Author: Organikos

Carbon-Calculated Menu Planning

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The menu from Studio Olafur Eliasson’s dinner for the Climate Museum’s Miranda Massie. Image courtesy of the artist’s Instagram

From the folks at Phaidon, news of a top artist’s contribution to the climate change conversation, in a manner we can kind of relate to:

Olafur Eliasson puts carbon on the menu

When Eliasson’s studio cooked a meal for NYC’s Climate Museum director it listed one additional ingredient.

The artist Olafur Eliasson is on the board of the Climate Museum, a US institution which endeavours to use the sciences, art, and design to inspire dialogue and innovation that address the challenges of climate change. The museum hasn’t been built, yet Eliasson has submitted a few concept sketches, picturing a globular structure that should, someday soon hopefully stand in New York City. Continue reading →

How Cities Can Adapt to New High Temperatures

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A community-gardening and forestry organization called Louisville Grows has planted city-hardy tree species on private land, churchyards, roadways, and curb strips to help the city cool its heat island. Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux

We already know that climate change is no longer something to be concerned about for the future, but rather a very present danger. There are ways they can adapt, and part of that involves becoming more sustainable, as some are already doing. But one thing we hadn’t learned much about until now is the impact of increasing heat on the urban environment. Madeline Ostrander writes:

Katy Schneider, the former deputy mayor of Louisville, Kentucky, lives near Eastern Parkway, which forms one strand of her city’s necklace of green. Spending time on the leafy boulevard can make Louisville seem deceptively lush and shady, even when midsummer heat bakes the downtown. But about five years ago, Schneider was surprised to learn that the city had a shortage of trees. In the spring of 2011, students at the University of Louisville surveyed the local canopy and found that it had about thirteen per cent fewer trees than the average for metropolitan areas in the region.

Continue reading →

Biles On Belize

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Benedict Kim for The New York Times

As newly self-appointed Belizophiles, we love what this superstar of gymnastics says about the country:

Why Simone Biles Loves Belize

By SHIVANI VORA

…The world may beckon, but the athlete said that her favorite destination would always be Belize, a Central American nation, where she holds dual citizenship through her mother, Nellie Cayetano Biles.

The younger Ms. Biles spoke about her love for Belize while she was on her way to the airport in Los Angeles (she was in town to film the season premiere of “Ellen”) to head home to Houston for a few days before beginning her tour… Continue reading →

Seagrass In The Food Chain

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Harvard University Post-Doctoral Fellow in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Barnabas Daru, researches seagrasses of the world. He is at Carson Beach in South Boston, where he found no seagrasses. Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer

Postdoctoral researchers contribute to scientific knowledge akin, perhaps, to the way seagrass contributes to the robustness of a marine ecosystem’s biodiversity:

Strong case for seagrass

Researcher behind biodiversity analysis cites key role in food chain

By Alvin Powell, Harvard Staff Writer

A new analysis of a key contributor to the marine food web has turned up a surprising twist: more unique species in cooler waters than in the tropics, a reversal of the situation on land.

The findings highlight the need to direct limited conservation dollars according to science, with a focus on places where biodiversity is most at risk, said Barnabas Daru, Harvard Herbaria Postdoctoral Fellow in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, who performed the analysis on the world’s 70 species of seagrass.

Daru acknowledged that seagrass isn’t as exciting as sharks or tuna, or as marine mammals such as seals, dolphins, and manatees. But for anyone who cares about the health of marine animals, he said, the role of humble seagrass at the beginning of the marine food chain is key. Continue reading →

Light Dance

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Light, Darkness. Movement, Stillness. Sound, Silence.  The contrast and flow of these opposites make the heart race.

White Canvas is only one of the innovative projects created by the interdisciplinary artistic team that makes up COCOLAB. Continue reading →

A Different Type of Hero

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The Veerni Institute now makes it possible for 75 girls to continue their education. But the group has to turn away nearly 300 applicants each year for lack of funding. Poulomi Basu for NPR

The Veerni Institute now makes it possible for 75 girls to continue their education. But the group has to turn away nearly 300 applicants each year for lack of funding.
Poulomi Basu for NPR

“It all began with a shawl…” seems like the stuff of fairy tales, but the combined attraction to a handmade textile and the desire to help the woman weaving it proved a pathway to Jacqueline de Chollet’s life work. Over 20 years ago while traveling in a dusty village of India she saw a woman weaving the shawl in her home.

