August 29, 2009

The cost of my current

This will shock no one given my lifestyle data obsession and current work focus, but I am now monitoring our home energy usage (and cost) in real time.

Back in April I noted in a harmless tweet what seemed to be far more attention to home power monitoring solutions in the UK than in the US. This prompted my excellent colleagues at IBM Hursley to try to help me out. The geeks at Hursley had for a while been playing around with the data outputs of monitoring hardware made by Current Cost. They saw my tweet, knew that Current Cost had modified some of their gizmos for US usage, and arranged to send me one.

I have bad luck with electrical home projects and I feared this one quite a lot given that I'd have to fuss with the house mains, but the installation proved remarkably easy. True, there are (as yet) no US-specific FAQs or video tutorials, but the idea was straightforward: find the mains and put the clamps over them.

In most of the UK this means locating the circuit breaker/meter combo which is located outside the house. In the US, only the meter is outside the home (due to the outdated practice of having electrical company employees drop by to read it). Yet, that's where I started. And almost ended. The meter is sheathed in metal for obvious reasons and there didn't seem to be any easy way in without a blowtorch. Live wires I figured I could handle; molten metal and live wires, no.

So back inside to dismantle the circuit breaker. And there they were. Three big cables: two mains, plus a ground (at the very top of the photo).

You don't mess with wiring at all, actually. Just gently place the clamps right on the insulated lines. The clamps lead to a battery-powered transmitter box. I bolted the breaker back up and that was that. Once I plugged in the receiver I was immediately receiving real-time data and cost for electricity usage.

In the image above you see that the display shows two power feeds (one per main) in the upper left and that it has a firm connection to the transmitter (upper right). You always have a current energy usage readout (2.8KW). The cost cycles between at-the-moment and per month. The display is rounded out with historical data, time, and temp. (Here's an annotated version.)

At a glance the data seems dead-on compared to our monthly electricity bills. And it is true that the current usage/cost changes merely by switching lights off and on around the house. It is definitely real-time. But the real value of the system comes in the ability to hook the monitor to your computer. Once that link is established there's a whole set of services you can plug into.

I use the Current Cost to Pachube app to send my data to the feed aggregator/visualizer service Pachube. Once there you can view the three data feeds -- temperature and wattage for the two mains -- over time. (The y axis is power in kilowatts.)

The week after I installed the unit we took a bit of a vacation so we were afforded the experiment of observing the house while we were not living in it. Obviously usage was way down (especially since we essentially shut off the AC), but the very quietness of the electricity usage surfaced interesting patterns in home energy consumption unprompted by human need. The graphs were mostly flatlines with regular, periodic low plateaus -- obviously something was kicking in on a regular interval. We're pretty sure one of these is the refrigerator/ice-maker, but there's one on the other main that we've not been able to sleuth just yet. Has to be something with a motor, we think.

We asked our housekeeper to come while we were out -- and of course knew precisely when she was there because the graph spiked (vacuum cleaner!). But the next day the graph spiked at roughly the same time and in the same way. Turns out she left early the first day and came back to finish the second (since we weren't there). So there it is: personal energy monitoring can also help you nab squatters and spy on your home help.

Because Pachube is really a service for mixing various sets of data (ala ManyEyes) you can nearly instantly see your home's energy usage plotted as CO₂ output. And there's a great iPhone app for viewing your Pachube feeds.

So there are two reasons to care about any of this and both relate to increasing awareness of one's own consumption patterns (something I wrote about extensively after my stint in Africa). First is cost savings. When you have in-your-face evidence of the impact of turning down the AC or switching off the lights, you are more inclined to do it. (To say nothing of using the monitor to track down energy sucks you didn't know you had.)

Second is that the idea of instrumenting part of one's consumption opens up all kinds of possibilities for how we might as a planet solve larger problems. Few would argue that we need smarter power grids. Bills that reflected actual usage (rather than estimated or aggregate) would prompt even great attention to personal usage. Widespread adoption of home monitoring like Current Cost -- and the sharing of anonymous data -- would show utilities and local governments patterns of usage that could inform smarter maintenance, more flexible infrastructure build-out, and even "competitive" incentive programs between localities.

