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."
Hmm, maybe Bush will sell them one of our internets?
feh. stuff.
Isn't it obvious? This is just another way to keep the people of China under the Communist Party's foot. They are scared about the growing globalization. (examples include their firewall, such and such) If they can seperate China into many small components, they can control it. This is going backwards, not forwards.
Recycling will not be worth it until the recycle nazis get some equipment to accept nonperfect items. For example, in my area if you want to recycle plastic bottles you need to take off the lids, remove the labels and make sure they are empty. What am I, the milk lady? Get yourself a machine to take off the lids and remove the labels. Also very hip at the moment is these "green bags". They're bags that are green, look like they're made of hemp (but are really made of plastic or some kind of canvas) that all the environmental concious people take with them to the shops.
"Would you like a bag with that?"
"Oh no, I bought my own."
"Right, $5 for a green bag."
*kaching*
"No, I'm not buying this green bag, I brought it to cart my goods away in."
"Well lady, we sell those green bags over there, how am I supposed to know whether you brought it in with you or you're just trying to shoplift it?"
"Ahh shit, I didn't think of that, and to make matters worse, green really doesn't go with my dress, they should be black bags, then they'd go with everything."
"Doctors carry black bags lady, and you aint smart enough to be a doctor, now either pay for the bag or I'm calling security to check their cameras."
Then you have those multicoloured bins that you have to sort your trash into. Paper, plasic, bottles. Wait, do they mean plastic bottles or glass bottles? Oh, glass bottles. Who the hell has glass bottles? Can I put jars in here? Oh, only if I remove the lid and the label and clean out the jar. To hell with that.
How we know is more important than what we know.
If you view this from the tech view, you can go, "Eh....That's nice."
Instead, view it in a geopolitical view. Mixed with Gaming, if you want a more geeky view of this.
Can you say "We Soak that Damage, You Cretin!"? An "eco-city" with heavily integrated, independent, redundant, and self-sufficient societal support systems can take a HUGE amount of damage physically before it stops functioning.
WORLD WAR III COORDINATOR: "Well, lets just bomb their power plants."
INTEL GUY: "What power plants?"
WORLD WAR III COORDINATOR: "Shit. Well, bomb their water treatment plants."
INTEL GUY: "Yes, sir. I'll get a bunker busting smart bomb queued up for every building in their cities."
WORLD WAR III COORDINATOR: "Shit. Well, how are things going on the west coast?"
INTEL GUY: "Well, the blew out our infrastructure stuff in Cali as soon as their troops landed on the San Fransciso bay. We were sitting ducks. Man, we sure didn't see those troop carrier subs coming. Talk about balls. And we can't really nuke LA at this point, can we?"
Think "long term" here, guys. This is like a game of chess. Or Poker. You don't always have to win every battle, but if you make more correct decisions than your enemy you will eventually win.
For example:
Bring more of your friends to the fight. Duh. China has us nailed there.
Bring better weapons. We still got china nailed there, but for how long guys? How much of our high tech electronics crap is made there? And how many US students do you see studying heavy engineering topics?
And finally, be able to take more hits. Hehehehehe. China would WELCOME us nuking 300 million of their people! Add to that a policy for building hardened, semi-underground cities that can take a serious ass kicking and still deliver a smile...
Who seems to be making more of the right decisions here, folks?
and no matter how scientific or literary you make it, it comes down to one group of people forcing their opinions down the throats of the rest of the population, that population before forced to live under and according to the designing and ruling group's theories.
Somehow, the masses are always being hurt by and dying for someone else's ideas of what is right. This fact of life is harped on endlessly by socialistic twits all the time, yet they are the first to live up to it with a vengeance when these sorts of things come up. Yes, it may "sustainable" (whatever that actually means at the moment, from moment to moment, and in the end). Yes, it may be "environmentally friendly" (whatever that actually means at the moment, from moment to moment, and in the end), and yes it may be "better" (whatever that actually means at the moment, from moment to moment, and in the end).
That's a lot of may-bes and unknowns. Who says these people are fit to make that decision for everyone else?
The only way that the environment will be better off and the human race free to keep on growing is technology. Humans of today are way past being able to turn back the technological clock and go back to pre-industrial civilization. A sizable portion of the exploding third-world population is now inextricably tied to the first-world's economy and technology whether anyone likes or accepts it or not. We turn back the clock, we can write off three quarters of the planet's population. Who makes that decision? It wasn't okay to risk it with the cold war and threat of nuclear global holocaust, why is it okay in the name of "the environment" (whatever that actually means at the moment, from moment to moment, and in the end)?
No amount of arrogant "we're better and smarter and know more" is going to turn this into a perfect cutsey world ala Demolition Man. No Raymond Cocteau, no "be well", no "joy joy" boredom and lack of conflict. The nature of man rules it out.
The only thing that will help the environment and humanity both is technology. Sure, there's a lot of unneeded trash, not nearly enough composting with trash being dumped heedless of basic biology and chemistry as applies to rotting matierals. With thick clay and sand caps every so many feet, we're guaranteeing that should present trends continue we will see a day when our cities will be built on top of trash and tunneled through mountains of it.
But present trends never continue unabated. Things change. Anyone remember the recent decade of the seventies when we were by now supposed to be variously fried and frozen by global warming, barbecued by a no longer existant ozone layer, over-populated to the tune of more then forty billion people and feeding on each other ala Soylent Green or starving due to lack of food if we didn't resort to cannibalism however high tech?
To borrow from Steven Wright, if present trends continued from my second birthday, by the time I was ten I'd be five hundred and twelve.
Space travel, terraforming, space settlement in the long run. In the short run, inventing better packaging, less power hungry and more efficient devices (anyone looking over their Pentium or Athlon hot plates at the moment, hmmm?), better recycling to go with better manufacturing, better ways of sewage and water treatment, alternative energy sources where it makes sense, but most of all to recapture waste energy and feed it back into manufacturing (thermionics and thermoelectrics don't ever seem to be used in the hot gas exhausts of cars to oil furnaces, so why not and why not design cheap flexible solar panels that can be nailed down doubling as roofing shingles) and other sources of the waste in the first place.
Top down utopian clap-trap sustainable plans are bogus and always will be. Human nature defies it. But you give me an electric or hybrid car that outperforms an all gas model and costs less? You got my business and you do something for the environment. Oh look, s
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)