For the first time in the history of housing, our places of habitation are getting smaller. As an antithesis to the McMansion trend—and a reflection of our current economic downturn—the tiny house movement embraces a whole new set of values: affordability, conservation of resources, downsizing, simplicity and a reevaluation of what the good life looks like. Websites like tinyhouseblog and cabinporn have thousands of fans and are a sure way to spend an afternoon in fantasy land. But for more and more people, this is not just an afternoon daydream, but rather a whole new way of life.

Jeff Shelden’s cabin in Montana’s Judith Mountains, as pictured on page 70 of Tiny Homes.

The energy, creativity, and ambition of this trend are perfectly captured in Lloyd Khan’s new book, Tiny Homes, Simple Shelter: Scaling Back in the 21^st Century. With more than 1,300 photos featuring 150 different tiny homes that range from small houses, to houseboats, campers, straw bale, and round timber, the book is crammed full of ideas and inspiration. The builders of these small spaces vary in experience from novices fulfilling life-long dreams of building their own homes, to architects and entrepreneurs with multiple tiny houses on their resumes. Organized like a family’s photo album, the book provides an intimate look into the spaces of strangers. Yet these tiny houses so perfectly reflect each homeowner’s personality that by the end of the book they will all feel like old friends.

The aesthetic designs, materials and approaches found in Tiny Homes are as diverse as the people who choose to make these spaces their homes. While some look like little more than mud huts, others have the charm of rustic wood hunting cabins from the turn of the century, or resemble a building straight out of a science fiction movie, metallic and paneled in energy harvesting solar cells. Defining shelter as more than just a roof over your head, Tiny Homes explores the oft-forgotten connection with the land and materials upon and with which we built our shelters.

Darren Macca and Ann Holley’s transportable ProtoStoga, as pictured on page 178 of Tiny Homes.

For instance, Mike Basich, a professional snowboarder, bought 40 acres on Donner Summit and built his house from the rock and lumber found on his land. Situated on a stuffing site, he can snowboard out his front door in the winter, and in summer the stone cottage perfectly blends in with the grey rock mountain landscape.

In another example, Linda Smiley Evans built a beautiful and organic looking house from cob and straw bales, with most materials wither from the site, recycled, or pulled out of the commercial waste stream. The roof is layered with a pond liner membrane cover and planted with native ferns and flower bulbs.

On the other end of the spectrum, the weeHouses by Alchemy Architects, are a prefab system with a clean modern aesthetic of wood and glass.

While the tiny house movement may be garnering a lot of new attention, the book’s author Lloyd Kahn is a longtime activist and visionary. His previous book, Shelter, first published in 1973, is a bible of handmade houses and helped give birth to the “Green Building” revolution. Tiny Homes brings Kahn’s vision into the 21st century by introducing us to countless others exploring alternative approaches to housing. The book is not lacking in examples or momentum, and while the low resolution quality of some photos is unfortunate, the sheer quantity of images more than makes up for it. Thoughtful commentary further enhances the pictures by telling the stories behind the houses, which are often as fascinating as the structures themselves.

SunRay Kelley’s “man cave” in Washington state’s forested land, as pictured on page 101 of Tiny Homes.

More than anything else, this book is a roadmap for a journey. It’s an excursion into the potential joy of scaling back, reducing living costs, and escaping high mortgages and rents. The design of these structure embraces the idea of a simpler life, and recognizes that people are happier when they are surrounded with high quality materials and an efficient use of space, rather than the consumer-culture-driven cluttered masses of “stuff” that seem to accumulate exponentially with every passing day. Self-sufficiency is prized and artistic approaches are highlighted, stirring a deep hum within our collective creative roots.

I plan to spend many more hours perusing this curated assortment of spaces, both for inspiration and to rouse a deeper imagination of what home can be.

Check out Lloyd Khan and the trailer for the book:

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“More than 15 years ago, we realized that new subspecies of Ninox hawk-owls existed in the Philippines,” said Pam Rasmussen, the lead author on the paper announcing the discovery. “But it wasn’t until last year that we obtained enough recordings that we could confirm that they were not just subspecies, but two new species of owls.”

The scientists were able to determine that these were new species based on their distinctive mating calls and unique physical features.

The first owl, the Camiguin Hawk-owl, is only found on the small island of Camiguin Sur. While it is geographically close to the Mindanao owls, its physical characteristics and voice are quite different. As night sets in, the bird releases a long solo song, with low growling tones that build with intensity. If there are two owls, the serenading begins with a growl and morphs into a short barking duet. Listen to its songs here. These owls also exhibit unusual blue-gray eyes.

