Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Environment Page 6 of 15

Yes, Virginia, Permafrost IS Going to Release Carbon and Methane

By

On June 25, 2021

Comments

So, for years I’ve been saying that a great point of concern was methane/carbon release from permafrost. Every time I brought this up, I was told by someone that studies said it was unlikely.

This summer in the Russian arctic:

Arctic Temperature 2nd last weekend June 2021.

Feel free to take a break from reading to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.

There is more carbon stored in permafrost that there is carbon in the atmosphere. When permafrost thaws, it comes out as a combination of carbon and methane.

The greatest concern for climate change has always been, “When do we hit the self-reinforcing spirals?” Put another way, “When does it stop mattering if humans reduce emissions?”

The problem is that we really don’t understand the climate very well; our models are crude. Almost everything is actually coming in faster than we anticipated — Arctic ice is clearing faster than expected, Antarctic ice is calving sooner than we thought it would, glaciers are retreating faster than expected, etc, etc.

This, again, was easily predictable, in the sense that, for decades now, consensus forecasts have always come in “under” the actual results. So the smart bet was always on the over, and that’s the bet I’ve made and shared with my readers for many years now.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT GOING TO BE STOPPED.

Even if it is still possible to do, we are not going to do it — our political masters aren’t doing anything significant enough to even nudge the curves. Our populations are not voting primarily on climate change, or Sanders would be President of the US and Corbyn Prime Minister of the UK.

You must plan for climate changed based on the assumption that government will be of little help — it’s you and your friends and any other people you can find who want to prepare with you.

This means assuming breakdowns in the supply chain. It means assuming hotter weather in general, BUT more variable weather also — cold waves and so on will also become more frequent. Hurricanes and other extreme weather events will continue their trends of being more common and more powerful.

Assume a marine inundation event sooner than expected; if you aren’t at least a couple feet above sea level, don’t assume you have forever do something about that — a couple decades, maybe, and extreme weather could easily cause a flood before that.

Remember that water is going to be harder and harder to get; as the glaciers go away and as there is less snow pack, rivers will be fed far less. A vast amount of groundwater has been polluted by farm runoff, fracking, and other stupidity.

I also expect that oxygen concentration in the air will decline, and air quality will be worse.

This is an accelerating trend. It has moved very slowly, but it is speeding up and will continue to speed up. Think about how Covid curves have gone in incompetent countries: slow, slow, slow — VERTICAL. We’re a ways from vertical yet, but the lines for effects are no longer in “looks flat” territory.

It may be that your circumstances allow you to do little, but do what you can. And turn your efforts towards triage: Saving, or helping, yourself and those you want to save. The political battle is lost, was lost, and until absolute catastrophe hits, nothing of significance will be done.

That’s the future. Plan for it, please.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Huge Western Wildfire Season Far Beyond California

By

On June 8, 2021

Comments

So, this is the drought map for 2020:

Here’s the drought map for this year:

Yeah.

Expect wildfires all through this region and beyond. You should prepare NOW if you live in these areas (check for Mexican or Canadian maps if you live in those countries). Remember, you buy NOW because if you wait everything will be out of stock.

You may need (not a complete list):

  • Respirators
  • Air filters, have extras, especially for any air conditioners
  • A “go bag” in case you’re forced to evacuate.
  • Some sort of back-up electricity, even if only some batteries for your small items.
  • Tape to tape over your doors and windows. Painters tape, perhaps.
  • Internal air filtering fans. (Tutorial on how to make from box fans.)
  • Standard stuff like water and staple foods in case supply chains are disrupted.
  • Asthmatics and other people with breathing problems should make sure they have enough meds, if they can.

 

Larger scale preparations may include:

  • Non-flammable roofing and keep the roof clean of flammable materials like leaves and needles;
  • Change your lawn to something non-flammable; a rock garden perhaps.
  • I hate chopping down trees, but you may wish to consider any too near your house.
  • Be sure any flammable vegetation is not touching your house nor can fall on it.

I’m sure no expert on this sort of thing, so please leave suggestions for preparing in the comments and do your own research.

BUT the main thing is to do your research and preparation NOW. (Really ,it should have been sooner, and I apologize for not writing this article earlier.)

This is, yes, a result of climate change, exacerbated by bad forestry and soil management. But without climate change it wouldn’t have happened. This is how the ecology of local areas is changing to match the new climates. Unfortunately, that means the destruction of what is there now.

