Fair’s Fare, More Than Fair

/ Organikos / 2 Comments
160404_r27910-690

The Salon de l’Agriculture, held every year in Paris, is also a political crucible. PHOTOGRAPH BY IMMO KLINK FOR THE NEW YORKER

It is our favorite annual edition of our favorite source of longform journalism, and this looks like it could be our favorite article from this year’s edition:

Come to the Fair

The food-and-booze fest that is France’s national agricultural exhibition.

BY LAUREN COLLINS

It would be a mistake to think of microtourism, the latest invented word to capture the imagination of the travel sector, as mere staycationing. The practice, as defined by a pair of design students in Denmark who recently completed a project on the theme, is a prerogative of a future in which “gas prices are so high that we must develop a new form of adventure that does not require travelling great distances.” Microtourism is not glamping (no yurt) or bleisure (no work) or minimooning (no wedding). Nor is it Netflix and putter. If a staycation means pajamas and the garden shed, microtourism means sneakers and the subway. Continue reading →

A Podcast Worthy Of The Binge

/ Crist Inman / 1 Comment

startup_logo_small2

Alex Blumberg was only vaguely familiar to me when I listened to an interview with him on a podcast series that accompanied my early morning bicycle rides in late 2015. I had listened to Planet Money on occasion, and found it amusingly interesting most of the time. I had rarely, if ever, listened to This American Life, though many friends had recommended it.

Blumberg caught my full attention in this conversation recorded in October, 2014 as he described the process of sharing his experience starting up a new company. Continue reading →

From A Friend In San Francisco

/ Organikos / 1 Comment

The magazine Bay Nature is new to us, brought to our attention thanks to a friend from that part of the world. It comes via this particular article, which touches on several topics–fungi, birds, conservation and Bay Area awesomeness–commonly seen in our own pages in the last five years. Have a read below and if you like it go read the remainder on their website:

Identifying With Lichen

How the surprising union between a fungus and an alga raises questions about the nature of identity

by Elizabeth Lopatto

In July, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill declaring the lace lichen—found along the Pacific coast and throughout the coast ranges—the state lichen. As of January 1, 2016, California will be the first state ever to designate a lichen as a state symbol.

Lace lichen, Ramalina menziesii, is easily recognized. It is pale green and dangles in strips from trees. It’s sometimes confused with Old Man’s Beard (Usnea sp.), which is also pale green and dangly. Lace lichen’s range stretches from Alaska to Baja California. It’s an important food for deer; it also serves as material for birds’ nests. I see it once, in researching this story, when naturalist Morgan Evans, a former student naturalist aide at Tilden Nature Area in the East Bay hills, removes it from her backpack and spreads it out. Evans is a pleasant and patient woman, whose true love is fungi. Her interest in lichens is an extension of that, she says. Anyway, she found some lace lichen growing in Morgan Territory Regional Park. She figured I’d want to see it and there isn’t much growing in Tilden that she knows of. She hands me the lichen, which feels strangely plasticine. It’s pale green—she wetted it so it wouldn’t crumble when she transported it—and dangles impressively, at least six inches long. Lace lichen can grow as long as a meter, and it has a netted structure that looks, to me at least, more like fishnet stockings than lace. Perhaps fishnet-stocking lichen would be a little too racy a nickname. Continue reading →

What The Holiday Wrought

/ Crist Inman / Leave a comment
071029_r16568c_p646-320

Cutting cacao pods on Diego Badaró’s farm, in Bahia. PHOTOGRAPHS BY JASON FLORIO

Because celebrating the Easter holiday is now so closely associated with chocolate, I presume, this article from the archives is suddenly front and center at one of our favorite websites. During our time in India I have learned from artisanal chocolatiers about Cadbury, among other big candy companies, who incentivized the removal of the high quality cacao that was growing here, in favor of more economical lower quality cacao. Bummer.

I remember first learning about chocolate from this article (click the image to the right to go to it), and it was worth the time to read it again based on my now-expanded interest in chocolate; also because it is a great story of entrepreneurship; and because Bill Buford is one of the greatest long-form writers on food:

Extreme Chocolate

The quest for the perfect bean.

