Old-school bOING bOING pal Jim Leftwich says:

The Sun Hive is a hanging honeybee hive designed by Günther Mancke and which is growing in popularity in the UK and elsewhere. It was designed around the needs of pollinating bees and colony health and preferences, and not around prioritizing honey production. As such, it's thought to be much better for sustaining bee populations. It's also quite beautiful.

There's also a Sun Hive book, that you can read or download (4.5Mb), and which gives the background on natural beekeeping and instructions on how to construct one.

Architect/developer Sebastian Mariscal designed and is expecting to build a 44-unit apartment building in densely-populated Boston where most of the space you'd expect to be used for parking spots is instead given over to a variety of gardens. There's a 7,000 public garden on the ground level and a roof that's 70 percent dedicated to community gardening. Meanwhile, each living unit includes a 144 square foot "outdoor room… full of vegetation."

"The Apartment Complex of Tomorrow—0 Parking Spots, 46 Personal Garden Spaces" (TakePart)

While Mariscal's original design only had six parking spaces, meant for rentals, and he only planned to rent to tenants who didn't own cars, the community was concerned that tenants would own cars anyway and park them on the street. So the architect added 35 spots to his plans and has apparently received preliminary approval to build from the Boston Redevelopment Authority. (Universal Hub, thanks Lis Riba!)]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/03/26/garden-apartment-redefined.html/feed 28 http://boingboing.net/2012/04/10/brilliant-pop-engineering-boo.html http://boingboing.net/2012/04/10/brilliant-pop-engineering-boo.html#comments Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:53:08 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=144867 The brilliant popular engineering Sustainable Materials - with Both Eyes Open: Future Buildings, Vehicles, Products and Equipment - Made Efficiently and Made with Less New Material has just been released in the USA. I reviewed this book last November, when it came out in the UK. Here's a brief excerpt from then:

We review a lot of popular science books around here, but Sustainable Materials (like Sustainable Energy) is a popular engineering text, a rare and wonderful kind of book. Sustainable Materials is an engineer's audit of the materials that our world is made of, the processes by which those materials are extracted, refined, used, recycled and disposed of, and the theoretical and practical efficiencies that we could, as a society, realize.

Allwood and Cullen write about engineering with the elegance of the best pop-science writers -- say, James Gleick or Rebecca Skloot -- but while science is never far from their work, their focus is on engineering. They render lucid and comprehensible the processes and calculations needed to make things and improve things, touching on chemistry, physics, materials science, economics and logistics without slowing down or losing the reader.

The authors quickly demonstrate that any effort to improve the sustainability of our materials usage must focus on steel and aluminum, first because of the prominence of these materials in our construction and fabrication, and second because they are characteristic microcosms of our other material usage, and what works for them will be generalizable to other materials.

From there, the book progresses to a fascinating primer on the processes associated with these metals, from ore to finished product and back through recycling, and the history of efficiency gains in these processes, and the theoretical limits on efficiency at each stage. Lavishly illustrated and superbly organized, this section and the ones that follow it are a crash course in the invisible energy embodied in the bones of our built up world.

But the primary work of the book is to look at how small (and large) changes in our society and business could make important gains in the sustainability of our material use, an important subject as developing nations start to copy the rich world's insatiable appetite for material goods and titanic cities.

Sustainable Materials - with Both Eyes Open: Future Buildings, Vehicles, Products and Equipment - Made Efficiently and Made with Less New Material ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/04/10/brilliant-pop-engineering-boo.html/feed 2 http://boingboing.net/2012/01/02/ikea-tries-cardboard-pallets.html http://boingboing.net/2012/01/02/ikea-tries-cardboard-pallets.html#comments Mon, 02 Jan 2012 19:03:21 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=136731 announced a new cardboard shipping pallet, which uses fiendishly clever folding to give a loading capacity of 1,650 lbs: "As Ikea uses some 10 million pallets a year, if the experiment is a success it's a good bet that other retail giants will take notice. But the thing that has analysts skeptical is that the pallets can only be used once." ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/01/02/ikea-tries-cardboard-pallets.html/feed 25 http://boingboing.net/2011/12/20/boing-boing-charitable-giving.html http://boingboing.net/2011/12/20/boing-boing-charitable-giving.html#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2011 17:40:59 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=134921 It's time again for Boing Boing's guide the charities we support in our annual giving. As always, please add the causes and charities you give to in the comments below!

Electronic Frontier Foundation
The EFF's mission has never been more important: as laws like SOPA are rammed through Congress, as bloggers around the world are arrested and tortured with the collusion of American network-surveillance companies, and as the FBI's unconstitutional, warrantless use of surveillance technology like GPS bugs comes to light, EFF is poised to be center-stage in the fight for a free and open world with a free and open Internet. —CD

Creative Commons
Creative Commons has permeated my life in a thousand ways -- on Boing
Boing and in my writing, Creative Commons is responsible for how I get
the job done and how I get paid for it. CC's advocacy of a nuanced,
intelligent position on creativity and sharing changes the lives of
creators, educators, scientists, scholars, and kids, all over the world. —CD

The Foundation Beyond Belief:
This is a great one for anybody who wants to donate to one place, but have their money reach multiple causes. It's also a good charity for people who want to donate to charity as an expression of humanist values, rather than religious ones. It works like this: You donate to the Foundation Beyond Belief. Every quarter, the Foundation picks ten charities, one in each of nine categories—health, poverty, environment, education, human rights, peace, animal protection, child welfare, other worldviews—plus the Foundation itself. You can tell them how you'd like your gift divvied up among the categories. At the end of the quarter, 100% of the donations go to the chosen charities and the cycle starts over again. —MKB

The Participatory Culture Foundation
PCF keeps on growing and making me proud to serve on its board. In
addition to Miro, its brilliant Internet video client, they've just
shipped their ambitious Universal Subtitles project, which aims at
nothing less than to render every video on the Web universal,
multilingual, and accessible. —CD

World Vision:
An oldie, but goodie. Highly rated by Charity Navigator, World Vision is the classic way to donate in someone's name as a gift. Children, families, and communities all over the world benefit. Your friends and loved ones get to see, in a tangible way, how they've helped to improve lives. Buy 5 ducks and 2 chickens for a family or a cow for a small village. In the US, you can provide school supplies, winter necessities, and food to children and families. I once bought half a cow in the name of my grandparents. As farmers, they liked knowing that they were helping other farmers. What a great way to make connections! —MKB

