November is a great time in the UK. The season is in full change and we are reminded of the powerful effects of nature and the passing of time as the leaves fall and winter starts to nip the cheeks. The recent Halloween, with little trick-or-treaters knocking on my door, makes me want to draw on what it means to be in a local community and all the many things that go into making them work but similarly with the excitement of Diwali and bonfire night still in my mind, I really want to look forward to what kind of sparkling community we want in the future. Will we choose flash-in-the-pan or great shining sustainable communities as our target? We are all drivers of this bus and it is the latter I hear you say.
For me a community is the inter-levering of the built-environment, the natural environment and people, the conscious decision makers, but their drivers are complex socio-economic forces and thereby it all becomes political. Immediately I want to use matrices of data to quantify and build the case, to wave before the decision-makers but the issues are often too complex to summarise here and the scope of sustainable community building just too vast. As we define terms we only see more edges to our vision and start to see society reduced to simplistic webs or even worse, strands rather than the fabric that society really is. Science is only a tool to find what is true. Instead I ask you to go with your heart this time, we all instinctively tend to know what is right but doing it often comes at very real cost and very little perceived benefit.
Deepak Chopra said: "I think every human being feels a sense of connection and a strong bond with nature. It is the womb of creation. This bond can be renewed by bringing people's awareness to the beauty of our planet by reminding them that the environment is our extended body.”
Well, our body is a temple and we must give praise for the gift of life. But I wonder how healthy this body is. In the post-recession of the late noughties and the coming of the next decade we either look at the future with optimism or some terror, or at least shift uneasily between the two spectrums. While it is quite possible, that your own future seems bright and flourishing, it is quite probable that for many in the world, the future is going to be at the least very hard, and most likely too hard. This is the Malthusian conclusion of a growing population near 7 billion competing for scarce resources that cannot always be easily discovered, produced or re-used.
There is space here for design in our communities, lifestyles and products. I am enlivened by the cradle to cradle design philosophy and the increasing use of the lifetime cost concept that are both coming to the fore driven by the concerns of the public about the sustainability their ecosystem. With careful design and forethought we are able to address the conflict between consumption and the environment and not only grow as a population but still consume in a very similar way as we do now. The only thing is their will be much more sustainability built into consumption and this will come at a change in price and possibly style.
Style is fluid by definition, thriving on change, so it is only really whether cost ends up being more in the long-run than would have happened in an approaching resource crunch situation that really interests us. This is debatable and based on much economic theorising. What is at least probable is that the immediate cost of this change would be higher as unsustainable products have a built in discount in them.
This seems to go against many green measures where the easy efficiency savings available make easy cost savings. Rising costs is still probable on many products that are not mass produced to enjoy the economies of scale. But designers embrace challenges like this and still might surprise us more.
Better design can have more upfront costs and it is only with the lifetime cost method for pricing that the benefits become evident. The conclusion is certainly not true for all products and our Shift Soil Remediation technology is a case in point where a clean technological design can save money due to the fundamental sustainability principles that it was challenged to meet simply to enter the evolving clean tech industry. Specifically it’s scalability in the quantities and type of contaminants it can remediate, and its speed and flexibility of deployment. But a good product is not in a vacuum, it is both a representation of needs and a cost to a populace.
Government plays a part here, often as regulator and sometimes even a market maker if there is a strong case for the social good. Politicians must work for everyone, a situation creating competing interests, making it hard to effectively find the best way forward. To get near the heart of Government’s role it is best neither to talk about the size of government nor to flog the competing political ideologies that can get in the way of progressive pragmatic policy. I simply want to address government’s unique ability to solve free-riders because what is at least certain to me is that government needs to be effective in the spaces that they do occupy.
Free-riders are those who would not pay a fair price for their share of socially good investments like public transport or the remediation of contaminated land. This is not necessarily a bad thing but it is when it leads to under production or even non-production of these governmental services. When asking ourselves what we want from government in terms of services, it is not only the filling of specific tasks but also the proper discharging of their duties with some of these duties being very clear.
Like Thomas Jefferson I personally want life, liberty and the freedom to seek out happiness. These views are largely universal and very closely reflect those criteria of the Human Development Index used by the United Nations. Life expectancy (standing for a population’s health and longevity) is there in the HDI (along with education and wealth) specifically because there can be no other utility without it. Therefore without almost all dispute government should pursue activities that sustain and prolong life as it is the most important unalienable right of all.
This might take creativity, adaption or simply the importation of some pragmatic solutions like the Mexican Waste Law which creates strict liability against owners and possessors (including operators) of a contaminated site. In the UK, as in pre 2006 Mexico, only parties held responsible for causing contamination are liable for its clean-up. As safe guards to these land possessors the law mandates disclosure of known information about site contamination (by hazardous materials or waste) from owners to potential third-party buyers or tenants and forbids transfer of a site contaminated with hazardous waste without express authorisation from the environmental ministry.
So in Mexico you do not now have to have caused the contamination to be held liable for the clean-up with the law highlighting the conflicting interests of buyers and sellers (and landlords and tenants) and is aimed at uncovering and addressing concerns over environmental contamination. This gives another valuable means to ensure our environments as the current implementation of the polluter pays principle has left us almost saturated with known toxic pollutants and has not protected our health.
We all need to engage politicians and where we can, influence them by letting them know we care about issues like a local environment free of contamination. Some other Thomas Jefferson words spring to mind here too, “In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock”.
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