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.

An astounding amount of astronomy is dependent on technological advancement, so it’s pretty neat when enough of the little things come together to allow for big breakthroughs. A group of researchers at the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland have recently used an intense Chilean telescope to survey the velocities of 150 stars, looking for perturbations of less than ONE METRE PER SECOND!!! (The average speed of stars in the universe is upwards of 32,000 metres per second). The fact this can be done at all just blows my mind, though the researchers claim that with continuing calibration this sensitivity can be increased further (accurate to less than 10cm per second). Anyway, the big finding: it seems that around 30% of stars (of those surveyed anyway) are orbited by planets roughly the same size of earth. This is a much, MUCH, higher proportion than was formerly commonly accepted, and lends evidence to the “crowded universe” theory - the idea that there are a lot of planets out there. I can only hope this means that the odds of finding life out there have increased substantially as well.

If you have access, read the Nature article. (I think it’s available free for the next few days)

For people that enjoy the subtle quirks of the Interweb or society at large, take a peek over at Google Trends. It would take an aneurysm these days to be unaware of this superpowered search engine that has effectively eliminated the need for public libraries, like, ever. What’s lesser known is that the site happily publishes the statistics (”trends”) that arise in searches, sorted by year and countries. Curious which country searches for pictures of dead babies? How about the most popular month for people to be googling “suicide”? What wins, good or evil?

For the truly adventurous, consider fabricating elaborate back-stories to explain random, hilarious patterns that you may find. I, for one, wonder why anal fisting became all the rage in the Czech Republic as of exactly January 2006.

Geoengineering is the intentional analogue of anthropogenic climate change - global scale modification of our natural environment intended to improve its habitability. In the wake of growing awareness surrounding climate change, geoengineering has emerged as a highly controversial field with vocal advocates and detractors alike. While some see a macro-scale scientific solution as the silver bullet that will save us from ourselves, the sheer scale of the topic and the host of staggeringly complex uncertainties surrounding any geoengineering scheme provide unprecedented opportunity for dangerous unintended circumstances.

I recently watched a BBC documentary called “Five Ways to Save the World.” It details five massive geoengineering schemes, ranging from a gigantic sixteen-trillion-piece space mirror, to forests of artificial chemical “trees” designed to sequester CO2. While the scientists in this documentary largely posit their plans as last-ditch efforts to avoid unmitigated climatic catastrophe, the technological proposals have given the political right another way to embrace pseudo-science in order to prop up the status quo. Lifestyle changes, compromise, conservation, and limiting growth are apparently too dramatic - instead, we should launch a perpetuity of rockets into the atmosphere, seeding it with millions of tonnes of sulphate aerosols to increase its albedo and reflect more sunlight. Sure, it might turn the sky green, swiss-cheese the ozone layer, and acidify all rain, but this way, we could still eat hamburgers all the time! Now why the fuck didn’t I think of that?

Given that we may have already overshot critical climate change thresholds, I think it’s dangerous to dismiss any potential solution out of hand. However, what disturbed me most about the documentary wasn’t even the nature of the proposals, but the sentiment voiced by several of the scientists that, “we should be starting now.” I have no qualms over modestly scaled research projects, but I fear that when any such scheme is initiated at a global scale, the unknown factors stand to overwhelm even the most sophisticated models we can develop today. Given our abysmal track record when we’ve tried to ‘fix’ nature, it’s a risk we can ill afford to take.

Now that things are finally starting to happen, I feel it’s time to commend the University of Guelph and its students (including myself, haha) for embarking on what seems to be a fairly ambitious series of energy retrofit projects.  About a year ago, undergraduate students voted 64% in favour of a referendum adding $10 to each semester’s tuition for the next 12 years (around $4.3 million) - money earmarked solely for energy conservation projects and matched dollar for dollar by the University.  I am happy to say that both the Graduate Students’ Association and the faculty association have since pledged comparable amounts.  Staff and alumni have also already pledged upwards of $1.3 million.

The first big project is just getting underway - switching all of the main library’s lights to electronic ballasts and installing compact fluorescent lights.  This project, while costing close to a million bucks, will save 2,077,000 kilowatt hours annually.  At the current electricity cost of roughly 6 cents/kwh (and it won’t be here for long),  that is a savings of  $125,000  a year, allowing the project to pay for itself in around 7.5 years.  Overall, around $12 million is going to be spent by 2018 on everything from adding compressed air storage facilities, beefing up insulation, and adding heat exchangers.  Even after taking into account projects with a long payoff, the $12 million should be recouped in around 7 years - saving 8,450,000 kwh annually, or cutting back on CO2 emissions by 6900 tonnes a year.

