stop to smell the flowers

Mcdonough's ideas of eco-effectiveness correlate nicely to Meadows thoughts on system surprise. A major reason why systems can surprise us is because of the linear thought patter we have all developed. We see the cause and effect, "event-level" of a system rather than understanding the behavior of a system. This gives us the ability to answer questions and solve problems but leaves almost no room for the way the world really works, on a non-linear system with constantly changing inputs, outputs, and feedback loops. "The relationship between cause and effect can only be drawn with curves or wiggles, not with a straight line."

Eco-effectiveness is breaking the linear model of the world. It challenges the reduce, reuse, recycle mantra of the eco-efficient era and moves towards the idea of being 100% good, rather than just being less bad. An efficient mind may drawn the conclusion if doing a little less bad is good, than doing a lot less bad will be even better. A great assumption for a linear world, but ultimately we have the same results, it just took us much longer to get there. Not to bad mouth the idea of eco-efficiency, it can buy us time to develop new ideas and it is the responsible path to take at the moment but what if we looked at the world with a slightly different twist.

McDonough relates his new ideas and buildings to the system of a cherry tree. He is looking to create an environment, a book, or anthing else that not only does not promote deforestation or polluting the waters but helps become a part of the natural system and would improve upon it's environment. He discusses creating a book that does not posses toxic inks or paper, and that when finished can be taken and not only recycled but cleanly upcycled. It would be made out of a product that would not lose it's value. He also talks about a building that promotes healthy wildlife along with workers. That uses the natural world to help cool, light, and warm that building. A building that would help keep workers in tune with the change of seasons and times of day. The landscape would have wetlands that help filter storm water and waste water giving the local river a helping hand.

These ideas were a result of looking at the world the way nature works in it. The cherry tree did not produce waste, it may be abundant in blossoms but they behave as food, fertilizer, home, and are aesthetically pleasing. The tree cleans our air and water, it creates no harmful effects on the world around it.

This is our time to be inspired. We have the ability to create and do good. (be 100% good in fact, what an interesting challenge) It's time for us as a whole to escape our one track minds and think a little out of the box. The answers to a sustainable future do not lie on the paved road ahead, they are somewhere on the side of the road that we haven't taken the time to stop by, smell the flowers, and say hi.

Paul Stamets - The Magic of Mushrooms

The study of biotechnologies is very new and interesting to me. I feel like this could be the new wave to ride on our way to rebuilding a successful and sustainable planet earth. Out of all the current biotechnological studies, I found Paul Stamets', "Magic Mushrooms: Planetary Healing with Deep Biology" excerpt to be one of the most interesting. Stemets describes how the use of fungi can be used to treat and heal polluted soil and ecosystems and also help control insect population. The amount of species of fungi is astonishing and their are still several to be discovered. As of now their are species that have medicinal, edible and now biotechnological qualities, who knows what the future brings with this amazing life-form. Stamets gives one example of the power of the mushroom that really blew my mind. A group of bioremediation companies (including Stamets company, Fungi Perfecti) was called to a diesel fuel spill near Bellingham, Washington. Each company was assigned to a mound of soil that had been destroyed by the spill. While the other companies went about using a standard bacterial and enzymatic procedure, Stamets knew a particular mushroom species that had abilities to break down such a toxic substance, the oyster mushroom. So his inoculated the soil pile with the mycelium of the mushroom. After six weeks the companies came back to the site and all except the pile covered in newly formed oyster mushrooms were still contaminated and unable to support life. The pile with the oysters mushrooms had broken down the toxic spill by releasing acids and enzymes, and tests of toxicity in the soil came back negative. Following this, the mushrooms attracted flies, which laid eggs on them. Maggots came in, which drew in birds and other small mammals to this soil pile, all because of this "magic" mushroom! It is necessary that this practice of study becomes more well-known and popular, it is the future of keeping the planet sustainable and clean.

The readings this week have given me the personal challenge to reword or redirect my thoughts. Thinking is Systems reminded me that "flow takes time to flow", things change at their pace but it's not always the outcome or the outflow that needs to be looked at, as obvious as it may seem, the inflow or origins are just as important and just as easily changed.
i tend to be very linear in my thinking and it's always important to me to be reminded to break things down and look at them in a system and not just points that need to be worked towards and conquered. Going with the theme of looking at things from a different angle, in the chapter about biomimicry in Natures Operating Instructions, the author challenges us and himself to ask questions like "how does nature stay clean", rather than how can we "tweak our conventional solutions" when it comes to everyday things such as cleaning a surface. Both authors offer different ways to start viewing our world.
It's encouraging and inspiring to read about people trying to develop safer, effective, and more sustainable ways to live the life we live. When a Hummingbird pollinating it's fuel source (the flower providing it with nectar) or the quick clean design petals of a lotus flower are the driving forces behind new ideas for gas stations or building facade paints it's exciting to think what else is out there for us to listen to and look for.

fish or bacteria?

