1. 19 August 2008

    Farewell, My Subaru

    49 days ago

    Journalist chronicles his transplantation into rural New Mexico with the goal of going green, almost cold–turkey. Solar electricity, water from a well, a veggie oil diesel truck conversion, goats chickens and a big garden. He even manages to find happiness and family. A good story.

    I’ve always wanted to try something like this. Particularly the computer nerd aspect of it: I’ll never pull a Thoreau so much as wait out for super–wifi that’ll let me bring an internet connection and solar powered computer paraphernalia into the sticks with me. The author has a website. Gotta figure out how to make that work. Overall a quick inspiring fun read.

  2. 26 July 2008

    Edible Estates

    73 days ago

    Attack on the front lawn. A not–all–that–interesting book, but on an interesting trend. My family’s house is on a double lot, roughly 80 feet wide. With front and back yards there’s very likely enough area that we could grow half of the food we eat in the summer. Being in minnesota would limit our choices a bit, but we could get over it and it’s not like there isn’t a grocer 5 minutes away by bike. But we have a reasonable green lawn instead. We have a rotary clipper—human-powered—and so don’t spew carbon into the air mowing it (1 hour of mowing your lawn is the equivalent of a 150km car trip), nor do we fertilize it with chemicals. But when you step back and think about it, the industry behing lawn care is indeed an insidious one.

    We do have a decent garden, though most of it’s for show. I started an herb garden in the side yard years ago, which I quickly neglected, but it’s still going. No vegetables though. I just don’t really know what I’m doing when it comes to gardening, and I don’t want to mess up my mom’s domain. When I get a place of my own I plan on starting a garden, but then maybe that’s just my deferral instinct talking. Who knows.

  3. 13 July 2008

    Citizenship Papers

    86 days ago

    Excellent set of essays, coming from agrarian and writer Wendell Berry. He espouses his philosophy and does a good job of demeaning everything about modern–day american politics and society, but in a good way. I took so many notes I don’t want to write any of them down, plus it’s summer. Instead I’ll mark this here down to re–read in the not distant future.

  4. 11 May 2008

    Garbage Warrior

    149 days ago

    Here’s an impressive documentary on Mike Reynolds, progenitor of the Earthship concept. 30 or so years ago he started to build houses out of trash: first tin cans mixed with natural cement, then incorporating tires and bottles. His keystone idea was that of a completely self–sufficient home. Harvesting rainwater off the roof, coupled with what’s come to be known as passive–solar to keep the place warm, small–scale electricity generation, and gardening for food. This kind of house covers all your bases. I’ve seen bits about earthships here and there (I’ve always taken an interest in the more marginalized forms of architecture), but learning more about these really fascinates me.

    It’s the perfect blending of home and environment, wrapping you in a microclimate that bends natural processes to your will instead of opposing them. I found a clip of Reynolds on Colbert’s Show, and he said something along the lines of: “we pick banana trees in the middle of winter grown with our own raw sewage.” This isn’t quite true—it’s grey–water that flows through the planters with the banana trees, so not quite sewage—but that’s semantic. Colbert was baffled, his eyes doubled in size, about 5 seconds later he regained his composure and ended the interview with one of his quips. But that about sums it up for me. I’ve always wanted to build up my own place out in the woods, and when I do I’ll be hard pressed not to try out one of these.

    — Garbage Warrior, by Oliver Hodge (torrent)
    — Reynolds’s Organization
    — Here’s a beautiful and recent Earthship being put up by Reynolds and his crew in Nicaragua
    — A pretty decent 7–minute feature from the Weather Channel
    — An equally long feature on an earthship in Normandy (in french)

    Reynolds used to be an architect, but his state liscense was revoked in the 90s. He’s recently had it given back, but fuck that, he calls himself a biotect now.

  5. 07 December 2007

    Gentle Architecture

    Malcolm Wells

    305 days ago

    The best-known architects of the day create stunning forms and impressive details, but there is little substance behind them. It’s not that the architects don’t know better. They do. We all do, by now. Modern architecture is empty because we still lack the courage to face its consequences. 5

    Life without the courage to face consequences is cowardice, and life teems with it today. 6

    Wells asks where the act of paving over 100 acres of prime wilderness should be put amidst this list:

    • Terrorism
    • Hostage Taking
    • Skyjacking
    • Kidnapping
    • Assault with a deadly weapon
    • etc, etc

    I do know that we’re wrecking this country with out failure to face the consequences of our acts. 7

    Pretending that there are no consequences rages through modern society. We are encouraged from all sides not to look beyond immediate gratification. And nowhere, it seems, is this attitude more common or more heavily cloaked in hypocrisy than it is in architecture. […] But we someitmes forget that each line we draw can actually destroy life. 8

    “abstraction is what dehumanizes us” Robert Finch, 10

    Take away all governments and armies, take away all businesses and industries, take away all communications; take away cars, houses, cities, hospitals, schools, and libraries; take away electricity, clothes, medicine, and police; take away everything, in fact, but the green plants, and most of us would survive. But take away the plants and we would all die. That’s how important they are. 19

    That’s why our cities and suburbs have failed. We’ve created so much convenience and ease we’ve turned ourselves into an artificial people, with artificial values, who live precariously far from the roots of life. If you don’t believe it, just listen to what most people are talking about. Look at what most of us are buying at the supermarket. 20

    “the only treasure we’ll ever have is this incredible ball beneath our feet.” 33

    It isn’t possible for us to clean up skies and rivers once they get dirty. They can do that only by themselves. Our job is to manage wastes and conserve resources. It doesn’t involve skies and rivers at all. Once we do our part we’ll find that the skies and the waters have somehow miraculously cleaned themselves. That’s when we’ll know we’ve been doing something right. 57

    Every creature except man builds unobtrusive or hidden buildings. Every creature except man has solar energy as its sole energy source. Every creature except man recycles all its wastes, not just some of them. […] Imagine having to burn electric lights in the daytime! Imagine having to air-condition! Imagine having to heat a building artificially! Imagine dropping human wastes into drinking water! 58

    But is that all we want, just to get by? Isn’t that exactly the kind of standard that’s caused so much of today’s mess? We’ve produced a whole civilization based on mediocrity, on throwaway automobiles, on honky-tonk highway business, and on nonrenewable resources. If someone doesn’t stop us, we’ll go right on producing it. 60

    As a species we have an almost criminal record of land destruction on this planet, and I feel at times as if the best solution to the environmental mess would be some kind of catastrophe great enough to eliminate all human life. But in my saner moments I know there is catastrophe enough already.

    The 26 acres of buildings and blacktop that make up that shopping center pour 600,000 gallons into the pipe every time an inch of rain falls. 67

    [Our cities] drink diluted sewage and throw away their rainwater. 68

    We look with admiration at the soaring glass walls and never smell all the sewage, never feel all the hear losses, never see all the paper being consumed behind those sheer facades. Our capacity for self-delusion seems unbounded, and the crises always catch us unawares. 87

    Emphasis mine.

    A paving moratorium doesn’t sound like a bad idea… 90

    It’s hard to imagine a future society that might treat land as shabbily as we treat it. We’ve got to change in order to survive, not by setting aside areas to be spared from our shortsightedness, but by making all land destruction a crime. 95

    We feel obliged to fill time. If there is nothing at hand to fill it with, then we manufacture filler. (Just look how we spend our days.) Menwhile, the most beautiful world we’ll ever know slides deeper into trouble. Four billion of us, simply by living here, are greasing its skids — four billion of us, all serving ourselves first. Statistically there seems to be no hope at all. No government, no religion, certainly no new architecture, is going to set things right. Even a sudden switch to the most enlightened, the gentlest, of architectures would make only a small dent in the overall problem.

  6. 16 January 2007

    Zodiac

    Neal Stephenson

    630 days ago

    Stephenson has his go at Captain Planet; kicks all kinds of ass.

    I had to ride slow because I was taking my guerilla route, the one I follow when I assume that everyonein a car is out to get me. My nighttime attitude is, anyone can run you down and get away with it. Why give some drunk the chance to plaster me against a car? That’s why I don’t even own a bike light, or one of those godawful reflective suits. Because if you’ve put yourself into a situation where someone has to see you in order to be safe – to see you, and give a fuck – you’ve already blown it. 45

    The big lie of American capitalism is that corporations work in their own best interests. In fact they’re constantly doing things that will eventually bring them to their knees. Most of these blunders involve toxic chemicals that any competent chemist should know to be dangerous. They pump these things into the environment and don’t even try to protect themselves. The evidence is right there in public, almost as if they’d printed up signed confessions and sprinkled them out of airplanes. Sooner or later, someone shows up in a Zodiac and points to that evidence, and the result is devastation far worse than what a terrorist, a Boone, could manage with bombs and guns. 57

    I knew this, but never fully realized what it meant:

    “Look, I’m no expert here,” Boone said, “but every environmentalist knows that a lot of water doesn’t have any air dissolved in it. Right? Polluted water, anything that’s got undecayed garbage or shit in it, doesn’t have air.”

    “Right,” Kelvin said, “because the organisms that break those things down use up all the air in the process. The more sewage there is in the water – that is the higher the Biochemical Oxygen Demand – the less oxygen is present. 250

  7. 12 January 2007

    People, Land, and Community

    635 days ago

    Collected Lectures of the E.F. Schumacher Society

    A nice set of ecological/economical/environmental lectures on how we ought to deal with the disaster that has befallen the earth. I think these are all posted to the internet in case you might want a closer look.

    I agree with most of the ideas here, but don’t really see being able to jump from mainstream american life into bioreigonally/sustainably/old-fashioned homstead culturing my own patch of earth for the rest of my life. I really like the idea of breaking down the gigantic structures of society into locally comprehensible bits, but then how the hell would I be able to order shit off amazon.com?

    Kirkpatrick Sale – The Colombian Legacy

    For there is no longer room to doubt that now, five hundred years later, the subcontinent of Europe – and all the continents it has peopled and all the cultures it has touched – represents a society in crisis, a crisis, like the previous one, of spirit as much as of substance. The industrial world, the European-culture world, of which this nation is a preeminent example, is sickly, miserable, melancholic, anguished, without a faith to believe in, institutions to trust, or values to rely on, victim of the disease I have called “affluenza,” the frenzied amassment of packages and products to the point where not only is the survival of the human animal in real question but the survival of all oxygen-dependent species and indeed the living earth itself. We have as a culture subscribed to the theory of progress – it is time to cancel that subscription. 17

    Affluenza is a token way to frame the West today. I’m not convinced that more is better – but surely what we have today is impressive! But is it worth the tremendous distress we’ve put upon the earth to obtain it.

    Winona LaDuke – Voices from White Earth

    Industrial language has changed things from being animate, alive, and having spirit to being inanimate, mere objects and commodities of society. When things are inanimate, “man” can view them as his God-given right. He can take them, commodify them, and manipulate them in society. 28

    If you look at the legal system in this country, you will find that it is based on the idea that Christians have a God-given right to dispossess heathens of their land. This attitude goes back to a palpal bull of the fifteenth or sixteenth century declaring that Christians have a superior right to land over heathens. 32

    John McClaughry – Bringing Power Back Home

    Merely going to the polls every two years or four years to cast a ballot for one or another television personality who happens to be running for office is a pretty cheap version of citizenship. Voting on a state referendum question, as Californians are famous for, is also a fairly insubstantial form of citizenship.

    By citizenship we mean active participation in public affairs at a level such as the town or neighborhood where the individual’s contribution can be appreciated and can count for something. The small human community, celebrated by Aristotle and Lao Tzu, the place where you belong and where you recognize those who belong and those who are strangers, where the good of everyone is tied together in an interconnected web that is ruptured only at the peril of everyone in the community – that is where citizenship resides.

    By contrast, in a society that is planned to be “specific in requirements, uniform in standards, and tough on delinquents1,” you are no longer a citizen but rather the subject of a central power. Once we become subjects, we lose those sparks of humanity and democracy and freedom that have made this country such a great country in world history. 137

    Ah, wouldn’t it be nice.

    1 Declaration of some governor of Vermont:

    Our governor, a rather liberal and well-meaning woman who wants good things for everyone, gave a speech last January in which she called for “a new era of planning” for our state. Her words in describing the new era were that it will be “specific in requirements, uniform in standards, and tough on delinquents.” It could have been Benito Mussolini in Milan in 1922.

    Wendell Berry – People, Land, and Community

    To know nothing, after all, is no more possible than to know enough. I am only proposing that knowledge, like everything else, has its place, and that we need urgently now to put it in its place. If we want to know and cannot help knowing, then let us learn as fully and accurately as we decently can. But let us at the same time abandon our superstitious beliefs about knowledge: that it is ever sufficient; that it can of itself solve problems; that it is intrinsically good; that it can be used objectively or disinterestedly. Let us acknowledge that the objective or disinterested researcher is always on the side that pays best. And let us give up our forlorn pursuit of the “informed decision.” 144

    What works poorly in agriculture – monoculture, for instance, or annual accounting – can be pretty fully explained, because what works poorly is invariably some oversimplifying thought that subjugates nature, people, and culture. What works well ultimately defies explanation because it involves an order which in both magnitude and complexity is ultimately incomprehensible. 150

    Wes Jackson – Becoming Native to this Place

    ...in a certain sense all we have to do is figure out a way to stay amused while we live out our lives as inexpensively as possible within the life support system. It’s what I call “the Mill-Around theory of Civilization”: if we can simply mill around and not expend too many resources, then we won’t do much harm to ourselves r the planet. The problem is, how do we learn to quit doing in a manner that uses up all the earth’s capital? Or stated otherwise, how do we make our vessel so small that it doesn’t take much to fill it? Should not this be our journey? 155

    I don’t know if I can agree with this – it seems a very depressed way of stating that we should harmonize with the land. The idea is the right one no doubt, but I can imagine no lack of ways to frame it better.

    Thomas Berry – The Ecozoic Era

    While we seem to be achieving magnificent things at the microphase level of our functioning, we are devastating the entire range of living beings at the macrophase level. The natural world is more sensitive than we have realized. Unaware of what we have done or its order of magnitude, we have thought our achievements to be of enormous benefit for the human process, but we now find that by disturbing the biosystems of the planet at the most basic level of their functioning, we have endangered all that makes the planet Earth a suitable place for the integral development of human life itself. 193

    Point number one in my cynical worldview: “Man we’re fucking this place up. Hey! TV shows!”

    The first condition is to understand that the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. Every being has its own inner form, its own spontaneity, its own voice, its ability to declare itself and to be present to other components of the universe in a subject-to-subject relationship. 196

    Descartes, we might say, killed the Earth and all its living beings. For him, the natural world was mechanism. There was no possibility of entering into a communion relationship. Western humans became autistic in relation to the surrounding world. There could be no communion with te birds or animals or plants, because these were all mechanical contrivances. The real value of things was reduced to their economic value. A destructive anthropocentrism came into being. 197

    ...the Earth is primary and humans are derivative. The present distorted view is that humans are primary and the Earth and its integral functioning only a secondary consideration – thus the pathology manifest in our various human institutions. The only acceptable way for humans to function effectively is by giving first consideration to the Earth community and then dealing with humans as integral members of that community. The Earth must become the primary concern of every human institution, profession, program, and activity (including economics). 198

    The entire pattern of Earth’s functioning is being altered in this transition from the Cenozoic to the Ecozoic. We did not even exist until the major developments of the Cenozoic were complete. In the Ecozoic, however, the human will have a pervasive influence on almost everything that happens. We are approaching a critical watershed in the entire modality of Earth’s functioning. Our positive power of creativity in the natural life systems is minimal; our power of negating is immense. Whereas we cannot make a blade of grass, there is liable not to be one blade of grass unless it is accepted, fostered, and protected by the human. Protected mainly from ourselves so that the Earth can function from within its own dynamism. 202

    Kirkpatrick Sale – Mother of All

    It was not until the development of European science, from about the sixteenth century on, that this animistic conception of the earth finally gave way, to be replaced by one supported by the new insights of physics, chemistry, mechanics, astronomy, and mathematics. The new perception held – in fact it proved – that the earth, the universe, and all within it operated by certain clear and calculable laws and not by the whims of any living, thinking being; that far from being divine and omnipotent, these laws were capable of scientific prediction and manipulation; and that objects, from the smallest stone to the earth itself and the planets beyond, were not animate with souls and wills and purposes but were nothing more than the combination of certain chemical and mechanical properties. [...]

    ...[This particular world-view’s] ultimate governing principle – that humans should not merely understand but be capable of manipulation nature, and indeed, as Descartes put it for all of European science, be “masters and possessors of Nature” – became ingrained into not only the scientific but also all scholarly and most popular thinking in the Western world and now shapes the perceptions of our senses and the patterns of our psyches.

    And if at the end of the twentieth century we see the earth as a static and neutral arena that is alterable by our chemicals and controllable by our technologies; if we see ourselves as a superior species, to whom is given the right to kill off as many hundreds of others as we wish and “have dominion over” the rest; if we believe we have the power to reorder earth’s atoms and reassemble its genes, to contrive weapons and machines fueled by our own invented elements and capable of plundering its resources, befouling its systems, poisoning its air (perhaps irretrievably), and altering its eons-old processes to suit our wishes… if this is our condition, it is so because, far from calling into question the scientific view of the universe in these past four centuries, we have accepted it virtually in its entirety. It has become the foundation and sustenance not only of our various social systems – education, agriculture, medicine, religion, energy, communication, transportation – but of our most basic economic and political institutions as well.

    To be sure, the scientific world-view is not without its values, its uses, its triumphs even, and I think we may want to call the world a better place for our knowledge of hygiene, say or radiotelegraphy or immunology or electricity. But its shortcomings, its failures, its calamitous dangers have by now become obvious, and it is surely sage to say that the path of sanity, perhaps survival, is to regain the spirit of the ancient Greeks, to once again comprehend the earth as a living creature. We need to recover the sense, as Schumacher puts it in Good Work, “that man is the servant of this world, or at least a trustee,” a concept that has been “organized out of our thinking,” as he puts it, “by the modern world,” and we must listen to the two great teachers, one “the marvelous system of living nature” and the other “the traditional wisdom of mankind,” teachers we have “rejected and replaced by some extraordinary structure we call objective science.” And we must re-envision humans as participants and not masters in the biotic community, as only one among many species, special perhaps in having certain skills of information-gathering and communication but not for that reason superior to those with other skills – for the human being, a Mark Twain might have said, is different from other animals only in that it is able to blush. Or needs to. 218-220, phew

    David Orr – Environmental Literacy

    Finally, had Bok so chosen, he would have been led to question how we define intelligence and what that might imply for our definition of an “educated” person. From an ecological perspective it is clear that we have often confused cleverness and intelligence. Cleverness, as I understand it, tents to fragment things and focus on the short term. The epitome of cleverness is the specialist whose intellect and person have been shaped by the demands of a single function. Ecological intelligence, on the other hand, requires a broader view of the world and a long-term perspective. Cleverness can be adequately measured by SAT and GRE tests, but intelligence is not so clearly computed. In time, I think we will come to see that true intelligence tends to be integrative and often works slowly while mulling things over. Further, intelligence can be inferred, according to Wendell Berry in Standing by Words, from the “good order or harmoniousness of [one’s] surroundings.” In other words, the consequences of our actions are a measure of our intelligence, and the plea of ignorance is no good defense. Because some consequences cannot be predicted, the exercise of intelligence requires forbearance and a sense of limits. Ecological intelligence, in contrast to mere cleverness, does not presume to act beyond a certain scale at which effects can be known and unpredictable consequences would not be catastrophic. 241

    John Todd – An Ecological Economic Order

    Shakespeare: there are sermons in stones, books in the running brooks, and good in everything. 268

