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D&T Association launches D&T Heroes campaign

"13592271_526818314187771_946504182981540745_n" — Spun by Heatherwick Studio, image by Susan Smart

The D&T Association has launched its D&T Heroes campaign, which it says looks to “promote and celebrate the value of design”.

The social campaign has been introduced in response to a parliamentary debate about the English Baccalaureate a GCSE qualification that excludes art and design earlier this month. The debate was triggered by a petition called “Include expressive arts subjects in the EBacc”.

Running for at least six months, D&T Heroes encourages anyone to submit their favourite designer, product or object spanning everything from industrial to technology design to its various social media sites.

Delivered to the Department of Education and Department for Business Innovation and Skills

The responses will be then collated into a book featuring the best British and international design heroes, complete with comments from design experts, before being signed by organisation partners and supporters and delivered to the Department of Education and the Department for Business Innovation and Skills.

Organisations that have signed up in support of the campaign so far include the RSA; Crafts Council; Creative & Cultural Skills; Design Museum; V&A; The Institution of Civil Engineers and The Institution of Engineering and Technology.

The campaign and the forthcoming book are intended to act as “a powerful statement about the importance and relevance of design and technology in education, industry and society”, according to the D&T Association.

Introduced into D&T curriculum in schools

From September, the campaign will also be launched in schools as a teaching resource that supports the D&T curriculum at several Key Stage levels.

The planned introduction of the book into school curriculum is designed to inspire pupils, teachers and parents to participate in the campaign, but will also act as “visual history” of design and technology that could be used as the basis for activities such as homework assignments, Design Week understands.

Submissions can be uploaded to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #DandTHeroes

"13559134_527028394166763_3067982013574772389_o" — Patriot Radio, 1940, George R. Kravis II, image courtesy of Indianapolis Museum of Art

"13567423_526818247521111_3620464207832296012_n" — Anglepoise Original 1227 Desk Lamp, image courtesy of Anglepoise

The post D&T Association launches D&T Heroes campaign appeared first on Design Week.

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Designers share projects from their student days

"Matt — Matt Baxter, creative director, Baxter and Bailey

“If the past is another country, the language they speak there is very exotic. Let these words instantly transport you back to 1992: Safmat, Omnicrom, Syquest, Zip, Jaz, Quark, Bromide and (whisper it) SCSI Probe. My time at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle was filled with such linguistic delights (as well as Viz and massive Stottie cakes). It's difficult to name a single stand-out project, as everything felt like such a revelation: using prehistoric Macs for the first time, the squeegee-powered joy of screenprinting, setting metal type, messing around with Hasselblads and Super-8s… all new, all amazing. But the project where it all came together was the final year D&AD student brief set by Pat Baglee, then of the charity Scope. Through that project, I understood the full range of skills required of me as a designer: listener, thinker, planner, writer, conceptualiser, typographer, photographer, art-worker. Design, I then realised, was brilliant. And flipping hard work.”

"Greg — Greg Quinton, executive creative director, The Partners

“Well, I did a packaging project for The Science Museum. Each item became a practical scientific experiment. Who knew that you can boil water in a paper bag or look over walls with a poster tube? (Other items included a hot air balloon bag and something fun with postcards, etc.) Yes, the type was lousy (it was hand spaced!), the logo went too far. Would I do it differently now? Sure, but the concept of encouraging you to think about the science that is around us every day is spot on. In fact, it's more relevant to the museum now than when I did it. Maybe they should call me?”

"James — James Greenfield, creative director, Studio Koto

“My time at university was at the beginning of the digital revolution as we know it now. A lot of time was invested in the learning of applications such as Macromedia Director and After Effects without any guidance from tutors who were oblivious to the power of these programs. As a result, my learning was at times chaotic and not the best use of my precious college time. It was against this backdrop of banging my head against a wall that I decided to stop my projects being driven by the software and let the ideas come first. I created a rather ropey identity for an internet radio station named ibiza.fm, an innovation idea where DJs would broadcast sets direct to listeners all over the world, without a Radio1-like partner in-between. In 2000, this was still ahead of the times and it reflects many of the services that exist today sixteen years later. It was my first step towards learning the best brands use great ideas delivered with great technology. Without that combination, you're a step behind.”

