How to Construct a Constructed Wetland

www.epa.gov/nrmrl/pubs/625r99010/625r99010.pdf

This useful link is to the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Tells you all you need to know about constructing wetlands for remediation.

M1 On Oil

It has been predicted with American geophysicist M. King Hubbert’s model in 1956 that the global petroleum production rates will peak just after year 2000 and has correctly predicted that production of oil from conventional sources would peak in the continental United States around 1970. Though oil is increasingly plentiful on the upslope of the bell curve, it is increasingly scarce and expensive on the down slope. Once the peak is passed, oil production slows and costs begin to accelerate, as seen currently in oil and gas prices. We are currently seeing the effects of the depletion of oil in our quotidian lives not to mention its effect on global warming. The issue is not of “running out” of oil, so much as not acquiring enough to keep global economy running that will lead to a collapse, that even a shortage of 10-15% of an oil dependant country is enough to collapse its economy and reduce its citizens to poverty(1).

Perhaps the most dramatic consequence of oil depletion is of agriculture. Pesticides and agro-chemicals are made from oil, commercial fertilizers are made from ammonia, which is from natural gas that will be peaking in the near future, and most farming tools are power driven by oil-derived fuels. Food shortage will be an outcome as transportation and distribution become expensive. The average transport of food in the U.S. is transported almost 2400 km before it is made available, and in Canada, the average is 8000 km (2). In the future, food prices will skyrocket and for those less fortunate, starvation and famine will take hold even on a global scale.

As well, the concept of suburbia will also be under speculation, as commuters can no longer afford to drive into the city, there will be an overflow of people in the near future looking to move closer to the centre. The growth of the city can also harvest new problems with water scarcity and also with health and sanitation. Presently in the United States, 4% of people do not drive, whether because of low income, being handicapped, or age—this number will likely rise, making driving exclusively for the elite class and most likely will harness resentment amongst the general population(3).

We will see an increase in oil nationalism when countries with the most oil is withholding its resources from the future market and then auctioned off to favoured customer relations with other countries that they want to maintain good relations with. The United States will probably tend to be less favoured amongst some of the oil producing nations. The monopoly of oil can potentially cause major warfare while nations battle over oil, not to mention civil wars that will arise from the shortcomings. Cities and nations will eventually fall apart as the consequences are unimaginable. Permanent fuel shortages would bring the world into a generations-long economic depression as millions become unemployed when industries implode. There will no longer be big box stores, clothing stores, cafes, and postal services—the financial economic downfall will be evident.

The financial community begins to accept the reality of Peak Oil.

"They accept that banks created capital during this epoch by lending more than they had on deposit, being confident that tomorrow’s expansion, fuelled by cheap oil-based energy, was adequate collateral for today’s debt. The decline of oil, the principal driver of economic growth, undermines the validity of that collateral which in turn erodes the valuation of most entities quoted on Stock Exchanges."(4)

When truth can no longer be concealed, prices for daily maintenance of life will escalate abruptly, and the support and infrastructure of our civilization will fall. There will be emergency summits, diplomatic initiatives, urgent exploration efforts, but the turmoil will not subside. Thousands of companies will go bankrupt, and millions will be unemployed. Democracy will be shut out, as economic hardships will bring out the worst in people. “Fascists will rise, feeding on the anger of the newly poor and whipping up support. These new rulers will find the tools of repression—emergency laws, prison camps, a relaxed attitude towards torture—already in place, courtesy of the war on terror” (5). Simultaneously, climate change will work against us, making its presence felt “with a vengeance”, while engulfed in financial ruin, food and water supplies will seize and prolonged droughts will crop up in numbers as harvesting crops decline(6).

Almost daily, we see our personal environments changing, whether with work, climate, commuting, spending—we must progress and take nothing for granted as a new Dark Era is emerging for ourselves and generations to come as growth may be coming to an end. The social and economic consequences are cataclysmic as our entire financial order from interest rates, pension funds, insurance, to stock market is dependant on growth(7). We must find new [renewable] alternatives and new ways of using the resources we already acquired in order to alleviate stress globally and especially oil dependant nations.

