If it takes a Great Collapse to green Dubai, that’s fine by me:

by Jenovah Art

This may look like an ordinary Petunia, but it’s just a little bit more than that. This photo is taken from WIRED UK’s image gallery of the works on display at Dublin’s Science Gallery’s Human+ exhibition, and the flower has been created by Biological artist Eduardo Kac combining his DNA with the flower’s, using genetic engineering.

It’s best explained on the artist’s website:

The central work in the “Natural History of the Enigma” series is a plantimal, a new life form Kac created and that he calls “Edunia”, a genetically-engineered flower that is a hybrid of Kac and Petunia. The Edunia expresses Kac’s DNA exclusively the red veins of the flower. The gene Kac selected is responsible for the identification of foreign bodies. In this work, it is precisely that which identifies and rejects the other that the artist integrates into the other, thus creating a new kind of self that is partially flower and partially human.

Art today, tomorrow yet another ‘perfect gift for the person that has everything’. In fact, I don’t think it’s too morbid to suggest this could also be a way to honour the passing of a loved one, letting a piece of them live on in a family garden.

From Inhabitat comes another dose of future-pr0n, a truly epic vertical farm project:

Urban Forest is a commercial high-rise building that takes the form of an urban mountain with over 70 floors, each one different and unique. Each floor is an abstract curved shape, layered slightly off-center to give the facade an organic look as it rises up into the sky. A central cylindrical core structure supports all the floors and hosts the mechanical systems and elevators.

Each floor is also covered in floor-to-ceiling glass windows, providing expansive views of the city. A walk-around balcony of differing widths hosts the green garden space, as well as pools, trees, and courtyards. Some floors are nothing but open space, while others contain offices or residential space. Each floor is seen as a separate and unique level of the urban forest and is meant to combine both nature and the urban metropolis.

Why do I keep blogging these crazy schemes? Because eventually one of them will succeed and I frankly can’t wait to go check out the one that does in person.

Speaking of ambitions, good news for Masdar City; the Dubai debt crisis shouldn’t affect it.

A green form of graff. This I like.

Ingredients:

• Two handfuls (or more, get lots) of moss
• 2 cups of yoghurt
• 2 cups of beer (you can use water if you want, but beer seems to hold it together a little bit better)
• 1/2 tsp. sugar
• Corn syrup (optional – for making it spreadable and sticky)

Wash/tease as much of the dirt from the moss as you can. Throw it, the yoghurt, beer and sugar into a blender and blend until a lovely smooth consistency. if it looks like it’s going to drip when you paint it, add the corn syrup to the mix.

When finding somewhere to paint, look for something porous (most older or rough concrete walls are perfect). Once you’ve painted your design, its suggested that you come back every week or to spray it with water, to help the moss along.

Check out Anna Garforth (her site is here), a dedicated moss artist.

From archiCentral:

Belgian firm Vincent Callebaut Architectures have designed a vertical farm based on the wings of a dragonfly. Located along the East River at the south edge of Rooselvelt Island in New York City the tower is a true living organism being self-sufficient in water, energy and bio fertilizing. Spanning 132 floors and 600 vertical meters, the dragonfly can accommodate 28 different agricultural fields for the production of fruit, vegetables, grains, meat and dairy.

thanks to cnawan for the tip-off!

Every now and then you’ll have a conversation with someone that will actually teach you something new.

This past week’s education came in the form of Travel Sprouting.

Mr T Chia Pet…not so much what I had in mind, but it’s still rather funny

Now, growing sprouts for …”fun” or “profit”, is not a new idea, but what I learnt was that there are people who grow sprouts in their backpacks. They have a couple of ways of doing this:

The ‘Easy Sprout’

Easy Sprout is 3 1/4 inches on the bottom and 4 1/2 inches on the top. It is 7 inches tall. It has a 1 liter/quart capacity. It is made of High Density Polyethylene (Fortiflex® T50-3600 HDP) – which is one of the few non-leaching plastics. The Easy Sprout is also Kosher – we kid you not.

