incipient world war between the American empire and the new slum poor.
Mark Davis, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, is a self-described Marxist environmentalist.
Jurema Action Plant is an interactive bio-machine. It consists in a customized machine which interfaces a sensitive plant (Mimosa pudica).
Jurema Action Plant aims to empower plants by enabling them to use similar technologies as humans use. It is also explores new ways of communication and co-relation between humans, living organism and a machine. Much like humans, animals and machines, the plants have an electrical signal traveling inside them, but they do not have nerves like humans and animals; nor wires and cables like machines. This electrical signal travels inside the cells of the plant. Inspired by this phenomenon, I collaborated with professor Bert van Duijn from the Biology University and the Hortus Botanicus, both from Leiden, on a research into the Action Potential of this plant. At V2_ , we settled upon a solution in which a signal amplifier reads the differences in the electromagnetic field around the plant to determine when it is being touched. These electromagnetic variations trigger movement of the robotic structure, on which the plant is situated, by means of a custom-made circuit board. The thresholds for response are set in such a way that only touching the plant makes it move away from the person touching it.
“Their movement however generally remains invisible to us, because their muscle and nerve-like systems operate at a very slow timescale and their rooting in soil confines their motion to the movement of branches and leaves. These restrictions give plants an enormous disadvantage compared to their main aggressors: animals and humans, in many instances resulting in a loss of biodiversity and even extinction.” (Michel van Dartel, curator V2)
To measure the Action Potential from the plant some electrodes are placed in its branches. When the leaves and branches of the plant are touched this signal changes. This electrical signal travels in the plant and the Action Potential can be measured in any part of the plant, not necessarily where the electrodes are placed. If the plants can fell the touch and this signal travels inside the plant and be can be measured in any part, does it means that plants have memory, consciousness?
When Loren Amelang bought land outside of Philo, California in 1973, it was a place to “live like hippies on the weekend”. Years later, his Silicon Valley employer put in florescent lighting and wouldn’t let employees bring in their own lights so Amelang decided to move full-time to his off-grid property and to create a space where he would have total control over his environment.
At first he lived in a tiny cabin he had built in the old sheep barn, but deciding he needed more room for his solar panels, he began building a home that would help him generate “free hot water, free power and a decent chunk of free heat”.
The entire south side of his home is covered in solar capture devices: 1600 watts of photovoltaic power, solar hot water panels, a sunroom/greenhouse and a solar hot air collector.
“The sunroom/greenhouse provides most of the free heat,” explains Amelang, “the ‘solar flue’ moderates it in warmer weather or circulates some of it into the house when needed, and the concrete walls stabilize the temperature over time”.
Putting his technical skills to use (he’s a pioneer in C++ programming), Amelang wrote over 10,000 lines of code so that his home’s water and electric systems could be operated more efficiently and automatically. An added benefit is the ability to control everything remotely, by even just a smartphone.
To the biologist Edward O. Wilson, the Metropolitan Museum of Art encapsulates some of the conflicting impulses natural selection has instilled in humans: the innate drive for expression that spurs some of us to make art, the selfishness that motivates others to earn the riches needed to collect it, and the altruism that compels the donation of collections for the public good — as long as the donors’ names are inscribed on the walls too.
But asked to imagine the museum from the perspective of ants, whose intricate social world he has built a towering reputation by studying, Dr. Wilson painted a scene that was less a lesson in evolution than a chaotic free-for-all.
“To them the crowds would just be a flank-to-flank herd of enormous elephants you have to dodge around,” he said with a boyish giggle from the museum’s teeming steps during a recent visit to New York to promote his 27th book, “The Social Conquest of Earth,” which is being published Monday by Liveright. “I don’t think ants would have any aesthetic or intellectual interest in the museum, though they would certainly find a happy home in Central Park.”
Excerpt of an article by JENNIFER SCHUESSLER at NYT. Continue HERE
The epic story of radical Earthship eco architect Michael Reynolds, and his fight to build off-the-grid self-sufficient communities. If you haven’t seen it, here is the full length documentary.
Michael Reynolds, the “Garbage Warrior”, is an architect based in New Mexico and a proponent of “radically sustainable living.” He has been a forceful and controversial critic of the profession of architecture for its failure to deal with the amount of waste that building design creates. After graduating from the University of Cincinnati in 1969, Reynolds began his provocative work almost immediately. His thesis was published in Architectural Record in 1971 and the following year he built his first house from recycled materials. The structures built under his direction utilize everyday trash items like aluminum cans and plastic bottles. Instead of using conventional (and energy-consuming) recycling methods, however, Reynolds takes the discarded item and uses it as-is. His Thumb House, built in 1972, used beer cans wired together into “bricks,” which were mortared together and then plastered over. (The brick design was awarded a U.S. patent in 1973.) Reynolds calls this practice “Earthship Biotecture” and has dedicated his career to it. He cites as an epiphany the moment when he realized that any object, be it a pop bottle or an old tire, could become powerful and durable insulation when it was filled with dirt. He has written five books on the subject. Soon he was building and selling his experimental homes while continuing to use trial and error to improve them. The “Earthships” over time incorporated features designed to make them comfortable to live in while existing off the grid. Solar panels and geothermal cooling were added. The homes caught the imagination of celebrities and environmental activists. Actors Dennis Weaver and Keith Carradine each commissioned Reynolds to build high-end Earthships for them.