(In that vein, we are coming up on a period of serious food inflation. If you can store it, buy food now.)

Be well, be safe.

(The more people subscribe or donate the more I write and the happier I am. So please consider doing so if you like my writing.)

Why Progress Always Required Space Travel

By

On April 28, 2021

Comments

When  I was a teenager I read The Club of Rome’s “Limits To Growth.” The Club ran consumption, pollution and population numbers thru some simple models to see what would happen. The model misses climate change, so we’re worse off than they expect (much worse off) and some other factors, but the stuff it models has been coming in approximately as expected.

The standard model of progress, often assailed by thinkers like John Michael Greer, assumes that there aren’t significant limits to growth that we can’t substitute out of. Run out of oil? Switch to solar? Run out lithium, figure out another way to make batteries? Run out of water, mass-desalinization? Run out of soil, make soil or grow plankton in water. Run out of fish? Fish farms.

Etc…

But the people who created the model, who championed it, aren’t as optimistic and stupid as their opponents often indicate: the standard future model of people who believe in progress requires space exploitation precisely because we can’t assume we can always find a substitute on Earth for what we lack.

If you want, in other words, to keep GROWTH you must exploit space. Send out the space miners! Harvest solar above the atmosphere. Explore, exploit, grow!

You don’t necessarily have to colonize space in any meaningful way to do this, though the earlier imagineers thought we would: this can be done by robots and telepresence mostly, with a very few actual humans in space.

Note that this side-cuts most of the standard complaints about space colonization: other planets nearby all suck, and are worse for life than Earth (even shitty places on Earth like Antarctica) and space itself is full of deadly radiation and other problems we don’t know  how to fully mitigate.

Doesn’t matter if you’re just sending out robots to get stuff (lithium, say) and bring it back.

BUT none of this matters in a larger sense because the real problem isn’t running out of lithium or copper or helium or any other simple substance like that.

It’s destroying the biosphere, climate and ecosphere

Earth’s true wealth is an intricate web of life, from creatures simpler than bacteria all the way up to blue whales, including plants and fungi and insects and a wild variety of creatures we don’t understand or haven’t even discovered.

That, along with Earth’s climate, is what you can only get on Earth, at least within the solar system. That’s what we’re destroying.

So… space exploitation? Why not. It may help deal with some bottlenecks. But it still won’t let us continue GROWTH and the standard progress model, because the real limit to growth is simply that if we go past the Earth’s carrying capacity — which I will say, despite some disagreeing with me — we unequivocally have, we then start destroying that carrying capacity and all the things we must have that only Earth supplies.

Earth is the Jewel, the most important place in the universe for humans, right now. We cannot do without it and what is important about it is not copper or lithium, it is precisely climate and LIFE (ecosystems). Our destruction of those two things is what makes the standard model of progress impossible.

We’ve got a limited resource, created by processes of evolution which take millions of years to work. We are so ignorant we cannot even create a self-sustaining biosphere; we cannot fix what we are breaking.

Anyone and any system destroying the Earth’s climate and ecosphere is thus, then, doing the greatest wrong possible for the future of humanity, and of much life on Earth. Our mass genocide of other species is a slow form of strangling ourselves.

Space can help, but it won’t get us around the real issues. Only true respect for the genuine non-renewable resources we MUST have and which exist only on Earth can create a positive future for humanity and for all the species we have held hostage and not yet murdered, who are unfortunate enough to be trapped on Earth with us.

(Writers need dental care, so subscriptions and donations help.)

All the Futures that Will Not Happen

By

On April 26, 2021

Comments

I’m often amused and saddened by the techno-optimists among us and their fantasies of great futures. Or even the woke folks who think that color and gender and whatnot are the great political frontier.

Let’s run through this. Water.

Baseline Water Stress

To put some numbers on it:

New modeling of the world’s groundwater levels finds aquifers — the soil or porous rocks that hold groundwater — in the Upper Ganges Basin area of India, southern Spain, and Italy could be depleted between 2040 and 2060.

In the US, aquifers in California’s Central Valley, Tulare Basin, and southern San Joaquin Valley, could be depleted within the 2030s. Aquifers in the southern High Plains, which supply groundwater to parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, could reach their limits between the 2050s and 2070s, according to the new research.

The thing to understand about this is that it doesn’t show permanent aquifer damage. If you overdraw aquifers, they lose the ability to hold as much water; that reduction is permanent.

