Positive Future #471 (Feature photo – Mining Sand – By User:Vmenkov – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58149721) Inhabitat journalist Lucienne Cross raises our awareness of what mining can do. Little known is that 85 percent of all material mined from Earth is sand – mostly used to make concrete. One study found that every…
Touch the Soil News #1337 (Feature photo – Urban Farming – CCA SA 4.0 International) The trend is gaining momentum – food, farming and food policy are being taken up by cities – often because national governments are ineffective in dealing with hunger and food security. SciDevNet reports that backyard farming is now key to…
Touch the Soil News #1336 (Feature photo – Dubai Apartments – Creative Commons CCO 1.0 Universal Public Domain) One of the most cosmopolitan centers in the world is the city of Dubai located in the United Arab Emirates. At the center of a metro area of 5.6 million people, city planners and officials are looking…
Touch the Soil News #1335 (Feature photo – Lined Canals of the Toshka Project –CCA SA 3.0 Unported) Farmland Grab brings us the latest on the Toshka project in Egypt. The project has lined canals to stop seepage and receives a large amount of Egypt’s fresh water resources. Started in 1997, the project has languished…
Positive Future #470 (Feature photo – Small Pre-Fab Homes – CCA SA 4.0 International) As housing costs rise, and apartment dwellers are crunched into tight spaces, the answer might be a pre-fab home. If you can find land, a pre-fab home might well be worth considering, since land is also a basic pre-requisite for having…
Positive Future #469 (Feature photo – Car Exhaust – CCA SA 3.0 Unported) Clean Technica journalist Cynthia Shahan brings us a short report from a larger study on the State of Global Air in 2019. The story reveals how unhealthy air has become a large driver of accelerating deaths from other diseases. As we always…
Touch the Soil News #1334 (Feature photo – Soil Erosion –CCA SA 1.0 Generic) The Yorkshire Post explores how hydroponics and soil substitutes are able to grow food 10 times faster than in soil out in a conventional field. As the world loses some 24 billion tons of topsoil to erosion each year, scientists at…
Positive Future #468 (Feature photo – Offshore Wind Farm – CCA SA 2.0 Generic – Rob Farrow) GreenTechMedia journalist Karl Stromsta brings news of the world’s largest wind turbine that is to be deployed in Europe. Good for Americans, the Haliade-X is made by General Electrics. General Electric was founded by Thomas Edison – inventor…
Positive Future #467 (Feature photo – Gas Cars on a Highway – CCA SA 3.0 Unported – Atlantacitizen)) While there is no guarantee that a particular piece of legislation will make it to law, the Zero-Emission Vehicles Act has been proposed in both the House of Representative and the U.S. Senate. The bill would eliminate…
Touch the Soil News #1333 (Feature photo – Urban Cow – Public Domain) Phil Lempert (https://www.supermarketguru.com/) brings an interesting story of how McDonalds just acquired a company called Dynamic Yield. Dynamic Yield specializes in machine learning to gather data about customers in order push recommendations on them in future visits. The obvious goal is to…