Last year I used WattzOn to calculate a rough personal footprint. It was atrocious. Sure I commute to work by public transportation or bike, but my international air travel shoved my impact off the charts. This year my travel is very different -- lots of small trips, none international. So I recalculated my CO₂ and, no surprise, housing is the number one contributor. (And that's just the house and the power/materials it uses. The Stuff category in the chart below largely deals with our home's appliances.)

My goal is modest. I've like to bring the combined housing and stuff number down by 25% in twelve months. Not sure if that's possible with the three kids, but they do like the idea of real-time feedback for their actions (rather than, say, a parent praising them merely for turning off the lights in their rooms).

In the end, beyond the sheer nerd factor of monitoring your own energy, what good is it if you don't use the new information to effect change?

Posted at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

January 19, 2009

Going Native

In the past year I've found myself becoming more and more interested in restoration ecology. I'm not an ecologist or a naturalist or even very environmentally-savvy, but I am working on it and it seems to me that the practice of restoring an ecosystem is a useful way of thinking far beyond its own application.

Malcolm McCullough, professor of architecture at the University of Michigan and one of the leading proponents of place-based interaction design, ends his fantastic 2004 Digital Ground with this historical blurb:

The expression going native apparently originated in nineteenth-century India .... [I]t began as a description of Englishmen wearing loose-fitting pajamas in public. This sensible adaptation to the sultry climate was seen as a token of deeper assimilations, particularly intermarriage, which the expression came to represent. Such practices were common enough amid mercantile colonization in the eighteenth century, but as foreign traders became rulers, the accompanying social tensions made assimilation taboo. Thus to the imperial British of the nineteenth century, "going native" was a crime. It represented a lapse of discipline and a descent into chaos.

This taboo pervades American culture today. To "go native" is to go niche, to be deliberately different. However logical it may seem, going native rubs up against one's own cultural sensibility -- and usually loses.

But here's the thing: going native is nothing more than letting context drive design. When an industrial designer goes to the factory floor and interviews workers about how the process works, that's context driving design. When a mobile phone maker spends time in a rural southeast Asian village watching how people communicate, that's context driving design. And it all yields the very best, most sustainable products.

It doesn't often happen this way, of course. Design itself in the west is a semi-sanctified endeavor. The artist receiving divine, solitary inspiration: this is a myth that won't die. (It may work for fine art, though you can argue that there's no such thing as an artist immune to external influence.) Nothing happens in a vacuum.

William Morris said "you can't have art without resistance in the materials" and he wasn't talking about hitting a knot while whittling. Resistance here is merely constraint on free-form design and almost always a good thing. You may not produce a photo-realistic drawing with most of your crayon box broken, but you'll certainly have to work harder. And hard work usually pays off.

So how does this relate to restoration ecology? Well, the living world itself is the world's longest-running design charrette and if it and its engine of creation known as evolution have taught us anything it is that constraint over time produces the most lasting products. (Also, at least one pretty engaging game.)

The natural environment has for most of evolutionary history been the constraint under which life's creative experiment has been run. Climate, geography, predators, food availability -- all are pressures that snap the crayons in the box, factors that have culled the palette of what would have otherwise produced an infinite and totally unsustainable variety of life.

Luckily, the world is a harsh place. Just to survive is amazing, but to produce something beautiful or unique is astounding. Evolution is the perfect marriage of an indefatigable artistic drive and an unrelenting set of constraints. You could say that neither "wins" (an equilibrium, if punctuated) -- or that they both win, always.

But that's only in the scenario where naturally-produced constraint is the sole factor. And that, of course, has not been the case since evolution's Mona Lisa -- homo sapiens -- slyly smiled its way onto the scene.

You might argue that human constraint is a natural constraint too. And I'll buy that to a point. But the scale and scope of the impact of human beings on evolution -- both negative (like pollution) and positive (like conservation) -- vaults it into a new classification in my opinion.

