Elsewhat

Yesterday I attended a talk at The Canadian Centre for Architecture given by members of HouseEurope!, an organization of architects pushing for laws which will encourage the renovation/restoration/adaptation of buildings using pre-used materials where possible as opposed to demolition and rebuilding from scratch.

They make some bold claims about the benefits of renovation:

↗︎ Renovation saves homes by keeping prices stable.
↗︎ Renovation saves jobs by boosting local markets.
↗︎ Renovation saves energy by preserving what is there.
↗︎ Renovation saves history by valuing the existing.

The organization pushes for tax and zoning reform to encourage renovation over demolition. Something we could use over here as well.

Bees are incredible. Just a bunch of ladies hanging around flowers all day and making candy. Did you know when they fly they beat their wings at over 230 beats per second?

Thomas Seeley has spent a lifetime studying bees, and though his book also gives a good overall sense of how amazing bees are, it centres itself on one tiny facet of their behaviour—how they choose where to live. When bees need a new place to live, they form a swarm—a big bundle of bees which gather on a tree branch, or building, or other temporarily safe spot with their queen in the middle.

What they do next is fascinating, they send out scouts to look for suitable places to live. when these bees find a spot, they return to the swarm and perform a waggle dance for their peers. The angle and duration of their dance, similar to those they do to tell their hive-mates where to find sources of food, expresses both where the potential new hive is and also how suitable it would be to live it. Bees have a number of criteria for their abode, including the size (15 litres or more), size of the main opening (15cm square or less), height above ground (10-15 feet off the ground is best) and direction (Southward-facing if possible).

As the scouts return and perform their waggle dances, a sort of debate takes place. Competing spots are advertised, visited, and if found suitable, other bees will waggle dance in advocacy for them. Over a few days, the swarm slowly reaches a consensus, and eventually sets off for their new home.

This is the sort of book that could only be written by someone who has made their life studying bees. The author seems to be positively overflowing with the sort of deep knowledge that you only get after a lifetime of studying, and loving, something very specific. The book feels like it can barely contain all the author has to say on the subject—as if the author could have gone on for hundreds more pages on the subject. Paul Stamet’s Mycelium Running about all matter of funguses seems like a worthy comparison.

Get the Book →

As pricey as a run to the grocery store has become, our grocery bills would be considerably more expensive if environmental costs were included, researchers say. The loss of species as cropland takes over habitat. Groundwater depletion. Greenhouse gases from manure and farm equipment.

For years, economists have been developing a system of “true cost accounting” based on a growing body of evidence about the environmental damage caused by different types of agriculture. Now, emerging research aims to translate this damage to the planet into dollar figures.

Beef has the highest environmental costs of the foods we examined, pound for pound, and it wasn’t close. Cattle are very inefficient at converting what they eat into body weight. For every 100 grams of protein a cow eats, less than 4 grams end up in the beef we eat.

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This isn’t quite new information for a lot of us, but I keep seeing the same tired arguments saying that closing cars to streets kills businesses. As a Montréaler, I’ve seen more and more streets closed while businesses continue to thrive.

As fellow Montréaler Toula Drimonis writes in the Walrus:

…once merchants saw the street fill with milling crowds, they were convinced. The pandemic initiative became an annual event. By 2023, the avenue’s commercial vacancy rate plummeted from 14.5 percent in 2018 to 5.6 percent. A few years earlier, in 2021, the pedestrianization of Wellington Street in the Verdun borough had increased foot traffic and shoppers by 17 percent. A once-drab strip is now lined with restaurants, bars, and cafes.

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The Walrus has a great profile of controversial writer Vaclav Smil, a prolific scribe of non-fiction about whom Bill Gates said “I wait for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie.”

Smil is a complicated figure, often pitting himself against environmental activists. I expected to disagree with a lot of his points, but after reading the profile I find myself much more in sync with his views than I would have expected, particularly with his view that decarbonization of the economy is going to be problematic, if not outright impossible. It pains me, but I’ve thought that for years. I’ve gotten into more than one argument with positive-thinking people who told me straight-faced that our economy would be totally de-carbonized within a couple decades. I’m much more pessimistic, despite going to great lengths de-carbonize my own life.

As the profile reminds us:

Vaclav Smil has spent half a century provoking combatants on all sides to examine their assumptions.

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Friend of Elsewhat’s Taras Grescoe‘s new book, The Lost Supper, follows the author as he tries to track down foods which have been lost to history, or otherwise forgotten or neglected by humanity. His journey is also a lens through which he looks at our own modern diet and its various impacts.

This has changed my day-to-day relationship with food, in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Before this journey began, I flattered myself that, with my diet heavy on small fish, vegetables, grains, and pulses, I was one of the world’s responsible eaters. My thoughtfulness, though, was limited to my consumer choices the items I picked off the shelves of local stores and markets. Thinking about the past of food has made me think harder about what I eat in the present, and every trip has changed the way I cook and eat.

Among the lost food he looks at are Garum (previously mentioned on this blog). He also looks at the (mostly) lost practice of eating insects, which lead to this little jab at paleo dieters:

“Paleo dieters are one of my favorite groups to pick on,” Lesnik added, with a chuckle. “They don’t have any real knowledge of what the paleo diet actually was. I always ask them, “Oh, so you eat a lot of insects?’ Consistently eating almond milk and bacon is not reflective of any form of the actual paleo diet. Eating bugs is.”

This was a great little book which combined food history with some healthy reflection on our modern diets, combined with some neat detective work and travel writing that is definitely off the beaten path.

The New York Times has a review of an exhibition of vintage environmental posters. The article has a nice gallery of some wonderfully designed and often poignant examples of graphic design with a message.

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Via Rafa

It’s easy to miss the fact that our cities often cover up existing streams and rivers, often diverting them underground or into existing storm drain systems. Back in 2009, Spacing posted a wonderful map of Montréal’s hidden rivers.

Ghost rivers is a street-level art project tracking a submerged river in Baltimore:

Ghost Rivers is a new 1.5-mile-long public art installation and walking tour by artist Bruce Willen that visualizes a lost stream buried below the streets of Baltimore.

This project explores the hidden history and path of Sumwalt Run, which now flows through underground culverts beneath the Remington and Charles Village neighborhoods.

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Artist Duke Riley makes scrimshaw-inspired art on plastic sea garbage. For the uninitiated, Scrimshaw are ink-engraved bones most commonly made by sailors. Thanks, Lily!

See the Gallery Here →