ENVIRONMENT

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Indigenous Engineering in Australia

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Indigenous Engineering in Australia

These efforts have been around for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years. Wow.

 

The detective work behind the Budj Bim eel traps World Heritage bid
The detective work behind the Budj Bim eel traps World Heritage bid
In the 1840s, the eel traps of Budj Bim were described as the work of ‘civilized men’. But it took another 135 years for more appreciative European eyes to examine the complexity of western Victorias Aboriginal fishery.

Rather than living passively off whatever nature provided, the Gunditjmara actively and deliberately manipulated local water flows and ecologies to engineer a landscape focused on increasing the availability and reliability of eels.

Manipulation of the landscape involved stone structures (such as traps and channels) dating back at least 6,600 years. Eel aquaculture facilities (ponds and dam walls) pre-date contact with Europeans by many hundreds (and possibly thousands) of years.

As Lourandos pointed out more than three decades ago, and Bruce Pascoe reveals in his recent award-winning book Dark Emu, differences between hunter gatherers and cultivators, and foragers and farmers, are far more complex and blurred than we once thought.

https://theconversation.com/the-detective-work-behind-the-budj-bim-eel-traps-world-heritage-bid-71800

And there’s much, much more to explore and celebrate:

 

 

Courtesy ‘Merki’ this week on Twitter’s ‘IndigenousX‘ rotating account. (Follow!)

Header photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash

 

Environment

Re-wilding: Re-introduced ‘Fishers’ Thrive In Cascade Mountains

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“Fishers” are slim furry, forest-dwelling relatives of weasels, mink and otters in North America. But they’ve been extinct in the Pacific Northwest since the 1900s. Until scientists attempted to re-introduce them in the Cascade mountains.

 

Fishers are back in Washington ? but can they survive?
Fishers are back in Washington – but can they survive?
Biologists released a handful of the endangered, weasel-like animals in 2008, but now they must find out if the population is sustaining itself.
https://crosscut.com/2018/02/fishers-are-back-washington-can-they-survive 

Header photo courtesy Earthfix

Environment Science

Oxygene: Goodyear’s living green tire made from moss and rubber

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Oxygene: Goodyear’s living green tire made from moss and rubber
Goodyear's moss-filled tires are here to save the environment
Goodyear’s ‘Oxygene’ moss-filled tires are here to save the environment

The company’s gone sort-of biotech, with living moss at the center of the tire. It draws in moisture from the road (not sure how that will fare in Arizona), eats CO2 and puts out oxygen — basically just doing what plants do. Goodyear estimates a that if every car in Paris had these tires, it would remove some 4,000 tons of CO2 each year. That’s equivalent to removing about 4,500 cars from the road there.

The plant-filled center is also biohacked to extract a small amount of electricity from photosynthesis.

… Going further, Goodyear imagines these tires would use something like Li-Fi to engage in vehicle-to-infrastructure communication.

[Not to be confused with the classic electronic music album by Jean-Michel Jarre.]

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/goodyear-oxygene-tire-alive-geneva-motor-show-auto/
Photo courtesy Goodyear

 

Environment Science Technology

Solar Geoengineering To Fight Climate Change

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Solar Geoengineering To Fight Climate Change
Scientists suggest a giant sunshade in the sky could solve global warming
Scientists suggest a giant sunshade in the sky could solve global warming

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction: the creation, using balloons or jets, of a manmade atmospheric sunshade to shield the most vulnerable countries in the global south against the worst effects of global warming.

But amid mounting interest in “solar geoengineering” – not least among western universities – a group of scientists from developing countries has issued a forceful call to have a greater say in the direction of research into climate change, arguing that their countries are the ones with most at stake.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/apr/05/scientists-suggest-giant-sunshade-in-sky-could-solve-global-warming

Header photo by Artur Dyadchenko on Unsplash

Environment

Beach Cleanup Fertile For Turtles

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Beach Cleanup Fertile For Turtles
Mumbai beach goes from dump to turtle hatchery in two years
Mumbai beach goes from dump to turtle hatchery in two years

Hatchlings from a vulnerable turtle species have been spotted for the first time in decades on a Mumbai beach that was rejuvenated in the past two years by a massive volunteer cleanup operation.

At least 80 Olive Ridley turtles have made their way into the Arabian Sea from nests on the southern end of Versova beach in the past week, protected from wild dogs and birds of prey by volunteers who slept overnight in the sand to watch over them.

