Save The Truffle, A Campaign We Are Destined To Support

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3b044a32123901-56703376190bcThis is a series of videos realized to launch “Save The Truffle” a new brand aiming to promote traditions and the conservation of the White Truffle of Alba. In this videos Agnello Renato, one of the last and most important “trifulau” (truffle seeker) of the zone, shares his stories about being a truffle seeker.For this project I took care of shooting, lighting and editing.
Creative project by Grid Studio.

Our family has a very happenstance connection to truffles that goes back to some sustainable tourism development work I carried out in Croatia starting in 2000, which led to our nirvanic 2006-2007 spent on an island in the southern Adriatic. But on my first visit to Croatia, in late autumn 2000, on a weekend off from work a local friend took me to Istria and the rest is history. You either love them or you probably will be disgusted by them, and I was in the former camp. A month later, coming home to my family in Costa Rica, I had some vacuum-packed fresh truffles; since then, we have been devotees.

A few years later, Milo became an encyclopedic mycophile, and a few years after that Seth had the chance to take a mycology courses at Cornell as an undergrad. So we are all happy to see this campaign represented by the logo above left. The article that brought our attention to this campaign is worth a read, whether you are a foodie, a fungist, or any kind of traditionalist. Click the logo to see some of the early creative work emerging for the campaign. We look forward to seeing more, but for now appreciate the journalist’s keen eye for what really matters in this story:

Amid Hills of Wine and Truffles, a Mission to Give Fungus Room to Breathe

By GAIA PIANIGIANI

BAROLO, Italy — Few places in Italy, and perhaps the world, have been so gifted with exquisite natural abundance as Barolo and its surrounding region. Continue reading →

A Question of Light

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Selling “light,” not light bulbs, is one way that companies producing long-lasting L.E.D. bulbs hope to stay in business, even after “socket saturation” sets in. PHOTOGRAPH BY TONY CENICOLA / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX

Selling “light,” not light bulbs, is one way that companies producing long-lasting L.E.D. bulbs hope to stay in business, even after “socket saturation” sets in.
PHOTOGRAPH BY TONY CENICOLA / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX

In a business world of planned obsolesce and consumer world “throw away behavior”,  it’s enlightening to see how companies are handling “doing good by doing well” for the both the environment and the consumer’s pockbook.

TRYING TO SOLVE THE L.E.D. QUANDARY

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Is there a workable business model for products that are built to last, rather than to fall apart? This is an idea that I explored here in July, in a story about the L.E.D. quandary. That quandary, in short: companies are making a good thing—light-emitting-diode bulbs that conserve energy and last for years—but they can’t make money in the long run from products that rarely need replacing. As global light sockets fill with L.E.D.s, century-old corporate titans are getting out of the bulb business even before “socket saturation” tips sales into a decline. The question remains whether any company has an incentive to make a product that is not designed to fall apart or become obsolete.

After that story ran, several newer, smaller firms reached out to me claiming to have solutions to the conundrum. Two seemed worth a deeper look: Cree, an L.E.D. specialist in the U.S.; and UrbanVolt, based in Dublin, Ireland. Both say that they no longer sell light bulbs but “light.” They exemplify two very different approaches to doing so.

Cree’s business model turns light into a gadget.

Continue reading →

Inspiring Science

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Long before we tackled the science to allow a view of what Carl Sagan would come to call “our pale blue dot”, there were artists and explorers who imagined the vastness of the world and took off into the unknown – both figuratively and literally.

EARTH collaborates with information from scientific organizations such as NASA and NOAA to create an interactive visualization of global weather conditions forecast by super computers updated every three hours. The actual global images are a fascinating swirl of wind and current, reminiscent of a Vincent Van Gogh painting.  The ocean surface current estimates are updated every five days, ocean surface temperatures and anomaly from daily average (1981-2011) are updated daily, and ocen waves are updated every three hours – all of which combine to present a moving canvas of what is presently occurring on this blue marble of a planet.

About The Art

EARTH, by Cameron Beccario, is a near real-time visualization of global weather conditions forecast by supercomputers. This vivid capture depicts intricate, dramatic swirling patterns of wind streamlines reminiscent of oil paintings of the Impressionists. Continue reading →

Tasting The Place

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Where I am located, since last week and until next, there is an abundance of flavors; both in terms of intensity and in terms of diversity. Thanks to a longstanding tradition of ensuring that those flavors pop, there is not only salt, but salt inspection. Only the finest will do, and the finest is also harvested locally. Just as the fish is harvested locally as in the photo below, taken a few hundred meters from where I am typing right now.

