b l a s t u l a reblog++

This article was written by Mara Hvistendahl in August 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

In 2005, green architect William McDonough and British engineering firm Arup separately announced plans to build ambitious eco-cities housing up to 500,000 inhabitants on the mainland. For a few months following these announcements, coverage was enthusiastic (we have written about these cities a number of times, with earlier articles here and here). Much of this coverage was deserved. Designers are, after all, devising solutions to what promises to be one of the largest rural-to-urban migrations in history.

But in recent months, journalists have begun to look at how these cities are shaping up. After publishing a glowing article on McDonough’s designs for sustainable Chinese cities in 2005, Newsweek ran an article this May that reads like a retraction. Its assessment of Huangbaiyu, the model village in McDonough’s program and the first in a series of seven planned eco-cities, is bleak:

The project appears to be a mess. Construction of the 400 houses is way behind schedule. The 42 that have been built still have no heat, electricity or running water. Walls are already cracking and moisture seeps through the ceilings. According to people who’ve worked on the project, many of the houses don’t adhere to the original specifications—meaning they could never achieve the energy savings they were meant to achieve. The biomass gasification facility meant to burn animal, human and agricultural waste, doesn’t work. Not surprisingly, no one in the village has volunteered to move into the new community.

Last month, Popular Science published a feature that casts similar doubts on the prospects for China’s eco-cities.

I saw Peter Head speak at April’s Holcim Forum, a gathering of sustainability-minded architects and engineers, in Shanghai. During his presentation, he showed a video that had been produced by the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation, the developer responsible for Dongtan, the city Arup designed for an island outside of Shanghai. The city presented in the video suggested the myriad gated communities that surround Shanghai: gaudy and dramatic, with very little of the restraint and economy that most would associate with sustainable design.

That is precisely the problem in China. People in developed countries have had a few decades to try out and reject excess. It isn’t just an awareness of environmental degradation that pushes us to go green; it’s a knowledge, gleaned from firsthand experience, that conventional living generates a level of waste that makes us uncomfortable. In urban China, however, bigger is still better. Most middle-class Chinese are still preoccupied with finding ways to display their wealth, not minimize its impact on the world.

Such attitudes — which are understandable, if not admirable — are behind the problems now surfacing in the transformation of urban China. To accomplish their goals, Western designers working in China might partner with local government officials, as McDonough has done. But such officials might be more concerned with project success than with enforcing land rights or securing public participation — also critical to creating healthy, enduring communities. On the other hand, another solution is to trust eco-city properties to the market, as Arup has done with Dongtan. Visitors to that project, which is now taking shape, decribe large single-family homes and suburban-style planning. Wired’s feature on Dongtan suggests that SIIC and Arup differed on what they wanted out of Dongtan early on:

Part of the problem was that SIIC wasn’t sure yet what it wanted. Its people talked about Dongtan as an eco-city, but they also talked about it as a quaint green suburb or as Shanghai’s Hamptons, a place for the city’s wealthy to flee for the weekend. They seemed to have good intentions but little direction.

The BBC alludes to similar problems in its recent article on Dongtan.

But the stream of Chinese eco-cities won’t stop. Last month, New York architect Kevin Kennon announced a green community for the resort island of Hainan. We should expect — and hope — to see more in years to come. Why? For people interested in seeing China go green (and, given its share of global emissions, we all should be), there isn’t any other option. The alternative to massive eco-cities is not slow, organic development but massive conventional cities, with all their attendant ills. Urbanization is simply occurring too rapidly in China to allow for anything else. The hope for China now is that is that its designers — Western architects and local politicians alike — will learn from their mistakes.

Image: Dongtan Marsh. Credit: flickr/laughterwyn

China Eco-Cities Update is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 2:05 PM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment

This article was written by Alex Steffen in May 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Our friends over at Grist have published a sharp little essay by Michael Tobis called My little world (and yours, too). Essentially, Tobis takes the concept of ecological footprinting, and helps it make sense by asking us to imagine living on our own tiny little planet.

But to know why I think this is cool, you have to know a little about ecological footprints. Ecological footprints give us a metaphor for understanding our impact on the planet and the meaning of sustainability: they boil that impact down to a single number and measure it in terms of land area, often in terms of global hectares. They then compare the metaphorical land area used to provide you and I with our communities, homes and lifestyles with what a globally fair share of the planet actually is.

Ecogeeks seem to argue a lot about whose footprint measurements offer the most accuracy. Their questions are sometimes difficult to parse — does the formula used incorporate the public-sector activity undertaken on our behalf? A thousand considerations bubble up, but I actually have a lot of confidence that the available formulae are pretty decent, and getting better.

Using those two numbers, our footprints and the footprint everyone could have without destroying our environment (often referred to as a one planet footprint), we can tell more or less how far off from sustainability we are. Generally, we find that if we living average lives in Europe, we need to shrink our footprints by 70 - 80%. If we’re Americans that number is more like 90%. If we’re wealthy, we may need to find even more hectares worth of ecological savings.

And here is where the metaphor goes screwy on us. I don’t think in hectares, and I’d bet you don’t either. I know that a hectare covers about the same area as two (American) football fields, and having spent a fair bit of my misspent youth on sports fields, I can more or less grasp how much real estate that is, but when it comes right down to it, lecturing me about hectares is like talking fashion with a dog.

Tobis takes a slightly different and pretty clever tack:

The Little Prince of the story is a child living alone on a small spherical asteroid, his only companion a single flower. He consoles himself by the fact that it is always a short walk to a sunrise or a sunset.

Let’s tell a slightly different story, with a similar asteroid, a per-capita world. Instead of being one of six billion people on a big planet, let’s suppose you were alone on a comparable asteroid. We’ll give you your six-billionth share of the surface area, your six-billionth share of each of the major landmasses and biomes, your own six-billionth scale Africa, your own little Australia. In other words, you will have exactly the average resource ownership of everyone else on earth.

