All posts by Garry Peterson

Prof. of Environmental science at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University in Sweden.
Design, General

Why green building has spread

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The built environment is a major part of humanity’s ecological footprint. The design of buildings, the materials they use, their interaction with their environments, and how they shape human behaviour have substantial impacts on urban ecology. The growth of the human population (7-11 billion by 2050) and the reduction of household size (fewer people per house) combine to suggest that people will need to build a huge number of new buildings (perhaps the same number as those already built) to house humanity in the coming decades. In this context the spread of green building has the potential to have a major impact on humanity’s ecological footprint.

The Harvard Business Review (June 2006) article Building the Green Way explains why green building practices have entered the mainstream. This article is interesting both for its location, and that it speculates on why green building has entered the mainstream. Hopefully, other green design and consumption approaches can learn from the normalizing of green building.

In June 2005, mayors from 50 large cities around the world met at the United Nations World Environment Day conference in San Francisco and signed the Urban Environmental Accords, which set out 21 sustainable-living actions for each city to complete by 2012. As part of the accords, the mayors pledged to mandate green rating standards for all new municipal buildings in their respective cities.

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Before 2000, companies generally regarded green buildings as interesting experiments but unfeasible projects in the real business world. Since then, several factors have caused a major shift in thinking.

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General

Inequality Dynamics in USA

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The Economist (15/06/06) has a special report on income inequality in the USA. They describe trends and a little about hypothesized drivers of these trends, but little about the consquences. They write:

Americans do not go in for envy. The gap between rich and poor is bigger than in any other advanced country, but most people are unconcerned. Whereas Europeans fret about the way the economic pie is divided, Americans want to join the rich, not soak them. Eight out of ten, more than anywhere else, believe that though you may start poor, if you work hard, you can make pots of money. It is a central part of the American Dream.

The political consensus, therefore, has sought to pursue economic growth rather than the redistribution of income, in keeping with John Kennedy’s adage that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” The tide has been rising fast recently. Thanks to a jump in productivity growth after 1995, America’s economy has outpaced other rich countries’ for a decade. Its workers now produce over 30% more each hour they work than ten years ago. In the late 1990s everybody shared in this boom. Though incomes were rising fastest at the top, all workers’ wages far outpaced inflation.

But after 2000 something changed. The pace of productivity growth has been rising again, but now it seems to be lifting fewer boats. After you adjust for inflation, the wages of the typical American worker—the one at the very middle of the income distribution—have risen less than 1% since 2000. In the previous five years, they rose over 6%. If you take into account the value of employee benefits, such as health care, the contrast is a little less stark. But, whatever the measure, it seems clear that only the most skilled workers have seen their pay packets swell much in the current economic expansion. The fruits of productivity gains have been skewed towards the highest earners, and towards companies, whose profits have reached record levels as a share of GDP

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Several new studies show parental income to be a better predictor of whether someone will be rich or poor in America than in Canada or much of Europe. In America about half of the income disparities in one generation are reflected in the next. In Canada and the Nordic countries that proportion is about a fifth.

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According to Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Thomas Piketty of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, the share of aggregate income going to the highest-earning 1% of Americans has doubled from 8% in 1980 to over 16% in 2004. That going to the top tenth of 1% has tripled from 2% in 1980 to 7% today. And that going to the top one-hundredth of 1%—the 14,000 taxpayers at the very top of the income ladder—has quadrupled from 0.65% in 1980 to 2.87% in 2004.

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But the scale of America’s income concentration at the top, and the fact that no other country has seen such extreme shifts, has sent people searching for other causes. The typical American chief executive now earns 300 times the average wage, up tenfold from the 1970s. Continental Europe’s bosses have seen nothing similar. This discrepancy has fostered the “fat cat” theory of inequality: greedy businessmen sanction huge salaries for each other at the expense of shareholders.

Whichever explanation you choose for the signs of growing inequality, none of the changes seems transitory. The middle rungs of America’s labour market are likely to become ever more squeezed. And that squeeze feels worse thanks to another change that has hit the middle class most: greater fluctuations in people’s incomes.

