I recently received my first vegetable basket of the year from my farm sharing program (I’ve decided to try and stop using the term “Community Supported Agriculture” because I find it a little unclear).

Besides being delicious, it’s also such a refreshing experience to feel even a little more connection to our food. Take, for example, the following excerpt from an email they recently sent out:

. . .we are blessed with a dynamic and efficient team, which includes Manuel, a foreign worker from Guatemala who is really friendly and adapting to his new environment. In these parts, May 20th is usually the date after which risks of frost have dissipated, but the day before yesterday, the mercury fell very low and affected several tomato plants we had recently planted as well as basil plants. The flea beetles, a tiny coleopteran that emerges from dormancy when the temperatures reach 18ºC, really love our asian greens and have caught us off guard and left little holes in the tender leaves. In the sheepbarn, many lambs have come this spring and we are waiting for a flock of laying hens.

The farm also encourages people to come and visit so they can see exactly where their food comes from. They’ve got a great website too (en Français).

(( Diagram via Sparknotes ))

Herman Daly, ecological economist, in an interview with Seed Magazine:

Elementary economic theory describes something called a circular flow diagram: Firms supply goods and services to households, which in turn supply labor and capital factors of production back to the firms. This flow goes around and around, and money flows in the opposite direction to pay for it.

The way it’s usually depicted is as a closed circulatory system. What’s imagined is the economy’s digestive system: the input of low-entropy raw materials from the environment and the expulsion of high-entropy waste products back into the environment. A fundamental assumption of those who treat the economy like a totally circular exchange is that the environment is infinite relative to us, that natural resources and space absorb our waste are not scarce. The assumption is no longer valid.

. . . we’re faced with two impossibilities. On one hand, it’s politically impossible to stop growth. On the other hand, it’s biophysically impossible to continue it ad infinitum.

When summer comes around, I bike everywhere I can. It’s almost always the healthiest, fastest, and cheapest way to get around. The biggest deterrent for me personally are cars. Every spring I usually have a few close calls because drivers have not yet readjusted to having to look out for bikes. As my city develops a more bike-friendly culture, I have seen this decline, but it’s still there.

Bike lanes can help by creating a clear space for bikes, letting drivers know where to avoid, but they don’t often go where you need them to go.

Enter the Light Lane. It’s just a concept, but it seems like something that could feasibly be built.

“Our system projects a crisply defined virtual bike lane onto pavement, using a laser, providing the driver with a familiar boundary to avoid. With a wider margin of safety, bikers will regain their confidence to ride at night, making the bike a more viable commuting alternative.”

Via Spacing Montréal.

I stumbled across this article from the economist, which briefly outlines some of the mechanisms which collective animals like bees and cockroaches make decisions. An excerpt:

Another form of groupthink occurs when people are either isolated from crucial sources of information or dominated by other members of the group, some of whom may have malevolent intent. This too has now been demonstrated in animals. José Halloy of the Free University of Brussels used robotic cockroaches to subvert the behaviour of living cockroaches and control their decision-making process. In his experiment, reported in an earlier issue of Science, the artificial bugs were introduced to the real ones and soon became sufficiently socially integrated that they were perceived as equals. By manipulating the robots, which were in the minority, he was able to persuade the cockroaches to choose an inappropriate shelter—even one which they had rejected before being infiltrated by machines.

I think we can easily find parallels to this in our own society. Deliberate disinformation campaigns by the cigarette industry and the fossil fuel industry regarding the safety of smoking and global warming, respectively, delayed the progression of the debate on these issues by years, maybe decades.

Via Policy Economist.

Partially inspired by this talk from the Long Now foundation (don’t ask me how), I got thinking about concept cars, and in particular how they tend to shape the view of the public. While they may represent a far-off future of the automotive industry, I find it interesting to see how much attention they tend to get, despite their often blatant impracticality in the present.

Above is the Hummer O2, which was created as part of an environmental design competition in 2006. While its intentions may have been good, it will never become a production car. It’s designed to have algae-filled panels which turn sunlight into fuel on the go, opening like “a flower” to capture the sun’s energies. The stupidity of carrying around several hundred pounds of algae-filled water to make a tiny fraction of the fuel needed should be pretty obvious. It’s the sort of empty, glamourous design that doesn’t make any sense in the real world.

Yet it somehow—bafflingly—managed to win the environmental design competition.

This is the sort of work that gives design a bad name. It’s the sort of empty, far-flung futurism that lead people to mistakenly believe that biofuels or hydrogen or what have you are just around the corner, and that they can just keep on driving like oil isn’t about to peak, or global warming is not a problem. That convinces them they can still buy a wasteful house in the suburbs because technology will come to their rescue, despite the fact that there is little indication that we can or will make any such switch.