BY BILL BUFORD

On July 7, 2001, Frederick Schilling and his girlfriend, Tracey Holderman, arrived in New York to attend the Fancy Food Show and launch Dagoba, an organic-chocolate company. Schilling had just turned thirty, Holderman was twenty-nine, and the show was the first entrepreneurial event of their lives. Dagoba had no employees and no orders. It had a lease for a ground-floor industrial space in Boulder, Colorado (the “factory”), and an investment of twenty thousand dollars (borrowed from Schilling’s mother and an uncle), which, after flights, a hotel, and a fee for the smallest possible booth, against a dark wall in the basement of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, was gone. It also had “launch products”—seven bars, including infusions of raspberry and mint—an amateurish jamboree, confected and poured into molds by a man who had never liked chocolate, hand-wrapped by a woman who rarely ate more than two ounces a year, and tested only by their Boulder friends and roommates, a scraggly crew of ski bums and folksingers. Dagoba was more bedroom than boardroom. In New York, that changed. Continue reading →

News We Can Cheer

/ Organikos / Leave a comment
windwins750.jpg

A wind farm in Washington state. Photo credit: Daniel Parks / flickr

Thanks to EcoWatch for this unexpected news:

Renewable Energy Investments Set New Record, Twice That of Coal and Gas

Renewable energy investment totaled a record $286 billion, with China, India, Brazil and other developing countries accounting for $156 billion in 2015. China’s investment alone rose 17 percent from the year prior, representing 36 percent of the global total. Experts expect this surge to continue, while coal remains in decline; China also announced this week that they will be suspending construction of new coal mines in 15 provinces. Continue reading →

Urban Heroic Recycling

/ Organikos / Leave a comment
29RECYCLE1-master675

Workers inspecting a bale of refuse at the Recology recycling plant in San Francisco. Foreign officials and others often visit the facility for ideas on how to handle their own mushrooming piles of garbage. Josh Haner/The New York Times

From the New York Times:

San Francisco, ‘the Silicon Valley of Recycling’

By MATT RICHTEL

Robert Reed, who is enjoying a surprising career turn as a busy tour guide at the latest hot spot here, stood smiling one recent sunny morning before 10 foreign dignitaries and journalists. They included the mayor of Genoa, Italy, and the general consuls from Italy, Canada and Switzerland.

Each visitor wore a sport coat and tie, and a yellow safety vest to ensure they wouldn’t be run down by garbage trucks. Continue reading →

Winds Across the Plains

/ Organikos / Leave a comment

High winds have played a significant role in the history of Texas, Oklahoma and the Great Plains. At worst they accentuated the destructive “dust bowl” period, at best they’ve helped to power small homestead farms for several centuries.

As the struggle to step back from carbon based energy continues, it’s happy news that the measures are meeting with more success and fewer obstacles:

The decision also signals that the Obama administration remains committed to encouraging the spread of renewable energy, seen as a major component of reaching national goals on stemming climate change.Multiple companies are hoping to build high-voltage transmission lines to transport renewable energy produced by wind farms and hydroelectric plants to more populous regions of the country. Continue reading →

Good Spirited

/ Organikos / Leave a comment

Although we don’t particularly endorse consumption of alcohol or hold loyalty to any single brand or type of liquor, we’re always on the lookout for positive environmental news in any corporate setting, and we’ve recently learned that Bacardi Limited, perhaps the best-known makers of rum in the world (and owners of other alcohol brands Martini, Grey Goose, Bombay Sapphire, and Dewar’s Scotch), has been attempting to do better for the environment.

Called “Good Spirited,” (who doesn’t like a nice pun), Bacardi’s campaign involves recycling, waste reduction, energy efficiency, and other mechanisms to reduce the company’s environmental impact in the world and become more sustainable. For example, they’ve removed plastic straws and stirrers from their North American headquarter events in Florida and their Bombay Sapphire distillery in the UK, which they estimate will save more than 12,000 of the small plastic tubes from landfills annually.

In their original distillery in Puerto Rico, the company reuses water from rinsing Continue reading →

New Egg Art

/ Seth Inman / 2 Comments

In the past I’ve shared some of my egg-based artwork, known in Ukrainian as pysanky, that’s for sale at the Xandari Resort gift shop in Costa Rica, including a sped-up video of the process. But my painstaking handiwork, with wax and dye, can now be replicated to some extent by a machine called the Eggbot, which is an open-source robotic machine that can draw on eggs or other spheroids. Most often it uses pens but it can also even work with an electric-heated “kitska” or wax stylus similar to the flame-heated ones that I use.