For one, human behavior introduces all kinds of new variables into evolution's experiment (e.g., the Aral Sea desertification). But more importantly, our impact on the natural world has divorced our adaptive behavior from natural constraint. Technology (or tool-making, something that makes us human in the first place) has greatly mitigated the effect the natural environment has on human behavior. People rarely need to go native.

Yes, when it is raining out you'll grab an umbrella. Yes, when there's a hurricane headed your way you'll (usually) get the hell out. And it is true that human intelligence makes it impossible to conceive of a planet where we don't modify our behavior in response of the environment.

Yet, it is the little things that add up. I think we can all agree that detonating nuclear bombs is a negative influence of human behavior on the natural order. But what about suburban lawns? How many people know how much water and gasoline they take to maintain and how many species native to the environment they simply cannot sustain? And this is merely the example most pertinent to restoration-based landscaping.

The point is merely this: natural constraint never goes away. The environment, the sum of natural phenomena, will always trump human artifice. Nothing built lasts forever. And since neither are we humans going away (fingers crossed), it is in our best interest to figure out how to balance this constraint with our own needs. We need to learn how to go native intelligently.

I've written previously about how I think Africa is a model here. Most Africans don't have the ability to live beyond the constraints that the environment puts on their behavior. To be sure, this is the source of much woe and privation in Africa. But conceptually -- consumption in line with an environment's ability to sustain production -- it is a behavior well worth imitating. It is, in short, a recipe for innovation.

And that's why I am fond of my father's project to return his lawn to native Illinois prairie. Yeah, it looks cool. And we get a visceral thrill of burning it down periodically. But the beauty is that it is a constant reminder of balance between human need (oooh, pretty!) and ecological compatibility. Evolution took a long damn time to figure out which flora and fauna could be successful in the Driftless Area of northwestern Illinois. Why on earth would we think we know better?

Our new prairie is a microcosm of behavioral equilibrium. On one side of the scale is the fact that it isn't a real prairie, only a human-engineered approximation of one that suffers the challenge of artificially depleted biodiversity (one lawn ain't gonna make all the native species return, especially if they are extinct) and also the challenge of being a native moat encircling a very artificial human-built house with all its environmental contributions. On the other side is the good news: no watering, no mowing, and most importantly a landscape that once again sustains the native animal life that evolved needing it.

This idea of balance, of "sensible adaptation," of smartly going native, needs to be scaled up. It needs to inform all our decisions as de facto stewards of the planet. There will always be trade-offs, precisely because humans have extraordinary needs and an extraordinary capacity to make things better. Restoration ecology alone will not save the planet, but the ideas that undergird it just might.

This entry is cross-posted in a slightly-modified form on Prairie Works. Thanks, Cory.

Posted at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

October 8, 2008

Fire and life

Africa affects me in little ways.

Like recently when I was contemplating my annual purchase of firewood. Burning real wood in a fireplace is one of my great loves during long Chicago winters. I easily tear through a cord per winter, sometimes needing extra. And yet, that's a lot of wood for what is largely aesthetic comfort (though our basement needs all the heat help it can get).

So this year I wanted to learn more about my options. Usually I get wood from one of any number of local, similar operations. A couple of laborers-for-hire pull up in a pickup, throw a bunch of wood in a pile in your garage, and then depart. God only knows where they get this wood from. Or if the company has any interest in the sustainability of the forests from which the wood comes.

So I turned to Ascent Stage's resident guest restoration ecologist, Cory Ritterbusch, for his usual clarity of insight. I asked about places in northern Illinois where I might deal with a firewood vendor who thinks about his source as much as his sale. Cory noted:

Right now our firewood industry has not been hit by the same environmental stewardship programs that paper and building materials have. So there is nowhere to point to for sustainable, managed firewood processes locally.

Most green thinkers choose their firewood by species to reduce the risk. Oak and Hickory are the preferred woods to burn in the fireplace, but that is done at the detriment of cutting very important slow-growing specimens. Environmentalists will ask for Red Elm or "Elm" as they are usually standing dead trees having died due to Dutch Elm Disease. It is also a great burning wood offering high temperature, little ash and easy split-ability.

Didn't know that. Did you?