Most people know Kew Gardens as home of the world’s largest living plant collection but are not aware that it is also the location of an internationally important botanical research and educational institution. Going beyond the gardens as we know them, Lonelyleap produced two films for 2012′s Tropical Extravaganza Festival which showcase the behind the scenes work of Kew’s scientists whilst also exploring two of the festival’s themes, Earth and Air.
The second film in the series looks at the work of the the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership in Surrey, home to 10% of the world’s plant diversity, and how the Seed Conservation Department is helping to save wild plants and habitats for our future.
A snail transformed into a living battery has moved the world one step closer to having tiny cyborg spies underfoot.
The pioneering experiment harnessed a snail’s blood sugar to “recharge” an implanted battery — the first time researchers have shown sustainable generation of electricity in a living creature’s body over several months. If the snails’ bodies can create enough electricity to power microelectronics, they could act as living sensors or detectors for the U.S. military and Homeland Security.
“In this [direction] the biofuel cells are expected to operate in small creatures (snails, worms, insects, etc) providing sustainable electrical power for various sensors and wireless transmitters,” said Evgeny Katz, a professor of chemistry at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y.
PHOTO CREDIT: Adapted with permission from L. Halámková, J. Halámek, V. Bocharova, A. Szczupak, L. Alfonta, E. Katz, Implanted biofuel cell operating in living snail. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2012, in press (DOI: 10.1021/ja211714w) | Copyright 2012 American Chemical Society.
Can physicists produce insights about language that have eluded linguists and English professors? That possibility was put to the test this week when a team of physicists published a paper drawing on Google’s massive collection of scanned books. They claim to have identified universal laws governing the birth, life course and death of words.
The paper marks an advance in a new field dubbed “Culturomics”: the application of data-crunching to subjects typically considered part of the humanities. Last year a group of social scientists and evolutionary theorists, plus the Google Books team, showed off the kinds of things that could be done with Google’s data, which include the contents of five-million-plus books, dating back to 1800.
Excerpt from an article written by CHRISTOPHER SHEA at WST. Continue HERE
The role of Transition Network is to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities as they self-organize around the transition model, creating initiatives that rebuild resilience and reduce CO2 emissions.
“In Transition 2.0 is an inspirational immersion in the Transition movement, gathering stories from around the world of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. You’ll hear about communities printing their own money, growing food, localizing their economies and setting up community power stations. It’s an idea that has gone viral, a social experiment that is about responding to uncertain times with solutions and optimism. In a world of increasing uncertainty, here is a story of hope, ingenuity and the power of growing vegetables in unexpected places”.
AIRE is a mask that converts wind energy (provided by the wearer’s breath) into electricity for the recharging of small electronic devices.
The consumerist tendencies of today’s industrialized society make the use of gadgets increasingly common, either by necessity or hobby. Though many of our gadgets offer benefits, they tend to consume a high amount of electrical energy. This may cause problems for the environment, especially if the energy used by these devices is derived from non-renewable sources.
The use of renewable energy sources is the most important step we can take for the minimization of environmental damage. Harnessing energy from human activities and transforming it into electrical energy is possible, and is a great solution to such energy issues.
AIRE offers a way to do this. It is an electronic mask capable of converting the wind energy provided by the wearer’s breath into electrical energy. Inside the unit there are small wind turbines that make the conversion and the energy is transferred through a cable to one’s small electronic device.
AIRE can be used in any situation, indoors or outdoors. It can be used while you sleep, walk, run, or read a book, for example. Besides saving energy (and contributing to environmental preservation), it also encourages the practice of physical exercise. Its energy is available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
In many ways, the artistic debates prevalent in the 1970s are recurring in our time: the relation between art and ecology, the position of the artist within a information and media society and the crisis of (neo)liberalism. Although the societal context and diameters of these discussions have changed profoundly, their basis can be found in the period from 1965 to 1975, considered a paradigmatic shift in art and society. But how well do we actually know our immediate past and what can we learn from it? Smithson’s artistic heritage provides an interesting and relevant case study in this respect. Rethinking Robert Smithson aims to open up a discussion about current concerns in art and theory at the intersection of art historical debate and contemporary art practice. Along the line of two thematic approaches related to Smithson’s work, Art and Ecology and The Cinematic Condition, topical concerns in artistic practice are reconsidered by internationally renowned theorists and artists.