Notes:
1. Matt Savinar, “Peak Oil”. Life After the Oil Crash, 27 Oct. 2009

2. Stephen Hesse, “Matters of Survival in a Shattered World,” The Japan Times, 25 Apr. 2005, 1 Nov. 2009,

3. James H. Kunstler, Interviewed by Glen Hiemstra for Futurists.com, May 2008,

4. Colin Campbell, “The Financial Consequences of Peak Oil,” 24 Feb 2004, 1 Nov 2009


5. Jeremy Leggett. The Empty Tank: Oil, Gas, Hot Air, and the Coming Financial Catastrophe. Random House: New York, 2005

6. Jonathon Gatehouse, “When Oil Runs Out,” Macleans, 9 Feb. 2006, 1 Nov. 2009

7. Bryan Appleyard, “Waiting for the Lights to Go Out,” The Times. 16 Oct. 2005, 3 Nov 2009,

Designing America's Waste Landscape--Mira Engler

Engler, Mira. “Designing America’s Waste Landscape”. London: John Hopkins University Press, 2004

The history of garbage in the past two centuries has been the history of urbanism: the rise of cities necessitated efficient collection of trash and excreta. Our modern-day equivalents are the aluminum can foragers, who open bags left out on trash night and search for redeemables. Their fortunes rose as those of the field scavengers fell. Prior to the 1970s, when cities and states first put a price on tossing them, cans were just trash among more trash, going to landfills. Forty years earlier, cans hadn’t yet been invented, and a few years before that, in the early 20th century, garbage itself was virtually nonexistent in big American cities.

Mira Engler’s Designing America’s Waste Landscapes covers the whole dirty history of excrement, offal, leavings, and scraps as they eventually evolved into sewage, compost, recyclables, and toxic sludge. Designing America’s Waste Landscapes is not a social history of how households and municipalities came to produce tons and tons of this stuff daily, instead, it brings together in one place many far-flung conversations about trash in disciplines as varied as art history, architecture, engineering, anthropology, and political science, with references to thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin. She focuses on the idea of trash transparency—that we should look our waste straight in the gut, so to speak, and not shy away from the noxious smells, industrial apparatus, or toxic byproducts that are the results of being consumers.

Engler’s overarching concern is the application of this principle to the reclamation of polluted landscapes and the planning of future waste disposal sites and looks to the work of a group of artists and landscape architects who have argued that, instead of recoiling from the waste we produce, we should integrate it into our everyday landscape. Many of the artistic projects Engler discusses have provoked policy makers and local bureaucrats to come up with more interesting solutions for our waste landscapes. Some works, such as Mel Chin’s experiment-as-conceptual-art piece Revival Field, have even advanced scientific understanding of what’s possible in remediating and recovering wasted landscapes. As a landscape architect who has submitted her own projects for re-envisioned dumps and former industrial sites, Engler is heavily invested in the idea that artists can make a measurable difference and to produce work that embraces waste, rather than hides it from public knowledge. Her ideal of trash transparency emphasizes that nature and culture are interdependent and that remediated landscapes should incorporate a record of human effects.


For Brief By Carly Berwick see:
http://americancity.org/magazine/article/review-mira-engler-baltimore/

Edward Burtynsky: on Manufactured Landscapes + Oil

"Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.

These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times."

In Manufactured Landscapes, Burtynksy's produced a series of still photography, contextualizing his photographs in the global cycles of energy, production, and waste, by cinematically inhabiting the subjects of his work. While his work serves as a commentary on the impact of large-scale industrialization, Burtynsky claims to neither criticize nor praise these developments, but to bring images to viewers in the hopes of opening their eyes to the realities of the contemporary world.


The series investigates:
1. The production cycle in China (Factories and Recycling),
2. Energy in China (coal industry and Three Gorges Dam),
3. globalization,
4. extraction industries (minding and the oil industries in Canada and U.S.), and also
5. urbanization in China (transformation of old neighbourhoods in Shanghai)

His exhibition on Oil surveys his 10-year journey of expansive documentation into the subjects of oil from:

1. extraction and refinement—how it is drawing from the earth, processed for our use
2. It then proceeds to show how oil is used and its effects—urbanization, roads, cars, etc.
3. And concludes with the destruction and consequences that lie at the end of oil—vast recycling yards, immense installations of defunct oil fields, breaking down of oil tankers

Notes on Alvin Toffler: Future Shock + The Third Wave

http://www.alvintoffler.net/?fa=bios

What differentiates the Tofflers from others who today echo this view is their insistence that there can be no economic transformation without a corresponding upheaval in our social, political and cultural institutions and values.

