I think that as Americans we don’t react to problems that don’t
directly affect us, rather we choose to only confront problems that finally spill into our daily lives. We don’t act until it’s too late. For example, think back to a few years ago when our airport security was weak. It took a national disaster to change policy and better the level of airport security. The same is true with environmental issues. We don’t feel the need to fix them, but if a major disaster were to occur, our minds would change. I think that Wessel’s view is correct in the way that at the rate we are moving, the future for the environment is grim. There are future implications that we need to address now, before it is too late. There has been some major progression toward lowering our economic footprint, such as the “go green” initiative and major recycling efforts put forth by our government. But this is just a start. Vermont is very well educated in sustainability, but we need to better educate other areas that do not have this green mindset.

Conscious Energy

First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. This statement from a scientific view I completely agree with but from a philosophical view I have to argue. From a personal stand point we all have a day to day routine where we expel a certain amount of energy and time on the things we find important in our lives; such as relationships, health, personal well being and the well being of others around us. Being educated and educating others

to make conscious and positive decisions in regards to how they impact the environment can create a collective energy changing our wasteful mindset changing the energy we expel each day to move towards a sustainable future.

Some of the simplest things such as having a garden in our backyard makes a huge difference by lessening our ecological footprint by reducing carbon emissions, unnatural pesticides and fertilizer pollution. In terms of the second law of thermodynamics stating that although energy cannot be created nor destroyed it can be transformed from one form to another I believe that this means that all energy is cycling. Converting energy from one form to another is not always 100 percent efficient sometimes losing energy called "entropy" but not actually lost only transferred to unusable energy. Having a garden is a perfect system when looked at linearly. Expend energy to grow the food that in turn provides the energy back, a perfect cycle, 100 percent efficient.

Not a bad idea

Having never written a blog before i find myself sitting her wondering how to begin. With so much information gained from Wessels and even the first few pages of Cradle to Cradle, what stands out to me the most? What new and old information can i reflect on in a interesting way? What can i say to make an impact on all the other intelligent people i am surrounded by? I find i am struggling this very same way when trying to decide how i can positively impact this beautiful yet endangered world around me. What stands out to me the most as something i can do personally to help earth? What new ways of living can i look into as well as what tried and true methods are already helping our planet? Moreover, with many highly qualified ecologists, biologist and scientists of all kinds, what can i do that hasn't already been done?
After reading Wessels i find he has a very strong point of view and goes into great detail to explain the science behind many different aspects of our environment. From the Acacia tree and its ants, the spider and wasp combo, to the Hemlock and Rocky ridge. But these are all analogies to relate certain aspects of our actions to the world around us. As an intelligent consumer this is all very interesting and helps me to understand the delicate balance around us, but i feel, with all Wessels had to say, Bill and Michael have cought my attention more in their 13 pages then Wessels ever did.
Bill and Michael, authors of Cradle to Cradle, seem to see the world for what it really is. They understand the vale over our eyes, the endless consumption machine that we are as a world, wait scratch that, as a race. With all the distractions around me, i am unable to make the rite decision, most of the time, regarding the environment and its health. Me being like many millions of other Americans, I am set up for failure.
In their rooftop conversation Bill and Michael hit the nail on the head. In essence, Do not change what the consuming masses have learned to do or buy already. Simply change what it is they are buying and the problem will fix its self. That is a good business plan, using the structured yet dirty economy we have already and infiltrate it with clean, reusable products. Instead of changing the consumer we are changing the product to fit the needs around it, just as we have done so many times before. This would certainly answer my questions from before in one foul swoop.

"Only madmen....."