The second species is the Cebu Hawk-owl. Scientists thought this already-known variety of owl was extinct, as much of its forest habitat has been destroyed by human activities. Although previously studied, this owl was not thought to be a new species. However, careful recording of its calls and vocalizations warranted new classifications. You can listen its calls here.

“The owls don’t learn their songs, which are genetically programmed in their DNA and are used to attract mates or defend their territory; so if they’re very different, they must be new species,” Rasmussen said. “When we first heard the songs of both owls, we were amazed because they were so distinctly different that we realized they were new species.”

But why did it take scientists so long to recognize these owls as new species?

Location, location, location. Both owls live on small, remote islands off the beaten path of the typical ornithologist and birder. Moreover, the complex variations in appearance that they exhibit had been inadequately studied by researchers, and their songs had not been recorded.

The process was so time-consuming and complicated that it took a team of scientists from a variety of groups, including Michigan State University, BirdLife International, the Oriental Bird Club, Philippines Biodiversity Conservation Foundation Inc. and Birdtour Asia with additional support provided by National Geographic.

Pam Rasmussen talks about the discovery in the video below:

That’s seems like a discovery worth singing about.

Main image adapted from original painting by John Gale/Oriental Bird Club

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Then last week, a New Zealand Navy ship ran into a remarkable sight: a floating island of pumice stretching over 26,000 square kilometers (nearly the size of Belgium). Scientists at the Laboratoire de Volcanologie in Tahiti say this “raft” was created by the recent eruption of  the underwater Havre volcano. It likely produced the golf-ball-sized pumice rocks as it spewed magma into the deep Pacific Ocean, but the very lightweight stones have since floated several hundred kilometers from their volcanic source.

It looked like a floating ice shelf, according to Naval Lt. Tim Oscar, and it extended beyond the reach of the ship’s spotlight as the HMNZS Canterbury passed through the pumice buoyant on a calm evening last week. The rocks are so porous that they can ride the waves for miles and pose no danger to ships. Lt. Oscar described it as the “weirdest thing” he had seen during his 18 years at sea.

Havre was one of three recent eruptions in the region, along with White Island off the west coast of New Zealand and Mount Tongariro, which spewed rock and ash on New Zealand’s North Island, having awakened after lying dormant for 115 years.

NASA satellite images are being used to correlate the plumes of smoke and ocean color changes associated with the Havre undersea eruption and the creation of the pumice raft. Next up scientists will head out in research vessel to take samples of the pumice stones and map any new changes in the seafloor near the volcano. Stay tuned for more explosive activity!

Main image credit: NASA Earth Observatory

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Coercion has been seen in India, where poor women from disadvantaged communities are being forcibly sterilized. In other cases, incentives are being offered: In the city of Satara, couples are offered $100 to wait to have their first child, while in Rajasthan, women are offered cell phones and a chance to win a car if they agree to be sterilized. Many more women are not offered a choice of contraceptive method. Instead, long-acting methods such as injectables or implants are being prescribed without regard to the needs or risks to the individual woman. For instance, Depo Provera has been the main method of contraception pushed by health and family programs in Africa, but numerous studies have found that use of this contraceptive increases the risk of contracting the HIV virus, potentially doubling the rate of infection.

Despite this controversy, Depo and a Chinese hormonal implant are the two main contraceptives promoted by the Gate’s Foundation in their recently announced $4 billion family planning initiative in partnership with the British government. The aim is to help 120 million poor women to gain access to modern birth control methods and increase research into new contraceptives but a number of well-respected international organizations—such as the Center for Reproductive Rights and Amnesty International—issued a statement of criticism calling for a focus on human health and pointing out the danger of returning to forced contraceptive methods.

The term “population justice” has been adopted to embody the need for a more balanced and ethical approach to population control, one that respects both women’s rights and the planet’s resource capacity. While it is clear that we are using the Earth’s resources at an unsustainable rate, the cause of this is not simply population growth, and it is unfair to blame disadvantaged women for this environmental degradation. If we really want to control the population, why not make all men go through with this easy and fully effective procedure?

Check out the Making Contact radio program below for a more in-depth discussion of the history of population control, the current problems, the potential solutions, and the ever-present controversy. The following program features Lauri Mazur, author of A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice, and the Environmental Challenge; Jade Sasser, Loyola Marymount University women’ studies professor; Elizabeth Barajas-Roman, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health policy director; and Ben Zuckerman, former Sierra Club board member. It was produced through funding from the Mary Wohlford Foundation.

