About the project Falling Fruit is a celebration of the overlooked culinary bounty of our city streets. By quantifying this resource on an interactive map, we hope to facilitate intimate connections between people, food, and the natural organisms growing in our neighborhoods. Not just a free lunch! Foraging in the 21st century is an opportunity for urban exploration, to fight the scourge of stained sidewalks, and to reconnect with the botanical origins of food.

Our edible map is not the first of its kind, but it aspires to be the world's most comprehensive. While our users contribute locations of their own, we comb the internet for pre-existing knowledge, seeking to unite the efforts of foragers, foresters, and freegans everywhere. The imported datasets range from small neighborhood foraging maps to vast professionally-compiled tree inventories. This so far amounts to thousands of different types of edibles (most, but not all, plant species) distributed over millions of locations. Beyond the cultivated and commonplace to the exotic flavors of foreign plants and long-forgotten native plants, foraging in your neighborhood is a journey through time and across cultures.

Join us in celebrating hyper-local food! The map is open for anyone to edit, the database can be downloaded with just one click, and the code is open-source. You are likewise encouraged to share the bounty with your fellow humans. Our sharing page lists hundreds of local organizations - planting public orchards and food forests, picking otherwise-wasted fruits and vegetables from city trees and farmers' fields, and sharing with neighbors and the needy.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/34795810

Public libraries and botanical gardens (and more) may keep seed exchange catalogs. They may also host events for seed exchanges among groups. Search online for seed libraries and seed exchanges near you to locate opportunities for finding free and interesting seeds to include in your garden this year.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/33788424

Solarpunk is often dismissed as a purely aesthetic movement - pretty pictures of skyscrapers covered in vines. But true Solarpunk is political. It is about decentralization.

If we want to become independent of the “Big Three” (US tech, Chinese manufacturing, Russian energy), we need to localize our survival.

For years, countries have told the United Nations how much methane they emit using a kind of bottom-up bookkeeping: Count the cows and oil barrels, estimate the volume of trash, and multiply by standard emission factors. Those ledgers can miss the mark, suggest measurements from aircraft and satellites. But the tools to translate that data into national emissions estimates have largely remained the domain of specialists. A team at Harvard is changing that. In a recent Nature Communications paper, the researchers describe Integrated Methane Inversion (IMI), an open-access system designed to let governments, researchers and civil society independently evaluate national methane claims against what satellites detect in the atmosphere, year after year.

Map generated with the tool described is available here: https://worldwidemethaneemissions.com/

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/32171077

While hundreds of millions around the world face food insecurity, a tiny South American nation has managed to become the only country that can entirely feed itself. How did Guyana manage it?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/23704984

So I wrote a blog post on how I feel we can encourage more people to fedi, and it starts with DON'T TELL PEOPLE ABOUT THE FEDIVERSE, because I'm very clever, or something. Would be happy to get your thoughts on that!

So I wrote a blog post on how I feel we can encourage more people to fedi, and it starts with DON'T TELL PEOPLE ABOUT THE FEDIVERSE, because I'm very clever, or something. Would be happy to get your thoughts on that!