[Pil-pc-oceania] Comparative Planetology

[Andrew Leahy]

Thanks Robyn, I enjoyed that.

Some of the photo's in the bloglink are from the exhibition "1973:
Sorry, Out of Gas".
Browsing the exhibition website (link below) should provide lot's of
70's flashbacks for those who remember alternative designs from that
era.

http://www.sorryoutofgas.org/
"1973: Sorry, Out of Gas"
Main Galleries, Canadian Centre for Architecture
7 November 2007 to 20 April 2008

The exhibition examines the oil crisis of 1973 as a major precedent of
contemporary concerns about energy resources and fossil fuel
dependency. The 1973 shortage triggered research and development of
renewable energy sources, improved technologies, and social
experiments that were to have an enduring impact on the architectural
and political fields. The global response to the crisis is presented
through a juxtaposition of individualistic, counterculture North
American approaches with the more structured collective responses of
European communities. A diverse range of materials, including archival
newspapers and television footage, architectural drawings, artefacts,
and photography capture the political urgency and international scope
of the energy crisis.

Cheers, Andrew

-- 
Fact: To manufacture a 3 tonne car requires 50 tonnes of raw material.
Fact: In your lifetime you will eat 50 tonnes of food and produce 3
tonnes of poo :)

On 12/01/2008, Robyn Williamson <ecogarden at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> BLDGBLOG has published a really interesting interview with science
> fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson including some great photos of
> the surfaces of mars, earth and the moon.  Here is a rather long
> excerpt, stay with it for at least 3 paragraphs:
>
> Kim Stanley Robinson:  One thing about Mars is that it's a radically
> impoverished landscape. You start with nothing – the bare rock, the
> volatile chemicals that are needed for life, some water, and an empty
> landscape. That makes it a kind of gigantic metaphor, or modeling
> exercise, and it gives you a way to imagine the fundamentals of what
> we're doing here on Earth. I find it is a very good thing to begin
> thinking that we are terraforming Earth – because we are, and we've
> been doing it for quite some time. We've been doing it by accident,
> and mostly by damaging things. In some ways, there have been
> improvements, in terms of human support systems, but there's still so
> much damage, damage that's gone unacknowledged or ignored, even when
> all along we knew it was happening. People kind of shrug and think:
> a) there's nothing we can do about it, or b) maybe the next
> generation will be clever enough to figure it out. So on we go.
>
> Mars is an interesting platform where we can model these things. But
> I don't know that we'll get there for another fifty years or so – and
> once we do get there, I think that for many, many years, maybe many
> decades, it will function like Antarctica does now: it will be an
> interesting scientific base that teaches us things and is beautiful
> and charismatic, but not important in the larger scheme of human
> history on Earth. It's just an interesting place to study, that we
> can learn things from. Actually, for many years, Mars will be even
> less important to us than Antarctica, because the Antarctic is at
> least part of our ecosphere.
>
> But if you think of yourself as terraforming Earth, and if you think
> about sustainability, then you can start thinking about permaculture
> and what permaculture really means. It's not just sustainable
> agriculture, but a name for a certain type of history. Because the
> word sustainability is now code for: let's make capitalism work over
> the long haul, without ever getting rid of the hierarchy between rich
> and poor and without establishing social justice.
>
> Sustainable development, as well: that's a term that's been
> contaminated. It doesn't even mean sustainable anymore. It means: let
> us continue to do what we're doing, but somehow get away with it. By
> some magic waving of the hands, or some techno silver bullet,
> suddenly we can make it all right to continue in all our current
> habits. And yet it's not just that our habits are destructive,
> they're not even satisfying to the people who get to play in them. So
> there's a stupidity involved, at the cultural level.
>
> BLDGBLOG: In other words, your lifestyle may now be carbon neutral –
> but was it really any good in the first place?
>
> Robinson: Right. Especially if it's been encoding, or essentially
> legitimizing, a grotesque hierarchy of social injustice of the most
> damaging kind. And the tendency for capitalism to want to overlook
> that – to wave its hands and say: well, it's a system in which
> eventually everyone gets to prosper, you know, the rising tide floats
> all boats, blah blah – well, this is just not true.
>
> We should take the political and aesthetic baggage out of the term
> utopia. I've been working all my career to try to redefine utopia in
> more positive terms – in more dynamic terms. People tend to think of
> utopia as a perfect end-stage, which is, by definition, impossible
> and maybe even bad for us. And so maybe it's better to use a word
> like permaculture, which not only includes permanent but also
> permutation. Permaculture suggests a certain kind of obvious human
> goal, which is that future generations will have at least as good a
> place to live as what we have now.
>
> It's almost as if a science fiction writer's job is to represent the
> unborn humanity that will inherit this place – you're speaking from
> the future and for the future. And you try to speak for them by
> envisioning scenarios that show them either doing things better or
> doing things worse – but you're also alerting the generations alive
> right now that these people have a voice in history.
>
> The future needs to be taken into account by the current system,
> which regularly steals from it in order to pad our ridiculous current
> lifestyle.
>
> BLDGBLOG: When it actually comes to designing the future, what will
> permaculture look like? Where will its structures and ideas come from?
>
> Robinson: Well, at the end of the 1960s and through the 70s, what we
> thought – and this is particularly true in architecture and design
> terms – was: OK, given these new possibilities for new and different
> ways of being, how do we design it? What happens in architecture?
> What happens in urban design?
>
> As a result of these questions there came into being a big body of
> utopian design literature that's now mostly obsolete and out of
> print ......."
>
> Read the whole interview here, it's quite long but well worth a read
> and the photos are just stunning:
>
> http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/comparative-planetology-interview-with.html
>
> CONTACT DETAILS:
>
> Robyn Williamson
> APC9 Secretariat
> info at apc9.org.au
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