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Individual Quality not Mass Quantity

          After class on Wednesday we saw the documentary We Feed the World directed by Wrein Wagenhofer. This documentary shows the conditions some people have to farm in order to stay alive or supply the large consumption demand in the world. Some tribes and third world countries have tried American agriculture and after a few years they depleted the nutrients in the soil leaving the ground useless forcing people to survive off goats’ milk. It doesn’t make sense to me that people always think that farming needs to be done in large scale producing more food than is needed at the time. If so much food is being wasted everyday due to overgrowth how come hundreds of thousands of people die every day due to starvation. We are wasting a vast amount of fossil fuel everyday shipping food across the world that a third of it will be thrown away before being bought. That food should be shipped to these poor countries dying of starvation. My favorite part of the clip is when the fisher man goes to work every morning without using Nature as his sense of time instead of a 24 hour clock to determine when to fish. On his way to work he can see the same family of foxes in the same meadow every day but according to his watch there 2 minutes earlier each day but to the foxes it’s the same time every day. There is no time in Nature, only the sun rotating around the earth determining the amount of sun light left in a day, man created the concept of time.

            After reading In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms are the New Bits by Chris Anderson I learned that large manufactories are now producing items for individual people. With the age of computers you can simply design whatever you want made and email a factory the plans then they can build it for you and ship it to your house. The home garage renaissance is starting and people are becoming tinkerers again and fixing things instead of throwing it away. A small car company called Local Motors released for sale a sports car like no other that you can assemble at your own home. I like the idea of this small company because it doesn’t want to compete with the large manufactures and is simply filling the gaps in between. The concept of creating things in small batches gives you the feeling that quality is important not the quantity. All the people who couldn’t become car designers are now allowed to come up with new ideas of how they want their car to look like and to not be stuck buying something that a large manufacture wants you to buy from them.  

Natural World of Tomorrow

I am in the Hospitality discipline, restaurants and the food industry in general is the most wasteful industry in the world. I found a video clip by Arthur Potts Dawson “A Vision for Sustainable Restaurants” that explains what he has done to reduce his waste. He has built entire restaurants out of recycled materials designed to work with the environment to heat and cool the infrastructure. Recycling everything possible in a restaurant is not possible and some boxes cannot be avoided. Although we can start with the food waste and put it into composts and then the dirt can grow more produce to be used in the kitchen. Excess water from the restaurant can be run throw rock beds lined with mint to clean it making the water almost good enough to drink but can run the toilets and possibly clean hands. In nature everything is used up in a closed continuous cycle, with waste being the end of the beginning. I believe there is going to be a big change and growth in restaurants with the concept of giving the customers local and sustainable products.

In the video clip 12 Sustainable Design Ideas from Nature by Janine Benyus she explores what life can teach us about technology and science from its design. My favorite line in the clip is that “organisms have figured a way to do things they do while taking care of the place that is going to take care of their offspring.” The human population has a long way to go before everyone starts to think about caring for our planet and understand how it will benefit our future and that of our children. We can observe in nature a brittle star has one of the most distorted free lenses in the world and they are self-assembled. To harness this production and produce lenses for consumers would take away the pollution and toxins needed to make lenses for the industrial world. With millions of different species living on earth in the same scenario we can learn from their evolution how to solve our problems that are similar.

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sustainable future

After watching the video of Khosla Ashok presenting Roger Revelle and his idea of science for the future I believe we can achieve a better world through technology only if it solves the problems of the community and not for the mass production of goods. Billions of people are living without clean drinking water or cooking fuel and their land is being used by American factories to make clothes and toys cheaper for us consumers. It was a crazy number to put on it but in 4 decades we could use up resources equal to two planets in order to satisfy our wants and not our needs of survival.  If there is not a stop or dramatic slowdown in our consumptions patterns, or the production and consumer system this number can be real but I would like to change that giving my kids a better life. A big factor that is causing the most damage in our system is ecological rucksacks. The largest use of energy in the world is moving materials across the planet to have it manufactured for a cheaper price, with significant damage to nature with the carbon footprint of travel. We may not be paying the full price for our products right now but it will catch up to us consumers.