The smell of burning firewood was constant in Ghana. In the morning, stepping out of my room to the call of the roosters; in the daytime walking down a crowded Kumasi street; at night when the smoke of a thousand dinners ascended and mixed above the town. The tang of wood on fire is for me essential Ghana. I came to love it.

But the wreckage it has caused! The denuded countryside, once rainforest, strikes you like returning to a loved home without any furniture in it. The same space, but not the same place. The soil, suddenly chemically-bereft of sustaining anything but what just got ripped out, is no longer landscape but ecological cul-de-sac. Redwood-sized trunks lashed to wheels and an engine barrel down dirt roads one after the other. it is stark cause-and-effect, easier to see than in the West with our complex chains of supply.

This is what Africa has done to me. Not a blinding moment of enlightenment, but many small moments that creep up without real thought. The things I saw there will be with me forever, ineradicable viruses of the imagination.

Posted at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 24, 2008

Africa is a way of thinking

I came to some startlingly common sense realizations while in Africa. For instance, its now clear to me that sustainable environment practices and Africa are inextricably linked. They aren't separate matters or concerns or causes. To act on one is to act on the other.

Here's the obvious part. Africa -- and the entire "Global South," as it is often called -- stands to lose the most from planet-wide environmental deterioration. The fate of Africa has always firstly been tied to the environment. Even when you subtract out all the man-made horrors that Africa has seen life on the continent is shaped in deep ways by the ecological, geological, and meteorological hand it has been dealt. Subsistence agriculture, wars over limited (or precious) resources, lack of access to coasts, the range of the tsetse fly -- all these things define life more immediately than the environment does (for now) in other places.

But there was insight too. A lesson, you could say, that the first world can learn from the third. Sustainability is a way of life for Africans. They don't think about it as such. It isn't a campaign or a movement like it has become in the West, but it is evident everywhere, woven into everything Africans do.

Simply put, Africans live with resource scarcity. They have not experienced consumption out of whack with production because it has never been a possibility.

For every place you see selling cars you see five places recycling every possible component of the cars. Usually its for repair, sometimes it is to create something utterly different.

Or take tro-tros, the ubiquitous, horn-happy minivans that criss-cross every part of Ghana moving people more efficiently than a bus system every could. It's a totally decentralized, mostly private group taxi service. Mass transit on an unbelievable scale with no set routes at all. Need a ride? Flag a tro-tro. You'll get where you're going. (Not unlike hailing a "taxi" in Russia, though there rides are less frequent, less capacious.) While tro-tros are almost universally decrepit, smoke-belching buckets of bolts, the system as a whole is by far more environmentally friendly than private cars or even a fleet of taxis.

One fact of life in Ghana is the unreliability of centralized services. The electricity grid, for example, cuts out a few times every week. Just ... off. Usually mid-day when it is hottest out. Yet this is not nearly as disruptive as it would be in the West. Partially this is just an attitude of resignation; that's just the way it is. But because it's the norm most places simply do it themselves with generators on standby (or have ways of manually doing what would otherwise be electrically-powered).

There's no central water supply either so in urban areas private gravity tanks (or nearby streams) provide running water. The explosive growth of mobile phones is in part fueled by a lack of reliance on a centralized grid of services. It's obviously not industrial age mega-infrastructure but more like modular, emergent services -- build as you go, bottom-up. Like the Internet itself, basic services are built to work around outages.

To a Westerner this seems like privation but, looked at another way, it is a built-in constraint on excess usage. Self-sufficiency isn't radical; it's practical. And self-sufficiency naturally requires an intimate knowledge of one's own patterns of consumption. You use what you have and nothing more. It ain't rocket science.

So why is this a lesson? Certainly I'm not claiming that open sewers or power outages are the way forward. Nor should it be taken to mean that Africans are somehow immune to over-exploitation of resources.

Yet, Africa provides an example of what a society might look like that has so totally internalized sustainable living that it informs everything it does. Africa as a behavioral template, not a developmental one.

There are many paths that lead to this way of living within one's means. You can choose to do it or you can be forced to because all your other options have been exhausted. Most of Africa has no other choice.