What was your best or favourite project you produced as a design student? Let us know in the comments section below.

The post Designers share projects from their student days appeared first on Design Week.

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It Takes a Village for Effective Conservation Projects: Insights from the Urban Caracal Project

By Laurel Serieys, Joleen Broadfield, and Max Allen

A portrait of a caracal from our study area in Cape Town (Photo by Urban Caracal Project)

In running the Urban Caracal Project there have been a number of learning opportunities. One of our most important insights is that by prioritizing public outreach we have built a strong community support group without which the project would be impossible. The community support has not just been integral to large-scale funding efforts, but also help with special project needs that sometimes seem impossible. It is when the community has stepped up that some of the most gratifying and memorable leaps in project success have happened. In our case, the African proverb of “it takes a village” is particularly apt, as it has taken a village to make the Urban Caracal Project successful.

The story of Tyger, a young male caracal that was the 16th that we radio-collared, is memorable on multiple fronts. First off, he is a survivor. As is common for our urban caracals, Tyger was hit by a car in the northern suburbs of Cape Town late last year. While most vehicle collisions end in death for caracals, Tyger was lucky that he escaped with only one broken leg. Perhaps more importantly, he was lucky that the community took action to ensure his survival; community members called the Cape of Good Hope SPCA who brought him in for rehabilitation. “Only a broken leg” is not a promising diagnosis for a wild carnivore because their survival depends their ability to travel far to hunt and find mates. For the lucky Tyger, however, the SPCA was optimistic that if the leg could heal, he would survive. And so the SPCA worked tirelessly to rehabilitate him, first with surgery to fix his broken leg, and then careful monitoring and feeding him as he healed and rebuilt his strength.

A photo of Tyger (Photo by Urban Caracal Project)

Within a couple of months Tyger was ready to be radio-collared and released. With the help of more community members, South Africa National Parks, the SPCA, the City of Cape Town and a handful of international volunteers, we were able to release him into the Tygerberg Reserve. This reserve is the nearest patch of natural habitat that is large enough to be able to support caracals near the suburbs where Tyger was initially found. Because of our limited number of available collars, we used a radio-collar that had only half of it's battery life left after it was recovered from the body of another caracal (Berg Wind, who had died from disease). But it would allow us to monitor his movements briefly, and whether he survived his release post-rehabilitation.

"The — The 55 km dispersal route taken by Tyger

We expected that Tyger would remain in, or nearby, the reserve until his radio-collar ran out of battery power. But after only 10 days of laying low in the urban reserve, Tyger started an unexpected journey. He found a narrow strip of relatively connected habitat to make his exit from the reserve (map above), and then headed straight north all the way to Malmesbury! All told this was a 55 kilometer trek, suggesting that his leg was not a hindrance.

Tyger himself taught us important lessons. He is the only caracal we have radio-collared outside of our isolated, urban Cape Peninsula study area. As a young two year old male, he appears to have been in dispersal mode (looking for an unoccupied territory to call his own). Successful dispersal is important for wild cats because it is a natural deterrent to inbreeding in populations. Our data is suggesting that our Cape Peninsula population is severely isolated by urbanization, and so far we have not seen any individuals successfully disperse outside of our study area. Our early data suggests that in this landscape isolated by a sea of water and dense urban development, successful dispersal may not be possible.

Tyger's story could be one of success. As we expected, Tyger's collar reached the end of its battery life in mid-March, and at that time he seemed to have settled down in the Malmesbury area. The last of his movements spanning approximately 6 weeks suggest he was exploring a potential territory of his own.

To ensure that the project caracals are not stuck wearing radio-collars for the entirety of their lives, we use multiple measures to ensure that the collars drop off. We then attempt to recover the collars to ensure it has indeed fallen off of the animal and to recover the data from the collar that we could not remotely access. When the battery on Tyger's collar died we were able to send a signal remotely, through a web interface, to the radio-collar to have it fall off. The “drop-off” activation through the website has proven effective on other caracal studies in South Africa, but it doesn't always work. Therefore, we followed up to recover the collar in the areas where Tyger's radio-collar collected data. We spent days and days driving around trying to hone in on a radio-signal. Unfortunately we had no luck; we were not even able to hear the signal.

