Wind, Water, Light

/ Amie Inman / 1 Comment

Janet Echelman, Her Secret is Patience, Phoenix, AZ, U.S.A. 2009

American artist Janet Echelman has worked in numerous mediums throughout her career and has a long history of working collaboratively with communities outside of her own culture, whether it be Balinese textile artisans or Indian bronze castors.

A Fulbright lectureship about painting brought her to Mahabalipuram, India, a fishing village in Tamil Nadu famous for sculpture. But it was watching the millennia-old craft of weaving and working with nets that ultimately inspired the work that now defines her art. When she watched the men making piles of nets on the shore she began wondering if the material was “a way to create volumetric form without heavy, solid materials.”   Continue reading →

New Energy From The Amazon

/ Organikos / 2 Comments

Guest Author: Tyler Gage

Crist asked if I would share some of our experience starting up Runa because, as a social enterprise, we are working in some of the same space–environmental and social responsibility being centerpieces of our business model–as other businesses that Raxa Collective showcases on this site.  We agreed that a good place to start would be with some questions we encounter frequently.  If there is interest in hearing more, I will be back to tell more of the story in finer detail.

Your website says Runa does not actually farm Guayusa. What do you do and why should people care about Guayusa?

Runa is creating markets for beverages created with Guayusa (“gwhy-you-sa), a native Amazonian tree leaf that contains more caffeine and double the antioxidants of any tea. With a flavor that is smooth and clean, guayusa offers a new kind of energy what the indigenous Kichwa people call “mental strength and courage”. Continue reading →

Bambouzle

/ Amie Inman / 1 Comment

France has a horticultural history that goes back centuries, from the forested hunting grounds to the formal gardens of kings.  But “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” leads to parks for the people, offering countless opportunities for visitors to fulfill their desires to commune with nature.

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Wordsmithing: Spa

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When it is capitalized, this word refers to the mineral springs in Liège, Belgium, believed to have curative properties.  In the last several centuries the meaning of the word has been generalized to refer to almost any place that has curative mineral waters, according to OED, so that “a town, locality, or resort possessing a mineral spring or springs; a watering-place of this kind” is fairly known as a spa.

The generalization has expanded further in recent decades through commercialization, and as always OED’s tracking of the etymology is intriguing:

A commercial establishment which offers health and beauty treatment (esp. for women) through steam baths, exercise equipment, massage, and the like. U.S.

1960    Life 8 Feb. 111/1   The submerged specter above‥is getting a hydraulic underwater massage at a plush health spa near San Diego called the Golden Gate beauty resort whose customers are usually female.
1976    Vogue Dec. 214/1   Most American spas are designed exclusively for women.
1981    W. Safire in N.Y. Times Mag. 21 June 10/2   Only fuddy-duddies go to the gym,‥the upscale‥crowd goes to the spa.

Breaking News! Prices of Old Newspapers Soar!

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Guest Author: Diwia Thomas

While asking around for newspaper donations, I often meet with reluctance and wondered why?  Ten years ago a kilo of old newspaper fetched only a meagre Rs 3/- , today the raddi-wala (the guy down the road who buys scrap) pays an enticing and irresistible Rs 7/- per kg.  I promptly made a trip down there to broker a deal with him for a steady supply of newspaper for our paper bags. He tells me that newsprint companies in India have begun to recycle old newspaper into newsprint. In the past newspaper was recycled into boards or brown coloured paper for packaging and boxes because recycled newsprint turns a dull greyish colour unsuitable for printing. Indian newspaper companies have found ways to deink newsprint pulp and retain its brightness for printing purposes. Mammoth deinking machines do this job. Featured here is a small one, just to demonstrate the process. Continue reading →

Le Vélo Bambou? Le Wow!

/ Amie Inman / 4 Comments

Bicycles are ubiquitous forms of transportation in my part of the world.  Previously I’ve posted how they can mean more than the sum of their parts, or in the urban art example, they can represent only their parts!

So what happens when form and function converge with sustainability, balance and simplicity? Continue reading →

Pause and Reflect

/ Amie Inman / 3 Comments

Land Art Installations can be as varied as the land they sit upon and the vision of the individuals who create them.   Sometimes urban and often in wilderness areas, they almost always offer a window into the hearts of their creators.

I’ve spoken about the convergence of art and architecture in previous posts, and Swedish firm Kjellgren Kaminsky Architecture was one such example.   Whereas the installation Clear Cut makes a visual statement about a particular conservation issue, Reflecting Time is a study of the interaction of  light and landscape.