It took me a while to realize how pragmatic the idiosyncrasies of daily life are in Ghana. After first I thought the army of vendors on the road was a nuisance. They're not "roadside" but in the middle of the road, often long lines of people selling the exact same thing -- tissues, water, power strips, mangos, anything. (Even the mayor wants them off the road.)

But actually it makes a ton of sense because traffic is often such a mess. It's like one huge drive-through mall. In the lingo of a typical consultant: they've monetized gridlock. It's efficient and practical, such as at the toll stop pictured above. I'm not arguing for in-road vending so much as noting that what seems crude is often entirely sensible, bordering on ingenious.

It's hard for non-Ghanaians not to do a double-take when they see women carrying staggering loads on their heads, but once the shock wears off you realize, wow, that really is efficient. The arms are free to do other things while the entire frame of the body distributes the load atop the spinal column. Also, it makes for good posture.

But the most practical form of carriage is the way babies are swaddled. Just a single sheet wrapped around the child who's straddling the mother's back and literally sitting atop her butt. I never once saw a child squirming or screaming and the moms looked similarly non-plussed. Again, the arms are free to do whatever.

What do baby swaddling and sustainable living have to do with one another? They're both examples of deep-rooted pragmatism. It seems simple, even backwards sometimes, but the way of life I saw both in Ghana and Kenya was firstly about solving everyday problems. It's largely coincidental that many of these problems are matters of production and consumption -- the very basis on our misaligned relationship with the planet.

Let's take some inspiration from Africa. It's a plentiful, renewable resource, after all.

Posted at 3:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 31, 2008

The biophony of Trout Lake

I spent the long Memorial Day weekend with high school pals, fathers, and siblings on a fishing trip in northwestern Ontario. (You may recall the write-up from a few years back featuring Bruce the ax-wielding moose-hunter.)

We've been making the trip for decades, but it was only this time that I realized the full impact of truly being off the grid: no roads, no landlines, no cell service, obviously no computers, no Internet. It was a fantastic shock to the system.

The disconnection is not abrupt. You fly into Winnipeg and all is well. Cell still works; iPhone happily sucking in data. You drive east out of Manitoba into Ontario, all good, happy banter in the car, people still covertly checking devices for refresh. Once past Vermillion Bay things start to get dodgy, connection in and out, sucking a shrinking air pocket inside a sinking vehicle. Then Red Lake. Nothing but landlines. Connectivity here is only for the old school essentials such as calling home to loved ones. You wonder, maybe this is the only connection that matters.

The next day you take the float plane to Trout Lake. The last moment of connectivity departs in a cataclysm of noise as the 1940's era prop aircraft motors up to speed. You put on old school noise-cancelling headsets (i.e., huge rubber and foam cans) and the world goes silent. When you're finally on the dock in Trout Lake you may as well still have the headset on because everything is utterly still, cloyingly quiet.

You better like the people you with because you can't tweet your discontent. Of course, liking the people you're with -- and the staff at the camp -- is the reason for the trip. But the importance of human communication rather hits you in the face.

And not just verbal communication. Most of the guides on the lake are native Canadians, Indians in the old parlance of the US. Famously taciturn, these guides know the lake like you knew your childhood neighborhood -- but they're not conversationalists. Most respond in grunts or curt phrases. Some open up occasionally (if, sadly, the chance of alcohol is involved) but even then it is awkward and quick to dissolve. As such, the communication throughput becomes even narrower. But the signal-to-noise ratio is off the charts.* From wideband always-on to hand gestures and body language in 24 hours.

So you're left to listen. And that's when it hits you. This place is loud. Lapping waves, birdcalls that can only be described as symphonic, overlapping frog croaks, the last floes of ice in the crunching throes of dissolution, indeterminate animal noises that frighten, even the low white noise of the biomass on the shore recycling itself.**

It's an internet. Which is to say, it is a massively-scaled, multiply-threaded system of signals with intention. The birds aren't chirping because its pretty; they're communicating. The ice isn't making noise with purpose but it serves a purpose. Moose and other shallows-dwelling animals hear it and adjust behavior.