Randall von Wedel has changed over from studying medicine to studying the environment. He was very discouraged by the deterioration of our environment. So Randall decided to research natural bacteria (bioremediation), effective solvents that are derived from vegetable oils (biosolvents), and a clean burning fuel made from nontoxic renewable vegatable oils and recycled cooking oils (biodiesel). He states that we all have connections to the earth and all do our part in poluting it. This I totally agree with, whether we mean to or not. "Industrial biotreatmant plants are basically bioremediation systems using living bacteria to process polluted water in ponds and tanks." We just needed to do tests to see which were biodegradable and which ones can break down these complicated materials. He started in a lab and tried to acclimate the bacteria to the point that it will use the toxic material as a source of food, as energy and as a source of carbon dioxide and water. He later creates a bacterial aquarium, with 5 gallon tanks and then larger drums. His end result was, he could clean up oil spills by installing this process. So this would be used for gas stations, shopping malls, truck terminals. They would interupt the flow of water where the oil, gas or diesel concentrates, then process the water in an above ground reactor. It would need to be treated over a period of about twelve to fifteen hours until the water comes out clean. The concept of all bioremediation is the same: you're letting bacteria eat something that has energy. They use the energy to grow and we get back clean water.

John Todd

We are fortunate to have John Todd as a resident in Vermont. I live in South Burlington and I did not know that my waste was being treated by Mr. Todds living machines. I had heard of the tilapia farms at the magic hat brewery and I thought it was a great idea. I had also heard of the project at the power plant on the intervale it was supposed to take the heat that was escaping through the stacks and pump the steam into underground pipes to warm greenhouses and supply fresh produce to the area. Unfortunately it died in some bureacratic mess.

Biomimicry seems to be the way to go in waste water treatment. You can take waste treat it, make it clean, and make money. It is a win win situation. It can be applied in countless ways in countless regions around the world. History will think fondly of Mr. Todd. Why the system is called living machines because it is a process which accelerates the natural process of water purification. He mimics natures three step process of a pond, stream and marshes.

Mr. Todd was the first winner of the Buckminster Fuller award in 2008 for his revolutionary views on how to clean up rural West Virginia. The Appalachia Mts have been leveled to get to the coal veins. This area in W. Virgingia is one the biggest ecological disasters in the world and it is not in some third world nation. The next time you hear the words clean coal think of these unfortunate peaple. The federal clean air and water act does not apply to these people. Our need for energy outweighs their need for clean air and water. There are trillions of gallons of toxic coal slurry and very little of the local habitat left to even begin to treat this sesspool. So Mr. Todd has put a plan together to treat the slurry with eco machines and begin to reforest the region for biomass fuel and add windmills. Ironically to make the area energy self sufficient. The project is called Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World: The Challenge of Appalachia.

He also co-founded Living Technologies Inc. a design, engineering and construction firm in Burlington. He has authored several books. He has a non profit Ocean Arks International. He founded the New Alchemy Institute.

He considers himself a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Scientist.

During the Industrial Revolution and not until too long ago people have had the mentality that the resources that we are depleting are in abundance not needing to worry about the limits they may have. That nature is always replenishing itself through its natural systems and that we are of no impact. We now know that this is surely not the case. We are depleting resources at a rate much faster than nature can replenish them and are quickly reaching are limit to growth. In “The Myth of Progress” the author Tom Wessel’s approaches this problem through scientific explanation of the three “laws of sustainability,” The law of limits to growth, the second law of thermodynamics, and the law of self-organization in complex systems. Wessel’s give a prime example of limits to growth during World War II with the introduction of twenty-nine reindeer to the island of St Matthew north of the Aleutians. These twenty-nine reindeer where introduced to this island as means to supply meat for the nineteen men stationed there. When the war was over, the men stations on St Matthews Island soon departed for their homes leaving the reindeer uncontrolled with no predators. The reindeer flourished for the first few decades with population growths growing massively. Soon the reindeer’s population exceeded its carrying capacity and thus depleted all of the necessary resources that where once abundantly available. Consequently the reindeer no longer had the resources to survive and sustain life. I believe that we are quickly reaching our limit to growth as well. Our resources are growing smaller as our waste is growing larger. There needs to be serious change in the way we expend energy, use resources, and created products to reverse this effect. Wessel details some of the ways to support many of these new ideas that can be executed on an individual bases or as a whole community to lessen one’s ecological footprint. I believe that we are currently moving in a direction that will fail miserably because it isn’t based on sustainability. Instead of dealing with these problems re-actively we should be dealing with these problems pro-actively before they have a greater effect to the health and wellness of our planet. It is usually much easier to prevent a problem rather than trying to fix a problem that has manifested through being ignored for so long.