In support of this idea, the Tofflers draw not merely on economics, but on social psychology, military history, politics, pop culture and religion, revealing the hidden or unnoticed relations among them - and their implications for the decisions we make today.

http://www.ameinfo.com/44149.html

“3rd wave” book argues huge historic changes:
1. hunting and gathering to agriculture
2. rise of industrial age and all the things that go with it, mass production, factories
3. rise of a knowledge based economy

The central feature of his futurology is to note patterns in human history.

Toffler's idea of leadership is one of the ability to handle change, and improve existing practices. As he argues: 'In every company new ideas, new products, and new people are waiting to be born. The leader's task is to get them out and breathing.

'In the third wave, good ideas can come from anywhere and anyone. It may mean courage, imagination, entrepreneurialism, warmth, organizational savvy or street smarts. These are the kinds of brains that will thrive in the third wave.'

He thinks the leaders of tomorrow must be 'managers of adaptation equipped with a whole set of new, nonlinear skills.' And this guru of the future suggests: 'The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.'

http://www.yoyow.com/marye/tofflers94.html

"future shock"--when too much change hits too fast for people to absorb, they then began to show signs of either deteriorated decision-making capability or disorientation; indeed, in some cases, stress and illness and so forth. Future shock is the consequence of the premature arrival of the future.

The Third Wave, ten years after Future Shock. That book said that the changes around us are not entirely random, that you can see patterns, and that basically what was happening was a revolutionary upheaval on a par with, or even greater than, the industrial revolution--or indeed the agrarian revolution that came first. We used the terminology First Wave, Second Wave, Third Wave.

Then came the industrial revolution of two or three hundred years ago, which launched what we call the second great transformatory wave in history, and gave rise to an industrial civilization. That industrial civilization had multiple forms. It had capitalists and communists; it had Japanese, Korean, Swedish, or American versions; but all of the industrial countries, by definition, were based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass entertainment. Sociologists referred to it as the mass society.

The old scenarios, the scenarios of Orwell and Huxley and hundreds, if not thousands, of science fiction writers, saw the continual advance of technology as necessarily increasing the industrial character of society--making it more bureaucratic, more centralized, more impersonal, more robotoid, and so on.

There is a contrast between second and third wave, where 2nd is based on mass society produced by industrial civilization, while computer age is more singular and independent.
Military on the contrary to mass production where they are participating in demassification of no assembly line.

http://www.solutioneers.net/solutioneering/thirdwave.html

Second Wave society and Expansionism is based on 3 beliefs:
1. Nature is to be exploited.
2. Humans are pinnacle of long process of evolution.
3. History flows irreversibly towards the progress of a better life for humanity.

When Bad Things Happen

A short [funny] guide to nine big things to worry about—and what you can do about them.

Read more: When Bad Things Happen - What to Do in Case of Disaster http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/features/14985/

Smallpox Attack
Chlorine Release
Blackout
Dirty Bomb

Earthquake:

What the city would do: Dig survivors out of crumbled tenements and town houses and race to extinguish blazes fueled by broken gas lines. A minimum 5 on the Richter scale would level homes all over the five boroughs, and more deaths would result later as destabilized buildings are toppled by aftershocks and pedestrians are pummeled by falling air conditioners and other debris. Though two major fault patterns run under Manhattan, experts say a big quake is unlikely.
Worst-case scenario: A high-magnitude earthquake with an epicenter within the five boroughs. Aboveground subway lines and bridges crack, and airports are disabled.
What you can do: Live in a steel-framed high-rise built after seismic codes were adopted in 1996. At the first tremor, grab a cell phone and take cover in a doorway or under a solid piece of furniture. Protect your head. If you can, turn off natural gas, water, and electricity, but beware of aftershocks. Cover your nose and mouth with clothing to avoid breathing toxic dust.

