Most of us living in the cities these days don't have the luxury of having a big garden to grow whatever we want to. We either live in apartments or in independent houses with hardly any place to have greenery.
On the other hand, there are plots of vacant land all around the city on which the owners have not yet constructed anything. There was a program on the Discovery channel sometime back which showed a solution to this problem. Machester city (not the club) rents out vacant parcels of land to its citizens for a nominal fee. Citizens who take this land on rent have the opportunity to grow whatever they want on this land. This would give those who want to try out their 'green thumbs' a place to try it out in.
Maybe this model should be replicated in other cities and see how successful it is. This idea is two pronged - firstly, it gives citizens an opportunity to maintain gardens; secondly, it adds to the greenery of the city thus not only making it more beautiful, but by also adding to the green cover hence lessening the carbon dioxide levels in the city. There would be unscrupulous elements who try to use this for building a house/ renting it out etc all in the name of a garden, but classifying vacant plots under a different zone which a very low Floor Area Ratio (FAR) might help. The land can be changed over to a zone with a higher FAR once the land is required for construction. When the actual owner wants to use this land for construction, he will have to inform the authorities a couple of months in advance. The authorities can in turn inform the land lessee who can then take away his prized plants - either to replant somewhere else, or...
Even though the plants might not be in the plot forever, they'll atleast help the city during that little while that they're around!
I feel this can be tried out in Bangalore.
~k
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Thursday, June 19, 2008
What if electricity could be generated from workouts?
Being a (almost) regular gymmer for sometime now, I have come to realize one thing- people come to the gym mostly to lose weight. Mind you, this is in the Indian context. The concept of chiselled bodies is something quite new here, so its 60-70% of the people are overweight/obese. So the basic premise behind gymming for these souls is to lose weight, which in turn translates to burning calories, which implicitly means they're hitting the gym to spend energy. With obesity levels rising, more and more people are taking to various forms of exercise so that they can add those couple of years to their life.
On the other hand, we have environmentalists crying out hoarse about a global warming- which is mostly caused by excessive, mindless use of energy in its various forms- be it coal, petrol, whatever.
The way I can see this, this dichotomy is of energy spending for the sake of it (in the form of gymming) on one side of the coin; and trying your very best to save energy on the other. Add to this the looming global food crisis (which would take another year atleast to get resolved).
One way to solve this problem would be to find a way by which the energy spent by humans could be converted into electricity. For example, everytime we walk, there could be some small device which could be pasted on our clothes which could convert the energy from our body movements into electricity and store it in a battery somewhere in our shoes! Similarly, if the energy spent in lifting dumb-bells and bars could be converted to electricity. The dumb-bells could have batteries built into them which get recharged every time we use it. And then, when we put them back into their slots, the slots could act as docking stations and send the electricity to a main battery. Treadmills could have some regenerative mechanism by which the energy we spend in running could be fed back to it to make it run.
Another thing that can be done would be to consume less food. This in no way means that you should starve yourself. It only means that we should reduce wastage at every step in the food supply chain. And this should apply to everyone across the world. But at the same time, it should be voluntary, and not enforced on anyone by anyone else. This would reduce the demand on world food supplies, thereby slowing the food crisis to some extent. I feel we'd be able to reduce our carbon footprint by a large extent with some of these steps.
Random thoughts again, one might say... But who knows how far we are from all this?
The line between reality and fiction is a very thin one! And its growing thinner by the moment!!
On the other hand, we have environmentalists crying out hoarse about a global warming- which is mostly caused by excessive, mindless use of energy in its various forms- be it coal, petrol, whatever.
The way I can see this, this dichotomy is of energy spending for the sake of it (in the form of gymming) on one side of the coin; and trying your very best to save energy on the other. Add to this the looming global food crisis (which would take another year atleast to get resolved).
One way to solve this problem would be to find a way by which the energy spent by humans could be converted into electricity. For example, everytime we walk, there could be some small device which could be pasted on our clothes which could convert the energy from our body movements into electricity and store it in a battery somewhere in our shoes! Similarly, if the energy spent in lifting dumb-bells and bars could be converted to electricity. The dumb-bells could have batteries built into them which get recharged every time we use it. And then, when we put them back into their slots, the slots could act as docking stations and send the electricity to a main battery. Treadmills could have some regenerative mechanism by which the energy we spend in running could be fed back to it to make it run.
Another thing that can be done would be to consume less food. This in no way means that you should starve yourself. It only means that we should reduce wastage at every step in the food supply chain. And this should apply to everyone across the world. But at the same time, it should be voluntary, and not enforced on anyone by anyone else. This would reduce the demand on world food supplies, thereby slowing the food crisis to some extent. I feel we'd be able to reduce our carbon footprint by a large extent with some of these steps.
Random thoughts again, one might say... But who knows how far we are from all this?
The line between reality and fiction is a very thin one! And its growing thinner by the moment!!
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