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.

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.

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: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".