The video above displays the various works of an Eggbot used by Jiri Zemanek at Continue reading →

Map the Herps You Spot

/ Seth Inman / 2 Comments

Spotted Salamander by Brian Magnier

In the spring of my penultimate year at Cornell, I took a Herpetology class that introduced me to the world of reptiles and amphibians, or “herps,” as they’re affectionately known. Thanks to that exposure, I was able to enjoy the spring migration of certain salamander species and learn the basics of the main families of frogs, lizards, snakes, and other herps like alligators, crocodiles, and all the other slimy or scaly animals in the classes Amphibia and Reptilia. If I had known of the existence of the citizen science project HerpMapper at the time (it wasn’t released until September of the same year as that salamander migration) I’d have certainly submitted some observations and photos to the organization! From their About page:

HerpMapper is a cooperative project, designed to gather and share information about reptile and amphibian observations across the planet. Using HerpMapper, you can create records of your herp observations and keep them all in one place. In turn, your data is made available to HerpMapper Partners – groups who use your recorded observations for research, conservation, and preservation purposes. Your observations can make valuable contributions on the behalf of amphibians and reptiles.

Continue reading →

Good News in Plastics

/ Organikos / 1 Comment

Compiled illustrations of a nylon chain above and PET chain below, both thermoplastic polymers, or simply put, types of plastic. Via WikiMedia, created by users YassineMrabet and Jynto, respectively.

There’s some cause to celebrate from a couple findings published recently in two journals, Nature and Animal Conservation, related to plastics, though of very different sorts. The first paper deals with a new method of plastic production using carbon dioxide and agricultural waste rather than petroleum as the raw input for PET plastic, and the second article studies the feasibility of introducing biodegradable fishing nets to replace nylon ones.

Continue reading →

Worldwide Vegetarian Lifestyle Calculated to Reduce Global Food Emissions by 44%

/ Organikos / Leave a comment

Probably fewer than half the contributors and readers of this blog are vegetarian, with a tiny percentage perhaps being vegan. A new study from Oxford University published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States might set some of us thinking about changing that, however.

With food in general creating over 25% of all global greenhouse gas emissions (including the need for transportation and all the rest), to think that about 80% of those emissions are linked to livestock makes one realize (once again, if we didn’t already know) the massive impact of eating red meat. Sarah DeWeerdt reports for Conservation magazine’s online section:

If every person on Earth adopted a vegan diet – without milk, meat, honey, or any other animal-sourced foods – the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the food system in 2050 would fall by more than half compared to 2005/2007 levels. That’s one of several striking findings from an analysis of food and climate published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Continue reading →

Birding Apps Re-reviewed by Boucher

/ Seth Inman / Leave a comment

I visit Tim Boucher’s blog on The Nature Conservancy’s website every week or so to see what’s new, and this last check-up I noticed an old post from 2013 that’s been edited to include observations on fresh updates for phone apps that help identify birds, like Merlin, which I’ve covered in the past.

So far I haven’t purchased any bird identification application for my phone, mostly because there are good ones like Merlin and Audubon available for free in the US, but I’ve been considering a $9.99 app for the birds of Costa Rica, made by bird-watching guides both in CR and Panama.

Boucher doesn’t rank the apps in his order of preference, but it looks like from his reviews that he prefers the Audubon and Merlin apps for the fact that they’re free and utilitarian, though Merlin is geared more towards beginners. He’s also pretty positive about the Sibley and Peterson apps, both of which started with physical book versions of their guides.  Continue reading →

Handy Bamboo

/ Jocelyn Toll / Leave a comment

bamboo20sticks_zpsoqedjljxBamboo is a highly malleable, fibrous plant that has many impressive capabilities that often serve a variety of utilitarian needs. At Xandari, we’ve used this resilient, rapid-growing grass (yes, it’s part of the grass family and some species are known to grow up to 90cm in a single day!) to create wind chimes for birds and now, we’ve been inspired once again to create a different, yet handy tool.

Continue reading →

An Unusual Library With A Conservation Mission

/ Crist Inman / 2 Comments

3058058-slide-3-the-rarest-colors-in-the-harvard-pigment-library.jpg

A short note here to link out to a story of interest because of its intersection of conservation, commerce and education. Thanks to this new (to us) source of interesting (to us) news:

The Harvard Library That Protects The World’s Rarest Colors

The most unusual colors from Harvard’s storied pigment library include beetle extracts, poisonous metals, and human mummies.

Today, every color imaginable is at your fingertips. You can peruse paint swatches at hardware stores, flip through Pantone books, and fuss with the color finder that comes with most computer programs, until achieving the hue of your heart’s desire. But rewind to a few centuries ago and finding that one specific color might have meant trekking to a single mineral deposit in remote Afghanistan—as was the case with lapis lazuli, a rock prized for its brilliant blue hue, which made it more valuable than gold in medieval times. Continue reading →