150 posts tagged with sustainability.
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"a time capsule, a signpost, and a monument"
"In my travels across the internet of wound-down, well-meaning organizations, a checklist has begun to form in my head of critical elements that need to be added, removed, or finalized on a website before the lights go out." Suggestions for what should go on a nonprofit organization's "tombstone site" if it is preparing to end.
"Wicked, complex, systemic… a task for the Transformative Three."
Two speculative stories about the "nothing about us without us" nuances of international disaster relief and economic development work. From November 2023, by Cory Doctorow: "The Canadian Miracle". Reactor's summary: "A contentious election and radicalized locals interfere with Canadian recovery workers’ efforts at the site of a catastrophic flood in near-future Mississippi." (Audio: Part 1, 2.) And: July 2024, by Auke Pols, a researcher in responsible innovation and sustainable tech: the novelette "The Transformative Three and the Clean Cooking Revolution (grant no. 437-775)", in The Future Fire. [more inside]
Dressing your home for comfort and style
The Material: How can the use of textiles support sustainable coolth and warmth throughout the year?
Traditional Polish house clothes in The Clothed Home by Aleksandra Kędziorek from E-Flux After Comfort. [more inside]
Conserving Energy in a Conservative Town
The Morris Model Morris, Minnesota is a rural town of about 5,200 in the western part of the state. TFG had a 22% advantage in the county in the 2020 presidential election.
But starting with a solar-powered municipal liquor store, a parthership of academic, civic, and governmental agencies has brought renewable energy and waste management to the town. Over 100 projects were brainstormed, and about half of those have been implemented. [more inside]
a living installation fed by the incoming-tide
The Plum Island Museum of Lost Toys & Curiosities aims to raise awareness about marine pollution and the environmental impact of single-use plastics and other forms of non-sustainable consumption by removing debris from the shoreline and transforming it into art.
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K-POP stans and crunchy snack fans for the planet!
K-pop fans organized by KPOP4PLANET pressure Hyundai into ending a greenwashed dirty energy aluminum deal in Indonesia. Will the collective action of snackers and ramen slurpers end PepsiCo's reliance on palm oil from deforested areas? PalmWatch is a brand new tool to trace palm oil supplies from the ground level (% of tree cover area lost by country), to the processing mills, to middleman parent corporations, and to the consumer brands that use the oil in their products. [more inside]
AI futures, meet Net Zero futures
The IPCC, the world authority on climate science, advises we need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than half by 2030, and get emissions down to net zero by 2050, if we want a chance of limiting average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. Actually, we've already crossed that threshhold, kind of.
Information Technology itself may contribute as much as 5% to global greenhouse gas emissions. Internationally recognised methods and standards for assessing the environmental impacts of AI don't yet exist, although they will.
Are AI revolution futures compatible with net zero futures? Are science and technology still on the same team? [more inside]
Indicator Species
Monarch butterfly numbers in Mexico plummet to near record low - "Biologists pin the blame for the nosedive on higher-than-usual temperatures and drought conditions where the butterfly reproduces, mostly in northwestern U.S. states like Washington, Oregon and California." [more inside]
"Nothing's free in Waterworld."
Move aside raw water antediluvianistas, water sommeliers are quenching their thirst in luxury. [more inside]
Biking the Goods - Adoption of E-Cargo Bikes in North America
Biking the Goods - A recent & approachable white paper out of the University of Washington's Urban Freight Lab, looking at the potential for cargo e-bikes to improve urban logistics systems & recommended policies to encourage their use. It looks at five case studies & six types of cargo e-bike to make the case for making them a part of city infrastructure in North America.
The hot water rectangle
Gary Klein, a guru of efficient hot water delivery (awesome podcast interview), developed the "hot water rectangle" to quantify the efficiency of a hot water distribution system: the smallest rectangle possible that includes the water heater and all the hot water fixtures in a house. In other words, why does your hot water take so long? The big reason is that the water heater and the wet rooms (i.e., the rooms where water is used) are too spread out. When you put a water heater in an attached garage, for example, and a bathroom on the opposite end of the house, there’s a whole lot of pipe for the hot water to traverse on its way to the showerhead.
