The Joni Mitchell lyric in the title of this post has long been a favorite singalong for environmentalists and with good reason. In our urban/suburban sprawls, parking lots are the ultimate example of our disregard for the land, representing formerly open countryside now coated in asphalt and covered with cars. But there may be some redemption for this stark image of man blithely overrunning nature.

Google and other companies are building solar ‘trees’ (ironic choice of descriptive nomenclature) that provide shade to parked cars while serving as inexpensive, ideally situated platforms for solar power generation. Because these platforms can be optimized for solar collection they are often far more useful than rooftops. The open spaces already exist as parking lots and you can’t really complain that they are esthetically less pleasing than an expanse of concrete covered with vehicles.

A good example of short term improvements in the way we use commercial land. It might be interesting to calculate how much fuel might be saved by lessening the blast of AC required to cool off a car that has been sitting in the California sun all day!

There is now a global network of satellite environmental information called GEONETCast. Access is free and it is a resource for all kinds of projects worldwide. This is over my head so I’ve included a description from their site in this post:

“GEONETCast is a global network of satellite based data dissemination systems providing environmental data to a world-wide user community. The current partners within the GEONETCast initiative include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and EUMETSAT, as well as many prospective data provider partners.

Aim of GEONETCast
GEONETCast is a milestone in the emerging Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) that is being coordinated by the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO), and is designed to put a vast range of essential environmental data at the fingertips of users around the globe. This user-driven, user-friendly and low-cost information dissemination service aims to provide global information as a basis for sound decision-making in a number of critical areas, including public health, energy, agriculture, weather, water, climate, natural disasters and ecosystems. Accessing and sharing such a range of vital data will yield societal benefits through improved human health and well-being, environment management and economic growth.
Within the existing framework, GEONETCast is already partially realising this goal with environmental data exchange and data delivery available in Europe, Africa and the Americas. An additional data exchanged is now being established covering the Asia Pacific region.

The following products and services are being made available to the GEONETCast user community:
Meteosat image data
GOES East and West image data
FY-2 image data
Land and Ocean Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility (SAF) products
EUMETSAT meteorological products
NOAA-NESDIS meteorological products
NOAA-NESDIS Ocean colour and sea surface temperature products
VEGETATION products from VITO
MODIS Ocean colour products
In-situ and observational data”

Worldchanging is a website dedicated to personal action and it is now a comprehensive book on the subject. As the effects of climate change and global warming accelerate, it is easy to wonder how any of us as individuals can do anything about it that really makes a difference. Worldchanging is about personal action and how small actions, when aggregated across millions of people, can change things.

This may very well be a handbook for our future.

Imagine a mechanical device 2000 years old that is more technologically advanced than many swiss watches. Sounds like something out of the Fifth Element doesn’t it? A british science team using high tech imaging techniques has determined that a heavily corroded device discovered in 1902 in the wreck of a ship dated between 100-150 BC is not sci-fi but reality. Called The Antikythera Mechanism, the bronze device originally contained 72 hand cut bronze gears and was used for celestial navigation. It apparently used extremely sophisticated engineering design to model anomalies in the moon’s eliptical orbit, making it more sophitistocated technically than anything produced in the next 1000 years.
It is speculated that the reason we haven’t found similar devices from the period is that bronze was so valuable that any on the surface would have been melted.
It will be interesting to see how quickly someone reconstructs a working model. Left image is the reconstruction, right image is the Mechanism as found.