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Coffee’s Potentially Powerful Afterlife

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Researchers are experimenting with using used coffee grounds to filter pollutants out of water. Credit RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post via Getty Images

Researchers are experimenting with using used coffee grounds to filter pollutants out of water. Credit RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post via Getty Images

Coffee lovers that we are, it’s amazing that we almost missed this piece of news…

Each year, coffee manufacturers, restaurants, cafes and home brewers worldwide produce about six billion tons of coffee waste… If not rotting in a dump or fertilizing a garden, the grounds end up in animal feed and biofuels.

But researchers in Italy have found a new home for the stinky old coffee bits — by infusing them into a porous foam that removes heavy metals from polluted water, according to a study published this month in ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering.

“We use a lot of coffee here in Italy,” said Despina Fragouli, the author of the study and a materials scientist at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia. She and her team develop new compounds from agricultural waste — like turning cacao husks into a material for preserving and packaging food.

Naturally, they wondered “What about coffee?” Continue reading →

Queso and Identity

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Scenic side road on the way to El Triunfo.

If queso was a food group it would certainly be my favorite. But that’s not what this post is about – even though cheese is a primary ingredient in many Mexican dishes and I had lots of it this past weekend. What this post is really about is the kinds of unexpected quirks one encounters when road tripping in Baja California Sur (B.C.S) and the unusual, but interesting conversations that come up with locals. Seth and I covered three towns: La Rivera, El Triunfo, and Todos Santos, for different lengths of time, but each with a distinctive story to tell.

Continue reading →

Absurdity In Vivid, Brilliant Living Color

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Clear-cutting along Highway 30 in Oregon. A bipartisan group of senators wants the government to assume that burning forests to generate electricity does not add carbon dioxide to the air but is instead “carbon neutral.” Leah Nash for The New York Times

We have stayed away from politics as much as possible on this platform, except to celebrate innovative successes in the interest of conservation; but this news item is a must-share due to the gravity of its weirdness:

Next ‘Renewable Energy’: Burning Forests, if Senators Get Their Way

Eduardo Porter

President Obama’s Clean Power Plan — the central plank in his strategy to combat climate change — is in danger.

It’s not just that it is under attack in court, where its legality was challenged last week by a coalition of 28 states and scores of companies and industry groups. Or that fossil fuel interests and Republicans in Congress will keep trying to block it, whatever the courts decide.

The president’s plan to reduce emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the nation’s power sector could be undone within a matter of weeks by an unlikely bipartisan collection of senators that includes staunch Republican climate change deniers as well as Democrats who support the administration’s strategy. Continue reading →

Birding from VdF: San José Estuary

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Since last week, I’ve been based back at Villa del Faro in Baja California Sur, Mexico, where I’ll be co-managing the property with Jocelyn for a good while. In addition to having the opportunity to see what kind of birds show up here in their winter migration, I’m also hoping to have time to check out the surrounding region for other birding hotspots. I’ll do this not only for my own interest, but also because we may get guests here in the future who are bird-watchers.  I’d like to be able to recommend areas based on my own experience, so they don’t have to rely solely on eBird, which helps find certain spots but can’t give you any directions that Google Maps doesn’t have.

Nevertheless, eBird is one of the best ways to quickly figure out what locations within a region are popular for birding, whether because they have lots of species or because lots of birders pass through there (or both). Continue reading →

Bookstores Are Just A Small Notch Below The Library In Our Pantheon Of Cultural Institutions, But They Are There

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Bodhi Tree—Los Angeles, California

We liked it the first time around, and appreciate his extension:

DRAWING THE WORLD’S GREATEST BOOKSTORES

By

It was a little more than two years ago that I walked around New York, drawing pictures of the city’s endangered landmark bookstores.  Continue reading →

If You Happen to Be In Gainsville

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We’ve been posting on the environmental impact of the invasive lionfish ever since contributor Phil Karp took on the project of building a demand for the notoriously difficult to catch fish. Helping to build a market for the delicious meat and beautiful spines created income for local fishermen and their families in numerous areas of the Caribbean.

