Lovely example of biomimicry from Ecovative via Grist:
Usually you do not want fungi in the walls of your home. But Ecovative is building a home in which having fungi in the walls is the entire point. The “Mushroom Tiny House” will use mycelium (the mass of threadlike “roots” that mushrooms use to take in nutrition) for insulation.
According to Inhabitat, this stuff is basically asbestos except that it’s not bad for the planet, won’t give you cancer, and is related to something you might put on a pizza…
An interesting ‘small, local, smart solution’ – maybe one of the world’s shortest commercial supply chains? “On a recent business trip to the Northeast US, I booked a flight that would allow me a long layover at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Even though most business travelers run from a layover, I had an ulterior motive. I wanted…
A recent start-up in Portland, Oregon is social car sharing. Instead of renting from a carshare company, you rent cars by the hour from people around you. So “waste” unused car hours are reduced and the car owner gets some extra income. (Part of the scheme includes management of risk issues such as insurance.) It’s…
Wandering the web the other day, it occurred to me that the continuous improvement process “5 whys” could be a powerful tool for sustainability. I was watching a LinkedIn conversation on the challenges of consumption, and there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of depth to the conversation.
Some of you may have noticed a long gap since our last publication (in fact, it’s a gap of 12 months). This has been due to my father’s losing battle with cancer. He died at the end of February, and now life has become more predictable, if sadder and a bit emptier than before. During this time, and particularly…
“Here are a few things you do with a prickly pear cactus: Get poked. Turn its fruit into jam. Use it to clean up dangerous concentrations of selenium in arid California lands. In California’s San Joaquin Valley, a long history of artificial irrigation has impregnated the soil with selenium. In small quantities, selenium is beneficial…
“We don’t see how things are, we see them according to how we are”. ― Anaïs Nin Modern neurobiology is providing evidence of what philosophers have been saying for a long time. What we observe is controlled and filtered by our beliefs and values, particularly in complex situations. How we see and respond to situations is…
