For the last four years, the Dredge Research Collaborative has been looking at dredging and erosion control as a form of often unacknowledged landscape architecture. Part of their work is a series of festivals they’re calling DredgeFest that celebrate and examine the role that dredging plays in landscaping. Their next event is in Louisiana. Gizmodo asked them to explain why.
     |
One of the ironies of CES, hosted here in Las Vegas, is that the largest and perhaps most spectacular gadget we could all be covering is nearly 80 years old, weighs 6.6 million tons, and supplies much of the electricity fueling the devices on display at the trade show.
| |
Who knew growing rice on a mountain could be so beautiful? The Ailao Mountains in Yunnan, China, have been carved into thousands of gradual steps, each a paddy growing red rice. The rice terraces stretch out over some 400 square miles of mountains and valleys.
| |
On highway medians, atop old landfills, in backyards—these are some of the places a monarch butterfly revival could begin. The yearly migration of monarchs from the northern U.S. and Canada to the warmer environs of Mexico was once a spectacular sight, and a now a rare one. Their numbers have dwindled. There’s no single cause, but a major one is habitat loss.
| |
Last week, Jalopnik’s Michael Ballaban posted about what is easily one of my favorite urban stories of all time, which is that parts of Manhattan are actually built on the wartime ruins of English towns
| |
At the Zhangye Danxia Landform Geological Park in Gansu, China, tourists flock to see China’s own version of the Grand Canyon: A mountain range of densely packed layers of minerals and rock that are dramatically striated into a layer cake of magenta, maroon, and lemon-colored stone.
| |
Photographer Martin Adolfsson’s book Suburbia Gone Wild, published earlier this year, documents the weird and expanding mirage of seemingly endless copies and duplicate environments called suburbia, like some poorly diagnosed spatial syndrome taking over the landscapes of the world from Mexico to Egypt, Thailand to India, to here in the United States.
The rooms are like dispersed pods from an unacknowledged global hotel chain, different only in their tiniest details. Is that image, above, from a house in Los Angeles, on the outskirts of Raleigh, or—as it happens—a suburb in Cairo, Egypt? Is this next photograph from Florida, Thailand, or—in reality—Moscow, Russia? How on earth can you tell?
| |
Humans have their dynamite; wind and water have time on their side; but animals, too, can reshape their landscape on a massive scale. None of these are the work of a lone gopher or even a single mighty elephant, but generations and generations of animals slowly chipping away.
| |
At first, it’s kind of charming. Look how well the Swiss treat their cows! A helicopter is dispatched just to carry an injured bovine stuck in the mountains! It’s not an uncommon sight in the Alps, either: in Switzerland, insurance that covers helicopter evacuation for your family also includes your cows.
| |
For all the hubbub about California banning the use of lead in ammunition, there’s been less of a focus on safer alternatives—but designer Per Crowell has taken this to perhaps its most tongue-in-cheek extreme, proposing shotgun shells filled with seeds.
| |
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
