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Geosocial Speciesism: The End of Climate Politics
(Some thoughts on a recent research article, ‘The Politics of Climate Change Is More Than the Politics of Capitalism’ by Dipesh Chakrabarty, published 02/2017 here) Humans are both in and of the Earth—just try telling us that. In a research opinion piece, Dipesh Chakrabarty of University of Chicago dissects our seemingly opposing approaches to the spectre of climate change: a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to stem the rising tides while clinging to the framework of the capitalist paradigm, or an acknowledgement that our agency as humans at the top of the food chain is inextricably linked to the function and demise…
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On the ‘Sovereignty of Planet Earth:’ Bookending the Industrial Revolution with Tales of Life and Living.
Two of last year’s most popular films, The Revenant and Mad Max: Fury Road, both serve as allegories for humans’ perceived place in Earth’s ecosystem today. Each tells their respective cautionary tales of survival, bookending the peak of the industrial revolution and the logical end of its aftermath. Here we examine the films together in the context of each other, and how our ideas of the past and future reveal where we are now. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant pulls us into a tall tale of history, brimming with frosty mist and crackling firelight, depicting the harsh and sublime realities of nature through a plot driven…
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Elasti-City: Thoughts on Urban Resiliency Through Regional Policy
Like a mature ecosystem, a city is shaped by its users. Any healthy system produces waste, whether it is a digestive system, an ecosystem or a citysystem. It is helpful to think of the abandoned, in-between, leftover land in cities as leaves on a forest floor, or fish bones on a seabed; if the system is functioning properly, all will be absorbed back in. The waste itself is an indicator of the system’s health and vitality. Without abandoned spaces, how can a city turn inwards for growth? If a city is truly healthy, elastic, and vital, it will continue to…
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The densest and the most popular.
Faced with the challenge of constantly doing more with less, the agribusiness has consistently championed the tools, practices and seed varieties that churn out higher crop yields, year over year. While this does provide more total cereal crops to an ever expanding global population, recent studies have pointed to the fact that this ‘sustainable intensification’ has sacrificed the overall nutritional content of these crops in order to produce higher yielding varieties, most notably in India. In fact, eating additional grains of poor nutrient content, likely further exacerbates the double-sided health challenges of obesity and malnutrition in LDCs. Lisa Curtis, the Founder of Kuli…
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Backing up the world’s seed collection
reposted from lisacreativedesigns.com When we think of food security, we think of farming intensification and greater resource management. In Aleppo, the capital city in Syria, as rebels began looting and razing ancient artifacts this past spring, a new definition emerged. There, the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) began developing its own emergency operation to safeguard their collection of 150,000 different seed populations (known as accessions) for wheat, barley, lentil and faba beans. Why are genebanks important?Rice, wheat and maize (corn) provide more than 50 percent of the world’s plant derived calories. Maintaining and understanding genetic materials and…
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Vanishing Into Our Common Home
Facebook has made waves by building a 9-acre green roof on its new headquarters in Menlo Park, CA. The building was designed by Frank Gehry with CMG Landscape Architecture in charge of the roof, and opened this spring. An insider compared the green roof to the High Line, and while it does incorporate native plantings, provides meandering pathways, and is “entirely inspired by the regional landscape,” there are some glaring differences. For one, it is built atop new construction carved out of marshy salt flats, rather than on reclaimed-abandoned urban infrastructure. As much lip service as the referential new landscape pays to its surroundings,…
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ICT + Ag extension
Last week I attended a conference on information and communications technology (ICT) and the opportunity it presents to improve smallholder agriculture in the development context. Gathered vendors offered a variety of ideas surrounding mobile credit service access and educational ag extension programs, intended to increase overall crop yields, market productivity and profitability. By far the most interesting discussion centered around an afternoon panel on the future of ag extension and the value of human interaction and the element of trust in decision models. Agricultural extension, or ag extension, consists of a chain of workers sharing and disseminating new scientific research…
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Consider the cricket
Over the past few years, there has been a growing appetite for edible insects, with a greater number of restaurants serving chili-spiced grasshoppers and cricket-covered pizza. Much of the attention follows the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) 2013 report highlighting the importance of insect protein in the future of food security and reducing malnutrition. Nicolas Pena Parra even dreamed up the Locust Farm, as a means of providing nutrition to refugee families living in Dadaab, Kenya lacking access to protein-rich plants or livestock. There are a multitude of environmental benefits supporting entomophagy, or the practice of eating bugs. Bitwater Farms, located in Sacramento, California, champions…
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Dunne & Raby’s United Micro Kingdoms
I first learned of Dunne & Raby in 2011, during their MoMA exhibition, Between Reality and the Impossible, exploring urban foraging and the concept of synthetic digestive systems to accommodate rising food insecurity. I instantly became fascinated by their futuristic and evolving examination of heterotopias and the dystopian earth. Two years ago their team created a “design fiction”, or fictional scenario fabricated to frame questions surrounding our current social values and decisions. Their project, entitled, United Micro Kingdoms, depicts four “super shires” within the United Kingdom, each extrapolating today’s buzzworthy topics and innovations to a fantastical degree, with a special emphasis on…
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A Synthetic Approach to the Industrial Food System
Cultured meat, or in vitro meat (IVM), has been science fiction for a long time; after a decade of research & development, in 2013 it became reality. IVM is actual meat created by harvesting muscle cells from a living animal, grown in a nutrient-dense medium for a number of weeks. It is not genetically modified; it is 100% muscle meat. One tissue sample can produce up to 20,000 tons of meat, and uses 50% of the energy and 2% of the land needed to raise cattle. It has the potential to someday be made in anyone’s kitchen, without using land for livestock, crops…