Category Archives: Uncategorized

Almost Good Advice on Consumption

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This CNN article, headlined “Parents, you don’t need to buy more stuff,” seemed promising. Though it’s pretty basic and obvious to EcoOptimism readers, my first reaction was that it’s great to see this type of post-consumer attitude in the “lamestream” media. However, it didn’t end as smartly as I’d expected.

I’m contentedly “childfree,” so the examples mentioned in the article aren’t all that applicable to my relatively small ecofootprint urban lifestyle, but still the advice in the closing paragraph caught my eye: “Focus on buying better time instead of buying better stuff.”  That sounded right for a second until I realized they were a bit off the mark in advising against buying better stuff. What we’re really talking about is buying less stuff. Despite the expensive and less functional high chair example they dwell on, a general rule should be buy less stuff, but when you do buy, aim for durable, high quality (as well as ecologically and socially responsible) stuff.

So I’m all for the advice to “accept every hand-me-down you can find and let your toddler put a vegetable colander on his head rather than hitting the store for the latest Hot Wheels Monster Truck” — even though my favorite toys were my Matchbox (non-monster sized) trucks. But if that colander is getting handed down because the cheap material has broken, don’t replace it with another cheap one that will just break again.

Holy (grass-fed) Cow, It’s Been a Year

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tag cloud2

First anniversary gifts are traditionally supposed to be made of paper. That seems thoroughly inappropriate, though, for celebrating an eco-blog’s one year mark.  Which is, in EcoOptimism’s case, today.

I suppose it might be interesting to look at how much paper would have been used to create, edit and distribute the year’s worth of posts were this a pre-digital age. (68 posts, not counting this one! And, for what it’s worth, the only paper consumed was a handful of in-office recycled pages and a few Post-Its. Electrons sacrificed, though? That’s another thing entirely.)

I think a different kind of tally is more interesting — and more useful as a type of gauge indicating where the focus and direction has been. To do this, I had to go back and set up something that, had I known, I should have been doing from the outset: creating “categories” and “tags” for each post. SEO is not one of my strengths.

Turned out that having to reread each post in order to create the list of categories and tags, and then analyzing the stats on tag usage was a great way to do a bit of a mission check or, in the famous words of the late Mayor Ed Koch, ask “How’m I doin’?”

In the blog-as-book metaphor, categories are sort of like the table of contents. Creating tags, I learned, is somewhat akin to creating an index – something I was spared in my book, Sustainable Design: A Critical Guide, where the publisher thought a glossary would be more useful for readers. (FYI, a glossary is much harder to do, but also much more fun. Creating definitions is a bit like playing God.) Once I’d created the “index” and logged which posts referenced the topic or person, the blog software kindly gave me the stats indicating how many occurrences there were for each entry. The software also provided me with a “tag cloud” – apologies if you already know this stuff – that graphically renders the stats by type size.

So here’s what I learned. I have a tie for the number of posts referencing “win-win-win” and “consumption.” That first one is a decent indicator that I’ve been pretty good about staying on topic since win-win-win is a reasonable synonym for EcoOptimism. (I didn’t index the term EcoOptimism, by the way. That seemed a little redundant, since pretty much every post includes it, not to mention it being a bit self-referential.) The tying term, consumption, is more useful to ponder. In the post “Answering the Wrong Question,” I discussed the formula I=PxCxT, which says environmental impact is a result of population, consumption and technology. (The formula is more often rendered I=PxAxT, where A stands for affluence, but the term affluence strikes me as both judgmental and not as accurate as looking at consumption.) This post started out addressing the flawed (as I see it) argument for nuclear power, but then went on to discuss the demand for energy and its relationship to consumption. That, in turn, brought up a point I often drill into my students: “It’s not just about climate change.” Quoting myself further (hey, it’s my anniversary so let me indulge):

[S]imply solving the energy issue with low-carbon sources … won’t make everything hunky-dory. It won’t solve resource depletion, water shortages, loss of biodiversity or numerous other ecological impacts. Moving away from fossil fuels doesn’t diminish the amounts of materials needed for all the stuff demanded by 10 billion people desiring to live as Americans do. It doesn’t reduce the staggering amounts of material we throw out daily. It doesn’t eliminate the toxic runoff from industrial farming …. It doesn’t change either P or C or T.

Thinking about this some more, that last point seems to indicate that something is missing from the I=PxCxT equation. It doesn’t take into account the sources of energy consumed and their relative effects. Environmental impact may not be only about climate change, but climate change as a result of using carbon-based energy is certainly a major – if not the major – factor. Perhaps then a better formula would be I=PxCxTxEC, where EC is short for energy from carbon. (Anyone got a suggestion for a single letter instead of EC? Maybe F for fossil fuels?)

Hmm, I thought this post was just going to be self-reflective. Now it seems to have expanded to propose revising a basic tenet of environmentalism. As my mother-in-law would say: “Go know.” My slightly more current version is “who’d a thunk.”

Returning to the stats on tags, the next tie is a neatly correlated one between “happiness” and “GDP.” Actually, the correlation between happiness and GDP is not a “neat” one, but is more like diminishing returns. As a poor country’s GDP increases, happiness in the form of wellbeing tends to increase with it. Basic needs like food and shelter become more available as do education and medicine. But that doesn’t continue to hold true. After a point, one which we in the US have surpassed, rising GDP fails to accompany increased wellbeing and, in fact, has the opposite effect. Gauges of Western wellbeing and happiness show decreases since roughly the middle of the twentieth century. Often this is explained in terms of the “hedonic treadmill.”