Now we’re talking! Rampaging across my own little Earth like a super-sized Godzilla, that’s something I can understand.

What’s more, Tobis does a great job of taking us on a tour of our private planets:

Your little asteroid has a six-billionth of the earth’s total surface area. It is a sphere with a radius of 82 meters, and with a surface area of about 85,000 square meters. That, depending on how you prefer to think about it, is almost exactly 21 acres, or 8.5 hectares. …

Since the ocean covers fifteen acres, the land surface covers the remaining six acres. [T]he area under cultivation is … a bit over a third of an acre. If you push matters to less valuable soil, you might be able to grow things on as much as an acre, but most of your 6 acres are desert or tundra. You even have some substantial ice sheets on your land. There is also the problem that you have built your house, your workshop, your garage, your driveway and many of your industrial outbuildings on the best farmland.

About a third of your land under cultivation is irrigated, much of it using depletable groundwater. Some of the groundwater is being contaminated by some of your industrial processes. To a lesser extent, your soils are also being contaminated, but a bigger problem is that as you till them for food they erode much faster than the natural rate of replenishment.

You also like to eat fish, but most of your ocean does not naturally support large fish. From the few areas that do, you have been eating the fish faster than they reproduce. This would astonish your great-grandparents, but of course they lived on a larger world. (Their per capita share was bigger with a smaller population.)

So, there we are, on our personal Earths, spinning around the planet, having a good time but making a bit of a mess of things. So far so good.

But then things start to go a little wrong. Tobis wisely informs us that our ancestors had larger personal Earths than we do because there were fewer of them on the planet — but he neglects to mention another important reason why their personal planets were bigger than ours: they’re the same planets, and they burned through a lot of real estate before we ever inherited them. You and I, for instance, don’t have a sustainable share of time spent swimming with Chinese river dolphins, because there aren’t any more. They’re now extinct.

Indeed, if we do a little research (for instance, by reading WWF’s Living Planet Report), we quickly realize that we have already dramatically disrupted over a third of the planet’s ecosystems. Our personal planets are crumbling away, chunk after chunk flying out from under our feet and off into space.

And because our lives are so resource- and energy-intensive — the average American would need his or her own personal planet and four other people’s as well to feed his or her consumption — we’re breaking off bigger and bigger chunks every day. Every day that passes means our personal planets shrink a bit more.

What is to be done about this dire state of affairs? Pretty important question. And here, unfortunately, Tobis jumps a little wrong and goes hurtling off into space… because it is here that the metaphor of ecological footprints breaks down.

“There is no replacing your six acres, no frontier,” Tobis tells us. “No amount of human ingenuity will make your world’s surface bigger.”

and

“Increasing wealth won’t make your asteroid any bigger…” he says. “No matter how clever our advances, we will never have more than an acre to feed us.”

And here the whole Matrix-world of the metaphor comes crashing down in shards of mental glass. For neither statement is true.

It is manifestly possible for us to increase the biological health and capacity of the planet — not only to preserve what exists, but to add to it. Every time we practice ecological restoration — even being as clumsy a set of practitioners of that art as we are — we increase the vigor of a small patch of the Earth. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that we could not, eventually, get much wiser about restoring ecological function while we reduce our ecological impact, perhaps even eliminating our ecological footprints and beginning to leave instead ecological handprints where we have made the Earth healthier. We can rebuild the surface of our personal planets, replacing acres, perhaps even restoring acres lost before we were even born. It won’t be easy, and we still need to fight like hell to preserve what we have, but all is not lost.

More importantly, Tobis’ views on wealth and ingenuity fly far wide of the mark: while it is mostly true that we “will never have more than an acre to feed us” in the sense that there is a limited amount of tillable land in the world (though even there, I’d place bets that careful stewardship and agricultural innovation could restore much farmland now regarded as lost), it is false in that the yields that acre gives us can vary profoundly: clever advances can in fact offer us the same fruits of prosperity at a fraction of the footprint.

Many old-school environmentalists can’t wrap their heads around this fact. Based on a combination of historical observation (industrial prosperity has so far increased ecological damage, so it must always — a statement about as realistic as saying my niece has always, for the four years of her life, been less than three-and-a-half feet tall, therefore she will be always be a yardling) and a culturally inherited distaste for modernity (with, you know, its dark satanic mills and lack of bears), OSEs love to recite the PAT formula: that environmental impact is equal to the size of the population times its affluence times its technology.

But what we know now is that affluence is a complex concept, not (beyond the meeting of certain essential needs) easily bound to material consumption, because a great many of the things that make us prosperous are in fact intangible or offer ecologically negligible impact, including art, innovation and care.

What’s more, through efficiency and redesign, a great many products and services can, in theory if not current practice, be offered at ecologically meaningless impacts. If I own a bright green car, say one that runs efficiently off electricity from wind turbines, is built of completely non-toxic components, is designed to be disassembled with its materials reused and recycled in a closed loop, and I travel 300 miles to visit grandma, I am doing so at a minute fraction of the footprint that Wally Waster has when he drives his Ford Earthcrusher SUV on a similar journey. Yes, for all practical purposes, I am just as prosperous.

Which is why the “T” part of the PAT equation is also dumb. Products which are more technologically advanced offer us far greater possibilities for efficiency and ecological sanity. Think, for instance, of the ways in which technology enables us to car share, or design smart green homes which most effectively use natural airflow and light.

If each of us has a personal planet, and on that planet sit miniature personal cars and homes, cities and factories, one of the most encouraging facts I know is that by sharing better ideas with one another and working together to innovate new solutions, we are actually capable of building prosperous lives which leave us living on what feel like much roomier asteroids.

Personal Planets and the Little Prince is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:59 AM)

Originally
from WorldChanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from WorldChanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment

This article was written by Alex Steffen in July 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Here’s the reality: we in the U.S., Canada, Australia and (to a lesser extent) Europe need to move very quickly to make deep cuts in our climate emissions if we hope for any chance of making big enough global cuts to avoid generating catastrophic global warming. In other words, we need radical change if we want to avoid cooking the planet.

