Wake Up Kids, New Extreme Paint Dropped

I just jerked out of my midday dissociation and realized that seed bombing a golf course with mint would be the ultimate crime.

Oh my god this is so evil. 

I love it. 

The vegan to ecofascist pipeline

Earth is truly healing

Urban Treehouse Uses 150 Trees To Protect Residents From Noise And Pollution

Luciano Pia, an architect in Italy, has a beautiful vision for how people and nature can live together even in a thoroughly urban landscape. 25 Verde, an apartment complex he designed in Turin, Italy, is a woven 5-story mix of lush trees and steel girders that let urban residents feel like they live in a giant urban tree-house.

Every step in the building’s design was taken with natural integration in mind. The organic and asymmetric shape of its terraces allow potted trees to “sprout” out from the building at random intervals. The ponds in the courtyard provide residents with a refreshing place to relax in the summer, and the 150 deciduous trees, which lose their trees in the winter, allow light to filter in to the building during the darker months. The building helps keep the city’s air cleaner and isolates the residents from the urban sounds and smells surrounding them.The building, which was completed in 2012, is located at Via Chabrera 25 in Turin, Italy – you can even check it out on Google Maps‘ street view!

Via:http://www.boredpanda.com/urban-treehouse-green-architecture-25-verde-luciano-pia-turin-italy/

I hope all of the adults making fun of a 16 year old girl for giving a shit about her generation’s future know every single one of their words has been recorded, broadcast and archived forever, and that when their apocalypse can no longer be denied people will watch and read what they said and will remember them only as the viscious, pathetic and self-destructive villains that they are, not worthy of the dirt their bodies will be buried in. Billions will scream out in pure hatred and anger and curse your names like nobody ever has before in history. That will be your legacy. I hope you’re fucking proud.

it's weird how people will be like "but we need Suburban Lawn so kids can play outside!" as if basically every kid isn't bored to tears by being confined to a yard that's nothing but flat grass.

like have you talked to a kid, have you spent time with kids, do you remember BEING a kid? "playing outside" isn't about Throwing Ball 1000 times it's about squishing mud, using sticks as swords and guns, making potions from plants, catching bugs, climbing trees, and building forts from brush and branches.

A highly manicured lawn has nothing to offer the senses and brain of a developing child. If there are no "weeds," what are they supposed to gather to make into potions?? I'm not even joking, what do you, a child, DO in a yard without wildflowers and mud and dead branches. I feel like my brain wouldn't have developed correctly if my outdoor space growing up wasn't full of chicory and asters and dandelions.

At least video games offer some dim imitation of a variety of stimuli

I see a lot of climate change misinformation circulating on this site. I wish I had the mental capacity to write up something eloquent right now, but in short:

Yes, the situation is pretty dire. But the whole “twelve year deadline” thing is a massive oversimplification.

We’re already experiencing climate change and it will get worse the longer we don’t act. It’s not a binary “it happens or it doesn’t” situation. Twelve years an estimate for how soon we need to drastically alter our infrastructure in order to land at or under two degrees of warming, which is an essentially arbitrary marker that we’re trying to avoid. Two degrees will still be Bad, capital B. But it’s better than three, four, five, or more degrees of warming.

Even if we stopped emitting carbon today, we’d continue to see warming for several more years because that kind of lag is built into our climate system. We can’t just stop at any time and have things go “back to normal.”

A lot of these fearmongering articles are based on the IPCC reports, which are excellent sources based on the best research done worldwide. You can read them for yourself here.

Please remember to fact-check for yourself and don’t give in to despair, on this as with all other issues.

california anti-drought measures are always like “take shorter showers! consider brushing your teeth with the sink turned off” and never mention the fact that nestle is bottling all of our fucking water and selling it to people who live in areas with plenty of water

Tiny Houses in Urban Context

I’ve seen a lot of really great tiny home designs, and I’ve seen a lot of love from other people for those designs as well. They combine a small space, perfect for one or two people, that usually only apartment buildings design for, with the benefits of having a detached home, with a yard, and windows on all sides for more natural light. 

What I don’t see is a whole lot of context, least of all in an urban neighborhood environment.  These houses are often pictured in an open grassy, or forested space, which is nice for some people I’m sure, but there are lots of people who would prefer to live in a city, in pedestrian and transit friendly areas, rather than in the middle of nowhere, where you’d have to use a car to get everywhere.

There already exists an urban context for tiny homes, but due to restrictive zoning, it’s not commonplace in most cities in the U.S.

They’re called Bungalow Courts, or sometimes Cottage Courts, and basically it’s where you take two adjacent lots, and rather than having one large single-family-house per lot, you have around 3 or so tiny houses per lot, all facing a shared space in the center. 

 All this takes up the same space as two city lots, which are usually zoned to only allow one house per lot. But not everyone wants, or can afford a large house, so Bungalow Courts would be a perfect fit in a lot of neighborhoods that currently lack a lot of housing diversity for a range of wants and needs.

Anyway, I just thought I’d share, because I think this a really neat concept that should be allowed more places. I’d think I’d like to live in a Bungalow Court; I like the idea of having a house to myself, but I don’t need much space, and I don’t want a huge yard to maintain.

In order to make this legal to build out, zoning would need to be changed to allow 3-4 units of housing to be built on lots currently restricted to only 1 unit of housing. A big contributing factor to rising housing costs has been the over-favoring of single-family houses on large lots since the end of WWII, so not enough units of housing are being built in many cities to keep up with demand. 

Legalizing more “missing middle housing” like Bungalow Courts in single-family-house-neighborhoods would help cities incrementally keep up with demand, in a way that fits nicely into existing neighborhoods. 

Giant floating islands that turn atmospheric CO2 into fuel could prevent climate change, scientists say

If rolled out globally, the islands could offset the total global emissions from fossil fuels.

Scientists in Norway and Switzerland have proposed that “Solar Methanol Islands” could use solar energy to recycle atmospheric CO2 into methanol fuel.

The idea arose when scientists were trying to find a way to provide electricity to future off-shore fish farms without access to power grids. Solar energy could power hydrogen production and CO2 extraction from seawater, which would produce gases that could be reacted to form methanol.

The team of scientists wrote:

“Humankind must cease CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning if dangerous climate change is to be avoided. However, liquid carbon-based energy carriers are often without practical alternatives for vital mobility applications. The recycling of atmospheric CO2 into synthetic fuels, using renewable energy, offers an energy concept with no net CO2 emission.”

Currently, the team of scientists is working on prototypes for the floating solar islands.

Thanks to @sabre-fish for sending this in!