China Planning For Sustainable Cities

TapeCutter writes "In a BBC article William McDonough says, 'The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.' The Chineese appear to agree with him and have commissioned McDonough's company to create an environmentally sustainable village as a pilot project for the more ambitious idea of sustainable cities. McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart have also written a book on the subject, Cradle to Cradle, previously reviewed here on Slashdot."

Comments

Boil water first...

[HockeyPuck]

I recently came back from China on a business trip... I stayed in a expensive hotel... and they warned me at the front desk that I should use bottled water for everything. Not just drinking, but brushing my teeth, washing my face etc..

If I needed more water for such activities all I had to do was call the front desk and they provide it free of charge.

Re:Sustainable City After Nuclear War?

[Anonymous Coward]

China, peaceful? Perhaps you've never heard of the Chinese EMPIRE. They've had several of them. China was a brutal conqueror long before Japan took their own shot in WW2. What always shocks me about the mindset of people coming out of China is that they don't seem to care about truth, or human rights, or even justice really, they have been so brainwashed by their government. Mostly, they're just afraid to stick their necks out, while their leaders bluster on threatening people right and left while they work on assimilating or exterminating ethnic minorities in order to make room for more Chinese people. (For example, look at what happened to Manchuria, as well as China's policies in Tibet.) Lucky for the Vietnamese, they drove out the Chinese while they had the chance. (Vietnam was actually a quasi-province of China for a long period of its history, in fact.)

For all the criticism of Americans, it is the Chinese who really take the cake for cultural insensitivity, imperialism (in the old-fashioned sense, not neo-colonialism because they're not rich enough for that yet), and disregard for the rights of all people, both within and outside their country. Oh yeah, they're also way more racist than we are, too.

If China is peaceful now, it's because they know that they will lose if it comes down to a confrontation with the USA. They don't actually have the capability to nuke the USA (they still lack the long-range missiles), they could hit Taiwan but that would be self-defeating; meanwhile they would risk having everything that they've built up in the past 100 years completely destroyed.

No doubt their space program largely aims at developing ICBM technology, so perhaps a greater threat is on the horizon. One might think that the value of trade would restrain China, but that didn't rein in Germany or Japan, and the Chinese seem quite capable of the kinds of abuses perpetrated by those powers back in the 1940's.

It's a beginning...

[userlame]

This is the first time I've seen anyone really discussing this. I'm glad to see it. This is going to be an extrememly important issue in our lifetimes.

Good reading: http://www.ishmael.com/Education/Writings/The_New_ Renaissance.shtml

And some great books: http://www.newtribalventures.com/ntv/market/catego ry.cfm?Category=11#72

Peanuts, soybeans, corn aren't renewable?

[jmichaelg]

I don't claim to be an expert, but plastic is a by-product of oil. When the oil runs out, no more plastic.

Plastic can be made from lots of different oils, not just petroleum. George Washington Carver managed to convert peanut oil to plastic.

Re:Peak Oil

[ArmorFiend]

There's good reason to believe that "Peak Oil" is already here. This is it. These are the painfully high gas prices we were warned about. (Historically speaking, gas prices today are horrifying. Ask your parents.)

In 1981 the cost of a gallon of gas was $3 in 2005 dollars. See "The Oil Uproar that Isn't."

So we pretty much know that the threshold for economic shit hitting the fan is between $2 and $3 per gallon in 2005 dollars, eh?

Re:Ramp-up time is key for energy infrastructure

[maxpublic]

Ethanol is a fool's fuel. It takes nearly a gallon of oil to produce a gallon of ethanol. How exactly does that help anyone, other than farmers in the Midwest who're take government subsidies to produce the appropriate crops?

Ethanol has been a sham from the get-go.

Max

Re:Sustainable cities?

[maxpublic]

I disagree with your statements, entirely

Disagree all you like, but it is indeed historical fact that the Fertile Crescent was covered in huge temperate forests, and that deforestation caused by humans dramatically reduced the rainfall the region received. Here are a few excerpts on the topic for ya:

"Along with its other distinctive qualities, the Epic of Gilgamesh is the earliest recorded story of desertification caused by the extensive destruction of forestlands. Lebanon went from more than 90 percent forest (the famous Cedars of Lebanon) to less than 7 percent over a 1,500-year period. Trees and their roots are an important part of the water cycle, so rainfall downwind of deforested areas decreased by 80 percent. Over time, millions of acres of land in the Fertile Crescent area turned to desert or scrubland, and remain relatively barren to this day...

"The result of this local climatic change more than 5000 years ago was widespread famine. The collapse of the last Mesopotamian empire happened around 4,000 years ago, and the records they left behind show that only at the very end of their empire did they realize how they had destroyed their precious source of food and fuel by razing their forests and despoiling the rest of their environment." This is actually just a summary of what you can find in any ecological textbook for undergrads, but is reprinted in "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" by Thom Hartmann, copyright (c) 1998, 1999, 2004 by Mythical Research, Inc. Used by permission of Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

Another:

". . .Fertile Crescent and eastern Mediterranean societies had the misfortune to arise in an ecologically fragile environment," writes Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. "They committed ecological suicide by destroying their own resource base."

Jared is referring to the fact that the societies in the Fertile Crescent cut down their forests for agricultural use and wood burning, which ultimately altered the climate and destroyed the land they were cultivating.

Another:

"A cautionary tale comes from the arc of land through parts of Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran -- the cradle of civilization known as the Fertile Crescent. In ancient times much of this land was forest. The area became a leader in food production as trees were cleared for agriculture, and cut for timber, firewood, and manufacturing plaster. Now the expression "Fertile Crescent" is absurd, because the land is largely desert, semi-desert, steppe-eroded and salinized terrain, unsuitable for agriculture." A summarization of another textbook article by Ann Hancock, who simplified it for a magazine article.

I can go on here. Any undergrad in ecological science will be able to confirm what I've said. It isn't an area of dispute where scientists are concerned.

I can't argue you this point, because it's simply not correct.

You can't argue with it because you've apparently never bothered to do a whit of research on the topic. But I suppose you're more learned than Jared Diamond, or just about any other ecological scientist on the planet?

Max