Science...

                Science is cool.  Technology too.  There are some incredible new developments going on in the world, and a lot of them are really awesome.  I love being amazed and surprised and just giggly happy to see the innovative new things that are going on in the world.  The things that get me the most excited are projects about clean energy and clean water, transportation systems, urban and parks planning, new building technologies, space travel, and oh so much more.  Human innovation is awesome. 

                Human intervention blocking innovation is just obnoxious.  I know change is hard, and we’re all set in our ways.  But certain things need to change in order to stay healthy.  You can’t sit in the same position for an entire day, you’ll end up with blood clots in your legs, just like all the truck drivers with deep vein thrombosis.  Change is necessary, just like occasional movement is also necessary.

                Some things seem to be harder to change than others.  Some things have even tried to change, only to be blocked and turned back, and then eventually completely forgotten about.  Like high speed rail.  In some cases all rail has been stopped.  What’s so scary about trains?  Five or ten years ago everyone was talking about setting up high speed rail lines.  California was going to create a zero-emissions line from San Fran to LA, an electric powered rail that was connected to its own wind farm.  Zero impact on the grid, entirely clean and green.  And it dried up like the rest of the projects around the country when the money ran out.  No one has mentioned high speed rail in years.

                Sometimes things are hard to change because it’s just not possible for science to do what we want it to.  Damn science.  Sometimes science is awesome – like here: 

A Dream of Trees Aglow at Night - in the world where scientists are bored, and they decided to try to make trees glow to combat boredom.  And street lights.

                And whats the problem here?  That people are scared of genetic engineering.  I’m sorry, but I think a tree with jellyfish genes is pretty freakin’ amazing.  I’ve always been fascinated by bio-luminescence, but it mostly occurs underwater and in random bacteria.  If it’s possible to put it in our trees?  As long as this doesn’t have some other nasty side-effect we aren’t even thinking of, just imagine how beautiful it could be.  I know I’ve driven down the dark roads of Vermont, entirely unlit by street lights, scared out of my mind because I can’t see anything outside the glow of my own headlights.  Glowing trees would have changed everything on that night-time drive.  I would actually like driving at night.

                Science should be used to make the world a better, prettier, more efficient place.  If we can save the energy and the materials from street lights, and use trees instead?  I say go for it, genetic engineering isn't that scary.  Its a useful tool, and we shouldn't let our ignorance preclude the use and creation of something useful.  And awesome.

A little slice of outside

                I work in non-profit, currently for one of the larger non-profits dedicated to environmentalism, energy efficiency and sustainability in NYC.  And yet for the past year+ I’ve been in a 15x15 room with 3 other people, concrete block walls, fluorescent lighting, carpet my boss thinks is growing mold, and nothing else.  No window.  OK we had an air conditioner, but we needed a space heater during the winter, and the room gets so stuffy that we were running the air conditioner on 70 degree days.  Last summer the company participated in an energy challenge with 3 other companies, calculating energy usage and then challenging the employees to work towards reducing our energy load.  Thankfully there were no electric meters hooked up in our little dungeon hole, because with the constant air conditioning and the lack of natural light there was no way we would be helping our company win.  Somehow though, the rest of the office did manage to pull out a win.  Meanwhile we were languishing in our hole, not missing the irony of an environmental org locking us in a dark dank dungeon.

                Last month, the most amazing thing happened, and one of the senior people in the office asked if there was anything that could be done to improve our space?  She was thinking a coat of paint, a plant (that was only going to die) or who knows what else.  What easy fix could there be?  So with nothing to lose we jokingly asked for a window.  We have an exterior wall, it just happens to be a solid wall of cmu’s, not something you can idly cut through in an afternoon.  And yet behold the new sight!  Because apparently yes, an organization that specializes in retrofits of buildings to increase energy efficiency, that replaces windows regularly, can in fact cut a hole in a concrete block wall.  We left one Friday, after having moved some furniture around, and when we returned on Monday there was a window!

                Fresh air, natural light, and a view of… the amazing BQE!  Ok, not the best site, lots of traffic noise, and there’s probably some fumes getting in through the window, but at least now we have a little slice of the outside world.  Our dungeon is no longer dark and dank.  Now its bright and dank!

