Tuesday, August 10. 2010Plastic is a new material in the Earths ecosystemVia NextNature
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by Koert van Mensvoort
I gathered this hand full of tiny pieces of plastic on less than one square meter of beach in Greece (map). Spotted with the Next Nature Spotter iPhone app. Related Links:Friday, July 09. 2010How Far the Oil Could Spread in a YearVia GOOD
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by Andrew Price
Via BLDGBLG
Personal comment:
Nobody speaks about it that much anymore, don't they? (at least here in Europe). The headline time is over, thanks to what? football? Wednesday, June 09. 2010Floating Mobile Gardens(Image by Rael San Fratello Architects.) What better way to introduce invasive species; cluster bomb pollens on nature-deprived asthmatic children and, to the delight of Big Pharma, Claritin-addicted allergy sufferers; and deplete the coffers of post-econopocalypse cities by littering their streets with fallen fruits and leafy detritus for their under budgeted public works department to clean up, than with a floating mobile garden. (Image by Rael San Fratello Architects.) As envisioned by Rael San Fratello Architects, these nomadic gardens “would be suspended in the air from large remotely controlled dirigibles. Each inflatable craft would house thousands of smaller plants attached to long vines. A family of dirigibles would migrate within a city, moving towards areas where the heat island effect is greatest, and also migrate seasonally, traveling to southern cities during winter months and northern cities during summer months.” One wonders if there will be an outbreak of botanical piracy, whereby someone lassos in one of the floating mobile gardens by the tentacles and anchors it right above his house all summer long, its cooling shades cutting down his air conditioner use, not to mention his electricity bill. Perhaps urban adventurers will also snag one of these gardens, but only temporarily, long enough for them to explore its feral tendrils and gelatinous parterres. They'll emerge out of their sewers and their abandoned hospitals, and, squinting hard at the fullness of the sun, they'll climb up, up, up, up towards the clouds, the heaviness of their claustrophobic playgrounds giving way to buoyancy and vistas. Nearby, meanwhile, will be another parked garden crawling with Avatar cosplayers. (Image by Rael San Fratello Architects.) Finally, we read that “each plant is attached to an individual propelled device that allows it to be set free from it’s base. Controlled by GPS and GIS information and organized in flocking patterns, plants move through the city in swarms hydrating, providing shade, and bring oxygen to greenless spaces in the urban field.” Clearly this means that any rogue robo-botanical hacker will be able to stage a vegetal version of The Birds. (Go see Rael San Fratello Architects in Consume at Exit Art in New York from June 18 to August 28, 2010. A project of SEA (Social Environmental Aesthetics), Consume “is a multimedia group exhibition and event series that investigates the world's systems of food production, distribution, consumption and waste.”)
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Territory
at
09:43
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, artificial reality, ecology, mobility, nature, speculation, territory
Tuesday, May 25. 2010Sixty-Six Percent NaturalVia Edible Geography
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by Nicola
IMAGE: Screen grab showing global agricultural land-use in 1700, from World Cropland, Bill Rankin, 2009. At Bill Rankin’s fantastic Radical Cartography site you can see an animation that shows the intensification and spread of agricultural land-use around the world over the past three hundred years.
IMAGES: Screen grabs showing global agricultural land-use in 1750 and 1800, from World Cropland, Bill Rankin, 2009. I could spend hours with these maps: for example, it’s amazing to see that agricultural activity in India in 1700 is as intensive, if not more so, than in the traditional bread-baskets of the Caucasus or the densely populated areas of Northern Europe. The persistent un-farmed patch of France’s Massif Central is also interesting: even the Alps appear to have more agricultural activity.
IMAGES: Screen grabs showing global agricultural land-use in 1850 and 1900, from World Cropland, Bill Rankin, 2009. Rankin notes that the major trend of the past three hundred years is simply the intensification of farming practices on land that was already agricultural, “punctuated by several episodes of rapid expansion into previously untapped areas: the Great Plains in the late nineteenth century, Argentina in the early twentieth century, and in last few decades, Brazil and central India.” He also points out rare but occasional declines in agricultural density: in the “central Amazon, northern Patagonia, or the Appalachian Piedmont after World War II.”
