Slashdot Mirror
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."
Sorry to sound like a cynic, but it's this kind of innovation that our IP laws will obstruct. Someone in the U.S. and the E.U. will get a patent on the very idea of sustainable cities and cause the whole thing to get bogged down in licensing.
Would such a society benefit from being separated from the outside world? Obviously a city can't be self-sustainable if its citizens wants things from outside the city. It seems to me that this concept just isn't practical, mainly because of the level of interdependence and globalization we've developed in the more modern nations.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
not to say that some sources are not contaminated with whatever, but that's not the reason most of the time.
that advice is usually given to all foreigners going anywhere but the most developped countries. the fact is, the water is not cleaned (if it is) the same way as what your system is used to.
locals can drink and abuse it without getting sick because they're used to it. your system, weakened by years of overtreated water, simply can't cope with it.
The Greeks are a bad choice of example. Here's what Plato had to say about a once fertile region, destroyed by the kind of irrigation now being heavily practiced in California, among other places:
What now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away.... Mountains which now have nothing but food for bees ... had trees not very long ago. [The land] was enriched by the yearly rains, which were not lost to it, as now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea; but the soil was deep, and therein received the water, and kept it in the loamy earth ... feeding springs and streams running everywhere. Now only abandoned shrines remain to show where the springs once flowed.
(Quoted in A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright. Go read it. A complete English translation of Critas is here.)
Has it never seemed strange to you that the area called the "Fertile Crescent", mostly Iraq and Israel, is now anything but fertile? It's that way because of too little long-term vision in farming practices. We have been stressing our environment for a long time.
I'm with P&T on most of their "Bullshit" episodes, but P&T missed some of the most important points of recycling. You really don't want to be dumping used motor oil, mercury thermometers, and lead-acid car batteries into landfills.
For the biodegradable stuff, fine. Dump it and let it rot. Or burn it as fuel. Whatever. But a lot of stuff isn't biodegradable -- plastics and glass for example.
And one nice thing about upcycling (McDonough & Braungart strongly object to current recycling models) plastic is that it frees companies from the variability of the oil market. Having a ready supply of pure and perpetually reusable plastics will help keep product costs down -- the grandparent can't possibly be suggesting that pumping from deep oceans or making bacteria produce plastic will be more efficient than melting and remolding pure, ready to use existing plastics. The key is just ceasing to churn out tainted plastics like PVC and turning instead to a model using purer technological ingredients from the start.
I had the opportunity to talk with McDonough at a design conference last year, and he pointed out that plastic futures were steadily rising. I don't know if that's still true, and I'm too lazy to check now, but regardless companies are going to be looking for steady plastics supplies, and upcycling makes the most economic sense.
That could be easiler utilized by small farms...
No.
No no no no no no no no no.
This is a really, really, really stupid idea.
Small farms suck. We had small farms for about 8000 years, and they sucked. 90% of the population was trapped in back-breaking labour and poverty.
Now we have big farms. Big farms allow us to use big machinery, which makes farming roughly one hundred times more efficient. The result of that is that I can get paid (by comparison) a small fortune to sit at a desk and fiddle with databases, and never have to look at the rear end of an ox. Food is good, cheap and plentiful because we don't have small farms.
The reason people throughout the third world are heading to the city (even if they end up in shanty towns) is that small farms suck. Living in a slum on the outskirts of Bombay or Mexico City may suck, but living on a small farm is even worse.
The problem in Greece, the formerly fertile crescent, northern Africa (the bread basket of the Roman Empire) and similar areas is deforestation. Clear the trees for your pastures, and sooner or later you'll find that the land has degraded to the point that your pasture is too poor to support cattle anymore. So you bring in sheep, and they degrade the land even further. You end up herding goats, which can live on anything, but prevent the land from ever recovering.
The solution is to come up with something that does for goats what myxomatosis did for rabbits.
