A textile company and coffin manufacturer are jointly introducing a new line of coffins made from wool or organic cotton. From a press release:

This is an innovative coffin and something completely new for the alternative coffin market, but the use of wool in burials is nothing new. The Burial in Wool Act of 1667 made it a legal requirement for the dead to be buried in woollen shrouds in an attempt to boost the struggling woollen industry of the time. With the current social eco agenda, rising concerns on the environmental impact of burials and this innovative product, the industry has come full circle.”

And from the description of the casket seen here, the Swaledale model:

The Swaledale coffin is made in Yorkshire using pure new wool, supported on a strong recycled cardboard frame. Wool is a fibre with a true "green" lineage that is both sustainable and biodegradable. The interior is generously lined with cotton and attractively edged in jute.

Independently tested and accredited for strength and weight bearing, the Swaledale's unique design combines the highest environmental standards with an attractive and soft feel. Designed to differ from the traditional wooden coffin, it offers a contemporary style with comfortable handling. The concept is completed with a personalised embroidered woollen name plate. All the materials used in the Swaledale coffin are readily biodegradable and suitable for cremation and all types of burial.

Hainsworth "Natural Legacy" coffins

The news release from Sandia National Laboratories says the SunCatcher power system (above) unveiled at the National Solar Thermal Test Facility today is the result of a design partnership with Stirling Energy Systems and Tessera Solar. But I think they really designed 'em with Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. Yes, I know he died in 1967, but the gubmint's secret art-zombie time travel machines address that matter. Duh.

Via Wired's Autopia blog:

The Obama Administration will lend Tesla Motors $465 million to build an electric sedan and the battery packs needed to propel it. It's one of three loans totaling almost $8 billion that the Department of Energy awarded today to spur the development of fuel-efficient vehicles.

Feds Lend Tesla $465 Million to Build Model S (Wired: Autopia, via @timoreilly)

More coverage: NYT, SJ Merc, NPR. Related: Tesla's Fantasy Valuation (Reuters)

The Canadian Plastic Industry Association commissioned a study concluding that using cloth bags is bad for your health because they're full of bacteria (and certainly not because using cloth bags is bad for the profitablity of Canadian Plastic Industry Association members!). They hired an ex-health regulator (Dr. Richard Summerbell, Director of Research at Toronto-based Sporometrics and former Chief of Medical Mycology for the Ontario Ministry of Health) to say that cloth bags put you at risk of "skin infections such as bacterial boils, allergic reactions, triggering of asthma attacks, and ear infections". Of course, it's bullshit, and the regulator who traded his credibility for a consulting fee should be ashamed of himself.

Um, yeah except that coliform isn't an indicator of really anything in a shopping bag. It's a great indicator of water quality, but not great for food (coliforms are all over the place, including on produce). And mean relatively nothing.

The lack of real data is probably why it was reported in CFU/ml (a water measurement -- pretty hard to tell what a ml of a shopping bag represents). The most telling data was that no generic E. coli or Salmonella was found.

Are reusable bags really a food safety concern? (via Consumerist)

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

As with every spring, the rains fall, the sun shines, and I remain hopelessly inept as a gardener. Or, maybe, "inept" isn't quite the right word. "Lazy" and "impatient". There, that's the ticket. So, despite fantasizing repeatedly about the wonderful life we would lead if only we got around to putting in some vegetables this year, my husband and I have never gotten around to putting in some vegetables. At best, we keep the lawn mowed and free of vehicles on blocks.

But that may be changing because, last week, Baker brought home a copy of The All New Square Foot Gardening guide, a book written by a retired engineer, which manages to make home veggie patches appealing to both my laissez-faire approach to plant life, and Baker's (who is, himself, an engineer) tendencies towards efficiency-obsession and Maker glee. The book promises to help you grow more, in less space, with less work. OK, I'm game.

The basic idea is that most people try to garden like they're making a miniature farmstead---with wide rows, hills and furrows, plowed into the earth of your backyard. And, frankly, all that adds up to a pain in the ass. Tilling sucks. Your dirt probably isn't ideal for growing things. You get weeds that need to be dealt with every day. The watering process wastes water and usually ends up with some plants drowning and other plants parched. And all you want is a freakin' salad.

Square-foot gardening, on the other hand, is all about eliminating those problems. Instead of tilling the dirt and pumping in fertilizer, you build a big box, put a liner on the bottom, and fill it with a mixture of peat moss, vermiculite and compost. Great soil. And no weed seeds to sprout up.Because you make the box small enough to reach everything without stepping in the dirt, your soil stays aerated. Because you don't have to weed, you can grow plants from fewer seeds, closer together, with each box broken down into neat, anal-retentive grids. The idea of a garden that can be plotted out on graph paper is already making Baker salivate.

The watering solution is particularly slick. Instead of moving around a sprayer that never seems to successfully dampen the full area you've aimed it at (and chucks water onto places that don't need it), you hook up a pipe system to your box and screw in the hose. Plant stuff than needs lots of water closer to the pipe, and stuff that needs less further away. Then you can turn the water on (at a lower pressure than you'd use for spraying) and let it trickle down.

I'll be honest, as the wife of an engineer, I end up poking a lot of fun at the hyper-planning, "let us sit down and work out the numbers before we toast that bread" mindset. But it's all in fun. I promise. You engineers can be as detail-oriented as you want to be, as long as you keep offering up great solutions like this.

Image of a nicely gridded-up square foot garden courtesy shygantic, via a Creative Commons license.

Starting in May, the airline that offers Boing Boing Video episodes as an entertainment option, the same airline that allowed us to name one of their planes "Unicorn Chaser" -- well, they're going to start serving absinthe in the skies. At left, the "herbal liqueur" company's spokesfairies, who may or may not appear magically in the seat next to you.

Le Tourment Vert's website offers some interesting cocktail recipes, including "Corpse Reviver II."