General, Visualization

Visualizing Global Urbanisation

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Urban Growth RatesThe BBC website has a visualization of the growth of global cities showing the growth of cities of more than 5 million people as part of their coverage of the World Urban Forum.

The coverage includes other interesting articles, such as a multimedia profile of a few of the million people who live in the slum of Dharavi in downtown Bombay, and Finding green in the concrete jungle, a look at how air pollution in cities compares in rural areas.

Fuel use, intimately connected to urban pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, demonstrates exquisitely the problems in trying to compare the ecological footprint of the rural and urban dweller.

In 2002, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) focused much of its Human Development Report on China.

“Rural residents consume less than 40% of the commercial energy used by their urban counterparts,” it concluded.

Tokyo skyline

Tokyo’s population and economy have grown while air quality decreased.

“However, if biomass [principally wood-burning] is included, the average person in the countryside uses nearly one-third more energy than a city dweller.”

So the rural resident apparently contributes more to global climate change than the urban citizen – but the equation hinges on how the energy is produced.

If “commercial energy” used in cities – principally electricity – is derived from renewable sources or nuclear stations, the urban dweller wins the eco-prize hands down. But if the rural citizen burns nothing but trees and always replaces them, he or she becomes “carbon neutral” and scoops the award.

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In London and Tokyo, air quality has improved over the last 50 years. In Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur, it has gone down, though there are signs of improvement elsewhere in the developing world.

“It has happened in Delhi, for example, where there has been a huge improvement in air quality by substituting liquefied petroleum gas [LPG] for diesel in vehicles,” observes John Harrington.

“Partly it is just that as cities become richer they can clean their act up, but it’s also how vocal the middle classes become, which in India counts in a way it doesn’t yet in China.

The coverage also includes less interesting articles. One disappointingly boring, and strikingly disconnected from the other articles is a collection of perspectives on the urban world in 2050 from urbanization experts. Their views of 2050 seem to more represent cities today, rather than a global view of what cities could become.

Tools

Urban ecology & the World Urban Forum – Urban Solutions

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Vancouver-WUFPrior to the WUF meeting in Vancouver, UN-HABITAT organized a global internet discussion – Habitat Jam – on urban problems to bring ideas from the public to those preparing for WUF3. According to the organizers, slum dwellers in poor countries were most active in this online forum. Following the discussion organizers collated the ideas to produce a workbook (pdf) and a website. Below are some of the “70 actionable ideas” that emerged from the discussion (and links to more details):

Idea: 4.3 Building Community Resiliency
Community resilience can be built using participatory tools that enable community members to map their own hazards and risks and mobilize critical resources to respond to those risks.

Natural disasters are occurring with increased frequency and their financial, social and environmental impacts are rising exponentially. The increased risk of disaster poses challenges to local authorities and their citizens. Community members are the first respondents in emergencies and it is their capacity to cope with impacts of disasters that often determines the risk to life and property. Simple knowledge of “Dos” and “Don’ts” before and after disasters can help improve community response. Post-disaster rehabilitation by rebuilding and reconstruction is not enough to build resiliency.
Idea: 5.3 Cities as Ecosystems
Local governments are figuring out how to treat the natural and built environment, and the humans that interact with it, as one interconnected “city ecosystem”.

Cities are organisms, consuming resources and discharging wastes at ever higher rates as their populations explode.Treating the city as an ecosystem recognizes natural limits. BedZED in the UK, Durban,South Africa and Auroville,India are examples of an approach that treats a city as a part of, rather than apart from, the natural world.

The ‘city as ecosystem’ research was started by UNEP, codified in the Melbourne Principles and the Cities As Sustainable Ecosystems (CASE) approach. CASE is the multidisciplinary study of urban and economic systems and their linkages with natural systems. It focuses on multiple spatial and temporal scales; emphasizes the systems approach; and takes account of techniques such as the ecological footprint, human ecosystem framework, urban metabolism and ecosystem services focus.

