What hope do we have for the future?

It’s scary to think that we could totally deplete our resources and pollute our lands and waters until the earth can simply not replenish itself. We can’t expect that this earth is going to sustain itself if we keep destroying it. For us to have a future that is just as good as what we have in the present, we have to follow all the sustainable practice discusses in this blog series. There are so many books and magazines on how to be green and more sustainable practices that I’m sure we could all improve upon.

It starts with the involvement of the whole community. We have to be realistic with what we can achieve and work towards continuous improvement. If we started to diligently do all the small things in our homes to be more sustainable such as turning down the heat, installing low flow shower heads and faucets, weather guarding your windows and doors, consuming less water and materials and producing less waste. There are many things we can do, that are so easy and simple we should have been diligently doing them already.

As mentioned before about the Earthships, we need to start incorporating more recycled products into our production now and building design. The hope for becoming ‘off-grid’ seems that of a distant dream that will never be reached, and maybe it is. But we can start incorporating some of the ideas and concepts for saving energy from the Earthship into our homes and buildings. Incorporate recyclables into our homes, and find better uses for them instead of having to be reprocessed into something else, or tossed into a landfill.

With a growing population, the need for smart design has never been more important. We can all live more meaningful and sustainable lives by reducing our dependency on vehicles. We can start by doing little things like carpooling, or taking the bus more often. Even better ways would be biking or moving closer to work and completely reducing the need for a single occupant vehicle. The ideas of new urbanism can help us get away from he problems we face in our communities today.

Future production and design will need to utilize ideologies of biomimicry to reduce out waste and energy inputs. It is going to take a total shift in our way of production from extraction and reducing the materials we use to make endless amount of ‘stuff’, all the way through to disposal.

If we don’t start changing our wasteful ways we can be certain that this earth is going to reach its carrying capacity. This would surly be a miserable time to be alive. We will use everything up and leave nothing for the generations to come. In this weeks class, we watched the short film by Dr Seuss, The Lorax. I had never heard of it before, being the Dr Seuss fan that I am, and I was surprised that he had already written a book that seems to tell a grim portrayal of the future we are destined for if we keep on using all our resources. In this film, a greedy Once-ler moves into a beautiful town and uses up all the Truffula trees to make ‘things’ out of them. He uses up all the trees and leaves nothing for the animals and fish that inhabit the land. The Lorax pleads to the Once-ler to stop using all the trees and stop polluting the land for the animals but the Once-ler does not listen. The Once-ler’s face is never shown, and so it resembles the figure we have of the big faceless corporations. At the end of the film, the town has been destroyed and there aren’t even any trees left to make anymore ‘things’. All the animals and fish have to evacuate the land since there is nothing left and it has been so polluted that they couldn’t even survive in it. Unless people start caring about the earth and begin taking care of it, instead of just taking from it, we don’t have a future.

Its pretty revolutionary for Dr Seuss and I think all children should start reading this book so they can understand that we only have 1 earth, and if we destroy it, we don’t have a backup, and we are going to be left with nothing.

The information used to write this blog was taken from various classes in Sustainable Development taught by Dr Ling.

How is sustainable development in Practice?

With an increasing population and depleting resources, we are beginning to understand the need for new sustainable design. After using up large amounts of our resources, taking up too much space and consuming and creating large amounts of waste, we are finally starting to tackle these issues. A case of sustainable development in building homes out of waste and recylable products is a great example of how sustainable development is being put into place (ands its really neat too).

During presentations last week in my sustainable development class, two groups discussed the implementation of ‘Earthships’. Earthships are a sustainable way of developing homes, especially in developing countries where disaster has struck. One group discussed how Haiti is using this design as a way of reestablishing homes for the millions of people that were left homeless after the massive earthquakes struck the country in January of 2010.

I guess I’ll tell you a little about these Earthships. An Earthship is essentially a home constructed out of waste materials and earth! It’s a great way of using our waste to the fullest. The foundation of most Earthships are made of tires filled with earth. These structures enable the home to resist catastrophes such as earthquakes as they are flexible. In many cases plastic bottles, glass bottles, or aluminum cans are uses to enforce the earth and concrete walls, this also makes then look very pretty, as different coloured bottles can be used and can create a sort of mosaic-like wall that look like tiny windows.

These Earthships are a great way of using our local resources and waste and harvest energy from the sun. They are made to be ‘off-grid’ homes as they use the sun for heating as well as lighting, and the materials used for walls provide temperature regulation within the home. No fossil fuels are needed for energy in these homes. The design of the thick walls allows them to be heated by the sun until the temperature in the room is lower than the temperature of the walls, at this time the walls will radiate heat back into the space. The earth roofs and walls keep the home cool in very hot climates.

