September

"And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be
Are full of trees and changing leaves."
in To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf.

 

Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

August

Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

August

Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

August

"The sun glistens on the leaves in a way I've never seen. It's real. Not like the sun in the Dome. (...) Mother Nature is always one step ahead when it comes to beauty. She's quite the artist." Giovanna and Tom Fletcher, 2018. Eve of Man. Penguin Books. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

Forests and Climate

In the begining of 19th century, "Humboldt was the first to explain the fundamental functions of the forest for the atmosphere and the climate: the trees' ability to store water and to enrich the atmosphere with moisture, their protection of the soil, and their cooling effect. (...) The effects of the human species' intervention were already 'incalculable', Humboldt insisted, and could became catastrophic if they continued to disturb the world so 'brutally'. " in Andrea Wulf, 2016, The Invention of Nature. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

August

"Mycorrhizal networks (also known as common mycorrhizal networks or CMN) are underground hyphal networks created by mycorrhizal fungi that connect individual plants together and transfer water, carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients and minerals. The formation of these networks is context dependent, and can be influenced by factors such as soil fertility, resource availability, host or myco-symbiont genotype, disturbance and seasonal variation."  Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

Forest

‘forest’ means an area of land defined by the minimum values for area size, tree crown cover or an equivalent stocking level, and potential tree height at maturity at the place of growth of the trees as specified for each Member State in Annex II. It includes areas with trees, including groups of growing, young, natural trees, or plantations that have yet to reach the minimum values for tree crown cover or an equivalent stocking level or minimum tree height as specified in Annex II, including any area that normally forms part of the forest area but on which there are temporarily no trees as a result of human intervention, such as harvesting, or as a result of natural causes, but which area can be expected to revert to forest;" 

in Regulation (EU) 2018/841 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 May 2018 on the inclusion of greenhouse gas emissions and removals from land use, land use change and forestry in the 2030 climate and energy framework, and amending Regulation (EU) No 525/2013 and Decision No 529/2013/EU (Text with EEA relevance). Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

July

Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

Nature

"Close your eyes, prick your ears, and from the softest sound to the wildest noise, from the simplest tone to the highest harmony, from the most violent, passionate scream to the gentlest words of sweet reason, it is Nature who speaks, revealing her being, her power, her life, and her relatedness so that a blind person, to whom the infinitely visible world is denied, can grasp an infinite vitality in what can be heard." J. Wolfgang von Goethe, cited by Andrea Wulf (2016), The Invention of Nature: the adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the lost hero of science. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

June

Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

June

“The free-radical theory of ageing is one of those beautiful ideas killed by ugly facts. (…) Not one tenet of the theory, as it was originally formulated, has withstood the scrutiny of experimental testing. (…) The findings are clear. Taking high-dose antioxidant supplements carries a modest but consistent risk. (…) Antioxidants can undermine energy availability.” Nick Lane, 2016. The Vital Question: why is life the way it is? Profile Books Ltd, London. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

summer

Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

June

"(...) the power for growth comes from the reactivity of the environment,  wich fluxes continuously through living cells  (in the form of food and oxygen in our case, photons of light in the case of plants). Living cells couple this continuous energy flux to growth, (...) through ingenious structures, in part specified by genes. But whatever those structures may be (...), they are themselves the outcome of growth and replication, natural selection and evolution, none of which is possible in the absence of a continuous energy flux from somewhere in the environment." Nick Lane, 2016). The Vital Question: why is life the way it Is? Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

June

Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

June

"The fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle." Arundhati Roy, The God of small things. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

June

"After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?" Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989. The Remains of the Day. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

June

"Over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background (...) It usually took strangers a while to notice him even when they were in the same room with him. It took them even longer to notice that he never spoke. Some never noticed at all" Arundhati Roy (2017). The God of small things. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

June

Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

success

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!” Ralph Waldo Emerson. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

Day

May 5, 2018. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

May

"Photographs were useful, but somehow always confirmed the memory rather than liberating it." Julian Barnes, 2018, The only story. May 15, 2018. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

smoothly overlaying

"(...) there are memories that seem to run like a film, smoothly overlaying all the others, that have such shape and form that you suspect that they are inventions and may have created themselves, and within them your own identity even begins to slide and fade, and is liable to change as in a dream." Georgina Harding, 2009, The spy game. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

time out

Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

Agency

Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

A new cycle

"We are back to family, to the life cycle, to human fragility and experience (...) above all, the virtues of appreciating relationships with all their attendant conflict, ambivalence, and meaning." Sherry Turkle,  2005. The Second Self: computers and the human spirit. MIT, Twenty Anniversary Edition, 298. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC) 

living frame

Doing what I know, the best I can, with what I have, wherever I am. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

diversity

Edible forest: fire prevention, energy production (biomass), carbon storage, growth of local resources (less energy/fuel consumption for transportation of outside resources, conditions to attract workers/residents), earth conservation (reflorestation, soil conservation, increased species, better air quality), carbon negative, odorific, beautiful... Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

creative assemblages

"More than conversation at the interface, it is creative assemblages like these that explore and elaborate the particular dynamic capacities that digital media afford and the ways that through them humans and machines can perform interesting new effects (...) in uniquely particular ways." Lucy Suchman, Human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions, 2009, 281. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

February in the garden

Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

connectivity

"How many millions of other activities begin and end at the same time? How many other «facts» converge in just the right way, creating symbolic connectivity?" Noah Hawley, 2017. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

Edifício L

"Life is a series of decisions and reactions. It is the things you do and the things that are done to you. And then its over." Noah Hawley, 2017. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

February

How can we build a better world? Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

living

Life is a distraction from death. Save energy. Adapt fast. Diversity is key for survival. Take some, leave some. Share surplus. Live in harmony. Love. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

mindfulness

Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

February in the garden

Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

February

"Life is made of this moments - of one's physical being moving through time and space - and we string them together in a story, and that story becomes our life" but, "what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on?" Noah Hawley, 2017, Before the Fall. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)