David Wann

writer speaker filmmaker

Investing in Living Wealth: The Bonds of Social Capital

Jul 4

Posted by David Wann in General | No Comments

It’s inevitable that our society will move back to an affordable, sustainable set point. We’ll give higher priority to belonging, and lower priority to belongings. The reason is simple: our current way of life often leaves us feeling used-up, and lonely. In that emotional state, it doesn’t matter what we own or don’t own – we’re not thriving. On the way to becoming world-class, gold medal consumers, many assumed that social connections were so basic they didn’t require much effort. After all, relationship challenges on TV usually resolve themselves in 23 minutes or less, and we expect the same in our own lives. We buy into a richly advertised paradigm that says products are socially advantageous — we smell sexier, or have that distinctive sparkle * of success.  But the sparkle is fading from a lifestyle that vacuums so much time and human energy out of our lives — leaving fewer opportunities for genuine connection and taking care of things. Now we see that many of the products we work so hard to buy actually isolate us from other people — for example, the iPhones, video games and Visa-funded fantasy vacations; houses so large we sometimes can’t find family members; and automobiles that carry us on solo journeys in which we can’t stop dialing numbers on our cell phones.

According to a study conducted by the National Science Foundation, summarized in American Sociological Review, one fourth of Americans say they have no one they can discuss personal problems with – more than twice the number in the lonely hearts club in 1985. The typical American has lost one of his closest friends, it seems, since even the average number of confidants has fallen from about three to about two.

A wealth of scientific evidence now supports what we’ve known in our hearts all along: without strong social and spiritual connections, we wither. We need to elevate love and connection to a higher priority even if that means we make less money and spend less time worrying about it. Researchers say it’s a matter of life and death. Dr. Dean Ornish, author of Love and Survival, says, “Study after study has shown that people who feel lonely, depressed and isolated are 3 to 7 times more likely to get sick and die prematurely than those who have a sense of love, connection, and community in their lives.” (6) One study looked at men and women who were about to have open-heart surgery. “The researchers asked two questions: ‘Do you draw strength from your religious faith?’ and, “Are you a member of a group of people who get together on a regular basis?” Those who said no to both questions were dead within 6 months, compared to only 3 percent of those who said yes to both questions.

Our health is even boosted by the unconditional love of pets. In a study of heart attack victims who now had irregular heartbeats, six times as many people died if they didn’t have a pet. Many other studies show similar results. Says Dean Ornish, “If some new drug showed a six-fold decrease in deaths, you can be sure that just about every doctor in the country would be prescribing it. Yet when was the last time your doctor prescribed a pet or supportive friend for you?”

After many years of hands-on medical work, Ornish concludes that the real epidemic is not just physical heart disease but also emotional and spiritual heart disease. Social support makes us feel valued and loved, feelings that enhance our health; but conversely, “Anything that promotes a sense of isolation can lead to illness and suffering.” The reasons why are tangible: for one thing, isolation increases the likelihood we’ll smoke, overeat, or fail to exercise. Furthermore, says Ornish, “Bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms must penetrate through our immune, neuroendocrine and other defense systems, and these defenses are measurably enhanced by love and relationships.” Social connections also reduce stress, the universal Grim Reaper. For example, when you’re low on cash, one of the most stressful things going, it sure helps to have a friend throw you a lifeline. When you’re sick, maybe another friend will take care of your kids for a few days until you feel better. Ornish has observed an especially strong correlation between the love of parents and good health, in part because parental relationships have such a long span: nutrition before and after birth; coping styles developed when young — such as anxiety, anger, and optimism — spiritual values and practices, and parental support and love in one’s adult life.

What sociologists call “social capital” is a renewable resource – the more we spend, the more we have.  Social capital is the glue that binds communities together, creating cultural norms, energetic networks, and reservoirs of trust. When freely and wisely spent, social capital lowers crime rates, makes schools more productive, and helps economies function better. Contracts, leases, and schedules operate more smoothly. In socially abundant communities and nations, individuals don’t have to earn as much money to be comfortable, because quality of life is partly provided by the strength of social bonds. For example, two farmers who share machinery with each other avoid having two combines on adjoining farms; credit union members and insurance carriers can share pools of financial capital; and jobseekers can find work more easily — substituting networking for possible bankruptcy. (More jobs are found by word of mouth than by reading the classifieds). The wealth of social capital also becomes apparent when we share information about resource efficiency in our houses; about which computers are more reliable; or which friend of a friend is looking for a partner.

Philosopher Martin Buber’s work distinguishes between two kinds of social connection.  In the I-You relationship, an unwavering, holistic bond of trust exists between and an individual and key aspects of his life, including other people, other living beings, and whatever a person perceives God to be. In Buber’s view, when we experience life from a perspective if I-You, we enter a sacred realm of authenticity and oneness. We make and keep commitments to “be there” without pretense or judgment, on a playing field of mutual caring, respect, and responsibility. In this way, we create the priceless relationships that make life worth living.

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In the I-You relationship, an unwavering, holistic bond of trust exists between and an individual and key aspects of his life.

On the other hand, in I-It relationships, people are misperceived as objects, valued only for what we can get from them. The ego is in the center, surrounded by things and people it tries to manipulate. Instead of being at one with the world, we become detached and isolated from it. If people or other living beings are no longer of use, we just throw them away. For example, when a huge school of fish is perceived as huge profits, it doesn’t matter if that particular species is an endangered species – the fish are just objects that exist for our benefit. We assume there are always more objects or more people  to exploit.

The analytic I-It approach to life makes us strangers in our own world, and is a primary reason why many feel a sense of emptiness. We strive to connect with a Higher Power we can sanctify rather than objectify — a being who won’t let us down, and to whom we are devoted. I believe we can and must bring sanctity to our everyday lives by creating I-You relationships; treating even the food we eat or a masterpiece painting with great respect, wonder, and connection, because the people who grew healthy food or created the painting “speak” through it.  By changing the way we regard the world, the “me” in each of us becomes a much wider we, and we feel interconnected and complete. Even in a world filled with contradiction and superficiality, we find True North.

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How to Save a Million Dollars With a Sustainable Lifestyle

Jul 4

Posted by David Wann in General | 7 Comments

Some federal agencies refer to U.S. households as “consumer units,” an insult that should incite acts of consumer disobedience rather than bargain-day stampedes. Yet, sadly, the term is all too appropriate. Most American homes are codependent with a lifestyle-support-system of roads, wires, pipes, lines of credit, satellites, and a collective identity determined by the supply side. Yet just about any household budget offers continuing opportunities for creating a healthier, less expensive lifestyle that’s also easier on the environment.  Because changing circumstances will demand it, we have to re-think the values that shape our decisions and rearrange our priorities to match those values. In other words, reach a new agreement about what constitutes a life well lived. We can imagine a symbolic “flag” flying over millions of homes, signifying that people are assertively changing the patterns of their lives, not just the pieces.

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Most American homes are codependent with a lifestyle-support-system of roads, wires, pipes, and lines of credit.

Rather than consumer units, our homes can be units of creativity and productivity that provide a higher percentage of what we need. For example, we can produce rather than consume entertainment, with house concerts or poker games in our own living rooms and backyards.  We can be as bold as the current First Family, replacing a chunk of lawn with miniature fruit trees and rows of vegetables. The food we eat can supply both vitality and monetary savings from avoided drugs and expensive medical treatments.  (Forty percent of the most prevalent diseases are related to diet, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, allergies, and depression). Some of our transportation needs can be fueled by carbohydrates from the garden rather than by hydrocarbons from Middle East oil wells.  By making a few well-researched choices about energy and water efficiency, we can cut our utility bills by a third. With this new, more sensible way of thinking, we can easily imagine avoiding a million dollars of expenses per household over the course of a lifetime, and enjoying many more hours of leisure.