“She had three or four children including a baby she was nursing in her arms,” de Chollet recalls. “And she looked way older than her age.”

Hoping to provide a little help, de Chollet offered to buy the shawl. “And as soon as I gave her the money a man walked in and took the money away from her.”

De Chollet was outraged. “I felt, this woman — nobody cares about her. She’s off the map. She has no rights.”

Although de Chollet came from far different circumstances as this woman, growing up in the 1950s she felt that society dictated her position as a wife and mother. She wanted to make a difference in the world, and felt that addressing the issue of the rights of women and girls in India was an important first step. Continue reading →

Using Those Final Months Well

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President Barack Obama on Midway Atoll in the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, earlier this month with Marine National Monuments Superintendent Matt Brown. Obama expanded the monument using his authority under the 1906 Antiquities Act. Carolyn Kaster/AP

We are happy to see the Antiquities Act again proving so useful, so soon (the clock is ticking):

Obama To Designate First Marine National Monument In The Atlantic Ocean

During the Our Ocean conference later this morning in Washington, D.C., President Obama will establish the first national marine monument in the Atlantic Ocean.

The area of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument is the size of Connecticut and has been called an “underwater Yellowstone” and “a deep sea Serengeti.” Continue reading →

Beware The Compost

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Image credit: US Department of Agriculture via Flickr

Thanks to Conservation for their tireless effort to review important science and summarize it for we, the less scientifically-trained folk:

HOME-GROWN VEGGIES CAN FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE—BUT BEWARE THE COMPOST PILE

Vegetables grown in home gardens are associated with lower greenhouse gas emissions than vegetables bought at the store, according to a study by researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Home gardening reduces emissions by about 2 kilograms for every kilogram of produce, they report in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning.

The study is the first to show that gardening could make a meaningful contribution to helping cities and states meet their emissions reductions targets. Continue reading →

If You Happen To Be In Oxford (MS, USA)

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9780871406804Paul Freedman in conversation with John T. Edge

If we could, we would be there to hear this conversation; no less a part of the attraction is to do so at an institution worthy of everyone’s book orders:

Monday, September 26, 2016 – 5:00pm
Square Books
129 Courthouse Sq
Oxford, MS 38655

Whether charting the rise of our love affair with Chinese food through San Francisco’s fabled The Mandarin, evoking the richness of Italian food through Mamma Leone’s, or chronicling the rise and fall of French haute cuisine through Henri Soule’s Le Pavillon, food historian Paul Freedman uses each restaurant to tell a wider story of race and class, immigration and assimilation. Freedman also treats us to a scintillating history of the then-revolutionary Schrafft’s, a chain of convivial lunch spots that catered to women, and that bygone favorite, Howard Johnson’s, which pioneered midcentury, on-the-road dining, only to be swept aside by McDonald’s. Lavishly designed with more than 100 photographs and images, including original menus, Ten Restaurants That Changed America is a significant and highly entertaining social history.

In case you missed it, a review of this book is finally available from one of the great food writers of our time:

Continue reading →

One Step Forward, Slip Sliding Away

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Aerial view of the Thelon River and forest landscape of Canada's far northern Thelon Game Sanctuary. The refuge is the largest and most remote game sanctuary in North America. For the Akaitcho Dene people, the Upper Thelon River is "the place where God

Aerial view of the Thelon River and forest landscape of Canada’s far northern Thelon Game Sanctuary. The refuge is the largest and most remote game sanctuary in North America. For the Akaitcho Dene people, the Upper Thelon River is “the place where God began.” In 2011 The Nature Conservancy’s lead scientist Sanjayan and Canada program director Dr. Richard Jeo went on an expedition through through this pristine area with young members of the Dene First Nation. They traveled by canoe along the Thelon River ending in North America’s largest and most remote wildlife refuge, the Thelon Game Sanctuary. This photograph is from that trip. PHOTO CREDIT: © Ami Vitale

Thanks to Cool Green Science, the conservation science blog of The Nature Conservancy, for this sobering update on the state of affairs of meeting conservation targets (um, those related to whether or not this planet will be one our future generations will be able to live on):

Global Wilderness Areas in Decline Despite Conservation Targets

BY JUSTINE E. HAUSHEER

Conservation today operates in a world of targets: Protect 17 percent of terrestrial systems and 10 percent of marine systems by 2020; keep global climate change below 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100; halve the rate of natural habitat loss.