“Real artists ship” was something said by Steve Jobs when working on the original Macintosh. Apple almost never releases any design concepts (at least under Jobs). They stick to what they can ship. You can bet that their designers have some fantastic sketches filed away, but they don’t let that get mixed up with their products.

The car companies have been trumpeting biofuels, hydrogen, and electric cars for years, and I think it’s lead us to become lazy about the future of our energy system. We have to stop deluding ourselves into thinking Hydrogen is just over the horizon—it’s been “almost here” for the last couple of decades.

What we can and should do now is reduce our dependence on cars. We don’t have to stop driving, we just need make sure we live in places that allow us to walk, bike or take public transit.

CBC’s Best of Ideas Podcast has just completed a fantastic series on Climate change by author Gwynne Dyer. It’s 3 hours long, and does a great job summarizing of the current state of the climate crisis. Riveting and sobering.

Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3

I just finished reading Janine Benyus’ Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, which is the sort of book that places itself very firmly on the optimistic side of the environmental debate. It is almost 300 pages of possible solutions to many of our problems based on the designs created by natural selection in nature. It covers everything from using shape-changing proteins to store digital information, to mimicking a natural prairie in our agriculture by using perennials instead of annuals.

So many of the ideas presented in the book are inspiring. Who can help but be impressed and humbled by a spider who is able to create a substance with a tensile strength greater than steel, in water, at room temperature, out of the flies and gnats they eat. Our methods of material creation ( toxic chemicals + heat + pressure ) seem so clumsy and wasteful in comparison.

Still, after a lengthy string of breakthroughs and observations presented in the book, I couldn’t help but be a little weary of this overly-technocratic look at our environmental issues. Technology is going to be extremely important in combatting our numerous environmental problems, but it’s only a small piece of the puzzle.

The sort of changes we need go well beyond simply swapping-out our incandescent bulbs and installing programmable thermostats. We need a fundamental shift in the way we live, in the way we move, the way we eat, in our economy and in our social norms. The book argues that we need to find a balanced existence not predicated on depletion of resources and unlimited growth. It’s going to be bumpy, but solving these problems is going to need real, deep social change.

At the very end of Biomimicry I ran across an observation made by Wendell Berry which touches on just one small element of social change. In Benyus’ words:

Berry argues, for instance, that shoddy workmanship is a much greater threat to our forests than clear-cutting. Only when we come to value the well-made chair or table that lasts a lifetime will we begin to value and save the source of these things, whole forests instead of trees. When the product of that forest is a durable idea, as it is in biomimicry, the same valuing of source will occur.

In short, we need to reject the whole notion of a commodity-based, disposable culture. We need to start buying things to last instead of to throw out. This often means putting-up more money up-front, but saving more in the long term. It also means being more careful and selective about the things we buy.

The Resilience Science Blog points to this fascinating article from New Scientist about humanity’s ever-rising impact on the environment. The graphs are perhaps the most striking thing in the article—the one above plots population, water use, CO2 concentration, GDP, Species extinction and more. Which is which is almost irrelevant—the trend is clear.

Resilience Science has an even more extensive series of graphs from the article, which stresses the need to move from an economy of exploitation and growth to one that is truly sustainable.

I’ve kept my eyes on Dubai’s development ever since hearing stories about $300 slices of cake served in the restaurant atop the Burj Al Arab (the world’s fanciest hotel, apparently, and certainly not the most reasonably priced). Just the lobby of the building is large enough that clouds formed in it when first built. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, as Dubai has embarked on mega-project after mega-project, including a whole series of islands, a downtown core, the world’s largest amusement park, and much more. Before they had even completed work on a record-breaking 800m high Burj Dubai, they began drawing plans for the 1200m high Al Burj.

On a certain level I have to respect their vision. Financial-crisis aside, oil is most-likely running out, and they seem to have embraced tourism and trade as replacements. They’re trying to build a world-class metropolis from the ground-up.

Aside from many glaring questions about whether this is sustainable financially and environmentally, my main concern is the sheer speed of expansion. A city is an incredibly complex web of various factors, and I personally believe that it is well beyond the capabilities of any designer or design team to draft up a fully functioning city in the middle of a desert in one fell swoop.

They may well get lucky and come up with the right mix of ingredients, but in my eyes a city is something that builds itself over the course of decades. Only time will tell, but the speed here certainly is alarming.

For a summary of recent Dubai building projects, I suggest the aptly, if not overly-simplisticly named Dubai is Nuts.

This is a cute little concept for cheap, biodegradable stir sticks for coffee shops – hard pasta. Washable spoons would be even better, but these would do the trick -especially for places who compost.

Via Chris.