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How a Sustainable Lifestyle Generates More Than a Million Dollars of Value

* Thousands of dollars a year avoided for purchases, maintenance costs, and loan interest payments for new cars, gadgets, and clothes you no longer covet because you’ve found other values to be passionate about;

* Thousands avoided in interest payments because you have very little debt;

*  Energy, water, and resource bills cut in half because your car is more efficient; you live in a more compact, resource-efficient house; and the things you need are close by;

* Expensive, resort-style vacations you don’t need because you’ve learned it’s cheaper to create your own, culturally rich vacations; and also because you’re more content being home than you were before you changed your life;

* Reduced food costs by cutting restaurant dining in half, since the food is usually pre-cooked and served in huge portions that make us feel bloated; and by preparing food at home that is higher in nutritional value (and flavor) so less food is needed.

* Reduced lawn care, day care, wrinkle care because you convert your lawn to a vegetable garden; you and your spouse alternate staying home with the kids, and a less stressful lifestyle results in fewer wrinkles (and less concern about them).

* Entertainment costs you don’t spend for spectator sports and home movie theaters because active entertainment (playing sports, talking with neighbors, practicing a craft, playing an instrument) is really far more engaging and stimulating.

* Diet programs, equipment, books, tapes, classes, psychiatrists, hypnotists and over the counter drugs not necessary because you’re not overweight;

*  No dental problems from chronic soda, candy and cigarette consumption. Foods like yogurt and frequent exercise have been proven to prevent gum disease that can cost five or ten thousand dollars to treat;

* Lower mortgage payments and less consumer spending after selling a house larger than you need. All remaining debt erased with the profit from selling the house).

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Though a million dollars in savings might seem far-fetched to some readers, blogger and self-made millionaire Jen Smith can easily substantiate that estimate with transportation savings alone. She writes a blog called Millionaire Mommy Next Door and speaks on national TV about financial independence. In a recent post she asked her readers, “Would You Ditch a Car for $1,000,000?”  She begins by telling her own story. “22 years ago, my husband and I sold one of our cars to pay for our wedding and honeymoon. We intended to replace the sold vehicle eventually — after we built up our credit score so we could get a car loan — but as time went by, we discovered that sharing one car between the two of us was no big deal. We learned to carpool, drop one another off, take turns, group errands, walk, bike, take the bus, work from an in-home office, go places together. Surprisingly, 22 years later, we still share just one car.”

Then Jen does the math: the average American spends $9,369, excluding loan payments, to drive 15,000 miles, according to the American Automobile Association. (This sum includes fuel, routine maintenance, tires, insurance, license and registration, loan finance charges and depreciation costs). Jen asserts that by choosing alternatives to the standard 2.28 vehicles per household, her family has already saved a small fortune. And if the family continues to share one car instead of owning two for the next 29 years, invests their compounded annual savings at 8 percent return per year, they’ll save an additional one million dollars. The point is not to “give up” the good life to save money, but rather to redefine the meaning of the good life, in terms of overall value rather than just symbolic stuff.

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How Does a Culture Shift?

Jul 2

Posted by David Wann in Community | No Comments

Massive change occurs when our security is threatened, when resources are scarce, or social structures are unfair. When factors like these converge, people not only see the light but also feel the heat. As a reformed addict does, an entire society creates a new identity – a new normal – and ours will inevitably become more conscious of what’s best for the general good. We’ll pull together or else circumstances will pull us ever further apart. Take the price of gasoline. Although there are tangible benefits to high-priced gasoline, we can only perceive them with a viewpoint that is less self-centered; more focused on what we need collectively.

Gasoline prices high enough to make people rethink household budgets and personal habits also reduce fatal collisions because there are fewer cars are on the road.  Scholars estimate that traffic fatalities will fall by a third in the U.S. if gas prices remain near $4 a gallon. That’s 1,000 lives spared every month, and one of those lives might be your spouse or child. Decreased levels of air pollution will spare another 2,000 lives a year. Insurance premiums will fall when those who are driving less qualify for lower car-insurance rates. traffic fatalities will fall by a third in the U.S. if gas prices remain near $4 a gallon.

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“traffic fatalities will fall by a third in the U.S. if gas prices remain near $4 a gallon.”

Obesity will fall by 10 percent, saving billions of dollars a year in health costs as people walk and bike more and eat out less. Environmental and social costs of sprawl will decline, and the sales of super-efficient cars that make life more affordable for all of us will continue to climb, helping prevent climatic meltdown. With more police officers on foot patrols and bicycles, the quality of life will improve in our neighborhoods. Many overseas jobs will come back home because of higher transportation costs– a very attractive benefit in times of rampant unemployment.

Higher gas prices are helping us redefine the meaning of “the good life.” Our culture is shifting, just in time, back to its anthropological set point: a species that works together toward common goals. In the last generation, we drifted away from the set point as responsible citizens morphed into mindless consumers, but the scope of that shift shows how quickly a nation can change its identity. Before World War II, only 44 percent of American homes were owned by their residents, and fewer than half of the country’s households had cars. However, in post-War years, cars, houses, and discount stores became organizing features of our shared identity, and the face of the American landscape and mindscape was radically different.

Like the transformation that’s now taking place, the culture shift of the 1940s and 1950s was stimulated in part by crisis: following the war, 14 million military personnel returned home and began to play a frantic game of musical chairs, living with extended family and friends or whatever else they could find:  converted boxcars, chicken coops, and garages. Crowds lined up at funeral parlors to get the addresses of newly vacant apartments. In response to the emergency, the U.S. government shifted gears and came up with a new plan of attack.  In a manner of speaking, we declared war on American soil, deploying bulldozers instead of tanks to level hills, fill creeks and yank trees out like weeds to build one lucrative subdivision after another.

Economists loved what the new Dream did for the Gross National Product, and the media loved the storyline, too: GI FAMILIES OCCUPY SUBURBIA. How could we question this energetic, giddy, sexy Dream? The ideal of the suburb was country homes for city people – nature without the mud.   In the suburbs, a family could have it all: community, fresh air, proximity to the city, and convenience.   



Seventy years later, many question the wisdom of an identity that requires a lifestyle support system that eats up our time, health, and connections – with nature and each other.  The “cultural creative” sector of the U.S. population (at least 60 million strong) insists on human rights, non-violent conflict resolution, and environmental restoration. They are helping create an energetic new identity in which whole new industries will be recycled, and others will flourish, such as suburban remodelers; vanpool operators; technical consultants who maintain residential solar, wind, and recycling systems. Renewable energy now supplies as much electricity as the world’s 400 nuclear power plants, providing more jobs per watt. Energetic gardeners are once again planting fruits and vegetables in their back and even front yards; devices are being installed to slow traffic, restaurants are appearing on even the cul-de-sacs and curvilinear streets of suburbia, and neighborhoods are re-energized by all the people who now work at home.

Cities are rezoning to allow single family McMansions to become multi-family homes; The City of Baltimore has made a special project out of making alleyways more beautiful and more useful – creating gathering places for neighbors and gardens where there were once only trash containers. In Detroit, an 80-acre urban farm is being created in the hollowed-out part of the city that is now vacant lots, with full city approval and encouragement. Chicago is piloting the installation of rooftop gardens and green spaces as part of its quest to acknowledge and prepare for climate change. One classic neighborhood in Seattle has re-imagined itself as a cooperative ecovillage, while in Boulder, a neighborhood is working to make the car an alternative form of transportation, replaced by pedestrian paths, bicycling, solar-powered vehicles, and public transit innovations. America’s small cities, once hubs of manufacturing and still blessed with town centers, are ready to be put back into service as regional centers of culture and industry.

