6-11: team up with an under-ten-year-old, and see how many questions the two of you can figure out within a month.
12-16: get help from an over-seventy-year-old.
17-22: please add questions to this list!
23: treat yourself to freshly gathered purslane or dandelion greens-- and post your recipes in the comment section.
Other News
President-elect Donald Trump says that environmental concerns over A.I.'s development would "hold us back". He plans to ramp up all kinds of energy, make the U.S. the crypto capital of the world and "strip back regulation of the crypto industry".
Meanwhile, Vaclav Smil explains that the modern world can't exist without cement (4.5 billion tons, annually), steel (1.8 billion tons), plastics (400 million tons) and ammonia (180 million tons to synthesize nitrogen fertilizers). Allistair Alexander states that we simply won't have the energy available in the future to do a huge amount of the things we do now. He proposes that we radically cut down and even stop many of our core industrial processes-- many of which seem essential to modern life.
New research shows that leaving a rainforest be boosts biodiversity, improves water quality and availability, and sucks up gigatons of carbon. "A rainforest can spring up in one to three years," said conservation scientist Matthew Fagan. "In five years, you can have a completely closed canopy that's 20 feet high." Such regrowth requires humans to stop using the land for intensive agriculture or ranching (cattle weight compacts soil and makes it hard for new plants to take root). The Bonn Challenge aims to restore 1.3 million square miles of degraded and deforested land by 2030. More than 70 governments and organizations from 60 countries have signed on.
In Los Angeles, gardening wizard Jamiah Hargins has created a nonprofit, Crop Swap LA, which turns lawns into edible landscaping. While providing kale, cabbage, arugula, eggplants and collard greens for hundreds of families, the small farms use a tiny fraction of the water that a lawn requires.
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