Our friend Josh Dorfman—aka The Lazy Environmentalist—voiced off on the Huffington Post recently on the distinction between the scientific and political in the debate over how (and even whether) to address global warming. His take? It’s not about convincing people the numbers are real, but about engaging their self-interest:

When it comes right down to it, I’ve learned that you don’t have to convince global warming skeptics that global warming is real in order to generate their support for the solutions that solve it. The question we must ask ourselves is, “Is this about winning the debate and being ‘right’ or is this about getting people enthusiastically on board with the solutions?”

Do you think less science and more talk is the right approach? Read the entire piece here, and share your thoughts in the comments.

(via Huffingtonpost)

Great post over on the landscape architecture blog Inspiration Wall from a tour of several of Seattle’s Green Roofs. If, like me, you don’t have access to a well-planted roof in your urban dwelling, it’s enough to make you, well, green with envy.

More, though, it’s good to see this concept taking off. Personally, every time I’m on top of a high building, I can’t help looking around and marveling at all the wasted space—who wouldn’t want a beautiful rooftop garden? Hell, just take the roof of any urban office building, plant a few square yards of green and perch an MCH (Micro Compact Home) on it, and you’re probably sitting on a few hundred grand worth of real estate…

(via Inspiration Wall)

According to this piece in Monday’s New York Times, yes you can.

Apparently, Dr. Michael J. Haas, a research biochemist at the United States Department of Agriculture, in collaboration with a Philadelphia biofuels company turned an 800-pound sculpture of Benjamin Franklin and the Liberty Bell (constructed for the Pennsylvania Farm Show, in Harrisburg) into 75 gallons of biodiesel fuel and a lower-grade bunker fuel.

Unfortunately (or not?), it doesn’t look like the process is economically feasible. “The cost of edible butter is too high,” Dr. Haas said, conceeding “The number of rancid butter sculptures in the U.S. is probably not significant.”

(via New York Times)

Today in the Thought Kitchen, we’re featuring an interview with writer, environmental scientist and sustainable food activist Temra Costa. She is the author of Farmer Jane: Women Changing the Way We Eat, a new book tracking the growth of the sustainable food movement and the role that women are playing in transforming the way we eat and farm. The book profiles thirty-two women in the sustainable food industry, from urban farmers to farm-to-school advocates.

The Thought Kitchen: I suppose it’s appropriate here in The Thought Kitchen that we’re talking about food and the issues around sustainable agriculture. What made you want to write this book?

"Farmer Jane" Author Temra Costa. Photo by Bart Nagel.

Temra Costa: Farmer Jane really provides an alternative lens through which to looking at sustainable food and agriculture. I feel that a lot of issues have been well articulated by other authors, but the whole feminine perspective has yet to be really well explored. Sixty percent of employees at grass roots Ag organizations are women, and moms in homes are the ones cooking meals and controlling upwards of 85 percent of household spending. In 2007 when the USDA came out with their last Ag census it showed that women farmers were the fastest growing demographic by 30 percent since 2002. So women are really making things happen and while they don’t always put themselves in front of cameras, they’re definitely behind the scenes making it happen every day.

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Design.

It is a difficult word to define, let alone execute with change-making results. It requires intent, insight, attention to detail. It asks for deeper thought around functionality, necessity, purpose and accessibility. Design has the power to change the way we interact with the world.

With this year’s Grant for Change we asked you to share your designs, but first, we negotiated the criteria. We asked for designs that instigate positive change. We asked for designs that address the world’s greatest challenges, and challenge assumptions about the way even the most basic things are done. We asked for design that is replicable, creative, compelling and effective.

After six weeks of open nominations, 124 nominees, an exciting voting period, support from hundreds of communities, interviews with our ten finalists, and much deliberation, we are excited to announce our second annual $10,000 Grant for Change Grantees:

Congratulations to Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney and their project Truck Farm.

Grandpa’s old pickup truck, turned mobile garden, has turned heads from Northern Massachusetts to Washington DC, and with it comes a humorous and edgy spin to the conversation around food.

It has inspired the creation of over 60 (and counting) food gardens in new and unusual places. Its course has been recorded with pictures and sound, culminating in a documentary film that is now rolling its way into the film festival circuit.

On the ground, the truck itself instigates awareness, offering a tangible, and remarkably simple, example of design as a tool for positive change; when the farm moves, it reminds us that we do not need a static plot of land to grow our own food.

