ISDRC_one

I am in Minnesota’s airport currently at a layover before returning to San Francisco from the 17^th Annual International Sustainable Development Research Conference at Columbia University, NYC. After a long red-eye to get to NYC, and the intense need for a nice nap to get over that, I appreciated all the more the attentive presence of Jeffrey Sachs at the conference this week. He arrived early Tuesday morning from spending several days in Egypt and Jordan, was a keynote speaker that morning at 8:30, and proceeded to facilitate an engaging panel discussion in the afternoon. Out of the whole conference, though I gained insight from many of the speakers, I was specifically most looking forward to seeing and hearing Sachs because reading his book, The End of Poverty, is what introduced me to the conference to begin with.

It’s beneficial for me to review my notes, so I will proceed to re-write them for your benefit as well as my own, as well as additional comments after I’ve allowed it to ‘settle.’ In order and skipping some research session presenters…

Sunday, May 8

Nina Federoff

Sustainable Agriculture for 9 Billion : Is this an Oxyoron?

· Thomas Malthus – Principle of Population

o Reduce agriculture ecological impact

o Reduce agricultural pollution of air, land, and water

o Decrease agricultural deand for water

· GMO (genetically modified… o’s) – not ore dangerous than regular crops, less pesticide use

· Organic does NOT equal sustainable

· Increase nitrogen utilization efficiency

· Increase efficiency of photosynthesis

· How?

o Modern science

o Agriculture as an integrated system

o Become a private sector profession

· Fertigation – Israel – water delivered underground by computer

· Hydroponics – Quebec

· Aquaponics – modern version of old Asian practices

· Urban farms – Loofa, Montreal

· Terminator seeds are an urban myth, they have never been developed

* After Nina started dissing organic food, I began to seriously question her goals and ideology. Her speech was addressing how to feed 9 billion people, which is projected by 2030 or so, with our limited resources. The majority of us do not understand what it takes to feed us – so much land, technology, machinery, etc., which ultimately relies on energy, as another speaker will share. Acknowledging these challenges, I suppose on the global scale it is indeed realistic to say that it is impossible with current infrastructure and social injustice to grow food organically for so many people. I think there’s a balance of food with another label, as GMO brings about bad attitudes by those seeking a pure, holistic kind of diet, while the label ‘organic’ itself causes setbacks and costs (much like LEED with buildings), and may prevent safe technologies from being utilized. The biggest gap that I therefore found in her speech was addressing the dwindling soil levels caused by monocultures in the U.S. Midwest; while GMOs may be used in this large expanse, its mass-industrialization is eroded the rich soil, and no solution was proposed for this growing problem.

Next were the conference themes by five experts:

1. Peter Schlosser – Pressures on Earth’s natural and socioeconomic systems

· Shishmaref – infrastructural implications

2. Upmanu Lall – Limits of Earth to support future development

· this is an anthropocentric view of the world

· a quantitative approach

· thinking in terms of parts, not limits

· higher level needs – “iPad as a fundamental right” (access to information) *I found this to be an important point to make, as satisfying simply the physical and health needs is enough to help people survive, but not empower them to contribute and achieve what they may strive for.

· Global phenomena à local impact

· Local impact à global phenomena

· The sun is the only renewable energy, we can only appropriately manage the ones ‘of the earth.’

· But the sun = unlimited growth

· ‘sustaining the sustainable model’

· the value we assign to water is high, and yet negligible

3. Klaus Lackner – Solutions to problems created by continued development

· What technology basis is one’s ‘sustainability’ based on 0 small scale, village, country, global, etc. ?

· Political stability – gap between rich and poor not sustainable (*another speaker later on, I forget who, pointed out that if the world were a single country, is would be the most polarized of all existing nations, enough that it would not be tolerated.)

· More stabilized developing nations – not based on migration. (*I don’t know what this means, looking back… perhaps the educated and privileged need to stay within their country, if it’s a developing one, to bring about real change.)

· Biggest bottleneck is energy use

· Food resource extraction, etc., is ultimately an energy issue

o *this concept first ‘hit home’ with me with a documentary about an alarmist Mike Ruppert. This man made a good point that I’m hearing reinforced now in different ways that our population has exploded because of engines and fossil fuel use, etc., and is being sustained by cheap products, services, etc., that are ultimately available because of using these exhaustible sources of energy. It would have been difficult to regulate this from its discovery, as we still don’t know how much of this finite resource is left, and yet it has caused such a growth of population, needs, and consumption that any energy alternative at this point cannot provide enough energy to sustain such a lifestyle and growth. This is why all issues spiral back to energy : clean energy is ideal because its environmental effects won’t degrade ecology or health, creating less of a need for ‘energy use’ to conserve it, such as controlling forest fires, providing aid for natural disaster refugees, etc.