Idea: 1.4 Urban Agriculture – A Poverty Reduction Strategy
In poor communities and informal settlements, city councils can promote urban agriculture as a means to fight malnutrition and hunger, enhance the environment and create jobs.

Although growing food in cities is an ancient practice,itskey role in reducing poverty is gaining recognition today. In Kampala, Uganda, the city council, NGOs, research groups,national and international agencies joined forces in a unique collaborative process to legitimize and safeguard growing food and keeping livestock in the city. Kampala’s set of supportive bylaws governing urban agriculture is a model for other cities grappling with this contentious issue. Now the Ugandan government is adopting a national urban agriculture policy.

Idea: 1.11 Ecological Sanitation: Public Toilets in Slums
Sanitation for people living in slums is a criticalproblem. Ecosan toilets, a system using source separation, not only provides sanitation services at low cost to poor inhabitants, it also recovers waste for reuse in agriculture.

The concept behind ecological sanitation (ecosan) is that sanitation problems could be solved more sustainably and efficiently if the resources contained in excretaand wastewater were recovered and used rather than discharged into water bodies and the surrounding environment. The sanitary systems that are used today are based on modern misconception that human excreta are simply wastes with no useful purpose and must be disposed of. Ideally, ecological sanitation systems enable a complete recovery of nutrients in household wastewater and their reuse in agriculture. In this way, they help preserve soil fertility and safeguard long-term food security, whilst minimizing the consumption and pollution of water resources.

Idea: 6.5 Attractive, Affordable Transit
The TransMilenio Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) System in Bogotá, Colombia provides equitable, clean and efficient transportation and has transformed the city from a place designed for cars to one designed for people.

In Bogotá, people happily choose to take the bus knowing their trip will be cheaper, faster, safer and cleaner than taking the same trip by car. The TransMilenio bus rapid transit system is a low-cost network of high efficiency buses that makes public transport the choice of the people. Cutting car use reduces energy consumption and air pollution,and makes cities more livable.

Scenarios, Tools

Reporting Futures

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Jamais Cascio, co-founder of WorldChanging, has an good post on his weblog Open the Future on what journalists need to know to report on studies of the future.

1. Nobody can predict the future. This should go without saying, but too often, reports about trends or emerging science and technology tell us what will happen instead of what could happen. In fact, most futurists and foresight consultants will avoid making any predictive claims, and you should take them at their word; any futurist who tells you that something is inevitable probably has something to sell.

2. Not everyone is surprised by surprises. The corollary to #1, be on the lookout for people who saw early indicators of surprises before they happened. Just like an “overnight success” worked for years to get there, the vast majority of wildcards and “bolt from the blue” changes have been on someone’s foresight radar for quite awhile. When something happens that “nobody expected,” look for the people who actually did expect it — chances are, they’ll be able to tell you quite a bit about why and how it took place.

3. Even when it’s fast, change feels slow. It’s tempting to assume that, because a possible change would make the world a decade from now very different from the world today, that the people ten years hence will feel “shocked” or “overwhelmed.” In reality, the people living in our future are living in their own present. That is, they weren’t thrust from today to the future in one leap, they lived through the increments and dead-ends and passing surprises. Their present will feel normal to them, just as our present feels normal to us. Be skeptical of claims of imminent future shock.

4. Most trends die out. Just because something is popular or ubiquitous today doesn’t mean it will be so in a few years. Be cautious about pronouncements that a given fashion or gadget is here to stay. There’s every chance that it will be overtaken by something new all too soon — and this includes trends and technologies that have had some staying power.

5. The future is usually the present, only moreso. Conversely, don’t expect changes to happen quickly and universally. The details will vary, but most of the time, the underlying behaviors and practices will remain consistent. Most people (in the US, at least) watch TV, drive a car, and go to work — even if the TV is high definition satellite, the car is a hybrid, and work is web programming.

6. There are always options. We may not like the choices we have, but the future is not written in stone. Don’t let a futurist get away with solemn pronouncements of doom without pressing for ways to avoid disaster, or get away with enthusiastic claims of nirvana without asking about what might prevent it from happening.

