One of the most fascinating aspects of sustainability for me is the sheer scope of the problem, encompassing nearly every aspect of civilization and the natural world beyond it. There is never a simple answer to any question. Any problem might have a hundred solutions; and often, any solution has a hundred problems. Counter-intuitive facts abound, forcing you to re-evaluate what were once touchstones. Looking at things from a different perspective often brings fresh insights, for better or for worse.

Can walking really be worse for the environment than driving a car if you eat a lot of meat? Can mercury-filled compact fluorescents really reduce net mercury emissions? Can trains really have a greater footprint than airplanes? Can planting trees really promote global warming? Can nuclear power really reduce the amount of radioactive material in the environment? Can eating local really produce more greenhouse gases than importing food? The answer to all of these is a resounding “maybe.” Or, “it depends.”

In short, I can’t imagine a more intellectually stimulating field to work in. Building a sustainable future is, without doubt, the most complicated challenge humanity has ever faced.

That’s a big statement. But just try and deny it.

While Laos is developing at an explosive rate, much of it remains relatively pristine, and it was fascinating for me to see first-hand the course that development has taken in these untouched areas. I’m going to use Laos as a microcosm for how I see the way that culture relates to the prospects for sustainable development in the Global South.

One of the most startling initial impressions while riding through the winding mountain roads was seeing huge swathes of forest on the mountainside slashed and burned. In much of northern Laos, this is how agriculture works; the burnt forests provide rich soil for planting crops, though they last only a single season. After the rice is harvested, the torrential rainy season washes away the arable soil on the unterraced hillside, and the local farmers repeat the process somewhere else. In a sparsely populated country where three-quarters of the people live rurally, its easy to see how farmers might imagine that their natural bounty is inexhaustible. Especially when that style of agriculture is what they have always practiced. Trying to convince a poor, scattered population that they need to break from tradition and work harder to foster more sustainable methods of agriculture ‘for the good of the planet’ is hardly a challenge unique to Laos.

However, while food and farming may be firmly rooted in cultural history, there is some reason for optimism when it comes to the elements of development that have no traditional precedent; namely power and communications. In these circumstances, the best technology wins, and when it comes to remote regions with inaccessible, inhospitable geography and climates, more often than not, the winner is renewables.

When I visited the village of Ban Kiew Kan in northern Laos, a day’s trek by foot from the village of Muang Ngoi, itself accessible only by boat, I would never have expected to see electricity. Yet every home had a compact-fluorescent bulb, and the chief’s house was even decked out with a satellite dish. Fossil-fueled generators would have been impossible option here in the mountains, with no practical or affordable way to resupply them with fuel, and so the solution came in the form of micro-hydro.

Scattered among the infinite streams that flow down from the mountains, the locals had set up wooden scaffolds that held machines resembling tiny outboard motors, their long driveshafts dipping into the current. These generators were enough to provide a modest, but simple, cheap, and consistent electrical supply to remote villages. The villagers aren’t ‘going green’ to pump up their eco-cred; they’re doing it because fossil fuels just don’t make sense for them.

Local micro-generation shows great promise to spur development in areas that lack access to transportation, let alone grid electricity. This sort of leap-frogging is certainly not restricted to power generation; the mobile phone has been the basis for a tremendously important communications revolution in the Global South, especially Africa. Without even the option of expensive, infrastructure-intensive land-lines, mobile phones in Africa have quickly become one of the fastest growing and most profitable industries in the entire world.

The take-home point is, while there are obvious challenges associated with shedding bad habits, places where those bad habits have not yet had a chance to take root can become great breeding grounds for sustainable development. When cleaner technologies win on the basis of practicality, availability, and affordability, is it any surprise to see their adoption?

While hydrogen was once the poster-child for the sustainable economy, now that the true magnitude of the costs and challenges associated with bringing it to fruition became apparent, it has largely been left in the dust by batteries. However, there are still plenty of H2-stalwarts researching technologies that could help bring the costs of portable energy into line for that distant, gas-free future we all dream of.

From ecogeek:

Scientists at the University of Delaware have come up with a new hydrogen storage solution:  chicken feathers.  Well, carbonized chicken feather fibers to be exact.  What’s more, their discovery meets the ambitious hydrogen storage targets set by the DOE for 2010 and 2015, which call for great storage capacity at a low cost.

