The last post I made was about two very ambitious and amazingly capable friends of mine, Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray (http://brittaandrebecca.org/), and their project Window Farms. They just started a Kickstarter Project because Window Farms is in need of funds to manage it’s growth (which has far exceeded their expectations).
It’s soilless food grown in your apartment. It’s controlling what you eat, where it comes from and how much it costs. It’s a collaborative resource to tackle a critical problem – fresh food in the city. It’s the beginning of an urban food revolution.
Give as much as you can and you can say you were there.
The Windowfarms Project is an open mass collaboration of ordinary people working together to find solutions to one of the most challenging problems of our times: the urban fresh food supply. We give urban folks a unique opportunity to make all of the decisions that bring healthy food to their own plates by helping them grow their own veggies inside. We are finding the most efficient and doable ways to grow food in any apartment window and generating free online instructions. We have received a lot of great attention and recently we even built a windowfarm at the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC!
Ever wonder what the climate would tell us if it had a voice? It’s safe to assume most of would rather not think about it. I mean, if I were the climate I’d have a lot of trouble keeping it PG.
Now, imagine if we were living years and years in the future and the climate was all happy and healthy because our current senators decided to reverse the track we’re on now. What would the climate tell us then? Who would the climate be thanking?
That is exactly what Live Earth is asking its supporters to imagine on in their recently launched “Love, The Climate” campaign. Steering clear of the typical ‘doom and gloom’ awareness campaigns, Live Earth is calling on its backers to submit their visions of what that rosy picture will look like.
Individuals are asked to participate in any of these ways:
Leave a voicemail. Dial 347.422.6392 to leave a message on the Live Earth message line (this is not a toll-free number). Live Earth will highlight the best voicemails on their website and forward the best ones to the senators to whom they’re addressed.
Post your thoughts on Facebook. Leave a message, a photo, or link on the “Love, The Climate” Facebook page that shows how fantastic the climate will be after senators have taken action by passing the Climate Bill
Make a video and upload it. Shoot a video demonstrating to senators how amazing life has become in a future where the environment is protected. Sing them a song, read a love sonnet, speak for the trees in costume, let the whales do the talking!
All participants who register to win will be entered into random drawings to win one of three awesome “Climate Love Packs” or the grand prize of a Schwinn 2010 World NX7. The campaign is slated to run through September 25, 2009, so get cranking!
Impressive film done by the folks at Hellmann’s to let other Canadians know about the importance of eating local. Beautiful graphs and charts adorn the video but the subject matter is very serious. Found at netdiver.
It is finally here, Summer! Yesterday, was the Summer Solstice officially ushering the season. It has been slow in coming but the signs are there: sun, flowers, and people smiling. Of course, this means it is time to start booking your summer escapes. While looking for cheapest deals may be priority, don’t forget to what that car trip or airplane ride might be costing the earth.
Now you can search you flights and get the C02 footprint at the same time. Michael Mandiberg, a fellow at NYC’s Eyebeam, has a FireFox plugin called The Real Cost. When you install it and search airline and car travel sites, it will give you the Co2 cost as part of the search results.
Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray (http://brittaandrebecca.org/) have generated some of my favorite projects in NYC. Notably, they developed a process for individuals to remove harmful chemicals from their urine, else it be deposited into our rivers and streams (drinkpeedrinkpeedrinkpee) demonstrating the collaborative and open exchange of information, which propels individuals to take initiative, rather than waiting for government action. With their latest exploration, Window Farms, they direct this approach to urban farming. Like drinkpeedrinkpeedrinkpee, Window Farmers are rooted in the DIY community and harness what they call crowd sourced research & development, a term you might not be familiar with, but is exactly what it sounds like. From their site:
The goal of the project is to create a new Research & Development model which puts the awesome power of discovery and creation into the hands of the masses, and then spread the know-how to every participant.
Though specifically addressing food production within current constraints of an urban environment, the big picture is Window Farms reminds folks of their own innovation, skill and value as contributors to their local and global community.
Look for the expanded site this month (http://windowfarms.org/), which will harbor this community and the information you need to start your own Window Farm.
Britta and Rebecca are residents at Eybeam and will be at showing Window Farms at their Mixer:Version benefit tonight through Saturday.
