an experiential adventure
National Geographic has an article about China’s Instant Cities that is actually more scarey than amazing - how the hell can that mass production environment be sustainable? Seriously? Is this why the Yellow River doesn’t reach the sea at some points of the year now? Mass environmental issues on the horizon.
Eric’s well written suggestion about taxing plastic bags reminds me of a book I reviewed recently - Cradle to Cradle. We need to start seeing this as a design problem.
They pollinate one third of the food we consume. Without the bee there would be no fruit or vegetables to speak of and the bees are disappearing.
An image says a thousand words - two images show as spheres how much water (including seawater, lakes, ice, and so forth) and how much air is available to us on great mother Earth. We probably couldn’t see the water if it was only fresh drinkable water, I’d expect. Its not that much when you think of it.
Mary Lou Jepsen’s Keynote to the Greener Gadgets Conference explains that designing for the poorest people in the world and trying to do the right thing led to the greenest laptop in the world - the XO laptop also known as the $100 laptop or the one laptop per child program. Battery (with processing) decomposes into fertilizer, 5% - 10% power consumption, no mercury, cadmium, lead or chromium, recyclable, 2.5 times the typical lifetime. The full length video of her keynote is also available.
Mieke Gerritzen’s LIFT08 presentation on Next Nature is both interesting and to some extent environmentally worrying - designing nature can be a little dangerous in the long term.
Cradle to Cradle, a book written by William McDonough and German chemist Michael Braungart, is a manifesto calling for the transformation of human industry through ecologically intelligent design. Waste = Food.
A cool Discovery Channel video which looks at the technologies we may be interacting with in 2057 (although hopefully we should be cutting energy consumption at the same time)