But despite widespread adoption of protected area targets, wilderness areas are still declining rapidly across the globe. Now, new research shows that 9.6 percent of all global wilderness has disappeared in the last 20 years. Continue reading →

The Kindness Of Strangers

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A fundraising campaign for Fidencio Sanchez has raised more than 50 times the original $3,000 that was sought. Go Fund Me

We can say, with no ideological intent whatsoever, that it is not good news that an elderly man in a prosperous nation must depend on the kindness of strangers; but if we add one iota of oomph to the momentum of a story like this going viral, we are more than happy to share occasions when that kindness is demonstrated with drama:

Strangers Raise $165,000 In 3 Days To Help Chicago Popsicle Vendor, 89

It was just a glimpse, but the scene spoke volumes — and started a push for help. Joel Cervantes Macias was struck by the sight of an elderly man pushing his cart of frozen treats on Chicago’s 26th Street, so he took a photo. That was last week; as of Monday afternoon, Macias had raised more than $165,000 to help a stranger. Continue reading →

A Business Model To Fish For

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Heroes are, by definition, not easy to come by. When they get profiled, read it (this one is thankfully not merely fluff):

…The ordeal, and the perspective of middle age, snapped him to attention and caused him to refine the company’s mission. In the eighties, he’d been feeling increasingly uneasy about being a businessman and about the transformations and compromises that seemed inevitably to accompany corporate success. The company, he worried, was straying from its hard-core origins. “I was faced with the prospect of owning a billion-dollar company, with thousands of employees making ‘outdoorlike’ clothing for posers,” he said early in 1991, in a speech to the employees, in which he outlined his misgivings and his new resolutions. These subsequently appeared in the Patagonia catalogue, as a manifesto, under the heading “The Next Hundred Years.” Continue reading →

Momentum In Tribal Territory

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Susan Leopold, a member of the Patawomeck tribe of Virginia, watching the sun rise over an encampment where thousands have come to protest an oil pipeline near Cannon Ball, N.D.  Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

This is a great follow up to the earlier stories we read on this topic. We appreciate that the New York Times is now giving this as much attention as it deserves, and doing so with the dignity and respect that the protesters deserve:

From 280 Tribes, a Protest on the Plains

By ALYSSA SCHUKAR and JACK HEALY

NEAR CANNON BALL, N.D. — When visitors turn off a narrow North Dakota highway and drive into the Sacred Stone Camp, where thousands have come to protest an oil pipeline, they thread through an arcade of flags whipping in the wind. Each represents one of the 280 Native American tribes that have flocked here in what activists are calling the largest, most diverse tribal action in at least a century, perhaps since Little Bighorn. Continue reading →

Antiquities Act & Presidential Creativity

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This July 15, 2016, file photo, U.S. The “Moonhouse” in McLoyd Canyon, near Blanding, Utah, is shown during U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell tour. Hundreds of people who oppose the proposed Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah showed up at Senate field hearing Wednesday, July 27, 2016, in Blanding on the polarizing topic. The meeting comes just weeks after Jewell visited the area and hosted a public town hall to hear from people from both sides. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

The Atlantic has another story we appreciate today, besides this one. Whether Utah wants it or not, the designation sounds appropriate, and we appreciate the creative efforts of the President of the USA to dust off the Antiquities Act for this purpose:

…1.9 million acres in southeast Utah that President Obama is pondering designating a national monument. The “ears” in question are twin buttes hovering over the surrounding San Juan County, a sprawling stretch of wilderness that now finds itself at the white-hot center of a brawl over public-land management, presidential authority, and the 110-year-old Antiquities Act. Continue reading →

The Medicine We Fear Instinctively

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Genetically modified mosquitoes could be the solution to Hawaii’s quickly disappearing avian population, including the island’s famous honeycreepers. PHOTOGRAPH BY RESOURCE HAWAII / ALAMY

Michael Specter writes frequently (but not exclusively) about frighteningly unpleasant, sometimes devastatingly horrible topics with grace not often found in technically rigorous writing. Here, in a short post, he addresses the prospects of a technology many rightly fear and its potential to address many rightly feared environmental (the one in the title below obviously catches our attention) and health challenges:

COULD GENETICALLY MODIFIED MOSQUITOES SAVE HAWAII’S ENDANGERED BIRDS?

