The Safe House - A Fortress of Sustainable Solitude

This is a classic case of people interpreting 'sustainability' as technofixes at the individual level rather than the cultural shift in how we live that could render such design unnecessary. One wonders what kind of threats are anticipated, and how effective even this would be in the face of large scale upheaval.

Sourced from Inhabitat, 14 April 2011

'Forget the Slomin Shield - if you really want home security, move into the Safe House. We're not talking about a few bars on some windows or heavy duty locks here. The Safe House is a minimalistic home that transforms into an impenetrable concrete cube at the push of a button. Designed by Polish firm KWK Promes, the modern day fortress also features a hybrid heat system (with most of the energy harvested from from renewable sources) as well as passive house strategies. The photo you're looking at right now shows the home in its "secure" state, click through the gallery to see how it looks when it transforms.

Located in a small village on the outskirts of Warsaw, the Safe House is surrounded by a series of thick, movable walls that arm and disarm like an armadillo’s armor. In its daytime state, the eastern and western side walls move apart to the garden. Even in this configuration, the outer walls remain securely shut so that there is no risk of children running into the street while playing in the front yard. When visitors approach the outer gates, they can be admitted, but the side walls come forward to create a buffer zone while the person’s identity is verified.

The walls aren’t the only parts of the home that move. Large shutters create an extra layer of protection over the windows and a drawbridge (talk about going medieval) leads to a roof terrace above the swimming pool. The southern elevation is secured via an airplane hangar style roll-down gate made by a company that normally supplies shipyards. An added plus to the southern facade is that it doubles as a gigantic movie projection screen.

The house was built with security in mind but sustainability played a large part too. “Wide glazings behind the movable walls let the building acquire energy during the day (winter) or prevent the sun’s heat from going into the house (summer),” explains KWK Promes. “At night, when the house is closed, the thick outer layer helps the building to accumulate the gained energy. Such a solution together with the hybrid heat system (most of the energy is gained from renewable sources – a heat pump and solar systems supported with gas heating) and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery makes the house become an intelligent passive building.”'

Coalition of the Willing

Sourced from Coalition of the Willing, 27 July 2010

'‘Coalition of The Willing’ is a film that discusses how we can use new internet technologies to leverage the powers of activists, experts, and ordinary citizens in collaborative ventures to combat climate change.'

Food Sensitive Planning and Urban Design (FSPUD) Report Released

Sourced from Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab, April 2011

'Food sensitive planning and urban design (FSPUD) recognises that access to healthy, sustainable and equitable food is an essential part of achieving liveable communities.

VEIL and David Locke Associates were commissioned by the National Heart Foundation of Australia (Victorian Division) to develop a resource further articulating the idea of 'Food Sensitive Planning and Urban Design' (first articulated by VEIL in 2008 as Food Sensitive Urban Design).

This new resource - Food Sensitive Planning and Urban Design: A conceptual framework for achieving a sustainable and just food system - is intended to raise the awareness of planners, architects, urban designers, engineers, policy makers, community members and elected representatives of the need to integrate food considerations into urban land use and development. It outlines:

• key areas in planning legislation, policy and processes to realise this outcomes;

• how meeting people's food needs contributes to the broader objectives of planning and urban design, including: health and fairness; sustainability and resilience; livelihoods and opportunity; and community and amenity; and

• a challenge to professionals and the broader community to take on a stronger role in ensuring that healthy, sustainable and equitable food is available for all Australians into the future.

Food Sensitive Planning & Urban Design - Conceptual Framework [pdf, 2.4MB]

Food Sensitive Planning & Urban Design - Summary [pdf, 5.4 MB]'

Das Rad (The Wheel)

"That was lucky!" << gold!!

Sourced from YouTube, 7 November 2009

Hooray for the Underdog

The Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy has been named 'Best Green Think Tank of 2011' by Treehugger, an influential sustainability/green media outlet cited by TIME magazine as one of the top 25 blogs in the world in 2009.

Reposted in full from the Daly News, April 2011

'What’s more compelling than an astonishing upset? We seem instinctively drawn to the underdog; we routinely root for the resilient scrapper who refuses to back down. It’s why Team USA over the Soviet Union in the 1980 Olympics has been memorialized as the Miracle on Ice. It’s why we cheered when Rocky Balboa went toe to toe with Apollo Creed (and subsequently KO’d All the President’s Men, Network, and Taxi Driver at the Oscars). It’s why Harry Truman’s defeat of Thomas Dewey in 1948 is one of the most famous U.S. Presidential elections. And it’s why David and Goliath is one of the most beloved biblical stories.

There are some powerful think tanks promoting “green” ideas around the world, especially when it comes to green growth, green technology, and green jobs. In a stunner, CASSE prevailed over them all as it was named the Best Green Think Tank of 2011 by the sustainability gurus at TreeHugger. Despite a miniscule budget and a skeletal staff that consists almost entirely of dedicated volunteers, the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy overcame odds almost as long as its name.

Perhaps it’s not all that shocking of an upset after all. With each passing day, the public is becoming more skeptical of the status quo and more receptive to CASSE’s message. Infinite economic growth on a finite planet makes no sense. It’s a difficult message to hear and internalize, especially amidst the constant clamor for evermore growth. But acceptance of this message is a prerequisite to making the transition to a steady state economy, and CASSE is the leading organization calling for this transition.