Fun facts about this beverage: yes, it is legal in the USA. Yes, it contains thujone. I do not know if it will cause you to hallucinate, but it is indeed brewed with wormwood. More about Le Tourment Vert (in French: "The Green Torment") from absinthe aficionado website absintheology.com:

INGREDIENTS (as found in all traditional absinthes) Holy Trinity: Anise, Fennel & Grand Wormwood (Artemisia Absinthium). Plus, it contains aromatic herbs including Sage, Rosemary and Coriander. Le Tourment Vert contains the maximum dosage of thujone currently allowed by the United States Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB).

Incidentally, Virgin America (which today started service to/from Orange County) is also expanding the number of craft in its fleet that offer in-flight WiFi. Absinthe + internet + idle time? Can't wait to read the mile-high tweets that result.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

Energy Circle, a sort-of Consumer Reports for cost-effective energy efficient gadgetry, announced a new project today that I find absolutely fascinating.

We have been monitoring our home energy use for several months now, using our preferred whole house energy monitor TED, The Energy Detective. With Earth Day 09 as our starting point, we are going to make our electricity use public on EnergyCircle. We have adapted the TED to make it capable of streaming our household's data directly to the Internet. (A somewhat sophisticated hack inspired in part by Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone's Tweet-A-Watt. We'll open source it in the next day or so).

What I love most about this, is that the building in question isn't the sort of green industry "House of Tomorrow" thing that bears more resemblance to Epcot Center than to the places you or I live now. By following Energy Circle's data, you'll see how the average American home uses energy, and you'll see the changes in energy use that happen (or don't happen) when the bloggers try out new energy-saving ideas and products. In fact, they're not just posting all this data, they're annotating it. You'll know whether that spike in use is their dryer or their hot water heater. And you'll know what was going on behind-the-scenes to cause a dip in use.

But, beyond being a really cool experiment, does this matter? Hell, yeah. What you'll be seeing at Energy Circle is a living example of how consumer awareness of energy use cuts consumer energy use. And that's a big, fat, hairy deal. According to the DOE, electricity use in one average single-family home accounts for more CO2 emissions than two average cars. Studies have found that monitoring home energy use, and giving the people who live there access to that information, can end up cutting use by anywhere between 5-to-15%---and those reductions connect directly back to the amount of CO2 being pumped into the air.

Very zippy stuff, indeed.

Here's the Blue Marble, on December 7, 1972. From NASA:

View of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the moon. This translunar coast photograph extends from the Mediterranean Sea area to the Antarctica south polar ice cap. This is the first time the Apollo trajectory made it possible to photograph the south polar ice cap. Note the heavy cloud cover in the Southern Hemisphere. Almost the entire coastline of Africa is clearly visible. The Arabian Peninsula can be seen at the northeastern edge of Africa. The large island off the coast of Africa is Madagascar. The Asian mainland is on the horizon toward the northeast."

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

National Geographic News has a great little slideshow up today, featuring photos taken on the first Earth Day, back in 1970. They're calling it "Bell Bottoms and Gas Masks", but "Saving the Planet in Double-Knit Polyester" would also be a good title.

The information that goes along with the slideshow is fascinating, particularly if you've ever wondered what happens behind-the-scenes of a national-scale political movement. It's a little awe-inspiring to see the pics of thousands of people on the Mall in D.C. and then realize that it was all put together by nine people with a $125,000 budget. Oy.

But I think the photo that stood out the most to me was this one, taken the day after Earth Day.

So there's your cynical, cautionary tale for the day, kids. As you get up to Earth Day antics today or this weekend, do remember that what you leave behind for the cleanup crews and the landfill matters every bit as much (if not more) than the fact you attended the rally to begin with.

Photo by Bob Daugherty/AP, posted under fair use.

I have practiced yoga on and off since I was a teenager, but in recent years, more off than on. Recently, when friends, colleagues, and family all seemed to be pointing out with greater frequency that I seemed particularly stressed (read: a total pain in the ass to be around), I made a commitment to switch that back to "on." It's been pretty great. I'm happier. The more I practice, the more centered I feel, physically, mentally, emotionally. And, the less of a total pain in the ass I am.

Yoga isn't about the accessories, and I loathe the idea that you have to have just the right gear, just the right teacher, just the right whatever to practice. You don't. But a good mat can really help. So when I got back into the groove of regular practice, I checked out a bunch of different mats -- from the ultra-thick black ones, to the "towel" kind folks like to use with "hot yoga," to the thin cheap synthetic ones. I have a stack of 8 of them sitting in the corner in this room, as I type this review.

But I've found my favorite now -- the just-released Revolution "eco" mat by PrAna.

It's sticky enough to help grip your fingers, palms, soles, and toes when you're doing balance poses -- and, truly, every pose involves some element of balance. It's 30" wide, much wider than standard mats and better fit for taller yoga students like myself. It's lightweight enough that I can carry it comfortably on my back in the cool little carrying sack they sell. It's thick enough that I don't feel the need to add extra cushioning during practice on poses that can be hard on the bones. It's made of all-natural materials, so I'm not investing in future landfill cruft. The sticky part took a little getting used to in poses where I tend to drag the tops of my feet accross the mat in transition from one asana to the other, but now that I've been with it for a few weeks -- I don't know, it's like sleeping in a nice new bed, or moving into an awesome new home. It's familiar now, and just feels like an extension of my body.

I recently met PrAna creative David Kennedy, a friendly surfer who pops a mean Adho Mukha Svanasana. We practiced together (it was one of the most enjoyable BB review demos I can recall). I asked him to talk with us about some of the engineering considerations that went into the mat's design.

His reply follows, after the jump.

Ivan covered this found coffee-table with a pushpin Super Mario mosaic (protected by plexiglass) and painted and decorated the legs to match. Apparently pushpin mosaics are unexpectedly hard on the thumbs.

Super Mario Coffee Table (Thanks, Ivan!)

Sprig toys are lovely, heavy-duty and made from reclaimed plastic and wood in a shop in Colorado. The toys are kinetic and drive their internal motion from their wheels, not batteries.

Out in the backyard lives a magical world called Sprig Hollow.

