rescued ponder

oh this is going to be so quick and dirty,
i can already feel it letting go, and me falling

this spring, when there were stories about green cities in china, which i laughed to myself about, i wrote a little note about how to arrange the world for refugees that included talking about those grand ecocities-of-the-future kinds of things.

basically i thought: plan it out as tight as you want. that’s not going to work, because there will be a billion refugees.

for reference: there are currently under 30 million official refugees. that number might be under 15 million. larger numbers range up above 150 million, which includes people internally displaced by war or weather. but the conservative multiplier, in a very fucked up future that may or may not be a generation away, try this:

7 times as many people without sustainable sustenance — meaning without water, food, and waste handling dedicated to them. and a much higher increase, maybe as high as 20x, of people without citizenship status — discouraging the building of facilities for them.

anyway, these two worldchanging articles floated up and basically forced me to say something. first, on the eco-cities themselves,

The alternative to massive eco-cities is not slow, organic development but massive conventional cities, with all their attendant ills. Urbanization is simply occurring too rapidly in China to allow for anything else.

my thought: build whatever cities you want. just put the personal resource allotments beneath the floor and let people figure out how to manage it. it’s china. pass a fucking law. rationing during the building stage is the right time, because the state’s already involved in the rest of it.

second, was this bit about living on earth like we’re really on mars:

The ability to colonize other planets is the ability to rewild our ecosystems — to reforest our plains and mountains, and to restock our oceans. A mature vertical farming technology is precisely the technology needed to do agriculture on Mars, for instance. Grey-water and black-water recycling are necessary in exactly the same ways. Ditto for energy production and conservation.

which is also interesting, because if you haven’t heard this bit yet, between jared diamond and a few other people,

North America is the greatest success story of European expansionism because its ecology was most similar to that of Europe, more than for any political or social factors.

and a third, about planetary thinking, because it looks good, and eventually i’ll get to it in my pile, once i fail out of my other class because the deeper me loves playing h*p*.

my point in writing all this is basically to say: epcot sucks. olympic cities are jokes. don’t wish — plan for zero.

•this also from worldchanging, sanitation services already suck.

— which i knew. for some reason, as i was writing this and thinking, really ought to tie this to slums or at least nod that way, i kept on rolling. the answer seems the same — modularity. mobility. these big victorian-era pipes don’t give enough options.

•the planetary thinking article was good. my clipped quote for the e-corkboard:

But the essential fact remains that we don’t understand the planet very well at all, and the rate at which our knowledge is growing … doesn’t suggest that we’ll be up to the task of safely undertaking planetary engineering any time in the near future.

Instead, two approaches suggest themselves as both sane and bold.

The first is planetary management (or planetary gardening — the phrase that’s coming to be preferred …). The basic idea here is both acknowledging that we’ve had a profound and ubiquitous impact on the world’s ecosystems, and that no force other than humanity is now capable of preserving the functioning of those ecosystems. It’ll take the humility to keep learning, a commitment to creating a restorative economy, and a fair dose of luck, but a response to this crisis based on millions of informed, small-scale efforts to preserve and restore ecosystem function seems much less likely to fail catastrophically.

The second is “colonizing” Earth: treat the limited resources the Earth offers us (without destroying natural systems) as the same sort of environmental envelope space explorers would face, and then design an amazing civilization that can live within those limits in a dynamic, creative and prosperous way.

steffen linked to an article by daniel janzen, gardenification of wildland nature and the human footprint, about to celebrate its 10th birthday. it is a phenomenal essay that must have influenced a lot of people. i slept through that.

The acquisition of sustenance — feeding — appears to be the only hopeful refuge for wildland biodiversity. At first glance this seems an unlikely route. We are hunters and gatherers. We eat wild biodiversity, and we do all we can to help our chromosomal extensions eat that which we cannot eat. A bean plant is a green machine that grows directly out of our chromosomes, sitting where wild biodiversity once was, another mouth for sun and minerals.

pause. another mouth for sun and minerals. yes. our plant crops, our animal crops — do they eat for their own benefit? they eat for us. ok, fastforward fastforward, play.

Part of the problem is in the name. Stop labeling the wild as the wild. There are simply many varieties of gardens. There is no footprint-free world. Every block of the world’s wildlands is already severely impacted. Not only are they internally impacted through macroevents such as the megafaunal extinctions and selective extraction of old-growth timber, but the very frameworks of their existence — global warming, acid rain, drained wetlands, green revolutions, wildland shrinkage, introduced pests, and many more — are set by Homo sapiens. The question is not whether we must manage nature, but rather how shall we manage it — by accident, haphazardly, or with the calculated goal of its survival forever?

it doesn’t take a lot of guts to predict that people are about to agree through the UN to manage forests and a few other natural resources as a worldwide system, albeit with diverse management regimes; nor does it take a genius to see the ocean about to be zoned as tightly as a new york city borough. neither of those is as restrictive as it sounds — and combined with a few varieties of wealth redistribution to get greener ventures going, they’re far preferable to what we’ll get with even half a decade more of growth-without-looking-at-the-gauges.

planetary thinking: the pamphlet. distributed at an anti-war march.