Honesty should never be confused with pessimism. Wessels book presented an, at times ,hard truth about our current situation. At the speed we are moving there are, and will be incredible environmental implications we will not be able to avoid by sticking our heads in the sand. He goes as far as to compare our increasing economic growth to a biospheric cancer. At this place and time i find it hard to disagree. We are moving and producing with little regard as to how we will maintain ourselves on this planet, and we have shown little interested in slowing down. Never once did i get the feeling Wessels felt defeated, nor was he presenting the information with a "gloom and doom" attitude, if anything i related much more to Wessels work than i did the beginning of McDonough's book. I'm certainly not a pessimist, but perhaps a realist. (you may ask yourself what's the difference, i'm still trying to figure it out) but McDonough seemed to overlook things in his efforts. He points out that a recycled carpet required just as much energy and waste as would a new carpet, and then praises himself for using a synthetic "paper" that was recycled and could be again. I suppose the difference between the two was that the carpet would eventually make it to the landfill but the book would continue in the cycle. But would it? And would it just use more energy in the process? I'm certainly not bashing is efforts, and appreciate his creative approach , i just feel he's getting a little lost in his idealism. (a huge conclusion to draw from reading 16 pages i know, i'm remaining open) I am however intrigued and inspired by the idea of doing "less bad" an idea that can go to great lengths. Exponential growth and what our future holds as a result of it is certainly a topic with much room for reflection, besides "Only madmen and economist believe in perpetual exponential growth."

Sustainability vs. Social Norms

It is no secret that we need to work on reducing the waste that humans create in the world. Everyone for years has been told to 'reduce, reuse and recycle', but all too often we just go about our normal lives and don't go out of our way to better the planet. It's the old mentality of "if it's not convenient, then it's just not worth doing". This is a poisonous mindset but it bring to mind thoughts of actualization; will we ever, as humans (mainly as Americans), ever come together and put a stop to frivolous waste? Well, as years go on, it seems that things are getting easier by way of convenience. It seems as though every grocery store has recycled paper products available and many have organic or local produce departments. the government is even giving tax breaks as an incentive to make your home less energy dependent. last year, my parents installed three large solar panels on the roof of there house. between the panels themselves, the wiring and the tank that stored the excess energy, the whole project cost around ten thousand dollars. this is a lot to undertake at once, but they knew that once tax season rolled around they would get about six thousand of that back between the Massachusetts and federal government. In David Suzuki's Green Guide, the author talks about reducing your ecological footprint, so that everyone can live on the planet without stepping on too many toes (foot humor). My parents found a very active way to reduce their footprint, but it's just as easy for all of us regardless of our financial situation by contributing in more subtle ways.

Moving Toward Sustainability by way of the “New Industrial Revolution”

After completing Tom Wessels’ book, I am left feeling less than inspired to “move towards” the sustainability issue. Despite his ideas and comments in the last 3 chapters concerning the reality of the free market, our obvious need for cultural change, as well as his personal feelings and ideas about interconnectedness via “Black Elk Speaks”, I am still not moved into action. Tom Wessels' writing comes from a problematic focal point and I don’t feel sufficiently inspired by the body of Wessels' contributions to take on what appears at times to be an insurmountable task. I feel the need for real focus on solutions, and a revolutionary approach to immediate change and how we frame the sustainability discussion are not his paramount goals.

After completing the introduction in McDonough’s and Braungaurt’s book “Cradle to Cradle”, I am feeling refreshed and inspired by their ideas on how to implement real fundamental change. The sustainability question that is continually bubbling up in my life goes something like; how do we as a people design, resource, manufacture, and recycle the products that are intended to enhance our lives? They begin their introduction with two and one half pages of examples of everyday problems that demand real solutions. they go on to demonstrate a viable example of how to print books on the subject of sustainability in a way as not to kill trees and further damage the environment. Then they proceed right into over nine pages of their own personal experiences, strength they have gained on the subject, and some real old fashioned hope for the future. They use evolved terminology, a new synthesis of the same old problematic rhetoric. Terms like “evolve away from”, and “seek more effective solutions”. They introduce us to the current "struggles"of the current “framework at odds”. Industry vs. the environmentalists, “We need to do more with less”, “Minimize your footprint and feel bad and guilty if you don’t". Although these concepts may at some point have a positive end result, the “guilt trips” have yet to be a cause for measurably effective change. What about the concepts of abundance and re-framing the subject in that way?

The background experience of these two authors is very important. McDonough has been abroad and saw first hand how the scarcity of resources encouraged people to create simpler, local, yet effective designs and solutions. When he returned to the states he witnessed how fruitless it is “tacking new technologies onto the same old model”. Braungaurt grew up in Germany with a background in environmental chemistry, politics, and Greenpeace. His ideas about “protesting more knowledgeably” led him to “reframe the debate” within his own vision for sustainability. Moving from “enforcement to encouragement” and from “recycle” to “upcycle”
Shortly after their first meeting McDonough’s and Braungaurt created the Hannover Principles in 1991 a set of design guidelines that would “eliminate the concept of waste” or as they say in the introduction “not reduce, or avoid waste as environmentalists were propounding, but eliminate the very concept by design.”

