Social Development Network

water-when-dry posted this article, and it was a very good read. It reminded me of The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature’s Salvation by Fred Pearce.

I put the obligatory “invasive species” warning on seed listings, and even occasionally profile the worst offenders, but as a concept, I think ‘invasive species’ is totally misguided, and mostly economically-motivated. The article digs deep into how the narrative of conservation has shifted from being against corporate environmental destruction, to an anti-invasive species rhetoric guided by corporations.

The only constants in nature are movement and change. Competition from new forms of life is part of what drives evolution.

I think sometimes we have a self-effacing narrative of ‘human hubris’ (which comes from human exceptionalism, where we don’t truly see ourselves as animals living in an ecosystem) that works it’s way into conservation discourse: a plant that arrives ‘naturally’ (ie. by any other means than being transported by humans) is fine, but anything we touch is ‘sinful’ in some way. We’re still assuming there is a nature/culture divide.

The truth is that a biome may be disrupted, and some species may go extinct when they can’t hack it (like North American marsupials did!), but life goes on and has for billions of years. If we step back and look at the changes on a geological time scale, the introduction of Zebra mussels – for example – is just a drop in the bucket of the shifting landscape around the Great Lakes. The reality is, a lot of these ‘invasive’ organisms have adapted to perform ecological services.

I’m not saying “import away” or “don’t do native species conservation,” but I am saying, “life will change and adapt whether we influence it directly or not, so we may as well cut ourselves some slack.”

A New Classroom That Produces More Energy Than It Consumes:

Energy neutral buildings are great. But you know what’s even better? Buildings that produce more energy than they consume. That’s the goal of a new type of classroom currently being tested in Ewa Beach, Hawaii.

The portable classroom, designed by San Francisco firm Anderson Anderson Architecture, is among the first wave of buildings to claim the “energy positive” label—an eco catchphrase that could soon replace “net zero” as the gold standard of environmentally-friendly bragging rights.

Like the name suggests, energy positive simply means a building makes more energy than it uses. In this case, the 1,000-square-foot classroom is projected to produce four times the energy it consumes—the result of eliminating the need for both artificial lighting and air conditioning.

Most homeowners still don’t know that solar power is cheaper than what they are paying right now.

In fact, they would save many thousands of dollars over the long term if they were to switch to solar power now.

It’s not just about money, of course. People who get solar panels installed on their homes will be doing their part to reduce air pollution.

Solar power is also a quickly growing industry that’s supplying many new jobs in cities across the U.S. and around the world.

An answer to the response to the answer to the growing question of the 21st century

By far, the most common concern in regards to my first article on Medium about the idea of an unconditional basic income was that all prices would inevitably go up as a result, immediately reducing the value of each dollar and essentially creating a new zero.