Gaia Theory & Deep Ecology by Dr. Stephan Harding
This is a youtube series. (10 episodes altogether) This is profound and very valuable info…
Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra – Knowledge ‘out there’ since over 30 years
I just found this book again in a used bookshop and, in case you did not read into it, yet, I recommend it highly…What also struck me was that it was first published in 1975. – My deepest respect to Fritjof Capra (http://www.fritjofcapra.net/).
This is from Chapter 2 Knowing and Seeing:
…The natural world, on the other hand, is one of infinite varieties and complexities, a multidimensional world which contains no straight lines or completely regular shapes, where things do not happen in sequences, but all together; a world where—as modern physics tells us—even empty space is curved. It is clear that our abstract system of conceptual thinking can never describe or understand this reality completely. In thinking about the world we are faced with the same kind of problem as the cartographer who tries to cover the curved face of the Earth with a sequence of plane maps. We can only expect an approximate representation of reality from such a procedure, and all rational knowledge is therefore necessarily limited.
On Friday, Oct 9th 2009 Humans Explode Surface of the Moon
Sadly, this is no joke. ‘In the name of science’ this friday (tomorrow) Nasa will intentionally crash a satellite onto the moon.
How do you feel about that? Is this what should be done? What is your connection to the moon? Do you know how intimately we are linked to its rhythms and dynamics? And so now human genuity will destroy its surface purposefully…How disconnected do you have to be?
At the same time: That seems to be the nature of things right now. That seems to be where it’s at. Curious what it will do. – It hurts, though. Pobre luna…
On Friday, however, the Earth’s nearest neighbour is set to stage one of the strangest moments in space exploration, as Nasa prepares to send a 2.3 tonne satellite smashing into the lunar surface.
If all goes to plan, officials at the space agency say the strike will take place at around 12.30pm UK time, with a booster rocket and $79m satellite slamming into a huge crater near the moon’s south pole.
Sharing info on mushrooms/mycelium
The mycelium infuses all landscapes, it holds soils together, it’s extremely tenacious. This holds up to 30,000 times its mass. They’re the grand molecular disassemblers of nature — the soil magicians. They generate the humus soils across the land masses of Earth. We have now discovered that there is a multi-directional transfer of nutrients between plants, mitigated by the mcyelium — so the mycelium is the mother that is giving nutrients from alder and birch trees to hemlocks, cedars and Douglas firs.
California lost 90% of it’s Wildlife, for example
“Shifting Baselines in the Tijuana Tide” is a new 5-minute video to be released on Earth Day, April 22, 2009, from the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project.
The video presentation is intended to help local conservation efforts communicate more effectively the current situation. Over 60 percent of Tijuana’s raw sewage flows directly into the river, through the Tijuana River Estuary and into the ocean. Imperial Beach pays the price for this problem with over 200 days a year of closed beaches and periodically high levels of Hepatitis A measured in the coastal waters. The video encourages viewers to join local efforts such as Pervious Pavers in an attempt to curb the overall pollution and runoff problem. It will be posted on multiple websites on Earth Day, along with a Spanish language version of the same piece.
The project is part of the on-going efforts of the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project (www.shiftingbaselines.org), which brings together ocean conservationists and filmmakers in an effort to communicate the problems to wider audiences. It is based at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and has more than 20 partner groups, including co-founding partners Scripps and Surfrider Foundation.
The Future of Food
Bueno, yet another movie. Hope it makes you angry (the movie, I mean…)
‘THE FUTURE OF FOOD examines the complex web of market and political forces that are changing what we eat as huge multinational corporations seek to control the world’s food system.’ – keep on watching the other parts…
You might also want to have a look at our ‘Corporate Watch’ playlist on youtube…
Shifting Perspective
Maybe many of you already know this film, since it is from 1977, meaning: around since a while, and one of the most successful films out of the realm of science:
Powers of Ten, ‘A film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe…’
Mesoscale Mystery
Like Gulliver, we return from Lilliput and Brodbingnag only to find hat some of the srangest goings-on are happening at the human scale. There is a case to be made that, for all their unanswered questions, it is the very large and the very small that are the best understood in science.
Water Writer by Mitsui Zosen
The middle of the range, the mesoscale, offers plenty of mysteries yet. There is much that we know, from Newton’s laws to chemistry, but there are also the puzzles of the organisation of life, the conscious mind, and the uncontrollable weather. You don’t need to go down to the scale of the atom and Schrödinger’s wave-in-a-box to be awed by the mystery of waves. Mitsui Zosen’s arrangement of wave generators in a circular tank order to create standing waves of unwavelike shapes, such as letters of the alphabet, reminds us that they are strange enough in the everyday world.
The mesoscale is where matter and energy behave in the ways intuitively familiar to us, where visualization is most relevant, and therefore where it is most likely that designers have a real contribution to make.