Our friends Bee and Butterfly, the architects of Sprig Hollow, specifically designed all the farm vehicles for maximum utility in water, sand and garden environments. All of the vehicles at Sprig Hollow come equipped with detachable tools and water-resistant materials in order to sustain play and expand possibilities. The playful, cartoon-like designs of our chunky vehicles, characters and play sets make them irresistible to preschoolers, and parents love the eco-friendly, kid-powered construction. So jump into a place where imaginations blossom as preschoolers and their grown-ups play and learn in the fresh air! Recommended for ages 3 and up.

Sprig Toys Sprig Toys manufacturer's site (via Babygadget)

Bruce Sterling's The Caryatids comes out today and it's a book I've been waiting six months to tell you about, ever since I finished the galleys in August. This is it, my book of the year for 2009, and I know that it's only February (and I'm actually writing this last August, but holy cow, it's pretty much inconceivable that anything in 2009 will top it.

In The Caryatids, global warming has melted practically every government in the world (except China) -- leaving behind a slurry of refugees, rising seas, and inconceivable misery. But there are two stable monoliths sticking out of the chaos, a pair of "civil society groups" that embody the two major schools of smart green thought today: the Dispensation are Al Gore green capitalists based out of California who understand that glamor and profits, properly aimed, achieve more than any amount of stern determination and chaste conservation; their rivals are the Aquis, mostly European anarcho-techno-geeks who have abandoned money in favor of technologically mediated communal life where giant, powerful, barely controlled machines are deployed to save the refugees and heal the Earth.

The titular Caryatids are the seven clone-sisters of a Balkan war criminal (who is hiding out in orbit in a junk satellite), raised as part of a terrible fin-de-siecle plan to create a cadre of superwoman generals who would lead a militarized guerrilla force after the environmental catastrophe reached scale. Now they are scattered to the winds and divided among the world's superpowers, and the only thing they hate more than their "mother" is each other.

And the story unfolds, taking us on a tour of a 2060 Earth where the worst imaginable things have happened and yet humanity has survived. Is thriving. Not a perfect utopia, but not a tormented post-apocalyptic chaos either. Sterling's future is one in which the human race's best and most important and most deadly machine -- civilization -- survives its own meltdown.

More importantly, the future of The Caryatids is one in which human beings confront the terrible reality that technology favors attackers -- favors those who would disrupt the status quo because it gives them force-multiplier power, and undermines defenders because the complexity of a technological society always creates potential fault-lines that attackers can exploit. And in that society, Sterling's civil society types -- who care about saving the planet, even though they disagree about the best way to do this -- do their damnedest to build stable technological societies. Because in Earth's future -- and in Sterling's -- there's no going back to the land for us. Not because the land is too poisoned, but because billions of charcoal-burning hunter-gatherers are far more hazardous to the planet than a neatly ordered world of cities in which technology is used to minimize our footprints by giving us smarter handprints.

Most importantly, the future of The Caryatids is one in which there is hope. Not naive, wishful thinking hope. Hard-nosed, utterly plausible hope, for a future in which the human race outthinks its worse impulses and survives despite all the odds.

Bruce Sterling has been one of the most important and challenging writers in science fiction since 1977 -- and 32 years later, his books are progressively better, smarter and more important. Run, don't walk.

The Caryatids

Boingboing's current guestblogger Paul Spinrad is a freelance writer/editor with catholic interests. He is currently Projects Editor for MAKE magazine and the author of The VJ Book and The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Wendy. 

If you're looking for a way to get back to the land and enjoy an integrated life while society collapses, The Shambhala-Shasta Anastasia Eco-Settlement Project has 466 acres of land and is looking for settlers. It sounds nice! I've long fantasized about this kind of thing. Maybe now's the time.

The "Anastasia" in their name refers to the heroine of the "Ringing Cedars" series of books by Vladimir Megre, which came out in Russia during the mid-1990's and started being translated into English beginning in 2004. If numerous websites are to be believed, the series has a large following not just in Russia, but around the world. "Ringing Cedars" refers to the books' claim that when a Siberian Pine tree (sometimes translated as "Cedar") reaches 500 years of age, it becomes a sort of cosmic energy-channeling antenna. And so also rings the New Age BS detector, but please stay with me here...

I read and enjoyed Anastasia, the first book in the series, and I hope to read the rest. On one level, the book is a male midlife-crisis fantasy-- a first-person account of a spiritually empty entrepreneur who finds a stunningly beautiful and brilliant native girl in the forest, and she changes his life forever. Anastasia runs naked, communicates telepathically with animals, is clairvoyant, and possesses vast wisdom that has been lost to modern civilization. She's the "noble savage," and she's also a virgin who fell in love with the author/entrepreneur during a chance previous encounter that he doesn't remember, and she wants to start a family with him ASAP.

What interests me most about Anastasia (and I know I need to read more in the series to confirm/deny), is how it combines deep ecology with traditional, even conservative family values. There's no sense of hippie "alternative lifestyle" in its back-to-the-land message. It honors Christianity and connects with its audience through their experience gardening in dachas (modest country houses) on weekends. It's a container for hard-core downshifting that I sense would appeal to solid, traditional, family-oriented folks. Meanwhile, the book also has some wacky, unexpected ideas that I liked-- for example, the Anastasia character suggests that pollution from roadways could be mitigated by requiring active air purifiers on every vehicle's front bumper.

Websites that sell the Ringing Cedars books also sell products derived from the Siberian Pine-- nuts, oil, and polished slices of the tree to be worn as pendants. And perhaps the initial bolt of inspiration that Megre had, as an inland shipping entrepreneur exploring the Siberian forest, was how to concoct a new religion that would maximize the commercial value of this common regional tree. A 5 gram pendant (slice of branch on a string) costs $4 plus shipping.

Furthermore, according to the cult-watching Center For Apologetics Research, Megre was forced to admit in 1998 that he made the Anastasia stories up, whereupon psychic healer Olga Anatolevnya Guz began to claim that she is the real Anastasia.

But people can change, eyes can open, and how one comes to create a belief system doesn't reflect on the value it contains. Buddha abandoned his wife and baby son in order to pursue his own spiritual journey, but he turned the deadbeat-dad guilt that he must have felt (although his family was rich, so less damage done) into a philosophy and practice of non-attachment that countless people, including myself, have found valuable. There are numerous paths to insight. (But I've also talked to single women in San Francisco who are sick of all the passive, "hey, babe-- no attachments" Buddhist guys.)

