Shay Emmons is walking across the country with almost no money and writing eloquently about the adventure. Our paths crossed at a cafe in Tucson.

Cynthia Hopper’s recent work follows the courses of several highly managed industrial waterways. An exhibition featuring seven of her films opens January 22 at CLUI.

Some of the best artists have defected from other disciplines. Miru Kim was going to be a doctor before she started photographing herself naked in abandoned factories and tunnels. Here’s her TED talk.

Couple of related collapse links. A radio interview with Dmitry Orlov and a peak oil update from The Guardian. Both mention a “fall-off in the current levels of investment in the [oil production] sector.” Orlov explains why the oil companies don’t seem invested in reaching the IEA’s predicted 105m barrels per day mark by 2030.

Aqualta. Studio Lindfors, a New York based architecture and interior design firm, has constructed these images depicting their city transformed by a dramatic rise in sea level. Note the airships.

Related: Orlov’s two-parter on sea level rise:
The Ocean’s are Coming Part I & Part II

After the Wall: Traces of the Soviet Empire. Eric Lusito’s images of abandoned Soviet military installations.

Edward Burtynsky photographs, “both the epicentres of industrial endeavour and the dumping grounds of its waste.”
Manufactured Landscapes, a beautifully shot documentary by Jennifer Baichwal, chronicles the artist’s work in rapidly industrializing China.

CLUI's latest exhibit: Urban Crude: The Oil Fields of the Los Angeles Basin.

Manhattan’s Highline photographed by Joel Sternfeld

One of New York’s few remaining feral spaces has finally been purified and absorbed into the regulated urban fabric; reincarnated as a park. “Weeds” have been replaced with preferred species neatly contained in beds, sending a clear message to creatures and plants that might attempt to play an active role in the making of an environment: “hey thanks nature, but we’ll take it from here.”

Wind powered factories: history (and future) of industrial windmills

Greer reminds us that: “Windmills with a net energy of 5- or 6-to-1 are hopelessly inadequate to power an industrial society, but deindustrial societies with grain to grind, water to pump, and many other uses for mechanical energy will find them just as economically viable as did the agrarian societies of the past.”

Tim Edensor’s book Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (2005) presents a reading of the contemporary ruin that reinforces many of my convictions regarding the value of such places. Here’s his website.