I have just finished editing an interview I did with one of Integral City's Advisors, Will Varey, of Emergnc in December, 2010. It will be posted for readers' listening pleasure on Meshcasts later today. We had a most wide-ranging dialogue that explored cities as living systems. Will's grounding in sustainability provided a "pingable" trampoline to explore the ecology [...]
A domesticated cousin to the apis melifera honey bee, is raising questions about how life conditions - including those created by humans - can offer a species the opportunity to expand its territory because of its natural but transplanted capacities. It is a good example of unintended consequences, and may prove to us (yet again) that resilience [...]
A few days ago a trusted colleague, John Steiner, sent me an email thread that told the story of an interesting Japanese invention - a machine that converts plastic into oil. You can see a video for yourself if you click here. This machine answers a question I have harboured for years, and that is: if plastic [...]
How is a masterfully crafted and portrayed story like Downton Abbey (currently being aired on PBS Masterpiece Theatre) an analog for today's down town world scene? Set in an English stately home just before WWI, the story is about the shifting of worldviews from traditional to modern. It uses cracks in the system of land/estate ownership, class and gender [...]
Detroit in ruins: The Photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre In downtown Detroit, the streets are lined with abandoned hotels and swimming pools, ruined movie houses and schools, all evidence of the motor city's painful decline. The photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre capture what remains of a once-great city – and [...]
Colony collapse disorder (CCD) for the honey bee has been giving me warning signs to look at the equivalent possibility for the human hive. Three stories from this week's news offer some strong "weak signals" that may be indications of onset of the human hive's CCD in America. The Tucson shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and many others are [...]
Rumi said that "for every garden we tend without, we tend 10,000 gardens within". Such is the power of consciousness. It is our leverage beyond the material world into an imaginary/imagining world with infinite possibilities and directions for growth. I am always looking for the natural laboratories that show us how communities self-organize and emerge into [...]
Several Integral Citi-zens have alerted me to the social media activist campaign by AVAAZ currently underway. They are alerting activists that the honey bee is in peril from the effects of a toxic insecticide. This may be the cause of colony collapse disorder (CCD) (along with other contributing factors.) I have been tracking CCD for several years and have [...]
One of the things I like about the Holland America cruises is the ship's log they give at the end of the voyage. It is an interesting accountability document for key resources, especially water and fuel. My recent cruise on the MS Rotterdam used 120 tons/day of fuel to travel a toal of 3529 nautical [...]
When you are looking for weak signals about the toughness of economic times look to see how business keeps the revenues flowing. I just returned from a floating city holiday aka a cruise. The travel industry has been hit in so many ways from terrorist threats, biological invasions and economic down cycles it is interesting [...]