Here’s the political reality: those who benefit from, or depend upon, the status quo are going to fight dirty against any meaningful change. They will see radical change as a mortal threat. In practice, this means that the carbon industries (especially coal), wealthy suburbanites (whose lifestyles, jobs and investments are most likely to generate extremely large carbon footprints) and conservative extremists (whose market fundamentalism finds itself at odds with the reality-based community) will be in the future, as now, the sworn enemies of intelligent change (or, as they would have it, “skeptics”). We aren’t going to change that, for reasons that are deeply entrenched in our societies, and these are extremely powerful interests, with the ability to at least slow real national progress.

Thus we have a need (radical change) which is blocked by a political reality. In such a conflict, even the most fundamental of steps — a real international price on carbon — will be an extremely hard-fought victory at the national level in all our countries.

We need national action, but maybe it’s time to rethink the rest of the approach. After all, legislation and markets, while absolutely essential, represent only one instrument in the tool chest we need to fight climate catastrophe. We also need technical invention, widespread innovation diffusion, new models and new approaches. And these things are much more difficult for the carbon lobby to stymie, if done at the proper combination of local and regional levels.

Urbanites already represent the natural constituency for a climate change revolution. Not only is environmental commitment highest among urban populations, the distance from present reality to future necessity is shortest. Tight-knit, compact communities emit less carbon; traveling through them on transit, bikes and foot is easier; sharing goods and participating in closed-loop product systems is dramatically easier in dense environments — even smart grids make a lot more sense in a city than a sprawling suburb. In fact, if we end up with an electric car/ smart grid/ renewables combination (the dream of some of the smartest folks I know, where distributed home energy systems and a smart grid hooked to renewable power electric vehicles designed for urban environments), dense urban neighborhoods is where it will first take hold.

And the fact is, we’re just getting started. The Vancouver model, of massive land redevelopment, shows extraordinary promise, but we’re also learning how to use infill development, retrofits, urban planning and new technologies to reweave existing neighborhoods into a far more sustainable pattern.

What if our strategy was to take a single city and make it truly climate neutral? Existence, as they say, is the best proof of possibility, and we desperately need to prove that living a climate neutral, prosperous life is possible.

Cities committing to Kyoto is not enough. We need skies unsullied by CO2, not minor reductions, and that will take big changes in all the activities the citizens of a city undertake, including those which are not visibly obvious (which demands knowing the backstory of an entire city’s footprint).

Creating a carbon-neutral city is no small challenge. It will take tens of thousands of people deciding to rework the environmental contexts of the organizations and communities of which they are a part. To give a sense of scale, I think it will require at least as big a revolution in thinking to get from here to there as it took to get from Silent Spring to the current day… and it needs to happen fast.

Climate denialists will tell us that committing ourselves to climate neutrality will destroy our economy, leaving us with the standard of living of the more remote parts of Albania and contributing to the widespread sinful cohabitation of dogs and cats. They’re full of it.

Anyone who looks at the situation with clear eyes realizes that climate neutrality is our future, and cities which embrace the future thrive.

Normally, I’d find the gulf we face and the timeline we’re racing a depressing combination, but not here. For a city need not launch itself at climate neutrality out of moral kindness: a much stronger reason for taking action might be found in pure self-interest. In a world where proprietary control over needed innovations is wealth, and where prominence in collaborative efforts is influence, and competition for everything from investment to tourism to workforces is global, the first city to commit in a genuine way to climate neutrality is going to leap to the front of the pack.

An urban political and economic coalition bent on transforming its city into a climate neutral one could undertake a huge variety of actions. It could lobby for radical energy policy, government procurement, land use and transportation planning changes. It could creating financing instruments for new development, retrofitting and industrial modernizations. It could mandate fundamental consumer changes and educate citizens to slash their personal carbon footprints. It could train a whole generation of working citizens who get green building, green manufacturing and clean energy. It could launch recruitment programs for sustainable designers, architects, engineers and technologists. It could make itself a hotbed for not only new thinking, but a new culture.

All of these steps are easily within the power of a well-coordinated citizen’s coalition, and I’m sure even more innovative answers are possible if you add to that citizen’s coalition social entrepreneurship, new technologies and distributed collaboration. The fact that many of these enterprises and initiatives could thrive in the right regional setting even without national regulation just adds to their momentum should carbon taxation or trading actually take.

Here’s the biggest problem: no one yet has any idea what a climate-neutral city would look like or how it would operate. We can’t build what we can’t imagine, so one of the first orders of business is vision: visions of various ways in which cities could slash their emissions while increasing their prosperity and quality of life.

For generations, city dwellers have led social revolutions, going to the barricades to fight injustice and force change on the unwilling powerful. Cities are ungovernable from the barricades — one can’t live in a permanent revolution — but that does not mean the barricades have no use. And, today, we urbanites find ourselves in a situation where business as usual is unacceptable. Perhaps the time has come to raise over the barricades of sustainable design, innovation, policy and business a new black flag: urban climate neutrality.

Creative Commons Photo Credit

Creative Commons Photo Credit

The Climate-Neutral City: An Idea Whose Time has Come is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:31 AM)

Originally
from WorldChanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from WorldChanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment

This article was written by Regine Debatty in June 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

I have yet to find any trace of ungainliness in The Institute for Applied Autonomy. The anonymous activist group believes in the importance of disseminating knowledge, encouraging autonomy, and developing methods of self-determination through artistic expression and application of military-like technology to the topics of criminal mischief, decentralized systems and individual autonomy.

You might have read or seen one of their pamphlets or spray painting robots, or participated to the protests during the 2004 US presidential campaign by using their TXTmob system.

StreetWriter

“The Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) was founded in 1998 as an anonymous collective of artists, activists, and engineers united by the cause of individual and collective self-determination.” Why did you decide to stay anonymous? How much does that anonymity serve your objectives? Is it part of a strategy?