As TreeHugger notes, “When it comes down to advocating for what we humbly submit to readers as the single most important economic concept of the 21st century, CASSE comes out on top.” And CASSE is in good company – awards are piling up for people and organizations daring to challenge the orthodoxy of perpetual economic growth:

• The New Economic Model, a project of nef (the New Economics Foundation), has been named a 2011 semi-finalist in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge. And nef was the 2010 winner of the TreeHugger award given to CASSE this year.

• The Post Carbon Institute won a DoGooder Nonprofit Video Award for its outstanding “300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds.”

• Herman Daly won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Council for Science and the Environment.

• The Global Footprint Network won the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship.

These awards help validate the messages being delivered by CASSE, nef, Post Carbon, GFN, and dozens of other organizations. And they increase public awareness of noteworthy efforts. But more importantly, they provide inspiration for us to follow the lead of these organizations. Underdog victories prove that the little guy can win the game. Their stories help us realize that we have the power to accomplish big things.

Underdogs of the world unite!

In this case, the underdogs are all the people who are distressed about the direction humanity is headed. We are the people craving a sane solution to climate chaos, mourning the culture of materialism, searching for solutions to the ongoing assault on nature, and hoping for an end to poverty. It will take unprecedented commitment, hard work and perseverance for us to overcome greed-based corporate agendas, outdated economic institutions, and our own reservations about saying and doing what is necessary.

Now, however, is the time for underdogs of the world to unite in action. As TreeHugger astutely observed, “In all honesty awarding the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy a Best of Green Award this year is as much about promise as past action.” We need to fulfill the promise and find a way to run the economy on something other than endlessly expanding consumption. If you want to join the underdog movement for a sustainable economy, please consider taking some simple actions to raise awareness about the perils of perpetual growth and the positive possibilities of a steady state.'

The Antidote to Apathy

Sourced from TED Talks, April 2011

Local politics - schools, zoning, council elections - hit us where we live. So why don't more of us actually get involved? Is it apathy? Dave Meslin says no. He identifies the 7 barriers that keep us from taking part in our communities, even when we truly care.

China's Ghost Cities

Here we are facing peak oil, climate change (cement manufacture being a major contributor), loss of forests - and China is building an estimated ten cities a year, but the government isn't concerned whether people are actually living in them, because it's maintaining economic growth! This is what the UN calls 'uneconomic growth'. Another word would be 'madness'.

Sourced from SBS's Dateline, 24 March 2011

The Odd Challenge for Detroit Planners

Excerpt from the New York Times, 5 April 2011

'When Marja M. Winters was studying urban planning in graduate school, she learned the art and science of helping cities grow.

Now Ms. Winters, a native of Detroit and the deputy director of the city’s planning and development department, finds herself in an utterly unexpected role, one that no school would have thought to prepare her for: she is sorting out how to help her hometown shrink, by working through difficult decisions that will determine which neighborhoods can be saved and which cannot.

“It was always this notion that the population of the world continues to grow, and more and more people want to live in cities,” Ms. Winters, 33, said about her courses at the University of Michigan. “The reality is very different. Who knew?”

Puzzling through the best way to downsize a city it is not unheard of (it has been considered in Youngstown, Ohio, and Flint, Mich. and even, decades ago, in New York). And Mayor Dave Bing has made it a priority to deal with Detroit’s fast-sinking population and crumbling infrastructure by steering those who remain into fewer neighborhoods, rather than leaving them scattered throughout the 139-square-mile city, whose boundaries made more sense when twice as many people lived here 40 years ago.

Actually carrying out such an effort, particularly in a city as vast as Detroit, is like solving a complicated set of interwoven puzzles, as Ms. Winters has discovered over many long days and some nights poring over thousands of pages of maps and statistics in her 23rd-floor downtown office.

How to reconfigure roads, bus lines, police districts? How to encourage people — there is no power of eminent domain to force them — to move out of the worst neighborhoods and into better ones?

Later this month, a team that includes Ms. Winters is expected to present a proposed — and certain to be highly controversial — map to guide investment in each of the city’s neighborhoods. A final plan for a remade city is expected by year’s end.

“The biggest misconception is that we don’t have to change,” said Mr. Bing, who was elected in 2009 and describes his city as a place that is “hurting” and “sick.”

“The biggest problems are those people who are on the outskirts more than anything else, where neighborhoods have gone down to a point where it makes no sense to reinvest,” he said. “People will say, ‘Well, why not me?’ And I’m saying, we don’t have the money to do that.”

Detroit is already shrinking on its own, of course. Recent census figures show the city, once the nation’s fourth largest, lost a quarter of its population in the last decade alone, leaving it with fewer than 714,000 people.

But the losses have been spread around the city, meaning that vacant, dilapidated homes and empty lots speckle Detroit’s neighborhoods, rather than cropping up in consolidated, convenient chunks on the city edges, leaving a more vibrant core. In fact, some of the city’s best-kept neighborhoods are on its outer edges, while the troubled spots are closer to downtown.

And so, a contingent of private consultants and city officials like Ms. Winters have taken part in one of the deepest mile-by-mile analyses of Detroit in memory, tracking population densities, foreclosed homes, disease, parks, roads, water lines, sewer lines, bus routes, publicly owned lands, and on and on.

Among the dismal findings: more than 100,000 parcels, private and public, are vacant; and only 38 percent of Detroiters work in the city.

The goal is to identify the strongest, most viable neighborhoods, which would receive extra attention and help from the city. The residents of some of the weakest, emptiest neighborhoods would be encouraged to move into them...

