jaginsburg.com
  • home
  • journalism | science | tech
    • sci | tech
  • exhibitions
    • introduction
    • mickey pallas
    • News art
  • children's media
  • photography
    • photography
    • book covers
  • blogs
    • Medium
    • better
    • PechaKucha
    • TrackerNews (archive)
    • archived faves

Green Circle: Redefining the Extractive Economy

12/7/2010

0 Comments

 
masthead
Recycling isn’t just sorting the trash for garbage pick-up any more. A new generation of designers, entrepreneurs and activists is coming up with all kind of clever ways to connect seemingly disparate supply chains, turn expense into profit and redefine the “extractive economy” through a mix of biomimicry and circular thinking.

The ancient alchemists aimed low, merely attempting to turn lead into gold for personal gain. The real magic, according to the chemists at start-up Micromidas , may be both muckier and microbial: turning sludge into bio-degradable plastic. If they are right, and their scheme scales commercially, it will be a win for everyone. What was once a problem will be transformed into an asset as a (literal) waste stream becomes a valuable feedstock. What was a  municipal cost will become a source of municipal income. And throw-away products made from eco-friendly plastic will, actually, goaway, decomposing into environmentally compatible parts, instead of swirling into eternity in middle-of-the-ocean gyres.

It is a radical re-think of the “extractive economy,” notes Ryan Smith, Micromidas’ CTO. After a few centuries of hauling finite resources—from fossil fuels to rare earth minerals—out of the ground, we have enough on the surface to keep us going, and in fairly good style, but only if we refocus our collective tech smarts and investment dollars on mining garbage.

Drilling for oil and refining it into a form that can be used to make a plastic bottle, for example,  is a long, complicated giant-carbon-footprint process. When the bottle is tossed, the energy embedded in its manufacture is lost as well.

Read More
0 Comments

The Farm Next Door: Urban Agriculture, Biomimicry, Aquaponics, Why Worms are Priceless & How Will Allen Aims to Fix the World

9/25/2009

0 Comments

 
masthead
Healthier food, better access for poor, landfill relief, reduced carbon footprint, off-the-shelf set up, replicable, scalable, jobs bonanza, includes fish; Can a “small food” paradigm succeed where Big Food has failed?

The next agricultural revolution will not be patented. It will not depend on genetically modified seeds or petrochemical fertilizers. It will not poison or deplete aquifers. It will not erode topsoil that took millennia to form. Nor will distance between “farm and fork” be measured in thousands of gas-guzzling miles.

The next agricultural revolution won’t even take place on the farm – at least as we know it.

It will be potted and stacked, set up in hoop houses and warehouses, sprout from rooftops, vacant lots and lawns. Worms will be celebrated, bacteria will flourish and grubs nurtured. It will be drought and flood resistant and productive all year long.

The next agricultural revolution will be street-smart and urban, yet mimic nature far more closely than agro-giant operations sprawled over hundreds or even thousands of monotonous monoculture acres.

Best of all, the next agricultural revolution is well underway, just 5 blocks from Milwaukee’s largest public housing project, off a busy street, behind an unassuming farm-stand surrounded by sunflowers basking in the brilliant light of a mid-September afternoon. Welcome to Growing Power.

Read More
0 Comments

Phone Riff: Hope Phones, Healthy Texting, Conflict Minerals, Ecological Intelligence, Blue Sweaters and Doing the Right Thing

5/26/2009

0 Comments

 
masthead
Hope Phones is one of those “Gosh, yes!” ideas:
  • Get people to donate old cell phones to a recycling company
  • Get recycling company to assign each phone a value
  • Use value to trade for refurbished phones
  • Donate refurbished phones to clinics in developing countries to use for sending health-related text messages
  • Good begets good
Stanford student Josh Nesbit, who came up with the scheme, spent last summer at a tiny hospital in rural Malawi armed with 100 refurbished phones ($10 per), a used laptop and some free software called FrontlineSMS for managing text messages. Could he set up a phone network to deliver more and better health care to the 250,000 people living in the region served by the hospital?

Read More
0 Comments

The Carbon NEGATIVE Option: Why Tim Flannery & James Lovelock Love Biochar

2/17/2009

0 Comments

 
masthead
“Sustainable” isn’t sustainable. It isn’t even achievable, according to several researchers presenting at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Global carbon emissions have accelerated so dramatically over the last eight years, we are “now outside the entire envelope of possibilities” reviewed by the IPCC. Sure enough, sea levels are rising and rising faster than predicted. Meanwhile, biofuels, the great green hope of so many, have only made things worse, leading to a increase in slash & burn farming in the tropics. Indeed, we could find ourselves “effectively burning rain forests in our gas tanks,” noted one scientist.

TrackerNews has been full of  stories over the last few months painting the same grim picture:

Read More
0 Comments

Matchmaking: On Soil, Lost Ideas, Terra Preta, Carbon Sequestration and Amy B. Smith

12/2/2008

0 Comments

 
masthead
A few days ago, I posted a suite of “green bar” links on TrackerNews about soil health and farming that includedNational Geographic piece— “Our Good Earth” —by Charles Mann.

Mann starts out describing in great detail just  how stunningly bad things are: 7.5 million acres degraded worldwide from compaction, erosion and deforestation (according to the most comprehensive report of its kind, which is now 17 years old…). From America’s breadbasket in the Midwest where $400,000 satellite-guided tractors literally take the breath out the soil by squeezing out all the air, to wrong-headed one-size-fits-all Maoist farm policies turned the Loess Plateu, one of the most fertile places on the planet, into “arguably the worst soil erosion in the world,” it is a devastating picture of agricultural folly.

Read More
0 Comments

    background

    The TrackerNews Project was a demo aggregator I developed for InSTEDD, an independent spin-off of Google.org's humanitarian practice. It covered health issues, humanitarian work and technology.

    archives

    November 2013
    November 2011
    October 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    October 2010
    September 2010
    August 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010
    April 2010
    February 2010
    January 2010
    December 2009
    November 2009
    October 2009
    September 2009
    August 2009
    July 2009
    May 2009
    April 2009
    February 2009
    December 2008
    November 2008
    October 2008

    Categories

    All
    Agriculture
    Architecture
    Big Data
    China
    Climate Change
    Communications
    Conferences
    Cyber Security
    Deforestation
    Demographics
    Disease Surveillance
    Earthquake
    Energy
    Environment
    Food
    Food Aid
    Free Press
    Haiti
    Health
    Hunger
    Innovation
    Instedd
    Land Mines
    Lighting
    Microfinance
    Mining
    Nuclear
    Oceans
    Philanthropy
    Pollution
    Probiotics
    Recycling
    Sanitation
    Social Enterprise
    Solar
    Tech
    Terrorism
    Transportation
    Travel
    Trees
    Vaccines
    Water
    Water Borne Disease
    Water-borne Disease
    Weather

    •
introduction
Picture
sci / tech
blogs
children's media
Picture
exhibitions
photography
Website designed by 
J.A. Ginsburg