Intentions for The Spekboom
About the publication
What is Spekboom?
For those of you that don’t know it, Spekboom or Portulacaria Afra is a rather remarkable South African plant. The best way to describe it is to use the terminology of Naseem Taleb and call it, anti-fragile. It’s a drought-resistant, fire-retardant, woody shrub that can grow to the size of a small tree, or remain just close to the ground. Moreover, it creates it’s own microclimate and brings water and biodiversity into the biomes around it. And, it tastes good in salad.
But what does that have to do with the price of eggs?
Since climate change has become a pressing and urgent issue (if we don’t do something there’s going to be hell) it will be worth collating climate-related solutions that are developed down South where people make a plan because most of the time, nothing works. In this regard, “The Spekboom” is intended to be a collection of articles and information on how to make the world more anti-fragile when it comes to climate but with a distinctly African-South-African feel.
Key themes
The key themes of the publication will be centered around climate and the fourth industrial revolution, including but by no means limited to the following.
- Climate change projects, research, and models.
- Tokenomics, economics, and blockchain.
- Plants that have unusual properties that have a role to play in climate stabilization, like Spekboom.
- Interesting people.
- Technological innovation as it pertains to the environment.
- Artificial Intelligence and Data Science.
- Life, and other things that are deemed to be relevant but not self-indulgent.
There will be no pictures
There won’t be any pictures or images in this publication apart from the header and this is done deliberately. The carbon footprint of this publication will go up significantly if pictures are added to each article. Textual data is much easier to store than graphics, and most of the information on Medium is contained in the text, and not in the graphics; unless your topic is data visualization.
Editors Note: I spent a bit of time thinking about this. Do we use pictures to build up an audience, and to fully leverage the Medium platform or not? Images are important, but they use space. Is there a trade-off? So, for now, there will be pictures and some diagrams when needed.
We need writers
If you would like to write for us then feel free to reach out to me over Medium or via LinkedIn. If you can string your words together intelligently, then I am more than happy to add you as a writer in this venture. We need to think our way out of this mess, and come up with a global scale, fast track solution. And, here is as good a place to brainstorm as any.
