A Quote
Doing some reading (I know, it’s bad for the eyes) and this Thomas Berry quote hit me a moment ago (it will either resonate for you or it won’t):
“Unaware of what we have done or its order of magniture, we seek to remedy the situation by altering our ways of acting on some minor scale, by recycling, by diminishing our use of energy, by limiting our use of automobiles, by fewer development projects. The difficulty is that we do these things, not primarily to ease our plundering of the Earth in its basic resources, but to make possible continuation of our plundering industrial life patterns by mitigating the consequences. We mistake the order of magnitude of what we are dealing with. Our problems are primarily problems of macrophase biology, the intergral functioning of the entire complex of biosystems of the planet.”
We all need to look a bit deeper, it would seem.
++
The most significant book you’ve read or I will buy it back from you at full purchase price: Lester Brown’s Plan B 2.0 Trust me on this one, just order it. You’ll thank me later.
Tags: environment, Ruminations
He’s absolutely right. I struggle with this issue all the time in my work as a green building engineer. Green buildling is an idea that is in the process of “tipping” (in the Malcom Gladwell sense). It’s becoming very popular very quickly with a great many people who mostly have not idea at all what it means. There is very little understanding within this industry, even among the professional practitioners, of what sustainability really means, or of the fact that a truely sustainable building (i.e. one that adds to, rather than diminishes, the total net natural capital) has yet to be built. The practical meaning of “green building” is in the process of being defined right now, which presents us with both danger and opportunity. The opportunity is obvious, but the danger is that “green building” will simply become a code for a building that realizes a greater long-term economic value by being slightly less bad for the planet.
“Efficiency” is a very loaded word for me these days. On one hand, you have Amory Lovins’ work. On the other hand, you have McDonough rightly pointing out that a cherry tree in bloom is hardly efficient, but is both remarkably effective and ecologically sound.
I have become convinced that there are (at least) two distinct regimes of efficiency. Incremental efficiency (10%-20% improvements) are by far the most common, usually consist of grabbing the “low hanging fruit” from existing processes, and in many cases help perpetuate exactly the difficulty that Thomas Berry describes. Radical efficiency (50%-90% improvements) almost always imply a complete rethinking of the process or system in question. The distinct benefit of radical efficiency is that it permits the transition to an entirely different way of addressing a problem. For example, applying radical efficiency to our transportation infrastructure would permit a real transition to biofuels and the elimination of imported petroleum. Incremental efficiency merely allows us to continue to do more or less what we have been doing; under this regime, biofuels can never be more than a drop in the bucket (or a political sop to the clueless).
Very well put. Nothing further for me to add, other than to fully agree that the sustainability-movement (whatever that means and whomoever it includes) needs to better identify its in-house terminology as terms like \’sustainability\’ and \’efficieny\’ are very malleabe - we see them change almost daily in the public arena as they are plastered on various books and products. We won\’t sway the public effectively when we can\’t even agree to agree upon the basics.