Copperfingertips - Represent The Human Race

A fully transparent solar cell that could make every window and screen a power source

Researchers at Michigan State University have created a fully transparent solar concentrator, which could turn any window or sheet of glass (like your smartphone’s screen) into a photovoltaic solar cell. Unlike other “transparent” solar cells that we’ve reported on in the past, this one really is transparent, as you can see in the photos throughout this story. According to Richard Lunt, who led the research, the team are confident that the transparent solar panels can be efficiently deployed in a wide range of settings, from “tall buildings with lots of windows or any kind of mobile device that demands high aesthetic quality like a phone or e-reader.”

Repair Cafés

Repair Cafés are free meeting places and they’re all about repairing things (together). In the place where a Repair Café is located, you’ll find tools and materials to help you make any repairs you need. On clothes, furniture, electrical appliances, bicycles, crockery, appliances, toys, et cetera. You’ll also find expert volunteers, with repair skills in all kinds of fields.

Visitors bring their broken items from home. Together with the specialists they start making their repairs in the Repair Café. It’s an ongoing learning process. If you have nothing to repair, you can enjoy a cup of tea or coffee. Or you can lend a hand with someone else’s repair job. You can also get inspired at the reading table – by leafing through books on repairs and DIY.

There are over 1.500 Repair Cafés worldwide. Visit one in your area or start one yourself!

Read more…

Solarpunk Activities for the Socially Anxious

 - Read up on the philosophical background(s) of solarpunk. I’ve got a bibliography page if you are looking for more. - Figure out which plants that are indigenous or endangered in your area. Read about their history (and if you can make seed bombs.) - Enjoy Alan Watts lecture on nature - Make a herb drying rack by using string and push pins. You can eat, burn or drink tea from the herbs. - Consider growing food from your scraps - Watch a Ted Talk on Conservation - Draw nature, real or imaginary. Take time to map out fantasy lands. (Think about it as an environmental vision board) - Consider if composting might be right for you - If you have houseplants, learn how to propagate them (or even just take the time to learn more about them…their history, and how best to care for them). If you do want to learn how to propagate, I suggest starting with succulents. They are hardy, fun, and fairly cheap. -Learn how to Talk to Trees with Charis Melina Brown - A National Geographic explainer on how trees talk to each other. - Listen to this amazing, free, nature meditation with Jessica Snow

[Top left: Green onion seedlings. Bottom left: Baby basil seedlings. Right: A jungle of thyme.]

I’ve been growing some veggies indoors for a while now (almost a year?) and we finally got the lighting right for the plants. These little guys are completely solarpunk/lunarpunk. I live out in the country and for some reason that wasn’t known to us until after we bought our house there is a ban on all veggie growing and structure building. So we couldn’t even build an outdoor greenhouse. These little guys are growing in a legit solarpunk recycled diy’d greenhouse structure inside my garage. Eventually we are going to try and go with completely heirloom non-gmo organic seedlings but until then these little guys are fighting unjust zoning regulations, fighting our ever increasing dystopian reality (I have a yard and I can’t plant things!), and living it up #solarpunk style.

Did I mention our neighbors are bending these rules too? :) I’m not the only solarpunk in my area. My neighbor plants mint and strawberries in their flowerbeds and planted a plum tree right between our property lines so that when it matures no one can say it was theirs or that the regulation people didn’t know about it. It’s been there for years people. I’ve also started some mint and lavender bushes myself. They can ask me all they want about what they are… I’ll just tell them they’re decorative. 

Now, I’m not saying that people should do these things. Bending the rules can get you into trouble. But my area is poor and people are hungry, local food pantries have been closing too and without these solarpunk guerrilla gardening tactics people would go hungry. I only know three of my neighbors because everyone keeps loosing their homes. Neighbors last about a year here and then are forced to leave. 

At my old town just 20 min away from where I live now, we grew grapes and apples and let whoever was hungry have them. Our neighbors sometimes foraged. There were wild apple trees, grapes, and mulberries and people knew where they were and when they were ready to be picked. It helped a lot of people who wouldn’t have had anything to eat otherwise. banning food sources is what should be illegal. Not tending to gardens. Gardens and plants should never be banned. We live on a living planet, it’s what kept us alive all these centuries. Why are we turning our back on it now?

solarpunk actions for minors/ppl with generally less independence ?

WOW LATE! Sorry, I’ve been without computer for a while.

Reuse! Wash and save jars. Rescue cans for planters. Before you toss something, think: is there another use for this?

Blow dandelion seeds around. Seriously, they grow anywhere and they’re useful from flower to tip.

On that note, learn what plants are edible where you are. Eat them.

Learn, research!

Find local organizations focused on conservation, food, and local sustainability. Donate money, time, stuff, whatever they need/you have.

Walk/bike places if you can/it’s safe

That’s all I have right now!! Anyone can reblog with more.