IMAGES: Screen grabs showing global agricultural land-use in 1950 and 1992, from World Cropland, Bill Rankin, 2009. You might be wondering how Rankin knows what percentage of land was used for growing crops in 1700, before much of the world had even been charted, let alone systematically analysed in terms of land-use. The dataset on which Rankin’s animation is based was developed by Navin Ramankutty and Jonathan Foley, whose methodology relied on an assessment of global agricultural land in 1992, at “5 min spatial resolution” (about 10 km at the equator), by “calibrating a remotely sensed land cover classification data set against cropland inventory data.” They then compiled an “extensive database of historical cropland inventory data, at the national and subnational level, from a variety of sources,” and processed that information through their 1992 land cover/inventory algorithm, in order to arrive at a historical reconstruction. As Ramankutty and Foley freely acknowledge, the resulting map is a guess, albeit an extremely educated one that also matches what we know of “the history of human settlement and patterns of economic development.” As always, much of the interest in maps like these lies in thinking about what is or isn’t measured—and why. Personally, I’m intrigued by the intensification metric, and the visual implication, as Bill Rankin puts it, that “many agricultural areas are at close to 100% exploitation.” This doesn’t seem quite right: Ramankutty and Foley are measuring agricultural land use (and only at a resolution of about 10 km at the equator), not productive potential. After all, surely an area of land could be solely devoted to agriculture and yet produce wildly differing yields depending on the crops sown and the farming techniques used? IMAGE: Map showing the suitability of land for agriculture. The map (larger view here) is derived from more data sets developed by Ramankutty and Foley, available at the Atlas of the Biosphere. Elsewhere, Ramankutty and Foley have also collaborated to map agricultural potential, based on “the temperature and soil conditions of each grid cell.” Somewhat implausibly, since agriculture both shapes and is shaped by human civilisation, the suitability rating ignores human inputs—urban sprawl, artificial irrigation, topsoil creation—altogether. Stepping even further away from plausibility (and human intervention), Ramankutty and Foley subsequently produced a fascinating map of potential vegetation, showing “the vegetation that would exist at a given location had human forms of land use never existed.” IMAGE: Map of potential vegetation. The map (larger view here) is derived from more data sets developed by Ramankutty and Foley, available at the Atlas of the Biosphere. It is an alternate surface of the earth, carefully surveyed and classified by a human civilization that could not have existed in order for it to be a reality. On a similar note, Colorado State University researcher David Theobald has designed a new system for evaluating and mapping the “naturalness” of a landscape. In his review, Rob Goldstein describes Theobald’s methodology thus:
Using this technique, Theobald arrived at “a natural landscape score of .6621 for the conterminous United States in 2001.” In other words, the lower forty-eight states are sixty-six percent “natural,” and only one-third human-designed, or “unnatural.” The project seems flawed on several levels (it is somewhat incredible that Owens Valley, with its hijacked river and poisonous lake-bed, could receive the “highest naturalness” scores under any rubric), but the paradox of its premise is fascinating—that a pure form of nature can be carefully located and recognised as such by humans whose activity otherwise renders impossible its very existence. Theobald suggests that his system is a useful tool for conservationists seeking to prioritise their efforts. To me, however, it is more interesting as a geographic expression of impossible nostalgia—the land-use database equivalent of medieval monks calculating how many angels could dance on a pin. Personal comment:
This is to be put in parallel with Jared Diamond's book: Guns Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies that explain the evolution of human socities from a geographic/food point of view, that would in a way generate, according to Diamond, social and cultural diversities. An eye opening book on the interaction between environment and human societies.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Territory
at
09:22
Defined tags for this entry: agriculture, ecology, environment, globalization, interferences, territory
Wednesday, May 19. 2010The Anthropocene Debate: Marking Humanity’s ImpactVia WorldChanging & Is human activity altering the planet on a scale comparable to major geological events of the past? Scientists are now considering whether to officially designate a new geological epoch to reflect the changes that homo sapiens have wrought: the Anthropocene.
