planted city

Wendell Berry: ‘IT ALL TURNS on affection’

From The National Endowment for the Humanities:

Wendell E. Berry, noted poet, essayist, novelist, farmer, and conservationist, delivered the 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on Monday, April 23, 2012 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

The annual lecture, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.

In his lecture, entitled “It All Turns on Affection,” Berry lamented the increasing divergence of modern man from the environment and local communities. Invoking the words of his mentor, the writer Wallace Stegner, Berry observed that throughout history Americans have been divided into two kinds:  the “boomers” who “pillage and run,” and the “stickers” who “settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.”

Inspired by a passage from E.M. Forster’s Howards End, Berry called for for a land use ethic that is shaped by a sense of “affection” for land and place. “And so,” he said, “I am nominating economy for an equal standing among the arts and humanities. I mean, not economics, but economy, the making of the human household upon the earth: the arts of adapting kindly the many human households to the earth’s many ecosystems and human neighborhoods.”  The full text of Wendell Berry’s lecture is available here. 

Check out the rest of the article here. Berry’s talk starts approximately 10:00 minutes into the video and you can check out media coverage of it here, here, and here.

(Photo credit: NEH)

The House Efficient: ‘Passive Passion’ 

From Charlie Hoxie via Vimeo:

“Passive Passion” looks at the Passive House standard for buildings - a design method from Germany that results in 90% reductions in the energy needed for heating and cooling. Building to the standard is commonplace in many parts of Europe, but has been slow to catch on in the U.S., though a burgeoning community of American Passive House enthusiasts seek to spread the idea and change the fundamentals of how we build.

You can read more about the documentary here. Also, YouTube is hosting four clips from the film. You can watch the first here.

(Image credit: Passive House Institute US)

From The Epoch Times:

Vancouver is about to get North America’s first VertiCrop rooftop veggie garden as part of the city’s goal to become the world’s greenest city by 2020.

Developed by Vancouver-based Valcent Products Inc., VertiCrop is a high-tech vertical farming system that enables leafy green vegetables to be grown using a fraction of the land, energy, and water conventionally required to grow produce.

Valcent has entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with EasyPark, a corporation that manages parkades and properties owned by the City of Vancouver, to install a VertiCrop system on the top level of a parkade on Richards Street in the heart of the city’s downtown.

Named in 2009 as one of TIME Magazine’s 50 Best Inventions, VertiCrop enables leafy greens and flowers to be grown year round in a controlled environment without the use of herbicides or pesticides.

“We’re very excited about the possibility of having North America’s first VertiCrop operation installed in the progressive city of Vancouver,” said Stephen Fane, CEO of Valcent.

“Urban farming systems like VertiCrop provide a secure and profitable growing solution by offering more efficient crop production, reduced food miles, and lower distribution costs than traditional field farming.”

Utilizing a series of suspended trays that rotate on motorized conveyors, the hydroponic system provides optimal exposure to either natural or artificial light with each plant receiving precisely measured nutrients.

The system produces around 20 times the yield of normal field crops while using only 8 percent of the water typically required for field agriculture, according to the company.

…

Construction of the project is scheduled to begin in January, with the first crops expected as soon as April. Local food supplier PSWJ Holdings Ltd., which entered into the MOU with Valcent and EasyPark, will market and distribute the produce.

“The ability to grow high-volume produce in local environments where weather and natural disasters aren’t a threat has never been more attractive,” said Fane.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: Vancouver Sun)

A Short (Horror) Movie About Energy Waste

From Grist:

David Parker’s “Light” depicts light pollution and wasted energy as a sort of Blob, not necessarily malign but relentless and implacable. In the film, energy-burning lights start dripping goo that covers the ground and finally drives people out of their homes — but it’s all very quiet and eerie, like a Chris Van Allsburg drawing. Showing light as akin to an oil spill draws attention to the wastefulness of using artificial lighting when it’s not needed — wasting energy does basically cover the planet with a gross oily substance, just not necessarily locally and not right away.

From the CBC:

1. The number of megacities has doubled.

2. The world is eating 26 per cent more meat.

3. Global temperatures continue to rise, with the last 10 years the warmest on record.

4. World industry is 23 per cent more energy efficient.

5. Plastic consumption has skyrocketed — with annual production reaching a record 265 million tonnes worldwide in 2010.

6. The 1990 Montreal Protocol to limit ozone-destroying chemicals is the world’s most successful international agreement, producing a 93 per cent drop in the damaging emissions since 1992.

7. Cement production is the fastest-growing source of C02 emissions.

8. The Mesopotamian Marshlands, the largest in the Middle East, are recovering from deliberate draining by Iraq in the 1990s.

