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Radical Mycology (click to download PDF)

“A new zine from the Spore Liberation Front exploring the numerous uses for mushrooms and their implications for ecoactivists and other Earth friendly folk. From food to medicine to paper and dyes to the amazing new field of mycorememdiation (the use of mushrooms to clean up oil spills and restore damaged habitats), this zine gives a thorough overview of the greater fungi with a novel, radical perspective.”

iisabelle:loveandzombies:catsluck:

The Nighttime Gardener’s Guide - a guide for the shy gardener in North Amerika (click for PDF)

• IT research firm Gartner estimates Google’s data centres contain nearly a million servers, each drawing about 1 kilowatt of electricity. So every hour Google’s engine burns through 1 million kilowatt-hours. Google serves up approximately 10 million search results per hour, so one search has the same energy cost as turning on a 100-watt light bulb for an hour.
• This doesn’t bode well. Even though the average American performs just 1.5 searches per day, it is hard to imagine that this will not rise dramatically.
• The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that data centres are responsible for 1.5 per cent of US energy use. How much more will that be when we, and our gadgets, are doing hundreds of searches per day? Or when the planet’s 6 billion inhabitants all want equal access? We’ve all heard the future of information architecture is cloud computing. It just might be a cloud of carbon dioxide.

• A tiny island claimed for years by India and Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal has disappeared beneath the rising seas, scientists in India say.
• The uninhabited territory south of the Hariabhanga river was known as New Moore Island to the Indians and South Talpatti Island to the Bangladeshis.
• Recent satellites images show the whole island under water, says the School of Oceanographic Studies in Calcutta.
• Its scientists say other nearby islands could also vanish as sea levels rise.

• New Delhi: In a major development, a High Power Committee established by the state government of Kerala in India has recommended today that Coca-Cola be held liable for Indian Rupees 216 crore (US$ 48 million) for damages caused as a result of the company’s bottling operations in Plachimada.
• The Coca-Cola bottling plant in Plachimada has remained shut down since March 2004 as a result of the community-led campaign in Plachimada challenging Coca-Cola’s abuse of water resources.
• The report and recommendations were welcomed by activists who have challenged Coca-Cola’s operations in Plachimada. Demanding compensation from the Coca-Cola company for the damages it has caused has been a central demand of the campaign from its inception.
• “We welcome the Committee’s recommendations and now the state government must find the political will to implement the recommendations,” said R. Ajayan of the Plachimada Solidarity Committee, a statewide organization that has been instrumental in moving the compensation process forward.
• The Adivasi Samrakshana Sangham and the Plachimada Solidarity Committee had submitted detailed proposals to the high level committee on the issue of compensation and the course forward.
• “The Committee thus has compelling evidence to conclude that the HCBPL has caused serious depletion of the water resources of Plachimada, and has severely contaminated the water and soil,” said the report. HCBPL is the Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Private Limited, a subsidiary of Atlanta based Coca-Cola Company.
• “The Committee has come to the conclusion that the Company is responsible for these damages and it is obligatory that they pay the compensation to the affected people for the agricultural losses, health problems, loss of wages, loss of educational opportunities, and the pollution caused to the water resources,” added the report.
• The report also agreed that Coca-Cola should be held criminally liable for its reckless actions in Plachimada – a key demand of the campaign to hold Coca-Cola accountable. “The compensation is not to be viewed as a quid pro quo for not initiating criminal charges,” the report stated.

Desert Dust Storm Roars Through China, Blankets Korea

• Imagine having neighbors whose yard — once lush and beautiful, filled with grass and trees — became a wasteland. Every time the wind blew hard, dust rose from their torn up plot of earth and wafted into your yard, into your house. It got on your clothes, in your kitchen, in your lungs.
• You’d be pretty annoyed at your neighbors, wouldn’t you? Well, South Koreans must be fairly ticked off just now, because their entire country is suffering from the worst dust storm the Korean Peninsula has ever seen.
• It’s basically China’s fault. The storm started when strong winds powered through the Gobi Desert in western China and Mongolia before turning day into night in Beijing, and then moving on to sprinkle over Japan and slam into Korea. China’s dust problems are well-documented, and largely thought to be the result of deforestation and poor land use management on farms near the arid fringes of the Gobi.
• Now, dust storms whipping up from deserts and arid regions all over the world are perfectly natural, if destructive. But this storm is part of a growing trend of increasingly frequent and severe dust events in the region.
• The NASA image gives you an idea of just how monstrously big this thing is…

