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Image source: 2twentythree3.com So. You've been reading Treehugger for years. You know everything there is to know about green. You probably know what we're going to post even before we do. In that case, you're probably up for the Smart Cart Quiz Challenge. Brought to you by the new eBay Marketplace, World of Good, The Smart Cart Quiz shows consumers how they can "vote" with their almighty dollar. Each question asks what sounds like an outrageous statement, and then includes facts with the answer so the reader has a comparative figure for what that money could be use...

Proving that Big Coal's nefarious influence knows no bounds, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown that pollution from coal burning has contaminated the Arctic for the last 100 years. Measurements taken from an ice core in Greenland, dating from 1772 to 2003, showed that the levels of the toxic heavy metals cadmium, thallium and lead were much higher than predicted -- which may have impa...

Obama lovers can wear their presidential endorsement on their sleeves—literally—with pro-Barack T-shirts from Obama Is The Man, the brain child of Aron Kressner of Vivavi. Made from 100 percent organic cotton and printed with water-based inks, the shirts come in six different sizes, in both men's and women's styles. (How's that for democratic?) Better still, a buck from each sale goes to the Obama campaign. You can even view videos made by people who are promoting change in their own live...

The REACTIVATE!! exhibition at the at the Espai d' Art Contemporani de Castelló, near Valencia (Spain), being an almost endless source of wonders i tried to cover last week (see REACTIVATE!! Part 1, Urban reanimations and the minimal intervention and REACTIVATE!! Part 2, Instant urbanism), i still have a last story in my magic bag to share with you:

Some of the projects presented in Castellon were commissioned by the contemporary art center to engage in a site-specific fashion with the theme of 'remodeled spaces and minimal interventions.'

The most poetical installation was created by ex.studio, two Barcelona-based Mexican architects Patricia Meneses and Iván Juárez with an impressive portfolio chock-full of projects that investigate and experiment with new ways of relating space with society.

Designed as minimal spaces for auto-reflexion, the Refugios Urbanos are 6 suspended semi-transparent pods that temporarily invade the building of the EACC and its public space.

Looking like chrysalids, the flexible structure can only contain one person. Its very delicate walls allow the inhabitant to enjoy privacy as well as a softly blurred view of the surrounding world.

Refugios Urbanos proposes new ways to inhabit and imagine space where people are both part and parcel of the city and isolated from it in order to better contemplate it.

A second project worth its weight in blog ink is María Navascues, Ramón Francos and Celia García's Atomish Garden

It all starts with the Pet Garden! At the opening of the Reactivate!! exhibition, visitors were invited to adopt a piece of garden. Each of them would take home a plant or plot of land to take care of it. Like real pets, owners can take them along for a walk in the street. They also require a lot of care and attention.

The flower pot comes with a code giving pet owners access to the Petgarden website that gives them all the necessary instruction to pamper their botanical pet. Besides, they can share with other woners the story, health news and adventure of the plant on a blog. Current technologies enable thus the various parts of this 'atomized garden' to form a community able to stay in virtual but close proximity.

All images courtesy of Espai d' Art Contemporani de Castelló.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 4:50 PM)

I first came across the name of this extraordinary place in one of the BBC's Imagine-documentaries about German director Werner Herzog, who asked to be met in what he called one of his favorite places in Los Angeles, The Museum of Jurassic Technology. After locating it in Culver City, BBC's Alan Yentob remarks: "I begin to understand why Herzog likes it here. The exhibits in the museum cross the line between fact and fiction, between reality and imagination."

Front of the museum in Culver City, Los Angeles

The collections of the museum, which was founded in 1989 and is being curated by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Wilson, span over three little buildings and consist of pieces from about a dozen sub-collections which are often centered around a certain subject such as belief and knowledge or personalities like Athanasius Kircher and their work. But, unlike what one might expect of a technology museum, throughout all of the exhibits, the boundaries between history and fiction, magic and reason, narrative and scientific method are in fact completely fluid (and the curators pleasurably make no effort to make things more clear, even indulge in elaborate descriptions and allusions that make it even more mysterious).

Many of the pieces consist of wonderfully crafted models and often amazing analog visual tricks for superimposing images. As a result, the whole space turns into a magical wunderkammer like I've rarely seen it, and probably one of the most astonishing approaches to the culture of art and technology on the planet. A few examples from the collections:

Duck's Breath

Tell the Bees...Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition, is one of the newest additions and reflects on the relationship between ancient beliefs and recipes and how some of them still bear importance today. Yet, the application of lithium for neurological illnesses sits right next to the practice of letting children breathe in the cold breath of a duck or goose.

An especially intriguing practice refers to bees, which were understood to be related to and a manifestation of the muse from which comes the bees alter identity of the muse's bird. And, the practice of telling of the bees of important events in the lives of the family has been for hundreds of years a widely observed practice and, although it varies somewhat among peoples, it is invariably a most elaborate ceremonial. The procedure is that as soon as a member of the family has breathed his or her last a younger member of the household, often a child, is told to visit the hives. and rattling a chain of small keys taps on the hive and whispers three times: "Little Brownies, little brownies, your mistress is dead."

