Ecological Engineering

Cameron Laird writes "Lou Licht goes beyond, "Pollution is bad, punish someone." Instead, he uses good science, engineering, and economics to make environmental remediation attractive. The basic technology: managing polluting chemical species through a system of live poplar tree stands. " We've talked about this before on Slashdot, going back a couple years ago. Very interesting stuff - plant usage to clean things up seems like the best of both worlds. Weelll...I suppose not polluting in the first place would probably be the best of both worlds, but you get my point.

Comments

Good, but probably futile

[rde]

For decades, we've more or less all been aware that environmental protection makes economic sense; I don't think anyone doubts that. Unfortunately, it rarely makes immediate- or short-term sense, which is why we see millions of hectares of rainforest disappearing annually.
Basically, you can't rely on human beings to act in their own self interest in anything but the short term.

We're now looking at Ecolovillage. We want to build a suburb of clustered housing, a small retirement village. That's what we want to do-and treat all the water on-site, really get focused on solid waste management, and grow enough carbon that we have a good running start to be even greenhouse-gas cyclic. You take a field and, instead of putting two-acre mini- mansions on it, you go out there, cluster housing, and keep the rest of the land either in productive agriculture or productive prairie, with wetlands and ecological diversity.

Hands up anyone out there who believes that more than an tiny minority of the peole who can afford mini-mansions would go for this?

Don't get me wrong; I was mightily impressed by this interview, and it convinced me to look further into the project. I don't, however, believe you can rely on the asshole that is the typical human to go along with it.