DESIGN MIAMI 2011
TOKYO DESIGN WEEK 2011
DUTCH DESIGN WEEK 2011
VIENNA DESIGN WEEK 2011If you got a kick out of the current Wired Magazine's cover story on Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green, and wondered what the greener-types thought of it, well, the editors were good enough to give Alex Steffen a rebuttal right in the book itself.
Ah, but there's more. Here's Alex on yesterday's Worldchanging:
The discussions we see today -- whether we're talking energy sources, farming practices or fashion choices -- are not even the right kind of debate. Unable to mentally grapple with the idea that we need to be aiming for total sustainability right now, we talk to death the same series of inadequate baby steps. Faced with the need to reinvent the material basis of our civilization, we argue paper or plastic.If you want truly dangerous bright green ideas, go way out beyond what the conventional wisdom thinks is possible. The conventional wisdom's sense of the possible is irrelevant to reality; it's being melted by climate change and planetary crisis faster than an Alpine glacier. Think, instead, of the implications of ideas like zero energy, zero emissions, zero waste, closed loops, true-cost accounting for the value of ecological services, product-service systems, visible flows, totally transparent backstories, open innovation, green infrastructure, etc. These concepts are really weird, full of new insights and critical uncertainties -- and they, or ideas like them, are very quickly going to become the operating principles of our entire society. If we want to avoid a catastrophic collision with ecological reality, we need to change our thinking.
Our ideas of what's normal, or even what's possible, will not outlast the next decade. Unfortunately, Wired's list of heresies is a list of normal, contemporary approaches (nukes, tree plantations, factory farming, living in the Sunbelt suburbs) and current environmental commonplaces (cities are good, China can be green, carbon trading needs reform) packaged in a way designed to shock and titillate.
What would have been far, far more heretical is to do for planetary sustainability issues what the first issues of Wired tried to do for information technologies: explain why the whole current debate was stale and out-of-touch, and attempt to illuminate a new way of thinking that to the folks back home seemed unfathomable, often crazy, but which turned out to be more right than wrong -- to predict the present in a way that changes our understanding of the world in which we live. There is an emerging culture of real, bright green hand-waving brilliant heretics out there, and the reading public deserves to know what they think.
Comments
As soon as I can lock down that fertile plain of 500 acres, I'll start farming organic sheep, and foraging for mushrooms....WTF! Zero energy, zero waste, closed loop...my gastro-intestinal track doesn't even accomplish that!
Lots or rehash here, and typically they dodge the real solution...population control
zippy hits it on the nose.
population control is not what is needed... we need better limitations of resources. it's something like the avr. US resident uses 17 times more of earth's resources than someone from India?