By

Every four years, thousands of environmentalists gather at the World Conservation Congress to assess the state of the planet, and to consider what might be done to protect it.  Continue reading →

If You Happen to be in Cincinnati

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If you happen to be (or work) in Cincinnati, you will likely notice that the city is setting precedent as one of the “greenest,” most innovative cities in the US. According to an article published on Triple Pundit, the city is one of the fastest growing centers for technology innovation and it is employing that expansion to propel its 60 sustainability initiatives as outlined in the Green Cincinnati Plan, which covers a whole spectrum of topics from renewable energy, to transportation, to food waste.

“In addition to benefiting the environment, our initiatives must make economic sense (save money, create jobs) and improve quality of life for residents (improve public health, mobility, connectedness)” explained Ollie Kroner, the Sustainability Coordinator for the City of Cincinnati.

Continue reading →

The Land Art Generator Initiative

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The Clear Orb is a proposed glass desalination dome 40 meters in diameter, lined with solar cells to generate power to pump seawater. Inside the orb, the sun’s heat would distill the saltwater through evaporation and condensation. The project could generate 3,820 megawatt hours of electricity and 2.2m liters of fresh water a year. The underbelly of the orb is covered in fins that can turn wave action into electricity. Artists: Jaesik Lim, Ahyoung Lee, Jaeyeol Kim, Taegu Lim from Seoul, South Korea. Photograph: Land Art Generator Initiative

The Clear Orb is a proposed glass desalination dome 40 meters in diameter, lined with solar cells to generate power to pump seawater. Inside the orb, the sun’s heat would distill the saltwater through evaporation and condensation. The project could generate 3,820 megawatt hours of electricity and 2.2m liters of fresh water a year. The underbelly of the orb is covered in fins that can turn wave action into electricity. Artists: Jaesik Lim, Ahyoung Lee, Jaeyeol Kim, Taegu Lim from Seoul, South Korea.
Photograph: Land Art Generator Initiative

In recent months we’ve seen some interesting competitions blending technology with art and aiming to improve the world in some way, like lionfish hunting, wildlife crime controlling, and milk tea brewing. But a biennial public art contest organized by the Land Art Generator Initiative, featured last week in The Guardian, might be the most impactful in terms of scale and long-term inspiration – although the anti-poaching stuff is pretty good too. Alison Moodie writes (and make sure to follow her first link!):

These ideas illustrate the possibility of marrying aesthetics with renewable energy and water technology and educate the public about the challenges of addressing climate change and feeding a growing population.

Continue reading →

Make Trouble When It Is Needed

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Protesters demonstrate against the Energy Transfer Partners’ Dakota Access oil pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, U.S. September 9, 2016. REUTERS/Andrew Cullen

We are happy that the trouble-maker who brought this to our attention, and those pictured above are heard by the Trouble-Maker-In-Chief of the USA (who we hope uses his remaining four months in that office to similar good effect):

The Obama Administration Temporarily Blocks the Dakota Access Pipeline

The surprise move came after a federal judge declined to stop the 1,100-mile fossil fuel project’s construction.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the hundreds of Native protestors who have joined them in rural North Dakota won a huge but provisional victory in their quest to stop the Dakota Access pipeline, as the U.S. government announced late on Friday afternoon that it was voluntarily halting work on the project. Continue reading →

A Resort Of The Future

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We do not need to love everything everafter created by architects whose earlier work we have been in love with; but we at least take a look:

High Line architects create volcano-style resort

Diller Scofidio + Renfro beat Foster + Partners in a competition to design a new international resort in China

Could Hainan, China’s smallest and most southerly province, become a new international tourist destination? That’s certainly the Chinese government’s ambition, which hopes to draw in thousands of international leisure travellers to this island province, 800 miles southwest of Hong Kong, by 2020.

Hainan Airlines Group announced the winner of its competition to design a 250-hectare resort which will be built on an artificial island in Haikou Bay, just off the coast of Hainan’s capital, Haikou. Continue reading →