ReefSavers was created with all these goals in mind. Founded to gain control of the Lionfish population in the southeast US and Caribbean, they work toward both harvesting and developing a stable market in which supply can always meet the current demands. By unifying

the organizations working to control the Lionfish outbreak into a cohesive market place. Channeling all harvested Lionfish through a centralized market place will allow for a more stabilized fishery. With the creation of the Lionfish Market Place organizations will have a centralized place to sell their catch and buyers will not have to worry about limited supplies. By opening the Lionfish Market buyers for the whole state of Florida will be connected with a more constant supply, in turn this access will help to grow the industry and put revenue into the hands of the people trying to fight the outbreak.

The ReefSavers team came up with innovative strategies to help with supply and demand logistics, fanning the market for the fish for both chefs and more importantly, consumers. Welcome the Lionfish Invasion Tour in Gainsville, Florida! Continue reading →

Viewing the Nobel Prize Through a 21st Century Lens

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We believe in the core principle from market-based economics that incentives drive behavior. We lean toward behavioral economics as a more robust and believable model than the standard “homo economicus” (read oversimplified but mathematically model-able idea of human decision-making) taught to most 20th century students. We believe that desire for recognition is an incentive commonly found among super-achievers. And this explains why “big” prizes are created and tend to matter over time. Not to  suggest that geniuses chase prizes (on the contrary, much of the time).

But the Nobel probably inspires its fair share of young academics in a few fields. For that reason we find this editorial opinion piece quite compelling, especially due to the first example given:

In the mid-1960s, Robert Paine, a scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, discovered a hidden organizing principle in the coastal ecosystem he was studying. When a certain species of starfish was present, a panoply of algae, limpets, barnacles, anemones and mussels lived in delicate, dynamic balance. But when he removed the starfish and tossed them into the ocean, that balance collapsed and one kind of mussel took over.

Dr. Paine coined a term to describe the starfish’s outsize influence: keystone species. Keystone species have since been identified in forests, in grasslands, in the ocean and even in the human gut. The concept has become one of ecology’s guiding theoretical principles, Continue reading →

Birdsong – Making Visible the Invisible

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We recently posted on artist Xavi Bou‘s creative use of chronophotography, a series of photos that capture the illusion of movement, to craft still portraits of birds in flight.

Australian artist Andy Thomas specializes in creating ‘audio life forms’: beautiful abstract shapes that react to sounds. These videos were created using computer program to activate particle effects from digitally captured bird sounds. Continue reading →

A River Runs Through Amboli Reserve

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On my Saturday afternoon I followed up a morning of farm visits with a visit to the local agricultural research extension of the state university. More on that tomorrow. For now, I want to share some images from my Sunday exploration about an hour from the farms described, due inland and into the Western Ghats. Specifically, Amboli Reserve, which is in the view above.

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National Park of the Week: Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia

/ Jocelyn Toll / 3 Comments
Plitvice Waterfalls

Source: holicoffee.com

Granted UNESCO World Heritage status in 1979, Plitvice Lakes National Park is Coratia’s largest and most popular park. Sixteen lakes, all inter-connected over a distance of 8 km by series of waterfalls and cascades, are set deep in the woodland and have a height difference of 135 meters (Veliki Slap, the largest waterfall, is 70 meters tall). Although the terraced lakes comprise only a small area of the total 300 sq km park, they offer a stunning sight with their changing hues throughout the seasons and garner practically all the attention from local and foreign tourists alike. Continue reading →

Coal Mining, Climate Change & Entrepreneurial Conservation

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Reclamation crews fill in rock highwalls like this one, creating flat land that Tom Clarke intends to reforest as a way to trap and hold carbon dioxide. Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

We had to read it to believe it:

A Curious Plan to Fight Climate Change: Buy Mines, Sell Coal

Tom Clarke, a nursing home owner, concocted a strategy to cut carbon emissions by gaining control of millions of tons of coal reserves and multiple mines.

By MICHAEL CORKERY and MICHAEL WINES

FAIRVIEW, W.Va. — The coal was piled about as high as it could go, spilling down to the railroad tracks and towering over the elevator shaft. A yellow bulldozer pushed the mound to make room for more. From a distance on this rainy day, the black heap looked like a giant whale about to swallow the mine whole.

The word underground was that Federal mine No. 2 would soon have to close. It was early April, and the mine was running out of storage space. There were not enough buyers for all the coal. Continue reading →