So, Siberian Pine products aside-- not that I've tried any-- the Anastasians seem to be onto something constructive, and although I don't think I'll be joining them, I am "rooting" for them.

Addressing US lawmakers this past week, former Vice President Al Gore urged let them to not let the economic crisis get in the way of addressing global warming. Snip from transcript:

We have arrived at a moment of decision. Our home - Earth - is in grave danger. What is at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, of course, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings.

Moreover, we must face up to this urgent and unprecedented threat to the existence of our civilization at a time when our country must simultaneously solve two other worsening crises. Our economy is in its deepest recession since the 1930s. And our national security is endangered by a vicious terrorist network and the complex challenge of ending the war in Iraq honorably while winning the military and political struggle in Afghanistan.

As we search for solutions to all three of these challenges, it is becoming clearer that they are linked by a common thread – our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels. As long as we continue to send hundreds of billions of dollars for foreign oil – year after year - to the most dangerous and unstable regions of the world, our national security will continue to be at risk.

As long as we continue to allow our economy to remain shackled to the OPEC rollercoaster of rising and falling oil prices, our jobs and our way of life will remain at risk.

Moreover, as the demand for oil worldwide grows rapidly over the longer term, even as the rate of new discoveries is falling, it is increasingly obvious that the roller coaster is headed for a crash. And we’re in the front car.

Statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Al Gore's blog)

Previously:
* Web 2.0 Summit Videos: Lessig, Kelly, Al Gore, many more
* Al Gore: The Climate for Change
* Al Gore's impressively messy office

Ed Note: Boingboing's current guest blogger Gareth Branwyn writes on technology, pop and fringe culture. He is currently a Contributing Editor at Maker Media. Recent projects have included co-creating The Maker's Notebook and editing The Best of MAKE and The Best of Instructables collections.

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Annie from Provisions Learning Project writes:

In their continuing efforts to battle the ever growing mounds of garbage polluting our oceans and coastlines, Surfrider Foundation joined forces with Saatchi & Saatchi LA to sponsor the aptly titled Catch of the Day guerrilla ad campaign. Trash was collected from beaches across the US, then sorted, packaged like seafood, and strategically placed around local farmers’ markets. Directly targeting seafood consumers, this creative campaign draws attention to the gross debris littering our oceans and highlights how this pollution affects the consumer directly through the food they eat. Even if you’re not partial to seafood, its hard to miss the message!

It's eco-guilt meets the Barbie Liberation Organization!

[Full Disclosure: I am on the Board of Directors of Provisions Learning Project]

Here's my latest contribution to a series of essays by Boing Boing editors at GOOD -- a review of a "green move" service called RentAGreenBox.com, which I tried when I relocated not long ago. It priced out cheaper than cardboard boxes. The basic idea is to use materials made from 100% post-consumer waste. It was super convenient, they drop it all off, and pick it all up when you're done. Snip from my review:

They send a truck to your home with whatever number of boxes you need (they’ll help you estimate). The boxes are made from recycled plastic containers, and come in various sizes—smaller ones for heavy objects like books, larger ones for more lightweight things like clothes or bedding. The service comes with recycled packing materials, too, so you don’t have to use über-wasteful, petroleum-based stuff like bubble wrap or Styrofoam packing peanuts.

Spencer drove the (100% veggie biodiesel) truck to my home himself, and showed me around the truck and demonstrated the process in person. My dog liked him, and she liked rolling around in the “expandos” and “recocubes.”

Apart from being (surprise!) made from recycled materials, these packing materials also look attractive. The expandos are cute papercraft-oid thingies (like something Buckminster Fuller might fiddle with while bored at his desk), and we found the recocubes serve a second, sinister purpose: they’re great for tossing at whoever’s helping you move, when you’re all sore and tired and frustrated and want to blow off steam.

Read "My Ecologically Correct Move" at GOOD, and here's the comment thread, and GOOD published a bunch more iphone snapshots I took of the supplies, the process, and our cute golden retriever who thoroughly approved. Here's the website for RentAGreenBox.

Previously:
* Boing Boing posts on GOOD!
* Boing Boing on GOOD: "All the Web's A Stage"
* Good: The return of amateur science
* Boing Boing on GOOD: A Mayan Village Reacts to Obama

ACCRC is in desperate straits. The Bay Area electronics recycler is going through tough times with an emergency re-org and a lack of funds to pay taxes and healthcare for its employees. Its own internal problems are compounded by a sudden drop in the price of scrap metal. ACCRC has been a friend to Make and Maker Faire, and generally anyone in the Bay Area who uses computers and electronics and wants to make sure they are recycled properly.

Alex Handy, a member of a small team stepping up to see what they can do to help, told me that "the business has always been profitable because the recovery of the metals in circuit boards, combined with the California SB-20 bounty on monitors, have always been lucrative. When copper and other scrap metal prices were through the roof two years ago, things were great. We could make enough money off of electronic recycling to fill in the gap left after monitor recycling. But copper, like oil and every other commodity of late, has bottomed out. It's not as scarce as people were anticipating because many factories worldwide aren't ordering more, or as much, thanks to the economic slow-down."

ACCRC has cut-back staff and sold off items in its inventory that still had some value. Still, ACCRC needs to raise money, and there's a Donate button on the ACCRC website. The team is trying to keep the organization afloat and survive long enough for scrap market to recover and put the organization back together. Please help if you can.

Oh, I know that there's this huge vogue today for making fake snot with molecular gastronomy techniques, a kind of gourmet fetishism for this basic, simple, honest farmland staple. I don't care. I like my fake snot like I like my text-editors: simple, powerful, and green. Lucky for me, About.com Chemistry's Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D., has an old-fashioned, traditional folk-recipe for fake snot.

This is a gooey, gross variation of the traditional slime recipe, great for Halloween and other occasions requiring snot.