Wessels defines the idea of a ruling paradigm, and the necessity of a change for the continuation of a livable planet and flourishing population. All of the books we are reading refer to the various hindrances to, and possible solutions for, the return of an ecologically conscious world life style. In the Myth of Progress; Wessels puts forth the widely regarded idea of the importance of decreasing consumer consumption. In the first chapters of their Green Guide Suzuki and Boyd further this idea, and present easily implemented actions an individual can undertake to move toward a “greener” existence. Then in Cradle to Cradle; McDonough and Braungart propose a different kind of solution. They propose that the emphasis on consumer change shift to that of an emphasis on the industry to change.
In Nick Garcia's third blog he brings up the fascinating remarks of Paolo Soleri. On the page before the opening of the introduction to Thinking in Systems; Meadows quotes Robert Pirsig, from his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainencem. Both of theses thoughts refer to the difficulties of a paradigm shift. Removing individual parts of a problem does not necessarily quantify to a solution. Meadows illustrates it is all about the system, not so much its parts, but their interactions as a whole. Our current unsustainable ruling paradigm is just that: a complex system of functioning, interconnected elements. For our paradigm to shift it is imperative for us to (as fully as possible) understand the complete system we are working to improve and evolve. The linear approach to problem solving, though far from being unhelpful, seems to be the dominant one in the mass “green” culture. From the information I've gleaned so far from in particular, Wessels and Meadows, it looks as though the solution for finding a functioning and sustainable future can found. The end solution is likely not to be about fixing the specific elements that arise as we run across them. More important is looking at the complete system, defining the feedback loops, and identifying the root problems. As this process is undertaken, it will likely be the work and ideas of individuals like Wessels, Suzuki and McDonough that will enable us, as a species, to cope in the meantime.

"Surely Some Revelation Is at Hand"

I'm taking a Macroeconomics class this semester as well, which is sort of challenging to absorb alongside all these critiques of the system that it focuses on. The material being so fresh, I frequently find myself contrasting what I'm learning about the way the market is supposed to work with what we're discussing in this class about how it actually has worked and how it might be made to work differently. This week, that clash was particularly sharp when Meadows introduced her flow diagrams: they recalled a figure from my economics text (which I found in a slightly altered version on Lewis & Clark College's website) that portrayed the flow of money through a market economy as it was exchanged for goods and services, labor and production.

It seems so elegant as presented. The more people spend, the more firms produce, and the more people get paid in turn for their labor or investment! The faster those arrows whip around, the better off everyone would seem to be -- as McDonough writes, "GDP takes only one measure of progress into account: activity." (36) Yet as we're learning, the center somehow cannot hold. What is it about this accounting that creates the impression of sustainable reciprocation and masks the loss of "human and ecological health, cultural and natural richness, and even enjoyment and delight"? (43) Maybe applying systemic thinking to the problem will reveal its weakness.

According to Meadows, a system consists of elements, interconnections, and purpose. For the diagram above, we can see that the elements are the capital stocks of firms and households as well as the markets to exchange them; the interactions are of course those exchanges of wealth, goods and services. The function, ostensibly, is to enable people access to goods and services they could not otherwise provide for themselves; as Wessels discussed in the Myth of Progress however, this has become equated in neoclassical economics with constant growth. Since there are no inflows or outflows documented here, we might wonder how the economy is supposed to increase in size by building only on the materials it is already comprised of. Perhaps it swells like a balloon, stretching itself thin and empty to increase in circumference -- of course, balloons can only be inflated to a certain point before they pop.

Perhaps it was fatuous to ignore the "land and capital" ascribed as possessions to household units, but it was in service of a point. The diagram above assumes the availability of a stock of natural resources in the system but doesn't address their provenance. Similarly, it eliminates the concept of waste (albeit in a much different sense than do McDonough and Braungart). If we were to represent these in- and outflows in the diagram, we could better conceive of our economic system as part of -- rather than separate from -- the biosphere and its resources.

