Biophilia

We’ve heard of recycling for a long time but in recent years a new term has turned up --UPCYCLING!    The term “Upcycling” was coined by the German engineer Reiner Pilz in 1994 during an interview about the European waste system where Reiner seemed to have been trying to diminish the idea of recycling by stating that recycling should really be called “downcycling” since it was a method of giving objects less value. Reiner was promoting a new idea of giving object more value after its initial use which he referred to as “upcycling”. The term upcycle was given additional popularity when William McDonough explored the idea of upcycling in his book Cradle to Cradle .   Upcycling is simply the act of taking an item after its initial original use and giving it a second life or a new function.   Whereas the recycling process breaks down a product to its base materials and use those materials to manufacture a different new product, for example, a recycled plastic bottle may

I recently moved to Suwannee County (North Florida), exactly six miles away from the prehistoric Suwannee River. Since moving here I have been exploring the many spring flows in the region and I’ve been absolutely mesmerized by the magnitude and beauty of these sacred gifts provided to Floridians by our planet Earth. Florida is known as the “Land of a thousand springs”, in the Suwannee River alone there are 314 documented springs releasing an average of 2.4 million gallons of water per day (MGD). The Suwannee is often referred to as the “Saudi Arabia of water” due to its abundant water flows. North Florida is a “hydrogeological wonder” with some of the greatest known concentration of springs on Earth. So what exactly is a spring? A spring is simply where water from the aquifer is naturally released into the surface of the Earth; in Florida it is a powerful source of pure fresh water. The water that comes out of our Florida’s springs is the same water that it is utilize