Sharing the Ascension Experience
“The way solar is progressing it will just be a matter of time before it becomes competitive with fossil fuels and eventually replace them.” So says Dr Jon Major who led a team at Liverpool University that has found a way of replacing one toxic element, used in the process of manufacturing solar cells, with … Read more
This is the Ecooking unit that Italian manufacturer Clei showed in Milan at the 2014 Salone del Mobile furniture fair. The Ecooking kitchen’s moving parts rotate around a central pivot that also serves as the exhaust pipe for the sink and dishwasher — and as the conduit for the plumbing and electricity. The tower can … Read more
The Windbelt is a small-scale wind turbine that can generate 40 milliwatts in 10-mph winds and only costs a couple of dollars. Working in Haiti, Shawn Frayne, a 28-year-old inventor based in Mountain View, California, saw the need for small-scale wind power to juice LED lamps and radios in the homes of the poor. Conventional … Read more
On the issue of pink slime, it’s not as if the food industry saw the light, they just felt the heat! The main supplier of ammoniated pink slime, Beef Products, Inc., has been spiraling down. But now there’s a good chance you are eating some of the other unappetizing ingredients that simply don’t belong in … Read more
What are the food security implications of the ever worsening drought? “Increasingly intense droughts in California, all of the Southwest, and even into the Midwest have everything to do with human-made climate change.” So says climatologist James Hansen, who co-authored one of the earliest studies on this subject back in 1990. The food security … Read more
In Singapore, the challenge of feeding a growing population is pushing the concept of urban farming to new heights. A super-efficient vertical farming system is producing greens for 5 million residents. “Can we supply enough food for everyone on the planet?” is a question plaguing leaders around the world. In Singapore SkyGreen offers one example … Read more
Ever since Monsanto developed, marketed and patented the glyphosate molecule — Roundup (®) herbicide’s active ingredient — beginning in the early 70’s, a substantial and ever-growing portion of the earth’s arable surface has been transformed into an environmental and human health experiment, of unprecedented scale. Roundup Ready (®) (glyphosate resistant) genetically modified (GM) plants (also … Read more
An affordable and effective alternative to glass greenhouses is the walipini (an Aymara Indian word for a “place of warmth”). Also known as an underground or pit greenhouse, it was first developed over 20 years ago for the cold mountainous regions of South America, this method allows growers to maintain a productive garden year-round, even in … Read more
A rich microbial ecosystem in our gut keeps us healthy. Now scientists are linking the health of our gut to the microbial ecosystems in the soils where our food is grown. Industrial food production pollutes rivers and streams, creating massive offshore dead zones. It kills off bee colonies, consigns millions of animals to inhumane confinement, … Read more
Because of the insidious way in which it works, it has been sold as a relatively benign replacement for the devastating earlier dioxin-based herbicides. But a barrage of experimental data has now shown glyphosate and the GMO foods incorporating it to pose serious dangers to health. Compounding the risk is the toxicity of “inert” ingredients … Read more