One little note: the video segment is very pretty and smooth, but might give the impression that making one of these systems is pretty much throwing some stuff in a jar. It’s not. Yes, the pond scum is important, but too much of it will be a very bad thing. So: read the full recipe at this link.

Thanks for being you, Malingering.

Somehow, kalevkevad’s photo titled “Garbage Disaster” seems apropos.

It’s a gentle preview of what might happen if Ralph Nader’s presidential bid manages to splinter off a piece of the progressive vote this year. Yes, I groaningly agree, none of the major candidates in the current election are sworn enemies of corporate capitalism. And you have to give the man extreme props for his heroism as a consumer advocate. But the concept that there is no difference between the two major parties, especially on environmental policies, is preposterous.

Go home to your honors and your achievements and a well-deserved beer, Ralph. I’ll even send you a sweet, sweet six to get the party started. We can watch the election returns together, and hold hands, and cry, and at the end of the night, smile with just a smidgeon of hope.

I must get legit press credentials so I can attend stellar events like this one: Bono and Al Gore together on the same stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Besides fueling slippery-fingered fantasies worldwide (how’d you like to get down with both of them in a Swiss hotel room? now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!), Al Gore got frank, and I’d say, helpful. He said, quote:

“I think it is really important from a climate change point of view to move away from the idea that personal actions from each of us represents the solution to this crisis.”

By personal actions, he’s talking about changing light bulbs and other bits of personal lifestyle, as promoted by treehugger and other relentlessly positive promoters of green consumerism.

“These are important… but in addition to changing the light bulbs it is important to change the laws,” Gore said.

Thank you Al. Don’t forget to vote!

Here come the objections: Unpermittable. Uninsurable. Illegal. Or my favorite: impossible!

[Ladder image borrowed from Monolithic.com via materialicious.]

People striving to make environmentally sensitive housing often struggle against building codes and planning officials that tell them their environmentally positive design feature simply “can’t be done.” In the case of small or tiny houses — which can be greener than a solar mcmansion just by being reasonably sized — one of the biggest challenges can come with stairways, since code stairways take up so much floor area and volume.

There are alternatives, of course, and here I’ll tell you about the one we used in my tiny house project: …more

Last year MAKE magazine published a tutorial I wrote about how to make a closed ecological system in a sealed bottle. It was a significant improvement on the earlier attempts I had made. My new system could reliably sustain Amano shrimp for 3 months or more, and snails indefinitely.

“The TSSM (Tabletop Shrimp Support Module) is a fun demonstration of the ecological cycles that keep us all alive, and an enticement to muse on everything from Godhood to space colonization,” I wrote in the teaser, and hey, I believe that more than ever now. Everybody should do this project.

Now MAKE’s a pricey mag — well worth it of course — but nonetheless it was nice to see the editors release my article to the public as a free PDF. In the months since the MAKE piece I’ve …more

VOTE. And if I can’t can’t convince you, how about flickr artiste magandafille?

Somehow I feel less cynical when I look at this photo.

Generally when it comes to greening up our lives, we tend to overestimate the impact of our sentiments, and …more

That blog’s name says it all. Here’s the link.

One of the basic problems of living a relatively high quality of life (with central heating, tasteful interior lighting, 24-hour grocery stores, UPS deliveries, hot and cold running pharmaceuticals, and so on — none of which I am going to give up, by the way) is that, practically by definition, it tends to isolate us from natural cycles and dynamics. We’re not swimming naked, at the whim of clouds and currents.

…more

In general, machismo is the sign of a loser. Think of some truly powerful people — Louis the XIV, the British Admiralty (once upon a time anyway), Tom Cruise, a Pope of your choice, even, for god’s sake, Rummy in his prime. Every one has a suspiciously feminine, manicured cleanliness. They all show off more than a patch of pale skin as they sway down a line between the momentous and the monstrous. It’s only the people they conquer that need to drink a lot, work out with weights, wave guns, and put on snarly faces. …more

I often wonder: Why do humans invent things? Why do we have culture?

Let’s face it, all we really need to do is eat and copulate. Why do we bother with so much more than that? To an outside observer, say an alien zoologist, what could possibly explain all the details in the following picture?

Who are these humans, he/she/it ponders? What are their machines? What, particularly, is the significance of the fuzzy ball on the cap of the human at the right? Is he, perhaps, a priest? …more