Then there is fracking and other forms of poisoning groundwater, though how much is difficult to determine. (It’s not small.)

Meanwhile, the next thing is that important rivers tend to be driven by snowpack runoff and glaciers, but snowpack is becoming less and less and glaciers are receding. We’re talking about rivers like the GANGES and the Yangtse, not to mention all the European rivers which start in the Alps.

So we have groundwater depletion, some of it permanent. We have poisoned groundwater, and we have a reasonable expectation of reduced water in rivers, which in some cases will dry up entirely.

Let’s move on to more fun stuff: ecosystem collapse.

Wildlife Reduction

This number is from 1970, which was already very reduced. You can read accounts of what the Grand Banks were like originally: They could literally dip a pail into the ocean and come up with fish. We’ve massively reduced wildlife everywhere, insect populations are collapsing, and so on. Recent estimates are that the Amazon is no longer a net producer of oxygen, but now produces Carbon Dioxide.

Phytoplankton produce half the world’s oxygen. From 1950 to 2010, the population of phytoplankton dropped 40 percent. We can safely assume losses were not even, but are accelerating.

The general picture in terms of climate change is all bad:

Climate Dashboard 2018

Note that first graph very carefully. There is NO sign in the actual numbers that we are doing anything of importance to stop this trend. Kyoto and Paris have achieved nothing, which is to be expected, since they were voluntary.

Let’s put this all together: massively rising temperatures; more extreme weather events; changes in climate, including rainfall patterns; massive depletion of aquifers at the same time as we can expect many rivers to lose volume or dry up; no effective political action.

One thing that India’s Covid crisis clarified for me is that India won’t be able to handle climate change, so let’s make some predictions.

India breaks up within 20 to 30 years. It dies amid great famines which kill two hundred million or more people. Bangladesh, of course, will go oven sooner, and unleash a tsunami of over 150 million refugees which India does not want, as they are mostly Muslim.

China breaks up 30 to 45 years from now and descends into warlordism. Prior to the breakup, there is a better-than-even chance of war with Russia for Siberia. Again, hundreds of millions of deaths.

The US is going to hurt worse than is obvious: Core areas will hit depletion, and many rivers will dry up. Large chunks of the Southwest will become completely uninhabitable. California’s population carrying capacity will drop massively, unless it moves to mass de-salinization (a dicey prospect).

We’ve just had ourselves a lesson in what exponential growth looks like. There is every reason to expect that at least some parts of ecosystem collapse and climate change will act that way: When break points are reached, they will accelerate, and nothing we can do will stop them. Worst case scenario is a hothouse Earth in which humanity goes extinct, but entirely plausible scenarios see the Earth losing half or more of its carrying capacity. The process will involve a lot of death, suffering, and war.

There’s a decent chance we get a marine inundation event. Rather than water rising by small amounts every year, at some point it rises very quickly, and large amounts of the coast flood permanently.

Remember that the “moderate” estimates have almost all been wrong. The “worst case” scenarios, for decades now, have been coming in correctly.

All of which is to say, whatever future you think you’re going to have, you need to run it past this lens. Does it survive this? Does society spend resources on whatever it is in the face of hundreds of millions of deaths and billions of refugees?

So, no, your future, whatever it is, unless you can instantiate it in the next two decades, probably isn’t going to happen.

The clock is ticking, we are running out of time to do whatever it is we want to do, and it is very likely that we are past the point of no return; that even if we were to go all-out to stop climate change and environmental collapse (we won’t), we could — at best — limit it to “losing half the population.”

lf you’re old enough, none of this matters, of course. But we are now at the point where, if you aren’t 60 and in poor health, or 70 and in good health, you’re probably going to get see at least the start of the really bad times.

We’ll come back to what this means in more depth later, but for now, just make your plans based on this understanding of what the future holds.

(Writers eat and pay rent, so subscriptions and donations help.)

American Suicide Numbers Dropped Last Year

By

On April 8, 2021

Comments

So, we kept being told Covid was causing increased suicides and it turned out not to be true.

I suspect this means is that American bosses are so shitty that a pandemic combined with massive economic problems is preferable to working with them in close quarters.

One of the great problems with “capitalism” is that businesses break people and aren’t stuck with having to clean up the mess they made. This is particularly noticeable, lately, at Amazon, who, in at least one case, kept an ambulance outside its warehouse because it knew enough workers would collapse and need it. Or who schedules its delivery drivers so tightly they shit in bags and piss in bottles and get UTIs.