Marine Mammal Center
Compassionately healing seals from diseases they did not want to contract the Marine Mammal Center then releases them into their native habitat -- if you are a marine dwelling mammal in trouble, and they can find you -- its proof positive the MMC will do their all to ensure your return to health. This tireless and heroic group of full-time staff and army of well trained volunteers need our help to continue helping beautiful creatures who can not help themselves. —JW

Doctors Without Borders:
In global disaster zones, few groups make as much impact as quickly as do Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders. The international medical humanitarian organization was created by doctors and journalists in France in 1971. Today, MSF provides aid in nearly 60 countries to people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe, primarily due to armed conflict, epidemics, malnutrition, exclusion from health care, or natural disasters. We've published items about their work in Congo, Haiti, and I've met with MSF staff in Guatemala, where they have a project dedicated to violence against women and girls. The do good work. They get things done in places where it is dangerous and difficult to get things done. —XJ

Nurse-Family Partnership:
Provides in-home nurse visits for low-income, first-time expectant mothers and their babies. This program is evidence-based and studies have shown that it has an impact on both public health, and reducing child abuse and neglect. In 2010, it was highly rated by GiveWell.org. It's also one of Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy's "Social Programs That Work". —MKB

Friends of Gettysburg:
From Gen. Buford's heroic first day defense to Pickett's disastrous charge -- no three days more define the struggle we now call the American Civil War. Viewed as the turning point of the war and the high-water mark of the confederacy, walking the roads, fields and hills of Gettysburg truly allows you to feel a deep connection with men and women who struggled here. Sadly, developers and other creeps continually try to modify, encroach upon and invade this monument; luckily we have an organization that still fights to preserve and continually improve access and education in and around the park - the Friends of the National Parks at Gettysburg. They tirelessly work to preserve my favorite National Park, which is saying a lot as I live inside another. —JW

National Lawyer's Guild: An American institution, these justice-loving lawyers have been a fixture at Occupy actions across the nation. When you see protesters with lawyers' numbers written in marker on their arms, chances are that's the local NLG chapter. —CD

Youth Radio:
Youth Radio is an afterschool program that teaches journalism, media, and audio production skills to underserved young people, mostly high school age You can hear their stories on National Public Radio, local airwaves, and of course online. A lot of the graduates stick around for a while as paid writers, producers, engineers, and teachers. —DP

The Sierra Club:
The US's oldest and biggest grassroots environmental organization. Whether it's protecting endangered species, opposing dams, or helping you learn how to green your home, the Sierra Club has spent more than a century trying to keep the wonder of the natural world wonderful. —DP

Big Brothers Big Sisters:
As a former Big, this was one of the most rewarding programs I've had the pleasure of being a part of. It also works. The Big Brothers Big Sisters approach has shown success in randomized controlled trials and it's one of the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy's "Social Programs That Work". —MKB

Facing History and Ourselves
Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational group that helps young people study issues around racism, antisemitism, and prejudice in history, from the Holocaust to today's immigrant experiences to the killing fields of Cambodia. Their aim is to teach young people "to think critically, to empathize, to recognize moral choices, to make their voices heard, we put in their hands the possibility--and the responsibility--to do the serious work demanded of us all as citizens." —DP

Fundacion Sobrevivientes:
Contact asobrevivientes@yahoo.es or info@sobrevivientes.org. Telephone (502) 2285-0100 or (502) 2285-0139

Fundacion Sobrevivientes (In English, "Survivors Foundation") works to end "femicide" in Guatemala. They provide legal aid, psychological care, and protection for rape victims -- including children. They assist women whose children have been snatched from them to be sold illegally into adoption. They provide support for families of female assassination victims. Founder Norma Cruz was featured in the documentary Killer's Paradise. Her work links the murders of thousands of Guatemalan women to the country's 36-year civil war. She, her colleagues, and family are frequently targeted by those who seek to prevent the center's work. —XJ

Innovations for Poverty Action: Highly rated by GiveWell.org, IPA does the studies that find out what kind of poverty interventions actually work and where those interventions work. IPA is led by scientists and uses randomized controlled trials to help make sure that charities are reaching their stated goals and doing what they're supposed to be doing. When they find programs that work, they also assist in scaling those programs up from trials to full-scale interventions. —MKB

Free Software Foundation/Defective By Design:
The Free Software Foundation's principled litigation, license creation and campaigning is fierce, uncompromising and has changed the world. You interact with code that they made possible a million times a day, and they never stop working to make sure that the code stays free. —CD

Wounded Warrior Project:
Via Susannah Breslin, whose "War Project" interviews I've blogged here on Boing Boing, a recommendation to consider the nonprofit Wounded Warrior Project. The group works to raise awareness and enlist the public's aid for the needs of injured service members; helps injured service members aid and assist each other, and provides unique, direct programs and services to meet the needs of injured service members. Many veteran's charities exist, few get as much good work done for actual vets as this one.—XJ

The Internet Archive: A free repository for all of human knowledge, a bottomless source of bandwidth and storage, the Internet's collective memory, the reinvention of the library right before our eyes. I don't know what I'd do without it. —CD

National Academy Foundation:
The NAF supports Career Academies in low-income public high schools, programs that are proven to make a difference in kids' lives. Studies have shown that graduates of Career Academies see an average 11% increase in annual earnings, an effect that stays strong over the long term. Basically, they start out making more money and keep making more money. —MKB

Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation:
My aunt Heather died of breast cancer when she was only 41. My whole family is now involved with the society. I don't live in Toronto and can't join the annual run for the cure there, but at least I can donate to the cause. —CD

Open Rights Group:
As Britain's slide into the surveillance society continues, as unelected officials present insane proposals to dismantle privacy and due process to catch pirates, ORG just gets more and more relevant. Membership is up 25% since the Digital Economy Bill was introduced and it continues to grow. Your £5/month pays to keep the lights on for a group of activists working to keep DRM off the BBC, working to ensure that you won't lose your Internet connection because someone in your house was accused of infringement. —CD

Kiva:
Since 2005, Kiva has been a pioneer in providing micro-financing to the "working poor", offering users the ability to choose their cause of choice. Micro-financing has shown itself to be a boon to the developing world, and especially in creating newly-empowered women entrepreneurs. Kiva has focused on this goal, and makes a difference in the regions they support.—Ken Snider

(I like Kiva, too. It's a fun family activity to look at the proposals and decide where to make investments. Also, Kiva Cards are a cool gift to introduce your friends to the fun world of microinvesting! —Mark Frauenfelder)