I’ll spare you a line by line further analysis of the tags; you can get a visual idea from the tag cloud above. Of note, I think, is that so many of the highest ranked tags relate not to design, but to economics. In addition to the ones already noted, there’s carbon pricing, ecological services, externalities, free market, economic growth, and true cost. As an architect and ecodesigner with a background in economics, I’d like to see more emphasis here on looking at the relationship of the quality of our built environment on environmental impact as well as the quality of the environment on human wellbeing.

It’s worth noting that Superstorm Sandy rates a large font in the graphic above, ranking only slightly below the top two ties. Perhaps relatedly, if you were to tally the categories (as opposed to tags) that each post falls under, the clear leader would be “Messaging.” Several of the 68 posts thus far have pondered why environmental issues and causes are having such a difficult time garnering public support: is it a matter of taking the wrong tactics to communicating the problems? How we approach this question goes to a core of EcoOptimism’s purpose. One way that climate disruption or other eco topics will rise to greater attention is when the reality, the fear, sets in. Sandy was seen by many as a harbinger.

But clarion calls may come too late. The disruptions set in motion by then may, like the proverbial train, take too long to stop, let alone reverse. EcoOptimism says, rather than build the demand on fear, build it on desire by establishing that the actions we need to take are actually steps that we want to take because, aside from the environmental benefits, they will improve our lives.

Post Post-Apocalypses

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It probably means something that my last post of 2012 was on resilience and one of my first posts of 2013 is on apocalypse. Perhaps I’ve got things backwards.

Do I know how to have a good time or what? I usually spend my late nights skimming through a way-too-long list of blogs, primarily on eco topics, slowing to read the ones that pique my interest. But the nearly two-week long end of the year holiday period managed to slow the number of incoming posts each night from well over 200 to a giddyingly time-freeing amount in the mid-two digits. So what did I do with the leftover time? I read not one, but two, anthologies of post-apocalyptic short stories. That’s what I mean about knowing how to have a good time. Some folks curl up with a good mystery. Me? I prefer evenings of vignettes and variants on themes the likes of Mad Max and Soylent Green. (Maybe not Zardoz, though. I do have standards.)

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Hard to tell if this is a scene from a disaster movie or the evening news. Image source: news.yahoo.com

This has nothing to do with the Mayan or various other supposed prophesies. Why then this interest from the self-anointed EcoOptimist? Life after the apocalypse is not exactly positive, not in the sense of EcoOptimism or of much of anything for that matter. Sure some post-apocalypse worlds are freed of the ravages of humanity and can return to a more balanced ecosystem, but that’s not exactly the path EcoOptimism has in mind.

I know many designers and many environmentalists who are fans of science fiction, which makes a lot of sense. I hope to elaborate on that in the future (or at least in a parallel future), but the basic point is that design is inherently optimistic in that it consists of attempts to improve things – creating futures — and so is most science fiction. But post-apocalyptic scenarios are a specific subset of science fiction. Where SF is more often based on StarTrek-like worlds in which humans are smarter and life is better (though there’s still plenty of room for wars and mysteries), stories that are based on what remains after a plague or a nuclear winter or the second coming (yes, those scenarios exist, too) tend to be much less filled with cool gadgets and warp drives, and more about sheer survival.

If our current world is anthropocentric (a new term has been coined for this period of geological time in which the planet is being shaped not by nature but by humanity: the Anthropocene), environmentalists usually envision one that is biocentric or ecocentric: giving equal weight to all living things – and perhaps some non-living things as well. A world after an apocalypse, however, is more likely to be a misanthropic one — one that by default or otherwise puts the interests and strength of nature above humanity’s. Maybe it’s that alternative view of the primacy of humans that sets me thinking. I like things that shake me up and, in this case especially, better that it be through fiction than the real thing.

Apocalypses seem to be everywhere these days. Even putting aside the Mayan misinterpretation (as well as that guy who predicted the Rapture not once but twice in 2011), there’s a run on ends of the world. Movies, books, television shows. Fact and fiction. It may not be high quality (the revolution may not be televised and Revolution probably shouldn’t have been), but it does constitute a full blown genre.

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NBC’s Revolution: apocalyptically bad? What a waste of an end of the world. Image source: techhive.com

At its most fundamental, creating stories of our future demise or near demise (in many of these stories, there are scraggly bands of survivors) can be seen as an exercise in avoidance. If we can anticipate what’s going to go wrong, then we should be able to avoid it. Nuclear war might be an example. At least I hope it is. I’m not sure whether “the Rapture” is or should be avoidable – or what steps one would take to do so – but man-made future cataclysms ought to be. Do we really think, though, that any of the made-for-SyFy movies are going to convince the climate skeptics? (Facts don’t seem to sway them; maybe fiction can.)

Future prognostications don’t have to end badly. Indeed, many such stories have the survivors, well, surviving. Some have used the genre to posit what they feel would be positive outcomes. Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia stories, in which the Pacific Northwest has seceded from the dysfunctional rest of the country, come to mind.

But John Michael Greer’s view is more typical, if you can describe anything about an environmentalist, author, historian and neo-Druid who writes on topics ranging from UFOs to peak oil to the occult as typical. In his non-fiction book, The Ecotechnic Future, as well as his online serialized novel Star’s Reach, he makes the point that our industrial age advances are entirely based on the easy availability of cheap energy and materials. If we were to create or encounter an apocalypse that sent us back into a pre-industrial age, therefore, it would be pretty much impossible, because the easily accessed energy and materials would have been used up, for us to do it again.

