Just watched ‘11th hour’ on channel 4. Brilliant – great to see some optimism about what can we be done as well as a rather depressing reality check on the current state of our global ecosystems.
My favourite contributer from this film was a guy called William McDonough who talks about re-inventing design away from ‘cradle to grave’ (ie we chuck it away) to ‘cradle to cradle’ – I read this book on Vorovoro, and if your interested in design then you’ll love this. You can even read the book underwater as it isn’t made from a tree.
“Why can’t buildings be modeled on trees?”
“Why can’t cities be modeled on forests?”
Mcdonough at TED > http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/104
Cradle to Cradle > http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm
Re-building communities sustainably IS the way forward. So what are we going to do about it?
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June 3, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Nommo
Hi Ben,
This reminds me of what one of my lecturers called ‘Biohaus’
“We need a biology of building. Seeding should replace designing, buildings must be planted and allowed to grow.”
I would love to grow my own house – but I am not sure that this kind of thing exists in nature – for me – one of the big issues for the future of the human race on earth (and possibly life as we know it) is resolving the dilemma of whether to ‘hack’ nature or to let it be.
I think we have left it too late to let it be – but I still get very nervous about GM crops – never mind ‘grow your own’ houses…