theendismeh

joined 1 year ago
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Rebel Cities: Radical Municipalism in c/urbanism@slrpnk.net
[–] theendismeh@slrpnk.net 3 points 9 months ago

Thanks, this looks great! I heard last year that Łódź, Poland was looking to do some interesting things across the city, too.

8
Commercial Building Sustainability Recommendations (slrpnk.net)
 

Does anyone have any recommendations for books, websites, podcasts, and/or videos regarding sustainability solutions for commercial buildings?

I've got some general ideas but want to research more in case there are solutions that I've missed.

Thanks!

35
The "3.5% rule" needs protesting (www.theneweuropean.co.uk)
 

A note of caution about the 3.5% rule that has received a lot of focus in recent years:

People will, of course, find reasons to explain away why one or the other of the protest movements don’t count – but what’s important is that both show there is nothing magical about a 3.5% threshold, even in exactly the context to which it was originally applied.

The animating theory of modern protest, then, has been extended well out of the context of its original research, and doesn’t hold up even in its original context when we look at the biggest non-violent protest movements of the last decade. And yet this goes entirely unexamined.

Shoppers say they want sustainable goods, but won't pay more in c/climate@slrpnk.net
[–] theendismeh@slrpnk.net 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

About 15-20 years ago, a friend of mine who teaches communication at a university told me of a study that I think of every time I'm in a store and see vague sustainability messaging on a product. The study had two types of milk containers, each with the same milk from the same producer, but one had a standard label and cap, while the other had green-coloured labelling and a meaningless phrase along the lines of "for a better tomorrow". The milk in the green, meaningless labels outsold the other one, even without making any actual claims. I think years of greenwashing BS have made people not trust claims of sustainability or eco-friendliness.

Another issue is hyperbolic discounting. Even if a more sustainable option saves money of the long run, people are generally bad at factoring in future savings.

Climate crisis could contribute to a global food shortage by 2050, US special envoy on food security warns in c/climate@slrpnk.net
[–] theendismeh@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 year ago

And then there are pandemics among crops to worry about:

“Never again should a major cultivated species be molded into such uniformity that it is so universally vulnerable to attack by a pathogen,” wrote plant pathologist Arnold John Ullstrup in a review of the matter published in 1972.

And yet, today, genetic uniformity is one of the main features of most large-scale agricultural systems, leading some scientists to warn that conditions are ripe for more major outbreaks of plant disease.

“I think we have all the conditions for a pandemic in agricultural systems to occur,” said agricologist Miguel Altieri, a professor emeritus from the University of California, Berkeley. Hunger and economic hardship would likely ensue.