Environmental issues – global warming etc
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:
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
With the climate shifting now so rapidly that we cannot foresee what the future may bring – or rather, with an ever increasing certainty of life as we know it struggling to survive – do we need a new approach to our understanding and management of our natural landscapes? I think this will become inevitable
I gave a talk last week on Internal Bio-Systems for buildings, to eFIG, the European Federation of Interiors Group (http://www.efig.eu.com/) which was reported on swiftly by Horticulture Week . They picked up on my use of the phrase “war-footing” for the kind of response levels needed to deal with the issues at hand. Why? Well,
Here in the UK, we may not be following the US presidential election campaigns, but if you use twitter and follow any environmentalists, you can hardly fail to read the comments about the deafening silence coming from all parties. It’s as if they’re in absolute denial about it; or perhaps they think it’s game over
I have this concept going on in my mind (first wrote about it in 2007) about the exterior surface of buildings being like a living membrane or “biomembrane” (a term for the exterior surface of a cell), and having direct interactions between the internal and external building space, regulating such things as temperature, humidity, air