Initially, we embraced anonymity as a defensive tactic, as many of our projects exist in a legal grey area. Working collectively and anonymously seemed natural to those of us with backgrounds in direct-action politics and the hacker and cyberpunks communities. Groups like Cult of the Dead Cow and native Hawaiian activists Hui Malama gave us a model for action that was both publicly engaged and effectively anonymous.

We’ve also found anonymity to be a useful tactic in dealing with the press. Many journalists seem to be more interested in writing about artists than about the art they create – this is particularly true when the work has explicitly political content. By refusing to provide any personal information about ourselves, we control the kinds of narratives that journalists create about our work and the issues it engages.

iSee enables users to avoid CCTV surveillance cameras. Some UK-based artists working on ideas of counter-surveillance for the broad public have discovered that in fact most people are totally comfortable with the idea of surveillance in public space. Have you noticed anything similar when you have deployed the project in several cities, both European and American? Did you notice different attitudes towards surveillance according to the country?

It’s true that many people are comfortable with surveillance of public space, especially when confronted with the usual choice between privacy and security. With iSee, we tried to subvert (or at least complicate) this binary. Initially this meant focusing on the mechanics of surveillance, pointing out that in practice CCTV surveillance has had very little impact on actual crime and that it is subject to the biases of system designers and operators, which means it often gets used to ogle women and single out youth and minorities for scrutiny. Ultimately though, the camera-avoidance part of the project became less significant than the data-collection and visualization aspects. We held workshops in which participants used our tools to create interactive maps of their city’s surveillance infrastructure. This activity asks a very different set of questions than simply “Does CCTV make you uncomfortable?” Instead, it points to the lack of any kind of baseline data about surveillance. Before we can have an intelligent conversation about CCTV surveillance, for example, it would be nice to know how many cameras are in operation, where they are, who owns them, etc. For the most part, this information simply doesn’t exist – In most countries, cameras are put up by individual building owners and their data is increasingly managed by third-party private companies. In effect, we have an emergent infrastructure of video surveillance that is growing on an ad-hoc basis, without any public discussion or oversight. The only way we have any information about the number and location of surveillance cameras is through the efforts of grassroots activists and concerned citizens.

Apart from surveillance and counter-surveillance, what are the issues you find worth fighting for/against?

We’re generally interested in the intersection between technology, public policy and social control, and with building systems that facilitate freedom of speech and public acts of dissent. This encompasses a number of related issues including surveillance, public space, and law enforcement. We’re also extremely interested in the ways that technologies and scientific knowledge are produced, which has lead to an ongoing engagement with academic research labs and with the funding agencies that support them.

Your robots have a very peculiar look. Little Brother has a cute metal tin look, while the GraffitiWriter just looks efficient. What or who guides the way you design robots?

We employ what might be called a kind of “tactical aesthetics,” in which aesthetic decisions are determined by the intended goals of a particular project. Little Brother was intended to distribute subversive literature to unsuspecting audiences, so we tried to make him really cute and engaging.

GraffitiWriter on the other hand leveraged techno-fetishism to confer a kind of legitimacy to robot-mediated criminality, so it needed to look like a “cool” robot. While functionally similar to GraffitiWriter, Streetwriter was intended as a clandestine graffiti writing machine so it looks fairly innocuous, appearing to be an ordinary cargo van. The latest version of StreetWriter, which we call SWX, was intended for the very specific purpose of infiltrating the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge which lead to a particular kind of sleekness in the design, with a glossy white exterior and laser-cut aluminum logos.

GraffitiWriter invites the public to spray paint graffiti on the pavement. How much are people ready to forget that they are well-behaved citizens and contribute to this piece of “street art” protest? Which kind of messages do you receive? Mainly love messages or rather angry complaints?

You’re referring to our “Rogues Gallery” project in which we took our GraffitiWriter robot to public spaces across the United States and Europe and offered it for use by the general public. One of the things that was so interesting about this project was that so many people were wiling to participate! We’d simply show up unannounced in a public park or city center, drive the robot around, and invite people to use the machine to spray paint messages on the ground. Virtually everyone we encountered was willing to give it a try, even though what we were doing was clearly illegal. To us, this seemed to be an interesting inversion of the usual narratives about technology extending human abilities. With Rogues Gallery, the robot overcame certain kinds of social conditioning not because of its mechanical capabilities but simply because it was seen as legitimate, based on the assumption that anyone possessing a robot represented some large research institution which probably had the “right” to spray its messages on public space, rather than simply being a couple of crazy people who built a machine in their garage. Imagine if we had tried the same experiment without a robot, using only a few cans of spray paint – no one would have participated because the action would have been clearly understood as an illegal act of public defacement.

What are the best locations to unleash a contestational robot?

It turns out you can release them almost anywhere. Although, I’d probably be careful around airports these days.

With the kind of public art/activist projects that you develop, things might not always go the way you foresaw. How much do you learn from the way users behave and interact with your pieces? Could you give (an) example(s) of unexpected and unwelcome/delightful experience?

Because our work mostly happens in uncontrolled environments, we’re almost always surprised by the way our projects unfold. The Rogues Gallery project we just discussed is a good example – our initial idea for the GraffitiWriter robot was to be able to spray paint in places that are too dangerous for human activists, like banks, shopping malls, and government buildings. We had anticipated that if there were any problems with authority the robot would be sacrificed rather than the person. However, during its initial public deployment on the steps of the U.S. Capital Building, the robot and its human operators were detained by one of DC’s finest. Surprisingly, the presence of the high-tech looking robot confused what might have been a straight-forward arrest. At that point in 1999 it was unthinkable that juvenile delinquents would have a robot at their disposal. We probably fell between the categories of having to file a complicated report or needing to call for backup, so the officer let us go. In that moment we discovered that the robot functions best not as a covert writing machine but rather as a way to engage the public in participating in subversive activity using a powerfully legitimizing technology. There’s a bit of the Stanley Milgram experiment here, only using robots rather than lab coats as the symbol of legitimate authority.