In cases like these, where we cannot hear the radio-signal from collar from the ground, it can be more effective to fly over the area to listen for the collar from above. As lead researchers on the project, we'd never even considered flights because of our limited budget. But we grew desperate to recover the collar, and with the knowledge of how far our community had carried the project to that point, we got creative. We reached out to our community supporters once again and posted a request on our Facebook page for volunteer help in scheduling a flight. Amazingly, our community came through yet again, and Ross Leighton and Stephan Moser from The Morningstar Aviation Club were able to get us up in the air within 12 hours of our Facebook post.

Despite the help, we were not able to find the radio-collar. But after the flight we could take solace in the fact that we had done all we could. After all our exhaustive searching, we now believe the collar fell off of Tyger and was then buried in sand. This is a problem we have seen in the past, and as the collar gets buried in sand the signal became too faint to hear.

A portrait of one of our female caracals (Photo by Urban Caracal Project)

The caracals on our project are resilient and adaptable. They seem to do remarkably well even in landscapes fragmented by agriculture and urbanization. But because this is in an environment where increasing fragmentation is occurring, it is important to try to retain what habitat connectivity remains; not just for caracals, but for the many other species that are trying to survive in the urbanizing landscape. Urbanization is the principle threat to global biodiversity conservation, and habitat loss and modification due to urbanization is going to continue at a rapid pace across the globe. It is important that if we want to try to protect biodiversity in the changing landscape, we protect areas that animals can move through to maintain functional habitat connectivity in fragmented landscapes.

It seems daily that we find ourselves counting our blessings to be doing the work within the supportive community of Cape Town. Our Cape Town “village” has helped this project function on many fronts, financially and logistically, as well as with their enthusiastic interest! So the project continues to survive and even thrive despite the various challenges that always crop up on large field projects.

The Urban Caracal Project is a cooperation between the Cape Leopard Trust, the University of Cape Town, University of California, Santa Cruz, the City of Cape Town, and South Africa National Parks, and the many private landowners around Cape Town. For updates on the project check out our project page: http://www.urbancaracal.org/ and give our facebook page a like: www.Facebook.com/UrbanCaracal.

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Obama Should Tell Florida Gov. Rick Scott: This Emergency Is Yours... Own It

When Gov. Rick Scott recently asked President Obama to declare a federal emergency over the toxic algae catastrophe coating South Florida's coasts, my head nearly exploded.

It is the zenith of hypocrisy for Gov. Scott to plead for federal assistance on the algae bloom catastrophe when his entire record is hacking, whittling and chopping federal authority into little, little pieces. And not just any federal authority -- specifically federal rules to regulate fertilizers and specifically federal actions to hold Florida accountable.

Many decades ago, the U.S. EPA "delegated" full responsibility to Florida to manage the state's water pollution regulations while preserving the federal right to protect all Americans' air and water quality.

Tight control of pollution, it turns out, is the last thing that top campaign funders -- like Big Sugar -- want. As a result, the Republicans war against the U.S. EPA has been unremitting. Florida's GOP has been on its own jihad against federal authority, claiming states' rights in favor of local jurisdictions except -- of course! -- when it comes to the threat by local jurisdictions to clamp down on fertilizer pollution by Big Ag. Then the state steps in!

Now in Florida, all the little piggies have their hands out to the federal government. If I were President Obama, I would be... livid.

Governor Scott blames the president, but in his six years as governor he has branded his bona fides by; a) rejecting federal authority, b) spurning federal assistance (ie. Obamacare), c) knee-capping state environmental agencies and science staff, d) cutting regulations specific to forms of pollution causing the algae blooms and e) lobbying against rule making by the U.S. EPA to regulate fertilizers.

One can almost hear President Obama saying: Florida, you have to figure this one out for yourselves. You want me to come to the rescue for your governor's fuck-ups?

President Obama, of course, is well aware how Florida works. It takes two seconds to understand the GOP practice of maintaining, buffing and shining polluters' privileges through gerrymandered districts. Just like the way one can trace the algae bloom back to excess phosphorous and nitrogen used by Big Sugar, one can trace the deformation of districts to outsized campaign contributions by polluters intent on maintain control legislatures whose pollution-control laws affect their profits.