7. Dinosaurs lived for over 200 million years. A favorite pundit cliche is the “dinosaurs vs. mammals” comparison, where dinosaurs are big, lumbering and doomed, while mammals are small, clever and poised for success. In reality, dinosaurs ruled the world for much, much longer than have mammals, and even managed to survive a planetary disaster by evolving into birds. When a futurist uses the dinosaurs/mammals cliche, that’s your sign to investigate why the “dinosaur” company/ organization/ institution may have far greater resources and flexibility than you’re being led to believe.

8. Gadgets are not futurism.Don’t get too enamored of “technology” as the sole driver of change. What’s important is how we use technology to engage in other (social, political, cultural, economic) activities. Don’t be hypnotized by blinking lights and shiny displays — ask why people would want it and what they’d do with it.

9. “Sports scores and stock quotes” was 1990s futurist-ese for “I have no idea;” “social networking and tagging” looks to be the 2000s version. Technology developers, industry analysts and foresight consultants rarely want to tell you that they don’t know how or why a new invention will be used. As a result, they’ll often fall back on claims about utility that are easily understood, familiar to the journalist, and almost certainly wrong.

10. “Technology” is anything invented since you turned 13. What seems weird and confusing will become familiar and obvious, especially to people who grow up with it. This means that, very often, the real utility of a new technology won’t emerge for a few years after it’s introduced, once people get used to its existence, and it stops being thought of as a “new technology.” Those real uses will often surprise — and sometimes upset — the creators of the technology.

11. The future belongs to the curious. If you want to find out why a new development is important, don’t just ask the people who brought it about; their agenda is to emphasize the benefits and ignore the drawbacks. Don’t just ask their competitors; their agenda is the opposite. Always ask the hackers, the people who love to take things apart and figure out how they work, love to figure out better ways of using a system, love to look for how to make new things fit together in unexpected ways.

12. “The future is process, not a destination.” — Bruce Sterling The future is not the end of the story — people won’t reach the “future” and declare victory. Ten years from now has its own ten years out, and so on; people of tomorrow will be looking at their own tomorrows. The picture of the future offered by foresight consultants, scenario planners, and futurists of all stripes should never be a snapshot, but a frame from a movie, with connections to the present and pathways to the days and years to come.

When talking with a futurist, then, don’t just ask what could happen. The right question is always “…and what happens then?”

Bruce Sterling follows up in the comments with his revisions:

1. The future belongs to the open-minded. If you want to find out why a new development is important, don’t just ask the people who brought it about; their agenda is to emphasize the benefits and ignore the drawbacks. Don’t just ask their competitors (((social opponents))); their agenda is the opposite. Always ask the hackers (((academics, regulators))), the people who love to take things apart and figure out how they work, love to figure out better ways of using a system, love to look for how to make new things fit together in unexpected ways.

2. Not everyone is surprised by surprises. Be on the lookout for the people who saw (((and published))) early indicators of surprises before they happened. Just like an “overnight success” worked for years to get there, the vast majority of wildcards and “bolt from the blue” changes have been on someone’s foresight radar for quite awhile. When something happens that “nobody expected,” look for the people who actually did expect it — they didn’t “predict the future,” because that’s impossible, but they will be able to tell you many useful and cogent things about why and how it took place.

3. The future is usually the present, only more so. The details will vary, but most of the time, the underlying behaviors and practices will remain consistent. Most people (in the US, at least) watch TV, drive a car, and go to work — even if the TV is high definition satellite, the car is a hybrid, and work is web programming.

4. There will always be avant-gardes and backwaters. Important changes can’t happen quickly and universally. Any important social change will create at least some reactionary counterforce.

5. There are always options. We may not like the choices we (((seem to have now, but new situations create new choices.))) The future is not written in stone. Don’t let a futurist get away with solemn pronouncements of doom without pressing for ways to avoid disaster, or get away with enthusiastic claims of nirvana without asking (((what people would do next after utopia arrives.)))