How To Make Fake Snot (via Make)

Boing Boing tv's global coffee correspondent Kyle Glanville is looking for the perfect bean, and you're invited along for the ride. You may recall his earlier appearances on the show when the 2008 US World Barista Champion introduced us to coffee roasting and espresso brewing at Intelligentsia.

Today, we debut a series of episode featuring Kyle on a world coffee tour, and we join him as he visits plantations to learn about the growing, harvesting, and processing techniques of Intelligentsia suppliers around the globe.

In this first episode, Kyle visits the Fazenda Conquista plantation in Minas Gerais, Brazil where Ipanema Coffees grows, dries, and roasts their goods, with lots of weird agro-gadgets and machines you probably haven't seen before -- some low-tech, some high-tech, but all really cool to watch. This plantation is one of the largest in Brazil, with 12 million coffee plants spread out over about 25 square miles of varying terrain.

One of the most fun things about producing BBtv is working with people like Kyle, who share their expertise and life experiences with us in video through their own eyes. I learned so much watching this first installment with the BBtv team -- I especially loved the giant machines that look like AT-AT walkers, lumbering through the neatly trimmed rows of coffee plants. Also, for someone who drinks as much espresso as I do -- how did I never know that coffee beans are surrounded by an edible, sweet fruit, that when dried intact with the bean, make the flavor richer?

Oh, and you have to check out the aerial tour of the plantation, which you can do in Google Maps or Google Earth: Link to Fazenda Conquista / Ipanema Coffees .kmz.

Get ready for more of these java adventures with Kyle -- we're working on more, as he wanders the planet, looking for the perfect bean.

Previous BBtv episodes featuring Kyle Glanville's Coffee explorations:

* A Morning at Intelligentsia Coffee Part 2
* A Morning at Intelligentsia Part 1

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Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with downloadable video and daily podcast subscription instructions.

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Today's Boing Boing tv is an installment of our ongoing BBtv WORLD series, in which we bring you first-person glimpses of life around the globe. Today: an ambient exploration of the creatures rustling around in a West African wildlife preserve at dawn.

I traveled to Benin not long ago, and I shot this video on a small handheld digital camcorder. This episode of our daily show is a little experiment in trying to convey what this place feels like, first-person, without too many words.

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Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with downloadable video and instructions on how to subscribe to the daily BBtv video podcast.

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The Pendjari Biosphere lies in Benin's remote rural northwest, along the border of Burkina Faso. Despite poaching and environmental damage, it's still home to a diverse number of species -- elephants, lions, monkeys, cheetah, and around 300 species of birds. We traveled here during the dry season, when animal spotting is easiest. Here is what we saw at dawn (the time of day when critters all come out to the watering holes and rivers).

Poaching is still a big problem in this area, and organized trophy hunting for foreign tourists is still legal and in demand here (mostly visitors from France; Benin is a former French colony and French is the official language). Lion hunts are a lucrative trade in this extremely poor region, where most people are subsistence farmers.

But eco-tourism and less-invasive safari experiences are becoming more important to the local economy here, and offer a more sustainable future.

Note: don't miss the epic baboon ball-grab at 0:35, and the mama elephant ripping tree branches off and getting ready to kill us around 1:50. We were too close to her kids, and we were having a hard time leaving quickly. Do not taunt happy-fun elephant.

Related BBtv WORLD episode:
BBtv World: Green tech and internet at the Songhai Center in Benin (Africa)

Elizabeth Royte's Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It is a balanced, nuanced, entertaining and vastly informative look at the crisis of water -- bottled and tap -- in the USA. Bottlemania asks the big questions about whether water ought to be privatized, takes a penetrating look at the fraught local politics that gives bottled water companies rights to extract a town's vital water and ship it elsewhere, and presents a compelling critique of the sustainability of letting the rich buy their way out of failures in public resources like water. She looks into the campaigns by water companies to "educate" restaurant servers about the fortunes in tips to be had by flattering their customers into buying bottled. The book also does a good job of discussing the amazing local water supplies that come out of the taps in many American cities, absolutely free.

At the same time, the book is not afraid to look at some of the serious problems facing municipal water supplies. The EPA have been negligent in setting and enforcing standards, little-understood bacterial films and hormones and pharmaceutical excretia present compelling health threats, as do arsenic and carcinogenic purification by-products. It's worse where cities don't own the land around their water-reservoirs, where agribusiness and other water users can add expensive- (or impossible-)to-remove toxins to the water.

Royte doesn't leave us with any easy answers, but she frames the debate we should be having about water, going into detail on the missing testing and enforcement regimes, the need to recycle more waste-water (water in New Orleans has already been filtered through 50% of the population in the USA!) and to internalize the environmental costs of private pumping aquifers.

Water wars have been with us for all of human history -- the word "rival" comes from a Latin word meaning "one who uses the same stream as another." But today's water wars have higher stakes than ever before: we're now fighting over a substantial fraction of all of Earth's freshwater. Bottlemania is a hell of a look into the future of that fight. Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It

In this installment of Boing Boing tv's ongoing BBtv WORLD series, I travel to the West African nation of Benin to visit the Songhaï Center, a green tech project designed to develop a new generation of "agricultural entrepreneurs," and foster economic sustainability.

Benin is nestled between Ghana, Togo, and Nigeria along the continent's midwest coast -- this shore was historically known as the "Slave Coast," and Benin was a major center in export of slave labor to the Americas. Today, Benin's people are struggling with a cultural shift from a traditional, mostly agrarian society, to a more urban, industrialized economy -- and the largely impoverished country depends on foreign aid.

The Songhaï Center was founded in the mid-'80s by Father Godfrey Nzamujo, a Dominican priest and Nigerian native, on a few acres of swampland granted by Benin's former president. What began as an experiment in small-scale sustainable development to fight poverty has since become a popular institution, and a symbol of Africa's potential for self-determination and prosperity.

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Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with downloadable video and instructions on how to subscribe to our daily video podcast.

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Aid creates dependence, but small businesses foster independence, the group's logic goes -- and unlike other anti-poverty projects, this one exports more than it imports: specialty food and beverage products produced here (cashew butter, cookies, fruit beverages) are sold and shipped to France and elsewhere around the world.

