When I First Saw This Headline On Facebook I Braced Myself To Be Disappointed. But It Sounds Like This

Lunarpunk Futures

All digital media is free to download and access by all even academic journals. But that doesn’t stop you from getting physical copies of your most cherished books on your shelves.

Study sessions and debates that bleed into the early morning hours at cafe’s with friends about philosophy, politics, and religious thought when your not engaged in actual study for one of your chose degree paths which are all free at your local university and online.

Late nights spent among strangers with telescopes pointing out the stars and learning their names.

Hacked fabric printers to print customized clothing in any size, shape, color, or pattern required. Need a skirt that looks good in a wheelchair? Check. Need a religious article of clothing? Check. Wanna change that to a bamboo silk instead of cotton? Check. Wanna put your own touches and designs on a pre-made base? Done.

Multilingualism is the norm and there are meetups to learn and share languages with each other.

Tablets that have great internal storage capabilities as well as settings for every language, blue light filtering, captions, font changes for dyslexia, dark mode, and more all built in by default.

Voting has taken on a whole new meaning with debates about the benefits or problems with bills, elections, etc. Voting is done regularly and with more public participation than ever before.

Every person has a guaranteed income that is above the poverty lines of the past, increases over time, and housing and healthcare are guaranteed.

Solar lanterns in tea gardens late at night listening to splash of koi fish while reading Basho.

Accessibility is built in by design in every building, walkway, path, etc. with bioluminescent lighting as needed.

Every home and apartment grows their own herbs, fruit trees hang over bioluminescent permeable sidewalks, and wild permaculture gardens are in every backyard.

Grocery stores contain zero advertising, offer delivery if needed, biodegradable and plastic free. Everything is designed to be recyclable or returned to nature is a beneficial way.

Rules on light and sound pollution preserve natural biological systems and keep wildlife stress to a minimum. Public transportation is the norm, there are still bicycles, electric mopeds, and wheelchair accessible self-driving taxis.

There is an online veggie trading system that allocates veggies to those who need them from those who have too many.

University is open to everyone and lifelong learning is emphasized. Emphasis is on learning and understanding topics not passing exams.

There are libraries, water bottling refilling stations, and green-spaces are the default.

*That’s all for now, I’ve currently got a cold and can’t think of anything else atm. I’ll try to keep posting things like this in the future though. :)

Printed Solar Bio-Batteries

Led by biotechnologist Marin Sawa, a group of researchers at Imperial College London have devised a way to print solar cells onto paper. They use an inkjet printer to place a conductive layer of carbon nanotubes and a layer of living cyanobacteria to create devices which can capture and store solar energy.

In their proof-of-concept experiment, the cyanobacteria survived the printing process and were able to produce energy from photosynthesis. The trial panel was palm sized and gave enough energy to power a small LED light. Even better, being little more than paper, carbon, and bacteria, the bio-cells are fully biodegradable.

The work is part of an emerging field of science called microbial biophotovoltaics (presumably related to the biovoltaics I’ve mentioned here before) which uses algae and cyanobacteria to generate energy. The energy generated may be small, but it’s also cheap and easy to manufacture, and the microbes can continue generating electricity after dark, using compounds made during daylight.

The bio-batteries aren’t intended to replace standard photovoltaics for large scale energy production. Instead, they can provide an inexpensive and renewable source of energy for specific uses, such as air quality monitors and healthcare applications.

“Imagine a paper-based, disposable environmental sensor disguised as wallpaper, which could monitor air quality in the home. When it has done its job it could be removed and left to biodegrade in the garden without any impact on the environment.” – Marin Sawa

Sawa et al (2017) – open access

i think one of the things i want to start learning in 2018 is how to make clothes. how do you start doing that?

I haven’t even read any communist stuff my ideology is “share and be nice” like the first two rules of a kindergarten

I turned a wasteland into a garden

With imagination and an army of helpers, a city wasteland was turned into a thriving garden for local people

Practical action + liaising with the local community = creating long term sustainable projects and ultimately a shift in culture.

Fall Arrangement Flowers

Not Herbalism but Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds just put out their 2019 Catalog. It’s time to plan gardens now, so that when spring comes, you can execute that plan. I have lived in apartments with very little space for the past 7 years, so I thought I’d share my “grows well in containers list” with you guys.

Greens: Most greens, spinach, arugula, lettuces, some cabbages, etc. will grow in a container quite well.

Herbs: Similar to above, you can get your typical herbs to grow in pots quite well, usually. The yield with herbs is always very good too.

Anything with “Tom Thumb” or “Dwarf” in front of it: These are varieties made for containers, basically. They’re very, very small. There’s peas, corn (as in pop corn), tomatoes. Lots of stuff. Even flowers.

Cheery Tomatoes: In general, with any “regular” veg, you’ll probably need a larger pot (Think like 1 gal). If you’re willing to go the distance, though, cherry tomatoes are a great container plant, in my opinion.

Alpine Strawberries: Again, somewhat larger (though not as large as above) is recommended to get more berries. These guys are tiny strawberries. Like one bite berries. 

Banana Peppers: I had two plants. They went wild. I ended up with several fresh peppers mixed into stir fry all summer and then two large canned jars of them, which I munched on through fall to the very very beginning of winter.

Carrots: Actually, if you’ve got a tall enough pot, you can grow regular carrots. But I like the Parisienne or other little round globe varieties. 

Radishes: Similar concept to the carrots. Small, round. Remember to eat your radish and carrot greens as well. 

Green onions: Either a chive situation or, some companies do actually have very small, like golf ball sized onions.

Look for “container mixes” on seed sites: Quite a few seed sights often put together container seed mixes. They’re usually the varieties recommended by the company. 

So that’s my list. Remember, grow what you want to eat. Also, a good plan is grow what is hard for you to buy. That way you aren’t doubling down on what you can easily find in town. 

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. 

plant friends