Similarly, with TXTmob the SMS-broadcast tool we created for use by
protesters at the 2004 Democratic and Republican National Conventions, we found many examples of unexpected use. Because we worked closely with several activist groups to design the system, we had a pretty good idea of how it would be used by protesters. However, it quickly became clear that it was also a really important tool for journalists covering the protests. Because so many of the actions were spontaneous and short-lived, occurring all over the city (for example, groups of demonstrators mobbing convention delegates who were spotted eating at local restaurants), there was virtually no way for sympathetic journalists to know what was going on. Once the journalists started using the SMS system, however, they were able report on all kinds of sit-ins, street theater, and demonstrations. As a result, the quality of reportage for the Republican National Convention in New York was better than we’ve seen for most recent demonstrations in the United States.

Terminal Air is a visualization system developed for mapping the movements of planes used in the CIA extraordinary rendition program. How can the project help counter the extraordinary rendition program practice? Has anyone ever tried to silence the project?

There are several components to the Terminal Air project. It is primarily an installation that examines the mechanics of extraordinary rendition, a current practice of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in which suspected terrorists detained in Western countries are transported to so-called “black sites” for interrogation and torture. Based on extensive research, the installation imagines the CIA office through which the program is administered as a sort of travel agency coordinating complex networks of private contractors, leased equipment, and shell companies. Wall-mounted displays track the movements of aircraft involved in extraordinary rendition, while promotional posters identify the private contractors that supply equipment and personnel. Booking agents’ desks feature computers offering interactive animations that enable visitors to monitor air traffic and airport data from around the world, while office telephones provide real-time updates as new flight plans are registered with international aviation authorities.

Seemingly-discarded receipts, notes attached to computer monitors, and other ephemera provide additional detail including names of detainees and suspected CIA agents, dates of known renditions, and images of rendition aircraft.

The project was inspired through conversations with extraordinary rendition researcher and author Trevor Paglen (Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights – Melville House Publishing). Data on the movements of the planes was compiled by Paglen, author Stephen Grey (Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program – St.Martin’s Press) and an anonymous army of plane-spotting enthusiasts.

The main goal behind the Terminal Air project is simply to raise awareness about extraordinary rendition, to call particular attention to governments, airports, and private contractors who are complicit in its operation, and to recognize the ongoing efforts of various journalists, activists, and citizens who are continuing to uncover and document it.

We’ve also amassed a large database of flight log information, which we make available to the public. So far, no one has tried to interfere with the project (indeed, public reception has been quite positive), but it’s still in the early days – the first installation of the project was in March, and we anticipate a few high-profile shows this fall, so we’ll see what happens.

Any upcoming project you could share with us?

We’ve got a few things in the works, but generally prefer to announce projects after they launch rather than beforehand. We’ll let you know!

Thanks IAA!

Interview with the Institute for Applied Autonomy is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:19 AM)

Originally
from WorldChanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from WorldChanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment

This article was written by Alex Steffen in June 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Here at the Tällberg Forum, both daylight and heady discussion about sustainability and global understanding seem to go on around the clock, but the show-stealer so far was the panel on climate change.

“Rogue” NASA scientist James Hansen lead the panel off with a grim pronouncement, saying that there looms a “huge gap” between what is understood (by scientists) about global warming and what is known by the public. In short, Hansen says, the climate crisis is a far more dire and present danger than most of us like to think. “We are closer to a level of dangerous, human-made interference with the climate than we realize. … We are about to leave the Holocene”

Hansen is particularly concerned about the timeframe within which we must act. There is increasing evidence that we are rapidly approaching a series of climate tipping points, where feedback loops in the environment (the march of forests pole-wards and melting glaciers and sea ice, meaning the Earth’s darkening surface retains more of the sun’s heat; melting tundra releasing increasing amounts of methane as it thaws; etc.) began to contribute to a galloping greenhouse effect brought on by our actions. (For a particularly elegant discussion of the concept of climate tipping points, I highly recommend the Real Climate post on the subject.) If we wish to avoid crossing these thresholds, we need, Hansen (and others) say, to try to restrain global temperature increases to two degrees celsius above the pre-industrial norm.

Because we have already committed ourselves to a certain amount of climate change (temperatures have already risen about a degree, he says), and because the emissions we are now putting into the climate will be there for a long while, time is not on our side here: since no matter how great our resolve, our emissions will not cease immediately, and many decisions being made now (power plant construction, urban planning, forest clearance) will continue to have climate implications in the future, we really have run out of time to delay change. We need, Hansen says, to have start acting like a climate neutral society within the next ten years.

“We’re really at the crisis point,” Hansen says.

C. S. Kiang, chairman of the Beijing University Environment Fund, reminds us that China has just recently become the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gasses. He goes on to joke that the Swedes shouldn’t be to proud of themselves for the leadership they’re showing on shrinking their climate footprint, since changing “23 million people is relatively easy — try changing 1.3 billion!”

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the German Government’s Chief Advisor on climate change, minces no words, either: “Our environmental maneuvering space is shrinking very fast now.”

Schellnhuber, however, is somewhat hopeful about the precedent set at the recent G8 summit in Heiligendamm. There, the leaders of the world’s richest nations agreed not only to creating a follow-up agreement to Kyoto by 2009, and to giving “serious consideration” to halving global climate emissions (compared to 1990 levels) by the year 2050, an achievement which he says is, compared to recent political realities “almost a revolution.”

Indeed, many think there are reasons to believe that a 50% global reduction by 2050 is possible, if undertaken on an aggressive enough timetable. Though it’s very worthwhile remembering that the 50% reduction is global, which means — given the higher current and historical emissions of developed nations and the need for climate equity if we are to expect emerging nations like China, India and Brazil to participate (and without them, the reductions are meaningless) — that we here in the developed world will probably be looking at far deeper reductions, far more quickly, perhaps as much as 80-90%.

