The Living Room
The private atmosphere of a Dutch living room is interrupted by the disturbing presence of a large oak tree that slowly enters the room.
Made by roderickhietbrink.nl
What is Next Nature?
With our attempts to cultivate nature, humankind causes the rising of a next nature, which is wild and unpredictable as ever. Wild systems, genetic surprises, autonomous machinery and splendidly beautiful black flowers. Nature changes along with us.
Posts Tagged ‘Green Blues’
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Welcome to Earth, Number 7,000,000,000!
Today marks another milestone in the march of the Anthropocene. According to United Nations demographers, the seven billionth person on Earth arrived today, just in time to put on a tiny halloween costume (might we suggest an adorably endangered tuna?). It’s taken just 12 years to add the last billion people, and even with slowing birth rates, it will still take us only 14 years to add another billion more.
What does the burgeoning population of Homo sapiens mean for our overloaded planet? Learn more about the global effects of the Anthropocene here and here. If you’re in the Amsterdam area on November 5th, Christian Schwägerl will be giving a talk on the “Age of Man” at the Next Nature Power Show.
Image via Looking to Business.
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Ecological Insecticide
Ecological insecticide allows you to extinguish-nature in a nature-friendly way. It nicely illustrates the “I love nature, but not in my backyard” attitude, so popular nowadays. Peculiar paradoxical product of the week.
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The Earth on Loan
Christian Schwägerl is a correspondent for Der Spiegel and the author of Menschenzeit (The Age of Man). He will be presenting his views on the Anthropocene at the Next Nature Power Show on November 5th. Learn more about the Anthropocene here.
We move mountains, make islands, create life, and call up lolcats at whim from the greatest storehouse of human knowledge ever compiled. Yet we can’t seem to control the economy.
In a recent opinion piece at Yale Environment 360, journalist and author Christian Schwägerl argues that the financial collapse and the environmental collapse stem from the same mistakes of human foresight. The financial crisis was triggered by a pass-the-buck thinking, with blindly optimistic (or darkly cynical) reliance on proliferating loans that no one ever expected to pay back. The problem only became apparent when there were no more suckers left to exploit. We ran the economy down to its lowest trophic level, and that’s exactly what we’re doing with the global ecology as well.
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Bottle Plant
The Coca-Cola introduces the PlantBottle. Partially made of plants, this bottle is 100% recyclable. Next step will be a natural bottle fully growing on a plant. In the meanwhile, I am still waiting for my Organic Coke.
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Essay: The Story of our Food
Every time we eat a piece of food, we take a bite out of the world. All these small bites tell a dozen stories. A carton of eggs presents the story of contented hens, a bottle of olive oil the tale of Italian grandmothers. Yet these pastoral scenes barely hide the realities of a food system that leaves one billion people starving and another billion overweight. Moving beyond food-based fictions, how should we react to the truth?
By Maartje Somers
It happened in a trendy restaurant. A breadbasket and a small bowl of olives had just been brought to the table. Our hands reached out to take some, when the waitress stopped us. “Wait,” she interrupted, “I have to explain the bread.” Explain the bread? Yes, that one variety of bread had been baked with hard durum wheat from a village just south of Tuscany, the other one came from a bakery slightly north of Amsterdam. The olives were kalamata olives, imported from Thessaloniki, and olivas violadas (olives ‘raped’ by an almond) from Basque Country in Spain. It took the waitress about five minutes to finish her lecture. Then, finally we could dig in.
All our food comes with a story to tell, and usually it is the story we want to hear. In the supermarket the story is about the price of the food, in a restaurant it is about the taste and the origin.
These days all our food comes with a story to tell. Usually it is the story we want to hear. In the supermarket the story is about the price of food, in a restaurant or delicatessen it is about taste and origin. Very often stories about food focus on authenticity. That is the way food would like to be – authentic and natural – like in the old days when people harvested their own crops. And this is exactly what we want to believe. The jam in my fridge has ‘a natural taste’ and the milk is ‘pure and honest.’ Eat colour, it says on the posters in the street, displaying juicy red peppers. And these shiny vegetables almost jump from the page in the cookbooks by Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson, bestsellers the world over. But at the same time we are buying more and more ready-made meals.
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Evolutionary Janitors
We normally think of polluted water as the source of disease, not the cure for it. The Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, affectionately known as the Super Fun Superfund, is one of the most polluted bodies of water in America. Most of the water is too low in oxygen to support plant or animal life. Worse still is the toxic mud at the bottom of the canal, rich in lead, dioxins, and mercury from decades of unchecked dumping from heavy industry.
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Electric Topiary
Has this tree gone Pac-Man on the power lines? In truth, the slice through the side of the tree is the work of ‘utility pruning.’ Topiary was once determined on entirely aesthetic lines, be it geometric shapes in formal gardens or more whimsical forms of animals or people. Now, the inadvertent topiaries of electricity are a common sight: the oak split down the middle, the pine with its top lopped off, the elm with an entire side of branches shaved away. It represents a curious compromise. Rather than being cut down, the tree is permitted to coexist with the utility cables. Along with insects, lightning strikes, and wind, power lines are now an important factor in how the landscape grows.
