What’s Wrong With What We Eat | Mark Bittman

This is a great talk. It’s not architecture or design related but it has everything to do with the environment and healt so it’s well worth sharing with everybody. Somewhere along the line in the food industry things have gone from bad to worse, so continuing with our eating habits would be like building more filthy factories.

”Mark Bittman is a bestselling cookbook author, journalist and television personality. His friendly, informal approach to home cooking has shown millions that fancy execution is no substitute for flavor and soul.”

Click on the image above to view the video.

TED

Save The Planet: Make Cows Fart Like Kangaroos

April 22nd | Earth Day

From 1970, when the first Earth Day was marked on the calenders after massive demonstrations on the environment in 1969, until today, people still did the Earth a lot of wrong. Yet the day is here and it’s a reminder to treat our planet carefully so that our children can inherit all the tastes, smells and sights that we get to enjoy. For the love of them, walk the walk.

“If all the insects on earth disappeared, within fifty years all life on Earth would disappear. If all humans disappeared, within fifty years life on Earth would flourish as never before.”

Jonas Salk

Our Crap In Space

Oh. Fuck. These are the ESA (European Space Agency) images of the debris humans sent into space from Sputnik to January 1st, 2008. We are an extremely freaking disgusting species. How the hell will we ever clean all this mess up? This makes me wanna throw up.

”Between the launch of Sputnik on 4 October 1957 and 1 January 2008, approximately 4600 launches have placed some 6000 satellites into orbit, of which about 400 are travelling beyond geostationary orbit or on interplanetary trajectories.
Today, it is estimated that only 800 satellites are operational – roughly 45 percent of these are both in LEO and GEO. Space debris comprise the ever-increasing amount of inactive space hardware in orbit around the Earth as well as fragments of spacecraft that have broken up, exploded or otherwise become abandoned. About 50 percent of all trackable objects are due to in-orbit explosion events (about 200) or collision events (less than 10).”

Images: click here for high resolution images from ESA

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(via: Gizmodo)

March 22nd | World Water Day

Video: UNICEF's Tap Project

In 1992 The UN General Assembly proclaimed March 22nd as World Water Day. They wanted to draw international attention to the lack of clean drinking water around the globe. About 20% of the World’s population, that is 1.1 billion people, lack access to safe drinking water. The lack of clean water kills about 4500 children per day. Water stressed countries posses a third of the World’s population which mostly contains of Third World residents, Sub-Saharan Africans and South Asians. The clean water issue is much greater though; those countries cannot develop properly with no knowledge of basic hygiene and lack of basic sanitation.

Please continue reading, your attention is crucial.

Attention Class: Lifestyle Choices

Click on the image for a larger view.

Oh this is so old school I needed to post it. As a very visual kid, often called ‘different’, I used to love colorful graphs and animations. That way information got stored in my head instead of it ending up somewhere in the dark corners of my brain, where it would have no effect and would die of boredom. The point here is simple, the author is trying to explain the ways to green your life and make it less fat/ smelly/ greedy, something we all need to not only consider, but start practicing asap. I’m being bashed with information about _global warming_ omg it’s here I tell ya, HERE! But the ‘change’ can be so simple if only change itself doesn’t scare you, and it shouldn’t, you’re young. What you, being on a student budget, can still do is: travel by train/ bus, use cloth bags instead of plastic ones, choose energy efficient home appliances, buy the right light bulbs, recycle and don’t stuff your face with so much meat so we won’t have so many cows farting us into the inevitable ecological disaster.

(via: TreeHugger)

Water and Air on Earth

I thought this shouldn’t just go in the container so here’s a post that contains nothing but this picture and some facts. Left – all the water on Earth, right – all the air on Earth. And some quick facts to go with (wiki):

Water: it covers 71% of the Earth’s surface; 97,2% is in the oceans, 1,8% in the glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets, 0,9% groundwater, 0,02% of fresh water in inland sees, lakes and rivers, 0,001% is atmospheric water vapor at any given time.

Air: the average mass of the atmosphere is 5 quadrillion metric tons or 1/1.200.000 of the mass of Earth which makes the pictured sphere of water 16% of the Earth’s size.

I was wondering what that giant ball rolling over my back yard was the other day. See how it’s standing on Slovenia? But I understand, I do. You had to pick a beautiful piece of Earth to put the ball on and you went with Slo, that’s cool.

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(via: Phiffer)

Rubbish Soup – The 8th Continent

click on the image for a full-size view

Aw heck. Soon the Earth will suffocate because our vicious species keeps shoving waste down its throat. Here’s the story, please read it. The Independent is reporting that an oceanographer Charles Moore ‘discovered’ a – to say the least – really dirty patch floating on the surface of the ocean between Japan and Hawaii. What he was looking at was the largest rubbish dump in the world held in place by the ocean currents. Up until today people thought that the patch was an island swamped by plastic that you could walk on. The huge thing, however, is no island; it is nearly twice the size as continental United States. The rubbish is basically debris that drifted from the mainland and shipborne garbage. The most worrying thing isn’t the garbage itself, although that alone is a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions; what will effect the marine ecosystem the most is the toxins that are produced by the decomposing plastic. You can’t detect the thing from the sky because of its translucency but it can be spotted from the ships.

/read more after the jump if you have a heart (haha, now you must)

Last Call For Planet Earth | Architects for a Better World

Last Call For Planet Earth is a movie made by Jacques Allard that will be screening from January on all over Europe. The movie includes interviews an oppinions of architects such as Kengo Kuma, Thomas Mayne of Morphosis, Massimiliano Fuksas and many more. It is made to raise awareness of the importance of building sustainably and to emphasize the fact that buildings can and do effect the environment profoundly. In an era when ecological topics are the buzz, I’m not surprised they made this movie and I’m happy to see them pushing the topic forward to the masses. It truly is not a trend, It’s a necessity.

Alpine Ski Resort in Texas | What The F%&#

No, no, NO! There are very little things that upset me at all, this is one of them. Now I love snowboarding with all my heart, but all I can think of doing with my snowboard in freaking Texas is punching these developers in the nuts so hard they’ll be pissing particles of my bindings for years to come. Some bright cookies in Texas thought this was a brilliant idea. Them having an IQ OF A FLEA, I’m not surprised. “Not only will Bearfire Resort be a huge economic boost to North Texas, but its innovative approach may prove to be a trend-setter for other cities around the country looking for ways to spur their local economies,” said Armey (one of the fleas). Keep reading, it gets better…

19.20.21 | Supercities Study

Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of TED conferences, made this slideshow revieling interesting data about supercities and their rise throughout history. 19.20.21 will be a ”five-year study that will encompass all aspects of the phenomenon of supercities”. The study will cover comparative and statistical analysis based on the following subjects (bare with me): health, education, transportation, demographics, energy consumption, growth patterns, water sources, use and quality, waste management, economics and the cost of living, infrastructure, quality of life and standard of living indices, crime dynamics, calamity risk, culture and art.

Thanks to their immense effort, the whole world will have access to all the information listed above and changes to the urban hubs (including urban design and strategies) could be done more effectively because of the project’s transparency.

Click on the image above to view the slideshow.
(via: swissmiss)