Greening the city with ecological street art

Evian recently launched an amazing curation platform for “wonder” contents called “The Source”. The idea behind the source is to create this place where you can revive, experience, share your sense of wonder by exploring content that’s inspirational, energizing, entertaining, surprising and moving. Can Green be wonder? These pieces of street art curated by evian the Source show us it can!

Reblogged from Evian The Source :

What if street art and graffiti could add a touch of green to the city? The artist Edina Tokodi and her collective, Mosstika, have come up with a way to make it happen! Using moss like paint, they cover the gray walls with nature’s wonders adding an unsuspected ecological dimension to street art!

Check out the rest of these amazing pictures on Evian the Source !

@laurencefoucher

Picture of the day: what does this make you think of?

Reblogged from Design Boom:

Nishan Jethi: the “clenoscope”

Littering is a hard-to-change habit. the challenge was to make people throw waste into the trash. turning to the kaleidoscope for reference,

The act of throwing garbage is now fun. when you place the unwanted objects into the container, it creates a beautiful pattern. 
Experimenting with user interaction, the product was placed in a public setting in a children’s park in Mumbai, India.

Read More

UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Programme is 40 years old

In 1971, UNESCO launched the Man and the Biosphere Programme to study our impact on nature and how it could be minimized. 40 years later, the programme continues to shape the future of sustainability and contribute to new global governance on ecology.

In 2011, the MAB celebrated its 40^th anniversary at an international conference “For life, for the future, biosphere reserves and climate change” in Dresden. MAB is short for the Man and the Biosphere Programme, an intergovernmental scientific programme launched by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 1971. Not only was it a landmark for international efforts on sustainability, but it has also contributed to the emergence of a “world government” on these issues. Let’s see how.

The genesis of MAB

In 1968, UNESCO, together with FAO, WHO and the United Nations, organized the “Biosphere Conference”, a Paris-based intergovernmental gathering of experts who were called to reflect on “the scientific basis for the rational use and conservation of the resources of the biosphere”. At the time, it was the first worldwide meeting, at a governmental level, to address environmental issues and to adopt a series of recommendations. The late 1960s, and to an even greater degree the early 1970s, were a time of growing awareness – and concern – regarding mankind’s impact on the environment. In 1972, the first Earth Summit was held in Rio, as public concern started to build regarding the pressure that a growing world population was putting on the planet’s resources. While some advocated a reduction in our demographic growth, others claimed that the main problem was in fact how much the developed world was consuming, and the means of production it used to satisfy consumerism’s appetite. In any case, it was now obvious that something had to be done to curb biodiversity loss. The “Biodiversity Conference” and its recommendations, and the International Co-ordinating Council that was formed afterwards, advised that panels of experts should be convened in the member States and biosphere reserves established in various places around the world, all of which prepared the ground for the MAB programme, officially inaugurated by UNESCO in 1971.

Read More

James Lovelock: Gaïa: A New Look at Life on Earth

Focus on one of the founding works of modern ecology: the Gaia hypothesis, unveiled to the world by scientist James Lovelock at the end of the 1970’s.

In 1979, British scientist James E. Lovelock published Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, the first in a series of works in which he would tirelessly expose the discovery which was his life’s work: the Gaia hypothesis. His theory came as a shock to many scientists and to the public, and durably framed the ecological approach to environmental issues. Flashback on a book, and its author, that created a new way of looking at the world that we live in, and of how to interact with it.