Rumors are winding through neighborhoods. Chief among them is that the worst neighborhoods will actually be closed, with the power turned off and buildings bulldozed. The true intent, Ms. Winters said, is far more nuanced, and slower-moving.

Though the city will offer some kind of incentives for people in miserable neighborhoods to move, no neighborhood will be simply shut down, she said. A place deemed not worthy of new residential investment might see subtle shifts: services like garbage pickup, she said, could slow to every 12 days from once a week.

“We want to reduce the city’s cost of delivering services, but we also want to support a baseline quality of life — the key is how do we balance that out?” Ms. Winters said.

The ultimate plan for those neighborhoods — and the ultimate cost of consolidating them — is uncertain; some might become home to new industry, and some might be used to fill temporary needs, or for urban gardens and green space.

In more well-to-do neighborhoods, like Indian Village, where mansions fill the blocks and lawn-service crews were out in force last week, the idea of shrinking the city’s neighborhoods sounds appealing to many residents.

“When I go in some of the neighborhoods now, I have tears in my face, I just can’t believe what I see,” said Rukayya Ahsan-McTier, who was walking briskly for exercise in Indian Village, while clasping a golf club in one hand for protection from stray dogs or, as she said, any other trouble that might come her way.

Still, even Ms. Ahsan-McTier had lingering doubts about how the city’s plan would work. How would the city persuade people to move from less expensive neighborhoods to more expensive ones? And would the new neighbors mesh?

Elsewhere, others had their own worries: Would this simply amount to another chapter of “urban renewal” in which the poorest, least educated and unluckiest would be forced to move?

And what exactly would become of the neighborhoods with diminished services, likely to be places already plagued in some cases by what residents described as new, audacious brands of crimes? (Stores in some neighborhoods here have taken to placing cement blocks outside their glass entryways, residents said, to prevent thieves from crashing their cars through the doors for break-ins.)...

For their part, city officials say the police and firefighters will always serve all Detroit neighborhoods — even ones where only a few people may be left.

Mr. Bing’s hope is that a “core group” of neighborhoods connected to downtown, and to the city’s spine, Woodward Avenue, will remain, and that the master plan will ultimately help end the exodus of Detroiters...'

Non-Geographic Mapping

click on link below to access interactive map

Sourced from Princeton University

'The International Networks Archive is a worldwide alliance of scholars interested in developing a new system of mapping our world, based on global transactions instead of geography.'

Enjoy the Ride Takes Off

The Western Australian government's road safety campaign 'Enjoy the Ride' - an inspired and very clever piece of communication!

Reposted in full from the ABC, 11 April 2011

'Within minutes of its launch, the 'slow down and enjoy the ride' commercial had been viewed by thousands of people around the world.

The three minute Office of Road Safety ad was broadcast simultaneously on three television stations last month but its spread online has been rapid in its own right.

In simple terms, the campaign encourages motorists to slow down.

It hardly sounds compelling but after decades of road safety advertising that has had a limited effect on the state's road toll, this campaign appears to be getting the message through.

So much so, people from around the world have been logging on to YouTube to view it, and they are doing it over and over again.

So what's so different this time around?

The campaign has been two years in the making.

Derry Simpson from 303 Advertising says she spent countless hours poring over research, listening to focus groups and watching old campaigns.

She says it became immediately clear that if this campaign was to be effective, a new approach would be needed.

"We needed to move away from the enforcement and consequence model," she said.

"It was becoming quite clear to me that a lot of the traditional campaigns were becoming a form of wallpaper."

Derry Simpson says more than 80 per cent of people admit to speeding but men aged 17 to 30, who are in the highest risk group, were becoming especially resistant.

"I could see that the ads were starting to lose traction and that particularly younger males were very quick to dismiss them," she said.

"The problem is, somewhere along the line, most of those people think they are in control, and they think their speeding is ok."

Slow Movement

The concept that would eventually shape the ad fell into place when the speed of life was taken into account.

An Italian group dedicated to slowing down life's pace, whether it be cooking, travelling or parenting, came to be known as the 'slow movement' and broadly refers back to when life was simpler.

It began in 1999 but its popularity has surged in recent years thanks to social media.

A professor of social marketing Rob Donovan says it is clear the ad has struck a chord.

"I think what the Office of Road Safety has done is picked up on a social movement and embedded an advertisement in that; they have made it something that is broader than just slowing down on the road," he said.

He says the ad's appeal is broad because it has been framed in a positive way.

"What they [the advertising company] is doing is tuning into the underlying need that people have about wanting to slow their lives down and do things in a less complicated way.

"This campaign taps into the anxiety that people have about what they might be missing out on while they are stressed and rushing from place to place," he said.

"It's not that people are stepping back and going wow what a great road safety campaign, they are going wow, what a great idea about how I should live my life."

In a major coup, internationally known author and Slow Movement contributor Carl Honore has also come on board with the campaign.

It's the first time the author of 'In Praise of Slow' has chosen to endorse a road safety campaign, despite numerous requests from around the world.

Going Viral

Even those closely involved with the 'Enjoy the Ride' campaign were surprised at how quickly it took off on the internet and other social media.

Since its launch on March 19th the ad has been 'tweeted' 314 times, there have been 207 blog posts since, and more than half of those were recorded in the last week.

5,104 people have shared the clip on Facebook.

The clip posted on YouTube has had over 63,000 views and almost 30,000 of those were in the last week alone.

