Be Wary, Is The Point

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Crouch-Amazon-dash-button-690

What would the opposite of a blog-crush be called? Whatever that is, we may have it for Amazon, not least because of their various commercial practices we cannot admire–though we admit to finding Jeff Bezos one of the most fascinating individuals alive today. But also because of our resistance of the standard rush to advance consumerism, and our wariness of innovations that make consumerism more difficult to resist, which this blog post explores in punchy terms:

The Horror of Amazon’s New Dash Button

BY IAN CROUCH

Amazon’s new Dash Button, which will allow shoppers to reorder frequently used domestic products like laundry detergent or paper towels with the click of a real-life button, is not a joke. Many people assumed it was, mostly because the announcement came the day before April Fool’s, but also because the idea seemed to poke fun at Amazon’s omnipresence, making it visibly manifest with little plastic one-click shopping buttons adhered to surfaces all over your home.

There was also something slightly off about the promotional video. Continue reading →

The Dumbest Experiment In History, By Far

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It’s official, our blog-crush on this particular conservation-focused entrepreneur. We have not yet heard (click above for a podcast in which “Neil deGrasse Tyson explores the future of humanity with one of the men forging that future: billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors. Co-hosted by Chuck Nice and guest starring Bill Nye.”) or yet read (continue below to Motherboard‘s interview) anything to make us question that he is the real deal; a living, breathing visionary achiever of heroic proportions:

Elon Musk: Burning Fossil Fuels Is the ‘Dumbest Experiment in History, By Far’

Written by JASON KOEBLER, STAFF WRITER

Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, and chairman of SolarCity, and the guy who dreamt up the hyper loop, says we shouldn’t need an environmentally motivated reason to transition to clean energy. We’re probably going to run out of oil sometime; why find out if we can destroy the world while we do it, if an alternative exists?

“If we don’t find a solution to burning oil for transport, when we then run out of oil, the economy will collapse and society will come to an end,” Musk said this week during a conversation with astrophysicist and Cosmos host Neil deGrasse Tyson. Continue reading →

Eye-Popping Understanding Of Palm Oil

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A Cargill-run palm plantation in Borneo in 2009. Image: ​David Gilbert/RAN

A Cargill-run palm plantation in Borneo in 2009. Image: ​David Gilbert/RAN

Every now and then we of non-technical education read an article written by and for a technical audience, and kind of get it, and feel the stretch is worth the effort. Raxa Collective works in locations where palm oil is grown, and recently has scouted locations in Borneo that make this article both eye-opening and eye-popping:

THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF EVERYTHING

The Race for Sustainable Palm Oil

WRITTEN BY ALEX SCOTT FOR CHEMICAL & ENGINEERING NEWS

Palm oil is a wonderfully versatile and cheap raw material. On its own or via chemical derivatives, the oil makes its way into many packaged foods and into household products ranging from fine cosmetics to heavy-duty detergents.

Some 63 million metric tons of palm oil is harvested annually from tropical plantations, 87 percent of it coming from Malaysia and Indonesia. Palm oil is derived from the flesh and kernel of the fruit of oil palms. Demand for the oil is set to exceed 70 million metric tons by the middle of the next decade.

But palm oil’s large-scale use has environmental costs. In Southeast Asia, it is the leading driver of deforestation. Indonesia has the third-largest area of contiguous tropical forest in the world, but according to a 2007 United Nations Environme​nt Programme report, 98 percent of the country’s natural rainforest will be destroyed by 2022 unless strict conservation measures are implemented. Continue reading →

Colors From Life Way Out There

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The Milky Way, from Scutum to Serpens and northern Sagittarius. CREDIT IMAGE BY JOHN CHUMACK / SCIENCE SOURCE

The Milky Way, from Scutum to Serpens and northern Sagittarius. CREDIT IMAGE BY JOHN CHUMACK / SCIENCE SOURCE

While pondering our own local attractions in the universe tonight, our minds will certainly wander, in wonder, toward the colors further afield, thanks to this post in the Elements section of the New Yorker‘s website and some of our earlier posts on this topic:

What Are the Colors of Alien Life?