Board Games Aren't Great For The Environment
Low-income people need ‘15-minute cities’ the most
"Those who think “15-minute cities” are for wealthy urbanites should consider this graph from a recent nationwide study. It shows a powerful reverse correlation between household income and use of services and amenities within a 15-minute walk of home. In other words, the wealthier you are, the less you rely on goods and services within your immediate neighborhood or adjacent neighborhoods. (You can easily afford to drive, or take a cab or Uber/Lyft to more distant locations)." [more inside]
Home is always, always, always worth it.
Things that no longer comfort me Finding comfort in the wrong things kept me complacent. Perhaps it’s the same for you. This is a list of things that no longer comfort me, and why. [more inside]
Bivalves boogie. Mollusks mambo.
Scallops have 200 tiny eyes, so the lights [on the modified crab pot] proved irresistible to the shellfish. "Currently, most commercial scallop harvesting is carried out using dredges, a fishing method which can cause extensive harm to sensitive marine habitats and species. This discovery paves the way for the creation of a new low-impact inshore fishery" (source). Tweet and direct link to the video of that EUREKA moment (complete with profanity).
First found via NPR.
So many possible headlines, but how about 'The Other Black Gold'
Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day
Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day is December 21. "[It] is about checking with yourself, and ending the commitments you need to end – maybe by taking a break, or by rotating it on to someone else, or by sunsetting a project." [via mefi projects] [more inside]
Plant obsessions are not a passion
Richard DeGrandpre discusses obsessions, sustainability, and the economy of houseplants. [more inside]
volunteering, mistakes, & "when we get the least signaling about it"
"We have to be willing to let someone else make mistakes and do it worse sometimes." Marissa Lingen reminds us that it's important to step back from particular volunteer jobs if you've been doing them for a long time -- for your own sake, and for the health of the organization. And: "Also of concern, and very hard to bring up: sometimes A’s skills slip for one reason or another. Yes, you. Even if you’re A.....we never think it’s us. We never think, I bet I’m the problem here."
Are clothing and textiles marketed as "vegan" really sustainable?
"I often hear well-meaning people conflate “vegan” with terms like “ethical,” “sustainable,” or “eco-friendly,” as if they can all be used interchangeably. The unnecessary death of animals is of course a bad thing, but as we can see in the case of the silkworm, an animal’s death sometimes produces social and even environmental benefits. Those benefits are often extensive enough that they could be classified as ethical. And given the way clothing is made in today’s intertwined world, where available resources decrease every year and pollution increases—saving one animal often means killing or harming others."
"a moonshot that might just land"
Man v food: is lab-grown meat really going to solve our nasty agriculture problem? If cellular agriculture is going to improve on the industrial system it is displacing, it needs to grow without passing the cost on to workers, consumers and the environment (The Guardian, long read)
Highway to Hell
Electric Vehicles Won’t Save Us. "Cars, however they’re powered, are environmentally cataclysmic, break the tethers of community, and force an infrastructure of dependency that is as financially ruinous to our country as it is dangerous to us as people."
