Bridging the Environmental Data Divide: When Earth Texts Home
In our latest From the Field, Frontline SMS CEO Sean McDonald talks about their new environmental sensor, designed to bridge the environmental data divide with open hardware.
Many thanks to Sean McDonald for sharing this article about the exciting environmental sensor technology Frontline SMS have developed with Feedback Labs. To find out more about their great work, be sure to follow them on Twitter @FrontlineSMS – you can follow Sean at @McDapper.
ROBERT STEELE: While noteworthy, this is too little too late. True Cost Economics as pioneered by Dr. Herman Daly and others requires that we be both informed and responsible at the product and process levels — if you are measuring as proposed above, you have skipped — abdicated — neglected — betrayed common due process — at all the prior steps. Every product, process, service, and behavior has true costs: water used over the course of the life cycle, fuel used in various forms by all related machine processes, toxins released into the environment measurable at each point in the process, not generically as proposed above; child labor and other forms of abuse across the life cycle (Asian textile slaves, Latino agricultural slaves, black furniture slaves in prisons); and of course measurable known tax avoidance and regulatory violations. All of this can be done as part of the financial and production and distribution processes. The proper model for sustainable ecology integrates holistic analytics, true cost economics, and open source everything engineering. No one, anywhere, is doing that today. I am looking for one university that would like to create both a new PhD program with those three tracks, and a School of Future-Oriented Hybrid Governance that leverages a World Brain Institute to “get a grip.” We do not lack for intelligence — we lack for integrity, in my always humble opinion.