All of biology happens at this scale. When he wrote about technology as the extension of man, Marshall McLuhan did not explicitly invoke technologies based on biological systems, although that possibility is inherent in our conception of such powers – we speak of of having eyes like a hawk or there are hearing ability of a dog, we envy bat’s radar and migrating birds navigational skill. The huge progress in bilogical sciences during the twentieth century now dictates that designers should no longer consider the mineral world as their raw material. Early work at this new boundary between science and design is both exciting and disturbing.
Seed Media Group Identity
Stefan Sagmeister and Matthias Ernstberger created the Seed Media Group Logos, based on a phyllotaxis structure, a quintessentially organic algorythm. Seed’s Mission is to establish science Position into culture. Jonathan Harris took the logo as a basis for a web-based project that symbolizes the space, where science meets culture, www.phylotaxis.com.
Susana Soares uses the fact that bees can be “trained” to react to specific odors to harness them in a kind of olfactory appurtenance that could enable us to sense toxins or pheromones. The idea may be bizzare now, but is it really stranger in principal than an explosives-sniffing dog? It is beayond question that closer appreciation of biological systems of all kinds now raises the prospect of extending human capabilities in many ways.
If tissue cells can be cultured to emulate human parts for use in reconstructive surgery, some designers have reasoned, then they can also be made to follow entirely novel forms. It is relatively straight forward matter to produce something faintly creepy using these techiques, as Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr do in their long-running project, Tissue Culture & Art. Their Pig Wings Project, wing shapes grown from pig tissue, is an example of a semi-living object, one which, by title and appearance, mocks the aspirations of the very biotechnology it utilizes to achieve its result.
It is all together harder, in the early days, to produce thing of beauty. However Tobie Kerridge, Nikki Stott and Ian Thompson may have succeded with Biojewellery, a project that allows wedding rings to be exchanged that are made of the bone grown from each marriage partner’s bone cells.
This approach on design seeks to adept specific advantages observed in natural ogranisms into human technology, but the polemical subtext of any design inspired by nature is that we are in danger of losing touch with the natural world. It pleeds for the biological, the technological, and the ethical to come together.
This is the objective of “consilience”, the term coined by biologist Edward O. Wilson for the reunification of the strands of intellectual inquiry artificialyy seperated as a consequence of the growth of specialized disciplines in science and the humanites. In his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Wilson writes: “If the world really works in a way so as the encourage the consilience of knowledge, I believe the enterprise of culture will eventually fall out into science, by which i mean the natural science, and the humanities, particulary the creative arts.”
Charles Eames and Richard Feynman were consilient personalities, but their meeting never happened because the world didn’t work in the right way. The question is: Does it now?
This was taken from the book “Design and the Elastic Mind”, edited by Libby Hruska and Rebecca Roberts, published by the Museum of Modern Art, NY.
Deutschland und der Umweltschutz: ‘Wir verwalten den Untergang und halten die Leute ruhig’
‘Tatsächlich stagniert Deutschland beim Thema Umweltschutz schon seit der Wiedervereinigung. Es tut mir weh, wenn ich sehe, dass die Deutschen Umweltschutz immer noch als nachgeschaltete Umwelttechnik verstehen statt als Produktinnovation. Damit sind die Deutschen für das, was ich vorschlage, eine Gefahr.
…für die Zukunft brauchen wir kein Schuldmanagement, sondern positive Ziele. Ich untersuche seit siebzehn Jahren Muttermilchproben im Labor. Wir finden über zweieinhalbtausend Chemikalien darin, keine einzige Probe dürfte als Trinkmilch vermarktet werden. Das Ziel sollte lauten: In zehn Jahren stellen wir gar nichts mehr her, was sich in Muttermilch wiederfindet. Dann könnte jeder junge Chemiker, jeder Wissenschaftler mitmachen, die hätten Innovationsziele. Stattdessen verwalten wir den Untergang und halten die Leute ruhig. …’
Aus einem Interview der FAZ mit Michael Braungart (Chemiker, Verfahrenstechniker, Wissenschaftler, Entwickler des ‘Cradle to Cradle’ Design Konzeptes) vom 10. Jan 09.
Passt zum Thema: ‘Deutsches Umweltbewusstsein 2008‘, ‘Germany and being green – A reality-check‘, ‘Die nächste industrielle Revolution‘
‘Die nächste industrielle Revolution’
So heisst das letzte Buch von Prof Dr. Michael Braungart und William McDonough. Wir waren Ende letzten Jahres auf der Utopia Konferenz in Berlin und der Vortrag von Herrn Braungart war das Highlight für uns…Scharfsinnig und herausfordernd und mit alamierenden Informationen. – und dabei sogar sehr unterhaltsam.
