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

Easy for China To Do

[Anonymous Coward]

China would have a much easier job of planning like this when the people there can't challenge the government.

In a free country that lived by the rule of law, the people have a right to object and challenge such reshaping of the land. Not in China, sadly.

Re:Easy for China To Do

[demachina]

" Sometimes we need to be told/made to do things that we dont want to (Like polution and population control)"

Uh, China might have an advantage in population control now though they were way late in starting, but its my understanding China is a disaster on pollution control. Thanks to central planning and the desire to industrialize fast, they've massively overbuilt coal fired power plants and coal fired steel mills and put them next to pretty much every city. As they abandon sensible bicycles for cars in an effort to catch up to American's in wasting energy and pollution, I think some cities have air so bad its not just a long term health risk, it is an immediate health risk.

One reason they have so many mining disasters is they mine so much coal. They along with the U.S. are probably the two leaders at fueling CO2 buildup and global warming.

Problem with central planning is if the central planners make bad choices they can do a lot of damage fast. For example they have almost always opted for economic growth over environmental protection. Thanks to central planning they can grow their economy really fast and destory their environment really fast too. They can also insure no tree huggers get in their way, in contrast to the U.S. The fact enivornmentalist have clout in the U.S., though less then they did thanks to Republicans being in power, is one reason U.S. economic competitiveness is falling while our environment is improving some. Though environmental protection is just one of many, others being out of control health care costs, uncompetitively high wage rates, bad education, and workers lacking motivation.

IP Laws will keep the idea from gaining traction

[rdean400]

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.

They'll need them

[winkydink]

seeing as most of there current cities are polluted beyond repair. Clean drinking water from the tap? I guess if you're cholera-resistant.

Sustainable cities?

[kc32]

You mean like the ones the Greeks had over 2000 years ago?

Re:Sustainable cities?

[Roger_Wilco]

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.

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

Peak Oil

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess China is preparing for the peak oil event. We should be doing that same in North America.

Re:Peak Oil

[WazzTheWizz]

It simply amazes me when Americans talk of gas (petrol) being expensive at $2.20. You guys are practically getting the stuff for free. Try comparing your price with the UK ($7.00 a gallon, pretty much anywhere in Europe or even Australia (where driving distances are also very large). At the ridicuolously cheap US prices, it's no wonder the stuff is wasted in big gas guzzlers.

Re:IP Laws will keep the idea from gaining tractio

[Scoria]

But the innovation will continue, as China is both influential and strong. They will simply move to disregard both American and European claims of intellectual ownership.

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:Boil water first...

[Feyr]

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.

Re:Living

[Anonymous Coward]

As a bank robber, I take offense. I much prefer well-crafted wines to crude street drugs.

Re:IP Laws will keep the idea from gaining tractio

[Jeremi]

Yup, you're a cynic. A realist would know that it's the vested interests (real estate developers, big box retailers, and purblind NIMBYism) that will keep this from happening in the U.S.

Re:What if sustainability isn't efficient?

[bani]

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.

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.

Ages

[Boronx]

The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones.

No, but the Age of Democracy might.

Re:What if sustainability isn't efficient?

[greg_barton]

Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller's (Penn & Teller) great show Bullshit did a great show last season on recycling.

You know, I really wish Penn and Teller would do an episode of Bullshit about themselves. Seriously doubt it, though. One common characteristic I see in self proclaimed skeptics is that they rarely apply their craft to themselves.

Sometimes I think they just have run out of ideas and just need to make filler shows. In the case of that particular episode, they were attacking a strawman the entire time. A ten year old could refute their argument. They constantly harped on the "recycling takes more energy" argument, while completely ignoring that lower energy usage is not the point of recycling. Not to mention that it's painfully obvious that, if you put effort into reusing a nonrenewable resource, you will expend energy in that effort. Duh.

Re:What if sustainability isn't efficient?

[patternjuggler]

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?... 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.

Wasn't it you that said something in a grandparent post like: "People with no imagination see any change to the status quo as the end of the world. Thank god there's people who see change as an opportunity and a challenge." ?

Re:These kind of initiatives are pointless

[interstellar_donkey]

I think it's that kind of reasoning that has kept the bulk of American city development going in the wrong direction. People don't just make decisions based on total cost. If that were the case, nobody would buy steak when a perfectly acceptable and much cheaper soy based meal is available.

People make decisions based a lot on perceived value, as opposed to outright cost. Many Americans live in a city with mass transit available to carry them wherever they need or want to go, yet they'll still choose cars. The cost of monthly transit passes is significantly lower then the cost of purchasing a car, buying insurance for it, filling it with expensive fuel and having routine maintenance performed on it.

Despite being cheaper, the perception most Americans have is that mass transit is something beneath them (only poor people take the bus, right?). They see the automobile as a symbol of freedom and independence, and in their minds auto ownership has a much better value despite the higher costs of a car compared with utilizing transit systems.

It's because of this perception that American city expansion and development is done almost exclusively to accommodate the automobile, leaving alternative means of transport like walking (which is both cheaper and better for you then driving) forgotten or a cursory afterthought.

New housing developments are laid out in such a way that it becomes very easy to quickly and efficiently take your car to the market to pick up milk, but incredibly difficult to walk or bicycle to the very same store. Is it any wonder why Americans are so fat?

If we started building cities with pedestrians and mass transit in mind, ultimately the cost savings would be huge for the typical household. But it would fail unless work was done to modify the popular perception that traveling by a car is better then walking or taking the bus.

So when someone says "People will never switch to environmentally friendly hybrid cars because they're too expensive, so we're going to stick with the internal combustion engine for a long time", they would be better off saying "owning any automobile is too expensive. Let's start building our cities with non-car owners in mind".

Re:These kind of initiatives are pointless

[Zibblsnrt]

(If that's not good enough for you, then freedom really isn't your thing. You're more into tyranny -- making peoples' choices for them, because you've decided you're better than them.)

Actually, yeah. When it comes to people who see the idea of any obligations to anything other than themselves as evil, I do consider myself better than them.

Most of those people seem to have trouble realizing that there is such a thing as cost aside from what they pull out of their wallet. And yet they continue to make their glorious, "free" decisions, despite happily fettering themselves in their own ignorance, something which seems to be the rage these days.

'Cause, see, thinking of anything other than yourself (like, for example, the neighbors, or your grandchildren's ability to hit middle age in their forties rather than their twenties) must be tyrannical communistic doom, false dichotomies also being the rage these days. If it involves any sense of non-personal responsibility, it's bad bad bad!

Do I have contempt for that attitude? Yes, I do. Am I better than people who trumpet it? Yes, I am.

-PS

Re:The most important step:

[sillybilly]

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.