“These spiders have escaped the floodwaters inundating the town of Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, Australia, by moving to higher ground and building massive networks of interconnected webs over raised sticks and bushes. They have covered entire fields with snow-like coverings. Meanwhile, the floodwaters show no sign of subsiding from the town, declared a disaster area: 9000 people have been evacuated.”
Scientists inspired by a camel’s nostrils are set to achieve the impossible and grow a man-made forest in the desert.
The £3.3 million giant open-air greenhouse in Qatar will bring plant life to one of the most inhospitable spots on earth and it is all thanks to the humped mammal’s nose.
Using a trick of nature the Sahara Forest Project will use surface water and cold water pumped up from 200 metres below the sand to feed trees, vegetables and algae.
Written by Martin Robinson, Daily Mail. Read article HERE
A film about place and memory, a farmhouse in Japan, and the lives of the people who called it home.
MINKA is a short documentary about a remarkable Japanese farmhouse and the memories it contains. In 1967, an American journalist and a Japanese student rescued the ancient house from the snow country of Japan, and their lives were forever changed.
The film begins when Associated Press foreign correspondent John Roderick became the unlikely owner of an enormous rundown farmhouse, a building type known as a “minka.” Working with a young university student named Yoshihiro Takishita, who would later become his adopted son, Roderick transported the massive timber house from the Japanese Alps to the Tokyo suburb of Kamakura. It defined both their lives: for Roderick, it was the backdrop for a remarkable career as the leading “China watcher” of the Mao era. For Takishita, it inspired a life spent collecting and rebuilding similar houses, work that continues today. But MINKA is more meditation than history. Filmed just following Roderick’s death at ninety-three, it uses this one house as a vessel of memory to explore the power of place, memory, architecture, and the meanings of home.
A paper by Adrian J. Ivakhiv for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference. Here is his original conference abstract:
Ecocinema has tended to be defined thematically as “cinema with ecological themes,” i.e., as “environmental films,” or formally as (something like) “cinema that takes ecology seriously.” Following these two trends, good ecocinema might be defined either as cinema that successfully promotes ecological themes or cinema that has ecologically beneficial effects, or that at least minimizes its ecologically harmful effects. But these two approaches neither take cinema nor ecology seriously enough.
This paper argues on behalf of an engagement with philosophy, including both film-philosophy and ecophilosophy. It insists that eco-film critics need to think through both the film/cinema object (what is cinema and how is it changing in the digital era?) and the eco-subject (what is ecology, and how can both films and their viewers be considered ecological and ecologically?). Proposing that a genuine “ecocinema” requires an engagement with eco/cinema philosophy, it asks what kinds of films might result from such an engagement. It compares James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), Hubert Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare (2004), and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2010) in light of these concerns.
In order to make plant production possible all over the world PlantLab delivers turnkey Plant Production Units. The cultivation units vary in size and consist of several cultivation layers on top of each other. The surface of 1 hectare cultivation area can consist of 10 modules of 1000 m² which are stacked on top of each other. The ultimate dimensions are determined based on cultivation wishes, climate wishes, investment costs, production expectations, internal transport, automation and suchlike.
Meat the future is a project that intends to inform people about todays unsustainable and inhumane meat industry. But also give hope for a change as there is a solution in sight, called In Vitro meat.
This is a project by Afshin Moeini, Christian Poppius and Kim Brundin from Beckmans College of Design.
This essay by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus was released at an October 2004 meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, and it’s been ruffling feathers ever since.
Introduction
To not think of dying is to not think of living.
— Jann Arden
Those of us who are children of the environmental movement must never forget that we are standing on the shoulders of all those who came before us.
The clean water we drink, the clean air we breathe, and the protected wilderness we treasure are all, in no small part, thanks to them. The two of us have worked for most of the country’s leading environmental organizations as staff or consultants. We hold a sincere and abiding respect for our parents and elders in the environmental community. They have worked hard and accomplished a great deal. For that we are deeply grateful.
At the same time, we believe that the best way to honor their achievements is to acknowledge that modern environmentalism is no longer capable of dealing with the world’s most serious ecological crisis.
Over the last 15 years environmental foundations and organizations have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into combating global warming.
The Amazon is home to more species than almost anywhere else on earth. One of them, carried home recently by a group from Yale University, appears to be quite happy eating plastic in airless landfills.
The fungi, Pestalotiopsis microspora, is the first anyone has found to survive on a steady diet of polyurethane alone and–even more surprising–do this in an anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment that is close to the condition at the bottom of a landfill.
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.
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