The Office of Road Safety's director of strategic communications Roger Farley says the ad is reaching those who are typically the most elusive.

"What's interesting is that those people who are tweeting and facebooking and blogging about this campaign are the younger audience who are very media savvy and who are the hardest to get a message through to," he said.

He says the move to create a more positive campaign rather than one which focussed on shock tactics has been a success.

"We have turned the whole thing on its head and lots of people have come to us and told us that things are getting too fast paced so that's why the advertisement is making such a difference," he said.

"We have had such a positive response and people are actually saying wow this is fantastic, where can I get a copy of it, can I buy it? I mean that is unheard of. "

It was interesting because we purposely kept road safety out of the equation until the final scenes.

It was more about the other things in life that can be improved if you slow down, and then road safety comes in at the end," he said.

Mr Farley says there was some concern about the strategy.

"There was a lot of anxiety associated with the campaign because we really were doing this for the first time.

We had a fair idea it was going to be a success but people have really taken the message on board, above and beyond what we ever could have anticipated," he said.

The council's chairman D'Arcy Holman says the campaign was a real change of thinking but it's been a total success.

"Every dollar that we have to spend on road safety campaign is so precious so we certainly can't afford to have advertising out there that isn't effective," he said.

He says the ad is just one part of a campaign.

"We need to remember this will be used in conjunction with other road safety messages.

The concern is that the minute you take those other campaigns away, then people will start to speed again, they will start to drink drive," he said.

Tallest Mountain to Deepest Ocean Trench

Sourced from Our Amazing Planet, 7 June 2010

Regime Shifts

Sourced from Regime Shifts, an initiative led by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, April 2011

'Regime shifts are large, persistent changes in the structure and function of social-ecological systems, with substantive impacts on the suite of ecosystem services provided by these systems...they may have substantial impacts on human well-being, and are often difficult to anticipate and costly to reverse.

The Regime Shifts DataBase focuses specifically on regime shifts that have large impacts on ecosystem services, and therefore on human well-being.'

How to Design a Neighborhood for Happiness

Excerpt from Shareable, 25 March 2011

'...The way we design our communities plays a huge role in how we experience our lives. Neighborhoods built without sidewalks, for instance, mean that people walk less and therefore experience fewer spontaneous encounters, which is what instills a spirit of community to a place. That’s a chief cause of the social isolation so rampant in the modern world that contributes to depression, distrust and other maladies.

You don’t have to be a therapist to realize all this creates lasting psychological effects. It thwarts the connections between people that encourage us to congregate, cooperate and work for the common good. We retreat into ever more privatized existences.

Of course, this is no startling revelation. Over the past 40 years, the shrinking sense of community across America has been widely discussed, and many proposals outlined about how to bring us back together.

One of the notable solutions being put into practice to combat this problem is New Urbanism, an architectural movement to build new communities (and revitalize existing ones) by maximizing opportunities for social exchange: public plazas, front porches, corner stores, coffee shops, neighborhood schools, narrow streets and, yes, sidewalks.

This line of thinking has transformed many communities, including my own World War I-era neighborhood in Minneapolis, which thankfully has sidewalks but was once bereft of the inviting public places that animate a community. Now I marvel at all the choices I have to mingle with the neighbors over a cappuccino, Pabst Blue Ribbon, juevos rancheros, artwork at a gallery opening or head of lettuce at the farmer’s market.

But while New Urbanism is making strides at the level of the neighborhood, we still spend most of our time at home, which today means seeing no one other than our nuclear family. How could we widen that circle just a bit? Not a ‘60s commune (“pass the brown rice, comrade, and don’t forget your shift cleaning the toilet ”), but good neighbors with whom we share more than a property line.

That’s an idea Seattle-area architect Ross Chapin has explored for many years, and now showcases in an inspiring and beautiful new book: Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating a Small-Scale Community in a Large-Scale World.

He believes that groupings of four to twelve households make an ideal community “where meaningful ‘neighborly’ relationships are fostered.” But even here, design shapes our destiny. Chapin explains that strong connections between neighbors develop most fully and organically when everyone shares some "common ground".

That can be a semi-private square, as in the pocket neighborhoods Chapin designed in the Seattle area. In the book’s bright photographs, they look like grassy patches of paradise, where kids scamper, flowers bloom, and neighbors stop to chat.

But Chapin points out these commons can take many different forms—an apartment building in Cambridge with a shared backyard, a group of neighbors in Oakland who tore down their backyard fences to create a commons, a block in Baltimore that turned their alley into a pubic commons, or the residential pedestrian streets found in Manhattan Beach, California, and all around Europe...'

Pocket Neighborhoods

Looks terrible - I think I'd rather stick with suburban sprawl...

Sourced from Pocket Neighborhoods, April 2011

'Pocket neighborhoods are clustered groups of neighboring houses or apartments gathered around some sort of shared open space — a garden courtyard, a pedestrian street, a series of joined backyards, or a reclaimed alley — all of which have a clear sense of territory and shared stewardship. They can be in urban, suburban or rural areas.

The fabric of social health in our society has been fraying, in part because many people lack networks of personal and social support. Family members can be spread across the country, friends live across town, and neighbors don’t know one another. A listening ear or helping hand is not available when it’s most needed.

Pocket neighborhoods can help mend a web of belonging, care and support. Their protected setting encourages informal interaction among neighbors, laying the ground for caring relationships. An elderly neighbor may need assistance trimming a hedge. Another needs help looking after the kids while going for a short errand, or feeding a cat while away on vacation. Nearby neighbors are the ones most available to respond to daily needs. They are also the ones to hear a story, admire a newly planted garden bed, or reminisce about old times. All of these encounters strengthen webs of support and friendship, which are the basis for healthy, livable communities.'