The Conversion of St. Eustace at Mentorella

Another collection, titled The World is Bound with Secret Knots, is devoted to the life and work of 17th century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, who dedicated himself to his parallel obsessions with magnetism, musicology, astronomy, archaeology, and linguistics, Kircher researched and compiled enormous amounts of data, invented innumerable optical, magnetic, and acoustic devices, composed music, poetry, and imaginative fiction. Created with the Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum in Hagen, Germany, the exhibit consist of many gorgeous pepper's ghost-style dioramas which illustrate Kircher's range of fascinations and inventions, especially in relation to his theory of magnetism being the invisible force that binds all the universe together.

Garden of Eden on Wheels

One part of the permanent exhibition focusses on Geoffrey Sonnabend, who in his three volume work Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter, departed from all previous memory research with the premise that memory is an illusion. Forgetting, he believed, not remembering is the inevitable outcome of all experience. Sonnabend believed that long term or "distant" memory was illusion, but similarly he questioned short term or "immediate" memory. On a number of occasions Sonnabend wrote that there is only experience and its decay, by which he meant to suggest that what we typically call short term memory is, in fact, our experiencing the decay of an experience.

The Sonnabend Model of Obliscience

Sonnabend believed that this phenomenon of true memory was our only connection to the past, if only the immediate past, and, as a result, he became obsessed with understanding the mechanisms of true memory by which experience decays. In an effort to illustrate his understanding of this process, Sonnabend, over the next several years, constructed an elaborate Model of Obliscence (or model of forgetting) which, in its simplest form, can be seen as the intersection of a plane and cone.

As with many pieces in this exhibition, it's practically impossible to find out whether Geoffrey Sonnabend even ever existed, but then again that's part of it all. As Herzog puts it: "Inventions [in every sense of the word] have a deeper reach, a deeper stratum of truth quite often than we'd like to admit. And that's the beauty of the museum here."

Many more photos here, and an interview with David Wilson.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 4:47 PM)

:: Beat the back to school blues with a splash of green! Consult our How to Go Green: Back to School guide. :: Take comfort food to healthier heights with this fresh-from-the-farm Olive Oil Mashed Potatoes recipe. :: Follow these five uplifting and energizing tips to give green conferences, parties and gatherings more zest. ...

When By Kids For Kids (BKFK) and The Weather Channel launched the Going Green Challenge to inspire kids to come up with neat inventions to help make an eco-difference there’s little doubt that the field was an open one. With a myriad of issues in need of resolution, the grand prize winner, Elizabeth Rintels, 12, of Keswick, Virginia, came up with a “Water Watcher” invention that helps monitor water usage in an ingenious way....

Geothermal energy is probably the greatest potential renewable energy source with the least amount of public awareness. It certainly spends much less time in the public gaze than wind, solar or biofuels. Recently the US Department of Ene...

photo by Theirry via flickr I find it more than slightly ironic that the National Clean Energy Summit is being held in Las Vegas, a city that on environmental grounds and water usage alone probably should not exist, but nonetheless it’s happening. Yesterday evening Bill Clinton opened the event will a speech which, among other things, outlined what he believes the US government should do to support renewable energy. At the Federal level these are his recommendations: And my comments, where warranted, in italics. ...

We just got our fall catalog from our German publisher, and look what they put on the cover:

We were so excited that we could hardly tear our eyes off it, until we saw pages 1-4:

Thanks to Worldchanging readers and contributors in Germany for your support of our book! In appreciation, we dove into our archives for some of our best recent posts on German innovations and leadership:

The Autobahn's Future and One-Liter Class Racing

Decoding the World's Best Energy Policies

The Afterlife of German Coal Mining

Enjoy! And if you'd like your own copy of the book, click here.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 2:01 PM)

Via PhotoBasement Bike Paths World's 10 Best Biking Trails That's the Bike Path? Good Luck! Mexico City to Build 186 Miles of Bike Paths by 2012...

photo by tokyofortwo via flickr In an effort to raise awareness of global warming, Japan is planning to label a range of consumer goods to show the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted in their manufacture, delivery and disposal. The project, the exact scope of which has yet to be finalized, is expected to begin in April 2009, AFP reports. Labeling products with their carbon footprint could be a good way to make people more aware of the environmental impact of things...

The Summer Olympic Games in Beijing kicked off on August 8 amidst competition, national pride and a Blue Sky day. Well, a ŒBlue Sky day‚ according to Beijing standards. The Detroit Free Press reports that only one percent of China‚s urban dwellers breathe air that is safe according to European norms. Accordingly, many athletes are training outside Beijing, and some have caused a stir by

Image source: WildGreenYonder With "need" (how to ensure all of those alternative plastics - corn, soy, sugarcane- are reused, now that regular plastic is poo-poo'd), comes a "market." The Bioplastics Recycling Consortium was created to "develop an effective, efficient and economical recovery system and end markets for post-consumer bioplastic material." Bioplastics are the alternatives to petroleum-based plastics, and are commonly made from corn, soy, sugar cane, or maize, and are thought to be a better source than petroleum-based plastic because they biodegrade - or at least can break down within a year under the right c...

photo: FUEL Given that there are much better feedstocks for biofuels than corn, it never ceases to amaze me when I hear about another corn ethanol biorefinery opening. Oh wait, I forgot, the United States is addicted to corn and corn subsidies and then dumping it in foreign markets or producing a biofuel from that very nearly requires more energy to make it than it provides...forgive me, that’s another post entirely. This one’s just about telling you about a new corn ethanol plant opening. 100 Million Gallons of Corn Ethanol Produced Annually In a bit over two-months’ time the state of Georgia will have its first corn-based ethanol...

