Richer Earth

kqedscience: A humbling map of real-time wind patterns in...

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:51:08 -0400

A humbling map of real-time wind patterns in Tornado Alley

“Wind Map” is a stunning interactive datavisualization that presents wind patterns across the continental U.S. in real time. Picture above is what it looked like last night at 10:59 CDT, in the aftermath of yesterday’s devastating Oklahoma tornado.”

Read more here from io9.

Urban Class Warfare: Are Cities Built for the Rich? - Interview with David Harvey

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:50:36 -0400

Urban Class Warfare: Are Cities Built for the Rich? - Interview with David Harvey :

Today’s class struggles are increasingly taking place in cities, says Marxist and social theorist David Harvey. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, he discusses how urbanization will play a key role in social conflicts to come.

everydayhybridity: Checked out the blog of a new follower and...

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:49:12 -0400

everydayhybridity:

Checked out the blog of a new follower and it is full of superb stuff. Especially recommended for fans of urbanism and public space…

Annette Koh

Change in cycle track policy needed to boost ridership, public health

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:48:37 -0400

Change in cycle track policy needed to boost ridership, public health:

HSPH calls for Euro-style bike lanes. Yes, please.

Boston, MA Bicycle engineering guidelines often used by state regulators to design bicycle facilities need to be overhauled to reflect current cyclists’ preferences and safety data, according to …

INTERVIEW: We Chat with Bridgette Meinhold the Author of 'Urgent Architecture' | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building

Fri, 10 May 2013 15:18:03 -0400

INTERVIEW: We Chat with Bridgette Meinhold the Author of 'Urgent Architecture' | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building:

Interesting solutions to housing in disaster-prone regions.

Photo

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:24:27 -0400

climateadaptation: Check out the gorgeous new weather website...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:23:46 -0400

climateadaptation:

Check out the gorgeous new weather website called Forecast. It also has a neat feature called “Time machine” on the top right that lets you see the weather on any given day going back about 80 years.

saveplanetearth: The orange shading is the beetles’ spread from...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:22:52 -0400

saveplanetearth:

The orange shading is the beetles’ spread from 2002-2006, while the red is 2007-2011. The solid red line is the spread’s leading edge in 2011.

Climate Change Keeps Expanding Canada’s Unprecedented Epidemic Of Forest-Destroying Beetles @ Climate Progress

The 25 Greatest Quotes About Writing

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:21:53 -0400

The 25 Greatest Quotes About Writing:

nevver:

“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” — Mark Twain

“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.” — Clarice Lispector

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” — Virginia Woolf

“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” — James Joyce

“The first draft of anything is shit.” — Ernest Hemingway

“Always be a poet, even in prose.” — Charles Baudelaire

“Literature — creative literature — unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.” — Gertrude Stein

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.” — Anaïs Nin

“One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.” — Henry Miller

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.” — Alain Robbe-Grillet

“James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.” — Samuel Beckett

“Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.” — Michel Houellebecq

“Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?” — Kurt Vonnegut

“Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.” — Julio Cortázar

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” — Franz Kafka

“Reading is more important than writing.” — Roberto Bolaño

“The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.” — Ezra Pound

“The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.” — David Foster Wallace

“The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.” — Vladimir Nabokov

“…Describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. — And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

“The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.” — Walt Whitman

“All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.” — Samuel Beckett

“Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion. Never. I’m a little overexcited now. Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won’t be asked. You won’t be asked if you were working on a wonderful, moving piece of writing when you died. You won’t be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. You won’t be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won’t even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would have been working on if you had known your time would be up when it was finished—I think only poor Soren K. will get asked that. I’m so sure you’ll only get asked two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. ” — J.D. Salinger

More

archimaps: Vaux and Olmsted’s 1870 map of Central Park, New...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:21:02 -0400

archimaps:

Vaux and Olmsted’s 1870 map of Central Park, New York City

I was lucky enough to see the original of their conceptual plan for the Park a few years back. Hand drawn in Vaux’s living room with help from the family. Wonderful.

humanscalecities: Phoenix metropolitan area at night (via NASA...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:50:58 -0400

humanscalecities:

Phoenix metropolitan area at night (via NASA Earth Observatory)

Climate Adaptation: Global warming predictions prove accurate

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 16:21:21 -0400

Climate Adaptation: Global warming predictions prove accurate:

Analysis of climate change modelling for past 15 years reveal accurate forecasts of rising global temperatures

The debate around the accuracy of climate modelling and forecasting has been especially intense recently, due to suggestions that forecasts have exaggerated the warming observed so…

Looks like Chi-town to me.

