I Am Still Alive

In an editorial at Wired Science, Erle Ellis writes about dismissing the term ‘nature’ and understanding that humans have been modifying environmental conditions for a long time.

“And it’s time for a ‘postnatural’ environmentalism. Postnaturalism is not about recycling your garbage, it is about making something good out of grandpa’s garbage and leaving the very best garbage for your grandchildren. Postnaturalism means loving and embracing our human nature, the nature we have created to feed ourselves, the nature we live in. What good is environmentalism if it makes you depressed about the future?”

I dug the piece. Ellis hits it square here. Sure, we shouldn’t blame the environment for environmental changes for which we are responsible or seek to restore some fantastical idea of a pristine natural world.

“If we want these places to look like they did before us, we will have to constantly recreate them. It will be a huge job for us humans to keep nature “wild.”…We humans can totally trash the planet and still survive. We already have in many ways.

Don’t like it? Stop trashing it!

Use renewable energy. Clean it up. Repair it. Get to work. There is plenty more mileage left in this spaceship Earth. Think about that while enjoying a trip to your local zoo or arboretum — the most biodiverse places that ever existed on Earth.”

I also want to read more about landscape ecology (Via @alexismadrigal)

New Orleans is one of the most lead-polluted cities in the US. Nearly eighty-six thousand regional properties don’t meet EPA lead standards. Addressing this environmental hazard is Mel Chin’s Safehouse, 2008, a residence painted completely white, on a once-abandoned lot in the neighborhood of St. Roch. An enormous, circular portion of this tabula rasa–cum–house facade has been cut out and mounted on a massive hinge, to form a mammoth bank-vault-like door that opens onto a mostly barren front yard sprinkled with jagged green shrubbery. In an elaborate performance piece enacted during the opening weekend of the Prospect.1 biennial, five participants dressed as security guards pulled up to the front of the house and ordered the audience to stand back as they ceremoniously opened the vault to reveal Chin and his team sitting amid thousands of fake hundred-dollar bills created by locals.

As part of Operation Paydirt, 2008, viewers are invited to contribute to the growing stash of “fundreds” in the Safehouse, until it attains a symbolic three hundred million dollars—the estimated cost of treating New Orleans’s soil for lead contamination. For the next stage of the project, an armored truck will collect these bills on a cross-country tour, arriving at the steps of Congress with a request for an even exchange with valid US currency. This type of work is a natural progression from Chin’s environmentally remedial projects such as S.P.A.W.N., 2001–2003, in Detroit, and Revival Field, 1990–1993, in Minnesota. By gathering work from individuals nationwide, Chin metaphorically reverses the post-Katrina diaspora, while fighting to provide suitable land—eventually encouraging residents to return home. Safehouse becomes a sculptural signifier for far-reaching and monumental political engagement that has the potential to truly transform a polluted land, while immediately calling attention to what is most valuable in our society. Among some of the most dynamic work found within the biennial, Chin’s venture creates an effective synergy between aesthetics and activism.
- Natalie Sciortino

“Walkability is not just an amenity. Is it not a lifestyle accessory for the well-heeled. It is, for many people, an issue of basic social and economic justice. Zoning that segregates housing from retail – and that reduces walkability and transit access – has serious consequences for equity. “

Mark Bittman on overfishing and farm-raised fish.

“These smaller fish are eaten not only by the endangered fish we love best, but also by many poor and not-so-poor people throughout the world. (And even by many American travelers who enjoy grilled sardines in England, fried anchovies in Spain, marinated mackerel in France and pickled or raw herring in Holland – though they mostly avoid them at home.)

But the biggest consumers of these smaller fish are the agriculture and aquaculture industries. Nearly one-third of the world’s wild-caught fish are reduced to fish meal and fed to farmed fish and cattle and pigs. Aquaculture alone consumes an estimated 53 percent of the world’s fish meal and 87 percent of its fish oil. (To make matters worse, as much as a quarter of the total wild catch is thrown back – dead – as “bycatch.”)

“We’ve totally depleted the upper predator ranks; we have fished down the food web,” said Christopher Mann, a senior officer with the Pew Environmental Group.”

Possibly a bit over the top – seemingly obssessed as he is with odor – but McIntosh makes good points and it’s a refreshing change of tone from the onslaught of (also great) TED talks we see everywhere.

In this talk I will speak in reference to my new book, “Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition.”

I consider that politics alone is not enough to tackle the scale and depth of the problem that faces us. At root is our addictive consumer mentality. Wants have replaced needs and consumption drives our very identity. Western societies and many others influenced by it have fallen prey to a numbing culture of violence and as part of it, the motivational manipulation of marketing.

The Bright Idea Shade is a project of the Eyebeam OpenLab, by Sustainability Action Group. We are converting all of our silver tipped incandescent bulbs into CFL bulbs (as they burn out.) The problem is a bare CFL bulb gives off very harsh light. So we set about designing a lampshade for the bulbs. We took several existing designs and customized the design to fit a CFL bulb, built it out of heat resistant photo diffuser material, found a diffuser material that could be laser cut, and built a laser cutter template.

The Bright Idea Shade is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution license.

First came across Joel Tauber’s work in this most recent Log magazine – issue 12 (good issue by the way).

I have fallen in love with a tree in the middle of a gigantic parking lot. I cannot really explain how this happened, but love is a hard thing to explain. The tree is not something that most people notice, except as a source of shade for their cars. Yet, somehow – on a beautiful summer day in June 2005—I was drawn to the beauty of this forsaken California Sycamore tree, stuck in the middle of Rose Bowl parking lot K. I was touched by how lonely it was, and I was outraged by the many indignities it suffered.

Thinking about contrails after seeing air travel over a 24-hour period

The grounding of planes for three days in the United States after September 11, 2001 provided a rare opportunity for scientists to study the effects of contrails on climate forcing. Measurements showed that without contrails, the local diurnal temperature range (difference of day and night temperatures) was about 1 degree Celsius higher than immediately before.