The Federal Drug Administration, responsible for determining the safety of what Americans put in their bodies, has looked at the dangers of Bisphenol A and concluded that "adequate margin of safety exists for BPA at current levels of exposure from food contact uses.” Their study acknowledges that the stuff gets into our bodies: "FDA estimates that BPA exposure from use in food contact materials in infants and adults is 2.42 µg/kg bw/day and 0.185 µg/kg bw/day, respectively." but also states that the "FDA has determined the appropriate no observed adverse effect level (NOAEL) for its assessment of BPA to be the NOAEL for systemic toxicity of 5 mg/kg bw/day (5000 µg/kg bw...

O'burger, the first organic fast food joint in Los Angeles, where the burgers and everything else are all organic. What does that mean exactly? Well, "the buns, the sauce, the vegetables, meat, ketchup, mustard, fries and salad dressing" - it's all organic. Yum! What about the burgers? Well the beef comes from grass-fed cows, the turkey burgers all come from free-range, grass fed turkeys and the veggie patties are vegan-friendly and made in-house from corn, oats and vegetables. According to O'burger, "if its edible, its organic."...

This year, Unilever-owned Ben & Jerry's sponsored a student/green entrepreneur from each of eight European countries in its three-year-old mentoring program Climate Change College. CO2 reductions plus behavior change The sponsorship chose the eight students for their innovative ideas on climate change reductions - the winning solutions had to not only reduce CO2 but also change behavior. For nine months students received mentoring on their business plans (worth about $30,000), and in addition, a scientific field trip to the arctic and approximately $10,000 to launch their selected idea. One of this year's students, Cara Augustenborg, is st...

Downtown housing affordability is an international problem.

Interesting article:  Alan Ehrenhalt argues in The New Republic that cities throughout North America are undergoing a "demographic inversion," in which the center city is once again becoming home to the well-off rather than the poor.

Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.

That certainly rings true for Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, too.  In fact, Ehrenhalt discusses Vancouver, with its "forest of slender, green, condo skyscrapers," at some length.  So apparently, the problems of urban housing affordability aren't just local ones; they're international in scope. (At least we're in good company.)

The article also makes a trenchant observation: the recent North American view of the city as a dumping ground for people who are too poor to escape is something of a historical anomaly.  More typically, cities have been magnets for wealth, not repositories for the impoverished.  Recent trends are, as much as anything else, a return to historic norms. 

Still, Ehrenhalt argues that the urban resurgence is being driven by some ahistorical demographic shifts:  later childbearing, professional couples choosing fewer (or no) kids, more empty nesters in good health.  Those kinds of shifts are likely to persist -- which will mean plenty more people will opt for urbanity over suburban living.  And high demand will likely mean higher prices for homes close to downtown.

So my question in all of this is:  given that people with lots of disposable income are choosing to move closer to downtown, is there a good way -- or, indeed, any way -- to retain decent, affordable housing for middle- and lower-income folks close to downtown jobs? 

I used to think that the best answer was simply to build more housing close to downtown, in part by getting rid of unhelpful restrictions on development.  Build enough housing, I figured, and supply and demand would meet at a more amenable price point.  But I'm no longer sure how much that will help; Vancouver's center city has grown enormously, but prices haven't moderated.  It could be that downtown development is a virtuous cycle with a vicious edge:  as the city gets wealthier, its amenities get better and better, attracting even more wealth -- and making it harder and harder for middle-income folks to find a decent, affordable place to live that doesn't require a long and fuel-wasting commute.

I'm not sure that there's a simple solution here.  I think it's worth a look around.  Has any city -- from Paris to Chicago to Vancouver -- found a good antidote to high housing costs near the city center?  If anyone knows of effective, tried-and-true models for urban housing affordability, I'm all ears.

Then again, this is not the worst sort of problem for a city to have. Consider the alternative.  For decades, wealthy folks avoided downtown, and many urban centers became concentrated enclaves of deep poverty.  The results -- economic segregation of the inner city -- fostered far worse social ills than housing affordability presents today.

Of course, some folks are opposed to gentrification in any form; but it's worth remembering that back in the 1970s and 1980s -- when cities had far less little wealth and economic vitality -- life for downtown residents was pretty lousy.  Idealizing that past is a mistake.  In comparison, current trends in downtown revitalization -- despite the affordability problems -- are in many ways a breath of fresh air.

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user hfabulous.]

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(Posted by Clark Williams-Derry in Urban Design and Planning at 8:48 AM)

LittleBits CEO Monica Rodgers has contributed yet another great green tip for our eco-tips project! Monica's video shows how children can enjoy reusing old paper, cardboard and