If I were President Obama, and you -- the reader -- were Florida Governor Rick Scott, and you asked me to declare a federal emergency of counties afflicted by toxic algae blooms, I'd be tempted to say:

"Really? You and the Florida legislature worked like mad dogs to reject, refuse and to deny the ability of the U.S. EPA to regulate fertilizers including nitrogen and phosphorous, the cause of the algae blooms. And you want the federal taxpayer to rescue you because of your own stupidities? When the federal government offered to assist in regulating fertilizers, you said 'no thanks'. Then you set the Florida Chamber of Commerce and Associated Industries of Florida loose on Congress. When we have tried to move Everglades restoration forward, your administration has pushed back against any efforts to put tighter restrictions on phosphorous and nitrogen flowing from sugar fields owned by your buddies, the Big Sugar cartel. So who are you kidding with your complaints about the federal government not stepping in and being active? We tried. You denied. We promoted the U.S. economy and environmental stewardship and you demagogued against pollution control laws because they "kill jobs". You kicked us out and then you cut your own agencies' science staff to the bone. Next time you call, give me some good news; like you support buying enough land in the Everglades Agricultural Area to stop the use of Florida waterways as sacrifice zones for Big Sugar."

This emergency is yours, Governor. Own it.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Changing Environmental Values and a Changing World
People value the planet's air, water, creatures, and natural wonders. While pundits do not always understand how the environment works as a political issue, this past Earth Day, Karlyn Bowman of Forbes analyzed the political dynamics of American environmentalism and accurately reported the latent power of America's environmental values. Bowman observed:

Each year since 1994, the Pew Research Center has asked about priorities for the President and Congress. Of the eighteen issues Pew examined in early 2016, 47% said "protecting the environment" should be a top priority. The issue ranked low--thirteenth of 18 issues the pollsters examined...These low rankings don't mean that Americans no longer care about the environment. Having a clean and healthful environment is a core value for most people. What the responses probably tell us is that Americans think policymakers, regulators, and activists are paying sufficient attention to environmental issues and that they want them to turn their attention to more pressing concerns...On occasion, however, a specific environmental problem can elevate the general issue in importance. Is the unsafe lead level in Flint Michigan's drinking water such a problem? We know from work by survey organizations such as Gallup that problems people can see in their communities such as air and water pollution tend to concern Americans more than issues that seem distant. As Gallup noted in a release in March, polluted drinking water and pollution of rivers, lakes and reservoirs "have consistently topped Americans' concerns during the 27 years the organization has been measuring environmental attitudes." This year, 61% told Gallup they worried a great deal about pollution of drinking water, and 56% gave that response about polluted waterways. Concern about both was up slightly from 2015.

Bowman identified other surveys indicating that the public was increasingly concerned about the quality of the tap water they were drawing from public water systems. I believe that concern over tap water is part of the growing movement for locally-sourced food, physical fitness, and what has been termed "wellness." The underlying source of support for environmental protection is a growing understanding of the relationship between a toxic environment and human health.

People wearing face masks in Asia to filter out air pollution, the popularity of bottled water, growing concern about the impact of football and boxing on the human brain, fast food salad meals, bans on public smoking, increases in auto safety equipment--all of these trends are part of a growing knowledge of health risks, and people are willing to take action to reduce those risks. For many people, a clean and healthy environment is deeply related to an effort to manage health risks, and they will therefore support government action to reduce pollution.

Flint, Michigan's lead pollution crisis has affected public opinion throughout the United States. Unlike pollution that comes from a single factory or effluent discharge, pollution from an entire water infrastructure is more difficult to identify and decontaminate. Repairing a water system requires expensive analysis and testing to determine the source of contamination. In the case of Flint, some of the worst contamination was within households or at the point the household connected to the city's system.

One of Flint's most profound national impacts has been the growing number of schools that have begun to regularly test their drinking water for lead and other toxic substances. Flint has also focused local governments on the condition of their aging water infrastructure. Lead and some other toxics do not come from lakes, aquifers or streams that are our sources of water, but from aging pipes and pumping stations that often have lead pipe, solder and other chemicals that end up in household water. Sometimes the contamination is within the home plumbing system.

