A similar dichotomy can be found in our built environments. We construct false environments of glass walls for light and filtered air to breathe, failing to see the complex connections between individual building systems, larger infrastructure and the environment.

Meanwhile, the battle cry for environmentalism is to “Go Green!” But going green has also become schizophrenic, developing into a random application of solar panels and wind turbines — a valiant but limited effort in resource renewal. Promoting underdeveloped technologies that pollute and expend a great amount of resources during their production is not using current and natural processes to promote real change. So it can be dangerous to “Go Green!”

What if architecture, a traditionally static and independent entity, became systemic? What if each structure considered the one next to it and the one next to that?

We need a more unified mindset around which to develop our built and networked infrastructure so it is concurrent and integral with nature. One that represents the complex yet balanced system that has evolved and adapted for ages, unlimited as an informed and evolutionary feedback loop. Nature is not slapping a solar panel on a flower because it is not producing enough chlorophyll or a wind turbine powering an alarm clock for a bear to wake from hibernation. More appropriate models are found in biomimicry, based on the complex interaction of nature and information as a seamless whole composed of countless scales and relationships. Janine Benyus, founder of the Biomimicry 3.8 Institute, notes that biomimicry can inform all systems, from building and services to social models and economics, that thrive on participation and interaction. The biomimicry model is dynamic, where conventional infrastructure is limiting and inflexible.

What if architecture, a traditionally static and independent entity, became systemic? What if each structure considered the one next to it and the one next to that and changed regionally and geometrically, undulating and responding to its surrounding environment, information and feedback loops? Form, in turn, would be multifunctional.

The geometry of a structure should be dictated not by a cookie-cutter manual, but by the resources of the region. In northern latitudes, for example, it may seem counterintuitive to see snow as a resource, but a structure that captures and maintains a snowpack can supply insulation from the thermal mass of snow throughout the cold winter months, while slowly shedding it as the temperatures warm. In a warm, dry climate such as the American Southwest, it would make sense instead to have a structure that collects and stores rainwater for the driest months.

As Benyus notes, biomimicry is not the same as bio-assisted processes. It’s not about using oysters or tilapia to clean polluted waterways. Instead it is about using information within a decentralized, connected network that neither gives nor takes more than it can sustain.

With building materials constituting up to 40 percent of the waste in landfills across the U.S., it’s clear we need to think differently about how we build. In mimicking how nature builds we could develop a structure out of natural proteins, for example, that when doused with seawater creates a lasting and natural hollow structure that could be used to pipe collected water throughout the structure. The latticed “shell” could act as a base for planting vegetation with roots penetrating the “pipes” to reach the water, creating a hydroponic system to grow food while simultaneously providing thermal mass (added to the thermal mass of the water in the piping) for insulation. Protruding structures could be designed into the form to capture rain, modeled on the papillae of a bat’s tongue, which increase in size during feeding to make nectar collection more efficient. Simultaneously these protrusions could collect energy from the water passing over and around them. 

Almost as soon as carbon neutrality took off, though, the concept was skewered, most famously by journalist George Monbiot, who compared carbon offsets to the Catholic Church’s Middle Ages practice of selling indulgences. Monbiot wrote that offsets would sidetrack society from the more urgent need to reduce fossil fuel use and merely assuage people’s guilt over their lifestyle, resulting in continuation of the status quo. His premise seemed to resonate with people and the idea spread.

But in 2007 Grist columnist David Roberts railed against Monbiot’s analogy, which he called a “transparent smear.” “[If] it was the aggregate amount of sin that mattered rather than any individual’s contribution, and indulgences really did reduce aggregate sin,” Roberts wrote, “then indulgences would have been a perfectly sensible idea.” And, Roberts wrote, despite a lack of evidence that people buy offsets to assuage guilt over an opulent lifestyle while neglecting other behaviors that benefit the environment, that argument was “just stated, over and over again, as though it is axiomatically true. … What is the personality profile of the guy who buys offsets and then considers his work done? I’ve never met him and have trouble envisioning him.”

But what, then, is the personality profile of an individual who offsets carbon? For three of the past five years, I have calculated and then offset my carbon footprint. I engage in many other energy-saving behaviors, but am not willing to live in a cave. Still, I’m a rarity even among climate-concerned folks. And I have often wondered: Had Monbiot and others not so effectively panned offsets, creating mass skepticism over their effectiveness (and the intentions behind those who use them), how many tons of greenhouse gases might have been eliminated by people like me?