The team headed north along the Norwegian coast, their only tools for this ephemeral installation 100 simple reflectors and the cameras they would need to record the work.  They climbed the seaside mountain, placing the reflectors in straight, parallel lines that defied the undulating landscape.  Then they spent time by the sea itself, marking the coast with tiny glimmers.

The tide is strong in Norway shifting the sea level up to 2 meters every day. A line of reflectors marked the coast, sometimes the reflectors lay on the ground later they float in the water. We made a ring further out in the sea untouched by the tide. It had an ephemeral glow that fascinated us.

In both cases the changing light and tides did the work, the art lay in meditating on the results.

Resilience, or Failure?

/ Seth Inman / 1 Comment

It is said that our early experiences create connections in our brains that last throughout our lives. In one particular case I know this to be true: visiting Tikal and Copan as a child filled me with a lifelong awe and interest in the Mayans. So in my current studies it is an easy leap from that simple interest to a more scholarly one.

For hundreds of years human civilizations have looked back on previous societies and wondered why they made certain decisions, how they coped with diverse problems, and what caused them to change. In his popular book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Pulitzer-winning author Jared Diamond examines societies that he claims had unsustainable relationships with their ecosystems, and describes how their actions largely led to their demise. He also refers to some current communities, such as those of modern-day Rwanda, but for my purposes I will only address the past societies (the most academically pertinent and personally interesting to me being the Mayans, because their disappearance from their grandiose cities–Tikal and Copán, for example–has historically been mysterious, and may be closely related to environmental stresses). Continue reading →

Protecting Penguins

/ Milo Inman / 2 Comments

Penguins – one of the most charismatic and charming birds on the planet, and yet very few people ever get the chance to see them. They are not enigmatic, nor are they rare, for the most part. And yet, the majority of people are under the impression that the only penguins living today are the Emperor Penguins, and that they live in the Arctic region. However, not only are the emperors one in over twenty extant species, but no penguins whatsoever live in the Arctic region. In fact, no penguins at all even live in the northern hemisphere – all are native to the southern hemisphere, but not exclusively in icy-cold climates such as Antarctica. They are spread over the entire hemisphere, with significant populations on the east coast of South America, the entire Sub-Antarctic, Oceania, and various islands on the Indian and Pacific oceans.

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A Four Year Echo Of Hope

/ Crist Inman / 3 Comments

For all of the challenges facing the Gulf Of California region ecologically, global trends in sustainable tourism offer potential solutions.  Broadly speaking, the mass tourism model propagated on the most accessible coastal regions of the world—particularly those visited by European and North American travelers—has been challenged by this alternative model.

Still, the mass tourism model has its advocates, in Mexico as in other parts of the world, and creeps into the planning models of destinations where sustainable development is the nominal platform. This happens because for at least half a century the notion of success or failure in tourism development has been defined according to this older model.  If WWF is to have an effective strategy for conservation in the GOC region, then a clear definition of competitiveness vis a vis sustainability must be established.

Those words opened the first draft of a report submitted four years ago . Continue reading →

Cochin Sunsets

/ Milo Inman / 2 Comments

From two of the windows in our flat in Cochin, the sunset at around 6 is visible, albeit with some structural interference. Nonetheless, the colors and hues, scientifically explained only two days ago, are visible from almost the entire city, or at least all the windows facing west Continue reading →

October Air

/ Amie Inman / 2 Comments

National Geographic Magazine, Vol. 1

There must be something in the air.  Some Universal Energy of Inspiration that touches down in October, if not annually, then biannually for a brief moment in time. Or is it just coincidence that two events of such simple, yet great significance should have happened on the same date?

What had begun as an elite club for academics and wealthy travel enthusiasts was reorganized in January 1888 into  “a society for the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge.”  The National Geographic Society was incorporated a few weeks later and the first issue of the magazine was published as its official journal on October 1st.

William Morris Davis, often called the “father of American Geography” was an early member and contributor who wrote the introduction to Vol.1 of the newly minted magazine.

History became a science when it outgrew mere narration and searched for the causes of the facts narrated; when it ceased to accept old narratives as absolute records and judged them by criteria derived from our knowledge of human nature as we see it at present, but modified to accord with past conditions.

The society’s historic mission has continued for well over a hundred years, extending beyond the specifics of geography to increase and diffuse geographic knowledge while promoting the conservation of the world’s cultural, historical, and natural resources.”

And so we come to conservation.  Continue reading →