Some of the United States' more developed, urbanized and populated cities include water, sewage, transport and electrical infrastructure that are a century old and in various stages of deterioration. As people learn that these expensive but essential resources are decaying and could harm their health or economic wellbeing, it possible that support for infrastructure reconstruction may grow. The costs of debt service, operation, and maintenance of infrastructure may raise taxes, but if costs are presented as "user fees" rather than general taxes, the American public may accept them. Smart grids could be built to transform our energy system, and mass transit and water infrastructure may make it possible to build cities that can support greater population density with lower environmental impacts.

All of these investments in urban sustainability will require political support from voters and leadership from political, business, and thought leaders. Engineers and other experts have been discussing America's deteriorating infrastructure for decades. An effort to develop "green" infrastructure has helped to wed concern for the importance of concrete and steel to the role that natural plantings, drainage, and ecosystem services can play in filtering toxics and absorbing the hydraulic impacts of major storms.

Support for funding infrastructure can come from the local level when leadership and public concerns match. For major projects this can present an enormous challenge. New York City's huge third water tunnel project was first authorized in 1954. The goal was to ensure that the city's supply of water from upstate New York would never be interrupted. The decades-long process of building a new tunnel to eventually permit the repair of two aging tunnels didn't start until the 1970s--and it's still being built today. Several times during its construction the city ran out of money and construction had to stop. New York City has spent nearly $6 billon on this critical part of its water system.

Despite that huge commitment, we learned earlier this year that even a project this essential could be subject to the political whims of the city's mayor. It turned out that Mayor Bill De Blasio had cut over $300 million from the project until excellent reporting by the Jim Dwyer of the NY Times exposed the cuts and caused a political uproar. While Mayor de Blasio's made a clumsy effort to shift blame for the water budget cuts to his staff, concern for the city's drinking water supply was so deep that the mayor reinstated the funds the very next day. We have seen similar expressions of support, like once people understood the water issue in Flint or when Charleston, West Virginia found its water supply polluted. The engineering and public health issues are complicated, but everyone shares the simple act of turning on the faucet and wondering if that liquid is safe for you and your family. The uncertainty of water supply quality can be used to build support for new infrastructure, but that support will disappear if the rebuilt water system is not competently, effectively and efficiently managed.

Despite the ideological noise of our political system, people know that the world they live in is not the same one they grew up in. In the United States, support for protecting the environment has been consistently high (typically 70%) since the 1970s. When a public health case can be made for investing in environmental infrastructure, the consensus can even be larger. But this must be presented against a backdrop of the nation's continued anti-tax and antigovernment mindset. People do not trust big institutions to protect them and doubt that the resources they are willing to invest will ever make it to the project they need. Infrastructure, by definition, is a community-wide project, and is a long-term, complex undertaking. Everyone needs to pay his or her share, and expects to be paid back in the form of increased service. Government has the challenge of regaining the public's trust. This may require public-private partnerships and other creative forms of program management to convince people that their money is not being wasted.

The potential is in place to obtain public support for infrastructure investment. People value a clean and healthy environment and have demonstrated over and over again a willingness to pay for it. Competent and mission-driven public servants, coupled with creative and technically-sophisticated private firms, could build on this support and modernize our infrastructure. This work will add to our national wealth and create jobs that cannot be outsourced.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Meatless Monday: Better Natured
A couple times a year, I like to swap my stilettos for a pair of hiking boots and lose myself in nature. To celebrate the centennial anniversary of the National Park system, my husband and just spent a week of hiking in the Smoky Mountains. Home to elk, deer, wild turkeys, Canada geese, rabbits, and black bear, this temperate rain forest has thin topsoil but the ground is so saturated with moisture, it's spongy beneath your feet. The rocks and trees are furred with bright green algae. Skinny pines, some up to 200 feet high, tower overhead, their few upper branches taking in the nourishment of the sun. It feels lush, dense, rich, primeval. Yet much of it was homestead and farmed land until the park system took it over in the 1930s, less than a century ago. The lesson here -- nature can reclaim and heal. But you have to give it a chance.

