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• Hail, Africa

  A vast white sheet of ice covered 30 acres in central Kenya this week due to a freak hailstorm that was mistaken by some villagers for the second coming of Jesus—and as it turns out, an ice storm of this ferocity in the region is about as likely.
  
  While locals look to be enjoying their batty weather much more than, say, the Gulf Coast might be right now, there's just something about ice covering African plans on the equator that we find disconcerting. At the very least, it's an odd concurrence with the disappearance of all that ice in the arctic.
  
  Photo: "This is freaking awesome," observed villagers near Nyahururu, Kenya.
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  • Date: Sep 04 2008
  • Posted by alexandra_m

• That Sinking Feeling

  Sinkholes are the result of water eating away bedrock and soil underground, causing the earth to drop out from under itself in vast depressions or gaping chasms.
  
  They can form gradually (like that of Berezniki, Russia) or very suddenly (last year in Guatemala City). It's unclear why there aren't more apocalyptic horror films about this sort of event. As evidenced by this collection of images of 13 of the most intense sinkholes on earth, they're terrifying and strange enough in real life.
  
  Photo: Sinkhole in Florida
  
  Via Neatorama
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  • Date: Aug 27 2008
  • Posted by alexandra_m

• Take Back The Filter

  The purveyors of water filtration systems at Brita have, by accident or design, found themselves riding a profitable wave of anti-bottled-water sentiment. New TV ads (which, incidentally, we can't seem to track down online) are confidently claiming the moral high ground for Brita. And fair enough: using a Brita or a Sigg is simply way more resource-friendly than buying bottled water. That's not really debatable.
  
  But for a while now, Brita devotees who want to avoid littering the planet with used water bottles have had to litter the planet with used Brita filters instead. In Europe, Brita will recycle used filters for you. In America, Clorox, the company that owns the regional rights to the Brita brand, provides no such service. So a petition asking Brita to recycle filters stateside launched at TakeBackTheFilter.org. Recently, Clorox's CEO sent the campaign an encouraging letter [PDF]. Brita's flush with eco-pride, and feeling some pressure from this petition. This would be the optimal time to add your signature if you're into the cause.
  
  Thanks Josh!
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  • Date: Aug 26 2008
  • Posted by Andrew Price

• Just Add Walls

  The hotel chain Travelodge is trying something new in the proliferation of their already cookie-cutter hotels. They just built a 120-bedroom hotel in Uxbridge, England using old shipping containers. It proved to be 40-60% quicker to build, with 70% less on-site waste than other building methods, and they were so charmed by the ease of it, a 307-room shipping-crate-based hotel in Heathrow is underway. The downside of the reusable shipping crate method for modern hotels is, you losing all the architectural flare and personality of their original construction (just kidding). The upshots, of course, include 1) environmental responsibility, 2) financial efficiency, 3) mad Green cred, and 4) the ten million pounds (aka 18.6 million dollars) they're set to save. Sounds like a livable compromise between building more ugly buildings and not immediately contributing to the swift demise of planet earth. Via Inhabitat
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  • Date: Aug 22 2008
  • Posted by alexandra_m

• NYC: The Windmill City

  With Mayor Bloomberg's plan to convert all the cabs in New York from yellow to Green in full swing, he's now pushing a new idea for energy efficiency in NYC: windmills. According to the New York Times, Bloomberg "is seeking to put wind turbines on the city’s bridges and skyscrapers and in its waters as part of a wide-ranging push to develop renewable energy." In a recent speech about how New York City is going to be the greenest metropolis ever, he described a future in which Lady Liberty’s torch is "powered by an ocean wind farm."
  
  It was decided back in 2003 that the top section of the WTC site Freedom Tower will be devoted to windmills to generate a fifth of the building's power, and New York already sports tidal turbines powering Roosevelt Island, so a few wind turbines tucked about the cityscape should fit right in. But thanks to bureaucratic hurdles (Oliasson's waterfalls required over 20 permits from different city departments) and the city's recent problems with unscrupulous construction, experts are saying that windmills affixed to buildings and bridges might remain distant reality.
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  • Date: Aug 20 2008
  • Posted by alexandra_m

• Two Questions: Made In China, Ending In Suburbia

  Today at Slate, the Green Lantern asks whether American consumers (who buy heaps of toys and appliances that are made in China) are to blame for air pollution in Beijing. The answer: kind of, but it's tough to determine the extent. In the end, the Lantern reminds us that, "for all of China's environmental problems [and regardless of how much of that is our fault], Americans still emit about four times more carbon dioxide per person."
  