But there is human-made noise, of course, all gas-powered. Float planes every few days, outboard motors every few minutes, and the camp generator way back in the woods always. It's an ecological disruption, if only aural. Not nearly the damage we're causing to the environment in other ways, but damage just the same.

Bernie Krause calls nature's soundscape biophony and contrasts it with human-made noise, anthrophony. He's a field-recording scientist who catalogs the ways in which man's din interferes with the communication networks built in to nature, inanimate and living. It's no different than spectrum interference between your router and cordless phone. Two signals with the same acoustic imprint are going to degrade each other.

The real reason the soundscape on the lake is an internet is because it works around outages; it isn't point-to-point. When a motorboat storms through a bay certain communications are disrupted, to be sure. But the toad croak network continues with shorter hops (so to speak) between rebroadcast. Eagles depart for quieter aeries from which to communicate. And of course most signals are simply queued for later transmission. It's remarkably effective ... to a point. When the noise is constant (as in the generator) the soundscape alters the landscape firmly, pushing the communication past a certain radius where it all works again.

It's only in a place as serene as Trout Lake that you realize all this, of course. Laws requiring sound abatement mostly exist only in dense urban areas whose ambient noise level is already ridiculously high. Exurbia and rural areas -- the places with the most at stake -- hardly give human-made noise a second thought.

(It's interesting to contrast this experience with the other annual fishing trip I take with my family on the Gulf in Texas. There, in a boat even miles out fishing the intercoastal waters, you're always in range of a cell tower. Guides follow the fish by talking to each other on phones constantly. You wonder what the fishing would be like if the guides had to jack into nature's network rather than Verizon's.)

Back on Trout Lake, you return to camp after a day fishing for a congenial bullshitting happy hour, just talking at a table face-to-face. Dinner preparation is announced with one bell ringing, serving by two. The night unwinds by a fire where you watch the aurora screensaver in the sky and, mostly, just listen to nature's nocturnal packet switching hit overdrive.

More photos and video here.

* High signal-to-noise is the very reason for no roads in. If you open up that bandwidth the pressure on the lake ecology increases exponentially, reducing the high value signals: huge, abundant fish.

** Some of the dads are hard of hearing and use in-ear aids. The near-absence of human noise and direct soundlines on the lake surface allow them to hear sounds far better (such as from boat to boat hundreds of yards apart) than they can even do in a small room around a table.

Posted at 9:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

April 22, 2008

The slovenly wilderness

My father, brother, sister and I have a dorky little bookclub. We don't meet nearly as often as we used to, but it's still an excuse to get together for lunch once in a while and make fun of each other for misreading a given book. We rotate selection responsibility, a responsibility which includes the book and a place for lunch somewhat related to the topic of the book.

The current selection was mine, The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, a thoughtful if scattershot exploration of what would happen to the human-built world if we all suddenly disappeared. It is billed as a "thought experiment." One of these experiments concerns envisioning what would happen if there were no one to maintain the petropolis of oil machinery, tanks, and pipes that dominate the sprawl between Galveston Bay and Houston. (Some of it would break down and rust into the soil and some of it would blow up, igniting the network of delivery pipes that connect to the rest of the country.)

The best parts of the book aren't hypotheses about catastrophe or collapse but examples of built places since abandoned, mini-worlds without us: the DMZ in North Korea, much of Turkish Cyprus, the Mayan empire. Short version: natures takes things back far faster than you'd think but there are certain things that our actions have wrought -- billions of microscopic plastic shards in the oceans, for example -- that are going to be part of the world until the sun blows up and ends it all.

It's an ecological manifesto, of course, an extreme version of pointing out that being green isn't just mitigating our disequilibrium with the environment going forward; it's about undoing what's been done in the past too. That's the point of positing the highly unlikely (though not impossible) scenario in which all the polluting human beings suddenly disappear: the planet's still fucked.

Chew on that, this Earth Day.

We met to discuss the book at the Garfield Park Conservatory, a really wonderful 100-year-old greenhouse complex that's part of the city's park district. A microcosm of the world without us, no?

