A Sustainable Train of Thought

The bottle caps on Nantucket Nectars always have a factoid written on the inside. Today, mine had this to say:

The average annual snowfall on Nantucket is 5 inches, in 2003-2004 it was 71 inches.

Hmm. Pretty dry stuff, even if it does look like a big difference when drawn like this:

But compare that rendering to this one:

Kinda changes things, doesn’t it?

While relegating evidence of climate change to factoids on the bottle caps of sugary drinks is problematic in its own right (does knowledge of what could be our civilization’s impending doom complement the refreshing qualities of the beverage?) more troubling is the lack of “next steps”. Am I supposed to absorb this information and feel depressed? Or should I feel motivated to do something about it?

Instead of energy-sapping factoids of doom and gloom, let’s take the “Oh ****!” reaction that we all have when we realize exactly what’s going on and channel that energy towards producing positive change. I like analogies:

It’s as if we’re on a ship that’s taking on water, and instead of bailing, engineering simply analyzes how fast the water is rising and periodically issues status updates on the situation.

Or perhaps more accurately, we’ve got a ship for sale that was pretty nice at one point, but it’s been a little abused and now it’s worn down and springing a few leaks. And instead of fixing the problems before selling it, we’re just carrying on as usual, hoping it won’t fall apart until after we hand it off to the new owners (which happens to be the next generation: our children), hoping that they won’t notice the puddles of water on the floor before they sign the papers.

Seems like Project Runway has something to contribute to climate change after all in Tim Gunn’s famous words: Make it work.

When you’ve got a deadline and the clock is ticking….hmm, sounds vaguely familiar to the situation we currently find ourselves in. Almost any action is better than staying on our present course. True, we can’t be sure that the choices we make now are the right ones, or the least harmful ones, or even beneficial ones. But we need to make the best decisions we can given the information we currently have. And if we discover that things aren’t working out quite how we intended, well, we’re going to have to adapt and change our strategy.

This points to a larger issue: we need an agile world, agile civilizations, agile cultures. We need to take charge and be proactive participants in change, not merely the recipients of it.

The subtle truth in the bottle cap is that we can no longer take anything for granted: the future will not be like the past. Unless we recognize and adapt to this new reality, we are living in yesterday’s paradigms and are in danger of being blind-sided by the present.

(The following is an excerpt from my thesis report.)

Things take time to happen. Change is slow. Even things which appear to happen quickly, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, take long periods of time (and sometimes a long chain of events) to enable those moments. In essence, we’re talking about long gestation periods before birth.

And in that sense, I think my thesis topic is opportunely timed. So-called “green” behavior or sustainable behavior has become chic and begun to enter the mainstream. As more momentum builds, we may eventually reach a tipping point.

Tipping points, as described by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point, are moments when a momentum of change manifests itself through seemingly small actions. As an example, if you remove parts of a scaffolding, it may remain standing for some time. As you remove more parts, the structure becomes more and more unstable. Finally, removing one or two critical parts will cause the entire structure to collapse. While it may seem like removing those final parts were the crucial actions, in reality all the steps were critical; the last two merely constituted the tipping point where the consequences of all the previous actions became manifest.

But just as it takes time to implement and effect change, we also face a deadline by which change must occur. One part of the equation is time horizons: when will things start to happen? In a chart outlining “potential military implications of climate change,” the Pentagon talks about the years 2010 to 2030. Jared Diamond talks about a time-frame of less than 50 years from today by which point we will begin to see the effects of the twelve issues he outlines.

This leads into the other dimension of the question “how long do we have?”, a dimension which I believe is more critical: at what point can we still do something to prevent or remediate the problems and their symptoms? This question is made more nuanced when one realizes the lag-time associated with certain phenomena and the observation of their effects. For instance, chemical interference in our endocrine system may occur now, but the results will not be felt for several generations, by which point it will be too late to take action. Global warming means that Siberian permafrost will begin to melt—areas of permafrost in Alaska have already started to melt—releasing methane and other greenhouse gases currently sequestered within the permafrost into the atmosphere, further strengthening global warming through an effect known as a positive feedback loop.

How long will it take for us to implement solutions? How long before these positive feedback loops take hold? These are weighty questions, although I decided to ignore them, at first because they were too distracting and contentious, and finally because I’d rather be working towards change rather than constructing a more accurate doomsday clock. However, the larger issue of time still remains an important focus within my thesis.

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Comments:

Yes, it’s important to understand the scale and scope of the problems we face. But measurements take time, and by all indications we are running low on that resource. I sincerely feel it is better to take action which we know will have a less harmful effect than to wait around for a consensus on definitive results and recommendations (if such things can ever be reached).