BY NICOLA TWILLEY

Just before it became the first man-made vessel to leave the solar system, in 1990, Voyager 1 took a portrait of Earth, some four billion miles away. Our pinprick of a planet occupied a mere twelve per cent of one pixel, but its atmosphere, rich in water, oxygen, and ozone, reflected and scattered the glow of the sun in an unmistakable way; the astronomer Carl Sagan dubbed Earth the “pale blue dot.”  Continue reading →

Tetrad, A Wonder To Behold Tonight In Kerala

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The moon exhibits a deep orange glow as the Earth casts its shadow in a total lunar eclipse as seen in Manila, Philippines, before dawn Thursday in a June 2011 eclipse. Bullit Marquez/AP

The moon exhibits a deep orange glow as the Earth casts its shadow in a total lunar eclipse as seen in Manila, Philippines, before dawn Thursday in a June 2011 eclipse. Bullit Marquez/AP

Thanks to National Public Radio (USA) for this notification of one of the occasional wonders of the universe, brought to a night sky near you, if you are in one of the lucky places. In Kerala we will be watching over the water from the deck of the restaurant, 51, at Spice Harbour :

Get Ready For The Third Installment In The Lunar Eclipse Tetrad

SCOTT NEUMAN

North Americans could get a glimpse of the Earth shadowing the moon (very) early Saturday — the third in a series of four lunar eclipses that began nearly a year ago. But only those on the West Coast, in the Pacific or Asia will have a chance at seeing the full show.

Continue reading →

Embracing Student Activism

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Students have been rallying for change since the time of Plato with varying degrees of effectiveness. In fact, the act of questioning authority through dialogue is part and parcel to the educational process. It’s heartening when the voices of resistance from multiple communities join forces to activate change.

Congratulations to the students of Syracuse University for rallying SU to remove endowments to direct investments in coal, gas and oil companies.

Syracuse is the biggest university in the world to have committed to remove its endowment from direct investments in coal, oil and gas companies. It aims to make additional investments in clean energy technologies such as solar, biofuels and advanced recycling.

In a statement, the university said it will “not directly invest in publicly traded companies whose primary business is extraction of fossil fuels and will direct its external investment managers to take every step possible to prohibit investments in these public companies as well”. Continue reading →

Necessary Measures Implemented By A Good Man, In A Great State, In A Moment Of Ecological Crisis

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California Governor Jerry Brown, left, discusses snowpack at Phillips Station, which this year is bare in April for the first time ever. PHOTOGRAPH BY MAX WHITTAKER/GETTY

California Governor Jerry Brown, left, discusses snowpack at Phillips Station, which this year is bare in April for the first time ever. PHOTOGRAPH BY MAX WHITTAKER/GETTY

We cannot say it is good news, but it is heartening to read news of a man we have always admired taking action in the great state of California, the land of endless possibilities (except where water is concerned). Deniers, back off. Get with the program:

Phillips Station sits about sixty-eight hundred feet up in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, not far from the ski resorts near the southern shore of Lake Tahoe. Each year around this time, a surveyor from the California Department of Water Resources thrusts a hollow, aluminum tube into the snow at Phillips Station—one of a number of such stations across the state—to collect a cylindrical sample. The aim is to measure the depth of the snow, which, as it melts and trickles down the mountain and into rivers and reservoirs, becomes one of California’s most crucial sources of water. Continue reading →

If You Happen To Be In London

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Peter Kelleher/Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2015. Spike studs, used to keep people from sleeping near buildings, are part of the exhibition.

Peter Kelleher/Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2015. Spike studs, used to keep people from sleeping near buildings, are part of the exhibition.

When we hear of civic-minded initiatives, museum shows are not the first thing that comes to mind. Schools, and libraries, and conservation initiatives come to mind.

Museums are civic institutions, of course, and we have posted more on this site about museums than almost any other topic.

But civic? We like the theme. This is a show we know will be worth seeing:

V&A Museum Returns to Its Civic-Minded Roots

By ALICE RAWSTHORN

“All of This Belongs to You,” an exhibition running through July 19 at the Victoria and Albert in London, seeks to stimulate debate about citizenship and the role of museums as public spaces.

Green, Greener, Greenest–Which City? Says Who? And How?

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The Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, 2015 Green Capital of Europe. Photograph: Destination Bristol.com/EPA

This is one of the environmentally-oriented rankings that many of us think about, from time to time, and then throw our hands in the air in frustration at the criteria used for judging green-ness, or what is often green-ish-ness. Thanks to the Guardian for asking the questions we want answered when it comes to rankings like this:

Where is the world’s greenest city?

