Complete Makeover

Episode 1: Retrofitting Suburbia (preview all episodes here) from MPC on Vimeo.

Style and design seem to age in one of two ways.  Things either become retro chic classics or they turn into cautionary tales of wrong headed thinking.....case in point: leisure suits.  A number of scientists and public policy specialists are arguing that the design of our cities since WW II is definitely in the leisure suit category.  But unlike the aesthetically odd,but mostly harmless leisure suit, they argue that the recent design of our cities has contributed to a host of serious problems including the epidemics of obesity, diabetes and stress, the social isolation of teenagers and the elderly, and the loss of ecosystem services.   This interesting series explores these issues and looks at some of the ways people are rethinking the design of our urban spaces.  From the website:

A provocative new 4-hour series, "Designing Healthy Communities." Host/Narrator Richard Jackson, MD, MPH, looks at the impact our built environment has on key public health indices – obesity, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, cancer and depression. Dr. Jackson connects bad community design with burgeoning health costs, then analyzes and illustrates what citizens are doing about this urgent crisis by looking upstream for innovative solutions.

9 Billion Mouths

Check out this great website put together by the Center for Investigative Reporting.  From the website:

"Food for 9 Billion" is a yearlong examination of the challenge of feeding the world at a time of growing demand, changing diets, rising food and energy prices, shrinking land and water resources, and accelerating climate change. It is a collaborative project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, Homelands Productions, PBS NEWSHOUR and American Public Media's Marketplace.

Conservation Crossroads

Both the science and practice of conservation seem to be sitting at a crossroads.  In one direction is a preservation path that has helped save some precious parts of  our world's biodiversity legacy.  Preservation tools include creating biodiversity preserves,  restoring degraded habitats and landscapes, and as a last resort preserving germplasm in captive breeding programs.  However, in recent years a number of people have started to argue that preservation alone is not sufficient...or even in many cases a misguided  approach.  They argue that conservation (and the environmental movement in general)  needs to take a less idealistic and more pragmatic path that is focused more on achieving functional goals and less on broadly preserving past natural history.  Clearly, reality is not as dichotomous as that, but there does seem to be a subtle yet profound shift in thinking and outlook going on.  Two recent articles describe this new thinking.  This op-ed piece in the New York Times provocatively titled "The age of Man is not a disaster" is co-authored by Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy.  This nice article in the Washington Post also provides a nice summary of the new ideas.

Also, in book club this term we are reading "Rambunctious garden: saving nature in a post-wild world" by Emma Marris" (the lead author of that NYT op-ed piece.  Check out the short video by Emma.