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Heirloom Design
Adele Peters, WorldChanging
Can we live sustainably while still enjoying our stuff? Buying better stuff (and less of it), and keeping it for longer is one realistic strategy for making that possible. But we know that won’t work with most of the stuff we have now. Whether it’s clothes, computers, appliances or even homes, throwaway culture in the developed world — accompanied by throwaway design — makes for stuff we not only don’t want to keep, but that we often can’t continue to use even if we try.
Enter a new meme: Heirloom Design. At Compostmodern, Saul Griffith proposed the concept, which he describes as design that is intended to last for generations. Griffith said he’s planning to give his soon-to-be-born son a Rolex and Mont Blanc pen … and then tell him that these would be the only watch and pen he could use for the next 100 years.
“It sounds like I’m a pretentious wanker when I say ‘green’ is a Rolex and a Mont Blanc pen, but what I really mean is, you have to design things and experiences that will last a very long time, that have been thoughtfully designed and are very beautiful,” Griffith explained.
Durability is not a new concept for sustainability. In theory, if a product stays around longer, it means that a replacement product doesn’t need to be manufactured and transported to the consumer, and the original product stays out of the landfill. But durability alone doesn’t ensure that something won’t be thrown away. Heirloom design introduces something more: our desire as consumers to keep an object because it has some meaning for us. What makes something worthy of passing down through generations?
(25 March 2009)
Collapse Forward
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
It’s reasonable to worry about collapse these days. From resource peaks to food scarcity, financial meltdowns to climate change, the news seems uniformly ominous.
We certainly could blow it badly enough to trigger irrecoverable collapse (for instance, by triggering climate tipping points), but I’m dubious that most of the collapses we fear will in fact occur, or, even if they occur, that they will last as long or be quite as catastrophic as we think.
That doesn’t mean that big shake-ups aren’t coming. They are. The question is, how do communities and regions prepare themselves to sail as gracefully through that turbulence as possible?
One possible answer: prepare to collapse forward (Jer prefers “collapsing upwards”).
Collapsing forward means investing now in solutions that will aid the functioning of the current system of doing things, withstand its collapse and soften its impact, and provide constituent parts for a better replacement system. Our goal should always been to avoid collapses in general, but where we see them coming, our goal should be to collapse as intelligently as possible.
(27 March 2009)
Video of Alex Steffen Discusses Sustainable Cities at the DAC.
Open Intellectual Property as Sustainability Accelerator by Alex Steffen
Can the West cultivate ideas from Cuba’s ‘Special Period’?
Matt Ford, EcoSolutions, CNN
Since the revolution in 1959 Cuba has been many things to many people, but the collapse of the Soviet Union meant few have seen the island state as a vision of the future.
But that could be changing — at least in one aspect.
As worries about “peak oil” grow in developed nations, the communist republic is proving to be an increasingly popular example of how to cope when the spigots run dry, for the simple reason: they’ve already been there.
With the loss of supplies from oil-rich Russia in 1991, and a U.S. embargo preventing imports from elsewhere, Cuba was plunged into a severe recession in the early 1990’s, referred to as “the Special Period.”
Suddenly society was faced with dramatically reduced amounts of hydrocarbon energy, and the result was a fundamental reorganization of food production, leading to a boom in urban organic agriculture, which requires fewer inputs than conventional farming.
(29 March 2009)
Maintaining spiritual wholeness as the economy and political order come apart (video)
Bill Moyers Journal
Interview with Parker Palmer
Bill Moyers sits down with Parker J. Palmer, founder and senior partner of the Center for Courage & Renewal, for a conversation about maintaining spiritual wholeness even as the economy and political order seem to come apart.
About Parker Palmer The collapse of the U.S. housing market at the heart of the recent financial crisis is also, according to Parker Palmer, the collapse of a series of long-held illusions in American society: that housing prices will always rise, that Americans can live beyond their means forever, and that the growing gap between rich and poor doesn’t matter.
Everyone realized the system was unsustainable, Palmer, a writer, traveling teacher and activist, told Bill Moyers on the JOURNAL, but, “We don’t want to know what we really know, because if we did, we’d have to change our lives.”