Bristol is the ‘green capital’ of Europe, but its predecessor Copenhagen comes top in a Europe-wide index. Curitiba, San Francisco and Singapore all have strong eco-friendly claims too – so what’s the best way to compare cities’ greenness?

It’s easy to say we’d like our cities to be cleaner and greener. But what does that even mean? “Greenness” is a concept that’s hard to pin down – there’s no official list of the top 50 most eco-friendly cities, nor any widely agreed set of measurements for working out how green a city actually is.

Continue reading →

Raxa Collective’s Activities & Model Replicability

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ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

A friend of Raxa Collective has a place in this story below, of which we share the first and last paragraph.  It does not matter who, or what role, just that it made us pay particular attention. And it rings true to us. Our work involves “first steps up” in emerging or re-emerging economies, at least those with remarkable patrimony and friendly people. First steps refers to stretching from what opportunities a place offered its community to a set of improved economic conditions (and related outcomes in health, education and other forms of welfare) for locals. We believe that what we do for a living is “a good place to start,” for many places:

In 1958, Laurance Rockefeller threw an inaugural party for Dorado Beach, his luxury resort on the northern coast of Puerto Rico. The guests included millionaires, politicians, and movie stars. Continue reading →

Easter Is Upon Us, And Our Tastes Shift Accordingly

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Remedying Americans’ resistance to lamb with a juicy roast that gets help from anchovies and butter. (Article plus video.)

Thanks to the New York Times‘ Food section for a reminder to try something new this particular holiday season:

RECIPE LAB

The Best Roast Lamb for Your Easter Feast

By JULIA MOSKIN

Remedying Americans’ resistance to lamb with a juicy roast that gets help from anchovies and butter. (Article plus video)

Where Are The Market Forces When We Need Them?

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More than half of the world’s forest loss between 1990 and 2010 took place in Brazil and Indonesia. Photograph: Nacho Doce/Reuters

More than half of the world’s forest loss between 1990 and 2010 took place in Brazil and Indonesia. Photograph: Nacho Doce/Reuters

Thanks to the Guardian‘s environment-focused reporting for this sad evidence on the state of affairs:

Subsidies to industries that cause deforestation worth 100 times more than aid to prevent it

Brazil and Indonesia paid over $40bn in subsidies to industries that drive rainforest destruction between 2009 and 2012 – compared to $346m in conservation aid they received to protect forests, according to new research

Brazil and Indonesia spent over 100 times more in subsidies to industries that cause deforestation than they received in international conservation aid to prevent it, according to a report by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI).

The two countries handed out over $40bn (£27bn) in subsidies to the palm oil, timber, soy, beef and biofuels sectors between 2009 and 2012 – 126 times more than the $346m they received to preserve their rainforests from the United Nations’ (UN) REDD+ scheme, mostly from Norway and Germany.

Continue reading →

Environmentalism, Puritanism and a Binocular View

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To slow global warming, we could blight every landscape with biofuel crops and wind turbines. But what about wildlife today? CREDIT ILLUSTRATION BY OLIVER MUNDAY

Jonathan Franzen, a writer who we have chosen to link to numerous times mainly because he is also clearly a bird guy, has a small masterpiece in this week’s New Yorker. Please, read it:

Last September, as someone who cares more about birds than the next man, I was following the story of the new stadium that the Twin Cities are building for their football Vikings. The stadium’s glass walls were expected to kill thousands of birds every year, and local bird-lovers had asked its sponsors to use a specially patterned glass to reduce collisions; the glass would have raised the stadium’s cost by one tenth of one per cent, and the sponsors had balked. Around the same time, the National Audubon Society issued a press release declaring climate change “the greatest threat” to American birds and warning that “nearly half ” of North America’s bird species were at risk of losing their habitats by 2080. Audubon’s announcement was credulously retransmitted by national and local media, including the Minneapolis Star Tribune, whose blogger on bird-related subjects, Jim Williams, drew the inevitable inference: Why argue about stadium glass when the real threat to birds was climate change? In comparison, Williams said, a few thousand bird deaths would be “nothing.” Continue reading →

Citizen Farmers

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Photo credit: Pattie Baker

Photo credit: Pattie Baker

As we “plant to the menu” at Marari Pearl we’re constantly looking at the inspiring stories of people who make the choice to stay connected with the land and the food we eat.