Still, Schellnhuber says we have little alternative but pushing our political leaders towards real action. “We see the symptoms of a serious collapse looming now… we will have to reinvent our civilization.”

Jacqueline McGlade, Executive Director of the European Environment Agency, completes the discussion by reminding us that threatening people (with the degree of catastrophe looming in front of us) can back-fire. People may well decide that the problem is so severe there is no point in acting.

Instead, she urges a pragmatic optimism, one that acknowledges that “things are not getting better, they’re getting harder, and we’re going to have to work very hard” to continue to experience the increases in standards of living that we enjoy today in the developed world and that so many others in the developing world aspire to, but that we can do — solutions are possible.

Which, if anything, is the point of this site: the problems are big, but the possibilities, if we change our thinking, may be bigger still…

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Letter from Tällberg: We are about to leave the Holocene is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:12 AM)

Originally
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by WorldChanging Team


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on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from WorldChanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

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This article was written by Alex Steffen in June 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

I write this from the medieval town of Visby, in the shadow of the ruined church of Saint Clement, on Sweden’s Gotland island. I’ve stayed here for a few days on my way to the Tällberg Forum, hoping for a chance to catch my breath.

It’s a beautiful place, Visby, a UNESCO World Heritage site of old buildings, tiles roofs, cobblestones, ancient churches and a huge stone wall circling the city, and I’ve spent the last few days wandering the narrow winding streets, sitting in cafes overlooking the ocean, reading and relaxing and trying to catch up with the flow of ideas and information that rolls through my life in what sometimes seems an unstoppable flood.

There’s something wonderful about contemplating the future while bathing in history. To read about emerging technologies, new scientific research, innovative social programs — the whole cacophony of change — while standing on ground where Vikings raided, where Hanseatic merchants sold goods, where the piratical Victual Brothers made their base in the 14th Century; it gives one a sense of the long view. Tones things down.

Carl Linnaeus spent time here as well. Locals proudly claim that the field research he did on Gotland in the 1740s gelled his ideas on taxonomy. Outsiders attribute a bit less importance to his trips here, but with his 300th birthday having just been celebrated here, and pictures of Linnaeus scattered around the town, it seems pointless to dampen anyone’s enthusiasm.

But if we’re uncertain about the impact of his Gotland field work on his theories, we are not at all uncertain about the impact of his theories themselves. Quite simply, Linnaeus contributed the tools we still use for classifying and understanding the diversity of nature.

Linnaean taxonomy uses hierarchical ranks to show the nature of — and relationship between, various living things.

We use them so frequently today that we tend to forget what a revolutionary tool taxonomies were, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, allowing people to order and structure the relationships between vastly disparate things: in the process, those things themselves were illuminated in new and telling ways. As an example, Wikipedia offers the Linnaean classification for human beings:

As an example, consider the Linnaean classification for modern humans:

• Kingdom: Animalia (with eukaryotic cells having cell membrane but lacking cell wall, multicellular, heterotrophic)

• Phylum: Chordata (animals with a notochord, dorsal nerve cord, and pharyngeal gill slits, which may be vestigial)

• Subphylum: Vertebrata (possessing a backbone, which may be cartilaginous, to protect the dorsal nerve cord)

• Class: Mammalia (warm-blooded vertebrates with hair and mammary glands which, in females, secrete milk to nourish young)

• Subclass: Placentalia (giving birth to live young after a full internal gestation period)

• Order: Primates (collar bone, eyes face forward, grasping hands with fingers, and two types of teeth: incisors and molars)

• Family: Hominidae (upright posture, large brain, stereoscopic vision, flat face, hands and feet have different specializations)

• Genus: Homo (s-curved spine, “man”)

• Species: Homo sapiens (high forehead, well-developed chin, skull bones thin)

Through this taxonomical placement of humanity, we learn all sorts of things about ourselves that we might not take notice of if we were merely to say “human” — all sorts of relationships and characteristics. Indeed, some have described Linnaean taxonomy as a tool for making mental order out of living profusion.

Of course, as scientific knowledge has advanced, certain problems have begun to crop up in the system Linnaeus first devised while hunting on horseback for unusual flowers to press into his notebooks.

First of all, biologists have found that the sheer variety and complexity of species (and evolutionary relationships) requires that a bewildering array of sub-classifications be added to Linnaeus’ originally simple system.

Second, as sampling and sequencing DNA has gotten easier and cheaper, the resulting wealth of insight into the evolutionary relationships between various creatures has upset enough applecarts that some scientists are proposing that a whole new way of describing the relatedness of species, an International Code of Phylogenetic Nomenclature, be added to the use of the Linnaean system (indeed, some very smart biologists are challenging the idea that classifying species, as we understand them, is the best way of understanding life, even reconsidering our current understanding of how evolution itself works).

But the third, and perhaps biggest, problem with using the Linnaean system to describe the world’s millions of unique plants and animals is that no one has ever seen most of those creatures. The number of species which have been described and classified by scientists represent some tiny fraction of the millions of species thought to exist. When it comes to biodiversity, we don’t know much.

One effort to address our ignorance may be the Encyclopedia of Life. The EoL is an emerging online reference and research tool, which aims to compile existing databases and efforts, mix their data with other content gathered from a variety of sources, and then have experts edit the resulting “mash up (their phrase) to produce and maintain the most comprehensive guide to all the species known to humanity.

It’s not quite open source science, as it brings in little in the way of either distributed collaboration or citizen science, but it still could represent a gargantuan leap forward in the way we keep track of what we know about life on earth.

It won’t, however, directly expand our knowledge. We’re still a long way from sequencing the planet: even the mere description of all the species on earth seems beyond our reach — the All Species Foundation, which aimed for “the complete inventory of all species of life on Earth within the next 25 years,” fizzled out with big ideas and small budgets. Nothing wrong with that, except that as far as I know no other similar efforts have gotten anywhere either.