Tubes consume a lot of electricity, as it turns out
Energy Transition
Where Wind and Solar Power Need to Grow for America to Meet Its Goals [ungated link] - "A broad shift toward renewable energy could transform landscapes and coastlines all over the United States." (Net Zero America Project) [more inside]
Carbon‐Neutral Pathways
New study: A zero-emissions US is now pretty cheap (pdf) - "In 2050, benefits to the US offset costs, but there are some unexpected outcomes." [more inside]
[Beef trusts] pride themselves on producing a safe and wholesome product
In 2008 Mexico refused a shipment of beef from the United States because its sampled copper content was too high to meet Mexican food safety standards. Regulators in the US could not prevent the beef from being re-sold to domestic distributors because the US does not have any limits on the copper content in food. A 2010 United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Inspector General report concluded... [more inside]
When you don't notice there aren't bugs on your windshield anymore
Insect populations suffering death by 1,000 cuts, say scientists - "'Frightening' global decline is 'tearing apart tapestry of life', with climate crisis a critical concern."[1,2] [more inside]
The magic of cheap energy
Why I'm so excited about solar and batteries - "Instead of the Jetsons future, we got the cyberpunk future. Why did that happen? ... I blame the slowdown in energy technology... we didn't get anything better than oil during this time. Nuclear fission provided a bit of a boost to electricity generation (and a big boost in France), but nobody ended up driving fission cars around or flying fission planes through the sky."[1] [more inside]
I called 911; they hanged up on me—my girlfriend, her father called 911…
On September 17th, the twenty-first anniversary of the Marshall Decision, Sipekneꞌkatik First Nation on Nopa Sko'sia declared a “moderate livelihood” fishery (photos) as a community exercise of their rights as Indigenous people. In response, non-Indigenous have escalated campaigns of harassment against First Nations people, the Mi'kmaq fleet, and their supporters, cutting lobster traps, firing flares at fishing vessels, engaging in arson, plundering catches, scattering improvised caltrops on shore to burst the tires of cars and trucks, discriminating against Mi'kmaq fishermen in retail stores, and making violent threats on social media. [more inside]
Serene, Afloat
Last November, Venice experienced the second-worst flooding in its history. Last month, Venice’s MOSE flood barriers (the system of 78 inflatable gates, designed in 1984, begun in 2003, plagued by delays, and now expected to be completed in 2021) were successfully deployed. [more inside]
The gentrification of sharecropping
The NYT publishes a romantic story about a couple escaping to the countryside to start a farm. (alternative link) The excellent Dr. Sarah Taber explains how, by treating it as a design & style story instead of a farming one, they inadvertedly exposed the whole thing as just hipster sharecropping – as shitty and exploitative as it was in the Jim Crow era – and how this is a recurring problem in the "sustainability" movement. As another mefite remarked: Everything “disruptive” is just “how do we undo a century of progress on labor rights.”
Skyscrapers for plants: maybe farm/forest arcologies should be things
Wheat yield potential in controlled-environment vertical farms - "Here we show that wheat grown on a single hectare of land in a 10-layer indoor vertical facility could produce ... 220 to 600 times the current world average annual wheat yield of 3.2 t/ha." (via) [more inside]
How the compost gets made (in 5 minutes and 28 seconds)
abuses continue without accountability
Institute for Multi-Stakeholder Initiative Integrity's new report Not Fit-For-Purpose concludes that
multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) to certify food or consumer products as “sustainable,” “fair,” or “ethical” have failed because (1) they were neither designed nor operated to be rights holder-centric, and (2) the inclusion of corporations in the initiatives entrenched the power imbalance between stakeholders such that key drivers of abuse went unaddressed. [more inside]
The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2020
Overfishing on the rise as global consumption climbs: U.N. agency - "More than a third of the fish stocks around the world are being overfished and the problem is particularly acute in developing countries, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in a report on Monday." (pdf) [more inside]
Innovation in 'atoms': build more solar, get cheaper energy
Solar's Future is Insanely Cheap (2020) [thread] - "This incredible pace of solar cost decline, with average prices in sunny parts of the world down to a penny or two by 2030 or 2035, is just remarkable. Building new solar would routinely be cheaper than operating already built fossil fuel plants, even in the world of ultra-cheap natural gas we live in now. This is what I've called the third phase of clean energy, where building new clean energy is cheaper than keeping fossil fuel plants running." [more inside]
Disintermediate cows: Simulate a hamburger like the Apollo program
Can a Burger Help Solve Climate Change? - "Eating meat creates huge environmental costs. Impossible Foods thinks it has a solution." [more inside]
Gardening is Gangsta
We can't rely on anyone to take care of us but us - Master Mark + Sifu Paul Davis.
China is on track to beat its peak-emissions 2015 Paris Agreement pledge
As China's service-sector surged circa 2014 (Invstopedia) and was continuing the shift in 2017 (Forbes), the country also continued to struggle to control its pollution problems (Forbes, 2017), because "China’s air pollution is influenced by a wide variety of physical and chemical factors; the problems are a lot more complex than most realize." But a recent study reports that China is on track to beat its peak-emissions pledge (Ars Technica, June 30, 2019). [more inside]
100 Most Sustainable U.S. Companies
Best Buy tops the list of "most sustainable U.S. companies." Barron's and Calvert Research and Management teamed up to produce the list, culled from the 1,000 largest publicly held U.S. companies. The scores aren't based on only environmental sustainability. It's more about overall corporate responsibility.