It doesn’t make sense to remain in denial. It’s time for a cultural revolution, a social tsunami. We’ll create a more sensible way of living – a new identity – by telling and retelling a story that promotes a joyfully moderate, less stressful, sustainable lifestyle. We’ll build a new civilization the way we built the current one: with incentives, social rewards, changing styles and designs, new kinds of technologies and new ways of meeting our needs. It’s time to demand quality over quantity, localization over globalization, time affluence rather than the poverty of constant, stressful deadlines. We need a new identity characterized by less aggression and more teamwork; more respect for public places, including the environment; and less obsession with individual acquisition.

The future is waiting, impatiently, for yet another shift in our way of life. It’s well past time for us to stop seeing the world as it is, and re-envision it as it should be.

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Are We Cheating on Our Genes?

May 14

Posted by David Wann in General | 6 Comments

Can the brain keep up with change at the speed of light?

What kind of a deal have we negotiated as a culture? In exchange for 100,000 hours per lifetime at jobs that often fail to inspire us, we settle for houses too big to maintain; superficial connections with people; easily broken gadgets and nutrition-free, processed food – counterfeit rewards that can’t possibly meet our needs. Why do we cling to them? Partly because we are physically, psychologically, and socially addicted.

In an ancient bundle of the human brain, the nucleus accumbens (aka the reward center) continuously dispenses chemical substances like dopamine when our actions register “hits” of pleasure. A kind of chemical pinball machine, the reward center’s underlying purpose is to seek out and score anthropologically critical needs like food, water, leisure, energy, sex, and social connection.

Here’s the problem:

The reward center is not equipped to evaluate high-tech, artificial substitutes. For example, sugar is rewarded for its energy potential, but the human body has never experienced concentrations and over-the-top concoctions like these. Sex spells survival to the reward center, despite the relentless specter of over-population. In scientific experiments, humans report that continuous stimulation of the reward center is “orgasmic.” (Laboratory rats are so addicted to self-induced stimulation of the reward center that they lose forty percent of their body weight and die.) Why bother to “save the planet,” learn to hand-craft a table, or make a new friend when our reward centers insist it’s all good, feasting on calculated hits and bits of images, tastes, memories, emotional cocktails that promise pleasure, security, vitality, and social conquest?

But here’s the good news:

I’ve bet my life energy on the good news; researched and written ten books based on it: our collective intuition remains fundamentally intact, and we still have a decent shot at creating a healthy new identity – a different way of life. We just need to collectively embrace the “click” of culture shift. In other words, demand a more sensible direction and stage an historic cultural revolution. A new Renaissance, using interventions like non-violent civil disobedience, consumer disobedience, focused social media and mentoring, anthropolicy, and biologic – all discussed in the book The New Normal: An Agenda for Responsible Living (2011).

Here’s why it will work: the moment has come when we simultaneously see the light and feel the heat. It’s time to joyfully dig deeper into who we are as humans. Using MRI technology and the projection of images, neurologists observe that altruism, generosity, and cooperation can out-compete even virulent addictions like gambling, drugs, war, shopping, and superficial sex. One of the very strongest, most satisfying stimuli is the universal bond of love and affection between mother and child. Healthy hormones are abundantly on tap in response to such images of trust, security, cooperation, and hope.

I believe we will save the world only by exposing and trashing counterfeit rewards and going with fundamentally comfortable natural rhythms and essential experiences, rather than brilliant illusions and weapons of mass distraction. We can and will make new agreements about what it means to be successful; then we’ll have the collective momentum to do what needs to be done to preserve our rich and ingenious civilization.
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How to Run a Sustainable Business

Apr 28

Posted by David Wann in General | No Comments

For Judy Wicks, good business is about quality and caring.

For twenty-six years, restaurateur Judy Wicks poured her energies into the White Dog Café in Philadelphia.  Though the restaurant started and remained relatively small, there have been many other ways that Wicks has measured growth. She’s never bought into the dominant paradigm that growth is defined solely by increased profits, even though she does believe that economic exchange can be one of the most satisfying and meaningful ways that humans interact. As Wicks sees it, growth is also about increasing knowledge; expanding consciousness; developing creativity, deepening relationships, increasing happiness and well being – and having fun.

“Money is simply a tool, she emphasizes. “Business should really be about relationships – with everyone we buy from and sell to, everyone we work with, and with the Earth itself.”  Wicks made a conscious decision to stay small; to be one special restaurant rather than a chain. She hung a sign in her closet that she’d see each morning: “Good morning beautiful business.” The sign reminded her of the farmers who were already out in the fields picking fresh organic fruits and vegetables; and the pigs, cows, chickens that were out in the pastures, enjoying the morning sun and fresh air. She would think of the restaurant’s bakers coming early in the morning to put cakes and pies in the oven, and she’d even remember the growers down in Chiapas, Mexico, growing the organic fair trade coffee beans that made her restaurant so fragrant each morning.

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“Good morning, beautiful business.”

The relationships and beauty she’s after have been reflected over the years in various programs, activities and spin-offs. For example, her decision to pay staff a “living wage” was the result of her realization that the people she worked with were very important to both her and the business. A living wage is a voluntary commitment by a business owner to pay employees the minimum amount needed to cover the cost of living in a particular location. It’s typically far above the federally mandated minimum wage, and at first Wicks refused to consider it.

Then one day she stood in the kitchen with three of her kitchen staff as they chopped vegetables and sliced meat.  “Looking at their faces, I had an instant realization,” she recalls. “Of course I wanted to pay Brian, Tyrone and James enough to live on – to buy food, clothes, pay their rent and other expenses. How could I not pay people working at the White Dog enough to cover basic needs?”

A table for seven billion, please.

Another epiphany came when she drove to a favorite hiking location, a forest north of Philadelphia. “The beautiful ferns that I loved were crumpled to the ground like brown tissue paper because of the drought we were having,” she recalls.  “And the creek, once rushing waist-deep, had no water at all, only dust-covered rocks. ‘This is what it will be like, I thought, when global warming brings drought and fire to some parts of the world and storms and floods to others.’” Her personal connection with nature prompted a commitment to purchase 100 percent of the restaurant’s electricity from renewable sources.

The White Dog became known for serving healthy food from local sources. It was worth the extra effort to her for several reasons: the direct relationships with farmers and growers build community and provide transparency about quality; local food reduces “food miles” and carbon emissions; and the much fresher food is superior in taste and nutrition. She was especially concerned about the drawbacks of standard factory and feedlot farming of livestock, so she made an effort to find local sources of grass-fed beef and pasture-raised pork. Still another chapter in her business evolution followed an “aha” realization that she was part of a much wider food system. She became as much an activist as business owner, sharing her hard-earned market niche with other restaurants throughout the city. “I had to move from a competitive mentality to one of cooperation in order to build a local economy based on humane and sustainable farming.”

The White Dog soon became an education and support center. When the farmer who supplied the restaurant with organic pork needed a refrigerator truck to expand his business and supply other restaurants, Judy Wicks lent him $30,000, which he has since paid back. Every year, Wicks staged a Green Dog Day to talk about green business practices and launch new green initiatives, which included a compost project that supplied compost to inner city school gardens; a solar hot water system to heat dishwasher water, and a ban on bottled water.

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“I receive not only a modest financial return, but also a ‘living return.’”

The White Dog Cafe mixed good intentions and good nutrition.

