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The Caring Hand Sculpture, located in Switzerland.

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Tilda Swinton photographed by Sølve Sundsbø for Dust Magazine January 2025

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Photo © Gerardo Vizmanos

Model. Derek Dunn

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I Spent the Last Year Learning to Love Green, Photographs and text by James Talbot, Slow Worm Press, (2022-)2023, Second Edition [Actual Source, Provo UT. Art: © James Talbot]

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"An ambitious plan to provide electricity to 300 million Africans by 2030, supported by an initial $30 billion commitment from the World Bank and the African Development Bank, is now underway, with assessments of the first potential beneficiaries already in progress, Bloomberg reported. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), more than 600 million Africans remain without access to electricity, leaving the continent with the lowest energy access rate in the world, hovering at just over 43%.

Africa accounts for nearly three-quarters of the world's population without access to electricity, with countries like South Sudan, Burundi, and Chad having electrification rates below 12%. This severe lack of power stifles productivity and constrains economic growth in some of the poorest countries globally.

“We’ve seen, frankly, stagnation” in getting electricity to more Africans over the last 15 years, Ashvin Dayal, who heads the Rockefeller Foundation’s power and climate program, told Bloomberg. “This is for us the defining climate and development challenge for the continent over the next 20 years.”

This funding will support 15 projects across 11 African countries, including Burkina Faso and Mozambique, with a focus on delivering clean energy solutions through technologies like mini-grids, according to a statement from the groups."

-via Business Insider Africa, September 20, 2024

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GmbH Fall 2024 Menswear

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Rene Burri: Ice Blocks (1978) Location: Argentina, Lago Viedma

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"In China, a landscape architect is reimagining cities across the vast country by working with nature to combat flooding through the ‘sponge city’ concept.

Through his architecture firm Turenscape, Yu has created hundreds of projects in dozens of cities using native plants, dirt, and clever planning to absorb excess rainwater and channel it away from densely populated areas.

Flooding, especially in the two Chinese heartlands of the commercial south and the agricultural north, is becoming increasingly common, but Yu says that concrete and pipe solutions can only go so far. They’re inflexible, expensive, and require constant maintenance. According to a 2021 World Bank report, 641 of China’s 654 largest cities face regular flooding.

“There’s a misconception that if we can build a flood wall higher and higher, or if we build the dams higher and stronger, we can protect a city from flooding,” Yu told CNN in a video call. “(We think) we can control the water… that is a mistake.”

Pictured: The Benjakitti Forest Park in Bangkok

Yu has been called the “Chinese Olmstead” referring to Frederick Law Olmstead, the designer of NYC’s Central Park. He grew up in a little farming village of 500 people in Zhejiang Province, where 36 weirs channel the waters of a creek across terraced rice paddies.

Once a year, carp would migrate upstream and Yu always looked forward to seeing them leap over the weirs.

This synthesis of man and nature is something that Turenscape projects encapsulate. These include The Nanchang Fish Tail Park, in China’s Jiangxi province, Red Ribbon Park in Qinghuandao, Hebei province, the Sanya Mangrove Park in China’s island province of Hainan, and almost a thousand others. In all cases, Yu utilizes native plants that don’t need any care to develop extremely spongey ground that absorbs excess rainfall.

Pictured: The Dong’an Wetland Park, another Turescape project in Sanya.

He often builds sponge projects on top of polluted or abandoned areas, giving his work an aspect of reclamation. The Nanchang Fish Tail Park for example was built across a 124-acre polluted former fish farm and coal ash dump site. Small islands with dawn redwoods and two types of cypress attract local wildlife to the metropolis of 6 million people.

Sanya Mangrove Park was built over an old concrete sea wall, a barren fish farm, and a nearby brownfield site to create a ‘living’ sea wall.

One hectare (2.47 acres) of Turenscape sponge land can naturally clean 800 tons of polluted water to the point that it is safe enough to swim in, and as a result, many of the sponge projects have become extremely popular with locals.

One of the reasons Yu likes these ideas over grand infrastructure projects is that they are flexible and can be deployed as needed to specific areas, creating a web of rain sponges. If a large drainage, dam, seawall, or canal is built in the wrong place, it represents a huge waste of time and money.

Pictured: A walkway leads visitors through the Nanchang Fish Tail Park.

The sponge city projects in Wuhan created by Turenscape and others cost in total around half a billion dollars less than proposed concrete ideas. Now there are over 300 sponge projects in Wuhan, including urban gardens, parks, and green spaces, all of which divert water into artificial lakes and ponds or capture it in soil which is then released more slowly into the sewer system.

Last year, The Cultural Landscape Foundation awarded Yu the $100,000 Oberlander Prize for elevating the role of design in the process of creating nature-based solutions for the public’s enjoyment and benefit."

-via Good News Network, August 15, 2024

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Lucy Rosiek photographed by Lola Banet for Love Want Magazine July 2024

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Li Qin | © Zeng Wu L'Officiel China (July 2024)

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2,000 year old Olive tree in Greece

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The milestone had been long expected due to a steady stream of coal plant retirements and the rapid growth of wind and solar. Last year, wind and solar outpaced coal through May before the fossil fuel eventually overtook the pair when power demand surged in the summer.

But the most recent statistics showed why wind and solar are on track in 2024 to exceed coal generation for an entire calendar year — with the renewable resources maintaining their lead through the heat of July. Coal generation usually declines in the spring months, due to falling power demand and seasonal plant maintenance, and picks up when electricity demand rises in the summer.

Renewables’ growth has been driven by a surge in solar production over the last year. The 118 terawatt-hours generated by utility-scale solar facilities through the end of July represented a 36 percent increase from the same time period last year, according to preliminary U.S. Energy Information Administration figures. Wind production was 275 TWh, up 8 percent over 2023 levels. Renewables' combined production of 393 TWh outpaced coal generation of 388 TWh.

“I think it is an important milestone,” said Ric O’Connell, who leads GridLab, a clean electricity consulting firm. “I think you’re seeing a solar surge and a coal decline and hence the lines are crossing.”

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Bol [porcelana esmaltada con carbonato de manganeso y cobre]. Lucie Rie, 1980 / MoMA

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Haiku

on my way somewhere,

leaves I can't identify

fall into my path

-- Michael Boiano

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© Maxime Ballesteros