It came to the inventor Gene Monson in a dream in the late 1970′s and he has spent much of his life since spreading the word.

And for those who prefer something more natural:

The Hemp Bag

Just dip and hang! Made from 100% pure hemp and flax fabric for long life and durability. Won’t mold, mildew or shrink. If you can dip a tea bag you can grow sprouts! So easy to use and convenient. Ready in only 3-5 days.

Grows all grains and beans, including: green pea, mung, adzuki, red pea, wheat, rye, soy, peanut, garbanzo, fenugreek, chia, shelled sunflower.

There seems to be a fair few different types of sproutables available for the on-the-go gardener, and all with seemingly quick turn around in growing time. I don’t, however, know how travel-friendly Mr T is. Which is a shame.

Some resources should you be enchanted by the idea of having your own portable salad bar:

-> SproutPeople: awesome for easy to understand and a friendly introduction to the idea. Their quick guide to travel sprouting is a must

-> NaturallyGreen UK: good products (was recommended by the guy who introduced me to the idea)

-> When Technology Fails by Matthew Stein: excerpt on Sprouting here, but damn that book is an interesting read.

From Inhabitat:

Doomsday devices they are not – these seed-sowing plant bombs are one design team’s weapon of choice in the fight against global desertification. Consisting of a biodegradable shell loaded with a potent payload of plant capsules and nutrient-rich artificial soil, Seedbombs are designed to be dropped out of planes to help slow the spread of desert regions that are growing due to deforestation and other man-made causes.

From New Scientist:

More than two decades after the world’s largest nuclear disaster, life around Chernobyl continues to adapt.

…

To determine how plants might have adapted to the meltdown, Hajduch’s team compared soya grown in radioactive plots near Chernobyl with plants grown about 100 kilometres away in uncontaminated soil.

Compared to the plants grown in normal soil, the Chernobyl soya produced significantly different amounts of several dozen proteins, the team found. Among those are proteins that contribute to the production of seeds, as well as proteins involved in defending cells from heavy metal and radiation damage. “One protein is known to actually protect human blood from radiation,” Hajduch says.

…

Determining how plants coped with life after Chernobyl could help scientists engineer radiation-resistant plants, Hajduch says. While few farmers are eager to cultivate radioactive plots on Earth, future interplanetary travellers may need to grow crops to withstand space radiation.

This little slide show how easy it is, and the benefits of, growing air from inside the cubicle hell that most office buildings are today:

via MAKE

There’s no wonder the latest Seminar About Long Term Thinking was sold-out well in advance; screw the Long Now, this was all about The Now!

During the Bush Era it seemed to me (as an outsider looking in) that the US’s Future was heading for something a lot like Israel. I don’t think it quite qualifies as a Black Swan, but did anyone really expect it to turn into Russia in ’90s?

Dmitry Orlov lived through that and gave the standing-room only audience some tips for the years ahead.

I’m just cut’n'pasting in the summary from Stewart Brand now, from the Long Now mailing list; all emphasis is mine, etc:

With vintage Russian black humor, Orlov described the social collapse he witnessed in Russia in the 1990s and spelled out its practical lessons for the American social collapse he sees as inevitable. The American economy in the 1990s described itself as “Goldilocks”—just the right size—when in fact is was “Tinkerbelle,” and one day the clapping stops. As in Russia, the US made itself vulnerable to the decline of crude oil, a trade deficit, military over-reach, and financial over-reach.

Russians were able to muddle through the collapse by finding ways to manage 1) food, 2) shelter, 3) transportation, and 4) security.

Russian agriculture had long been ruined by collectivization, so people had developed personal kitchen gardens, accessible by public transit. The state felt a time-honored obligation to provide bread, and no one starved. (Orlov noted that women in Russia handled collapse pragmatically, putting on their garden gloves, whereas middle-aged men dissolved into lonely drunks.) Americans are good at gardening and could shift easily to raising their own food, perhaps adopting the Cuban practice of gardens in parking lots and on roofs and balconies.