The same century has wrought changes in us that are not natural, not healing. The Smoky Mountains are rich full-flavored, nutrient-dense, local produce -- every region in our country is. Yet what people flock to are chicken-fried steak and country ham at breakfast, barbecue at lunch and dinner, and fudge, ice cream and pancakes in between. This meat-heavy diet of largely processed food has had very large results. Us. I saw far too many people, both locals and tourists, carrying 50 to 150 pounds of extra weight. This goes far beyond enjoying a vacation treat or two. This kind of obesity adds up to poor health and soaring health costs -- up to $200 billion each year.

My blogs seldom focus on the connection between a plant-based diet and health because I assume the message is already out there. Even the government is coming around to encouraging a diet of nutrient-dense plant-based foods. But clearly, it's a message not everyone has received.

Does a meatless diet sound scary? Restrictive? The alternative -- a life sentence of diabetes, cancer and heart disease -- sounds worse.

Forget healing and nutrient-dense -- a plant-based diet can be downright indulgent. Along the river trail one day, I spotted small mushrooms popping out from the green forest floor -- apricot-colored with broad, flat caps with frilly edges -- chanterelles, aka Tennessee truffles.* With their nutty, umami flavor, and meaty texture, chanterelles are in no ways austere --they're a rare seasonal feast. I also spotted two of my favorite greens-- astringent dandelion and lemony sorrel -- growing wild. Were it not for a very few vegan-friendly dining options (thanks especially to Wild Plum Tea Room), I was ready to start foraging for food the way mountain locals have done for generations.

Nature can heal us, too. It won't take a century. It will take moving away from an animal-rich, processed diet and enjoying what a more plant-based diet offers -- big flavors, big health. "There's more to life than meat and potatoes," as one of the Smoky Mountain guidebooks put it. Start today, Meatless Monday. Let the healing begin. Naturally.

*Food foraging isn't guesswork. Learn how to identify what's safe.

Cat-Heads with Spinach and Mushroom Gravy (and no Cats)

Cat-heads are biscuits, big ones (cat-head-sized, if you're into hyperbole). Beloved in the south, they're tall, fluffy, and alas, traditionally made with lard. This vegan version may upset southern traditionalists, but their slight but pleasing tang and light texture honors the original without pork fat or harm to pig. No traditional milk-and-pork-fat gravy , but a plant-based one. Lemon zest can stand in for harder-to-find sorrel and everyday button mushrooms replace pricy chanterelles.

If like my dad, you prefer sweet to savory, skip the spinach and mushroom gravy, enjoy another southern tradition, biscuits and sorghum syrup.

For the biscuits:

-- Use a light hand with the dough. Even better, use a food processor. The whole batch comes together in minutes.

-- Chilled vegan butter. It keeps the dough cool so the fat melts into the biscuit dough only during baking.

-- Many southern cooks swear by White Lily flour, a soft wheat flour. I've adjusted by adding corn starch to unbleached all-purpose flour for lighter biscuits.

-- Biscuits always taste best fresh out of the oven.

1/2 cup unsweetened soy milk
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
1-3/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour, plus additional for shaping biscuits
3 tablespoons cornstarch
4-1/2 teaspoon aluminum-free baking powder
pinch sea salt
6 tablespoons) vegan butter or margarine, chilled
1 tablespoon vegan butter or margarine, melted (optional)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper.

In a small bowl, whisk together soy milk and cider vinegar to make vegan buttermilk (mixture will clabber -- it's supposed to). Set aside.

In a food processor, sift together flour, cornstarch, baking powder and salt. Pulse a time or two to combine.

Pulse in the chilled vegan margarine and mix quickly, just until mixture becomes like coarse meal. Pour in vegan buttermilk and give a quick mix to form a damp dough.

Dust rolling surface generously with more flour. Turn out the biscuit dough. Knead oh-so-briefly, working in flour -- a tablespoon or two at a time -- just until dough loses its stickiness. Pat or roll out dough to 1/2-inch thick. Flour the rim of a glass or use a floured 2-inch or 3-inch biscuit cutter to form biscuits.

Place biscuits on the rimmed baking sheet. Brush tops with melted vegan butter, if desired.

Bake for 15 minutes. Biscuit should be lightly golden, pillowy and fragrant. Best served at once, with a generous ladleful of gravy.

Makes 6 to 8 biscuits, serving 6 to 8.