The Different Kinds of Ecosystem Services

Useful summary of Ecosystems Services

Reposted in full from The Bank of Natural Capital, 12 October 2010

'Ecosystem services are the direct and indirect contributions of ecosystems to human well-being. We can distinguish between provisioning, regulating, supporting and cultural services provided by ecosystems:

Provisioning Services are ecosystem services that describe the material or energy outputs from ecosystems. They include food, water and other resources.

Food: Ecosystems provide the conditions for growing food. Food comes principally from managed agro-ecosystems but marine and freshwater systems or forests also provide food for human consumption. Wild foods from forests are often underestimated.

Raw materials: Ecosystems provide a great diversity of materials for construction and fuel including wood, biofuels and plant oils that are directly derived from wild and cultivated plant species.

Fresh water: Ecosystems play a vital role in the global hydrological cycle, as they regulate the flow and purification of water. Vegetation and forests influence the quantity of water available locally.

Medicinal resources: Ecosystems and biodiversity provide many plants used as traditional medicines as well as providing the raw materials for the pharmaceutical industry. All ecosystems are a potential source of medicinal resources.

Regulating Services are the services that ecosystems provide by acting as regulators eg. regulating the quality of air and soil or by providing flood and disease control.

Local climate and air quality: Trees provide shade whilst forests influence rainfall and water availability both locally and regionally. Trees or other plants also play an important role in regulating air quality by removing pollutants from the atmosphere.

Carbon sequestration and storage: Ecosystems regulate the global climate by storing and sequestering greenhouse gases. As trees and plants grow, they remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and effectively lock it away in their tissues. In this way forest ecosystems are carbon stores. Biodiversity also plays an important role by improving the capacity of ecosystems to adapt to the effects of climate change.

Moderation of extreme events: Extreme weather events or natural hazards include floods, storms, tsunamis, avalanches and landslides. Ecosystems and living organisms create buffers against natural disasters, thereby preventing possible damage. For example, wetlands can soak up flood water whilst trees can stabilize slopes. Coral reefs and mangroves help protect coastlines from storm damage.

Waste-water treatment: Ecosystems such as wetlands filter both human and animal waste and act as a natural buffer to the surrounding environment. Through the biological activity of microorganisms in the soil, most waste is broken down. Thereby pathogens (disease causing microbes) are eliminated, and the level of nutrients and pollution is reduced.

Erosion prevention and maintenance of soil fertility: Soil erosion is a key factor in the process of land degradation and desertification. Vegetation cover provides a vital regulating service by preventing soil erosion. Soil fertility is essential for plant growth and agriculture and well functioning ecosystems supply the soil with nutrients required to support plant growth.

Pollination: Insects and wind pollinate plants and trees which is essential for the development of fruits, vegetables and seeds. Animal pollination is an ecosystem service mainly provided by insects but also by some birds and bats. Some 87 out of the 115 leading global food crops depend upon animal pollination including important cash crops such as cocoa and coffee (Klein et al. 2007).

Biological control: Ecosystems are important for regulating pests and vector borne diseases that attack plants, animals and people. Ecosystems regulate pests and diseases through the activities of predators and parasites. Birds, bats, flies, wasps, frogs and fungi all act as natural controls.

Habitat or Supporting Services underpin almost all other services. Ecosystems provide living spaces for plants or animals; they also maintain a diversity of different breeds of plants and animals.

Habitats for species: Habitats provide everything that an individual plant or animal needs to survive: food; water; and shelter. Each ecosystem provides different habitats that can be essential for a species’ lifecycle. Migratory species including birds, fish, mammals and insects all depend upon different ecosystems during their movements.

Maintenance of genetic diversity: Genetic diversity is the variety of genes between and within species populations. Genetic diversity distinguishes different breeds or races from each other thus providing the basis for locally well-adapted cultivars and a gene pool for further developing commercial crops and livestock. Some habitats have an exceptionally high number of species which makes them more genetically diverse than others and are known as ‘biodiversity hotspots’.

Cultural Services include the non-material benefits people obtain from contact with ecosystems. They include aesthetic, spiritual and psychological benefits.

Recreation and mental and physical health: Walking and playing sports in green space is not only a good form of physical exercise but also lets people relax. The role that green space plays in maintaining mental and physical health is increasingly being recognized, despite difficulties of measurement.

Tourism: Ecosystems and biodiversity play an important role for many kinds of tourism which in turn provides considerable economic benefits and is a vital source of income for many countries. In 2008 global earnings from tourism summed up to US$ 944 billion. Cultural and eco-tourism can also educate people about the importance of biological diversity.

Aesthetic appreciation and inspiration for culture, art and design: Language, knowledge and the natural environment have been intimately related throughout human history. Biodiversity, ecosystems and natural landscapes have been the source of inspiration for much of our art, culture and increasingly for science.

Spiritual experience and sense of place: In many parts of the world natural features such as specific forests, caves or mountains are considered sacred or have a religious meaning. Nature is a common element of all major religions and traditional knowledge, and associated customs are important for creating a sense of belonging.'