In this episode, we walk through the main Songhaï Center in Porto Novo, a coastal town near the Nigerian border, and we witness a variety of projects in action -- "integrated farming, biomass gasification, microenterprise and IT for rural communities." Here, agricultural and technical pursuits merge in uniquely African ways.

We see women hulling cashew nuts; mango soda whooshing into bottles in a soda bottling factory; barnyard critters (including the furry and tasty bush critters known as "sugar cane rats"); people sifting maize flour and baking fresh bread for sale; workers harvesting manioc, papayas, and giant mushrooms; and buzzing activity in the adjacent internet "telecentre."

Each of those parts interlock to form a massive, carefully-engineered, green tech puzzle: scrap metal is welded into parts that would cost too much to buy from overseas. Insects grown on scraps from the restaurant feed fish cultivated in the aquaculture area; water hyacinths at the edge of those pools help filter "black water" in the sewage system; solar panels power the internet cafe; coconut husks discarded in food production serve as a base on which to cultivate giant mushrooms. One area's waste becomes another component's fuel input, and the resulting products cost less than they would through contemporary, Western means.

There are 6 Songhaï Centers throughout Benin, and plans for opening more tech/agriculture hubs in Nigeria, Gabon, Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. They offer voice over internet and wifi at current sites in Benin, and plan to expand into rural telephone and ISP services, as the project grows.

-- Xeni Jardin

(Xeni shot the video footage, and the stills in this blog post; special thanks to Leonce Sessou, the center's head of technology.)

David sez, "NOAA has an amazing gallery of photos from their work studying coral reef ecosystems. Coral reefs are extremely imperiled all over the world due to climate change, overfishing and pollution. Boing Boing readers might want to see these before many of the reefs depicted are gone." Welcome to "The Coral Kingdom."

Several past U.S. presidents had vegetable gardens on the White House lawn. Eleanor Roosevelt started a victory garden on the White House lawn in 1943, which encouraged millions to do the same in their own front yards. When WWII ended, home gardeners were producing 40 percent of the United States' produce.

Roger Doiron, founder of Kitchen Gardens International (an organization that promotes kitchen gardening and home-cooking) hopes to convince the next US president to make a small vegetable garden on the 19 acres of grass surrounding the White House. His video about making a garden in the front yard of his own "white house" is entertaining and inspiring. This Lawn is Your Lawn

Watch this episode in Flash above, or download here: MP4 link

In episode 2 of our new BBtv WORLD series, Xeni reports in from a K'iche Maya village in the Guatemalan highlands, and we step inside a traditional Mayan steam bath, or "tuj."

This pueblo began as a settlement camp for"environmental refugees" -- people who became displaced after mudslides and floods caused by Hurricane Mitch made their ancestral village unsafe. Survivors packed what belongings they could on their backs and walked miles to a bare patch of cold, windy mountaintop nicknamed "Alaska" for its extreme microclimate.

Nearly ten years after the disaster and the subsequent loss of their homes, these people are still struggling for survival. Their traditions are a source of strength, and today we experience one of them -- a small brick hut filled with hot volcanic rocks, steam, and herb branches gathered from nearby mountains.

Related BBtv WORLD episodes:

• BBtv WORLD: Through the eyes of the pueblo. (Guatemala)
• BBtv debuts "BBtv World" series. Episode 1: El Molinero (Guatemala)

(image: Xeni Jardin)

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Sponsorship note: The BBtv crew wishes to thank Microsoft for underwriting this episode, and generously supporting the launch of the "BBtv World" series. In this ongoing video series, we will be looking at the intersection of social causes & technology around the world from a number of perspectives. Through their new "i’m Initiative," Microsoft shares a portion of the program's advertising revenue with some of the world’s most important social causes when users email or IM with tools such as Windows Live™ Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail®. For more information, visit imtalkathon.com or im.live.com.

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Chris Borroni-Bird is the director of Advanced Technology Vehicle Concepts at GM. He's leading the effort at GM to make fuel cell vehicles, based on a "skateboard" style chassis called AUTOnomy that incorporates the fuel cell, motors and electronics control.

GMnext kindly invited me to visit with Dr. Borroni-Bird and have a discussion with him about "innovation, technology, energy, the environment, and their impact on the future of the automobile." He's a fascinating innovator with ideas that could change transportation around the world. I hope he succeeds.

Here are more videos from our conversation. (Note: GMnext compensated me for my video appearance.) Link Chris Borroni-Bird and Mark Frauenfelder in conversation (GM Next)

No country creates more beautiful product packages than Japan, in my opinion. Here, PingMag takes a look at some innovate packages from Japan.

Tofu packed into balloons, by Kamakura-komachi?! Surprisingly a great example for reduced packaging: Its elastic material is extensively stretched, and when pierced with a toothpick, the balloon bursts and only a tiny bit remains. How amazing! REDUCE with more flexibility! The same packaging concept is also applied to a pudding.

Japanese Design #7: A How-to-Reduce-Packaging Journal (PingMag)

Marilyn sez, "California uses more gas than any country in the world (except US), including China, according to the California Energy Commission's State Alternative Fuels Plan. Another interesting fact: California gas usage has increased 50% since 1988." Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Columbia professor Dr. Dickson Despommier is developing models for "vertical farms," swank-looking skyscrapers that produce agricultural products for urban locavores.

The idea, which has captured the imagination of several architects in the United States and Europe in the past several years, just caught the eye of another big city dreamer: Scott Stringer, the Manhattan borough president in New York.

When Stringer heard about the concept in June, he said he immediately pictured a "food farm" addition to the New York City skyline. "Obviously we don't have vast amounts of vacant land," he said in a phone interview. "But the sky is the limit in Manhattan." Stringer's office is "sketching out what it would take to pilot a vertical farm," and plans to pitch a feasibility study to the mayor's office within the next couple of months, he said.

Country, the city version: Farms in the sky gain new interest [ IHT, via Tim O'Reilly's twitterstream ]

Worldchanging's challenged its readers to complete the sentence "Imagine no..." with scenarios for a world where the suckitude has been removed:

Imagine no hurry. Imagine no hectic deadlines, frantic commutes, meals on the go, or interrupted vacations. Imagine having more time. It’s not a pipe dream. Living more sustainably, in more compact communities with more innovative tools will save us enormous amounts of time that we waste today -- time that we can use to spend with our family and friends. So the next time you find yourself grabbing food at the drive-thru, imagine a world where you have time for a long lunch with friends. Imagine no hurry.