Walmart built its business on underpaying workers and sending them to get government benefits; meaning, it wasn’t actually paying for the cost of its labor. By doing so, it wiped out businesses who did pay the cost of their labor.

Capitalism, for most of its history, has required not paying either cost of its labor practices (the human damage it does) or the cost of the resources it is permanently destroying (most recently, we are on track to kill about 50 percent of all known living species, which have both monetary and non-monetary value).

A system which throws off that much damage is obviously deranged and its “gains” are obviously unsustainable. Humanity has a limited set of resources off of which it has to live (including an ecosphere) and no, “technology” cannot replace them all. We don’t even understand the interactions of a properly functioning ecology enough to create a simple one in a biosphere; we can’t fix, or heal, what we break, any more than companies who compel employees to suicide can bring them back.

None of this is particularly necessary. Our problem is that we are STUPID. Capitalism has obvious problems that we refuse to acknowledge or deal with. We need a new way of managing our economy, one which also manages ecology and resources like, oh, THE Amazon.

This is not going to be possible if we base economic decision-making on supply and demand as we currently understand them. Nor is it going to be possible with the version of democracy or one-party states through which we have been running our society. (Nor is green fascism a solution, since fascism bottlenecks decision making.)

Money, based on debt, of which our society runs huge chunks around for almost all of our history, will also have to be completely re-thought because money has a strong tendency to reward people who abuse at scale, and always has.

None of this is impossible, though we’ve left it too late, so we’re going to eat the bitter fruits of our actions. I suggest, among other things, working to be sure that those with the most power, rather than using that power (money is power) to avoid the consequences of their actions, are forced to gorge on what they have done.

Letting bygones be bygones is a very large mistake when the bygone is multi-species genocide.

More on the rest, later.

All the content here is free, but subscriptions and donations do help, a lot.

The Vast Confusion of Implicit Assumptions Like Wages and Productivity

By

On March 29, 2021

Comments

Ran across this gem:

Paul Krugman, 1994: “Economic history offers no example of a country that experienced long-term productivity growth without a roughly equal rise in real wages.”

Now, this is one of those phrases which is a bit dubious, even on its own terms. “Long run” is doing a lot of work here.

But I’m not interested in that, it’s the embedded assumptions that matter.

Let’s tackle the word “wages” first.

When peasants were forced off the land through enclosures, and went to to work in factories, their wages increased. (Artisans who lost their jobs to factories had their wages drop, but they were a minority compared to the ex-peasants.)

These peasants went from work that they controlled, that was often only a few hours a day, with more days “off” (minus mandatory farm tasks like feeding and mucking) than modern workers, to jobs that often were 6/1/2 days a week, 12 hours a day, except Sundays, where you only worked six hours.

They lived fewer years, they were sick more often, and maimed far more often. They went from jobs with little to no supervision to closely supervised factory labor that was very de-skilled and boring.

Yes, they had more money — because they had to pay for everything (food, housing, etc.), whereas a peasant created much of their daily necessities together with other peasants and were only partially in the “money economy.”

The point is, that an increase in wages does not automatically mean an increase in wages.

After NAFTA, over a million subsistence farmers were pushed into Mexico’s slums. At the same time, the nutritional value of food in Mexico dropped due to deregulation and mergers allowing a few large companies to dominate the processing and sale of various staple grain products, and those companies decreased the quality of their offerings.

These new slum dwellers were pushed further into the money economy: they had to buy everything they needed. If you looked at the numbers, you would say, “Hey, they have more money, therefore they are better off!”

This process happened over and over again in developing countries. Peasants pushed off farms, and into slums, and it often looked like a net win. Usually, it wasn’t. Even in places where it looked like it was, like China, the results were mixed (the happiness data in China shows that those who moved to cities increased their income, but their happiness dropped). In countries that did not effectively develop, it was just a clear, net welfare drop.

This is similar to Western Europeans having lower salaries than Americans, but being healthier, taller (a good proxy for nutrition), and living longer, with higher happiness rates, fewer overweight people, and less illness.

Meanwhile, Americans pay more for worse healthcare, have to have a car, and live in larger houses with more land, farther from their jobs.

Anyway, all of this is a long way of saying wages and welfare are not the same thing.

Now, let’s talk productivity. The economic definition is the ration between output volume and input volume (labor/capital). Perfectly useful definition.