“He couldn’t make an ugly job of work to save his life.”
Going home with Wendell Berry The integration of the various animals and crops into a relatively small acreage becomes a formal problem that is just as interesting and just as demanding as the arrangement of the parts of a novel. You’ve got to decide what comes first, and then you work your way to the revelation of what comes last. But the parts also have to be ordered. And if they’re ordered properly on a farm, something even more miraculous than most art happens: you have sustainability. Each thing supports the whole thing. [more inside]
Green economic growth, how feasible is it as a policy aim?
Is economic growth compatible with ecological sustainability? A new report from the European Environmental Bureau finds that efforts to decouple economic growth from environmental harm, known as ‘green growth’, have not succeeded and are unlikely to succeed in their aim. [more inside]
What Will the Farms of the Future Look Like?
Every person on earth needs food every day. Every day, food is tended, harvested, transported, stored, and served up on our tables. In a very real sense, food cannot be separated from life itself. And so it has been said that changing the way we grow and eat food is one of the most powerful tools we have for changing our economies and society as a whole.
So when we ask: what will the farms of the future look like? We should really be asking — what do we want the future to look like? And then answers may begin to emerge. [more inside]
Green Stoics: Stoicism, Cosmopolitanism & Environmental Sustainability
On Stoicism and Sustainability: How can stoicism be used to solve/tackle the problems of climate change? Kai Whiting (@KaiWhiting), a researcher and lecturer in sustainability and Stoicism based at the University of Lisbon, writes on resource use and the practical application of Stoic philosophy, emphasizing its oft-neglected Cosmopolitanism: "given that the ancient Stoics directly connected the good life with living in accordance with the four virtues... Stoicism can certainly do more than support a quest for self-development. In my opinion, it can guide us into a green transition... I believe that Stoicism offers a practical framework that helps you make decisions which bring you closer to the good (and greener) life instead of moving you further from it." [more inside]
Public, democratic ownership of the commons
“Attacking gentrification is only the beginning of a socialist response. We need to reorient our perspective to embrace land not as an extractive resource to exploit, but a part of our community to nurture, a neighbor to live with in harmony. A Green New Deal gives us the opportunity to push for democratic control of the land through policies such as land banks, community land trusts, and the restoration of Native stewardship. Before we get to how a GND must confront land-use, let’s talk about the origin of land-use policy in the U.S” It Begins With The Land: Land use has been a tool of oppression, but it can also be a tool of our liberation.
The problem with optimism is that it can be indulgent
"One problem with ecological urban development is that it is too often disjointed and tokenistic. Hipster equivalents of Dig for Victory, however commendable, will not save us. Development needs to be rolled out on city-wide scales; every possible street, rooftop, block utilised. Sustainable building and the use of recycling to move towards a zero-waste culture is admirable but arguably still insufficient." An Architecture That Is More Than Just Green
I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll...build your house up
Researchers in Australia believe globally stockpiled sewage sludge could be used to make biosolids bricks, an advance that could boost sustainability in the construction industry. The paper: A Proposal for Recycling the World’s Unused Stockpiles of Treated Wastewater Sludge (Biosolids) in Fired-Clay Bricks. [more inside]
Higher Steaks
Will 2019 be the year of lab-grown meat? - "After years in the lab, will meats derived from animal cells finally break into the mainstream consumer market? The products could have huge implications for the planet, human health and animal welfare." [more inside]
Intersectional sustainable crop science, and GIFs
Dr. Sarah Taber is an aquaponics and agricultural consultant and food safety scientist, Doctor of Plant Medicine, Plant Protection and Integrated Pest Management, and science communicator who's attracted a Twitter following and is writing a book. Following the jump, a collection of links. [more inside]
Farming While Black
Farming While Black "She made it her goal to start a farm for her neighbors, and to provide fresh food to refugees, immigrants and people affected by mass incarceration. She calls the lack of access to fresh food "food apartheid" because it's a human-created system of segregation." [more inside]