Paradise Unpaved and Other Eco-illustrations
One Toronto family found paradise by unpaving their driveway -- then created an illustrated essay documenting the process! (via Kottke)
At first, the city told the enviro-family they weren't allowed to rip up their driveway. But the fam fought the city -- bringing them to their side. Now, instead of a 4-car driveway, Toronto has one new pretty garden that provides natural cooling and prevents urban runoff. Added bonus: Instead of getting annoyed by people using their driveway to turn their cars around, the family gets compliments on their garden from passers-by.
The grow-your-own-food movement's catching on everywhere. Shayna in Oakland shows off her fresh garden produce in Apartment Therapy's Re-Nest blog. Shayna grows her own tomatoes -- as well as plums, zucchini, and jalopenos.
Making environmentalism look pretty is what "Bubble Boy" Buckminster Fuller did way back in the 1920s. Nerve.com's new feature on Fuller points out that "He coined the phrase "Spaceship Earth" to try to make people see our planet as a groovy interstellar vehicle that needed care and maintenance, just like a trendy car."
If you've realized your own eco-dream at home, illustrate it and enter Re-Nest's green@home contest to win Ecover cleaning products and organic cotton bedding from Raksha Bella.
The GIY Guide: The Birds and the Bees
Like a lot of you, I live in the city, where food miles are
measured by how many blocks away the nearest pizza parlor is, and growing one’s
own food is often limited to a windowbox of parsley, sage, rosemary, or
thyme. But a burgeoning subculture of
city-bound agrarians are changing the urban landscape, back lot by garden plot,
planting fruit trees, cultivating crops, and even raising livestock. Not livestock as in horses and cows perhaps,
but livestock as in chickens, ducks, and bees.
The rationale behind raising your own food in the concrete
jungle is as timeless as it is timely.
After all, the DIY impulse is deeply rooted in the urge for
self-sufficiency on every level, not just mechanical ones. Engaging in the food chain as an active
participant inspires new (or rather much older) ways of thinking about food and
its source. And as the justification of
shipping food thousands of miles to be sold as pre-packaged processed “product”
becomes less easy to stomach, the more conscientious, not to mention delicious,
eating locally appears.
Of course raising urban livestock, particularly fowl, does
require certain considerations of space.
Apartment and condo-dwellers without yard access might have to forgo the
“to-raise-or-not-to-raise” discussion altogether. Many cities and counties have regulations in
place as to how many feet away from a housing unit urban livestock must be
kept, and how many animals are allowed per household. But once such criteria are satisfied, it can
be surprisingly simple to proceed.
Beyond protection from predators, stable housing, and daily
feedings, chickens and ducks require little day-to-day attention and the
tangible rewards of compostable manure, pest control, eggs, and perhaps an
eventual chicken dinner (or at least a good soup stock), make them an eminently
pragmatic pet choice. Bees, too, require
very in little in terms of daily upkeep or space, and the yield from a single
bee box can be as much as sixty pounds of honey per year. It might not be milking your own cow or
shearing your own sheep, but small-scale animal husbandry can still put you
back in touch with your environment, not to mention your food chain, in a
significant way.
Photo courtesy of thomas pix.
