Practical idea exchange about sustainable building development and living
From the category archives:
I was reading the NY Times this morning and struck by a piece on a vid phenom called “The Story of Stuff“. Its impressive, designed as an educational tool it breaks down the global consumption chain and offers a pretty frank an in my opinion 100% correct critique of the worldwide economy. We can’t live sustainably under our current assumptions – what do you think?
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Marc Ona Essangui is an activist in Gabon fighting both his government and the Chinese company CMEC’s plan to harvest Iron Ore in the ecology sensitive Ivindo National Park. He is the recipient of the San Francisco based Goldman Environmental Prize, brainchild of Richard & the late Rhoda Goldman, two of the City’s brightest philanthropic and humanitarian lights.
Resource exploitation is one of the foundations of growth. The global economy cannot produce all the outputs needed for capitalism to survive without raw material for production. Most of the harvesting of these raw materials happen in far off places like Gabon, and most consumers do not care if some poor black or brown tribe gets stepped on in the name of progress. But it is the basics, things like iron, steel and wood, that goes into our structures when we build. If we don’t become conscious of what we are using on the back end, communities like Marc’s, and in the end our own as well, will fall.
Marc has been a grass roots leader in Gabon, leading his NGO “Brainforest” to advocate for the rights of the people and environment of Gabon in the face of international resource acquisition. His work has lead to threats, arrest and restrictions for both him and his family, but he continues to press for sustainable policies in Gabon & by extension, here in the US.
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Politics has as much to do with sustainable building and living as good insulation and non toxic materials. Maybe your not a politico like I am, but you should be. Without political power, we have no chance of realizing global sustainability. I only remodeled one little house in San Francisco, and the boards over at the Chronicle lit up like a Christmas tree with folks criticizing my motives, calling me a dirty developer and profiteer, so on and so forth.
But its all good – if I am not being criticized I figure I am not actually doing anything. For every 5 people who like the solar array I installed I run across one grump who tells me its a lousy idea because San Francisco is foggy (1,500 watts today baby!!!). So imagine someone who has a much higher profile and the abuse they get. Here is a short clip form on of Al Gore’s recent house committee appearances where he has to defend himself against charges of being a greedy SOB. Since the science behind his arguments in an Inconvenient Truth have never to my satisfaction been refuted (and feel free to show me any hard data here) character assassination is the only tool left for tools like Rep Blackburn.
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The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) should get props for constantly pushing conservation and eco friendly approaches to water use. Building on that history is their new Our Water Our World (OWOW) program that has much practical informaiton to help you build safer, water conscious front & back-scapes. Another handy dandy link for you Californians is this Nifty 50 PDF that has 50 great, native choices to consider when building real local looking gardens.
All water eventually leads to the ocean, and every bit of whatever that is so casually flushed away does not simply disappear. Your choices echo on and on, sometimes in really disturbing ways. Here is one of the latest updates on Oceanic Dead Zones – something most of us hear about from time to time, perhaps in a 30 second spot on the news or a small blurb box in the local market rag. Sure, maybe large scale industrial & agricultural pollution IS the main culprit here, but you look at the 20 LB bag of nitrogen fertilizer in your garage for your lawn, hell look at your damn lawn, and you think about all the water, fertilizer and pesticides you dump there, that I have dumped there, and you ask yourself is it worth it?
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So its 4/22 and everything has gone green in some sort of weird global St. Patrick’s Day redux. Don’t get me wrong, I love Earth day – but if I get an Earth Day greeting card from the Hallmark store, complete with 82% post consumer waste paper and soy based ink, I will have a frakin fit.
Commercialization is as pervasive as gravity, and it is one of the many threats and opportunities to global sustainability, and global sustainability is the holly grail we all need to be looking for here. Commercialization is a threat in the sense that it allows every snake oil salesman out there to slap “GREEN” and “ECO” on whatever product they are shilling for to squeeze a few more dollars out of your pockets. I have seen it with the Organic movement in food labeling, reducing the word so badly that it really is impossible to know what it means when you see it on some random whatever at your local market. Green, Eco and other foot soldiers of the lexicon going the same way, so the burden is going to be on you, the consumer, as it always is.
But commercialization is an opportunity as well, because unless sustainable principles of living, eating, building; unless these principles get blown out on a global scale we are all just spinning our wheels. Concrete with high concentration of fly ash content needs to simply be the expected option when building 100 story buildings or replacing your driveway – not an unusual “green” feature. High efficiency lighting needs to be part of the building codes of every community, and newer and better technologies, next generation bulbs without the toxic issues surrounding CFLS need to be imagined, invented and mass produced to the point where that is what you have in the local hardware store, not just an end display of “Eco” products. People need to get filthy rich doing this – unless we manage to replace capitalism as the foundation of the global economy.
Which is not a bad thought, but practically speaking I do not see it happening soon enough for us to make the deep changes we must to survive. So we have to use whats right in front of us to make it happen – and that means those sales types in their organic cotton shirts I was just talking about. You need to be rough with these guys. When one of them tells you its green, you have to say, Why? How? It is a semantic battle as much as a push for better insulation, and let me tell you something, were losing. If we lose the battle for the language of the movement, we cede the high ground. Define or be defined. Do you want some nationalist freako Bush loving totalitarian telling you what “Earth Day” is all about?
Do you?
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