For example, we need to reduce the amount of CO₂ that humans release into the atmosphere. Is it important to know by exactly how much? In the grand scheme of things, no, we just need to reduce emissions and ideally eliminate them. Yes, we need methods to measure reductions and to figure out whether solutions are effective. But focus too hard on measurements instead of action and you’ll chart the rising level of water in a sinking ship until it’s too late to bail. And in the case of the Earth, we have no lifeboats.

While the first attempts to implement reductions on a wide scale will probably not be very efficient, that efficiency will increase over time as technology, measurements, and our understanding improve. In the meantime, companies will have actually done something, producing at least two major results: 1) a reduction in some part of emissions, and 2) good publicity.

As people begin to realize the seriousness of the situation and demand action, corporate values will come under increasing scrutiny. After all, it’s in no company’s interest to kill its customers, and any company that takes a cavalier attitude towards the climate crisis could very well find itself with an outraged public. (Think about Exxon…)

(The following is an excerpt from my thesis report.)

The second point is that large systems are complex. While this may seem self-evident, I raise this point because any solution I could potentially pursue within this thesis will be part of a larger puzzle. There is no single answer that will solve all the world’s problems. That said, it is better to embrace that complexity than shy away from it. Understanding the inherent interconnections is key to comprehensive, effective, and lasting solutions.

Sustainability embraces education, economics, business, belief systems, and much more. Although these interrelationships can be hard to figure out, they are critical to solving or at least understanding and addressing some of these massive problems. The tricky part lies in the fact that not all of the interrelationships are visible or even make immediate sense. A report released by the Pentagon in early 2005 described some of the social and economic effects of climate change:

The report explores how such an abrupt climate change scenario could potentially de-stabilize the geo-political environment, leading to skirmishes, battles, and even war due to resource constraints such as:

1. Food shortages due to decreases in net global agricultural production


2. Decreased availability and quality of fresh water in key regions due to shifted precipitation patters, causing more frequent floods and droughts


3. Disrupted access to energy supplies due to extensive sea ice and storminess

[Note that I’ve removed an excerpt from Jared Diamond’s Collapse because of copyright concerns when publishing on the Web. The gist of this missing excerpt is that while the Third World has First World aspirations, the reality is that world resources cannot sustain the current population living at First World standards, much less the added population of the Third World. Diamond asks, “What will happen when it finally dawns on all those people in the Third World that current First World standards are unreachable for them, and that the First World refuses to abandon those standards for itself (Diamond 496)?”]

And according to William McDonough:

“The Chinese are going to house 400 million people in the next 12 years. It’s the largest migration of humans in history. Essentially they’re rebuilding the housing stock of two Americas—in 12 years. ... [The China Housing Industry Association] did a mass-energy study on what would happen if all 400 million units were built with brick. They’d lose all their soil and burn all their coal. You’d have cities, but you wouldn’t have any food or energy. That’s how big this is. In fact, 174 jurisdictions have made brick illegal (Pederson).”

The intricacies of interrelationships are brought into sharp relief when talking about China. Because of its massive population and First World aspirations, any behavior which affects the world’s infrastructure, both natural and man-made, has world-wide consequences.

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Comments:

It’s impossible to understand all the myriad connections. What’s more important is to constantly monitor and evaluate the situation and to be flexible enough to change tactics and tweak solutions when needed.

By acknowledging the importance of sustainability, a whole bunch of stakeholders are added to the situation. While we may have insight into and experience with some of those stakeholders, others are completely new (at least for the purposes of these sorts of calculations) and not very well understood. It would be foolish to think we understand everything when in fact we’ve just begun to explore the effects and implications of our actions on the word around us.

(The following is an excerpt from my thesis report.)

First in my mind is the concept that the world as a finite reality. We have finite space, finite water, finite resources. They may be unimaginably large amounts of resources, but they are finite because the earth is a finite space. And that finite-ness is being tested through exponential population growth, worldwide resource drawdown, climate change, and a ticking clock, among other things. Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse, puts the timeline at less than 50 years. That’s time enough whereby I will be alive to see the consequences of my ancestors’ choices, and where my children (should I choose to have them) will be living in what could be dramatically different conditions. By supplying a concrete number, Diamond helps an otherwise abstract concept of “someday” assume great urgency. And it is this tendency towards abstraction which threatens our sense of reality.

Typically, we think of waste “going away” when we throw it out. Or wood for our homes coming from someplace where they grow trees. But in a finite world facing the unknowable consequences of globalization, it really does matter where “away” is, and where those trees are coming from. That salmon in a Pennsylvania WalMart actually came from Peru, twenty-four hours ago and several thousand miles away (Fishman). That transaction has a cost, invisible though it may be, and, I’d venture, it’s a cost which nobody thinks twice about. After all, it is generally held as a good thing that people in Pennsylvania have fresh Peruvian salmon, and I am inclined to agree on an abstract level. But I am also faced with the reality that growing, shipping, and consuming that salmon has very real environmental, social, and economic consequences.

