Comments on: Could this turn cities into carbon sinks?

By: Con Little

Con Little — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 04:19:43 +0000

“… but in the fields of ecology and natural history no such stifling has occurred and nor will it.”

Science is free of politics? Well may I suggest you acquaint yourself with the climate change debate and the attitudes of scientists like Fred Singer, Pat Michael etc etc etc

By: FDB

FDB — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 03:46:27 +0000

“Unfortunately the left-liberal black armband narrative has effectively stifled any disinterested discussion of such matters.”

Bullshit. Ummm, with all due respect ‘n’ all.
There is a piddling minority of folks who simply won’t hear a word against Aboriginal culture and history, but in the fields of ecology and natural history no such stifling has occurred and nor will it.

By: Con Little

Con Little — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 03:24:31 +0000

“Firestick farmning created some open land, but most significantly it favoured eucalypt forest over any other kind - there is no doubt biodiversity took a bit hit from Indigenous “stewardship” of the land.”

I’ll say. Indigenous Australians caused a massive extinction event in regards to megafauna and fire sensitive plant species. Yaz may have misunderstood Tim Flannery, as Flannery has used the term “blitzkrieg” to describe the impact of Aboriginal practices on the early Australian landscape. Unfortunately the left-liberal black armband narrative has effectively stifled any disinterested discussion of such matters.

When I fly over Melbourne I’m struck by the green canopy over the city and wonder if the extant vegetation is sequestering almost as much carbon as it did circa 1770, particularly when the wood in buildings etc is taken into account.

By: FDB

FDB — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:56:20 +0000

Firestick farmning created some open land, but most significantly it favoured eucalypt forest over any other kind - there is no doubt biodiversity took a bit hit from Indigenous “stewardship” of the land.

By: Yaz

Yaz — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:47:21 +0000

Con Little,
There is a bit of a debate about how Aboriginal people changed the landscape. I am sure they did - none of us humans are good at avoiding our impacts on the planets, there are just a lot more of us now. However as I understand it, firestick farming is mostly low temperature burns in cooler months, to burn understorey and grasses rather than established trees.
Tim Flannery suggest that perhaps Australia’s megafauna once kept this continent with something more akin to open woodland, than dense forest, and perhaps indig people had an impact on their disappearance…

By: Con Little

Con Little — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:15:30 +0000

“In Oz, the real “green” solution is buy-back of stations and farms in marginal areas, and reafforestation of native flora through the vast, once-treed reaches of inland Australia; but even this will be water-expensive in the short term.”

Umm, I think the Aboriginals and their “fire stick farming” destroyed most of those “once treed reaches” well before white fellas showed up.

By: A Gnome Named Grimble Grumble

A Gnome Named Grimble Grumble — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 09:25:21 +0000

“It may not be enough of a carbon sink for our sad ailing world, but it is something. There is always a good reason to plant something.”

Picture this: genetically modified solid hardwood redwood trees, which have been engineered to grow into house- and building-shaped formations. An entire vertical redwood city: a vast long-lived carbon sink, solid as rocks, picturesque as all get-out, and plus you get to live in not just a treehouse, but a penthouse treehouse.

Get cracking, bio-geniuses. If you fail, we’re stuck with just bamboo and kudzu.

By: Helen

Helen — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:51:28 +0000

Ambigulous
There was a news item on ABCTV news and in “The Age” a few months back about a Brunswick lass growing veges on her roof. Pumpkins etc.

That was the Republic of Moreland.

More (land) here.

http://republicmoreland.wordpress.com/2007/05/10/green-roofs-could-make-more-land-in-moreland/

By: Ambigulous

Ambigulous — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:15:13 +0000

If you mean passive solar heating, kymbos, it’s alive and well in home building and small scale commercial buildings. Free lighting, winter warming from the lower sun, etc. All through the north-facing windows, and very cheap to achieve. Design eaves to shade out the sun in hotter summer months.

Solar clothes-drying’s been around for centuries too.

cheerio

By: Yaz

Yaz — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:14:40 +0000

Kymbos,
I quite like the idea of passionfruit dropping from 50 stories, but they would not grow that high. Something about water not being able to move up through the stem above a certain height. Though if they did, they are pretty light once ripe, and might not be too damaging…

By: kymbos

kymbos — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 23:16:05 +0000

Yep, I think water supply is the only shortcoming - either availability or cost. But if there are real avoided aircon costs they could net each other out. I always liked that idea of using skyrise windows as solar panels. What happened to that idea?

