ARTS & FARCES internet

Thumbtack, a website connecting consumers with local service providers—think Angie’s List for microbusinesses—uses the data it collects in interesting ways. For example, last July the website published a list of the eco-friendliest cities in the US. Ho-hum, another green list, you’re thinking. Not so fast. Thumbtack’s data-driven approach factors the two biggest problems with going green: Availability and cost in terms of ten green services commonly provided by microbusinesses:

1. Solar panel installation
2. Bicycle repair
3. Chemical-free house cleaning
4. Organic catering
5. Electronics recycling
6. Chemical-free pest control
7. Chemical-free carpet cleaning
8. Sustainable interior design
9. Green architects
10. Home energy audits

Factoring in per-capita prevalence to the equation and controlling “for the distribution of listings on Thumbtack so that cities with fewer listings overall weren’t penalized,” Thumbtack arrived at a top-ten list that might surprise you:

1. San Francisco, CA
2. Oakland, CA
3. San Jose, CA
4. Las Vegas, NV
5. Raleigh, NC
6. Columbus, OH
7. Seattle, WA
8. Kansas City, MO
9. Denver, CO
10. San Diego, CA

Las Vegas, NV, Columbus, OH and Kansas City, MO? You’ve got to be kidding. Not according to Thumbtack’s data. “These rankings match up well with other city rankings for sustainability,” writes Thumbtack. “Nine of the top ten cities on our list are also cited by the National Resources Defense Council as examples of smarter cities.”

How does Thumbtack explain the country’s green poster child, Portland, OR coming in a pretty sad 13 in the overall rankings? “Either this ster-eco-type is misplaced, or now is a great time to open a chemical-free carpet cleaning business in Portland. We’re betting on the latter.”

One of the things that I miss most about living in the deep south is butter beans. As close as anyone gets up here on the far edge are lima beans and they’re vastly different and not nearly as tasty.

Last January I wrote a small article about BrightFarms building greenhouses on the roofs of grocery stores. Until recently, the company’s experiments were limited to a handful of stores fairly close to its New York, NY headquarters.

But now that’s changing according to a Pioneer Press report by Frederick Melo. Stillwater, MN-based Cub Foods, the warehouse grocery chain is collaborating with BrightFarms and a local produce distributor to carry locally-grown produce year-round. Departing from its rooftop greenhouse model, BrightFarms began construction on a 38,000-square-foot hydroponic greenhouse last month.

The greenhouse is going up behind produce distributor J&J Distributing, on Rice Street, in Saint Paul. J&J Distributing received US$500,000 for the greenhouse construction through Saint Paul’s Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program. The program is part of President Obama’s economic recovery initiative and administered through the Department of Housing and Urban Development - Recovery Act Community Development Fund (CDBG) Formula Grant Program Recovery Plan.

Melo reports that Cub Foods expects to begin selling more than 350,000 pounds of produce from the 0.87-acre BrightFarms greenhouse each year. The greenhouse will cost between US$1.5 million and US$2 million to build and the endeavor will add six full-time, living wage jobs in the city.

The hydroponically-grown produce, while not being organic, will be grown using less water and land than traditional field farming. “Growers will drip collected rainwater onto the plants and recirculate it, using 4.5 million fewer gallons of water for the same yield,” writes Melo. Because the produce won’t be trucked halfway across country, less pollution will be created.

According to BrightFarms chief executive Paul Lightfoot, its produce prices will be comparable to organic produce (that is, higher than traditionally-farmed produce) because “the greenhouse will enjoy fewer economies of scale and higher labor and capital costs than a mega-farm….”

Here’s hoping there’s at least a few butter bean patches amongst all that lettuce and tomatoes.

Tipping points existed long, long before Malcolm Gladwell popularized the concept in his book of the same name. In science—as opposed to pop culture—a tipping point is more appropriately thought of as a threshold. The point at which a relatively small change produces a rapid change—a state shift—in a system. In systems as large as the global ecosystem, this threshold is a zone rather than a point.