Versova has undergone what the United Nations has called the “world’s largest beach cleanup project” over the past two years, transformed from a shin-deep dump yard for plastics and rubbish to a virtually pristine piece of coastline.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/30/mumbai-beach-goes-from-dump-to-turtle-hatchery-in-two-years
Header photo: Jeremy Bishop

 

Environment Society

#TheInternetOfLivingThings: Melbourne Fans Email Love Letters To Their Local Park Trees

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#TheInternetOfLivingThings: Melbourne Fans Email Love Letters To Their Local Park Trees
People Are Writing Thousands of Emails to Trees
Space probes have Twitter acccounts, as do architecturally famous bridges and museums.  Cats. squirrels, goats, hedgehogs are stars on Instagram. Now Melbourne’s trees have emails.  Citizen-based monitoring/engagment with culture, art, and especially *nature* is one relatively positive side of the Internet of (Living) Things; a modern day reflection of what past cultures had seen as a spiritual engagement.  (Maybe we can get whales in on the social media game?)  From The Atlantic:
People Are Writing Thousands of Emails to Trees
When the city of Melbourne linked email accounts to trees so people could report problems, they wrote love letters to the trees instead.
Officials assigned the trees ID numbers and email addresses in 2013 as part of a program designed to make it easier for citizens to report problems like dangerous branches. The “unintended but positive consequence,” as the chair of Melbourne’s Environment Portfolio, Councillor Arron Wood, put it to me in an email, was that people did more than just report issues. They also wrote directly to the trees, which have received thousands of messages—everything from banal greetings and questions about current events to love letters and existential dilemmas.

It’s a dynamic that is playing out more broadly, too, in concert with a profound shift toward the ubiquity of interactive, cloud-connected technologies. Modern tools for communicating, publishing, and networking aren’t just for connecting to other humans, but end up establishing relationships between people and anthropomorphized non-human objects, too. The experience of chatting with a robot or emailing a tree may be delightful, but it’s not really unusual.  

The move toward the Internet of Things only encourages the sense that our objects are not actually just things but acquaintances.

More: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/when-you-give-a-tree-an-email-address/398210/ 
Photo courtesy Casey Horner on Unsplash

 

Culture Environment Society Wow Cool

Pawnee Eagle Corn Revived

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Pawnee Eagle Corn reflects social, political, agricultural history. A fascinating tale.

Trust, friendship lead to regrowth of sacred corn
Trust, friendship lead to regrowth of sacred corn
When the Pawnee Nation was forced from its homeland in Nebraska to a reservation in Oklahoma in the 1870s, they lost a lot more than their home and their lives.
www.hastingstribune.com
Keepers of the Seed - True West Magazine
Keepers of the Seed – True West Magazine
A partnership allows the first Cornhuskers to save the ancient Eagle Corn seed. The last 50 kernels of Eagle Corn were kept in a mayonnaise jar, the last seeds of a mother corn that had nurtured the Pawnee people for generations and was taken with them when they were exiled from Nebraska to Oklahoma…
truewestmagazine.com
Pawnee corn: Sacred and sustainable
Pawnee corn: Sacred and sustainable
SHELTON:  Seed sisters Ronnie OBrien and Deb Echo-Hawk can barely contain their joy when they talk about progress made by Oklahoma and Nebraska gardeners to restore the Pawnee corn
www.kearneyhub.com

This, and much more on @AgBioWorld’s thread.

Culture Environment Health

Julian Melchiorri’s Exhale Bionic Chandelier

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The Exhale Bionic Chandelier: Microorganism-filled 'leaves' that 'breathe'
The Exhale Bionic Chandelier: Microorganism-filled ‘leaves’ that ‘breathe’
An air purifier, an art object, and a piece of lighting design all in one living, ‘breathing’ chandelier. This is London-based inventor and bioengineer Julian Melchiorri’s Exhale Bionic Chandelier, a microorganism-filled light made from 70 ‘leaves’ that take carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it
thekidshouldseethis.com

 

Environment Science

Biodegradable Six-Pack Rings

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A brewery is making the ocean safer with this new edible packaging
A brewery is making the ocean safer with this new edible packaging
A Florida brewery is helping lessen marine pollution by creating six-pack rings out of barley and wheat so that sea life can eat them.
www.youtube.com
A brewery invented 'edible six-pack rings' to save ocean animals
A brewery invented ‘edible six-pack rings’ to save ocean animals
Saltwater Brewery in Florida has invented six-pack rings that ocean animals can actually eat.
www.businessinsider.com