Have I been greenwashed, or should I be proud of this initiative?

While I’m on the topic of filtering water, I recently read about the grandiosely named Lifesaver bottle, which is capable of rapidly filtering out even the smallest pathogens in water, producing 6000 L of ultra-pure drinking water over the course of its filter’s usable life. The one problem is, it currently costs £230, or $460.

I wonder if this product could benefit from the mantra “good is good enough.” While it is an impressive tour de force of engineering development, the $460 price tag is staggering, limiting its audience to the wealthy (who could easily afford to treat the disease, anyway, if it came to that). Existing commercial water filter bottles, or inventions such as the LifeStraw, may not completely purify water - but you can buy 150 LifeStraws for the price of 1 Lifesaver. And even the LifeStraw is too expensive for those who truly need it.

As with uber-supercars like the Bugatti Veyron, it’s an object that has lost all relevance in its pursuit of the ultimate.

I may be putting the case too harshly, because as the Inhabitat blogger mentions, that price must be representative of tremendous R&D investment, and genuine progress is impossible without such costs. One can only hope that the technology will filter down to future products at more sane prices.

While the concept has already been picked up by bloggers, as the designer I feel I should at least provide a brief rationale for the idea. In short, Filterbrella is an umbrella with a canopy that channels rainwater through an activated carbon filter. The handle incorporates standard-size threads so that users can screw in a water or pop-bottle to collect the purified contents to drink later. The entire umbrella is moulded of compostable polylactic acid blends to reduce plastic waste.

I should admit first of all that I never meant this to be seen as a purely utilitarian product. Rather, it is a whimsical, conceptual piece intended to get people thinking about the idea of water use in our society, and the need for (im)permanence in everyday artifacts by taking a cradle-to-cradle approach.

Part of the impetus derives from my longstanding contempt for bottled water and the environmental and ethical ills it embodies. While I recognize that people drink bottled water largely out of convenience, and waiting for a rainstorm is anything but, the Filterbrella would hopefully serve (in some limited capacity) as an everyday reminder of the manner in which we take water utterly for granted. That some sort of rainwater harvesting (or at least greywater recycling) for toilets and gardens isn’t mandatory in new construction continues to baffle me.

(And for the people who have hounded me to make the canopy design more dramatically inverted, like a chanterelle mushroom, I suspect such a shape would result in a seriously top-heavy, unwieldy umbrella, prone to dumping loads of water on the user if it were unbalanced. Not a great way to encourage adoption of the product - besides, in any reasonable downpour you should still get plenty of water.)

While Andy and I have been (rather lazily) maintaining this site for more than a year, and I regularly try to read and participate in a variety of blogs, the true potential that the Internet has as a medium for intellectual synthesis never really sank in for me until I saw it first hand this past week.

I’m alluding, of course, to the discussion that has cropped up in response to my airship thesis. Once Engadget picked it up, the trackbacks started to really go wild, and it’s been really fascinating to see the different perspectives that people have based on where they’re coming from. The post has even been translated into Spanish and Chinese, and in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake, it’s been eye-opening for me to see the sense of urgency that many commenters have about the idea. The humanitarian nature of the project has really galvanized discussion about the technology in a way that I would have never expected.

What I’ve found most heartening, though, is the sheer volume of ideas and applications that people have posited to build on and shape the concept. The Internet has the capability to link so many different people and points of view, and when you throw them all together in one place, you’re bound to get something out of it.

By glaring contrast, it’s got me thinking about the nature of the design industry, and how fiercely protective young designers are about their ideas, when realistically everyone would stand to benefit far more from collaboration. I think there could be real potential in an open-source design project, or at least a ‘net-wide brainstorming session to kick off a competition.

Maybe in the not-too-distant future, pulltheskydown should host one?

I’ve always loved the idea of integrated systems for technological and biological symbiosis, and I fully intend to embrace cybernetics to aid me in my twilight years. As such, I found Ryan Wolfe’s cyborg houseplants that photosynthesize independently of sunlight through the use of embedded LEDs to be unbelievably cool.

Natural or not, I find there’s an alien beauty to them that is weirdly compelling. Though I feel like he should maybe be using more red and violet-blue LEDs for proper photosynthesis, not green…