Eat your environment.
Foraging and Feasting celebrates local foods by identifying wild edible plants and offering recipes for their enjoyment. The collaboration of a botanical illustrator and a veteran herbalist, this cookbook doubles as a field guide to the edible outdoors.
Gently down the stream.
Tucked away in a corner of Southeastern Ohio, Raccoon Creek winds across a hundred miles of natural splendor.
Now a local community group is organizing to preserve the river for future generations, creating and publishing a map of its many secret gems to distribute throughout the state and beyond.
Hatching an egg.
Air Quality Egg is a powerful pollution-monitoring device in a simple eggshell.
After successfully funding the project in April and undergoing months of design revisions, programming, tooling, and testing, the project is almost ready to be assembled.
The creators just posted this fascinating chart of their creative and technical journey, beginning with the seeds of an idea more than a year ago and continuing on into the expected launch next year. Click the photo to take a look at the full chart.
Go play in the dirt.
Laughing Mother Farms is a labor of love for two young farmers in Northern California.
A combination of community-supported agriculture local composting operation, and outdoor education program, Laughing Mother operates almost entirely on human power, food waste, and a small handful of donations. Give a little green and get some in return — this endeavor is our Project of the Day.
Crowd-sourced urbanism.
Developed by dozens of volunteer architects, scientists, and designers on three continents, Taiwan Strait Atlas is a comprehensive manual for a sustainable future.
Based on years of research by CHORA, an architecture practice based in London, Berlin, and China, the book will propose a master plan for a low-carbon “smart region” in the Taiwan Strait.
Art or frack?
No Land Escapes is a collaborative exhibition featuring new work by six artists influenced by the natural world and concerned about its safety.
The photo above includes many of the rewards available to backers, including original prints by all six participating artists. With the pace of fossil-fuel extraction continuing to increase throughout upstate New York and across the country, these printmakers are asking viewers to look at their surroundings and imagine the impact of our decisions.
How’s the air up there?
Urban Air is an experimental bamboo forest high above a Los Angeles freeway.
Surrounded by concrete, bad drivers, and worse advertising, the LA commute feels like the ultimate environmental disconnect. Urban Air seeks to subvert that daily alienation — one billboard at a time. The idea is pretty simple: Take disused billboards, remove the commercial facade, and install a living, breathing cloud forest of bamboo.
Time to reclaim the asphalt jungle and score one for the trees — it’s our Project of the Day.
Welcome to Recycled Island.
WHIM is an Amsterdam-based architecture firm with a big question. Is it possible to build a self-sustaining home entirely from plastic waste?
Disturbed by the increasingly enormous deposits of floating trash that cloud oceans and cover coastlines across the globe, WHIM hatched a plan to develop a floating island of plastic that could function as a human habitation.
The initial phase will test various types of plastic waste found in marine trash and develop strategies to build with these materials. Once gathered and recycled, the materials will be transformed into a flood-proof floating home — perhaps suggesting a new model for communities affected by both widespread marine litter and rising sea levels.
Taxonomy of trash.
RAIR is an artist residency program with a twist: Its greatest resource is refuse.
An experiment at the intersection of art and industry, RAIR carves out a self-sustaining workspace in the middle of a Philadelphia recycling facility.
Artists are introduced to the waste stream and empowered to salvage a cornucopia of materials, which become the building blocks of new work. In turn, these projects increase awareness of reuse on a larger scale, suggesting unconventional ways of seeing the things we throw away.
After years of scrappy operation with neither a budget or a staff, the small team behind RAIR is turning to Kickstarter for a boost. By cultivating an infusion of funding and a community of backers, the organization hopes to develop a more active, accessible, and sustainable model for 2013 — and produce new transformations of trash into treasure.
TRASH is a simple experiment: Replace thousands of black trash bags with artist-designed, biodegradable bags and set them loose in a metropolis.
An urban beautification project with a subtle environmental impact, TRASH is designed to encourage participation — whether its intentional, accidental or just a daily chore.
The first iteration of the project took place in 2008. Now the collaborative creators are turning to Kickstarter to generate support for a massive new installation in 2013.