Chicken feather fibers are made of keratin, a protein that forms strong, hollow tubes.  The scientists heated the chicken feathers until hollow carbon microtubes formed with nanoporous walls and the fibers’ surface area increased.  The resulting carbonized chicken feather fibers allow the storage of as much, or more, hydrogen than carbon nanotubes or metal hydrides, other materials that have been found to store hydrogen well.

The big success here is that making carbonized chicken feather storage tanks is far less costly than producing storage tanks made of the other materials.  A 20-gallon carbon nanotube tank would cost $5.5 million to produce, while the same size tank made with metal hydrides would cost $30,000.  Comparitively, a carbonized chicken feather tank would run about $200.

The scientists estimate that a car would require a 75-gallon tank using this material in order to have a range of 300 miles.  They are working now to increase that range.

Now that I’m temporarily living in North York, my daily commute ends up being about 35 km. While the bike infrastructure in parts of Toronto is actually adequate, as far as I can tell, there is no safe, direct corridor that cuts north-south across the city, thanks in part to two major chokepoints; highway 401, and the Don Valley. As a result, I need to spend at least part of those eighteen morning kilometers sharing the road with cars.

A number of bike advocacy groups promote so-called ‘vehicular cycling,’ which sees bicycles as viable road traffic, privy to the same rights as cars and trucks. While the law is (largely) on the side of vehicular cyclists, I suspect most car commuters don’t give much of a shit before they’ve had their morning coffee. As a result, I’m given three options, none of which are especially desirable; I can ride, pressed at the side of the road, on broken pavement amidst glass and gravel debris; I can periodically swerve further into the lane to avoid the worst of the potholes, making sure I have an omniscient sense of traffic flow behind me; or I can simply take the lane and infuriate drivers behind me, and hope that one of them doesn’t decide to take me out.

This situation was make acutely transparent to me this morning, when I realized, about 3 km into my ride, that I’d forgotten my helmet. Anti-helmet groups (such things exist!) say that wearing a helmet may lead to ‘risk compensation’ behaviour, leading wearers to feel safer than they otherwise would, and thus take greater risks. Previously, I’d dismissed such arguments offhand - after all, helmet or no, no one wants to get hit. But I realized today that it rings true to an extent. When I’m wearing my helmet, I tend to take for granted that I am part of traffic, and assume that drivers will at least respect my existence on the road. But when it becomes clear that the only thing that is preventing you from ending up splattered across the road - not even a foam bucket - is your wits and the desperate hope that the other people on the road are actually paying attention, you choose take your life into your own hands much more seriously. Boiling down a steep, bumpy hill on Bayview at 40 km/h with cars whipping by made me feel like a gazelle in a pack of fucking lions. And I can’t remember the last time I’ve had less respect for my fellow man than when half a dozen cars blatantly steamed through a red light, nearly running me down as I was turned in, waiting to cross the road.

Tomorrow I’ll probably don my helmet and throw myself into the fray once again, but I can see why people in the suburbs feel uncomfortable about commuting into the city by bike. Bikes remain the perfect way to get around in dense urban areas, but long-haul treks along sprawling urban arteries can be downright dangerous. The car-centric urban planning that has prevailed since the ’50s has ruined our cities, and it will take a concerted effort - and probably some spectacular circumstances - to fix things.

Here’s hoping gas hits $200/bbl this summer.

Animal cruelty is apparently the issue at hand. After all, what could be worse than clubbing an innocent, ivory-furred week-old baby seal, not yet old enough to even move? Never mind that hunting pups has been illegal in Canada since 1987. It must have lifted such a burden off the hearts of the EU’s politicians to finally rid their union of such (fictitious) malignity. I wonder, did the French celebrate with a satisfying spread of pate de foie gras? Perhaps the Italians indulged in some veal parmigiana? Or maybe the Spaniards, in such a mood of lusty self-satisfaction, reveled in a stirring round of bullfighting? Was a fox hunt in the cards for the good old boys in Britain? Maybe not - I’m sure that every single smug one of them is an ethical vegetarian, just like the animal-loving populations they represent.