But what it doesn’t include is interesting. If I’m drawing down an aquifer to make bottled water and, in fact, causing that aquifer to be damaged so it will NEVER recover to the same capacity, ever again, but I’m not forced to book that as a negative input, am I measuring productivity correctly?

If I am polluting the air in a way that will cause climate changes that will kill a billion people and ruin tons of property, but I don’t have to book those foreseeable costs as negative input, am I measuring productivity correctly?

If my production is causing general environmental damage which shows that half the world’s species will go extinct, should that be added to the inputs side in negative terms?

If I’m using up dense energy (hydrocarbons) which took billions of years to create and which I cannot replace, should that be a net negative?

In standard accounting, wear and tear for capital equipment is counted as an expense. But the destruction of the environment, people, and entire species is not.

If I’m cold, and I light my house on fire, for a while I will be very warm. No one would think what I’ve done is wise, however — unless the other option was dying. Lighting an entire neighbourhood on fire to save one life wouldn’t be considered acceptable either.

But, in fact, by burning down the world, we are going to kill a lot more people, animals, and plants than by not burning down the world. All of this has left out more standard issues: all the asthma caused by air pollution, all the cancer caused by various chemicals in our food, water, and air, the crash in human fertility, etc, etc.

If you don’t price in externalities, to use the economic term, then you don’t know the actual productivity numbers.

So, what we’re going to find on recalculating productivity properly is that, at some fairly early point, there were no productivity increases from industrialization, and that productivity has been dropping for generations now.

Wages are very often not a good proxy for welfare. Productivity rarely includes all the negative inputs, and thus, is also inaccurate (and we’ve only touched on the issues with both).

When you have embedded assumptions, and you don’t realize what those assumptions are, or think they don’t really matter, you make terrible mistakes. If you create a decision making system (“do it if it makes a profit”) whose numbers don’t include those hidden costs, you can drive yourself very productively, and efficiently, into a hole from which you’ll never be able to dig yourself out.

It’s not that economists don’t acknowledge this. But in practice, they have acted as if it doesn’t matter.

It does. It matters now, for all the people whose lives were made worse over the last couple centuries, and it matters tomorrow, when the full bill will start to come due.

All the content here is free, but subscriptions and donations do help, a lot.

The Fortune of the Commons

By

On December 7, 2020

Comments

There is a theory, called, “the tragedy of the commons” that if no one owns something, it will be overused.

You can see this in pollution. No one owns the air, so assholes over-pollute it because they get the profits and bear only a tiny part of the costs. When I was young the BC coasts had tons of clam and oyster beds. In the 90s people with no connection to local communities (Vietnamese) came along and stripped them clean. Made a lot of money, but destroyed most of the beds.

The problem is that these aren’t “commons”.

Commons are resources a community or group in the community manages together. The air and oyster beds weren’t managed.

The commons, in England and elsewhere, lasted for well over a 1,000 years. They were managed well, were over 90% as productive as enclosed fields and produced a far better standard of living for more people than enclosed fields, which were associated with throwing people off the land they had lived on for over a thousand years, so they could work over 80 hours a week in factories with horrific rates of dismemberment, in cities rife with disease where people died far younger and were ill far more often.

There is no tragedy of the commons.


What we call commons, aren’t. To be a commons, a group of people which benefit more from the continued existence of something than its destruction or degradation have to be charge in it. No short-termers or outsiders (people who don’t need it to continue in their lifetime and beyond) need apply. In the terms of Carse’s “Finite and Infinite Games” no one playing a finite game can ever be allowed close to a commons.

 

(It’s my annual fundraiser (and still running behind compared to past fundraisers) If you value my writing and can afford to, please consider subscribing or donating.)

It does make a difference.

 

The tragedy of the commons is that people who didn’t benefit from them continuing used the power of the state to break them up (enclose) them for their private profit, thus improverishing millions of people.

The modern tragedy of shared resources (which are NOT commons) is that the people in charge of them are playing finite games. My friend Stirling Newberry called this the death-bet. Simply put, the people fucking the world up with massive pollution and over-using resources, will be dead when the bet comes due. Nancy Pelosi, clinging grimly to power, is 80 years old.

The people you want in charge are people who are young and people who care about their great-grandchildren. Or, in the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) phrase, for the next seven generations.

As for old people, the problem is twofold: first they think their money will help their kids, second they don’t /really/ care about their children or grandchildren. (Based on the behaviour I see, I assume most Americans don’t actually care much about their kids, especially once they’re adults. They scream that they do, but their actions show otherwise.)