Image via The Small Wave 2
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Cheiracanthium drives a Mazda
In March, Mazda recalled 65,000 cars, not because of any structural faults in the vehicle, but because the engineers had inadvertently created the perfect habitat for a tiny spider. The yellow sac spider, capable of inflicting a painful bite, was inexorably drawn to build webs in the car’s evaporative canister vent line. The spider’s nest could restrict the line, raising pressure in the fuel tank and eventually leading to a crack. It may be that the species is attracted to the smell of hydrogen oxide in gasoline, or it could just be that the little arachnids think Americans need to do a better job of carpooling.
Arthropods have a distinguished history of gumming up our most precise pieces of technology. The first computer bug was a brown moth that got stuck in Harvard’s Relay Calculator in 1947. I remember battling the ants that took up residence in my laptop in the Philippines, and a quick Google search shows that computer-nerd ants are a common complaint. Technology may be designed for humans, but it’s used by the entire ecosystem.
Via The Consumerist. Image via UW Madison Department of Etymology.
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Pump My Ride
Lovely image of a really fat car by Austrian artist Erwin Wurm. This image is for a Belgian eco-awareness campaign.
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Soundmixtree
Diego Stocco is sound designer and composer from Burbank CA/US. He plays a tree as a rhythmic musical instrument, recording its sounds using a custom stethoscope. I suggest him to get in touch with Guido Maciocci to start a band.
via Boingboing.net
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Microbic Landscapes
Beautiful Google Maps shots of housing projects in southwest Florida. Probably designed to look and feel more natural than your average straight street neighborhood, they remind me of microbes under a microscope.
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Fata Morgana
Finally… A gas station in the ocean! If we all rigorously continue filling up our tanks, this fiction can become a reality one day.
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Polar Ice for sale
Original pieces of polar ice will be sold in a shop in Amsterdam from this Friday the 25th. MyPolarIce is a venture led by Coralie Vogelaar and Teun Castelein. They went to the northern part of Greenland to harvest some of the finest polar ice still available. The pieces of ice were extracted from the Sermeq Kujalleg glacier, and were put on transport to Amsterdam
Starting from November 26th till December 5th your are invited to get your piece. It is the chance of a lifetime to obtain a frozen relic from the last ice age.
A piece of polar ice will cost 24.95 euros, but if the stock rapidly diminish prices may rise. A fixed amount of 1000 pieces is for sale, each numbered and a certificate of authenticity is attached. The pieces are packed in special capsule-shaped containers. This packaging ensures that the ice remains frozen up to three hours outside a freezer.The goal of MyPolarIce is to sell the pieces to people that cherish and preserve it, to let the ice hybernate in the freezer for better times to come. Like a piece of Berlin Wall reminds of a past era in history, would a piece of polar ice in your fridge remind you – in some future – of the period in the geological history of the earth, when we still had the ice caps? This project leaves room for the argument that we maybe should update our five strategies of biomimicmarketing with a sixth strategy: the presentation and exploitation of nature as a scarce commodity.
MyPolarIce store
From 27 November till 5 December.
Museum square, next to the pond
Opening 26 November at 17:00
www.mypolarice.com -
Save the Coral: Dump a Tank
Our peculiar image of the week learns us that what is good for the environment doesn’t always look good for the environment.
The adieu of this disused tank into the Gulf of Thailand last week looks like a blatantly disgraceful act of dumping waste. Yet all was done in the name of ecology. Trucks and 25 old Army tanks were dropped into the ocean to form artificial corals hoped to improve the ecosystem’s fish stocks.
Now lets hope some future archeologist that might find the tanks won’t mistake the site for an ancient war zone flooded by the trenches of global warming.
Via the Mirror.
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Castle Duivenvoorde
That Next Nature is nothing new can be proven in a walk around Castle Duivenvoorde. The castle dates back from the 11th century, while the gardens date from 1631. In a time where wild and old nature was still widespread, the noble family Van Duivenvoorde created a vast terrain of gardens and ponds.
Ironically, the terrain is now enclosed by two highways and a railway. The inhabitants of the castle try to live of the land and have a cradle-to-cradle philosophy on the preservation of the complex.
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Unlimited Urban Woods
What to do when you have a small city with limited space, and you rather turn available space into parking lots instead of parks? You turn to DUS Architects for an unlimited forrest. The Unlimited Urban Woods lets you disappear into an endless forrest that just takes a few square meters.
By placing a real tree into a cubic space of mirrors, the tree gets repeated endlessly, creating the feeling of a forrest. Personally, I would be interested in an endless parking space in the forrest too.
Images by Pieter Kers.
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Nature as a building
As the world is preparing to show off at the World Expo in Shanghai, their pavilions are nearing their final stage. To me, it feels like a lot of them are making references to nature, or at least natural textures. Call it a coincidence, but it seems to me the countries that don’t have that much nature left are the ones using nature in this country branding show. Biggest example would be the stacked Dutch landscapes in the Dutch pavilion at the 2000 World Expo.
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