Curt and Ian are fired up for the next steps of the Truck Farm movement. Their goals include a movie-screen attachment, to make the mobile farm a portable theatre; a series of contests focused on who can grow a garden in the craziest place; a succession of portable events, to gain traction with schools, through youth programs and innovative curriculum; and a (wish list) meeting with the CEOs of the Big Three automakers to see if any of them are interested in bringing a mass-production Truck Farm to market. In their own words:

“Urban agriculture is taking root in Detroit now, with vacant lots being planted in crops and commercially-viable farms sprouting up on 8 Mile Road. So why not take a bit of inspiration from that, and build a line of cars with room for a seedling or two? It sounds ridiculous, and is, but wouldn’t it be fun?”

Take a closer look – and see what we’re so excited about – here. We look forward to the upcoming year of storytelling, mobile farm movements and the urban agriculture conversation. We hope you will join the discussion.

You know composting is good. Perhaps you’re doing it yourself on a small scale, collecting the organic waste from your kitchen and turning it into rich soil for your garden. But what happens to that larger scale organic matter that sometimes passes through your life? Where does yard debris go after you put it on the curb?

The surprising answers to those questions led two young entrepreneurs—Tyler Miller, and Nau alum Pierce Louis—to start Dirt Hugger, a local composting company that creates sustainable economies by collecting, processing, and utilizing valuable organic nutrients locally. It turns out that without access to composting services, organic materials are mostly processed in unsustainable ways: they are dumped in landfills where they produce 40% of the nation’s methane gas emissions, burned in open air piles, or trucked long distances to urban processing centers.

Tyler and Pierce are in the running for the Myoo Create Beat Waste Startup Challenge: as one of ten finalists, they’re up for a $15,000 grant from Adventure Ecology, the folks behind the Plastiki expedition. For nurturing the idea that organic waste has real nutrient value and that communities are strengthened when they retain that value locally rather than trucking it out of town, they’ve got our vote. Whether in compost or clothing, we need more of this kind of closed-loop thinking.

(via Vimeo)

Currently, the energy that we all depend on comes almost entirely from taking ancient carbon bonds (in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas), mixing them with oxygen, and lighting them on fire.  The products of this chemical reaction are energy (heat) and green house gases emissions.  By now, we all know this is not sustainable.

The folks at the Rocky Mountain Institute — a self-described “Think-and-Do Tank” whose mission is to “drive the efficient and restorative use of resources” – believe we can find a way to avoid literally burning up our collective future.  They lay out a vision for how our market economy can drive transformative change from dirty carbon to renewables and energy efficiency:  They call it ”Reinventing Fire.”

I know, I know, “Vision…blah, blah…Policy…blah, blah, blah…” — it gets boring fast.  But it’s critically important stuff, so give this video a chance – it communicates complex issues in simple terms, has cool images to illustrate key concepts, uses great video clips of old-school carbon, and even includes some quick hits of info-graphic porn for the process nerds among us.

In my continuing fascination with small space living, I’ve lusted after the design efficiency of the 72 square foot Micro Compact Home, dreamed about on what remote patch of land I would plant an itHouse, and lingered over the pages of Tiny, a picture book of homes under 1,000 square feet. But in all those clever uses of space, I’ve never seen one that takes advantage of rotation like the Roll-It house, a project by students at the Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design [ITKE] at the University of Karlsruhe.

While I might not want to live there full time, the spinning bed-to-desk component is pretty damn cool, and something that could easily be incorporated into other small spaces. Check out more pictures, and details, at Arkinet.

(via notcot.org)

Equal parts experimental architecture, sustainable sculpture, jungle gym, and live performance, Big Bambu—Mike and Doug Starns’ massive installation on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—takes a decidedly outdoor approach to creating art.

Produced in collaboration with a group of climbers from New Paltz, NY (home of The Gunks, the Northeast’s trad-climbing shangri-la), Big Bambu is a work in progress, rising pole by pole as the climbers lash them together with nylon rope. It’s watching this progress that offers a good part of the work’s appeal: on a recent visit, when the structure stood over 30 feet tall, they sat perched in the latticework, with Central Park and the New York City skyline spread out behind them, like workers building a mid-century skyscraper.

The finished piece, as the Starn’s envision it, will take the form of a cresting wave; in progress, it looks like the bones of a kind of bamboo Bilbao Guggenheim. And while it’s no longer green in color—a month and a half of sun has bleached the shoots to a weathered tan—it’s renewable nature stands as a refreshing monument to the flexibility of sustainable materials.

For a closer look, a series of ramps and walkways allow (ticketed) visitors to climb up into the structure, which when completed is expected to measure 100 feet long, 50 feet wide and fifty feet high. Of the scale of the project, Doug says, “The reason we had to make it so big is to make all of us feel small—or at least to awaken us to the fact that individually we are not so big. Once we’re aware of our true stature we can feel a part of something much more vast than we could ever have dreamed of before.”