Category: agriculture
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Daily Drawdown 13: Urban Forests
This is the thirteenth in an ongoing series illustrating the relationship of Drawdown strategies to landscape architecture. For context, read the initial post here. My presentation for Grey to Green is right around the corner, so if you’re at the conference come check it out (Thursday, April 5th in Toronto), so this will be the…
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Daily Drawdown 11: Materials
This is the eleventh in an ongoing series illustrating the relationship of Drawdown strategies to landscape architecture. For context, read the initial post here. The decisions about materials we use on projects have implications in a number of areas, including loss of biodiversity, the pollution produced during manufacturing, and the overall greenhouse gas emissions that…
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Daily Drawdown 9: Water
This is the ninth in an ongoing series illustrating the relationship of Drawdown strategies to landscape architecture. For context, read the initial post here. Water is fundamental to discussions about climate change. Specifically the major shifts in water that will occur through global warming — droughts, extreme precipitation events, storm surge, and sea level rise,…
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Daily Drawdown 8: Soils
This is the eighth in an ongoing series illustrating the relationship of Drawdown strategies to landscape architecture. For context, read the initial post here. Drawdown outlines a number of individual strategies, which allows areas to be isolated and the impacts. It’s also useful to think of those beneficial relationships, and how leveraging changes in one…
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Daily Drawdown 4: Perennial Biomass
This is the fourth in an ongoing series illustrating the relationship of Drawdown strategies to landscape architecture. For context, read the initial post here. One Drawdown subject that fascinated me when I started reading about it was Perennial Biomass, specifically being able to use landscape waste as fuel for combustion as energy production, or for…
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Hemp to the Rescue
We’ve heard of many plants that have phytoremediative qualities, that is, the properties that can absorb and neutralize toxic substances in soils. For all the versatility of hemp, I hadn’t thought of it as possessing that ability until I read recent post on Roads and Kingdoms entitled Hemp and Change. The crux of the…
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Moon Gardens
Spaced based gardening? As a test of the harshest conditions for supporting life, NASA is planning on experiments to grow cress, turnips and basil on the moon. The challenge – a temperature differential of +150° F on the sunny side and -150° F on the dark side of the moon. Via NPR, quoting NASA plant…
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Aquifers not Aquitards
From the recent post on watershed boundaries, a reader mentioned the concept of underground aquifers and their relation to geographical boundaries and . My title is in jest (sort of) referring to ‘Aquitards’ which according to Wikipedia is “a zone within the earth that restricts the flow of groundwater from one aquifer to another“, but…
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Bio-luminescent Trees: WTF?
Bad idea of the week? The Inhabitat story “Gold Nanoparticles Could Transform Trees Into Street Lights” mentions new research: “A group of scientists in Taiwan recently discovered that placing gold nanoparticles within the leaves of trees, causes them to give off a luminous reddish glow. The idea of using trees to replace street lights is an…