Cold Constructs Blog

From this article over at WorldChanging.

In the industrialized world, we do not need “sustainable development”. We need sustainable re-development, a set of transformations in the direction of sustainability, in virtually every sector.

Here are just a few of the challenges we actually face, challenges that we inherited from our recent ancestors and that we will almost certainly pass on to our descendants:

The complete redevelopment of our energy systems. Energy is the life-blood of our economies, but producing it is destroying our climate, damaging our health, and degrading nature. We must make our energy sources and systems climate-neutral, or better yet climate-restorative. This transformation involves much more than just energy efficiency or hybrid engines. We must either put fossil-carbon-based energy systems essentially to rest in our cars, planes, and power plants; or we must find a way to permanently sequester the carbon and manage the Earth’s atmosphere, permanently.

The complete redevelopment of chemical, material, and building technologies. While we have begun a transformation in all these areas, the work remains far from finished. We still release dizzying amounts of poisonous substances into nature, where they accumulate in living bodies. We still build incredibly wasteful, toxic, and inefficient products and buildings. We are now adding the wild cards of nanotechnology and biotechnology to this strange brew. How we make things, and how we think about how we make things, must change radically.

The complete redevelopment of industrial agriculture. If we are to feed the world and coming generations, we need farming and food production systems that do not depend on fossil fuel, fossil water, chemical pesticides, ever-increasing nitrogen fertilizers and the like. Despite many wonderful experiments with change, most people’s very lives still depend on one or all these things — all of which are known to be dangerous, devastating, or deadly. This is perhaps the transformation nearest to our survival needs.

The preservation of the world’s remaining species and ecosystems. I say “remaining” to remind us that much is already lost. The cost of that loss is immeasurable, even in gross economic, human-centered terms. Cures for cancer, models for chemical production, and farmable sources of food have all certainly disappeared, without our knowing it. Gone already are many sources of inspiration, joy, and — think of the dodo — even laughter. “Nature” as we have known it for millennia is disappearing. And yet there is no more precious inheritance to preserve for future generations than the richness of life itself.

Given the scale of these challenges, perhaps our greatest need is a drastic increase in the number of people who understand them, accept them, and dedicate their efforts to addressing them. And fortunately, the increase is well under way, as the number of people working directly on “sustainability,” or incorporating it into their existing work, continues to grow exponentially.

Synthetic paper covered with a thin film of a waterproof polymer that can be dissolved with heat and re-applied (solidified and pasted back on) to another (or the same) sheet of synthetic paper. Ink of some sort is printed on the synthetic paper but it’s kept in place by slapping the polymer film on it. To reuse it, simply slide it into the printer as if loading paper. It will burn it off (not too intense heat however) and wipe off the writing automatically… it’s then ready to be printed on once more.

This eliminates the whole “recycle” process (which is actually cheap degradation into worse products), the shredding of paper, and will save our oxygen supply (trees) which will in turn help with global warming by sucking up more CO2. Not that they’d stop cutting down trees or anything, but hey, we can hope. And threaten their fucking lives (or provide them with better-paying jobs).

It’s possible, right-the-fuck-now, to cut your monthly energy bills to nothing, PLUS you’ll never see a power-outage again. MSNBC has a great article about how some people have already accomplished this. It’s like this: solar panels, low-power appliances, and “spectrally selective” windows to block solar heat in the summer and retain indoor warmth in cold weather. Fluorescent bulbs use two thirds the juice of incandescents. A suitcase-size tankless water heater in the garage, powered by gas, saves energy by warming water only when the tap is turned on. Mircogrids are possible now, cheaply.

That’s what can be done immediately… sell your “old” appliances, buying more energy-efficient ones, replacing windows with insulating ones, replacing your light bulbs with flourescent ones (soon, LEDs). Replace that CRT monitor with an LCD screen (soon, OLED displays), as well as turn the old TV into a new plasma HD version. Slap a wind micro-turbine onto the roof while you’re at it. And solar shingles. Yay.

Go here where I go through things you can do if you’re building a house from scratch.

We suck at mazes, but thats how we’re forced to navigate through computers, cameras, and a load of other electronic devices. Camera manufacturers need to bring back dials and knobs - we’re good at that shit. As for computers, I think the best we can do with the windowing environment is SymphonyOS.

Little keyboards on smartphones is a horrible idea. One letter at a time? FUCK that. I’ll draw words at a time with IBM’s SHARK thingy. Too bad it doesn’t work too well. It doesn’t watch what letter you begin with but rather the general area, and it does this through the whole gesture so you usually end up with a completely different word than what you intended. The worst part is that it has to have a database of any word you wish to draw. On the other hand, this is very early alpha software.

I seek the truth, no matter what the consequences may be or how difficult the truth may turn out to be. Sometimes it breaks my soul (eliminates it even) and have trouble dealing with it, but just knowing it’s the truth mends the pieces back together, making them stronger than before. The truth is all I ask for - this is why I’m a philosopher.

What’s the truth about the Creationist Intelligent Design vs Evolution shit? It is this: evolution progressed scientific thought, and intelligent design did not.

The creation story has been around for thousands of years, yet we’ve gotten nowhere with it. The theory of evolution gained popular support at around 1858. Despite this relatively short time, the theory has given us more insight into life on our planet than any kind of religous fervor ever did.

Science or religion. Which one should be taught in schools?