    Stephanie Mills – Making Amends to the Myriad Creatures

    Earth Manual – How to Work on Wild Land Without Taming it 286

    David Brower – It’s Healing Time on Earth

    We do not have a democracy in the United States. Any country where only half of the eligible voters are registered and where only half of those who are registered vote and where only half of those who vote like their choice is not a democracy. Any country that isn’t ruled by its government, that is ruled instead by the Fortune 500, isn’t a democracy. And any world government that is ruled by transnational corporations isn’t a democracy. yet such is the state of our national and global governments. According to my definition, a corporation is, right now, by law, a lawyer’s attempt to create something that can act like a person without a conscience. If you are a CEO or a member of the Board of Directors of a corporation that bypasses an opportunity for profit, you can be sued by the stockholders! There should at least be something written into law that says you can bypass it for sound social or ecological reasons. 290

    He makes a good allegory squeezing the 4.5 billion years of scientific history into the 6 days of biblical creation history. Humans didn’t come about until 1.5 seconds before midnight on the sixth day.

  8. 26 July 2006

    804 days ago

    William McDonough at Bioneers 2000

    Amazing lecture. Make this into a feature film, and elect this guy president.

    via Kjell Olsen804 days ago

  9. 05 July 2006

    Saksun

    825 days ago

    There’s definitely something special about the Faroes. I was there a few years ago, and really would love to go back. Just look at this!

  10. 09 May 2006

    882 days ago

    Flower power - Vulnerable endangered species or environmental sleight-of-hand?

    Oppose massive commercial developments? Want beautiful green land in and around your city? Sow the seeds of endangered species on land threatened by development and there will be problems for the bulldozers.

    via Kjell Olsen882 days ago

  11. 17 April 2006

    904 days ago

    A Path of Hope for the Future

    Essay from Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael. Which if you haven’t read, you need to.

    The extraordinary thing that is going to happen in the next two or three decades is not that the human race is going to become extinct. The extraordinary thing that’s going to happen in the next two or three decades is that a great second renaissance is going to occur. A great and astounding renaissance.
    Nothing less than that is going to save us.

    If there are still people here in 200 years, they won’t be living the way we do. I can make that prediction with confidence, because if people go on living the way we do, there won’t be any people here in 200 years.
    I can make another prediction with confidence. If there are still people here in 200 years, they won’t be thinking the way we do. I can make that prediction with equal confidence, because if people go on thinking the way we do, then they’ll go on living the way we do—and there won’t be any people here in 200 years.

    Humans don’t belong to an order of being separate from everything else.

    We’re like people living in the penthouse of a tall brick building. Every day we need 200 bricks to maintain our walls, so we go downstairs, knock 200 bricks out of the walls below and bring them back upstairs for our own use. Every day. . . . Every day we go downstairs and knock 200 bricks out of the walls that are holding up the building we live in. Seventy thousand bricks a year, year after year after year.

    We’re systematically destroying the biodiversity of the living community to support ourselves, which is to say that we’re systematically destroying the infrastructure that is keeping us alive.

    via Kjell Olsen904 days ago

  12. 21 December 2005

    1021 days ago

    A photo tour of the Transparent Factory in Dresden

    Incredible.

    Kjell Olsen1021 days ago

  13. 05 December 2005

    1037 days ago

    The Struggle Against Ourselves

    The structure, the complexity, the diversity of our lives, everything we know, everything that we have taken for granted, that looked solid and non-negotiable, suddenly looks contingent. All this is a great tottering pile balanced on a ball, a ball that is about to start rolling downhill.

    And we find ourselves in an extraordinary position. This is the first mass political movement to demand less, not more. The first to take to the streets in pursuit of austerity. The first to demand that our luxuries, even our comforts, are curtailed.

    Kjell Olsen1037 days ago

  14. 20 November 2005

    1052 days ago

    Phenomonal Plyboo

    Plywood Bamboo – cheap, green, and nice looking.

    via Kjell Olsen1052 days ago

  15. 13 November 2005

    1059 days ago

    Inhabitat

    Planted roofs are so hot.

    via Kjell Olsen1059 days ago

  16. 02 November 2005

    1070 days ago

    Confronting The American Lifestyle

    Americans basically want peace and prosperity. But right now, our economy is driving the opposite. In order to secure the oil we need, we’re trapped in a major war in Iraq. The commuting, shopping and activities that comprise our day-to-day lives are draining our pocketbooks and keeping families apart. Again, it’s not Jane Q. Public’s fault, it’s not the market’s fault. It’s the government’s fault for laying out the rules so poorly.

    via Kjell Olsen1070 days ago

  17. 22 October 2005

    1081 days ago

    Welcome to the house of FUN

    Impressive looking subterranean ultra green home. When I build my house it’s going to be south facing and subterranean with a green roof – this is almost my dream home. More at CNN, and click via to read the great summary at treehugger”

    via Kjell Olsen1081 days ago

  18. 15 September 2005

    1118 days ago

    Organic concrete

    There’s little I hate more then pavement.

