Guerrila gardner from london

London's guerrilla gardener and author Richard Reynolds proposes the hands on grassroot movement to change the ecology of the urban area.

Originally from http://www.boingboing.net/2008/11/04/minidocumentary-of-l.html

ARTSPEAK

The arts community is responding to climate change, and changing the conversation in the process.

by Natalie Jeremijenko •

Seed magazine

link

The point is that the artists' view is invaluable precisely because they are not experts and do not have the authority granted by science. They are only as persuasive as their images. As nonexperts—though interested and knowledgeable—they stand in for the view of the everyman. This reflects the nature of urban and natural systems. They transcend boundaries; they transcend borders, disciplines, issues, and expertise. With art, the viewer knows that she has a license to interpret, to critically evaluate the work, that her opinion matters. The same can't be said of science. Scientific arguments are presented in the public imagination as fait accompli. When definitive terms like "discovered" and "understood" are the norm, science is often a one-way conversation. The creativity on display in these exhibitions plays into the public imagination differently than the computational model, the quantitative risk analysis, or other summative representations used by environmental agencies to inform public decision-making. The art invites interpretation without oversimplification or unnecessary precision. And by combining legibility with a diverse viewership the works of art provide the opportunity for evidence-driven discussion. They invite skepticism (who trusts an artist?) and critical engagement. They incite participation, not passive consumption of facts. In a participatory democracy, strategies that raise the standards of evidence used in public debate and that engage diverse publics are worth attention. And as much as climate change is a phenomenon of the environmental commons—we are all subject to it, layperson or expert—it necessitates, and deserves, a response from the commons.

wired animal - possible introduction of new species?

Situated Technologies

Situated Technologies Pamphlets 3: Situated Advocacy

by Benjamin Bratton
Natalie Jeremijenko
Laura Forlano
Dharma Dailey

• Download FREE Advocacy is the act of arguing on behalf of a particular cause, idea or person, and addresses issues including self-advocacy, environmental protection, the rights of women, youth and minorities, social justice, the re-structured digital divide and political reform. Situated Technologies Pamphlets 3: Situated Advocacy considers how situated technologies have been—or might be—mobilized toward changing and/or influencing social or political policies, practices, and beliefs. What new forms of advocacy are enabled by contemporary location-based or context-aware media and information systems? How might they lend tactical support to the process of managing information flows and disseminating strategic knowledge that influences individual behavior or opinion, corporate conduct or public policy and law? Includes the essays: •Community Wireless Networks as Situated Advocacy, by Laura Forlano and Dharma Dailey •Suspicious Images, Latent Interfaces, by Benjamin Bratton and Natalie Jeremijenko

Preventing forest fires with tree power

Sensor system runs on electricity generated by trees

Elizabeth A. Thomson, News Office
September 23, 2008

MIT researchers and colleagues are working to find out whether energy from trees can power a network of sensors to prevent spreading forest fires.

What they learn also could raise the possibility of using trees as silent sentinels along the nation's borders to detect potential threats such as smuggled radioactive materials.

The U.S. Forest Service currently predicts and tracks fires with a variety of tools, including remote automated weather stations. But these stations are expensive and sparsely distributed. Additional sensors could save trees by providing better local climate data to be used in fire prediction models and earlier alerts. However, manually recharging or replacing batteries at often very hard-to-reach locations makes this impractical and costly.

The new sensor system seeks to avoid this problem by tapping into trees as a self-sustaining power supply. Each sensor is equipped with an off-the-shelf battery that can be slowly recharged using electricity generated by the tree. A single tree doesn't generate a lot of power, but over time the "trickle charge" adds up, "just like a dripping faucet can fill a bucket over time," said Shuguang Zhang, one of the researchers on the project and the associate director of MIT's Center for Biomedical Engineering (CBE).

The system produces enough electricity to allow the temperature and humidity sensors to wirelessly transmit signals four times a day, or immediately if there's a fire. Each signal hops from one sensor to another, until it reaches an existing weather station that beams the data by satellite to a forestry command center in Boise, Idaho.

Scientists have long known that trees can produce extremely small amounts of electricity. But no one knew exactly how the energy was produced or how to take advantage of the power.

In a recent issue of the Public Library of Science ONE, Zhang and MIT colleagues report the answer. "It's really a fairly simple phenomenon: An imbalance in pH between a tree and the soil it grows in," said Andreas Mershin, a postdoctoral associate at the CBE. The first author of the paper is Christopher J. Love, an MIT senior in chemistry who has been working on the project since his freshman year.

To solve the puzzle of where the voltage comes from, the team had to test a number of theories -- many of them exotic. That meant a slew of experiments that showed, among other things, that the electricity was not due to a simple electrochemical redox reaction (the type that powers the 'potato batteries' common in high school science labs, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_battery). The team also ruled out the source as due to coupling to underground power lines, radio waves or other electromagnetic interference.

Testing of the wireless sensor network, which is being developed by Voltree Power (http://voltreepower.com), is slated to begin in the spring on a 10-acre plot of land provided by the Forest Service.

According to Love, who with Mershin has a financial interest in Voltree, the bioenergy harvester battery charger module and sensors are ready. "We expect that we'll need to instrument four trees per acre," he said, noting that the system is designed for easy installation by unskilled workers.

"Right now we're finalizing exactly how the wireless sensor network will be configured to use the minimum amount of power," he concluded.

The original experiments were funded by MagCap Engineering, LLC, through MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.