Laos is the most isolated country in Southeast Asia, a slash of thick forests, jagged mountains, and snaking rivers that cuts through the heart of the region. Until relatively recently, road access to other countries was virtually impossible, and the flow of people, goods, and information was along the Mekong or the Nam Ou rivers. Even today, nearly half of the settlements in the country have no road access.

While Laos is developing at an explosive rate, much of it remains relatively pristine, and it was fascinating for me to see first-hand the course that development has taken in these untouched areas. I’m going to use Laos as a microcosm for how I see the way that culture relates to the prospects for sustainable development in the Global South.

One of the most startling initial impressions while riding through the winding mountain roads was seeing huge swathes of forest on the mountainside slashed and burned. In much of northern Laos, this is how agriculture works; the burnt forests provide rich soil for planting crops, though they last only a single season. After the rice is harvested, the torrential rainy season washes away the arable soil on the unterraced hillside, and the local farmers repeat the process somewhere else. In a sparsely populated country where three-quarters of the people live rurally, its easy to see how farmers might imagine that their natural bounty is inexhaustible. Especially when that style of agriculture is what they have always practiced. Trying to convince a poor, scattered population that they need to break from tradition and work harder to foster more sustainable methods of agriculture ‘for the good of the planet’ is hardly a challenge unique to Laos.

However, while food and farming may be firmly rooted in cultural history, there is some reason for optimism when it comes to the elements of development that have no traditional precedent; namely power and communications. In these circumstances, the best technology wins, and when it comes to remote regions with inaccessible, inhospitable geography and climates, more often than not, the winner is renewables.

When I visited the village of Ban Kiew Kan in northern Laos, a day’s trek by foot from the village of Muang Ngoi, itself accessible only by boat, I would never have expected to see electricity. Yet every home had a compact-fluorescent bulb, and the chief’s house was even decked out with a satellite dish. Fossil-fueled generators would have been impossible option here in the mountains, with no practical or affordable way to resupply them with fuel, and so the solution came in the form of micro-hydro.

Scattered among the infinite streams that flow down from the mountains, the locals had set up wooden scaffolds that held machines resembling tiny outboard motors, their long driveshafts dipping into the current. These generators were enough to provide a modest, but simple, cheap, and consistent electrical supply to remote villages. The villagers aren’t ‘going green’ to pump up their eco-cred; they’re doing it because fossil fuels just don’t make sense for them.

Local micro-generation shows great promise to spur development in areas that lack access to transportation, let alone grid electricity. This sort of leap-frogging is certainly not restricted to power generation; the mobile phone has been the basis for a tremendously important communications revolution in the Global South, especially Africa. Without even the option of expensive, infrastructure-intensive land-lines, mobile phones in Africa have quickly become one of the fastest growing and most profitable industries in the entire world.

The take-home point is, while there are obvious challenges associated with shedding bad habits, places where those bad habits have not yet had a chance to take root can become great breeding grounds for sustainable development. When cleaner technologies win on the basis of practicality, availability, and affordability, is it any surprise to see their adoption?

I couldn’t have made this story up if I wanted to.

While hydrogen was once the poster-child for the sustainable economy, now that the true magnitude of the costs and challenges associated with bringing it to fruition became apparent, it has largely been left in the dust by batteries. However, there are still plenty of H2-stalwarts researching technologies that could help bring the costs of portable energy into line for that distant, gas-free future we all dream of.

From ecogeek:

Scientists at the University of Delaware have come up with a new hydrogen storage solution:  chicken feathers.  Well, carbonized chicken feather fibers to be exact.  What’s more, their discovery meets the ambitious hydrogen storage targets set by the DOE for 2010 and 2015, which call for great storage capacity at a low cost.

Chicken feather fibers are made of keratin, a protein that forms strong, hollow tubes.  The scientists heated the chicken feathers until hollow carbon microtubes formed with nanoporous walls and the fibers’ surface area increased.  The resulting carbonized chicken feather fibers allow the storage of as much, or more, hydrogen than carbon nanotubes or metal hydrides, other materials that have been found to store hydrogen well.

The big success here is that making carbonized chicken feather storage tanks is far less costly than producing storage tanks made of the other materials.  A 20-gallon carbon nanotube tank would cost $5.5 million to produce, while the same size tank made with metal hydrides would cost $30,000.  Comparitively, a carbonized chicken feather tank would run about $200.

The scientists estimate that a car would require a 75-gallon tank using this material in order to have a range of 300 miles.  They are working now to increase that range.

This is not a music blag, but it occasionally pretends to be about social justice, so I’m posting this song from Propagandhi’s newest album on that pretext.

When the credits finally roll
for this, the worst story ever told,
don’t bother sifting through the names
for yours or anyone you know.
Unless they were by chance a shepherd king,
a virgin birth, a resurrection, a messianic prince
or some such childish thing.
You can storm the edit suite
or move to block its theatrical release,
but I think we can safely guarantee
that there will be no revisions to the script
made on behalf of a supporting cast(e).