“I think of my own small efforts to cut my emissions as the climate change version of the ‘First Rule of Holes,’ which is: If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.” – Environmental journalist Nancy Bazilchuk

Looking for others who offset their carbon footprint proved challenging — perhaps not surprising given that individuals comprised only 1 percent of the voluntary offset market in 2010, down from 5 percent in 2006. A World Bank report valued the voluntary offset market at $569 million in 2011, with around 87 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents traded, primarily from businesses and nonprofits interested in corporate social responsibility. The much larger “compliance market,” in which companies and governments purchase carbon credits to comply with caps on the amount of greenhouse gas emissions allowed under the Kyoto Protocol and other climate policies, was valued at $175.5 billion in 2011, with 10 billion metric tons CO₂e traded. But the price of carbon has dropped substantially, raising concern over the future of the market.

It turns out, at least with those to whom I spoke, individuals who offset their footprint voluntarily do feel some guilt associated with their lifestyle, but contrary to Monbiot’s argument, all engage in additional environmentally conscious and energy-saving tactics, whether riding bikes, buying a hybrid vehicle, recycling or eating less meat. Since completely eliminating their footprint is nearly impossible in the modern world, all expressed a desire to do something more to help what they consider a global environmental and social problem.

“I know that the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that we are putting into the atmosphere is going to cause us all a great deal of trouble as … global temperatures increase and sea level rises,” says environmental journalist Nancy Bazilchuk, a U.S. citizen living in Norway. “I think of my own small efforts to cut my emissions as the climate change version of the ‘First Rule of Holes,’ which is: If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.”

Though Bazilchuk was surprised by the low cost (“I can’t believe I can dispense with all my guilt for just $20 per transatlantic flight,” she says), she has concerns over whether offsets can make a difference. A series in the Christian Science Monitor in 2010 harshly criticized a handful of the carbon-reduction projects supported by offset purchases, expressing concern over the concept of “additionality” — whether these projects actually reduce emissions in a way that would not have occurred otherwise. Nevertheless, the reporting did not address how common these cases are among the thousands of projects that exist. 

This interview originally appeared in the Winter 2012 issue of Momentum magazine, Ensia’s predecessor.

While there is not one single solution to desertification, Kulun Qi, a dry area in northeastern Inner Mongolia, has shown signs of hope that may eventually work as an example to others adversely affected by encroaching deserts around the world.

At the Desert’s Edge documents the trials and tentative successes of a collaborative effort between local residents, governmental initiatives and non-governmental organizations fighting to combat China’s growing deserts by planting vast barriers of trees.

Since this documentary was completed, The Million Tree Project, an initiative of Shanghai Roots & Shoots, planted its millionth tree and pledged to plant another million trees at the edge of the Gobi Desert in China. The organization is well on its way as it recently passed the 200,000 mark.

This video was originally produced for The Asia Society – a global non-profit organization forging closer ties between Asia and the West through arts, education, policy and business outreach.

Sir Partha Dasgupta
Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus of Economics
University of Cambridge

“The literature on economic development has suffered from a persistent weakness. The indices used to judge the progress and regress of nations are all ad hoc; they aren’t derived from any reasonable conception of intergenerational well-being. For example, GDP doesn’t account for the depreciation of capital assets, such as natural capital. That means GDP doesn’t take the well-being of future generations into account. The Human Development Index (HDI) suffers from the same weakness.

If an index is to serve economic evaluation meaningfully, it must meet two conditions. First, it should reflect intergenerational well-being — meaning that the index records an improvement if and only if intergenerational well-being increases. Second, the index should be linear in economic quantities to ease measurement problems for the economic statistician.

An inclusive measure of wealth satisfies both conditions. By wealth I mean the social worth of an economy’s entire stock of capital: manufactured, human and natural. Wealth connects any conception of intergenerational well-being to the economy’s capital assets via a system of shadow prices. Some shadow prices would be expected to equal market prices (at least approximately), but many others would have to be estimated. That’s hard work, because shadow prices depend not only on the conception of intergenerational well-being we adopt for the purpose of economic evaluation, but also on the extent to which goods and services can be substituted for one another in consumption and production. The intellectual trick that’s required is to devise useful shortcuts for estimating shadow prices.

