NatureLand: What They Used to Call the Environment
bcohen | January 23, 2009This is a follow-up to a post a few weeks back about the One Laptop Per Child program. I had offered that post by way of summary to a class exercise about technology in cultural context. In part, it was an exercise about discussing the place of technology in global development efforts; at the same time it was an effort to take the history of technology discussions we'd been having and place them into a kind of global history context. For example, we needed to see more of the prior history of Western aid in the non-western world--the patterns of high modernist development, environmental…
bcohen | January 8, 2009The genre of "environmental documentary" or "environmental film" is large enough now that it can suitably hold sub-sets. Here is a start to a filmography of agro-environmental documentaries and films. Since it is by no means exhaustive, I welcome all additions. I should say too that although many of these almost necessarily touch on GMOs and biotechnology in general, I am looking more for ones that put the lens on alternative and sustainable agriculture as their centerpiece.
Princeton's Environmental Film Festival (currently underway), is hosting some of these agro-food films, along with…
bcohen | December 29, 2008For the new year, in the winter's gray, here are three pictures of summer color past.
Happy new year.
bcohen | December 1, 2008Here's something tasty. Or odd. You decide.
Fruit Balloons, by C. Warner
From the Telegraph (as found through Arts and Letters Daily), comes a unique series by London-based photographer Carl Warner. It says there he "makes foodscapes: landscapes made of food." The images below are borrowed from the Telegraph's slideshow, who borrowed it from Warner's homepage. To keep them under the same umbrella as the prior landscape and modernity images (trees; the West; the pasture; the A-bomb), I'll note this: we have here food items from actual physical landscapes (not represented landscapes), re-…
bcohen | November 19, 2008The Morning News has another stunning series of landscape photographs on display and another chance to reflect on the intersection of landscapes, nature, and technology. It's possible that each of those words should be in quotes--one point brought up by previous commenters in this Landscape and Modernity Series (the West; the pasture; the A-bomb) --to suggest better the implications of defining them. Perhaps so.
Myoung Ho Lee: Tree # 3, Archival Ink-jet print on paper, 100x80cm, 2006
These images are by Myoung Ho Lee, whose work you can find and purchase at Lens Culture. Mike Smith, who…
bcohen | October 27, 2008These offer another set of landscape images (here were some others: one; two), these punctuated by the contrast of nuclear sky, horizon, and military maneuver. I saw them at this site, though that site was reposting images from the book How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb, by Peter Kuran. The Cal Lit Review site says this by way of couching the images:
Between 1945 and 1962, the United States conducted over 300 atmospheric nuclear tests above the ground, in the ocean or in outer space.
On August 5, 1963, the United States and the former Soviet Union signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty,…
bcohen | October 20, 2008In my line of work, fenceline discussions are more often about pollution from chemical manufacturers that border residential communities -- "fenceline communities" like those all up and down Cancer Alley in Louisiana. But the fenceline images below are in keeping with the set of landscape photographs I referred to in a post last week. And rather than the western scenery captured by Jesse Chehak in those images, the ones below (taken by my wife) are of a regular old central Virginia farm site. They put the human contrivance of fencing, bordering, containing, demarcating , etc., in contrast…
bcohen | October 17, 2008These are some samples of a set of stunning landscape photographs out west by the photographer Jesse Chehak. The Morning News has an interview with Chehak, who is someone I didn't know about until coming across their slideshow. Go there for larger, more vibrant versions of the reduced-size images sampled below. I'm taken by the Primm, NV, one the most. Something about the modern clash of color and mountain and angles and fabrication amidst/against the scale of sky. There's also a lot to be said about the Rio Blanco one, with the dead deer in front of the fenceline, in the foreground…
bcohen | October 10, 2008Appalachian Voices shows you how to connect to legislators shilling for Big Coal and how to follow the $$. They do good work there at AV. We've pointed to their actions before (with Mountaintop Removal, for one).
Go to this link: Follow the Coal Money. Then click on Zip Code and Name search. Then you get two ways to see the connections-- one, a visual mapping that connects your political representative to her/his funders; the other, tabulated data. The image below shows the results for Virgil Goode (R-VA), who is (unfortunately) the congressional representative for my district.
Breathing Space: On the Historical Connections of Allergies and Landscapes, with Author Gregg Mitman
bcohen | October 1, 2008Part 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (Yale University Press, 2007), with its author Gregg Mitman. Prof. Mitman is Interim Director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and William Coleman Professor of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also a professor in the Department of Medical History and the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies.
If you were to ask how one could hold together so many…
bcohen | September 29, 2008This one's about integrity, oversight, and endocrine disruption and how the tangled web grows bigger by the day. It's a guest post by Jody Roberts, of the Chemical Heritage Foundation.
