Categorie: land
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…
“The EU must invest more, to avoid falling behind”, economists warned this week. “Otherwise, in 50 years we will be the open-air museum for the rest of the world”. Well, if we do, invest more, society might end in a collapse, and in 50 years we will have to go…
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…
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….
Vertical farming, and thus “indoors,” is a form of enormous technocratic hubris, which costs more than it yields. I wrote about it before, that trying to beat nature, millions of years of evolution, is complete madness.[1] Growing crops via natural selection/cropcrossings and maybe indoors ( unheated greenhouses),with yields accelerated thus…
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…
I’m sitting on a terrace on the borders of the Moselle, tasting some local wine. And looking out over the slopes along the Mosel, I come to a rather confrontational observation: we have deforested an enormous area, in order to be able to grow our wine… All the southern slopes…
A new regulation is in the making in Europe: No net land take. PBL ( NL environmental assessment agency) recently organized a meeting on the topic.[1] It’s an interesting approach and wording, but what’s really the point? First, there is the assumption that no more land should be sacrificed to…
The other day I was thinking, I’m going to invest some money in land, since it has a stable value, or at least, has lasting ‘value’. But then I realized that this has mainly (for the time being) financial value, because the land itself is completely exhausted, exhausted by farmers…
Since we are in an energy transition , in which we completely switch to renewable energy, the energy at building level will mainly have to come from solar energy. We assume that, the more local energy the better, and a ‘0 energy house’, including compensation for material energy, to be…