The Gutenberg Project: The world's leading access-to-public-domain project. They have truly created a library from nothing, and oh, what a library. This year marked the sad, premature death of its visionary founder, Michael Hart, and supporting his life's work is a fitting tribute to one of the Internet's true pioneers —CD

Mission statement: "Founded in 1991, the Institute for Justice is what a civil liberties law firm should be. As our nation's only libertarian public interest law firm, we engage in cutting-edge litigation and advocacy both in the courts of law and in the court of public opinion on behalf of individuals whose most basic rights are denied by the government--like the right to earn an honest living, private property rights, and the right to free speech, especially in the areas of commercial and Internet speech. As Wired magazine said, the Institute for Justice 'helps individuals subject to wacky government regulations.'" —MF

I've been a member of the American Civil Liberties Union for many years. They need all the support they can get to keep Americans safe and free from a government that answers only to their corporate string-pullers. —MF

The MetaBrainz Foundation:
I'm on the board of this charity, which oversees the MusicBrainz project. MusicBrainz is a free and open alternative to the evil (dis)Gracenote, which took all the metadata about CDs that you and I keyed in and locked it away behind a wall of patents and onerous licensing deals. The org that controls the metadata controls the world -- this needs to be in the public's hands. —CD

Any homelessness charity that uses Critical Time Intervention strategies: Homelessness charities are inherently local things. Find one near you, then find out whether it uses CTI, a method of reaching people during crisis situations so that they never become homeless to begin with. CTI has been found to reduce the likelihood of homelessness by 60%, 18 months after people were randomly assigned to CTI-based programs. —MKB

The Clarion Foundation:
I'm also a volunteer on Clarion's board, helping to oversee the world-famous Clarion Writers' Workshop, a bootcamp for sf writers that has produced some of the finest talents in our field, including Octavia Butler, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, and Lucius Shepard. I'm a graduate myself, and an instructor (I taught in 2005 and 2007) -- I received a substantial scholarship to the workshop in 1992 and it changed my life. I will pay that debt forward every year. —CD

Amnesty International:
Justly famed for their principled, effective campaigning for justice and fair treatment under the law, Amnesty has its finger in every pie -- freeing Gitmo detainees, defending jailed journalists, fighting torture and human trafficking, and standing up to bullies wherever they find them. They deserve every cent we can give them. —CD

Hospice Net:
I make a donation to this charity every year in memory of my dear friend, former Boing Boing guestblogger Pat York. Pat was killed in a car accident, and her family nominated this charity for memorial gifts. —CD

Two great jobs charities: Year Up is a national program that trains highly motivated, low-income young adults for well-paying careers. Candidates spend six months going through intensive training and six months on an internship. Most end up with jobs that pay upwards of $40,000 to $60,000 a year. At the other end of the jobs spectrum is The Hope Program, which focuses on getting extremely disadvantaged New Yorkers a job. The Hope Program is working with people who would otherwise have trouble finding any kind of employment at all, folks with histories of substance abuse, homelessness, and prison records. Helping people overcome those barriers and find employment can be a key to making sure they don't end up back in a bad situation. —MKB

ACLU:
For the liberties the EFF doesn't cover, here in sticky meatspace, we have the ACLU. Fearless upholders of the Constitution -- an org that knows that you have to stand up for the rights of people you disagree with, or you aren't in a free society. Unwinding the violence done to fundamental freedoms over the past eight years will take time and money. The number of bad laws and regulations to overturn is staggering. —CD

Liberty:
Britain's answer to the American Civil Liberties Union. Every single time I read or hear a news-story about incursions on human rights in the UK, there's an articulate, knowledgeable Liberty commentator countering government's flimsy arguments and campaigning for our freedom. In an era where politicians spy on us seemingly through naked instinct, like ants building hills, it's groups like Liberty that present our best bulwark against tyranny. —CD

Child Rights and You:
I travelled to Mumbai in 2009 for research and was overwhelmed by the terrible, ubiquitous child poverty -- thousands and thousands of children, barefoot, disfigured, begging. I asked my Indian friends about it and was told that it was endemic to Mumbai and India in general, and that many children are exploited by desperate parents or criminal "pimps" who muscle them out of the majority of their earnings. As a new parent, I couldn't help but wonder again and again how I would feel if it were my child living in those circumstances. I'm no stranger to poverty -- I helped build schools with Nicaraguan refugees in Central America, worked to set up an NGO in sub-Saharan Africa -- but I'd never seen anything to rival this. On advice from my Indian friends, I investigated and made a donation to CRY. CRY works to remedy the root causes of child poverty in India, in cities and the countryside, with a special emphasis on protecting girls from exploitation. The problem is deep and huge, but the solution has to begin somewhere. CRY also maintains a UK site for British donors. —CD

Software Freedom Law Center:
As the leading legal clinic defending the interests of free software authors, SFLC is a nexus for the defeat of stupid software patents, work on free software stacks for use in defeating network censorship and shutdowns in repressive regimes, and fighting obscure but vital fights like the battle over UEFI, which threatens to make it both legally and technically challenging to install GNU/Linux on your own computer.

Neighborworks America: This national charity has done a couple of things I really, really like. First, it's a leader in providing counseling to families at risk of losing their homes to foreclosure. At a time when there are lots of scams ready to prey on the weak, Neighborworks protects and helps people keep their homes. Second, they're working for sustainable, affordable housing, making sure that all people can afford homes that are energy efficient and environmentally safe. —MKB

The Friends of the Merril Collection:
Every library's "friends" organization deserves your support, but the Merril is special -- it's the largest
public science fiction reference collection in the world, and performs a
real service for the global community of sf writers and readers. As of
this year, Americans can also get a tax-receipt for their donations to
the Merril. —CD

MySociety:
Software in the public interest -- it's a damned good idea. MySociety produces software like Pledgebank ("I will risk arrest by refusing to register for a UK ID card if 100,000 other Britons will also do it") and TheyWorkForYou (every word and deed by every Member of Parliament). It's plumbing for activists and community organizers. —CD

We review a lot of popular science books around here, but Sustainable Materials (like Sustainable Energy) is a popular engineering text, a rare and wonderful kind of book. Sustainable Materials is an engineer's audit of the materials that our world is made of, the processes by which those materials are extracted, refined, used, recycled and disposed of, and the theoretical and practical efficiencies that we could, as a society, realize.

Allwood and Cullen write about engineering with the elegance of the best pop-science writers -- say, James Gleick or Rebecca Skloot -- but while science is never far from their work, their focus is on engineering. They render lucid and comprehensible the processes and calculations needed to make things and improve things, touching on chemistry, physics, materials science, economics and logistics without slowing down or losing the reader.

