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 20th 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.
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?
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