GIS, the Giant Iguanodon Skeleton. Or not?

“The early days of GIS were very lonely. No-one knew what it meant.”

Roger Tomlinson, the Father of GIS

Behind the mysterious abbreviation of GIS, which may sound familiar to some of you already, there are no dinosaurs or skeletons, or even giants.It actually stands for a sort of “formula”: geographic + information + system. If reading that you feel disappointed and irritated, while recalling that you’ve always hated geography, computers and unknown abbreviations, be fast to scroll the page and read some other nice blog posts with probably less catchy titles. For the rest of you it should be an interesting topic and I’ll continue.

Arcology

By Katja Räsänen

Building for Future Generations

Humanity is running up against the limits of a finite planet. We are experiencing rapid global climate destabilization and the endangerment of entire ecosystems. A great percentage of the world’s population lives in cities and the amount keeps on growing. The use of cars and natural resources has skyrocketed and we are now at a point of great crisis with the way we live.

These major life-threatening global environmental problems demand a reconstruction of our way of life. Seeing as the way we live is linked to the way we build and use resources, instead of trying to improve our outdated infrastructure, it needs to be redesigned to suit the finite capacity of our planet.

China and U.A.E Are Building Eco Cities

Timo Karjalainen

What's Happening?

While people in U.S. and Europe are building and developing zero-energy houses, in China and United Arab Emirates, they are building sustainable cities. That’s right, sustainable cities, not just sustainable houses or small scale housing, but huge cities. 

Masdar Project

Currently in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, there is a completely new city being constructed that will house 50000 inhabitants in an area of 6 square kilometers. After its construction, it will be the first completely carbon neutral and zero waste city in the world.

F1 sport, only waste of energy?

By Sanni Joensuu

When you start thinking about car races, the first thing that comes to mind as an environmental engineer is the huge amount of money spent on them, and the serious environmental impacts they have. A large number of cars and personnel are transported from country to country to races, only to damage more of our valuable and precious environment. Not to mention the amount of people who also travel to watch the race…

However, could there still be some greater meaning for this? Something that we as regular people could actually learn from Formula 1? My opinion is that there is.

Ideas from nature

By Michael Kloet

At an ever-increasing rate, we are starting to realize that our rigid and mechanical approaches to everyday issues aren’t sustainable. Fossil fuel reserves are running out, agriculture is depleting the soils and lately we’ve been thinking that incinerating our waste is a good idea instead of reducing our waste output. We’ve become stuck, and the environment suffers from it. People have to see there is a bigger picture and work with it instead of blindly painting over it with fire and bulldozers. I think it is perfectly clear that our current ways of ‘dominating nature’ are what stands between us and a bright future for humanity and the planet. Fortunately, people are becoming more environmentally aware and there are many different fields of study that aim to find sustainable alternatives to our current unsustainable ways.