Jamais Cascio of Open the Future has spoken on apocalypses and how we envision our future, dwelling on what he calls legacy futures. An example of a legacy future, he says, is the jet pack – it’s what we expected the future to have. “The apocalypse [or] the catastrophic tomorrow,” he observes, “is the cornerstone legacy future.” I’m not sure he’s right. Is it what we really expect to happen? Are we such fatalists? “[These stories] leave us disempowered, discouraged and feeling doomed.” I won’t claim to represent all of us, but the stories and movies don’t affect me that way. What they do do is inject, in as much as fiction can, an element of reality, something relatable: this could happen. And could happen to people like us.

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Jamais Cascio’s categorization of possible apocalypse causes

So why do I enjoy these less-than-heartwarming stories? I’d like to think it’s in order to see wiser paths, like a Grimm fable without the later Disneyfication. But it may simply be that they provide an escape, albeit a perverse one: let’s get away from the potential end of the world problems by immersing in fictional scenarios of same.

Cascio makes the point that human beings, alone among other species (at least that we know of), have evolved to think about the future. (I don’t think squirreling away acorns counts.) When we create stories of the end of the world, he says, “they serve to tell us we live on a fragile planet and it is extremely possible we could break it and destroy it.” Yes, but I don’t think that needs to be perceived as disempowering or discouraging. The purpose of warnings, fictional or otherwise, is to help us avoid the danger. We wouldn’t ponder whether we need measures to destroy incoming asteroids if we didn’t have whiz-bang movies depicting the possibility, and if we didn’t have the pure bang of the impact that killed off the dinosaurs.

Ellen LaConte, in the Resilience blog, writes “How about, let’s pretend the world’s worsening weather is a threat akin to a pending asteroid collision, because, though its effects will be less sudden and simultaneous, it is. How about we call it ‘Global Warning.’”

There’s at least one difference between the actions we’d take to avoid death-by-asteroid and what’s needed to diminish and/or adapt to climate disruption. Asteroid avoidance would involve spending large amounts of money and resources merely to sustain our existence. The technological and social responses to climate disruption and resource depletion, on the other hand, have the potential to not merely sustain but to better our lives, while simultaneously having a positive return on investment. And that’s a major part of the point of EcoOptimism – that these are desirable things to do even if we didn’t have the specter of climatic apocalypse shoving us in their direction.

 

 

 

Lines in the Earth

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(In a previous post, I mused about the idea of assigning the rights to the Earth’s resources to the Earth itself, similarly to the way rights are assigned to people and to corporations. The post here is more or less the opposite. It’s about the artificiality of our current concept of property rights: dividing up and assigning the rights to pieces of the Earth, not to the Earth but to people and other legal entities.)

Several of my teenage summers were spent working for local surveyors. In many ways, it was an ideal summer job (if you ignored the poison ivy factor). We started work early and got off early, in time for a swim or a bike ride. If it was a nice day, we were “in the field” running surveys and, if it rained, I sat at a drafting table and manually plotted the numbers from the surveyor’s notebook, in essence recreating the land I’d just walked from the mathematical version of it.

This was in the early seventies, in or after the tail end of the baby boom, but there was still plenty of land subdivision going on in my increasingly suburban county.  A few orchards remained, though most now bore cul-de-sacs rather than apples.

On several occasions we were surveying in dense wetlands, perhaps the closest thing the northeast has to a rainforest. A clear sightline had to be created between the guy with the theodolite on a tripod (the “instrument man”) and each point to be measured. Being the new guy, I was usually the “rodman” – the one who walked out to each of those points and gingerly held a rod balanced upright between my fingers so that it was exactly vertical.

Those wetland areas were certainly not my favorite locations during the hot and sticky NY summers. (The best places, it turned out, were inside large sewer pipes that were kept cool by the ground above them. It took more than a little convincing before I acknowledged the fact that the, um, fluid didn’t smell when it was moving and that, in fact, the pipes were cool and shady places to eat lunch.)

Forested wetland image, source US Fish & Wildlife Service

Forested wetland image, source US Fish & Wildlife Service

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clearing the sightlines involved using a tool I never thought had a place in suburbia: a machete. We’d hack away at tall weeds and reeds, hoping nothing had a stem or trunk too thick to survive the machete, advancing in the straightest line we could from the seemingly arbitrary point where the tripod had been set. The instrument man would tell us if we were “off course.” It could often take half an hour of hacking to get to each point.

I recalled this experience recently while reading a chapter in The Agile City in which the author discusses the evolution of property rights here and abroad. On more than one occasion, I had thought about the “nature” of property rights and how, given a different cultural view, the idea of individuals possessing parts of the Earth could be seen as strange and unnatural.  Why should our freedom to walk – to be — anywhere be curtailed by the artificial concept of property rights.

The manifestation of property rights seems, in retrospect, to be particularly artificial in those wetlands where we were carving straight lines – human geometry — into the landscape. Straight lines, I’ve often heard, do not exist in nature; they are a creation of our minds, necessitated by our need to, among other things, define borders. Look, for instance, at the border dividing Canada from the United States. Parts of it are “natural,” defined by the middle of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes (what happens if a river border meanders over time?), but then there’s a huge distance through most of the western half of the continent demarked by nothing visible: just the 49th Parallel, an artificial construct derived from geometry that didn’t even exist when the Earth was still thought to be flat.

The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 laid a relentless grid over the varied topography of Manhattan. Image source: places.designobserver.com

The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 laid a relentless grid over the varied topography of Manhattan. Image source: places.designobserver.com

 

 

 

 

 

The property lines we were “staking” in those wetlands, or through the soon to be ex-farms and orchards, were just as artificial. This became especially clear to me when one day we were sent out to confirm the locations of the corners of a new house’s foundation. The numbers weren’t making any sense until we realized that the foundation had been poured in error on the adjacent property. So artificial were the divisions overlaid on the terrain that you couldn’t tell one piece of property from another. (I never did find out how the problem was legally resolved.)