Judy Wicks’ overall vision – a sustainable global economy based on a worldwide network of sustainable local economies – has now spread to many other communities. She co-founded BALLE, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, in 2001, which now includes 80 or more local networks and over 20,000 locally owned businesses.  One of the best examples of BALLE’s mission is Sustainable Connections in Bellingham, Washington, which now has 600 independent businesses in its membership. Recognizing the need for a new generation of farmers to provide locally grown food, that program has offered apprenticeships to 30 or more new organic farmers in the past three years.

Choosing a place and taking responsibility for it is the first step in building a local living economy, she asserts. Ten years ago, she sold her stocks and put her life savings into The Reinvestment Fund, a Philadelphia community investment group that loans money to support things like affordable housing, local businesses, and community centers. “I soon discovered that the wind turbines producing renewable energy for our region, including my own home and business, were financed by The Reinvestment Fund,” she recalls. “From my local investment, I receive not only a modest financial return (which has recently outperformed the stock market), but also a ‘living return’  – the benefit of living in a more sustainable community.”

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Prospecting for Energy Savings in Business

Apr 16

Posted by David Wann in Climate Change and Energy | 3 Comments

U.S. business will play a key role in achieving President Obama’s call for 80% of U.S. electricity from clean energy by 2035 or before, and the billions of dollars saved can also put people back to work. Forward-looking companies and federal incentives have stimulated industrial process innovations, lighting upgrades, and fleet fuel efficiency improvements, but there is still a mother lode of opportunity to generate much less industrial energy per unit of product – a third to a half less.

Profit isn’t the only stimulant.  Especially important in the U.S. are renewable energy standards set by twenty-nine states, mandating that increasingly percentages of electricity must be generated by renewable technologies in specified time periods. (Another five states set ambitious voluntary goals.) Together, these states consume close to half the country’s electricity; when New York called for 24 percent; Illinois 25 percent, and California, 33 percent, renewable energy as an industry swiftly moved from fantasy to reality. EPA’s declaration that greenhouse gases would be indeed be regulated as air pollutants was another stimulant, as is the virtual guarantee that Congress will eventually pass a climate change bill, putting a price on carbon emissions.

Another key policy strategy that may soon be on the table is the incremental shifting of subsidies away from the coal, oil and gas industries – which annually amount to $47 billion or more – and toward renewable energy. Belgium, France and Japan have phased out subsidies for coal, and Germany intends to phase out the entire industry.  encouraging innovation and helping to shift automakers toward efficiency.  Another great idea is share the profits of efficiency improvements along the whole supply chain, making designers, builders/manufacturers and marketers stakeholders in innovation.

Where Industry Spends Energy, and How to Spend Less of It

Industrial Processes (these percentages are author estimates based on various sources)

40% petroleum refining and chemical manufacture

19% steel

8% other metals

9% paper

7% cement

5% food processing

Heat generated in industry and power generation often goes up the stack or into the nearest river. Yet energy expert Tom Casten estimates that the waste heat could provide up to 20 percent of U.S. electricity needs (up from its current 7 percent) if it was used to turn turbines. The concept is simple: when you have waste heat, generate electricity; when you generate electricity, use all the waste heat. Called cogeneration, this technology is already widely used in metals, glass, and silicon manufacturing. Waste heat can also be used to heat or cool (with absorption chillers) buildings and campuses. Denmark and the Netherlands generate 40 percent of their electricity with cogeneration, and also widely employ “district heating” in buildings.

The petrochemical industry uses more energy than any other manufacturing sector, yet certain trends may begin to significantly reduce energy consumed. For example, research is expanding in the field of green chemistry, using chemicals that come from living organisms (such as microbial enzymes or soybeans) rather than once-living organisms (such as fossil fuels). Green chemistry pathways typically use less energy per unit of product because they take place at room temperature and have fewer intermediate steps. (However, this transition will be gradual because some chemical pathways and reactions are centuries old standard practices.) If organic agriculture takes a larger share of the market, less energy-intensive nitrogen fertilizer (which comes from fossil fuel) will be necessary to produce the same yields. Trends that may reduce energy consumed in the manufacture of energy-intensive plastics include a backlash against plastic containers because of health and environmental effects; a trend toward localization, reducing the need for plastics in shipping; and a gradual transition to plastics made with green chemistry.

By using recycled rather than virgin steel, paper, aluminum, plastics and other materials, the worlds’ most energy-intensive manufacturing industries can radically reduce energy use. For example, the recycling of steel cans in the U.S. is currently only 60 percent, but as that percentage increases, more efficient equipment that utilizes recycled materials can be used. According to the Environmental Policy Institute, if three fourths of steel production were to switch to electric arc furnaces using scrap, energy use in the steel industry could be cut by almost 40 percent. Similarly, if all cement producers worldwide used the most efficient dry kiln process in use today, energy use in the cement industry could drop 42 percent.

It’s a similar story throughout the industrial sector: recycling and changing the processes in energy-hungry industries like paper, cement, aluminum, transportation equipment, and fabricated metal products can reduce overall energy consumption in manufacturing by 50 percent or more. However, in some cases, cultural change may produce larger reductions than efficiency improvements. For example, more than one-sixth of the energy used in the food processing industry is used in animal slaughtering and processing. Only a reduction in meat eating will significantly reduce energy use in this case. About half of the paper manufactured is used for packaging and wrapping paper; about 30 percent is printing and writing paper; and 20 percent is newsprint and household uses. With a noteworthy trend toward more regional buying; the failure of many newspapers and magazines; the reduction of paper use from cost-conscious changes in office policy; and increased use of electronic products like Kindle, only toilet paper is likely to remain at current levels of production. (And even there, a transition to a narrower width and less “fluffy” paper can reduce materials and energy use).

The innovative European experiment with “extended producer responsibility” (also known as the Take-Back Law) may well lay the groundwork for a radically different flow of materials through the global economy. This law requires manufacturers to take their products back at the end of their useful lives. Rather than ending up in a landfill at the end of their useful lives, packaging, electronic products and other goods are collected at central locations and sent back to manufacturers. This brilliant political innovation encourages designing for durability, modularity, and non-toxicity in products, and increases recycling by closing the loop in the flow of “nutrients,” just as nature does. EU countries have also adopted industry-altering efficiency standards for 23 different appliances and electrical end-uses, from battery chargers to street lighting. Even more ambitious is Japan’s Top Runner program, which sets appliance standards based on the most efficient products already on the market. Though voluntary, this program successfully relies on Japanese pride in quality products to set – and mentor – new performance levels.

Commercial (Service-providing offices, businesses and government.)

30% lighting

14% heating

13% cooling

10% office equipment

7% water heating

6% water heating

6% ventilation

4% refrigeration

“We can compost and conserve all we want at home,” writes Time Magazine journalist Lisa Takeuchi Cullen. “But as soon as we hit the office, we turn into triplicate-printing, paper-cup-squashing, run-our-computers-all-night-so-the-boss-thinks-we’re-working earth befoulers.” A single office worker can easily go through 10,000 pieces of copier paper a year, in cahoots with computers that collectively burn $1 billion worth of energy a year when they are not even being used. Offices, stores, and public buildings consume more than 70 percent of the electricity used in the U.S., and are responsible for more than a third of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions. Heating, cooling and powering the se buildings has become one of humanity’s biggest energy challenges.

The challenge is to design and construct (or retrofit) greener buildings that provide light, heat, coolness and electricity for equipment far more efficiently. At the Ford Motor Company’s Rouge River Plant, a 10.4-acre, heat- absorbing roof surface was replaced by a “green roof” of hardy plants that keep the building cooler in summer and warmer in winter, reducing energy consumption by 25 percent. Two New York City office buildings – one recently constructed and the other – the iconic Empire State Building, built back in 1931 – are also raising the bar of green building design. The 4 Times Square Building, 48 stories high and with 1.6 million square feet of office space, was designed with sophisticated energy software to ensure that lighting, windows, and heating/cooling systems work together optimally. 15 kW of photovoltaic panels were integrated right into the sides of the building – doubling as a construction material – and two large fuel cells supply 100 percent of night-time electrical needs and 5 percent of peak load needs. The hot water by-product from the fuel cells helps heat the building as well as its potable water.