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Comments:

I still think that we have an almost impossible task in attempting to wrap our heads around how large, yet finite, the world is. I’ve been reading the new Tufte book Beautiful Evidence and one of his complaints (among many) is that NASA doesn’t provide scale information when showing photos of celestial bodies. My immediate thought was, Well, stick an Earth in there an you’ll get some scale.

Yet how many of us have an understanding of what that really means? Put a shoe next to a car and I have a basis for really understanding how much bigger the car is. But a quasar next to our solar system next to our Earth? It borders on the abstract. Yes, we’d get a proportional sense of scale, but not a literal understanding of size. We just aren’t equipped to think in those terms: it’s like trying to provide scale for a human by placing an atom next to her. It may be a valid comparison, but it’s inconvenient.

So what path forward for us? Perhaps the size of the earth seems so daunting because it’s abstract. We don’t have catalogs detailing the number of trees, blades of grass, or drops of water. Perhaps once confronted with real numbers, or approximately real numbers, we can better understand change within our environment. While they would remain very large numbers, maybe the fact that they are numbers rather than infinity would make an impression: that this Earth and everything on it, is the only one we have.

I’ve been meaning to document my thesis work, but other matters have been more pressing. Eventually I will create that site, but in the meantime I thought it might be nice to pick out what I consider some highlights from my thesis explorations and present them in my blog. You know, maybe get some people to read them and hopefully comment on them…but more importantly, it would be nice to advance my theories as my own and claim ownership of them by documenting them. With the rate of change we’ve been seeing in the world lately, reality has been steadily overtaking my thesis work, and I’d prefer to say “here’s something cool I thought of” before someone goes out and does it, rather than vice versa.

In the spirit of drawing this process out as long as possible (and so I don’t have to think of new content all the time), I’ll post a section every few days and perhaps add a little commentary to expand on the concepts or talk about any shifts in thinking I might have had over the year.

Let’s begin at the beginning, shall we?

My thesis year at IDII was spent investigating how individuals could make a difference in such a large issue as sustainability. On the one hand we have initiatives to encourage individuals to recycle or carpool. On the other hand in the realm of nation states we have the Kyoto Protocol. A huge gulf separates the two extremes of action. And yet, after reading several compelling books (The Ecology of Commerce and Collapse, among others), and feeling an overwhelming urge to do something, I found myself lacking for direction. The Kyoto Protocol is way beyond my influence, and I already did things like recycling. I wanted to do something more, but what?

In the course of my research, I found that many people felt the same way. They read the same books, had the same realizations, and were full of energy and enthusiasm, yet they found (as did I) that there was no outlet for them. There was no way for them to make meaningful contributions to sustainability.

With this realization, I saw some opportunity to act.

Service design seemed like the best way to go for a couple of reasons: it offers opportunities for involving people in processes and it can promote dematerialization—while working on a thesis about sustainability, it seemed hypocritical to create yet another fancy widget.

My first step in the thesis process was to get my bearings within the land of sustainability and develop some approach vectors which might indicate more promising areas of investigation and development.

First was the realization that sustainability is a murky word because it is a quality, not a thing. You can’t point to sustainability and say “Aha, there it is!” Nor can you pin sustainability down to a specific checklist, because its qualities vary depending on the specific situation. For example, the concept of a “sustainable home” differs between the Sahara and the Arctic: an igloo wouldn’t last two minutes in the Sahara.

By the end of my thesis process, I grew incredibly tired of the word sustainability. While it encompasses a lot of concepts, its murky generality renders it almost a nonsense word. You can talk about sustainability this and sustainability that and in the end have said not much of anything. I also found its use and abuse extremely frustrating. A variety of industries seem to have found sustainability the new buzzword: the sustainable chair, the sustainable this, the sustainable that. Great, it’s sustainable, but what exactly are you doing? Sustainability necessarily encompasses a huge amount of complexity, and to think that “sustainable” can be bestowed upon an object because it’s made from recycled soda bottles is a violent misconception (if I can use that phrase). As Cradle to Cradle points out, that’s merely down-cycling material, not re-envisioning and re-making how we produce, consume, renew, or dispose of things. How can a light-bulb be “more sustainable” when its electricity comes from a coal-fired power plant?

I was struck by the need for massive change (to use Bruce Mau’s terminology), perhaps what one might even call a revolution. I saw a need for revolutionary thought and action, and yet all I saw were incremental, step-wise iterations of existing products, services, and systems. And this struck me as bizarre, because once you see the incredible amount of opportunity for innovation, with the attendant intellectual property, patents, royalties, and so forth, you’d think that companies would be stumbling over each other to innovate, to become leaders in their fields.

My future posts will explore this situation and where I think some of the solutions lie.