posts about sustainability issues
Reporters always have to grab a headline, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when the new green wall near Victoria station started grabbing headlines such as “London’s largest living wall prevents flooding”. It’s a misleading headline to say the least: A, it’s not the largest wall, that “accolade” (if size is all that counts) belongs
I came across some interesting vertical greening at Borough Market recently, in a glazed atrium/entrance space called the Market Hall which served as a place for people to relax, sit and eat. The plants were obviously chosen for their connections with food, so the climbers were hops (used mostly for beer making) and there were an
This article was written in 2013 and updated in April 2019. I’ve written before on the subject of adaptive landscapes and trans-migrational landscapes but I’ve been reading recently of a real-life ecology that was created by man in the last 150 years, and is thriving. This is on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean, a
This ASLA (American Society of Landscape Architects) animation does a great job of explaining the need for trees. One minor criticism: the part which shows the trees’ underground root structure shows it way too small; should be at least twice the radius, if not three times. Never mind, worth a watch:
I’ve been reading several websites by visionary developers in Azerbaijan, who are proposing some massive Dubai-style developments to the Bay area of Baku, the country’s capital. One, the http://khazarislands.com/ seems like an ambitious Dubai-competitor, an ultra-sleek development on up to 30 artificial islands (think the Palm Jumeirah), the other is based on an existing island and
Last year some interesting work emerged over the use of green walls for mitigation of air pollution; in particular the ability (or otherwise) of plants to remove particulate matter from the air, with pm10 being the size range focussed upon. This is the particle size most emitted from diesel exhaust, and this does a lot
I was chatting to the local farm manager the other day, out on the snow-lined track. “There’s nothing in the hedgerows for the birds” he told me. It made me glad that there was in my garden, which borders the track and fields. It also brought home such a startling truth: the birds need us
I’ve been doing a lot of research since writing my blog post on trans-migrational landscapes, my theory on how we have to adapt our natural environments – or rather, help them adapt – to combat the rapidly increasing effects of climate change. It’s not going to be easy; right now I’m not sure if we
Happy New Year! With the seemingly “non-event” of the end-of-the-world, what was/is really going on – anything? We’re all keen now (I guess) to get on with the new year, but there are some interesting parallels between modern civilization and the ancient Mayans. For a start, they were an incredibly complex society, with high levels
I came across an interesting article by Ruth Potts with the above title (http://www.thenewmaterialism.org/), which summed up pretty well where we need to be headed as a society to make the transition to a resource-scarce future. The crucial thing is, that this could be a much better future. Aren’t we all exhausted with the endless