Water is harvested and store in cisterns outside the home.  The water is caught from the roof and is heated by solar energy. A water organizing modules regulates the water through the home, is used about 4 times and is treated them onsite in botanical cells.

Earthship residents are able to harvest their own food in the Earthship greenhouses, with the effort to produce enough food to feed the residents of each home. Expanded food production capabilities can be built through larger greenhouses enabling residents to have fish, chickens and goats for meat, cheezes and milk.

I think this is a great example of sustainable development in practice and I think that we should all live in Earthships, at least I want to live in an Earthship. It is a great way to address our global warming issue and has many advantages in design and energy and water conservation. I’m really excited to know about Earthships because my family owns property in Chile, and my brother and sister have always talked about building an eco friendly house, but this idea seems so much better. I’ve already discussed this idea with them, and I can’t wait to get started!

You can get more information on the Earthship Biotecture Website.

The information obtained to write this blog was taken from the Earthship Biotecture website as well as from classmates.

Stuff, stuff and more stuff

As North Americans, we are bombarded everyday with advertisements for the newest ‘stuff’ that we all apparently ‘need’. As consumers we are brainwashed into thinking that we need stuff to be happy. We see other people with stuff and we feel that we need it too. We are constantly buying more and more stuff, half of it we don’t even need. We are just satisfying our need to have the newest and best stuff.

Do we really need those designer clothes? Or more vehicles than there are drivers? Or every new video game console that comes out on the market? I know some people who do all of these things, none in my class of course. The answer to all these is no. We need to stop being so materialistic, greedy and wasteful. People replace things that aren’t even broken and then we just throw everything away or store it in attics and garages. We need to stop and think about how much stuff we buy and how much of it we actually need to survive.

In the video “The story of Stuff”, Annie Leonard discusses the life cycle of the ‘stuff’ we buy. She outlines it from extraction all the way to disposal. The chain of events starts at extraction from the earth, production of the product, distribution in stores, consumption and then disposal.

Annie Leonard, The story of stuff

She talks about how we extract mass amounts of resources, mostly from other countries, expose our workers to toxic chemicals during production for low wages, sell products in mass quantities in stores to give the consumer the cheapest price, probably cheaper than the total cost to extract and produce the good. So who pays? The country whose resources were depleted and the workers who expose themselves to toxic environments for low wages, just so we can get stuff at the cheapest price, making us want to buy more! So we do, then we throw it out, because now companies make products that have a short lifespan. It’s true when they say they just don’t make things the way they used to. It’s as if they think we have a bottomless pit to keep throwing all the old stuff that nobody wants any more into.

Clearly producing so much stuff is taking a toll on our resources. We put so much energy into production of stuff. The concept of Biomimicry is a great way to incorporate natural processes into our products. If we can design products from nature inspired models, we can obtain products using less energy, less waste, and lower toxicity, making it very sustainable.

Tubercle Technology for wind turbines

Biomimicry examples

·       Self Assembly (CaCO₃ in self-assembling shells)

·       CO₂ as a feedstock (plants can do this)

·       Solar transformation

·       Power of shape

o   Energy efficiency: whale fins- aviation wing design

o   Self cleaning objects: leaf shape

·       Quenching thirst by drawing water from air and fog

·       Metals without mining- microbes do this

·       Green chemistry

·       Timed degradation: mussels in ocean- threads dissolve within 2 years

The coolest cases of Biomimicry can be seen at this link. Some things we can do to reduce the amount of stuff we consume is to buy things from garage sales, make your own stuff, and just stop buying stuff.

Information taken from my sustainable development serious class, taught by Dr Ling. Other sources from this website, http://www.whatwomenmake.com/the-forest-for-the-trees

Sustainable Cities

Kitchener, Waterloo, Ont.

One of the biggest problems with maintaining a sustainable city is the issue of urban sprawl. With a growing population, we are going to run out of space if we keep building communities and neighbourhoods the same way. As of now, we have dug ourselves into a hole, where we are consuming large amounts of land to house a minimal number of people. Urban sprawl has many disadvantages, such as a loss in a sense of ‘place’, high dependency on automobiles, less interaction among communities and loss of natural ecosystems and farmland due to large land consumption. Urban sprawl doesn’t allow people to commute by walking or biking and decreases interactions among neighbours, increases social and health impacts, not to mention it is very expensive and inefficient.