Being a new member of the team at Core Industries, I’ve found myself renewing my childhood roots in eco-friendly living. You see, I had grown up in a family that was really more like a homestead. We had a compost, a few gardens with vegetables and herbs, chickens for eggs, goats for milk, wood stove heat, no carpeting, no hot water heater (we used the wood stove), and even an old time washer with hand ringer. Skip forward several years and you can see that I shed much of what I learned as a child and became captivated by the modern amenities of comfort and ease. But now being at Core has helped me re-discover why we did all of that growing up. Yes, it was a pain in the ass to heat your own water on the stove then put it in a 5 gallon jug to take a shower, but it was also a practice that made me aware of how precious water was and how not to waste it.
From that point of view, my wife and I have been thinking of how we can make our home more eco-friendly. Our goal is to take on some projects over the course of the next few years to really make a change in the way we live and teach our children the importance of preserving our world.
So to get us started I’ve been doing some research on places to get good information on products, vendors, and just plain insight on how to make a home go green. Here are 20 links of the best stuff I have found so far but I am sure there is more out there, so feel free to share your links in the comments or email them to me at daniel [at] core-industries.com.
Green Home Environmental Store View pre-screened and environmentally friendly products for your home and office. You should also check out their articles which are perfect for those new to green living as well as those with a little experience living a sustainable lifestyle.
Green Home Outfitters I have not ordered anything from them yet but it looks like you’ll find some great natural, ecologically safe, sustainable, hypoallergenic, and non-toxic products at Green Home Outfitters. They also have engineered panels, biodegradable bags, and say that they “specialize in decorative concrete resurfacer, stains and sealants”. The eco friendly carpeting has me especially intrigued.
30 Days to Natural Sign up to get tips in your email everyday, for 30 days. You can also checkout tips, downloads, and video diaries from three women making their lifestyles go green. Sponsored by Green Works Cleaners.
Natural Home Magazine Who would have though, but they’re are print magazines focused on sustainable green home living – I just really really hope that the pages are made with recycled paper (I’m sure they are). This magazine looks like it covers some great topics and they also provide a handy 2009 Resource Guide for finding products and vendors to use for your home.
Sierra Club Green Home Kind of like the epicenter for green living, the Sierra Club provides some awesome advice on greening your home, keeping your family healthy, and reducing your carbon footprint. As they say on their site, “Your health, your wallet and the earth will thank you.”
Green Home Guide Got a question for a professional who understands how to make your office/home green? No problem! Ask the folks over at Green Home Guide and they’ll send your question to their “network of the best and brightest green architects, designers, contractors and consultants across the U.S.”
Green Depot A supplier of environmentally friendly and sustainable building products, services and solutions with showrooms in Brooklyn, Newark, Philadelphia, Boston, Greenport, Chicago, Albany and Manhattan.
Green Home Building The site design might not look like much, but look past it and you’ll find a wide range of information about sustainable architecture and natural building. They include plenty of real world examples and links to videos and books that will help you on your way.
Planet Green A joint venture between Discovery and Treehugger, Planet Green provides some articles on DIY projects for the home that will have you reusing and recycling in no time. One of my favorites, How to Mulch With Newspapers.
Best Green Home Tips A blog providing everything you need to stay green at home; from green building, to earth-friendly furniture, to gardening, to tips and how-tos for keeping it green.
Free Green Home Designs Thinking of remodeling or building a whole new home? Then checkout Free Green where you can get free house plans, home plans, and floor plans for green home building. Obviously you should consult an architect to make sure that the design will work for your climate, zoning laws, durability, etc… but this is a great place to start dreaming and planning.
Green Nest
Green Nest is an ecommerce store that is a bit different than Green Home Outfitters – the Nest specializes in”providing certified organic products for the home including organic mattresses, shower water filters, organic crib bedding, indoor air purifiers and natural floor carpet”. And the site is run by a husband and wife team of Certified Green Building Professionals too – this scores high marks in my book!
EcoHome Magazine A magazine that is gear more towards the professional builder or architect but certainly a good read for anyone looking to remodel their home to be eco friendly. The website and the magazine deliver topics on “green building products and product trends, technical innovations, and building science”. Their videos have been captivating me for the past few days – providing me with lots of information, very quickly.
Energy Savers The U.S. Department of Energy’s website focused on Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. The site is packed, and I mean packed, with information to help you understand what you can due to reduce your energy consumption. I’d highly suggest checking their site to find tax credits, rebates, and financial assistance before you make ANY purchases – they can save you green and save green in the long run.
Consumer Guide to Home Energy Savings: Online Guide This site is the online version of the popular book version, now in its 9th edition, of the Consumer Guide to Home Energy Savings. Its chock full of tips – I literally was overwhelmed at how much great information and small actionable examples there are here. My favorites so far are the Home Energy Checklist and the How to Choose a Contractor.