9. Saudi Arabia has transformed from an importer of food to an exporter due to irrigation.

10. Environmentally protected areas have increased worldwide by 42 per cent.

11. Fish stock depletion is now one of the most pressing environmental issues.

12. Renewable energy has skyrocketed, with solar energy leading the way — up 30,000 per cent since 1992.

13. Biofuel production — up 300,000 per cent — is converting more land from farming to production of fuel.

14. Organic farming is up 240 per cent since 1999.

15. The Amazon rainforest has been largely destroyed due to drought and farming.

16. Tourism and travel is the world’s largest business sector — and ecotourism is the fastest-growing type of tourism, up 20-34 per cent per year.

17. Passenger trips by airplanes have doubled in the past two decades.

18. Clean drinking water access increased to 87 per cent, but widespread sanitation is still slow.

19. 30 per cent more private companies are adopting environmental standards every year.

20. Women’s influence is rising with more 60 per cent more seats in national parliaments.

Check out the rest of the article here. You can check out more about the 1992 Earth Summit here and the 2012 edition here. Also worth a read is a joint statement written by a number of experts in global sustainability in advance of the conference. 

Infographic: ‘Power Consumption Facts for the US’

(Source: PowerSuperSite via Treehugger)

From Green Flow:

The internet, distributed renewable energy, electric vehicles and energy management are ready to coalesce: the impact on cities and our lives will be profound. The US-China Green Energy Conference (sponsored by the US-China Green Energy Council) held Friday in the Silicon Valley took a deep bi-national dive into what smart grids are and what they will mean for so-called smart cities, their wired citizenry and the future of global carbon emissions.

Smart grid specifics are finally starting to emerge from the marketing haze. They will rely heavily on smart buildings, and are a critical solution in making renewable energy more scalable through more efficient energy transmission systems. Cities like Dubuque, Iowa are working with 1,000 residents to test smart grid applications and have reportedly lowered their water use by 6% in early trials with IBM.

Elsewhere, China is testing a four-square kilometer smart grid pilot area in its national urban eco showcase, Tianjin Eco-City. The smart grid includes a 30kw PV solar microgrid on the roof of the Tianjin “Eco-City Business Hall,” where residents will be able to charge their electric vehicles while they view virtual reality demonstrations of how the smart grid works, including its “self-healing” capabilities within the Eco-City’s network.

In terms of renewable energy, smart grids will be a killer app. Right now, when the wind completely dies in larger areas of wind power generation, such as the West Texas plains, the transmission system supplying electricity to cities, including Austin and Dallas, suffers a “mad scramble,” according to Liang Min, of the US Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). In fact, according to Chuck Wells from OSISoft, such power hiccups are currently so disruptive, that 45% more fossil fuel is needed to back up regional energy grids having large-scale wind and solar generation versus regional grids that rely only on fossil fuels.

On the home or business side, people are responsible for about 30% of a typical building’s energy system performance, said John Skinner, Managing Director of Intel’s Open Energy initiative. The more reliable information people have, the more likely they can make smart decisions about energy use, and the more likely they can pay less for energy than they do with analog meters (the ones with the wheels turning inside them).

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Image credit: Consumer Energy Report)

Michael Pollan answers the question, ‘Why Eat Local’?

(Source: Nourish)

Protected Areas Insufficient: ‘Data Shows All of Earth’s Systems in Rapid Decline’

From IPS:

The size and number of protected areas on land and sea has increased dramatically since the 1980s, now totaling over 100,000 in number and covering 17 million square kilometres of land and two million square kilometres of oceans, a new study reported Thursday. 

But impressive as those numbers look, all indicators reveal species going extinct faster than ever before, despite all the additions of new parks, reserves and other conservation measures, according to the study published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.

…

The loss of biodiversity is a major issue because it is humanity’s only life-support system, delivering everything from food, to clean water and air, to recreation and tourism, to novel chemicals that drive our advanced civilization, said Mora. Right now the dominant strategy to halt the loss of biodiversity is with protected areas. 

“That’s putting all our eggs in one basket,” he said. “A major shift is needed to deal with the roots of the problem.” 

The ever-expanding footprint of humanity is the primary cause of global biodiversity loss. When the world’s population was five billion people in 1985, the amount of nature’s resources being used or impacted became more than the planet could sustain indefinitely according to many estimates, said Mora. 

The world population, currently at seven billion, is well beyond Earth’s ability to sustain. By 2050, with a projected population of 10 billion people and without a change in consumption patterns, the cumulative use of natural resources will amount to the productivity of up to 27 planet Earths, the study found. 

Sustaining the current seven billion people on the planet requires a major shift in resource use. At present, the average U.S. citizen’s ecological footprint is about 10 hectares, while a Haitian’s is less than one. The planet could sustain us if everyone’s footprint averaged two ha, Mora said. 

…

“The awareness of the public about this is shockingly low,” he noted. What is needed is for humanity as a mass to change direction, he said. 

“But can we find the hook, the lever that’s needed to make that happen?” Sale asked. 

Check out the rest of the article here. The BBC’s environmental correspondent, Richard Black, provides analysis of the paper here.

(Image credit: Global Footprint Network)