In a recent paper titled “The New World of the Anthropocene,” which appeared in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, a group of geologists listed more than a half dozen human-driven processes that are likely to leave a lasting mark on the planet — lasting here understood to mean likely to leave traces that will last tens of millions of years. These include: habitat destruction and the introduction of invasive species, which are causing widespread extinctions; ocean acidification, which is changing the chemical makeup of the seas; and urbanization, which is vastly increasing rates of sedimentation and erosion. Human activity, the group wrote, is altering the planet “on a scale comparable with some of the major events of the ancient past. Some of these changes are now seen as permanent, even on a geological time-scale.” Prompted by the group’s paper, the Independent of London last month conducted a straw poll of the members of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the official keeper of the geological time scale. Half the commission members surveyed said they thought the case for a new epoch was already strong enough to consider a formal designation. “Human activities, particularly since the onset of the industrial revolution, are clearly having a major impact on the Earth,” Barry Richards of the Geological Survey of Canada told the newspaper. “We are leaving a clear and unique record.” The term “Anthropocene” was coined a decade ago by Paul Crutzen, one of the three chemists who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for discovering the effects of ozone-depleting compounds. In a paper published in 2000, Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, a professor at the University of Michigan, noted that many forms of human activity now dwarf their natural counterparts; for instance, more nitrogen today is fixed synthetically than is fixed by all the world’s plants, on land and in the ocean. Considering this, the pair wrote in the newsletter of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, “it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term ‘anthropocene’ for the current geological epoch.” Two years later, Crutzen restated the argument in an article in Nature titled “Geology of Mankind.” The Anthropocene, Crutzen wrote, “could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane.” Soon, the term began popping up in other scientific publications. “Riverine quality of the Anthropocene,” was the title of a 2002 paper in the journal Aquatic Sciences. “Soils and sediments in the anthropocene,” read the title of a 2004 editorial in the Journal of Soils and Sediments. Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the Britain’s University of Leicester, found the spread of the concept intriguing. “I noticed that Paul Crutzen’s term was appearing in the serious literature, in papers in Science and such like, without inverted commas and without a sense of irony,” he recalled in a recent interview. At the time, Zalasiewicz was the head of the stratigraphic commission of the Geological Society of London. At luncheon meeting of the society, he asked his fellow stratigraphers what they thought of the idea. “We simply discussed it,” he said. “And to my surprise, because these are technical geologists, a majority of us thought that there was something to this term.” In 2008, Zalasiewicz and 20 other British geologists published an article in GSA Today, the magazine of the Geological Society of America, that asked: “Are we now living in the Anthropocene?” The answer, the group concluded, was probably yes: “Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene... as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalization.” (An epoch, in geological terms, is a relatively short span of time; a period, like the Cretaceous, can last for tens of millions of years, and an era, like the Mesozoic, for hundreds of millions.) The group pointed to changes in sedimentation rates, in ocean chemistry, in the climate, and in the global distribution of plants and animals as phenomena that would all leave lasting traces. Increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, the group wrote, are predicted to lead to “global temperatures not encountered since the Tertiary,” the period that ended 2.6 million years ago. Zalasiewicz now heads of the Anthropocene Working Group of the ICS, which is looking into whether a new epoch should be officially designated, and if so, how. Traditionally, the boundaries between geological time periods have been established on the basis of changes in the fossil record — by, for example, the appearance of one type of commonly preserved organism or the disappearance of another. The process of naming the various periods and their various subsets is often quite contentious; for years, geologists have debated whether the Quaternary — the geological period that includes both the Holocene and its predecessor, the Pleistocene — ought to exist, or if the term ought to be abolished, in which case the Holocene and Pleistocene would become epochs of the Neogene, which began some 23 million years ago. (Just last year, the ICS decided to keep the Quaternary, but to push back its boundary by almost a million years.) In recent decades, the ICS has been trying to standardize the geological time scale by choosing a rock sequence in a particular place to serve as a marker. Thus, for example, the marker for the Calabrian stage of the Pleistocene can be found at 39.0385°N 17.1348°E, which is in the toe of the boot of Italy. Since there is no rock record yet of the Anthropocene, its boundary would obviously have to be marked in a different way. The epoch could be said simply to have begun at a certain date, say 1800. Or its onset could be correlated to the first atomic tests, in the 1940s, which left behind a permanent record in the form of radioactive isotopes. One argument against the idea that a new human-dominated epoch has recently begun is that humans have been changing the planet for a long time already, indeed practically since the start of the Holocene. People have been farming for 8,000 or 9,000 years, and some scientists — most notably William Ruddiman, of the University of Virginia — have proposed that this development already represents an impact on a geological scale. Alternatively, it could be argued that the Anthropocene has not yet arrived because human impacts on the planet are destined to be even greater 50 or a hundred years from now. “We’re still now debating whether we’ve actually got to the event horizon, because potentially what’s going to happen in the 21st century could be even more significant,” observed Mark Williams, a member of the Anthropocene Working Group who is also a geologist at the University of Leicester. In general, Williams said, the reaction that the working group had received to its efforts so far has been positive. “Most of the geologists and stratigraphers that we’ve spoken with think it’s a very good idea in that they agree that the degree of change is very significant.” Zalasiewicz said that even if new epoch is not formally designated, the exercise of considering it was still useful. “Really it’s a piece of science,” he said. “We’re trying to get some handle on the scale of contemporary change in its very largest context.”
