Books = Christmas trees
Do you remember our December 2010 post about a Christmas tree made from books at the Gleeson Library at the University of San Francisco, or our post about this smaller book tree? Or perhaps you saw some mention last year of the book tree constructed by the folks at Juniper Books in Boulder?
Well, it looks like the book tree idea has caught on in other places. In Poland, librarians at the University Library of UWM (University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn), made the above-pictured tree from 1,600 books. (That’s a lot of copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Joseph Heller’s Picture This!) Click here for details and here to view a Flickr stream showing 50+ shots of the tree, including several photos captured during the construction process, a how-to for others who want to build book trees.
And here’s a book tree located at the Inglewood Public Library, in the Los Angeles area.
Let us know if you spot other book trees elsewhere.
Related: Unconsumption posts about trees made from other non-traditional materials: shopping carts, bicycle parts, 40,000 plastic bottles, upside down tomato cages with strings of lights, wood scraps.
Billion dollar weather disasters, by NOAA. This takes a minute to grasp. See the green bar on the far far right? It shows the number of climate related events in 2011 that exceeded one billion dollars. So far, it shows 12 event at $200 billion dollars in damage - the highest number of events and most costs in history. Background:
- To date, the United States set a record with 12 separate billion dollar weather/climate disasters in 2011, with an aggregate damage total of approximately $52 billion. This record year breaks the previous record of nine billion-dollar weather/climate disasters in one year, which occurred in 2008.
- These twelve disasters alone resulted in the tragic loss of 646 lives, with the National Weather Service reporting over 1,000 deaths across all weather categories for the year.
- Previously only 10 events were reported; the two new billion-dollar weather and climate events added to the 2011 total include:
- The Texas, New Mexico, Arizona wildfires event, now exceeding $1 billion, had been previously accounted for in the larger Southern Plains drought and heatwave event. This is in line with how NOAA has traditionally accounted for large wildfire events as separate events.
- The June 18-22 Midwest/Southeast Tornadoes and Severe Weather event, which just recently exceeded the $1 billion threshold
- NOAA continues to collect and assess data regarding several other extreme events that occurred this year including the pre-Halloween winter storm that impacted the Northeast and the wind/flood damage from Tropical Storm Lee. Currently, these events are not over the $1B threshold using the available data.
Source: NOAA
While browsing various pins on Pinterest, I clicked on a pin and found the Craftberry Bush blog — a blog that’s new to me — where I came across this cute “DIY / make-your-own ‘penguins’ from the bottoms of plastic bottles” project. The project basically involves cutting off bottle bottoms, then attaching them together and painting them.
Head over to Craftberry Bush for all the how-to details.
If you are on Pinterest, we’re there, too: http://pinterest.com/unconsumption/
