MachineMachine /stream - tagged with environment http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net How Catholicism made Marshall McLuhan one of the twentieth century’s freest and finest thinkers http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.07-media-divine-inspiration/1/ APPROPRIATELY ENOUGH, a century after his birth in 1911, Marshall McLuhan has found a second life on the Internet. YouTube and other sites are a rich repository of McLuhan interviews, revealing that the late media sage still has the power to provoke and infuriate. Connoisseurs of Canadian television should track down a 1968 episode of a CBC program called The Summer Way, a highbrow cultural and political show that once featured a half-hour debate about technology between McLuhan and the novelist Norman Mailer.

Both freewheeling public intellectuals with a penchant for making wild statements, Mailer and McLuhan… ]]> Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:16:25 -0700 http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.07-media-divine-inspiration/1/ This will be the Century of Disasters http://www.slate.com/id/2294013/ A half-mile wide twister tore through Joplin, Mo., on Sunday, killing nearly 100. The tornado was one of 68 reported across seven states this weekend. Unfortunately, this century will be a time when natural disasters and failures of human design go hand-in-hand. As Joel Achenbach explained earlier this month in the article reprinted below, we've engineered a planet that works well but is susceptible to catastrophic failures.

This will be the century of disasters.

In the same way that the 20th century was the century of world wars, genocide, and grinding ideological conflict, the… ]]> Wed, 25 May 2011 03:52:56 -0700 http://www.slate.com/id/2294013/ Human influence comes of age http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110511/full/473133a.html?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+yahoo%2FqUaz+%28Nature+news%29&utm_content=Twitter Humanity's profound impact on this planet is hard to deny, but is it big enough to merit its own geological epoch? This is the question facing geoscientists gathered in London this week to debate the validity and definition of the 'Anthropocene', a proposed new epoch characterized by human effects on the geological record.

"We are in the process of formalizing it," says Michael Ellis, head of the climate-change programme of the British Geological Survey in Nottingham, who coordinated the 11 May meeting. He and others hope that adopting the term will shift the thinking of policy-makers. "It… ]]> Wed, 11 May 2011 11:27:47 -0700 http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110511/full/473133a.html?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+yahoo%2FqUaz+%28Nature+news%29&utm_content=Twitter We are as gods and have to get good at it http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/brand09/brand09_index.html The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with climate change. Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, "we are as gods, we might as well get good at it". Photographs of earth from space had that god-like perspective.

What I'm saying now is we are as gods and have to get good at it. Necessity comes from climate change, potentially disastrous for civilization. The planet will be okay, life will be okay. We will lose vast quantities of species, probably lose the rain forests if the climate… ]]> Thu, 28 Apr 2011 03:27:00 -0700 http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/brand09/brand09_index.html The last stand of the Amazon http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/03/last-stand-of-the-amazon The best way to think about the remaining tribes in 2011 is to imagine a series of concentric circles, all of which interact on each boundary. There are the tribes that stay on their own homelands in the forest (or seek to do so), but who have regular relations with the outside. These retain a strong tribal identity, but they are coming to know the world all too well; they will travel to fight legal battles for their territories and their children will leave for the cities. Then there are a good number of tribes (or parts of tribes) who… ]]> Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:07:07 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/03/last-stand-of-the-amazon On Resilience http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience/ A key feature of complex adaptive systems is their ability to self-organize along a number of different pathways with possible sudden shifts between states: A lake, for example, can exist in either an oxygenated, clear state or an algae-dominated, murky one. A financial market can float on a housing bubble or settle into a basin of recession. Conventionally, we’ve tended to view the transition between such states as gradual. But there is increasing evidence that systems often don’t respond to change in a smooth way: The clear lake seems hardly affected by fertilizer runoff until a critical threshold is passed,… ]]> Thu, 16 Dec 2010 04:09:00 -0700 http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience/ Planet Zoo http://themorningnews.org/archives/opinions/planet_zoo.php Look, I wouldn’t trade the 21st century for any other. We have toilet paper and vitamin-fortified milk and a measles vaccine. We can buy avocados in Fairbanks in January. But sometimes, particularly in the United States, we tend to put too much faith into the transformative powers of technology. Is progress really a curve that sweeps perpetually, unfailingly higher? Wasn’t toy-making or winemaking or milk-making or cheese-making or cement-making sometimes performed with more skill 300 or 700 or 1,900 years ago? I think of a tour guide I once overheard in the Roman Forum. She pointed with the tip of… ]]> Mon, 27 Sep 2010 05:15:00 -0700 http://themorningnews.org/archives/opinions/planet_zoo.php The most isolated man on the planet http://www.slate.com/id/2264478/pagenum/all/ He's an Indian, and Brazilian officials have concluded that he's the last survivor of an uncontacted tribe. They first became aware of his existence nearly 15 years ago and for a decade launched numerous expeditions to track him, to ensure his safety, and to try to establish peaceful contact with him. In 2007, with ranching and logging closing in quickly on all sides, government officials declared a 31-square-mile area around him off-limits to trespassing and development.
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It's meant to be a safe zone. He's still in there. Alone.