6. “Technology” is anything invented since you turned 13. What seems weird and confusing will become familiar and obvious, especially to people who grow up with it. (((The most important technologies are the huge, old, taken-for-granted technologies already massively integrated into everyday life.))) The real utility of a new technology won’t emerge for a few years after it’s introduced, once people get used to its existence, and it stops being thought of as a “new technology.” Those real uses will often surprise — and sometimes upset — the creators of the technology.

7. Even when it’s fast, change feels slow. It’s tempting to assume that, because a possible change would make the world a decade from now very different from the world today, that the people ten years hence will feel “shocked” or “overwhelmed.” In reality, the people living in our future are living in their own present. That is, they weren’t thrust from today to the future in one leap, they lived through the increments and dead-ends and passing surprises. Their present will feel normal to them, just as our present feels normal to us. Be skeptical of claims of imminent future shock.

8. Gadgets are not futurism. Don’t be hypnotized by blinking lights and shiny displays just because they make such good copy. (((Ask the full set of journalistic questions of a gizmo: who, what, when, where, how, why? Why would people would want such a thing? Which people, which demographic? What do they plan to do with it? What’s the killer application? Where’s the revenue stream? What’s the track record of the people introducing this innovation? Does it do anything genuinely novel?)))

9. Most trends die out. (((No tree grows to the sky.))) Just because some trend is (((sexy))) today doesn’t mean it will stay sexy in a few years. Be cautious about pronouncements that a given fashion or gadget is here to stay. There’s every chance that it will be overtaken by something new all too soon — and this includes trends and technologies that have had some staying power.

10. “The future is a process, not a destination.” — Bruce Sterling The future is not the end of the story — people won’t reach the “future” and declare victory. Ten years from now has its own ten years out, and so on; people of tomorrow will be looking at their own tomorrows. The picture of the future offered by foresight consultants, scenario planners, and futurists of all stripes should never be a snapshot, but a frame from a movie, with connections to the present and pathways to the days and years to come.

Ideas, Reorganization

Urban ecology & the World Urban Forum – universities as catalysts of innovation

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Michael M’Gonigle is co-author of Planet U: Sustaining the World, Reinventing the University, has an article in the Toronto Star How universities can help Canada’s troubled cities.  He writes that universities can help cities solve their problems and help build sustainable liveable cities:

The idea of many such cities and regions co-operating directly, as well as globally, is intriguing. To help it happen, I have a strategy, too, one that involves an unlikely ally —one with massive and diverse expertise, potentially boundless youthful energy, a large land base, and lots of power, prestige and wealth

I’m referring, of course, to the university. The “higher education industry” is arguably the most important industry in the world. A recent study of the American industry (with 6,500 accredited colleges and universities) put its economic impact at $1.2 trillion per year. At any time, 20 million Americans either work for, or attend, an “institution of higher education.”

Of Canada’s total R&D, 35 per cent (or $9 billion worth) was done by universities. This investment sustains a million jobs, contributes more to the country’s GDP than pulp and paper, automobiles, or the arts, entertainment and recreation industries combined.

These locally situated colleges are also plugged into countless worldwide networks; they are truly a global intelligence. Indeed, with millions of university graduates staffing the high-tech firms and hospitals and manufacturers that make up today’s knowledge economy, the university is actually the mother of all industries.

Today, universities generate huge traffic problems and massive quantities of greenhouse gases. Yet, some now save millions of dollars by giving every student a free transit pass. Local demand for buses has shot up; the need to drive has dropped. Fifty American universities issue passes to more than 825,000 students and staff.

Now, instead of 50 colleges, imagine 5,000. And, looking beyond just the bus pass, think of all these campuses building only state-of-the-art “green buildings,” revitalizing local farming and food systems, shifting to renewable energy suppliers, and redirecting institutional investments into community enterprises. Where a university adopts a mandate of comprehensive local innovation, its potential is truly Earth-changing.