As for shelter, Russians live in apartments from which they cannot be evicted. The buildings are heat-efficient, and the communities are close enough to protect themselves from the increase in crime. Americans, Orlov said, have yet to realize there is no lower limit to real estate value, nor that suburban homes are expensive to maintain and get to. He predicts flight, not to remote log cabins, but to dense urban living. Office buildings, he suggests, can easily be converted to apartments, and college campuses could make instant communities, with all that grass turned into pasture or gardens. There are already plenty of empty buildings in America; the cheapest way to get one is to offer to caretake it.

The rule with transportation, he said, is not to strand people in nonsurvivable places. Fuel will be expensive and hoarded. He noted that the most efficient of all vehicles is an old pickup fully loaded with people, driving slowly. He suggested that freight trains be required to provide a few empty boxcars for hoboes. Donkeys, he advised, provide reliable transport, and they dine as comfortably on the Wall Street Journal as they did on Pravda.

Security has to take into account that prisons will be emptied (by stages, preferably), overseas troops will be repatriated and released, and cops will go corrupt. You will have a surplus of mentally unstable people skilled with weapons. There will be crime waves and mafias, but you can rent a policeman, hire a soldier. Security becomes a matter of local collaboration. When the formal legal structure breaks down, adaptive improvisation can be pretty efficient.

By way of readiness, Orlov urges all to prepare for life without a job, with near-zero burn rate. It takes practice to learn how to be poor well. Those who are already poor have an advantage.

And just when we thought the Present was already Science Fictional, all the missing elements of Cyberpunk will be arriving soon enough it seems.

The full text of Dmitry Orlov’s SALT talk is posted at his blog. You can also check out the slides he used for a famous 2006 talk, “Closing the Collapse Gap“.

For the podcast favouring, check the LongNow site for the mp3 later in week, or just grab the feed.

Presenting Farm Fountain:

..a system for growing edible and ornamental fish and plants in a constructed, indoor ecosystem. Based on the concept of aquaponics, this hanging garden fountain uses a simple pond pump, along with gravity to flow the nutrients from fish waste through the plant roots. The plants and bacteria in the system serve to cleanse and purify the water for the fish.

The perfect water feature for a re-claimed McMansion turned artist’s colony. Or for the lounge of a low-gravity space habitat.

They’ve included full instructions and a video overview. It’s a simple, but powerful concept. Great work!

thanks to Nova for the tip-off!

From NextNature:

You never know when an opportunity for planting might present itself. Be prepared with these tiny glass bottles filled with vegetable and flower seeds. Great for secretively planting in friends’ yards, medians, and those boring beds full of petunias outside your doctor’s office.

Get them here.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

With a bit of luck, we’ll have a new generation that lives up to this ideal; Future Mars Colonists, one and all.

Some good friends of mine opted out of a city life a few years ago and are now completely off-the-grid, yet still working in the same fields as before. If anything, they will thrive in the years ahead. And their daughter will learn to repair solar panels, maintain a garden and build a website.

They are the early-adopters. It should be clear to us all now that the Future involves nested utility systems, not top-down ones. The House of the Future will generate most of it’s power and water, and peer with it’s neighbours to share their surplus.

But we must feel a little sorry for the now hurting Middle Class, that backbone of the Status Quo. They were just blindly trusting the System after all.

From NYTimes:

After all, as incomes rose and gender roles changed over the last 50 years, families have become accustomed to outsourcing more and more of their household chores. No longer was it just the very rich who had “servants,” said Jan de Vries, an economic historian at the University of California, Berkeley.

…

“The way households function 20 years from now will probably be sort of surprising to us.”

…

“A lot of the way we’d been living was all an illusion, a fantasy,” said Ms. Spada, who has also been cooking more and bathing the family dog instead of going to the groomer. “We’ve been asking ourselves: Can we replicate some of those specialized services, which normally we would outsource, ourselves?”

Yes you can!

As Bruce Sterling called it “an autonomous urban taxi with passengers that are rice plants.”

Agriculture’s about to become a game of Dune2.

