GeoParadise Blog

As usual, TED is a great source of inspiration for GeoParadise. We share here Rachel Botsman´s talk, which we really liked, about the dramatic increase in collaborative behaviors in different bits of our lives. We found it very encouraging regarding the future of human kind and planet Earth and opens a whole array of possibilities for GeoParadise projects.

Have a look and enjoy witnessing the times of change we are living through these days.

Recent advances in cellular science are heralding an important evolutionary turning point. For almost fifty years we have held the illusion that our health and fate were pre-programmed in our genes, a concept referred to as genetic determinacy.

In Paul Stamets book Growing Gourmet & Medicinal Mushrooms, he discusses interesting uses of mycelium, from eating through to pretty much everything to do with the planet.
Here’s one of our favourite, mycelium does marvellous things with petrocarbon pollution. In Bellingham piles of toxic soil were treated by remediation scientists. A number of treatments were used on different piles; enzyme/chemical, mushroom inoculate, and bacterial treatments, for instance. Four weeks later the black tarps were pulled back and five piles were dead ... but not the Oyster mushrooms. The mushrooms grew happily then, after being exposed, died of old age and began to rot, drawing flies that created larvae. With the maggots came birds, and with the birds, seeds and droppings.

Economic damage from climate change will hit Southeast Asia harder than other regions and seriously jeopardize production of rice, the world's most important food crop, according to a report by the Asian Development Bank.

There’s scepticism about companies going “carbon neutral” — particularly if firms rely on Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), which at best is controversial and hard to verify.
(RECs)= Tax cuts and a clean public image.

Biosphere Home Farming is a structure that houses fishes, root veggies, grasses, plants and algae all under one roof. It takes all your kitchen-trash as fodder for the farm and manages to generate food, water and cooking gas for the family. In short you consume your trash in a more refined way! Ok, enough of green bashing hit the jump to see what exactly Philips has to say about this concept.

The idea of DIY VeggiePatch is to get involved in the process of growing vegetables for families and communities and in some ways nip food miles, packaging, food processing, and flood irrigation at the top of the food chain process. The project proposes to reduce eco-footprint by using materials like cardboard, banana paper and tire crumb to construct the patch. The pros of the patch include eliminating the need for transportation, refrigeration, and storage of vegetables plus the health benefits of organic food.

Sustainable architecture is an exciting and important field, with many people reviving traditional methods of building and others creating innovations to established practices.
There are courses available to help you understand the construction techniques used, we would list them here but they are too numerous, so help yourself and browse the web.

Take ordinary cement. Mix in an agent called a photo-catalyzer (titanium dioxide, if you really want to know), which speeds up the natural process that breaks down smog into its component parts.

No blog on architecture would be complete without a mention of Earthships, these amazing buildings have featured in the sustainable self-build scene for .. Well, ever.
The Earthship, as it exists today, began to take shape in the 1970s. Mike Reynolds, founder of Earthship Biotecture, a company that specializes in designing and building Earthships, wanted to create a home that would do three things; first, it would be sustainable, using material indigenous to the entire planet as well as recycled materials wherever possible.

The air inside your home may be as much as 10 times more polluted than the outside air. Today most people will spend as much as 90 percent of their lives indoors.As people spend more time indoors there has been an increase in the number and severity of allergic reactions and other chronic illnesses. So where is all this coming from? Of the hundreds of toxic chemicals found indoors, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) studied three because they were the most commonly found and in greater abundance.
These toxins are formaldehyde, benzene and carbon monoxide.

A community vote is now underway, hopefully one of the final steps in the process the migration of Wikipedia (actually Wikipedias, as each language is its own site, and also other Wikimedia Foundation sites) to using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as its primary content license.
The vote is one of the most historic decisions by the Wikimedia Foundation regarding its future orientation.

MIT engineers have created a kind of beltway that allows for the rapid transit of electrical energy through a well-known battery material, an advance that could usher in smaller, lighter batteries -- for cell phones and other devices -- that could recharge in seconds rather than hours.

The development of plastics from plant matter - bioplastics - holds great promise to address many of the sustainability problems and national security concerns generated by the manufacture of plastics from petroleum and other fossil fuels.
We are witnessing everyday the unconditional enthusiasm coming from the manufacturing industry, that has realized that Green sells and is trying to put the green label to every product, from building materials to packaging, leaving the consumers overwhelmed with a whole set of environmentally friendly

Petroleum is a great source of power. It's energy-dense, portable and (relatively) cheap. Remove the carbon and it would be perfect — which is essentially what researchers at Arizona State University (ASU) have been trying to do. Milton Sommerfeld and Qiang Hu have been working on raising algae to turn into a biofuel that would be virtually identical to gasoline.