Image of person overlooking sea of clouds courtesy of Flickr photographer ewan and donabel under the Creative Commons License. Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Sustainability, Territory
at
09:55
Defined tags for this entry: ecology, environment, geography, sustainability, territory, theory, thinkers
Wednesday, March 10. 2010Open Source EcologyOpen Source Ecology ----- Via Pruned Tuesday, February 23. 2010An Augmented Ecology of Wildlife and IndustryTiré d'un post plus long sur Mammoth à propos des glaciers -- (...) Wen Ying Teh’s “An Augmented Ecology of Wildlife and Industry”, a RIBA President’s Medal winning project last year, proposes a hybrid structure — part building, part extension of the ecological process of a saline lagoon — which could be inserted into one of the salt mines near Puerto Ayora, supporting the salt mining industry while restoring the ecological balance of the saline lagoon, drawing Greater Flamingos back to Santa Cruz. The structure, which hosts a brine shrimp hatchery, salt crystal harvestry, salt market, tourist education center, and flamingo observatory, protrudes linearly into the lagoon before fanning out into a series of tanks housing the brine shrimp. The skin of the structure is composed of hanging nylon threads, which wick salt from the lake through capillary action, crystallizing a mineral skin that is cyclically harvested by the salt miners, so that the building pulses through the seasons with the wax and wane of sodium chloride. Because the miners no longer need to disturb the lagoon to harvest salt, the natural balance of the lagoon can be restored. Wen Ying Teh conducted physical experiments at scale to test the proposed nylon fiber system and the capillary deposition of salt upon the system.
The cyclical growth of the salt skin, shown over the shrimp tanks.
In Wen Ying Teh’s project, the building itself is constituted by processes of accretion and erosion: salt accretes to form the skin through capillary action, and then is eroded, both by harvesting and by rain, with the latter process of erosion being tied into the maintenance of proper salinity for the shrimp hatchery. The structure serves as an extension of the lacustrian ecosystem, not just physically, but in time and process. While in some ways this is an amplification of processes that already occur on buildings — eroding as they weather, accreting objects, paints, memories, and so on as they’re occupied and augmented and built upon — making accretion and erosion not just ancillary to the architecture, but central to it, remains an unusual and beautiful approach. I first saw Ying’s project at dpr-barcelona; Ying’s tutors were Kate Davies and Liam Young, of the always-interesting Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today. ----- Via Mammoth Related Links:Wednesday, January 20. 2010Rainforests Destroyed as Fast as a Field of Matches
Photo via Greenpeace While the rate of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest may be declining, it and other rainforests around the world continue to be cleared at an alarming rate. Figures that are quite alarming, like the fact that 17 percent of the Amazon rainforest has been decimated and 74 million hectares of Indonesian forests were completely destroyed, tend to lose their potency due to their unimaginable scope. Put in more manageable terms, every two seconds an area of forest the size of a soccer field is being destroyed in the world--a fact brought to life by this intriguing animation. The video was produced by Greenpeace in Switzerland, and illustrates just how quickly the world is losing its rainforests, like the oldest in Indonesia and the largest in the Amazon. But, more than just losing forest cover, deforestation devastates habitats and unique ecosystems--threatening a multitude of species found nowhere else on earth. For example, according to Greenpeace, the number of Sumatran orangutans has decreased 91% since 1991. A similar fate awaits countless other species if the rate of deforestation does not drop dramatically. In most cases, agricultural development and logging are the biggest threats to the world's forests--practices policies have been put in place to curb. Nevertheless, it continues and progress has come in fits and starts. It would benefit the concerned spectator of environmental affairs to bear in the mind the video when deciding what action should be taken to combat the problem, for there is much more at stake than a soccer field made of matchsticks. More on Deforestation ----- Via Treehugger Personal comment: Vidéo édifiante... Monday, December 14. 2009Cooling the Asphalt JungleThe asphalt jungle is due for a makeover as tar beach becomes a sanctuary for native plants, wildflowers and winged pollinators. Like mushrooms after a spring rain, "green roofs" are proliferating on rooftops across the United States and throughout Europe, gaining adherents among sustainable design advocates intent on creating more livable and greener cities. "Green roofs" are proliferating on rooftops across the United States and throughout Europe, gaining adherents among sustainable design advocates intent on creating more livable and greener cities.While rooftop gardens have been a part of city life since the 19th century (if not earlier), their environmental benefits are just beginning to be fully realized. As global temperatures creep upwards, scientists are glancing at the skyline, looking for ways to cool down concrete-bound cities and the planet. One proposal has been to install white roofs, which would reflect solar heat and require less energy to cool urban areas. Another idea is to absorb — or sequester — heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide