I had a moment yesterday during an interview with Christy Clark where I lapsed into some mumbo-jumbo about losing our connections with the natural environment, being closed off by the walls of the built environment, and ending up thinking about nature as if it were something apart from cities where preserving it became some kind of dutiful imperative like making regular deposits in a bank account, rather than something that we were a part of. Somewhere behind the miasma of confusion produced by extreme sleep deprivation and the lingering effects of a mild illness that now seems to be resolving, there was a rational thought, though you'd never know it from the answer I gave Christy.
So it delighted me today to learn of a short article written by a colleague of mine that captures some small inkling of what I was trying to say, but puts it into language that anyone could understand. When we think about design (of essentially anything), we think in terms of sustainability. It's become second nature for us to ask the right sustainability questions when we're thinking about the purchase of any kind of consumer good from a bottle opener to a hospital. Or at least, it should be so.
But all signs suggest that we're getting on to this boat a bit too late. Even if everything we made from this day forward adhered strictly to the standards of sustainable design, it would not be enough to right the ship. So we could just throw up our hands and resign ourselves to living well for the last few years we've got left (which would likely take us well past the natural lifespan of anyone reading this, but possibly not beyond the lifespan of their grandchildren). That seems to be the attitude of some.
OR
We could say that if we're going down, we're going down as we came up -- as the most magnificently intelligent and resourceful species to have ever walked the planet. We could begin by thinking a little outside the box about design. If sustainable design isn't good enough, can we go past sustainable to something else? What's past sustainable? What's past a zero impact design? What about a positive impact design? What about design that not only doesn't take, but gives back?
That's what the Resource+ initiative, described here by Douglas MacLeod of the Okanagan Science and Technology Council is all about. Inventing designs and design tools that allow us to re-build a planet together. It's an incredibly exciting and optimistic idea.
This past summer, I had the privilege of sitting at a table with some of the engineers and architects whom Douglas mentions in the article. I felt small, insignificant, completely out of my league among such a talented, creative and multidisciplinary group. Nevertheless, we forged a plan, a proposal, a funding application to design a mechanism to move towards resource positive design. I'm really excited about the potential role for social scientists in such a movement, but I'm much more excited than that to think that there are still women and men of action in our country who have not given up. The odds often (mostly) look daunting. But admitting defeat seems a lousy, cowardly option.
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