Eco vacation in a box? or not?

Regarding the “eco vacations” some travel agencies sell these days;

One of the best eco vacations would be local travel by bicycle or by foot. I’m sure there are many a location fairly near to where one lives that you have not visited or don’t know much about.

For a more distant location rail is by far the best (most efficient regarding energy) trips under a 1000km should if at all possible be done by rail. If you have to fly try to book your flights so that you fly non-stop as takeoff takes up to 25% of the total fuel consumption during a flight.

For accommodation, camping (in a responsible way), certified hostels hotels and the like by any “green” standard, The Green key, ISO etc. or otherwise proof of the fact that the place you stay really does something for the environment. These places might do a minimum for getting the piece of paper that says they are “green” but they are promoting environmentally friendly lodgings and you know that they will have had to at least think about these issues.

I think part of the ideal eco vacation is the process of planning an eco vacation it’s a very informative process that more of us should go through.

When considering activities try to consume services and experiences that has a minimum impact on the local environment but brings a maximum revenue (that you can afford) to the local population. Try not to consume goods, one of the reasons being it’s very hard to know what impact that little hand-painted-made on the other side of the world souvenir has on the environment.

You can of course buy a “eco-vacation” from a travel agency but an important part of the eco is to understand and know what exactly is your impact on the environment when you do go on vacation.

For more information have a look at  this site as an example http://www.ecotourism.org/index.html

Oasis in the City of Ljubljana

The latest oasis, the first in the 2nd expedition of the Nurope has just finished and I was again happy that I attended. During the days we met a lot of different people, to describe it a bit, we met “1/4th” of Laibach something of a national icon part of an awakening in Slovenia regarding media censorship public participation democracy philosophy etc. They told us about the process how they came to be, what the reactions were to their work, how they overcame some of the negative reactions and described to an extent how they work. One thing they said I can’t help but repeat

“You can’t come with flowers or you can but the idea is bizarre.”

This is I suppose is part of what I think art is, simple sometimes everyday things that can move or affect in a great way, “…a little bit”.

On Saturday a party was arranged in the City Museum, DJ Emil was playing. We, me and Kim had our first public screening of our road movie a rough cut version. To which we got some really good feedback and even some professional advice as some of the participants have a little experience in cultural productions.
The local hosts had done a wonderful job and everything worked very smoothly. We were mostly working in the City Museum but also had sessions walking around the city, at the ministry for commerce and Moderna Gallerija.

Ljubljana is one of my favourite cities in Europe and not because of the nice riverbank cafés or the great architecture, the nice small squares, the castle looking down over the city, no, those are just a small part, the nicest part of Ljubljana by far was the people! Friendly, helpful, nice, beautiful and smart :o) Thank you all for making my stay a great one.

But back to the culturally vibrant side of town or in this case the capital of Slovenia. Ljubljana felt more alive than many other cities, and for me I think it’s partly because of the graffiti. The art form was everywhere but in most cases done very tastefully and with great skill. You often see graffiti and tags written all over and with most larger works on smooth surfaces. I was impressed that they in Ljubljana used the weave of the surface as a part of the piece. As an example, there was a city painted on a wall at an under-pass, however the wall was made up of vertical lines in the cement  ||||||||||||||||| this pattern was simply used as a part of the work and made into sky rises by painting windows on them short black lines simulating windows and floors the material painted on did the rest.

In ten days I will be attending the oasis in Istanbul and I look forward to the experience immensely.

Flickr e-mail posting

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

That has been edited by me =o)

Neat little feature that allows one to
e-mail-post pictures via flickr straight
onto ones blog.

As as-far-as I know it’s not possible to do that here on wordpress.com yet.

Åbo in winter. a panorama.

I do so look forward to scenes like this again, this picture(s) was taken last year walking from the castle by the harbour towards the city centre. It was stitched together by Windows Live Photo Gallery which is part of the same “family” of tools as the Windows Live Writer that has been used to post these words.

The stitching worked well enough except one little detail, the white church tower in the middle which look a little bit like a crooked stick, well I suppose you can’t get everything. All-in-all the software works well enough as well as is very user friendly.

Blog Stats

Just thought I’d save that for the archives, perhaps I should write something of use too…There is a Link list, on the right hand side” that I call “Living List” it tracks/posts my del.icio.us links here. A small selection of what I think important or not, that I come across during “surfs up”.

OER, Open Educational Resources

OER is the new milennia for online educational resources a change in paradigms can be seen slowly changing from private information and copyright to open information and copyleft. Open courses and the exchange of coursematerial between educators and the possibility for students anywhere and whomever to take courses for free online is very important for us all to be able to reach a just society where everyone has access to the same level of education. On a global scale this movement for OER is very important, as it gives people in developing countries the possibility to utilize the resources and know-how of old from developed countries. However countries in Africa for example are working very vigorously at providing e-learning resources for their citizens developing new modes of e-learning as well as implementing state-of-the-art tecniques and technology to be in the forefront of this very important field.

Check out:

(in no specific order a random selection)

• http://www.oercommons.org/
• http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/
• http://worldbridges.net/
• http://www.wikieducator.org/Main_Page
• http://www.unesco.org/iiep/virtualuniversity/
• http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org
• http://oer.repository.ac.nz/
• http://ocw.mit.edu (close enough)

del.icio.us Tags: OER, open source, ESD

Re-greening Chicago

Re-greening Chicago is a short video about greening urban space and other environmental actions within the urban area.

Opera and widgets

Opera being my browser of choice for a number of years now have these small goodies, widgets, that you can download for that ultimate desktop of internet experience. One of the nicest features is Widgetize with which you can for example make your favorite blog or feed into a widget to sit there right on your desktop.

My blog as a Widget:

My Flickr Photos as a Widget:

Start using Opera and enjoy the wonderful world of Opera Widgets.

Alive and busy

During the past month I’ve taken part in an Environmental Festival in Copenhagen, Denmark. A conference about Energy efficiency and a Partner Search Forum for the next EU, Baltic Sea Region (BSR) programme for 2007-2013. More to come about these two as well as other things I’ve picked up during this past month.

prefabs and material flows

the U.K. based programme WRAP (Waste and Rescources Action Programme) published a report in the spring of 2007 with the findings that prefabricated buildings could cut construction waste by a staggering 90%! by increasing the use of off site manufacture and modern methods of construction. this is adding to the cost and time predictability as well as health and safety benefits construction companies already count on with prefabrication.

The biggest parts of the waste flows from a construction site are plasterboard <36%, timber <25% and packaging <%5 (wood pallets, shrink wrap, cardboard)  as well as concrete, bricks and cement.

Since march this year (2007) there has been an Industry agreement in place in the U.K to increaase the recycling of Gypsum from plasterboards.

The targets of the agreement being: (form the WRAP website)

• to reduce the amount of waste being sent to landfill from manufacturing operations in Great Britain to 10,000 tonnes/year by 2010; and
• to increase the take back and recycling of plasterboard waste, for use in plasterboard manufacture, to 50% of new construction waste arisings by 2010.

In addition, all parties have agreed to work with other parts of the supply chain to develop processes to reduce the amount of wastage generated in new construction and to make further progress towards achieving the ultimate objective of zero plasterboard waste to landfill.

In 2006 about 2.5 million tonnes of plasterboard was used in the U.K of this about 300.000 tonnes ended up as waste. which accounts for about 12%! reducing this to 10.000 tonnes would take it down to 0,4% or save up to 290.000 tonnes of material! reducing the amount of waste by a factor of 30 for plasterboard.