The authors quickly demonstrate that any effort to improve the sustainability of our materials usage must focus on steel and aluminum, first because of the prominence of these materials in our construction and fabrication, and second because they are characteristic microcosms of our other material usage, and what works for them will be generalizable to other materials.

From there, the book progresses to a fascinating primer on the processes associated with these metals, from ore to finished product and back through recycling, and the history of efficiency gains in these processes, and the theoretical limits on efficiency at each stage. Lavishly illustrated and superbly organized, this section and the ones that follow it are a crash course in the invisible energy embodied in the bones of our built up world.

But the primary work of the book is to look at how small (and large) changes in our society and business could make important gains in the sustainability of our material use, an important subject as developing nations start to copy the rich world's insatiable appetite for material goods and titanic cities.

As with Sustainable Energy, Sustainable Materials is a valuable, impartial expert source in an important debate. While it explains the measures that can improve our materials usage, it also lays out the tradeoffs that these measures entails, the the relative benefits to be gained by each trade -- but it doesn't lecture or demand, merely invites the reader to consider the engineering facts and decide for herself what to do about them.

The publisher has put up a great website for the book, with free, downloadable text, and some good supplementary materials.

Sustainable Materials - with Both Eyes Open: Future Buildings, Vehicles, Products and Equipment - Made Efficiently and Made with Less New Material ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/11/17/sustainable-materials.html/feed 3 http://boingboing.net/2011/07/13/live-webchat-about-e.html http://boingboing.net/2011/07/13/live-webchat-about-e.html#comments Wed, 13 Jul 2011 06:00:55 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology , and Science magazine's Eli Kintisch, author of Hack the Planet: Science's Best Hope - or Worst Nightmare - for Averting Climate Catastrophe, for a live web chat as we talk about how Americans created the energy systems we live with today, and how we might build better ones for the future. "Green Energy's Forgotten Past, Uncertain Future" starts at 3:00 Eastern on ScienceLive. We'll be taking questions from the audience and talking about our respective books, including my upcoming book "Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before it Conquers Us," which is due out next March. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/07/13/live-webchat-about-e.html/feed 1 http://boingboing.net/2011/06/09/seedbomb-vending-mac.html http://boingboing.net/2011/06/09/seedbomb-vending-mac.html#comments Thu, 09 Jun 2011 04:24:52 +0000 David Pescovitz The term "seed grenade" was first used by Liz Christy in 1973 when she started the "Green Guerrillas". The first seed grenades were made from condoms filled with local wildflower seeds, water and fertilizer. They were tossed over fences onto empty lots in New York City in order to make the neighborhoods look better. It was the start of the guerrilla gardening movement...

The earliest records of aerial reforestation date back from 1930. In this period, planes were used to distribute seeds over certain inaccessible mountains in Honolulu after forest fires.[2] Seed bombing is also widely used in Africa; where they are put in barren or simply grassy areas. With technology expanding, it is now placed in a biodegradable container and "bombed" grenade-style onto the land. As the sprout grows, the container biodegrades and the plant grows. It is usually done as a large-scale project with hundreds dropped in a single area at any one time. Therefore, a barren land can be turned into a garden in a little over a month.
Seedbombs by Greenaid

Seed bombing (Wikipedia)

"On Seedballs"

"On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries" by Richard Reynolds (Amazon)

"How to Make a Seed Bomb" (Instructables)]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/06/09/seedbomb-vending-mac.html/feed 36 http://boingboing.net/2011/05/02/eggshell-planters.html http://boingboing.net/2011/05/02/eggshell-planters.html#comments Mon, 02 May 2011 07:18:13 +0000 David Pescovitz I spotted this wonderful display of eggshell planters at the mighty Dynamo Donuts in San Francisco's Mission District. (Note the fresh-from-the-fryer bacon maple apple donuts in the upper left.) Instructables has a how-to on making your own "eggshell seed starters."]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/05/02/eggshell-planters.html/feed 7 http://boingboing.net/2011/03/10/pitch-perfect-comic.html http://boingboing.net/2011/03/10/pitch-perfect-comic.html#comments Thu, 10 Mar 2011 03:24:09 +0000 David Ng Just wanted to showcase this marvelous comic by Stuart McMillen (the cover of which you see above and is a nice nod to Hergé). It's called "St. Matthew Island" and asks: "What happens when you introduce 29 reindeer to an isolated island of untouched natural resources?" As a parable (humans being humans, and reindeer being reindeer), it does a great job of gently and effectively illustrating the issue of over consumption . St Matthew Island by Stuart McMillen]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/03/10/pitch-perfect-comic.html/feed 29 http://boingboing.net/2010/12/15/ciclavia-on-kickstar.html http://boingboing.net/2010/12/15/ciclavia-on-kickstar.html#comments Wed, 15 Dec 2010 06:14:17 +0000 Sean Bonner

How it works:

1.  Post your green-worthy DIY project to the Green Project Contest website on MAKE.

2.  Encourage your readers, family and friends, and your social network to vote for your project!

3.  Posts that get lots of votes, besides be eligible for prizes, will also draw the attention of MAKE editors. We’ll start doing blog posts, and maybe even articles in the magazine, about some of the more popular projects. To help inspire you, we're putting together a series of videos on Maker Pioneers who are doing work we think is worth of the tag "green". The first video is with Saul Griffith, talking about his Onya Cycles business. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2010/12/01/post-your-green-wort.html/feed 4 http://boingboing.net/2010/10/13/pro-mining-propagand.html http://boingboing.net/2010/10/13/pro-mining-propagand.html#comments Wed, 13 Oct 2010 07:36:01 +0000 Xeni Jardin

As the Chilean Miner telenovela continues today, with mining company execs and politicians now transforming a barely-averted catastrophe into a publicity stunt: here's timely look back at some mid-century American mining industry propaganda in the form of a weird comic book unearthed by Ethan Persoff.

"With an environmental message!," says Ethan— "Specifically how strip mines are good for clearing landscape of pesky earth to make way for park benches and manufactured fishing (check out the very funny Sportsman's paradise joke on page 11).

Comics with Problems #41: "New Uses for Good Earth" (or, Ethan's title, "Gee Dad, can they flatten our mountaintop, TOO?")

Foraging can be a risky business: in some municipalities, it's not allowed in public parks. Earlier this year, the New York Times' urban foraging columnist suggested that would-be gatherers pick day lily shoots from Central Park; the Times had to quickly post a clarification that picking plants from city parks was against the law.