Making the USA into one state…

• Most intelligent people recognize that suburban sprawl is a blight. A lot of people also realize that walkable cities and well-planned communities would be a huge improvement on ghost malls, suburban slums and other hideous after-effects of developer greed and stupidity. Livable cities are the hallmark of a true civilization.
• That being said, there are a lot of radical ideas out there that have the strong whiff of elite social engineering. This may or may not be one of them, but fitting the entire population of the US into a territory the size of New Hampshire seems a bit extreme, don’t you think? But we’re living in a time when plans are being drawn up to bulldoze any number of Rust Belt ghost towns back into farmlands. All bets are off.
• We’re also living at a time when it seems that the country is being goaded into disintegration, mainly through media shills rejiggering our political symbols and myths into social weapons. It could turn out that certain parts of the US could be radically transformed into sci-fi habitats surrounded by forest and farmland. Keep an eye out for signs of this in the days to come.

My favorite line from the infographic: “we’d all be neighbors!”

Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.

Rather than warehouse their children in factory schools invented to instill obedience in the future mill workers of America, bourgeois rebels will educate their kids in virtual schools tailored to different learning styles. Whereas only 1.5 million children were homeschooled in 2007, we can expect the number to explode in future years as distance education blows past the traditional variety in cost and quality. The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian “hacktivists.”

Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they’ll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it’s coming.

• Just a few months into 2010, and Mother Nature has delivered a slew of costly and deadly natural disasters. From the catastrophic Haiti and Chilean earthquakes to the U.S. blizzard that descended on Washington, D.C., last month, which was mostly just inconvenient by comparison, 2010 is already above average in terms of natural-disaster casualties.
• In comparison to previous years, the number of casualties from natural disasters in 2010, which is already well above 200,000, is outside the norm. Yet as in other disastrous years, the high toll this year is due largely to a single event.
• Over the decade from 2000 to the end of 2009, the yearly average was 78,000, according to the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR). For the 1990s, the average was 43,000, and the 1980s was 75,000. Disaster experts say the rise in tragedy is at least partly due to increases in urban populations.

Antarctic Glacier Has Five-story Blood-red Waterfall of Primordial Ooze

There is a five-story, blood-red waterfall pouring slowly from the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valley. Its back story, at Atlas Obscura, is simply remarkable:

Roughly 2 million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed beneath it a small body of water which contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. Evolving independently of the rest of the living world, these microbes exist without heat, light, or oxygen, and are essentially the definition of “primordial ooze.” The trapped lake has very high salinity and is rich in iron, which gives the waterfall its red color. A fissure in the glacier allows the subglacial lake to flow out, forming the falls without contaminating the ecosystem within.

Settled: Dinosaurs done in by asteroid

• What killed off the dinosaurs?
• Thirty years ago, UC Berkeley geologist Walter Alvarez offered his revolutionary answer to that question and incited one of the liveliest controversies in modern science.
• Now, an international team of scientists says today the issue is settled: Alvarez was right.
• In 1980, Alvarez and his colleagues at Berkeley theorized that a monstrous asteroid 10 miles wide slammed into Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula about 65 million years ago and dug a crater 60 miles wide and 15 miles deep. The impact sent up a huge cloud of ash, soot, pulverized rock and sulfurous steam that darkened the skies for years like a nuclear winter, dooming more than half the world’s life on land and in the oceans - microorganisms, plants and animals.
• The dinosaurs, those iconic beasts that had ruled the world for 160 million years, also vanished in that long-lasting cataclysm, the Alvarez team maintained.

Now, what will kill off the humans?

Giant Sea Serpent Captured on Camera (via LabEquipment)

the sushi on the bottom of the ocean can be scary.