By completely changing our cities, making them more compact and walkable, we will greatly increase our quality of life. Having more compacts communities will bring people and services closer together, creating greater interaction and simpler, cheaper ways of getting around. Having more walkable cities encourages attractive design and makes the best use of the land.

New urbanism is a concept that is trying to do just this; create more walkable communities. New urbanism is very similar to old urbanisms, before everyone had a car to get around in and lived in closer proximities to school, work and services. New urbanism actually strives to have all services within a 10 minute walking distance. You can check how walkable your house is in proximity to services in your area at www.walkscore.com. All you have to do is type in your address or postal code and it will give you a score out of 100 on how walkable your home is. When I typed in my home here is Victoria, I got an 83/100, very walkable! I already knew it would be better than my home in Ontario, as here I live within 10 minutes of the uptown Wal-mart centre and next door to the Mayfair mall. I also live very close to a grocery store, and many services on Douglas. However, my home in Ontario got a 27/100, Car-dependant. I did expect a low score, since my home is in a subdivision with one Mac’s milk, and it takes 10 minutes just to get there.

New urbanism encourages a walkable community but also offers better transit system for people who need to commute farther to work. An example this is seen in the use of mobility hubs in Toronto. They have integrating of travel and services. Some advantages of mobility hubs are that they offer a place for regional and inner city transit, connections for bike and car share programs, ferries and taxis.

Downtown Montreal

I love to visit my sister in Montreal, and the more I think about it, they have done a good job of minataining a sustainable city, well, if you live downtown. My sister has lived there for almost 15 years and she has never had a car. She lives close to downtown, and can get anywhere by taking the bus or metro, but she mostly walks.Montreal was named the 15th most sustainable city in Canada in the magazine for clean capitalism, Corporate Knights. The 2010 Most sustainable cities in Canada can be found in the link.

New city infrastructure is being developed all the time, it should be an initiative, or even a law, for architects to start building all buildings with the objective of creating a sustainable city.

Information from this blog was taken from a Sustainable Development Series class, taught my Dr. Ling.

Powering the sustainable society

In Canada, our means of powering society are far form sustainable. Canadians generate energy from crude oil, coal, natural gas, hydroelectric power, nuclear and other renewable energy sources. When developing a system to obtain sustainable energy for a region, the source and uses of the energy must be taken into account. This has become increasingly important, as populations are growing as well as the demand for energy, preferably renewable. Assessing the options for sustainable energy is crucial and should not be overlooked. Depending on the area, different methods of energy can be employed, such as wind, tidal and solar generation. It is necessary to determine the distribution of the energy required. Larger communities will require higher energy inputs then smaller communities. The density of population in the area being supplied is also valuable information, larger, spread out areas may enable the use of wind or solar farms that otherwise may not have been instituted in urban, downtown areas.

Currently, unsustainable practices are being used to harvest energy. Crude oil is the leading form of energy used for Canadians and supply is decreasing. This means that soon crude oil prices will become so high that we will not be able to afford to heat our homes with this type of energy. Harvesting energy from crude oil, nuclear and coal are all unsustainable, inefficient and have polluting effects.

The question about biofuels for energy has encountered many issues. In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the Canadian government has encouraged the production and commercialization of biofuels and biofuel technology. Biofuel can be broken into two main categories: Ethanol and Biodiesel. Ethanol of harvested from grains such as corn, or cellulose from agricultural and forestry waste materials. Biodiesel is obtained form the combination of natural oils or fats with alcohol (methanol).

The production of Biofuels for energy can have great impacts but may take a long time to reap the benefits. In 2 decades, the UN says the 25% of the worlds energy needs have be provided from biofuels, and is a way for decrease our dependence on crude oil and nuclear options for energy production. According to Suleiman Jasir al-Herbish, Director-General of the OPEC Fund for International Development, biofuels have a negative impact on society and the worlds grain production. A large amount of corn needs to be grown, taking away from the food that could be used to feed starving civilians. Not only does this reduce food production, it also uses up large amounts of water, creating shortages in the water supply.

Micro-generation technologies are also being innovated to heat air and water through solar photovoltaic’s, as well as small wind turbines. Solar has been determined to be the most effective way of harvesting renewable energy. As discussed in class, active solar heating systems in Canada are successfully divert 23,200 tonnes of CO₂ annually. It is necessary to start replacing our dependence on unsustainable practices with more renewable ways to harvest energy.

Information from this blog was taken from a Sustainable Development Series class, taught my Dr. Ling.

