One Cubic Foot of Life

Lap-sized habitats, or what Central Park gardens and Polynesian reefs have in common.

UPDATE: The project is now a book, featuring a foreword by E. O. Wilson.

Ask a scientist, and she’ll tell you size is absolute. Ask an artist, and he’ll prove it’s relative. That’s exactly what photographer David Liittschwager did in his One Cubic Foot project, exploring how much of different ecosystems can fit within a single cubic foot of space. (Can you tell we’re on a biodiversity roll this week?)

Armed with a 12-inch cube, a green metal frame, and a team of assistants and biologists, Liittschwager set out to probe five sharply different environments — water and land, from New York’s temperate Central Park to a tropical forest in Costa Rica — putting down the cube in each, then waiting patiently, counting and photographing all the creatures that lived or crossed that space, down to those about a millimeter in size.

The Hallett Nature Sanctuary at Central Park, New York

Table Mountain National Park is an iconic mesa towering over Cape Town, South Africa

The endeavor was just as laborious as it sounds — each habitat took about three weeks to catalog, and a total of over 1000 organisms were photographed.

For clear access to the organisms of Duck River, Tennessee, the team had to lift a sample into a tank

It was like finding little gems.” ~ David Liittschwager

The project is highly reminiscent of a WWF campaign we featured last year, putting a global spin on the concept of ecological microcosms.

Towering a hundred feet over Monteverde, Costa Rica, this tropical cloud forest houses a microcosm of organisms the size of a finger nail

Coral reef in Moorea, French Polynesia, where Liittschwager worked with scientists from the Moorea Biocode Project, an effort to catalog every creature in and around the Moorea

Besides the original concept and impressive amount of work that went into it, the One Cubic Foot project bespeaks the incredible richness of our planet — and the regrettable gray deadness of our man-made concrete jungles: Try setting the green cube in the middle of an LA expressway or a New York City sidewalk.

So next time you venture out into the non-grey world, consider the fascinating and intricate homes and habitats framed by your even footstep.

Thanks, @TEDchris

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Phylomon: The Game of Life

Pokemon meets Mother Earth, or what preschoolers have to do with the life of life.

The UN has declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity. And while we’ve seen a number of smart, ambitious scientific and creative efforts inspired by and advocating nature’s bounty, the fact remains that preserving the incredible natural variety of species is in the hands of the future generations. So raising children with a biological sensibility and getting them excited about biodiversity is at the root of any viable effort.

Which is why we love the understatedly brilliant Phylomon project by The Science Creative Quarterly, a wonderful repository for well-written, unconventional scientific literature.

When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all. ~ E. O. Wilson.

Phylomon is a web-based initiative for creating Pokemon-like cards, using real creatures and nature’s own “character design” genius. The project was inspired by a recent study that found young children have the remarkable ability to identify and characterize more than 120 different Pokemon characters, but fail to name more than half of common wildlife species. So Phylomon has set out to broaden children’s natural characters vocabulary, drawing inspiration from the clearly successful model used by “synthetic characters” like Pokemon.

Submissions will be crowdsourced from a variety of creatives, with the scientific community weighing in on the content, game designers invited to brainstorm innovative ways of using the cards, and teachers participating to evaluate the educational merit of the cards.

Best of all, the hope is that this will all occur in a non-commercial-open-access-open-source-because-basically-this-is-good-for-you-your-children-and-your-planet sort of way.

Because Phylomon depends so heavily on the creative community’s contributions, we urge you to submit yours. Use this Flickr pool if you’re a designer or illustrator, this one if you’re a photographer, or this one if you come from the education community.

And if you still have doubts about the momentous importance of biodiversity, take it from Ban Ki-moon, the UNSYG himself — it’s important, alright.

Read up on Phylomon and contribute — why not?

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Death by Design

Minimizing your mortal footprint, or how to write a shopping list — literally — with the dead.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” according to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. If you want to understand the life cycle in more specific molecular detail, though, you should look to a surprising disciplinary source. That’s because the most contemporary thinking on decomposition doesn’t come from religion or science; it comes from industrial design.

Perhaps it’s the passing of another year that has us thinking about the ultimate human passage. That’s right: today we’re all about death. More specifically, it’s about designerly approaches to death, and why this topic merits interest for reasons beyond aesthetic fetishism. The objects we’re considering today illustrate how design can imbue death with dignity, while also creating value for the people and earth that remain behind — not a bad legacy to leave.

SPIRITREE

Recipient of an honorable mention in I.D. magazine’s 2009 Annual Design Review, Spiritree is one option for those looking to leave the lightest footprint at the end of their lives. (As an aside, we were dismayed to learn that I.D. is itself meeting an untimely end because of the death of its publishing model. RIP, I.D.)