We met “Farmer D” when we participated in a newly created community garden while living near Atlanta. He and his family are now sowing seeds in California, and we know that he continues to spread the fruitful good word.

ABOUT THE BOOK
Biodynamic farming, with its focus on ecological sustainability, has emerged as the gold standard in the organic gardening movement. Daron Joffe (known as Farmer D) has made it his mission to empower, educate, and inspire people to become conscientious consumers, citizens, and stewards of the land. In this engaging call to action, Farmer D teaches us to not only create sustainable gardens but also to develop a more holistic, community-minded approach to how our food is grown and how we live our lives in balance with nature. Continue reading →

Waste Less, Want Less, Lean In, Pop Up

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In this Thursday, March 19, 2015 photo, chef Dan Barber hands a waiter an order of fried skate wing cartilage with smoked whitefish head tartar sauce at WastED in New York. Dishes using scraps and other ignored bits comprise the menu at chef Dan Barber's WastED, a pop-up project at one of his Blue Hill restaurants intended to shed light on the waste of food. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

In this Thursday, March 19, 2015 photo, chef Dan Barber hands a waiter an order of fried skate wing cartilage with smoked whitefish head tartar sauce at WastED in New York. Dishes using scraps and other ignored bits comprise the menu at chef Dan Barber’s WastED, a pop-up project at one of his Blue Hill restaurants intended to shed light on the waste of food. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Thanks to Hannah Goldfield for this post:

The other night, as I ate a salad at Blue Hill, in the West Village, a server approached my table with an iPad. “Have you seen this?” she asked. “Chef wanted you to see this.” By “Chef,” she meant Dan Barber, the man behind Blue Hill and Blue Hill Stone Barns, a sister restaurant and farm upstate. By “this,” she meant a photograph of a dumpster, into which a chute was depositing an enormous quantity of multi-colored scraps of fruit and vegetables—the runoff from a commercial food processor. The experience felt something similar to being shown a picture of what would happen to a sad-eyed old horse if you didn’t save it from the glue factory. Sitting in a small, enamel casserole dish in front of me were fruit and vegetable scraps that Barber had rescued, just like the ones in the photo. Arranged in an artful tangle, bits of carrot, apple, and pear were dressed with a creamy green emulsion, studded with pistachios, and garnished with a foamy pouf that turned out to be the liquid from canned chickpeas, whipped into haute cuisine. Continue reading →

Orcas In Captivity, Reviewed

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Author John Hargrove interacts with Kasatka during a show at SeaWorld. He calls her “the most dangerous whale in the corporation.” PHOTOGRAPH BY MELISSA HARGROVE

Author John Hargrove interacts with Kasatka during a show at SeaWorld. He calls her “the most dangerous whale in the corporation.” PHOTOGRAPH BY MELISSA HARGROVE

A book we had heard about, finally reviewed in a publication where it belongs to be taken seriously by a global audience of concerned citizens:

Former Trainer Slams SeaWorld for Cruel Treatment of Orcas

Author says the damage to these animals in the name of entertainment and profit is morally and ethically unacceptable.

By Simon Worrall, National Geographic

In 2013, the movie Blackfish exposed the dark side of orca shows at the marine park franchise SeaWorld by documenting the deaths of several trainers. John Hargrove, author of Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish, was the senior trainer at the time and one of the most experienced orca handlers in the world. He has since left SeaWorld and is now an advocate for orcas.

Speaking from his home in New York, he describes how a childhood experience in Florida made him fall in love with orcas, why he marvels at and fears them, how captivity impoverishes and deforms their lives, and why he believes it is time to stop treating orcas like circus animals.

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PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY PALGRAVE USA

The book opens with a terrifying experience with an orca called Freya. Put us inside that moment.

That was the first and only time in my career that I questioned whether I was going to make it out alive. In killer whale training you zip up that wet suit and believe in your relationship and your abilities. The incident took place at a SeaWorld affiliate in France. Freya was the most dangerous of all the whales that did water work there. That day I had been swimming with Freya’s son in another pool. She had been watching

Continue reading →