The Empire State Building project, which will save building occupants $4.4 million a year, demonstrates that a combination of computer-age logic and upgrades to windows, lights, plug-load controllers and air conditioning systems can reduce energy consumption by forty percent in existing buildings – a critical finding since at least 10 percent of the energy a building uses in its lifetime is consumed in construction and demolition. The U.S. Green Building Council, which administers the coveted LEED certification awards for building efficiency, has recently added awards for building retrofits. These include installing automatic shutoffs – occupancy sensors – for lighting, and snooze controls that power computers down automatically after 15 minutes of idle time, cutting a machine’s energy use by 70%.

One of the most interesting heating and cooling innovations for a large building is the Eastgate Centre, Zimbabwe’s largest office and shopping complex. Convection tubes used by African termites to keep their mounded, high-rise colonies cool inspired this passive cooling design. Taking advantage of large temperature swings from dusk to dawn, the design breathes fresh, cool air into the building, reducing energy consumption by 90 percent compares with conventionally cooled buildings. A similar strategy has recently been used at a London building across from Westminster Palace.

And the British are also front-runners in the adoption of LED lighting.  Buckingham Palace has recently been given a royal makeover, including the conversion of 60-foot high ceiling lights, chandelier fixtures, and exterior lights which last as long as 22 years. So stingy with electricity are the LED bulbs that lighting the palace’s entire façade requires less electricity than running an electric teakettle.

There’s no doubt that compact fluorescent bulbs have already led the way to light bulbs that are semi-permanent, more like plumbing fixtures. But currently designed, CFLs contain mercury, which typically becomes a hazardous waste when the bulb finally burns out. Most CFLs are not dimmable, so they always use maximum power regardless of how much light is needed. Still, they have saved a lot of energy and reduced a lot of greenhouse gas emissions already; from 2001 to 2006, global sales of these energy miser bulbs more than tripled, from 750 million bulbs to 2.4 billion. Maybe CFLs just need a deposit system that ensures they’ll be recycled.  And since LED bulbs have a few problems of their own, CFLs are likely to be around for awhile. LED light works better as a spotlight rather than a multi-directional light. Although their lifetime is up to four times as long as a CFL, the quality of light degrades over time.

However, one thing is certain: the Edison bulb, which converts 90 percent of its electricity to heat, is headed for the museum, unless it can be radically upgraded.  Various studies suggest that completely converting the world’s fixtures to LED technology could slash carbon dioxide emissions from lighting by up to 50 percent in 20 years. In the U.S., lighting currently consumes about 6 percent of all energy use. With a boost from federal stimulus funds, lots of cities have already installed the low-maintenance LED bulbs for street and parking garage lighting. Three major California cities, Los Angeles, San Jose and San Francisco have by 2010 installed about a quarter of a million bulbs.  The next major market is likely to be office, retail, and government buildings.  There are about half a million federal buildings alone in the U.S., according to Earth Policy Institute, and they will pioneer the use of LED lighting.

As a result of these many converging and interacting forces, governmental policies are beginning to yank global energy systems in a new direction, just in time.

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Taking the Lawn into Our Own Hands

Mar 28

Posted by David Wann in Gardening | 5 Comments

Let's see... grass clippings or fresh strawberries?

What’s the opposite of a suicide bomber?  Maybe a community gardening activist – like a Green Guerilla — lobbing a benign grenade filled with seeds and fertilizer onto a vacant lot. The mission of the New York City-based Green Guerillas is to “help people turn vacant, rubble strewn lots into vibrant community gardens that serve as outdoor environmental, educational and cultural centers.” About 25 years ago I became a green guerilla in my own yard, and what I learned along the way changed my life.

Growing vegetables and fruits taught me the value of filling time with something that feels right. I’d spend Saturday planting vegetables and digging a new plot in the crazy quilt I called a garden, then Sunday morning, I’d just want to do more of the same. Getting so much exercise and good food taught me what it felt like to feel great, and I wanted more of that feeling. (My then-wife customized a T-shirt for me that read “Mr. Vigor,” which I wore proudly as I ate organic broccoli or battled slugs and hailstones.)

I learned what a passion is about – something you did whether or not it seemed like a good idea to others. I noticed, though, that people would tour my little garden and comment on how much work it must be; then next year, they’d call with questions about how to start their own gardens. It’s not that we gardeners are trying to be “old-fashioned” or unsocial with our time, more that we are reviving a skill we can take with us into the future – a pastime that doesn’t cost money, but saves it, also delivering wide-ranging health and environmental benefits. If I eat a sweet pepper or a handful of raspberries as I work, I can count on an energy boost that lasts hours, because that food is still charged with life as I’m eating it. Rather than traveling an average 2,000 miles to my mouth, it’s more like two feet. The fuel savings are huge. The food that comes from my garden also doesn’t require pesticides, but rather skill – again, a great energy-saver and environmental bonus. Gardens create habitats; absorb storm water to reduce flooding; and give us something to take care of – a basic, primordial human need.

When we take the risk of planting a seed or a tree, we step right into the flow of nature. We become part of a daring experiment in which the seed is hope and the tomato is joy – juicy, flavorful joy. Ironically, life’s mysteries become more manageable as the garden presents greater challenges. Between 2008 and 2009, the percentage of Americans who risk time and energy to grow fruits, herbs, and vegetables increased by 19 percent, according to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive. (And the previous year was also up by 10 percent.)  Picture 43 million households putting off mowing the lawn to instead hoe rows of bell peppers and strawberries. Why the increased interest?  58 percent of U.S. gardeners say they want better tasting food, and about half want to make sure it’s healthier, and safer. In today’s economy, 54 percent also want to save money on their grocery bills. One gardening family tallied up the value of last year’s yield, and subtracted expenses. “If we consider that our out-of-pocket costs were $282 and the total value generated was $2,431, that means we had a return on investment of 862 percent,” says Maine resident Roger Doiron.

Lawns use ten times as many chemicals per acre as industrial farmland, and more than half of those herbicides and fertilizers are wasted, washing into our rivers, lakes, and streams. The luxurious power mowers that now dominate our neighborhoods emit more air pollution in an hour than a 1990s-vintage car emits in 8 hours or 350 miles – and as much noise as a jackhammer.  Deciding which lawnmower or herbicide to choose becomes irrelevant and unnecessary if you decide to un-plant your lawn and plant a garden instead.

From my own perspective, there are many benefits and few disadvantages in converting lawns – at least partially – into edible landscapes. For the past ten years, my front lawn has been a lush, fragrant groundcover of strawberry plants; I really haven’t noticed a downside to this variation on an American theme. Probably the greatest benefit is watching through my kitchen window as neighborhood kids sneak into my yard and steal strawberries, an adventure they may remember years from now. Whatever berries the kids overlook, the birds get, but there’s another boxed-in strawberry patch out in the garden, so who cares?  I feel great knowing I’ve taken one small square out of the 23 million-acre green quilt that blankets America. Americans pay $30 billion a year to maintain that quilt, an average per-lawn expense of about $500. As America’s largest single crop, the lawn consumes about 270 billion gallons of water each week, enough to instead water 81 million acres of organic vegetables.

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In the garden, life’s struggles, snags and snafus decompose into rich, black earth.