In a recent online thread, an architect inquired how to find a property corner stake that had disappeared underground. Some of the replies were straightforward: presuming the stake to be metal, borrow a metal detector. (At significant survey points, a concrete post with an indent on top is often placed to mark the precise survey point. I always thought it interesting that those markers were called “monuments.” Though they bore no human figure in the sense that a conventional monument might, they surely were monuments to man’s claim to nature.)

A survey monument. Image source: landsurveyorsunited.com

A survey monument. Image source: landsurveyorsunited.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If the stake was wood, though, the answer as much more complicated. First, of course, there’s no such thing as a “wood detector.” Moreover, if the stake was in the soil and had been there for a while, it might have decomposed. What could be more appropriate? Nature devouring – digesting – man’s attempt to define and claim it.

In The Agile City, James Russell notes that during the constitutional convention, there was a debate between Jefferson and Franklin as to whether the Constitution should guarantee “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” or “life, liberty and property.” In spite of happiness (and Franklin) winning out, property rights in this country have an extraordinary place in law and in our ethos. For some, property equates to happiness, especially in a material society. But perhaps we should refocus on the decision to emphasize happiness versus property. It stands to reason that we would be happier.

Resilience – 2012 Word of the Year?

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Even before Sandy, the word ‘resilience’ was on its way to becoming a meme. Then, when a “natural disaster” struck the political and financial powers of New York City – along with countless others – the idea started to take on some urgency.

Ironically, urgency is not a typical approach to resilience. The idea of resilience, in short, is to have the ability to survive and bounce back from “bad things,” whether they be natural or man-made. The reason urgency often doesn’t apply is that, as many have observed, we humans are not well equipped to plan for future possibilities. Especially ones that seem less than imminent or less likely to affect you personally.

Sandy both proved the immediacy of a formerly more or less theoretical threat and showed that it can bring a major American city to its knees. (Katrina’s hit on New Orleans should have accomplished that, but it didn’t, perhaps because NOLA has long lived with the possibility of flooding or because Wall Street is not in New Orleans.) Enough so that resilience is now even a US Senate topic in the form of the STRONG (Strengthening the Resiliency of Our Nation on the Ground) Act introduced post-Sandy by senators from NY, NJ and Massachusetts.

Increasing resilience has long been a reaction to natural disasters such as earthquakes. Building codes are updated; procedures for the aftermath are put in place (though never adequate for a worse-than-the-previous event). They tend, though, to lose out to complacency. In some of the areas devastated by the tsunami that hit Japan, there were century-old stone markers placed after a previous tsunami warning people not to build closer to the shore. But when no tsunamis occurred for a while, the stones were ignored and forgotten. Resilience itself may not be resilient, at least not to the effects of time.

"High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants," the stone slab reads. "Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point." Source: Huffington Post

“High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants,” the stone slab reads. “Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.” Source: Huffington Post

 

 

 

 

 

Sandy-type disasters are not likely to fade with time. Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanos and the like generally don’t have patterns to their frequency or scale. And it used to be that climate disasters like drought or flooding didn’t either. But where the former are truly natural – “acts of God” – we can no longer say the same is true of the latter.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not claiming that Sandy or the Midwest drought wouldn’t have occurred were it not for our environmental “sins.” (Hmm, there must be a religion somewhere that believes these events were indeed acts of God in response to those sins.) But without several anthropocenic multipliers, their effects would certainly have been less. And as there is no foreseeable diminishment of those influences (CO2 levels are not falling, marshes and mangroves are not being re-established, shore development is not abating), it’s apparent that, unlike truly natural disasters, the frequency and scale of climate-related disasters will only escalate.

Which brings us back to resilience and the question of how we deal with the prospect of future disasters. The EcoOptimist in me has somewhat mixed feelings about emphasizing resilience. My  reservations derive from two related issues. The first is that the pursuit of resilience can be seen as the equivalent of throwing in the towel and conceding defeat to the inevitability of climate disruption. The second is that, in our binary either-or thought process, an emphasis on resilience is all too likely to occur at the expense of actions and investments that might diminish the causes of climate disruption (thus in fact leading to that same defeat). The costs of adapting cities will surely divert funds from programs to curtail CO2 emissions.

In a recent talk, I divided climate actions into three categories: prevention, mitigation and adaptation. Prevention is the primary path we’ve been pursuing. Though there’ve been some successes (for example, acid rain), there have been far more failures, mostly in the form of opportunities not taken. This is highly unfortunate because, aside from the obvious reasons, virtually every study has shown that prevention is the least costly approach. It’s going to cost a fortune to build seawalls to protect NYC. If we (or had we) spent that kind of money on cutting greenhouse gases, we’d be far ahead of the game – especially since that investment would provide future returns that seawalls don’t.

Storm surge barrier locations proposed for NYC starting in 2004 after a study predicting the flooding from a “superstorm.” Image is from New York Sea Grant.

Storm surge barrier locations proposed for NYC starting in 2004 after a study predicting the flooding from a “superstorm.” Image is from New York Sea Grant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unfortunately, there’s a fundamental question now of whether it’s too late for prevention. If we somehow found the political resolve, could we actually obviate the need for remedial steps? In other words, could the train of global warming be stopped in time? There is a built in lag factor, a delay between the time greenhouse gases are released and its impacts are felt. So the warming of the next bunch of years or decades is preordained.

