On Sustainability…

For those of you who are concerned about sustainability (and that should be all of you), two articles worth checking out.

Both from Scientific American

The first is about Todd Brady, who is Corp Environmental Manager at Intel, and has designed Intel’s first green building to be opened this year in Haifa, Israel.

The other article, far more technical, raised my awareness (from zero) on the looming crisis of a Phosphorus Famine.

I had NO idea about this at all or how critical it is.

The visual that brought the phosphorus issue (and more…ever since An Incovnenient Truth, I feel like my outlook has dramatically changed), was the author’s description of the Earth as a spaceship.

He writes:

Green Revelation
My interest in phosphorus dates back to the mid-1990s, when I became involved in a NASA program aiming to learn how to grow food in space. The design of such a system requires a careful analysis of the cycles of all elements that go into food and that would need to be recycled within the closed environment of a spaceship. Such know-how may be necessary for a future trip to Mars, which would last almost three years.

Our planet is also a spaceship: it has an essentially fixed total amount of each element.

Worth the read.