This is chewing through the philosophy of the biosphere metaverse project. It’s still messy, and trigger warning, it involves mention of patriarchy and ecofeminism. In more developed framing it won’t mention these to avoid the hangups around the words. Probably won’t mention metaverse either for the same reason.
outline:
Background: why does patriarchy persist
Pathological defences against loss applied to our relationship with nature
Repairing relationship through association, ways of listening
A globally accessible ecosystem of integrated data
Case study: UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves (WNBR)
The previous post – version 5.1 was a mess and I found it really hard to work through all that stuff. Part of my frustration is the feeling that I am doing this to get academic research funds, but I don’t really care about this aspect of the academic rigour, and that doesn’t do wonders for the motivation. That changed this week. I’m really starting to see the value in it, for designing an actual game, for example, and I’m having fun! My brain hurts, but hey.
I’m currently looking at building something like a participation curiosity scale or something like that, inspired by Kahan’s article. I’m a bit embarrassed to say I’ve been quoting Tim Harford left and right since 2017, but only actually read the article that he quotes this week, spurred on by Ricardo’s mention of causal approaches and me having a panic about how one measures ‘replacing judgement with curiosity’.
Scientifically literate people, remember, were more likely to be polarised in their answers to politically charged scientific questions. But scientifically curious people were not.
Curiosity brought people together in a way that mere facts did not.
European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Penninga, F., Lutz, M., Minghini, M., et al. (2021) INSPIRE, a public sector contribution to the European green deal data space : a vision for the technological evolution of Europe’s spatial data infrastructures for 2030. Publications Office of the European Union. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2760/8563
p6 Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) must evolve from complex and highly specialised frameworks to more sustainable, flexible and agile data ecosystems, lowering the entry level to non-specialists and welcoming an increased participation from less traditional stakeholders (e.g. open source software communities, standardisation bodies and early adopters) in addition to data providers and users.
This workshop was held at GreenCape on the 22nd of February 2019, the event description is available at a previous post: https://indiebio.co.za/distributed-bioeconomy/ The raw notes can be downloaded here. From the introduction it was clear that there is an emerging ecosystem and there are enough skills and ‘ecosystem components’ in the room and wider to make this work. There is enough of a realised need from higher income markets to test it out in a complex country like South Africa (as a nation, too high income to rely on donor funding, but too poor and with too weak governance to effect changes in the way a rich country would be able to, if it wanted to.)
Focus: dealing with biomass that may be or have potential to become hazardous
Case study: 1) container based sanitation (CBS) and 2) urine beneficiation, catering to the sanitation service delivery to higher LSM markets in South Africa.
More information, event write-up and discussion here: https://indiebio.co.za/distributed-bioeconomy/
Focus: dealing with biomass that may be or have potential to become hazardous
Case study: 1) container based sanitation (CBS) and 2) urine
beneficiation, catering to the sanitation service delivery to higher
LSM markets in South Africa.
Separett asked me to write a piece for them, but didn’t think this first draft was appropriate for what they intended. I like it, so here it is. (The second draft was even better 🙂 )
A quick snap of a poster at the Separett factory. Not the best quality and couldn’t find a similar thing online, but this really captures what dry toilets represent to me.
It’s confusing, isn’t it? They are mostly political terms, so the exact definitions are probably non-existent, but let’s settle for vague. I do think they’re different and important to distinguish, so here’s my stab at explaining what the differences are between bio-, green and the circular economy, and then I throw in water sensitive design as a bonus. Oh, and distributed. That’s what all of these have in common. This is just my opinion, of course.
