Thanks Mark.

I just came across this site the other week on Motionographer, Nissan’s Journey To Zero. I’m usually not a huge fan of the whole ‘emersive web experience’ type of thing, or most uses of flash, or even websites with music for that matter. But I have to say, the content intention and design of this Journey to Zero site are great.

It includes talks from Richard Saul Wurman who is the Founder and Chairman of TED, and who in 1976 coined the phrase ‘Information Architect’ (this guy is fast becoming another one of our favorite people), and involves contributions from Universal Everything, Markus Eriksson/Subdisc, SU11, IAAH, Wade Davis, and PSFK. Works include videos, motion graphics, a typeface, essays and a call to action for people to download and create video response to the content created by IAAH…

Overall I think it’s really nice to see so many smart and talented people coming together to brand and discuss how we can move toward zero emissions. I know a lot of this sort of corporate giant funded projects can sometimes seem hallow, but it’s still important to have the discussion. Even if you want credit for funding it. Better spend your money on that than on simply fighting legislation or more silly cars.

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And Nissan has spent money to roll out the first production electric car just this year. Another good step. I was fortunate enough to be asked to help animate some of these informational videos for the Nissan Leaf, Nissans new fully electric car. It’s pretty smart for them to go straight ahead into developing an electric car, if an obvious one. It still takes some corporate courage to make the big changes happen. But surely, we all can see that cars that don’t run on gas are the future, so it’s smart to get a production gas free car on the market and the sooner the better. Gives you a leg up on the competition. I still think it’s very unfortunate that no one  had the guts to work harder and push this technology sooner.

Nissan, with these changes has definitely moved from somewhere in the background into the forefront of how to solve some of the issues we have with emissions and transportation. And hopefully this will move other auto-manufacturers to have to do them one better or keep up with some actual acts of environmental responsibility…

Ken Yeang and Ross Lovegrove show how nature can inspire our living spaces and cities by fusing efficiency and beauty.

via SwissMiss.

Pretty alarming (though not completely surprising) article on Medical News Today regarding cell phone usage.

Lloyd Morgan, lead author and member of the Bioelectromagnetics Society says, “Exposure to cellphone radiation is the largest human health experiment ever undertaken, without informed consent, and has some 4 billion participants enrolled. Science has shown increased risk of brain tumors from use of cellphones, as well as increased risk of eye cancer, salivary gland tumors, testicular cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and leukemia. The public must be informed.”

I would recommend highly getting that phone out of your pocket all day long and limiting time on the phone as well as using some type of headset or earbuds to get the actual device away from your brain.

Or just go all the way and get a pocket full of quarters and start remembering peoples phone numbers again like in the good old 20th century.

+++UPDATE+++

Here’s a link to the Environmental Working Group’s list and ratings for radiation associated with using various cell phones. Looks like the iPhone 3G I use is pretty high on this list. Might have to look into downgrading back to a Motorola Razr which is less convenient for email and gps maps, but will be less likely to give me testicular or eyeball cancer, which I could do without. o_o

(and John Podesta, but watching his part is not so necessary, nowhere near as focused, and i dare say, less interesting.)

A Green World is a Safer One from National Building Museum on Vimeo.

Now, this is a recording of a museum lecture, which means (for those of you who have never been to one) there’s about 10 minutes of introduction and thank you’s to supporting organizations, et cetera, ad nauseum. Just skip ahead. Also, it is a longish talk (Ed’s part is about 35 minutes long).

(work by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Brenman. Additional information pertaining to the animation on Fisch and McLeod’s wiki: shifthappens.wikispaces.com.)

By July of this year Philips will have given the U.S. what (to my knowledge) is the first attractive LED bulb to use our standard incandecent form factor. It will cost $50, but is rated to give 45,000 hours of light. It’s important to note, however, that LEDs won’t burn out as we are used to incandecent bulbs doing, which is to say that at the end of that 45,000 hour stint of bulb-use, it won’t have died, it will just have dimmed by 10%.

Not only will it be usable for up to 40 times as long as an incandecent bult, but the light it gives, equivalent in intensity to a 40 watt bulb, will use just 7 watts of electricity.

For those for of us trying keep our total energy use under 2000 watts, it will come as a delightful boon to use as little as 77 watts to light our entire apartments, with every bulb on (should we want to do such things), as opposed to 75 watts for one corner.

Energy concious bulb-buyers currently tend to go for compact fluorecent bulbs, but are just as often worried about their mercury content, and the unpleaset light qualty generally found. LED bulbs have no mercury, but will still have to prove themselves friendly on the eyes. i’ll certainly be picking up at least one of thes hummers to see how it feels.

“Print is Dead.” I’ve been hearing this for at least as long as i’ve been alive (Egon says it in the first Ghostbusters movie), yet even now with the ubiquity of internet reading, and digital text media, print is alive and (relatively) well. At least as far as books are concerned. Small newspapers are closing around the country, or being purchased by larger corporations, but this could be said to be as much a problem of business as a problem of communication method. In any case, just as recorded music didn’t [completely] destroy live music, TV didn’t kill radio, and BETA/VHS could never fully compete with watching films in theaters, print, and the use of paper/paper-like-materials will likely never die out entirely. Some things are simply too delightful to the human senses to disappear from a culture, and i would argue that reading the printed word and turning the pages of a book is one of those things.

