Nice piece by TFA Curator Stowe Boyd yesterday. I (Gerd) love the term ‘slow capitalism’ and Stowe hits the nail on the head with his comments on not looking to further enrich the 1% with a new form of the same thing. I still think that Al Gore’s sustainable capitalism manifesto makes some very good points, as well; they just may be slightly more realistic:)

underpaidgenius:

Yesterday, I read Al Gore’s Manifesto for Sustainable Capitalism (pdf), and made a few comments. After reflecting a day, I have a more sweeping response: Gore’s focus — and that of his co-author, David Blood — is far too focused on the corporate boardroom, the compensation of CEOs, and the way… ‘Sustainable Capitalism’ is a term dreamed up by enlightened and benign members of the 1%: an admonition by the members of the elite to the elite, saying in effect that they should to play more fairly. But it’s not broadly based enough for the 99%, who demand a system rooted in justice, not just a suggestion that the overloads agree to crush us a bit less. What we need is ‘slow capitalism’. A system that rewards all for their work and investments, but which is founded on the full accounting of costs in the world. Businesses cannot be allowed to make a huge profit by moving operations to an unregulated corner of the world where there are no environmental regulations, and spewing poisons into the air and ocean. Investors cannot be allowed to make money on pointless financial transactions that add no value, but simply bleed money from a broken system. And the time horizon of our considerations must be reckoned in decades, not in quarters or microseconds.

A group of Yale students discovered a fungus in the jungles of Equador — Pestalotiopsis microspora — that can eat polyurethane: plastic. And apparently it can eat plastic even in the oxygen-free setting at the bottom of a landfill. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn the plastic into CO2, though.

A recent study by J. Allen Williams and colleagues found that the depiction of the ‘built environment’ — cities, homes, buildings — has increased in Caldecott award winning books since the ’60s, when ‘natural’ settings were about half of all images. Today, the depictions of the built environment occur twice as frequently as the natural:

via Wiley

If we ask what today’s children are learning about the environment from contemporary picture books, perhaps the most important answer is that for the most part they are reading stories set in built environments. They are exposed to relatively few images of the natural environment and even fewer images of humans interacting with nature. They also are seeing less human interaction with animals than in the past. Scenes of interaction with wild animals have never been common, but have become even less so in recent years. Perhaps because interaction with domestic animals is relatively rare in the more recent books, when it is shown, it is more likely to play an important role in a story.

We cannot say that increasing isolation from the natural world influenced the content changes we have found in children’s picture books, but the increase in built environments and the decline in natural environments and wild animals are certainly consistent with it.