I say "part of... its resources" because it allows for the possibility suggested in Cradle to Cradle that human endeavor could actually contribute to environmental quality. I haven't done away with waste in my diagram, however, because I intend it to reflect things as they are currently. Meadows writes that "as long as the sum of all inflows exceeds the sum of all outflows, the level of the stock will rise," which means that for the economy to perform its function as described by Wessels -- that is, for it to grow ever larger -- the consumption of natural resources needs to be faster than the generation of waste. (22) That is, the taps need to be flowing faster than the drain. We tend to consider the inflow more than the outflow, which means that to keep those economic arrows spinning around we adopt policies and practices that cause us to consume more and have little concern for the waste we generate as long as it's less than the harvested natural capital.

Braungart and McDonough, in their cradle-to-cradle model, would focus more equally on the waste side of the equation to keep the economic bathtub full. Better design, they suggest, can make manufactured products not just less useless at the end of their lives, but actually integral parts of some other industrial or biological process. Making more thorough use of the material and energy we extract from our natural environment can lead us to waste less (theoretically to waste nothing) while maintaining stocks of wealth and quality of life previously sustained through the brute force method of massive inflow. With that in mind, let's reconsider the stated purpose of the economic system above: to enable access to goods and services.

What is it that hinders such access? Is it a dearth of technology, labor, production or extraction capacity? Or is it that, despite our eagerness and ability to consume we are running into natural limits like the amount of carbon that can be processed by the environment or the worldwide arable acreage? Is there something wrong with our bathtub, or have we just opened the taps as wide as they'll go? Maybe we should use some sort of grey water treatment to reclaim some of the gallons swirling down the drain. Cradle to cradle design incorporates some of the most important insights of systems thinking toward some of the most important goals outlined in The Myth of Process.

Utopia and/or Revolution

When McDonough and Braungart write that they “see a world of abundance, not limits,” they seem go challenge Wessels and those like him who believe that the ethos of consumption needs to be changed. I don't think that they literally mean not to recognize limits to growth, however: the difference is in large part a semantic one, reflected in the constructive framing of environmental/industrial tension that Dave Kaczynski so astutely pointed out in his post.

While I recognize the ideological utility of such positioning, the authors' position seems to have an empty world-style economic perspective because of its focus on human-created capital. They provide numerous exciting examples of reprocessing, repurposing, and recycling manufactured goods while maintaining access to some form of those goods (in contrast to Wessels's anti-entropic intention to simply do away with many consumer goods). As I spent more time thinking about it, though, I realized that McDonough and Braungart are really avant-garde full worlders looking to “increase the productivity of the scarcest (limiting) factor” (natural capital), “as well as to try to increase its supply.” (Costanza, Robert. Ecological Economics, 83)

So it seems to me like the Cradle to Cradle authors are looking to find a way to maintain a dynamic equilibrium in the world's economy after all. By mimicking the natural world's efficiency at storing and utilizing energy the concept of waste could be eliminated and society's economic life could become more self-sustaining and anti-entropic. This is the bridge between these books: although McDonough and Braungart envision a world in which our modern material expectations continue to be met, their road to that future is the same as Wessels's to long-term sustainablity: a “more diverse, integrated, and efficient” economic system. (89)

Incidentally, Paolo Soleri presaged this conversation as early as 1971: “The only hope, which is then in addition the chance to gain for one's self some "divinity," lies in replacing man, this phenomenon of supercomplex nature, within the terms defined by reality, accepting the first postulate thereof ... that of complexity and miniaturization.” (Utopia e o Revoluzione, Perspective v 13 / 14 p 281-285, 1971) Earlier in the paper he rejects the idea of utopia because it involves an attempt to live outside the limits of natural laws, and the idea of revolution because it suggests a movement to a human condition previously unexperienced in history. This consideration is relevant in a comparison of these two books as well, I think: McDonough and Braungart's "city like a forest, cool and quiet" and "ecological footprint to delight in" (14, 16) might sound utopian just as Wessels's "Need for Cultural Change" -- and associated rhetoric, e.g. "Never in the history of democratic societies..." (107) -- might sound like a call for revolution. One very important consideration for those interested in implementing their ideas will be how to persuade society not just of their virtues but of their achievability. To do that it is important to present (as Cradle to Cradle especially tries to do) such new models as natural adaptations to natural law that are compatible with human nature as well.