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.
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.
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.