This is one point that I utterly disagree on. When the chinese prime minister was here, during the Clinton years, and was asked about human rights violations in China, you know what his answer was? He said, yes, freedom and liberty are important, but he believes, to a chinese person, even before he gets his full freedom, he'd rather have an education. That sentence struck me very much, at the core of my belief system, which was freedom above all. But he's right - after all, what is freedom good for without wisdom, what is freedom good for if you don't know what to do with it? I personally witnessed the fall of communism in the eastern block countries, and the fingerpointing, blaming and lynching of each other that starts whenever people free suddenly "free" and run rampant without self control, because there is no longer a secret service that's watching and comes takes you away. Remember the french revolution and guillotines? A temporary fix could be freedom+religion, fear of God, God is watching instead of the secret service, but the Chinese don't have Gods. Yet their culture is the most outspoken preacher of self control - wax on, wax off - remember? Wouldn't inner self control be a much more dignified way to be a human being, than an external self control, such as secret service or God?
Don't write off the Chinese so easily - they somehow put a stop to the explosive population growth, in a culture that values huge families. As far as sustainability goes, they hold the record - they have maintained a continuous existence for almost longer than any other culture - though heavily violent at first, the philosophies of Confucius and Lao Tzu from millenia ago, that still dominate today, sound very nonviolent and sustainable, even if not perfect - e.g. father as an absolute "tyrant." The Chinese were also not perfect in the sense that they too had an emperor until very recently, corruption, etc., but still, it's worth paying attention to what they are saying. They are not convinced the Taiwanese system that we pump so full of cash and resources to showcase it to them as bait, will lead to good. After all, they know what kind of opium-plague the free market can lead to, that scar in their memory is still very recent. When I see internet censoring stories about them, I'm not fully convinced that it's done simply out of a need to maintain corrupt power, or to keep China from succumbing to the inflow of miseducation and sex-opium-n-rocknroll that you get from the liberated, freemarket, human-rights promoting Clearchannel-RIAA western media.
The reason China's economy is growing really fast is because they stopped centrally planning it. Yes they do have a lot of state sponsored works but the real dynamo of China's economy is that a lot of a generals in the Chinese army took their military contract funds and opened up factories to produce goods bound for America. Chinese banks now underwrite this production dramatically, so that, anyone in China can get a loan to start a factory if they can convince the bank they have a buyer in America for the goods that it produces.
This is my sig.
The very reason it is faster for you is exactly that US city planners almost exclusively focus on making it convenient to get around by car vs. public transport.
Mass transit works well even in countries like Norway (average population density: 13 per square kilometer) - they just don't work everywhere. I don't think anybody suggests that someone living in a rural area should rely entirely on public transport. But vast areas of major population centres in the US consists of out of control sprawl because public transport hasn't been given priority.
The times I've visited the parts of Virginia near D.C. for instance, I've constantly been shocked at how hard it was to get around even by foot. I stayed in a hotel what should have been a 15 minute walk away from a restaurant, and we were faced with having to cross several 4-6 lane roads and several sections where there was no proper sidewalk.
This was an area with a population density far higher than anywhere in Norway (where I'm originally from), yet so pedestrian unfriendly and with such a useless public transport system that the typical 5000-10.000 inhabitant village in Norway would have more people using public transport on a daily basis.
I've never owned a car or gotten a drivers license, because I've never had a reason to. Perhaps I'll get one whenever I get kids, but for now public transport serves 95%+ of my transport needs, and the rest is solved with cabs, and I end up saving both time and money that way. However it always makes it interesting whenever I visit the US (going again this weekend, and will be staying in Palo Alto).
To be fair, some areas are quite good - the D.C metro was quite nice when I went there, and SF has a reasonable transport system, though it's still slow and inefficient if you want to go out to any of the smaller towns that don't have rail links.
But to claim that you need "very high population densities" for mass transit to work is bullshit, as anyone who has visited some of the European countries with lower population densities can tell you. Once density drops down you may need to have access to a car now and again, but there's a huge difference between having a transport system you can easily use for 80% of your journeys and not having one at all.
I also find it interesting that in Europe, most families will own a car, but will still take train/buses/undeground etc. into account when deciding how to get somewhere, while in large parts of the US (outside some of the major metro areas like NYC) it seems that the assumption is that if you have a car it will be your sole mode of transport apart from planes, regardless of whether a particular trip might be just as convenient or faster or cheaper with public transport.
That unwillingness in many areas to consider public transport unless you are forced to by not having a car fascinates me - it's very clear that there is a social status consideration in what mode of transport you consider in the US, which is much less pronounced in Europe, and that is more important than whether or not public transport is convenient, cheap or fast.