Energy Star The gold standard of energy efficiency, Energy Star is a joint venture between the U.S. Dept. of Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy. Choosing an Energy Star certified appliance will reduce your over all energy consumption and help lower your monthly costs. The site lists all certified products and also provides tips for home and office sustainability. The Energy Star @ Home interactive microsite is tons of fun too – navigate through a house and see all the ways you can be more efficient.
Being the excellent little web enthusiasts that we are, we took video of all the presentations on a handy little flip cam for those who weren’t able to attend. Below is the video of the winning entry, Gotham Greens. All five presentations can be seen at the Green Business Competition Channel on Vimeo.
Gotham Greens is creating NYC’s first commercial scale, rooftop hydroponic farm. The 12,000 ft2 facility will grow over 30 tons of premium quality, pesticide-free vegetables each year for the NYC retail and restaurant market. The farm will combine technically sophisticated Controlled Environment Agriculture techniques with unique energy saving innovations. Gotham Greens addresses ecological and public health concerns surrounding conventional agriculture, including long distance food transport and food safety, while bringing New Yorkers delicious, local produce year round.
We’re happy to announce that two of our writers here at Greensearch, Megan MacMurray and Angela Pablo are heading to the Futuresonic Festival and Conference in Manchester, UK to display their art piece, The Garden Electric. Fellow Greensearch contributor Rory Nugent made the electronics of the project more robust for the long term exhibition. Here’s a snippet of what its all about:
Garden Electric
We use electricity all the time, but it’s a hidden process contained in plugs and kept behind walls. The garden visualises your electricity usage through the life and death of its plants.
The “garden” is made up of flowers constructed by sculpting and inflating recycled plastic bags connected to a lamp through a current sensor which reads the amount of power being consumed. This value triggers fans which inflate and deflate the garden as a whole. When the lamp is turned off and energy is conserved, the garden thrives and stays inflated; when the lamp is on, the garden is placed in a dying state. The Garden Electric invites you to interact with the garden by turning appliances on and off, allowing electricity to take on a tactile form.
We had the chance to sit down with Megan and discuss the art project, the motivation behind it, her environmental activism, and what it all means for us. The following is an insightful and eye-opening glimpse into the mind of an artist that provokes us all to think more about the world we live in and how we interact with it.
GS: How did you come up with the idea?
MM: Garden Electric was created within constraints, both self-imposed and external, through courses at ITP (NYU’s Iterative Telecommunications Program). Originally we were looking for a tangible way to represent electricity without using electricity (outside of what we were measuring of course). We loved the purpose of bringing the abstract lifeblood of all our technologies into a physical analog form. The flowers in their first iteration were inflated through a series of bellows (not fans which we use now) and while the concept was great the physical project looked like a medieval ventilator! (incredible charming but a little overwhelming, so much so that it took away from communicating what we had intended) Within that process we also focused on using materials that had the least amount of impact in their creation. When trying the find used materials which were in excess in NYC and we didn’t need to look past the plastic grocery bag. This overwhelming excess is represented by the number of projects we’ve seen made from these 3 min products! (3 mins being the time it takes for you to walk from the store to your home or office with the plastic bag, only to throw it away). Both Angela Pablo and I love making beauty from trash, finding use in waste and the creative re-purpose of everyday objects. This became the focus of the project, with a parallel goal of making the invisible negative effects of sources of energy tangible. The colors, structure and setup of the project is simple, interactive and fun.
GS: Have you always been interested in environmentalism?
MM: I’ve always been a camper, hiker and tree climber, but I don’t feel that I’ve been enough of an active environmentalist. I have friends that are considerably more radical and outspoken. I’m a lover plants and dirt and forests and beaches and mountains – so I guess it makes sense that the longer I live in cities (yikes, it’s been over 10 years now) the more I feel I need to force myself to connect with the earth. Most importantly, I work to improve how I live my life in relation to our planet and this is bound to spill over into how I relate to people. I grew up with three acres of forest to run around in. I appreciate it so much more now, so I want to do my part to make sure we don’t destroy those spaces. I am a firm supporter of grassroots, collective action versus government policy, so my form of environmental action is definitely rooted in local and the individual.
GS: What are your thoughts on conserving electricity?
MM: There are two main approaches that have equal importance. Conservation – which empowers the individual to be aware of and alter their impact on the environment, and alternative sources of energy – which is reliant on industry innovation to find sources of power for our energy infrastructure and make this system as efficient as possible.
