- WASTE: TOWARD SOME UNDERSTANDING OF– Waste: Built into the system, since it provides jobs at all levels.– Conserving (reducing waste): Enables more waste–leaves more to be wasted, over a longer period. Enabling more jobs.– Creating waste and inhibiting waste are part of the same system.– Excess Waste Supply: This era could be called one of peak resources. But BAU can keep on wasting for a while due to the extraordinary over production of manufactured stuff that serve as a secondary source of natural resources. (There’s still a lot to waste due to the profligacy of extraction and the unprecedented past power of IC to produce.)– Finiteness: The stuff to waste is finite. A simplified way of viewing our economy might be that the big heavy stuff based on a maxed out period of surplus energy and consequent industrial production (1945-1975) is over. So, while we can continue wasting embodied energy now, we can’t keep doing it for much longer.– The Economy of Refinement: Jobs that were once involved in producing raw natural energy now switch to jobs refining and extending the products of that original energy. For my focus on the “built environment,” it’s straightforward to see how shelter can be doubled using the existing structures and merely refining them.– Absorption: Part of refinement is absorption, a means of mitigating the harm of waste. For instance, an over development of a rural scenic route can be mitigated through refinements–landscaping, for instance–that disguise (absorb) the visual effect of this over development, enabling the route to continue serving a scenic-tourism economic role much longer.– A Design Economy: Refinement and absorption are generally based on aesthetic sophistication (which can be found among tribal people as well as in western art-related academies). It is not generally found in the business world, which has the major power to shape the world.– Overlap: It is unclear where more surplus energy will ever come from, and it might be that while the waste economy continues but steadily declines something to compensate for the decline has to be created before the decline goes too far. Food, water, health and nuclear security have to be part of this. Shelter need not be a problem.
Artleads says:What I learn on FW has an unexpected effect on my view of aesthetics (the study of beauty). If there HAS to be waste to survive–and I think aesthetics are bound up with what enables you to survive–your aesthetic ideas might change to accommodate waste. The same sea coast whose development I recently bemoaned now is seen differently, and might even prompt me to want more of it. Why? Because the mind seeks pattern, and pattern is involved with the idea of beauty. Now, the maze of roads you see on a Google satellite map is less like a creeping cancer and more like veins, enabling circulation in a new life form.NYC’s Manhattan island comes to mind. Early prints and maps give you a sketchy idea of what it was like before European settlement. Nothing like what a Google map would have shown. But if we’ve lived in Manhattan, or seen it represented in movies, we might think of it as having a compelling beauty based on its very rational pattern. Streets align one way, and avenues another, perpendicular to the streets. It’s very easy to figure out where you are and how to navigate your journey. The order of the road system produces an order to the buildings that line it. They all have the same setback from the curb. They are of similar height. There windows and story levels might more or less align too. A lot of energy is conserved through this patterning based on an original grid concept.But even though a human-imposed angularity replaces nature, it doesn’t remove the pleasure and efficacy of having nature nearby. In Manhattan, there is Central Park.So, in the name of economy to survive, must a lovely coastal area with endangered turtles and conches be turned into a version of Manhattan? Without FW (ourfiniteworld.com), I wouldn’t even have considered such a thing–despite the economic system steamrolling over my objections anyway. FW gives me a handle in why this it happening, why it might need to happen, and better ways to think about it.- Interesting observations! There is definitely more than one way to see situations.This is why we now have such diverse political parties.
Monday, November 20, 2017
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