As the sustainability dialogue moves forward, I’ve seen two interesting directions in which it’s being reframed and recontextualized from being something about “just surviving” the ecological crisis towards being about actually living in a green world. One is Jamais Cascio’s concept of “resilience”?
There have been some truly sensational crop circle formations appearing in 2009 and while I was hunting around for some good images to post here, I came across an article (on the BBC’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy forums, I think I should add) that contained this rather astonishing bit of information:
Crop circles are not a new phenomenon. There are 17th Century woodcuts that record the observation of what appears to be crop circles. One such woodcut, entitled The Devil Mower, appeared in a Hertfordshire newspaper dated 22 August, 1678. The article described the apparition overnight of a strange design in a field of oats, so neatly pressed that ‘no mortal man was able to do the like’ which was attributed to the ‘devil or some infernal spirit’. By convoluted logic this apparition confirmed the existence of God since, it was argued, if devils have a Hell then there must be a Heaven, and a God.
Here is what it says:
Being a True Relation of a Farmer, who Bargaining with a Poor Mower, about the Cutting down Three Half Acres of Oats: upon the Mower’s asking too much, the Farmer swore That the Devil should Mow it rather than He. And so it fell out, that very Night, the Crop of Oat shew’d as if it had been all of a flame: but next Morning appear’d so neatly mow’d by the Devil or some Infernal Spirit, that no Mortal Man was able to do the like. Also, How the said Oats ly now in the Field, and the Owner has not Power to fetch them away. Liscensed, August 22nd, 1678.
Arguments Against the Hoax Theory of Crop Circles by Joseph E. Mason (he works for NASA)
WELLINGTON, FL—Debra Mitchell is a lead code compliance officer for the Village of Wellington. During the collapse of the housing market, the community was left with a large number of foreclosed homes.
Pointing out one example Mitchell said, “It has an unsanitary, abandoned swimming pool, stagnant swimming pool. There’s no electricity running at this location.”
The code compliance department was paying nearly 7,000 dollars a year to dump chemicals into the pools to treat the scummy buildup.
That’s when Mitchell and some of her colleagues came up with an environmentally-friendly idea to get rid of the green. An idea with a much lower price tag of just 700 dollars.
“Some of us got clever and decided to try the fish-eating…er algae eating fish,” she said.
At a typical home that needed help Mitchell revealed, “We have dumped 15 pleco algae-eating fish in here to take care of the algae situation.”
Something’s fishy in Wellington
(via Arbroath )
Alisa Opar from Audubon Magazine says,
For the first time in nearly 70 years, an Amorphophallus titanum, dubbed the ?
I just saw Tom Petrie of Bank of America Merrill Lynch say on Bloomberg TV that we are at Peak Oil, and that in spite of BP’s “giant” oil find, there will be no major change in the oil supply. In other words, the World’s oil supply will continue to terminally decline…
This is a major admission coming from one America’s top banks. I can’t emphasize the importance of Petrie’s statement.
Say hello and goodbye forever to the Thylacine (above), and the Quagga (below). These are just two of the thought-provoking photos of long-gone animals gathered at Environmental Graffiti. Echoing Jared Diamond’s Collapse, Graffiti’s Karl Fabricius writes, “With modern photography having only been invented in the 1820s, these snapshots are a visible testament to just how recently the creatures shown were wiped out—and a jarring reminder of the precarious situation for many species still left on the planet.”
Well, all I can say is it’s a good thing cameras have come a long way since 1820! When it’s our time to go, and we need those final pictures, mankind can rely on automatic timers.
In Environmental Graffiti: Rare Photos Of Now Extinct Beats
See also: Jared Diamond speaks @ TED
Take a look at the fascinating work of Germany’s “trashy” answer to Christo, H.A. Schult:
Garbage is once again the leitmotif in Schult’s latest work. “We are living in the time of garbage,” says Schult. “We produce garbage and we will be garbage. I created a thousand sculptures of garbage. They are a mirror of ourselves.” Here, Schult is referring to his 1,000 trash people, humanoids he has created from trash. He first exhibited them in 1996 at the Roman amphitheater inside Xantene, a recreated Roman village in the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
The figures triggered such an overwhelmingly positive response that he decided to take them on tour. “It is a social sculpture,” he explains. “It is not only a sculpture for the eyes. It’s a sculpture to spread the idea that we live in a time of garbage.”
Here’s an amazing 3D panoramic view photograph of one of Schult’s Trash People installations.
I was lucky enough to be in Austin, Texas during the Summer on three occasions and each time I saw hundreds of thousands of these bats waking up for the night and going out to look for a bite. During the day they slept under a bridge and at dusk they would start streaming out. It was an incredible sight. The sky would literally turn black with bats.
Obviously Texas is a great place to study bats and researchers at Texas A&M and the University of Texas, Austin have released the results of a new study that indicates bats sing “love songs”—a sort bat version of free jazz scat singing—to woo potential mates:
In the musical city of Austin, Texas, a group of smelly, pug-faced crooners is hoping to woo some females with surprisingly complex tunes.
That’s the finding of a new study of Brazilian free-tailed bats, which now join songbirds and whales as some of the only animals known to use a kind of musical language during courtship.
Also known as the Mexican free-tailed bat, the species is quite numerous in Austin and around the Texas A&M University football stadium in College Park.
Based on recordings of the animals from both locations, the researchers found that the bats’ songs contain definite phrases made up of birdlike chirps, buzzes, and trills.
Males sing their ballads as they hang upside down or sideways, sometimes flapping their wings and dripping a foul-smelling liquid that further attracts females.
Thanks Steve Silberman!