Indian Point Explosion
Avian-Flu Pandemic

Hurricane:

What the city would do: Issue evacuation orders 48 hours before the storm hits, urging people in vulnerable zones (see map) to flee those areas by public transportation or catch an MTA bus to Madison Square Garden or one of 22 other intake centers.
Worst-case scenario: A storm closes in on the city faster than expected. Evacuees are stuck in cars on closed roads; the subways and Hudson River tunnels flood. Though a death toll would likely be low, damage could be extensive.
What you can do: Keep three days’ worth of food, water, diapers, medication, and other supplies in a safe place. If you’re in a hurricane zone, buy flood insurance and snap photos of your house for future reference. Keep a prescription stash handy and pack a bag with copies of important documents, extra keys, rain gear and shoes, nonperishable foods, and at least $100.
As the storm approaches, nail plywood over windows and bring balcony furniture and garbage cans inside. If you’re evacuating, unplug appliances, turn off pilot lights and water, and put valuables you can’t take along in watertight containers. Fill your tank, grab a map, and get out of town—with your pets.

Nuclear Bomb:

What the city would do: Pray for help from the Feds because city hospitals, police precincts, and firehouses could be destroyed. If the prospect of a fema-managed catastrophe isn’t scary enough, a nuclear bomb would kill millions, and the lucky ones would get vaporized instantly. Others would be burned, blinded, or poisoned by radiation sickness in subsequent weeks and months. Bodies would litter the streets, and the water supply would be contaminated. The city would be too radioactive for outside emergency workers to enter, so those left alive would have to improvise.
Worst-case scenario: A bomb in the center of midtown. It doesn’t get worse than this.
What you can do: You could try to get your hands on some potassium iodide tablets in case you survive. Or, you might consider investing $200,000 in a “safe room”—a sealed, gamma-radiation-proof space with positive pressure, oxygen, food, necessary medicine, and other supplies—preferably underground. If you’re in a tall building, there’s no harm in heading for the center of the middle floors, which will put more mass between you and the radiation outside. But really: Kiss your ass good-bye.

Dragonfly, A Metabolic Farm for Urban Agriculture

http://www.tuvie.com/dragonfly-a-metabolic-farm-for-new-york-city-in-the-future/

by Vincent Callebaut
http://vincent.callebaut.org/

Dragonfly vertical farm is a concept urban farm specially designed for the Roosevelt Island of New York City which will reduce the problems associated with food shortage, mileage and connection between the producers and consumers. Because of the densely packed city civilization, this farm has been designed vertically, spanning 132 floors and 28 different agricultural fields for accommodating dragonflies aiming to produce fruit, grains, vegetables, meat and dairy. This Dragonfly wing shaped superstructure features wind and solar power producing capability and includes housing, offices, research labs and communal areas separated from farms, orchards and production rooms. Throughout the glass and steel set of wings, animal and plant farming is arranged as well as soil nutrient levels are maintained properly.



These very light wings in glass and steel retake the loads of the building and are directly inspired from the structure of the dragonfly wings coming from the family of “Odonata Anisoptera” whose transparent membrane is very finely nervured. Two inhabited rings buttress around these wings. Their organically chiselled exo-structure accommodates the inter-climatic spaces that receive the agrarian cultures. They buttress.

The whole set forms «double layer» architecture in bee nest mesh that exploits the solar passive energy at its maximum level, by accumulating the warm air in the winter in the thickness of the exo-structure, and by cooling the atmosphere by natural ventilation and by evapo-perpiration of the plants in the summer. Protecting thus the cultures from climatic changes in New York (from -25.5°C in the winter to +41°C in the summer), these plug spaces are useful to reflect on the agriculture not anymore in terms of surface area but really in terms of volume.

Biomimicry

I learned a new w0rd today, Biomimicry, which I thought was uber cool:

Biomimicry is an innovation method that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature's time-tested patterns and strategies, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf. The goal is to create products, processes, and policies---new ways of living---that are well-adapted to life on earth over the long haul.

Taken from: http://www.biomimicryguild.com/guild_biomimicry.html

15 Cool cases applied today:
http://brainz.org/15-coolest-cases-biomimicry/

Content:
1. Velcro
2. Passive Cooling
3. Gecko Tape
4. Whalepower wind terbine
5. Lotus effect hydrophobia
6. self-healing plastics
7. The golden streamlining principle
8. Artificial Photosynthesis
9. Bionic Car
10. Morphing aircraft wings
11. Friction reducing sharkfin
12. Diatomaceous nanotech
13. Glo-fish
14. Insect inspired autonomous robots
15. Butterfly inspired displays