But let’s assume that somehow we bring enough minds to bear on the study of biodiversity (and, for that matter, all the other research fields involved in sustainability science) to generate the raw data, basic research and fundamental insights to more or less describe the natural world: what, really, would we have accomplished?

Well, for one thing, if we worked quickly enough, we would have gathered information about the world before the catastrophe we’ve unleashed had fully hit. The world today is already a biologically impoverished world, compared to that of even 1,000 years ago, but by the end of the century it’s likely that we’ll have lost up to half the diversity of life. A decent snapshot of how the world was put together before that disaster might well be one of the greatest gifts we could leave our descendants.

It may be possible to use such snapshots, in combination with new work creating sensor arrays, to give us an unparalleled ability to understand, visualize and communicate relationships in the natural world.

Consider the James Reserve, which has deployed hundreds of sensing devices in an effort to create the most comprehensive understanding of the functioning of a particular ecosystem yet forged:

The James Reserve, some 90 miles southeast of Los Angeles on a mountain flank that is home to 1,500 species of plants and animals, including the yellow-legged frog and willow flycatcher, now bristles with enough monitoring gear to make it one of the world’s most advanced tests of ecologic networking. Wireless motes, cameras and other sensors track the nesting habits of birds, the life cycles of moss and the carbon dioxide uptake of various soils. Robots move along wires strung from tree to tree, lowering sensors to take temperature, humidity and light-level readings at different levels.

Even such a detailed understanding is still primitive, and too expensive and labor-intensive for widespread replication (if you use Google Earth you can check out some of their data mapped here. But there’s every reason to believe that the hardware will continue to get cheaper and more sophisticated, the expertise more widespread and the modeling of ecosystem functions more advanced. There is, indeed, every reason to believe that the workings of the natural world around us will be made plainer and plainer to see.

Which raises some interesting possibilities. For one thing, it brings up the idea of being able to perceive the ecosystems in which we live on multiple scales of time and space. Theoretically, we might soon be people who know the natural systems around us more intimately than even our most attuned hunter-gatherer ancestors… if we find it interesting enough to pay attention to.

One way of making things interesting is turning them into a game. That the management of a natural area might make for a good game is the premise of my old piece on the EcoSystem Game. A host of new tools and games — from open source astronomy programs that let you explore 3D models of the universe to the game Spore — is rolling out, promising to make knowing the planet, the universe and the sorts of processes which run it more fun.

But increased knowledge and better techniques for visualizing and exploring data attached to real world places and flows needn’t be limited to purely scientific relationships. Very quickly, I expect, we’ll be seeing digital tools overlap physical space to reveal the backstories of our lives in ways that are difficult to now imagine. Think of the sorts of tools that we’ve described variously as Way New Urbanism, Walkshed Technologies and Future-Making Techniques, applied not only to making our lives easier but to making the impacts of our actions more transparent.

These tools are only getting more powerful. If you’re interested in a bit of futurism about where they might be going, take a look at the new Metaverse Roadmap (PDF) [disclosure: our own Jamais Cascio was one of the study's authors].

The Roadmap, though not an easy read, is an intriguing exploration of the ways in which information technology, physical space and social interaction are overlapping and influencing each other. It explores four futures:

Virtual Worlds, in which online 3D worlds (think Second Life or World of Warcraft) increasingly become the focus of community and economic life, essentially supplanting the web as we know it, with its orientation on text and video.

Mirror Worlds, in which geospatial information is use to create models of the physical world, which then in turn inform our understanding of the world: think Google Earth on steroids.

Augmented Reality, in which intelligent objects (think RFIDs) and participatory panopticon tools like heads-up displays create a world alive with information, and in which information about our physical surroundings is accessible in a myriad of ways.

Lifelogging (an unfortunate coinage), in which the objects around us conspire to make records of our activities — from personal video recorders which are on for much of our lives to distributed monitoring of public spaces to car keys which wail plaintively when we get too far away from them.

Leaving aside the question of the validity of these scenarios, they do offer further insight into trends we’ve long looked at here, and, more importantly, suggest some of the ways in which tools like these may apply to sustainability.

1) Personal planets: one of the biggest sustainability challenges from a consumer/citizen point of view is getting an accurate read on the impacts of your choices. With new technologies, this might become dramatically easier: virtual environments might model our physical world lives, allowing us to play with the implications, say, of buying a new washing machine on our energy and water use; mirror world technologies could help us better navigate our lives in a more sustainable fashion, working in the form of walkshed technologies to substitute fine-grained local knowledge for lots of wasted drive-time; augmented reality tools might provide us with consumer-group ratings and other tools for practicing strategic consumption at the check-out stand, much as Japanese consumers are already using their mobile phones to find out more about products; while lifelogging technologies help us monitor indoor air, keep track of our energy usage and even make zero waste recycling systems more practical.

2) Bright green products: at the most crass level, these technologies will help companies design better products and processes, waste less, operate more efficiently and so on. But the real bang for the buck, I suspect, lies not in doing things better. It lies in doing different things: in substituting virtual storefronts for trips to the mall (think Netflix); in creating relationships with consumers where ongoing service contracts are substituted for the sale of goods (think product-service systems like car-sharing or carpet leasing) and where producer responsibility leads to design for disassembly and neobiological, closed loop manufacturing systems.

3) Networked activism: I suspect we will increasingly see activists using these sorts of tools to make visible the invisible flows and relationships which make up so much of the unsavory side of our personal backstories. Expect an explosion of activists using cheap videophones, hacked RFID tags and satellite maps to track supply chains back to unacceptable sources (think blood diamonds), reveal inhumane working conditions (think Witness) or capture environmental crimes as they unfold. Expect others to use these technologies to maintain free speech under repressive conditions. Expect others still to use the kind of data streams (and data visualization abilities) these technologies offer to mine public information and create new and more powerful versions of projects like FarmSubsidy.org. In short, expect a flood of information about the backstories of all sorts of objects, services, practices and programs, made increasingly more accessible and compelling for us, and forcing us to confront the unpleasant realities behind much of the surface of our lives.

