Categorie: Embodied Land

Survival of the Richest

Man has distanced himself from the normal ecological course of events, depleting raw materials, all in the pursuit of acquiring more property. It has long since ceased to be necessary for survival, at least in the wealthy part of the world.For this, homo sapiens has come up with something clever:…

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Slow Living: Why Less Speed Means More Future

As human beings, we seem to want everything faster. Or at least, that’s how society and industry are structured—faster cars, fast fashion, fast food (who even peels their own potatoes anymore?), and so on. We call it progress, or prosperity. And we convince ourselves it’s a good thing—mainly because many…

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Raw Materials Are Truly Finite, Biobased Is Inevitable, So Land Is the Limiting Factor

Imagine you’re on a small island (metaphorically speaking, a little ball in the universe), and you theoretically have only one source of concentrated material—a small hill, so to speak. You also have a piece of land just sufficient for growing food, and nothing else matters. Let’s say that hill is…

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Metals are regrowable: 0,7 kg/ha-year

Metals are often said to be “non-renewable.” It’s suggested there’s no other way to deal with it. But we can renew them—though what’s usually meant is reuse or recycling: renewed use of something that already exists. And that, in turn, is called circular. But that’s not quite correct: it’s prolonged…

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horses – decadency in our land use

Land is our capital, and everything can be expressed in the space-time needed for the activity, in hectare-years of output to capture and store (solar) energy. This can be as food, as raw material, or as stored energy.But it’s not only ‘raw materials’ that require land; social activities and hobbies…

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Buildings and the 11 dimensions and entanglement from Quantum physics.

Recently, I read some interesting books again about developments in quantum physics and space relativity, essentially the micro and macro aspects of physics, and the attempts to unify the two. It’s not entirely my field, but incredibly fascinating. What I struggle with most in the formation the theory are the…

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The CO2 Swamp

How to deal with CO2, causes quite a bit of confusion. (See also earlier [1]) No wonder, considering that focusing on an effect rather than a cause leads to such confusion, but more on that in a moment. I was once again triggered by the debate about Carbon Credits. For…

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There is no Space for Cork…

Cork. Lately I regularly come across publications and buildings with Cork. Ideal insulator, it seems, and weatherproof, And quite a decorative material, recently saw some nice applications in construction design. Well, that could be so, but is it a serious option? For that, we have to dive into some figures….

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We need yearly a land-budgetting

The Netherlands is grappling with its land. With its land management and spatial planning. From all sides, there’s a demand for scarce land: by livestock farmers for pasture and spreading manure, they want to expand more and more. But also for construction, roads, and solar parks. And data and distribution…

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Sheep (and wool and land and etc.)

Regularly questions and discussions arise about wool and sheep [1]. Is it effective and/or useful, is it better/worse than alternatives, and so forth. Time to delve into that and try to put it into perspective. First, let’s look at some numbers: There are approximately 800.000 sheep in the Netherlands, producing…

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