Environment

“I wonder about the trees,” Robert Frost wrote. Monumental in size, alive but inert, they inhabit a different temporality than ours. Some species’ life spans can be measured in human generations. We wake to find that a tree’s leaves have turned, or register, come spring, its sturdier trunk. But such changes are always perceived after the fact. We’ll never see them unfold, with our own eyes, in human time.

No one has been able to capture this 3,200-year-old tree in one image before – until now.

Halcyon curates the most significant environment-related content from carefully selected sources. Please contact us if you'd like our help with environment-related challenges.

Karl-Erik Sveiby on aboriginal cultures:

• Treading Lightly: The Hidden Wisdom of the World's Oldest People
• The First Leadership? The non-hierarchical model of the Australian Aborigines
• Aboriginal Principles for Sustainability
• Keep All Alive!. An Aboriginal model for Sustainability
• Nhunggabarra Knowledge Painting and story.

Our current meat-heavy system of food production seems to many unsustainable, a waste of resources and a source of pollution in the form of pesticides and hormones as well as methane gas from livestock manure.

Please see below key Sustainable Development Goal (SDG)-related developments during June 2017:

Visiting Luc Schuiten's Vegetal City exhibition in Brussels back in 2009 served as an eye-opening introduction to the potential that biomimicry might play in helping us design a sustainable future.

Many projects are already underway; some young architects are designing structures made completely out of living trees, while others are imagining how our great cities might return to their more natural state.

A related website tried to organise all biological information by function and asked the question - what we can we learn from this organism (e.g. any inventor, anywhere, at the moment of creation, could ask "how does nature remove salt from water?")

Aurora Borealis glows in the sky above the Achavanich Stones in Caithness, Scotland, on the 9th January 2014.