The wings of our emerging sustainability paradigm are still wet and fragile. We need researchers and scientists,as well as activists, corporations, and people everywhere to embrace this new model of thinking and living. I am looking forward to exploring in detail, the thoughts, personal experience, and practices that McDonough and Braungaurt will explore in th rest of "Cradle to Cradle". It is my hope that their ideas will affect change in all of us. I for one feel we are on the cusp of the most amazing and critically transformative time in the history of the environmental movement and mankind itself. and these are the new paradigm thinkers that will lead the way.



”

We can not have it both ways...

I loved Wessels book The Myth of Progress. The idea that one day fuel prices will so high that big box stores will not have the monopoly they now enjoy. When it is cheaper to buy locally than have our food shipped from 1500-5000 miles away. They will eventually close and and the land the are are on now becomes a farm again.
Being a poor college student I struggle with the decisions I have to make in order to survive. I mean I would like to eat locally all of those fresh, tasty and expensive items taunt me. Often I do find myself walking into a store as large as a football field. I feel guilty but there is little I can do I need the cheaper food. Also I have gone to Walmart to buy toilet paper and stuff for school it is at least 1/2 the price. Yes I do shop there knowing that it costs American jobs and it destroys the local diversity of shops and yes I feel guilty. I am after all a consumer not a citizen anymore. A victim if you will of the quagmire of cheaper goods made outside of our country. With corporations having the rights to sue sovereign nations even if these same corporations are putting peoples live at risk. Corporations are getting way to big they are simplifying a diverse free market economy and making it much more unstable. These corps live outside of any known system of law. I think we need to form a green corp. to fight the bad corps. on a level playing field. We could name it the People Corporation its sole duty is to ensure safety for its members and maybe try to bring mutualism back into the equation.

Any Day Now... Please

Upon reading The Myth of Progress, I found that there were passages that made me hopeful, and there were parts that made me very depressed about the future of the planet. The concept that various species are often exceeding their capacity, with regular population drops, even in just my lifetime, is unsettling. It makes it seem as though it's just a matter of time before the human population exceeds its carrying capacity. I found that I felt hopeful when I read about nature balancing itself. I guess because I always felt that our negative impact on our environment would lead to a barren wasteland of a planet. Wessel seems to have a different idea about our impact of the planet, which seems to look at it more as "the planet will balance itself regardless of whether of not humans are around." I guess we just have to hope that we're part of this. More appropriately, I guess we have to see what we can do to become part of it. Unfortunately, it seems that, at this rate, we're headed for extinction. Though, given the complexities of human behavior, who knows, we might make some big changes in the right direction sometime soon. As with most revolutions, everything happens at the drop of a hat. For instance, social revolutions tend to happen when they're most needed, just when injustices become intolerable, just when the shit hits the fan. We can only hope that we'll be able to make these moves in the right direction soon. Ideally before said feces is spattered all over. But alas, there's no way to know when it will happen. Prediction only happens in theory. I suppose when we all are walking around smelling like metaphorical dung we will know it's now or never.

The Myth of Progress... Myth or reality?

In the remaining few chapters of the Myth of Progress, Wessels first describes the role of co -evolution and how it goes hand in hand with mutualism within an ecosystem. He illustrates how in nature, mutualism allows species to coexist and provide for one another while gaining benefits for doing so. If one thinks about our existence in a more broad view, everything is on a smaller scale in comparison to something else. For example, we consider the Earth a rather large place, in comparison to us, but in comparison to other planets, and...to the universe, Earth is minuscule and is just another system working within larger systems. My point being is that if smaller scales of mutualism can function in a positive manner, such as the example of the bull's-horn acacia tree and the acacia ant, then it can also work on a larger scale, such as humans and the environment. Wessels then describes the several drawbacks of our continuously growing industry. Big-box stores and large corporations like Wal-Mart are devaluing humanity. In the simple ages of human existence, everyone relied on one another to make ends meet and to survive, now that way of life is extinct and it's every man/woman for themselves. We need to look back to our roots, in order to move forward into becoming more sustainable.