Five Benefits of the Crowd-Sourced City

Reposted in full from Shareable, 24 March 2011

'With the rise of affordable consumer electronics and the explosion of the information age, the gap between professionals and amateurs has narrowed. In nearly every sector, the average Joe may have ideas and talents that are as good -- or better -- than those of the “powers that be.” When professionals give an open call to an undefined crowd, opening up policies and plans to receive their ideas and talents, the concept of “crowd-sourcing” is being utilized. Crowd-sourcing can involve collaboration by the public on any number of tasks, and the term has drawn both criticism and controversy. However, a large representation of professionals have found it very helpful.

When private businesses began to discover the untapped resource of collective intelligence that lay within their customer base and to draw on that intelligence through tech solutions, a new way of doing business was born. Suddenly, through the power of the Internet and mobile applications, companies and organizations could crowd-source everything from customer service to ideation. It was a novel idea -- saving time and money while making the consumer a real and valued part of the business. The concept of crowd-sourcing garnered a significant following, and like all good ideas... it spread.

Forward-thinking communities and cities have begun to adopt the “new way of doing business,” examining areas in which they can invite the participation of citizens. “Open government” developed as a term to describe the process of making civic data accessible and usable to residents. More recently, place-based technologies -- which allow people to geographically reference, track, discuss, and develop ideas about specific locations -- have moved the crowd-sourcing concept beyond mere public participation. Some cities have broken new ground by using these and other technologies to allow for collaboration or “co-design” -- actually working with citizens through the whole development process. This relates to the planning of public spaces, the resolution of local social issues, and much more.

There are significant challenges to implementing this boldly engaging approach. Cities must be committed to fostering a culture of openness and transparency which, let’s face it, doesn’t always come naturally to administration. But the rewards are worth the effort. The engaging city that works to create an environment of “publicness” and reaches to draw a continuous flow of ideas from the entire citizen base will discover:

1. Increased efficiency and lowered costs


Crowd-sourcing has been touted as a cost-reducer, which certainly appeals to policy makers as cities struggle to balance unstable budgets. Governments are turning to citizens for ideas on how to trim or maintain city services instead of spending huge sums on solution development. This works because many citizens are thinkers, artists, accountants, businessmen, and developers -- many with the creativity and ability to build valuable systems that solve civic problems or improve services. These systems are non-traditional; they are web-based and publicly accessible, which is what makes them affordable and valuable to communities.

One example is Trein, an iPhone app developed by a student which brings real-time train-tracking information to mobile devices in the Netherlands. The Dutch Railways have been spending money for years in attempts to create a workable tracking system. A private individual was able to do it on his own! If the Dutch Railways had embraced his work (which they unfortunately did not), they would have saved time and money, gaining a tool to keep citizens up-to-date and informed.

2. Management of community and infrastructure problems


Place-based technology and the Open311 movement, which strives to create an open standard for city services, have been influential in unleashing the power of crowd-sourcing to track community problems. Platforms like SeeClickFix and CitySourced have emerged to offer citizens the chance to report potholes, graffiti, overgrown intersections, and other quality-of-life issues to local authorities. People can use their mobile devices to report issues, leave comments, and view reports that have been made anywhere in the world. Smart cities will embrace such technologies as an organic way to come alongside citizens in managing community and infrastructure issues.

3. Collective resolution of social issues


Gaining a citizen perspective is key for policy makers when developing any type of public solution, but town hall meetings or letters to the editor often fall short of giving adequate representation of what the general public thinks about an issue. In order to combat the pitfalls of these traditional methods, engaging cities are reaching out in new ways, inviting public collaboration in problem-solving.

MindLab, based in Copenhagen, Denmark, is a cross-ministerial unit that helps develop the public sector “from within.” The organization provides neutral spaces (intentionally located apart from ministerial buildings) to allow for free development of ideas and solutions. MindLab projects have provided input on a variety of social issues, from enhancing young people’s understanding of finances to generating a debate around gender equality. Citizens work side-by-side with civil servants, creating and innovating. And the city reaps the benefits.

4. Creation and maintenance of public datasets


Despite all the possibilities inherent in open data, cities are often unable, due to time and money constraints, to develop and maintain the datasets that could provide valuable information for cities and citizens alike. By enlisting the time and talents of residents, communities are finding new ways of collecting data that don’t require manpower from the city, often using geographic information system (GIS) technologies that allow for interactive, real-time mapping of data.

In Los Angeles, the city’s Office of Historic Resources has launched SurveyLA, a comprehensive program to identify important historical resources throughout the city. Citizens are actively invited to participate in the process through surveys and online submission of historical resources or to search for a particular site using the city’s GIS-powered map of historical structures. Similarly, the city of San Francisco is turning residents into urban foresters by instituting collaboration on a map of the trees in the area. The Urban Forest Map allows people to browse or add information about trees in their neighborhoods, recording species, location, trunk diameter, and height. The data will help planners manage existing trees and plan for new ones, while combating tree pests and diseases; over time, a better and healthier urban forest will emerge in San Francisco.

5. Development of people-planned, people-focused spaces


Perhaps the most valuable application of co-design is that of involving the public in long-term projects and community plans. Citizens themselves often hold the most intimate knowledge of the needs in their area. One bold experiment in engaging planning is the neighborhood wiki in the Netherlands, a collaborative site that is drawing on the everyday knowledge and experience of citizens to form long-range plans for the area. For cities wishing to implement an engaging approach throughout community development projects, there are helpful tools for facilitating public involvement. One of these is Engaging Plans, which provides a website package tailored to a specific plan or project. Through the custom site, citizens can participate in online dialogues, map and comment on ideas, and stay up-to-date on developments. Meanwhile, cities collect valuable feedback.

