We awoke to find that it was still dark, still cold, and still raining in not-so-scenic Tacoma, Washington. After grabbing a quick snack, we bussed over to the course and quietly hid inside for as long as possible. But with an hour to go, we needed to leave our warmth and comfort to start warming […]
Chinese Drone Maker Plows Into Agriculture – WSJ
NEWLEY PURNELL in Singapore and JACK NICAS in San Francisco November 26, 2015 China’s SZ DJI Technology Co., the world’s top consumer-drone maker, is setting its sights on the agriculture industry with the launch of a crop sprayer that will test whether farming is fertile ground for drone technology. DJI, which helped kick-start the global […]
Ecotypes and Identities
Reading a whole bunch of different articles about various “Ecotypes”, or environmental values, has been certainly interesting, but it also left me wondering what the point of it was. They all seemed to say the same thing: there are x number of boxes to lump environmental identities into. Either you can be bright, light, or […]
Methodology and Green Spaces in Portland
For our project on urban green spaces in Portland, it was a struggle to define exactly what focus question we would be testing and the best possible methodologies for research. Despite being advised to not let “the tail wag the dog” and let our methodologies define our research, it was hard not to. We have […]
Race and Awareness at Lewis and Clark Protests
This week, our campus was faced with the reality that racism is alive and well on our perfect little campus on the hill. And people reacted. Being a part of an intro anthropology class, we became aware of and discussed issues of race that have always been present on our campus but really made themselves […]
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Integral Theory
Over the weekend, I finished Haruki Murakami’s wonderful novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It is a book about a lot of things, but most importantly it’s a commentary on human suffering and a portrait of modern Japan. This may not directly stand out as an environmental text, but I found several interesting parallels between the […]
Understand Urban Greenspace
When researching urban green spaces it is important to keep an eye on the bigger picture and ask how this may benefit different models of cities. Portland is unique in its proximity and attachment to nature, so it is interesting to read studies on how green spaces are perceived in other cities. A study from 2010 […]
Beginning Thoughts and Questions
This week in ENVS 220, we were preparing to ask the big framing questions for our next group project for which we chose to explore Portland environmental organizations and attempt to explore an issue that is related to one of the organizations. We chose to address the topic of green spaces versus grey spaces in […]
Defining a Framing Question – Urban Greenspaces
This past week in lab, we explored several possible topics to study in our situated projects. One of the biggest problems our lab teams collectively faced was how to frame our topic with a huge, global question. It was easy enough to bring the problem outside of Portland, but it was a challenge to address […]
Hi-tech agriculture is freeing the farmer from his fields | The Guardian
by John Vidal The big, blue 18-tonne New Holland T8.435 tractor is not the heaviest or the tallest in the world but its £3,000 tyres and tank-style tracks stand two metres high, it bristles with antenna and at, about £250,000, it must be one of the most expensive. For that, the farmer gets a monster […]