Big Question: Feast or Famine?
"The world population is growing by 75 million people each year. That's almost the size of Germany. Today, we're nearing 7 billion people. At this rate, we'll reach 9 billion people by 2040. And we all need to eat. But how? That's a critical issue the IonE tackles in our first Big Question video.
At the same time, agriculture is a major contributor to climate change and will suffer as an industry from the consequences."
(Institute on the Environment, 2009, University of Minnesota)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Masdar: Abu Dhabi's carbon-neutral city
"The world's first zero-carbon city is being built in Abu Dhabi and is designed to be not only free of cars and skyscrapers but also powered by the sun.
The oil-rich United Arab Emirates is the last place you would expect to learn lessons on low-carbon living, but the emerging eco-city of Masdar could teach the world.
At first glance, the parched landscape of Abu Dhabi looks like the craziest place to build any city, let alone a sustainable one.
The inhospitable terrain suggests that the only way to survive here is with the maximum of technological support, a bit like living on the moon.
The genius of Masdar - if it works - will be combining 21st Century engineering with traditional desert architecture to deliver zero-carbon comfort. And it is being built now.
Masdar will be home to about 50,000 people, at least 1,000 businesses and a university.
It is being designed by British architects Foster and Partners, but it is the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is paying for it. And it will cost between £10bn (USD$15bn) and £20bn (USD$30bn). "
(Tom Heap, BBC News)
[Profiled on the BBC Radio 4 programme 'Costing The Earth: Eco-City Limits' Monday 29 March at 2100 BST]
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Nomad Space: Constant Directions
"The nomad, nomad space, is localised and not delimited. What is both limited and limiting is striated space, the relative global: it is limited in its parts, which are assigned constant directions, are oriented in relation to one another, divisible by boundaries, and can interlink; what is limiting (limes or wall, and no longer boundary) is this aggregate in relation to the smooth spaces it 'contains,' whose growth it slows or prevents, and which it restricts or places outside. Even when the nomad sustains its effects, he does not belong to this relative global, where one passes from one point to another, from one region to another. Rather, he is in a local absolute, an absolute that is manifested locally, and engendered in a series of local operations of varying orientations: desert, steppe, ice, sea [and salt-lake]."
(Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari p.382)
Fig.1 David Nash, 2004. A dry salt lake on the way between Cervantes and Kalbarri, Australia
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