With this week’s gathering asking how we might create sustainable cities despite the intransigence of national governments and transnational corporations, we have an answer: Look to your own backyard.

Design, Vulnerability

Urban ecology & the World Urban Forum – Planet of Slums?

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In 1978 the first meeting of UN Habitat occurred in Vancouver. Thirty years later, Un Habitat’s World Urban Forum runs from June 19th-23rd 2006 in Vancouver. During the time between these meetings the world’s urban population has grown rapidly, in particular in developing countries. Both these trends can be seen in a last of the world’s biggest cities in 1975 and 2005.

Largest cities 1975 Population (Millions) Largest cities 2005 Population (Millions)
Tokyo, Japan 26.6 Tokyo, Japan 35.3
New York-Newark, USA 15.9 Mexico City, Mexico 19
Shanghai, China 11.4 New York-Newark, USA 18.5
Mexico City, Mexico 10.7 Mumbai, India 18.3
Osaka-Kobe, Japan 9.8 Sao Paulo, Brazil 18.3
Sao Paulo, Brazil 9.6 Delhi, India 15.3
Buenos Aires, Argentina 9.1 Calcutta, India 14.3
Los Angeles, USA 8.9 Buenos Aires, Argentina 13.3
Paris, France 8.6 Jakarta, Indonesia 13.2
Beijing, China 8.5 Shanghai, China 12.7

In 1975, 5 of the largest cities were in developing countries, in 2005, 80%. In 1978, about 1/3 of the world’s population lived in cities, today it is 2/3. Indeed most of the world’s net population growth in coming decades is expected to occur in developing world cities.

Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, Under-Secretary-General and executive director of UN-HABITAT, reviewing Mike Davis’ book Planet of Slums identifies the vulnerability of slums:

Slum dwellers are more vulnerable than most to hazards such as volcanos, floods, earthquakes, landslides, fires and road traffic accidents. Their health is constantly under threat from inadequate sanitation and low-quality drinking water. As Davis writes: “The most extreme health differentials are no longer between towns and countrysides, but between the urban middle classes and the urban poor.” This conclusion is echoed in the State of the World’s Cities report, which describes how the poor are forced to pay an “urban penalty” that encompasses poor health, early death and vulnerability to both natural and human-made disasters.

UN Habitat has released State of the World’s Cities Report 2006/7 (which annoyingly isn’t available on the web). From a BBC article Report reveals global slum crisis

Slum-dwellers who make up a third of the world’s urban population often live no better – if not worse – than rural people, a United Nations report says.

Worst hit is Sub-Saharan Africa where 72% of urban inhabitants live in slums rising to nearly 100% in some states.

Some states, the report notes, have already taken significant action to improve conditions, notably in Latin America where about 31% of urban people are classified as living in slums (figures for 2005) – down from 35% in 1990.

Of the urban population of South Asia, 57% live in slums though this is down on the 1990 figure of nearly 64%.

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A slum is defined by UN Habitat as a place of residence lacking one or more of five things: durable housing, sufficient living area, access to improved water, access to sanitation and secure tenure.

Slums have existed in what is now the developed world since the Industrial Revolution and 6% of its current urban population also fall under Habitat’s definition.

However, the growth in slums is unprecedented, Habitat finds, and the nature of the problem has also changed.

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Dr Tibaijuka told journalists that urbanisation in itself was not the problem as it drove both national output and rural development.

“History has shown that urbanisation cannot be reversed,” she continued.

“People move to the cities not because they will be better off but because they expect to be better off.”

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has a set of resources – Slum Cities – on the state of urbanization in the developing world, including articles on Bombay, Cairo, and an interview with Mike Davis, along with a good set of internet links. They are also have a variety of special coverage of WUF.

Ideas, New Orleans, Reorganization, Vulnerability

Rebuilding New Orleans: Don’t build on quicksand

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Down to Earth points to a Washington Post editorial (June 7th) that writes:

… the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers admitted responsibility for much of the destruction of New Orleans. … As the Corps’ own inquiry found, the agency committed numerous mistakes of design: Its network of pumps, walls and levees was “a system in name only”; it failed to take into account the gradual sinking of the local soil; it closed its ears when people pointed out these problems. The result was a national tragedy.