Tiny Houses in Urban Context

I’ve seen a lot of really great tiny home designs, and I’ve seen a lot of love from other people for those designs as well. They combine a small space, perfect for one or two people, that usually only apartment buildings design for, with the benefits of having a detached home, with a yard, and windows on all sides for more natural light. 

What I don’t see is a whole lot of context, least of all in an urban neighborhood environment.  These houses are often pictured in an open grassy, or forested space, which is nice for some people I’m sure, but there are lots of people who would prefer to live in a city, in pedestrian and transit friendly areas, rather than in the middle of nowhere, where you’d have to use a car to get everywhere.

There already exists an urban context for tiny homes, but due to restrictive zoning, it’s not commonplace in most cities in the U.S.

They’re called Bungalow Courts, or sometimes Cottage Courts, and basically it’s where you take two adjacent lots, and rather than having one large single-family-house per lot, you have around 3 or so tiny houses per lot, all facing a shared space in the center. 

 All this takes up the same space as two city lots, which are usually zoned to only allow one house per lot. But not everyone wants, or can afford a large house, so Bungalow Courts would be a perfect fit in a lot of neighborhoods that currently lack a lot of housing diversity for a range of wants and needs.

Anyway, I just thought I’d share, because I think this a really neat concept that should be allowed more places. I’d think I’d like to live in a Bungalow Court; I like the idea of having a house to myself, but I don’t need much space, and I don’t want a huge yard to maintain.

In order to make this legal to build out, zoning would need to be changed to allow 3-4 units of housing to be built on lots currently restricted to only 1 unit of housing. A big contributing factor to rising housing costs has been the over-favoring of single-family houses on large lots since the end of WWII, so not enough units of housing are being built in many cities to keep up with demand. 

Legalizing more “missing middle housing” like Bungalow Courts in single-family-house-neighborhoods would help cities incrementally keep up with demand, in a way that fits nicely into existing neighborhoods. 

This startup is turning plastic waste into affordable housing

The company called Eco Domum, or Eco Home, is based in Puebla, Mexico. Founder Carlos Daniel González collects, sorts and melts down non-toxic plastics into a liquid, according to Unreasonable. That sludge is then put into a hydraulic press, which forms the plastic into hardened panels. It takes two tons of plastic to make one house. At scale, González’s plastic houses could be just what Mexico needs.

Follow @the-future-now​

The Insect Apocalypse Is Here

What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?

~ the pondering muse🌙

Where have all the bugs gone? That’s what this post tries to answer and if you’re like me and hadn’t really noticed the lack of bugs recently, you’ll understand why this is such a big deal after reading the article. However, before we dive into this article, I want to share with you what I’ve noticed. 

I’ve lived in Missouri for almost 19 years now, about a decade ago I remember windshields so full of bug splats that you couldn’t see out of it while driving down the highway and cringing at the *thump* of especially large bugs when they hit. I remember a season where when I rode my bike around town I couldn’t not hit a grasshopper because there were more than I could count all over the roads and fields. Last summer however? I remember pulling a single butterfly from the grill of my dad’s truck. That’s it… There were no more bugs. …

Here’s how plentiful our world used to be. We tend to think that the environmental conditions that we are born into are normal, but it is anything but normal.

“In “The Once and Future World,” the journalist J.B. MacKinnon cites records from recent centuries that hint at what has only just been lost: “In the North Atlantic, a school of cod stalls a tall ship in midocean; off Sydney, Australia, a ship’s captain sails from noon until sunset through pods of sperm whales as far as the eye can see. … Pacific pioneers complain to the authorities that splashing salmon threaten to swamp their canoes.” There were reports of lions in the south of France, walruses at the mouth of the Thames, flocks of birds that took three days to fly overhead, as many as 100 blue whales in the Southern Ocean for every one that’s there now. “These are not sights from some ancient age of fire and ice,” MacKinnon writes. “We are talking about things seen by human eyes, recalled in human memory.”“

So, when you read the above article, please understand how dire these circumstances are for us and our planet. Ok, so what are the highlights of the article?

“A 2013 paper in Nature, which modeled both natural and computer-generated food webs, suggested that a loss of even 30 percent of a species’ abundance can be so destabilizing that other species start going fully, numerically extinct — in fact, 80 percent of the time it was a secondarily affected creature that was the first to disappear.”

- Drastic drops in insect populations have been recorded globally.

- World’s largest king penguin colony shrank by 88%.

- Blue-fin Tuna populations have shrunk 97%.

- 60% decrease in total wild land animal populations.

- 96% of the planet’s biomass now is humans and livestock. Wild animals represent less than 4%. …

- 10-60% less arthropod biomass in Puerto Rico.

- 50-80% drops in partridges from France due to the lack of insects they eat.

- 50% of all farmland birds in Europe are gone.

- Birds which rely on insects may be starving to death due to their collapse. 

These are some drastic decreases and we tend to forget that all species are connected. When we loose one species, we can loose all the species that rely on it. We need to recognize what is happening around us with our environment and our planet. We need to know, that what we are seeing today, isn’t normal.