The McDonough and Braungart reading, I found very enlightening. Unlike in David Suzuki's "Green Guide", this text seems to have gone much deeper into the understanding of each of the fact's they provide (just like Wessels said, understanding something is much more effective than just knowing the facts.) I have already found myself questioning the products I buy, and where I buy them from. I find myself asking, "What is going to happen to this product after I'm done with it?" "Is their a more eco-friendly alternative to this product?" Yes, there is. I'm very eager to find out what else this motivated two-man team has to offer in the next several sections.

The Battle of Bunker Hill

Under Wessels' complex-systems framework, sustainability is analogous to dynamic equilibrium. In his vision of progress, our cultural economic system “matures” and divorces itself from the unnatural concepts of unlimited growth and unlimited substitutability. At this point, ideally, society becomes like the old growth forest he returns to in each chapter: the amount of energy we absorb is exactly the same as the energy we release. Wessels presents a concise yet thoroughly considered explanation not only of the fact that such an arrangement is at odds with our current paradigm, but of how that came to be so. His broadly systemic approach to the urgent problems of unchecked economic expansion and concomitant environmental degradation was both refreshing and reassuring to me for the perspective it provided.
Suzuki and Boyd, on the other hand, had a nervous energy to their writing that left me unconvinced of the efficacy of their approach to the same problems. In fairness, they are proposing much more concrete measures to combat environmental degradation than Wessels; given that, I think that while their conceptualization of the problem's ultimate causes are in line with that author's, their approach to implementation of solutions is a bridge too far. Certainly, being more thoughtful about how we house and feed ourselves and how and when we travel will be integral to mitigating our cumulative environmental impact – my concern is that such considerations focus on specific parts of the extant economic system, rather than fundamental change.
This seems to me to be the greatest challenge faced in averting environmental degradation to the point of bifurcation. Wessels writes that “large-scale change in complex systems never comes from the top down; it always bubbles up from the bottom,” and to that end the Green Guide is a useful book to have been published. Unfortunately, I think the potential exists for people to soothe themselves with the suggestions made in that book and others like it. Even of the people who buy the book (which is ranked only around 20,000 on Amazon), how many will really adopt a majority of its suggestions? I know, despite my near-crippling terror about the dangers of worsening environmental quality, that I haven't necessarily the fortitude to make the most dramatic and impactful changes.
I want to be clear (Spencer) that I am not suggesting that we can't change, or that the problem is “too big.” I am trying to make a fine point about the usefulness of the practical, changes-we-can-all-make-in-our-daily-lives approach to the current predicament, of which concern about the aggregate impact of incremental changes is only the first half. The corollary is that, after replacing their incandescent light bulbs and purchasing local kale – even after forgoing a jet-fueled vacation to Hawaii – people might well feel that they've “done their part.” This is dangerous, in part because they will have. As long as our complexly intertwined model of global capitalism persists as the dominant paradigm, consumerism (and I'm talking specifically about the U.S.) will reign supreme, and the net effect of all these measures will be to forestall the symptoms of a well-established disease. While even Wessels writes that our aim should be to slow movement down the continuum of degradation, such movement will enable us to avoid making really hard decisions about societal values (see Tom Friedman in the New York Times: "Real Men Tax Gas"). I don't mean to disparage any of these authors, or anyone making palpable changes to their lifestyle in an effort to help. I just think about last summer, when gas prices went over $4 per gallon and people stopped driving so much: prices dropped, and everyone hit the road in celebration. As much as many of us do want to to work for real change, I think we are also very good at deferring it by moderating the current, unsustainable model.
Unfortunately, while the intra-economic changes proposed by Boyd and Suzuki are incremental, the environmental detriment caused by the current economic model is compounding. The end result of the well-intentioned changes proposed to mitigate the environmental impact of industrialized societies might well be to delay the biggest changes past the point of their usefulness. I think of William Prescot and his courageous but doomed militia on a hilltop in Boston nearly 250 years ago: he told them, "don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes," and the rest is history.