I looked at economist Manfred Max-Neef’s list of human needs the other day, which reminded me that the “food-miles” of a given backyard vegetable can better be measured in feet; that the best way to know if your food is safe is to grow it yourself; and that gardening is a challenging sport you can eat. If what we truly value in life are subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity, and freedom, gardening delivers about 100%. So when we take the lawn into our own hands, we don’t have to feel like we’re in a hurry, since just about everything we genuinely need is already provided, if we slow down and harvest both the food and the satisfaction. Gardening is not an add-on activity, but a possible replacement for trips to the mall, staying late at the office, watching one more TV crime show, or aimlessly surfing the web.

In the book, The Zen of Gardening, I wrote, “In the garden, life’s struggles, snags and snafus decompose into rich, black earth. I see and feel things happening – things that are real, not just white-knuckle policies and commercial blabber. As I plant seedlings or hoe a sturdy crop of basil, I don’t think about operators who are “currently busy helping other customers.”  I can touch, smell, see, and taste where I live; I know about Golden, Colorado partly by making horticultural deals with it.  I learn what it can provide and what I can coax from it, as my knowledge and skill continue to expand.  In the garden, life and death dance before my eyes every day, and I come to a better understanding of my own health and mortality. The garden literally brings me back to my senses.”

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How “Flow” Beats the Call of the Mall

Mar 28

Posted by David Wann in Consumer, General | No Comments

Night of the Living Dead

One day, way back in my college years, I noticed I’d been working for a few hours on a whimsical essay and thought it was only a few minutes. As opposed to the schoolwork I was required to do, the writing was something I did because I loved it. It was a fascinating puzzle, and the more I focused, the faster the time flew by. I suspected back then that writing could be something I might do for a “living.”  I think my instincts were guiding me towards something that might be of use. (I’ll leave that up to you.)

I’ve had many similar experiences before and since then, and a few years ago, I found a clear explanation for what I often experience in writing, gardening, playing music, or hiking. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (try saying that name three times backwards) calls it “flow.” He describes this phenomenon as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

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“Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz.”

Csikszentmihalyi’s research indicates that the process of an activity can be far more important than the end product, and when we are fully in the process, fully focused on a task, we feel alive. The activity becomes its own reward. After a flow experience, we are not only refreshed, but we’ve increased our skills, sensitivity, and self-confidence. We are more “complex,” to use Csikszentmihalyi’s term. (It seems we are hard-wired to improve ourselves!)  He’s been researching “optimal experience” at the University of Chicago since the 1970s, and has compiled a large data set involving people from all walks of life. Basically his technique, the “experience sampling method,” (ESM) catches people in the middle of their daily activities and asks them to record what they are doing and how much they enjoy it.  When they are signaled at random a certain number of times during the day, participants record in a workbook if they are in a condition of flow, or something far less.

To be genuinely happy, observes Csikszentmihalyi, we need to actively create our experiences and our lives, rather than passively letting media and marketers create it for us. The pathway to greatest happiness goes beyond mindless consuming to the heightened, enlightened realm of mindful challenge, where we are engaged, connected, and alive. Csikszentmihalyi’s distinction between pleasure and enjoyment suggests that many of us are settling for Grade B happiness – a package of mind dulling pleasures – rather than reaching for more intrinsic flow experiences. His ESM research indicates that when we challenge ourselves to experience or produce something new; to see things in a different light; and in general, to become actively engaged in what we’re doing, true enjoyment transforms moments of our lives from the routine to the extraordinary.  The great news is that anyone can do it, with activities that are self-determined.

Conditions that Encourage and Define Flow*

  1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernable).
  2. Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
  3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
  4. Distorted sense of time – our subjective experience of time is altered.
  5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
  6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is not too easy or too difficult).
  7. A sense of control and mastery over the situation or activity, as when a golfer’s concentration results in a great shot.
  8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.

*Adapted from “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”

University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman also prefers a deeper, more resonant definition of the word “happy.” The author of Authentic Happiness divides the happiness continuum into pleasure (gratification, social compliance), engagement (depth of involvement with people, work, and hobbies) and meaning (such as using personal strengths for the good of society). Says Seligman, “Many Americans build their lives around pursuing pleasure, but it turns out that engagement and meaning are much more important.” While most psychological theories focus on an “end product,” such as the alleviation of anxiety, Csikszentmihalyi and Seligman come from a more positive perspective, asking, “What makes us feel glad to be alive?”

Optimal experiences make our doubts and hesitations disappear. We aren’t absorbed in ourselves and directed by our egos, but rather by spontaneity, a sense of challenge, and connection with others. Despite the greatest ad campaign in the history of the universe, many of us still have original thoughts, and memories of peak experiences in which consumption played no role: skating on a late afternoon in January, learning to skate backwards on a large pond at the edge of the neighborhood, hardly noticing that it’s almost pitch dark. Standing at an overlook of a trail in total silence except the occasional chirp of a wren; gazing out over a valley covered with vineyards. Standing small and amazed beneath a starry sky lit up with shooting stars. Slurping a sweet, blushing organic peach seconds after it was picked. Making love in a huge, cozy hammock in the heart of a rainforest. Many have realized that humans cherish moments when we are active participants in life. We’re becoming saturated by images that offer fantasies for sale, and we are realizing, at last, that we are such obedient consumers partly because we’re afraid to follow our instincts.

For the philosophers like Aristotle,  happiness was a function of rational development – a reward for leading a virtuous, balanced life.  He believed that happiness must be evaluated over a long period of time (not just in the lick of an ice cream cone, as in our world of instant gratification). Happiness, he wrote, consists of a blend of moderation, gentleness, modesty, friendliness, and self-expression. Happiness is harmony and balance in which desire is tempered through rational restraint. His words sound very much like something an enlightened Zen master might say; and like directions to the sunnier shores that may lie ahead, if we choose moderation and balance.

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Intelligent Design – By Humans

Mar 2

Posted by David Wann in General | No Comments

In the old-normal way of thinking and doing business, the design profession’s marching orders were defined by convenience, stylishness, speed, and most of all, profit. And we literally bought into the wayward direction of these products, because they expressed our codependent, rather unhealthy way of life. But design has a higher purpose, now.  Driven by regulations, changes in consumer demand, fear of future lawsuits, and a green-tinged business environment, design has suddenly increased its IQ. As opposed to passive, accidental design that doesn’t ‘know’ where it’s going or who will use it, next-generation design is analytical, and ergonomic -  packed with synergistic information and “biologic.”

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next-generation design is analytical, and ergonomic -  packed with synergistic information and “biologic.”

For example, when Procter & Gamble examined the energy impact of its detergents, it discovered that washing machines were the largest single energy user in the whole laundry system. Since most detergents only work effectively in warm water, a lot of energy is used to heat the water, so P&G researchers went back to the lab and invented a detergent, Ariel Cool Clean, which works in cold water, saving energy without any loss in performance. Says P&G’s sustainability website: “We combine two key strengths – consumer understanding and science – to deliver sustainable innovations that don’t require tradeoffs in performance or value.” Is this mission statement ‘green wash’? Partly, but it’s also an ethical direction, and possibly, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

These kinds of opportunities exist in all types of design – we just need cultural instructions to look for them. The challenges we face require radically redesigned production systems, landscapes and structures – all sensitive to changing variables like energy, health, climate and resource availability. We need an inspired new generation of whole-systems designers to express changing values in their creations. Society should grant the design profession the social stature of doctors and lawyers – calling for pride, skill, and integrity in the design field. As with the age-old physician’s oath to “do no harm”, we need a designers’ oath to “design nothing harmful.” Designers reflect cultural direction, and their designs in turn are responses to directions they receive from the culture, often intuitively.