…the New Orleans disaster has illustrated the folly of building flood defenses for vulnerable low land: Some of the worst-hit areas would not have been developed in the first place if the Corps hadn’t decided to build “protections” for them. Encouraging the Army Corps of Engineers to build Category 5 defenses for all of Louisiana, including parts that are sparsely populated for good reason, would not merely cost billions that would be better spent on defending urban areas. It would encourage settlement of more flood-prone land and set the stage for the next tragedy.

On Down to Earth, Daniel Collins comments on how this behaviour falls into the pathology of natural resource management:

The engineering that the Corps offers provides residents and residents-to-be with a false sense of security. There is an implicit belief that since we have re-worked nature as much as we have in the past, or that we have been given dominion over the Earth, that we can continue in the same vein without limit. Modern societies endeavour to isolate themselves from the vagaries of the environment. What that has given us is a higher quality of living, offset by disasters like Katrina. Hurricanes will continue to roll into Louisiana, with or without global warming; New Orleans will continue to sink; and eventually the Mississippi will transfer its discharge into the Atchafalaya.

Building buffers against nature is a sound strategy, but it should be supplemented by building into society a degree of resilience and flexibility. Part of this is the ability (strength even?) to impose limits on building in unsafe regions. This may constrain liberties, but Katrina constrained the ultimate liberty of at least 1,800 people.

Design, General

From Science Fiction to Viridian Design: Guardian Interview with Bruce Sterling

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The science fiction writer turned design theorist, Bruce Sterling is interviewed in the Guardian (June 1/2006) about the future of green design.

TG: In your book Shaping Things, you describe climate change as the result of technology pioneers like Edison and Ford. Yet you say the only solution is to press forward with technology and shift to a new type of society.

BS: Not many science-fiction writers write industrial design manifestoes, but I was commissioned by Peter Lunenfeld of Arts Centre College of Design in California, where I was visionary in residence. Why do you want a sci-fi writer in a design school? You want someone who’ll think outside the box. The book talks about a new tech phenomenon with six or seven terms attached: the Internet of Things, Ubiquitous Computation, Everyware, Ambient Findability, Spimes (my term).

My own theory, which has gone into Shaping Things, is the key element is the identity for objects. It’s putting tags on things that allow them to interact with digital networks. That is the key concept around which other things accrue. My goal in this is sustainability. I want us to invent a better way to put our toys away. We are emitting too much junk. Google is good at sorting garbage. We could do something similar if we tagged our garbage, basically, everything we make.

Ideally, we need to tag an object before it exists. We need to tag the blueprints and then the manufactured object. Then, when it’s junk, we need to read it, know where it goes, have it ripped apart and recycled.

TG: Where does the concept of Spimes come from?

BS: Spimes was one of those spontaneous neologisms I came up with at a conference, a contraction of “space” and “time.” The idea is you no longer look at an object as an artefact, but as a process. A modern bottle of wine in one sense does exactly the same as the clay jug and stopper that the ancient Greeks used. On the other hand, it is now mass produced industrial glass, with a machine-applied label containing a barcode and a host of other information, even an associated web page. These invite you to do more than just drink the wine. These innovations link this product into a wider relationship.

Yet the moment the bottle is empty, we make a subtle semantic reclassification and designate it “trash”. The logistics of manufacture and distribution will already have tracked the bottle from factory, to warehouse, to store. But the relationship is not a closed loop. The moment you buy the wine, it’s your responsibility. The onus is on you to recycle it, or it’ll spend eternity in landfill. We really should be thinking about the trajectory all this stuff follows. We are in trouble as a culture because we don’t have a strong idea of where we are in time, and what we might need to do to deserve a future.

