Skitching Press

Go Forward

irkone — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 20:48:28 +0000

Or as Bill Hicks would say, “Let’s evolve.”

Here are some ideas, heavily influenced by permaculture principles.

Many homes are sitting vacant, falling apart, eager to be demolished. These structures are perfect candidates to support a new kind of housing. Through our understanding of botany and ecology and their potential as art, we can transform the home into a symbiont, and dissolve boundaries between human and nature; indoors and outdoors.

This idea is popping up all over the world:
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665381/now-starting-a-60-year-project-to-build-a-dome-using-living-trees#7

http://arborsmith.com/

http://inhabitat.com/worlds-first-building-made-of-hundreds-of-living-trees/

However, rather than constructing a scaffold to guide the trees, and allowing pre-built structures with preset windows, piping, and heating to be bulldozed for eight to ten-thousand dollars, that money can fund a caretaker’s salary, who monitors the project in collaboration with artists, scientists and engineers

It is a long-term project, with long-term goals. That ultimately being the phasing out of fossil fuels used in the home, and the sequestering of carbon. Multiple ambient heat sources would be utilized in “Treehouse 2.0″, including passive solar, thermophilic compost, wood stove (cooking and backup heat). Power would be harnessed from bountiful rains in the northeast, to either charge batteries or perform a direct function, such as spin a wood lathe. Other bioregions could harness wind, animal power, etc. Treehouse would act as a greenhouse, where edible and medicinal plants are grown year-round, and fast-growing, carbon-intensive plants are turned into biochar to amend soil and prolong the life of Treehouse.

The best places to find house skeletons are in neighborhoods where home values have plummeted. Detroit comes to mind first. Other towns such as Cleveland sound promising. There are millions of such structures across the nation. Just go exploring in a town near you!

I have begun preparing a basement in such a vacant home that was subdivided years ago and left abandoned. The first stage in the retrofitting process is to create a compost greenhouse and artists studio. Paper and food products are composted with the help of animals, and plastic compressed and used as insulation (maybe not?). Nature moves at a slow pace, and a designer can comfortably work at that same pace, without the looming threat of a deadline.

What better way to rejuvenate a desolate area than to turn it into an other dimension!

Skitching Taxis: Coming Soon

irkone — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 19:49:46 +0000

Your Brain on Fat

irkone — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 18:54:34 +0000

“The second thing to understand about the brain is that it is hungry. It uses energy like gangbusters. Depending on what source you read, the brain makes up between 2.5-5% of our total body weight, but it uses around 20% of our energy. The reason it uses so much energy is because thought is expensive and basically runs on electricity. All this energy is used to pump ions across membranes, rather like ski lifts taking skiiers to the top of the hill. Once you have enough skiiers at the top, open a gate, set them loose, and they use all the stored energy to zip to the bottom. Thought runs the same way – ions are pumped against a charge gradient, so that when the proper signal comes, you have a whole host of ions to release and start that spark of nerve communication. But it takes a lot of energy to get those skiiers to the top of the hill, and it takes a lot of energy to keep the brain primed and working at maximum efficiency.”

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/your-brain-and-the-primal-blueprint/#more-20796

Latest Dmitry Orlov interview

irkone — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 05:34:06 +0000

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2011/04/interview-on-kows-fms-what-now-with-ken.html

Taxation WITH Representation

irkone — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 15:51:45 +0000

On taxation: Democratic taxation. Taxation as “giving back to society”. Each year, social organizations release a report entitled “Condition of the county/city”. Citizens continue to pay taxes, but choose where their taxes go. Whether into the arts (innovation), road repair, transit, parks, compost collection services, renewable energy, agriculture, bombs, missiles, nuclear, education, bike-share programs etc. Tax payers decide society’s course through their vote – their money.

“Frack is Whack”

irkone — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 22:17:04 +0000

So energy companies are clamoring to drill. And they are getting rare support from their usual sparring partners. Environmentalists say using natural gas will help slow climate change because it burns more cleanly than coal and oil. Lawmakers hail the gas as a source of jobs. They also see it as a way to wean the United States from its dependency on other countries for oil.

But the relatively new drilling method — known as high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking — carries significant environmental risks. It involves injecting huge amounts of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, at high pressures to break up rock formations and release the gas.

With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/us/27gas.html?_r=1

Noam Chomsky: How Climate Change Became a ‘Liberal Hoax’

irkone — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 18:50:02 +0000

Bees!

irkone — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:32:34 +0000

Alarming decline in bumble bee populations

irkone — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:03:27 +0000

(Reuters) – Four previously abundant species of bumblebee are close to disappearing in the United States, researchers reported Monday in a study confirming that the agriculturally important bees are being affected worldwide.

They documented a 96 percent decline in the numbers of the four species, and said their range had shrunk by as much as 87 percent. As with honeybees, a pathogen is partly involved, but the researchers also found evidence of inbreeding caused by habitat loss.

“We provide incontrovertible evidence that multiple Bombus species have experienced sharp population declines at the national level,”….

http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE7023P720110103

AGRICULTURE: Ending the World as We Know It

irkone — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 23:12:24 +0000

by John Feeney

So how’s all that modern environmentalism working out for us — the green living, the carbon credits, reduced consumption, development in the Third World, better solar panels? If it all seems hopelessly inadequate, even laughable in the face of today’s global ecological crisis, perhaps that’s because it’s rooted in denial of the origins of the ecological drama now playing out.

It’s a drama of which climate change is only a part. It goes back ten thousand years and farther into the human past, confronts us with how we relate to nature, and brings reminders of abandoned civilizations.

We turn away from this drama because it raises troubling questions going straight to the foundations of our way of life. But grappling with converging environmental crises and the specter of widespread ecological collapse, for the sake of the human future it’s time we face it…. [1]

http://www.canyoncountryzephyr.com/newzephyr/august-september2010/html/aug10-20.htm