While wandering around the streets of Norwich, a city in the UK, we came across this.
That really is live and growing vegetation. Mostly low-growing shrubs and grasses. It appears to rely mainly on water captured and stored on the roof of the building.
As I understand it, It’s part of an experiment with novel forms of carbon capture. The thinking is that cladding buildings in this kind of thing on a national scale could make an enormous carbon capture surface available. In addition, done at scale, the extra layer should help insulate the building interior from summer heat and improve the urban environment outside by covering heat-radiating brick and concrete with relatively cool transpiring vegetation.
By way of a contrast, the building edging into the shot on the left takes a different approach to passive cooling. It’s a thousand-year-old church that relies on the thousand tons or so of dressed stone and flint from which it’s built to act as an enormous heat sink. It works too; It’s cool inside even on the hottest days.
While the church approach is effective, it’s not so practical for a modern-day new build. The garden wall technology, by contrast, could be integrated into the design of many new builds fairly easily.
The other things I noticed around here? One — there are way more electric cars than you might expect (mostly BMWs and Nissans, although I saw a Tesla once). Along with charging stations at most public venues. Two — nobody, but nobody, not even the cops has a gun. An armed society may or may not be a polite society, but an unarmed one is polite enough, and a lot less frightened and lot more relaxed. (Although that might also be down to everyone in the picture having access to free health care on demand.)
Once we get our country back, once Trump and his gang are in jail, we need to do a lot more than fix the damage they did. We have to undo the harm that the republicans from Reagan onward have so single-mindedly inflicted on our society if we are to catch up with the rest of the developed world. And then, we have to make sure they never try it again — they have to pay a price that will stop them. That price has to be firmly in accord with our principles of legality and justice, but it has to be extracted. There has to be trial and punishment. There has to be retribution.