As for planting passionfruit, I’m picturing them dropping from the 50th floor onto the footpath below…

By: Yaz

Yaz — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 07:42:06 +0000

pete m - Greenery IS a carbonsink - that’s all that forests do, after all. Some of it is not very long-lived but it depends what happens to it as it dies. Some of it becomes carbon stored in the soil, some of it stays locked up in woody parts of the plants that hang out as mulch. It may not be enough of a carbon sink for our sad ailing world, but it is something. There is always a good reason to plant something.

BilB - Don’t plant ivy. It is a horribly invasive exotic plant with few redeeming features, except for being virtually unkillable, and able to grow in the shade (try it indoors, where it can do less harm). If you need fast-growing native species to cover a wall, try Wonga wonga vine (Pandorea pandorana) or Black Coral Pea (Kennedia Nigricans). I’ve probably got those Latin names wrong, but it’ll be enough to track them down. Neither of these get watered by me, but they love to grow. They can both cope with shade, and they have stunning flowers. Sadly, they won’t attach to your wall directly, and will need some sort of structure, but some fixed wires is usually the easiest to get them started. If you must have a plant that self-attaches, Ficus pumila (creeping fig) is an exotic that is far less offensive than ivy, IMO.

By: pete m

pete m — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 02:52:26 +0000

greenery (aka plants) is not a carbon sink. great idea to beautify and give life to boring and stale architecture, but don’t think of it in greenhouse terms. plants die and release the carbon they sequester.

By: Peterc

Peterc — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 12:46:05 +0000

By sheer coincidence, I just wrote this brief article on the Musée du quai Branly that features a Patrick Blanc living wall.

It is a great idea, along with green roofs and solar panels on buildings.

The times they are a changin’

By: danny

danny — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 09:23:55 +0000

Another way to “turn cities into carbon sinks” might be to use

“Eco-Cement which absorbs C02 from the atmosphere to set and harden and can be recycled.”

I saw it on The Inventors: wouldn’t it be great if all those concrete monstrosities, such as most modern university buildings, were part of the solution, not just the problem?

By: clarencegirl

clarencegirl — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 05:23:36 +0000

Dee Cee (# 3 Jul 12th, 2008 at 9:37 am) has a point. Many Australian city precincts are just too close to flamable bush and, we just may have to uniformly reserve even grey water for other uses if the southern part of the continent continues to dry.
However, having said that, I am sure that there would be many large buildings across the country who could use ‘greened’ roofs and walls to mitigate energy use and bad design.

By: paul walter

paul walter — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 04:12:27 +0000

Of course, people could always get of their bums and protest that forests not chopped down for arse paper, so that all the start up effort of manufacturing
artificial ones could then be applied to other problems.
Then perhaps we could move from the latest cycle of neoliberalism, that demands that the public be punished for global warning, alibiing the shifting of capitalism’s fetishist costs onto them yet again.
Never mind, so long as as Mr Gunns and Mr Cubbie Creek and MR Macbank and their attending hordes of political,press legal, and bean counting parasites are left ok.

By: BilB

BilB — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 03:28:57 +0000

Great point Tyro Rex. That solves the water problem. I’ll start to plan straight away. I had planned to ivy the front wall of my (ugly) factory, but attempts (half baked) to sprout the ivy in the unfriendly rubble under the tar failed several times. The next door factory was converted to a dance studio and they have planters beside the door fed with water from the air conditioner. The planters were struggling to survive the dry and cigarette buts (waiting parents) until the airconditioners were installed last summer.

Grey water, greyt idea.

By: Tyro Rex

Tyro Rex — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 01:21:29 +0000

Plenty of opportunistic birds, insects and small mammals would find a home. Most animal life in jungles and forests lives vertically…

Australian cities already have plenty of urban ecology. I reckon you’d have to trial it to see if it further advantages the ferals or whether other species reach pest proportions.

Also I don’t really think of Australian forests as vertical in the sense of living on cliffs. Many birds for instance, pick a level in the forest and generally stick to it. So you will find bower birds and lyrebirds in the bottom story, treecreepers on the bare trunks, pardalotes in the top story. And many small marsupials that inhabit the top stories of rainforest are all born and die 30 meters up. The ground is a completely alien space to them - they needed connected top stories to travel horizontally. Up in NQ (in the Daintree i think) they started putting wires across the roads so the forest on either side is connected up for these species.

By: Tyro Rex

Tyro Rex — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 01:14:03 +0000

if the plants are watered by grey water from the roof … what’s the energy cost of getting the water on the roof? rainwater might be a better bet i might guess. australian cities get good rainfall generally in the city area - just not always in the dam catchments. looks like an interesting idea … can it be done with australian native species?