First observed on this day fifty years ago and now celebrated in every polity around the globe as the largest secular holiday of them all, organisers in colleges and universities brought out roughly twenty million individuals into the spring sunshine to peaceful demonstrate for environmental reform.
The original impetus was a devastating oil spill of the coast of Santa Barbara, California that was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of marine creatures during the previous winter with city solemnly marking the one-year anniversary of that disaster in January with an Environmental Rights Day, further advancing the idea for a day of action generally for ecological responsibility and justice. For the occasion, illustrator Walt Kelly created an anti-pollution poster with his comic strip character declaiming the above quotation, parodying a missive sent by Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry (older brother of Commodore Matthew Perry) to General William Harrison on his victory, more confident and less contrite, in the Battle of Lake Erie—another environmental mess we are trying to remediate—“We have met the enemy, and they are ours.”
Wednesday 22 April 2020
we have met the enemy and he is us
Tuesday 7 April 2020
flotsam and jetsam
Via Present /&/ Correct, we are introduced to a new form of beachcombing, mudlarking (see also here and here) that’s pivoted for one Cornwall resident from shells and lost treasures to the plastic detritus of modern times in LEGO Lost at Sea, who has nonetheless continued to collect what she can scavenge from the shores and displays them in their dismaying beauty. Learn more at the links above and share your own meticulously arranged collages of castaways.
Friday 27 March 2020
bed, bath and beyond
We are quite pleased with the way our interior design came together and one of the more pleasant aspect was visiting showrooms and browsing through catalogues to select faucets and fixtures.
Not looking to redecorate any time soon mind you, we enjoyed quite a bit leafing through this American Radiator and Standard Sanitary Corporation (today the rather sedate Trane Inc., having divested itself of its bathroom division) brochure from 1940 with some fantastic period pastels and palettes to choose from. Much more to explore from Present /&/ Correct at the link above.
Wednesday 4 March 2020
ๆฒข็ปใ
Via tmn, we learn about a particular subset of mountaineering called sawanobori—literally stream-climbing that involves ascending a tributary to its source be that up and over ravines and waterfalls and always against the current. Although speciality gear is usually now employed—as the video advertises—traditionally climbers wore straw-rope shoes called waraji (่้), differentiated from other sandals by how the toes protruded over the edge to help one gain a purchase whilst hiking up an incline.
catagories: ๐ฏ๐ต, ๐ง, sport and games
Saturday 15 February 2020
downspout
Researchers from the City University of Hong Kong are developing a new technique to harness the power of falling rainwater and convert it into electricity for passive applications and battery recharging.
One water drop alone under this novel way of converting and redistributing its kinetic energy can generate enough of a spark to light up a matrix of one LED bulbs. While the rain may not be appropriate for energy-intensive scenarios, the project leader believes that the field effect transistor method could be overlaid with other energy harvesters to multiply their efficacy—on rooftop solar panels, for instance, to ensure a steadier power-supply even when the conditions aren’t so sunny, or even one’s own umbrella whose cane would become a power-wand. Learn more at the link above.
Sunday 18 August 2019
holy mackerel
Though I am sure our friend Lew Zealand would gladly help spawning fish to navigate man-made obstacles that block their migratory routes, we also appreciated this artificial-intelligence aided system that creates a portal to help fish mount dams blocking rivers by gently launching them through a pneumatic tube up and over the top. Dams harvest hydropower—a sustainable and reliable energy source, but such interventions often clash with the environment and creatures that share these waters, but systems like the ones being developed, in tandem with fish-ladders and existing ways to shuttle, can help lessen the impact. Read more about the Whooshh Passage Portal at Dezeen at the link above.
Friday 28 June 2019
saturn vi
Though exploration of the Cronian satellite cannot begin before 2034 (distant-seeming but only fifteen years hence), NASA has committed, choosing among twelve contending proposals, to send a fleet of aerial drones to survey Titan, more planet than moon-like with a dense atmosphere, complex terrain, weather and methane driven precipitation similar to the water cycle on Earth, only sustainable at much lower temperatures, to seek out alien life.
Saturday 22 June 2019
watershed moment
On this day in 1969, the Cuyahoga River, downstream from the industrial cities of Akron, Kent and Cleveland Ohio, caught on fire—the latest in a series of at least a dozen major conflagrations of the polluted tributary of Lake Erie—captured the attention of reporters at TIME magazine and the issue made the cover of the June edition. The public outrage that followed helped endorse a tranche of pollution-control measures and eventually led to the creation of a federal and state Environmental Protection Agency by early December of the following year.
Wednesday 5 June 2019
glowing, glowing, gone
We are all for any gesture—however notional—that highlights the plight of the planet and causes us to reflect on how rubbish we are as stewards of the oceans, so appreciated Pantone and Adobe owing up to its slightly tone-deaf irony in nominating Living Coral as the colour of the year, considering that over half of the vital ecosystems have died off over the past three decades with the rest endangered and on the decline, by introducing a palette that reflects the death-rattle of coral.
Called coral fluorescence, the vibrant colour change from purple to yellow to blue is the reef’s final response to heated, acidified water, heralding succumbing to the phenomena of coral bleaching and demise. Signalling overall health but still not fully understood (like most tings, it seems to be far more nuanced and a way of filtering sunlight, protecting from ultra-violet rays and regulating its symbiotic relationship with algรฆ and other denizens), going through these chromatic transformations is a distress message that we can’t ignore.