GS: Have you always had a passion for art?
MM: I’ve always loved storytelling, which originally took the form of acting for me. I ended up feeling limited on stage, so I got into video then started messing around with building physical projects when I came to NYC and went to ITP. I love film, stories and illustrations but also enjoy building things, so I suppose the form a project takes depends on what I’m interested in. It’s freeing to not just be a performer or a writer or an illustrator but to be what ever suites what you want to say.
GS: What gallery showings have you had, besides this one?
MM: The garden electric was in the City Sol in 2007 as well as the ITP Winter Show 2006. Wallflowers were shown at Greylock Arts in Massachusetts.
GS: What do you do during the day?
MM: I work at Core Industries. My title is Production Designer, my day-to-day role is a bit of a wild card. I love it. I gained a broad knowledge of software and programming languages at ITP which equipped me perfectly for Core. I am able to work on video, programming and research depending on the needs of the project at hand. Since we are still small this works well. So much of what Corey is tackling at Core is uncharted. To create smart, innovative technology and design for non-profits and environmental organizations we need to be creative and versatile, ITP definitely prepared me for that.
GS: What other installation art are you working on right now?
MM: I’m actually returning to storytelling and working on an animation/documentary with an amazing performer/writer and dear friend Christine Miller. She wrote a one woman show that was in Fringe Festival last year, which the film will focus on. Actually, Corey has had me working in Flash so much at Core that I’m doing the animation in Flash instead of After Effects (which is what I was originally going to use). It’s been amazing how the work we are doing at Core (in regards to both content and technology) has benefited my outside creative projects. Corey has been a great support.
GS: What effect have you seen from your art on the green movement and vice versa?
MM: The biggest quantitative effect was the response to the Instructable I put up on the Wallflowers project. It was picked up on a few blogs, was featured on Instructables and got a great response. People get really excited when they realize they can make something valuable from what others might disregard, so being able to contribute to the process is great. It’s very valuable to make the effort to get the most out of the life of a material and not be so quick to just through it away.
GS: Is there something that everyone can do to be more conscious about our energy consumption?
MM: I think the act of trying to be aware of the invisible is a huge task in and of itself! Once people make that effort their behavior follows. The tricky thing in our and recent generations is that the convenience of civilization has created a huge disconnect with the negative effects of energy consumption. It takes effort to take a close look at where products and utilities come from and the energy it takes to get them into your hands or home. My latest personal push has to be as local as possible with food and products. Michael Pollan, who wrote The Omnivores Dilemma and Botany of Desire, is a huge advocate of growing your own food. It is the only true way regain personal control of the resources and energy that goes into of that part the infrastructure. I agree completely. Growing you own food requires a greater personal investment than buying organic industrially grown food, but the process creates such an immediate personal connection that it can make the invisible tangible. The process of seed to fruit is so rarely experienced, to reclaim that is very powerful! I don’t have a yard so I don’t have a garden yet, but I am a member of the community garden in my neighborhood, so there are ways to work within your community.
Wired posted a sometimes scathing article yesterday, calling out well-intentioned efforts to better the planet that not only fall short, but can cause more damage. Although the article makes a cynical start, highlighting many actions individuals take that have little or no impact, the more important point to take from the piece is that we can’t take arbitrary tips on face value and must do our research. Imagine that.
On this the day of Earth take a look at Earthster which is aggregating company contributed data to allow businesses to calculate the environmental impact of the shipper they are using. Their consumer facing outlet is currently GoodGuide. And check your references.
I am completely hooked on this time-lapse of glacier melt in areas such as Alaska, Greenland and Iceland available through NOVA’s Extreme Ice Survey. The amount of content and span of time this project covers is huge and also available in a doumentary.
The project was started in 2006 by photojournalist James Balog and National Geographic. It covers every year since and the footage is not only beautiful (using the Nikon D-200) but some of the videos are consciously edited to convey perceptible information, framing the scale of what is happening in a more tangible context. If you view the time-lapse videos, be sure to track down May 15-Sept 21 at Columbia Glacier in Alaska (try this link though it seems that their video unique urls are not working). There is an effective, though not necessarily innovative, use of school buses as measurement units that communicates how grand the landscape really is.
My qualm with the site? With such an immense amount of content, I would really love to search. Please NOVA? Can I search?
The data, however, is priceless. They’ve documented landscapes that already no longer exist and are providing invaluable data to scientists.
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