"If 15 people decide to go harvest day lilies to stir-fry that night, you could wipe out the entire population of day lilies around the Central Park reservoir," Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe told the Times.

There's another risk: chemicals. "Most of the foragers we have talked to are expressing concerns about toxicity," Poe said. Public park managers aren't necessarily interested in preserving the edibility of the wild things that grow there--don't even start on whatever might grow in a median or alley. Park managers and city planners could make it easier for foragers, Poe suggested, by minimizing the chemicals sprayed or, at the very least, putting up signs to alert would-be foragers when pesticides are at their most potent.
"Urban Foragers Cropping Up in U.S."

Via the BB Submitterator, Marilyn Terrell of National Geographic says,

Scientists studying the water surface near the BP rig explosion spotted relatively huge particles of sea snot, a mucus-like substance that phytoplankton produce when stressed. "It's possible that exposure to the Deepwater Horizon oil caused them to pump out more of the sticky stuff than usual." Sinking quickly en masse to the sea floor, the clumps of mucus may have temporarily wiped out the base of the food chain in the spill region. Adding oil to the snot makes marine mucilage, which can grow 100 mi. long.

Mercedes Benz Fashion Week might have a new location this year at Lincoln Center, but the freshest and most creative fashion presentations arguably were found off-site. A perfect example was Samantha Pleet's Spring/Summer 2011 presentation, which was part of the Greenshows downtown. A film created by Pleet's friend David Black featured BeachHouse singer Victoria Legrand as a star-crossed lover. The film and still images were projected onto the walls surrounding models styled by Christina Turner in jewelry by Bliss Lau and shoes designed specially for Pleet by Osborne.

Nothing about the clothing looked particularly eco-friendly, ethically sound or fair trade, but it was nice to know that fantastic design and styling can be all those things without screaming "green." To top off the evening, Pleet gathered friends and fans at the Classic Car Club, where she and I grabbed a seat in 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder for a quick interview...

(Photographs by Kristen Philipkoski)

KP: How did the film collaboration come about?

SP: Dave and I had worked on my last spring film. We're really good friends. My friend Turner also really wanted to style the film, so the three of us came together went down to Baltimore's Pretty Boy Dam. (Beachhouse is from Baltimore). We were a tight crew of eight people and we drove down in two cars, and shot the whole thing over a weekend. It ended up being this lost lovers film of finding something 10 years later and having this melancholy but beautiful feeling towards it which really went well with the collection.

KP: What was your inspiration for Spring/Summer 2011?

SP: Twin Peaks is always an inspiration for me. I'm really influenced by film: Godard, David Lynch, Czech new age films. I think the subconscious element really comes out in my designs. I was also reading Franny and Zooey and Moby Dick, so the line has a nautical New England twisted preppiness with the collared shirts. They're very masculine.

KP: What's your over-arching approach to designing clothes?

SP: I want the girl to be able to create her own story and feel special in the clothes. I'm not so trend driven. You could put (one of my pieces) on five years later, or give it to your grandchildren one day. I wear my grandmother's clothes from the 50s. But i don't want my clothes to look vintage. I want them to be modern but have that feeling.

KP: I loved the bathing suits!

SP: I personally love going to the beach, but i go with friends. So i don't necessarily want to wear a string bikini. I love high waisted pieces. One of them you can wear high waisted or you can make it low -- it's the new reversible. I generally like either really high or low. I don't really like the in between mom waistline.

(The print on the white suit) came from artwork on a 15th century manuscript called Hours of Catherine Cleves that my husband (an architect) found. We spent weeks creating it, it was very challenging. It was all original artwork that we reinvented on Illustrator.

KP: You work on your designs with your husband. What's it like to mix work and marriage?

SP: We are best friends we share everything. He's so creative but we are very different. I'm very fast with a million ideas, and he's very deliberate. Our two minds work well together in our relationship and our work. We have a very strong relationship; we're very lucky.

KP: Tell me how your line is "green?"

SP: I work with all local business and source my material as locally as possible. I work with people who i really believe in, like Osborne. I'm pretty much a one-person company. I produce everything locally in New York City. I use organic cottons. I think I have a really small carbon footprint. I hand-deliver my garments to stores in New York, and as I've been growing bigger that hasn't changed. All the clothes in my collaboration with Urban Outfitters were organic.

Above: Dave Black and Samantha Pleet.]]> http://boingboing.net/2010/09/23/fashion-week-dispatc.html/feed 15 http://boingboing.net/2010/08/26/changing-attitudes-a.html http://boingboing.net/2010/08/26/changing-attitudes-a.html#comments Thu, 26 Aug 2010 08:21:25 +0000 Andrea James

Video link: not for the queasy of stomach.

David Kuria runs EcoTact Limited, an organization with a groundbreaking approach to a difficult issue. In many poor parts of Africa, basic sanitation is nonexistent, and open sewers drain untreated waste directly into the water supply, causing 80% of the disease.

Kuria quotes Gandhi: "Sanitation is more important than independence," adding, "We want to do a social transformation, where people don't think this is a toilet, where they think a toilet is a dirty place. So for us to change that community and social mentality of a toilet, then we want to put in more activities in the toilet. Then they start interacting with the facility not as a toilet, but more of a community convenient point."

Amenities include a small kiosk with snacks and personal items for sale. Kenyan comedian Makhoha Keya even worked up an act to make learning about basic sanitation entertaining. Ecotact provides safe drinking water at no cost, and the toilet usage fee is about five cents a day, usually recouped through fewer doctor visits and lost days of work.

EcoTact Limited website]]> http://boingboing.net/2010/08/26/changing-attitudes-a.html/feed 4 http://boingboing.net/2009/11/18/energy-literacy-part.html http://boingboing.net/2009/11/18/energy-literacy-part.html#comments Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:09:51 +0000 Saul Griffith Saul Griffith is an inventor and entrepreneur. He did his PhD at MIT in programmable matter, exploring the relationship between bits and atoms, or information and materials. Since leaving MIT, he has co-founded a number of technology companies including www.optiopia.com, www.squid-labs.com, www.instructables.com, www.potenco.com, and www.makanipower.com.

You might have just driven home. When you filled your car with gasoline, most likely you didn't even see the fluid as it was pumped into your gas tank. Once home, you probably turned on some lights, some music, your computer, and maybe even heat, so you could read this web page. You can't see the power running through the electrical lines that lead to your light bulb, and you don't feel it, but you do enjoy the results. Our society has made energy invisible. This invisibility makes energy convenient to use -- and the modern age is arguably wonderful as a result -- but it also makes it easy to take it for granted. Here we try to make our appetite for energy visible.

