Fossil fuel subsidies are huge. It is something many of us now know, but which even more people don’t. Thus, it is something we come back to from time to time on here.
A new report out by Bloomberg New Energy Finance shows that governments worldwide spend a ton more on fossil fuels than on renewable energy.
Russia, heavily focused on oil and gas, has just unveiled plans to build its biggest wind farm. The country also intends to build its first solar power plant soon. Are the heat waves and fires getting to the country and President Medvedev?
Perhaps, but Medvedev has been talking about diversifying Russia’s energy base and economy for a little while now.
Russia, heavily focused on oil and gas, has just unveiled plans to build its biggest wind farm. The country also intends to build its first solar power plant soon. Are the heat waves and fires getting to the country and President Medvedev?
Perhaps, but Medvedev has been talking about diversifying Russia’s energy base and economy for a little while now.
Ayllu (pronounced ‘i-u’) in media partnership with NextBillion has launched a new resource for tracking social enterprise projects globally: iuMAP.
(iuMAP screenshot)
According to Melissa Richer, Founder and Executive Director of Ayllu, iuMAP will be the world’s largest directory of BOP social enterprises. She writes that iuMAP, in its current beta form, “lists 300 market solutions in 55 countries, and we aim to triple its size by year’s end!”
The Ayllu team developed iuMAP in response to what they saw as a lack of centralized information, a place where one could find easily digestible and “critical information to help the social enterprise community learn from successes, failures and challenges, so that decisions can be made more easily, quickly, and cheaply.” To that end, they developed iuMAP to be:
the public face of Ayllu’s internal database; it is a directory of market-based solutions to poverty, searchable by name, geography, and area of focus. It was built in partnership with OpenAction during the first semester of 2010, and it will continue to be updated in the months to come. We envision it as a valuable resource for practitioners, social entrepreneurs, funders (investors and donors), students, academics and generally those interested in social enterprise.
Additionally, Richer believes that iuMAP can become the missing link in information sharing in the social enterprise world and address the “big question about how to scale the impact of these brilliant ideas to millions more people.”
By this fall, Ayllu plans to have iuMAP:
feature more data and analysis tools. We will map geographies and industries, and topic-specific maps. The first two will focus on microenergy (analyzing data from 20 leading enterprises) and the market ecosystem in Brazil (scope and opportunity). Over time, you will be able to use iuMAP to filter data and best practices of social enterprise with tools similar to Hans Rosling’s Gapminder.
The iuMAP database is a collaborative venture and the administrators welcome your feedback. If you’d like to help them grow their database of social enterprises, please submit your ideas here.
(via NextBillion)
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(Posted by Amanda Reed in Resource – Community at 5:00 PM)
Worldchanging contributor Geoff Manaugh of BLDG|BLOG has a great article up about the contemporary and future design possibilities of “sacred groves” at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) Study Centre website.
Ships botanically assembling themselves in the forest, from “Growing a Hidden Architecture” by Christian Kerrigan (via BLDG|BLOG)
The article, titled “The Design Future of the Sacred Grove,” was inspired by a 2009 paper by Patrick Bowe called “The Sacred Groves of Ancient Greece,” which was published in the journal Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes. In his own article, Manaugh brings design proposals by Christian Kerrigan, Sascha Pohflepp, and BOARD to bear on Bowe’s discussion of the “ritual zones” of the forest; he takes Bowe’s exploration of Ancient Greece and speculates about:
what sorts of uniquely specific groves or small forests of our own time might someday, perhaps millennia from now, be seen, rightly or wrongly, as “sacred” in some way or another. The “sacred grove,” seen in this light, would really be a kind of specialized forestry service, and thus something interpretatively present in a variety of surprising sites. After all, it is distinctly possible that a landscape now retroactively seen as sacred might not have been anything of the sort; perhaps it was simply being grown for timber; perhaps it was the subject of a property dispute; perhaps it was over-run with insects for a decade or two and thus left untouched. It should always be assumed, in other words, that ancient sites we jump to call “sacred” might actually have been utterly mundane.
To that end, Manaugh put together
a short, very subjective, and by no means anywhere near exhaustive list of a few speculative landscape design proposals and real-life forestry sites that strike me as particularly worthy of consideration in the context of the ancient Greek sacred grove. If, in some future catalog of lost landscapes, one of the following sites was to be listed alongside the sacred groves of a forgotten civilization, how might that transform our understanding of their intended spatial role?
Consider this list nothing more than a brief conversation-starter.
Join the conversation: See the full article and all the fantastic projects and images Manaugh compiled by following this link.
Image from “Growth Assembly” by Sascha Pohflepp (via CCA)
Image by the Bureau of Architecture, Research, and Design (BOARD) (via CCA)
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(Posted by Amanda Reed in Arts at 4:00 PM)