eyal matsliah's Library tagged environmentalism →  View Popular

Our constraints: no electricity, local materials, built and maintained locally, with a price point under $5.

Here’s how you do it. (Here’s how you do it if you’re an extremely creative and innovative Nigerian engineer.) Make two clay pots, one smaller than the other so it can fit inside it and leave a gap. Fill the gap between the pots with sand. Thoroughly wet the sand. Cover the top of your apparatus with a wet cloth. A couple of times a day, wet the sand and the cloth.

Here are the seven principles of innovation from constraint that I shared with my audience in Barcelona:

- innovation often comes from constraint

- don’t fight culture

- embrace market mechanisms

- innovate on existing platforms

- realize that problems aren’t obvious from afar

- understand that what you have is more important than what you lack

- build infrastructure on infrastructure

I’d add two other observations that I’ve realized in giving this talk more recently:

- objects need to become familiar and pervasive, then they become hackable

- the really amazing innovation happens when objects change function

For Thailand, which imports most of its energy, biofuels also represent a way to cut its import bill while reducing reliance on overseas producers.

But critics say biofuel is jacking up prices of basic food products by intensifying demand for agricultural produce.

But
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none of this is to say that we as people should not worry about
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global change; we should worry a lot. This is because climate
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change may not hurt the planet, but it hurts people. In particular,
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it will hurt people who are too poor to adapt. Significant
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climate change will change rainfall patterns, and probably
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patterns of extreme events as well, in ways that could easily
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threaten the food security of hundreds of millions of people
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supporting themselves through subsistence agriculture or pastoralism.
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It will have a massive effect on the lives of the relatively
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small number of people in places where sea ice is an important
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part of the environment (and it seems unlikely that anything
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we do now can change that). In other, more densely populated
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places local environmental and biotic change may have similarly
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sweeping effects.
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• If  you’re veggie, eat more eggs than cheese—one pound of cheese takes ten pounds of milk to make. It has about the same impact as a pound of beef.  I’ve read that far-away beans as a protein source may be better than local cheese.
• Eat fresh and seasonal—freezing and keeping food frozen is not so low impact.

Distribution
means transportation and the average piece of American food has traveled 1500
Miles to get to your plate. I emphasize local because:




• A regional and local food system would release five to seventeen times less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than our current national and international model (according to this Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture study).

Professor White writes in his Orion essay:

“Responding to environmental destruction requires not only
the overcoming of corporate evildoers but “self-overcoming,” a transformation
in the way we live. A more adequate response to our true problems requires that
we cease to be a society that believes that wealth is the accumulation of money
(no matter how much of it we’re planning on “giving back” to nature), and begin
to be a society that understands that “there is no wealth but life,” as John
Ruskin put it…”