Do I have to rant again about how much sense it makes to grow your food in the city you’re supplying? K, cool.

Check out this beautiful concept art, cherry picked from TIME’s slideshow on Urban Farming:

This one is my favourite though:

And yes, they’d all look much better on Mars. But we have to practice here first.

via MAKE

Who wouldn’t want to buy a network of sekrit tunnels beneath London? It may be stuffy down there, but it would surely be better than the tube during peak hour.

“Built during World War II as bomb shelters for about 8,000 people and were designed to allow them to survive for five weeks shut off from the outside world.” It’s a bargain at $7.4 million!

More from NYTimes.com

Appearing more like the set of a James Bond movie than prime real estate, the complex still has a bar and two canteens, not in use, and a billiard room, not to mention functioning water and electricity supplies…and a canteen kitchen equipped with potato-peeling machine, dishwasher and a menu board offering sausages and peas.

If.only…

But seriously, massive underground hydroponic market gardens anyone?

via BoingBoing

Via inhabitat.com

The Outquisition, it’s the alterna-post-apocalypse:

Because if the ruins of the unsustainable are the new frontier, and if, as is already happening, the various economic and environmental transitions we face will leave many people unmoored from their familiar assumptions at the very least and, at the worst, cut loose from their jobs or driven from their homes, a huge number of people are going to need help forging new ways of life.

Even if we do a pretty decent job of hugging the curve, and bright green innovation brings prosperity and security to a lot of people in many regions, some others will still suffer from ecological shifts, political abandonment, economic collapse or some combination of all three. Unless things change dramatically, we have not seen our last Dust Bowl, our last New Orleans, our last Detroit. What do the people who are left trapped in degrading places, who don’t get the green collar jobs, do?

And we got on this riff about heroes who got the paradox of the moment: that abandoned people and places are sometimes the ones who most need radical innovation; that, these days, new tools and models are practically scattered all over the ground, just waiting for people to pick them up; but that those who most need them are those who least know how to find them.

What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.

Am I the only one that gets a vision of these emergent posthumans wandering the Earth: helping set up clean water, spread knowledge, settle disputes, trade tech and then vanishing once things are stabilized? Terraforming the Earth as practice for Mars?

Or dial it back a bit – and flash on Gibson’s notion of everting (from Spook Country), as the internet continues to swallow the “real world”. People start doing, instead of (mostly) just talking about it. New communities form, and blogs become ways for them to share their results, as they attempt to brute force the problem space of climate change.

Or…?

- image via inhabitat.com

Being the Dutch design aficionados that we are, we don’t think we’ll ever get tired of playful Dutch design, especially when it’s as sustainable and delightful as Krejci’s ‘Let’s Grow Some Balls!’ chair, which is both a planter and chair all in one. A garden chair that IS the garden, users are brought closer to nature by being surrounded with it.

The ‘Eco-ball’ chair we saw at the Tuttobene show in Milan was a prototype, but designer Krejci is speaking to various potential partners in the injection moulding industry, aiming to release a variety of different models in different eco-materials, from recycled plastic, biodegradeable plastic and shredded wood that’s held together using natural plastic that biodegrades with heat. Dutch recycled plastic company AKG Polymer is already working with them.

Krejci’s design also tackles another problem associated with conventional design: users simply getting bored with the look and throwing it away. The constantly growing, changing and evolving contents maintain the user’s interest, and as people spend more time and effort tending to their chair-garden, a deeper relationship between user and furniture should blossom.

Link via inhabitat.com

Growing plants would be a lot easier if plants could express what it is they need from you. Fret not because that’s what the Pet Plant by Junyi Heo does. The very sleek looking pot measures soil conditions, temperature, humidity, and water – calculates those variables based on the need of said plant, and expresses its condition via a series of pictograms on an LCD display.

It’s also smart enough to know if you’ve over watered and will systematically drain itself into a water vessel. All this high tech goodness does mean it needs power but a simple USB interface does double duty by charging and transmitting pertinent information to and from computer software.

Link & images via yankodesign.com