Wooden Spoons
It may seem hard to believe now, with so many man-made materials in our kitchens, but once upon a time, wooden spoons were the key players in cooking and baking.
Do The Green Thing Countdown 25/29
Continuing our promotion of Do The Green Thing’s campaign on behalf of WWF for Earth Hour, we point you to Switch Off Engine by Harry Pearce in which he:
…takes a warning sign from the depths of the car world and reuses it to create a messages that instructs us to step away from our vehicles and go by foot instead.
“The visual language of obedience demands our attention and compliance,” says Harry. “Maybe the car industry should follow its own rules.”
Why?
Bird of the Day: Eastern Screech-Owl (Magee Marsh, Ohio)
Libraries Old And New, Big And Small, At The Core Of Communities
This book by Robert Dawson pays attention to one of the institutions we care most about, libraries–specifically public ones. Why do we care so much about them? Because of the essential role they play in so many communities, both small and large, with regard to education and egalitarian opportunity.
Toni Morrison’s assessment of the book is that “Robert Dawson’s work is an irrefutable argument for the preservation of public libraries. His book is profound and heartbreakingly beautiful.” From the author/photographer’s own website the text that introduces the work is a mix of promotion and fact:
This project is a photographic survey of public libraries throughout the United States featuring essays on libraries and the public commons from prominent American writers. The book The Public Library: A Photographic Essay will be published in April, 2014 by Princeton Architectural Press. ISBN 978-1-61689-217-3
Smallest library, now closed, Hartland Four Corners, Vermont
There are over 17,000 public libraries in this country. Since I began the project in 1994, I have photographed hundreds of libraries in forty-eight states. From Alaska to Florida, New England to the West Coast, the photographs reveal a vibrant, essential, yet threatened system.
For the past two centuries public libraries in America have functioned as a system of noncommercial centers that help us define what we value and what we share. The modern library in the computer age is in the midst of reinventing itself. What belongs in a library? Continue reading
Adyanpara Waterfalls
The nightly Adyanpara Waterfalls are nestled near the city of Nilambur. Not many know of its existence. Even though I belong to the same city, I came to know of it only quite recently.
At Adyanpara, the speeding stream finds its way through the ups and downs of the contours of a black rocky terrain that plummet around 300 feet. The stream flows through the rain forest to the rocky basin with a series of cascades all along the way; however most of them are too tiny to be taken seriously. The swift stream in due course gets morphed into the bigger and slower River Chaliyar.
Recycling’s Rare Odd Find
We should recycle, re-use, waste less just because. Occasionally there are distracting stories about other reasons for these more eco-efficient behaviors. A copy of the USA Declaration Of Independence found in a “junk” sale–that sort of thing. These rare occurrences just make it more fun to do the green thing:
When a scrap metal dealer from U.S. Midwest bought a golden ornament at a junk market, it never crossed his mind that he was the owner of a $20 million Faberge egg hailing from the court of imperial Russia.
In a mystery fit for the tumultuous history of Russia’s ostentatious elite, the 8-cm (3-inch) golden egg was spirited out of St Petersburg after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and then disappeared for decades in the United States. Continue reading
Do The Green Thing Countdown 24/29
We will walk the walk until March 29, when Earth Hour comes, and talk that walk too. To infinity, and beyond, if possible. Yesterday, when this campaign first came to our attention, we posted three samples from the campaign linked from Phaidon’s article. Today, straight from the source:
Our motto is Creativity vs Climate Change. Our product is a feed of beautiful, subversive and delightful inspiration made by great creative talent from around the world. Our aim is to inspire as many people as possible to live in a less selfish, less consumptive, more imaginative and more sustainable way. Try it. You might even like it. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Blue-tailed Bee-eater (Mysore, Karnataka)
Pro-Environment Posters For WWF’s March 29 Earth Hour Initiative
Walk the Walk by Marina Willer for 29 Posters for the Planet
We appreciate collaborative efforts to raise awareness about environmental issues, especially when they come from places where the focus is not normally on conservation. Design agencies are generally designed to sell more stuff. Publishers are generally designed to use ex-trees to communicate stuff. But some designers are on the other side of the consumer behavior-influencing fence. And some publishers use those ex-trees to publicize a more tree-centric future. Ethics sometimes prevail over ambition. Education sometimes jumps the line.