Palmer draws on his own experience with clinical depression for his analyis. Parker believes depression, for a society and for an individual, presents an opportunity to find a workable reality:
I got tremendous help from a therapist at one point — in one of my depressions — who said to me, “Parker, you seem to keep treating this experience as if depression were the hand of an enemy trying to crush you. Would it be possible to re-image depression as the hand of a friend trying to press you down to ground on which it’s safe to stand?” Well, those words didn’t mean much to me immediately because when you’re there, you can’t hear that kind of counsel. But they grew on me, those words did.
Palmer believes that for the United States, as himself, illusions lead to dark moments, and Americans must take this moment to ground themselves: “Reality won’t let you down. It is what it is. And we have to learn to deal with it. So I think there are dramatic parallels. And I would say to us collectively — to the extent that I have any right to do that — what my therapist said to me.”
Interview
… BILL MOYERS: This seems to me one of those moments when the dots connect themselves. Reality can no longer be denied, right?
PARKER PALMER: Well, absolutely. Absolutely. So at the same time, I don’t think that we should ever doubt our capacity to deny reality. I mean, after all, until you get to be our age, you really believe you’re not going to die. That fundamental human fact of life.
And of course, that’s part of our problem. I mean, I could make the same argument about the current economic collapse. Who didn’t know it was coming? Who didn’t know that a system that encouraged us to live beyond our means and provided all kinds of devious and ethically doubtful ways for us to do that was going to fall apart someday?
Who didn’t know that housing was over-evaluated? That stocks were overpriced? Who didn’t know that a system the makes the rich richer while the poor get poorer will someday face a curtain call? We all knew that at some level, just like we know we’re going to die. And yet our capacity to deny reality is huge. And I think that we don’t want to know what we really know because if we did, we’d have to change our lives. And now we have to change our lives because the whole thing is crashing down around our head.
… PARKER PALMER: What’s behind those words, Bill, is that my closest analogue to some of the economic suffering that’s going on right now that I don’t share in is my own journey with personal darkness.
BILL MOYERS: Depression?
PARKER PALMER: Three times clinical depression, which I’ve written about and spoken about-
BILL MOYERS: Yes.
PARKER PALMER: -most recently when I was 65 years old. I think it’s a very important thing to talk about partly because it remains a subject of shame in this culture. And I think those of us who have come through to the other side and have a new appreciation for life and its realities need to talk about it on behalf of those that suffer and those who are standing with them.
I got tremendous help from a therapist at one point, in one of my depressions, who said to me, “Parker, you seem to keep treating this experience as if depression were the hand of an enemy trying to crush you. Would it be possible to re-image depression as the hand of a friend trying to press you down to ground on which it’s safe to stand?”
Well, those words didn’t mean much to me immediately because when you’re there you can’t hear that kind of counsel. But they grew on me, those words did. And I started to understand that in my case this very situational depression that I had fallen into, not the result of bad genetics or brain chemistry gone awry, but the result of getting crosswise with some of my own truth had resulted from my living at altitude.
I was living in my intellect. I was living in my ego. I was living in a kind of up, up, and away spirituality. And I was living in a set of ethics that didn’t really have anything to do with what my, how I intersected with the world-
BILL MOYERS: I don’t understand that.
PARKER PALMER: -rightfully and properly. Well-
BILL MOYERS: You mean you’re a hypocrite?
PARKER PALMER: Yeah. I was living by oughts that weren’t mine to act out. I mean, there are a million oughts in the world. There’s a million ways in which I ought to be serving the world. But the ways I’m gifted to serve and the opportunities that come to me to serve are not a million. They’re more like one, two, three, four dozen over the course of a 70-year journey. And so when you live at elevation and you trip and fall, as most of us do every day, you have a long way to fall. And it might kill you.
(20 February 2009)
A haunting line from the interview that I think applies to peak oil, etc.:
“Parker, you seem to keep treating this experience as if depression were the hand of an enemy trying to crush you. Would it be possible to re-image depression as the hand of a friend trying to press you down to ground on which it’s safe to stand?”
Bill Moyer’s been hot lately. Recent interviews:
Robert Johnson, former managing director of Soros Fund Management and an expert in emerging markets, believes the government’s approach — which he calls “drip intravenous capital injection” — wastes taxpayer money and won’t solve the financial crisis.”
Mike Davis — “We need more protests. We need more noise in the street. At the end of the day, political parties tend to legislate what social movements and social voices have already achieved in the factories or the streets or in the civil rights demonstration.”
-BA