Climate change is a phenomenon we now recognize as one of the most important challenges to ever confront humanity. Like energy use, it is also mostly invisible to us, and in two important ways.  Firstly, the enormous volumes of green-house gases -- carbon dioxide, methane, CFC's etc, are quite literally invisible to our naked eyes. Secondly, the changes in climate progress so slowly that they seem invisible amidst the hustle and bustle of our daily lives. Because these consequences accumulate over decades, generations, and centuries, it is easy to not see them as pressing and urgent. Here we try to make visible these complicated and largely invisible things.

The global energy and climate conversation is about choices, both individual choices and collective choices. By choosing the amount and type of energy we consume, we are choosing the look and feel of our future. Everyone is involved in that choice. Don't be fooled: individual choices collectively have enormous effects.   A large coal power plant has a power output of 1GW (GigaWatt) which is 1 billion (1 000 000 000) Watts.  If 1 billion people reduced their power needs by just 1 watt ( About what is required to keep a compact fluorescent burning for just 1 hour a day), that's a coal fired power plant you don't need to build.  

This material tries to help you make those choices in a more informed manner. We also hope this material influences the governments, organizations and corporations who make the decisions about our energy future on a macro level.

These posts are about energy, climate change, finite resources, and the future. Unfortunately, the creation of this material is implicated in the very climate change and energy challenges we wish to avoid. You chose to read this, which means you chose to use some energy. These posts are not "carbon free" or "carbon neutral". At the time of its publishing there was practically no way that it ever could have been. Nearly every choice you make involves energy and all those choices have implications for the environment.

Two people wrote this stuff. We both ate food produced by modern industrial agriculture to power ourselves while writing. We used at least five computers at different times to do the calculations, write the words, and edit the layout. After we had done our work, editors and designers used computers to further refine the text and images. Each of those computers ran for many hours, consuming somewhere between 20 and 200 watts of power each as they did so. The computers themselves were made in factories in China and Japan with chips produced in the United States, and cases probably made from bauxite mined in Australia and processed in Argentina.

If you print this out, the paper it is printed on was probably made from trees that were cut down in Canada. The chainsaws that cut the trees ran on two-stroke gasoline. The trees were lifted onto a truck with a crane powered by diesel fuel. The truck drove the trees to the sawmill using diesel. Before the trees from which these pages were made had even been pulped, three internal combustion engines had been fired up, burned a fossil fuel and emitted some carbon dioxide. How much CO2? Not a lot. But all the little pieces add up.

If you are just reading this on the web, there are disks and processors in data centers in numerous places running from coal plants, gas plants, even hydro and solar plants where the production of the cement and silicon was itself done using fossil fuels. The point is, it's a really complex system.

As these paragraphs show, the global supply chain for energy is complex. This was in small part inspired by the pamphlet "I, Pencil - My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read." (1958). A piece that highlights just how interconnected our modern world is.

We fill our cars with gas regularly, but don't even see the liquid go into the tank. If we were to imagine that we had to fill a backpack with the fuels required for a day of our lives, what would we be filling our energy back-pack with each day?

Each day the average American sets out with:

OIL = 10.81 L/Person/day (2.9Gallons)


COAL = 9.54 kg/person/day (21 pounds)


NATURAL GAS = 5.88 m^3/person/day (208 cubic feet)

Which roughly converted to those other units is around 22 Pints of oil per day (one per hour!), 21 pounds of coal (another per hour) and 200 cubic feet of natural gas.

I used the annual consumption of coal and natural gas, and the daily consumption of oil, and converted it to the daily average by dividing it out by the population of the US.

The data is here. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2009/11/18/energy-literacy-part.html/feed 18 http://boingboing.net/2009/11/14/koalas-may-go-extinc.html http://boingboing.net/2009/11/14/koalas-may-go-extinc.html#comments Sat, 14 Nov 2009 12:52:57 +0000 Xeni Jardin

[Image: Koala, a CC-licensed photo by Mshai]

The Australian Koala Foundation reported this week that koala populations are declining because we humans continue to invade their habitats. Wildfires and global warming aren't helping, either. They could become extinct within a few decades. More: BBC, Reuters.]]> http://boingboing.net/2009/11/14/koalas-may-go-extinc.html/feed 86 http://boingboing.net/2009/11/02/abandoned-bowling-al.html http://boingboing.net/2009/11/02/abandoned-bowling-al.html#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:16:47 +0000 Cory Doctorow
An abandoned bowling alley finds a second life in this beautiful series of furniture by LA-based designer/woodworker William Stranger. Crafted from reclaimed strips of wood salvaged from a local defunct Tava Lanes Bowling alley, the collection springs to life in a variety of forms including a series of wall hangings and a low coffee table. Recycled Bowling Lane Furniture is Right up Our Alley (Thanks, Ape Lad!)]]> http://boingboing.net/2009/11/02/abandoned-bowling-al.html/feed 23 http://boingboing.net/2009/11/02/the-harvest.html http://boingboing.net/2009/11/02/the-harvest.html#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:26:26 +0000 Xeni Jardin

Our friends at Good have a post up with striking images by photographer Mathieu Young. These photos were shot during harvest time (last year) in California's Mendocino County region, where an awful lot of marijuana is grown.

"On the one hand it seems like an illicit activity," Young told Good. "But on the other hand, you have a bunch of people who are living off the land, which is beautiful."

Picture Show: The Harvest [GOOD]
Full gallery here, in larger rez: The Harvest [ mathieuyoung.com ]]]> http://boingboing.net/2009/11/02/the-harvest.html/feed 12 http://boingboing.net/2009/10/23/leds-throwing.html http://boingboing.net/2009/10/23/leds-throwing.html#comments Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:25:21 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker Let's start this off with a quick clarification. When I say "LED light", I'm not talking about the nifty, little blinky things that are frequently part of the ingredients list in Make projects. I'm talking about the Big Show: An LED light that can replace the incandescent bulbs and/or CFLs you have lighting up your home right now. To do it right, you don't just need a single LED that works, you need an array of them...and you need them to produce enough light, and the right color of light, reliably enough that people can buy an LED bulb and know what they're getting into.That ain't easy. But it is getting easier.