Crowd-sourced cities are strong cities


Collaboration between citizens and governments is an evolving concept; there will be new advances to watch as cities and developers work together toward an engaged public. Challenges of crowd-sourcing - such as culling the meaningless ideas from the valuable ones or motivating the largest segment of the population to participate - continue to be addressed with every new platform that is introduced. Meanwhile, the process of engaging the public continues to grow in value. Cities and the organizations within them will find that if they open their policies, plans, and datasets to include this “new way of doing business,” the end result will be better communities that effectively meet the needs of the people living in them.'

The Human Cost of Comfort

Sourced from Credit Loan, 2009

click on link for full size image

'Can you imagine living without the Internet? Well, the Internet’s not even that old. How about living without your television or telephone?

Today, we take a whole range of human comforts for granted. We also don’t appreciate just how inexpensive most of our creature comforts – cling plastic wrap, anyone? – are.

Here’s a brief rundown of some of the human comforts that we now take for granted and the average cost of these items.

Take toothpaste, for instance. This essential product was invented in the 1700s. But that long-ago toothpaste bears little resemblance to the toothpaste of today. In the 1700s, the product was made from burnt bread or from resin and cinnamon. Today’s toothpaste is made from hydrogen peroxide and baking soda. You can credit Dr. Washington Sheffield with inventing toothpaste in a tube. He accomplished this feat in 1892. The cost of this creature comfort? About $3 to $5 a tube.

Air conditioning is another comfort that we barely think about, unless our central air units suddenly stop working on a 90-degree day. Willis Haviland invented the first modern air conditioning unit in 1902. Haviland sought to control the temperature in a printing plant. Before this, cooling the air was hardly an easy process. How much does this basic human comfort cost us? Just pennies an hour.

Credit Leonardo da Vinci with another of our prized creature comforts: contact lenses. The great inventor proposed the idea of contact lenses as a method of studying the eye. The first useful contacts came on the scene in 1887. These were made of hard glass, and were far from comfortable. Soft contacts made of hydrogel were invented by Czech chemists Otto Wichterle and Drahoslav Lim in 1959. Nearly 40 million people in the United States now wear soft contacts. These contacts cost as little as $10 apiece.

What if you have a headache? You can always reach for the aspirin. But this wasn’t always the case. French chemist Charles Frederic Gerhardt first invented aspirin in 1853. By 1899, Bayer had patented aspirin and was selling it in great quantities. Acetaminophen, the main ingredient in Tylenol, came onto the scene in 1956, while ibuprofen showed up in 1969. You can now achieve pain relief for as little as a few cents per headache.

The next time you’re folding laundry, spare Louis Goldenberg a thought. He invented the electric washing machine at the beginning of the 20th Century while working for Ford Motor Company. Spin dryers were added to the mix in the 1930s, forever changing the way we wash and dry our clothes.

We may grow tired of listening to our co-workers, family members and fellow commuters babbling on their cell phones. But think of how difficult life would be without these handy devices. Martin Cooper of Motorola is credited with inventing the first mobile phone in 1973. The FCC eventually approved the first commercial mobile phone in the United States in 1983. Today, of course, these phones are everywhere. You can chat on your mobile phone for as little as $40 a month.

And finally, don’t forget about the amazing flushable toilet. Life truly would be more of a challenge without this wonder. John Harrington developed the precursor to the first flush toilet in 1596. Eventually, we ended up with today’s modern toilets. You can expect to pay about $200 to avoid the indignity of having to take your potty breaks in outhouses.'

The Carbon Atlas

click on link to original source for interactive map

Sourced from The Guardian, 9 December 2008

'New figures confirm that China has overtaken the US as the largest emitter of CO2. This interactive emissions map shows how the rest of the world compares. Global C02 emissions totalled 29,195m tonnes in 2006 – up 2.4% on 2005'

Escaping from Civilisation Only a Remote Possibility

Travel time to anywhere in the world...

Sourced from the New Scientist, 2 April 2009

'Very little of the world's land can now be thought of as inaccessible, according to a new map of connectedness.

The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water.

The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and rivernetworks. It also considers how factors like altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel.

Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10% of the world's land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city.

What's more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20% of the land is more than two days from a city - around the same proportion as Canada's Quebec province.'

How travel time was calculated

Shipping Lanes

Road Networks

The Old American Dream is a Nightmare

Excerpt from Grist, 9 March 2011

'...[James Howard] Kunstler has long warned of the horrendous hangover we're going to wake up with after our "cheap oil fiesta," but he's not gloating as global instability and climate destabilization become the new not-so-normal. Unlike some dystopians, he's motivated less by the desire to say "I told you so" than by the hope that we might still manage to reinvent the American dream on a scale that better suits our current circumstances.

Q. In your 2005 book The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, you gave high-rises low marks, and declared that you're "not optimistic about our big cities." You maintain that towns and small cities are far better equipped to adapt to the post-cheap-oil future.

Now, we've got economist Edward Glaeser talking up skyscrapers in The Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier. David Owen made a similar case with Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability.

Do you find yourself swayed, even a little, by these defenders of urban density?

A. I am completely on board with compact, dense urbanism. It's a mistake, though, to think that's the same as an urbanism of mega-structures - either skyscrapers or landscrapers.

