Posted December 8th, 2009 by mark
I find these photos from a recent exhibition disturbing yet hauntingly beautiful. Lu Guang (卢广) from People’s Republic of China won the $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his documentary project “Pollution in China.”
You can view the rest here.
http://www.chinahush.com/2009/10/21/amazing-pictures-pollution-in-china/
Posted May 21st, 2009 by mark
The world needs to become more useless. It needs to cut down on consumption of the planet's resources and quickly if we are to have any chance of leaving it in a livable state for our children and their children, one that has enough food and water for them, that isn't unbearably hot or in a constant state of war as desperate people fight for scarce resources.
This used to be a doomsday scenario but it's starting to look frightening likely. As the population creeps up from 6.77 billion now to nine billion by 2040 and the average temperature rises somewhere 2.0 and 11.6 degrees Farenheit before the end of the century (IPCC projections), sea levels will rise, millions of people will get displaced and whatever natural resources are left by that time will be fought over by governments and warlords. The wars in Sudan and Darfur as primarily the result of people trying to grab or hold onto land that can produce food and water.
Posted May 11th, 2009 by mark
These posts are very cool. A mother’s perspective on the future of the planet for her grandchildren who don’t exist yet.
http://www.frankejames.com/debate/?p=34
Posted March 25th, 2009 by mark
Here’s a great diagram showing how much water we use and how we can cut down. Courtesy of those good folks at Good Magazine.
http://awesome.goodmagazine.com/transparency/web/trans0309walkthisway.html
Posted March 11th, 2009 by mark
“Our bodies used to be all flesh, but now we are wired to iPods, GPS devices and the Internet. The hybrids we drive are the hybrids we are, and it took the whole of the 20th century to mainstream the idea. The United States was always a nation of hybrids: Immigrants mixed here to make a new kind of people — a hybrid people called Americans. The 20th century, the “American century,” was the huge rush of euphoria that came from the mixing of so many differences. This was the reality, but acknowledging it was something else: Not until the 1970s did we allow the possibility that we could accept our roots and also be Americans. The age of the hyphen was upon us: We became African-Americans, Italian-Americans, Mexican-Americans and so on.