Wednesday 15 May 2019
ะณะพะปะพั ะฒะพะดะธ
Commissioned for the 23 March annual observance of World Water Day (previously), a group of one hundred sound engineers and musicians—including the group DakhaBrakha—teamed up to create a tone poem from the waters of Ukraine, designing special accompanying instruments to capture the character of currents coursing down the Carpathians. More to explore at Calvert Journal at the link above and for those of you who missed the commemoration like we did, it’s your cue to appreciate and collect the music of your local body of water.
catagories: ๐บ๐ฆ, ๐, ๐ถ, ๐ง, environment
Wednesday 1 May 2019
macroalgae
Instead of the usual plastic cups or bottles of water offered to parched runners, for this past London Marathon participants were handed out some thirty thousand gulps of a sports drink encapsulated (previously) in a seaweed-based edible container. Among the newest wonder material, designers and the industry are just beginning to appreciate the potential of seaweed as a sustainable bio-plastic which, incorporated dietarily, can also combat the bio-genesis of methane.
catagories: ๐ง, environment, sport and games
Monday 1 April 2019
plop, plop, fizz, fizz
Swedish sound artist Alexander Hรถglund ordered different effervescent pain-relieving tablets from around the world and brought them to his recording studio in Malmรถ to press a limited run of vinyl records as a meditation on the fizzing sounds as the pills slowly dissolve.
The resulting album, Substance, is surprisingly soothing and perhaps a nice placebo—resonant with me as well for the morning ritual H calls my “vitamin water”—and makes me want to experiment a bit with the drinking vessel and water levels and makes me wonder how much of the experience one has to take in to achieve the desired result, like the impression that the angry hiss of tablet finding just a few drops of moisture instead of the full glass would probably begrudge any pharmacological efficacy.
Friday 24 August 2018
hungersteine
Weeks of drought conditions have precipitated significant drops in the water level in rivers and lakes across Europe, including the Elbe (Labe), where near the border between Germany and the Czech Republic at Dฤฤรญn carved boulders, normally submerged, have been exposed. Known as hunger stones, the engravings mark historic droughts and thus failed harvests that have occurred over the past six centuries. While such memorials lends some perspective to our times, the extremes we are experiencing now and unprecedented in combination with intense temperatures that overtax the resilience of ecosystems when there’s no relenting.
Thursday 2 August 2018
anthropocene
Friday 27 July 2018
water column
Oceanographers in Queensland for the first time have produced a comprehensive, global map charting out the pristine, untouched areas of oceanic wilderness, which sadly reveals that there is only a small percentage not already befouled by mankind.
Researchers admit that they were expecting to find much broader expanses of unspoilt waters and ecosystems but these contrary results, testament to the endless assault that people are waging with careless pollution, climate change heating up waters and disrupting currents, over-fishing, sand-mining (the chief component of all the concrete and glass that goes into new construction) and intensive shipping, demonstrate the degree of negative, disruptive impact that humans have had above and below the waves.
catagories: ๐, ๐ก️, ๐ช️, ๐ง, environment
Saturday 28 October 2017
eau la la
To impart a bit of public luxury, the city of Paris is expanding its campaign of effervescent water (eau pรฉtillante) fountains and will soon be installing at least one public convenience in each of the twenty arrondissements.
Though more subdued and functional than the historic Wallace drinking fountains that are scattered throughout the City of Lights (so called for being the first metropolis to be illuminated by night) the new ones are a modern complement to those iconic symbols of Paris cast by sculptor Charles-Auguste Lebourg at the behest of the eponymous philanthropist, Sir Richard Wallace, to make these watering places to supplement the utilities destroyed by the Franco-Prussian War and make drinking water as safe a beverage of choice so people weren’t expected to repair to alcohol, like since the Dark Ages when booze was the only non-lethal thing to imbibe, a little carbonation goes a long way. Expatriate Wallace gladly credited France with all his good fortune and wanted to repay his adopted home with every honour but also was sort of a teetotaler. It is hoped that this nudge will reduce plastic bottle use plus the need to shuffle bottled water around the world. Despite the off-putting news recently that there was a trace of Legionnaires’ Disease causing bacteria in my apartment building’s plumbing but it was immediately redressed, I’d gladly too drink water from the tap, so long as it was sparkling.
Wednesday 18 October 2017
flussbau
We had not realised that the upper Rhein valley acquired its present appearance not by Nature but rather through extensive engineering until reading this profile on Johann Gottfried Tulla.
Of course many of the ancient palaces and fortifications that lend the river its romantic airs existed prior to Tulla’s excavation and construction that worked to straighten meandering sections, deepen the bed to improve navigation and remove numerous islets that began in the first decade of the nineteenth century, but the character of place was really transformed by the efforts to tame the marshlands and regulate flooding. Transportation infrastructure was the primary motivation and not tourism, but the manicured embankments did make for a good monumental showcase. Virtually unrecognisable from an ecological standpoint, Tulla’s landscaping and construction would be considered criminal today and an assault on the environment, it’s hard to imagine villages developing in swampier climes and malaria (which Tulla himself ultimately succumbed to) was rampant in the area. The efforts to mitigate flooding in the industrially-important cities of Koblenz, Bonn and Kรถln produced flooding further downstream, and presently work is being undertaken to re-naturalise and de-constrain the river as much as possible and allow it to choose its own course.
catagories: ๐ง, ๐งณ, Hessen, Rheinland-Pfalz
Wednesday 23 September 2015
primary packaging
Via the ineffably fascinating Mental Floss comes the innovative news that a design company in the UK is poised to revolutionise the way people transport, store and imbibe their beverages.
Called the Ooho, liquid is stored in a transparent membrane made mostly of algรฆ, completely biodegradable and even edible. Now one can stay hydrated like the astronauts that get to chase down floating blobs of water. Sloshing sacks that resemble silicone implants may not immediately strike the market as the intuitive alternative but, like wine skins, the small portions could be bundled to be delivered in larger containers and the idea confronts one immediately with unadulterated sustainability, using completely natural substances and forgoing the plastic bottle altogether.