Learning About Edible Plants (and Eating Them) Has Given Me A Lot Of Insight Into The Problems With The

Cleaning the oceans one step at a time

Two Australians created this container that collects plastic, paper, oil, fuel and detergent floating in the ocean. They want to implement it the middle of next year to clean up the sea worldwide. It seems a great idea. The only “but” as always is money, so they are raising funds to get to their goal. You can see their project and donations here.

إنسانية 🕊️

‏نزعت الخطاف من فم احد القروش وعند مشاهدة القروش الاخرى لذلك صارت القروش تأتي لنفس المكان لنزع الخطاف من فمها علما ان هذه القروش لا تحب ان يلمسها احد.

هذا في البهاما والغواصة ،خلال الـ 15 سنة الماضية ، أزالت 250 خطاف.

Sustainable fashion is not affordable

Ethically and environmentaly friendly made clothes are expensive as hell and it makes sense. Fast fashion is cheap because it uses slaves and it destroys the planet. Sustainable fashion is great but not everyone can really afford it. So I thought I’d share some tips on how to be more nature friendly while not spedning too much money:

1. Use what you have

You don’t need to buy new sustainable clothes, you don’t have to buy anything new at all. Use what you have as long as you can and as much as you can.

This doesn’t apply to clothes only. You don’t need new wooden cutlery, just take your silverware from home. You don’t need new home decorations, move things around to get the best out of them.

2. Don’t throw stuff away

People have a tendency to throw away things that are bad for the environment, but you should always think about it before you throw it away. You already own it and throwing it away is worse than using it as long as you can.

3. Thrift

Buying used is even better than buying new sustainable things

4. Buy as little as you can

Try to stop buying things you don’t need completely. Buy one tshirt that you need from fast fashion store is a lot less harmful than buying 3 just because you like them

I hope I helped and have a great week!

XKCD’s excellent presentation on historical global temperature and anthropogenic global warming. 

[After setting your car on fire] “Listen, your car’s temperature has changed before.”

I started working on an edible forest garden three years ago, and this is the first year that it’s really started tasting like one.

The best things in life take a little patience.

Books on edible forest gardening

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. 

You know of any examples of wintry Solarpunk?

I’m not sure how all of the logistics would work (I’m more of a sociology guy than a STEM guy), but I don’t see why a colder climate wouldn’t be able to take advantage of renewable energy sources – geothermal and perfected solar technology and such.

Aesthetically, you’d probably end up with something very similar to the “Northern Lights glass igloos” in Finland:

Maybe connect all the igloos with a tunnel/tube system and have them all link up to a big hub at the center. Maybe the hub has advanced solar panels and sits on a geothermal hot spot, and the energy accumulated there could power the surrounding homes and buildings. 

People can and should add to this, because my winter solarpunk imagination is a tad limited. 

Btw I’m terrified and we are all gonna die and if I hear one more person say “our species destroyed the environment” I’m gonna lose it harder than I already am which is, for the record, Very Hard Indeed

The Leatherdos is a hair clip that doubles as a multi-tool that combines 5 different tools in a tiny hair clip: screw-drivers, a wrench, a trolley coin, a ruler, and a cutting edge.

—->http://odditymall.com/leatherdos-is-a-hair-clip-multi-tool