                The point is that now we’re happier.  It’s a primal thing, a psychological thing.  It may not be the best view (in fact we can see a rooftop bar from our window, which may make working afternoons and evenings this summer even more difficult than before the window), but it’s a window.  It’s a little slice of the environment, of the natural world.  And that’s important.  It’s important to have that connection, to feel fresh air and be able to hear the rain fall, and see the sunshine (not much sunshine, it’s a north facing window), and to have some notion of the natural world.  We need to protect this, because the post-apocalyptic future described by Philip K Dick and Isaac Asimov and probably tons of others, where there is no outside, and all of society is trapped in these indoor mega cities does not sound like a happy thing.  I don’t want the environment to degrade to such a state that the air is pure nitrogen, or sulfur, or carbon dioxide, or some combination of other chemicals that we can’t breathe, that plants can’t live in, that the whole planet shrivels up and dies.  I don’t want acid rain to be normal.  I want to be able to cut a hole in my wall, make a window and be happy about what I see outside!

                That’s the extreme, mega cities with no possibility of ever going outside, or seeing the outside.  But the extreme sometimes happens.  Close your eyes, and wish away all the bad stuff… and you stop paying attention long enough to stop the bad stuff.  Now is the time to open your eyes, bust a hole in the wall so you can finally see outside, and make a difference.

Styrofoam...

There has been a big effort in recent years to reduce the amount of Styrofoam produced, used, and thus turned into a waste product, but it’s still out there.  I had an environmental policy professor in Grad School that was admittedly a little crazy, but she was passionate about her work, and about the health of her family, her students, and herself.  She also really liked to tell random anecdotal stories in the middle of class, and had explained repeatedly that she refuses to use Styrofoam.  Styrofoam leaches VOC’s when heated, so if you buy a cup of coffee and it’s poured into a Styrofoam cup you’re drinking some nasty chemicals.  Not in high doses mind you, but it was enough to make this one professor return food items after they had been made because they were packaged in Styrofoam.  I wish I knew how frequently she was forced to turn down a cup of coffee the guy behind the counter at a bodega had just served her because it was in a Styrofoam cup.  I also wonder how many bodega workers she pissed off, how many coffee carts she had to stop visiting because of her crazy anti-styrofoam demands.

                But, was she crazy?  To avoid Styrofoam at all costs?  Or was she the wave of the future?  Granted, Styrofoam is not as prevalent as it used to be.  Maybe this is all the work of one environmental lawyer/graduate policy professor.  Or maybe public policy in favor of environmental quality is actually starting to work.  All that matters is that there is still Styrofoam in our world, and thus there is still Styrofoam ending up in our landfills.  If we can’t get everyone to turn down a cup of coffee or a platter of jerk chicken just because it’s served in Styrofoam, then we still need to figure out what to do with all that polystyrene waste.  And this is where all the awesome innovative scientists and bored high-school students looking for a science fair project come in. 

                Packing peanuts.  The bane of my father’s existence.  He hates them.  As a kid I always thought they were awesome.  The made a mess everywhere, floated like giant snowflakes, stuck to your arm when you went digging around in a box, and weighed absolutely nothing.  This stuff was magical.  Now, packing peanuts are evil, and if someone sends me a package full of packing peanuts its rude, annoying to clean up, and environmentally irresponsible (and ok, just 3 hours after writing this I found a package from a friend on my doorstep… and it was full of packing peanuts.  But when packing peanuts protect homemade chocolates… sometimes exceptions can be made).  So what do we do with all those peanuts? 

There are a few options, and here are some of the more interesting ones.  If you throw some packing peanuts into a fuel tank full of biodiesel, it just might make your engine run better! (http://earth911.com/news/2009/05/07/styrofoam-to-power-biodiesel-engines/) (http://www.fastcompany.com/1277458/dissolving-styrofoam-biodiesel-makes-better-fuel) And NYC has even been talking lately about banning Styrofoam, so maybe my crazy professor wasn’t crazy, just at the forefront of a new world.  (http://www.wasterecyclingnews.com/article/20130206/NEWS08/130209948/new-york-city-weighs-styrofoam-ban)

And finally, if you can’t beat them, join them – but finally in a good way.  If we can’t get rid of Styrofoam, maybe we can at least throw it out and keep a clean conscious, but only if its biodegradeable when we throw it out - http://dramarnathgiri.blogspot.com/2012/10/bacteria-that-effectively-transform.html. 

