Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
The Rail~Volution Conference rolled into Los Angeles to illustrate how transit projects energize neighborhoods, meeting a significant demand for multi-density housing walkable to restaurants, offices, and shops. They can transform the landscape and mindset, in this case, of auto-addicted Southern California. One stop at a time.
Passive solar Earthships provide electricity, potable water, sustainable food production, with contained sewage treatment, and can be built anywhere in the world. Renegade eco-architect Michael Reynolds’ construction and design process called Earthship Biotecture creates beyond LEED Architecture, a sustainable green building design made of natural and recycled materials.
A short film follows artist Chris Jordan to investigate the thousands of albatrosses dying from ingestion of plastic from the Pacific Garbage Patch. The Albatross journey across the sea takes them over the world’s largest dump: slowly rotating masses of partially-submerged trash between San Francisco and Hawai’i.
In Siberia, shamans combine a distinctive imagery of reindeer and of bird-flight. Their costumes sometimes include imitation reindeer antlers, occasionally tipped with wings or feathers, placed on the headdress. Like the participants in the Eveny (Evenki) midsummer ritual, shamans may ride to the sky on a bird or a reindeer.
Despite an eventual pricetag of $68 billion and numerous engineering, environmental and political challenges, the California bullet train offers a promising vision of sustainable mobility, posing less impacts and competitive costs than expanding airports and freeways.
Set in a wild forest near the Skärsjön Lake, the Kolarbyn Eco-Lodge is Sweden’s most primitive hotel, offering twelve electricity-free “nature huts” allowing communion with the Swedish landscape without actually camping.
John Cage’s 1948 magnum opus for prepared piano, takes the listener through an hour-long journey told as a meditative story. Influenced by the Hindu aesthetic theory of rasa, or emotional character, it intones the listener toward tranquility.