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Yule Heibel's Bookmarks tagged environment   View Popular

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"Environmental Heresies; The founder of The Whole Earth Catalog believes the environmental movement will soon reverse its position on four core issues," by Stewart Brand

Great article from May 2005, by Stewart Brand, on scientific thinking v romanticist thinking, applied to environmentalism and predictions for the future. Great stuff. It starts like this (and doesn't slow down):
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Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbani­zation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.
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Tags: mit_techreview, stewart_brand, environment, ecology, criticalthinking, futurismo on 2009-02-19 -All Annotations (6) -About

more fromwww.technologyreview.com

"Premier rightly targets blowhard NIMBYists," by Christopher Hume (Toronto Star)

Backed by a recent announcement by Dalton McGuinty (that "the province will limit the endless NIMBY wrangling that accompanies its every attempt to introduce environmental measures"), Hume takes aim at Toronto NIMBYs and blasts away. No holds barred, great stuff:
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The NIMBY response has become a given, a default position, an automatic reaction, a cliché. It's the same whether we're talking about highrise condos in north Toronto, narrowing Jarvis St. from five lanes to four, constructing a streetcar right-of-way on St. Clair Ave., rehabilitating the Wychwood Barns or trying to slow global warming to save the planet and this sorry ass of a city.

Many residents assume that to live in a neighbourhood confers the exclusive right to decide what should or shouldn't happen in it. In some cases, NIMBY opponents of homes for unwed mothers and the like have claimed the right to say who can live next door. The sense of entitlement behind such an attitude could sink a battleship.
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So true.

Tags: nimbyism, toronto, christopher_hume, cities, environment on 2009-02-17 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.thestar.com

"Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait / current work" by Chris Jordan

Fascinating project:
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Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibililties of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

~chris jordan, Seattle, 2008
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Tags: photography, visualization, statistics, consumerism, culture, environment, chris_jordan, art_projects on 2009-01-18 and saved by 103 people -All Annotations (3) -About

more fromwww.chrisjordan.com

Better Place || Electric Changes Everything

Hmmm, from the header: "electric changes everything :: When we break the cycle of oil dependence, new things become possible. See how the switch to electric transforms the relationship between cars, people and the planet."

Proposed solution? Electric everything?

Portal page.

Interesting - lots to explore...

Tags: ecology, economics, environment, electricity, futurismo, better_place, shai_agassi on 2008-12-01 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (1) -About

more fromwww.betterplace.com

Business Guide - David Suzuki Foundation

"New guide to cutting greenhouse gas emissions shows how businesses can save millions and the environment." Portal page for downloading the document(s), etc.

Tags: environment, ecology, economics, business, david_suzuki, green_strategies on 2008-12-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.davidsuzuki.org

The Gospel of Green | CBC News: the fifth estate

CBC portal page for a program on Germany's shift to a green(er) infrastructure/ economy, w/ focus on Hermann Scheer, parliamentarian who helped make it happen.
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Hermann Scheer is a German parliamentarian who has turned ideas into practical solutions. Because of the laws that bear his name, Germany is now a solar-paneled, windmill-building, job-producing green powerhouse of the industrialized world. Fifteen per cent of Germany's electricity now comes from renewable energy systems. Scheer predicts that, if his country continues on this course, that number could be 100 per cent by 2030.
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Tags: cbc, hermann_scheer, environment, economy, green_strategies, germany on 2008-11-21 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.cbc.ca

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Introduction: By Paul Hawken - SustainLane

Great defense of cities by Paul Hawken.
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Urban migration represents a kind of collective wisdom, and how we configure our cities will be critical to our survival. Regardless of the myths about living close to the land, cities are where human beings have the lowest ecological footprint. It takes less energy, wood, material, and food to provide a good life for a person in a city than in the country. Rather than perceive the city as an ecological sink sucking up the resources of the countryside, which cities can do, cities can also be a kind of ecological ark, places where humanity gathers while we peak in population and develop ecological intelligence for a new civilization. There is wisdom in this that is rather extraordinary. It was not predicted that cities might be the best strategy for our long-term survival and well-being. Yet that is exactly what is happening.
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Tags: sustainlane, paul_hawken, sustainability, cities, urbanization, environment, ecology on 2008-11-20 -All Annotations (9) -About

more fromwww.sustainlane.com

LED Lamp is Powered by Dirt | PSFK - Trends, Ideas & Inspiration

I wonder whether something like this could be used to power city streetlights? Just stick the poles in the ground, and ...?
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Sounding like something out of a science fair project, the Soil Lamp runs on mud. Designer Marieke Staps says that the metabolism of biological life within the soil produces enough electricity to power the lamp’s LED bulb. The mud is housed within copper and zinc cells that conduct the electricity produced within the wet soil. Maintenance is simple - pour a little water in the dirt, and the lamp will keep going.
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Tags: psfk, lighting, environment, innovation on 2008-11-13 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.psfk.com

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Oil sands will pollute Great Lakes, report warns

I was already opposed to the oil sands project on several levels (it seems inefficient, for one thing), but this really clinches it: exploiting the oil sands in Alberta will lead to a build up of refineries along the Great Lakes, which will raise pollution and environmental degradation levels exponentially in that region.