4) Transparent organizations: Because most people want to live lives of guilt-free affluence — want to be able to live well without worrying that they are drowning polar bears or participating in the enslavement of child laborers, however indirectly — networked activism is going to blow a big hole in the standard operating procedures of many organizations. Up until now, it’s been good enough to simply not do obviously bad things (or, a cynic might say, at least not to get caught doing them); increasingly, however, it’s going to be necessary to demonstrate that what your organization is doing is good. Smart companies will increasingly be using these sorts of technologies to demonstrate transparency: even smarter ones will be figuring out how to use these technologies to tell compelling stories about the virtuous nature of the things they make and do. Think remote tours of factories, tagging of products to specific workers who make them, virtual supply chain flyovers (showing sustainability improvements), corporate sustainability reports turned into videogames.

In a million ways, we are going to be able to increasingly connect our growing knowledge of the natural world and sustainable practices to the direct stories (and backstories) of our lives.

It’ll be a strange world, but probably, in many ways not all that different from our own, just as in some profound ways, our own natures are not all that different from those of the people who built this church. In some things, there is a deep continuity. Perhaps that’s the proper note on which to end this letter then, wondering if, as a counterpoise to the rapidly changing, we might need as well to think more about the long-standing and deeply ingrained, about that part of ourselves that, as James wrote, “is a gift and not an acquisition,” and about how to serve that more fully in the world we are building. For ultimately, no matter how clever our tools, we won’t get far if they are merely faster ways of going nowhere.

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Letter from Visby: Linnaeus, the Encyclopedia of Life and the Metaverse is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 10:55 AM)

Originally
from WorldChanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from WorldChanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment

This article was written by Alex Lowe in June 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

To understand the subtleties and difficulties in ecological footprinting, think of accounting. In the past few years, Enron’s collapse and the scandals that surrounded WorldCom gave people a small glimpse into the intricacies of accountancy. To the uninitiated, the swirl of news reports circa 2003 must have posed several questions: How hard can accounting really be? How can any grey areas exist in an activity as seemingly concrete and dry as counting beans?

But grey areas abound, and the task of accounting for nature’s resources as well as their depletion from human demand is, to use the colloquial, a doozy. How can one compare the value of a single fish to that of a bushel of corn or a California redwood? How does that relationship change from the exhaust pouring out of your car or the dishwater circling your drain?

The methodology for answering these questions in ecological footprint analysis (EFA) is often criticized for being incomplete and for underestimating humanity’s true impact on the environment. In response, researchers at Redefining Progress have made several amendments to the standard methodology, and given their creation the handle ‘Ecological Footprint 2.0.’ (Best explained by the paper Footprint of Nations, 2005 Update.)

The first improvement that Redefining Progress made is including the total surface area of the earth to estimate biocapacity, whereas the earlier methodology (hereafter called ‘EF 1.0′) used only the accessible regions and, most glaringly, left out the open ocean. EF 2.0 also sets aside 13.4% of the world’s biocapacity for wild species. This number comes from a procedure called global gap analysis and reflects the amount of biocapacity needed for 55% of significantly threatened species to survive. EF 1.0 assumed that humans would occupy every last bioproductive hectare which leads to an artificially smaller ecological footprint and leaves no room for other species. In other words, the future envisioned by EF 1.0 has precious little work for nature photographers.

EF 2.0 also diverges from EF 1.0 in estimating the global food supply. EF 1.0 uses estimates of potential agricultural productivity furnished by the Global Agricultural Ecological Zone (GAEZ). Potential agricultural productivity measures the potential yield of food-energy from farmland in kilo-calories. While widely used, some researchers criticize this method because of its discrepancies with measurements of actual yields, such as those calculated in certain parts of Africa where actual production was significantly lower that potential production. EF 2.0 calculates the total amount of energy stored in a food source and subtracts the respiration of primary producers. This technique, called net primary productivity (NPP) estimates the full amount of available food-energy, and is a more accurate procedure for footprint needs than EF 1.0’s potential agricultural productivity.

Other researchers have added to the standard EF 1.0 methodology in different ways. Experts at the Global Footprint Network have improved estimates of the footprint that international trade creates by making use of the U.N.’s COMTRADE database, which tracks more than 600 products as they move between nations. These experts have also made the leap of reporting time-trends in the Living Planet Report 2006 in units of constant 2003 global hectares. This improvement ‘adjusts for inflation’ so that people can compare the bioproductivity of two different years on the same scale.

The UK’s Best Foot Forward research group throws two trademarked methodologies called ‘Stepwise’ and ‘EcoIndex’ into the mix, which break down the data from the National Footprint Accounts into several “categories of impact,” including direct energy, materials & waste, food & drink, personal transport, water, and built land. Each of these categories can be further reduced to smaller components which let experts zero in on which objects and behaviors in everyday life press down on the environment with the most relevant footprints. For example, the study City Limits focused on the footprint of London and found that eating meat has a footprint of almost six million gha, over 24 times the size of fruit’s footprint. If Londoners swore off meat, that change alone would decrease their footprint significantly.

But there are other ways that future research could refine these methods. For example, still missing from EF 2.0 and other methods is a way to account for the footprint of myriad other pollutants besides carbon. Presently, carbon is the only pollutant that ecological footprints consider. (Not surprising, considering the gravity of global warming) But there are many other pollutants that have significant deleterious effects on the environment, such as dioxins, mercury and endocrine-disruptors. With countries such as China and India growing massively in their production, these pollutants will make their impact felt by the environment as well as human health. Some pollutants, like radioactive waste, are not absorbed by the environment at all, and more refined measures must also take them into account. The work also excludes behaviors that harm ecosystems’ future health, such as soil erosion and overfishing. Hopefully this will be one of the directions that research takes as scientists around the world improve their estimate of humanity’s footprint.

Ecological Footprint 2.0 is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:42 AM)

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by WorldChanging Team


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on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from WorldChanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

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