They also have to be, for types of commons which are not global, locals, so that they can’t leave when things go bad. People who aren’t committed to the local area can’t be in charge of the long-term sustainability of a local area.

Put crudely, people who don’t have to eat where they shit can’t be in charge of anything.

Because this isn’t always possible, with global resources, you need to put people in artificial boxes. They need to experience the consequences of their failures. If they have both authority and power to act, after a certain time in office (and when out of office for a certain amount of time, so they don’t dodge their failures) they need to eat their own dogfood, to use the business expression. Make them live in the place with the worst pollution. If there are people there without a mask, then they don’t get to have one either. Make them drink the water. Make them eat the fish from the river.

This sort of personal responsibility, if combined with actual power, will clear problems up fast. If you want to make it really potent, give them a bit of time then make their non-adult children do the same.

In India there is a longstanding problem, not primarily environmental, but similiar, called manual scavenging. Simply put, untouchable (Dalit) caste members clean sewers and so on manually. No other jobs are available to them.

If you simply made it so that the governor and police chief and Prime Minister all had to do a day of manual scavenging every week till there was no manual scavenging (or so close to none as to unmeasurable) I guarantee this problem would be solved so fast your head would spin.

As for heads of industry, making the Shell CEO and every executive and all major shareholders eat fish from the Gulf oil spill for a year would be laudatory.

No wealth or power without responsibility for results. None. No scapegoats. If you have power, you’re in charge, no saying someone is responsible without giving them necessary authority.

The Ganges, in India, is horribly polluted and Indian politicians constantly wail, promise to do something and do nothing. Make them drink it every day, in front of witnesses, and the problem will resolve itself. (Sure, there can be some time lag. But perhaps make them drink one glass at the start of their term of office. Concentrate the mind a bit.)

No one gets to be in charge of anything unless they are affected by the results of their actions. Nothing.

This may seem similar to “Skin in the Game” by Taleb, but it is an ancient idea. Even in modern thinking, before Taleb, Jared Diamond made the same point in his book Collapse. But the idea is as old as civilization, and I am quite sure older.

As for the generational altruism idea, the ancient Greek saying was “a society is great when old men plant trees in whose shades they will never sit.”

We know all this, but in the modern era bunch of people who were either fools or evil or both, starting with Adam Smith (who was, admittedly, not quite as bad as his idea’s misuse would lead one to believe), created the idea that governing the world based on short term greed would lead to good results.

It did, for some people, and for a larger group for a while (that while is coming to an end.) It was based on genocide, enclosure (aka the violent removal of property rights from peasants) and the conquest of 70%+ of the world.

Or, if  you want another authority, Keynes,

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

Put that way, it’s pretty obviously nonsense.

The Tragedy of the Commons is that we don’t have properly constituted Commons, that is all.

 

SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

 

The Beauty of the Future

By

On December 6, 2020

Comments

These pictures are of the Bosco Verticale, or Veritical Forest, located in Milan.

This is a beautiful building, and even with embedded carbon (the carbon of its materials) it’s better for the environment than normal buildings. The two towers have

“a total of 800 trees (480 first and second stage trees, 300 smaller ones, 15,000 perennials and/or ground covering plants and 5,000 shrubs, providing an amount of vegetation equivalent to 30,000 square metres of woodland and undergrowth, concentrated on 3,000 square metres of urban surface.”

It’s cooler in the summer, warmer in the winter, has better humidity. The water pumps run off solar power and use ground water.

(It’s my annual fundraiser (and going slower than normal this year.) If you value my writing and can afford to, please consider subscribing or donating.)

It also appears to be a lovely place to live.

Creating any future includes making it something people want. People wanted the suburban house with picket fences, a castle of their own. If they are to embrace a green future, that future has to attractive to them.

There’s no reason that shouldn’t be so. People love trees, plants, waterfalls, mist, ponds and even marshes (so long as they don’t have to slog thru them.) Natural light is healthier and buildings like these need less air conditioning and heating and thus feel better to live in. Air conditioning is better than the alternative, but being cool without it or with less is more comfortable.

An era is as much about aesthetics as about anything else. It is about a look and a feel and a way of doing things. This sort of building, while only a start, shows the way towards a green aesthetic. There’s no need for a green world to feel worse for people, it should feel better.

SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

Page 6 of 15

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén