Most contemporary architecture =“petro-capitalist modernism”: it values only profit maximization & is entirely reliant on artificially cheap energy for its design & construction
There are exceptions though. One of the best is contemporary Southeast Asian bamboo architecture
Made from one of the most dynamic & sustainable materials on Earth, it inspires the kind of awe you might expect from an old world cathedral combined w/ the marvelous whimsy of surrealism
A post-carbon, post-capitalist future can look like this if we want it to #ecosocialism
I see this is speaking to people, which is awesome!
Please smash that follow button if you want tweets that don’t just talk about how oppressively awful life is under capitalism, but also offers a beautiful, achievable alternative ⬇️
I tried to get Midjourney to illustrate what a car-free city might look like in this style & the results are pretty meh imo. Prompt suggestions are welcomed
Also, the Discord interface is a horror show & reminds me that engineers simply do not understand human beings
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
The backstory is a real “necessity is the mother of invention” thing: bred in communist Hungary for use on collective farms that often lacked fungicides, herbicides, refrigeration, or anti-sprouting treatments 🧵
Sarpo Mira is perhaps the most naturally blight resistant potato in existence. It also produces an unusually large amount of foliage, shading out weeds in the process. And the yields are massive in part b/c it is “indeterminate”: it’ll keep growing until it’s killed by frost
The large, deep root system it develops means the plant requires less irrigation & is less susceptible to drought. And the potatoes themselves are unusually high in dry matter, making them excellent keepers. Last but not least, it has lovely pink/purple flowers
Just learned about the trompe: a simple device w/ no moving parts that turns the movement of water into compressed air
Every stream on Earth can yield an unlimited supply of free compressed air & we’ve known how to do this since the 17th Century
Legit makes me feel insane
Compressed air has many uses, but the most notable is that it’s a battery in gas form. When you release it, it can drive a turbine, which can either yield mechanical or electrical energy
We could easily enjoy many of the benefits of industrialism w/o killing our ecosystem
Instead we argue about whether we should replace one doomsday technology w/ another
If we’re willing to live w/ industrialism lite & deploy appropriate technologies, we don’t need to turn half the world into sacrifice zones & the other half into a plastic & concrete hellscape
If tools became more expensive— reflecting the negative externalities created by their production—it would reduce people’s ability to amass them
But paired w/ tool libraries, access to tools would dramatically increase, not decrease. This would make us richer, not poorer
Not only would it increase your personal access to tools, it would increase everyone’s. And since you share the world w/ others, you would benefit from that as well: your neighbors would make more repairs, complete more projects, & there’d be fewer negative externalities
It’s almost impossible to talk about food & climate change w/o wading into the morass of culture war bullshit
But at the end of the day, the only sane take is this: we should eat whatever mix of foods allows us to survive on this planet indefinitely nature.com/articles/s4155…
Under current conditions, that means a lot less meat. Like everything else in our civilization, animal agriculture is propped up by artificially cheap energy, which is killing us. The moral abomination of factory farming is essentially the process of turning gasoline into protein
Raising animals for food requires a lot of inputs: labor, food, water, medicine, infrastructure, etc. Orders of magnitude more than plants
They are also much more valuable alive than dead: they produce milk, eggs, labor, fiber, manure, offspring, & so on
The normal operation of nuclear power plants is extremely harmful to human life & the environment
Thermal discharge destroys aquatic life & creates vast dead zones. Radioactive discharge damages the DNA of animals & humans. Childhood cancer rates soar around nuclear plants
That’s for “normal operations,” but accidents are themselves part of the normal operation of any human system. We should not pretend nuclear accidents can be prevented
And nuclear power plant accidents are horrific beyond words. They represent a totally unacceptable risk to life
Eco-modernists would have you believe that only irrational fear mongers fail to see the viability of nuclear power as a solution to climate change
That is wildly, laughably incorrect. In addition to the deadly harms created by radioactivity, they are not carbon free