But mostly, it’s just here because it rocks so fucking hard.

How do you monitor water pollution levels in harbours around the world in an affordable, non-invasive, thorough, and sustainable manner?  How about by using a robotic carp?

Professor Huosheng Hu and his students at the University of Essex have developed a 150cm metal carp designed to patrol marine environments detecting pollution, especially point sources such as leaks in ships or pipelines.  Says the lab website: “Instead of the conventional rotary propeller used in ship or underwater vehicles, the undulation movement provides the main energy of a robotic fish. The observation on a real fish shows that this kind of propulsion is more noiseless, effective, and manoeuvrable than the propeller-based propulsion. The aim of our project is to design and build autonomous robotic fishes that are able to reactive to the environment and navigate toward the charging station. In other words, they should have the features such as fish-swimming behaviour, autonomously navigating ability, cartoon-like appearance that is not-existed in the real world.” With a swimming speed of around 1m/s and a battery life of around 8 hours before autonomously returning to the recharge station, these robots can cover a lot of ground.

Says the prof, “We are designing these fish very carefully to ensure that they will be able to detect changes in environmental conditions in the port and pick up on early signs of pollution spreading, for example by locating a small leak in a vessel.  The hope is that this will prevent potentially hazardous discharges at sea, as the leak would undoubtedly get worse over time if not located.”

Though the pilot project is limited to Gijon, Spain, I can easily see these fish being used in shipping hubs around the world.   Though the cost of 20,000 GBP ($36,000 CDN) per fish is steep for a university project funded primarily by an aquarium (the London Aquarium has chipped in around $275,000 CDN), with mass production (relatively) of these robots combined with the crazy budgets of governments and for-profit harbours, deploying them worldwide doesn’t seem to me like it would be much of a problem.  And if they can find oil leaks on ships that are docked and get them fixed before the ship heads out, there should be some real benefits to oceans everywhere.

Awesome YouTube of the fish swimming - CHECK THIS

Via:

Practical Fishkeeping
BMT Group

Check this story from Wired out - TorrentFreak has introduced a Firefox add-on that places a “Download 4 Free” button on Amazon.com pages selling music.  This button provides a link to the leading The Pirate Bay torrent for that album, and I can personally say that it works very well.  While the website that originally launched the app, Pirates-of-the-Amazon.com, is a school project website that has removed the offending file due to legal threats from Amazon, the add-on is still available from TorrentFreak.  While it may not be all that useful, this IS slick, and quite funny.  Try it out.

Before the beginning of this summer, I must confess that I rather disliked bicycling. My only real experience with bikes, except as a small child, was on an old mountain bike that was ill-suited to the trail riding and jumping my friends did, and hardly up to the task of a 35 minute commute to high school, either. As a wackjob hippie, I’ve long appreciated the idea of biking, but actually commuting by bike every day always seemed a little bit too hardcore (think Calvin’s dad) for me.

Upon moving downtown, however, I found myself in a situation where biking to get around was not only cheaper, but also more convenient, faster, and infinitely more fun than taking transit. As luck would have it, Toronto’s sparse bike lanes led straight to my office, allaying any initial trepidation. Despite being far too small for me, I grew to really appreciate my old, neglected bike, and it served me well until I finally invested in my current ride, a Jamis flat-bar road bike that I’ve transformed into a lean, mean commuting machine. I’ve since moved farther away, and despite the plunging temperatures and the daily risk of having a door opened into my face at 25 kph, I take a perverse glee in my daily rides. On Monday, after patching a flat tire, I decided to take my bike out for a spin. At night. In the pouring rain. I decided it would be a good time to practice riding with no hands. I have unabashedly fallen back in love with bicycling after a 15 year hiatus.

My attitudes about biking changed abruptly over the course of only a few weeks, and all it took was the taste of freedom (i.e. the ability to sleep for 15 more minutes) and the comfort factor of having bike lanes to ease the transition. Am I atypical, or is that all it takes? How many of you bike to work? How many of you don’t? Why? And more importantly, what would it take to get you on a bike? Is it an issue with the comfort, image, or convenience associated with bikes themselves, or is it the policy and infrastructure that surrounds it?

(My general curiosity aside, I should give full disclosure and say that this line of questioning was spurred by a post at the excellent Bicycle Design blog, which recently posted a design competition to design a commuter bike for the masses. The prize is an incredibly sweet bike. Your feedback will be going towards a good cause - that is, helping me win it.)

Radiohead’s most recent album, In Rainbows, was launched extremely successfully using a pay-what-you-can model, and a new website, Aralie, is banking that this model can work for smaller bands as well. Says the website:

Aralie.com was created to support independent artists, by giving them a free market place to sell and promote their music. We are dedicated to helping small artists by doing anything we can to help them get exposure, gigs, sponsorship, and interviews. All music on Aralie.com will always be available DRM free, with no strings attached, and always downloadable for what ever price you choose (including $0).