[audio:http://www.radioproject.org/sound/2012/MakingCon_120620_Ax.mp3]
The audio player is not supported by Mozilla Firefox. Firefox users can download the podcast here.

Main image credit: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Audio credit: National Radio Project

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Atomic clocks are the most accurate time keepers in the world,  and the timepieces by which the world sets all other clocks. The rotation of the Earth is not quite as constant. It can change pace due to phenomenon such as global warming or changes in mass distribution caused by earthquakes. As a result, the time it takes the Earth to rotate on its axis and complete one full day is two milliseconds longer than it was 100 years ago, according to Geoff Chester, the spokesman at the U.S. Naval Observatory where the official U.S. atomic clocks are kept. Because of this difference, after many years the world’s atomic clocks would be ahead of planetary time, and the sun would set at noon.

To remedy this disparity, atomic clocks must be periodically synchronized, explained Daniel Gambis, head of IRES. “We want to have both times close together and it’s not possible to adjust the earth’s rotation,” he told Reuters. The system was first adopted in 1972 and this will be the 25th leap second. The last one was December 31, 2008 and the next one likely won’t be needed until 2015 or 2016.  Much like the extra day in a leap year, which makes sure the calendar and the seasons are in line, the leap second matches human measurements with planetary time. In a hundred years or so, we may have to start adding 2 leap seconds a year.

The leap second is not without some controversy. Atomic clocks are used to set Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), and as such, are important to govern time standards for sattelite navigation, astronomy, banking computer networks, and international air traffic systems. Opponents would like a simpler less costly system with reduced room for error in making these manual changes. This past January, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the U.N. agency responsible for international communications standards called to abandon the leap second, but the group failed to reach consensus and will try again in 2015. A much broader discussion on the consequences of abandoning the leap second is needed, said Britain’s Royal Astronomical Society spokesman Robert Massey, as we would be decoupling measured time from the position of the sun.

If only cinderella had had an extra second at the stroke of midnight, before her coach turned into a pumpkin and her glass slipper disappeared. Here is your chance to use this additional time wisely.

Image credit: nist.gov 

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The program reveals the GPS tagged route of a bicycle pizza deliveryman on a busy Friday night in the heart of New York City. We zoom out a level to the supply chain center in Connecticut, which supplies the food for all the Domino’s stores in the Northeast Region. Zoom out again and watch the  lines of the satellite tracked-refrigerated trucks as they move supplies across the country, resembling the arterial networks of the human body. Eventually, the pizza is tracked all the way back to its source: California’s Central Valley, where nearly 50% of America’s fruits, nuts and vegetables are grown.

The American industrial revolution has created the most productive food machine in the world, feeding nearly 300 million people each day. For the first time in human history, 98 percent of the population is fed by those comprising less than 2 percent.The cost of this appetite has had a huge impact on our health and environment.

Check out the trailer below or watch the full episode here. You will never be able to look at a pizza the same way again.

Main image credit: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Check out the winning photographs below and don’t be surprised if they make you feel clean, green, and inspired.

The overall winner, Markus Haslinger is an active mountaineer, fisher and naturalist. He took this picture of the Inning Wind Farm in Lower Austria while paragliding one foggy morning.

Luca Catalano Gonza won the Asia Category. This wind farm is located at Dhule in Maharashtra, 200 miles from Mumbai, and displaces approximately 70,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. The photo is part of a larger project called ‘Child Survival in a Changing Climate.’

Franz Weinhofer’s winning entry in the Europe category contrasts a stork’s wings with the blades of a turbine.

Chris Wilson won the Australia/Oceania/Antarctica category with his photo of a wind turbine set against a backdrop of the Southern Lights in Antarctica. Taken at Mawson Station, these two 300kW wind turbines  are capable of carrying 100% of the station load for long periods of time and have been specially adapted to the extreme climate conditions of Antarctica.

Jeff Chamberland captured this dramatic storm cloud approaching a wind farm near Alberta, Canada. An electrician by trade, Chamberland switched to constructing turbines so he could take a proactive approach to helping the environment.

The African category goes to Electrawinds Africa and Indian Ocean Islands.  Their vision is to create South African industry throughout the wind value chain which recognizes that wind power is about people as much as about electricity.

All photos credit: GlobalWindDay.org

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As with many renewable energy innovations, scientists are figuring out how to develop an increasingly efficient solar cell. Sharp Corporation has just achieved an efficiency milestone of 43.5 percent, surpassing their previous record of 36.9 percent efficiency. The triple-junction compound solar cells are made of three layers of photo-absorptive materials constructed from a combination of rare elements such as indium, gallium and arsenide. The cells are placed under a lens system that focuses sunlight onto the conversion materials. Efficiency was also gained by optimizing the spacing between electrodes on the surface of the concentrator cell and minimizing the cell’s electrical resistance.