Hence the need to turn to the next steps: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation is finding ways to diminish the impact (versus preventing it). In the case of flooding events like Sandy and Katrina, mitigation would involve efforts such as preservation or recreation of wetlands that can absorb the water. Even oysters, it turns out, can have a role. In addition to their ability to cleanse polluted waters, oyster beds can also slow tidal surges.

“Oyster-tecture” reefs proposed by Scape/Landscape Architecture for storm surge protection in NY harbor. Part of the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Rising Currents” in 2010.

“Oyster-tecture” reefs proposed by Scape/Landscape Architecture for storm surge protection in NY harbor. Part of the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Rising Currents” in 2010.

 

Mitigation can also involve less natural methods ranging from porous pavement to the further extreme of storm-surge barriers or seawalls. Here in NY, the stage is being set for a classic environmental battle, with a group led by Governor Cuomo promoting construction of a many-billion dollar barrier and opposition led by Mayor Bloomberg questioning the feasibility of a seawall. (The third camp, deniers, holds little sway here.) The Bloomberg camp points out that, even if the barrier worked when needed, it would have very large environmental impacts of its own and would also merely deflect the water elsewhere, perhaps increasing the damage in neighboring areas. Stalemate.

Hierarchically, mitigation is the path necessitated by the failure of prevention. Adaptation, then, is required when both prevention and mitigation fail. Focusing again on Sandy and NYC, adaptation responses range from elevating buildings (or at least their necessary services) to abandonment of low-lying areas. It would include making our electricity supply better able to endure partial interruptions and our transit systems able to stop flooding or at least recover faster (and cheaper) from it. In larger terms, we’d make our food supply less dependent on transport over long distances.  It’s making our human support system more resilient, in short.

It also is pretty much writing off the idea of returning our planet – and us – to some semblance of sustainability. Andrew Zolli, often called a futurist, wrote recently “Where sustainability aims to put the world back into balance, resilience looks for ways to manage in an imbalanced world.” The problem with resorting to resilience is that, if the world is still imbalanced, you have to keep moving the goal posts. If we don’t stop global warming, how high will sea levels rise and will the barriers we construct in this part of the century be adequate for the future? Similar questions arise concerning food supplies (or food security, as it’s coming to be known) or, say, infectious diseases spread by climate-driven insect migrations. And those are only some of the impacts that we can try to foresee; how many other side effects might we not have the smarts to anticipate?

EcoOptimism, with its implicit assumption that solutions are available, would have us focus on prevention. It’s much smarter to spend money on ‘front of tailpipe’ solutions — actions that nip the problem before it occurs — than on much more expensive and likely less predictable end of tailpipe reactions. But at this stage in our non-committal response to climate disruption, we’ve almost certainly committed ourselves, by default, to a mix of both positive actions, ideally taken by choice, and necessary involuntary reactions: an all of the above combination of prevention, mitigation and adaptation.

That’s a key point; resilience is undertaken when we realize we have no options left. The seas are going to rise. Crops are going to be disrupted. Storms are going to get stronger. We will have to take responsive measures. (We may call them precautionary, but there’s no “pre” involved. We’re past that.)

Not that resilience is bad. It’s just unfortunate that we’ve come to the point in terms of climate disruption where there’s a strong case to be made for it: for adaptation rather than prevention. We’re talking about building the bomb shelters instead of defusing the bombs. And those bunkers were never going to help much in a post-nuclear war world.

EcoOptimistic solutions are ones that deliver benefits both ecologically and economically, and leave us in a better place than we started. Carbon fees are a perfect example. Assuming the fees are revenue-neutral, we end up with a productive reallocation in which we tax and disincentivize the “bads” while promoting the goods.

Multi-billion dollar seawalls that play catch up with ever-rising oceans are not optimistic endeavors in any sense. Nor is diverting Missouri River waters to the west. These are last ditch efforts that only provide temporary fixes. Zolli writes “Combating those kinds of disruptions isn’t just about building higher walls — it’s about accommodating the waves.” Resilience, by this description, incorporates both mitigation and adaptation. But it assumes the waves and ignores prevention. I despise metaphors (it always seems there’s a metaphor to prove any point), but it’s the equivalent of adding life preservers rather than making the boat more seaworthy. Or, better yet, altering course to avoid the storm. More life preservers might make sense if you’re already in the storm. We’re probably encountering the outer rings of the storm, and it may or may not be too late to change course. The smart thing to do is choose a new heading, while there are still some choices available, and while holding drills and battening down the hatches just in case.

Here Comes the Stuff

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Don’t buy me any gifts for the holiday season.

Not that you were planning to (I assume!), but that’s not the point. I’m “consumed,” as it were, by the quantity of things surrounding me and by emotions like garbage guilt. I look around at most of the stuff in store windows and catalogs, and realize that, not only do I not need most of it, I don’t even want a lot of it. Our place is full. If anything, we need to shed possessions. Clothes we rarely wear. Books we rarely read. (Why is it so hard to get rid of books?) Sentimental things we’ve been given but don’t know where to put. Unthinking things we’ve been given and would rather not find a place for.

I’m happy that we have no hamburger-patty-maker type kitchen appliances, and not only because we don’t have anywhere to store them.

When I look at those things, I can’t help it: I see all the materials and energy that went into making them, and I see the space indefinitely occupied in the landfills that they’ll end up in, often sooner rather than later. That’s what I mean by garbage guilt.

Yeah, I know that’s no way to look at a festive season, or at the well wishes and good intentions of those who give gifts. Bah humbug, Grinch and all that. But really I’m happy with – and prefer to have – those well wishes of my relatives and friends, just without the material encumbrances. Let’s have a meal or go to a movie together. Or send a donation to a charity.