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have discovered evidence of just such a threshold for the earth’s ecosystem($$). The research received precious little attention in the corporate media.

Localized ecologies have been known to reach a threshold zone and shift drastically and irreversibly for some time (the researchers cite the Cambrian explosion and past mass extinctions), but this is the first time the same criteria has been found to be applicable to the global ecosystem. What’s changed is that humans are now exerting ever more powerful “forcings” at an accelerating pace. According to the researchers, such “forcings” include “human population growth with attendant resource consumption, habitat transformation and fragmentation, energy production and consumption, and climate change.”

No one has the slightest idea of what would happen if such a state shift occurred in the global ecosystem, but we can make guesses based on historical precedent:

“On the timescale most relevant to biological forecasting today, biotic effects observed in the shift from the last glacial to the present interglacial included many extinctions; drastic changes in species distributions, abundances and diversity; and the emergence of novel communities. New patterns of gene flow triggered new evolutionary trajectories, but the time since then has not been long enough for evolution to compensate for extinctions.

“At a minimum, these kinds of effects would be expected from a global-scale state shift forced by present drivers, not only in human-dominated regions but also in remote regions not now heavily occupied by humans; indeed, such changes are already under way.

“Given that it takes hundreds of thousands to millions of years for evolution to build diversity back up to pre-crash levels after major extinction episodes, increased rates of extinction are of particular concern, especially because global and regional diversity today is generally lower than it was 20,000 years ago as a result of the last planetary state shift.”

Related links:

• University of California, Berkeley media release
• ”Is Humanity Pushing Earth Past a Tipping Point?” (Brandon Keim, Wired)
• ”We’re about to push the Earth over the brink, new study finds” (David Roberts, Grist)
• ”I Fear This Will Be the Most Important News of 2012” (James Fallows, The Atlantic)

John Tomanio has created an infographic for National Geographic that sparsely and alarmingly illustrates the dramatic loss of diversity in food seed—an astounding 93 percent—over an 80 year period from 1903-83 using the metaphor of a tree. Tomanio’s infographic is based on data from a study conducted in 1983 by Rural Advancement Foundation International which is now part of the ETC Group.

In 1903 we had 408 distinct varieties of tomatoes, for example. By 1983, there were only 79 varietal tomatoes. And that’s the best news in Tomanio’s infographic. Lettuce has been reduced from 497 varieties in 1903 to 36 in 1983.

Industrial agriculture’s nutrient-depleting monoculture is mostly to blame for this devastation. Farmers used to employ self-sustaining planting and harvest cycles, crop rotation, and letting land lie fallow. Now most farmland has been stripped of nutrients which much be replaced artificially.

Thank goodness the Norwegians had the foresight to create the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in an abandoned coal mine in 1984. More than 10,000 seed samples of more than 2,000 cultivars, of 300 different plant species have been preserved to date.

Steelcase—the furniture maker—asked 100 thinkers to describe a wish for the next 100 years. Christopher Mims, writing for the Technology Review, reports that MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito absolutely nailed it in 150 words.

“One hundred years from now, the role of science and technology will be about becoming part of nature rather than trying to control it.

“So much of science and technology has been about pursuing efficiency, scale and ‘exponential growth’ at the expense of our environment and our resources. We have rewarded those who invent technologies that control our triumph over nature in some way. This is clearly not sustainable.

“We must understand that we live in a complex system where everything is interrelated and interdependent and that everything we design impacts a larger system.

“My dream is that 100 years from now, we will be learning from nature, integrating with nature and using science and technology to bring nature into our lives to make human beings and our artifacts not only zero impact but a positive impact to the natural system that we live in.”

Now if the brain trust at the MIT Press would get off its dead ass and publish Howard Rheingold’s Net Smart: How to Thrive Online as a non-DRMed EPUB ebook (as well as the rest of the Rheingold back catalog it has seemed to corral) my faith in MIT would be at least partially restored.