The best idea might just be to find something other than Styrofoam and packing peanuts to cushion homemade chocolates and keep our coffee warm, but change always takes time.  And change that means moving the mountain that is the free market takes even longer.  I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to create a product that we can’t throw out without sending it through an additional process – just seems like a waste of energy, and the point of the sustainable urban machine is that the decisions we make, and the energy we expend is not extraneous, and is not supporting dirty or wasteful technologies.  And Styrofoam is a mess. For now, make your own decisions, but know that there are things you can do with your waste Styrofoam.  And dream with me a little dream about the day that Styrofoam is no more.

It's time to become a part of the Machine...

It was French Architect Le Corbusier that first talked about living spaces and machines.  Designing primarily in the first half of the 20^th century up until his death in 1965, his goal was to define and design a house as a machine for living.  His theories and practices looked at the metaphor of the machine and the home, examining the possibility of creating spaces that are primal in their perfection.  Additional changes by the owner or inhabitant are not necessary.  Extra ‘stuff’ is not necessary.  There is a sweet perfection to minimalist functionality, and that is what he created.  Not a superfluous line or object, but not boring and empty either. 

Mother Nature is very similar in her perfection.  No unnecessary effort is expended in creating the beauty of a forest, in maintaining the vibrant life in the oceans.  The planet, our environment and the various ecosystems that span the globe is each its own living, green machine.  They each function perfectly well without us, and if humans had never started working to adjust the ecosystems around us, they would have continued to function without us for millennia.  Many things would have changed over time, just as life always changes.  But life would have been sustained, in one form or another.

Instead humanity stepped in and decided Mother Nature’s efforts were nice, but they could be improved upon.  (Thanks, but I think I can do it better.)  Even the Native Americans changed the world around them by altering forests, encouraging growth of plants for harvest without actually setting up farms and cultivating things.  The ecosystem changed because of their involvement and encouragement.

Today we are faced with the question – are we a burden on the environment around us?  Or is there a way for humanity to become an integral part of the green machine that is Earth?  Up to this point we have bulldozed forests, leveled hills and mountains, filled in rivers, dammed others to create lakes, and basically changed everything we thought we could if it would somehow make our lives easier.  And clearly it has.  Humans are by far the most dominant species on the planet.  This earth is no longer Mother Nature’s playground, it’s now ours to do with as we please, and it has been for some time.  We’ve changed what we wanted, and we’re still going.  We’ve created buildings, paved roads, invented cars trains and airplanes, developed CFC’s and then removed them from production, designed pesticides and Genetically Modified Organisms and then debated their health and safety.  We’ve discovered oil and its uses; worried it was running out then developed ways of going deeper, getting more oil out of the ground.

Technologically we’ve come a long way since the days that London was covered in three inches of soot from factories, oil was a common fuel for lighting our homes, and most people actually believed that frogs were mystically created by heavy rain.  And yet a lot of what we do is very similar to how we lived back then.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/00/Transistor_Count_and_Moore%27s_Law_-_2011.svg/667px-Transistor_Count_and_Moore%27s_Law_-_2011.svg.png

Moore’s law states that the processing power of a computer doubles every two years.  That’s an exponential change over time.  And computers have been following that expected growth.  But much of our other technology hasn’t changed and advanced in a similar fashion.  The first gas powered car was built in 1885 by Karl Friedrich Benz (yes, of Mercedes Benz), and quite a lot has changed between then and now.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&docid=y14HzwErC2_H1M&tbnid=KEdosbFqrZNdDM:&ved=0CAgQjRwwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fvisitkokomo.wordpress.com%2Ftag%2Felwood-haynes-museum%2F&ei=TR14UfK4H9a24APF8IDQAQ&psig=AFQjCNEtAoQt4y96d9FOiw3XUG4OX0EiPQ&ust=1366912717549222

But we’re still using the same polluting, finite resource as a fuel source. It’s been 128 years since the automobile has been introduced to the world.  The first patent for the telephone was awarded to Thomas Edison in 1876, only nine years earlier, and today there is very little about how the telecommunications systems work today that is anything like the manual switchboards of the past.

Why is it that after over a century and a quarter we are still dependent on the fossil fuels that are destroying the environment?  Global climate change and poor air quality can’t be the changes that we wanted to make to the environment around us.  These things are simply the bi-products of the changes we did want to make.  It seems that in the modern world we have been left with a lot of the bi-products of development and technological advancement, but we have few developments and technological advancements to help abate the effects of those bi-products.  Or maybe we have them (like electric or hybrid vehicles, wind, solar and hydro power) but we don’t have the incentives or the policies to make these the normal practice.