Plus I’m picky and hard to buy for, but that’s another topic entirely.

What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more. ~Dr. Seuss

 

 

 

Our apartment is decent sized by NYC standards, though tiny, I’m sure, compared to many a suburban home. It’s certainly much larger than Graham Hill’s Life Edited apartment ten blocks away or many of the other micro digs featured these days in TreeHugger and Inhabitat. But it’s overflowing with stuff, as is our storage space crosstown. Factor in that I’d much rather be a minimalist, and it really doesn’t (or does!) add up.

And this is without venturing into the even more guilt ridden point that there are others who need things far more than I do. So I don’t think I’m being a killjoy in dampening the consumer wave.  (You know, the one that’s supposed to rescue the economy.) What’s the point in having (or being given) something you don’t need – or worse, don’t like? Actually, I think the concept is quite positive.

When you start looking at stuff this way, it quickly becomes a weight on your shoulders. I don’t want go all Buddhist or something on you, but I truly think I’d be happier with fewer material things. I’m not alone in that either. On Grist.org this week, a post is titled “Married father of two seeks Best Christmas Ever. No presents allowed.” But Greg (the author of the post) and I are apparently far from the norm. His idea was deemed so unusual that it warranted not one, but two, film crews and interviews.

Like Greg, I grew up with a mountain of gifts, piled in our case beneath a “Hannukah bush.” (In my teen years, we developed early eco traditions of using the Sunday “Funnies” for wrapping paper and buying live trees, which I would lug out the patio door and plant in the back yard on New Year’s Day – having dug the hole at Thanksgiving.) I remember not being able to sleep on the Christmas Eve when I strongly suspected there was a train set awaiting me on sawhorses in the basement. For theoretically Jewish kids, we made out great. Of course the holidays should be joyous for kids and gifts are part of that. But let it be things with meaning, not plastic throw-aways. I loved that train set and spent many a weekend building elaborate landscapes for it. There were many other gifts, though, whose longevity could be counted in hours.

Fortunately I don’t work in a company where we have Secret Santas. If I did, would it be acceptable for the wrapping to enclose a card acknowledging a charity donation? Or perhaps a gift certificate to a local business? I’d be plenty happy receiving either.

However, if you’re still unconvinced, there are of course things I covet. (That enlightened I’m not.)  But they tend to be expensive and electronic, so I’ll settle for a fun dinner at a local joint.

A Thanksgiving Cornucopia of Wrongest Products

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We could almost throw in the 1000 thread count towel and just admit we’ve been insurmountably topped in the Wrongest Product Awards competition.  First came the suggestion from a reader following our nomination of the lighted pillow spied in a local outpost of a chain store. (local chain store = oxymoron?) He noticed the proud and iconic “As Seen on TV” logo and mentioned he’d once survived a visit to the As Seen on TV store. (We didn’t even know there was such a thing. Is everything displayed on TV’s?) For our awards, he said, it was a “target-rich environment.”

Then along comes a post from one of our favorite blogs, Unconsumption, linking to a thoroughly justified lampoon of the Williams-Sonoma catalog. In it one can apparently find such necessities of life as a waffle batter dispenser (in what I can only assume is a related post, Unconsumption points out a suggestion by Real Simple for a free one), an acorn shaped wooden container for twine (they squandered, though, the opportunity to call it a twine cozy), and my own

$29.95 from Williams-Sonoma vs free as suggested by Real Simple via Unconsumption

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

favorite gift for an instant greenie: a “reclaimed rustic chicken coop” that costs $759.95 with a painted chicken on the side or $599.95 without. The site’s author notes “and honestly, if you’re buying a goddamn chicken coop from a catalog, why NOT spring for the painted chicken?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As far as our simply conceding defeat here and now in the search for the Wrongest Product, we prefer to take it as a sign of just how many candidates there are out there.

Previous Wrongest Product Award nominations

 

Wrongest Product Award nominations are open! Send your nominees to ImNotBuyinIt (at) EcoOptimism.com.

Are we scared yet?

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Scary things I’ve experienced or heard in the past couple of weeks:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the bright side, I guess, we’ve a re-elected president who actually mentioned climate change (though barely) and, here in NY, a governor and a mayor who are willing to go further than just mentioning it. Whether that will amount to more than lip service is yet to be seen.

Among the many issues this quadfecta of scariness raises is one that starts with the question: is it time to be scared? Once you get past the basic question of whether this truly is scary stuff — the dead canaries before an imminent disaster — it’s actually, I think, a matter of several more complex questions.

The primary one I’d pose asks whether getting societally scared is useful. This is an old question in the environmental movement. Will we be more successful and persuasive if people fear for their lives? Historically this has been true, but there are risks in that approach: backlashes, accusations of crying wolf and/or hysteria and, conversely, the possibility – which seems to have proven the case so far – that there’s no way to create an imminent enough and sustained environmental fear. Climate disasters and oil crises come and go. Most of the country has long moved past Katrina and the BP oil spill, and Sandy is already all but gone from the headlines.

Can one be scared and optimistic, too?

For a blog incorporating the word optimism in its title, a further question is whether fear is antithetical to optimism. I don’t want to get embroiled in language or psychology definitions; certainly one can be afraid while hoping for the best. But EcoOptimism is based on the idea that we neither want nor need to make the eco argument on an “end is nigh” approach. We know that hasn’t worked with previous warning signs. Perhaps it might this time. We don’t, however, know whether there is a tipping point of warnings, in terms of either frequency or scale. In other words, even if we wanted to, we can’t count on it.