Triple-compound solar cells are already in use, primarily on space satellites, but Sharp hopes to bring this technology back to Earth by developing concentrator photovoltaic power systems that are able to use small-surface-area solar cells.

This latest version of Sharp’s compound solar cell was a product of an R&D project through Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO). The recorded value of 43.5 percent efficiency was independently confirmed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) in Germany. Interestingly, the U.S. company Solar Junction achieved the exact same conversion efficiency in March 2011 with their multi-junction solar cell technology.

Both of these examples are a good sign that brighter times are ahead for solar energy efficiency.

Image credits: Sharp Corporation

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DeChant draws his theory on research published a few years ago, which argues that there is a tight relationship between per capita income and urban forest cover. The study found that “for every 1 percent increase in per capita income, demand for forest cover increased by 1.76 percent. But when income dropped by the same amount, demand decreased by 1.26 percent.” It also found that as population grew, the urban forest area also increased, but at a slower pace than population growth.

The reason behind the leafy manifestations of this income gap: Wealthier cities can afford to maintain more trees both on public and private lands. Moreover, rich people usually reside on larger plots of land that can support more and bigger trees. While tree cover is also dependent upon the geographic location of the city, and the ecology of the area, and the age of neighborhood, income-based differences in tree cover are political in nature as well. As DeChant says, “Compounding the inequality is the fact that most tree planting programs are local. Urban forestry has sailed largely under the federal government’s radar.” While the U.S. Forest Service has a community forestry program, it is highly underfunded.

Urban trees provide many benefits, including shading streets and houses which lowers ambient air temperature in summer and reduces cooling costs, creating habitats for birds and animals, and scrub the air of pollution and particulates, which can potentially reduce the rates of asthma. In some cases, trees have also been found to reduce crime rates. Many cities around the country are boosting efforts to increase urban trees. New York City aims to double the number of trees to 1 million, and Chicago has planted over 600,000 trees over the last twenty years. London aims to plant 20,000 new trees before the Summer 2012 Olympics.

While this is a good effort, it doesn’t address the relationship between wealth and trees, nor does it help poor cities increase their urban forests. To DeChant, this is exactly the point: trees are not a luxury to be purchased by the wealthiest, but rather an important benefit in urban life.

Photo credits: Google Maps, DigitalGlobe, GeoEye, U.S. Geological Survey, USDA Farm Service Agency

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A joint report by three climate research groups—non-governmental organization Climate Analytics, consultancy Ecofys, and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research—has revealed that a number of countries will fail to cut their emissions to target levels. By signing the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, thirty-seven industrialized countries committed to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 5% below their 1990 levels. This threshold was chosen in order to limit the increase in global average temperature to less than 2 degrees Celsius, which scientists say is the maximum warming we can experience without devastating consequences for the planet.

“It’s clear that many governments are nowhere near putting in place the policies they have committed to, policies that are not enough to keep temperature rise to below 2 degrees,” said Bill Hare, Director of Climate Analytics. Mexico will likely achieve a 12 percent emissions reduction by 2020, but this does not meet the 30 percent it pledged. The United States expects to lower GHG emissions somewhat by 2020—mostly due to the economic downturn and a shift from reliance on coal to increased natural gas usage—but a gap of 384 million metric tons remains to reach its target reductions. Moreover, China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions increased by 3.2 percent last year, canceling out any reductions by the United States and Europe. Japan also increased emissions in 2011, by 2.4 percent, as a result of reduced reliance on nuclear power after the Fukushima accident.

As a result, we are experiencing an emissions gap; the actions taken today are unable to even prevent the annual increase of emissions, much less reduce them to historic levels. A report by the International Energy Agency found that global CO2 is at the highest ever recorded level. “Climate change is sliding down in the international policy agenda, which is definitely a worrying trend,” Fatih Birol, IEA’s chief said. The United States remains the world’s second-biggest CO2 emitter after China.

Scientists are now predicting that by 2020 greenhouse gas emissions could rise to 9.92 billion tons above the necessary level to limit global warming. This would cause a temperature rise of at least 3.5 degrees and lead to a number of big problems including crop failures, extensive heatwaves, water shortages, and health risks unlike anything we have experienced before. Developing countries will be hardest hit, according to Hare, but industrialized countries will also be affected.

It is clear that unless ambitious action is taken immediately, the future holds a significantly warmer world.

Graphic credit: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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