One day we will find ourselves at a tipping point.  Maybe we already have.  Peak oil may not have occurred (yet) and we may not be able to predict when it will, but eventually there will not be any more oil to be found under the earth’s crust.  It will not be a matter of drilling deeper, sifting through tar sands, or identifying new oil fields.  The oil we have took millions of years to create, and we don’t have the luxury of waiting around for another 500 million years for the earth’s heat and pressure to make more, if that’s even possible.  And once the oil is gone… what does that leave us with?  An infrastructure system that simply isn’t equipped to turn overnight from fossil fuel based to renewables.  Cars, trains, planes, all necessary for the global economy that we have become accustomed to and no possibility of continuing that on bio-diesel and solar powered cars.  Not unless we start to make those changes now.  Prepare for the inevitable or it will blindside you.

Seriously, what other choice do we have?

Introduction to the Sustainable Urban Machine

Our planet is a massively complex system, with millions of different ecological typologies spread from one end to the other. Remarkably, they have all managed to work together and sustain life for over 4.5 billion years . Our existence as humans has only been for a fraction of that time, a mere 160,000 years , which is only .00035% of the planet's life span to date. During that time we have had an immeasurable impact on the earth. Until recently, there has been no thought as to how our own existence is a part of the earth's ecological system, but this is becoming more and more difficult to ignore the cause and effect of our existence.

The entire planet is made up of each of those distinct ecologies working together, as a complex machine of life and death, evolution and mutation, weather patterns, currents, night and day, creation and destruction. As the first species to have the knowledge and capability to change our environment on an industrial scale, we have added another system without perhaps even realizing it, and certainly without planning out an end result. At the start of the industrial revolution, there was no idea of sustainability, which simply put is making sure that the impacts you create are not felt generations down the road. If you use a resource, you do not deplete it, but replenish it, leaving it there for use tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that.

We are now at a crossroads in our existence. We can continue down the path we have paved for ourselves, ignoring the cries of nature, ignoring the need to maintain the delicate balance that is the planet-wide ecology. We need to work towards being a part of the system, rather than work against it. We need to restructure the way we live our lives, and feed off the environment. We need to become a part of the ecological machine, a fully functioning gear in the works, rather than the misshapen gear that needs constant attention, and drains the resources and efficiency of the rest of the machine. Until now, humanity has been a parasite on the planet. It is time to work together, in symbiosis. It is time to create the sustainable urban machine.

What is “sustainable”? Why do we care?

Sustainability is a funny term these days. That word, along with “green”, is being tossed around on a lot of products and advertisements, in architecture, design and urban planning classrooms and conferences, in government offices and official speeches, on bills and laws, legal decisions, etc. The word is getting used so much, and with little definition or backing behind it until the concept itself is beginning to get lost. Advertisers talk about green and sustainable products, but what are they referring to? Our nation’s president discusses a growth of the green industry, but what does he define as “green”? Webster’s defines sustainability as:

1. the ability to be sustained, supported, upheld, or confirmed.
2. Environmental Science: the quality of not being harmful to the environment or depleting natural resources, and thereby supporting long-term ecological balance

The second item refers directly to the environment, but only so far as things not being harmful to the environment or depleting natural resources. There are certainly things that modern society is doing that don’t directly affect the sustainability of the environment, while still being harmful. The popular understanding of sustainability needs to encompass not just an environmental preservationist ideal, but needs to understand the full cycle of the impact of our actions. We can’t continue to produce items for waste, without considering the impact of that item from cradle to grave.

Sustainability is not a new idea, though most might find it to be so. In fact Thomas Jefferson defined sustainability in a letter to James Madison in September, 1789:

I say, the earth belongs to each of these generations during its course, fully and in its own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts and encumbrances of the first, the third of the second, and so on. For if the first could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation. Then, no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.

In order to achieve this, we must move beyond hybrid cars, recycled plastic bottles and low flow toilets. If we don’t move in this direction there will be a limited time left for the health of this planet, and the people that rely on it. Maintaining a balance and an understanding with the environment of this planet is important for the perpetuation of our species. We are reaching a tipping point for the environment, and this blog will detail arguments for the sustainable urban machine, and how best we can go about achieving it.


Sources:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3814-dawn-of-human-race-uncovered.html
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sustainability
http://kitchengardeners.org/thomas-jefferson-sustainability

Image credit:

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2011-02/21/c_13742134.htm