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Two news stories in last week's edition of Chemical and Engineering News perfectly demonstrate the complex interweaving of technical, social, and political processes in attempting to grapple with emerging sciences and environmental health. In the article, "Debating Science," we see once again the hot button issue of science and politics, science in politics, and politics in science. In "Test of Endocrine…
worldsfair | September 25, 2008
ELIZABETH MAY: Ooh oh - I know this one: Something to do with the colour green. That's right. Wasn't she in Anne of Green Gables? "Oh Elizabeth May, I do believe that your frock is on backwards, which is not the impression of civility one wants to make in Cape Breton." (or something like that). This is important, because I can't remember if she was one of the nice ones in the show, or the girl who was basically a real bitch. That would make a big difference in whether I'd support her or not. Anyway, I'm a big fan of historical dramas which is great because at least someone will talk…
bcohen | September 19, 2008"Construction of green roofs grew 30 percent in North America last year," reports the Chicago Tribune.
(image credit: G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times)
White roofs, green roofs, what can I say? My grandfather was a roofer.
The architects and engineers have done a lot with green roofs here at UVA, especially as part of their ecoMOD project (noted in earlier posts). I've had the fortune to advise a few undergrad projects on this and, in great part through those students, learn about the feasibility, benefits, and challenges of green roofs.
Here's the New York Times chiming in a few weeks…
bcohen | September 19, 2008More low technology solutions to energy problems. Just ask guest blogger Jody, he's always going on about this. Or Isaac Newton. He knew something about light.
Here's an L.A. Times story,"To slow global warming, install white roofs," reporting on it.
But why not title it, "To reduce energy use, install white roofs"?
Why not, "To save a billion dollars, install white roofs"?
Why not, "To practice more ecologically sustainable living, install white roofs"?
Why not, "To stand out from your neighbor, install white roofs"?
Why not, "To instigate a conversation on the proper social etiquette…
bcohen | September 13, 2008The same guy who sent me those Patagonian Volcano Storm pictures (thanks Dana, by the way) also forwarded these images of a mass migration of stingrays. To quote the note I got, they look "like giant leaves floating in the sea." I first thought it was some kind of quilt, a checkered pattern on a blanket. The pictures were taken off the Yucatan Peninsula by Sandra Critelli.
bcohen | September 12, 2008A former student sent along these fascinating images. The e-mail said: "Tons of dust and ash from the eruption of the Chaitin volcano poured into the night sky just as an electric storm passed overhead. The resulting collision created a spectacular sight as lightning flickered around the dust cloud amid the orange glow of the volcano. The eruption was all the more spectacular because the Chaitin volcano, 800 miles (1,290km) south of Santiago, has been dormant for hundreds - if not thousands of years."
Apparently, this happened in May.
(The note didn't say who took these, so I don…
bcohen | September 11, 2008"As America's colleges and universities search for ways to go green, many are looking at the dining hall....where five times more energy and water are consumed than any place else on campus." (WVTF)
Small things matter.
Here at U.Va. and apparently at several hundred other colleges, Aramark--a primary food distribution company for large organizations like schools and hospitals and corporations--is going without trays. (Listen here. See here.) Large-scale food distribution provides both the benefits of efficiencies of scale and the drawbacks of efficiencies of scale. They can get a lot of…
worldsfair | September 4, 2008
Actually, the clues are probably too obvious but how cool is this...
(Answer below the fold)
Here - this should pretty much give it away.
Yes, the answer is the Pacific Ocean, about 4km deep.
What we have here is a wonderful example of science culture, specifically from science types who study the ocean (whether it be with a earth science or life science angle). This cup which was given to me by Dave Semenuik (who also blogs over at terry.ubc.ca),. Dave's research focuses on monitoring trace metals in certain marine life, partly from an evolutionary angle, but also as a read out of ocean…
bcohen | September 3, 2008That's how today's McSweeney's column began at least. In the course of revision, it became "An Anti-Environmentalist Writes His Next Column While Eating Take-out and Driving His Hummer." My motivation was this asinine column by Tierney a little over a month ago. Did I mention how unnerving this guy's reasoning is? It is. It's bad. Asinine, one might say.
If you don't meander over today, the permanent link is here.
bcohen | August 12, 2008In a time of increasing concern for water quality and availability, nuclear power facilities require enormous quantities of water and put back effluent into those nearby water sources. At a time of carbon counting, they also generate considerable carbon emissions through the process of construction and with the life-cycle chain of fuel (uranium) mining, milling, transporting, and disposing. As Americans relearn the breadth of what an environmental issue is, nuclear plants all the while create new social and cultural problems for community stability and autonomy. Coal-fired plants quite…