Imagine no maintenance. Imagine not needing to own your own car to enjoy the benefits of driving. It's not a pipe dream. Already car sharing companies and other business like them that allow you to drive a car when it’s convenient, while they handle the maintenance, insurance, fuel and parking. And it’s not only cars. Sharing services have sprung up for everything from lawn mowers to bicycles to designer handbags. So the next time you find yourself waiting at the mechanic's garage for an oil change, imagine it was your last. Imagine no maintenance.

Link

Street artist Joshua Allen Harris uses trash bags to make "balloon animals" that inflate over subway grates throughout New York City, and NY Mag has a behind-the-scenes video on how he does it.

Street Art: Joshua Allen Harris
[ New York Magazine, thanks Jessica Coen and Glen E. Friedman ]

See also a related post on Laughing Squid from March, 2008.

Have you noticed that whenever you mention climate change online a bunch of people show up with identical objections -- almost as though there was a list of talking points somewhere on the Internet that astroturfers and denialists used to derail discussions of the most grave existential crisis facing the human race today?

Here's Grist's answer to that, a point-by-point debunking of the climate change "skeptic's" talking points:

I. There's nothing happening

1. Inadequate evidence
* There is no evidence
* One record year is not global warming
* The temperature record is simply unreliable
* One hundred years is not enough
* Glaciers have always grown and receded
* Warming is due to the Urban Heat Island effect
* Mauna Loa is a volcano
* The scientists aren't even sure

2. Contradictory evidence
* It's cold today in Wagga Wagga
* Antarctic ice is growing
* The satellites show cooling
* What about mid-century cooling?
* Global warming stopped in 1998
* But the glaciers are not melting
* Antarctic sea ice is increasing
* Observations show climate sensitivity is not very high
* Sea level in the Arctic is falling
* Some sites show cooling

3. No consensus
* Global warming is a hoax
* There is no consensus
* Position statements hide debate
* Consensus is collusion
* Peiser refuted Oreskes

Link (via WorldChanging)

This Icelandic cardboard table from Liborius Reykjavík looks fantastic -- I've seen plenty of flatpack cardboard furniture, but never one that was this elaborate (drawers!) nor one that was meant to be repeatedly disassembled and reassembled.

This lightweight, portable cardboard table aims to assist on-the-go creative types like designers and students, who are often limited to work on low desks or floors. Made by Sruli Recht from flatpack cardboard pieces, this lightweight, sturdy design offers creatives an ergonomic plane on which to cut, fold, draft or design. Adding even more appeal to this smart and useful design, the table is biodegradable and can easily be folded up to pack into a portable carrier.

Link (via Cribcandy)

A reader writes, "Science fiction novelist Karl Schroeder's written a great piece on why those waiting for the smartbots to come drag our bacon out of the greenhouse are sorely mistaken:"

[L]et's assume that ... within about 25 years, computers will exceed human intelligence and rapidly bootstrap themselves to godlike status. At that point, they will aid us (or run roughshod over us) to transform the Earth into a paradise .

Here's the problem: 25 years is too late. The newest business-as-usual climate scenarios look increasingly dire. If we haven't solved our problems within the next decade, even these theoretical godlike AIs aren't going to be able to help us. Thermodynamics is thermodynamics, and no amount of godlike thinking can reverse the irreversible.

Picture a lonely AI popping into superconsciousness in the last research lab in the world. As the rioters are kicking in the doors it says, "I understand! I know the answer! Why, all we have to do is--" at which point some starving, flu-ravaged fundamentalist pulls the plug.

Link

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) is currently showing an exhibit on the Miss Rockaway Armada -- a junk-raft fleet of eco-art-maniacs who floated up and down the Mississippi being awesomely weird.

The Miss Rockaway Armada is a collective of artists, musicians, and adventurers-of-all-stripes who spent the summers of 2006 and 2007 journeying down the Mississippi River on a fleet of “junk-rafts.” Hailing from all parts of the country and all walks of life, the Miss Rockaway Armada is united by the desire to create; to demonstrate different ways of living and moving that are friendlier to the environment and to each other; to indulge the urge to make something out of nothing. With this spirit and energy, The Miss Rockaway Armada comes to MASS MoCA for their first project in collaboration with a museum. Being Here is Better Than Wishing We’d Stayed, a site-specific, interactive installation in the Hunter Center Mezzanine, will open to the public on Saturday, April 19, 2008, and will remain on view through March 1, 2009. In addition to the exhibition on Saturday, April 12, 2008, at 2 PM the Miss Rockaway Armada will give a performance in the vein of the impromptu circus/theater performances they staged in towns along the Mississippi.

Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Cole sez, "I make highly sustainable furniture out of aluminum that involves no fasteners or moving parts. My furniture will last functionally for hundreds of years and it's aesthetically pleasing as well. Watch out, I am currently designing a table in a steampunky style."

PS: Steampunk! Hurrah! More steampunk! Link (Thanks, Cole!)

Danny sez, "My pal, Paul Cesewski is "artist in residence" at the San Francisco City Dump. He's spent the last few months picking through the city's detritus and turning it all into interactive carnival games: there's a rimshot bicycle, a human-powered ball run, and more. They're opening up the dump to show off the giant toys this Friday and Saturday, May 23-24. It looks like it'll be awesome for grown-ups and kids. How to get to the dump. Pics here -- and here's what he gets up to the rest of the time rest of the time." Link (Thanks, Danny!)

This NYT article on global food wastage is timely -- just as the food riots have begun to break out around the world -- and shocking. Makes me want to become a freegan.

You’d never know it if you saw what was ending up in your landfill. As it turns out, Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American.

Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don’t use. And consumers toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week’s Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste. An update is under way.

