Sustainability

Category Archives: Sustainability

How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist

I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That’s why I spent the last three years as Google’s Design Ethicist caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people’s minds from getting hijacked.

When using technology, we often focus optimisticallyon all the things it does for us. But I want you to show you where it might do the opposite.

Where does technology exploit our minds weaknesses?

http://www.tristanharris.com/essays/

WTO Summit to Ignore Price Crisis, Agricultural Dumping

Around the world, chronically low crop prices are keeping farmers from making a living despite record harvests.

Crops are in across the U.S. farm belt, with record harvests filling farmers’ silos with grain and their hearts with pride. Yet persistent and punishingly low prices for those crops leave them no better off for their efforts. Net farm income this year is about half what it was in 2013.

U.S. farmers are not alone. The world is experiencing what Reuters called a “global grain glut,” with many staple food crops filling silos from Brazil to the Ukraine. Crop prices have fallen dramatically, with serious repercussions for farmers, particularly poor farmers in developing countries.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/12/10/wto-summit-ignore-price-crisis-agricultural-dumping-0

Working and playing with plants helps cope with illness, disabilities

“Oh, that’s like me,” Underhill says, reaching for it. “That’s my kind of plant.”

The Botanical Garden’s therapeutic horticulture program has grown in popularity in recent years, offering connections with nature to those enduring serious illness, developmental disabilities, or physical or mental trauma. It includes sessions at the garden, in a part known as the Sensory Garden, as well as outreach at area treatment centres such as Siteman.

“We believe that connection to nature provides healing,” Carbone said. “I can bring this to people who are probably in the worst situation they’re ever going to be in.”

https://www.thespec.com/living-story/7981624-working-and-playing-with-plants-helps-cope-with-illness-disabilities/

WHAT IS THE SYMBIOTIC ECONOMY?

THE OPPORTUNITY TO CREATE A NEW ECONOMIC PARADIGM

If assembled, innovations from three spheres of economic activity – those using natural ecosystems, social and collaborative innovation, and efficient technology – enter into symbiotic relationship.

Together, we can create a new economic paradigm which can amplify our positive impact on the planet, while renewing global prosperity

https://symbiotique.org

Soil Power! The Dirty Way to a Green Planet

The earth possesses five major pools of carbon. Of those pools, the atmosphere is already overloaded with the stuff; the oceans are turning acidic as they become saturated with it; the forests are diminishing; and underground fossil fuel reserves are being emptied. That leaves soil as the most likely repository for immense quantities of carbon.

Now scientists are documenting how sequestering carbon in soil can produce a double dividend: It reduces climate change by extracting carbon from the atmosphere, and it restores the health of degraded soil and increases agricultural yields. Many scientists and farmers believe the emerging understanding of soil’s role in climate stability and agricultural productivity will prompt a paradigm shift in agriculture, triggering the abandonment of conventional practices like tillage, crop residue removal, mono-cropping, excessive grazing and blanket use of chemical fertilizer and pesticide. Even cattle, usually considered climate change culprits because they belch at least 25 gallons of methane a day, are being studied as a potential part of the climate change solution because of their role in naturally fertilizing soil and cycling nutrients.

The Power of Regenerative Systems

“We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.”

Buckminster Fuller

 

In these times of increasing uncertainty and volatility we must remain adaptive and responsive to the world’s most significant challenges in order to achieve global prosperity.

One solution is a circular economic system that restructures finance and business to prioritize sustainability and accessibility across our global resource supply chain, thereby guaranteeing livelihoods around the world. This regenerative system will be formed by a new era of social and cultural awareness, one that truly appreciates the interconnectedness of mankind’s socioeconomic systems and our surrounding environment. The main challenge will be to ensure that the global system aligns with the fundamental and universal principles of life.

 

The Power of Regenerative Systems

Fate of the Earth Considered Again

Partisan politics has absolutely nothing to do with this terrible threat.

When Jonathan Schell wrote The Fate of the Earth for The New Yorker,and then a book of the same title in 1982, many were shocked into recognition of what an all-out nuclear war would mean. But with the passage of time, and all the loose talk about nukes and North Korea these days, maybe it is time to revisit a few things, for the forgetful. The need for this recall was especially brought to mind by a report about fancy nuclear shelters being bought by some of the well off; one that would even let six live in it up to a year with no outside help.

https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/fate-earth-considered-again

New Study Links Living Near Forests to Healthier Brains

A lady walks her dog through a winter forest with the morning light streaming through the trees and illuminating the pine trees behind.

Evidence keeps mounting that, in stressful times, there is much to gain by surrounding yourself with plants and trees.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/new-study-links-living-near-forests-to-healthier-brains-20171130

South Australia turns on Tesla’s 100MW battery: ‘History in the making’

The world’s largest lithium-ion battery has officially been turned on in South Australia promising to usher in a revolution in how electricity is produced and stored.

Tesla boss Elon Musk has made good on his promise to build the 100-megawatt facility on deadline or provide it free after blackouts last year that critics of the state’s Labor government blamed on pro-renewable policies.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/dec/01/south-australia-turns-on-teslas-100mw-battery-history-in-the-making

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