A frightening creature compounded of incongruous elements. Frankenstein was a monster. A large hideous animal or thing a monster house. Monstrous Hybrids, according to Jane Jacobs, occur when private and public interest get mixed like in the mafia system Frankenstein products or monstrous hybrid material occur when material get mixed in a way that their future recycling is made extremely difficult if not impossible.
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Tag Archives: Newsletter
Eleven lessons from the Vietnam war
Robert McNamara was US Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war, a position held today by Donald Rumsfeld. During the Vietnam In 1995, Robert McNamara published In Retrospect, the first of his three books dissecting the errors, myths and miscalculations that led to the Vietnam War, which he now believes was a serious mistake. “We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to the future generatrions to explain why”. Nine years later, most of these lessons seem uncannily relevant to the Iraq war in its current nation-building, guerrilla-warfare phase. See 11 lessons below.
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Three Questions on Sustainable Technologies
Three questions that ought to be considered as our society decides which technologies are worth developing:
- Should we continue long-standing efforts to conquer and dominate nature rather than seek harmony with natural structures and processes?
- Should we actively promote a path of development in which technical means become the driving force that shapes social ends?
- It is wise to develop technologies likely to produce irreversible effects?
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Footprint (ecological)
The ‘ecological footprint’ of a specified population is the area of land and water ecosystems required to produce the resources that the population consumes, and to assimilate the wastes that the population produces, wherever on Earth the relevant land/water may be located. Term coined by William Rees of University of British Columbia (Canada).
• from: William Rees • in detail XlnkS62C XlnkC18D7
Footprint (ecological) (WWF)
he Ecological Footprint (EP) developed by the WWF indicates is a measure of the consumption of renewable natural resources by a human population. A population’s EF is the total area of productive land or sea required to produce all the crops, meat, seafood, wood and fibre it consumes, to sustain its energy consumption and to give space for its infrastructure. The EF can be compared with the biologically productive capacity of the land and sea available to that population. The Earth has about 11.4 billion hectares of productive land and sea space, after all unproductive areas of icecaps, desert and open ocean are discounted, or about a quarter of its surface area. Divided between the global population of six billion people, this total equates to just 1.9 hectares per person. This definition differs from Bill Rees’ who includes the area needed to assimilate human wastes
• from: WWF • in detail • see also: Footprint (ecological) XlnkS62E XlnkC18D8
The Sixth Extinction
Paleontologists have identified in the past history of earth five large extinction episodes. The latest that happened 75 millions years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs was provoked by the fall of a large meteor near the Yucatan peninsula. A new large scale extinction is happening right now. Scientists estimate that the extinction rate is 1000 times greater today than in pre-industrial era and that in 2050 3% of all known species will have disappeared. This is known as the sixth extinction. And for the first time it is provoked by a human cataclysm and not by a geological one.
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Decarbonization
The decreasing carbon to hydrogen ratio in fuel. From prehistoric ages, about 750,000 years ago, until the beginning of the 19th century, wood was the main source of energy. Since society has moved from wood, to coal, to oil to natural gas, to – soon- pure hydrogen. Wood has 10 atoms carbons for 1 atom of hydrogen. Coal, 1~2 Carbon for 1 hydrogen Oil, 1 carbon for 2 hydrogen Natural Gas, 1 carbon for 4 hydrogen. Burning Carbon produces CO2 a Green House Gas. Burning Hydrogen produces water. Together with energy conservation, Decarbonization of our economy is a sustainable solution to Climate Change.
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Obnoxico
A metaphorical firm, imagined by Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller. A growing megacorporation flooding the world with needless knick-knacks. Working life’s hours away at that sort of enterprise soon reduce people to robots – a heavy price to pay for security. This creates a fortress-building, conservative mind, adverse to change. Investment, equity and fear of ageing take precedence on imagination and creativity. For Bucky, there is another path for security: being too fast and agile to hit. This strategy requires taking chances and thinking for yourself.
• from: Buckminster Fuller • in detail XlnkS627 XlnkC185F
Climate Change Scenarios
The IPCC has imagined a series of future world scenarios to try predicting the effect of society choices on climate change. The global futures scenarios vary widely along different demographic, socio-economic, and technological dimensions (follow the scenario dimensions below). Scenarios range from economic collapse to virtually unlimited economic prosperity; from population collapse (caused by famine, disease, and/or war), to stabilization near current levels, to explosive population growth. Governance systems range from decentralized, semiautonomous communities with a form of direct democracy to global oligarchies. Some scenarios posit large improvements in income and social equality, within and among nations, while others foresee a widening of the income gap. Many scenarios envisage a future world that is high-tech, with varying rates of diffusion, but some envisage a world in which a crisis of some kind leads to a decline in technological development and even a loss of technological capability. Most scenarios are pessimistic with respect to resource availability; some are more optimistic, pointing to the ability of technology and demand changes to alleviate scarcity. Most scenarios also project increasing environmental degradation; more positively, many of these scenarios portray this trend reversing in the long-term, leading to an eventual improvement in environmental quality. The sustainable development scenarios, on the other hand, describe a future in which environmental quality improves throughout the scenario.
weblink: IPCC web site • from: IPCC • in detail • see also: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – IPCC XlnkS628 XlnkC17DC
Utopia
Literally, “That exists nowhere, a no-place (u-topos). An ideal? Maybe, but programmed, organized, planned. In the worst case, an imposed ideal. It is not a new concept, Platon, Thomas More or Fourier have all invented and described Utopias. It may describe both an ideal society that will exist some day or an imaginary society that will never exist. In the first case, it is an objective to reach, in the later, a situation to avoid. In all cases, utopias are always dangerous ideas as they presuppose brainwashing, constraints, and may favor totalitarism.
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