In this moment of massive change, we need democratic, values-driven design. In this precarious moment, we are designing not just gadgets and packaging but we’re also redesigning the civilization that contains them.  In the Renaissance, the highest mission of a designer was to glorify God; in our time, the highest mission is to fit the natural world like a glove fits a hand.  If we integrate values such as efficiency, moderation, and fairness into our designs, using tools such as precision, prevention and participation, we stand a chance of creating a realistic, affordable civilization. However, if we integrate the spoiled assumptions of our current era into our products, buildings and landscapes, we’ll lock ourselves into a future that is literally designed to fail.

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our designs will be so well conceived that fewer regulations will be necessary.
Ideally, our designs will be so well conceived that fewer regulations will be necessary. For example, if we design products that are fully recyclable and a collection system that makes recycling effortless, it will become almost impossible not to recycle. If we use eco-intelligent ingredients and procedures throughout the industrial sector, we will radically reduce many environmental and health impacts that have plagued us for centuries. In effect, we will integrate the law right into the product.

Just as an architect needs to know the characteristics and constraints of a building site before designing a house, designers of all types need to work with biologists and sociologists to make sure their designs are in synch with natural and cultural constraints. “We can’t practice architecture without knowledge of forestry and energy issues,” wrote Paul Hawken in the foreword to my book, Deep Design: Pathways to a Livable Future. “Chemical Engineering without epidemiology and biology is inexact and lacking, and transportation systems that don’t take into account community, family and climate are not systems at all.”

Like scientific papers, designs and technologies should be peer-reviewed. Experts as well as everyday users should be able to choose what enters our world, and what doesn’t.  Products that prove harmful – whether physically, environmentally, or socially, should get very low grades, even if heavy, misleading advertising made them popular initially.

Since cheap supplies of energy and materials are no longer a sure thing, designers need to be socially as well as technically competent. For example, state-of-the-art batteries for electric vehicles and elsewhere contain lithium, an element that is most abundant in Bolivia — a country the U.S. is currently not on great terms with. And heavy rare earth metals like dysprosium, which make electric motors up to 90 per cent more efficient, are also geographically perplexing: 99 per cent of all dysprosium comes from 200 mines in China.

In the near future, enlightened designers won’t just say, Here’s what you can have; instead they will wisely ask, What do we need?  How can design make your life better, not just busier and more expensive?

Designing Like Our Lives Depend on It - and They Do

A civilization on the cusp of mega change needs to prioritize its design goals, and channel public, private, and non-profit resources toward those goals. At the top of the list are systems that:

  • Prevent climate change
  • Preserve, conserve, and restore water supplies
  • Minimize pollution and health impacts
  • Effectively and humanely prevent unwanted birth
  • Make recycling automatic
  • Restore farmland and forested land
  • Optimize social capabilities as well as needs

This is not a trivial to-do list, is it? Some of the heavy-hitting human activities that are especially in need of redesign are energy production, wastewater treatment, and the manufacture of automobiles, cement and plastic. Fortunately, designers all over the world are immersed in research that is yielding major breakthroughs. Consider the following examples.

Cement making has always been an environmental challenge

The cement industry accounts for six per cent of global CO2 emissions (twice as much as the aviation industry), and that figure will rise as Asia and Eastern Europe continue to build infrastructure. Some analysts predict that the cement industry could become a larger contributor to climate change than the entire European Union by 2030.

Calera Corporation in California is challenging a cement-making paradigm that has remained constant for more than 2,300 years with a process that’s similar to the way coral reefs self-assemble.

Calera injects carbon dioxide emissions from power plants into seawater, which creates a chalky carbonate that is added to gravel and water to make concrete. This process avoids the need for the high temperatures typically supplied by coal-fired kilns, creating a cement that is 40 percent solidified carbonate by weight.

Algae has a higher "power density" than corn

The industrial production of algae for fuel is being assessed as a way to scrub CO2 emissions from power plants. Algae may prove to be the most efficient way to produce biofuels, so why not create a partnership between power plants and biofuel factories? Raytheon Company and others are currently running pilot programs to see if algae can efficiently absorb carbon dioxide, then be made into a biofuel. Though ethanol from corn was originally thought to be a serendipitous substitute for gasoline, it doesn’t significantly reduce greenhouse gases; too much gas-emitting energy is used when the corn is fertilized, harvested, and processed. Many scientists rank the power density of algae far higher than corn and other prospects like cellulose-rich switchgrass. Other advantages of algae are that its production doesn’t compete with food and feed crops for prime farmland, and that it can be grown wherever there’s sunlight and water, even in deserts, where land is cheap, or at wastewater treatment plants, where algae growth and harvest could help purify the water as well as power the plant.

A company in Venice, Italy is using synthetic natural gas made from algae to power electricity-producing turbines. The carbon dioxide released by the combustion goes back into the process, to stimulate the next generation of algae. A San Diego start-up company, Sapphire Energy, proposes to use existing infrastructure – pipelines, refineries, and vehicles – to produce a fuel that has the same molecules as conventional fossil fuels. Their product has already been flight-tested by various airlines and given good grades: it combusts at lower temperatures than conventional jet fuel and has 4 percent better mileage in the tests.

However, as an industry, algae-based biofuel faces stiff political competition. So far, the 18 senators from nine corn-growing U.S. states have consistently voted to subsidize corn-based ethanol. However, the current federal mandate for biofuels is 1 billion gallons by 2020, and it’s quite possible that algae can become part of that equation.

A third technological innovation that meets high-priority needs is plastic that incorporates CO2 right into the product. Currently, 10 per cent of oil consumed  is used for plastics manufacturing and packaging. The plastics industry is also responsible for heavy emissions of greenhouse gases and toxic substances found in products like baby bottles and coatings in tin cans; vinyl toys, and flame-retardants. Novomer Company, in upstate New York, may have a new kind of plastic that could radically transform the industry. According to CEO Jim Mahoney, the manufacture of polypropylene carbonate (PPC) reduces petroleum usage per unit by at least 50 per cent while also converting CO2 from pollution into valuable materials. As in the biofuel and cement processes mentioned above, the CO2 could come from power plant or industrial scrubbers.

Looking ahead, it’s not hard to imagine an ‘industrial ecology’ facility at which these four industries would share and optimize resources like CO2, waste heat, electricity, and distribution pipelines.

Designing With Nature

A new movement in the world of design, called biomimicry, is destined to change the way our world functions. By developing a genuine understanding of how the world’s species meet their needs, designers can draw on a living catalog of inventions. Says Biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus: “You take an Engineering problem like how to lubricate or adhere to something, and you find examples of how nature has solved that problem. If you look carefully, you can always find technologies shaped by natural selection that hold the answers.” Dietar Gurtler, an engineer with DaimlerChrysler, used that very approach, studying the shapes of fish to design an aerodynamic compact car. Says Gurtler, “Evolution has formed creatures that are very economical with energy.”

Similarly, Oregon State University Professor Kaichang Li studied the way mussels cling to surf-battered shoreline rocks, discovering that they exude threads of protein as an adhesive. He had a flash of insight: why not add amino acids to soybeans to create a water-resistant, non-toxic adhesive? Several years later, many homes and buildings became less toxic when one of the country’s largest plywood manufacturers replaced cancer-causing formaldehyde in its adhesive resins with soybeans.  Elsewhere, paint companies have mimicked the self-cleaning technique of the lotus leaf, which maintains its solar exposure even in swampy conditions; the microscopic structure of its top layer makes dust particles stick to raindrops, which then drip off the leaf.

