Aug 21, 08
Geoengineering: A Worldchanging Retrospective
Worldchanging Executive Editor Alex Steffen has become a respected voice of dissent in the global conversation about geo-engineering strategies. This fall, he re-enters the debate as part of the cast of front-line innovators featured in a new docu-style series from Discovery and Impossible Pictures. The program, called Discovery Project...
Can Sustainability Save the Midwest?
Since World War II, Midwestern farmers have been encouraged to use machinery, chemicals and government policies to ramp up crop and livestock production to feed the growing population and economy. But since then, many farmers have felt the harmful effects of this quantity-over-quality production model, and have started to investigate how to make their methods more sustainable. During the past few decades, small organizations promoting sustainable agriculture have been popping up and banding together across the Midwest to create a patchwork of information, support and tools for those interested in taking part in the sustainable agriculture movement. Groups like the Midwest Sustainable Agriculture Working Group and its lobbyist sister group the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition started promoting ideas of sustainable farming in 1988. The coalition is made up of farm...
Alternative Trade Networks and the Coffee System
by John Thackara Every day 1.5 billion cups of coffee are drunk somewhere in the world – quite a few of them in this house - but few of us in the North know much about the 25 million families that grow and produce this valuable bean. After reading a new book called Confronting The Coffee Crisis I feel better informed not just about the negative aspects of the story - but also motivated to explore practically the potential of emerging alternative trade networks to change the bigger picture in profound ways. In a system that can involve as many as eight transactions to bring the coffee to market, coffee farmers receive less than two percent of the price of a cup of coffee sold in a coffee bar or...
Staking the Vampire: The Future of Recharging
By Glenn Fleishman The unsightly plastic warts on our walls are sucking down hundreds of gigawatts of power globally each year. It’s time to put a stop to that needless energy drain by replacing dumb bricks with smart hubs -- putting a computerized stake through the hearts of our home electrical vampires. Devices that are plugged in but not in use consume between 200 and 400 terawatt hours (TWh) per year, according to the International Energy Agency. Other research pegs the not-in-use drain from 5 to 25 percent of all residential energy used in the U.S., with numbers rising. Research doesn’t divvy up between the consumption of DC-converting “wall warts” that provide juice to recharge batteries or convert power for various electronics, and the power sucked by the standby...
More Parking! Chicago Discovers Their Curbsides are Lined with Gold
San Francisco may have the most technologically nifty new parking system in the U.S., but Chicago wins big points for the mercenary genius of their approach: the city expects to raise over a billion dollars by auctioning a 50-year concession on their entire parking system. Private vendors are willing to pay so much for the right to manage the city's 36,000 parking spaces because they know the real estate is presently underpriced. The winning bidder will be required to install "state-of-the-art parking meters that monitor parking space availability and adjust rates to ensure an open space on every block." The new system should reduce congestion, lower greenhouse gas emissions, improve air quality, and generally make the city more livable. It will also mint a good deal of cash for...
Inside WCI: Federal Pre-emption
What happens with a new president? by Eric de Place This is the eigth in a short series of posts that explain some important but often overlooked policy issues in...
Tired of Waiting for Efficiency
Our right to know about fuel-efficient tires. by Eric de Place I'm always fascinated by the "1 percent solutions" to energy. It seems to me that in order to address...
DNA Forensics May Prevent Elephant Poaching
A shipment of forest timber traveled around the southern tip of Africa and across the Indian Ocean before it arrived at the Hong Kong dockyards two years ago. During...
REACTIVATE!! Atomized, virtual gardens.
The REACTIVATE!! exhibition at the at the Espai d' Art Contemporani de Castelló, near Valencia (Spain), being an almost endless source of wonders i tried to cover last week (see...
Museum of Jurassic Technology
I first came across the name of this extraordinary place in one of the BBC's Imagine-documentaries about German director Werner Herzog, who asked to be met in what he called...
Danke!
We just got our fall catalog from our German publisher, and look what they put on the cover: We were so excited that we could hardly tear our eyes off...
Affordability and the City
Downtown housing affordability is an international problem. Interesting article: Alan Ehrenhalt argues in The New Republic that cities throughout North America are undergoing a "demographic inversion," in which the center...
Calling For Reader Reports: Cool Conferences this Fall
As much as we'd love to, we can't be everywhere that interesting discussions, conferences and events are taking place, even nearly as often as the opportunities pop up. We...
Misunderstanding Cyberwar
There’s nothing like the term “cyberwar” to capture a reader’s attention. For those who grew up on “Wargames”, “Sneakers” or William Gibson novels, the term conjures up images of heroic...
Can the Dead Sea Be Brought to Life?
by Hannah Doherty The Dead Sea has been a religious and cultural landmark of the Middle East for thousands of years. Saltier than the oceans, the lake is like none...
Toilet to Tap or Perfectly Potable? California Uses New Treatment Technology to Increase Water Resources
Pressed for water resources, California's Orange County has spent millions of dollars to build and recently open a state-of-the-art water treatment system that processes and transforms formerly flushed sewage...
Virtual Transgender Suit, Avatar Termination and Other Online World Tales
You might remember that a year ago Marc Owens designed the Avatar Machine, a system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view...
U.K. Biofuels Sources Are Largely Unknown
As biofuels imports increase in the United Kingdom, policymakers remain largely uninformed about the true environmental and social costs of producing these fuels, posing a significant challenge for efforts...
Who Wants What? Google Insight on Spam, Pirated Software and Other Fun Stuff
Oh man. Google Insights for Search is good fun. I’m supposed to spend this week finishing a number of writing projects. But I spent almost all today running different searches...
Carbon Share
by Eric de Place A new spin on cap and dividend. Here's an intriguing idea from California: Carbon Share. It's basically a version of Cap and Dividend (aka Skytrust) but...
Pop!Tech Announces 2008 Lineup
This October, renowned ideas summit Pop!Tech will once again bring the world's social innovation network to the seaside town of Camden, Maine. (Check out our archives for Worldchanging coverage...
Everybody Eats: The Unifying Power of Food
By Sharon Hoyer There probably isn’t a single issue of sustainability and health that consistently strikes as passionate a chord as the production, distribution and preparation of food. It makes...
Two Views of Greenhouse Gases
The same data yields two very different pictures of what's important. Behold: two very different ways of looking at U.S. climate-warming emissions, thanks to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality...
Exports Account For One-Third of China’s Emissions
As Chinese manufacturers feed a growing global appetite for cheap goods, these exports account for a rising share of the country's greenhouse gas emissions, a new study reveals. Exports are...
AP’s Ethnography of News Consumption
A media group in continuous operation since 1846 may not be the company you should look to for advice on the future of media. Or maybe they should: the Associated...
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