The article references a report by UofT's Munk Centre, which calls the pipeline network for transporting the fuel a "pollution delivery system."

Great...

Tags: pollution, oil_sands, canada, great_lakes, environment, water on 2008-10-08 -All Annotations (11) -About

more fromwww.theglobeandmail.com

WATT: World's 1st Sustainable Dance Club (SDC)

Page for WATT, Rotterdam's Sustainable Dance Club. Includes a really cool video (one guy, quoting verbatim, talks about how we're "leaving the tree hugger age" and moving into a whole new era that embraces innovation etc.). Found via Inhabitat (see http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/10/02/sustainable-dance-club-opens-in-rotterdam/), which includes more images.

Tags: dance_club, sustainability, innovation, rotterdam, environment on 2008-10-03 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.sustainabledanceclub.com

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A Concrete Fix to Global Warming (MIT Technology Review)

A company in Nova Scotia says it has developed a process by which manufacturers of precast concrete products can store 60Ts of CO2 in every 1000Ts of concrete product. This would be factory carbon dioxide (produced by heating the plant, running the machinery, etc.), which would be redirected onto the concrete, and absorbed (sequestered) by it, effectively negating the initial production of CO2. From the article:
QUOTE:
Concrete accounts for more than 5 percent of human-caused carbon-dioxide emissions annually, mostly because cement, the active ingredient in concrete, is made by baking limestone and clay powders under intense heat that is generally produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Making finished concrete products--by mixing cement with water, sand, and gravel--creates additional emissions because heat and steam are often used to accelerate the curing process.

But Robert Niven, founder of Halifax-based Carbon Sense Solutions, says that his company's process would actually allow precast concrete to store carbon dioxide. The company takes advantage of a natural process; carbon dioxide is already reabsorbed in concrete products over hundreds of years from natural chemical reactions. Freshly mixed concrete is exposed to a stream of carbon-dioxide-rich flue gas, rapidly speeding up the reactions between the gas and the calcium-containing minerals in cement (which represents about 10 to 15 percent of the concrete's volume). The technology also virtually eliminates the need for heat or steam, saving energy and emissions.
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One of the comments to the article notes that carbonated concrete wouldn't be good for use in reinforced concrete buildings because the carbonation reduces the alkalinity of the product, and that in turn affects the durability and strength of the rebar/ steel, but that it would work well for sidewalks (and presumably cinderblock type materials?).

Interesting development, at any rate, as concrete production accounts for 5% of the world's human-caused carbon-dioxide emissions annually.

Tags: mit_techreview, concrete, carbon_emissions, carbon_sequestering, environment on 2008-07-23 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.technologyreview.com

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Why daylight saving time is bad for the environment (Toronto Star)

"The annual time change has long been sold as a way to save energy, but the opposite might be true." I wouldn't mind if we stayed on one time all year round, although I admit liking daylight savings for the longer evenings. But then I don't live in an area that uses air conditioning -- the main reason why electricity use goes way up in DST and therefore there's a net increase in fuel / energy consumption (vs any sort of energy saving).

I dislike changing from standard time to daylight saving time and vice versa, the silly business of spring forward or falling back -- it feels like jet lag without any of the benefits of actual travel.

Tags: daylight_savings_time, dst, energy, environment on 2008-03-10 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.thestar.com

My Other Car is a Bright Green City - WorldChanging: Tools, Models and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future

via CEOs for Cities, an article by Alex Steffen, which argues for dense, urban communities that will help curb (literally) car use. \n\nFrom his intro preamble: "This is a rough draft of a long essay about why I believe building compact communities should be one of America's highest environmental priorities, and why, in fact, our obsession with building greener cars may be obscuring some fundamental aspects of the problem and some of the benefits of using land-use change as a primary sustainability solution."

Tags: alex_steffen, cars, cities, environment, green_strategies, sustainability, urbanism, worldchanging on 2008-01-25 and saved by 8 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.worldchanging.com

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Crosscut Seattle - Green is the new gold rush? Not without government R&D

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