One thing the world desperately needs is an alternative for the flush toilet, another of humanity’s biggest blunders. What do you have when you put a drop of clean water into a gallon of sewage? Sewage. What do you have when you put a drop of sewage into a gallon of water? Sewage. Now for the critical question: What do you have when you put billions of gallons of industrial wastes into sewage, every day? A system that prevents the recycling of nutrients back into agriculture.

The state of Indiana permits wastewater to be treated with aquaculture

However, the bio-inspired Living Machine, perfected by bioneer John Todd, is a solar aquaculture system that looks like a greenhouse. A succession of organisms like snails, cattails, microbes, fish and even roses purifies wastewater as well or better than conventional wastewater treatment plants; the state of Indiana has already certified this technology as legal treatment. The synergies between this naturalized system create a technology with no noticeable odor (I’ve toured a few);  apartment buildings, office buildings and neighborhoods could, with start-up subsidies, make our way of life far more affordable overall, providing jobs and a very important balance between what we consume and what we grow. The missing link in this open loop may be more perceptual than actual: health concerns. Surely, microbiology, vermiculture and compost science are sufficiently advanced to change the wastewater paradigm, too.

Designing for a New Normal

In the end, we will get to a more sensible way of living by telling and retelling a story that promotes a joyfully moderate, less stressful, sustainable lifestyle. We’ll build a new civilization the way we built the current one: with incentives, social rewards, changing styles and designs, new kinds of technologies and new ways of meeting our needs.

It’s time for us to stop seeing the world as it is, and begin to see it as it could be.  Design should take its marching orders from cultural consensus: if our society demands that only nature-compatible design is acceptable, future generations will regard ours as an era that designed its way out of a blind alley.

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Do We Really Have a Choice?

Mar 2

Posted by David Wann in Sustainable Policy | 3 Comments

Beyond the Assumption of Consumption

Thomas Jefferson warned more than two centuries ago that change is inevitable: “As new discoveries are made, and manners and opinions change, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.”  Policy analyst Charles Siegel of the Preservation Institute is doing his best to oblige.  Siegel researches and writes about the ‘compulsory consumption’ that’s built into government and corporate policies for work/time choices, housing and parking choices, medical choices, child-care choices, and many other American standard operating procedures. “We should focus on policies that let middle-class Americans choose whether they want to consume more or have more time for their families, communities, and personal interests,” says Siegel. He points out that most Americans work full-time because they must. Part-time jobs typically have lower hourly pay and no benefits. Instead of using higher productivity at the national level to increase consumption, why not use it to reduce work hours?

In 1933, when jobs were scarce, Americans almost had a 30-hour workweek that would have shared the work and nurtured a more productive, healthier workforce. This might have resulted in extra time for all Americans, as Kellogg Company employees enjoyed with a six-hour workday that lasted from 1930 to 1985. With two hours added to each weekday, there were more “room mothers” in classrooms. City parks, community centers, skating rinks, churches, libraries, and YMCAs became centers of activity.  Kellogg workers recall that the balance of their lives shifted from working to living.  What to do with their time became more important than what to buy with their money.

The nationally mandated 30-hour workweek was a near miss: the Black-Connery bill week passed in the Senate but vigorously opposed by business leaders. Instead of promoting shorter hours to fight unemployment and keep employees healthier, business leaders pitched “a new gospel of consumption,” and the bill was defeated in the House by just a few votes. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set the 40-hour workweek in stone, and the work-and-spend culture went into high gear, propelled by World War II, which geared up production to levels history had never seen before.  In 1950, marketing analyst Victor Lebow wrote, “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption a way of, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek spiritual satisfaction, ego satisfaction, in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.” Did Americans choose this consumptive way of life, or were we corralled into it with drumbeats of patriotism, social engineering, and economic fundamentalism?

Siegel believes that by law, part-time employees who do the same work should get the same hourly pay as full-time employees, and that they should also have the same seniority – based on the number of hours worked – and the same chance of promotion and pro-rated benefits as full-time workers. Does this sound impossible to implement?  Not really: the entire European Union has already adopted agreements like these to end discrimination against part-time workers.   As a result, employee-chosen part-time work is becoming quite normal in the EU, with Holland leading the charge. In 2005, for example, nearly half of all Dutch employees worked less than 35 hours a week, including 75 percent of all women and 23 percent of all men.

A similar logic applies to auto-centric policies that dictate what American towns and cities look like. Sprawl is essentially a government program that began right after WW II when the federal government subsidized mortgage deductions, highways, and cheap gasoline to encourage suburban growth. Those subsidies are still in place, forcing Americans to pay for a car-centered transportation system whether or not they drive.

Since streets and traffic signals are paid for out of cities’ general funds,

Most cars sit idle 22 hours a day

residents pay for them through sales taxes and property taxes – even if they bicycle or take public transit and use only one-tenth as much street space. It’s the same theme with “free” parking.  Even if we don’t drive because we are too young, too old, too poor, or disabled, we get charged for parking by employers, property sellers and businesses, who build the costs of parking into wages, mortgages, and price tags. Recently, parking policies are being re-thought. In Washington, D.C., planners have rewritten 50-year-old codes that now require fewer parking spaces for commercial and residential buildings. (Earlier mandates required four spaces per 1,000 square feet; the new law requires only one.)

We're rewarded for driving but not for biking or public transit.

Child-care is a third example of compulsory consumption. The average American child now spends ten hours per week less with parents than in 1970. “Fifty years ago, one parent working 40 hours a week supported the typical family,” says Siegel. “Today, the typical family is supported by two parents working 80 hours a week.”  The economy takes up too much of our time.

Flaws in the daycare system are in plain sight yet disregarded because we assume – and want to believe – that our present lifestyle is working. The current tax credit for day care gives parents an incentive to work longer hours and spend less time with their children because it pays for day care. However, parents and caretakers who work less and care for their own children get nothing. Siegel suggests that non-discriminatory tax credits could be given to low and middle-income families – he estimates about $7,000 a year per child. Households that need day care, such as those with single parents, would be covered, and other families could also choose whether the tax credit should cover day care or help them work shorter hours and have more time with their kids.

Obviously, policy and design modifications can help give Americans a wider palette of choices.  The most sweeping – and critical – choice of all might be the choice between “your money or your life.” When the culture’s policy-makers unlocked the door marked “money,” they in effect barricaded the door marked “life.”

POLICIES THAT REWARD SENSIBLE LIFESTYLES

1.     U.S. Income Tax policy discourages saving and investing by taking a bite out of income. Solution: Lower income taxes and instead tax carbon-heavy fuels and technologies, as more than twenty EU countries already have.

2.     Mandatory 40-hour workweeks don’t offer workers the choice of trading less income for more time. Solution: Enact laws that guarantee equal pay for part-time workers, as many EU countries already have.

3.     Free parking at workplaces rewards driving but offers no incentives for alternatives such as walking, bicycling, and carpooling. Solution: give a stipend to all employees, rewarding non-drivers and letting drivers pay for parking.

4     Daycare tax credits assume that employees would rather pay for daycare than work less and care for their own children. Solution: Credit a fixed amount per U.S. child; let parents choose how to spend it.

5.     Flat-rate trash policies discourage recycling. Solution: Implement “pay as you throw” policies that charge by the volume of un-recycled trash, while pick-up of recycled goods is free.

6.     Current beverage container policies don’t reward recycling. Solution: Enact a federal “bottle bill” law, as eleven states already have.

7.     Suburban sprawl wastes time, money, land, and energy. Solution: Enact local, state, and federal policies that encourage public transit, compact development, and mixed-use zoning.

Sources: Charles Siegel, The Politics of Simple Living: A New Direction for Liberalism; David Wann, Simple Prosperity

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