The self-serving hypocrisy represented by condemning the Canadian seal hunt while casting a blind-eye to the disgusting depravity of industrial meat production is simply staggering. That the cute-factor plays such a paramount role in the ethical considerations of animal rights is similarly shameful. I wonder how many of the politicians who signed the bills have seen a seal that’s older than two weeks, once it’s shed its pristine white coat - would they still be so sympathetic after laying eyes on the bloated, parasite-pitted monstrosities they become after a few years? (Funny how we shudder at the prospect of Koreans or Vietnamese eating dog, but think nothing of digging into a pork chop, which comes from a demonstrably much more intelligent animal.) Then again, I guess impoverished Newfoundland fishermen aren’t the most attractive things around, either.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on the EU, though. Maybe they aren’t looking to capture the moral high ground in order to please their constituencies (which seem to love consuming seal-products, given that Europe is the world’s largest market). Maybe it’s just plain-old illegal protectionism, given that Sweden and Finland both hunt commercially, and the UK culls seals to preserve their fisheries.

(Since the issue at hand is strictly cruelty, of course, I won’t bother mentioning that the seal hunt has been a traditional, sustainable aspect of Canada’s maritime ecosystem for hundreds of years, and that the harp seal population has never been in any risk of collapse. More sustainable and humane, dare I say it, than the vast majority of farming practices in the Western world…)

I continue to hate politics.

In the dialogue, two characters were decrying the impact that the 2010 Olympics was having on the besieged poor in the Downtown Eastside, while drinking heavily at a rooftop hotel bar. It would be hard to accuse the author of literature, but that would also be missing the point. At the scene’s climax, the protagonist hurls a broken whiskey bottle from the roof onto a police car parked out front. “It was a glorious blow for the revolution,” the author read, laced with irony.

I’d been cringing a bit throughout the reading, but the self-deprecation in that line nearly redeemed it all. It made me think. While in recent years, I’ve largely stopped believing in the feasibility of ‘the revolution,’ or ultimately even in its desirability. I’d thought that was the product of a maturation in my political views (perhaps part of why I haven’t been to any punk shows in a while), but hearing the same sentiment coming from the mouth of a dyed-in-the-wool lifer punk threw me off a bit.

It made me realize that if even in the hearts of its staunchest supporters, ‘the revolution’ is just sort of an vague abstraction that will - and possibly can - never come to fruition, it still has its place. Things may get better, or they may not, but the punks want to remind us that this isn’t the best it can be. This is not the end of history.

When dire situations drive people to radical action, you have to ask why. White-collar office workers who commute from the suburbs in Honda Civics don’t throw Molotov cocktails. Violence is inexcusable, but then again, its rarely the resort of people who feel socially and politically enfranchised.

There was something Sisyphean in the author’s words. Being part of the angry detritus as society’s margins isn’t pretty, but maybe somebody’s got to do it. If only to pinch us awake every now and then.

When the credits finally roll
for this, the worst story ever told,
don’t bother sifting through the names
for yours or anyone you know.
Unless they were by chance a shepherd king,
a virgin birth, a resurrection, a messianic prince
or some such childish thing.
You can storm the edit suite
or move to block its theatrical release,
but I think we can safely guarantee
that there will be no revisions to the script
made on behalf of a supporting cast(e).

But mostly, it’s just here because it rocks so fucking hard.

If you live in a city where plastic takeout containers are not recyclable, you may be feeling the same frustrations that we are. Those of us who can’t bear the thought of simply tossing the receptacles that hold our beloved chinese food, sushi, and wraps try to reuse them as many times as possible. But what could make people who don’t really care about the environment want to hold on to their food containers instead of trashing them? That is the question that designer Takeshi Miyakawa set out to answer. His solution? Shaping the containers to look like a childhood favorite that most adults find difficult to resist–legos!

This does not strike me as a positive development. Unless it uses a more benign material that can biodegrade (recycling/downcycling is better than nothing, but not by an awful lot), gimmicky design like this merely delays the inevitable. Instead of storing their garbage in a landfill, consumers will merely store it temporarily in their homes before they bore of it. I doubt even the designer holds any illusions that these won’t be the first thing to go when the users need to make some room in their apartments, move out, or simply tire of having a space filled with uncomfortable, ill-constructed, barely-usable furnishings. Yes, they may linger in the household for a little bit longer than otherwise, but we’re talking about at most a few years in the lifespan of a plastic container that will live on in the environment for hundreds. On top of that, the containers remain a useless oddity until you acquire a sufficiently large critical mass of them to actually do something with them (which will take either a very long time, or simply drive greater consumption of take-out…)

It seems to me that a great deal of new industrial design objets d’art have are earning their “green” credentials by feeding upon the trend of largely superficial reuse-o-philia. While there is always some limited potential to repurpose old waste and turn it into something new and valuable, more often than not the ‘waste’ was never really garbage to begin with. I’m reminded of a translucent lamp design I saw that was made up of hundreds of drinking straws (there have been lots of these - feel free to visualize whatever example comes most recently to mind). I’m sure the straws were all post-consumer, of course. Because the designer must have paid some poor sap to sort through cafeteria garbage cans for hours, and then to clean them all before they were repurposed, right? Making it so expensive that it will remain an object of transient amusement for some yuppie with eco guilt?