As we redefine what print can mean, the question of environmental and social justice necessarily come up, if not for any altruistic “hippy-dippy” reasons, then simply for the bottom-line issues of resource use, both material and human, in the production of any goods.

Unfortunately there is no known printing method in popular use which is environmentally just. Most environmental energy in the printing world is focused on creating papers and inks that are little more than slight modifications on the precedent models of production. These are: wood pulp from “sustainably managed forests,” higher and higher recycled contents, and post consumer contents,* as well as alternate ink binders, mostly soy, or polymer based. As with any attempt to do something in a manner which is “less bad,” it is still not good. At least not entirely. The Forest Stewardship Council, will tell you all about the wonderful effects they’re having on the world’s forests by virtue of widespread adoption of their methods on the “about” page of their website. The best news is that they don’t just worry about printing, but certify logging operations which fell trees for timber used in all manner of wood products. The bad news is that we’re still writing on trees, if slightly fewer of them.

Paper use in the fine art world can arguably be called a celebration of the material (or perhaps I’m just biased as an artist), but use of tree products in the creation of office detritus is no such celebration. Meeting minutes, intra-office notes, and the daily news are a disrespectful use the oldest lived life form on our planet, and the services they render us in acting as our global lungs, and a life giving force for thousands of species. In either case of paper use (the arts or daily waste), other options exist, and have for quite seme time.

An article from the New York Times from 1916 (concurrent with a country wide paper production cost increase, during which prices threatened the newspaper industry) described the impassioned efforts of Georgian senator Hoke Smith to switch the country’s paper production from trees to waste stalks, that is: the stalks of extant commodity or food crops such as cotton, corn, rice. According to the article, a 1911 report by the Department of Agriculture demonstrated that paper could be made from any of these sources (it issued the report in 5 versions, each on a paper made from a different kind of waste stalk). Making paper in this method at that time was not considered commercially viable, however, as the U.S of A’s supply of timber seemed as endless as the heavens, and as a result of this psychological devaluation, paper was strictly cheaper to make from trees than from agricultural waste. Only in countries like India and China did the practice of making paper from plant stalks take hold, at least, until recently.

A recent Worldchanging article describes a revitalization of the idea in our friendly country to the north. The most compelling information is this tidbit from Ottawa printer Dollco, in a press release from earlier this year concerning only the waste of wheat straw in paper pulp:

The majority of Canada’s paper is currently made from Boreal forests and Temperate rainforests. Straw from Canada’s wheat harvest could produce 8 millions of tonnes of pulp—equivalent to the paper volume used by the North American newspaper industry every year. That could result in a saving of 100 million trees each year—without impacting food production or increasing energy inputs, while providing a new source of income for grain growers.

Two issue of environmental justice jump to mind on this issue, however, one, Silica, is addressed in the Worldchanging article, while the other, Dioxin, is absent. Dioxin is a carcinogenic compound (possibly the most dangerous known to exist) that is created in the paper making process, during the chlorination (bleaching) step. This tends (ironically) to be more dramatic in post-consumer waste paper products, and could possibly be as sever a problem in the waste-stalk paper world. We shall see.

On the ink side of things, are the “environmentally friendly inks,” so called because they use binders which are non-toxic, and off-gass little or no volatile organic compounds. Soy, and polymer inks, in addition to being non-toxic have various properties which make them conducive to our current methods of recycling. Unfortunately, the compounds making colour within in the inks in the first place are still dangerous, and if not recycled, can seep into the environment, including food and water supplies, much more readily than their conventional toxic-ink counterparts. The toxicity of the products are much lower overall, but potentially more dangerous.

Perhaps a more exciting possibility for both our papers and inks, is that of a closed loop production model for polymer papers and high-tech dyes, where-in each generation of recycled product is of just as high a material standard as the first, and none of the materials are environmentally dangerous if they escape that loop. This implies relatively minor advances in the technologies of the materials involved, but a great advance in the culture of paper use, where we would return the product to it’s manufacturer or distributor as a matter of course. There would no “recycling,” per se, only use and re-use. The technical challenges here are creating polymers that are safe for the kind of use they would withstand as reading material, and dyes that could be “washed” off of the paper easily, but not in any way that naturally occurs (a zero-engergy safe chemical process for instance). Again, we shall see.

Another stop-gap possibility, long talked about, are e-inks, and e-papers. Of which there are relatively few in scientific development which seem promising, but nonetheless offer exciting possibilities, at least for tech nerds, and those who like holding paper-like-substrates. Current methods are mostly not entirely friendly, and lack not only the tactile delight of printed paper, but also (at least publicly) the environmentally sound focus of those researchers working in other fields. On the other hand, this we can see, and now:

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* Paper products can legally be called “recycled,” even if they contain no post-consumer products. This version of recycling is more accurately “rescuing,” or “reclaiming” as it makes use of wood pulp deemed to be of too low a grade for general use in paper making. This pulp is usually used for some other wood product industry (particle board and the like), or simply thrown “away.” Post-consumer products, on the other hand, are actually wood pulps made from your local recycling center, by way of your old cereal boxes, newspapers, and junk mail.