[Photography courtesy of Marc Adamus] Here follows the talk I gave last week at the Global Design Forum in London.
“Last week I went a restored paper mill in a tiny village in the middle of Sweden. I was there (*) to meet a bunch of people who’ve been given a uniquely challenging task: make the bedroom and bathroom products sold globally by a famous home furnishing giant – – sustainable.
When I say that their task is “challenging”, think of it this way. Read More
Devastating news reaches me that Bill Moggridge has died.
Many readers here will know that Bill Moggridge had been director of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, since 2010, and this was the latest chapter in an illustrious and history-changing career. The Museum has just posted a fine tribute to Bill’s life and work here. Read More
A huge urban master plan in southen France gets serious about nature as a project. In Bordeaux 55,000 (above) the city of Bordeaux (CUB) has invited five multidisciplinary teams to develop projects, during a a six month “competitive dialogue”, that will explore ‘how best to transform 55,000 hectares (136,000 acres) into natural areas’. Read More
Ritual as Feedback in Bali
The unique social and ecological nature of regional watersheds was the focus of a mesmerising presentation by Stephen Lansing at last month’s poptech conference in Iceland. His key point: Bali’s subak water management system is a “coupled social-ecological system”.
Balinese farmers have been growing rice in terraces since at least the eleventh century. Because the island’s volcanic rock is rich in mineral nutrients, water running off mountains fills the rice paddies to create a kind of aquarium.This system has enabled farmers to grow two crops of rice a year year for centuries. They do this using a unique form of cooperative agriculture that enables farming to flourish despite water scarcity and the constant threat of disease and pests.
Rice planting and water allocation is coordinated by subaks; these bring together all of the farmers who share water from a single source – such as a spring, or an irrigation canal. The subaks adjust cropping patterns cooperatively in order to achieve fallow periods over sufficiently large areas to minimize dispersal of pests.
Irrigation, in this context, is not just a matter of delivering water to a plant’s roots. The rice terraces are hydrologically connected to each other, so the farmers have had to solve a complex coordination problem: who gets to use how much water, when, and how. A complex, ‘pulsed’ artificial ecosystem has evolved over generations in which the allocation of water is adjudicated by a priest in a water temple. The arrangement is a dynamic one; cooperation is continuous among hundreds of farmers whose relationships span entire watersheds.
“There is a complex adaptive systems explanation for water temples” Lansing explains, “but also a complex cultural one”. (Lansing has been studying irrigated rice agriculture in Bali for 40 years, but is also is associated with the Santa Fe Institute where his interests include ‘ecological anthropology’).”The temples are more than just a kind of mathematical device”, he explains; “a great deal of attention is devoted to symbolic ritual activities such as food offerings, prayers to deities, and elaborate pilgrimages.
[Photo taken by the author at Instituto Inhotim, Brazil].
People the world over are divided between radically different conceptions of their future: resource-intensive production on the one side, versus regenerative land-based enterprises, and mosaics of micro-enterprises, on the other.
Our dilemma is that although industrial and agribusiness development breeds its own fear and insecurity – most of it justified – the alternatives on offer are not reassuring; they can seem too small, and too marginal, as the basis of a secure future.
The growing hype about a Green Economy exemplifies this dilemma. On offer is a ‘green’ switch to renewable biomass energy as an alternative to the thermo-industrial economy. The trouble with this charming vision is that its implementation involves the biggest earth grab in 500 years – in the words of one research group “a red-hot resource grab on the lands, livelihoods, knowledge and resources of the global South, where 86% of all biomass is located“.
The displacement of farmers and indigenous peoples means the loss of local and traditional knowledge, too. In practice, biomass energy production Read More
For some Icelanders, in a country whose inhabitants have survived 1,100 winters without central heating, the environmental costs of aluminium smelting are worth paying if the alternative is a return to a life in grass-roofed huts.
To many, that choice does not feel far-fetched. Andri Snær Magnason’s grandfather, for example, worked continuously on the land and sea in order to survive. As the author of Dreamland recalls, “my family caught fish, burned driftwood, milked cows, and herded sheep. Food was life for twenty to thirty people in a house of 1,400 square feet. Everything edible was cut and dried: One sheep represented a month and a bit of human survival next winter. That was their reality”.
The vitality of that living memory is one reason debate about Iceland’s economic future seems to have been limited to a stark choice: sell the country, body and soul, to global energy and extractive interests – or go back to those huts.
The search for a third way was one underlying theme at last week’s Poptech in Reykjavik on the theme “Toward Resilience”. My invitation (from Andrew Zolli) to take part afforded a welcome opportunity to re-connect with a country confronted by an agonising choice: “eaten-alive-or-growing-to-live?”. Read More
This jequitiba tree in Brazil moves hundreds of gallons of water up into its canopy every day. It does so without pumps, without electricity, and without recourse to the concrete reservoirs and sewage treatment plants on which most modern cities depend.
The jequitiba is a joyous marvel to behold, of course – but it would also be an practical inspiration to the world’s designers and city builders, faced with imminent energy descent, if only we were minded to notice.
But we’re not. As with energy, although threats to the security of water supply command a lot of attention, we’ve lost touch with the realities of where it comes from, and how we use it. By the year 2050, as a consequence of this hydro-myopia, as many as two-thirds of the world population will be living in areas subject to water stress.
Here is a thought experiment to demonstrate how alienated we’ve become from water. Imagine emptying 500 litre bottles of water into a huge pot and carrying it 50 miles – every day of the year. Read More
How To Manage a Constellation
The map below is of the Baltic Sea. Over the last hundred years its ecosystems have been poisoned almost to death by outputs from a multitude of industries and farming activities in the nine countries that surround it. These deadly flows are shown on the complicated chart below: Read More »