Well, not exactly. For one, even a botanical park like this is completely artificial; these plants would never live together naturally. But more interestingly, in a world suddenly without us a conservatory would actually be a real threat to the environment. The glass and structure would fail rather quickly, exposing the flora and its seeds and pollen to the winds and animals. Much of it would die off but some of it, nearly all "invasive" to local ecologies, would make its way out into the environment and wreak havoc. That ain't natural. (For those of you who've seen I Am Legend you'll note that this is a similar scenario to the predators from the Bronx Zoo competing with Will Smith for game in Times Square.)

We ate outside -- the weather topped 70F today. Only as we left I noticed that the benches we were sitting on had carved on them one of my favorite poems, Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens. Seems appropriate for today.

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

You won't believe it, but it was nothing but coincidence that we chose today to meet about this particular book. I of course enjoyed it. I like my book club meetings laden with meaning.

Posted at 8:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

November 29, 2007

What being green means to most of America

My parents have let the lot at the home in Galena, IL return to natural Illinois prairie. This is cool in a natural-historical way, and certainly beautiful*, but it also takes a bit of work to rehabilitate the land after the tumult of excavation and construction. So, they hired the company Prairie Works as landscape consultants who've guided the process of planting and, in the case of the photo below, burning of the grasses as happens naturally every so often.

Recently I came across the Prairie Works blog maintained by Cory Ritterbusch and have been surprised at how interesting it is. City boy adds blog about prairie grass to his reader, imagine that. Consider the post about the culture of lawns in America:

In 2006 the American lawn reached a higher status among its citizens - it became the country’s largest irrigated crop. Between our golf courses, sports fields, town squares and residential lawns turfgrass now covers an amazing 40 million acres, or 80 percent, of non-farmed land.

40 million acres, sweet jesu. That's a lot of agriculture for show.

Although the 1/2-acre area of grass that is carefully manicured by its owner seams rather harmless, it is the large-scale ramifications of millions of such owners that prove to be devastating. In 2005 it took 238 gallons of water per person to irrigate 40 million acres of turfgrass, which are being mowed with 800 million gallons of small engine gasoline and kept green by 70 million pounds of chemicals. All this costs an estimated 30 billion dollars annually (2005). The effects on water and air quality are staggering as are the 68,000 injuries sustained annually while mowing.

Am I the only one staggered by the amount of gasoline and water that it takes to keep something up that is in most cases an extension of a home's aesthetic rather than functional?

Oddly enough, lawn care advertising confirms that most residential lawn care is a losing battle against climate, pests, traffic and other variables, unless more efforts, including watering and chemicals, are applied to the cause. The 70 million pounds of chemicals applied to turfgrass annually represent a higher concentration of chemical input than any other form of agriculture worldwide.

My suburban friends have probably stopped reading by now and written this post off as the rantings of a guy with a postage stamp-size parcel of grass in the city. Against lawns? That's un-American! But I have to believe that there's a sizable majority of middle America who, in suddenly eco-conscious America, believes that their ginormous lawns are part of the solution to environmental problems. I'm not sure that's entirely true, but happy to read otherwise in the comments.

* Even if it does have an abandoned lead mine on the property. Ecologically sound or not?

Posted at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 17, 2007

Hack the planet: Spore and Worldchanging

The two most powerful presentations I saw at South by Southwest concerned vastly different topics -- gaming and environmentalism -- but their essence was the same. How to engineer a planet?

The first was Will Wright's mile-a-minute discussion of interactive narrative and demo of the upcoming Spore (update: video) .Then, later that day was Alex Steffen's captivating Worldchanging exploration of living for a sustainable future (udpate: podcast).

Spore of course is really Wright's “SimUniverse,” starting you off in the protoplasmic goop as a unicellular creature in search of not dying and concluding, if evolution is kind, with you at the helm of a stable, interstellar civilization. Spore is, in short, a massive modeling tool for the complex systems that make up a world. It looks like a hell of a lot of fun.