    Exploiting concrete’s capacity to retain humidity, the material functions as a battery in which the water is released during dry periods. Applied as a surface, organic concrete makes it possible to obtain permeable living surfaces, offering a natural component for public urban spaces.

    via Kjell Olsen1118 days ago

  19. 12 September 2005

    1121 days ago

    Zoka Zola

    Net zero energy home.

    Our aim is to construct an urban single-family house that is ecological, socially regenerative and self-sustaining. We will only use energy generated on site. We would like this building to be an inspiration to other homeowners and developers in urban environments.

    via Kjell Olsen1121 days ago

  20. 29 June 2005

    1196 days ago

    Freegan.info

    These guys are out there, but sure take a good angle at attacking the status quo. Something about society just makes me a little sick sometimes, and these guys have their fingers on it.

    Freegans say enough of this. We want no part. We reject it all—the drive for status, the lust for wealth, the sense of power and accomplishment from the purchase of needless commodities. We provide for our needs without feeding the monster. In a system inextricable from oppression, our jobs will ultimately harm others, the money we spend will be cycled into an economy that harms others.

    Capitalism NEVER considers the impact of its heavy hand; conservative in the cutting of economic cost, the corporation NEVER seeks to reign in its social and ecological cost—unless there’s money in it.

    We want no part of this civilization other than to take part in its destruction, to tear down the barbed wire of its laws, the stone edifices of its economic precepts, and to break the chains of its ideologies.

    As freegans we liberate not only goods but also the moments of our lives. Hours not spent carrying out the hollow directives of bosses are instead spent free for we need not make money to acquire goods that we won’t buy. Our time is instead spent directly acquiring the things we need, enjoying our time, or working to create a better world.

    This really hits me – I absolutely hate the idea of having a job, but feel guilty that I have need for money. I really don’t have much of a need for money – it’s been two years since I’ve really bought any clothes (the older the better I say). I don’t buy much of anything, except for neat computer gizmos.

    I really feel guilty about having bought a powerbook – it’s more computer then I need, and really it cost more then I can afford. But I’m a slave to apple, and I’ve dreamt of having a powerbook for five years, how could I not pull the trigger with my target in sight?

    via Kjell Olsen1196 days ago

  21. 09 June 2005

    1216 days ago

    Selected ReNew articles

    Nice looking pdf’s from a sustainable lifestyle magazine. I don’t want to forget these.

    Kjell Olsen1216 days ago

  22. 26 May 2005

    1230 days ago

    Wired 13.06: The Mad Genius from the Bottom of the Sea

    A nice contrast to The Long Emergency, heres a guy bent on generating wackloads of power by pulling freezing deep ocean water from the depths of the ocean to the surface, and somehow capitalizing on the temperature difference.

    “The potential of OTEC is great,” says Joseph Huang, a senior scientist for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and an expert on the process. “The oceans are the biggest solar collector on Earth, and there’s enough energy in them to supply a thousand times the world’s needs. If you want to depend on nature, the oceans are the only energy source big enough to tap.” ??1??