Spiritree is a futuristic-looking pod that transforms the traditional funerary urn into something that looks like the lovechild of Karim Rashid’s brain and a bird feeder. Spiritree’s website cites eco-entrepreneur Paul Hawken as an inspiration, and we can see why. Designed by Arquitectura/Diseño in Puerto Rico, the Spiritree turns remains into fertile fodder for “a living memorial in the form of a tree.” Its pieces are intended to biodegrade as the seeds added to it germinate; and the pod’s ceramic upper half eventually cracks as the emerging plant grows strong enough to break it.

We don’t like to talk or think about what happens to our mortal coils when we shuffle them off, but, like all of our remains, they have to go somewhere.

And like much else we humans leave behind as a species, we haven’t been good at disposing of ourselves. Death is a resource-intensive business. By some estimates, 200 million pounds of steel are used each year to build caskets; many are also lined with copper or zinc. Embalming usually involves carcinogenic chemicals — not much of a concern for the recently departed, but definitely bad when they eventually leach into our groundwater. And many cemeteries encourage water waste and other landscaping evils.

POST-MORTEM PROJECT

Thankfully, intrepid industrial designers like Nadine Jarvis have been ruminating on the vessels via which we meet our earthly rest.

Jarvis’s thesis project at the University of London took the form of a series of alternative proposals for the post mortem. In Carbon Copies, Jarvis turned cremains into a lifetime supply of pencils — 240 to be exact — to be used by the deceased’s survivors. Rest in Pieces takes the form of a ceramic urn suspended from a tree; the cord from which it hangs deteriorates over a period of one to three years, at which point the urn drops and smashes, scattering its contents.

Jarvis’s Bird Feeders gesture at reincarnation, relying on birds’ ingestion of the ash and seeds that comprise the pieces. Her work engages the grieving process with elegance, enlarging through form the spaces in which we mourn. Pieces from Jarvis’s post-mortem research are in the collections of London’s Design Museum and Funeria, the founding agency behind the only (to our knowledge, anyway) biennial for funerary artwork, Ashes to Art.

ECOPOD

Finally, for cradle-to-cradle coffins, look no further than the Ecopod. Made by hand from recycled paper products, Ecopod was designed by natural-birthing practitioner Hazel Selina. Selina created the product in response to a friend’s death and her research around the limitations of traditional casket and coffin design. Ecopods come in a variety of colors (including the gorgeous gold version above), and can be screen printed with various designs or lined with feathers. We weren’t surprised to learn that the UK-based Selina was fascinated by ancient Egyptian burial rituals, since the Ecopod looks like what we imagine a 21st-century Tutankhamun might choose for his own final rest.

We realize that since the world couldn’t even agree on carbon limits at Copenhagen, we’re unlikely to see mass reform around such a personal topic as death. Still, it’s at least worth considering how we might, in our final act, try to leave the earth better rather than worse for our wear. For more resources on green burials, visit the non-profit Green Burial Council.

Kirstin Butler is writing an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called Dead SULs, but when not working spends far, far too much time on Twitter. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA.

In 2009, we spent more than 240 hours a month bringing you Brain Pickings. That’s over 2,880 hours for the year, over which we could’ve seen 29 feature-length films, listened to 72 music albums or taken 960 bathroom visits. If you found any joy and inspiration here this year, please consider supporting us with a modest donation — it lets us know we’re doing something right.

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100 Places to Remember

What the world’s best photographers have to do with nipping carbon emissions.

Some time ago, we looked at the incredible power of photography in recording and reminding us of the precious resources we are losing with climate change. But never has a concentrated effort harnessed that power, combining it with other forces of cultural traction like celebrity, science and the art world — until now.

Enter 100 Places to Remember, a fascinating book-and-oh-so-much-more of 100 photographs from 100 different places around the world in risk of disappearing due to climate change, based on UN reports, each taken by one of the world’s greatest living photographers.

Developed by a team of Danish media and marketing industry vets, 100 Places to Remember extends far beyond the book, living as a poster series, art exhibitions, children’s book, postcards and calendars. 100 TV spots spotlight the climate threats specific to each of the places, from Tokyo’s industry-induced heat islands to Sri Lanka’s withering tea crops to the dwindling ice cap on Kilimanjaro, causing water shortages for 1 million people.

The project goes beyond simple fear appeal with 100 pragmatic tips on what each of us can do, through anything from personal day-to-day habits to political activism, to help preserve the precious beauty of this world we live in.

Part Chris Jordan, part Yann Arthus Bertrand, the project plays on a basic principle of human psychology: We often fail to consider change until we see — and deeply, emotionally, viscerally feel — just what’s at stake.

So go ahead and explore all the places for an immersion in beauty of the most resonant kind.

In 2009, we spent more than 240 hours a month bringing you Brain Pickings. That’s over 2,880 hours for the year, over which we could’ve seen 29 feature-length films, listened to 72 music albums or taken 960 bathroom visits. If you found any joy and inspiration here this year, please consider supporting us with a modest donation — it lets us know we’re doing something right.

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