Many of us have also been reluctant to make our case hinge on such a tipping point because it’s entirely possible that by the time the public perceives that we’ve reached that point, it will be too late. That fatalism would seem to be even less in keeping with this idea of EcoOptimism, but here’s where I think some clarification is needed. E-O (I’m tired of typing it out) isn’t about a belief that the worst won’t happen. We’ll leave that head-in-the-sand delusiveness to the James Imhofes, Koch brothers and other Friends of Fox.

Rather, the optimism in E-O is the belief that, yes, there are solutions to our environmental issues, but additionally those solutions are also compatible with (or the same as!) solutions to our economic travails AND, furthermore, implementing those solutions will result in improved well-being and improved life styles. This is counter to both the usual notion that environmental solutions are a drag on the economy, and that environmental solutions require sacrifices in the quality of our lives. (Apologies if you’ve been a regular reader of E-O; you’ve heard me say this innumerable times.)

So what this means is you or I can be an EcoOptimist and yet be concerned or even pessimistic about our future. Phew, so in my moments of eco despair  I’m not contradicting myself after all. Nor do we have to be delusional or unrealistic; we can comprehend that we’ve got a nasty situation here, and we may or may not be too late. (More on that in an upcoming post.) The point is that you don’t have to agree that doom is imminent (plus or minus a century or two) in order to pursue the same steps and policies advocated by the Chicken Little greenies when those policies are also beneficial in non-enviro senses…and, oh by the way, might also save humanity. As any number of Jewish moms would say:

What’s not to like?  

What we have here is the environmental analog of Pascal’s Wager. (What’s the term – other than “plate of shrimp” –used to describe when something comes up multiple times in a short period? Pascal’s Wager has done that to me this week.) Blaise Pascal argued that one might as well believe in God because, in doing so, you’d have nothing to lose and everything to gain. It’s just, he says, the rational thing to do. And so it is with environmental policy.

Is 3D Printing Part of the Path to Sustainability?

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Virtually in the shadow of the Unisphere and directly adjacent to a display of actual NASA rockets, the NY Maker Faire set up tents, tables, robots and fire-breathing dragons this past weekend. While the task of grading 50 student essays kept me tied to my desk, I did attend last year’s Faire and marveled at the diversity and inventiveness of the creations.

The whole maker movement – and the NY Faire represents only a tiny fraction of the group which could be said to include DIYers as well – presents, I think, an interesting dilemma in the context of environmentalism.

On the one hand, there are those greenies who promote what has lately come to be called “resilience” – the idea that we need to be able to adapt to and survive in a future that may include major climate changes, resource shortages and food scarcity. One way to do this, they maintain, is by becoming more self-sufficient. This would engender being able to, as individuals or communities, grow more of our own food and make more of the things we need. Those trained in resilience would make good candidates for a remake of Lost or for the current TV series Revolution, set in a near future in which nothing electric works.

Implicit in self-sufficiency is the notion that we should (or must) own fewer things, that we have to become less materialistic. I have no argument with that even though it connotes the unpopular concept of sacrifice and equates environmentalism with giving things up, which might at first be seen as not in keeping with the concepts of EcoOptimism. But as has been observed by many, materialism – once one is past the point of having necessities – does not add to happiness.

Much of Maker Faire, as well as a rapidly growing new industry, now revolves around 3D printing. As you might surmise, 3D printing is the capability of “printing” 3-dimensional objects. The technology is evolving incredibly fast and what, only a few years ago, required a commercial stove-size piece of equipment and a sizeable investment, can now be accomplished, in some cases, by something not much larger than a home microwave and around the same cost as a decent refrigerator. (I’ve no idea why this became a comparison to kitchen appliances.)

(Image source: MakerBot.com)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In fact, the technology is bringing us that much closer to Star Trek “replicators.” One can now input a 3D model computer file instructing the machine (the popular available one is called a MakerBot) to print a piece of intricate jewelry made of stainless steel, a replacement part for your car – or a recipe. It’s not quite that advanced yet – don’t expect a soufflé – but just a few years ago, the only things you could output were objects made of plaster-like materials. The media – the “ink” – available now includes metals and even organic matter to make meat.

Clothing aside, I could see this shot from Star Trek as an ad in a mid-century (20th, that is) magazine. (Image source: 3dprinterreviews.blogspot.com/2011/04/star-trek-replicator-roots.html)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is great EcoOptimism potential in this disruptive, as it’s termed, technology. It will enable us to make virtually anything anywhere on demand. That funny shape screwdriver you need to open your iPhone? Well, you’ll no longer have to special order it from somewhere halfway around the world. (Predictably, one of the major markets for 3D printed objects is iPhone accessories.) You will download the 3D file (or if you’re really handy, create it yourself) and then print it out perhaps in your garage or your home office, or if it’s a larger piece than your printer can handle, have it sent to a Kinkos-like service in town. Resources will be saved (stores wouldn’t have to stock – or overstock — things), less transport energy will be incurred, more things may be repaired rather than thrown out. And the whole process of design and fabrication should become more accessible and egalitarian.

But there’s a potential conflict here between the environmentalist goal of being less materialistic and the increased ease with which we’ll be able to make things. That conflict is analogous to the non-appearance of the predicted paperless office. The reality turned out to be that it was so easy to print things, in multiple drafts and widespread copies, that people ended up going through vast reams of paper even more than before.

Suppose, in our 3D printer world, you feel like you want a new salad server set for your dinner party tonight? Just print one out. Want a different color earring to match your (newly printed?) hat? You might have it printed and on your ear in an hour or so.

