An Array of Utopian Flowers
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Defensible Space: My Wildfire-Appropriate Retrofit Journey – Part I
Posted on November 16, 2018 | No Comments -
KXL Blocked – How Indigenous People Will End Tar Sands Pipelines
Posted on November 12, 2018 | No Comments -
Mythological Journey to the Aztec Underworld
Posted on October 10, 2018 | 1 Comment -
Confronting Wildfire: Retrofit Communities, Not Forests
Posted on September 17, 2018 | 1 Comment -
San Onofre Nuclear Waste Dangers Compound
Posted on September 4, 2018 | No Comments
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WilderUtopia in 102 Languages
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Archive for October, 2012
Day of the Dead: Aztec Dance Honoring the Soul’s Rest
Posted on October 29, 2012 | 25 CommentsIn the pre-Hispanic era, skulls were kept as trophies and displayed during the rituals to symbolize death and rebirth. These ancestors passed down the knowledge that souls exist after death, resting in Mictlan, the land of the dead, not for judgment or resurrection, but for the day each year when they could return home to visit their loved ones.
Earthquakes at San Onofre: The Elephant in the Room
Posted on October 27, 2012 | 1 CommentSan Onofre Nuke Plant was designed for a 7.0 earthquake, but sits next to a fault with an 8.0 earthquake probability — 10 times stronger and long overdue.
Keystone XL Blockade: Defending the Land and Water from Tar Sands Oil
Posted on October 24, 2012 | 3 CommentsWhile bulldozers and diggers bashed a 50-foor-wide path for the Keystone XL pipeline, planned from Cushing, Oklahoma to Port Arthur, Texas, a group of tar sands blockaders have taken to the trees.
Frank Gehry: Toronto’s Trio of Living Sculptures
Posted on October 23, 2012 | 2 CommentsDeveloper David Mirvish hopes his string of sculptural towers in Toronto arts district will provide an antidote for the banality of the traditional glass box condo tower. “I am not building condominiums,” he said at the announcement. “I am building three sculptures for people to live in.”
A Los Angeles Rail~Volution: A City in Sustainable Transition
Posted on October 23, 2012 | 1 CommentThe Rail~Volution Conference rolled into Los Angeles to illustrate how transit projects energize neighborhoods, meeting a significant demand for multi-density housing walkable to restaurants, offices, and shops. They can transform the landscape and mindset, in this case, of auto-addicted Southern California. One stop at a time.
Kumeyaay People: Traditions Survive in Baja California
Posted on October 22, 2012 | 5 CommentsGroups of Kumeyaay People live in the isolated canyons of the Tijuana River watershed, high in the Baja California peninsula. They harvest acorns and pine nuts, hunt rattlesnake and small animals, collect grasses to weave baskets. They allow a glimpse of what life in Southern California before the Spanish arrived was like.
Earthship Biotecture: Self-Sufficient, Off-the-Grid Communities
Posted on October 16, 2012 | 3 CommentsPassive solar Earthships provide electricity, potable water, sustainable food production, with contained sewage treatment, and can be built anywhere in the world. Renegade eco-architect Michael Reynolds' construction and design process called Earthship Biotecture creates beyond LEED Architecture, a sustainable green building design made of natural and recycled materials.
Sustainable Mobility: Rail~Volution Los Angeles 2012
Posted on October 10, 2012 | 2 CommentsRail~Volution is a network, movement and conference that brings together community advocates, developers, and civic planners energized by a mix of ideas, cultures, and transit projects unique to the greater Los Angeles region, on the 14th to 17th of October 2012.
Midway Atoll: The Plastic Plight of the Albatross
Posted on October 9, 2012 | 25 CommentsA short film follows artist Chris Jordan to investigate the thousands of albatrosses dying from ingestion of plastic from the Pacific Garbage Patch. The Albatross journey across the sea takes them over the world’s largest dump: slowly rotating masses of partially-submerged trash between San Francisco and Hawai’i.
Bangladesh: A Flooding, Mega-Urbanizing, Climate Trap
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsIn Dhaka, climate change refugees are moving from the countryside and into squalid slums due to repeated monsoonal floods that have rendered traditional farmland unusable. A new documentary by Ami Vitale from the Knight Center for International Media wades through the floods, looking for solutions.
Edward Abbey: A Solitary Voice in the Wilderness
Posted on October 5, 2012 | 7 CommentsThe Monkey Wrench Gang is the wish-fulfilment dream of eco-Luddites everywhere. Civilisation violates the land, so Hayduke ("a good, healthy psychopath") and his pals violate civilization.
Geek Alert: That Computer Cloud is Diesel-Powered – By Jerry Collamer
Posted on October 4, 2012 | No CommentsThat magic iCloud, our e-brilliance is being beamed up to, ain't no cloud, but warehouses stuffed with memory-servers kept running 24-7 by mammoth banks of polluting diesel generators.
Federico Fellini: Intuitive Visual Art
Posted on October 3, 2012 | 3 CommentsFellini in the 1969 experimental documentary on US television opines on his Felliniesque creative process: "I think almost exclusively in images, which explains why an actor's face and body are more important to me than plot structure . . . . The key word to understanding my kind of cinema is vitality. What I seek is to live the expression itself."
Urban Neighborhoods Revitalized with Certified Greening
Posted on October 3, 2012 | 1 CommentThree LEED-ND pilot participants—the Brewery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; the SALT District in Syracuse, New York; and Tassafaronga Village in Oakland, California—show promise as neighborhood-scale revitalized green adaptive reuse in a difficult economy.
