Re:loading #02 – Your Agenda: maps, books, events & awards

Edwin Gardner — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 14:49:19 +0000

[1] Atlas of hidden water may avert future conflict (article/ New Scientist)
[2] Depletion and Abundance: Life On The New Home Front – Sharon Astyk (book review)
[3] Call for entries (journal/ Bracket)
[4] City Eco Lab (event/ Biennale Internationale Design – Saint Etienne)
[5] Urban Farmer Will Allen receives award

[1]
Atlas of hidden water may avert future conflict – Article from New Scientist, 24 October, 2008

They are one of the world’s greatest and most precious natural resources, yet are entirely hidden. Now, for the first time, a high-resolution map shows where underground aquifers store vast amounts of water.

[2]
Depletion and Abundance: Life On The New Home Front – Sharon Astyk is a writer, teacher and subsistence farmer, and the author of two forthcoming books on Peak Oil and Climate Change — Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front (Fall ‘08) and A Nation of Farmers (And Cooks) (Spring ‘09), the latter co-authored with Aaron Newton. Both books are forthcoming from New Society Publishers.

Review by Amanda Kovattana at Energy Bulletin
Commentary: “Unplugged – or unhinged” by John Thackara at Doors of Perception

[3]
Call for entries on the theme of farming by the new journal (annually) Bracket, founded by InfraNet Lab and Archinect.

timetable: Submissions due: February 2, 2009 / Jury Review: February 2009 / Notification and Editing: March 2009 / Book release: October 2009

theme: The first edition of [bracket] is centered around the theme of farming. Once merely understood in terms of agriculture, today information, energy, labour, and landscape, among others, can be farmed. Farming harnesses the efficiency of collectivity and community. Whether cultivating land, harvesting resources, extracting energy or delegating labor, farming reveals the interdependencies of our globalized world. Simultaneously, farming represents the local gesture, the productive landscape, and the alternative economy. The processes of farming are mutable, parametric, and efficient. From terraforming to foodsheds to crowdsourcing, farming often involves the management of the natural mediated by the technologic. Farming, beyond its most common agricultural understanding is the modification of infrastructure, urbanisms, architectures, and landscapes toward a privileging of production. more …

[4]
City Eco Lab at Biennale Internationale Design – Saint Etienne – 15-30 November, 2008

City Eco Lab is an event, a market of travelling projects that bears witness to experiments carried out around the country. For this reason, the 2008 biennial, will organise workshops, encounters and exchanges centred around daily life themes: foodstuffs, water, energy, mobility etc. Visitors will be encouraged to think about how they might use these commodities in a more sustainable world.

City Eco Lab blog and an outline by John Thackara (the curator)

[5]
Urban Farmer Will Allen receives award, a (50.000 USD) genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation:

Will Allen is an urban farmer who is transforming the cultivation, production, and delivery of healthy foods to underserved, urban populations. In 1995, while assisting neighborhood children with a gardening project, Allen began developing the farming methods and educational programs that are now the hallmark of the non-profit organization Growing Power, which he directs and co-founded. Guiding all is his efforts is the recognition that the unhealthy diets of low-income, urban populations, and such related health problems as obesity and diabetes, largely are attributable to limited access to safe and affordable fresh fruits and vegetables. more info about Allen at Macarthur

Here the NYT article: “An Urban Farmer Is Rewarded for His Dream “

Re:loading #01 – Sun, Food and a Guru

Edwin Gardner — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 12:05:19 +0000

Author: Volume

[1] Here Comes The Sun (documentary/VPRO)
[2] Food as A National Security Issue (radio show/NPR)
[3] The Future of Food (magazine/Wired)
[4] Green Guru Gone Wrong: William McDonough (article/Fast Company)

[1]
Here Comes The Sun – Backlight (45min) (watch on youtube) – documentary broadcasted by VPRO on the 20th of October 2008

About the ‘Solar Revolution’ of which many believe will parallel the rise of the computer industry in growth and impact on society. With in this documentary amongst others Hermann Scheer, the man behind the legislation that made the boom of the solar industry in Germany possible.

[2]
Food as A National Security Issue (40min) – NPR – Radio show broadcasted by NPR on the 20th of October

In a open letter to the next president, author Michael Pollan writes about the waning health of America’s food systems — and warns that “the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close.”

The future president’s food policies, says Pollan, will have a large impact on a wide range of issues, including national security, climate change, energy independence and health care.

Pollan is the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History Of Four Meals and In Defense OF Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.

[3]
Wired 16.11 – The Future of Food

As always Wired tries to be the first to announce the next revolution, In this case the next green revolution: Forty years ago, we defused the Population Bomb with the Green Revolution. Modern fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides boosted crop yield and fed an expanding population. But now the chemical age of agriculture is running out of juice. Production per acre has gone flat, and demand is rising faster than ever. Fortunately, we can reverse those trends. The November Wired presents an atlas that shows where the problems lie–and what to do about them. The good news: our capacity for innovation is as limitless as our appetites.

[4]
Green Guru Gone Wrong: William McDonough – Article from Fast Company Issue 130, November 2008

Green architect William McDonough has been hailed as a water-walking visionary. The truth is far more complicated.

Sustainability Reloaded » reblog

Re:loading #02 – Your Agenda: maps, books, events & awards

Re:loading #01 – Sun, Food and a Guru