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:51:01 -0400

Looks like Chi-town to me.

Upcoming Travels

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:50:38 -0400

I’ll be city gazing (and working):

New York

Houston

Toronto

London

Paris

More to come…

My original copy is held together with an elastic band. I love...

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:47:18 -0400

My original copy is held together with an elastic band. I love this book and have learned so much from Jacobs.

davidsshelf:

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Jane Jacobs

The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as “perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning… . [It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book’s arguments.” Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jane Jacobs’s tour de force is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It remains sensible, knowledgeable, readable, and indispensable.

davidsshelf: The Geography of Nowhere James Howard Kunstler The...

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:46:17 -0400

davidsshelf:

The Geography of Nowhere

James Howard Kunstler

The Geography of Nowhere traces America’s evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where every place is like no place in particular, where the cities are dead zones and the countryside is a wasteland of cartoon architecture and parking lots. In elegant and often hilarious prose, Kunstler depicts our nation’s evolution from the Pilgrim settlements to the modern auto suburb in all its ghastliness. The Geography of Nowhere tallies up the huge economic, social, and spiritual costs that America is paying for its car-crazed lifestyle. It is also a wake-up call for citizens to reinvent the places where we live and work, to build communities that are once again worthy of our affection. Kunstler proposes that by reviving civic art and civic life, we will rediscover public virtue and a new vision of the common good. “The future will require us to build better places,” Kunstler says, “or the future will belong to other people in other societies.”

wisconsinforward: Milwaukee, Wisconsin Forbes: 15 U.S. Cities’...

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:44:54 -0400

wisconsinforward:

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Forbes: 15 U.S. Cities’ Emerging Downtowns

thisbigcity: “Don’t tear down this wall!” This phrase may sound...

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:44:15 -0400

thisbigcity:

“Don’t tear down this wall!”

This phrase may sound shocking to Berliners who lived for decades in a divided city and celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But it is the rallying cry of the current protest in Berlin to preserve the East Side Gallery, a 1.3 kilometer section of the Berlin Wall in the Friedrichshain neighborhood.

futurist-foresight: A look at how climate change is changing...

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:43:40 -0400

futurist-foresight:

A look at how climate change is changing agriculture.

climateadaptation:

Climate Change Shifts North’s Growing Seasons

temperature and vegetation growth at northern latitudes now resemble those found 4 degrees to 6 degrees of latitude farther south as recently as 1982.

“Higher northern latitudes are getting warmer, Arctic sea ice and the duration of snow cover are diminishing, the growing season is getting longer and plants are growing more,” said Ranga Myneni of Boston University’s Department of Earth and Environment. “In the north’s Arctic and boreal areas, the characteristics of the seasons are changing, leading to great disruptions for plants and related ecosystems.”

Via NASA

Image: Of the 10 million square miles (26 million square kilometers) of northern vegetated lands, 34 to 41 percent showed increases in plant growth (green and blue), 3 to 5 percent showed decreases in plant growth (orange and red), and 51 to 62 percent showed no changes (yellow) over the past 30 years. Satellite data in this visualization are from the AVHRR and MODIS instruments, which contribute to a vegetation index that allows researchers to track changes in plant growth over large areas.

"U.S. farmers converted more than 1.3 million acres of grassland into corn and soybean fields between..."

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:42:57 -0400

“U.S. farmers converted more than 1.3 million acres of grassland into corn and soybean fields between 2006 and 2011.”

- - Corn and soy wiping out America’s grasslands at fastest pace since the 1930s.

Update: This is more about America’s heritage landscapes - grasslands - and less about particular crops. Grasslands provide important habitat for countless species. President Theodore Roosevelt protected millions of acres of grasslands by including them in several National Parks. Converting them to crops destroys habitat for animals, changes and poisons the soil, pollutes rivers, devalues people’s properties, among numerous other environmental harms. Destroying nature for a quick buck is not the right direction for America’s future. The situation is worse when climate change is factored in.

And, the US Forest Service has an excellent overview of how grasslands are threatened by agriculture and climate change.

(via climateadaptation)