· 100 years at least of fossil fuels left

· the viable sources we have now include solar, nuclear, and fossil fuels, to sustain 50 terahertz of energy use/day in the future

· complete transformation, revolution on technology side to drive the right things forward through politics

4. Marc Levy – Adequacy of existing local, regional, and global institutions and governing structures

· multilateral environmental agreements: popular but ineffective; usually in global scope

· governing the commons – possible if you narrow scale & scope efficiently – Elinor Ostrom

· +Resilience – context-specific, place-specific, elusive

· transformational politics

· problems are getting worse faster than governance institutions are getting better

· graph

· as Marc lovingly referred to this, WTF? Or, What are The Fundamentals?

o A vision – compass – Arrows Theorem

How do we need to change the institutions that govern our lives?

o Restraint – a brake

o Science – a gyroscope

· Restraint – of human ambition, violence…

· How to better focus on fundamentals:

o Embrace the normative nature of our task – don’t apologize for it

o Expand our repertoire

· The Great Transformation – Karl Polanyi

· Normative transformational research, normative fundamentals methods

· *I appreciated Marc’s discussion as a call to appropriate action. The conference itself was evidence of his point, that we are having lots of good ideas, but these need to be implemented, on whatever scale and to whatever degree is most appropriate. But this should be a priority.

· *I also found his emphasis on normative methodology strangely refreshing. Within the field of architecture, it is encouraged to strive to become a “STARchitect” like Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid, and yet most students and professionals will not. Instead of finding a meaningful niche, then, in my opinion, architects seems to get lost in complacency instead of inspired to action and forwarding the field in whatever way, even if it’s labeled “normative.” There is a balance of this between falling into normative design behavior and not escaping it, and utilizing generations of architectural and building knowledge in order to challenge it.

5. Peter Dobers – Assessment of (existing) pilot programs

· 1988 – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

· 1992 – UNFCCC

· 2005 – Kyoto Protocol

o IET – International Emission Trading

o CDM – Clean Development Mechanism

o JI – Joint Implementation

Q & A

· Sustainable indicators and indexes are not steering change as researchers would have liked

· Are we at the goodwill of political leaders in terms of advancing sustainable technology?

o Conservation vs. preservation management practices.

Parallel Sessions

Jennifer Allen – Eco-Districts & Eco-Cities: Public-private partnerships for urban innovation (Portland State University)

· Eco-trust – NGO in Pacific Northwest

· Government along and NGO alone cannot solve the problems

· Eco-districts – “software” – engagement of people, “hardware” – infrastructure

· Development – “20 minute neighborhood” – all amenities, good, and services available to dwellers within a 20-minute walk

· Diverse areas and conditions of Lloyd District, PSU, S. Waterfront, Gateway, Lents

· Thermal energy-sharing amongst buildings, water reuse, smart grid, green streets

· Hoi An – “Cycle of Engagement & Synergy” – integrating systems across scales and themselves

· UN Habitat

· Importance of engagement; context, culture, engagement (local leaders, organizers); on-going learning

· *This presentation was relevant to what I’ve been studying and designing lately in school. The concept of sustainable systems and infrastructure within an urban fabric just makes sense on a scale larger than only a single building. It seems this would be easier to implement in a new city versus retro-fitting an existing one, but the resources and motivation exist in Portland, so it is beneficial at least for the developed/overdeveloped countries to learn from this.

Danielle Tingley – Design for Deconstruction

· BedZED, S. London – reuse of 98 tons of structural steel, UTSC’s student center, Ottawa Convention Center, Chartwell school in California

· Deconstruct rather than demolish

· Lease vs. sell materials

Discussion

· What is economically feasible vs. what should we really do? (we should be researching what we CAN DO)

· Clients like interdisciplinary collaboration projects; even well-engineered and well-designed projects are lacking in this way

· Design alone is not the problem; consumption levels, more roots and fundamentals must change

· Importance of research, social research with design, sustainability

· The role of researchers funding à research à input

· +Choosing local materials for less energy consumption

· ++Cities teach you how to act – a sustainable city would do this, it would become a model. – man from U. Kentucky

That's day one. I'll do the other two later, as I'm now back in SF and tired!

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

II Cor. 4.16-18