For the spinach and mushroom gravy:

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 clove garlic, chopped
2 scallions, green tops and thick white stems, chopped
8 ounces mushrooms, chopped
4 ounces spinach leaves
1 handful sorrel leaves, if you can get them or 1 lemon, zested
1-1/2 teaspoons nutritional yeast
1/4 cup plain unsweetened soy milk
sea salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

Heat olive oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. Add chopped garlic, scallions and mushrooms. Saute, giving the vegetables an occasional stir, for about 4 to 5 minutes, or until they're softened.

Cover and reduce heat to low, cooking another 10 minutes or until mushrooms have darkened and produced a nice amount of broth.

Add spinach leaves by the handful, the sorrel if you can get it, or the lemon zest if you can't. Stir just until the greens go limp, another minute or two.

Pour everything into a blender or food processor, scraping up any mushroom bits that stick to the bottom of the pan. Add soy milk and nutritional yeast. Give a quick puree until sauce thickens and becomes smooth and green. Season with sea salt and pepper. Spoon over biscuits or pair with any fresh vegetable.

Makes roughly 1 cup, serving 4 to 6.

More at soulfulvegan.com

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Vienna HFC Update #1: Amendment Talks Go Into High Gear

This post co-authored with Alex Hillbrand

Talks in Vienna to limit the super-warming chemicals called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) under the Montreal Protocol kicked into high gear on Friday and Saturday. The first phase of the nine-day negotiating session ended favorably in the wee hours of Sunday morning with agreement on key “challenges and solutions.”

That agreement paves the way for countries to spend the week ahead coming to terms on the central issues: ambitious schedules for freezing and phasing down HFC production and use in both developed and developing countries, and financial assistance to help developing countries achieve their phase-down commitments.

The upbeat mood of the first two days, evident in the words and actions of nearly all parties, further raises expectations that this is the year for agreeing on an HFC amendment.

The goal for the Vienna meeting is to get close enough to a complete agreement on phase-down schedules and financing provisions that countries can seal the deal on a final HFC amendment to the Montreal Protocol when they meet in Kigali, Rwanda, in October.

The stakes are high. Left unchecked, HFC production, use, and emissions are rising fast. An treaty amendment this year could prevent, between now and 2050, HFC emissions with a warming power equal to nearly three times the world's current annual output of carbon dioxide. This would be the biggest climate protection achievement of 2016 and help power the Paris Climate Agreement forward.

The Sunday-morning agreement addresses the main principles to govern financial assistance to help developing countries meet HFC phase-down commitments. The parties agreed to continue using the Montreal Protocol's Multilateral Fund (MLF) the mechanism through which donor countries helped developing countries phase out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and many other ozone-destroying and climate-damaging chemicals and to provide “sufficient additional financial resources” to help those countries meet new HFC commitments. They agreed on a list of activities eligible for funding, and on a process for the MLF to adopt detailed guidelines.

The Sunday-morning agreement reassures countries that the MLF will cover the costs of licensing patents where needed. Patent issues have been a point of contention in past negotiations, although recent research presented at the meeting has helped cut this problem down to a resolvable size. The agreement also asks the MLF to look at ways to support enhancing the energy efficiency of air conditioners and other equipment in tandem with adopting new refrigerants.

The agreement also opens the door for making certain exemptions available as the phase-down proceeds. This is a tried-and-true mechanism for addressing the fear that alternatives won't be ready for some uses when phase-down limits kick in. The possibility of hard-case exemptions makes it acceptable for countries to agree up front to ambitious reduction schedules.

Negotiators' enthusiasm palpably increased with every “challenge” met and “solution” found.

India and China are joining the U.S., Canada, Mexico, European Union and others in down-to-earth problem solving. Even Saudi Arabia, in the past an obstacle, is contributing to progress.

What's next? Negotiators will work all next week to develop the specific language of the HFC amendment, building from four existing proposals and the “solutions” adopted this weekend. On Friday and Saturday, ministers from around the world will convene for a high-level “Meeting of the Parties.” The U.S. will be represented by EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy as well as high-level White House and State Department officials.

The goal is to get as close as possible to a final deal, so that the ministers can close the remaining gaps this week and in the months ahead, and sign the long-awaited HFC phase-down amendment to the Montreal Protocol in Kigali this October.

We'll provide further updates as the week's talks proceed.

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