A lot of this misunderstanding derived from David Owen's 2004 New Yorker article, "Green Manhattan," which declared that stacking people up in towers was the ultimate triumph of urban ecology. Owen is a very nice fellow, but this thesis was a crock.

And I'm confident that Ed Glaeser and his acolytes will be disappointed with how it all works out, too. We are entering a capital-scarce, energy-scarce future. The skyscraper is already obsolete and the architects and academic economists remain tragically clueless about it.

Oddly, the main reason we're done with skyscrapers is not because of the electric issues or heating-cooling issues per se, but because they will never be renovated! They are one-generation buildings. We will not have the capital to renovate them - and all buildings eventually require renovation! We likely won't have the fabricated modular materials they require, either - everything from the manufactured sheet-rock to the silicon gaskets and sealers needed to keep the glass curtain walls attached.

You cannot have a city of buildings unavailable for and unsuited for adaptive re-use. This final exuberant generation of skyscrapers built the past few decades - including the mis-named "green" skyscrapers - may be considered the architectural expression of the final cheap oil blow-off.

From now on, we need desperately to tone down our grandiosity. We will discover to our dismay that all these skyscrapers - amazing feats that they might be - are liabilities, not assets. Our cities are going to contract a lot and the process will be painful in terms of lost notional wealth (and probably other ways, too). They have attained a scale that is inconsistent with the economic and energy realities of the future. The optimum building height, we will re-discover, is the number of stories most healthy people can comfortably walk up.

Q. Is "smart growth" the antidote to sprawl, or just a developer's disingenuous oxymoron?

A. "Smart growth" started as a polemical retort to the "dumb" growth of suburban sprawl. It happened that dumb growth was utterly entrenched in all our local land-use laws, and in the sectors that served them - especially the construction trades and our lending practices. The zoning laws mandated a car-dependent outcome, and the builders furnished it, exactly as specified.

By the way, it's important to understand that suburbia was not dreamed up by the devil or any of his agents among us. It just seemed like a good idea in the America of the 20th century. We had the material and capital resources to build this empire of comfort and convenience, so we did. And all this implies a powerful cultural consensus - a broad agreement that this way of living is okay.

Eventually, of course, it became embedded in our national identity as a late incarnation of the American Dream. All well and good - and over! Because our circumstances have changed drastically now. We face the awful predicament of peak oil, and the global contest over the world's remaining resources, and reality is telling us very loudly that we have to live differently - we have to get a new American Dream.

The resistance to this is ferocious, not because Americans are particularly dumb or wicked, but because of the massive investments we have already made in these suburban infrastructures for daily living. We can't accept the scary mandates of reality, or begin the process of letting go.

Smart growth was a strategy undertaken by the New Urbanist reformers to offer an alternative template for land development in America - one based on the traditional walkable neighborhood. The New Urbanists were superbly skilled at drawing up clear graphical codes that might be used to replace the suburban codes around the country. The term "smart" growth was intended to be a selling point - though, unfortunately it often offended the very people it was aimed at by making their own codes look dumb...

The housing bubble bust...represents not just a transient economic fiasco; it is the end of the suburban project per se. We are finished with suburbia. We're stuck with the residue of it. And now we'll see how this all sorts itself out in the face of $100+ per barrel oil.

We will probably come to see a long era of little-to-no-growth. Whatever happens in terms of the human habitat from now on will involve the re-use of stuff that is already there, one way or another.

Personally, I believe the action is going to shift to small towns, small cities, and places that exist in a relationship with a productive agricultural landscape. The fate of suburbia is to become slums, salvage sites, and ruins. Human beings are very good at sorting out materials, and we'll have to do a lot of that. I believe a great deal of all trade in the years ahead will be in material goods already made, re-purposed, as they say, and re-circulated.

...I maintain that any activity organized at the colossal scale will tend to fail in the face of the compound crises of energy, capital, and ecology (climate change). Giant governments, giant universities, giant retail operations - all these things will wobble and fail in the years ahead as reality compels us to downscale and re-localize...

...we are mounting a foolish campaign to sustain the unsustainable, to defend our previous investments in things like suburban living, instead of making new arrangements. That's what we do when we invest half a trillion dollars of "stimulus" capital in building new circumferential highways around our hypertrophied metroplex cities instead of repairing the railroad system.

There is, sadly, much truth in the old saying that people get what they deserve, not what they expect. We are an extremely demoralized nation, unable to construct a coherent consensus about what is happening and what we might do about it, and floundering as a result. Even at the elite environmentalist level, the conversation is ridiculous. For two years in a row, I attended the Aspen Environmental forum, which attracts the cream of the green-and-enviro community. Whenever the subjects of peak oil and our extreme car dependency came up, all they wanted to talk about was running cars by other clever means: electricity, biodiesel, etc. They showed a total lack interest in walkable communities or public transit. They were blind to the fact that their own techno-grandiosity left them in a position that only promoted further car dependency - which is suicidal, of course...

...I suspect that we have left behind the supposed normality of the past decade and have now entered uncharted territory of the long emergency. We have also seen the first stirrings of American unrest in the battles over public employee bargaining rights. I'd maintain that this is only the start of a very rough political era in the USA. The buildup of tensions is fantastic. You have a dissolving middle class watching their futures whirl around the drain, and an obscenely rich Wall Street banking class (abetted by a disgustingly bought-off political class) that has been allowed to evade the rule of law in running a set of ruinous financial rackets, swindles, and frauds, and this alone is, to me, a recipe for civil disorder. I'm amazed that the Hamptons have not yet been torched.'