That is not a weakness unique to wealth, of course. Shortcuts are necessary in any exercise in economic evaluation. The estimation of GDP, for example, is full of shortcuts. That wealth proves to be difficult to measure isn’t an argument for not estimating it. Our research and the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change’s Inclusive Wealth Report 2012 constitute a first step in what will prove to be a lengthy but necessary project.”

Gernot Wagner
Economist
Environmental Defense Fund

“GDP is broken. Robert F. Kennedy said as much in his first major presidential campaign speech. Simon Kuznets, the father of GDP, acknowledged its shortcomings. GDP is an imperfect indicator of human well-being at best, and outright misleading at worst.

Still, we shouldn’t scrap GDP and start over.

Up to a point, GDP does tell us important facts about people’s lives, livelihoods and aspirations. Living on a dollar a day is miserable no matter how you look at it.

Choking on economic growth, of course, is equally bad. There are a few simple, well-established steps we ought to take to bring GDP closer to where we should be. That, by the way, isn’t ‘Green GDP’ or ‘green accounting.’ It’s honest accounting.

Start with accounting for the true value of natural assets still in the ground. We don’t ‘produce’ coal. We extract it. And the fact that the ton of coal extracted today is no longer there for the taking tomorrow should show up in our national income accounts. A ton of West Virginian coal adds about $30 to GDP. Honest bookkeeping would decrease that amount to $15. The same holds for oil, trees, water and all the other valuable natural assets that fuel our economy but are largely treated as free in our GDP accounting.

Then quickly move on to pollution. Every ton of coal, every barrel of oil causes more in external damages than it adds value to GDP. Properly measured GDP ought to reflect that fact.

In the end, policy makers should expand their horizon and look at a dashboard of indicators to get a fuller picture of the true state of the economy, society and the planet. Yet when it comes to GDP itself, the name of the game is fixing it rather than scrapping it. We know how to do that. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis is at the ready. Let’s have a go at it.”

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of Momentum magazine, Ensia’s predecessor.

We seem obsessed with the need to always deliver more energy, more food and more water, without asking the obvious question: Can we use our existing resources better by becoming more efficient and reducing the huge amount of waste we see today?

Let’s look at food as an example.

There is no doubt that the demand for food is increasing. Population growth alone — from over 7 billion today to an expected 9 billion by 2050 (a 28 percent increase) — would, if all else stays the same, imply that 28 percent more food is needed. But all else is not staying the same: Diets are changing, with dramatic increases in meat and dairy consumption as much of the world becomes wealthier. All told, the expected changes in population, wealth and diets — assuming that recent historical trends are a good guide — would result in the need to roughly double global crop production by 2050, according to University of Minnesota ecologist David Tilman and colleagues. And increases in biofuel consumption may further exacerbate the situation.

Many in the agricultural sector use this estimate to justify a massive investment in agronomic practices and improved crops, including genetically modified organisms. The argument goes like this: We need to double the world’s food supply. To do so without clearing the world’s remaining forests, we’ll need to double the average yields on the world’s existing farmland, and that will take more advanced agricultural technology.

It’s estimated that, on average, 30 to 50 percent of the world’s food is never consumed. It’s wasted somewhere in the supply chain that connects farmers to consumers.

Yes. And no. As I’ve written about extensively, this is not the whole story.

It turns out that recent investments in agricultural technology and advanced genetics have been making only a modest dent in meeting our global food demands. In the last 20 years, the world’s total agricultural production increased by roughly 28 percent. Only 20 of those 28 percentage points are attributable to increased yields — roughly 1 percent per year, since crop yields tend to grow linearly. And for the last decade, my colleague Deepak Ray has shown that crop yields for many important crops have, in fact, begun to slow down and stagnate in many regions.

Even if crop yields were not stagnating, the challenges of meeting future food demands from yield increases alone is daunting. Doubling global crop production by 2050 would require a 2.7 percent annual (noncompounding) yield increase. Clearly, with yields increasing at roughly 1 percent per year, we are far from meeting that goal, and that’s with decades of research and investment in new agricultural and genetic technologies. Simply put, until something new comes along, genetics and agronomics alone are unlikely to get us to the solution we need.

That’s where waste comes in.

It’s estimated that, on average, 30 to 50 percent of the world’s food is never consumed. It’s wasted somewhere in the supply chain that connects farmers to consumers. In poorer countries, much of the waste happens between the farm and the marketplace, because crops are lost to pests or due to a lack of infrastructure (trains, trucks, roads, warehouses, etc.) to get products to market. In rich countries, most of the food waste happens around the retailer or consumer — in our supermarkets, restaurants, cafeterias and refrigerators. And while it is bad enough that we lose the food in rich countries, in poor countries the food is lost, but so is the farmer’s income — a double tragedy.