History offers few examples… ]]> Mon, 30 Aug 2010 08:05:00 -0700 http://www.slate.com/id/2264478/pagenum/all/ Should This Be the Last Generation? http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/should-this-be-the-last-generation/ Have you ever thought about whether to have a child? If so, what factors entered into your decision? Was it whether having children would be good for you, your partner and others close to the possible child, such as children you may already have, or perhaps your parents? For most people contemplating reproduction, those are the dominant questions. Some may also think about the desirability of adding to the strain that the nearly seven billion people already here are putting on our planet’s environment. But very few ask whether coming into existence is a good thing for the child itself.… ]]> Thu, 10 Jun 2010 02:45:00 -0700 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/should-this-be-the-last-generation/ Techno-Archaeology Rescues Climate Data from Early Satellites http://nsidc.org/monthlyhighlights/january2010.html Scientists today who study polar sea ice conditions rely on satellite records reaching back to 1979. But soon, data scientists hope to extend the look back by another decade or more. Researchers at NSIDC and NASA have shown that the oldest Earth observing satellite data can be made to yield new information, adding significantly to the view of Earth's climate history.

When NASA launched the first Nimbus satellite in the 1960s, they also launched an era of Earth observations from space. While the early Nimbus satellites provided meteorological and other observations, methods did not yet exist to… ]]> Sat, 29 May 2010 09:51:00 -0700 http://nsidc.org/monthlyhighlights/january2010.html Theses on Sustainability http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/5502 [1] THE TERM HAS BECOME so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give those activities the gloss of moral imperative, the cachet of environmental enlightenment. “Sustainable” has been used variously to mean “politically feasible,” “economically feasible,” “not part of a pyramid or bubble,” “socially enlightened,” “consistent with neoconservative small-government dogma,” “consistent with liberal principles of justice and fairness,” “morally desirable,” and, at its most diffuse, “sensibly far-sighted.”

[2] NATURE WILL DECIDE what is sustainable; it always has and always will.… ]]> Sat, 15 May 2010 04:25:00 -0700 http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/5502 Desire Paths: Reading, Memory and Inscription http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/07/desire-paths-reading-memory-and-inscription.html

by Daniel Rourke

This article is an edifice, a mockery of the freedom needed to create it. It is rigid, it is linear. Its sentences end only to lead onwards to the next, pulling the reader's eye through a series of limited, and limiting pathways. And yet, reading does not have to be this way. In the process of writing this article little time was spent laying out the path of words you now follow to their conclusion. The process of writing is non-linear, perhaps more like a network of ideas spanning out from nodes…

]]> Sun, 12 Jul 2009 22:35:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/07/desire-paths-reading-memory-and-inscription.html Is There a Better Word for Doom? http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/is_there_a_better_word_for_doom/ Six experts discuss the merits of framing climate change, the language that troubles them, and the inherent bias of any chosen word. In a report to be released the first week in June — though a summary was accidentally leaked by email to the press late last month — the firm has compiled the results of extensive polling and focus-group sessions conducted over the last several years. Those studies, according to EcoAmerica, indicate that words like “global warming,” “cap and trade,” and “carbon dioxide” turn people off. The firm advises that environmental and government leaders begin talking about “our deteriorating atmosphere” and a “pollution… ]]> Wed, 27 May 2009 17:19:00 -0700 http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/is_there_a_better_word_for_doom/ Way more about paths at UC Berkeley than you'd ever want to read http://www.peterme.com/archives/000073.html How architectural and design choices are mediated and ultimately over-ruled by user choice, reflexion, repetition and desire. ]]> Mon, 25 May 2009 12:21:00 -0700 http://www.peterme.com/archives/000073.html Desire Paths/Lines: the original translation and related concepts/terms http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/122978 Desire Paths / Lines: a term apparently coined by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. What was the original French he used? and are there any other terms for the act and outcome of paths that emerge through routine, reflexion and the feedback of movement. What was Bachelard's original name for desire lines, in French?

Also, I am not just interested in desire lines as object/artefact, but the actual act of creating/adding to desire lines. Is there a different term for this? or a series of related terms? any terms from other areas/disciplines which… ]]> Mon, 25 May 2009 11:37:00 -0700 http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/122978