  That got us thinking about our daily acts of consumption and wastefulness back home, especially those of us commuting types that make our homes in the suburbs. We couldn't help but think of our all-time favorite superlative, which comes from the documentary The End of Suburbia. Therein, James Kunstler refers to the mass construction of suburbs in the United States as "the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world."
  
  Knustler, it just so happens, recently contributed to a Freakonomics forum (with four other forward-thinkers) in an attempt to answer the question,"What will the suburbs look like in 40 years?" The answers: no one's certain, but it's somewhere in the range of slum, wasteland, and flexible hybrid of groundbreaking modular design.
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  • Date: Aug 19 2008
  • Posted by Patrick James

• Not Quite Yeti

  In June, a car salesman and a police officer on disability leave from backwoods Georgia claimed to have the 7'7" corpse of a Bigfoot stuffed in a freezer at an undisclosed location. Unsurprisingly, their discovery was received with skepticism. Then this weekend, DNA tests revealed that its blood composition was four percent human and 96 percent o'possum. So, that either means we have to rework our conception of Bigfoot and start visualizing more possum than ape, or it's a big, dumb hoax. But, hoax or not, the international media seems to have an untiring interest in the theme. Every couple years, news of another close call with a Bigfoot somewhere in the world pops up (Siberia in 2003, Mt. Everest in 2007), and concurrent with the American discovery this past June, a terrified BBC journalist affirmed the existence of India's estimated 660-lb. mande barung ("forest man"). Hairs were collected after it was sighted in the woods, but all the lab results revealed was split ends. Between Canada's sasquatch, Brazil's mapinguary, Australia's yowie, Indonesia's sajarang gigi, India's mande barung, Malaysia's mawas, Nepal's yeti, and China's unnamed, more petite version (according to reports, a gray-colored ape-like animal about 5'4"), it doesn't seem like the world will tire of Bigfoot stories, preposterously falsified or otherwise, any time soon.
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  • Date: Aug 18 2008
  • Posted by alexandra_m

• Intermission

  This video of mushrooms and other fungi springing out of the ground and spreading across their substrates is beautiful, alien, and intermittently a little obscene.
  
  Thanks Folkert!
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  • Date: Aug 14 2008
  • Posted by Andrew Price

• Village Of The Dammed

  Funded by grants from Austria, Switzerland, and Germany, the Ilisu Dam being planned for Turkey's Tigris River is meant to help Turkey harness the power-generating potential of the Tigris, which would then produce 2 percent of Turkey's energy needs. Sounds great. But the Turks aren't getting it together. The Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs was just griping about how they need to start moving on the aspects of "environment, cultural heritage, the resettlement of residents, and neighborhood policies" in order for the dam plans to move forward. The Swiss have been very encouraging (and not entirely selflessly—part of the Ilisu initiative involves Turkey granting the Swiss transportation rights for much easier access to Iranian oil). But part of the dam hold-up could be that a rumored 20,000 people will need to be relocated, as many as 15 endemic species of the Tigris River will be affected, and an ancient archaeological site will be completely submerged. Ah, the pros and cons of development. Or, more, the cons of development. Photo: Hasan Keyf, one of the oldest human settlements in the world, is now vacant, soon to be just for the fish. Thanks Aysu
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  • Date: Aug 14 2008
  • Posted by alexandra_m

• No Waste Left Behind

  Kamikatsu, a small arboreal village in south-west Japan, has begun the arduous process of becoming Japan's first zero-waste community. By its target year of 2020, the village hopes to say sayonara to any incinerating or dumping. The experiment involves each household separating its waste into no fewer than 34 categories before it arrives at the village recycling center; a sort of Baskin Robbins of rubbish. Here’s a sample of the regulations:
  
  “Glass bottles must be relieved of their caps and sorted by colour. Plastic bottles for soy sauce and cooking oil must be kept separate from Pet (polyethylene teraphthalate) bottles that once contained mineral water and green tea.
  
  All bottles, cans and even plastic food wrappers must be washed thoroughly; newspapers and magazines have to be piled into neat bundles tied with a twine made from recycled milk cartons.”
  
  It's an ambitious endeavor; we wish the folks of Kamikatsu luck and success.
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  • Date: Aug 07 2008
  • Posted by Jason Jude Chan