    Ok, here’s how it works and some applications – basically just pump this cold water through any number of devices to get heat air-conditioning, irrigate farmland, or generate electricity:

    Once primed, the pipe acts like a giant siphon, requiring relatively little energy to keep an inexhaustible supply of cold at hand. Already, 39-degree-Fahrenheit water courses through the Natural Energy Lab’s newest pipe – a 55-inch-diameter, 9,000-foot-long polyethylene behemoth – at the rate of 27,000 gallons a minute, 24 hours a day.
    Running the frigid pipes through heat exchangers produces unlimited air-conditioning that costs almost nothing. Draining their sweat yields an endless supply of freshwater for drinking and irrigation. The cold water also creates a temperature difference between root and fruit that Craven believes speeds growth. And by turning the flow on and off, Craven has found he can further accelerate the plants’ growth cycle by forcing them in and out of dormancy – he can get three crops of grapes a year and pineapples in eight months instead of the usual 18. Feeding some of the water through a contraption Craven calls a hurricane tower generates clean electricity. “What the world doesn’t understand,” says Craven, still zigzagging through the parking lot, “is that what we don’t have enough of is cold, not heat.” ??1??

    What’s next on this guys list? Anti Aging treatments. He claims to have invented one in which cold is forced upon the human lymphatic (?) system, which kicks the bodies own regenerating abilities up a notch or two. He’s in his 80’s and claims to be running marathons.

    How all this would actually work

    via Kjell Olsen1230 days ago

  23. 19 May 2005

    1237 days ago

    May is National Bike Month!

    I’ve been biking 10-30 miles on nice days the last few months, how about you? Biking is so much more gratifying then driving.

    via Kjell Olsen1237 days ago

  24. 10 May 2005

    1246 days ago

    Designing the Future

    Fabulous interview with William McDonough, co-author of Cradle to Cradle, which I just read about a month ago. Looks like hes starting to catch fire, getting his ideas out into the world in the form of really sweet buildings.

    The fabric produced in the Switzerland factory talked about in the book is starting to get used, chiefly now in the new Airbus 380:

    It was selected for upholstery on the new Airbus 380. It’s made of worsted wool to keep you at the right temperature—cool when it’s hot and warm when it’s cold—and [a plant fiber called] ramie to wick away moisture. It’s a high-performance-design product. Going ecological doesn’t mean downgrading performance criteria. 2

    The China Housing Industry Association has the responsibility for building housing for 400 million people in the next 12 years. We’re working with them to design seven new cities. 3

    (emphasis mine). Wow, wow, wow… Talk about a contract.

    I love nuclear energy. I just want to make sure it stays where God put it—93 million miles away, in the sun. 3

    I wish more people would riff Einstein these days, who could be a better technological or scientific role model?

    no problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it. Our job is to dream—and to make those dreams happen. 3

    via Kjell Olsen1246 days ago

  25. 1246 days ago

    Home Power Magazine - Your Small Scale Renewable Energy (RE) Source

    On how to live off, or mostly independent, from the grid.

    via Kjell Olsen1246 days ago

  26. 02 May 2005

    1254 days ago

    Earth Sheltered Technology, Inc. - 25 Reasons Why You Should Consider EarthSheltered Living

    I already knew all of this, it’s pretty bs – but I’m just reminding myself how sweet the house I want to build up at my cabin is going to be when I get around to it. It’s going to be the sweetest!

    via Kjell Olsen1254 days ago

  27. 27 April 2005

    Planting Green Roofs and Living Walls

    Nigel Dunnett and Noel Kingsbury

    1259 days ago

    A nice look at the effects and advantages of a planted roof system, along with the methods needed to best achieve one. A little technical, but interesting.

    I want to eventually build a cabin up on some land my family owns, earth sheltered, south facing, and with a green roof. It’s gonna be sweet.

  28. 08 April 2005

    1278 days ago

    Land Living: Modern Lifestyle Design

    Paolo Soleri is an Italian architect who was an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 1940’s. Soleri later developed the concept of Arcology, the fusion of architecture and ecology, an alternative urban development form. In 1970 construction began on Arcosanti, a prototype town for 5,000 people (there are currently about 60 residents).

    Looks cool.

    via Kjell Olsen1278 days ago

  29. 07 April 2005

    Cradle to Cradle

    William McDonough, Michael Braungart

    1279 days ago

    Excellent book detailing how exactly we can begin to stop incessantly raping the earth. Improving the way we build and manufacture things: build things to be recovered and reused, not recycled, but upcycled – made into more valuable or at least equally valuable things after being consumed instead of lesser.

  30. Also somewhat recently

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