Tag: student posts

Unsustainable Practices and Their Consequences

Most people do not realize the detrimental consequences of using unsustainable practices to obtain resources, nor do people view water as a resource to be protected and reused with care. Benoit Aquin’s photography series named “The Chinese Dust Bowl” emphasizes the importance of employing sustainable practices as well as to the scarcity of water as a resource. The pictures revolve around the widespread desertification in China, man-made deserts that are slowly expanding from over use of arable land, overgrazing, and increased drilling for water. Aquin presents shocking pictures of dry, cracked, and dusty land that highlight a lack of water through the haze and overall tan color present in all of the dusty, sandy pictures, especially since one of the reasons that the deserts were created was to find water by drilling into the ground. The dirt and heat of each picture can almost be felt by the viewer as they see the conditions that people are forced to walk, travel, and live in every day. People walk around with face masks, showing that the air itself is saturated with the dust from these man-made deserts that make it difficult to breathe normally. The desertification continues to spread and diffuse outward through wind and giant sandstorms, and it represents the most massive and rapid conversion of arable land into barren deserts.

The pictures that Aquin took push the viewers to focus on the importance of implementing sustainable practices into society, especially taking care of the environment as a necessary factor in the decisions made. They expose water as an important and scarce resource to certain places in the world, and implies the need to protect and preserve it. His pictures won the Prix Pictet, a global award dedicated to photography and sustainability, in 2008, a well-deserved reward for his presentation of the ecological damage humans inflict on nature through lack of sustainability and improper mindsets.

What Should Our Future Cities Look Like?

Even being in the year 2017, a year that represented “the future” in the past, humans continue looking forward to further improve and progress. One area that this thought process is employed in would be urban design. Architects, designers, and urban planners create plans for how our future cities should look like, taking into account the strive towards urban sustainability. ABIBOO Studio is an international design firm that focuses on innovation in architecture, urban areas, and interior spaces that allows for the integration of “arts, engineering, economics, sensorial experiences, and technology” (ABIBOO). In this article from ABIBOO’s Think Tank, Juanjo Ortega discussed the different aspects necessary to create an ideal future city, emphasizing urban sustainability as the key to the future. He presented a new strategy, hybrid urbanism, that offers programs for a city population involving projects to preserve natural landscape with architecture and urban planning that will help promote culture and the environment.

A couple of ideas and focuses presented by Ortega include buildings designed to clean the air through a series of green houses that work as filters and creation of terraces for collection of rainwater and agriculture or to bury organic residues to produce power, fertilizers and biogas. The main concept of his ideal future city is to have a “network of effective infrastructures in small areas with mainly touristic buildings where visitors and workers share the resources and the facilities” (Ortega).  The ideas he highlighted in this article involved solutions and innovations that will reform cities to make them more sustainable and more efficient for the future populations to come.

Using “Toxic Art” to Advocate Water Sustainability

Water sustainability can be carried out in multiple ways. John Sabraw is an artist that works with environmentalists and scientists to do research on streams polluted from abandoned coal mines in Ohio. He also works on making a fully sustainable art practice that produces eco-conscious art. His recent art pieces, called “Toxic Art”, were made from pigments created from the acid polluted mine runoff. These vibrant art pieces are not only beautiful to look at, but also brings awareness to the pollution of our world’s waters due to humans and industrialization.  Continue reading “Using “Toxic Art” to Advocate Water Sustainability”

Climate Change and Politics

Especially now, climate change has been an important and surprisingly controversial topic in today’s time, with large populations of people denying the existence of global warming and the harmful effects it will cause on our world. This issue has been an ongoing battle for years and years, since scientists noticed and began to understand the potential impacts of the alterations being imposed upon our Earth. However, politics and science do not always align in their opinions on what should be considered priority. Award-winning political cartoonist, Mike Keefe, created a cartoon for The Denver Post in 2010, one that continues to be relevant today, according to the decisions being made by our current political leaders.

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The Importance of Technology for Sustainability and the Environment

Cities around the world, including our own New York City, have been referred to as “concrete jungles,” one of the only real associations to nature given to cities, along with having to battle with pigeons as you commute to school or work. Despite having small designated areas reserved for nature in parks, the city itself remains largely grey. Naziha Mestaoui, a light artist, has created a powerful statement through her creation of the “One Beat, One Tree,” a technological light art piece, in which she projects virtual trees onto cityscapes and a new virtual tree will bloom with every heartbeat of the viewer. In her statement regarding this magnificent art piece, she said, “‘I wanted to create an art piece using technologies to connect us to this immaterial value of nature… If we want technologies to reconnect us to nature, we just need to create it’” (Frank). Her statement represents the need to use innovations and technology to reconnect us to nature and to remind the world of the importance of our environment.

Continue reading “The Importance of Technology for Sustainability and the Environment”

My BioBlitz Experience

Ecology is the study of the relationships between the organisms and the environment, how the roles of each part of nature, whether abiotic or biotic, work together efficiently. At the BioBlitz event, I was able to witness and experience, first-hand, how biotic and abiotic factors are related in nature, namely insects and the environments in which they are found. Insects are found all over nature and they represent a group that has some of the largest diversity, not only in species, but also in how they function in nature.

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Availability of Food

In thinking about “What is science?”,  one thing to consider is the scope of it. Science extends to just about everything, including food.  This video explains how closely tied science is to food in terms of food availability concerning local availability. It insightfully claims that much of the food that is eaten on a daily basis would be inconceivable without food science and technology like refrigeration.  It paints a rather scary image of a severely understocked supermarket with mostly rotten foods, highlighting the importance of science in something as routine as grocery shopping.

 

 

 

 

However, it only touches on the great importance of food science on a global scale.  Without food science and technology, the way food is produced and stored/shipped as well as the functions of nearly everyone’s daily lives would be radically changed.  Furthermore, without food science the 20th century would have been wrought with tragic famines. In an even known as the Green Revolution, scientists were able to develop more efficient agricultural practices, new technologies, and high yield staple crops, which were used to prevent the world’s rapidly expanding population from starving to death. So when you are thinking about what science is, think of the cold orange juice in your fridge and world a few steps closer to living in post-scarcity.

 

Sources:

“Availability of Food Colin Dennis, Ph.D., Previous Director-General, Campden BRI, Explains How Access to a Variety of Safe and Nutritious Foods Would Be Affected in a World without Food Science.” Availability of Food – IFT.org.

Briney, Amanda. “All You Wanted to Know About the Green Revolution.” ThoughtCo, 17 May 2017.