"The rainforests hold answers to questions we have yet to ask." - Mark Plotkin
The new edition of Halcyon Days covers diversity, immortality, inequality, slavery, sustainability, sympathy and more http://t.co/YkJtzfrKRt
— Dominic Kelleher (@DomKelleher) October 23, 2014
The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody- the idea that we must all co-operate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system - George Orwell, in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
We don't realise the incredible footprint of man. Sure, life is good now. But we are exhausting our resources. There's not enough fish., not enough wood, not enough land. We have to do better with less - Yann Athrus-Bertrand
We don't need to save the world, just spend it more wisely - Swami Beyondananda
We are an exceptional model of the human race. We no longer know how to produce food. We no longer can heal ourselves. We no longer raise our young. We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon. We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us. We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived. But when the lights are off we are helpless. We cannot move without traffic signals. We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breast-feed our baby. We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life. And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life. We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand. We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us - Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid
In Todmorden, Yorkshire, vegetables and herbs grow almost everywhere, even in the cemetery and outside the police station. Everywhere you turn edible plants abound. In this talk given at TED London Salon, Pam Warhurst explained why and how she and others created Incredible Edible, a revolution not only in the way the town eats, but also in the way they think about public space, and which is inspiring other communites around the UK and increasingly, around the world.
An art student invented new vegetable packaging which is 100% biodegradable, with the label text created through laser cutting to avoid the use of ink. What's more, the labels are embedded with seeds, so that a supermarket purchase can also result in a homegrown harvest.
Would we curb our wasteful activities if only we knew more about what happened to our waste? Researchers from MIT think so, and in order to equip the public with the knowledge we need to change our behaviour, they've tagged our trash with GPS chips and tracked it across the globe.
A large number of tools are now available to help us calculate our personal carbon footprint.