Making new, attractive things - and taking advantage of industrial processes that can make said things accessible to the masses rather than just the elite - is not inherently bad. It’s only bad so long as we work in open loops, and the energy and material put into that object cannot be reclaimed in some way or another (either by nature, in the form of biodegradation, or by us through reuse or recycling). While good design blends art and technology, I fear that the eco movement’s schizophrenic consumption has skewed the direction of contemporary design too far to the former. Maybe it takes more effort to think about efficient materials, processes, and technology than it is to handcraft an art-project bauble out of old junk and sell it to the rich. Given that the result will evidently be lapped up by an uncritical design press eager for new sustainafashions, I’m inclined to think so.

(As an afterword to this somewhat unintentionally raging post, my hope is that the large companies that actually have the power to influence consumption patterns in some meaningful way will take the high road and look towards macro-level solutions and innovative materials to close the loop. I suspect the ‘high’ design magazines, blogs, shows and fairs will continue to mostly fill their pages and halls with irrelevant frippery, but I suppose that’s always been the case.)

How do you monitor water pollution levels in harbours around the world in an affordable, non-invasive, thorough, and sustainable manner?  How about by using a robotic carp?

Professor Huosheng Hu and his students at the University of Essex have developed a 150cm metal carp designed to patrol marine environments detecting pollution, especially point sources such as leaks in ships or pipelines.  Says the lab website: “Instead of the conventional rotary propeller used in ship or underwater vehicles, the undulation movement provides the main energy of a robotic fish. The observation on a real fish shows that this kind of propulsion is more noiseless, effective, and manoeuvrable than the propeller-based propulsion. The aim of our project is to design and build autonomous robotic fishes that are able to reactive to the environment and navigate toward the charging station. In other words, they should have the features such as fish-swimming behaviour, autonomously navigating ability, cartoon-like appearance that is not-existed in the real world.” With a swimming speed of around 1m/s and a battery life of around 8 hours before autonomously returning to the recharge station, these robots can cover a lot of ground.

Says the prof, “We are designing these fish very carefully to ensure that they will be able to detect changes in environmental conditions in the port and pick up on early signs of pollution spreading, for example by locating a small leak in a vessel.  The hope is that this will prevent potentially hazardous discharges at sea, as the leak would undoubtedly get worse over time if not located.”

Though the pilot project is limited to Gijon, Spain, I can easily see these fish being used in shipping hubs around the world.   Though the cost of 20,000 GBP ($36,000 CDN) per fish is steep for a university project funded primarily by an aquarium (the London Aquarium has chipped in around $275,000 CDN), with mass production (relatively) of these robots combined with the crazy budgets of governments and for-profit harbours, deploying them worldwide doesn’t seem to me like it would be much of a problem.  And if they can find oil leaks on ships that are docked and get them fixed before the ship heads out, there should be some real benefits to oceans everywhere.

Awesome YouTube of the fish swimming - CHECK THIS

Via:

Practical Fishkeeping
BMT Group

From thestar.com

“Authorities in Ohio say a man has been charged with drunken driving after crashing his motorized bar stool.  Police in Newark say when they responded to a report of a crash on March 4, they found a man who had wrecked a bar stool powered by a lawn mower.  Kile Wygle, 28, was taken to hospital and treated for minor injuries.  Police say he was charged with operating a vehicle while intoxicated after he told an officer that he had consumed at least 15 beers.  Wygle, who was travelling at about 30 km/h when he crashed, told police his motorized bar stool has a top speed of about 60 km/h.  Wygle was also charged with driving on a suspended licence. He has pleaded not guilty and has requested a jury trial.”

Come on jury trial!  I’ll bet 100 bucks this guy will get off… there’s no way I’d convict him anyway.