Vegetarian Nike

No animals were hurt or injured in the production of these vegetarian Nikes.

Created by Paul van Barneveld. Thanks Floris. See also Flesh Nike.

Smart Forests - EWAN

At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Christopher Love and colleagues are working to find out whether energy from trees can be used to prevent forest fires. A sensor system taps into trees as a self-sustaining power supply. Each sensor is equipped with a battery that can be slowly recharged using electricity generated by the tree. The system produces enough electricity to allow the temperature and humidity sensors to wirelessly transmit signals four times a day, or immediately if there’s a fire. Each signal hops from one sensor to another, until it reaches an existing weather station that beams the data by satellite to a forestry command center. The project is called EWAN; Early Wildfire Alert Network.

Via BoingBoing | Related: Fire Fighting Beetle

If the implications of global warming were fair

Contrary to popular belief, global warming is not simply a bad thing: there are winners and losers. While low-lying countries, like Bangladesh, are expected to suffer extensively from rising temperatures and sea-levels, countries situated at the top of the Northern Hemisphere, like Canada and Russia, might gain enormous regions of pristine exploitable farming ground, as temperatures rise.

Contrary to popular belief, global warming is not a natural disaster: it is a political disaster. The countries that cause the global warming effect, aren’t necessary the countries who suffer the consequences. National political agenda’s hardly align with their globally felt consequences.

Imagine the effects of global warming were fair. The visualization above shows a distorted world map, in which the landmass of countries is scaled according the amount with which they’ve reduced carbon emissions between 1980-2000. Life would be so simple, if polluting countries would simply disappear into the ocean.

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A Garden raised by Television

This installation is called Feed and raises ferns that can survive under conditions of extreme lighting.
The television screens provide light to the plants, which grow towards them in a constricted space, eventually colliding.

If I could make a title suggestion for this piece; the German word for “watching TV” is Fernsehen.
By Shane Cooper | Thanks Robbert!

Recycled Books

A lot of dead books were used to make this piece of tree trunk.
By Jacqueline Rush Lee | Related: Modernistic Tree | Modernistic Chair

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Learning to build Superman’s House

Superman already knew it: Manipulating growth is the future of architecture.

The lower picture was taken at the Industrias Peñoles nano-chrystal architecture lab in Chihuahuan, Mexico where researchers are growing giant crystals. No seriously, the Cave of Crystals isn’t man made. It was discovered by Industrias Peñoles miners a thousand feet (300 meters) below Naica mountain in the Chihuahuan Desert.

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Michelangelo’s David after his stay in the US

I got this in my email from my uncle who lives in Australia. “After a short stay in America, David returns to Italy.” You know what’s coming before you even open the picture. Apparently these are the jokes they make down under.

Ambient Umbrella

The Ambient Umbrella shows when rain or snow is in the forecast by illuminating its handle. Light patterns intuitively indicate rain, drizzle, snow, or thunderstorms. Local weather is automatically downloaded from the internet.

From nifty idea to fully fledged product, although we are unsure if this product comes from the same creators as the weather forcasting umbrella we featured two years ago. Thanks Selby.

Join the Neolithic Revolution

Why hunt? Why gather? Join the Neolithic revolution! Somewhere around 9500 BC proto-farmers began to select and cultivate food plants with desired characteristics. While in their own days they were ‘revolutionary technologists’ who radically changed their relation with the environment, today we would describe these people as ‘organic farmers’.

The impact of the neolithic revolution can hardly be underestimated. Agriculture amplifies specialization, enables increased division of labor, establishes the material foundations of social hierarchy, and initiates environmental destruction. Priests, kings, labor, warfare are a few of its fairly immediate consequences. Nextnature avant la lettre folks!

However, with every next nature that emerges, an older nature dries out. What was lost with the rise of agriculture we can only begin to imagine. Some have suggested the end of hunter-gatherer life brought a decline in size, stature, skeletal robustness and introduced tooth decay, nutritional deficiencies, and most infectious diseases.

Not that we should romanticize the hunter-gather life, which must at times have been cruel in its very own way. In fact, it was a completely different life altogether. In the mind of a hunter-gatherer we – contemporary humans – would probably be considered ‘post-human’ already. Think about it next time you are gathering food in your local supermarket.

Comic by David Steinlicht (download PDF), via Sustainability reloaded. See also: Napkin sketch.

Sustainable roof

Peculiar image of the week by Beatrice Jansen.