So if we’re losing 30 to 50 percent of the world’s food through waste, and all of the agricultural technologies of the past 20 years have only given us a 20 percent increase in crop yields, why aren’t we focusing at least as much attention on reducing food waste? Even cutting waste in half would be a huge step toward global food security and a boon for the environment. Billions of dollars are currently invested in genetic modification, advanced agricultural chemicals and farm machinery. Where is the comparable investment in reducing food waste? 

The park is a welcome patch of green space in a neighborhood transitioning from light industrial to a mixed-use community of retail, residences and industry, says Mike Fowler, a principal of Ross/Fowler Architecture and Landscape Architecture, the firm that consulted with the city on designing the space. “It is an intensely paved environment, and Main Terrain is a green respite.”

The park offers respite of a less visible sort to Chattanooga’s stormwater management system. Beneath the lush turf is a mix of topsoil, sand and gravel, specially designed to filter stormwater runoff. After a heavy rain, two retention ponds in the park hang onto runoff for eight to 10 hours; a system of drain tiles moves the rainwater to a nearby underground storage tank, where it ultimately serves as irrigation water for the park.

Stormwater management is one of those vital necessities of the built environment that remain invisible unless it fails.

Main Terrain is one of a growing number of urban developments that mix stormwater management with recreational facilities. A rail yard in Milwaukee has been redeveloped as a mixed-use industrial park with picnic areas, athletic fields and a stormwater system that filters pollutants out of runoff. In Neu Ulm, Germany, a public plaza designed by landscape architecture firm Atelier Dreiseitl uses a filtration device and public fountains to sequester urban runoff from the main stormwater system. And the Qunli Stormwater Park, a project in Haerbin City, China, won last year’s Award of Excellence from the American Society of Landscape Architects. One of the driving forces among all of these experiments is a radical rethinking of how we manage urban runoff.

Sea Change for Stormwater

For many of us, our interest in stormwater management began and ended around age 10, when we would put on swimsuits, run out into the rain and race pinecones down the street until they disappeared into the maw of a cast-iron sewer drain. But the fact is that stormwater management is one of those vital necessities of the built environment that remain invisible unless it fails, causing damaging floods to low-lying neighborhoods.

For most U.S. cities, those cast-iron openings along the curb represented the primary method of stormwater management when they were constructed: Rain fell on the roofs and pavement of the city, ran downhill to the nearest gutter, coursed into the underground sewer system, and dumped into the nearest body of water.

The idea was to “get it the hell away from here as fast as possible,” says Thomas Ballestero, director of the University of New Hampshire Stormwater Center in Durham. That strategy worked pretty well for the “here” — by preventing urban floods — but not so well for the “there.” Every storm dumped litter and pollutants into the watershed, and the volume of water concentrated from even small rainstorms caused erosion downstream. Worse, many municipal systems combined stormwater and human waste in one sewer system. Rainstorms would overcome those systems and wash raw sewage into the watershed.

The Clean Water Act was designed to correct these shortcomings. In its latest incarnation, the federal legislation requires municipalities and new developments to incorporate more nuanced forms of managing stormwater.

These new strategies include a wide range of possibilities, according to Reid Christianson, a water resources engineer for the Center for Watershed Protection, a Maryland-based nonprofit organization that helps municipalities design and site stormwater treatment facilities. Some strategies, such as rain barrel and rain garden programs, prevent runoff in the first place. Others, such as the retention ponds at Main Terrain, use green space to hold runoff long enough to allow the soil to absorb the pollutants it contains.

In dense urban areas, green space can be hard to come by — hence the drive behind mixed-use projects like Main Terrain. Originally, Chattanooga’s department of public works had proposed the entire Main Terrain site be used as a holding pond for stormwater runoff. “We heard a strong voice from the community in favor of green space that incorporates fitness and art,” Fowler says. “A simple retention basin would have consumed the entire site, and people wouldn’t have been able to use it for recreation at all.”

Partial Solution

Just how effective are projects like Main Terrain at keeping pollutants out of the watershed? “The most accurate answer is that it hasn’t been studied enough,” says Jonathan Scott, communications director for the nonprofit organization Clean Water Action. “These projects are coming online rapidly, and they barely have enough funding for the project itself, much less the science.”