Sustainability and Community

A great limitation to sustainable communities is scale. An individual is able to change their own ways and live more sustainably, but change depends on how they can influence a greater number of people. Since individual in the community are not involved in keys aspects of planning and utility supply, they need to work with what they are given to reduce their ecological footprint and hopefully influence other to follow in their actions.

In this context, community describes a group of people with shared ethnic, cultural or religious views that live in a within a local area. They could reside in the same work place, organization or simply reside in the same area. It may seem ineffective for one person to being a movement towards sustainable living, but it must start somewhere. Community sustainability requires the maintenance of ecological, social and economic processes to preserve natural systems, diversity and human equity.

Reducing our carbon footprint is a great way to start becoming sustainable in your community with regards to ecological processes. You could start riding your bike to work/school, taking the bus or get involved in a ride share program. Using energy efficient light bulbs and installing low flow showerheads or dual flush toilets are a good way of reducing your footprint. Simple things like remembering to turn off lights, or turning down the heat are ways to save energy and are easy to do. Investing in carbon offsets or introducing them into your own home though solar panels is another option but is very costly, but If you have the means, why not?

Often we need encouragement from the people around us to get us motivated to live healthier, more sustainable lives. To obtain and maintain a sustainable community, you need to help and participation of many people; it may be a good idea to start a group to brainstorm ideas on sustainable living. It is necessary to livability and quality of life, without hindering health and well-being.

Issues such as climate change require community involvement to bring about change. Economic diversity, resilience and adaptability all require the support of a community to be upheld in order to drive innovation, lower costs and maintain a competitive edge.

Community involvement is key is planning a sustainable community. Once the area is understood, a plan can be created to maximize the benefits within the carrying capacity of the region. Once a viable plan has been created, it can be implemented. Results are not likely going to happen overnight, but a long-term vision of a reasonable goal can be achieved with perseverance.

Information from this blog was taken from a Sustainable Development Series class, taught my Dr. Ling.

Overpopulation or overconsumption?

I have recently been faced with the question of what is a bigger issue, overpopulation or overconsumption? After reading a few articles, I have come to the conclusion that overconsumption is the main issue at hand, as well as being the only issue that we have control over.

It is hard to think that overpopulation is an issue here in Canada, where we have about 33 million people in an area of 3,559,294 square miles. In short, there are about 9.27 people per square mile. In reality the Southern half of the country inhabits most of the population. Although it seems like we have a lot of resources and space, we are only just living within our ecological footprint. This is shamefull! We have such a large amount of space but if our population continues to grow (and it will), we won’t have enough resources to sustain it.

Although population is growing, it can be seen in this chart that underdeveloped countries are growing at rates faster than in developed countries. This could be due to lack of education in birth control options and such education should be given to young females in underdeveloped and developed nations.

It has been suggested that the earth would not be able to produce enough food to sustain the growing population, but we have more food now than ever, and consequently we are consuming more now than ever before.

This leads me to believe that we are overconsuming and using our resources faster than they can be produced. The lack of enough resources to meet the growing population demand is a serious global problem. It is such a problem that people don’t see just how big of a problem it is. We are genetically modifying foods and crops to obtain the maximum yields of food, and people are still starving all over the world.

Major consumption of all of our resources seems to be taking place mainly in developed countries and underdeveloped countries are going to be affected. Not only are we overconsuming food, we are using up all our oil and creating a problem that will affect developed countries the hardest. Once we have used up all the oil (which we will at this rate), gas prices will be so high that we won’t be able to afford to drive our vehicles.

There are so many programs on TV that glorify overconsumption.Shows like CRIBS, where you get to see celebrities that have massive houses and 5 cars (probably a Hummer), make Americans feel that they need those things to be happy. But in reality, who needs 5 cars, or a massive house that resembles a hotel? The energy needed to heat a house that large is probably enough to heat 5 smaller houses. Another show, Man vs. Food, viewers can watch a man eat enough food to feed 5-10 people. It seems ridiculous that people are supporting this show and that money is being spent to allow this man to consume such a large quantity of food when there are people starving. The money used to produce this show should be put into a food security program for a developing country. It is disgusting how much people consume, even the McDonalds meals have grown considerably since they first opened. Why is this necessary? People don’t need to eat that much McDonalds.

The issue of overconsumption goes hand in hand with overpopulation and people around the world need to understand that this is an issue that won’t go away. Everyone needs to consume less to sustain the growing population demands.

Information from this blog was taken from a Sustainable Development Series class, taught my Dr. Ling.