by using rooftops as yards. In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at Michigan State University have calculated the carbon sequestration benefits extensive green roofs can provide. Findings from horticulturalists Kristen Getter and Brad Rowe in October's Environmental Science & Technology revealed green roofs' potential as carbon sinks. During photosynthesis, plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store CO2 in the leaves, soil and root system, converting sunshine into carbon-based compounds such as carbohydrates and sugar. According to Environmental Protection Agency statistics, U.S. forests sequestered 637 million metric tons of the carbon dioxide emitted by made-sources such as coal, fuel and natural gas. Urban forests sequestered on average an additional 74 million metric tons. (All told, the U.S. offsets about an eighth of the carbon it produces, and the vast majority of the offset comes from forests.) Currently the job of large-scale carbon sequestration is performed in the vast storehouse of the Earth's ocean and forest ecosystems that play an integral part in regulation of the temperature of the atmosphere. While there have been studies on how much heat green roofs might fend off, how well a green roof would store carbon had been uncertain up until Getter and Rowe's study. Two experiments were run to measure the potential of storing carbon in green roofs. The first involved eight green roofs in Michigan and four in Maryland ranging from 1 to 6 years of age. The second involved planting an extensive green roof of 20 1-square-meter plots at MSU's campus in East Lansing. All the green roofs were planted with Sedum, a genus of leafy succulent known for its hardiness and often used as ground cover. "We planted what we knew would grow," said Getter. The researchers estimated the city of Detroit has 219 acres of roof space available for conversion. If black tar roofs were retrofitted, 55,000 tons of CO2 could be removed from the air — enough CO2 to offset the carbon emissions of 10,000 mid-sized SUVs or trucks for an entire year, they calculated. "Implementing a green roof strategy would definitely be one way of managing the sequestration of carbon," said Getter. And yet ... in order to offset man-made carbon emissions it would require a Texas-sized green roof to make a significant contribution to carbon sequestration. "Green roofs certainly don't store the kind of carbon that a forest or productive grassland stores, but a traditional roof is essentially a wasteland — no carbon storage whatsoever," Getter wrote via e-mail. Jim Mumford, a horticulturalist turned entrepreneur, is dubious about the amount of carbon sequestration a green roof provides. Perceiving it as an added but minor benefit, "it's debatable about how much of a carbon sink it really is," he said. Still, he's in total agreement there has to be more green and less tar on city rooftops. In 2007, he retrofitted his office with a 478-square-meter green roof, the first of its kind in San Diego, if not the state. As the founder of GreenScaped Building, he's completed construction on nine green roofs in San Diego County and has several more projects under proposal throughout California and the United States. Instead of talking meters and grams, Mumford is faced with the challenge of turning data into a business plan. He believes retrofitting commercial space with green roofs in Southern California is cost-prohibitive, especially in the current business climate. For the time being, "building has ground to a halt," he said. Once the market revives, the next challenge he faces will be building large-scale green roofs at a price real estate developers and building owners will pay. Green roofs cost typically twice as much to install as conventional roofs. Nonetheless, he's intrigued. "The more I looked at it the more excited I got," he said. Mumford envisions a day when installing a green roof will be part of a comprehensive plan to create buildings that are both energy efficient and conserve water. He's assembled living walls and demonstrated water-caching systems on the grounds of his business complex, transforming his workplace into an "open laboratory" for water and energy conservation strategies, and seeking cost-effective ways to capture rainwater rather than rely on drinking water to irrigate green roofs. Burnishing a building with a living skin has several environmental advantages. Most notably, it cuts down on storm water runoff, reducing the energy costs associated with heating and cooling buildings, and extends the material lifespan of roofs exposed to the elements. Inside his office, Mumford has noticed a marked difference. White noise has been reduced. He's saved 23 percent on his electric bills. And rather than redoing his roof every 10 to 20 years, he believes his green roof can last up to 60 years if maintained properly. A study by the Berkeley Lawrence Lab found that if 15 percent of the buildings in Los Angeles installed reflective or green roofs, daytime temperatures would be reduced by 3 degrees Celsius — saving Los Angeles half to 1 gigawatt of power during peak-use hours. As green roofs proliferate to cool and cheer cityscapes, might they also suck up and store some of the carbon urban life pumps out? ----- Via Miller - Mc Cune Thursday, December 10. 2009Designing Bugs that eat Plastic
Earlier, we’ve discussed some of the dramatic effects of this nextnature material and suggested how a future-evolving microbe able to digest plastic, could thrive on the vast amount of ----- Via NextNature
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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