Trouble is, they're being oversold, like whoa. For about two-and-a-half years, I've been reporting on LED lighting for a trade magazine called Architectural SSL*. During that time, I've watched mainstream press and enviro blogs tout LEDs as the green energy miracle light. Often, with a level of enthusiasm seldom seen outside rooms full of puppies. Don't get me wrong. LEDs are pretty cool. There are places where they're useful now, and places they probably will be soon. But if you're just hearing about the awesome, you aren't getting the full story. And, as more LED products start showing up on store shelves, that really starts to matter.

Join me, won't you, as we put on our Sober Assessment Goggles and take a peek at the current state of light bulb of the tomorrow...

*The glamorous life of a freelance writer, everybody. That said, if you are thinking about freelance, I recommend convincing a trade magazine or two to love you. The work is steady, the pay is decent and the people are good. And that is a better situation than you'll get from a lot of things you could do to pay the bills. /unsolicitedwriteradvice

1. There Are Good LED Lights Out There; But You Probably Can't Afford Them
A Twitter friend lamented the other day that LED lighting technology just isn't getting any better. And that's wrong. Right now, if you were a city manager, the owner of a fine hotel (like the Wit) or somebody with enough cash to hire a lighting designer to pick out the fixtures in your living room, you could go drop some money on LED lights that would work great, look beautiful and (depending on your project) give you some big savings on energy use. The obvious problem here is that, with a few exceptions, you are likely none of those things.

No, what you see is the stuff for sale at Home Depot. And that, my friends, is usually not worth your time or money. Not yet, anyway. Buy 'em if you want, but prepare for disappointment...Christmas tree lights that say "white" and turn out to be blue...$20 lightbulbs that conk out after two weeks. That's a lot of what's out there. Case in point: A couple weeks ago, I was at an LED conference and one of the speakers told a story about buying 10 screw-in LED lightbulbs from his local Costco, just to see what they'd do. The box claimed they'd last 30,000 hours. Within two weeks, four were dark, and one had changed colors and started blinking. Less than two months later, all the lights had dimmed out enough to be useless. I've heard that same, basic story about 50,000 times now. Sure, there may well be good, affordable products out there. But you have no way of telling the difference, which brings me to....

2. Trust No One
See, the LED industry is kind of in this awkward teenage phase right now, where it's doing the business equivalent of tagging public buildings and sneaking cigarettes out behind the barn. There's a lot of misrepresentation and a lot of flat-out lies, and just because a box says something that doesn't mean you can believe it (more so than boxes of other things). In fact, up until last year, there weren't really any useful standards to compare LED lights. Anybody could make any claim they wanted to and even the professionals had nothing to judge it by. That's changing, but for now, assume you're dealing with the early 20th-century patent medicine industry.

Again, yes, there are good products and there are honest companies. But finding them takes a LOT of research. Last year, at that same LED conference, I watched a discussion panel devolve into (literally) tears and yelling over this very topic. The phrase, "Pull up your big boy pants," was shouted. This isn't yet a place where average consumers can just walk in and grab something off the shelf.

The DOE is trying to fix that, though. One way they're fighting back is with CALiPER, basically a secret-shopper program with a lab experiment twist. Researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (and other labs) purchase LED bulbs and fixtures anonymously (often via third-parties) and run them through an extensive testing process to see whether they live up to the claims on the box. The majority still don't, though it's getting better. More than 175 products have been tested since 2006. But, while CALiPER is improving the overall situation, it won't help you a lot. The reports are fairly technical--they're written for lighting designers and engineers--and the DOE doesn't name names. CALiPER can tell you whether, in general, you can seriously consider a certain type of LED bulb. But it can't tell you what specific products are bunk.

3. Keep a Close Eye On that "Energy Efficiency" Thing
The biggest selling point--at least for average consumers--is that LEDs are more energy efficient than any other kind of lighting. They'll slash your bills and save the planet! Rejoice!

You can probably guess where this is going. The fact is, LEDs are pretty damn efficient. Much, much more so than the old, incandescent Edison bulbs. But they aren't always a greener choice compared to fluorescent lamps. The thing to look at is lumens per watt, a fancy term that basically just refers to how much light you get out vs. how much energy you put in. The more lumens per watt, the better the energy efficiency. The kind of fluorescent lamps used in offices--the long, narrow ones that are called T-5 or T-8s in Technicalland--regularly get more than 100 lumens per watt. An LED T-8 lamp tested by CALiPER last year got 42.*

Plus, the lumens per watt rating of the LED itself doesn't necessarily mean that a lamp made with an array of LEDs will get the same rating...or that a fixture made with a couple LED lamps will even get close. You lose efficiency each time you add other parts to the system. And many times, when you hear about super-efficient LEDs, you're hearing about just the single LED, not about its efficiency in a complicated system.

If you do happen to be in a position where you can buy LEDs, and you care about the environment, this is something you need to be really critical about. A good green PR campaign isn't the same as actually green numbers.

Again, I want to stress that LEDs don't suck. And where they do suck, they're getting better. But I don't want you to get burned by hype. And right now the amount of hype surrounding these things would make Flava Flav blush.

*Yes, fluorescent lamps contain mercury. But so does the pollution from coal-fired power plants. This is part of what makes the green-ness of LEDs so complicated right now. If you get your energy clean, it might well be more green to buy an LED over a fluorescent, even if it uses more energy to produce the same amount of light. But if your energy comes from coal, that could change the equation, especially when you consider the fact that a lot of cities have good fluorescent recycling programs.

Thumbnail photo: Goins]]> http://boingboing.net/2009/10/23/leds-throwing.html/feed 80 http://boingboing.net/2009/10/20/freakonomics-sequel.html http://boingboing.net/2009/10/20/freakonomics-sequel.html#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:10:48 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker The Freakonomics guys have apparently either really dropped the ball when it comes to understanding science, or they're willfully ignoring it. Either way, I'm pretty disappointed.

The sequel's contrarian take on climate change--and the bad science it's steeped in--have been analyzed in exquisite detail by everybody from Paul Krugman, Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong, to the Union of Concerned Scientists, to various climate scientists spread hither and non about the Web.

That's a lot of links, but they're there so you can go back and read page-by-page breakdowns of the mistakes and inaccuracies, by experts, if you want. I think that's important, because I know at least some of you are going to assume that any criticism of this book and its contents is all about some violation of pseudo-religious orthodoxy. I want you to be able to go see that this is about science. If you just want a quick summary, though, read on...

There's a lot of stuff that the chapter on climate change gets wrong, but we can break it down into three key problems.

First, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt argue that carbon dioxide isn't really the cause of climate change. It's not really "the bad guy". They cite Stanford climate scientist Ken Caldeira as supporting this, but Caldeira says what he actually told them was that carbon dioxide wasn't the only bad guy. And that's true. There are several gases in the greenhouse gas family and they're all a problem to varying degrees. But that doesn't mean that CO2 isn't a problem. (If you read the links, there's some journalism "Inside Baseball" about whether Dubner and Levitt knew they were misrepresenting Caldeira and, if not, what happened instead.)

Second, they make the claim that the planet has actually been getting cooler for the last 10 years and, thus, climate change projections are wrong. That idea is based on data from a single study and is contradicted in others. Either way, short-term cooling doesn't invalidate a global warming trend. Why? Because global warming isn't a straight line going up. On a graph, this is a series of peaks and valleys. Close up, on the scale of decades, the trends appear to fluctuate up and down fairly randomly. Pull back and look at the last century, though, and there is clear upward movement. It doesn't really matter how hot or cold it was this year, or in 1999. What matters is what's happening, on a grand scale, between 1900 and 2009. (This link has the best in-depth explanation.)

The last thing I'm going to talk about is Dubner and Levitt's assertion that geoengineering is a better way of dealing with climate change than any attempts to change energy use or sourcing. This one, I'm less well-versed in, particularly when it comes to the economics of such an endeavor. Although, the J. Bradford DeLong links provide some context. But let's put it this way: Geoengineering is cool, but it's a big risk. You're basically running a massive, one-time experiment and hoping the models caught all the possible consequences. Not saying it's evil. Not saying we won't maybe need to try something like that someday. But it's not exactly a first-line-of-defense kind of weapon.

So, why do I care? Well, frankly, because I really enjoyed reading the original "Freakonomics" book. Dubner and Levitt are engaging writers, and they have a big audience. And that means they have a lot of influence. Part of me would like to ignore the problems with this new book, because it kind of comes across as an attention-grabbing ploy and I hate to bite the marketing stick. But, it's factually wrong. They're influential. And so their factual inaccuracies will enter into public debate as "fact". And so I feel the need to make a big, damn long post about it.

Instead of sending human divers underwater, Triton built a giant yellow submarine called the Sawfish — a 5,500-pound unmanned logging device capable of finding, chopping, and floating trees weighing up to 200 pounds to the surface from deep underwater. When pictures of the Sawfish circulated the blogosphere in 2006, three years after its initial deployment, the sub was harvesting softwood on the west coast of Canada. It has since increased its fleet to four, doubled each machine's lifting power, and expanded its mission to underwater hardwood forests in tropical reservoirs in Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa. Join me and Jim Hahurst, Triton's VP of Marketing, for a photo tour of how the new Sawfish works.

Guided by sonar, video cameras, and GPS, the Sawfish dives down under the surface and finds forests to harvest.

Once it finds the tree, the Sawfish grabs onto the bark with its grapples, which are like giant arms. It inserts a rolled up airbag that bolts onto the tree. Compressed air inflates the airbag. The saw on the Sawfish then cuts the trunk just below the airbag and stays there as the usable part of the tree shoots up to the surface. Then it moves on to the next one. The new Sawfish is capable of cutting and floating up 50 trees per dive.

When the airbags surface, a boat corals the floating trees and pulls them over to a barge area, where they are then transferred to a tugboat that takes them to shore for processing.

These photos were taken at a recent Triton mission in Kenyir Lake in Malaysia. "We got an invitation from the government to do this," Hahurst tells me. "Kenyir Lake had divers for underwater logging in the past, but they were keen to try out safer, more environmentally sound tech." The government gets a royalty and stumpage, but Triton gets full ownership of the logs.

There are about 300 million trees underwater, all of them lying still in a deep freeze, inert because the lack of air prevents them from sequestering carbon. "By putting these trees on the market, we potentially displace land-based logging," Hayhurst says. "There are 45,000 major dam reservations in the world, and we've identified the top 20 opportunities. This is kind of like mining, really — we know where the diamonds are." ]]> http://boingboing.net/2009/10/14/the-sawfish.html/feed 34 http://boingboing.net/2009/10/07/howd-they-do-that-po.html http://boingboing.net/2009/10/07/howd-they-do-that-po.html#comments Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:30:00 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker When I was visiting BoingBoing last spring, I told y'all about some research being done by Lewis Ziska from the USDA and Jackie Mohan from the University of Georgia on how poison ivy responds to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. (Answer: In a way that kind of sucks for people.)

What I didn't tell you was how the scientists figured out that CO2 makes ivy grow incredibly fast, and problematically poisonous. While some of the evidence comes from controlled studies done in a tidy, little lab, there's more to it than that.

These look a bit like high-voltage electricity transmission towers, or a Stonehenge-style monument built for some forest-dwelling version of Burning Man. Suffice to say, they are neither. Instead, they're actually giant structures of PVC pipe that Ziska, Mohan and their colleagues built to test the effects of CO2 on wild forest. The base rings are a 100 feet in diameter and vertical piping goes up to the very top of the forest canopy. Six towers total, in use from 1998 until 2004. Three blowing air. And three blowing a heady mix of air and carbon dioxide that pumped parts of the forest up to the ambient CO2 levels predicted for the year 2050.

And that was how the team learned something really neat. When I posted about this research before, somebody here asked whether other plants, besides poison ivy, got the same growth spurt from CO2 exposure. At the time, I didn't know. But talking to Mohan more, I found out that there's at least some basis for comparison. In particular, let's talk trees, turkey.

Both trees and poison ivy grew faster, when exposed to higher concentrations of CO2, than their oxygen-only counterparts. But poison ivy grew faster than the trees--150% faster, in fact, compared to a 20% increase in tree growth. The difference, according to Jackie Mohan, is that poison ivy, like all vines, is a bit lazy.

"Vines don't need to devote so much of their CO2 resources to growing these big, woody trunks," she says. "Instead, they can devote that to growing more green leaves, which increase photosynthesis some more. And it becomes a cycle."

This study was the first time the effects of CO2 had been researched like this in the wild. The next step will be to see how the growth of poison ivy differs between rural areas and cities, where CO2 levels are naturally higher thanks to a higher concentration of cars and industrial pollution. Mohan is working on that now. It's too early to tell, but she expects to find that the urban ivy is bigger and tougher than its country mouse cousin.

All images courtesy Jackie Mohan and Duke University.

In this picture, you can see the yellow lines that really seem to do a good job of efficiently linking up the whole country. Those power lines haven't been built yet. In the interactive part, you can take those off, revealing a clearer view of our current transmission infrastructure that looks more like a series of occasionally connected river systems than a grid.