Amazon.com, for instance, allows you to study lots of information about physical products (books) without needing to consider the physical artefact itself. Or bookcrossing.com, a site where you can track physical books from reader to reader. Wheresgeorge.com does the same with dollar bills. Spimes are both the physical object and the metadata related to that object. Then, as with Amazon’s reviews, we can start adding correspondence on the nature of objects, creating a forum to discuss all our stuff and what to do with it.

TG: So how do RFID (radio frequency identification) chips relate to this?

BS: To study spimes we need to be able to track them. RFID chips are the next evolutionary step from bar codes. They allow objects to have an identity that can be easily read. They were invented by the Pentagon’s shipping, tracking and logistics agency, and Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, inspired by some work at MIT. Unlike the barcode, which needs to be scanned up-close, you can just ping a whole warehouse, or delivery truck or cargo container, and an RFID scanner will simultaneously detect and log everything in there. You also see them in swipe cards. These tags make it extremely easy to assign identities to objects and connect them to databases.

Greenlash, Ideas, Vulnerability

Future Oceans: Warming Up, Rising High, Turning Sour

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The world’s oceans are warming, rising, and acidifing due to human action. The German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) on May 31 2006 released a new report on climate change and the world’s oceans, The Future Oceans: Warming Up, Rising High, Turning Sour, that synthesizes current knowledge on climate change and oceans. They state that climate change in combination with over-fishing is threatening already depleted fish stocks. Sea-level rise is exposing coastal regions to mounting flood and hurricane risks. They argue that to keep the impacts on human wellbeing within manageable limits it is necessary to both increase coastal and ocean resilience and reduce the amount of future global warming and ocean acidification. The WBGU recommends that societies act to:

Limit acidification and temperature rise
Adaptation measures can only succeed if sea-level rise, ocean warming and ocean acidification are limited to tolerable levels. The only way to do this is through aggressive climate protection policies. WBGU has already recommended previously that the rise in global mean temperature be limited to a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level. Ocean conservation is a further reason for imposing this limit. Furthermore, in order to restrain acidification it is essential to reduce not only emissions of the overall basket of greenhouse gases, but also to ensure that carbon dioxide emissions in particular are sufficiently abated. It follows in WBGU’s view that global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions will need to be approximately halved by 2050 from 1990 levels.

Strengthen the resilience of marine ecosystems
To strengthen the resilience of marine ecosystems to elevated seawater temperatures and acidification, it is essential to manage marine resources sustainably. In particular, over-fishing must be stopped. In addition, WBGU recommends designating at least 20–30 per cent of the global marine area as conservation zones. The international community has already adopted goals in this regard, for instance at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. These must now be implemented, and the regulatory gap for the high seas closed by adopting an appropriate international agreement.

Develop new strategies for coastal protection
About every fifth person lives within 30 kilometres of the sea. Many of these people are put at immediate risk by sea-level rise and hurricanes. Coastal protection is thus becoming a key challenge for society, not least in financial terms. National and international strategies for mitigation and adaptation need to be further developed and harmonized. This includes plans for a managed retreat from endangered areas. In developing countries, financing needs to be secured by means of both existing and innovative financing instruments such as micro-insurance.

Give legal certainty to refugees from sea-level rise
At present, international law neither establishes a commitment to receive people who are forced to leave coastal areas or islands because of climate change, nor is the cost question resolved. Over the long term, a quota system is conceivable, under which states would have to adopt responsibility for refugees in line with their greenhouse gas emissions. This will require formal international agreements and the establishment of dedicated funds for international compensation payments.

Use carbon dioxide storage only as a transitional solution
To mitigate emissions, carbon dioxide can be captured in energy-generating facilities and then stored in geological formations on land or under the sea floor. Direct injection into the deep sea is a further option under debate, but this lacks permanence and harbours a risk of ecological damage in the deep sea. WBGU therefore recommends prohibiting the injection of carbon dioxide into seawater in general. In contrast, storing carbon dioxide in geological formations under the sea floor can present a transitional solution for climate protection, complementing more sustainable approaches such as enhancing energy efficiency and expanding renewable energies. Permits should only be granted, however, if such storage is environmentally sound and is secure for at least 10,000 years.