 

The best definition of sustainable development I found in the reading Sustainable Development by Stephen Wheller is “development that improves the long-term health of human and ecological systems.” I like this definition because it leaves out the “needs” of the world and the capacity the planet can sustain. Since the dawn of time animals and human have developed their communities and livelihood with pre-existing ecosystems. Animals have adapted to their ecosystems more efficiently than humans and we can learn from their ways of life to teach us. I found it interesting that the idea of sustainable did get introduced to America until decades after the German’s had been practicing methods of sustainability. Then in 1960 some of the first photos of earth made people conceptualize the planet as a whole. People were able to put the size of the world into perspective that we all live on this small planet together and that everyone should get treated equal with the same rights to lands.

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systems control the world

            After watching YouTube video “The Story of Stuff” I can start to understand how much resources and time went into a product that I’m about to purchase and whether or not I want to support that company. Anne Leonard makes the system of things and stuff so real. With the visual effects expressing each step necessary to harvest the resources to make a product and the disposal of it I never knew how much could go into one simple item. The materials economy is destroying the world and using up all the natural resources. I found it hard to believe that human breast milk was on top of the food chain for having the highest amounts of chemicals in it, this is not right. Factory workers also endure huge amounts of toxins as they make products out of natural resources and these workers are usually mothers and children. After 9-11 America has become a nation of consumers and 99 percent of our purchases are thrown away after 6 months.  We make four and a half pounds of garbage a day and it either goes to landfills or incinerators. People need to unite and accept the idea of sustainability, equity and green chemistry and change the idea of consumption or we will kill our planet.

            I like Donella Meadows way of describing systems in “The System Lens” by bringing out a slinky and showing class the behavior of a system. From this reading I have learned that systems are all around us and make up the world for what it is today. Going around school and work I notice now how everything works together as a team or in a system that keeps flowing. You can change the people working in a kitchen but it still operates the same, only changing the purpose or rules of a kitchen will the system of a restaurant change. In the article about how a system runs itself I found it interesting when talking about your bank account and if you feel it is decreasing. The first answer we think of is to work more hours to get more money, when an easier solution is to spend less. The inflow doesn’t always affect the system as much as the outflow can.

CicLavia

CicLavia

I went to MacArthur park on Sunday October 5 to participate in taking back the city streets. I started walking here from the park and went all the way to Spring street and then down it. Witnessing the none stop flow of people riding bikes, roller blades and a few skateboards through the streets was interesting to see the crowd of people who heard about this event. It was great to see the city at a slower pace than being in the car or bus zipping around the corners. All the people who came out to ride also supported the local stores on the streets around the function brining the community together. I support the idea of giving the people back a part of the city that is normally controlled by vehicles, even though its for a day it opens people up to the idea of how nice it is not to have to depend on cars.

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learning sustainability

My experience in sustainability is the idea of conserving resources for future use and restoring past damages. I am in the hospitality industry and sustainability in my experience is not using plastic for service and by practicing conservation by reusing things. There is a high amount of waste in a kitchen and trying to reuse materials when appropriate is a big step in being sustainable. When growing the produce farmers can rotate crops so the soil will not deplete and lose all nutrients dry out and create another dust bowl. By preserving the underground water resources for our future generations to have access to groundwater is sustainable. My favorite resource that needs to be keep clean and sustainable for our future generations is the oceans. Human pollution is throwing off the system of ocean evaporation and altering the hydrologic cycle. This is causing less rain fall to be added back to the lakes and icepack creating the sea levels to rise changing life for every inhabit on earth. Along with over fishing the waters and putting certain types of fish on the endangered spices list will destroy the local ecosystem altering the planet for future generations.

 

After watching John Seely Brown’s video “Do more with less” I learned how the web 2.0 and new technology like this is making it easier to mass communicate with others around the world and learn from each other. Peer based learning is a great way to open up social networking and give you skills to present yourself in front of peers confidently making you more prepared for the world. Education involved around who is the smartest and can stump the class and possibly the teacher doesn’t allow student to feel comfortable if they are below the par. By connecting students to students teaching each other how they solved an equation or figuring it out together is more productive than a teacher lecturing. By virtually putting student and teachers into study groups people who would normally never get an education have a chance to be taught and involved in a class thousands of miles away.  Especially if MIT is posting class lectures on ITunes videos it makes it easily accessible for anyone to obtain the knowledge or lesson inside the video.  I enjoyed the part were Mr. Brown talks about how amateurs are not below or in a second class to professionals but that they are lovers and have passion for their subject of interest.