Professional communities–whether design firms, publishers, hotel companies or take your pick–all have latent collective action lurking in their futures. We hope nature and culture are the beneficiaries. Thanks in particular at this moment to publisher Phaidon, which is in itself worthy of a post on its series of environmentally-friendly books and initiatives, for bringing this initiative of design firm Pentagram to our attention:
Pentagram’s carbon free foot print
Design agency works with Do The Green Thing charity on environmentally friendly posters
The gulf between our high-consumption lifestyles and the kind of sustainable world many of us hope to inhabit is vast. Yet the changes that could take us there aren’t unthinkable, as our recent book, The World We Made, makes clear. Continue reading
Taj Mahal
Photo credit: Sanjayan
A Unesco World Heritage Site and considered one of the eight wonders of the world, the Taj Mahal is in Agra in the Indian state of Utterpradesh. Twenty-two thousand laborers and craftsmen worked on the mausoleum complex between A.D. 1631 and 1653, to the cost of what is believed to be thirty-two crore (320 million) rupees. Continue reading
Sophie Olsen, Come To Kerala!
It has been a while since we extended one of these invitations. More frequently than we realized, these invitations have some connection to water. This exhibit on Sophie Olsen’s website, which came to our attention due to a blog post by Jessie Wender on the New Yorker’s website, leaves us wanting to learn more about the people she has photographed. With the photograph featured in Wender’s post there is just a small bit of context:
OLSEN: Diving down to the ocean bed without any equipment, Ngui is searching for fish to bring home to his family, on the Surin Islands, off the coast of Thailand. This photograph is part of a larger series about the sea nomads called the Mokens. Traditionally, one Moken family lives for as many nine months of the year on a boat; their children learn how to swim before they can walk.
So, what better than to invite Sophie to come to Kerala and tell us more in person. Until then, on the Dazed website there is an archived blurb about this exhibit that looks like about as much as we will learn for now: Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Barn Swallow (Mysore, Karnataka)
Nākd Bars Revisited
A while back I was exposed to the wonder of Nākd bars, and I shared some reasons why you should eat them. Now, I’ve had the luck to try several more of their creative and delicious flavors. Before I dive into those, a quick aside: along with seven hundred other students, this semester I’m taking one of the most popular classes at Cornell University, Introduction to Wines. One of the course goals is learning how to parse the different aromas and their combination with the wine’s acidity, alcohol, and other elements, all of which come together to make a complex liquid.
As I tasted more Nākd bar flavors this year, I thought to myself that if I was being taught how to judge and analyze such a complicated thing as wine, then there was no reason I couldn’t apply the same process to something as naturally simple as a Nākd bar, and write some brief thoughts on the new flavors I tried! Continue reading
Banasura Sagar Dam – Wayanad
Photo credits : Surus
Banasura Sagar Dam is situated about 16 Km from Kalpetta in Wayanad district. It is constructed in the Banasura Lake and the nearby mountains are known as the Banasura hills. It is the largest earth dam in India and second largest in Asia. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Great Egret (Coal Oil Point Preserve, California)
If You Happen To Be In New York City
Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris
January 29 – May 4, 2014
…As the exhibition of his photographs at the Metropolitan Museum makes clear, Marville was the right man for the job. For starters, he was a local. His father was a tailor, his mother a laundress. He grew up on a cramped street near the Louvre that later vanished to make way for one of Haussmann’s imperial avenues. Like Baudelaire, his contemporary, Marville honed his eye on Paris; the city taught him to see…
Brought to our attention by a post on the New Yorker’s website today, from which the snippet of text above is taken (and where you can see 10 excellent images from the collection the text describes), this exhibit catches our eye because it has to do with both the history of photography and the cultural heritage of a lost form of Paris:
Exhibition Location: Galleries for Drawings, Prints, and Photographs, Second Floor, Galleries 691-693
Press Preview: Monday, January 27, 2014, 10 a.m.–noon Continue reading
Kovalam Beach – Kerala
Photo credits: Dileep
Kovalam Beach is situated outside the capital city of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram. Comprised of three adjacent crescent beaches and a massive rocky promontory, the beach forms a beautiful bay of calm waters ideal for sea bathing. For all these reasons it has been a favorite for tourists from around India and the world. Continue reading
Energy, Development and the Global Environment
Bosch is testing the viability of electric cars in Singapore. Photograph: Samuel He/Bosch
Normally we avoid articles that look strictly like press releases promoting a PR firm’s client. However, in this case, a couple of exceptions were allowed. First, we like the storyline because of its relevance to three years’ worth of posts on our site. Second, there is not one iota of obnoxious flimflam, which is what normally forces us to avoid press releases.
But, an additional component to this one really made the difference. Nearly one year ago two of Raxa Collective’s contributors had the opportunity to visit Duke University and sit in the office of the founder and director of their Center for Energy, Development and the Global Environment. A conversation that was meant to last 15 minutes continued for hours that day, because of the credible commitment that Center and its leadership are making to ensure that future business leaders see sustainability as serious business. So, we gladly pass this newsworthy article on:
When it comes to sustainability ambitions, Singapore might take the prize. The island nation, which currently relies on neighboring Malaysia for its water, is aiming for water self-sufficiency by 2050, with 55% of its water needs met via recycled water and 25% from seawater desalination. Continue reading
Organikos 