Steffen's presentation was about modeling a future world too, though in this case it is the one we're currently living on. Where An Inconvenient Truth highlighted the problem, Steffen's site, book, and organization work to demonstrate solutions. He is a powerful speaker. The audience was as spellbound as it was during the Spore demo and probably for the same reason: waiting raptly to find out how this particular world was going to turn out.

Both the game and the strategy for a sustainable Earth have to do with little things that have big consequences. In Spore this might be giving your creature asymmetrical appendages, something which may serve you well when foraging in nooks and crannies but which might turn out to be a liability in hand-to-hand combat or when piloting a spaceship. In Worldchanging, it might be car-sharing, for people who share a vehicle tend to be more efficient drivers since they have to plan their excursions. Both talks were essentially about sliding the scale on civilization and seeing what happens, what Steven Johnson calls The Long Zoom. (His recent book, The Ghost Map, focuses on the interplay of scale between the cholera microorganism and the urban patterns of 19th century London.)

Wright calls interactive narrative of this sort “filling in possibility space”. There's always structure and constraint, but an element of free will allows for gameplay. You might argue the same goes for environmentalism. Natural resources, physics, and the human imagination are our constraints. We must merely fill in the possibility space, change the narrative for a happier ending.

Wright says that “the process of playing the game is the process of making assets for the game.” You could say the same thing about SimCity too, of course, but you could also say that about life. If life is a game -- and in non-trivial ways, it is: a set of goal-directed actions to maximize returns -- then we've got a rather tidy analogy on our hands. You don't live in a static world; you make the world as you live.

Consider these quotes:

“One must dematerialize the extraneous stuff that gets in the way of the experiences we want.”

“Compact living in well-designed cities dematerializes transportation and infrastructure allowing access by proximity.”

“Many things are only garbage when they are in the wrong place.”

All from Steffen, all about eco-friendly living. But they're absolutely relevant to Spore. Which isn't to say that Spore is an in-your-face green manifesto. It isn't. You might create a perfectly sustainable planet with oceans of methane. But in doing so you've foreclosed many possibility spaces suitable to human beings. Fun in a game, not so fun for carbon-based lifeforms.

Some other bits I found interesting in the Worldchanging session:

Car-sharing is an old idea (it just sounds 1970's) made useful only through recent mapping and GPS technologies. ZipCar and iGo are successful because technology has finally made it easy for people to find a car when they need one.

Steffen asked how many in the audience owned power drills. Most hands went up. (This was a geekfest after all.) He then told us that the average power drill gets used for six to twenty minutes in its entire life -- an epitome of unsustainable waste. What we want is the hole not the drill.

Measuring things changes the way you use them. The example he gave came from the UK where a test group had their energy meters moved inside the house. This act by itself reduced power consumption. When you see the meter you think about the meter and when you think about it you turn the lights off.

Why can't we separate practical objects from objects that mean something to us? Your childhood teddy bear means something to you emotionally, where your washing machine most likely doesn't. What if most practical objects were leased rather than owned? The effect would be greener production. If a cell phone manufacturer had to take the phone back at the end of its useful life the company would be far more likely to make it easy to recycle. (Steffen called computers -- which nearly everyone in the audience had on their lap -- an “environmental nightmare” because of their unrecyclability.)

It was interesting to me that some of the technologies found in the third world are the greenest: evaporative refrigeration, fog-catchers, rainwater recyclers, wired infrastructure leapfrogging.

The final bit of advice was to “green your geek.” Don't stay up at night worrying about paper versus plastic. Rather focus on whatever you are really into (i.e., “your geek”) and try to change just that. Simple, potentially powerful.

In the end these two sessions about Spore and Worldchanging kinda merged in my head. To create a sustainable world you have to imagine what you want, then build it. Spore gives us a simulator; Worldchanging gives us an imperative.

Reminds me of the History Channel City of the Future design challenge. Much more on this soon!

As a sidenote, it's been remarked that the panel-heavy structure of South by Southwest doesn't allow for sustained exploration of an idea. I'm still a fan of the conversational tone of the panels, but in looking back on the week that was I admit that the three most powerful sessions I attended had a single speaker.

Tags: environment, sustainable, sim, spore, worldchanging

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