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Archive for “Technology” category
Showing results 51 - 55 of 87 for the category: Technology.
4 Sep 2007
Well no not really, but I was very surprised to find when visiting St Ives Museum in Cornwall a couple of weeks back that the beginning of the fossil fuel era was so close to home. Although peak oilers like to trace the beginning of our current woes back to the drilling of the first oil wells in Pennsylvania in the 1850s, the real beginnings go back earlier, to 1712, and a man called Thomas Newcomen. It was that year that he finally got his steam engine working properly, which burnt coal to make steam, and then used that steam to drive a pump which drained water from the mines to enable vastly increased rates of coal mining. According to Bill McKibben’s recent book ‘Deep Economy’ (review gestating), his machine replaced a team of 500 horses walking in a circle, an astonishing breakthrough.
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31 Aug 2007
A while ago I wrote a product review of my EcoKettle, for which I got quite a lot of flack from those who don’t think there is any such thing as an eco gadget. Actually I subsequently read in Chris Goodall’s excellent book How to Live a Low-Carbon Life a pretty thorough demolition of the EcoKettle, arguing that they will take 4 years to pay back and are not built to last anything like that long. So, anyway, we’ll move on from the EcoKettle to a gadget I recently bought which I think is rather wonderful, and which I would recommend to anyone, the Electrisave.
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10 Aug 2007
I didn’t get to many talks at the Big Green Gathering, but I did get to one excellent, and very important one, given by Paul Allen and Richard Hawkins of the Centre for Alternative Technology. The talk was to introduce the wonderful piece of work they have just completed, a report called Zero Carbon Britain. I think it is the most important piece of work CAT had ever produced, and is very important for Transition Initiatives too. In essence it is the first draft of an Energy Descent Plan for the UK, although its focus is largely on energy. The two of them presented the report, how it came about, and what its aims are, in a very accessible way. Here, reconstructed from my notes, is the general gist of their presentation.
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17 May 2007
**’Wattle and Daub’ by Paula Sunshine. Shire Books. 2006. pp40.**
There is something very nourishing about the process of rediscovering the building materials of our ancestors. I often remark when teaching people about cob building that in the UK we have an earth building gene, that deep inside ourselves, once we start to handle these materials we find instinctively that we know what we are doing, they feel right in our hands, we feel at home with them. The first time I made a wattle and daub panel, we just decided we wanted to do one, and we used a book and made it up as we went along. We didn’t have great clay, we put the wattles too close together and didn’t use enough straw in the mix. It worked, but only just.
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14 May 2007
A couple of weeks ago in Totnes, as part of the Great Reskilling programme, we held a workshop with Keith Ellis from Transition Town Lewes called **A Hands-on Introduction to YouTube Video Activism**, which aimed to teach people how to make short films just using a digital camera and a laptop, and to transfer them onto sites such as YouTube and VideoGoogle, a cheap and very powerful way of communicating ideas of transition and energy descent. The course was a great success, with about 15 people with widely varying experience of making films spending the day filming and editing a number of short films.
Read more»
Well no not really, but I was very surprised to find when visiting St Ives Museum in Cornwall a couple of weeks back that the beginning of the fossil fuel era was so close to home. Although peak oilers like to trace the beginning of our current woes back to the drilling of the first oil wells in Pennsylvania in the 1850s, the real beginnings go back earlier, to 1712, and a man called Thomas Newcomen. It was that year that he finally got his steam engine working properly, which burnt coal to make steam, and then used that steam to drive a pump which drained water from the mines to enable vastly increased rates of coal mining. According to Bill McKibben’s recent book ‘Deep Economy’ (review gestating), his machine replaced a team of 500 horses walking in a circle, an astonishing breakthrough.
