Combines Holistic Thinking with Drill-Down Detail
August 1, 2010
Heather Rogers
This is a solid five in my view because the author goes beyond weaving a story about green gone wrong in three main areas (food, shelter, transportation), providing what almost all other books miss: the systems of systems “its all connected” and “what's good for one part of the system may be very bad for other parts,” both views developed by, among others, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Ackoff, and Herman Daly.
As much as I read, I can say up front that I found no false notes or glibness in this book, and found many nuggets that were new to me. Among the concepts covered by the book that were new to me were “food miles” (a portion of “true cost”), Eathship, Passivhaus (Passive House), Baugruppe (families hiring community builders directly, cutting out the middlemen developers), Agro-Ecology, Socio-Ecology, and the Jevons Paradox (conservation savings get poured back into expansion, nullifying the savings).
Two bottom lines up front:
EDUCATION of both the public and the politicians, and of all those associated with creating anything, is the sucking chest wound in our society. Green to Gold, Cradle to Cradle, Sustainable Design, Ecological Economics, all of this is going nowhere unless we can ramp up the speed and depth of public education on these topics.
GREEN TECHNOLOGY MAINTENANCE & REPAIR is the other sucking chest wound. The momentum is not there yet, meaning that well-intentioned groups can buy in to ecologically-sensible technology, but the company that installs it is generally not local, and there are no local green maintenance & repair skill sets on call. This struck me as a huge opportunity for community colleges.