In fact, MakerBot is opening a store near me in few weeks. Will it be full of things I didn’t know I wanted? Will it enable me to make things that I couldn’t previously afford because it would have been too expensive as a one-off? Is that a good thing or bad? (Hint: it’s both.)

An architect friend of mine, with whom I often have, ahem, political differences, says the most important people around are “Makers of Things.” The service economy? Not for him. Unsurprisingly, I’m not convinced he’s right. For one thing, I’m not sure that self-sufficiency is that great a goal. We’re far past the point, barring apocalyptic events, of returning to rural agrarian living. It’s more likely that we will see major increases in the costs of energy and transportation, to the point where we will choose or be forced to make changes in how and where we make things. 3D printing raises the possibility of removing much of the transportation costs and perhaps even encouraging making things differently in different parts of world (as we used to before globalization).

But is it a problem that it will also make it easier to satisfy immediate desires, to make or buy things as we, perhaps impulsively decide we “need” them? We already shop and acquire too impulsively. Perhaps 3D printers need to come with an admonishing voice that says, in a HAL-9000 tone: “Just what do you think you’re making, Dave?”

What’s an architect to do?

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Some not-so-startling news – at least to those of us directly affected – was released last week by the American Institute of Architects.  The gist of the sobering report: architectural firm billings have dropped 40% since 2008 and more than 28% of positions have disappeared.

(We always, by the way, seem to be one of the professions hardest hit by economic cycles. In a previous period, I recall a newspaper headline that went something to the effect of “In This Recession, Be Glad You’re Not an Architect.” I couldn’t find that despondent headline in Google just now. But, searching the New York Times, I turned up apparently similar articles from other downturns: “Recession is Ravaging Architectural Firms” (1992), “Many Architects Are Losing Jobs in the Recession” (1983), among others.”)

 

 

 

 

The situation assessed more bluntly at planetizen.com

I brought this up in my return visit on Curtis B. Wayne’s radio show “Burning Down the House” this past Sunday (archived here) in which we were discussing ecodesign and economics. While our larger topics concerned the origins of suburban sprawl and how that subsequently became the “American Way of Life,” I used those statistics as a segue to talk about what it is that architects and other designers can or should be doing in a future that is likely to preclude making things – buildings and objects – on the same material scale as in the previous century.

On the face of it, there’s a conflict of interest in a designer advocating a less materialistic world. Are we, in effect, talking ourselves out of jobs? (You know, the jobs that don’t exist in the first place….) Certainly we have to spurn McMansion commissions, or at least urge our less eco-minded clients to adhere to the advice Sarah Susanka provides in the Not So Big House. And it’s rather hard to justify designing yet another chair or teapot when the world is not exactly lacking in those.

But – and here comes the EcoOptimist’s sunny side of the storm – architects and designers are particularly well suited to the imminent task of advocating for and persuasively cajoling us into the “better place” that can be the outcome of our dual eco crises. As I’ve mentioned previously, designers are, virtually by definition, optimists; “Designers look at a thing or a problem and immediately start imagining what could be.” And as my blog’s alter ego might say, “problems, have we got problems.” So that optimism has plenty of targets to address.

Designers, obviously, also have to be visionaries. How else to see to possibilities amidst the economic and ecological rubble? Or to envision potential utopias where others fear post-apocalyptic dystopia? Accompanying that, most designers have the ability, developed through years of sometimes contentious client and public agency meetings, to communicate their visions. (One hopes, of course, that they are not so good at communicating that they are able to white- or green-wash a less than visionary idea. I’m looking at you, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. Plan Voisin and Broadacre City, as enticing as they may have looked at the time, did not help.)  Environmentalism and ecodesign have long-standing PR and image problems, with most people connoting the movements with personal sacrifice. Designers, working in teams with others as they often do in their projects, can both devise positive solutions and create imagery that allows the public to envision how our lives would be affected.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s often been stated that architects are “Renaissance men” (apologies for the gender specificity), with their endeavors encompassing math, physics, sociology, psychology – and sometimes, for those designing private residences, couples counseling – as well as, of course, the expected 2D and 3D arts. This generalist background, which unfortunately is becoming less the norm in architectural education, is necessary for dealing with complex, multidisciplinary issues in a systems manner. Specialists, on the other hand, are not usually equipped to synthesize the factors outside their expertise; consciously or subconsciously they focus on what they are familiar with. (Old medical joke: What’s the difference between a general practitioner and a specialist? One treats what you have; the other thinks you have what he treats.)

Here, then, is the upside of that AIA survey. Yes, conventional building and object design, along with their attendant jobs, are going away. That’s a good thing in terms of environmental solutions. Turns out it’s also a good thing for architects and designers, as well as the world at large, in that their abilities can provide a much-needed service as we all search for and develop those solutions.

A post in The Atlantic Cities about the AIA survey asks: “Where are all the out-of-work architects going? Possibly to jobs in real estate and city government. And that could be good news for everyone.” In past recessions, architects, especially recent grads, have often found their careers re-routed. Coincidentally, a few years back, the AIA embarked on an initiative to encourage architects to run for public office, observing “architects learn creative problem solving and other skills that can make them effective community leaders.” The emphasis there is on architects’ strengths in listening and consensus building. Fair enough and important enough, but the potential goes beyond that I think, to employing those multidisciplinary, generalist skills mentioned above into a – and I use the word hesitantly – holistic synthesis.

So designers have both an opportunity and a responsibility to redirect their talents. For reasons of both necessity and choice, we designers need to apply ourselves to developing and communicating our constructed futures. We need the work, and it’s good work to be doing.