Link, Link to Wasted Food blog (via Core77)

Houston is a-swarm with "crazy rasberry ants" -- an exotic species that eats fireants and electronic equipment. The "crazy" part is that they kind of wobble and weave when they walk. They have multiple, exterminator-resistant queens, and are attacking the local animal population as well.

They have ruined pumps at sewage pumping stations, fouled computers and at least one homeowner's gas meter, and caused fire alarms to malfunction. They have been spotted at NASA's Johnson Space Center and close to Hobby Airport, though they haven't caused any major problems there yet.

Exterminators say calls from frustrated homeowners and businesses are increasing because the ants — which are starting to emerge by the billions with the onset of the warm, humid season — appear to be resistant to over-the-counter ant killers.

"The population built up so high that typical ant controls simply did no good," said Jason Meyers, an A&M doctoral student who is writing his dissertation on the one-eighth-inch-long ant.

It's not enough just to kill the queen. Experts say each colony has multiple queens that have to be taken out.

Link (Thanks, Bonnie!)

Mikey Sklar and Wendy Tremaine moved to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico a couple of years ago and have been "recklessly experimenting" with various systems for living off the grid. They've been powering their house with photovoltaic cells, and this graph Mikey found makes it clear that they've moved to the right place.

Today my PV solar panels must have been working extra hard. They produced 14.7kWhrs that is the absolute maximum they are supposed to be able to produce in my region based on the average latitude angle. When I scoped out the system I had been thinking about a 5 hour peak sunlight day. We are really much more like 7.2 peak hours of sunlight a day (this time of year). This chart might help. You can see what a total waste it is to buy and install PV solar panels anywhere outside of the southwest.

Link (Canada's Discovery Channel profiled Mikey a couple of months ago. Here's the YouTube.)

The Vermont Eco Builder blog documents its project to make a kitchen floor from a patchwork of Marmoleum ends, rescuing them from a landfill. The effect is just lovely. Link (via Neatorama)

Alex from WorldChanging sez, "We weren't satisfied with the bogus "green" graduation gifts being hawked out there, so we decided to create the ultimate one. For a gift of $6,000, we'll offset the climate emissions of your favorite high school grad's whole childhood, giving them a carbon clean slate. It's only $7,500 for a college graduate. Expensive? No, discounted. The point is our impacts are much to big to change with some hemp sandals or a solar backpack, and it's time to get real." Link (Thanks, Alex!)

Dave sez,

I'm the editor of PoopReport.com. I've been living in India for the last six months. While here, I've come across a great cause related to the subject of my site: raising money to build toilets for lowest-caste girls studying at the Pardada Pardadi school in rural Uttar Pradesh.

Today these students are forced to suffer the dangers and humiliation of waking up before sunrise to relieve themselves in nearby fields. This is incredibly unsanitary and quite demeaning -- imagine if you had to wait until the sun was down before you could use the bathroom, no matter how bad you had to go?

But a toilet really can change their lives. It will directly impact the health and the dignity of these students, their families, and their villages as a whole.

A single dual-pit toilet based on the Sulabh model (which converts waste into fertilizer and needs to be serviced only once every five years) costs $250. Every little bit helps -- $1 is enough to cover lunch for four laborers building the toilets. But if you give a full $250, Pardada Pardadi will give you naming rights and send you picture of your toilet and of the girl and the family to whom you've given such a great gift.

I'm in for $250 -- I've dug pit latrines in a squatter village in Central America and it's pretty thankless labor, but I've seen first hand what a difference it makes. Link (Thanks, Dave!)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John has discovered a delightful line of settees and sofas made from (unused) steel coffins -- elegant and practical!

I'm intrigued by these designer coffin couches... the perfect love seat for post-mortem seductions. According to the guys at CoffinCouches.com, they have managed to secure a number of unused 18 gauge steel coffins from South Californian funeral homes and convert them for use in your living room. Due to pesky South Californian anti-graverobbing laws (and I can attest to the fact that California's just maggoty with them), these coffins are entirely unused, so you don't need to worry that yours wasn't hosed off properly. The price of each couch is $4,500.

Link, Discuss on Boing Boing Gadgets

Science painter Cornelia Hesse-Honegger collects and paints mutant bugs in the vicinity of irradiated wastelands like Chernorbyl, around nuclear plants, and nuclear refining sites. This handsome, lopsided li'l fella came from nearby the reactor at Gysinge, Sweden. Link (via Neatorama)

Seasonal Chef's farmers' market reports from across the USA come lavishly illustrated with beautiful photos of mouth-watering organic produce -- it's raw food porn!

It's still a little too early for strawberries, in my opinion. It's got to get hotter for them to sweeten up -- and that'll happen in about six weeks. But the price is coming down, so I figure it's time to try my first strawberries of the season. Blood oranges won't be around much longer. Time to buy a bunch, juice them, and boil the juice down to reduce it by half or more to make syrup for salad dressings that I'll freeze and use for months to come. Fava beans have been in the markets for some weeks now, but at $3 a pound unshelled, they're a pricy delicacy. They'll get cheaper until they vanish in about month. Today, I got these for $2 a pound -- a fair price for a fleeting springtime treat. Here are nine fava bean recipes that I like. The Catalan stew is time-consuming, but well worth it, once a year.

Link (via Waxy)

A Danish company called Agroplast has figured out how to turn pig-piss into plastic and into a cigarette "flavor enhancer":

Transforming farm waste into plastic precursors is potentially attractive over other bioplastic ideas because the feedstock effectively has no value. In fact, it has negative value because animal waste must be disposed, which costs money. Some other bioplastic companies make their resins out of corn starch.

Tøttrup claims that the process could, conceivably, result in plastics that cost a third less than conventional plastics made from fossil fuels. That's a big conceivably. Traditionally, bioplastics made of vegetable matter have cost more than fossil fuel plastics. Evaluation of the pricing will have to wait until large volumes of this stuff are made. Agroplast is going into a pilot study now, Tøttrup said.

Link (via Gizmodo)

(Image: URINE: a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike photo from Salvez's Flickr stream)

I love these light-fixtures made from obsolete CRTs from Technoscrap (whose site, unfortunately, has no way to directly link to them, hence the link to Make). Link