Category: Environment

Dystopian Farm

Eric Vergne’s Dystopian Farm project is all about urban vertical farming. He envisions urban farming in New York City to be done vertically in some really strange looking skyscrapers.

Designed for the Hudson Yard area of Manhattan, Eric Vergne’s Dystopian Farm aims to provide New York with a sustainable food source while creating a dynamic social space that integrates producers with consumers. Based upon the “material logic of plant mechanics”, the biomorphic skyscraper is modeled after the plant cells of ferns and provides space for farms, residential areas, and markets. These organic structures will harness systems such as airoponic watering, nutrient technology and controlled lighting and CO2 levels to meet the food demands of future populations.

Seed Bank Saves Seeds

The ‘doomsday vault’ is getting more attention and love to save seeds. They’ve created a new, expanded, goal to save 100,000 seeds. This is good news because having a well-kept seed bank to preserve biodiversity can prove invaluable if some of the plants die out or are struck by a horrible disease. THink of it has a global insurance policy on plants.

Countries participating in the programme including Ireland, have assembled extensive duplicate seed collections to match those held at home. These are then to be delivered to the vault which will hold them in perpetuity at -18 degrees, something that should keep them safe for thousands of years, Dr Fowler said.

By the end of February there will be about 400,000 varieties in the vault.

Ireland’s seeds are expected to arrive either later this month or by April, Dr Fowler said.

The ongoing project is separate to this new initiative to rescue threatened seed collections in 46 countries, he continued.

Many countries struggle to maintain their seed banks to an international standard, leaving them at risk of partial or even total loss.

“There are a number of small seed banks around the world where the facilities are pretty poor. The seeds are basically dying in their packages,” he said.

“If we sit and wait we will have another wave of extinctions in agricultural biodiversity.”

Trust staff will visit 49 institutes where seeds are held, using funding provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Grains Research and Development Corporation.

Greener Homes for Aussies and Brits

Both the British and Australian governments have announced that they will help home owners green their homes. Australia is offering 2.2 million homes a free insulation upgrade and more financial incentives for solar water heating. In the UK, it was announced that the government will help people with a full ‘eco-makeover’.

More than one in four homes in the UK will be offered a complete eco-makeover under ambitious plans expected to be announced this week to slash fuel bills and cut global warming pollution.

The campaign is thought to involve giving 7m houses and flats a complete refit to improve insulation, and will be compared to the 10-year programme that converted British homes to gas central heating in the 1960s and 1970s. Householders could also be encouraged to install small-scale renewable and low-carbon heating systems such as solar panels and wood-burning boilers.

In total, it is thought the Department of Energy and Climate Change will commit to cutting a third of greenhouse gas emissions from households by 2020.

China Rules the Air

We just saw that Mexico has a huge wind farm, well it’s apparently nothing compared to what China is up to. China is now the world’s largest producer of wind energy, and this is only in a couple years of installing wind-powered generators.

China last year doubled its wind energy capacity – for the fourth straight year – adding 6,300 megawatts of new electricity generation for a total capacity of 12,210 megawatts. A third of the world’s new wind capacity last year was installed in Asia, with China accounting for 73% of that power. China reached its 2010 target of generating 5,000 megawatts of wind-powered electricity in 2007 and is expected to hit its 2030 goal of 30,000 megawatts years early.

“In 2009, new installed capacity is expected to nearly double again, which will be one third or more of the world’s total new installed capacity for the year,” Li Junfeng, Secretary General of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industry Association, said in a statement.

Google Earth Includes Oceans

Google Earth is a neat program, but what people can use it for is far more interesting than the software itself. Google has gone ahead and modified their program to now include information about the Earth’s ocean to make people aware of how the oceans are connected to our lives.

“I’ve been struggling my whole life to figure out how to reach people and get them to understand they’re connected to the ocean,” Dr. Earle said.

“But I go to the supermarket and still see the United Nations of fish for sale,” she said. “Marine sanctuaries are still not really protected. Google Earth gets all this information now and puts it in one place for the littlest kid and the stuffiest grownup to see in a way that hasn’t been possible in all preceding history.”

By choosing among 20 buttons holding archives of information, called “layers” by Google, a visitor can read logs of oceanographic expeditions, see old film clips from the heyday of Jacques-Yves Cousteau and check daily Navy maps of sea temperatures.