From Mars to Gaia

James Lovelock warns his readers: “This book is about a search for life, and the quest for Gaia is an attempt to find the largest living creature on Earth.” He explains that this quest started while he was working, in the mid-sixties, as a consultant to a team in the Jet Propulsion Laboratories at the California Institute of Technology, whose goal was to “devise ways and means of detecting life on Mars”. This job led him to wonder what the real nature of life was, and how it could be recognized – and to discover that there was almost nothing in scientific literature which resembled “a comprehensive definition of life as a physical process, on which one could base the design of life-detection experiments”. This lack of understanding of life itself was an issue, given that a scientific process needed to be defined to evidence the presence of life on Mars, or lack thereof. Lovelock then thought of life detection by atmospheric analysis, which was especially pertinent since Mars has no oceans: if there was life there, it certainly had made use of the atmosphere to establish itself. Lovelock started to dig into how it all worked on Earth, and how the study of the atmosphere could lead to the scientific and unquestionable conclusion that there was indeed life on our planet. Conclusion: “the only feasible explanation of the Earth’s highly improbable atmosphere was that it was being manipulated on a day-to-day basis from the surface, and that the manipulator was life itself.” In other words, that life was maintaining the conditions of its own subsistence by manipulating and regulating the atmosphere. Lovelock’s mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories then ended, but the idea had taken root deep inside his mind – where it had first been planted by the conquest of space!

Read More

The family tree of ecology

Click on the picture to enlarge the infographic

Over the past century, ecology has become a main concern for mankind, and thus for governments, international organizations and companies. But where does the concept come from ? Who forged it, what events led it to acquire such importance, and how does ecology now belong to our collective unconscious ?

@Adeline_Bordot

Last week, we had the chance to observe a gorgeous phenomenon referred to as the “Supermoon” or “Perigee Moon”.

Here are some pictures made by The Big Picture on this phenomenon, click on the following link to see more photos.

Reblogged from The Big Picture :

The night sky on May 5 was animated by the once-a-year cosmic event of the perigee moon. Popularly known as the “Supermoon”, the moon appears much larger above us when the elliptical orbit brings it within 221,802 miles to Earth, the closest point. The effect is magnified during a full moon, when we see our nearest celestial neighbor appear roughly 20 percent brighter and 15 percent larger. Collected here are images taken just before, during, and just after the perigee moon of 2012.

When plastic becomes part of Nature’s recycling system

Plastic is widely acknowledged as an environmental plague, but replacement solutions are hard to find and it seems that we would never be able to live without it. But what if a revolutionary decision was taken at the 2032 Earth Summit?

2032. The Rio + 40 Earth Summit which has just ended was the scene of a surprising, courageous and visionary decision: to “eradicate all non-biodegradable and polluting plastics within the next 20 years”. A bold statement that immediately drew criticism from representatives of the petrochemical and plastic industries and oil-producing countries, who argued in a joint statement that a world without plastic was “inconceivable and simply impossible to attain”, and that this “utopia (would) soon die by itself”. However, with the exception of OPEC member countries and the United States, every country represented at the Earth Summit co-signed the declaration and committed to achieving quantifiable goals. An ad hoc international organizationis expected to be created within the next few months. A world without plastic seems to be dawning. Flash-back on how the need to eradicate plastic has become an imperative over the past 50 years, and how new solutions to replace it were found.

Why plastic must disappear

The decision to eradicate “traditional” plastic was fervently supported by the main global powers, led by China, India and Brazil, who chose at the turn of the 2020s to encourage the transition towards a world without petroleum. Even Brazil, then an oil exporter, decided to forego this activity and focus on more sustainable energies. At the time, Chinese president Xi Jinping declared: “If we, the nations still known in the Western world as “emerging countries”, want to maintain the economic leadership position we have established, we must free ourselves from dependency on oil and fossil resources as soon as possible.” Awareness was then growing over the catastrophe that plastic had become for the environment. The discovery of the Great Garbage Patch in the 1990s was the first and most visible sign of how it had invaded every part of nature: this Patch of plastic waste that floated in the North Pacific, between California and Japan, amounted to 3.5 million tons of garbage in 2012. The effects on biodiversity and wildlife were dramatic: countless birds found dead with their stomachs full of plastic, tortoises that mistook plastic bags for jellyfish and suffocated on them, fish killed by the tiny particles of plastic they ingested, etc. According to the NGO Oceana, in 2010, 675 tons of waste were thrown into the sea each hour!

Read More