Making Sense of Things

Posts tagged with sustainable

• 14 November 2011 - Talking rubbish – Turning trash into treasure

  Here at Bustan Qaraaqa they don’t simply sort their recycling, compost their vegetable scraps and put out the rubbish to be collected weekly – they take REDUCE, REUSE and RECYCLE to a whole new level. With no municipal waste management in Palestine, they have adopted a policy of ‘what comes on site, stays on site’, often collecting other peoples waste too! Using permaculture, creativity, knowledge and passion they educate and demonstrate by living sustainably themselves and maintaining a philosophy that there is no such thing as waste - just a failure of imagination. They hope to inspire Palestinians to stop throwing their rubbish down hillsides or burning it on the side of the road and for foreign guests to understand their role in the waste cycle too. What would you do if your council didn’t collect your waste? How would you consume differently? What would you do with your rubbish?

  This … Read the rest

• 13 March 2011 - Twelve unsustainable things that will soon come to a disastrous end on our planet

  For those of you who ‘liked’ Making Sense of Things on Facebook know that we sometimes share on Facebook articles of interest that contribute in discussing further the topics we’ve raised within our posts. Although we don’t have rules about it, we’ve traditionally used the Making Sense of Things Facebook page to share with you others’ thoughts, and kept the blog itself to share our own views.

  Today we challenge this modus operandi in order to share with those of you who are not on Facebook an article titled “Twelve unsustainable things that will soon come to a disastrous end on our planet” written by Mike Adams and published on Natural News. The content of the article is not original per se, but the author nevertheless does an excellent job in providing an easily accessible overview of different topics of concerns, which are likely to occur and that … Read the rest

• 8 February 2011 - What is collapse? Conspiracy or a very real phenomenon?

  The concept of collapse of our civilisation is often heard among conspiracy theorists, causing many mainstreamers out there to ignore the concept altogether. But should they? Is it really a word that should be owned by the conspiracy theorists and disregarded accordingly?

  

  We believe we should not disregard it, but, rather than viewing ‘collapse’ through the lens of conspiracy theories, we could understand it in a historical and ecological sense. This then allows us to be realistic about future scenarios.

  Have you heard of the global collapse of fish species? If not, you need to watch The End of the Line (see our previous post to watch it easily). You will discover that Atlantic cod stocks were severely overfished in the 1970s and 80s, leading to their abrupt collapse in 1992. In Newfoundland, Canada, the devastating collapse of cod has impoverished entire communities, and the cod stocks have never recovered. … Read the rest

• 23 November 2010 - Urban Permaculture in Practice

  What is Permaculture?  Well, this is where I find it difficult to explain because it seems like it’s EVERYTHING – it’s gardening, it’s organic, it’s energy systems, it’s sustainability, it’s agriculture, it’s raising animals, it’s pest control, it’s regeneration of natural ecosystems, it’s efficiency, it’s energy efficient building and architecture, it’s a philosophy, a way of living, it’s community building… and more.  It’s a word that joins PERMANENT and AGRICULTURE but has been extended to include CULTURE too.  Perhaps the founder, Bill Mollison, can describe it better for you with these quotes:

  “An integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man”

  “Consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs”

  “People, building and the ways in which they organise themselves are central”

  or co-founder, David Holmgren’s definition … Read the rest

• 14 November 2010 - Top 10 eye-opening ecological documentaries – and how to watch them easily

  Images often speak better than words. Part of this blog’s aim is to contribute in raising readers’ awareness to certain issues and offer some ideas to deal constructively with them. True to this aim, we present to you today a selection of ecological documentaries that we consider as must-see. Indeed, if they are daunting, they are also eye-opening, inspirational and serve as helpful triggers for change. We assume that you’ve already watched the awards-winning An Inconvenient Truth, so we haven’t included it here. Do watch it (here) if you haven’t yet though…

  To encourage you watching these 10 documentaries, we’ve also added links or given hints on how to access them easily. So that you can’t say you didn’t know!

  So, here are our top 10 ecological documentaries:

  
  

  1) Food, Inc. It’s a must-see. It provides a rather objective – if scary – assessment of food production in the … Read the rest