After talking to Wyatt, the man behind this operation, and browsing the site, I feel pretty optimistic that the pay-what-you-can model can thrive. Even if the average download generates just a couple dollars, that’s still matched with the money from a traditional record deal - minus all the hassle and controlling influences. And I love Aralie for how little they demand from the artists that use their download service - no contracts, exclusivity, any of that shit. I just hope that people will throw a few bucks to the up and coming bands, not just the Radioheads of the world. I guess we can just watch and find out.

If your reaction isn’t “who the hell is Wayne Leibel?”, then I’m pretty impressed, but I fully expect it to be. Don’t worry, it’s ok. (Besides his mate choice research, he’s probably best known for writing regular columns in two of the biggest aquarium hobby magazines, making him one of the people I’ve admired most since I was a little kid). The point of this shitty story (shitty to everyone but me) is that it makes me feel the need to comment on how fantastic the academic community is - for democratizing knowledge and ensuring ideas are judged above all else. I have been lucky enough to attend the Ecological and Evolutionary Ethology of Fishes conference in Boston this past week, and it’s been an incredible venue for scientists from 15 countries, from students to established heavyweights, to get together and discuss their research, share their problems, and get suggestions from everyone else. Not in my wildest dreams did I think that such a venue would be so cooperative - there really is no hint of secrecy or competition, just a genuine desire for answers. There I was chatting with Wayne, the guy who “knows everything”, and we were talking about how important it is to learn from amateur aquarium hobbyists and their observations. Maybe I was too cynical going into this thing, after experiencing a life of watching so many self-congratulatory events in almost every field, but nothing here was about the accomplishments of the past. It was about reaching out to novel ideas, trying to find new ways to explain behaviour, preserve fisheries, and understand evolution. I just wish there was a way to get the rest of the world to understand the advances that could be made if egos were put aside and people actually bought into cooperative efforts.

I’m starting to get really excited about the whole open source design concept.

So long Jeb Bush, and good riddance. New(ish) Florida governor Charlie Crist, another, better republican, has just invested a very un-republican amount of money into the Everglades. No, we’re not talking the usual $100,000 or $1 million that public parks usually beg for. This is an investment worth $1.7 billion that will purchase over 750 square kilometers of land to add to the park. The best part? This land is being acquired from a sugar producer (this is an industry notoriously damaging to environments everywhere), U.S. Sugar, and will result in this company going out of business within 6 years. There is no government forcing out business here, no draconian intervention, just good old capitalism doing what it does best - tempting a business into its own death with shitloads of money.

Stolen from the National Parks Service

What this money, and new land, will allow is the connection of Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades, reestablishing the historical hydrological system. This will provide a more reliable water source for the “River of Grass”, hopefully stopping the slow degradation that has plagued the Everglades for the last few decades, and protecting habitat for everything from Florida panthers to snail kites. And if you’re a bigtime anthropocentric asshole, this new water flow should really help maintain the region’s groundwater supplies - possibly a big deal if the West decides they’d rather import water than give up trying to grow grass in the desert.

I love being able to write something positive for a change.

It has become a bit of a cliché among our posts to point out the pervasive unsustainability of our society. Occasionally there are laudable developments worth mentioning, but even when we write about these, the discourse is too often tinged with cynicism. We know what’s wrong now, and what can be done, but progress is slow, and maintaining enthusiasm in the face of perpetual disappointment can be difficult. It becomes important to occasionally detach yourself from the minutiae of the everyday, and take the long view.

The question becomes, then, what should the future look like? What is required to craft a world without harmful emissions, without waste? A world where our energy, our buildings, our products, move in closed loops?

Visionary projects such as Masdar City in Abu Dhabi offer us tempting glimpses as to what one such future might look like. While it is a cost-no-object halo project for the UAE (who are wisely investing their present oil wealth into a future that is independent of it), it serves as a beacon, achieving a carbon neutral society using technology that exists commercially today. Yet the same technical feasibility that makes Masdar so edifying in shaping policy today renders it inadequate as a model for the future, given the awesome pace of technological development.

Masdar is today’s vision of a sustainable utopia, but what does 2020’s Masdar look like? Or 2050’s?

One should be able to look towards science fiction as a source of inspiration, but even here, the drama of suffering leads to endemic negavity, promoting a ubiquity of dystopian visions. Clearly, it’s harder to make incisive social commentary by portraying a happy future than a tragic one.

The call to arms for a sustainable future is being ushered in with the stick; but maybe that’s only because no one is growing carrots. I think we need both.

I’m planning to use this mandate as an opportunity to do a number of small design projects, giving a snapshot of my views for a sustainable future, from transportation, to infrastructure, to architecture, to anything else I happen to think of (and I’m open to suggestions). The idea isn’t to create a polished vision, but to develop a jumping-off point for discussion; the Internet is full of people who know a lot more than I do. Besides, my sketching skills are getting rusty, and I need an excuse and some motivation. It should be fun.